cc x·˚ ༘₊· ͟͟͞͞꒰➳ thinking about...reader trying to break up with yandere gojo
minors / ageless blogs / blank blogs - do not interact.
ˏˋ°•*⁀➷ tags: yandere; dub con; lovesick gojo & he’s obsessive/toxic about it; he’s mean but yummy, okay?; size kink (ish?); gojo showing off his strength; sex without protection
notes: I had this written as an idea right after I wrote my hc’s for the jjk men in their yandere version. twylm readers, please forgive me for not posting the next chapter. I am working on it but I am really struggling - I had the worst burn out after the last chapter, and have been having a hard time trying to get back into the story >.<
wc: 1,228
gojo plays with the hem of your skirt - the flat expression on his face telling you that he’s listening but appears unbothered by your statement. you can see the annoyance in his eyes, the irritation that you would say something so ridiculous in the middle of a make out session.
his hands find the back of your thighs and with one swift motion he pulls you over his long legs so you’re hovering above his lap. the imbalance forces you to clutch onto his shirt with frustration, and he mindlessly reaches to undo his belt before tugging your underwear aside with his long, slender digits.
“toru, are you listening to me?” you whisper in a small voice.
“you want to take a break?” he repeats calmly, but those last two words are laced with disgust, barely slipping through his clenched teeth, and he lowers you down just enough for him to press the tip of his swollen cock against your slit.
“I need to slow things down...” you breathe, lashes fluttering at the sensation from the contact.
your thighs naturally start to tense up when he holds you there, and the pads of his fingers dig roughly into your hip to keep you in place. you hiss against the harsh touch, gazing down to find your lover pouting at you like a disappointed child.
any stranger would consider this an adorable expression with the way his big eyes widen while his brows upturn sorrowfully.
to you, however, it was an entirely different message.
“are you unhappy?” he asks, his words weighed down by hurt.
a warm sensation travels up your calves as you try to maintain the pose and you shake your head no while squeezing him gently with reassurance. satoru flickers his attention back to the point of contact. your pelvis feels tight from holding this awkward position, and the ache to have him inside you naturally makes the space between your legs pulse with need.
satoru gojo has given you everything and more. there is no reason for you to be unhappy.
he made sure of that.
“okay,” he confirms with a sigh, one palm moving to grope the curve of your ass while the other stabilizes your leg as he draws you down his length. “do you not love me?”
a hard lump forms in your throat.
you’re careful never to actually say those words to him.
satoru’s devotion consumes your entire your soul - you can’t help but feel like you would be making a deal with a devil if you decided to admit your true feelings.
you managed to keep his peace of mind this far by reassuring him with deep, promising kisses and strong acknowledgements of his feelings.
technically you aren’t lying, but the reality is that you’re afraid to love him...and of what your love does to him.
giving him another silent reply, you nod your head as your fear creeps up the back of your spine. the only relief you find is the stretch between your legs, and your lips part into a circle as satoru gives himself to you inch by glorious inch.
your skirt flaps over you both, concealing him buried inside you. he arches forward to kiss your jaw, his large hands finding your breasts and he massages them over your fitted tank.
he delicately trails his fingers down your waist to latch onto your hips once more. “then why...” he murmurs into your neck, “do you want to take a break?”
your hand finds the back of his head, a moan leaving your parted lips when you feel him lick a stripe up the column before lightly nipping at your earlobe.
“it’s just...” you gasp, feeling flowers of heat bloom in all the places he’s touching you, “I just feel like we are getting ahead of o-ourselves..ah...”
he rocks your hips back and forth, moving at such a languid pace that you can’t help but clench your thighs around his own. your fingers curl around the snowy threads of his white hair, tugging at it gently before pulling his face away so you can meet his eyes.
he looks smug - but he always does because he knows that you’re just addicted to him as he is to you.
“isn’t that what we want?” he questions, the corner of his mouth twitching into a lazy smile as he takes off your top and unfastens your bra, “we’re already so perfect...”
“satoru,” you whine, “that’s not the point-”
this time he ruts his pelvis upward, interrupting your thoughts as he hits you at the right spot that makes your eyes disappear into the back of your head. he leans against the chair, maintaining full eye contact with you as he casually lifts you up before dropping you back down on his cock. “just want to make you m’pretty wife, is all...fuck you like this every single night...”
you bite your bottom lip, frustrated with how wet he’s making you with his words. your body subconsciously succumbs to his demands and you slowly start bouncing up and down over his length.
“that’s right, angel,” satoru grunts with approval, his hungry hands grab your ass roughly, and you squeak when you feel a slight sting from behind as the sound of his palm slapping against your skin echoes around the room. “see? I’m making you feel s’fucking good, your pussy’s so wet f’me...just for me...”
when his mouth finds yours, you know you’ve lost the battle. his scalding kisses leave your lips swollen but you still search for him out of desperation to feel the fire. he’s reminding you how hard it would be to let go of him, reiterating that there is no man in this world who could ever love you as much he does. you feel silly for bringing this up, questioning your own trepidations about him and wondering if this is simply you sabotaging what you already have.
you are in a daze from the way he fucks you but he isn’t slowing down his movements and you feel like he might actually split you in two. he would never speak to you with angry words, but you can feel it in his movements.
“gonna c-cum, gonna cum, gonna cum...”
it comes out of you like a warning, but it only makes satoru go deeper and before you know it your vision is white. your body feels everything all at once, and the coil that’s been tightening around your lower belly loosens from the intense orgasm. the pleasure is euphoric, sinfully so, and it drains you of all the energy you’ve preserved. your body goes limp in satoru’s arms, and he keeps them wrapped securely around your waist as he pumps his cum inside you.
he holds you in this embrace, allowing the seconds to pass. his breath fans your collar bone while he tries to catch himself. your eyes feel heavy when you blink them open, and you cup his face in your hands as you seek to cool yourself down with his azure eyes.
“I’m never going to let you go,” he confesses with a sweet kiss to the inside of your palm, before placing another on your cheek while he tightens his grip, “so stop trying to push me away.”
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points at u. how do u play eridan so well!!! hes such a tricky bastard to write for 4 some reason
It's because he's got so many problems and playing him is basically Mental Illness Simulator :') Whipped up a small (that's a lie, it's large and extensive) guide under the cut
ERIDAN DOES NOT HAVE FUN
First most important thing about playing Eridan: THIS BOY DOES NOT DO JOKES. He does NOT DO BITS. He does NOT HAVE FUN. If you check out his logs, pretty much every time he talks to somebody, he has a very clear purpose in mind (usually flirting or grandstanding). One of the few times he does strike up a conversation without a clear goal in mind, it's absolutely disastrous:
CA: fef
CA: hey
CC: ?
CA: glub
CC: Glub glub!
CC: 38)
CA: yeah
CA: hm
CC: W)(at is it!!!
CA: wwhat
He's sooooooo so so so bad at conversation. He doesn't tell jokes. He doesn't know how to lighten the mood. He has no chill. He has no sense of humor. When playing him, if you are making jokes, you are doing it wrong!
The reason for this is because, psychologically, you have to imagine that he is constantly teetering on the edge of a murderous freakout. If he is not, at all times, Being Useful (AKA murderous, sea dweller-y), then Something Bad Will Happen. His entire life is about duty, pressure, responsibility, and, accordingly, at ALL TIMES, he feels an extreme, anxious weight on his shoulders, which makes him incapable of indulging in "frivolous" behavior, like making smalltalk or doing things for fun. In fact, sarcasm and facetiousness are literally considered childish by Alternians, and Equius associates it with lower blood colors:
CT: D --> Humorous insincerity is for pedantic wigglers
AG: Pshhhhhhhh, I know! I know you never make jokes. I was the one 8eing sarcastic, you stooge!
AG: I was 8eing sarcastic a8out you 8eing sarcastic. Duh.
CT: D --> That's because you're a little worse than me
That's why it's also kind of important to make him not really have hobbies. Eridan DOES have interests: he loves wizards and magic, and he's a hipster. HOWEVER, he only ever talks about magic in pursuit of some other goal, like finding a date or winning at a rivalry, AND he's constantly denying his own interest in these things, because they're frivolous, stupid, ridiculous, and deviations from what he "should" be like. He actively distances himself from things that make him happy. In fact, we only know he's a hipster because it's part of his design and Karkat mentions it once - Eridan himself has never talked about it. That's how far he's buried anything that actually brings him joy.
If your Eridan is smiling for ANY REASON, you are DOING IT WRONG!
While we're on the topic, things Eridan is NOT ACTUALLY INTERESTED IN:
History (he only ever talks about history in the vaguest possible terms; I think he is book smart and genuinely knows a lot ABOUT history, but his actual interest in it is middling. He's just expected to be really obsessed with history, especially military history, as a member of the aristocracy, and he reads it in the same way as one doomscrolls on twitter - it's a way for him to self-reinforce his own mental illness and soothe his cognitive dissonance)
Marine life/marine anything (he's TERRIFIED of the ocean, and has spent a few days underwater TOTAL. He knows nothing of the sea.)
Weaponry (he HAS a lot of guns, so he definitely knows how to use and maintain them, but there's a reason he outsources the building of all his doomsday devices. Also, he got a "god weapon" early on in his life, and has kind of just been... using that. He neither has a need to know much about weaponry, nor has ever displayed any particular interest or knowledge. He leaves fully loaded harpoons just lying around on the floor of his house. It's knowledge of necessity, not interest.)
Hunting/Violence/Murder (he's really good at it, he knows a lot about it, he will teach you on request, he will mention it constantly, but he doesn't actually derive any particular joy out of it, especially since we know his thought process after each kill is "that's going to make an orphaned troll very sad. they will be culled soon :/")
Fashion (he has more of an interest than the average Alternian, but it's still not a lot. He dresses up to emulate Dualscar, and his actual clothing choices beyond that are pretty disastrous. Canon Eridan has never shown an interest in fashion. Even if you do want to play him with an interest in fashion, which I think is fine, you have to remember that he deliberately distances himself from anything that brings him joy, so even if he likes fashion, he'll keep that a secret and insist he only does it for utility purposes.)
Pale Romance (just throwing this in there, it's the one quadrant he is *never* shown to pursue. He's tried Feferi and Nepeta in flushed, Sollux, Terezi, and Kanaya in ashen, and Rose and Vriska in pitch. if anything, he goes out of his way to AVOID pale romances, both because he just had a painful pale breakup, and because he freaks out at the implication that he's weak in any way, which pursuing a pale romance would all but be admitting)
The thing that makes playing Eridan so hard, I think, is that he's abjectly fucking miserable, BY CHOICE, and for most RPers, playing a character who's abjectly fucking miserable kind of goes against the appeal of RPing in the first place (that is, having fun). All of the things he says he's really into are things that he either has no interest in, or that actively make his life less enjoyable. All the things he spends all his time thinking about are things that make him feel anxious and hopeless. All the things he actually likes and would have fun with are the things he actively, deliberately, and loudly decries and suppresses.
So that's point 1: Eridan does NOT have fun.
ERIDAN IS AGGRO AS *FUCK*
The next most thing I see that trips people up is that they make Eridan too friendly, usually as an extension of accidentally giving him too much chill. There are two main factors here at play: the first is that he's desperately trying to be a violent, casteist, oppressive, dangerous sea dweller, and outright pushes that image, and the second is that he's really fucking anxious ALL THE TIME, and most peoples' sociability goes down when they feel the cold breath of the reaper on the backs of their necks 24/7.
When looking at the 4 responses to danger - fight, flight, freeze, and fawn - Eridan will overwhelmingly choose "fight," with "fawn" as his secondary option. This makes absolute sense in context: all his trauma comes from its inescapable nature - if he tries to run from his duties, everybody dies; if he freezes up and fails to complete them, everybody dies. Therefore, his only two options are to Fight, and to channel that violent response into completing his duties, and to Fawn, to capitulate to the things that are hurting him - much moreso the former than the latter. Unfortunately, that bleeds over into everything else. Great!
We can see this illustrated really well in his conversations with Kanaya: Eridan does not ask for favors or help, he makes demands:
CA: kan make her talk to me do somethin
...
CA: so help me out tell her to talk to me i think she blocked me you got to
ERIDAN: you should of told me about this
ERIDAN: if theres goin to be any sort a hope for our race as the prince of hope i demand to be invvolvved
ERIDAN: so dont go anywwhere wwithout me got it
The only time he ever really backs off is in confessions, where he's willing to be like "hey, I think we really got something here, don't you think so?", or when talking to Karkat (Karkat is really the only person that Eridan doesn't feel the need to put on airs around, and we can only speculate as to why. It's because they're destined moirails for each other.)
He will also do this for statements that he isn't 100% sure about. If he's going to say something, he is going to ASSERT IT as if it is IMMUTABLE FACT, even if he's immediately disproven. In which case he will admit fault, but then his NEXT wild assumption is the IMMUTABLE FACT.
CA: wwell fine you dont havve to behavve vvillainous if youre bent up on actin against the grain a your nobility or somesuch
CA: i can play that role its not like i evver didnt get my gills dirty before
TT: Nobility? What are you talking about?
CA: wwell arent you
TT: No. What gave you that idea?
CA: the wway you
CA: ok
CA: i had a misconclusion about that so my fault
CA: obvviously you got rich blood so maybe when you crash landed you wwerent recognized for it by wwhatevver vvehicle upholds the class structure in human society
I feel like he's the type who, if he's genuinely unsure about something, he just won't say it at all. Basically, Eridan is always operating at either 0% or 100%, with almost no in-between. NO CHILL. Given that he only strikes up conversations when he's trying to achieve something from it - whether that's actively getting someone to do something for him, or just trying to assert that magic is fake - he treats every conversation like it' i's a battle, where the prize is whatever it is he's attempting to do, and his conversation partner is an enemy that he has to beat into submission. (Karkat is the only exception. He actually just likes talking to Karkat, and will do more traditional "hey man you wanna talk about your feelings" kind of dialogue with him.)
If your Eridan has chill, you are doing it wrong!
ERIDAN STRUGGLES WITH EMPATHY
This really needs to be qualified: he does HAVE empathy. He DOES care about his friends. But his brain is really cooked, and he has an extremely difficult time actually working up the emotional energy to express or experience it.
He's kind of downright sociopathic, lol:
ERISOLSPRITE: iim of the miind2et that wwhen you havve a rock 2oliid piiece of a22 tiied twwo the dock, you dont bloody wwell tug the knot loo2e and 2hovve the fucker off wwiith the heel a your boot.
ERISOLSPRITE: but then another part of me ju2t wwonder2 wwhat the FUCK ii ju2t 2aiid there? liike that wwa2 ju2t 2uch a wweiird 2ociiopathiic thought ii had, ii hone2tly had no iidea howw bad ii could po22iibly feel about my2elf untiil ii BECAME my2elf, iif THAT make2 2en2e.
Like, okay, how do I explain this. His body count is 2000+. He has an EXTREMELY difficult time caring about life or death. He's had to watch kids cry over their dead parents. He has had to kill kids trying to protect their parents, whom he has then had to kill. And he has done this over, and over, and over again, as long as he can remember, to the point where he calls it "all i evver done practically."
Just for the sake of preserving what's left of his sanity, he's had to learn how to not care about that. If he sees someone crying in front of him, it's unlikely to even emotionally register to him as anything beyond "factually, this person is sad." Shit happens, people die. Violence, tragedy, murder, injury, and death are literally daily occurrences to him. For you, the day I killed your lusus was the most important day of your now tragically short life. For me, it was Tuesday.
Vriska is in the same boat, BTW. I think a combination of just being a less sensitive person to start with, the existence of a support network (Equius and Kanaya and Terezi as friends + she was friends with Team Charge before the... incident), and the lack of all the Duty(tm) and Responsibility(tm), helped her cope a bit better, and be better about opening up to people and relying on them for emotional support.
What this means, in terms of playing/writing him, is that his priorities are extremely skewed, and he is genuinely not going to understand things like "maybe I shouldn't tell this land dweller I'm trying to kill all land dwellers," or "maybe this person is sad and I should comfort them," or "maybe my constant talk about murder and death is offputting to other people." Here he is, literally not understanding why insulting and belittling Kanaya has led to her not wanting to help him, as well as not understanding why Vriska might've blocked him:
CA: wwhatEVVER you are so the vvillage twwo wwheel devvice wwhen it comes to auspisticing
CA: you cant let a grudge go by you wwont stick your busy stem betwwixt so get wwith the program fussyfangs
GA: If Your Slander Werent So Predictable Id Block You Too For Saying That
GA: Has It Occurred To You She May Have Blocked You Because You Are Vvery Ovverbearing
GA: I Just Said That Aloud Now In Your Silly Accent And Had A Private Moment Of Enjoyment
CA: wwho givves a shit wwhy she blocked me or about my fuckin manners come on youvve got a wway wwith her
His brain is constantly running at a fevered 100% full-tilt run; he doesn't have the space, leisure, or energy to spend considering things from the perspective of other people. It leads to weird paradoxes, where he IS considerate of other peoples' feelings, but doesn't actually consider their feelings. After spending almost the ENTIRE conversation with Kanaya belittling her and demanding she be his and Vriska's auspice, he abruptly switches gears:
CA: fine i get it ill step off
CA: you dont wwant to be our auspistice cause you dont wwant to get locked into that sort of relation wwith her i can respect that
GA: No Thats Not It
CA: yeah it is your real feelins run pretty awwful RUDDY methinks evverybody knowws it
CA: especially that assblood karkat he and me havve you so pegged about that its upright silly
CA: but its cool its totally fine dont wworry ill leavve you alone and givve you a shot
Because he LIKES Kanaya, he REALLY CARES ABOUT Kanaya, he WANTS GOOD THINGS for Kanaya... and yet is entirely, wholly, not taking her feelings into account at all.
BUT! This also applies in reverse! You can make all the death threats and casteist insults and demands towards Eridan as you want, and he won't give a shit aside from his usual grandstanding protests. The only time we ever truly see him offended is when he's genuinely trying to do Jade a favor by giving her the code to his gun, and she calls it a piece of shit and tosses it out with the trash - and even then, he doesn't take THAT much offense. Judge for yourself:
GG: so ill just dump it outside the house with the trash
GG: and if it is fated to find my penpal one day then so be it!
CA: god damn it
CA: its like you people go out of your wway to think a howw to disrespect me
GG: maybe you should have been nicer to me!
GG: in any case i dont appreciate the spirit in which the gift was given so this is what i will do!
CA: fine fuck it wwhat do i care
CA: this has been a completely flippin useless exchange as havve they all been wwith your species
After all, he's accustomed to much, much, much worse. His emotional response here is indignation, not even really HURT. Karkat also makes a bunch of genuine death threats towards Eridan, which get entirely written off as "wwitty repartee." He's just really bad at processing hostility! Hostility is very normal to him!
So basically, before letting Eridan engage in any act of empathy or compassion, you have to ask whether or not he's going to recognize that the situation would call for that in the first place, which he is REALLY BAD at identifying. He only asks Karkat if Karkat wants to talk about his feelings after Karkat explicitly says that he's freaking out in every possible way, and without that explicit indication, I don't think Eridan would've even noticed.
If your Eridan has social skills, you are Doing It Wrong!
This also means that, even if Eridan has realized that he needs to act compassionate, he's still going to be really fucking trash at actually providing emotional support. He can't even emotionally support himself, you think he can figure it out for other people?
The most he can do is call it like he sees it - "this is a stupid thing to get worked up over," for example. Or he can jump straight to solutions, like "so what, are you gonna kill that guy?" Being as charitable as humanly possible, he might be able to fire off a "that's rough, buddy" at ABSOLUTE maximum.
ERIDAN KIND OF JUST SEES SLURS AS FACTUAL DESCRIPTORS (AND OTHER GENERAL NOTES FOR HIS SYNTAX AND VOCAB)
And, let's face it, on Alternia, they kind of are. Kanaya doesn't even bother to call him out for calling Karkat an assblood, Terezi and Feferi and Sollux don't bother taking offense to calling Sollux a mustard blood, and Karkat calls himself a gutter blood at one point. Like, even if you're playing/writing an Eridan who's rejected Alternian society, he'll still probably be out here calling people slurs? Things that would be considered hostile from other characters are very much just neutral coming from Eridan. There is no emotional difference to him, calling someone a rustblood or a burgundy, but he's expected to say rustblood because of his sea dweller status, so that's what he goes with.
Also, make some grounded but wild assertions about people and things. This boy loves to Assume. Writing Eridan is a lot of going "ERIDAN DON'T SAY THAT!!!" it's great. Really painful. Highly unrecommended.
He's obviously quite book smart and uses a lot of big vocabulary words. You guys need to have Eridan go on these insane purple-prose rants more often. They're so fun to write and so cringe to post.
CA: yeah go ahead and kiss us off but therell be blood on your hands
CA: you could either play along as our auspistice and do a little mediating like you wwere fuckin hatched to
CA: or wwatch she and me devvolvve into fuckin full fledged kismesisses the kind like you dont get once in ten thousand swweeps
CA: you knoww thats wwhat it wwould be there wwould be rainboww rivvers runnin through star systems and all nebulizin like liquid firewworks
CA: it wwill be beautiful and heartbreaking all at once
CA: but the thing is i need a rivval wwho can pose me a challenge
CA: and frankly shes not evven fit for holdin my cape anymore
CA: at this point i find all her adorable black pixie dabblins to be prime kiddie playtime shit
CA: all of her FRAUDULENT MAGICS cannot come close to posin threat to my mastery ovver the TRUEST SCIENCES
CA: an wwith my empiricists wwand i servve as the righteous hope that wwill incinerate delusion and the deluded alike
CA: my holy fire is the wwhite fury bled from the wwrath-wweary eyes of fifty thousand nonfictional angels
CA: and wwhen theyre finished wweepin they wwill boww before their prince
GG: wow what are you talking about
For no reason at all. I'm going to post a little Karkat for comparison.
PCG: THE FUNNY THING IS IN THE FUTURE EVERYONE WILL RECOGNIZE ME AS THE UNDISPUTED LEADER, EVEN YOU.
PCG: YOU WILL BE STANDING ON THE TIPPYTOES OF YOUR IDIOTIC METAL SHOES, TAKING DELICATE PURCHASE OF MY NUBBY HORNS AND HOISTING YOURSELF OVER MY HEAD TO PUT YOUR SWEATIEST TOUGH GUY SMOOCH UPON MY TWITCHING SPINE LUMP.
PCG: IT WILL BE TENDER AND DEFERENTIAL, LIKE A PAUPER KISSING A NOBLE'S RING.
PCG: JUST SCROLL DOWN, READ THE LOGS.
Also, notes about his typing quirk:
First, the ww and vv stuff is actively a fake accent he puts on for the #Aesthetic, and his natural way of speaking doesn't include those at all, so it's entirely likely that if you're writing him after he's rejected Alternian society, or if he's trying to be really really emotionally sincere, he wouldn't be bothering with that part of the quirk specifically.
He doesn't ALWAYS drop the G at the end of words ending in -ing. It's frequent and common, but don't feel bad about letting a word end in a g, especially if it would sound or look better (for example, "being a kid and growwing up" doesn't bother to drop the g's at all).
Similarly, he doesn't ALWAYS change "of" to "a," especially preceding a vowel sound. You gotta be careful with when you change this up, because he pretty much only does it when it would make sense spoken aloud.
In phrases like "must have" or "could have," he will often (but not always) change "have" to "of" (so "must of" or "could of").
Dropping the D from the word "and" happens only one time in the entire comic, so it's probably a typo, and if it isn't, it's REALLY REALLY infrequent.
He will sometimes use shorthanded words, like "em" instead of "them" or "ya" instead of "you." I'd say it's occassional, a bit rarer than the G-dropping. He does tend to use "got to" instead of "gotta," however. Again, try saying his lines out loud, to figure out when best to use what.
Given his loquaciousness and clear command of the language, it's likely that this is for Style, but he also doesn't always bother with proper grammar. Places where "[person] and I" would be used are often switched out for "[person] and me," and he might forgo a contraction like "I've" or "we've" and just post the pronoun (for example, "you got to" instead of "you've got to."
He references ocean shit, and ocean anatomy, like his own fins and gills, pretty often! He just doesn't do the puns. Try using "flippin" instead of "fuckin" every now and then, or "glubbin" instead of "talkin," or nautical analogies.
Also throw in some British "bloody"s every so often.
Cusses like a sailor, though, has one of the highest "fuck" counts relative to wordcount out of all the characters (cough like Karkat cough).
HE DOES NOT USE PUNCTUATION. EVER. (Ok, he does use a period once while talking to Terezi in Alterniabound, but I think that that's a mistake because it's literally the only time). This is actually in STARK contrast to other characters that don't generally use punctuation, like Aradia or Nepeta, who will still use ellipses, exclamation points, and question marks. Eridan actively, consciously forgoes using ANY punctuation, EVER, even for questions (which you shouldn't be asking too many of, because Eridan makes DEMANDS).
ERIDAN DOES NOT ANGST
This is another thing that I see a lot. Yes, Eridan thinks that he's worse than everybody. Yes, he deliberately keeps fun things at bay and focuses on things that make him miserable. Yes, he's sad, anxious, emotionally neglected, etc. etc. But I often see this self-loathing played for dramatics - Eridan being withdrawn, quiet, moody, and sad. Or being consumed with guilt and regret, and wishing he didn't have to be a murderer or wasn't forced into the position he was. And that's just not the vibe.
Because Eridan has a lot of pride. He refuses to appear weak, and he has genuinely lost the emotional capacity to feel too guilty about all the killing. Moreover, here's something I often see get overlooked:
He would think of the murders he committed, and the fact that he's so good at murdering, as good things.
It's not only useful, but oftentimes NECESSARY, for somebody on the team to be willing to make those kinds of sacrifices, to be willing to pull the trigger. Very literally, murder kept him and his friends alive long enough to play the game.
There's no universe in which Eridan would denounce killing and violence, because to do so would be to say that he shouldn't have kept his friends alive. Even in a hypothetical golden ending, where everybody survives to the end, Eridan would be the guy on the team who posits murder as a potential solution to problems, reminds people that society is built on sacrifices and suffering, and offers to do the dirty work himself if nobody else has the stomach for it. As much as being the orphaner was DISASTROUS for his mental and emotional well-being, he wouldn't regret the things he did.
And this is reflected in the comic - the rare times he does break down and show that he kind of hates himself, the focus is never on guilt or regret, it's on his perceived shortcomings - calling himself an idiot or pathetic. Because that's what his real insecurity is - he doesn't hate himself because he sees himself as this awful piece of shit, the way Sollux does, he hates himself because he thinks of himself as not good enough, because if he's Not Good Enough, then Something Bad Will Happen.
Remember, his danger response is FIGHT. It's a different paradigm than what most of us are used to, which is why I see his inner turmoil so often represented by him being moody and broody, which he's never really done in the comic. Eridan doesn't get sad, even though he is sad; he gets mad, aggressive, combative. He doesn't wallow; he just keeps swimming.
CA: i got to keep tryin thats howw all the great military masterminds became great through upright persevverance
Again, his response to being insulted is indignation, not hurt. He doesn't sit in his room feeling sorry for himself, he obsesses over genocide and murdering all the land dwellers. His response to seeing the love of his life turn on him with killing intent is to flip out and start killing right back. After being broken up with, his response is to go and pester his friends (and yell at Gamzee a bit) until he can get some emotional support. He doesn't angst, he tries to solve the problem, and, if he can't solve the problem, he starts shooting.
He's awfully violent! If your Eridan is not awfully violent, you're probably doing it wrong!
BUT, ERIDAN LOVES HIS FRIENDS
At his core, however, as tangled up in all of the above as he may be, Eridan loves:
His friends
Wizards
Magic
Probably hipster shit
Happy endings
He is still, after all, a HOPE player. He struggles as hard as he does because he can't give up on the idea that things will get better, eventually. Even if he's struggling in the wrong direction, toward the wrong ideals, and even if emotionally, he's feeling more and more hopeless and closed in, he can't stop himself from trying, and trying, and trying again.
He loves magic. As much as he tries to push it away and calls it stupid and fake and lame at every turn, he still brought his shitty wands onto the meteor. Why does he love magic? It's an extension of his inability to give up. No matter how hopeless the situation, no matter how awful he feels, no matter how unrealistic salvation might seem, if only magic is real, then there's a solution. He wants to be a wizard so badly because wizards can do magic, and magic can overturn reality, and reality is this awful, inescapable nightmare. He is constantly being caught between nihilism and pessimism and hope and belief. In the comic, the nihilism won, but that's the great conflict at the core of his being.
So ummmmm yeah, I hope any of that helps with writing the fish boy at all. Basically, if you aren't constantly cringing while writing the bullshit that comes out of his mouth, you're probably doing it wrong...
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