A Word Aside 2 -- Suguri/Sora characters

Yesterday we had a word about how I conceptualised the various QPverse characters, what I wanted to explore with them and some rough ideas on how I was going to do it. Today, I’ll bore you with the Sugiverse characters.

Obviously, first on the list has to be Suguri. If you separate Suguriverse characters into quiet and loud, Suguri is definitely on the quiet side. She seems like an obvious responsibility figure in comparison to pseudo-insane characters like Kae, Tsih or Nanako; other characters, like Saki and Hime, are functional adults but come across much more light hearted than she does. Her most similar personality is Kyoko, who comes across as highly straight laced. If we posit for a moment that Suguri and Kyoko would both be lawful good, I feel like Suguri would be lawful good and Kyoko would be lawful good.

In a way, this adultness she has is one of the things that make her a foil to Shifu and NoName, who are, in different ways, very childish. Shifu’s main aggression towards the planet earth is that he covets it and cannot share it with anybody; he wants to enforce his will over the planet totally, in much the same way as he does with all of his minions save for Hime. In that sense, Shifu is like a child who’s been given great power – he hasn’t learned to share, and he always has to get his own way. Meanwhile, NoName is just immature in various ways for the sake of comedy, although it’s easy to see NoName as a reminder of how awful living under Shifu could have been if NoName’s lechery, and his penchant for forcing people to indulge it, is anything like his more serious counterparts’.

One large contrast can be made between Suguri and Sora. Suguri has great confidence in her own power, always seems to know what her aim is and seems to understand there is a huge difference between the people compelled to do evil things against their will, and an actually evil man – showing some degree of hesitance towards fighting the former, and attacking the latter without reservation. She’s many thousands of years old, is experienced at what she does, and seems unflappable. In that way, Suguri is introduced to us as an a fully-fledged, already realised hero. This contrasts with Sora, who is considerably less sure of herself and whether what she’s doing is right, occasionally works for the wrong people, and lets her emotions get the better of her sometimes (like when she attacks Suguri and Hime at the end of Sora). In that way, Sora is something of a hero ascendant; in leaving behind the army, she takes the first steps on her journey towards being a hero, a journey which she is acknowledged as having completed by the people of Suguri’s time. Logically, though, I could definitely see a very childish side of Sora coming out – the girl who never got to be a child, and was raised as a weapon of war. Sora may be thousands of years old by Suguri’s time, but she’s been awake for little of it, and won’t have nearly the experience or resolution that Suguri has.

Next, I’ll move onto Hime. Hime is a character that I’ve already gone on record to say that I love her more every time I write about her. She seems to be very refined but playful, which complements Suguri’s seriousness. I feel that a certain amount of what she does is for somebody else’s benefit; she was, after all, the guardian angel of a ship, who immediately took responsibility for saving them. In that way, I feel like there are a lot of different colours and shades of Hime – just as her wings have different colours.

Hime, beyond her strong friendship with Suguri (that lasts, according to Mixed Juice, millions of years) also seems to crave new experiences and new friendships. That provides a motivation for the two as a duo; Suguri has seen everything Earth has to offer, and seems to have no particular aim besides protecting it on the occasion that it is threatened. Hime, on the other hand, seeks adventure and exploration, possibly illuminating the world in a new relief.

When it comes to the other Suguriverse characters, I feel like “Big Sis Hime” is probably the best way to describe her relationships. She’s somewhat more reliable and adult than most, but she’s not stoic and above it all in the way that Kyoko and Suguri might act.

Thus far in my work, Saki has been conspicuous by her absence, and that’s because I only have the glimmer of an idea what to do with her. She’s somewhat plain in comparison to the rest of the characters, who are written a little larger than life, but I do have some ideas. Mainly, I feel like Saki is cheerful, in a way that nobody else really manages in the Sugiverse proper; Hime, while usually enjoying herself, seems too reserved, and Kae is far too energetic and wild. Saki, however, feels like she’ll make the best of a bad situation. She should be like sunshine; where she falls, happiness should follow.

Nanako is, for me, characterised by a certain bitterness. She knows what Shifu did to her, and is aware that her brain and her perceptions have been tinkered with. I feel like, in a way, she’s somewhat fatalistic about the whole thing, which is why she attacks Suguri so whole-heartedly when they first meet. (You could say that this feeling of being resigned to fate is reflected in the Deploy Bits card, since that’s almost entirely RNG…) Mainly she just seems pretty grumpy, looking for the negative wherever the positive presents itself – and in that sense, I feel like she’d get on quite well with a lot of the characters from the Sora time period, who have also been touched by the misfortune of their own circumstances. In particular, I wonder how she’d get along with Nath.

Kyoko presents the image of being cool, calm and professional. That’s about it…? I haven’t thought about Kyoko in any great depth.

Kae is something of a flat character. Well, not in terms of bust size, but she’s very much just a battle-hungry, energetic shonen protagonist who happens to be on the wrong side, usually. She’d make a great motivating force for a lot of plots, but I would have to do some more work with her to understand how she’d handle as the main focus of a piece.

Shifu’s dead.

That’s the characters from the Suguri time period, so now we’ll move onto Soraverse. We start with Sora, who spends most of her own game wandering and confused, fighting people she really doesn’t want to fight and then almost sacrifices her life to save an Earth she’s never particularly had the chance to explore. She values the blue sky, and seems serious to a fault. That’s who she is; the question becomes, who could she be, had she not fallen asleep? Who could she be, in the future with Suguri and Hime to play with?

There are a few different roads Sora can take. The first is that she gradually discovers life outside of military training and serious, world-ending calamities, which is something I’ve begun to explore in my other two Sora pieces. The second is that she mourns for what she lost in her time sleeping, since none of the other characters in the Soraverse seem to canonically be alive by the time Suguri and Hime are around (although that won’t stop me from using them, obviously). Either one will start to shade in Sora and round out my interpretation of her – the game she’s in seems to be less about her and more about the war she fights in.

Sora is, however, bae, and I’m sure whatever happens I will continue to love her.

Next is Alte. Alte is a tragic kind of heroine; she’s married, she’s so devoted to the war effort that she’s prepared to explode to take Sora out, and she just generally embodies suffering in general. I feel like Alte might have a martyr complex, but is also pretty determined. (Although, I can’t help but think she would be gloomy all the time…)

Then, there’s Tsih. Tsih I vaguely remember as being a huge annoyance and an actual psychopath, but she’s a cutie so it’s okay…? Maybe? She seems like the Kae of the Soraverse, which is fine, but I don’t actually remember what she was like.

Mira seems super cool, and has the oddness that she apparently is two souls, of different genders, smooshed together in one body. There’s a lot of interesting things to explore there, if I can figure out what it actually means.

Sham. Sham is interesting in that she’s one of the only characters in the Soraverse that Sora really has a friendly relationship with (even if they do fight). Sham goes on record as being uncomfortable with formalities and is obviously hurt by her duty to bring Sora back to a place she doesn’t want to go, but is otherwise fairly cheerful. I can imagine her wanting to do a great many things outside of being a participant in the war that seems to be devouring the world.

Then we have… Nath? Nath seems to define herself as ‘an ultimate weapon’, which is a pretty sad self-definition. I’ve explored her once before, in a story that I felt didn’t hit the right notes and was more or less a practice ‘return’ piece, but I do like the idea of her as a survivor of the war devoted to ensuring no more weapons like herself are created, both because of her residual pride at being the strongest, and her horror of what beings like her cost the world. She may also function as a visceral reminder (along with Star Breaker) to the rest of the Soraverse cast by showing them the logical conclusion of the war and the weapons it creates; any one of them could have been like Nath, functionally crippled in every aspect of life that isn’t destruction.

Last, but not least, we have Star Breaker. Star Breaker, bombastic and ludicrously insane destroyer of worlds, a giggling villain that destroys because it’s fun. All of the war girls so far were human, at least in base design; upon reaching Nath and Star Breaker, that humanity slowly begins to get stripped away in various forms. Nath is only a human weapon; Star Breaker is only a weapon. The most interesting parts of Star Breaker are looking at when she’s not currently destroying the world (see Orange Juice campaign mode or 200% Mixed Hoshino Reika) and observe the contrast: that’s the true tragedy of the war. Star Breaker, like all the other girls, is a victim, but she’s so far gone that she probably doesn’t realise it.

Well, that took longer than intended. Next time I’ll talk about schedules and projects – what’ll be coming up in the near future, and what I’m considering writing about.