Character Moralities!!!!!!

[mywife]

It was brought up in a plurk, and I thought it was entirely fascinating. We have such a wide range of characters in Imeeji and moralities can run wild around in these parts. There are some big obvious aspects for every character, but there are probably tiny aspects that we don't get to see everyday. I want to know all.

You can include whatever, things like what is considered good, what kind of people they find abhorrent, what kind of acts are actually the worst (it might not even be murder OHOHO!), how DO they feel about murder, ARE THEY THE LAW OR ARE THEY WILLING TO FOLLOW THE LAW, whats your dnd alignment, some other things I cannot think of but tldr I love to see people ramble, and I think it's easier to do that on dw than on plurk

I am selfish, let me read your thoughts. Ok plz ty.

(ooc: ill post a heart meme soon too since ppl were asking for it, maybe next weekend?!)

Comments

[sunflowering]

Kaguya/Yuuki

People who steal other people's pudding...!! It's the absolute worst!!!

But hmmm, this is interesting. For Kaguya/Yuuki, I'm not...........hmm. In the fanbook, it lists Yuuki as having a clear sense of right and wrong. That right and wrong doesn't necessarily align with what is socially acceptable, or the law, either, though. For instance, in canon sharing your blood with a Level E vampire to sustain them is considered forbidden/a sin probably because of elitist vampires and jerk hunters. But Yuuki doesn't care and shares her blood anyway.

Her morals get a little more...skewed as the series goes on though. FOR INSTANCE. She knows it's really difficult for the pureblood to die. They can't just die. They just keep existing except under special circumstances. So after an incident at a ball in which supposedly a pureblood turned a hunter human to get them to kill them (this didn't really happen....) she thought...

WELP. I know what I need to do. And she ran away from home to go ask the other pureblood if they wanted to die! As one does. Because that, to her, is better than a pureblood destroying a human's life for such a wish.

Furthermore, Yuuki tends to try and apprehend people first and turn them in. She doesn't really like the shoot first, questions later type attitude. But she's also a vigilante at times. I mean when she finds out vampire society starts targetting her boy toy because he's not good enough for her (vampire politics...) she shows up to tell them to knock it off or DEATHTTT. AS ONE DOES. It was reasonable to her.

This get complicated with fiance/brother because he does a lot of not great things and she is WAYYY too forgiving with him at times. But she kind of draws the line at genocide. At one point she almost considered genocide herself after reaching a breaking point but was able to walk herself back from that.

All of this said she won't hesitate to kill if someone she loves is on the line. And she might go make threats stupidly because that's what a genki vampire girl does. At one point she founds out in canon that someone is placing some bombs under daycares and she was ready to go out and do some murder, but her friends who are in various associations and policing factions of various kinds were like 'PLEASE DON'T YOU WILL MAKE MORE TROUBLE. I'M NOT TELLING YOU WHERE TO GO LOOK."

She does try to work with changing various laws, however, and has helped put into place a sort of democratic method of dealing with vampires they think need to be exterminated (which I'm not sure necessarily aligns entirely with the hunters, but you know. There are lots of politics revolving around that.

But like ALL OF THAT SAID. If you touch her family she will murder you so dead it will be like you never existed before. Don't touch her children because you don't mess with mama bears. >(

Leviathan/Kija

ER... OKAY. Moving onto Levi/Kija. Death in his world is kind of a commonplace. Even his village has presumably killed trespassers for getting... too close to his village. And that's just for finding his secret village....! But protecting the 'sacred white dragon' is of the utmost importance of course.

But overall, Levi cares a great deal about people. He LOVES to fight and can actually... get pretty bloodlusty. In canon when told he gets to go fight or battle he's all AH YEAH /flexes claws. So he kind of likes the thrill of it. On the flip side, it's not like he enjoys killiing or the like, but he also won't hesitate. There are been a number of battles where he's fought without trying to kill others... but to merely stop them, which is...hard with his power set in canon.

His group is basically vigilantes who go around trying to help downtrodden portions of the country and defend it when necessary. When the life of his friends or the princess have been threatened however he's made it clear he will murder you dead though, and that no one, absolutely no one is allowed to fuck with them. Even when some men were under the influence of drugs, when one harmed the princess it took every bit of his self-control not to crush that person's head....

(He can probably be somewhat of a berserker depending on the circumstances)

But he has things that he believes are RIGHT and that are WRONG, even if he intends to kill you for instance. Mizari in his canon harmed his friends and did a lot of shit to them. But when they were all thrown in prison for a time and Mizari was attacked and unable to fight whatsoever, he was like OH HELL NAH you can't just kill someone who is locked up behind bars??? Because that isn't honorable!!! And he freed Mizari.

Basically, Levi doesn't have a problem with killing someone if they bring on the consequences themselves. But he doesn't believe in being underhanded about it. He wouldn't poison someone or try to surprise attack. He'd rather be up front and honest about it because that is more honorable to him??

To give another example: He realized in canon that Soo-Won (the current king who murdered Yona's father (Hiryuu) and had been the cause of her and Hak's misfortunes....) was the one responsible for what happened to them, and when Hak came upon him and had murder revenge on the mind... Levi was content to let him do it. That was between them and he didn't feel it was right to stop him. And the only reason he DID help stop him was that Hak was already injured going into that.

At one point Levi DOES meet Soo-Won by himself. Soo-Won like awkwardly holds his hand for a moment (it's weird) and he's thrown by the whole thing and very much wants to slice him but also he restrains himself because it's not his place too and also because there were more important things going on at the time. And he left feeling somewhat troubled because he didn't get the feeling that he was a BAD person, which Levi had perceived him to be due to everything he knew prior to that.

I think due to the world he has been raised in, overall he fights for peace and helping the downtrodden. But you also protect your own, and if that means you gotta kill someone, then there's no hesitation. It's just the kind of world he comes from. When you a dragon warrior you gotta do some dragon warrior things.

These are their morals which are mostly just explanations of things and how they would react to things.

They're both kind sweet children who just. Also may kill you if you harm people they love. NEITHER, however, would take what happens inside of a game outside of a game unless something was done vindictively with the full intent of causing extra harm and they were in their right mind at the time. That would maybeeeee sway them.

[bevoted]

SPOILERS FOR MAKAI OUJI AND PROBABLY ALSO ENSEMBLE STARS. DOES ANYONE CARE? NO? COOL

So first off I want to just say, that the basic differences between Dantalion and Leo are really funny to me... that is to say, Dantalion is a fairly emotionally stable (in comparison to Leo) individual with a sort of... foreign/sideways moral compass, while Leo was born and raised in our modern age so his ideas of morality are pretty standard to our own but he's severely kneecapped by the fact that he's mcfuckinginsane.

Also this is all going to be real stream-of-thought-ey so I'm sorry if it's difficult to read.

Anyways starting with the easy one for me,

Dantalion/Loki

In the first place Dantalion was nnnnever a human being, he was a "giant" from norse mythology and a "god among the giants" at that. He was routinely placed above others for being "the wisest of the giants", and thus he felt completely isolated from his own kind. That didn't really make him EXTREMELY SMART by the way, because the average intelligence of giants is uh... not much. But he was still "the wisest" so it was probably like being an adult amongst a bunch of giant toddlers. I really am not CERTAIN as makai ouji is a bad series and it doesn't tell me shit about SHIT, but Solomon repeatedly states that he and Dantalion have a "similar loneliness". And Solomon's loneliness stemmed from his wisdom, from feeling like he couldn't connect to others truly, and like he was constantly responsible for everything and everyone. ANYWAYS I'M GETTING OFF COURSE A BIT HERE.

The point is that Dantalion often feels estranged from others just as a default. He very often feels like he cannot connect or be understood, and he just kind of accepts that. And that acceptance makes other people... people that he doesn't care about especially, hardly register as people. So therein lies our first hurdle to "standard morality", he was a God and a Demon and he never connected to humans so why would he have the same set of standards and sense of morals as them?

On the demon thing as well, I've already talked about this before but he was coerced into becoming a "demon", a completely foreign concept to him at the time of a symbol of "ultimate evil". Even if he was not at the time, even if he is not really evil, the more you are told that you are evil and without hope of being anything but, the more you begin to believe that. This combined with Hell Politics which essentially boils down to "dog eat dog" and the constant expectations of murder and soul stealing... your standards just get really shifted.

FOR LOKI IT IS A LITTLE BIT DIFFERENT, in some ways... worse. As Loki didn't start out with the sense of "I used to be a god/I am a demon general/I have responsibilities to things other than myself", and Betrayal hit him like a freight truck. The breaking point really wasn't the idea of "other people are dangerous" so much as he, himself, was dangerous and he didn't know what to do aside from cling strongly to the people that mattered most to him, the people that seemed to understand him the most... and that was all he cared about.

To put it simply, Loki's sense of morality kind of takes a backseat to "I want this thing and I will do everything I can to keep it". In a way you can call this selfish, in fact it is really selfish. But he can't like... care deeply about everyone. He can only care deeply about a select few, and anyone/anything outside of that narrow scope ... they're like expendable NPCs.

Tribalistic! That's the word I keep using. He's very "us vs them" and "eye for an eye". That being said... he understands the difference between right and wrong. He just accepts that he has, is, and will continue do wrong. He kind of struggled with this in the beginning as "Loki" (like, trying to desperately argue that he was right in certain situations as opposed to just purely hating xyz) but after he remembered his demonhood... well no a bit before that actually, the button game is where he started to realize that he is UNCOMFORTABLY good at murder, and more than that deciding who was "expendable" for the sake of people he actually cares about.

... if u have any questions feel free to ask but I think I should move on, i'll reply to my own comment with a Leo thing in a second here this was already a lot.

[syncintohell]

OKAY SO SHU AND MORALITY:

In canon he has this long diatribe near the of the year, wherein he is trying to get someone to listen to him and be a goddamn person, so a lot of his philosophical thoughts on morality in canon are laid out explicitly via monologue.

So Shu's moral system in canon is based very intensely on what affected him growing up. Long story short, he was bullied very badly as a child (specific reason not said but likely because he was weird, and also liked girly things since he is stated specifically to want to be an idol partially to prove to the world that targeted him that he has value, and considering his insistence on including the artsy and doll motifs, it's likely he also wishes to prove these things he was rejected for are worthy) but art and sewing, etc saved him. And then in high school, he managed to become the top idol of Yumenosaki, only to be again dragged down by the mob and hated/rejected by the majority of the school. So! What this means is Shu has a very very low baseline of trust in most other people and humans in general.

But also, humans are of course the ones who create the art that is so beloved by him-- animals don't paint, make dolls, etc. He reconciles this as basically: that is the worthwhile part of human nature. Even if he was weak, even if he was unloved, even if he was bullied and hated, even if he cried all the time, he was able to find solace in art and a purpose to drive him forward in life. So him, it is literal only worthwhile part. Which means the rest of human nature is not, it's beastly: as animals can care for other other animals, form packs and families just as people do. That's not exclusively reserved for human beings. Meanwhile, a cheetah will not go two weeks without food to dig up pigment from a ditch to create a painting upon a rock-- only humans would do that, so that is the worthwhile part of human nature. He calls this dividing line reason. Even though the definition he's using is definitely not one other people would use.

So, he has very little respect for things most people value! Par example: he has no respect for greater good rhetoric. He doesn't think filial piety is particularly special: as animals, they survive better in groups. He also could be said to be cynical: he's not particularly surprised either that people who have more resources would keep them for themselves, or use them against those who have no way of fighting back. Strong animals take everything they need and the weak die off is the way of the natural world. So he lumps both these kinds of behaviors in the same category.

In contrast, what he values are acts of reason-- by which he honestly means personal consideration. A person who might work three days straight on a melody, neglecting their physical needs-- that is a wholly human act. A person who would kill their beloved-- also wholly human! Not for reasons of like, we need less mouths to feed, but just I loved them so I murdered them with my own hands kind of act: it's a conclusion the person reached without consideration of survival but on their own ethos or pathos. But also, a person who would throw their life away to protect someone who is in all ways less capable than them: that's a human act, as opposed to an animal that might let the runt starve.

---

What this means more functionally in Imeeji is he has a certain disdain for all the ALL THE UNITS SHOULD GET ALONG, greater good sort of rhetoric. If getting along means being damned to suffer as a scapegoat, to hell with that; but neither does Shu actually value his own survival. He acts on what he is willing to do, which means he actually doesn't want to hurt others because he hates that kind of MIGHT MAKES RIGHT rhetoric just as much as he hates the everyone risk yourselves for the greater good. He wants to protect, basically, those he deems worthy and without specific artistic accomplishments to assign in early Imeeji he definitely just wanted to protect those who seemed pure and unlikely to harm others, esp since early in Imeeji he hadn't really remembered his full world-view yet, and just placed a higher value on aesthetics than most people would. But amnesia didn't mean he automatically just suddenly learned everyone else's value system, and one of his early memories being Eichi holding hostage ra*bits to get his way, Shu was automatically suspicious of threats.

To add to this, Shu also is someone who generally holds himself to ludicrously high standards, and in canon does this to prove himself to the world that rejected him, and Imeeji he was primed to do the same thing by his profile just calling him broken from the start. They could call him what he liked, he would don that mantle and refuse to give them the satisfaction of seeing him break! Except, then, of course he had to take responsibility for acts in Betrayal, etc, but even then Shu took responsibility by tracking down both his victims and seeing if they wanted anything from him. So like, before and after his "breaking", personal responsibility is a huge thing, which feeds into the personal consideration part of reason, even without remembering he had that complex. He holds himself to ridiculously high standards, but also expects others to conduct themselves with full consideration of their actions!

Which primed him to consider BEDE (this happened before Betrayal, but as mentioned, Shu just in general is like this with high standards and had his profile set him up for this from the start bc SPITE) unforgivable and immoral because they betrayed and were like OH SHIT NO WE CAUSED HARM. If they had chosen to gamble, acknowledged the harm they might do, and then did it anyway he would have been less pissed off. But since it was an accident, there was no reason or ownership, that sort of thing is unforgivable.

Now that he has like, a good amount of canon memories back his moral paradigm is very similar to canon. His distaste for Cardigan is spurred by the twin lances of Might Makes Right + The Greater Good, for instance. BOTH THINGS HE HATES IN ONE PACKAGE.

But to talk about where he diverges morally in Imeeji from canon-- uh in canon one of the examples of a human act he gives is like, KILLING YOUR LOVER thank you Itsuki Shu. yeah he doesn't actually respect that in Imeeji because rather than defining his early feelings into ART and REASON, art was just love, see him dating Persephone because he's pretty. He also fucking does this in canon with Nazuna, but Nazuna has all this other idealism stuff mixed in and Nazuna is a beautiful artwork. With Persephone though, due to like, Santa and seeing her memories and going oh shit I should try and see him as a person Shu decided fairly early on to prioritize the feeling of Love above Beauty. SO. AS A RESULT, in Imeeji he is very scandalized by the idea of killing your lover, especially since he did so in Betrayal. So that meant he clashed really hard with Maki over it in The Last Supper.

He's also judged himself in imeeji as morally worthless-- he's already passed that moral boundary, so now he wishes to keep those who are valuable from dirtying their hands. He'll do what he must for Taisho!

BUT OVERALL: he respects personal reason/responsibility in decision-making; does not respect MIGHT MAKES RIGHT and THE GREATER GOOD. Survival and human instinct are inherently suspect and distasteful. He's just more willing to accept human connections as part of personal reason and responsibility, and base things on love not just creation.

[crossmyheartandhope]

Hurricane

In canon, Hurricane is a good boy who has been set up by a sketchy authority, along with some other kids, to be fed into the meatgrinder for the sake of the greater good. He is mostly aware of this, though as his canon goes on, he discovers that the authority is much sketchier than bargained for and attempts to nope out/do good by exposing that, hey, the authority of law in this case is actually not great.

He wants to help people! He is actually very easy to order around! He seems like he should be a good little soldier. But neither of these things are his primary motivators. Mostly, he prioritizes his important people over what the law and authority says is right or wrong. He gets into his canon situation to support his mother, because she needs him, and when the situation compromises Nemesis' safety, he defects and sides with her instead. People > ideals > actual law

Overall, he is more pulled by big concepts and the general feeling of what's right than what the law says is proper. He's pretty firmly Chaotic Good. Smaller rules are to be ignored in favor of finding something fun. It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, but if you can get away without getting caught, you don't need forgiveness, either.

In Imeeji, Hurricane started out with a strong intrinsic sense of right and wrong, which he mostly still retains, though it has been somewhat battered. This isn't okay, and I'm not going to do this, and we're not going to do this in games. He is a character for whom what is fair is very important, and he will balk hard at things that go against that.

He started out extremely idealistic and full of purpose, and that has definitely taken a hit. He REALLY believed that people in Imeeji could come together and agree on a base set of standards that they would abide by to make life easier for everyone. "We are literally being tortured and killed for funsies. Why on earth would anyone NOT want to make that less messy when we possibly can?"

HSS tried to organize people early on to get some kind of understanding or arrangement set up, and people planted their heels and dragged their feet over small details, and the first try ended in a giant argument and not much getting done. Round two was not much better.

Then betrayal house happened, and every single priority took a back seat for him, for a long time, to just not falling the heck apart.

When he finally got it together enough again, he talked to Hiryuu a little about something potentially more democratic, because a lot of the kickback early on was, "You're not the boss of me, you can't tell me what to do!!!" even though that was never really the point. So he gave it one more try and asked around for suggestions, so that everyone could get their ideas in on the ground floor and maybe circumvent some of the hangups that had stalled them last time. He got told, in no uncertain terms, that it was a dumb idea, and he was dumb for trying it, and Hurricane takes criticism to heart hard. His takeaway: guess this was a dumb idea, and I am dumb, and maybe I should stop having ideas.

Add to this his Hunger Games experience, where two characters he thought of as friends teamed up to kill his most important person after instigating the fight. Add to this also the fact that he killed Nya to keep it from happening again. Add to this also that Phoenix told him off afterward, for not doing better and resolving the incident without violence. Add to this the background of him being steamrolled in games for important choices fairly regularly and also games that are ostensibly about choice but do not in fact offer much choice in what they're allowed to do.

All of that adds up to: he is tired. Real, real tired. He guesses there's just murder now? And that's the way it's going to be. No one seems to care, and no one seems to want to do anything about it, and he's just... tired. He will still intervene if and when he can, but he always seems to find out too late to do anything. He literally became a zombie to try and keep people safe, and he can't even do that.

He wants to do better, and be better, but also he knows if given a do-over of the Hunger Games he would probably, honestly, do exactly the same thing.

===

Thorn

In canon, Thorn is mmmmostly a good guy who has had life be such a dick to him that for a long time he stops believing that other people can be decent. The law is useless, because if the law doesn't help people living their lives, what good is it? It has no teeth. The only way to take care of yourself is to put on a show and make people take one look and go, "Huh, maybe that one is more trouble than he's worth." A lot of his surface abrasiveness and don't-fuck-with-me styling is performative. He's like a snake whose colors broadcast poison, and that's by design.

He is weirdly rigid about following certain laws, not out of respect to authority, but out of pride. Fuck that, he doesn't need to steal; that's almost like charity. He's going to play by the rules and win anyway, and no one's going to stop him.

He has certain impulses toward good that he will flat-out deny if asked, and downplay when he can. He has a weak spot a mile wide for people who can't protect themselves and will step in for someone in a heartbeat. He's a mage in canon, and has compromised his combat strength for the sake of healing magic, just because sometimes people need that.

In general, his morality is kind of a mess. Authority is shitty, and yet he is in his world's equivalent of the military for a while. Law enforcement is dumb, but he loves detective stories and murder mysteries. People are the fucking worst - but not that one, that one can't do anything, what the fuck are you thinking, go find cover you absolute dumbass.

In Imeeji... Thorn actually mellowed out a lot at first. He had a team and a home, and by and large people were not awful. The society seemed lawless, but who needs laws anyway? There were some murders, but for a place that promotes torture games, it seemed pretty mild.

The Hunger Games changed his mind in a big way.

Without rehashing an old write-up, which got very long, it shunted him right back into his early canon view: people are bad, and even people who seem innocuous can be fucking awful. People will gang up on you and fuck you over while you're down. There's no sense of right and wrong; no one else cares what's fair.

So, he's right back to that mindset from early on: the only way to take care of yourself is to put on a show and make people take one look and go, "Huh, maybe that one is more trouble than he's worth." He didn't kill Yasuragi for revenge. He killed Yasuragi (tried to beat the shit out of him, actually; the killing was an accident) to make sure he's never stuck like he was in Hunger Games again, helpless and at someone else's mercy.

In Thorn's mind, since no one's going to back him up, and people feel free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, the only way to prevent it is to make the consequence high enough that no one's going to touch him again. If he gets a rep, even better. Now people who aren't Yasuragi also know he's not fucking around.

In general, his morality is pretty black and white. If he feels you're in the wrong, you are wrong, period. He will fight you about it if he cares, and sometimes he cares. He first got into it with Yasu over what he perceived as a dick move pulled against a complete stranger, which led to that stranger unnecessarily getting killed.

Laws are worthless; authority can go fuck itself. But if you're a dick, he will be a dick right back. If you hurt him or kill him, there will be consequences. And if you touch his people, you'd better believe you'll get what's coming to you.

[sonof]

I'M DROPPING LITERALLY TOMORROW BUT I FEEL I WAS IN THIS GAME LONG ENOUGH THAT I'M VALID ANSWERING THIS!!!

Yasuragi was originally from a heavily classist, highly warmongering society - might makes right, more allowances are made for you the higher your standing, torture and execution are standardized sentences for wide range of crimes, and giving up or running away are considered worse than failure or even turning traitor. Yasuragi runs by-and-large counter to his homeland's values, but they do still serve as his initial baseline understanding of morality.

After trying and failing to "fit" with societal expectations when he was younger, he ended up veering hard into defining himself in deliberate opposition to his people's definition of "right," aligning himself with lawlessness, shamelessness, cowardice, flagrant disrespect, and outright petty crime while openly disdaining "the proper way of things." With an amnesia reset, Yasuragi was lllless drastically Like This than he once was in "canon," but by force of habit, he remained a person who didn't see righteousness as something to strive for - and consequentially considers himself dramatically less moralistic than he actually is. He doesn't intentionally hold himself, or anyone else for that matter, to any particular standard of behavior, and he's quick to profess to being completely self-interested if asked, but in actuality I NEED TO SHUT OFF MY COMPUTER SO I'M GOING TO COME BACK AND EDIT THIS COMMENT AND FINISH LATER