#this also can dive into how relationships are treated on alternia

[fantroll-purgatory]

Heya, this is my first time submitting IIRC!! so like. please be gentle

I don’t actually have a finished drawing of this character yet, I’ll have to work on them later. Is that ok? If I show you their design in a separate post after I’ve finished the art of them? Sorry its just. i really want to hear your thoughts on her personality and such

Of course it’s alright! We take trolls without drawn design concepts all the time. You can definitely send them in later! I’m always happy to review a good character! 

World: Ouranos, a troll planet that orbits a red dwarf, and is tidally locked-one side always faces towards the sun, and the other side faces away. Unlike Alternia, Ouranos has never had any seadwelling trolls, and all the castes simply run from red to purple. All trolls are de jure equal, after a long and bloody history of subjugation under many tyrannical rulers, but this de jure equality hardly matters due to wealth and resource disparities that prevent historical lowbloods from holding any sort of power. Trolls on Ouranos don’t inherently live longer if they have bluer blood, but wealth disparities means that higher bloods can essentially live as long as they want while lowbloods suffer and die within just a few dozen sweeps. I like this world setup a lot! It expands upon some extant questions about Alternian society, too, like if part of the lifespan disparity is simply caused by lack of access and difference in labor expectations. You should think about details of this planet like: Is this just the planet they’ve always lived on in your AU? Or is it a colony planet established by the Condesce? Or is it a forgotten planet that the trolls we are familiar with lived on Before moving to Alternia and there’s been a convergent evolution despite the planetary separation?  Name: Elapea Serpen (Serpen comes from the suborder Serpentes, which defines all snakes, while Elapea comes form Elapidae, a family in Serpentes that contains sea snakes and coral snakes, the two kinds of snakes she is based off of. she isn’t exclusively based off of elapids though, she has some elements of boas as well: see her strife specibus)

I love this a Lot for a character themed around being a landdwelling creature diving into the water.  Age: 5 Sweeps

Theme/Story: So Elapea is kind of a Meenah/Feferi figure on Ouranos- she is the descendant of the Imperial Devourer, the last empress of Ouranos before she was overthrown by a gang of lowbloods. She actually knows this, as her caretaker (who is another troll instead of a lusus) is a very old highblood who was alive during the reign of the Imperial Devourer.

Backstory out of the way, Elapea is basically a weird conspiracy theorist. You remember how I said Ouranos has no seadwellers? Elapea believes they actually do exist, and they’re controlling the entire planet from the shadows, or something. (This was inspired by the story of cults like the Illuminati, or the lizard people conspiracy theory, but I only realized how antisemitic those stories were, so like. I’m trying to think of a way to have it so that she can still believe seadwellers exist and control the planet without it resembling any of those antisemitic conspiracy theories). As such, Elapea dives deep into the ocean to try and hunt down and kill seadwellers, enamored with the idea that by killing them all she could become worshipped by trollkind, or something. She never finds any seadwellers of course (not for a while at least), just a bunch of monsters.

Due to pressures from her now old (898 sweeps exactly) caretaker, who is kind of not great at doing his job and tries to grow her into an extremely strong troll who can rule the planet like her ancestor, she has taken to pitch romanticizing the idea of a seadweller, simply because she thinks she has to. (This part needs working out as well, i want it to be like. uncomfortable. but i also want it to be clear that i dont condone that kind of thing in kids like her? bc once again she’s only five sweeps old and i just realized that this doesnt actually go well with what her caretaker tries to shape her into what do i dO (actually what if i made it so that her caretaker wanted to enforce a traditional notion of femininity that’s akin to our sense of toxic masculinity, simply under a matriarchy as opposed to a patriarchy? that might work)).

Ok I realize I got back into backstory, so one more thing. Elapea is extremely dramatic, akin to a theater kid. Once again, she wants to be a superhero, so she sort of plays out everything she does like she’s in a play and the whole world is watching. She wants to be the protagonist of a story.

I love that you’re actually thinking about the sensitivity implications of these kinds of things, it’s always encouraging to see writers thinking about and researching the backgrounds of this. Wrt the illuminati and snake people thing, the simplest solution is to just try to avoid drawing any kind of aesthetic or cultural similarities to it. You can’t let Ouranos have the same kind of Hype around Illuminati conspiracies or the same degree of online jokes about the ‘lizard people living among us’ premise. I think your safest bet overall is to avoid Any kind of “shadowy cabal of noble people destroying the world,” because that almost always has antisemitic roots unless you’re very careful about it and most non-Jewish people just aren’t going to be able to achieve that kind of nuance without a Jewish sensitivity reader. 

Maybe if you wanted to play on her Hero Bent, you could dive more into an Atlantian/Cosmic Horror (Lovecraft Don’t Interact)/Greek Hero sort of angle? I know that’s an odd sort of mishmash, but instead of her believing seadwellers are some kind of String-Pulling Clique, she could believe more in Furthest Ring style interpretation of seadwellers who aren’t so much controlling the world as they are driving the world mad. You could give her a very classic-style Dive Into The Underworld To Fight A God style vibe. Read about Katabasis.

As for the Bad Guardian thing, I can say that you could probably push the relationship angle effectively without straying into ‘too weird’ territory by having the Guardian try to remind her that a strong leader “HAS” to have strong quadrants backing her and trying to like set her up on dates with other highbloods. You can make it obvious that this has a significant impact on her view of relationships, like having her waffle between believing in true love(s) and thinking of romance as a purely political tool, of her straining between wanting to make her guardian proud/wanting to date nobly and wanting to pursue her own happiness. 

So make that a clear reflection of the pressures her Guardian puts on her in general. Everything is performative, everything is in pursuit of her political aims, everything is so that she can take her proper throne, the Lonesome treats her not as a person but as a tool, as a potentiality, and she is not allowed to be herself in any ways. If you want to keep the Seadweller Fantasy, maybe you could do something that a lot of Abused Kids experience- maybe she experiences the Shape Of Water effect. Daydreams about finding a monster partner who will take her away from the pressures of modern society. 

Goals: Basically, to make sure i can solidly lock her backstory into one that isn’t like. really antisemitic and also somewhat pedophilic? because frankly i dont want people to think im saying its ok to ship literal children or something and like. how do i get that across, that this kid is really not treated very well by her caretaker (ill just say his title, it’s Assassin Lonesome. he’s a pretty edgy dude but i wont get too much in detail with him). Also, I need a fair bit of help with a quest? and also to try and develop who she *really* wants to be and the dichotomy with how her caretaker *wants* her to be.

I think you don’t have to worry about two characters who are the same age dating or having feelings- that’s normal for 15 year olds to do. You should definitely just make it obvious that you don’t think adults should have a hand in children’s relationships the way the Lonesome tries to. As I said above, press on the fact that the Lonesome really puts the weight of her ancestor over her and tries to force her to fit a mold and a role, maybe indicate that he objectifies her/treats her more as a weapon or tool than as a person with her own goals. We’ll get into what SHE wants to be when we get down to personality/interests, etc. Strife Specibus: Elapea uses a Kusarigama, a kind of scythe-on-a-chain weapon, apparently said to have the highest mortality of any weapon of its time. i actually just found that out as i wrote this, i just thought they fit the theme bc she’s a snake. anyways if you dont know they basically have a scythe on one end and a heavy weight on the other end of the chain, and the idea is that you swing the weight end to bind someone in place and then use the scythe to go in for the kill, which is both somewhat representative of how snakes in general bite their prey to kill them, and also how boas in particular will wrap their bodies around their prey to strangle them.

That’s definitely a COOL weapon to use and is fitting themeatically for the snake concept. I do worry about its utility in water, though. She wants to die into the sea and hunt seadwellers, right? A spear or harpoon might end up being the more functional weapon for her in the end… But there’s nothing that says she couldn’t have two strife specibi, one for on land and one for at sea.  Fetch Modus: Elapea uses the Locket Modus; whenever an item is captchalogued, the two halves of its essence are split up between two halves of a heart, diamond, spade, or club locket, and she keeps one half while the other half goes to someone close to her. (they dont have to necessarily be in quadrants, like often times they go to Mullen, who is essentially just her little brother, or to Assassin Lonesome) She can only get the item out by meeting with the person who has the other half of the locket, and combining the lockets. Shenanigans then ensue from this, esp since she has one locket which she has no idea how she got and no idea who holds the other half and it contains a legendary super powerful juju that i can’t get into right now.

Okay, that’s a super cute modus idea that I love the idea and implications of. Always make all your choices together! It also does have the stressful implications, of course, of the idea that the Lonesome in some ways controls her behavior/what she is allowed to do. Dual Purposes!  Blood Color: Purple Symbol and Meaning: 

https://imgur.com/LnlLu0g

(i cant figure out how to embed images mshjbvbxchj) basically it’s a uhh. its a snake. this was my first fanmade sign like, ever, and i love it

It looks great! And fits the purple sign language very well. 

Handle:

 serpentineBloodthirst (SB) (All of my fantrolls and fankids have element symbols for their chat handles, so Elapea’s respective element is antimony, an element traditionally associated with things like femininity and makeup, referencing how elapea is basically supposed to be a queen, but it also- wait no it was tellurium that smells really terrible. i cant remember a lot of its properties tbh)

Well, antimony comes from a root that basically means “Monk-Killer,” so that’d be fun to play with. Out here killing/almost killing a seadweller monk.  

serpentineBloodthirst feels a little too obvious, though. It’s a direct statement of some of her themes and her goals, but it doesn’t tell you much about her character, what she values, or what she’s interested in. Imagine if Kanaya’s handle were something like vampiricFashionista, for example. Remember- the characters pick their handles for themselves. Is this how she would describe herself? You could go with something funner, like slitheringBrutaliberation, with brutaliberation being a portmanteau of Brutality and Liberation, since she thinks she’s being a hero. 

Quirk:

 Elapea opens every line with “~~~< ” and every one of her s’s is replaced with “SSS”. i made this before i learned how common the double s quirk is, so i’m glad it goes the extra mile of not just turning “as” into “ass”, but going so far as to turn it into “aSSS”

Hey, snakes hiss, it’s a good quirk to use. Maybe you could also have her end threats with “vv” (they’re her fangs). ex: ~~~< dont try me unlesss you want to get bit vv 

Special Abilities:

 None (or at least she can’t use psychic powers. Trolls on Ouranos have long ago lost their psychic powers, so all she can really do is punch people and stuff. She’s also a really good swimmer, so you could count that i guess)

Lusus/Guardian:

 once again, trolls on Ouranos don’t have lusii! instead, Elapea has a “caretaker”, who is an older troll who adopts them like a parent. Once again, her caretaker is Assassin Lonesome, who tries to raise her to be like her ancestor, lethal and cold, so that she can continue the tyrant tradition of the bygone days of Ouranos.

Interests:

 Unsure how much of this i accidentally explained in the theme section, once again Elapea loves drama and stories of great heroes, and as such everything she does takes on an incredibly dramatic flair to please whatever Providence watches over her. She is highly interested in romanticism, though really not at all ready for its highs and lows yet.

Elapea also really likes to swim! She goes out into the ocean hunting for seadwellers, and likes to take thrill in slaying the monsters that lurk in the waters, risking life and limb in a dark space where even the luxury of breathing is taken from you, simply for the thrill. This does not concern Assassin Lonesome at all as he is, as has been established multiple times now, an idiot who cannot raise children.

Now I’m going to go ahead and spoil my classpect discussion here when I say I almost think making Elapea a heart player is going to be too obvious. I Mean I think it’s definitely still something you could go with and justify solidly, because she does have a core conflict about her identity and who she is as well as relationship problems, but I feel like that’s such a problem that isn’t only internal to her but is also external- it’s not her being wrapped up in her own head about it, it’s her environment pushing an uncertainty on her. And I think she needs a little more of a classpect push than from the internalized forces of heart and mind. 

All of that is to say I think she reads more like she might need some Void influence to me. She believes in mysterious things out there beyond her view, she wants to hunt them down, find the answers. Delving into dark places to try to find something new is what light’s all about. The blank canvas, the something where there was nothing, that’s void, and that’s interesting. She needs to learn to cast doubt on what she’s known, to bring the lessons she’s been taught under scrutiny, to determine where the truth really lies, if there is a truth at all. 

…Which is all to say I think you could expand her interests to reflect all of this. Does she like stories about the murky dark and the dangers within? Does she like Unsolved Mysteries and conspiracy theories that have lead her to this? Does she like political espionage and intrigue? Does she want to smooch a fish?

Appearance: I won’t get too into detail since I’ll be posting a drawing later, but basically, she wears a black one piece swimsuit with a long swim skirt over it with black, red, and yellow stripes in the pattern of a coral snake. Besides her sign, she only really wears purple on her slippers, and i’m currently debating whether or not she should also wear purple makeup because of the antimony association that forces her to be stereotypically feminine? still unsure there. She also wears a long ponytail with red and yellow streaks down it (because it would be silly to have a horizontally striped ponytail).

Troll femininity is different from human femininity anyways. Alternian femininity mostly seems to mean Long Hair and that’s about it, considering Feferi/Fuchsias are the standard of beauty and not all of them wear makeup. Even a fashion-focused character like Kanaya only rarely wore lipstick and didn’t have lash color. Makeup is more of an accent piece for trolls than a Femininity Standard. Personality: Elapea is, once again, highly dramatic, but also bold and somewhat harsh, with a very strong “holier than thou” attitude. Elapea is older than this meme, but thinking about it now, it’s sort of the same idea as the “NPC wojak” meme, where other people are viewed as more like NPCs in a video game, and the “player characters” view them as lesser, even though they’re not? is that making sense? (and yes, i know npc wojak is a fascist meme, the idea is that she’s sort of been indoctrinated by her fascist dad) she’s also rather violent, tending to take out her anger on innocent people or things. We love a flawed character who gets to learn. Like I described above I think giving her a bit more curiosity and maybe low-level, boiling rebelliousness might be a good idea. As the EZ says about Void, “In order for something new to be built, the old, rotting foundation must often be razed.”  Lunar Sway: Derse- she’s fighting back against a perceived complacency or numbness in society, the one the same “NPC wojak” meme expresses, that other people don’t have an internal dialogue and are less than human. It’s hard to explain? Later she realizes that this is wrong, and starts to fight back against people who push that kind of worldview. Title: Page of Heart. I must admit that I gave her that title based on the idea that the Page is the active counterpart to the Knight who is passive. So that might explain some things; it denotes her struggle to become ok with who she is and not who she’s being pushed to be- she wants to be a dramatic fun loving kid who gets to save people’s lives, and to be a hero, but not the ruthless dictator her caretaker wants her to be.

It’s hard to discuss classes since there’s no canon information on them unfortunately, but I do think there’s something to be said for the history of pages serving knights and how that makes it seem more likely a page would be passive over active, but I do think Page could probably serve her well either way. But I’m honestly leaning more Maid, because I do think she needs an active class in her pocket and she might just need the billowing Force of maidhood behind her, that Snap, That Push To Change. Become One With The Void, Dive Into The Ocean, Become The Mystery, Be The Cryptid.  Land: Land of Mirage and Lockets; it’s a surreal land with lavender soil and clouds, and strange trees with blood red leaves and heart lockets hanging from them. Each of the lockets contain the essence of a desire- in addition, the mirages off in the distance beckon with things that are desirable to the viewer- for example, heroism. The consorts are doves, who flit about speaking… I’m not sure yet. but they speak something to eachother, some sort of secret? I think? I need help with this bit.

Void players are secret-keepers, so I think even with my void recommendation this could continue well. Maybe the doves just whisper rumors/instructions and her quest is to not obsess over which is true while also learning how not to fall for every single bit of “advice” that is given to her. 

Well, I’m finally done, I’m sorry this is so long!! please feel free to take your time ^u^

Hey, sometimes you’ve got a lot to say about a character! I hope I was able to help with the problems you were having. Thank you for the submission! 

-CD

#purpleblood #fan planet #submission #review #cd review #clownpieceoffreedom #elapea serpen #elapea #serpen