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FINALLY. I KNOW YOU ALL CARE VERY DEEPLY ABOUT MY CHARACTER THOUGHTS and were WONDERING ANXIOUSLY why I hadn't written my obligatory character essay for Lloyd yet. I think this thing is the most horribly unorganized jumble of rambling I've yet hacked out, don't read it.
Lloyd on the surface is a pretty standard hero! He gets a bit trope broken by the way he ends up deciding to bring a completely independent and less morally black-and-white angle to the problems he wants to fix, how he learns by game 2 to check his privilege, etc - but it probably takes me to read him as a sort of horrifying character. I love him but I don't think I'd want him to exist irl - there's a reason he and Claire Stanfield can be bffs in CFUD, and it's because they're similiar in some ways. Their confidence in their own capabilities is completely insane. Claire's is because he is in fact totally off his rocker and believes that the world revolves around him; Lloyd's is partly because there's something weird in the way he deals with stress and self-doubt, but also because he has made a conscious decision to never give in to the weakness of his heart ever. And... apparently... that's a decision you can just make, if you're Lloyd Irving?! N-NOT NORMAL.
I'll start with addressing the handling stress thing briefly. I don't feel like summarizing ToS, but Lloyd deals with a lot of really crushing realizations in canon. The plot curbstomps his head into the pavement re: his assumptions about the world multiple times, in horribly personal ways that deal with his heroes, his friends, his mentor figure, who he is, and his choices. To put this in perspective: I play Sera from DDS. She by no means started off as stable as Lloyd did, but just two comparable curbstomps in her storyline completely fucked her up mentally. You'd expect that Lloyd's journey would leave him with self-doubt and angst that part of his story would be about overcoming.
This... doesn't really happen, in ToS. Lloyd changes his mind about what he needs to do and how he needs to act to do it according to his trauma, but there is never a moment where he really doubts his ability to deal with it. You see Lloyd rattled, sad, angry, and thoughtful. You don't see him think he can't handle things. Considering that he's making decisions for the whole world, and completely understands that his decisions are getting people killed, it's disconcerting. I DON'T KNOW WHAT HE DOES WITH IT. IT JUST GOES SOMEWHERE.
The killing people is also worth going into! Tales games are noteworthy for not beating around the fact that the random encounters are people, and that the disasters the parties leave in their wake are affecting lives. It's emphasized in game 2 that Lloyd does in fact feel a lot of social responsibility for all this, and since he's a jesus who values everyone's life, he's serious about that responsibility. The thing is! You'd expect someone with that mindset to have regrets and self-doubt even more! Most jesii are full of internal pain and martyr complexes! But no. Once Lloyd decides that it's definitely the right thing to do to kill someone, he's completely willing to do it without regretting it later. He makes that decision about several people we see in canon: the Desians, Kvar specifically, Zelos if you go that route, Mithos, Emil at one point in ToS2 before he changes his mind, Richter... I'm going to ignore the ToS2 people for this because they're just continuations of the trend, but yes.
His approach to the Desians early in the first game is particularly freaky, because he pretty clearly is not thinking of them as real people. He cuts them down without any more thought than "you'll have to do my homework for me ^__^" for Genis's sake, and he's savagely happy to kill Kvar for the sake of vengeance even though Kvar is neither the person who actually killed his mom (that was Kratos!) nor the person ultimately responsible for the research done to her (Mithos! :'D). It sort of makes sense in that he grew up near a village that lived in the shadow of a Desian-run concentration camp, but his total belief in his own justice makes it easy for him to see an enemy as a dark, looming threat without a face until he has the life experiences to combat that tendency.
Eventually Lloyd learns Important Lessons About Racial Hate. He did not super need them, actually! He already disassociates being a Desian from being a half-elf somewhat more than most people in Sylvarant, possibly because the guy who raised him was a dwarf who probably had dealings with other half-elves in his life. (He says stuff like "those damn Desians," and the word is so synonymous with half-elf in Sylvarant that I'm sure it's awk for Genis and Raine, but he also tells Genis very early on that "Not all half-elves are Desians" so I'm pretty sure he just thought the organization was full of dicks.) Nonetheless! His Important Lessons do teach him to stop hating people in groups passionately and without further considering them as individuals who have individual motivations to do things he dislikes. Lloyd's leveled up jesus form is someone who's decided that each individual life has merit just by existing in the world, and that he wants to protect all of them.
But that resolution doesn't make him feel very bad about all the people he killed before that, and it doesn't make him much more chary of taking life when he feels justified afterwards. This is where Lloyd gets scary for me. The thing that the game keeps telling you is that Lloyd is basically the same person as the Big Bad, Mithos, only minus book smarts/siscon/ostracization and plus stability/ability to back down from overwhelming wrongness. And Mithos is the dude who went around the bend, isolated himself, and then waded through endless oceans of blood for four thousand years. This is a thing Lloyd is capable of doing! I don't think it will happen ever, for several reasons. Lloyd sucks at cutting himself off from people, his canon experiences have made him allergic to sacrificing people or allowing them to sacrifice themselves, and if people or events beat him upside the head with his WRONGNESS, he will stop and change directions; he's much less fragile and emotionally invested in being in the right than Mithos was. But the total determination needed to carry plans of possibly terrible scope through to their logical end is there.
There are two examples of this in canon EVEN AFTER Lloyd has decided for sure on the Everyone's Life Has Value path. In the game, you can have Zelos betray the party, and he does so and attacks everyone while deriding his own right to exist. (This is the first possible appearance of Let's Commit Suicide By Lloyd. 8|) Lloyd COMPLETELY CALLS Zelos on this bullshit. He knows that Zelos is lying and really does care about the party! But since there's no other way to make him stop attacking them, he kills him anyway. It's the only thing to be done, because Zelos is in the way, and he's sad and angry about losing his friend! But he has no regrets that are ever shown, because it was the only right choice to make. Later, the endboss is Mithos! Mithos is someone the game has gone to ELABORATE LENGTHS to force Lloyd to empathize with. He has a tragic backstory, he's the hero Lloyd looked up to, he strikes up a clear emotional parallel with Lloyd's best friend when Lloyd KNOWS what Genis's issues are already, he's described TO Lloyd as someone similar to himself, he DERPS AROUND WITH THE PARTY - Namco is not subtle! POTENTIALLY SYMPATHETIC VILLAIN WITH COMPLEX MOTIVATIONS HERE. And Lloyd seriously thinks about all this, and decides he'd rather not kill Mithos if he doesn't have to! If Mithos will just back down and go with Lloyd's (admittedly less genocidetastic) world regeneration plan, or just move out of the party's WAY, Lloyd emphatically wants Mithos to be able to live in any new world Lloyd makes.
But he doesn't! So they kill him. And two years later, though Lloyd's still thinking about that as a failure he had in not helping a friend change enough to stay alive, he doesn't have regrets for BEING THE ONE TO KILL HIM. Because the other side wouldn't back down, and nothing has convinced Lloyd that HE was wrong, so he was right.
Basically Lloyd seems to see the world as a place where there is a right thing for him personally to do, and he, Lloyd Irving, is going to find and do it. He can be convinced that it is in fact NOT RIGHT, or question it and find a right thing of MORE RIGHTNESS on his own! I think his comfort with being wrong comes from a lifetime of being yelled at by everyone he loves for being a dumbass. Regardless though! WHATEVER THAT RIGHT THING IS Lloyd is going to find it and have total confidence in it and himself. And! If it turns out he was wrong! THAT IS A PITY AND TOO BAD. He will get stronger so he can fix things and be MORE RIGHT next time. YOU CAN COUNT ON HIM!
Um.
LUCKILY, though Lloyd is not self-aware of this past knowing that I BELIEVE IN ME, it's unlikely to be a problem. He tends not to get trapped in his own head and he constantly surrounds himself with people who are lovingly on his case ALL THE TIME and will smack him. If none of these people are available he CREATES THEM by being an enormous easily mocked jesus at passerby. He's also had a variety of life experiences that indicate to him that the best course for MAXIMUM RIGHTITUDE is to ruthlessly question authority, and to prioritize trusting other people to also pursue rightness - at the least valuing their lives whether you have to kill them or not.
It's still weird and sort of frightening. :|a
QUESTIONS and COMMENTS and SHUT UP YOU'RE OUT OF CHARACTERS are welcome as always
Lloyd on the surface is a pretty standard hero! He gets a bit trope broken by the way he ends up deciding to bring a completely independent and less morally black-and-white angle to the problems he wants to fix, how he learns by game 2 to check his privilege, etc - but it probably takes me to read him as a sort of horrifying character. I love him but I don't think I'd want him to exist irl - there's a reason he and Claire Stanfield can be bffs in CFUD, and it's because they're similiar in some ways. Their confidence in their own capabilities is completely insane. Claire's is because he is in fact totally off his rocker and believes that the world revolves around him; Lloyd's is partly because there's something weird in the way he deals with stress and self-doubt, but also because he has made a conscious decision to never give in to the weakness of his heart ever. And... apparently... that's a decision you can just make, if you're Lloyd Irving?! N-NOT NORMAL.
I'll start with addressing the handling stress thing briefly. I don't feel like summarizing ToS, but Lloyd deals with a lot of really crushing realizations in canon. The plot curbstomps his head into the pavement re: his assumptions about the world multiple times, in horribly personal ways that deal with his heroes, his friends, his mentor figure, who he is, and his choices. To put this in perspective: I play Sera from DDS. She by no means started off as stable as Lloyd did, but just two comparable curbstomps in her storyline completely fucked her up mentally. You'd expect that Lloyd's journey would leave him with self-doubt and angst that part of his story would be about overcoming.
This... doesn't really happen, in ToS. Lloyd changes his mind about what he needs to do and how he needs to act to do it according to his trauma, but there is never a moment where he really doubts his ability to deal with it. You see Lloyd rattled, sad, angry, and thoughtful. You don't see him think he can't handle things. Considering that he's making decisions for the whole world, and completely understands that his decisions are getting people killed, it's disconcerting. I DON'T KNOW WHAT HE DOES WITH IT. IT JUST GOES SOMEWHERE.
The killing people is also worth going into! Tales games are noteworthy for not beating around the fact that the random encounters are people, and that the disasters the parties leave in their wake are affecting lives. It's emphasized in game 2 that Lloyd does in fact feel a lot of social responsibility for all this, and since he's a jesus who values everyone's life, he's serious about that responsibility. The thing is! You'd expect someone with that mindset to have regrets and self-doubt even more! Most jesii are full of internal pain and martyr complexes! But no. Once Lloyd decides that it's definitely the right thing to do to kill someone, he's completely willing to do it without regretting it later. He makes that decision about several people we see in canon: the Desians, Kvar specifically, Zelos if you go that route, Mithos, Emil at one point in ToS2 before he changes his mind, Richter... I'm going to ignore the ToS2 people for this because they're just continuations of the trend, but yes.
His approach to the Desians early in the first game is particularly freaky, because he pretty clearly is not thinking of them as real people. He cuts them down without any more thought than "you'll have to do my homework for me ^__^" for Genis's sake, and he's savagely happy to kill Kvar for the sake of vengeance even though Kvar is neither the person who actually killed his mom (that was Kratos!) nor the person ultimately responsible for the research done to her (Mithos! :'D). It sort of makes sense in that he grew up near a village that lived in the shadow of a Desian-run concentration camp, but his total belief in his own justice makes it easy for him to see an enemy as a dark, looming threat without a face until he has the life experiences to combat that tendency.
Eventually Lloyd learns Important Lessons About Racial Hate. He did not super need them, actually! He already disassociates being a Desian from being a half-elf somewhat more than most people in Sylvarant, possibly because the guy who raised him was a dwarf who probably had dealings with other half-elves in his life. (He says stuff like "those damn Desians," and the word is so synonymous with half-elf in Sylvarant that I'm sure it's awk for Genis and Raine, but he also tells Genis very early on that "Not all half-elves are Desians" so I'm pretty sure he just thought the organization was full of dicks.) Nonetheless! His Important Lessons do teach him to stop hating people in groups passionately and without further considering them as individuals who have individual motivations to do things he dislikes. Lloyd's leveled up jesus form is someone who's decided that each individual life has merit just by existing in the world, and that he wants to protect all of them.
But that resolution doesn't make him feel very bad about all the people he killed before that, and it doesn't make him much more chary of taking life when he feels justified afterwards. This is where Lloyd gets scary for me. The thing that the game keeps telling you is that Lloyd is basically the same person as the Big Bad, Mithos, only minus book smarts/siscon/ostracization and plus stability/ability to back down from overwhelming wrongness. And Mithos is the dude who went around the bend, isolated himself, and then waded through endless oceans of blood for four thousand years. This is a thing Lloyd is capable of doing! I don't think it will happen ever, for several reasons. Lloyd sucks at cutting himself off from people, his canon experiences have made him allergic to sacrificing people or allowing them to sacrifice themselves, and if people or events beat him upside the head with his WRONGNESS, he will stop and change directions; he's much less fragile and emotionally invested in being in the right than Mithos was. But the total determination needed to carry plans of possibly terrible scope through to their logical end is there.
There are two examples of this in canon EVEN AFTER Lloyd has decided for sure on the Everyone's Life Has Value path. In the game, you can have Zelos betray the party, and he does so and attacks everyone while deriding his own right to exist. (This is the first possible appearance of Let's Commit Suicide By Lloyd. 8|) Lloyd COMPLETELY CALLS Zelos on this bullshit. He knows that Zelos is lying and really does care about the party! But since there's no other way to make him stop attacking them, he kills him anyway. It's the only thing to be done, because Zelos is in the way, and he's sad and angry about losing his friend! But he has no regrets that are ever shown, because it was the only right choice to make. Later, the endboss is Mithos! Mithos is someone the game has gone to ELABORATE LENGTHS to force Lloyd to empathize with. He has a tragic backstory, he's the hero Lloyd looked up to, he strikes up a clear emotional parallel with Lloyd's best friend when Lloyd KNOWS what Genis's issues are already, he's described TO Lloyd as someone similar to himself, he DERPS AROUND WITH THE PARTY - Namco is not subtle! POTENTIALLY SYMPATHETIC VILLAIN WITH COMPLEX MOTIVATIONS HERE. And Lloyd seriously thinks about all this, and decides he'd rather not kill Mithos if he doesn't have to! If Mithos will just back down and go with Lloyd's (admittedly less genocidetastic) world regeneration plan, or just move out of the party's WAY, Lloyd emphatically wants Mithos to be able to live in any new world Lloyd makes.
But he doesn't! So they kill him. And two years later, though Lloyd's still thinking about that as a failure he had in not helping a friend change enough to stay alive, he doesn't have regrets for BEING THE ONE TO KILL HIM. Because the other side wouldn't back down, and nothing has convinced Lloyd that HE was wrong, so he was right.
Basically Lloyd seems to see the world as a place where there is a right thing for him personally to do, and he, Lloyd Irving, is going to find and do it. He can be convinced that it is in fact NOT RIGHT, or question it and find a right thing of MORE RIGHTNESS on his own! I think his comfort with being wrong comes from a lifetime of being yelled at by everyone he loves for being a dumbass. Regardless though! WHATEVER THAT RIGHT THING IS Lloyd is going to find it and have total confidence in it and himself. And! If it turns out he was wrong! THAT IS A PITY AND TOO BAD. He will get stronger so he can fix things and be MORE RIGHT next time. YOU CAN COUNT ON HIM!
Um.
LUCKILY, though Lloyd is not self-aware of this past knowing that I BELIEVE IN ME, it's unlikely to be a problem. He tends not to get trapped in his own head and he constantly surrounds himself with people who are lovingly on his case ALL THE TIME and will smack him. If none of these people are available he CREATES THEM by being an enormous easily mocked jesus at passerby. He's also had a variety of life experiences that indicate to him that the best course for MAXIMUM RIGHTITUDE is to ruthlessly question authority, and to prioritize trusting other people to also pursue rightness - at the least valuing their lives whether you have to kill them or not.
It's still weird and sort of frightening. :|a
QUESTIONS and COMMENTS and SHUT UP YOU'RE OUT OF CHARACTERS are welcome as always