#anyway faedren bad person arc!!!! whooooo let's goooo!!!!!!!!

[vulpinesaint]

tell me about faedrennnnnn

oh my goddddd okay. essay. putting this under a readmore cause not only do i not want all of this directly on people's dash i personally do not want to have to scroll past all this when i go through my little faedren tag for funzies (<— subtle promotion for my faedren tag. which is very funzies)

trying to remember what i told you in my last very long faedren post. i think i have to approach this from my constant litany of 'people think faedren is like this but that's NOT what's going on' and then i will tell you what i've been thinking about with him plot-wise lately :D

so. my thing with faedren is that people often think he is a certain way based off of surface-level observations and while those things may be true to a certain point they are NEVER fully accurate. faedren from the outside seems like a violent fuckboy religious fanatic who wants to fuck his goddess and like. hm. yeah. some of that. but more thoroughly:

faedren is a cult member 👍 this is not something that he knows about himself but it is something that his party members have noted and are. concerned about. lmao. the point being: he absolutely is a religious fanatic, and his views are skewed because he was taught an extreme version of the dictates of calistria (goddess of lust, trickery, and revenge), but it comes along with like. other stuff. he is extremely easy to set off on a tangent about how beautiful and perfect his goddess is and it seems like usual fucked up religious fanaticism but also faedren is like. for real in love with his goddess. he grew up in an environment where he was NOT receiving the connection that people need, and in his head, his goddess is the only being that truly cares for him. so he talks about her with stars in his eyes and follows what he believes to be her edicts with absolute devotion, and a lot of it is driven by this parasocial and extremely personal connection that he created with his image of his goddess as. a coping strategy, essentially.

from that. faedren sleeps around at whatever chance he gets but that's primarily an extension of the sentiments that i mentioned just now. first of all sex as an explicitly approved religious thing haha. second of all he is starved for connection and affection and at this point in his life he has rationalized that the only way that he can get that is in casual hookups. does that come across when he's making out with a random soldier or flirting with any woman he sees at the bar. no. but it's important for me to note about him.

faedren perpetrates and idealizes a LOT of violence but he is not an implicitly violent or angry or destructive person. he's incredibly chill, actually, all things considered. when i say he rocks up to the function sounding like a personal trainer who's really involved in social media wellness trends, that Is reflective of his demeanor and inner life. for him, sex and violence are religious dictates that are the course to personal peace and catharsis and the ultimate path to a happy life. faedren espouses all the beauty of terrible gory revenge not because he really wants to hurt people but because in his head, it's about taking the anger that builds when someone wrongs you and directing it back on that person with extreme prejudice until you find catharsis, and that lets you continue on with your life in peace, unburdened by that frustration. he's not even really that pressed about being wronged. he acts like he's hot shit but that's just a high charisma score and confidence in his objective attractiveness and skill with weaponry; he has very little ego or self-worth, and so he doesn't really care when you bump into him too hard at the bar, but he is very dedicated to his goddess and following her teachings so he's gonna turn around and beat the shit out of you on principle. it's not about retribution as it is about acting out revenge: he's following the steps of revenge as he sees it, which is 1) identifying some wrong and 2) returning that wrong. he has been hurt much worse by people he cares about and trusted before, but he doesn't follow through with that as revenge, because he doesn't process it as a wrong done to him; of course he can be hurt by someone he cares about.

to that point. he is chaotic neutral. not chaotic evil. he'd burn down that village but it wouldn't be about destroying things or hurting people; it'd be some other motivation at play. he sucks really bad (for reasons that are not entirely his fault) and he doesn't do good things but he's not a Bad Person. he's not malicious, doesn't treat people with malice. he follows through on a set of principles that he's been given with devotion bordering on obsession, but that's about personal principle.

he's actually a pretty positive guy :) walks into every social situation with a smile ready to meet new people learn new things. he doesn't really. know how to handle negative emotions. so he brushes off physical and emotional pain and continues on as best he can. tries to numb and ignore the pain whenever possible. he has an alcohol problem 👍

so that brings us to the present! and also to faedren with his party, who he's gotten very close with over a long, harrowing time spent fairly isolated fighting in terrible conditions. group of guys who all have to sleep in the same room with each other to feel safe. shout out to all of these motherfuckers for not knowing anything about connection and affection (abused cult member) (literal demon from hell put into a mortal body) (girl who was raised alone in the woods with just her parents) and therefore not knowing how to express that they care for each other. or even fully realize it, really. the polycule <3

faedren's friends (who he's kind of in love with but doesn't know how to process that) are very invested in trying to get him to realize that he's cared for, that he's worth something, etc. etc. and faedren is REELING with the positive personal connections and affection from people who genuinely care for him. totally fucking crazy. rewriting the rules of life as he knows them. absolutely does not know what the hell to do with that.

it's good though! so they all pile into the same bed to ward off the nightmares and they all go into battle together knowing exactly how they should structure the party and they all know what order they walk in when they go through a dungeon. and then they're getting through a vampire-infested cave system and they get to the end of a puzzle room and they find what they're looking for. and they don't know that this stone is going to temporarily vampirize the person who touches it. and faedren's party member touches it and when he walks into the room, unaware of what's happening, he gets attacked and nearly gets his throat ripped out by someone he loves.

so that. sucks. and he's fucked up about it but he's so woozy on bloodloss that he can't even begin to process that. so it waits until the morning, when he decides that he's going to be pragmatic about it, and tells his party member (who he flinches when he sees in the room, because he may be trying to be reasonable about this but his body is learning otherwise) that it's fine. it's okay. it doesn't matter that he was hurt; there's no hard feelings, because faedren's been hurt way worse before, he can take this, it wasn't their fault, and relationships are supposed to hurt. that's how things work. he was doubting it for a second there, but now he's been very clearly reminded of the way of the world and he's fully aware that caring about someone hurts. smiles. tries to laugh about it. doesn't know how to deal with the negative emotions that would come with this, so tries not to feel negatively about it at all.

and what he takes from that is that yeah. caring about people will always hurt you. and he resolves to pull himself away from his party members to spare himself the pain the next time. he's never been loved by people like that before and it was wonderful but it makes him so much easier to hurt, so it's better to keep things shallow, easy, trysts with strangers and comrades in battle only because he can't take on a whole group by himself.

lucky for him the party member who bit him is also feeling extremely fucked up about it! so they both independently start to pull away from the party. and one of their party members, the little pumpkin leshy who faedren taught to read, gets fucking Slaughtered, and so what is there to really keep them together any longer?

anyway. faedren pulls away. and it's one thing to promise yourself that you'll do that and it's another thing to be face-to-face with the Distance between yourself and the people you were so close with. and he's so so sad and so frustrated with the lack of simplicity and the lack of trust and he's only ever been taught how to channel that into anger

faedren's only ever having been taught to channel negative emotions into anger, and when he's finally dealing with intense negative emotions that he can’t falsely cheer himself out of or staunchly ignore, he only knows how to turn it into tenseness, standoffishness, anger. and he’s not angry. he’s so so sad in a way that he’s never been before (and possibly in a way that he’s always been but has never let himself recognize) but when it starts bubbling over he only has one channel for it. so when he flinches without meaning to at the sight of his party member around a corner (because even though they have lurked in the shadows as long as he's known them, his body doesn't trust them like that anymore) the only thing that reaction can become for him is clenched fists and a tense jaw and eventually snapped harsh words that he doesn’t mean and that he would never have said before. trying not to put a hand to his sword but if his body is in fight or flight then fighting is all his body knows how to do.

so he crosses a bunch of little lines doing things that he didn’t really mean to do and wouldn’t have wanted to do and regrets doing, but he’s never been taught to apologize, and he’s never substantially fucked something up with someone who he actually had to repair a relationship with over something that he actually did wrong and so he just. doesn’t. he gets defensive. gets angrier about it. he knows somewhere implicitly that yelling at his party member after a battle that went wrong was not the right thing to do and that it wasn’t justified, he knows that he wouldn’t have wanted to yell at his friend otherwise, but it’s so so so much easier on his heart to let his mind start spinning the cognitive dissonance into defensiveness. false justifications. more anger in response to being too harsh to begin with. and it cycles and cycles and cycles.

and THIS is where i get back around to my main point because i think this is where faedren starts turning into the person that people THINK he is.

my vision for faedren is that this is when he starts to develop an ego. because this is when he starts putting up walls: he finally gets the love he's wanted for so long and it's ripped away from him, and he's so so sad and so so angry, and he puts up boundaries to protect himself. builds up an ego to protect himself. says, for the first time, "no, i don't want to be hurt," and starts channeling that frustration out on other people. and this is where he does become malicious, because it's where he starts saying "i want other people to feel the hurt that i'm feeling." this is where his revenge fanaticism becomes less about devotional acts for his goddess and more about him becoming genuinely furious at the smallest slight, and carving out pounds of flesh for himself in retribution because it's gratifying. like i said, i don't think that faedren ever really truly has ill intent toward people unless they disrespected someone he loves: i think this gives him the capacity to hate people, given time.

and he's drinking more. and following the pleasures of the flesh. and if he's sleeping with people it's not for any care or connection with them. and he's mean in a way that he wasn't before, that he didn't have the capacity for. and violence is just another pleasure to indulge in because even if it doesn't lessen his own hurt at least he can watch someone else suffer for it. if faedren's ever manipulative it's at this point in his life: when he starts wanting things and taking them from other people. putting his insane intimidation stat to good use. enjoying the lying as the 'trickery' aspect of his goddess' edicts. and then there's the bad person that people have been interpreting him as. which is all to say that i think faedren gets hot and evil. nd i'm really passionate about it 👍

#and of course he's actually very hurt and damaged under all of that. but does that really matter if you're hurting everyone around you 👍 #he's gonna be so awful i think about him so much. i care about him so much actually #our dm let us have social time challenge these bitches need to destroy their own relationships with each other #faedren #he has a +13 to intimidation at level 6 btw! :D #this is not the extent of my faedren thoughts but i have to wrap this up SOMEHOW or i'll never stop talking about it 😭 #anyway faedren bad person arc!!!! whooooo let's goooo!!!!!!!! #ask