ardyn izunia belongs in the garbage bin. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
daemonized) wrote2018-11-29 12:24 am
daemonized) wrote2018-11-29 12:24 am
meadowlark app.
> PLAYER INFORMATION
NAME: Jen
PRONOUNS: she/her
AGE: 32
CONTACT:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
aurajen
> CHARACTER INFORMATION
NAME: Ardyn Izunia (Ardyn Lucis Caelum)
CANON: Final Fantasy XV
AGE: 2000+
CANON POINT: Just after summoning down the astral Ifrit during the final chapter.
HISTORY: A wiki link for this hot mess of a man.
PERSONALITY:
Ardyn Izunia is a difficult man to parse. At first glance, he is built upon contradictions which make little sense when compared to each other; but upon further inspection and knowledge of his past experiences, all these bizarre pieces come together to neatly form a whole. To begin, it’s easiest to start with outside appearances.
The Chancellor of Niflheim is a lofty title, one that might invoke the imagery of a stern and unrelenting man. And yet, instead you get Ardyn — supercilious and fueled by a condescending sort of humor aimed at those around him. He is malleable as he is silver-tongued, eloquent, and unaffected by very much. He is theatrical and even sarcastic; he’s just as quick to pay a compliment as he is to throw out verbal barbs, and his expression remains the same regardless of which he chooses. As his English VA once described him, he is full of “insincere sincerity”. He’s a difficult man to read, because he seems fluid and unnecessarily fills the air with words that may not have much meaning to them to begin with. In this way he is both ineffable and confusing, even frustrating, but undoubtedly dripping in charm the entire time. He's shrewd and intelligent, confident and subtly cocky. He can get under your skin with some well-placed words, which is how he prefers to do it.
Whereas some of this persona is a farce, some accurately reflects his character. Ardyn lacks empathy, which can be clearly seen once he reveals his more devious side in the later chapters of the game. How he kills Lunafreya without so much batting an eye, how he patronizingly taunts Noctis throughout all of Chapter 13, and how eager he is to bring darkness to all of Eos, just for the sake of revenge on the Caelum line and the astrals, two thousand years in the future. If he seems lackadaisical, it's because he simply doesn't care about the "smaller picture", the day-to-day moments and considerations. Immortal and long-lived, Ardyn looks at everything in a wider scope. This is especially true given his goals in the game.
The other side of Ardyn Izunia is the ugly half. It’s the devious mind that lies beneath the surface of what most think is a puzzling man; it’s the fact that often his empty words are empty for a reason, because he’s either manipulating someone by holding back the truth, or merely sees no reason to share it at all. He's clever and calculating, and Ardyn likes to pull the strings from afar — throughout the game, he aids Noctis and his companions (technically his enemies) just to further his own goals. And it takes a bitter, twisted sort of man to cover the world in literal darkness just for the sake of his own vendetta. Beneath everything, he has an anger and a cruelty there that, coupled with his apathy, makes him a very dangerous person. He even takes a sadistic sort of pleasure in toying with others, something he doesn't even try to hide near the end of the game.
It isn't a stretch to say that a very, very long time ago, Ardyn may have been a nicer person. He had been a King and leader, as well as a healer; he healed countless, the implication being that there was a clear devotion to the goal, and a possession of empathy for those suffering from the Starscourge. In the game, we no longer see him utilizing these powers at all. He's lost any sense of humanitarianism beyond achieving a clear-cut objective. There's no warmth, no real concern for those around him; he's quick to even betray those he had allied with, simply because they outlived their usefulness. This is important, because this clear transition from healer king to Man Who Wants to Fuck Up the World was brought on by a betrayal that defined him for millennia to come.
This betrayal was by both gods and family, and in its completeness Ardyn became angry and spiteful. Shrewd and motivated. In his most revealing moments, he tells Noctis that he had been left in the darkness for ages, the resentment finally spilling forth in uncommon forthrightness. It reveals the anger he has kept bubbling in the pit of his chest for countless years, a bitterness that has been the motivation behind his very existence. Revenge turns a mind dark and its purpose razor-sharp, and this, along with the burden of countless daemons he keeps within himself, only fueled this venom within him.
And yet despite everything, as immortal as the man is, as eager as he can be to destroy the Lucis Caelum line, there is a part of him that wishes for his own death just so that he can finally be unburdened by the daemons he carries and pass peacefully. This adds a twist of tragedy to his otherwise unsavory character faults, and though it does not excuse the travesties he wishes to place upon Eos, it does provide further motivation for Ardyn. In various bits of dialogue, there's hinting that Ardyn almost expects Noctis to kill him during the final battle, so that he can finally be free. This lends itself to the notion that there may be the tiniest amount of regret he harbors, or at the very least, a stark awareness of the monster he's become over millennia. It's enough for him to pursue the only way in which he can actually die, which is to have Noctis become the True King to kill him.
As a result, this desire for revenge (and possible freedom) is what makes up the ugly core of Ardyn, completely disregarding any sort of decent individual he might have been in the past. He's calculating with more than enough potential to be cruel, though he usually keeps all of this hidden behind a veneer of patronizing humor, questionable charm, and clever wordplay. In the end, most everything he does is either for the sake of manipulation, or in contrast, because something is unimportant enough in his eyes to actually care. His past experience as a king, his betrayal by his own family line and the astrals, and the thousands of years wrought on his humanity was more than enough to unfortunately shape him into the man he is during the events of the game: a man bent on throwing the world into darkness simply because of the injustices incurred upon him thousands of years ago.
CRAU:
Ardyn spent a little more than a year in the game El Nysa. There, he was forced to live with several circumstances he never had to take into consideration during his canon — the information of his world being apparently destroyed, the extreme nerfing of his powers, and close proximity and forced cooperation with canonmates, and others with whom he would not normally associate with.
At first, this combination didn’t help very much with his ingrained character faults, seeing it as all of his plans for Eos, and for his own death, having been quickly upended. He felt wronged by it, as if the wheel of fate kept turning and crushing him under its force; the entirety of it all made him angry, and Ardyn dealt with that anger by antagonizing familiar faces and strangers alike. Yet given that he had no choice but to interact with fellow characters who had been taken by their homes as well, he began to form a small circle of acquaintances that he would speak to time and time again. And by way of integrating to the new setting, he even took up a job in the local city, beginning his slow adjustment to what was forcibly his new life. He became used to the idea of foreign magics, of different worlds/universes, and with his own castmates' misaligned timelines.
Time passed, wearing down the edges of this anger, though he would never feel as if it was a fair lot that he had been thrown in. With his own castmates came interactions by way of proximity, until there became a strange undercurrent of tense understanding between them. Facets of his true personality and the truth of who he was, what he had done, slowly began to unravel. Between them, even some small amount of understanding, though never a true comfortability with any of them. The idea of him being able to move on from his agenda in Eos came up time and time again, and while Ardyn would never say as much to any of them, it slowly began to become a consideration in his own mind.
As a result, compared to the beginning of his stay in El Nysa, near the end, the villainous tendencies did not so much disappear, but they did abate slightly. Acceptance of his new life was slowly beginning to sink in, possibly the most poignant change for Ardyn as a character, which brought on small tweaks to his personality as a result — a faintly more prevalent willingness to cooperate, honesty about himself and who/what he was with his closest CR, and his violent tendencies (while still very prevalent) sleeping under a few more layers, taking more to awaken than it would normally.
Since there’s the potential of one of his closest CR apping in the same round, it’s worth mentioning it briefly here. X’rhun Tia and Ardyn Izunia grew close during their time spent in El Nysa, and it was this relationship that helped some of the positive growth mentioned above take place, however small. X’rhun, despite knowing of Ardyn’s history, wanted to see him live a new life as a better man. He kept faith in him even though he saw the worst parts of his personality, and encouraged him to be better and to keep hope. Ardyn didn’t quite buy all of it — still doesn’t completely — but appreciation and consideration for these efforts still existed. As a result, Ardyn has a distinct fondness for X’rhun, and the man was the one he had trusted most by the time he departed the game.
SPECIES: Human/daemon. The latter is thanks to his connection to the Starscourge; otherwise born as a human, and will certainly be defined as one in the game setting.
APPEARANCE: [1] [2]
SKILLS:
GENERALIZED COMBAT - Ardyn is familiar with a wide range of weapons (as indicated by him having his own Armiger), and is a skilled combatant on the field, even if seeing him sincerely fight is reserved only for the end of the narrative. He is intimate with the handling of a multitude of traditional melee weapons, as well as firearms and hand-to-hand combat.
MASTER MANIPULATOR - It's worth mentioning that Ardyn is a very manipulative individual. Keen on looking at the bigger picture as a whole, he is a far-seeing man in regards to knowing how people will react, and how to subtly push them in the right direction to get what he wants. He's particularly good at manipulating the emotions and motivations of others by mere words alone. This, coupled with an innate cleverness, makes him a very shrewd individual.
MAGICAL/DAEMONIC KNOWLEDGE - While his canon abilities wouldn't apply here, he still possesses thorough knowledge of how his magic works in his world, as well as how the Starscourge itself works... considering that he's the avatar of it.
REALLY EXTRA - Ardyn is very eloquent to the point of grandiloquence. He has a penchant for dramatic gestures and rhetoric, and will flaunt and tease others without much remorse. He wears whatever the heck he wants, has the floofiest hair, and is overall just A Lot. So much that this does deserve its own bullet point.
NEW POWER: Illusion manipulation. The ability to make a single object or person appear as something completely different to the person he is affecting his power on. This isn't a transformation, but merely what it says on the tin; an illusion. An apple will stay an apple, for instance, even if Ardyn can suddenly make it appear as an orange to this single individual.
As per mod suggestion: Limited to working only on smaller objects for now, will be mentally taxing when employed, and not sustainable for very long.
POWER REASONING: Ardyn is a deceitful and manipulative individual, which is reflected in the power of illusion; a talent that relies heavily on misdirection. This is also parallel to his role in canon, in which hides his true identity until he wishes to reveal it on his own terms. More practically, it is also congruent with a canon power he possessed of similar function.
> SAMPLES
SAMPLE ONE: log sample.
SAMPLE TWO: log sample.
NAME: Jen
PRONOUNS: she/her
AGE: 32
CONTACT:
> CHARACTER INFORMATION
NAME: Ardyn Izunia (Ardyn Lucis Caelum)
CANON: Final Fantasy XV
AGE: 2000+
CANON POINT: Just after summoning down the astral Ifrit during the final chapter.
HISTORY: A wiki link for this hot mess of a man.
PERSONALITY:
Ardyn Izunia is a difficult man to parse. At first glance, he is built upon contradictions which make little sense when compared to each other; but upon further inspection and knowledge of his past experiences, all these bizarre pieces come together to neatly form a whole. To begin, it’s easiest to start with outside appearances.
The Chancellor of Niflheim is a lofty title, one that might invoke the imagery of a stern and unrelenting man. And yet, instead you get Ardyn — supercilious and fueled by a condescending sort of humor aimed at those around him. He is malleable as he is silver-tongued, eloquent, and unaffected by very much. He is theatrical and even sarcastic; he’s just as quick to pay a compliment as he is to throw out verbal barbs, and his expression remains the same regardless of which he chooses. As his English VA once described him, he is full of “insincere sincerity”. He’s a difficult man to read, because he seems fluid and unnecessarily fills the air with words that may not have much meaning to them to begin with. In this way he is both ineffable and confusing, even frustrating, but undoubtedly dripping in charm the entire time. He's shrewd and intelligent, confident and subtly cocky. He can get under your skin with some well-placed words, which is how he prefers to do it.
Whereas some of this persona is a farce, some accurately reflects his character. Ardyn lacks empathy, which can be clearly seen once he reveals his more devious side in the later chapters of the game. How he kills Lunafreya without so much batting an eye, how he patronizingly taunts Noctis throughout all of Chapter 13, and how eager he is to bring darkness to all of Eos, just for the sake of revenge on the Caelum line and the astrals, two thousand years in the future. If he seems lackadaisical, it's because he simply doesn't care about the "smaller picture", the day-to-day moments and considerations. Immortal and long-lived, Ardyn looks at everything in a wider scope. This is especially true given his goals in the game.
The other side of Ardyn Izunia is the ugly half. It’s the devious mind that lies beneath the surface of what most think is a puzzling man; it’s the fact that often his empty words are empty for a reason, because he’s either manipulating someone by holding back the truth, or merely sees no reason to share it at all. He's clever and calculating, and Ardyn likes to pull the strings from afar — throughout the game, he aids Noctis and his companions (technically his enemies) just to further his own goals. And it takes a bitter, twisted sort of man to cover the world in literal darkness just for the sake of his own vendetta. Beneath everything, he has an anger and a cruelty there that, coupled with his apathy, makes him a very dangerous person. He even takes a sadistic sort of pleasure in toying with others, something he doesn't even try to hide near the end of the game.
It isn't a stretch to say that a very, very long time ago, Ardyn may have been a nicer person. He had been a King and leader, as well as a healer; he healed countless, the implication being that there was a clear devotion to the goal, and a possession of empathy for those suffering from the Starscourge. In the game, we no longer see him utilizing these powers at all. He's lost any sense of humanitarianism beyond achieving a clear-cut objective. There's no warmth, no real concern for those around him; he's quick to even betray those he had allied with, simply because they outlived their usefulness. This is important, because this clear transition from healer king to Man Who Wants to Fuck Up the World was brought on by a betrayal that defined him for millennia to come.
This betrayal was by both gods and family, and in its completeness Ardyn became angry and spiteful. Shrewd and motivated. In his most revealing moments, he tells Noctis that he had been left in the darkness for ages, the resentment finally spilling forth in uncommon forthrightness. It reveals the anger he has kept bubbling in the pit of his chest for countless years, a bitterness that has been the motivation behind his very existence. Revenge turns a mind dark and its purpose razor-sharp, and this, along with the burden of countless daemons he keeps within himself, only fueled this venom within him.
And yet despite everything, as immortal as the man is, as eager as he can be to destroy the Lucis Caelum line, there is a part of him that wishes for his own death just so that he can finally be unburdened by the daemons he carries and pass peacefully. This adds a twist of tragedy to his otherwise unsavory character faults, and though it does not excuse the travesties he wishes to place upon Eos, it does provide further motivation for Ardyn. In various bits of dialogue, there's hinting that Ardyn almost expects Noctis to kill him during the final battle, so that he can finally be free. This lends itself to the notion that there may be the tiniest amount of regret he harbors, or at the very least, a stark awareness of the monster he's become over millennia. It's enough for him to pursue the only way in which he can actually die, which is to have Noctis become the True King to kill him.
As a result, this desire for revenge (and possible freedom) is what makes up the ugly core of Ardyn, completely disregarding any sort of decent individual he might have been in the past. He's calculating with more than enough potential to be cruel, though he usually keeps all of this hidden behind a veneer of patronizing humor, questionable charm, and clever wordplay. In the end, most everything he does is either for the sake of manipulation, or in contrast, because something is unimportant enough in his eyes to actually care. His past experience as a king, his betrayal by his own family line and the astrals, and the thousands of years wrought on his humanity was more than enough to unfortunately shape him into the man he is during the events of the game: a man bent on throwing the world into darkness simply because of the injustices incurred upon him thousands of years ago.
CRAU:
Ardyn spent a little more than a year in the game El Nysa. There, he was forced to live with several circumstances he never had to take into consideration during his canon — the information of his world being apparently destroyed, the extreme nerfing of his powers, and close proximity and forced cooperation with canonmates, and others with whom he would not normally associate with.
At first, this combination didn’t help very much with his ingrained character faults, seeing it as all of his plans for Eos, and for his own death, having been quickly upended. He felt wronged by it, as if the wheel of fate kept turning and crushing him under its force; the entirety of it all made him angry, and Ardyn dealt with that anger by antagonizing familiar faces and strangers alike. Yet given that he had no choice but to interact with fellow characters who had been taken by their homes as well, he began to form a small circle of acquaintances that he would speak to time and time again. And by way of integrating to the new setting, he even took up a job in the local city, beginning his slow adjustment to what was forcibly his new life. He became used to the idea of foreign magics, of different worlds/universes, and with his own castmates' misaligned timelines.
Time passed, wearing down the edges of this anger, though he would never feel as if it was a fair lot that he had been thrown in. With his own castmates came interactions by way of proximity, until there became a strange undercurrent of tense understanding between them. Facets of his true personality and the truth of who he was, what he had done, slowly began to unravel. Between them, even some small amount of understanding, though never a true comfortability with any of them. The idea of him being able to move on from his agenda in Eos came up time and time again, and while Ardyn would never say as much to any of them, it slowly began to become a consideration in his own mind.
As a result, compared to the beginning of his stay in El Nysa, near the end, the villainous tendencies did not so much disappear, but they did abate slightly. Acceptance of his new life was slowly beginning to sink in, possibly the most poignant change for Ardyn as a character, which brought on small tweaks to his personality as a result — a faintly more prevalent willingness to cooperate, honesty about himself and who/what he was with his closest CR, and his violent tendencies (while still very prevalent) sleeping under a few more layers, taking more to awaken than it would normally.
Since there’s the potential of one of his closest CR apping in the same round, it’s worth mentioning it briefly here. X’rhun Tia and Ardyn Izunia grew close during their time spent in El Nysa, and it was this relationship that helped some of the positive growth mentioned above take place, however small. X’rhun, despite knowing of Ardyn’s history, wanted to see him live a new life as a better man. He kept faith in him even though he saw the worst parts of his personality, and encouraged him to be better and to keep hope. Ardyn didn’t quite buy all of it — still doesn’t completely — but appreciation and consideration for these efforts still existed. As a result, Ardyn has a distinct fondness for X’rhun, and the man was the one he had trusted most by the time he departed the game.
SPECIES: Human/daemon. The latter is thanks to his connection to the Starscourge; otherwise born as a human, and will certainly be defined as one in the game setting.
APPEARANCE: [1] [2]
SKILLS:
NEW POWER: Illusion manipulation. The ability to make a single object or person appear as something completely different to the person he is affecting his power on. This isn't a transformation, but merely what it says on the tin; an illusion. An apple will stay an apple, for instance, even if Ardyn can suddenly make it appear as an orange to this single individual.
As per mod suggestion: Limited to working only on smaller objects for now, will be mentally taxing when employed, and not sustainable for very long.
POWER REASONING: Ardyn is a deceitful and manipulative individual, which is reflected in the power of illusion; a talent that relies heavily on misdirection. This is also parallel to his role in canon, in which hides his true identity until he wishes to reveal it on his own terms. More practically, it is also congruent with a canon power he possessed of similar function.
> SAMPLES
SAMPLE ONE: log sample.
SAMPLE TWO: log sample.