Name: Kae Contact:caturday Current Characters: N/A
Character.
Name: Aradia Megido (CRAU name: Ami Aihara) Canon: Homestuck Canon Point: End of Act 7. Lord English has (probably?) been defeated, and the Furthest Ring is being sucked into a metacosmic black hole while Aradia watches it all fall apart.
CRAU Timeline/Game(s): Game is Recollé. The premise is that all the characters' universes have been destroyed, but their souls were somehow rescued from the same fate, and they were reborn as regular humans who came to live in a city also called Recollé. As the game progressed, they gradually regained memories, abilities, and physical traits from their past selves, as their body, mind, and soul came into "alignment." Aradia's soul was reborn as a girl named Ami Aihara. She is 14 years old, but spent 13 of those years with no memory of her previous life. She spent one year "awakened," i.e. as a player character, before abruptly losing all her regains and reverting to NPC status when dropped. I'm pulling her from about a month I dropped her, so it's around June 2018 from her perspective.
Character History: Once upon a time, a young girl from Alternia discovered a video game hidden in a frog temple. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move.
CRAU History: Ami Aihara is Aradia Megido, but reincarnated as a human, originally with no memory of her previous life. She was raised in the city of Recollé, USA, as a human, by human parents, in a world populated exclusively by humans. Her parents were loving and supportive, albeit frequently preoccupied with the antics of her much older sister Danielle. (Dani was a problem child who bullied Ami mercilessly for most of her formative years, dropped out of high school, got into drugs, got kicked out of the house, and eventually wound up in jail. It's a whole thing.) This led to a not insignificant amount of salutory neglect in Ami's childhood - her needs were always provided for, and her parents of course cared about her safety and all, but there were a lot of missed third-grade plays and so on.
Once Dani was out of the picture, their parents tried to make it up to Ami, but may have overcompensated a bit. As long as Ami stayed out of trouble, her folks were incredibly permissive, letting her do more or less whatever she wanted. Fortunately, their trust in her is well-placed. Ami is kind, thoughtful, independent, and mature for her age, so she stayed out of trouble almost completely.
I say "almost" because she still gravitates toward people you might consider bad influences. At age 12 she went full mall goth, hanging around Hot Topic etc. with her goth friends. But even this was largely for the aesthetic, the music, and her interest in the occult; she was the weirdly perky one of the group, without much in the way of pessimism or authority issues. She even had a makeup tutorial channel on YouTube.
Right as she was finishing up the 8th grade, however, she found an app called Retrospec on her phone, which connected her to a group of people remembering their past lives... and getting superpowers. At first Ami thought this was dope as hell (despite the inconveniences, like everyone shrinking to one apple tall, or entire colors ceasing to exist for months), but then... it started happening to her.
There were plenty of good points about it, of course. She made many dear, dear friends through Retrospec and their shared experiences. But reality as they knew it was breaking down, and she was thrust into increasingly dangerous situations for the sake of saving her friends and the city as a whole. Holding her own was a little easier once she regained her telekinesis, but it took her months to really learn how to control her power, and the violence and destruction she was capable of frightened her. Moreover, as she started manifesting troll physical features - the yellow eyes, gaudy ram horns, and so on - she started to feel as alien as she looked.
Her fragmented visions of the past were little comfort; like anyone reading Homestuck out of order, she had no idea what was going on, and the little she understood, she didn't like. Aradia's personality seemed wildly inconsistent - in one memory she'd be bright and bubbly, in another cold and fatalistic, in another a robot, and at one point she even vividly remembered murdering someone. Because of all this, Ami soon came to distrust her past self, and tried to cope by consciously rejecting any part of Aradia she didn't like.
But was that actually enough? No amount of willpower could prevent her from becoming Aradia physically, after all. And even if Ami hadn't come to dislike her, the thought of becoming her mentally was existentially terrifying. How much longer would Ami remain "herself"? Would she one day be subsumed entirely by the alien being whose soul she inherited? And even if not, would she still become too freakish to live among normal humans?
Ultimately, these questions would go unanswered. About a year after she first got the app, Ami's soul slipped far enough out of alignment that she reverted back to fully human, with no memory of the Retrospec app or any of the unusual events tied to it. She's being taken from about a month after that.
Personality: As Ami has begun to piece together, Aradia's canon personality has been through some wild changes. At her introduction, she was cold and fatalistic, as dead on the inside as she is on the outside, and then acquiring her robot body added gratuitous violence to the equation. But her truest personality actually isn't that different from Ami's.
Aradia delights in being alive. She's warm and outgoing, and nearly always smiling. She loves making friends and sharing stories, as well as poking good-natured fun at people she likes. She has a lot of patience, considering how many stubborn, cranky, difficult people she counts among her closest friends; their bullshit just slides off her like she's a set of magical self-cleaning god pajamas. It's almost impossible to make her truly angry.
In conversation, she's quite open about her feelings and opinions. However, this candidness often backfires when it comes to difficult subjects like death. Having grown up surrounded by ghosts, Aradia sees death as little more than a mundane natural phenomenon - she doesn't relish it, but she isn't bothered by it, either. She loves the concept of funerals, since there was no such thing on her home planet, but her "corpse parties" would be inappropriately jubilant by just about anyone's standards.
Understandably, her bluntness and unique attitude toward certain grave subjects can make her come off as callous or creepy, even to those who expect it from her, but she doesn't mean any harm by it. In fact, she might not even realize it. It's not that she doesn't care about people's feelings; she's just sort of oblivious to the impressions she leaves.
But overall, she's a sociable, fun-loving girl who loves her friends and can't resist a good adventure. She doesn't enjoy fighting for its own sake, but she'll happily help beat up the BBEG when it's time. She's matured a lot since before her first death, learned from her past mistakes, and even forgiven the person who murdered her. Fate doesn't matter, all loops will be completed, paradox space will tidy up after itself, and that's the way it should be. By her final appearance in Act 7, she's along for the ride, watching the end of the story with the confidence that everything will turn out all right.
CRAU Development: Obviously, the biggest change is that Ami has spent 13 of the last 14 years being raised as a human, by humans, in a human society, with no memory of her life as Aradia (until recently). As a result, she's operating from a vastly different cultural and pop-cultural context. She didn't grow up fending for herself in a harsh environment where everything is considered unsuspecting prey by everything else; she wasn't literally raised by animals; and perhaps most importantly, she has no memory of any of her deaths.
She's still fiercely independent, but much better than Aradia about following instructions and deferring to legitimate authority. This is partly down to the influence of her sister, who as mentioned above is terrible and in jail. She's naturally kind, but also consciously wants to do the right thing and be a petter person than Dani.
Lacking Aradia's long-term exposure to death, ghosts, or any kind of genuine suffering, Ami came to romanticize the macabre rather than simply being used to it. Her experiences as a Retrospec user have led her to take such things more seriously, but she didn't stop being a goth or anything. She collects spooky and spooky-cute things of all sorts, and she's an avid consumer of horror movies. She's always believed in ghosts, and gaining the ability to see and interact with them for real reaffirmed her feelings, and inspired a certain sense of duty in her as well - if she can help them to move on, or alleviate their suffering some other way (even if it's just to keep them company!), she'll readily do it.
Incidentally, where Aradia's character arc in canon follows her from depressed fatalism to confidence and hope, Ami's has started leading her toward some of that depression and resignation. Some of the changes she's going to experience are inevitable, which frustrates and frightens her. But she tries to put on a brave face and be strong so that her friends don't have to worry about her and/or commit crimes on her behalf (JAMES).
Relationship-wise, she was close friends with reincarnations of Bucky Barnes (616, "James"), Lumina (FFXIII, "Luna"), Allen Walker (D.Gray-Man, "Noah Campbell"), and Karkat Vantas (Hamsteak). She was less close with her other canonmates, and in particular had a major falling-out with Dave that was never resolved.
Anything Else? As discussed on Plurk a while back, Ami will be arriving fully human, with no powers and no memory of the strange events that took place in Recollé over the past year. Remembering her time in-game and her prior memory regains will happen early on as a "canon update" of sorts, with all the associated flickering. After that, though, she'll continue to regain new memories as she would have in Recollé, triggered by events and conversations she has in Redshift, and she'll gradually begin re-regaining her powers and physical traits as well.
(I think we'd said that those things would also take place through the canon update mechanic? Let me know if you'd like to discuss it further. I can notify y'all before any major changes if you like. And obviously her Time powers will take some nerfing on account of our inability to time travel in real life, but I could see them potentially opening up interesting plot avenues.)
Aradia Megido (Recollé CRAU) | Homestuck | Not Reserved
Name: Kae
Contact:
Current Characters: N/A
Name: Aradia Megido (CRAU name: Ami Aihara)
Canon: Homestuck
Canon Point: End of Act 7. Lord English has (probably?) been defeated, and the Furthest Ring is being sucked into a metacosmic black hole while Aradia watches it all fall apart.
CRAU Timeline/Game(s): Game is Recollé. The premise is that all the characters' universes have been destroyed, but their souls were somehow rescued from the same fate, and they were reborn as regular humans who came to live in a city also called Recollé. As the game progressed, they gradually regained memories, abilities, and physical traits from their past selves, as their body, mind, and soul came into "alignment." Aradia's soul was reborn as a girl named Ami Aihara. She is 14 years old, but spent 13 of those years with no memory of her previous life. She spent one year "awakened," i.e. as a player character, before abruptly losing all her regains and reverting to NPC status when dropped. I'm pulling her from about a month I dropped her, so it's around June 2018 from her perspective.
Character History: Once upon a time, a young girl from Alternia discovered a video game hidden in a frog temple. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move.
CRAU History: Ami Aihara is Aradia Megido, but reincarnated as a human, originally with no memory of her previous life. She was raised in the city of Recollé, USA, as a human, by human parents, in a world populated exclusively by humans. Her parents were loving and supportive, albeit frequently preoccupied with the antics of her much older sister Danielle. (Dani was a problem child who bullied Ami mercilessly for most of her formative years, dropped out of high school, got into drugs, got kicked out of the house, and eventually wound up in jail. It's a whole thing.) This led to a not insignificant amount of salutory neglect in Ami's childhood - her needs were always provided for, and her parents of course cared about her safety and all, but there were a lot of missed third-grade plays and so on.
Once Dani was out of the picture, their parents tried to make it up to Ami, but may have overcompensated a bit. As long as Ami stayed out of trouble, her folks were incredibly permissive, letting her do more or less whatever she wanted. Fortunately, their trust in her is well-placed. Ami is kind, thoughtful, independent, and mature for her age, so she stayed out of trouble almost completely.
I say "almost" because she still gravitates toward people you might consider bad influences. At age 12 she went full mall goth, hanging around Hot Topic etc. with her goth friends. But even this was largely for the aesthetic, the music, and her interest in the occult; she was the weirdly perky one of the group, without much in the way of pessimism or authority issues. She even had a makeup tutorial channel on YouTube.
Right as she was finishing up the 8th grade, however, she found an app called Retrospec on her phone, which connected her to a group of people remembering their past lives... and getting superpowers. At first Ami thought this was dope as hell (despite the inconveniences, like everyone shrinking to one apple tall, or entire colors ceasing to exist for months), but then... it started happening to her.
There were plenty of good points about it, of course. She made many dear, dear friends through Retrospec and their shared experiences. But reality as they knew it was breaking down, and she was thrust into increasingly dangerous situations for the sake of saving her friends and the city as a whole. Holding her own was a little easier once she regained her telekinesis, but it took her months to really learn how to control her power, and the violence and destruction she was capable of frightened her. Moreover, as she started manifesting troll physical features - the yellow eyes, gaudy ram horns, and so on - she started to feel as alien as she looked.
Her fragmented visions of the past were little comfort; like anyone reading Homestuck out of order, she had no idea what was going on, and the little she understood, she didn't like. Aradia's personality seemed wildly inconsistent - in one memory she'd be bright and bubbly, in another cold and fatalistic, in another a robot, and at one point she even vividly remembered murdering someone. Because of all this, Ami soon came to distrust her past self, and tried to cope by consciously rejecting any part of Aradia she didn't like.
But was that actually enough? No amount of willpower could prevent her from becoming Aradia physically, after all. And even if Ami hadn't come to dislike her, the thought of becoming her mentally was existentially terrifying. How much longer would Ami remain "herself"? Would she one day be subsumed entirely by the alien being whose soul she inherited? And even if not, would she still become too freakish to live among normal humans?
Ultimately, these questions would go unanswered. About a year after she first got the app, Ami's soul slipped far enough out of alignment that she reverted back to fully human, with no memory of the Retrospec app or any of the unusual events tied to it. She's being taken from about a month after that.
Personality: As Ami has begun to piece together, Aradia's canon personality has been through some wild changes. At her introduction, she was cold and fatalistic, as dead on the inside as she is on the outside, and then acquiring her robot body added gratuitous violence to the equation. But her truest personality actually isn't that different from Ami's.
Aradia delights in being alive. She's warm and outgoing, and nearly always smiling. She loves making friends and sharing stories, as well as poking good-natured fun at people she likes. She has a lot of patience, considering how many stubborn, cranky, difficult people she counts among her closest friends; their bullshit just slides off her like she's a set of magical self-cleaning god pajamas. It's almost impossible to make her truly angry.
In conversation, she's quite open about her feelings and opinions. However, this candidness often backfires when it comes to difficult subjects like death. Having grown up surrounded by ghosts, Aradia sees death as little more than a mundane natural phenomenon - she doesn't relish it, but she isn't bothered by it, either. She loves the concept of funerals, since there was no such thing on her home planet, but her "corpse parties" would be inappropriately jubilant by just about anyone's standards.
Understandably, her bluntness and unique attitude toward certain grave subjects can make her come off as callous or creepy, even to those who expect it from her, but she doesn't mean any harm by it. In fact, she might not even realize it. It's not that she doesn't care about people's feelings; she's just sort of oblivious to the impressions she leaves.
But overall, she's a sociable, fun-loving girl who loves her friends and can't resist a good adventure. She doesn't enjoy fighting for its own sake, but she'll happily help beat up the BBEG when it's time. She's matured a lot since before her first death, learned from her past mistakes, and even forgiven the person who murdered her. Fate doesn't matter, all loops will be completed, paradox space will tidy up after itself, and that's the way it should be. By her final appearance in Act 7, she's along for the ride, watching the end of the story with the confidence that everything will turn out all right.
CRAU Development: Obviously, the biggest change is that Ami has spent 13 of the last 14 years being raised as a human, by humans, in a human society, with no memory of her life as Aradia (until recently). As a result, she's operating from a vastly different cultural and pop-cultural context. She didn't grow up fending for herself in a harsh environment where everything is considered unsuspecting prey by everything else; she wasn't literally raised by animals; and perhaps most importantly, she has no memory of any of her deaths.
She's still fiercely independent, but much better than Aradia about following instructions and deferring to legitimate authority. This is partly down to the influence of her sister, who as mentioned above is terrible and in jail. She's naturally kind, but also consciously wants to do the right thing and be a petter person than Dani.
Lacking Aradia's long-term exposure to death, ghosts, or any kind of genuine suffering, Ami came to romanticize the macabre rather than simply being used to it. Her experiences as a Retrospec user have led her to take such things more seriously, but she didn't stop being a goth or anything. She collects spooky and spooky-cute things of all sorts, and she's an avid consumer of horror movies. She's always believed in ghosts, and gaining the ability to see and interact with them for real reaffirmed her feelings, and inspired a certain sense of duty in her as well - if she can help them to move on, or alleviate their suffering some other way (even if it's just to keep them company!), she'll readily do it.
Incidentally, where Aradia's character arc in canon follows her from depressed fatalism to confidence and hope, Ami's has started leading her toward some of that depression and resignation. Some of the changes she's going to experience are inevitable, which frustrates and frightens her. But she tries to put on a brave face and be strong so that her friends don't have to worry about her and/or commit crimes on her behalf (JAMES).
Relationship-wise, she was close friends with reincarnations of Bucky Barnes (616, "James"), Lumina (FFXIII, "Luna"), Allen Walker (D.Gray-Man, "Noah Campbell"), and Karkat Vantas (Hamsteak). She was less close with her other canonmates, and in particular had a major falling-out with Dave that was never resolved.
Powers/Abilities: They wouldn't fit I'm so sorry
Inventory:
Anything Else? As discussed on Plurk a while back, Ami will be arriving fully human, with no powers and no memory of the strange events that took place in Recollé over the past year. Remembering her time in-game and her prior memory regains will happen early on as a "canon update" of sorts, with all the associated flickering. After that, though, she'll continue to regain new memories as she would have in Recollé, triggered by events and conversations she has in Redshift, and she'll gradually begin re-regaining her powers and physical traits as well.
(I think we'd said that those things would also take place through the canon update mechanic? Let me know if you'd like to discuss it further. I can notify y'all before any major changes if you like. And obviously her Time powers will take some nerfing on account of our inability to time travel in real life, but I could see them potentially opening up interesting plot avenues.)
Prose/Brackets Sample: Top-level and tequila sunrise
(I can provide more samples if these aren't sufficient.)