knightceties | Imeeji: App

Player name: Cheshire
Player age: 18+
Method of contact: Cheshire#9758 + ivoryandhorn @ plurk, gmail

Character name: Ace
Character canon: Heart no Kuni no Alice

Character summary:

Heart no Kuni no Alice is the story of Alice Liddell, who gets kidnapped to the world and is told that in order to return to her home, she needs to connect with and earn the affection and friendship of Wonderland's denizens. Not everything is as straightforward as it seems, because Wonderland is world ruled by a game, and in that game certain people are 'role holders' who have faces and occupy special, well, roles within the game. The three factions of Wonderland are headed by role holders who constantly war with each other for territory. Everyone else is pretty much chopped liver, interchangeable and replaceable…except for Alice, the outsider, who all the role holders are drawn to. Thus, the shoujo atmosphere of Alice and her numerous suitors is constantly interrupted by gouts of blood as her suitors try to kill each other or casually dispose of the faceless NPCs.

Ace is one of the role holders—in fact, he holds multiple roles, most prominently that of the Knight of Hearts, the Queen of Hearts' executioner. However, his time in Wonderland began long before Alice. As a young child, lost and abandoned, he was himself kidnapped to Wonderland. Unlike Alice, he adapted to his strange new home and became quite attached to his well-meaning but absent-minded guardian, Julius Monrey. Julius, due to Wonderland's alternate universe shenaningans, was doomed to permanently disappear from all timelines, dying a permanent death. Despite preparing strenuously, Ace was unable to save Julius' life at the critical moment. In this moment of failure he was offered a deal: if he took the special role of Executioner, Julius could have the special role of Clockmaker, thus sort of preserving his essence forever. Rather than lose every Julius entirely, Ace took the deal.

Some point after, Ace wound up in the timeline where Alice's story takes place. By now, his was Knight of Hearts in addition to Executioner. He had also become friends with that world's Julius, serving and protecting him as Executioner. Ace hated working as Knight of Hearts, carrying out his work as shoddily as possible in the hope that the Queen of Hearts would fire him. His bitter enmity with the rest of his faction made the Castle of Hearts an uncomfortable place for NPCs.

Like all the other role holders, Ace was drawn to Alice. To her, Ace was yet another suitor, his silly and refreshing demeanor a stark contrast to the bloody violence of his life. Nonetheless, due to her living with Julius, she saw Ace often, and glimpsed the sadder and darker sides of his personality. For Ace's part, being drawn to her filled him with resentment, as he saw it as another way his role forced his allegiance to someone he didn't want to serve. Eventually, he decided to try and kill Alice—only to decide against it at the last moment, so he could hear her heartbeat again. Yeah, it was weird.

Character personality:

It's most useful to look at Ace's personality as existing along a spectrum. At one end he's a cheerful, pleasant, laidback kind of guy who relishes his travels and the adventures he has while lost, taking all his misadventures in stride. On the other end he is a bitter, obsessive, possessive, rageful, and callous man who, like most role holders, has an extremely casual attitude toward death, lacking any sense of empathy or compassion, untouched by the (many, many) murders he's carried out as the Executioner. At any given point the self that Ace expresses exists somewhere along the spectrum between those two extremes but both of them exist as part of one cohesive whole in Ace's personality.

Though Ace can come across as sort of oblivious and not that bright, he is a lot more perceptive and manipulative than people take him for. He is not above using that perception of him as a facade, one which allows him to drive his enemies nuts while getting in sly jabs under the guise of being a bright, friendly, not-terribly-sharp fella. He can turn that bright, cheerful face on and off like a switch depending on the situation and what effect he wants. The fact that he is nearly always seen smiling, no matter the situation, makes it even harder to guess at his true feelings and emotions at any given time. At the same time, he really is that cheerful, pleasant guy he appears to be, and he really does have those bizarre blind spots (like his incredibly awful sense of direction, and his incredibly high alcohol tolerance) that make him seem so endearingly offbeat. The degree to which Ace's behavior is sincere and disingenuous is always something that's in doubt.

Another spectrum that Ace's personality exists along can be seen by the way he treats and interacts with the concept of being a knight. Despite doing everything in his power to ditch the responsibilities of his role as the Knight of Hearts, Ace nonetheless brings up the fact that he is a knight to justify actions, or apologize when his actions aren't completely knightly. Again, the degree to which he actually cares about how "knightly" he is or is just playing at caring is not always obvious. And the truth is that Ace does in many ways embody classic knightly qualities: he's courageous, adventurous, confident, and loyal. But he also embodies the dark side of those qualities: arrogance, obstinance, obsession, self-doubt and self-hatred.

Ace's constant habit of getting lost is another illustration of how Ace's personality mingles harmless and harmful aspects. His truly horrible sense of direction leads him to constantly get lost even on very simple journeys, along single clearly marked paths. He refers to his detours as "travelling" and often talks about how much he enjoys his travels. And, to a certain extent, this is genuine -- he does seem to enjoy wandering around and getting lost and camping out very much. But at the same time his constant absences due to travels seem to in part be a cover for the fact that he's often out and about carrying out work (murders) for Julius and his other master, Joker. Though he also gets lost on his way to Julius's tower for assignments so he does really just have an incredibly bad sense of direction... But, on the third hand, Ace's lack of direction is also a kind of psychosomatic expression of his internal chaos and self-doubt; in canon, Ace being physically lost is an outward expression of that fact that he is emotionally lost. And on the fourth hand, Ace's constant travels are demonstrate his pride; he largely prefers to be self-sufficient, and absolutely refuses to ask for directions, or let people tell him where he can and cannot pitch his tent (a significant issue, given his penchant for getting lost in the Castle of Hearts and camping out in random hallways...).

Julius is, obviously, a huge part of Ace's personality and the whole thing surrounding Julius' death is worth looking at for how it illuminates some parts of Ace's personality that are not immediately obvious. Despite Ace's general lack of empathy, when he does care for someone he devotes his entire being to it (even if that person would maybe wish for him to not do that). He devoted himself to trying to prevent the first Julius' death and even now, knowing that his bargain with Joker can never bring back the Julius he loved, or indeed any other version of Julius who might have and currently loves some version of Ace himself, Ace nonetheless continues to devote himself to safeguarding Julius' remaining selves as much as possible. At the same time, he is plagued with self-hatred for being unable to save his original Julius, and self-doubt about whether forcing Julius to become the Clockmaker was the right thing to do, since he's aware that the resulting existence after Julius' alternates all die off will will not know him, and in all likelihood develop into an existence that differs significantly from any existing Julius anyway. The irony that it was his own hand that ensured he couldn't undo that decision (by killing Julius) is not lost on him. Yet his decision was the only one that could prevent Julius from vanishing entirely, and the idea of experience such a total and devastating loss again is unbearable to him. And even if it's not "his" Julius, at least "a" Julius will continue to exist. He exists in a perpetual state of both regretting and not regretting his decision.

Related to Julius' impact on Ace's personality is Ace's relationship with violence. In Wonderland, with its murderous game and murderous faction leaders, violence is a calmly accepted part of everyday life, to the point that even maids and servants and amusement park attendants go about openly armed at all times. Attempted murder between factions is common and accepted. Ace even has to field attacks from his own faction: the hostility between him and his fellow role holders at the Castle of Hearts is so great that the other two frequently send assassins after him, a fact he seems to largely finds amusing. Violence and death are always close by and he is extremely comfortable with both, and has no problem with the fact that his life and job consists of endless murder. He is a callous and selfish person with virtually no empathy or compassion. Even so, he's not nearly as trigger-happy as some of Wonderland's other inhabitants. Ace generally doesn't break out his weapons unless he feels there's some need required.

Ultimately, Ace is a person composed of contradictions. His personality contains a jumble of conflicting and contrasting traits, and teasing out the truth of him is complicated by the fact that it's not always clear when he is and isn't being honest. He can be manipulative and bluntly straightforward, he can be cheerfully oblivious and meanly perceptive. He can be altruistic and callous. His personality exists in a liminal state where it's not always obvious how much of his self-expression is genuine, and the bright, cheerful exterior he presents to the world hides a dark, chaotic depth--but both that surface and that depth are equally real parts of who he is.

Character in Imeeji:

As an amnesiac, Ace would start out leaning heavily toward the brighter aspects of his personality. He'd be a cheerful dumbass, basically. He's a nice guy! He wants to be your friend! He also still has no empathy or compassion or notion of personal boundaries but you know, details. (That...probably won't change no matter how much anyone tries, but he won't be hostile to attempts to teach him otherwise, like he might be if he were his canon self.) He'll still be a bit of a troll, but rather harmless about it, rather than actively malicious or trying to start shit, as he sometimes does in canon with people he dislikes. The reasoning behind this is that sans baggage there wouldn't be much to bring out the darker side of him. He would be missing years and years of bitterness and resentment and violence. Even in canon, when he does have that baggage, Ace is genuinely a cheerful dumbass when the mood takes him, which is honestly most of the time. So he'll start off with his personality weighted in that direction.

However, the darker sides of his personality WILL surface eventually, through memory regains if nothing else. It may also begin to surface naturally when everyday interactions and other people's memories and attitudes rub him the wrong way. Who knows! Imeeji itself will undoubtedly bring it out eventually. Even without memories, being constrained by unit characteristics and games and all that will undoubtedly cause his rather carefree spirit to chafe at all these darned restrictions. Add his unpleasant memories of the game back home and you get a recipe of seething anger at, uh, everything. He will not remain just a cheerful dumbass forever, though the cheerful dumbassery will never vanish. If he starts off weighted in one way, you could say he'll probably start evening out over time.

All of this makes it sound like Ace is a ticking time bomb, and while that's sort of true, it really only applies to himself. As I mentioned in his personality section, he is accustomed and largely inured to violence and death, but he's not really trigger-happy. He is actually very good at self-control when it comes to those darned murderous impulses. Ace is only violent under specific circumstances (admittedly, he'll sometimes provoke those circumstances just to start shit). So while he will definitely pick up a lot of anger, etc., he's not a berserker by any stretch of the imagination. Self-control is really central to how I view him so I don't think being an amnesiac will affect this trait that much.

Teammates will have a big effect on Ace. Aside from Julius, and later Alice, Ace is accustomed to more or less being a lone wolf. He jealously protects his precious people but even in that role it's very much Ace stepping in to protect the squishy ones--whether they want him to or not. Factions in the game are ostensibly on the same side but considering that his side frequently tries to murder him, the idea of being a team because someone decreed it so is completely laughable. Of course, Ace won't have that background going into Imeeji, so the odds are he'll probably attach to his team without much trouble. Who doesn't like friends? At the very least, roommates should get along. As he picks up more memories or develops his reaction to being in Imeeji, that may change for the negative, but that's also highly dependent on how "team-y" his unit ends up being. Maybe they won't be very close and he won't feel like he was tricked into emotional investment. Or maybe he WILL feel helplessly attached to them all and will have to contend with all those darned conflicting on- and off- team loyalties. Who knows??

(If tricking him into emotional investment or mitigating potential for negative in-team CR is desired, though, putting him on a team with genuinely good people, especially vulnerable squishy ones, will help, since those are the types he tends to get all protective over. It may not necessarily result in positive and/or healthy CR, but he'll at least tone down the murderous hatred toward his own team, so...yay...?? But this is all very tentative and relies on so many factors! It's just a possibility I wanted to acknowledge.)

The power cap in Imeeji will also have an interesting effect on him. Ace is used to not just being part of a powerful class of people--not just a role holder, but the one acknowledged as THE BEST fighter. So being dropped to more even footing with his peers would be quite interesting for him, in ways that's hard to predict. Of course, he will eventually get back some really unpleasant memories of being totally powerless at the critical juncture of the first Julius' death, so... He probably won't like being powerless all that much. Not that he has a choice. It'll be interesting to see if he decides to prioritize power acquisition over memory regain, especially since CR could really influence that decision.

Voice Samples:
TD w/ Yuuya: https://imeeji-backstage.dreamwidth.org/385.html?thread=1153#cmt1153
TD w/ Kano: https://imeeji-backstage.dreamwidth.org/385.html?thread=16257#cmt16257