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[orexis]

User Name/Nick: Danii
User DW: yarnzipan
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact: yarnzipan @ plurk
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Jon Sims, Makima

Character Name: Griffith
Series: Berserk (manga)
Age: Unknown, but in his early 20s to start
From When?: Griffith will be coming from just after his escape from the Tower of Rebirth, during his attempted suicide in the red lake. He sees a sharp piece of rock and tries to kill himself in that moment by falling on it aiming to pierce his heart or his throat. In canon, he fails and pierces his shoulder, which makes him bleed enough to activate the crimson beherit that fate had returned to him and... well, let's say things get VERY DARK VERY QUICKLY.

Inmate Justification: Griffith is unbelievably, mind-bendingly, reality-bendingly selfish and self-centered, to the point where there is nothing and no one that he wouldn't destroy (save one supposedlyinsignificantexception) in order to satisfy his desires. He sacrifices his own men when necessary to reach his goals with surgical precision and even though he knows he has other, less violent, less terrible options at his disposal, he is disgusted by them and chooses instead to horrifically butcher hundreds of people who had risked everything for him and his dream. ...and it literally only gets worse from there.

Griffith requires redemption because everything he's ever done has been for his own satisfaction and happiness and he literally cannot handle the least bit of rejection without imploding and bringing everyone down with him as terribly and viciously as possible. He needs a warden to pierce through some of the lofty ideals and bullshit he hides his selfishness behind, make clear to him how very human he still very much is where it counts, and show him that his path has been nothing but lies and trickery and loss... that there is nothing that he 'deserves' no matter where a shiny fate stone ended up and people tell him.

Arrival: 100% against his will. This is not part of his destiny, it is not part of causality, and it is directly counter to his dream. This place is a block on his desires and it will take a very long time before he doesn't outright loathe both the Admiral and those who work for him.

Abilities/Powers: At the moment in which I'm bringing him in, he is a standard baseline human. He'll actually be severely handicapped to start as he'd undergone a year of torture which utterly destroyed his body and made him an invalid. Once he's healed up, however, he will just be a baseline human who happens to be very very good at swordplay and is almost supernaturally pretty.

I do have every intention of moving him through his timeline, however, because the depths of his fuckery require it (even though all the seeds are there from the start) and once he has become Femto of the Godhand (literally directly after his entrance event in canon) he has the following abilities: as covered here, though his physiology is also changed as mentioned here. To summarize: The Godhand is like... super-apostles. And all of it is just people empowered by their own willingness to toss aside the things that make them human. My intent would be to nerf him into the ground, quite frankly, and he'd only have the power to do minor spatial manipulation, limited flight (more like a glide), limited supernatural speed/strength, improved healing, and some telekinesis.

Inmate Information: Griffith began his life as a street urchin in a medieval city that seemed to be relatively well-managed. We know very little else, other than the fact that he stole and scraped to get by as a child. He was always beautiful and he was always well liked. And one day, he looked up at the castle that his city surrounded and a dream blossomed in his heart: to have a kingdom of his own.

Sounds nice, right? Except this world is a lot closer to actual medieval Europe than it isn't, and if anything, it's actually worse off and more cruel. There were no fairy tale situations that were going to pop up and make this happen and no secret missing princes that he could conveniently be. Instead, he got good and formed a mercenary band, taking in people from all walks of life and all situations; very often it was the bandits he and his men had just defeated. Old, young, skilled, not, he'd take anyone and using an almost supernatural charisma, he built a veritable mini army who would all gladly die for him. He just has a way of looking at people, at really seeing them, at saying the right thing at the right time to engender loyalty... and he's 100% aware of how and when to use them for maximum effect. He was also willing to do whatever he needed to do to keep the successes rolling, including selling his body to a lech of a man with money to spare to outfit his troops.

[cw sexual assault] One of those people that he recruited was a woman named Casca who he saved from being raped on the road; he threw her a sword and let her defend herself and when she survived, he told her that she was welcome to do what she wanted, including join his band. And that's... kind of how he proceeded with everyone, never making anyone do anything but very very good at making them want to do what he wanted them to do. There were others he recruited, but the two big important ones are Casca (who trained up to be a goddamn badass and basically second best fighter in the band, though he always kept a certain amount of distance) and a man they stumbled upon named Guts.

Griffith immediately wanted Guts and unlike the others, he dueled him for the right to claim him for his mercenary group, to 'keep' him. When Griffith bested Guts (who was very surprised at this because he's also Very Very Good with a sword), he claimed the other man, touching his face and leeeet's just say it's pretty clear that the interest wasn't platonic or strategic. But it also wasn't not that, because Guts becomes one of his main fighters very quickly. Queue bonding montage, complete with the love triangle of Casca wants Griffith, Griffith wants Guts, Guts wants Casca. It doesn't interfere in their success, however, and slowly the Band of the Hawk, as they're called, manage success after success in the employ of a country called Midland (think big ol' fantasy Germany).

Griffith gets far enough in good graces to not just become a knight (nearly unheard of) but then a count and even a general after a massive military success that no one saw coming. It makes him enemies who, with the help of Guts and his own cleverness, he manages to figure out and then murder to get out of the way. He's introduced to the princess, who's totally into him, and everything's looking great... and then Guts says he wants to leave.

And Griffith, control freak that he is, says no. Guts offers a duel, for him to win his freedom, and Griffith assumes he'll just win again. But while Griffith was playing politics, Guts was studying the blade, and the duel is over in one charge. Guts wins... and Griffith shatters. Partially from losing (for the first time ever), partially from losing the one person who mattered to him, that he saw as a person, and partially because he no doubt realized that in leaving, he introduced the first chink in the perfection that was his band; someone didn't love him, didn't follow him. Someone saw something else as 'better'.

[cw torture and mutilation, mention of SA] And he loses. his goddamn. mind. Immediately goes and makes some of the worst mistakes he possibly could and gets tossed into the dungeon, all of his allies run off as bandits, and spends a year being tortured after mouthing off to the king himself. [cw mutilation] He has all of his tendons cut, his tongue removed, hair pulled out... pretty much any mutilation you can think of to do to a body was done to him. When Guts and Casca manage to sneak in and free him, he is a husk of his former self in a helmet they can't remove without weeping. His ears are just fine, though, so when he hears Casca and Guts essentially talking about the future, about how Casca will stay with Griffith and take care of him and try to nurse him to as much health as he can get even though it's clear she wants to go with Guts (there was development there, Griffith was aiming for marrying the princess, Casca and Guts had bonded, she wasn't abandoning him, quite the contrary) but anyway, he [cw SA]1. tries to force himself bodily on Casca in a flail of limbs for... some sort of control, which she instantly forgives (which is almost the worst part for him) and then 2. steals the wagon he was in and gets himself far enough away to, he hopes, end his own life. That's his initial pull point.

He fails, and he's bleeding, which is when he sees what's known as 'the Egg of the King' or the crimson behelit, an item which (in this world) is fated to find those who are suitable to become apostles (monsters) by making a deal and giving up their tie to humanity. They're activated, of course, by the blood of the one making the sacrifice. And Griffith... falters for a moment. But eventually, without any coercion or really even more than gentle reminders of what reality is? Decides to sacrifice the entire Band of the Hawk.

Hundreds of people. Which in turn triggers a giant world cataclysm that brings a bunch of demons that pop up and start ripping through his men. It's... AWFUL. All of them die in terrible, horrible, painful, hideous, torturous ways... and Griffith is reborn as part of the Godhand, the top five apostles/demons in the world. Which is terrible. But you could almost say that a man in his position, you could understand why he'd take a deal like that, as awful as it is.

[cw rape]...except for the bit where he [cw sexual violence/rape] plucks Casca from the fracas and rapes her repeatedly in front of Guts just to be a vicious asshole. Guts and Casca probably would have died were it not for the intervention of someone else but he lets them go, and it's arguably to a worse existence than just death since they're now branded as being beacons for spirits and demons to come after them every night.

But that's... not... it.

Because he manufactures a situation to let himself be reborn into a human body again, to look like a person again. But he needed to do it, of course, so that he could accomplish his dream of having a kingdom of his own. Which he does, by essentially manipulating world politics to start a massive war of conquest that kills thousands, then uses the negative energy from that to fuck the world up even further: he causes all of reality to essentially start blending with fantasy. It brings more and more fantastic (horrible) supernatural creatures into what had been a largely normal medieval world and lots. and lots. of people die.

Oh, he makes a beautiful utopia of a city/kingdom named Falconia with all the forces of his command, and it's a paradise and it's wonderful. But it also has a literal demon fighting arena beneath it where demons fight and kill one another in between his intended conquests. The bastard is literally sitting on a throne of lies here. And all of this is so that he can be a hero. All of it is so that he can be in the history books, so that he can be everyone's savior, so that he can have his kingdom and it can be the best kingdom there ever was. Some people like to make out that 'oh he was trying to fix things by making a good kingdom' but 1. he doesn't give a shit about the people of his kingdom and 2. so so SO many people had to die in order to make this happen and so much was put out of balance and the world was literally shifted in a way that resulted in untold suffering and damage not to mention 3. he didn't. have. to do. any of this. But it's what he wanted, his dream, and he would not even entertain any other possibility for moving forward. Would not tolerate even the idea of it.

Path to Redemption: First off, they're going to have to peel through his 'I've given up my mortal concerns' nonsense because that is absolutely not true: he's upset when Rickert slaps him for all that he's done, and he's still fixated on Guts more than he would be if he didn't have that human connection. Also one of the terrible things about the apostles/Godhand is that the power they are representatives of isn't Satan or Lucifer: it's the God of the Abyss, the deepest desires of the collective human heart, the part in every person that asks questions like 'why do bad things happen?' and seeks to answer it. The only commandment given to any apostle is 'do as thou wilt' with no barriers; he's not influenced to just Do Evil and he literally can't have had his human motivations removed otherwise he wouldn't have any 'will' to do. The cosmology is very clear: Griffith is in there and all the bullshit is just a smokescreen between him and the world so he can dismiss things.

Second off, they're going to have to tackle the terrible logic of his sunken cost fallacy that he's used to justify his continuing shitty behavior: 'well, a bunch of people are already dead, I can't stop now or their deaths will mean nothing' because it all loops into his intensely self-centered and self-involved worldview that people don't have any meaning or use except as things for him to use.

Third, they're going to have to make him realize that he didn't make anything 'better', that he didn't make a shining city on the hill; he made a lie. He made a façade and he didn't do it for any of those people; he did it because he wanted to do it and he wanted to do it so that he'd be seen a certain way and remembered a certain way, that he'd get the respect and admiration and veneration that he feels he deserves.

Fourth, he's going to have to deal with the total shitstorm that is his way of dealing with and viewing other people, basically as pawns to be used or pieces to be manipulated towards a dream that, in truth, has less value than even a one of them. The idea that this abstract idea, this dream, matters more than any of them, even if they consented to being used like that is a deep seated justification and it's absolute bullshit given the kind of cult tactics he utilizes with his people.

Fifth, they're going to have to deal with his shittiness around believing in making the world a more 'magical' place, because that 'magic' comes with a price and that price is not one that people consented to. This isn't like a mixed bag of magic; almost all of the magic things are consuming or pillaging or making things worse other than the ones that Griffith is pointedly manipulating into something else. From some character's comments, it's corrupting the natural world, meddling with the natural spirits, and could (for all we know) have some terrible side effects. But this mental tendency to want to be a hero, to make situations where he can be a hero (peace is bad because there's no room for more military victories!) that kind of thinking... that's the problem with this that needs tackling.

Sixth, (woof) they really need to deal with his vindictive, mean-spirited nature that has him lashing out like an overgrown child and having no modulation when he doesn't get what he wants and part of that is seven: being willing to see people as their own autonomous entities who can and will leave or come back or need to pursue their own dreams and are not beholden to him to sacrifice their own dream for his. That you can't and shouldn't use people against another, especially in the way that he chose to, because it's shitty.

And last but not least, this is all going to have to come along with the very firm stomping of the idea that he 'deserves' anything no matter what the weird fate egg did or set up, that he didn't have a choice (he absolutely did, choice is a huge part of this cosmology), that this is his story and that that logic is more important than anything else. He's got major 'main character syndrome' that's going to have to get knocked out of him but hard.

"He's not going to take any of this well" is an understatement. He's going to throw all manner of shitfits about just about all of this and as shown, it's probably going to be messy every fresh setback. The worst will come after he's become Femto/part of the Godhand. Oh, he'll use the library to work on his skills, take up duels with people to work on his swordsmanship, he's going to be one hell of an opportunist... but that won't stop him absolutely fucking LOATHING this place and the whole process underneath any curiosity or friendliness. He is going to require one hell of a patient warden because he's going to subvert and play games and throw up a dozen other smokescreens for his problems because he's uninterested in solving his.

He's going to need someone who doesn't buy his charisma or his routine, who sees him for the absolute shitstain that he is and comes down hard. Someone who can see all the nuance to exactly how awful he is, all the places where he's discounted other people, where he's put his own longing and wants (not needs, WANTS) over other people's lives and happiness and even the fate of the entire world... and call him out for them. He's going to fight just about every wardening syle there is but he will need someone genuine because he's very good at reading people and their intent and he'll twitch at the barest hint that someone's just fucking with him. Getting through to him is going to take some real effort making him make connections... because he's going to default to not-really-friends with people, shallow as a cheap hammock. Breaches will almost certainly be useful for him.

History: his background

Sample Network Entry: In the depths of the Tower of Rebirth, I knew my time would come. Beyond all logic, beyond all reason, I knew within the depths of my heart that I would leave this place. The form of my escape was no surprise, beyond his presence. Everyone else, I knew they would come eventually, but him.

And yet, despite my working limbs, my healed skin, my reconstructed nerves, the down of my hair returned to my head, I feel further from my goal than I ever have been. Further than the torturers of that lecherous, incestuous coward could ever drive me. Further than I was as a child running through the streets of the city with trinkets in my pocket.

More terrible is the fact that I was brought here by my own weakness.

I have been told that I must redeem myself to leave this place, but I am not interested in redemption. Nevertheless, I will find a way to leave this place. Just as I have triumphed against every other setback, I will triumph here. Just as I have done the impossible before, I will do it again. I am destined for great things.

And even death and its servants will not hold me from my dream.

Sample RP: TDM Entry

Special Notes: His world is DARK and awful and he's one of the most dark and awful parts of it. As such, I made an opt out post for him here which I'll be offering to everyone once he's in.