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rubycity_rp canon update request
Character Name: Kirei Kotomine
Canon: Fate/stay night
Original Application: here!
Current canon point: Post-Heaven's Feel route
Updating to: Dangan Roleplay CRAU, roughly a year and a half after F/SN.
Personality (if applicable): Kirei went through a massive upheaval that ended in a moderate personality shift, and I'll try to summarize it in bullet points here.
► Following his death at the end of Heaven's Feel, Kirei is brought back through a wormhole machine and a possible small application of black magic to join 'Hope's Army', an organization formed by the Future Foundation. Why Kirei of all people? Primarily because 'Assassins' was probably a better term than 'Army', and secondly because the goal was to deal with a Junko Enoshima-possessed Lysandre in Kalos. Probably need an exorcist for that, and that's one of several things Kirei Kotomine does best.
► Being reluctantly involved in the offshoot organization, he gained a passing familiarity with his new coworkers. (While the nature of that would ordinarily mean he'd have a wide range of cross-canon knowledge, Kirei being largely apathetic about them means he simply doesn't care to remember the majority of information.) Among these was Schuldig, a fellow career assassin and advocate for genocide-for-funsies who Kirei eventually recognized as a person he gave halfway close to a damn about.
► The group's mission failed completely and they were captured and mindwiped to be put into a murdergame. All of them lost the entirety of their memories of Hope's Army and varying degrees of their canon memories as well. Kirei found he'd forgotten a minimum of ten years of his life--placing him mentally back in the Fate/Zero timeline, before he even truly knew he was a sadist with murderous tendencies. He also found himself quite literally without a heart and having no idea as to why that was the case.
► Faced with Monobear and the 'kill your friends to escape' murdergame formula, the amnesiac Kirei holding on to morals that were a decade out of date refused to act on any of it. However, someone did and at the end of the first trial Kirei slowly began to retrace over a revelation he'd forgotten: he enjoyed the despair and suffering the entire affair had been.
► Following the initial murder investigation/trial, Kirei began to get to know a few of his 'classmates'--Lysandre proved to have the same cold and logical approach as the priest himself, and Schuldig was the sort of person to poke an apathetic dragon with a stick to see what he might do. Gradually, he found he had an odd fascination with Lysandre; as he did with Kiritsugu in Fate/Zero, Kirei latched on to the idea that the SHSL Leader could have been similar to him in some unclear measure, and in his own obsessive way tried to learn more about himself through getting to know Lysandre.
► Kirei observed how the others reacted to the high-tension situation as the weeks and murders carried on, each of them gradually restoring everyone's memories one at a time. And as they did he was forced to realize that his father was dead, he'd killed his own teacher, and generally just became a horrifically terrible person. As much as Kirei kept the whole thing largely to himself, it was a shock to his system rather than the gradual burn it had been in Fate/Zero canon. He finally admitted, if only to himself, that he was enjoying the murdergame; that the pain and despair were the only thing he could derive true enjoyment from. The problem then laid in the why, and whether or not it was too late to turn back from a mentality like that.
► Lysandre's 'death' in the sixth week was, put simply, something he did not take well. Finding himself incomprehensible, Kirei had (however incorrectly) let himself believe that Lysandre could have understood him. His belief that may have gone far enough to be called legitimate hope was that he and Lysandre were the same kind of twisted, when if anything Lysandre's mentality was more similar to Kiritsugu's--twisted like Kirei, but in the completely opposite direction. With nearly the entire remaining class made ofprotagonists morally good and hopefully optimistic people, Kirei ended up associating with the only other person that had a grip on their grim reality: Schuldig. Following Lysandre's execution the two had a brief sparring match in which Kirei was able to act more like himself rather than the stone wall he was around the others.
► But the incicent with Lysandre was still a breaking point, and Kirei decided he had grown bored with the repetition of murder to investigation to trial every weekend like clockwork. He determined that no, he could never be a 'good person' like so many of the others in this game with him. They were on such opposite ends of the scale that Kirei couldn't even comprehend them, much less want to be like that. With no answer to 'is it wrong for me to exist the way that I am if that way is evil' and nothing but boredom and repetition in the near future, and knowing that he had already died back in Fuyuki, he resolved to do one last thing to put an end to the 'evil' that was Kirei Kotomine. To his morality, 'evil' was the kind of thing that needed to be eradicated--Kirei himself was not exempt from that fact. But he wasn't going to make it easy.
► In the eighth week, the universal translator broke down and left Kirei and Schuldig fluent in German and talking to each other. Finally, the entire story came out (in a lot of hovertext i am so sorry). Schuldig had determined that Kirei wanted to kill the people he liked because that made him feel more than 'nothing'. And when he guessed that Kirei was looking for some kind of answer, everything followed: Kirei confessed that he wished to know if it was wrong to live as he was despite being different from others. He told Schuldig about Avenger and how he was sure that was the only thing which could answer it. Schuldig, being the human incarnation of 'reckless', listened to Kirei's lack of a heartbeat as proof. And in doung that, he unwittingly brought Kirei to another unprecedented conclusion: despite the desire to hurt those he liked and should have liked, he didn't want to kill Schuldig at all. That same night, he wrote a letter that he knew Schuldig would find upon Kirei's death, which he fully intended to be very soon.
► The seventh murder left two bodies; Fujimoto carelessly pushed into an empty pool and dying of head trauma, and Himeko Inaba stumbling upon an attempted corpse disposal. Startling Kirei by pushing him back into an unfortunately placed pitchfork, she recieved a heart-destroying blow to the chest as thanks for her efforts. The investigation and trial proceeded as any other had before it, and despite his own efforts to mislead the others, the evidence pointed to Kirei as the culprit. Finally, he showed everyone his true nature that only Schuldig and to some extent Lysandre had seen up to that point. He openly taunted the others for being no less innocent than he was in voting to execute the previous culprits, also openly snapping at Cynthia that biding their time and waiting for a solution wouldn't stop anyone from dying. And then Schuldig happened, as he tended to do. Kirei confessed that even when he was happy, he wasn't because he knew that joy came from something reprehensible. Upon telling Schuldig that his false heart would give out in a matter of minutes, the latter insisted that not only was it not wrong to be the person you are and that those who don't understand weren't important, but also that if Avenger wouldn't answer that question, Schuldig himself would. For once, Kirei answered in as few words as possible: a brief expression of gratitude and telling Schuldig that kindness shouldn't be wasted on the defective. Voting for himself as the culprit to seal the fact that this was what was morally right, Kirei died when his false heart made by Avenger gave out.
► He awoke again in a peculiar sort of afterlife taking the same shape as the bunker they had all been living in for weeks. Now stuck with his fellow victims and culprits as well as the pair he'd killed himself, Kirei retreated into something resembling solitude at first. He found he was presented with a whole new set of questions: why would anyone even try to understand him, why would anyone care to tell him what he wanted to hear if that was the case, why were people sympathetic towards him when he eventually admitted to being the way he was, why had he at the last minute decided to kill Fujimoto rather than Schuldig? As the last few weeks carried on, the insistent uncertainty hovered in the back of Kirei's mind like a persistent swarm of bees that couldn't be ignored.
► The final trials were the only one that the afterlife was able to witness as an unseen audience; first to deduce who the mastermind was and the second to confront them directly. Kirei and Homura worked to determine the former, and the answer was one that left Kirei completely livid. Not only had Lysandre faked his death, but he was the one behind the game from even before its start. In the process they learned about Hope's Army and the memories they were all still missing.
► As the mastermind's trial begain Kirei realized he didn't know what he wanted anymore--whether it was an answer, death, or just to burn the entire world and Lysandre to ashes. Schuldig saying outright that he wanted to tell Kirei that his life mattered only served to cement that sense of uncertainty. He recognized that not a single person in his lifetime had ever actually tried to know who he really was--apart from Gilgamesh, who was a terrible influence all his own. And while Kirei knew that would never excuse what he'd done and he'd never seek forgiveness for a moment of it, if it truly wasn't inherently wrong to simply live as one was created then should he not have done exactly that from the start?
► Following Lysandre's execution and appearance in the afterlife, the two had a conversation in which Kirei was forced to examine the fact that he had met someone significant in a world full of what he saw as incomprehensible people. Incapable of any sentiment resembling love, Kirei concluded that the worth he did or did not assign anyone--Lysandre, Schuldig, Homura, or any of the people he had ever encountered--was dependent solely on their capacity for understanding.
► Following some further exploration of the ruined Kalos by the survivors, Xerneas was discovered and bargained with to resurrect victims and culprits alike. Doubting whether he should have been brought back at all, Kirei momentarily wondered if living uncertain of whether or not he was meant to was his punishment for a lifetime of murder and betrayal at every opportunity he'd had. After having conviction enough to seal his own fate by committing murder, living was not exactly part of his plan. Neither was actually beeing halfway greeted by the survivors as though they cared whether he stayed dead or not. But then, Schuldig happened again, telling Kirei that his life had value and offering him a place in the assassin organization Schuldig himself belonged to. In short, Kirei found he had no desire to change the terrible person that he was and Schuldig offered him a place where he could be that person freely without constraints or judgment other than Kirei's own.
► Following the game's resolution, Kirei went to the Weiss Kreuz universe and joined Schwarz as an assassin, deciding firmly that this was the place he should have been and all other questions and answers could be resolved in time. He'd waited ten years for some resolution as to whether or not he should have existed, so a little more time for a hundred more questions was nothing to him.
► Occasionally they did return to bother the Future Foundation, as well as being actively called back to help with rescue efforts for a third murdergame.
► Kirei learned from the survivors that the mastermind of this particular round was so infatuated with his own particular raison d'être that she openly had a schoolgirl crush on him, which he admitted to finding hilarious. Upon actually arriving to meet the third class, he halfway-befriended a fellow Grail War participant and punched another in the face. While not making a fantastic impression, Kirei was already by that point known as some kind of dreaded figure at the Foundation itself, cementing his reputation with the new batch of survivors by being his general unnerving self.
► To summarize, Kirei is notably different from his initial canon self--the memory loss and regain in a high-pressure situation combined with a perfect storm of people who made some effort to give a damn about him gradually began to lead him to see things in a slightly less black-and-white perspective. It's no longer 'people can completely understand me or they can understand nothing', but instead he now accepts that there are those who can comprehend his existence and perspective in part if not in whole, and he's a little more open to the idea of compromise. Weeks in a murderbunker with people he usually wouldn't be able to stand has sort of gotten him used to the idea of tolerating what he sees as the annoyingly optimistic type of person as well.
►He's fiercely and violently protective of Schwarz in general and Schuldig in particular--because in his mind the two amount to the only place where 'Kirei Kotomine' as a flawed and contradictory existence belongs. It's incorrect to say he's 'better' on a moral standpoint; if anything he's worse. Kirei is and remains someone who takes enjoyment from 'evil' things such as human suffering and despair, and has by now learned to focus that on things like assassination jobs and other such delightful hobbies. While he still fights with his morality and knowing where his actions stand on what is commonly accepted as 'good' and 'evil', he's begun to be able to take a stance of 'this is what I am and how I was created, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise'.
Abilities (if applicable): Nothing's changed in Kirei's own abilities, but if possible I'd like him to be able to keep Caren, a Meowstic he got before leaving Kalos--she doesn't really fight much and mostly she's just around to be an equally judgmental mascot.
Canon: Fate/stay night
Original Application: here!
Current canon point: Post-Heaven's Feel route
Updating to: Dangan Roleplay CRAU, roughly a year and a half after F/SN.
Personality (if applicable): Kirei went through a massive upheaval that ended in a moderate personality shift, and I'll try to summarize it in bullet points here.
► Following his death at the end of Heaven's Feel, Kirei is brought back through a wormhole machine and a possible small application of black magic to join 'Hope's Army', an organization formed by the Future Foundation. Why Kirei of all people? Primarily because 'Assassins' was probably a better term than 'Army', and secondly because the goal was to deal with a Junko Enoshima-possessed Lysandre in Kalos. Probably need an exorcist for that, and that's one of several things Kirei Kotomine does best.
► Being reluctantly involved in the offshoot organization, he gained a passing familiarity with his new coworkers. (While the nature of that would ordinarily mean he'd have a wide range of cross-canon knowledge, Kirei being largely apathetic about them means he simply doesn't care to remember the majority of information.) Among these was Schuldig, a fellow career assassin and advocate for genocide-for-funsies who Kirei eventually recognized as a person he gave halfway close to a damn about.
► The group's mission failed completely and they were captured and mindwiped to be put into a murdergame. All of them lost the entirety of their memories of Hope's Army and varying degrees of their canon memories as well. Kirei found he'd forgotten a minimum of ten years of his life--placing him mentally back in the Fate/Zero timeline, before he even truly knew he was a sadist with murderous tendencies. He also found himself quite literally without a heart and having no idea as to why that was the case.
► Faced with Monobear and the 'kill your friends to escape' murdergame formula, the amnesiac Kirei holding on to morals that were a decade out of date refused to act on any of it. However, someone did and at the end of the first trial Kirei slowly began to retrace over a revelation he'd forgotten: he enjoyed the despair and suffering the entire affair had been.
► Following the initial murder investigation/trial, Kirei began to get to know a few of his 'classmates'--Lysandre proved to have the same cold and logical approach as the priest himself, and Schuldig was the sort of person to poke an apathetic dragon with a stick to see what he might do. Gradually, he found he had an odd fascination with Lysandre; as he did with Kiritsugu in Fate/Zero, Kirei latched on to the idea that the SHSL Leader could have been similar to him in some unclear measure, and in his own obsessive way tried to learn more about himself through getting to know Lysandre.
► Kirei observed how the others reacted to the high-tension situation as the weeks and murders carried on, each of them gradually restoring everyone's memories one at a time. And as they did he was forced to realize that his father was dead, he'd killed his own teacher, and generally just became a horrifically terrible person. As much as Kirei kept the whole thing largely to himself, it was a shock to his system rather than the gradual burn it had been in Fate/Zero canon. He finally admitted, if only to himself, that he was enjoying the murdergame; that the pain and despair were the only thing he could derive true enjoyment from. The problem then laid in the why, and whether or not it was too late to turn back from a mentality like that.
► Lysandre's 'death' in the sixth week was, put simply, something he did not take well. Finding himself incomprehensible, Kirei had (however incorrectly) let himself believe that Lysandre could have understood him. His belief that may have gone far enough to be called legitimate hope was that he and Lysandre were the same kind of twisted, when if anything Lysandre's mentality was more similar to Kiritsugu's--twisted like Kirei, but in the completely opposite direction. With nearly the entire remaining class made of
► But the incicent with Lysandre was still a breaking point, and Kirei decided he had grown bored with the repetition of murder to investigation to trial every weekend like clockwork. He determined that no, he could never be a 'good person' like so many of the others in this game with him. They were on such opposite ends of the scale that Kirei couldn't even comprehend them, much less want to be like that. With no answer to 'is it wrong for me to exist the way that I am if that way is evil' and nothing but boredom and repetition in the near future, and knowing that he had already died back in Fuyuki, he resolved to do one last thing to put an end to the 'evil' that was Kirei Kotomine. To his morality, 'evil' was the kind of thing that needed to be eradicated--Kirei himself was not exempt from that fact. But he wasn't going to make it easy.
► In the eighth week, the universal translator broke down and left Kirei and Schuldig fluent in German and talking to each other. Finally, the entire story came out (in a lot of hovertext i am so sorry). Schuldig had determined that Kirei wanted to kill the people he liked because that made him feel more than 'nothing'. And when he guessed that Kirei was looking for some kind of answer, everything followed: Kirei confessed that he wished to know if it was wrong to live as he was despite being different from others. He told Schuldig about Avenger and how he was sure that was the only thing which could answer it. Schuldig, being the human incarnation of 'reckless', listened to Kirei's lack of a heartbeat as proof. And in doung that, he unwittingly brought Kirei to another unprecedented conclusion: despite the desire to hurt those he liked and should have liked, he didn't want to kill Schuldig at all. That same night, he wrote a letter that he knew Schuldig would find upon Kirei's death, which he fully intended to be very soon.
► The seventh murder left two bodies; Fujimoto carelessly pushed into an empty pool and dying of head trauma, and Himeko Inaba stumbling upon an attempted corpse disposal. Startling Kirei by pushing him back into an unfortunately placed pitchfork, she recieved a heart-destroying blow to the chest as thanks for her efforts. The investigation and trial proceeded as any other had before it, and despite his own efforts to mislead the others, the evidence pointed to Kirei as the culprit. Finally, he showed everyone his true nature that only Schuldig and to some extent Lysandre had seen up to that point. He openly taunted the others for being no less innocent than he was in voting to execute the previous culprits, also openly snapping at Cynthia that biding their time and waiting for a solution wouldn't stop anyone from dying. And then Schuldig happened, as he tended to do. Kirei confessed that even when he was happy, he wasn't because he knew that joy came from something reprehensible. Upon telling Schuldig that his false heart would give out in a matter of minutes, the latter insisted that not only was it not wrong to be the person you are and that those who don't understand weren't important, but also that if Avenger wouldn't answer that question, Schuldig himself would. For once, Kirei answered in as few words as possible: a brief expression of gratitude and telling Schuldig that kindness shouldn't be wasted on the defective. Voting for himself as the culprit to seal the fact that this was what was morally right, Kirei died when his false heart made by Avenger gave out.
► He awoke again in a peculiar sort of afterlife taking the same shape as the bunker they had all been living in for weeks. Now stuck with his fellow victims and culprits as well as the pair he'd killed himself, Kirei retreated into something resembling solitude at first. He found he was presented with a whole new set of questions: why would anyone even try to understand him, why would anyone care to tell him what he wanted to hear if that was the case, why were people sympathetic towards him when he eventually admitted to being the way he was, why had he at the last minute decided to kill Fujimoto rather than Schuldig? As the last few weeks carried on, the insistent uncertainty hovered in the back of Kirei's mind like a persistent swarm of bees that couldn't be ignored.
► The final trials were the only one that the afterlife was able to witness as an unseen audience; first to deduce who the mastermind was and the second to confront them directly. Kirei and Homura worked to determine the former, and the answer was one that left Kirei completely livid. Not only had Lysandre faked his death, but he was the one behind the game from even before its start. In the process they learned about Hope's Army and the memories they were all still missing.
► As the mastermind's trial begain Kirei realized he didn't know what he wanted anymore--whether it was an answer, death, or just to burn the entire world and Lysandre to ashes. Schuldig saying outright that he wanted to tell Kirei that his life mattered only served to cement that sense of uncertainty. He recognized that not a single person in his lifetime had ever actually tried to know who he really was--apart from Gilgamesh, who was a terrible influence all his own. And while Kirei knew that would never excuse what he'd done and he'd never seek forgiveness for a moment of it, if it truly wasn't inherently wrong to simply live as one was created then should he not have done exactly that from the start?
► Following Lysandre's execution and appearance in the afterlife, the two had a conversation in which Kirei was forced to examine the fact that he had met someone significant in a world full of what he saw as incomprehensible people. Incapable of any sentiment resembling love, Kirei concluded that the worth he did or did not assign anyone--Lysandre, Schuldig, Homura, or any of the people he had ever encountered--was dependent solely on their capacity for understanding.
► Following some further exploration of the ruined Kalos by the survivors, Xerneas was discovered and bargained with to resurrect victims and culprits alike. Doubting whether he should have been brought back at all, Kirei momentarily wondered if living uncertain of whether or not he was meant to was his punishment for a lifetime of murder and betrayal at every opportunity he'd had. After having conviction enough to seal his own fate by committing murder, living was not exactly part of his plan. Neither was actually beeing halfway greeted by the survivors as though they cared whether he stayed dead or not. But then, Schuldig happened again, telling Kirei that his life had value and offering him a place in the assassin organization Schuldig himself belonged to. In short, Kirei found he had no desire to change the terrible person that he was and Schuldig offered him a place where he could be that person freely without constraints or judgment other than Kirei's own.
► Following the game's resolution, Kirei went to the Weiss Kreuz universe and joined Schwarz as an assassin, deciding firmly that this was the place he should have been and all other questions and answers could be resolved in time. He'd waited ten years for some resolution as to whether or not he should have existed, so a little more time for a hundred more questions was nothing to him.
► Occasionally they did return to bother the Future Foundation, as well as being actively called back to help with rescue efforts for a third murdergame.
► Kirei learned from the survivors that the mastermind of this particular round was so infatuated with his own particular raison d'être that she openly had a schoolgirl crush on him, which he admitted to finding hilarious. Upon actually arriving to meet the third class, he halfway-befriended a fellow Grail War participant and punched another in the face. While not making a fantastic impression, Kirei was already by that point known as some kind of dreaded figure at the Foundation itself, cementing his reputation with the new batch of survivors by being his general unnerving self.
► To summarize, Kirei is notably different from his initial canon self--the memory loss and regain in a high-pressure situation combined with a perfect storm of people who made some effort to give a damn about him gradually began to lead him to see things in a slightly less black-and-white perspective. It's no longer 'people can completely understand me or they can understand nothing', but instead he now accepts that there are those who can comprehend his existence and perspective in part if not in whole, and he's a little more open to the idea of compromise. Weeks in a murderbunker with people he usually wouldn't be able to stand has sort of gotten him used to the idea of tolerating what he sees as the annoyingly optimistic type of person as well.
►He's fiercely and violently protective of Schwarz in general and Schuldig in particular--because in his mind the two amount to the only place where 'Kirei Kotomine' as a flawed and contradictory existence belongs. It's incorrect to say he's 'better' on a moral standpoint; if anything he's worse. Kirei is and remains someone who takes enjoyment from 'evil' things such as human suffering and despair, and has by now learned to focus that on things like assassination jobs and other such delightful hobbies. While he still fights with his morality and knowing where his actions stand on what is commonly accepted as 'good' and 'evil', he's begun to be able to take a stance of 'this is what I am and how I was created, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise'.
Abilities (if applicable): Nothing's changed in Kirei's own abilities, but if possible I'd like him to be able to keep Caren, a Meowstic he got before leaving Kalos--she doesn't really fight much and mostly she's just around to be an equally judgmental mascot.