Character Profiles

Character Profile – Okapi

Kris Takahashi Character Profiles 1 Comment

Misguided fools always do.  Mean well.  Yes, things in the pit do get…gory. But in the end, there’s a difference between hurt and pain.
–Okapi

Before I started the mod, one of my goals this year was to finish Infinite Jest.  Needless to say, I failed.  I want to blame the mod, but to be frank, I blame the book.  The book is a bit of a grind.  Now, while I find David Foster Wallace to be funny, thoughtful, and at times inspiring, the story itself makes me want to fling said book out the window and go back to marathoning porn.  To this day I don’t know if that represents a personal failing or the author’s, but I choose to blame it on him, seeing as he’s dead and can’t defend himself.

Given our shaky history, it would seem counter-intuitive for me to want to read one of his essays.  Essays are by nature extremely didactic(read: boring), as they’re typically sans all the witty humor and lingual acrobatics an author performs in his novels.  Still, I’m glad I picked up Consider the Lobster, because the whole thing was a fascinating read, and something to draw back on when building the character Okapi, the degenerate pit fight gambler.

The premise of the article is simple.  Is it inhumane to cook a lobster?  The argument Wallace makes is that the answer is unknowable, because the answer, er, boils down to whether a lobster feels pain.  And because it’s impossible to know whether a lobster feels pain, your answer reflects more about you than it reveals about the scruples of your local seafood buffet.

For humans, the purpose of pain is obvious.  Whether it’s a knife in the gut or a deep-seeded regret, pain more than anything else molds experience.   When athletes talk about their career, they remember the heartbreaking loss more than the glory.  When old timers reminisce about high school crushes, they’ll talk most vividly about the one that got away.  Pain cuts deeper because it’s wired deeper.  Grog knows not to eat rocks because the last time it gave him a tummy ache.  However, none of this would be applicable if not for memory and our concept of time.   Without an understanding of the past and a fear of what might happen in the future, there’s nothing to stop Grog from jugging down a bottle of drain cleaner  while petting a king cobra.

For animals, memory isn’t memory.  It’s a miasma of circadian rhythms, Pavlovian cues, and funky hormones.   The less complex the brain, the more unreliable it gets.  At some point, the act of avoiding pain isn’t so much a decision as it is a reflex.  And like a hand jumping back from a hot stove, the body works on its own.  The mind is on a need to know basis.  The pain only comes after, to forge the memory so we don’t touch the stove a second time.  This is the basis of Okapi’s argument for why the pit fights are kosher.  Animals get hurt, but they don’t feel pain. For animals, everything is a reflex.

Obviously, such an argument is relatively shallow, something a mother kitty said to assuage her child.  Wolves are not lobsters.  Moreover, feeling pain has other functions besides memory, as it plays an integral role in recuperation.  A wolf who hurts its leg may not understand it has to rest, but it will likely avoid chasing Red Riding Hoods because the pain is sharp.  It won’t remember the experience or tell its grandwolfs about it, but in that moment, it feels the pain every bit as much Okapi does after a bad day at the pits.  Having no memory doesn’t equate to no pain.  What it does mean is that an animal is far more likely to hurt itself a second time.

Which brings us full circle to the character herself.  Okapi, you see, is a gambler.  And the fundamental trait of all degenerate gamblers is an inability to learn from their mistakes.  They double down and let it ride, all the way to the poorhouse.  They spend years trying to mine their way out of the gutter, building back their bankroll only to have it collapse on a single bet.

Okapi may argue that wolves have no memory, but in the end, it’s hers that’s a cause for concern.

Character Profile – Dagri’lon

Kris Takahashi Character Profiles 26 Comments

When it comes to Dagri’lon, there’s a few things I need to address:

Yes, Dagri’lon is overpowered for a follower.  He was never intended to be one.  He was designed to be a challenging fight in a game devoid of challenges.  It really isn’t his level either.  It’s his spells.  They wreak havoc.

Yes, Dagri’lon has no head.  That was not Jay33721’s original concept.  He was supposed to be a rotting corpse, but at the time, I didn’t know how to make Draugr talk.  So, fiddling around with a pasty Dark Elf, I put a Flame Atronach’s armor in his inventory and voila.  No head.  It started out as a compromise, and it evolved into a story.

Yes, Dagri’lon has a voice that is practically a caricature of all the evil voices in the history of evildom.  However, Dagri’lon is not motivated by evil.  He does not live to see the hero dipped slowly into a pool of boiling acid, while he sits patiently on a throne of skulls making finger steeples.  And while Dagri’lon seeks immortality, he is not a creature of greed.  He is motivated by one thing and one thing only.  The man abhors decay.

If there is an inspiration for Dagri’lon, it comes from the writings of Yukio Mishima, and the Buddhist scriptures on the decay of angels.  There are five signs in total, so if you come across an angel during your next trip to the market, be sure to look for them.  They are as follows:

1. The flowery crown withers.
2. Sweat pours from the armpits.
3. The robe is soiled.
4. They lose self-awareness, or become dissatisfied with their station.
5. The body becomes fetid, ceasing to give off light, and the eyelids tremble.

Yes, the decay of all that’s good and holy is not a new concept.  It’s a common theme quoted in everything from the notebooks of angst-ridden teenagers to grown men forming Fight Clubs.  I want to spoil that which is heavenly, I want to destroy something beautiful.  I am by no means an expert on the author – I’ve only read Confessions of a Mask – but that seems to be the mantra of a lot of Mishima’s characters.  Protagonists who are disgusted with themselves, self-loathers who lash out by perverting the pure.  Yet Dagri’lon is not a whiny teenager.  He harbors no jealousy of things that are beautiful.   He simply recognizes its transience.  He will burn down the Golden Pavilion in a wall of flames, but his intent isn’t to defile its beauty.  It’s to preserve it.

No, Dagri’lon isn’t a destroyer of worlds.  Destruction is a compromise, a last ditch effort to defy that most intractable of taskmasters – time.  Yet in the end, he cannot see fit to destroy himself, and the irony is he’s become the very thing he despises most.  A decaying angel.

Character Profile – Gorr

Kris Takahashi Character Profiles 4 Comments

You hear this roar.  So loud it rumbles in your chest. You don’t know who they cheer for. What they cheer for.  Victory, glory, or death.
– Gorr

There’s really only two things you need to know about Gorr. He’s a big man, with a big laugh. A man who crushes mead steins on his head, and laughs heartily at his own foolishness. Gorr can be imposing, and he’s damn sure intimidating, but only when he isn’t smiling. When he puts his big paws on his belly and roars, all the fears inside you are swept away.

You could say he’s a gentle giant, but he’s hardly gentle to bandits. He might pet a mudcrab, but if he’s hungry it won’t stop him from eating it. He’s a man with his own code, but not the brooding type who spends all day thinking about it. He goes where his stomach takes him, or he’ll flip a bandit and let you call it in the air. Heads we go this way. Tails we go that way. Yet in the end, it doesn’t really matter. As long as you’re going somewhere, there’s adventure to be had.

People often tell me they love Gorr’s voice, and by proxy, they love Nile’s voice as well. I think it’s safe to say, however, that Nile sounds nothing like Gorr. That’s how much range he has an actor.  His original audition for Gorr was more of a raspy, sinister voice. What I wanted was something that filled the room, a voice that made his foes tremble and his friends rally. With this in mind, Nile went back in the lab, jacked up the bass, and Gorr spoke for the first time.

The original difficulties weren’t surprising in the least. From squatter to wanderer, follower to marriage candidate, Gorr’s development has always been a bit circuitous. Most times I have an idea of who the character is going to be, but in some cases, they’re molded out of something far more nebulous. Gorr, for instance, was a character who was built around a concept. It wasn’t about a big brute who loved horkers, or even the lore of the Imperial City Arena. From the beginning, Gorr was a character that was fashioned out of my love of sports.

But that’s the beauty of the Arena, ain’t it. Nothing’s ever written, nothing’s ever known.

When you write a story, there’s always a line you can’t cross. There’s a point of demarcation where the reader loses their sense of disbelief. If halfway through Gorr’s arena story, I said he went back to his quarters and fucked a unicorn, that would be grounds for an uninstall. The beauty of sports is, that line can be crossed every day. Unbelievable things happen. Unicorns may or may not be fucked. You just never know. That’s why we watch – to see that 40 point comeback, or the underdog beating the undefeated champion. We’re amazed when the old, overpaid star, redeems himself with a single game, after you and everyone else had buried him and prayed for the groundskeeper to rake off his face. In sports, you’re free to imagine. Whether it’s a kid attending his first baseball game, or a little Redguard sneaking his way into the Imperial City Arena, it’s the same. Nothing is written. There’s no hand guiding you to a single end. You never lose your sense of wonder.

That’s why we cheer. Why we’re so passionate about watching a bunch of grown men play with balls and sticks. Sports is the closest thing we have to a meritocracy, and the closest thing we have to the surreal. Every year there are thousands of articles and blog posts and talk radio rants that try to unravel the alchemy of it all, and every year there’s an outcome that leaves us holding our alembic. In the information age, when everything is researched and perused and analyzed, when algorithms predict the future with startling accuracy and all the answers are there at the click of a mouse, there’s something to be said about being surprised, even when the outcome isn’t all that surprising.

The Grand Champion can win a hundred matches and name a skeever as his next opponent, and the audience will still hold their breath. Unlike the stories, it’s always a surprise when the hero wins.  ‘Cause in the Arena, the hero’s allowed to fail.