Cfud Sekirei essay
Or “Yes I’m still trying to avoid doing the massive headcanon essay”.
So there was an awesome cfuzazzle game semi-recently, and if you stripped away the sci-fi elements, it really could have been another chapter out of Absolute Obedience. Why you ask? Because it dealt with the overarching themes in Zhores’ mission and handled them pretty much like AO did... but better written.
You see for the most part Kia’s missions feature characters that have a goal in mind. Dirk wants to keep his town from being destroyed, Silvio wants to reclaim his family’s treasure and solve his caretaker’s riddle, Ali ends up trying to stop an assassination attempt, and so on. However, Louise’s missions focus more on emotional issues and something the targets need to deal with. Lawless deals with his guilt, Ferdinand gets a rude awakening about what relationships can be like, and Zhores? Zhores deals with his control issues, and in some ways, his issues about losing people he cares for.
Now when I say control issues, I mean Control Issues. He’s been an agent specializing in seduction for a number of years, and he’s never been on the receiving end? Yeah that’s a pretty good indicator right there. Furthermore, he’s the target that you can mess up pretty easily on. Do the wrong thing and you can find yourself topped, drugged, Zhores escaping... the list goes on. Zhores just plain resists the hardest when is comes to submitting.
The loss of people he cares about is also an important theme, but at first it appears to fly under the radar. At the beginning you’re told that Zhores took over the role from his dead older sister. Later on if you drug Zhores and get one of the bad ends, you find a little bit more about her. His parents/grandparents/exc are never mentioned either time, which is big in AO. In all the cases where people think or talk about their families, they mention the people who raised them, even if they’re deceased. I tend to consider it a sign that his sister was really the person who raised him. If he grew up in an orphanage, I doubt that he’d think about his sister when it looks like he’s about to die.
So now that we’ve got that established, let’s just get that beloved sister killed and send him to work as a spy! That won’t cause problems later on, right? Yeaaah you can see where this is going. But it’s not like any of these things will affect how he reacts when Louise tells him he loves him!
”I know it’s your secret job to dominate people like this. I know you don’t really love me. [...] You’re just work-related to me, too. I can use you to find information.
[...]
Are you sure you’re working on your own? Are you sure you’re not being controlled?”
Moreover the worst thing is that he’s right. Louise answers that he likes his physical body. Nothing about romance whatsoever. The guy has had a lot of cases, and in one of the endings it’s indicated that he views love as one of those wacky concepts that only fools believe in. While he keeps people around who are useful or a challenge to him, Louise in general lets the now-smitten targets fall by the wayside. Considering that most of the supplemental material shows Zhores a hell of a lot less affectionate then in the best ending, I tend to assume that Louise might already be starting to disconnect. This means that even though Louise has changed him, Zhores is still going to be defensive about anything close to romance.
So with that backstory, let’s see what went down in the game.
Firstly there’s Zhores’ partner and leader of the group, Turkey. Now they had only one thread in camp, and it didn’t leave much of an impression. But he started to react to him in the game, so he promptly started to see what kind of guy he was. What would he have done if he hadn’t lived up to his expectations? Resist it as hard as he could.
However! Turkey checked out and passed the first test to see if he could handle a snarky, horrible person like Zhores can be. At the least he had a competent partner, and he could live with the amount of control that the shepherds had over him because the modifications hadn’t really affected him yet. (another point what that they were all equally screwed). He also viewed it as just a game, so that helped him deal with it too.
As the events went on though, things got more serious. Turkey hit a lot of Zhores’ pings that he had with Louise. Hell, I’m just going to put up a chart because there’s so damn many similarities:
As one might guess, the understanding and being flexible thing confused the hell out of him. In AO there are people who show genuine affection and caring to Zhores, but they’re not on top, and he doesn’t really get connected to them. With Turkey, the bastard kept coming out the victor in the domination struggles. However he didn’t seem to mind giving up some of that control when Zhores needed it.
So he kept testing and trying to push boundaries and found that no, Turkey wasn’t going to let Zhores dominate him, but he wasn’t out to hurt him. He ended uo passing everything that Zhores threw in his direction, and even if he missed one of Zhores’ warning signs, he made up for it when he crossed a line. More or less he managed to get Zhores to trust him, which is saying something.
By the end of it, Zhores was fairly involved. While he wasn’t going to come out and say that he loved Turkey, he felt strongly enough about him to feel safe and cared for.
AND THEN THE OUSTING HAPPENED, AND THE PLOT TWIST OCCURED. It sucked enough to get his ass kicked by a pink-haired teenager, but then came the limbo post and the isolation.
This is why I teal deer’d about his past. You throw someone into a game where his emotions are manipulated, where the guy turns out to be someone who he’d at least want to get to know better out of the game. You watch him get into quite possibly the healthiest relationship he’s ever had in his life, and start to see him trust someone. And then the game not only takes that person away (with no indication that he’d see him before he was back in camp again), but left him with the horrible feeling of loss not unlike what he was worried about with Louise.
So he went a little nuts.
Oh who am I kidding, he went bugfuck insane. He went past the anger, into the blind rage, and out the other side into the tranquil fury. For a little while he was able to stay in a semi-normal state externally, but later on it became pretty obvious just how much he wanted the shepherds to suffer. It wasn’t that he’d had time to “cool off”, just more he couldn’t keep his anger under wraps for that long. (...Though seeing Russia take down LJ and getting the bond back did help his temper).
As for post-game? He got to see Turkey again and even without the bond he was fond of him. In fact Turkey kept him from scouring the place until he hunted down and killed the shepherds. Would he have been able to stop Zhores from doing it if they were right there? Probably not, but he was at least able to calm him down enough to focus on other things.
So what did carry over from the game?
-The bond, though far from all the memories (and none of the abilities) of the game.
-An adorable baby leopard, now named Sasha because I’m a hooker for tf2.
-NOT the memories of what happened after the ousting. I’m carrying this over to any Sekirei games that might happen in the future because I love playing him in those, but I don’t want him to be trying to kill the shepherds.
-A bit more respect for America, even if he can’t remember why in camp.
-I refill on his ammo/equipment/exc.
But let’s not stop there. Part of the fun about Sekirei games is when they do carry over, and boy has this game affected things in camp.
First of all there’s the thread in the LJ post. Whether he realizes it or not, Zhores is flirting pretty hard there with Turkey. He even offers him a favor, which he wouldn’t do for many people. He also agrees to room with him, which he would be a hell of a lot more reluctant to do if his instincts didn’t say it was mostly safe. It was the start of a beautiful relationship! ...until Turkey revealed that he knew about the poison needles.
It would have been relatively easy to say “Zhores, I know about them because of cfuw” But the best and the worst thing about the cfud games is that even the things that people remember are hazy at best. So if one was a spy and just found out that someone knew about his equipment, but claimed that they “didn’t know” where they got that info, what would you do? Exactly, someone needed to be interrogated and then properly shut up.
...I’d like to mention that Turkey is the second country that Zhores has drugged or gassed. If it happens again I swear to god I’m going to start keeping a scorecard. But as I was saying, Turkey was pissed and Zhores got that no, he really didn’t remember where he heard it from, so drugging and taking blackmail pictures of the guy probably wasn’t a great idea. Guilt ensued, even more so when Turkey let him get away with a comparatively minor form of payback.
And then they moved in and got married. Okay so it’s not anything romantic like that at all. Zhores wanted something to keep the lovable tentacle alien away and he figured that Turkey would want to annul the marriage too. Much like the cfuw game, things got a bit more serious.
Zhores went from flirting to an almost ridiculous level of flirting somewhere when he started to openly mock Turkey and got physical. It’s how he shows his affection, really (unless you’re Prussia and then that just seems to be how they have a normal conversation). He also let Turkey stay in his personal space, which again, says a lot. Plus when things turned to his new roommate saying stupid things, he kinda tore into him. Again, why?
Because like hell was he going to let him do something stupid when he knew he was better then that. Even if he couldn’t remember it, his instincts told him that he could trust the guy. That meant that he’d already tested him, and if Turkey had passed those tests then he knew that he wasn’t an idiot or incompetent. ...Fine, it was also because he worried about something possibly happen to him.
TL;DR how does he feel about Turkey, really?
Not fully in love, let’s get that right out of the way. He cares and to some extent trusts him, but at best it’s a tinycrush. He sees Turkey as someone who can be a dick, but he also has a more caring side then Zhores expected. He also loves to see Turkey caught off guard or flustered, so he’s A++ trolling material. Past that he sees someone he can be relatively honest around, including talking about his other job. Would he hit that? You bet. Does he like rooming with Turkey? There’s only a few others that he’d be roommates with. Is he going to non-jokingly refer to Turkey as his husband? Oh FUCK no.
He’s got a Kuu/Tsundere reputation to uphold.
...I- I can’t believe I just wrote 10 pages on paper about Turkey and the cfuzazzle game.
So there was an awesome cfuzazzle game semi-recently, and if you stripped away the sci-fi elements, it really could have been another chapter out of Absolute Obedience. Why you ask? Because it dealt with the overarching themes in Zhores’ mission and handled them pretty much like AO did... but better written.
You see for the most part Kia’s missions feature characters that have a goal in mind. Dirk wants to keep his town from being destroyed, Silvio wants to reclaim his family’s treasure and solve his caretaker’s riddle, Ali ends up trying to stop an assassination attempt, and so on. However, Louise’s missions focus more on emotional issues and something the targets need to deal with. Lawless deals with his guilt, Ferdinand gets a rude awakening about what relationships can be like, and Zhores? Zhores deals with his control issues, and in some ways, his issues about losing people he cares for.
Now when I say control issues, I mean Control Issues. He’s been an agent specializing in seduction for a number of years, and he’s never been on the receiving end? Yeah that’s a pretty good indicator right there. Furthermore, he’s the target that you can mess up pretty easily on. Do the wrong thing and you can find yourself topped, drugged, Zhores escaping... the list goes on. Zhores just plain resists the hardest when is comes to submitting.
The loss of people he cares about is also an important theme, but at first it appears to fly under the radar. At the beginning you’re told that Zhores took over the role from his dead older sister. Later on if you drug Zhores and get one of the bad ends, you find a little bit more about her. His parents/grandparents/exc are never mentioned either time, which is big in AO. In all the cases where people think or talk about their families, they mention the people who raised them, even if they’re deceased. I tend to consider it a sign that his sister was really the person who raised him. If he grew up in an orphanage, I doubt that he’d think about his sister when it looks like he’s about to die.
So now that we’ve got that established, let’s just get that beloved sister killed and send him to work as a spy! That won’t cause problems later on, right? Yeaaah you can see where this is going. But it’s not like any of these things will affect how he reacts when Louise tells him he loves him!
”I know it’s your secret job to dominate people like this. I know you don’t really love me. [...] You’re just work-related to me, too. I can use you to find information.
[...]
Are you sure you’re working on your own? Are you sure you’re not being controlled?”
Moreover the worst thing is that he’s right. Louise answers that he likes his physical body. Nothing about romance whatsoever. The guy has had a lot of cases, and in one of the endings it’s indicated that he views love as one of those wacky concepts that only fools believe in. While he keeps people around who are useful or a challenge to him, Louise in general lets the now-smitten targets fall by the wayside. Considering that most of the supplemental material shows Zhores a hell of a lot less affectionate then in the best ending, I tend to assume that Louise might already be starting to disconnect. This means that even though Louise has changed him, Zhores is still going to be defensive about anything close to romance.
So with that backstory, let’s see what went down in the game.
Firstly there’s Zhores’ partner and leader of the group, Turkey. Now they had only one thread in camp, and it didn’t leave much of an impression. But he started to react to him in the game, so he promptly started to see what kind of guy he was. What would he have done if he hadn’t lived up to his expectations? Resist it as hard as he could.
However! Turkey checked out and passed the first test to see if he could handle a snarky, horrible person like Zhores can be. At the least he had a competent partner, and he could live with the amount of control that the shepherds had over him because the modifications hadn’t really affected him yet. (another point what that they were all equally screwed). He also viewed it as just a game, so that helped him deal with it too.
As the events went on though, things got more serious. Turkey hit a lot of Zhores’ pings that he had with Louise. Hell, I’m just going to put up a chart because there’s so damn many similarities:
As one might guess, the understanding and being flexible thing confused the hell out of him. In AO there are people who show genuine affection and caring to Zhores, but they’re not on top, and he doesn’t really get connected to them. With Turkey, the bastard kept coming out the victor in the domination struggles. However he didn’t seem to mind giving up some of that control when Zhores needed it.
So he kept testing and trying to push boundaries and found that no, Turkey wasn’t going to let Zhores dominate him, but he wasn’t out to hurt him. He ended uo passing everything that Zhores threw in his direction, and even if he missed one of Zhores’ warning signs, he made up for it when he crossed a line. More or less he managed to get Zhores to trust him, which is saying something.
By the end of it, Zhores was fairly involved. While he wasn’t going to come out and say that he loved Turkey, he felt strongly enough about him to feel safe and cared for.
AND THEN THE OUSTING HAPPENED, AND THE PLOT TWIST OCCURED. It sucked enough to get his ass kicked by a pink-haired teenager, but then came the limbo post and the isolation.
This is why I teal deer’d about his past. You throw someone into a game where his emotions are manipulated, where the guy turns out to be someone who he’d at least want to get to know better out of the game. You watch him get into quite possibly the healthiest relationship he’s ever had in his life, and start to see him trust someone. And then the game not only takes that person away (with no indication that he’d see him before he was back in camp again), but left him with the horrible feeling of loss not unlike what he was worried about with Louise.
So he went a little nuts.
Oh who am I kidding, he went bugfuck insane. He went past the anger, into the blind rage, and out the other side into the tranquil fury. For a little while he was able to stay in a semi-normal state externally, but later on it became pretty obvious just how much he wanted the shepherds to suffer. It wasn’t that he’d had time to “cool off”, just more he couldn’t keep his anger under wraps for that long. (...Though seeing Russia take down LJ and getting the bond back did help his temper).
As for post-game? He got to see Turkey again and even without the bond he was fond of him. In fact Turkey kept him from scouring the place until he hunted down and killed the shepherds. Would he have been able to stop Zhores from doing it if they were right there? Probably not, but he was at least able to calm him down enough to focus on other things.
So what did carry over from the game?
-The bond, though far from all the memories (and none of the abilities) of the game.
-An adorable baby leopard, now named Sasha because I’m a hooker for tf2.
-NOT the memories of what happened after the ousting. I’m carrying this over to any Sekirei games that might happen in the future because I love playing him in those, but I don’t want him to be trying to kill the shepherds.
-A bit more respect for America, even if he can’t remember why in camp.
-I refill on his ammo/equipment/exc.
But let’s not stop there. Part of the fun about Sekirei games is when they do carry over, and boy has this game affected things in camp.
First of all there’s the thread in the LJ post. Whether he realizes it or not, Zhores is flirting pretty hard there with Turkey. He even offers him a favor, which he wouldn’t do for many people. He also agrees to room with him, which he would be a hell of a lot more reluctant to do if his instincts didn’t say it was mostly safe. It was the start of a beautiful relationship! ...until Turkey revealed that he knew about the poison needles.
It would have been relatively easy to say “Zhores, I know about them because of cfuw” But the best and the worst thing about the cfud games is that even the things that people remember are hazy at best. So if one was a spy and just found out that someone knew about his equipment, but claimed that they “didn’t know” where they got that info, what would you do? Exactly, someone needed to be interrogated and then properly shut up.
...I’d like to mention that Turkey is the second country that Zhores has drugged or gassed. If it happens again I swear to god I’m going to start keeping a scorecard. But as I was saying, Turkey was pissed and Zhores got that no, he really didn’t remember where he heard it from, so drugging and taking blackmail pictures of the guy probably wasn’t a great idea. Guilt ensued, even more so when Turkey let him get away with a comparatively minor form of payback.
And then they moved in and got married. Okay so it’s not anything romantic like that at all. Zhores wanted something to keep the lovable tentacle alien away and he figured that Turkey would want to annul the marriage too. Much like the cfuw game, things got a bit more serious.
Zhores went from flirting to an almost ridiculous level of flirting somewhere when he started to openly mock Turkey and got physical. It’s how he shows his affection, really (unless you’re Prussia and then that just seems to be how they have a normal conversation). He also let Turkey stay in his personal space, which again, says a lot. Plus when things turned to his new roommate saying stupid things, he kinda tore into him. Again, why?
Because like hell was he going to let him do something stupid when he knew he was better then that. Even if he couldn’t remember it, his instincts told him that he could trust the guy. That meant that he’d already tested him, and if Turkey had passed those tests then he knew that he wasn’t an idiot or incompetent. ...Fine, it was also because he worried about something possibly happen to him.
TL;DR how does he feel about Turkey, really?
Not fully in love, let’s get that right out of the way. He cares and to some extent trusts him, but at best it’s a tinycrush. He sees Turkey as someone who can be a dick, but he also has a more caring side then Zhores expected. He also loves to see Turkey caught off guard or flustered, so he’s A++ trolling material. Past that he sees someone he can be relatively honest around, including talking about his other job. Would he hit that? You bet. Does he like rooming with Turkey? There’s only a few others that he’d be roommates with. Is he going to non-jokingly refer to Turkey as his husband? Oh FUCK no.
He’s got a Kuu/Tsundere reputation to uphold.
...I- I can’t believe I just wrote 10 pages on paper about Turkey and the cfuzazzle game.