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TL;CR MEME
1. Comment with your character.
2. Receive comments from others.
3. Reply to their comments with long ballads and explanations of your characters' relationship throughout the game.
4. Suffer as we have suffered over your CR.
1. Comment with your character.
2. Receive comments from others.
3. Reply to their comments with long ballads and explanations of your characters' relationship throughout the game.
4. Suffer as we have suffered over your CR.
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you know, the funny thing is that childe actually kind of hates schemes and deception? like. he specifically has voicelines about it: "Face me in person, man to man, and I'll always have a chance of beating you. Same goes if you're a deity or a monster from the abyss. But the Harbingers? They are more enamored with their intangible methods, spending their days scheming and maneuvering. This is why we cannot get along." even during the main questline when he's revealed to have been the villain, he straight up just goes "yeah I would've skipped all of this to begin with but it wasn't up to me". childe is the sort who will do what it takes to accomplish his goals, regardless of whether or not he personally agrees with it or finds it distasteful, and he came to this game fresh from doing a whole bunch of scheming and plotting that he didn't want to do AND THEN finding out that the whole time he was just being used as a pawn by the gods in THEIR schemes anyway. GOD.
ALL OF THIS RAMBLING IS TO SAY THAT childe came into this game with 0% trust anticipating a trap but not caring, because he was really expecting that it was going to be some super intense, straightforward battle royale where the strongest person would defeat everyone and take their prize, if there even really was a prize. so when he first arrived, he was immediately just assuming that everyone had some kind of hidden strengths or powers, since appearances can certainly be deceiving!! ON TOP OF THAT he and gu yun also agreed to start building a kind of info network like, immediately lmfkjhg so he was gauging people for how likely they'd be to work with him on that.
but he is genuinely a friendly guy, so chatting with people in the beginning was a combination of trying to get a feel for their strengths and weaknesses as potential opponents as well as just getting to know them. but he isn't really the pushy type? for a few different reasons (like, back home he has access to a massive info network so he barely has to do any snooping on his own) but mostly because a lot of the time he operates on the rule of fairness--i.e., if he pries into your business, you're allowed to pry into his. and given that what little trust he has was broken before he came, he was not at all eager to do that here.
so from that perspective, harrow immediately struck him as... not closed off, exactly, but not the sort of person who was going to share a lot very easily? and on top of that, if she did have fighting strength, it was clearly nerfed like his own powers or she was very good at hiding it (bc fight jocks like him are stupid and make it clear pretty quickly that they're fight jocks). so basically he just kind of slotted her into neutral-positive territory and didn't think about it too much. she seemed intelligent enough and focused and clearly not a total normie but that's about it.
THEN THE FIRST CYOA HAPPENED wow!! THAT really got his attention far more than the first trial and execution, because it was a sign that Scheme-y Thingsâ„¢ were happening. he actually did consider going to talk to harrow about it? but he recognized that that would've been like, a super rude and insensitive thing to do and he isn't (always) a (total) asshole, plus he was like "even if I did do that the chances of them telling me what happened are pretty low" since he wasn't particularly close to any of the four of them. so instead he reached out to primrose and gu yun about it and got a little info from them and went to stay in medbay in case something else happened.
ending up in there with the four of them + molly and mineo was. so much. their very sudden and very intense reactions immediately tipped him off to the fact that the simulation was reminding them of something that happened while they were gone, and they clearly weren't going to talk about it so he was just like "oooookay" and set it aside to talk to gu yun about later. AND INDEED on friday he went to gu yun like "hey who told you about the cyoa because all four of them were nutter butters last night so please follow up on this k thx." he asked gu yun which of the four cyoaers he'd spoken to (info for info--he was very careful about not giving away too much for free) and gu yun gave harrow's name, so he passed on her behavior specifically so that gu yun had more to work with, and also took that as an opportunity to slot harrow as--not necessarily gu yun's ally, at that point, but like, "okay, I can leave harrow to gu yun and expect that any info she gets might get back to him." it was eliminating redundancy, mostly--there was no point in working on harrow as an info buddy if gu yun already had her taken care of, if that makes sense? he was trying to cover his bases. the murders and the trials were really barely even on his mind that week.
BUT THEY HAD TO TRIAL ANYWAY and childe was already committed by then to not actually doing any intense participating unless he cared about the people who died (which he really did not want to do because getting attached under these circumstances is for DUMMIES!!!), except that it seemed like people were? actually trying to solve things this time?? and childe didn't have any reason to like, actively hinder people's efforts to find killers, and playing along even a little was objectively better than making a big spectacle about how stupid he thought the whole thing was so he did.
the week 1 execution though. HOO BOY. that was a big turning point for childe, and it really altered the way he viewed basically everybody in the whole game. the hk-47 execution was where people made it exceedingly clear that they were growing attached to each other, that they were really, truly not the sorts of ruthless opponents he'd anticipated facing when he arrived--in his view, anybody who looked at hk-47 and was shocked or enraged immediately belonged in a mental category of "people who are not at all suited to be in this environment." molly kind of?? got a pass but everyone else got judged extremely hard. harrow actually stood out to him here because she was the one who brought up the idea of piling curses onto hk-47 to make him suffer even more--which, like. torture and vengeance isn't really his thing?? but he gets it, and that was one of the first clear shades of her brand of ruthlessness that he saw, so she got to be a little higher up on his list of "people who are not total weenies (and thus I might be able to respect them)". she actually ranked higher than gu yun tbh LMFKJSHG bc that execution and the conversation afterwards was where gu yun lost some of his... not respect, exactly, but... trust? in the sense of "oh I trust you to be ruthless like me". gu yun clearly had a softer core than he wanted people to see, and harrow had a stronger backbone than childe had initially assumed, so that was kind of his perspective moving forward.
and then week 2 was when mahito and endorsi dragged him into MURDER COVER, which was the first step towards getting involved in the murders and the trials more thoroughly. lust told him at the very beginning that his powers weren't locked away forever and I think this is when he found out that murder was what could unlock them again? so he was planning to get his hands dirty pretty early on, he just took a while to make his move. but for this week he did a shitton of cover up work for the two of them, which was a MASSIVE PAIN because that was post-cyoa for him and he had a SKELETON HAND AND COULDN'T HOLD THINGS so he had to time his healing very carefully but at least he had a really solid alibi. which is hilarious because he actually showed up with fresh bruises? from helping cover up fight injuries immediately after regrowing his stupid hand?? I'm in tears
ANYWAY waves hand. that was when he got directly involved in the murder side of things, while harrow was pretty firmly on the "solving murders" side of things, so that's when their paths really began to branch away from each other, and they just kept going that way. he'd agreed to help cover for law as well, but week 3 was SURPRISE MEDBAY TRAP DUN DUN DUN. childe saw law's fingers, but he didn't know it was part of a trap until gu yun came around for a hand check and just blatantly told him that's what it was lmfkjhg. mahito told him that harrow had done his hand check, and then it came out in the trial that the trap was her and molly's idea. and he was impressed!! it was a very clever thing to do--this week was really what got harrow and molly on his radar, and from w3 forward he knew he was going to have to pay closer attention to them. especially harrow, because while he didn't think molly was stupid by any means, he also just got the vibe that harrow bossed him around lmfkjhgg SORRY MOLLY.
THE THING IS, though, that even after they caught law, they were just kind of "...oh :( well we caught you but I'm not voting for you" about it, and childe was just? so baffled?? he had a conversation with mahito about it, like "why the hell are they working so hard to catch killers if they don't like what happens when they do?" he just really could not understand why they were putting their obvious skills and intelligence towards catching murderers and working so hard to do it, only to apparently not be satisfied by the outcome. the execution just made it worse, because they'd been relatively sympathetic towards law the day before, but as soon as he started to fight for his life they immediately started to condemn him and want him dead, and childe was just like "??? what???" about the whole thing. for him it wasn't "a murderer vs. an innocent girl"--he never really let go of the idea of "everyone here is everyone's opponent" and that combined with "we all agreed to come here for something we wanted badly enough that we'd do anything for it" meant that he was never going to view anybody as a truly innocent victim, whether they'd killed someone on the base or not. as far as he was concerned, they were all just equal pawns on a chessboard, and people like harrow were getting way too attached to other pieces and losing sight of winning the overall game.
EVEN SO his respect for her diligence and their clever thinking was genuine; by that point it was also clear that was gu yun was solidly on her "side" of things, which widened the gap between the two of them. this was also around the time childe seriously considered targeting her. he thought about going after molly as well but he figured that would piss off way too many people--harrow he viewed as less popular than molly, but also far more likely to have traps and plans in place, especially since she had two very smart and focused roommates who would care a lot, as well as molly and gu yun, who were both very loud and active. he pretty much decided there were too many potential unknown risks when it came taking her out and decided it was probably safer just to try and work around her whenever he did make his move.
I AM LOSING STEAM BECAUSE I'M TIRED I WILL CONTINUE TOMORROW
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SO ANYWAY like I said, w3 was really what got harrow on his radar of someone to watch out for, since she was clearly intelligent and dedicated to catching killers (and thus highly unlikely to be sympathetic to his ambition). he talked about it with both mahito and endorsi, but at that point he was viewing her as someone he respected for being intelligent and ruthless, but that he also thought was wasting her skill and energy focusing on the wrong thing.
originally he and mahito were going to kill on week 4, but then Kindness Week struck and cucked them so they didn't. but they still discussed it and started putting their plans in place, and those plans were like 90% shaped by endorsi's no-kill list and harrow's dedication to catching killers lmfkjhg. honestly the majority of the reason childe ended up targeting a noncombatant (though part of the reason he picked lenore was because she didn't seem totally helpless) was because he wanted to subvert expectations, since he knew harrow would be relentless about following up on leads and if a strong fighter got taken out, she would look at all the strong fighters left with an equally careful eye. gu yun mentioned to him at some point that he was gonna set up a trap in his own room, so childe was just super convinced that harrow and molly were gonna add more traps to like. the elevator! the sleep bay! places that had a really high chance of catching someone! basically he was trying to play mental chess and plan around her without actually getting on her radar, because it would've been really stupid to approach her out of the blue like "sooo heeeeey any ideas about other traps? just wondering lol"
BUT YEAH. he had nothing to do with w4 trial so he was a spectator to the whole Misa Mess, which, wow!! drama!!! it was interesting to see harrow in action that trial, because like. in part, his respect for her continued to go up--that she was dedicated enough to getting killers caught that she'd doxx someone instead of covering for them, but he also kind of got the vibe that harrow was lying about some things? he didn't buy that harrow would've just cursed misa out of killing and left it at that, and her reaction also seemed like... more emotional and uncertain than he expected? things just didn't seem to piece together cleanly to him. but overall it was once again a case of respect for harrow bc she worked hard to accomplish her goal (catching killers) combined with "wtf is she doing" because she seemed very upset about... accomplishing her goal. HE DIDN'T GET IT MAN.
this convo really just was an accurate representation of his feelings at the time--he didn't want to get caught, but if he did and it was harrow, then he wouldn't mind all that much, because she was a worthy opponent and it would just be a fair loss on his part.
AND THEN WEEK 5... or more specifically, weekend 5. as soon as childe woke up to hear mahito was dead, he was like "oh fuck" because that immediately narrowed down the guilty list, and he already knew people were gonna be more upset about aoi's death than mahito's. he also remembered molly's item, so he figured that automatically meant a 50/50 chance it was gonna be used on lenore's death rooms or aoi's, which severely upped his chances of getting caught (and depending on how the item worked, he wouldn't be able to pretend it was self-defense, which meant he'd just be fucked if they caught him). then gu yun told him he killed mahito (and tried to claim it was self-defense, hilariously, which childe immediately knew was a lie) and basically told him that harrow and molly were covering for him, and once he heard that, childe was like "welp, I'm done for." he knew his only real chance was them not tracing lenore back to him, but the chances of that were very slim if harrow and molly were going to be working doubly hard to make sure gu yun didn't get caught.
childe had endorsi and medb on his side, but the problem with being on team Shady Bastard is that you can't openly defend other shady bastards if you don't want to give yourself away. since childe only chose to rely on people who openly prioritized themselves over him, he never expected them to throw themselves in the line of fire for him. he reached out to them since they both knew he'd killed, but he went into trial on friday not really expecting it to go any way other than it did. iris had given him the revival power early on, so he knew there was a chance he would survive the execution, but honestly even without it his attitude probably would've been the same--just sort of calm and collected. HONESTLY NO MATTER WHAT this would've been him tbh "ARE YOU READY TO BE WRONG?" FJSHKHKj god. what a butt.
I'm rambling again FUCK ANYWAY!!!
tl;dr the moment gu yun told him he'd killed mahito and he was planning to claim it was self-defense with harrow and molly on his side, childe knew that his days were numbered. even if he survived the execution, he knew he wouldn't last long past it, so no matter what, he was gonna be dead soon. which sucked! but he knew the risks, so, eh. but he wasn't going to give them the satisfaction of folding under pressure, so he stood his ground under her accusations until the end. he wasn't exactly happy about getting caught, but at the end of the day it was just a fair loss to worthy opponent, so he was just kind of "/shrugs, fair game" about the whole thing.
HOWEVER, he was very annoyed that gu yun had lied to him about it being self-defense (especially when he'd used his fuckin knife), so when harrow came to talk to him in jail, he intentionally tipped her off that he knew gu yun was a liar and a killer. he didn't go so far as to doxx that he knew the self-defense thing was a lie, since it didn't seem necessary, but his goal was basically like I mentioned on discord, where... it wasn't necessarily to make her suspect gu yun, but to kind of show her that like. he wasn't necessarily the "good" guy she might think he was? BASICALLY from weekend 5 onwards childe just really tried to hammer in the idea of "trust fucking no one you emotional fools" as hard as possible to like, everybody. he thought harrow was too smart to not be on her guard, and he thought she could really benefit from taking a second look at her relationships and reconsidering how much trust she put in people like gu yun, someone who was apparently just as willing to kill for personal gain as childe was (since childe didn't know about his medicine or anything like that).
he did appreciate that she stuck to her guns trying to out-bluff him, though. and he genuinely tried to be (mostly) polite and cordial to her, since he liked her, even though she helped get him caught for moida. u_u SOMETIMES YOU LOSE THE GAME, it's fine.
anyway, after he survived the execution and they spoke again, he was like... genuinely a tiny bit baffled that she approached him with an offer and not a threat? like, even though he wasn't going to go after any of them in revenge, he recognized that they were going to view him as extremely dangerous (which was fine by him, because he is dangerous; he would've lost his dang mind if they hadn't treated him exactly as they did) but he definitely wasn't expecting harrow to come to him from the angle of "here, I'll give you something you want if you do this for us." it kind of--tipped her hand, I guess is the best way to say it? it showed him just how much she cared about gu yun not dying, but by that point, there wasn't really anything for him to do with that information. (he did briefly consider tapping people up to kill gu yun, but he discarded the idea pretty quickly because it wouldn't haven't accomplished anything and he was being honest when he said he isn't really a revenge kill sorta guy.) EITHER WAY, she was basically offering him something for nothing, and he was like "well sure I'll take that deal" lmf. I think I told you this before, but he also appreciated that she was one of the few people during the town hall who discussed killing him in an objectively beneficial way--obviously he wanted to live as long as he could, but if he couldn't have that, then he preferred to get targeted on thursday instead of shoved into the execution ring again on sunday + whoever targeted him would get a boon and also a prize if they weren't voted out so it was just a smart decision.
OUTSIDE OF THAT he was perfectly fine working with her on plot stuff, especially by that point when things were really starting to pick up--their paths converging was kind of a "better late than never" deal on his end. but he had no grudge against her, and he was glad to have another smart person to discuss things with besides gu yun--not because he had anything against continuing to work with gu yun, but just because at that point they really needed all hands on deck and he knew she would be ruthless and diligent in approaching this the same way she was about trials. basically he could trust that working with her wouldn't be all that different from working with gu yun--that anything they discussed, any ideas or suggestions, would be very carefully considered from multiple angles, with relative objectivity and the intent to achieve the best possible outcome.
WAVES HANDS IN ENDGAME they were mostly doing their own thing so there's not much to say about that. when all was said and done he did honestly just want to go thank her for her contribution, because he thinks hard work should be acknowledged and respected!! but he's fine parting ways with a business handshake and a "we'll probably never speak again." she's gonna go off and do her own thing, and she seems maybe happy enough?? at least not super miserable. childe's just kind of giving her a thumbs up from the distance and hoping she puts her talents to better use than she did here LMFKJHG god. exhausting.