gladion "microwaved by dog" pokespecial (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
familyproblem) wrote2022-08-15 07:44 pm
familyproblem) wrote2022-08-15 07:44 pm
Ryslig app
OOC INFORMATION
Name: Holo
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
hologramblue or PM this journal
Age: Over 18
Other Characters: none
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Gladion
Age: 15
Canon: Pokémon
Canon Point: Adventures/Special continuity, post-Sun & Moon chapter (end of SM37)
Character Information: Bulbapedia synopsis, my chronological summary.
Personality:
Gladion is a prickly and standoffish kid who wears his heart on his sleeve nonetheless - rather literally, on his sleeves, and you can learn a lot about him just by looking at how he dresses and presents himself. His preferred outfit is all black with red accents, long sleeves, and a spiky, rumpled hoodie (in tropical Hawai'i) (or its Pokémon world counterpart). He styles his bangs to cover half his face so he can give dramatic, one-eyed glowers. Jagged rips in everything give off a sense of danger. Or, at least, a sense that Gladion wants to be seen as dangerous and taken seriously. Those rips suit his sense of dramatics, but he didn't put them there for the sake of fashion - they're actually collateral damage from roughhousing with his beloved Pokémon Silvally, and he taught himself how to sew so he could mend around them.
He won't tell that story (or explain whether he didn't close them up on purpose) without some prodding, and he's tight-lipped about himself on a lot of other points, too. Gladion keeps people at arm's length habitually and tends to talk around his feelings, snapping and grumbling at others when he's embarrassed and trying to play it cool the rest of the time. He doesn't like talking about himself - he put down nothing but his name to enter the Iki Town festival tournament, skipping over sections even as innocuous as "what's your favorite food" - and he's too often willing to let people assume the worst of his intentions instead of taking time to explain what he's up to.
At the same time, it's not all that hard to read what he's feeling, even if he keeps a tight lid on what he's thinking. Gladion's brooding demeanor is much better at letting you know he wants you to look past his emotions than it is at actually shielding his emotions from view: he clenches his fists and speaks rudely when he's upset, he looks away and mumbles when he's flustered, and when something intrigues him it's easy to catch him staring. He also rarely lies, you might notice if you listen to him for long enough - he's reticent and evasive and brushes off any question he doesn't want to answer, but Gladion is not a very deceptive person and shows no interest in trying to be one.
His actions speak where he refuses to: Gladion can be very intense in pursuit of a goal, fixing his eyes on his target and committing to the path it takes to get there even if it takes him through gang leaders and guardian deities, but he doesn't seem to take any joy in wreaking destruction and he throws himself into battle to protect people in the same breath that he scoffs and makes a show of not caring about them. And when it comes to his Pokémon, Gladion isn't even willing to pretend he doesn't care, though he'll dress up his obvious devotion as a matter of camaraderie and strength. He is - as much as he would hate to hear it in these words - not a bad kid, just one who is too quick to push people away and get himself in trouble trying to deal with something on his own.
This is not a flaw unknown to Gladion. It's the arc of the last eight-or-so months of his life, if you count from that fateful day in Iki Town - or the last almost-two-years, if you count from when he met Type: Null. Everything about his demeanor, his fashion sense, his guardedness and stubborn pride, goes back one way or another to the setting he grew up in and why he ran away from it. His parents were wealthy and well-respected scholars, co-leaders of a Pokémon conservation and research organization; 5 years ago, his father vanished, and thus began Gladion's memory of his mother's transformation. Insisting her husband had abandoned the family, Lusamine became controlling and viciously critical towards Gladion and his younger sister Lillie. He remembers being her preferred target, older and more willful as he was, and on the isolated island of Aether Paradise surrounded by Lusamine's employees, he found little refuge from her emotional abuse.
And then he found out about the Ultra Beasts. Suddenly, it all made sense - an extradimensional threat had stolen her heart and turned her into what she was now, and Gladion couldn't face her down himself but he could stop her in her tracks and maybe give Lillie some breathing room. Lusamine already hated him, he reasoned, so he had nothing to lose by stealing the synthetic Pokémon crucial to her plans and vanishing into the night. In his self-imposed exile, he bonded with the Type: Null, relating its "failure" to do what it had been created for to how his own mother had treated him. He tried to remake himself in defiance of Lusamine's demands, with dark colors and a bad attitude, sloughing off reminders of his own "failure". And yet, when Ultra Wormholes began to appear over Alola, rather than deciding Lusamine's schemes weren't his burden to bear anymore, he immediately took it on as his own responsibility to stop, running headlong back into his family's problems.
Gladion brought some baggage with him when he left, obviously. He remembers searching himself for things his mother might use to tear him down, and trying to be more like who she wanted him to be, before giving up on it and retreating into himself instead. There is a deep strain of self-consciousness in him that shapes almost everything he does, whether it pushes him to cover up his feelings or he pushes back at it by doing something that feels cool. It's the root of the conflict between his strong, earnest emotions and his desire to be seen as unaffected by appeals to those emotions. Caught between the two, he comes up with reasons his concerns are grandiose enough to be worth caring so much about - dramatic narratives about duty and fate and dignity that justify the distance he keeps from people. At the other end of his self-consciousness, Gladion can be too hard on himself about the collateral damage of his actions, embracing the comfort of an all-or-nothing attitude where it's more comfortable to be a bad guy than it is to be a "failed" good guy who sometimes needs help or has to apologize.
Helping and hindering the untangling of this mess of emotions is Gladion's own intellect. Moon pins his tactics and observations in battle as having a "science-y feeling"; raised by and around people who wanted to improve the world through scientific advances (or who at least claimed to), he learned to value cleverness, and he generally deals with problems by thinking first and then acting. He's perceptive, too, and puts the details he notices to work when drawing conclusions or coming up with plans. The unfortunate fallback of Gladion's analytical thinking is that when his emotions compel him to a course of action, he has a very easy time rationalizing those actions, and when he isolates himself - as he is prone to doing - he can think-and-feel himself into a corner when the actions don't work, unable to disentangle from his own justification and accept outside help.
This is, again, the flaw that is not unknown to Gladion, because one of the very few people he will simply listen to is Lillie, and she called him on it directly. In the six months since his search for the Tapu, Gladion has mellowed out a little, no longer driven by mounting panic as the sky tears itself open and he braces himself to solve it alone. He's still stubborn and aloof and a little melodramatic, but he's aware of the risks of isolating himself and is committed to making little efforts, when he can, to be more trusting and less closed-off. Treating Moon as an actual ally in battle, for instance, or trying to stop the battle with Ryuki and clear up a misconception.
It goes against the tide for Gladion, but luckily for him it's not completely unnatural. He was a sweet kid before everything changed with his family, and once he pushes through the background noise of shame he finds it easy to default to caring about people and wanting to get along. It's this well he draws his powerful, sometimes excessive sense of responsibility from; he considers his ties to his family unseverable, for better (Lillie) or worse (Lusamine), and beyond them is a very small circle that Gladion is very slow to let people into but whose occupants receive his unwavering dedication. Moon is only the second to be let in. The first, of course, is Silvally, the Pokémon he freed, whose rehabilitation he devoted his life to after running away, whom he allowed to irradiate him (not a joke tbh) so that it could be free of its restraint mask. Who, in turn, trusted Gladion completely, inspired him to think about life after Lusamine, and demonstrated to him all the good he was capable of.
5-10 Key Character Traits:
- Irritable
- Guarded
- Earnest
- Dedicated
- Self-conscious
- Dramatic
- Analytical
- Caring
Would you prefer a monster that FITS your character’s personality, CONFLICTS with it, EITHER, or opt for 100% RANDOMIZATION? Fits
Opt-Outs: Faerie, Goblin, Minotaur, Simulacrum, Waldgeist, Werebear
Roleplay Sample: TDM thread
Name: Holo
Contact:
Age: Over 18
Other Characters: none
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Gladion
Age: 15
Canon: Pokémon
Canon Point: Adventures/Special continuity, post-Sun & Moon chapter (end of SM37)
Character Information: Bulbapedia synopsis, my chronological summary.
Personality:
Gladion is a prickly and standoffish kid who wears his heart on his sleeve nonetheless - rather literally, on his sleeves, and you can learn a lot about him just by looking at how he dresses and presents himself. His preferred outfit is all black with red accents, long sleeves, and a spiky, rumpled hoodie (in tropical Hawai'i) (or its Pokémon world counterpart). He styles his bangs to cover half his face so he can give dramatic, one-eyed glowers. Jagged rips in everything give off a sense of danger. Or, at least, a sense that Gladion wants to be seen as dangerous and taken seriously. Those rips suit his sense of dramatics, but he didn't put them there for the sake of fashion - they're actually collateral damage from roughhousing with his beloved Pokémon Silvally, and he taught himself how to sew so he could mend around them.
He won't tell that story (or explain whether he didn't close them up on purpose) without some prodding, and he's tight-lipped about himself on a lot of other points, too. Gladion keeps people at arm's length habitually and tends to talk around his feelings, snapping and grumbling at others when he's embarrassed and trying to play it cool the rest of the time. He doesn't like talking about himself - he put down nothing but his name to enter the Iki Town festival tournament, skipping over sections even as innocuous as "what's your favorite food" - and he's too often willing to let people assume the worst of his intentions instead of taking time to explain what he's up to.
At the same time, it's not all that hard to read what he's feeling, even if he keeps a tight lid on what he's thinking. Gladion's brooding demeanor is much better at letting you know he wants you to look past his emotions than it is at actually shielding his emotions from view: he clenches his fists and speaks rudely when he's upset, he looks away and mumbles when he's flustered, and when something intrigues him it's easy to catch him staring. He also rarely lies, you might notice if you listen to him for long enough - he's reticent and evasive and brushes off any question he doesn't want to answer, but Gladion is not a very deceptive person and shows no interest in trying to be one.
His actions speak where he refuses to: Gladion can be very intense in pursuit of a goal, fixing his eyes on his target and committing to the path it takes to get there even if it takes him through gang leaders and guardian deities, but he doesn't seem to take any joy in wreaking destruction and he throws himself into battle to protect people in the same breath that he scoffs and makes a show of not caring about them. And when it comes to his Pokémon, Gladion isn't even willing to pretend he doesn't care, though he'll dress up his obvious devotion as a matter of camaraderie and strength. He is - as much as he would hate to hear it in these words - not a bad kid, just one who is too quick to push people away and get himself in trouble trying to deal with something on his own.
This is not a flaw unknown to Gladion. It's the arc of the last eight-or-so months of his life, if you count from that fateful day in Iki Town - or the last almost-two-years, if you count from when he met Type: Null. Everything about his demeanor, his fashion sense, his guardedness and stubborn pride, goes back one way or another to the setting he grew up in and why he ran away from it. His parents were wealthy and well-respected scholars, co-leaders of a Pokémon conservation and research organization; 5 years ago, his father vanished, and thus began Gladion's memory of his mother's transformation. Insisting her husband had abandoned the family, Lusamine became controlling and viciously critical towards Gladion and his younger sister Lillie. He remembers being her preferred target, older and more willful as he was, and on the isolated island of Aether Paradise surrounded by Lusamine's employees, he found little refuge from her emotional abuse.
And then he found out about the Ultra Beasts. Suddenly, it all made sense - an extradimensional threat had stolen her heart and turned her into what she was now, and Gladion couldn't face her down himself but he could stop her in her tracks and maybe give Lillie some breathing room. Lusamine already hated him, he reasoned, so he had nothing to lose by stealing the synthetic Pokémon crucial to her plans and vanishing into the night. In his self-imposed exile, he bonded with the Type: Null, relating its "failure" to do what it had been created for to how his own mother had treated him. He tried to remake himself in defiance of Lusamine's demands, with dark colors and a bad attitude, sloughing off reminders of his own "failure". And yet, when Ultra Wormholes began to appear over Alola, rather than deciding Lusamine's schemes weren't his burden to bear anymore, he immediately took it on as his own responsibility to stop, running headlong back into his family's problems.
Gladion brought some baggage with him when he left, obviously. He remembers searching himself for things his mother might use to tear him down, and trying to be more like who she wanted him to be, before giving up on it and retreating into himself instead. There is a deep strain of self-consciousness in him that shapes almost everything he does, whether it pushes him to cover up his feelings or he pushes back at it by doing something that feels cool. It's the root of the conflict between his strong, earnest emotions and his desire to be seen as unaffected by appeals to those emotions. Caught between the two, he comes up with reasons his concerns are grandiose enough to be worth caring so much about - dramatic narratives about duty and fate and dignity that justify the distance he keeps from people. At the other end of his self-consciousness, Gladion can be too hard on himself about the collateral damage of his actions, embracing the comfort of an all-or-nothing attitude where it's more comfortable to be a bad guy than it is to be a "failed" good guy who sometimes needs help or has to apologize.
Helping and hindering the untangling of this mess of emotions is Gladion's own intellect. Moon pins his tactics and observations in battle as having a "science-y feeling"; raised by and around people who wanted to improve the world through scientific advances (or who at least claimed to), he learned to value cleverness, and he generally deals with problems by thinking first and then acting. He's perceptive, too, and puts the details he notices to work when drawing conclusions or coming up with plans. The unfortunate fallback of Gladion's analytical thinking is that when his emotions compel him to a course of action, he has a very easy time rationalizing those actions, and when he isolates himself - as he is prone to doing - he can think-and-feel himself into a corner when the actions don't work, unable to disentangle from his own justification and accept outside help.
This is, again, the flaw that is not unknown to Gladion, because one of the very few people he will simply listen to is Lillie, and she called him on it directly. In the six months since his search for the Tapu, Gladion has mellowed out a little, no longer driven by mounting panic as the sky tears itself open and he braces himself to solve it alone. He's still stubborn and aloof and a little melodramatic, but he's aware of the risks of isolating himself and is committed to making little efforts, when he can, to be more trusting and less closed-off. Treating Moon as an actual ally in battle, for instance, or trying to stop the battle with Ryuki and clear up a misconception.
It goes against the tide for Gladion, but luckily for him it's not completely unnatural. He was a sweet kid before everything changed with his family, and once he pushes through the background noise of shame he finds it easy to default to caring about people and wanting to get along. It's this well he draws his powerful, sometimes excessive sense of responsibility from; he considers his ties to his family unseverable, for better (Lillie) or worse (Lusamine), and beyond them is a very small circle that Gladion is very slow to let people into but whose occupants receive his unwavering dedication. Moon is only the second to be let in. The first, of course, is Silvally, the Pokémon he freed, whose rehabilitation he devoted his life to after running away, whom he allowed to irradiate him (not a joke tbh) so that it could be free of its restraint mask. Who, in turn, trusted Gladion completely, inspired him to think about life after Lusamine, and demonstrated to him all the good he was capable of.
5-10 Key Character Traits:
- Irritable
- Guarded
- Earnest
- Dedicated
- Self-conscious
- Dramatic
- Analytical
- Caring
Would you prefer a monster that FITS your character’s personality, CONFLICTS with it, EITHER, or opt for 100% RANDOMIZATION? Fits
Opt-Outs: Faerie, Goblin, Minotaur, Simulacrum, Waldgeist, Werebear
Roleplay Sample: TDM thread