TL;CR MEME

[probe]

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.

Comments

[toyska]

HARROOOOOW swings her around

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 Things™ 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