This is mostly about the game Arknights. Warning: ramblings, yumeshipping, and discussion of suicidal ideation. Spoilers for the Babel event.
Welcome Home, Doctor
Of course I self-project to the Doctor in Arknights. It's so easy for me to do so. I've written before of how Arknights, like Pyre, is a power fantasy for sickly bookworm. I, too, am a disabled smartass who wants to be able to do good despite my limited physical capabilities, to have friends and comrades who trust me and whom I can trust in return.
In a lot of ways, the Doctor is me. She reacts to things roughly the way I do. She does things that I would expect myself to do. The people she is most close to are the characters I like and spend the time with the most. This is one of those things where gameplay and narrative are in accord: the characters I give most favor to, I "built" the most, are the ones she/I can most rely on in combat. They save her/my ass countless times, and some more than others.
Her being partially me makes for some interesting dynamics. Amiya is often treated by the narrative as the Doctor's/your daughter, but I find it hard to love her in that way. She feels like somebody that's just thrust to me, a responsibility I'm saddled with, like a stepdaughter from a not-particularly-pleasant relationship.
This is how my Doctor feels about her, and it shapes how her story unfolds in my mind. My Doctor is pretty maternal, in a way that she keeps "adopting" kids around the landship and providing them with what they need. Aak is her son. Typhon is her daughter. Bassline, Indigo, Ethan, Cuora. But Amiya? The one who for all purposes treat her as a mother? She no longer has the memory of Amiya as her daughter, and she subconsciously resents that Amiya does; a gulf that neither of them is sure how to surmounts. Amiya might feel a little jealous, as a result. My Doctor might feel a little guilty. They both learn to live with that.
I'm not immune to falling in love with fictional characters. Not immune to wanting to, say, kiss them. Warning: This is entirely self-indulgent, but heyyyy, aren't all stories, in a way?
My Doctor, to both our embarrassment, used to hold a little crush for Enciodes SilverAsh. He's a confident man in high position, who doesn't? I think (it's a lot more interesting story if) he also felt the same way. However, he was too nervous, too busy, too standoffish, to be honest with that affection, and it didn't amount to anything at the end. In real life terms, he never came home to me, I had to buy his ass from the gold cert shop when the Kernel Banner was up, over a year after I started playing.
Well that crush really isn't meant to be because then my Doctor (I) fell for Mr. Lee from Lungmen almost on first sight. I love him so bad. Kindest man I've ever met and a father of three to boot. He noticed how heads over heels the Doctor was for him and played along. He was my first non-starter 6-star. All my early-game strategies are built around having him. He saved my ass so much, my hero. I love him.
Sometimes I wonder what it'll be like if SilverAsh was my first 6-star. Could have changed the trajectory of my entire life, I'm so serious.
There's a lot of the dynamics that I can go into here, between Lee and my Doctor. Something to do with how she's beholden to her duty on Rhodes Island, and him with his attachment to Lungmen. How his kids—Aak, Hung, Waai Fu—gradually spend less time at home as they work with Rhodes Island; the mild resentment that came from that, then acceptance. She loves him unquestionably, and it'd crush her if she has to leave him to further her cause with Rhodes Island, but she would do it. Lee's not sure how to feel about that, because truthfully his feelings for her isn't half as strong. I even wrote a whole fic about this. I imagine they'd work through their feelings, though. They find in each other a warm domestic home, amidst everything that's happening.
They were chatting, laughing, and she might have been drinking a little too much because she remembered not wanting to let him go, pushing away the realization that she'd have to take her leave tomorrow and then it would be another weeks, maybe months until Rhodes Island will dock back on Lungmen. Drinking more just to shut the thought away and then, as if a fledgling final step, as Lee carried her away (she remembered. Lee carrying her, her face so close to his snout, his voice so casually assuring, Little too much alcohol tonight, eh Doctor? Let's get you home, home as if his home was equally hers), leaning close to his ear and whispering, "Lee, marry me. Come stay in Rhodes Island with me."
My Doctor, as I, loves Rhodes Island. She loves Terra and all its people, and will do everything to protect this land and those who needed it. Ah, isn't that part of the power fantasy? That we can do something to make the world better? She did this not out of duty or as a favour to Kal'tsit or Amiya or to who she used to be, but just from what she had seen since she woke up, from the stories she'd/I've heard.
The love almost kills her. People get hurt and die, many under her command. Sometime, despite Rhodes Island's best effort, they're too late to save someone. Sometimes she makes mistakes, bet on the wrong place or wrong time or the wrong people. In the middle of the conflict, she can keep up a strong face: blank, analytical, unfeeling. When she gets home, she hits the bar and do something which I can't do in real life and thus vicariously enjoy through her: drink more alcohol than good health could allow.
More than drowning and forgetting her sorrows, it's a form of self-mutilation. Hide the pain through more pain. I can go on how this reflects me in real life too but that's a bit more trauma-dumping than I'm ready for, haha.
This is where I reveal that I'm open to polyamory. In the course of endless battles and calculations, she develops a, let's call it a fascination, interest, in that operator who also seemingly can understand nothing but cold calculation: operator Executor, real name Federico Giallo. He's a strange one: completely insensitive to other people's emotions, constantly needing to be explained things that other people find obvious, but she sees something more in him, in the way he will drop everything to help others. A kindness.
I'll just drop the link to the fic I wrote here and the second part here. At the end she finds comfort in having him around, in just being able to hold his hand and not having to meet the gaping maw of despair alone, out in the battlefield which she wouldn't even think of burdening her other lover with (Lee stays at home, a home to return to). Federico, on his part, finds her reliable; more than just reliable, but also a solid foundation for him to stand on, to better understand the world and what he can do for it. He finds the idea of a world that loses her unacceptable, and so put importance in her survival. That's as good as love can be, isn't it?
He reached for her hand, held it the way she had. He continued, “To that end, Doctor, I wish to protect you. I wish… for you to thrive, to not hurt yourself further when your emotions had already hurt you so. If there is anything I can do to help you, to alleviate the pain, I would do so without hesitation. You need only say the word because, I’m afraid, I do not always have the knowledge to know what to do. I still have much to learn.”
Jostling for Space in the Jigsaw Puzzle that is My Doctor's Lore
All these, and other additional relationships, just developed naturally in my head as I played the game. As it is, it would all fit neatly with the space that the game leaves for its players. The Doctor has amnesia, after all. Whatever before is a space that the game has yet to fill, but whatever afterwards, vis-a-vis who the Doctor is, is left for the player to fill, and I did.
My overimaginative brain hungered for more, though, and against my best attempts, went on and formed its own backstory for the Doctor.
My Doctor is an aegir, or resembles them, with features likening her to the lionfish (one of my favorite animals). She's an originium scholar, this is canon, but she has a little chemistry and neuroscience hobby, crafting toxins and questionable medicine with Thorns and Blue Poison (because lionfishes are venomous, haha get it). Sometimes she finds herself humming songs that are unfamiliar to her, which the Abyssal Hunters later identified as from their native Aegir. Is that where the Doctor came from, then?
Yes, why the hell not. In my earliest drafts, the Doctor and her parents came from a foreign land beyond Terra, hence why her physical features differ from regular Terrans. She then spent a significant portion of her childhood in Aegir.
That's about as developed as I let my brain went, and would you look at that. Lone Trail happened, revealing the Doctor actually came from the Earth-human-like First Civilization, which went extinct a few thousands years ago before the Terran civilization even began. Alright, time to revise my backstory.
The Doctor was one of the First Civilization, but, just as Kal'tsit walked Terra for those thousand years, she woke up at some point and also walked the land. They went together for a while, developed a meaningful relationship, but then something happened that made it unbearable to stay together. It was a messy break-up; maybe my Doctor disagreed with how Kal'tsit handled Kazdel, maybe they were frustrated at their inability to move forward with solving Oripathy. Either way, my Doctor left for Aegir.
She didn't just go to Aegir just because it's far away. Aegir was the most advanced nation at the time, and its distance from the mainland shielded it from Catasthropes and Originium. This much is canon: that oripathy is a landborne disease, and that it's incompatible with seaborne biology. My Doctor went to Aegir specifically to continue her study of originium. She went on to have a whole life there, enough that it still echoes even after she lost her memory.
At some point before forming Babel, Kal'tsit contacted the Doctor again. They made up, somehow, and the Doctor went back to land to help her and Theresa with their Babel project. Whatever happened afterwards that put the Doctor back in the coffin, I figured the game will reveal that eventually, so I left my headcanon here.
Lo and behold! Babel (the event) was released. It did explain why the Doctor went back into the coffin, along with a whole slew of other things. I returned to the jigsaw puzzle that is my Doctor's lore and sighed as how much space canon is now taking up.
I could go with 100% canon adherence. I could cut up my Doctor's lore even more just so she'll fit with the rest of the canon. It won't change too much, would it? She'll still retain all the relationships and experience she had since she woke up with amnesia. But I've gotten attached to all the things my mind had made up to fill the gap and—perhaps this is arrogance—I think it'll be more interesting if I keep them.
My Doctor has oripathy; this is one part of her characterization that I don't want to let go. It's an abnormal one, however: the oripathy is localized entirely on her head, attached to her skull, crystal forming between her hair. It gives her periodic splitting headaches, often forcing her to leave her office and hide in places around Rhodes Island.
Of course this is me self-projecting: I have chronic headaches too. It's hell, sometimes. It often forces me to drop everything I'm doing and do nothing but cry in the dark. The difference being that mine is an undiagnosable cryptid while hers has a clear cause: oripathy. That's comforting, that there's a reason for the pain, even if it's a supposedly incurable disease.
Well, Babel revealed that the Doctor, being of the First Civilization, is actually immune to Oripathy. I've suspected this, and it actually works pretty well with how my Doctor's oripathy is abnormal. If she cuts her arm with originium, it'll bleed but she won't be infected.
So I worked this into her lore. In the original version, she's half-Aegir. In the second version, she went to Aegir after breaking up with Kal'tsit where she performed experiments on herself in her attempt to cute oripathy. Some of it involves injecting herself with seaborn blood. While it ends up making her resembles Aegir, she's actually half Seaborn. It was a partially successful cure: the oripathy was localized to her head and her body was immune.
The adjustments I have to make actually made this more tragic. She was immune to Oripathy during her years wandering with Kal'tsit. When she went to Aegir, she wasn't trying to cure her own Oripathy. She was trying to infect herself, to better understand the people of this land and how to solve their problem. The success wasn't that she couldn't be infected, as my Doctor was suspecting post-amnesia, but that she finally could.
Then the Profound Silence happened; I have canon confirmation that this can at least happen before Babel. All her research was lost and the Aegir city she lived in was destroyed. She was badly wounded and called for Kal'tsit for help. Kal'tsit found her, dying, already a hybrid of aegir, seaborn, and whatever she was before, fins and appendages growing out of her body even as shew as bleeding. Kal'tsit put her back into the sarcophagus in Rhodes Island landship to save her life. Things happened that caused Rhodes Island to be lost afterwards.
A few years later, Kal'tsit found Rhodes Island again, and thought sufficient time has passed for the Doctor to recover. I need to cut up canon a bit here: the interaction she had with PRTS, Kal'tsit, and Theresa is a little different, as this wasn't her first awakening on Terra, but it's largely the same. The Doctor was lucid when she woke up, but her memory of Aegir and what happened after her first awakening was a little blurry. Her aegir/seaborn features had receded, so she still resembled her old self more. She still asked Kal'tsit to wander the land a bit before settling back in Babel, in an attempt to find herb bearings and recover her memory.
What happened afterwards are largely the same. She had her little adventure on Terra, under Ascalon's watch. She met and rescued Amiya, and treated her as a daughter. She went back to Babel wanting to cure her adopted daughter's oripathy, and solve the land's originium crisis along the way.
And here is where it's a little different. In the canon, the Doctor was haunted by the goal she and her people had set themselves had set up thousands of years ago: to cover the land in originium and thus save the universe from some far-in-the-future catastrophe. She betrayed Babel, despite the love she had grown for it, to accelerate the end of Terra's civilization and ensure the success of the originium project.
My Doctor has already grappled with this issue after her first awakening, during her first time wandering the land with Kal'tsit. In a way, she was braver than the Doctor in canon: she chose to abandon or postpone the originium project to save Terra anyway. But her research into curing oripathy bore no result, and after she went to Aegir not only did she lose it all at the end, but so did Aegir. This was her second time seeing a whole civilization falls.
When again in Babel she found inescapable conflict and road without an end, she felt despair. She felt, once again, that no effort she or anyone put in will be worth it at the end. It wasn't just fear for the future that prompted her to agree to the meeting with Theresis. Giving Theresis the means to destroy the world was also her way of expressing that she could no longer bear it. It's a form of suicide.
This kind of despair is something that I've felt personally, but hahahaaa, maybe let's not trauma-dump here.
A few months ago, right around the time I finished Zwillingsturme im Herbst, I wrote a little fic to help me cope with some own emotions, unrelated to the event. In it, Arturia played the Doctor's heart, prompting her to attempt to jump from the landship to her death.
What she played tonight was merely an elegy of sorrow and fear, the burden of all the world placed on one shoulder. Oh, but it was beautiful! Perhaps to call it an elegy is to distract from what it was: nightmares measured in half a dozen years but hints of thousands underneath, all plucked from the heart of one person. They say the Doctor has amnesia, but Arturia can see it as it really is: a spectre over all of Rhodes Island, perhaps all of Terra.
Such simple fears that form the deepest trenches: that you wouldn’t make it, that no one would, that all this effort will amount to nothing. Such simple sorrows that create the endless void: lives and laughters cut short, the loss of small beauties, the guilt that none of it should have been necessary.
The Doctor has the right to feel them, to hear them, not to lock them up and hide them away behind busywork or her dreams or anyone else’s. If it drives her to throw her body from the landship and end it all, is that not also her right?
It's a pretty general sense of despair, all things considered, but it does tickles me how well it fits.
In a scene that happened after the fic, which I haven't written but have let form in my head, the Doctor met again with Arturia and begged her to play again. With all that she'd experienced, all the people she loves, she knew with perfect clarity that she would not want it all to end. So this emotion, this despair, was not her own, but one that she used to held. She used to be somebody who wanted to jump from the landship and end it all, whose burden was heavier than she could imagine. Who is that someone? What does she know?
Perhaps when Theresa erased her memory, there were strands of emotions that eluded her.
A Handshake between Writer and Reader
I'm a strong believer that when you read about a character, the character becomes alive in your mind, and that each character in every mind is unique. There is no one "correct" take of a character. The character you build in your mind from what you've read, and the character the writers themselves build and write down, are in a way different people, but it is in the threads that they share that the writer and reader form a connection.
With video game characters, and especially the "silent" protagonists for role playing games, there are more levers that influence how the character become alive. But the end is still the same: I shake hand with the writers at Hypergrpyh, and together we build the jigsaw puzzle that is who the Doctor, my Doctor, is, even if there's some jostling along the way.
Arknights still has a lot more stories to tell, and we'll likely jostle a few more times. There will always be gaps, and I will inevitably be drawn to fill it. I'm already thinking of how Kal'tsit feel with my Doctor struggling with the Oripathy she didn't know was self-inflicted. I'm thinking of how Scout and the Doctor were probably close, very close, and how tragic it is that they both "died" without knowing what happened to the other. Does the remaining elite operators notice the parallels when the Doctor is together with Executor, just like how she used to do with Scout?
I have a canon-divergent AU, taking place twenty or so years in the future, where the seaborn took over the land and abducted the Doctor to be their strategist. When she escaped their clutches five years later, she regained all her lost memories. This fits neatly with the truth revealed in Babel. Pre-amnesia Doctor was a coward who put up a ruthless facede, post-amnesia Doctor is honest and kind but ignorant, while this Doctor, having accepted all her past selves, can be truer and in-turn, more ruthless in her pursuit for her goals.
But oh, there's still so much more I can make up. I'm looking forward to everything Hypergryph is writing, looking forward to more jostling and gap-filling, looking forward to just let my mind Make Shit Up (tm), and maybe find myself along the way. There are few stories that really get me going like this (hiiii Fire Emblem: Three Houses). I'm glad I found this one.
