sorrowful blade of the softly-falling rain (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
softlyfalling) wrote2020-08-09 11:22 am
softlyfalling) wrote2020-08-09 11:22 am
Shrike's Ideal World 🌾 Post-Mortem
or: "The World and Anything Worse."
Shrike's Ideals
In Shrike's ideal world, she has graduated from Imeeji alongside Persephone, and returned home to Creation as she's planned. She fought as part of a war to defeat the Deathlords and the Neverborn, her old masters, and Creation is finally peaceful, with her childhood friend Lark Sings at Dawn helping to hold it together as a diplomat.
Her friends and family have also all happily graduated from Imeeji and found good homes; she's written a happy ending to the best of her ability for basically everyone. Amaranth and Cardinal are married, Gold is engaged to B and has a food truck with Mike, Kohime goes on adventures with Req and Nem, Glory, Nero, Raven and Jason went home together to fight demons and the Sparda twins are mostly not fighting, etc.
After the war, she retired to a quiet life of farming, where she builds all her own things and grows her own food, and keeps up a lot of happy correspondence. She gets books from Persephone, who writes smut and has a partner who's a musician, and still has off-world poetry volumes. She keeps an avante jacket for old times' sake and thinks about her time in Imeeji with fondness.
The Flaws
The Main Fracture
There are many. The one that would convince Shrike this was bad sauce and she wanted to leave regardless of where she was with emotional appeals was that no one could die, regardless of what happened to them. This is a thing that wigs a lot of the Exalted cast about Imeeji for a variety of different reasons. Specifically here: 1. she feels like That's Wrong, and 2. if no one can die, the Neverborn aren't dead, either.
This could become apparent in several ways. Objects with obvious uses as weapons were generally dangerous to pick up—they'd slip from your hand and hurt you, cut your hand or your finger, or if you found a sword, it would stab you through the gut in a mirror of the mortal wound that Shrike carries with her. Drinking water from the well would make you ill. The drawers would scrape your fingers. Trying to go too far outside the boundary of the world would cause you to trip and break your nose before eventually turning you around. This happened a lot to the second group. Whoops.
She also doesn't have meat products at all. She explained that animals don't like her to Jason, but the real reason is that, well... nothing can die. So no meat products.
Everything Else
There were a lot of ways people could convince Shrike that this wasn't real or that this actually sucked. Going into the well at all was a thing I wrote in after Lucifel decided to in the first run, but just going down there would start giving her the heebie-jeebies. Lucifel also pass-agg confronting her in his Lucifel way with the implication of what was down there also just... started breaking things open at that point.
Shrike also could not touch anyone—other people could touch her first, but she couldn't initiate any kind of touch or she'd just clip right through a person. She is currently wigged out by the fact that she dissociated and tried to strangle Sashay on Tanabata, and feels like there is some kind of inherent danger to her as a person; so isn't it better to just... not be able to? (Other people could touch her because she like... felt it was fair if someone wanted revenge on her to like. Let them?)
But of course Shrike is someone who does actually really like affectionate touch in that she's very touch-starved from the first ??? years of her life, and has a lot of people she'd really like to touch her. Jason pointed out in his very special way that no one would be able to shove her against a wall to make out with h er and then goaded her into punching him in the face; she decided she really just wanted to kiss Nero enough to end the dream; Raven just went immediately to casual physical intimacy and that gave her a real problem.
Also, her personal ideal future was just very lonely! She doesn't actually like that, but she felt like she'd regret it more if she didn't go back home and finish what she started, and didn't feel like she could just make up a miracle where somehow she's still able to see people who went home to other worlds. When people really started pressing on that, she'd fold pretty fast. Basically everyone in the fourth run (Nem, Raven, Hlasoh, Glory) just went right for that and called her an idiot sandwich over it. Gold and Nem in run 1 and 4 respectively never left the starting area and just immediately came for her on that point with knives out.
Questioning the happy endings she wrote for people would also start to break things. Leo in particular balked at the idea of his graduating happily and still looking the way he does, and said some really relatable things about not wanting to be broken and not knowing if he has a place to go, they talked about dissociating and doing bad shit, and then she promised that if he wanted she'd take him with her so there is some possible future where Creation is terrorized by Leo Tsukinaga, who honestly would just fit right in.
Every run had its own very unique moe which I was very thankful for. Thank you for playing/reading! If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments.
Once, there was a maiden...First of all, if you want to read through all the pre-written text, you can view my twine file here!...who was the living embodiment of everything right in the world.
While she lived, no real harm could come to anyone. Oh, wounds, disease, even death, sure. But she stood between the world and anything worse.
"Except," she said, "I'm going to die." And no one listened.
"I'm going to die tomorrow," she said. And no one heard.
Into the silence, she said: "There's always an ending, after all."
Shrike's Ideals
In Shrike's ideal world, she has graduated from Imeeji alongside Persephone, and returned home to Creation as she's planned. She fought as part of a war to defeat the Deathlords and the Neverborn, her old masters, and Creation is finally peaceful, with her childhood friend Lark Sings at Dawn helping to hold it together as a diplomat.
Her friends and family have also all happily graduated from Imeeji and found good homes; she's written a happy ending to the best of her ability for basically everyone. Amaranth and Cardinal are married, Gold is engaged to B and has a food truck with Mike, Kohime goes on adventures with Req and Nem, Glory, Nero, Raven and Jason went home together to fight demons and the Sparda twins are mostly not fighting, etc.
After the war, she retired to a quiet life of farming, where she builds all her own things and grows her own food, and keeps up a lot of happy correspondence. She gets books from Persephone, who writes smut and has a partner who's a musician, and still has off-world poetry volumes. She keeps an avante jacket for old times' sake and thinks about her time in Imeeji with fondness.
The Flaws
The Main Fracture
There are many. The one that would convince Shrike this was bad sauce and she wanted to leave regardless of where she was with emotional appeals was that no one could die, regardless of what happened to them. This is a thing that wigs a lot of the Exalted cast about Imeeji for a variety of different reasons. Specifically here: 1. she feels like That's Wrong, and 2. if no one can die, the Neverborn aren't dead, either.
This could become apparent in several ways. Objects with obvious uses as weapons were generally dangerous to pick up—they'd slip from your hand and hurt you, cut your hand or your finger, or if you found a sword, it would stab you through the gut in a mirror of the mortal wound that Shrike carries with her. Drinking water from the well would make you ill. The drawers would scrape your fingers. Trying to go too far outside the boundary of the world would cause you to trip and break your nose before eventually turning you around. This happened a lot to the second group. Whoops.
She also doesn't have meat products at all. She explained that animals don't like her to Jason, but the real reason is that, well... nothing can die. So no meat products.
Everything Else
There were a lot of ways people could convince Shrike that this wasn't real or that this actually sucked. Going into the well at all was a thing I wrote in after Lucifel decided to in the first run, but just going down there would start giving her the heebie-jeebies. Lucifel also pass-agg confronting her in his Lucifel way with the implication of what was down there also just... started breaking things open at that point.
Shrike also could not touch anyone—other people could touch her first, but she couldn't initiate any kind of touch or she'd just clip right through a person. She is currently wigged out by the fact that she dissociated and tried to strangle Sashay on Tanabata, and feels like there is some kind of inherent danger to her as a person; so isn't it better to just... not be able to? (Other people could touch her because she like... felt it was fair if someone wanted revenge on her to like. Let them?)
But of course Shrike is someone who does actually really like affectionate touch in that she's very touch-starved from the first ??? years of her life, and has a lot of people she'd really like to touch her. Jason pointed out in his very special way that no one would be able to shove her against a wall to make out with h er and then goaded her into punching him in the face; she decided she really just wanted to kiss Nero enough to end the dream; Raven just went immediately to casual physical intimacy and that gave her a real problem.
Also, her personal ideal future was just very lonely! She doesn't actually like that, but she felt like she'd regret it more if she didn't go back home and finish what she started, and didn't feel like she could just make up a miracle where somehow she's still able to see people who went home to other worlds. When people really started pressing on that, she'd fold pretty fast. Basically everyone in the fourth run (Nem, Raven, Hlasoh, Glory) just went right for that and called her an idiot sandwich over it. Gold and Nem in run 1 and 4 respectively never left the starting area and just immediately came for her on that point with knives out.
Questioning the happy endings she wrote for people would also start to break things. Leo in particular balked at the idea of his graduating happily and still looking the way he does, and said some really relatable things about not wanting to be broken and not knowing if he has a place to go, they talked about dissociating and doing bad shit, and then she promised that if he wanted she'd take him with her so there is some possible future where Creation is terrorized by Leo Tsukinaga, who honestly would just fit right in.
Every run had its own very unique moe which I was very thankful for. Thank you for playing/reading! If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments.