Name: Em Are you over 18?: Yes Contact: skycrawler[at]plurk, DM Other characters: Sheryl Nome Permissions & opt-out:Permissions, Opt-out
IC INFORMATION
Name: Setsuna F. Seiei (formerly Soran Ibrahim) Canon: Mobile Suit Gundam 00 Age: 23 Gender: Male Species: Human (some metahuman traits) Appearance:Here Canon point: Pre-epilogue Awakening of the Trailblazer (right as Setsuna and Tieria leave to find more aliens)
Personality answers: CW: App contains discussions of religious violence and patricide involving young children.
Explain which event in canon is most pivotal to your character's development, and who they are today.
Setsuna was lured into a fake holy war and killed his own parents when he was eight, then spent the next two years in a children’s guerrilla brigade that glorified martyrdom. His child soldier buddies were killed, and Setsuna reached a point where he lost all faith and was simply waiting to die. But one battle, a giant robot, a prototype “Gundam,” dropped out of the sky and wiped out everyone fighting—leaving Setsuna, and only Setsuna, alive. And suddenly Setsuna had a reason to live again: he wanted to have the power to eradicate conflict and save people like that robot. Chasing that ideal, teenage Setsuna joined a secret organization dedicated to eliminating war by beating everyone up with overpowered giant robots.
Setsuna eventually learns that peace-through-force isn’t sustainable (even his team’s surgical interventions leave mourning families behind, and although the team succeeds in unifying the world against them they accidentally empower a tyrannical world government in the process), and begins pursuing peace-through-understanding (supplemented by shanking truly incorrigible assholes) instead. Although Setsuna loses his teenage idealization of Gundams, he loses neither his affection for them nor his desire to make a peaceful world alongside them. Instead, Setsuna decides that he and his robot will change together, which ultimately leads to Setsuna becoming a telepath with a giant robot that specializes in creating temporary psychic links rather than specializing in destruction.
Setsuna’s Very Tragic Backstory could have made him dysfunctional and edgy, but the sense of hope and purpose that came from being saved by a giant robot make him generally stable and functional. He’s reserved and mission-focused, and can be awkwardly blunt when interacting with carefree people about mundane topics that he can’t relate to. But he’s optimistic that people can improve, and tries to support both individuals and humanity-as-a-whole on that path.
Who in your character's canon influenced the most growth in your character? What do they think about this character?
Seeing a robot drop out of the sky gave Setsuna a goal, but Marina Ismail changes how Setsuna approaches that goal.
As a teenager, Setsuna has a chance encounter with Marina Ismail, the mostly-powerless figurehead of the country that brutally annexed Setsuna’s homeland. At first, Setsuna is critical of Marina—while she’s trying to secure foreign economic assistance, people are dying and her country is careening toward another war—and is convinced that his own peace-through-force approach is more immediate and practical. But Setsuna gradually realizes that Marina is doing the best that she can with limited influence, and that her faith in mutual understanding is genuine. As Setsuna’s goal of peace-through-force crumbles, Setsuna starts to believe that, although Marina’s understanding-based approach may be harder to accomplish, it could lead to a more durable peace.
Marina’s outlook ultimately shifts Setsuna’s approach to eradicating war: he eventually pushes reconciliation over revenge and embraces his own weird burgeoning telepathic powers. (To be clear, Setsuna will still absolutely kill people, he’ll just try to talk them down first if there’s time.) And when a giant swarm of aliens shows up, Setsuna chooses Marina’s approach rather than a militant approach, and defuses first contact by communicating with aliens rather than wiping them out.
At this canon point, Setsuna sees Marina as someone that he can’t be close to. Part of that is because Setsuna is part of an internationally infamous paramilitary organization and being associated with him makes Marina and her country a target. But another part of it is that their lives are still very different: Marina is a steadfastly pacifist diplomat, and Setsuna hasn’t been able to fully leave his role intervening in armed conflicts. So Setsuna protects Marina anonymously-ish, and her distant existence gives him hope: even if the only thing Setsuna knows is fighting, Marina is out there growing flowers, and one day humanity might have more people like Marina than Setsuna.
What would your character say is their best trait? What is truly their best trait?
Setsuna would stare awkwardly if asked about his best trait. If further prompted by someone he’s comfortable with, he would say that he’s good at fighting. If that someone pointed out that being good at fighting is a skill not a trait, he would stare uncomfortably and offer that he keeps working toward his goal despite mistakes and failures. Setsuna self-defines in terms of his goals much more than by his personal traits.
Setsuna’s actual best trait is his capacity and willingness to change, on multiple levels. As he realizes that peace-through-force isn’t working, and that fixating on the past comes at the expense of the future, he accepts that in the long term he should be aiming for peace through understanding. After his secret organization falls apart, he transitions from being someone who (mostly) just follows orders to a decisionmaker who gets the gang back together to repair the damage they’ve inadvertently caused to the world. He also rolls with mutating into a telepath—even though being the first person with these weird abilities is isolating and he has trouble sorting out all the feelings he’s picking up—because it enables trippy conscious-sharing that he hopes can end conflict more effectively than beating people up.
What would it take to truly upset your character, enough that they would act upon their feelings? Are they the sort to forgive?
It takes a lot to upset Setsuna—he ignores or stoically endures people yelling at him, people pulling guns on him, and grieving teammates beating the hell out of him. When teammates die, Setsuna cries alone, mostly packs away his feelings of guilt and powerlessness, and uses the remaining feelings as motivation to keep fighting.
Setsuna gets upset most often by people recklessly or deliberately targeting non-combatants, by people fighting for personal gain or ego, and by kids getting dragged into battles; although Setsuna is generally mission-focused, these will get him to lose focus and pick emotion-driven fights. For most of the series, Setsuna goes recklessly nuts when he encounters the guy who kicked off his childhood holy war because, in addition to getting a bunch of kids killed, the guy turns out to be an unapologetic mercenary who faked the religious angle.
Setsuna routinely forgives things that people do out of ignorance or good intentions—for example, he eventually becomes besties with the teammate who used to semi-regularly threaten to kill him. And although he doesn’t forgive unapologetic villains, he does end up moving past them: As noted, Setsuna spends most of the series getting worked up about the guy who faked his childhood holy war, but is ultimately able to leave that guy to his teammates while focusing on the bigger bad. And when that bigger bad seemingly comes back to life, Setsuna’s first reaction is to try warning shots and then non-lethal shots on someone who space-lasered millions. (When non-lethal shots have no effect, Setsuna moves on to lethal shots and then chucking C4. Setsuna can move past things, but also he’d like to live.)
Inventory: 1. A flower in a lab jar. 2. Scarf. 3. Scarf. 4. Scarf.
Powers/Abilities: Setsuna was over-exposed to robot sparkle particles and mutated slightly. As a result, his special abilities include:
1. He’s functionally a low-grade telepath—he can send and receive “quantum brain waves,” and therefore picks up on feelings/intent/emotions from other people with telepath-ish abilities. This extends to picking up feelings/intent/emotions from intelligent telepath-ish non-human life, although these are harder for him to process/interpret. Setsuna’s telepathic abilities are inherently limited by his brain’s capacity to handle information (when he tries to make direct psychic contact with an alien hivemind on his own he gives himself brain damage and goes into a coma because it’s too much for him to process), though he can mitigate this by psychically linking up to someone else to reduce mental strain. NERF-ADJACENT: Unless mods indicate otherwise, I assume that trying to use psychic abilities on Katalyth still conveys “misery,” accompanied by madness and mutation.
2. If there’s a sufficiently high concentration of canon-specific robot sparkle particles in the area then Setsuna is a much stronger telepath and can both (1) hear and send thoughts more clearly and (2) turn the area around him into a telepathic zone where everyone else also starts sharing thoughts and emotions telepathically with each other, regardless of whether other people have their own telepathic abilities. (Sometimes the latter manifests as everyone floating naked in space.) PROPOSED NERF: Generally nerf these two related abilities (there’s no robot to make the necessary canon-specific sparkle particles!). If there’s ever an in-game event that otherwise enables a large-scale psychic connection, I’ll probably reach out to the mod team about whether Setsuna can make the connection clearer/stronger or otherwise slightly affect the way it functions, but I’m fine with being told “no.” Setsuna’s Terra abilities will include mild psychedelic effects though.
3. He can sense when other people are being affected by psychic abilities (e.g., when they’re effectively possessed), although he feels it more as “she’s not herself; she feels wrong/dangerous” than necessarily understanding what’s happening.
4. Once when he was in a coma he had an out-of-body experience and saw stuff that was happening all over the world. PROPOSED NERF: Nerf this.
5. He’s got somewhat-higher-than-human spatial awareness, including awareness of attacks that are about to land.
6. He’s got somewhat-higher-than-human strength and resilience, and ages about half as fast as a normal person. (The latter is imperceptible at this canon point because the slower aging only kicked in two years ago.)
He’s also an excellent giant robot pilot, a decent mechanic (restored a busted robot and kept it running for four years while on his own), and an all-around-capable fighter. He breaks into palaces and military installations to ask dramatic questions and then jumps out the window.
Player Goals: Over the course of the show, Marina tells Setsuna that he can and should learn a way of living other than fighting, but Setsuna never gets a chance to try because there are too many shenanigans that he needs to handle with a giant robot… and then, at this particular canon point, Setsuna heads off on a fifty year roadtrip to find a ruined alien homeworld. I want to put Setsuna in a setting where he has to interact with mundane people doing mundane things on a regular basis for a prolonged period of time. And I want to make it even more awkward by giving him a Terra Natural Soul that is misaligned with his skillset/lifestyle (although aligned with the show’s heavy-handed “flowers are symbols of Setsuna’s yearning for peace” symbolism).
Basically I would like my horror with a side of fish-out-of-water comedy. Setsuna will probably try to take down Patho-Gen, but he’ll have to deal with people who care about interior decorating first.
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Application
Name: Em
Are you over 18?: Yes
Contact: skycrawler[at]plurk, DM
Other characters: Sheryl Nome
Permissions & opt-out: Permissions, Opt-out
Name: Setsuna F. Seiei (formerly Soran Ibrahim)
Canon: Mobile Suit Gundam 00
Age: 23
Gender: Male
Species: Human (some metahuman traits)
Appearance: Here
Canon point: Pre-epilogue Awakening of the Trailblazer (right as Setsuna and Tieria leave to find more aliens)
History: Here.
CRAU details: N/A
Personality answers: CW: App contains discussions of religious violence and patricide involving young children.
Explain which event in canon is most pivotal to your character's development, and who they are today.
Setsuna was lured into a fake holy war and killed his own parents when he was eight, then spent the next two years in a children’s guerrilla brigade that glorified martyrdom. His child soldier buddies were killed, and Setsuna reached a point where he lost all faith and was simply waiting to die. But one battle, a giant robot, a prototype “Gundam,” dropped out of the sky and wiped out everyone fighting—leaving Setsuna, and only Setsuna, alive. And suddenly Setsuna had a reason to live again: he wanted to have the power to eradicate conflict and save people like that robot. Chasing that ideal, teenage Setsuna joined a secret organization dedicated to eliminating war by beating everyone up with overpowered giant robots.
Setsuna eventually learns that peace-through-force isn’t sustainable (even his team’s surgical interventions leave mourning families behind, and although the team succeeds in unifying the world against them they accidentally empower a tyrannical world government in the process), and begins pursuing peace-through-understanding (supplemented by shanking truly incorrigible assholes) instead. Although Setsuna loses his teenage idealization of Gundams, he loses neither his affection for them nor his desire to make a peaceful world alongside them. Instead, Setsuna decides that he and his robot will change together, which ultimately leads to Setsuna becoming a telepath with a giant robot that specializes in creating temporary psychic links rather than specializing in destruction.
Setsuna’s Very Tragic Backstory could have made him dysfunctional and edgy, but the sense of hope and purpose that came from being saved by a giant robot make him generally stable and functional. He’s reserved and mission-focused, and can be awkwardly blunt when interacting with carefree people about mundane topics that he can’t relate to. But he’s optimistic that people can improve, and tries to support both individuals and humanity-as-a-whole on that path.
Who in your character's canon influenced the most growth in your character? What do they think about this character?
Seeing a robot drop out of the sky gave Setsuna a goal, but Marina Ismail changes how Setsuna approaches that goal.
As a teenager, Setsuna has a chance encounter with Marina Ismail, the mostly-powerless figurehead of the country that brutally annexed Setsuna’s homeland. At first, Setsuna is critical of Marina—while she’s trying to secure foreign economic assistance, people are dying and her country is careening toward another war—and is convinced that his own peace-through-force approach is more immediate and practical. But Setsuna gradually realizes that Marina is doing the best that she can with limited influence, and that her faith in mutual understanding is genuine. As Setsuna’s goal of peace-through-force crumbles, Setsuna starts to believe that, although Marina’s understanding-based approach may be harder to accomplish, it could lead to a more durable peace.
Marina’s outlook ultimately shifts Setsuna’s approach to eradicating war: he eventually pushes reconciliation over revenge and embraces his own weird burgeoning telepathic powers. (To be clear, Setsuna will still absolutely kill people, he’ll just try to talk them down first if there’s time.) And when a giant swarm of aliens shows up, Setsuna chooses Marina’s approach rather than a militant approach, and defuses first contact by communicating with aliens rather than wiping them out.
At this canon point, Setsuna sees Marina as someone that he can’t be close to. Part of that is because Setsuna is part of an internationally infamous paramilitary organization and being associated with him makes Marina and her country a target. But another part of it is that their lives are still very different: Marina is a steadfastly pacifist diplomat, and Setsuna hasn’t been able to fully leave his role intervening in armed conflicts. So Setsuna protects Marina anonymously-ish, and her distant existence gives him hope: even if the only thing Setsuna knows is fighting, Marina is out there growing flowers, and one day humanity might have more people like Marina than Setsuna.
What would your character say is their best trait? What is truly their best trait?
Setsuna would stare awkwardly if asked about his best trait. If further prompted by someone he’s comfortable with, he would say that he’s good at fighting. If that someone pointed out that being good at fighting is a skill not a trait, he would stare uncomfortably and offer that he keeps working toward his goal despite mistakes and failures. Setsuna self-defines in terms of his goals much more than by his personal traits.
Setsuna’s actual best trait is his capacity and willingness to change, on multiple levels. As he realizes that peace-through-force isn’t working, and that fixating on the past comes at the expense of the future, he accepts that in the long term he should be aiming for peace through understanding. After his secret organization falls apart, he transitions from being someone who (mostly) just follows orders to a decisionmaker who gets the gang back together to repair the damage they’ve inadvertently caused to the world. He also rolls with mutating into a telepath—even though being the first person with these weird abilities is isolating and he has trouble sorting out all the feelings he’s picking up—because it enables trippy conscious-sharing that he hopes can end conflict more effectively than beating people up.
What would it take to truly upset your character, enough that they would act upon their feelings? Are they the sort to forgive?
It takes a lot to upset Setsuna—he ignores or stoically endures people yelling at him, people pulling guns on him, and grieving teammates beating the hell out of him. When teammates die, Setsuna cries alone, mostly packs away his feelings of guilt and powerlessness, and uses the remaining feelings as motivation to keep fighting.
Setsuna gets upset most often by people recklessly or deliberately targeting non-combatants, by people fighting for personal gain or ego, and by kids getting dragged into battles; although Setsuna is generally mission-focused, these will get him to lose focus and pick emotion-driven fights. For most of the series, Setsuna goes recklessly nuts when he encounters the guy who kicked off his childhood holy war because, in addition to getting a bunch of kids killed, the guy turns out to be an unapologetic mercenary who faked the religious angle.
Setsuna routinely forgives things that people do out of ignorance or good intentions—for example, he eventually becomes besties with the teammate who used to semi-regularly threaten to kill him. And although he doesn’t forgive unapologetic villains, he does end up moving past them: As noted, Setsuna spends most of the series getting worked up about the guy who faked his childhood holy war, but is ultimately able to leave that guy to his teammates while focusing on the bigger bad. And when that bigger bad seemingly comes back to life, Setsuna’s first reaction is to try warning shots and then non-lethal shots on someone who space-lasered millions. (When non-lethal shots have no effect, Setsuna moves on to lethal shots and then chucking C4. Setsuna can move past things, but also he’d like to live.)
Inventory: 1. A flower in a lab jar. 2. Scarf. 3. Scarf. 4. Scarf.
Powers/Abilities: Setsuna was over-exposed to robot sparkle particles and mutated slightly. As a result, his special abilities include:
1. He’s functionally a low-grade telepath—he can send and receive “quantum brain waves,” and therefore picks up on feelings/intent/emotions from other people with telepath-ish abilities. This extends to picking up feelings/intent/emotions from intelligent telepath-ish non-human life, although these are harder for him to process/interpret. Setsuna’s telepathic abilities are inherently limited by his brain’s capacity to handle information (when he tries to make direct psychic contact with an alien hivemind on his own he gives himself brain damage and goes into a coma because it’s too much for him to process), though he can mitigate this by psychically linking up to someone else to reduce mental strain. NERF-ADJACENT: Unless mods indicate otherwise, I assume that trying to use psychic abilities on Katalyth still conveys “misery,” accompanied by madness and mutation.
2. If there’s a sufficiently high concentration of canon-specific robot sparkle particles in the area then Setsuna is a much stronger telepath and can both (1) hear and send thoughts more clearly and (2) turn the area around him into a telepathic zone where everyone else also starts sharing thoughts and emotions telepathically with each other, regardless of whether other people have their own telepathic abilities. (Sometimes the latter manifests as everyone floating naked in space.) PROPOSED NERF: Generally nerf these two related abilities (there’s no robot to make the necessary canon-specific sparkle particles!). If there’s ever an in-game event that otherwise enables a large-scale psychic connection, I’ll probably reach out to the mod team about whether Setsuna can make the connection clearer/stronger or otherwise slightly affect the way it functions, but I’m fine with being told “no.” Setsuna’s Terra abilities will include mild psychedelic effects though.
3. He can sense when other people are being affected by psychic abilities (e.g., when they’re effectively possessed), although he feels it more as “she’s not herself; she feels wrong/dangerous” than necessarily understanding what’s happening.
4. Once when he was in a coma he had an out-of-body experience and saw stuff that was happening all over the world. PROPOSED NERF: Nerf this.
5. He’s got somewhat-higher-than-human spatial awareness, including awareness of attacks that are about to land.
6. He’s got somewhat-higher-than-human strength and resilience, and ages about half as fast as a normal person. (The latter is imperceptible at this canon point because the slower aging only kicked in two years ago.)
He’s also an excellent giant robot pilot, a decent mechanic (restored a busted robot and kept it running for four years while on his own), and an all-around-capable fighter. He breaks into palaces and military installations to ask dramatic questions and then jumps out the window.
Samples: Here & Here
Player Goals: Over the course of the show, Marina tells Setsuna that he can and should learn a way of living other than fighting, but Setsuna never gets a chance to try because there are too many shenanigans that he needs to handle with a giant robot… and then, at this particular canon point, Setsuna heads off on a fifty year roadtrip to find a ruined alien homeworld. I want to put Setsuna in a setting where he has to interact with mundane people doing mundane things on a regular basis for a prolonged period of time. And I want to make it even more awkward by giving him a Terra Natural Soul that is misaligned with his skillset/lifestyle (although aligned with the show’s heavy-handed “flowers are symbols of Setsuna’s yearning for peace” symbolism).
Basically I would like my horror with a side of fish-out-of-water comedy. Setsuna will probably try to take down Patho-Gen, but he’ll have to deal with people who care about interior decorating first.
Soul Choice: Terra (tumble thistle)