adharma | moekuro crap

Memory Path

8/10 TriPos
2/3 SigPos
5/12 TrivNeu
5/8 SigNeu
3/9 TrivNeg
1/2 SigNeg

Ratios somewhat misleading due to locks and when I added new memories. *s denote "kickers" in terms of personal impact. ^s are memories that are headcanon or implied or mentioned but not onscreen. ~s are memories that are either onscreen or directly spoken about but there is some amount of perspective/personal wiggle room. !s are omake, drama cd or novel canon.

^*1 • Hell (SigNeu)
!2 • KOKUYOU UNIFORM I CHOOSE YOU (ur so pretty) (TriNeu)
~3 • cockblocking Mammon's bj paper (TriPos)
4 • meeting Chrome (SigPos)
5 • beating up hibari (while cheating) (TriNeu)
^6 • chrome makeover yeay (TriPos)
7 • Vindice time (TriNeg)
8 • First face to face meeting with Tsuna (while others are fighting Lancia) (TriPos)
~*9 • hilarious childhood whatever (SigNeg)
10 • arrivederci (TriNeg)
^11 • misc. mafia killing yay (TriPos)
!12 • apples (TriPos)
!13 • Kokuyou Novel bit (SigNeu)
!14 • lip cream (TriPos)
15 • the deal with Iemitsu (SigNeu)
^16 • making Lancia feel miserable about something or other (TriPos)
^17 • picking Lancia's family/meeting them etc (SigNeu)
18 • the end of Lancia's family (SigPos)
19 • SOME FUCKER IS LICKING HIMSELF IN MY BODY!!! (TriNeg)
!20 • possessing bianchi after the lip cream bit + ~in tsuna's dream~ (TriPos)
21 • first half of the kokuyou fight, up to arrivederci (SigNeu)
~22 • everyone hates us lol (TriNeg)
~23 • "Mukuro's" jailbreak out of the high security prison. (TriNeu)
^24 • i used to be a 'yes man' until i started saying 'no' (c) (TriNeg)

Memory 1 was the memory I chose to start him with. Hell is headcanon! The reason why is because Mukuro is always like BLAH BLAH BLAH I GOT MY SKILLS IN HELL but. I mean. TBQH Mukuro could also easily say I shit rainbows. You don't really know if it's true. It could go either way. I chose it to be true because I needed something to kick him down the path of fauxiopathy for my personal enjoyment of playing him.

Memories 2-8 with the exception of beating up Hibari are very like . . . neutral/positive/not terribly impactful. They are a lot of very small memories. Meeting Chrome is positive significant for him in canon but to get it early in Aather was just kind of like. :|a oh, a nice thing? Because of the way he works as a person, as well, it just didn't have the same impact. The Vindice memory kind of weirds him out, no lie. Not something he'd repeat for funsies.

9-11 is a hilarious mix. 9 is one of the other kicker memories and pretty much the memory that influences him "the most" overall, ever. It's a summary and impression of years of terrible childhood things. I've been filling a lot of my trivneg filler/padding memories with details from this part of his life too. Memory 10 made him think he was dead. And 11 was the one he showed Yayoi that freaked her out.

Memories 12, 14 and 15 are all affirmations of him not being as terrible as he thought. 15 is a bit affirmation that he is a terrible person.

16-18 are hilariously all about Lancia. MIXED FEELINGS but it mostly completes the story-arc there for him.

Memories 19 and 20 are both trivial of the not-mattering-at-all bit. Though possession is a bit awk to chat about with teammates sometimes. Also he is horrifically embarrassed and thoroughly uncomfortable by the Spade thing. Irrationally dislikes owls right now :|.

21 he could semi-guess about. It had pretty much no impact except Luke mocked him for it :(

22 ACTUALLY HAS NO IMPACT AS A MEMORY BY ITSELF! It's filler from his lolchildhood. Stuff he already knew and experienced and pretty much had accepted as the way of the world even if he disliked it. In the same way kids are like :( mom makes me eat broccoli it is like :( people shoot at us and kill us and kind of hate us ok. I mean, in terms of emotionally parsing it. However he shared it witthhh a lot of people. IIRC he still has one share left on it. But it was pretty much ... people had really strong reactions to it. And he was just like. ... a...wk...ward ... ... ... But it was a big moment in the whole world-view readjustment for him.

Memory 23 and Memory 24 I haven't written up yet because I have to do a fair amount of deciding on how I want to do them. Memory 24 is headcanon! More hilarious childhood adventures. "Adventures". Memory 23 is talked about in canon with no real details also "Mukuro" who on death row was Lancia then so lololol. Either way, personally they have no real impact on him and he'll be reluctant to share or speak on them whenever he does take them because after Memory 22 he is pretty much like ( u n s u r e ) about sharing memories. I know, it takes him a while to get there. Slow learner.

Speaking of "Learning"

Mukuro is not the best at learning! There are some things he learns very quickly but other things ... he doesn't learn ... a...t... all... In general! I think about amnesia as giving my character the cultural "basics". I consider these what people do naturally -- like shake hands, generally make eye contact, etc. For those who are habitually not handshakers (or not from cultures that handshake, etc) it would be different, course. But the same things like expressing condolences, seeing from the other person's perspective, that kind of thing is also 'cultural'. You could think of it as how small children (in general) are incredibly egocentric and have to be taught to be more like someone who can function in society. Or, I guess, "How are you?" "I'm fine." The politeness "I'm fine". You could also compare it to language, maybe, if that makes it easier. Language has its own flow and rules and exceptions and so forth. Say you have three pictures, a monkey, a banana and an apple. You ask people to pair them together. Adults will usually pair the monkey and the banana. Children will usually pair the banana and the apple. (Monkey eats banana v. apples and bananas are both fruit). ANYWAY THE POINT IS. Mukuro tends to re-learn a lot of the cultural/social stuff piece at a time and then he is really bad at following the expected rule.

IT IS A BIT LIKE THIS:
1) punch someone
2) get reamed for punching
3) decide punching someone is bad

However this doesn't apply to "physical violence is bad". So if he kicks someone rinse, repeat, kicking gets added to the list. Sometimes he'll run through the whole list of instances, compare and contrast what might be accepted and go from there. Often that is far too much work and far too frustrating because he then still doesn't get it right so he just is like WELP NO EXACT FIX OH WELL. The rules of casual engagement are not really things he had innately and trying to construct them un-instinctively is a pain in the ass. YOU COULD ALSO USE THE METAPHOR OF MANY SOCIAL SITUATIONS ARE LIKE A MATH PROOF AND MUKURO DOESN'T HAVE ANY FORMULAS!!11 Now he has some, but this was just the general "WHY ARE YOU SO STUPID" answer so.

The 'T' word

Which is 'trying'. Ooohh how someone doesn't like trying. Mukuro has a really weird relationship with trying. For the first sevenish years of his life or whatever trying was pretty much met with rejection and/or pain or terrible things. And then for the next sevenish years of his life he didn't have to try for much! His six skills are pretty loaded in terms of being a cheater cheaterface. Oh I need to con some adults? Hardly even have to blink to do it. Life tends to be both IMPOSSIBLE CHALLENGES and then like FAR TOO EASY. This is probably where his narcissism traits come from ... ... ... anyway. In Aather Acedia finds trying unrewarding. No matter what he finds his trying ends up in 'not good enough' and he pretty much hates it. On the other hand he is also super not satisfied with how things are now (due to memories and moral boyfriends and disapproving fathers and crap).

In a lot of ways like. "I try to be a nice person" -> "I was a nice person to soandso" -> "I have feelings of satisfaction from this interaction" is how the social formula theoretically goes. (There is a lot of stuff I could put here about nurturing parents or being fed when you are hungry as a baby or held when you are a child or whatever, but the idea is that we as people are conditioned to feel good when we do nice things for other people. Or, well, it is productive to us as a society and a species, whatever). But Acedia's is like. "I try to be a nice person" -> "Well... I was kind of a dick but I was nicer than usual" -> "That's really irritating" is how it ends up working out ... in the rare occasion it works out well he is just kind of confused by the interaction (ie: the bowl with Cinnamon). His patterns of interaction with people tend to not be . . . positive like that. Even his "good relations" with people like Rolo and Kaworu or his more buddy like ones with like Vriska are on a completely different dynamic. And he feels no intrinsic reward for being nice. Usually at best it is like. 'Well... at least people won't be as peeved at me I guess.'

World Destroyer

lol. I just. lol. OK. Back in the Kokuyou arc he really did want this. I am pretty convinced it was like the BIG THING you know, most important thing whatever. I am ok sacrificing all my other sort of important things, whatnot, etc. Big Life Goals. Blah blah blah. But of course also a lot of angry 15 year old boy. And crazy.

Acedia knows he doesn't want to destroy the world now. He knows Mukuro didn't want to after losing to Tsuna too. What he isn't willing to entirely give up though is that piece of his past self. If he completely says he isn't going to ever try again it would be a pretty big . . . loss for him. It's a cornerstone of the Mukuro identity (consequently also one to all his Kokuyou ties, for good or bad). But he's also pretty willing to at least hedge at it and push it aside because it's . . . well, true.

Distortion

The general header for a few things! Skills 1 and 5 are going here as well as some self-delusion talk. We'll see how far AJ gets.

SKILL 1, ILLUSIONS. I've talked a bit about this before I think? Illusions in Reborn are odd because they're belief dependent but also not. They don't become less effective just because you know they are illusions because there is an amount of will involved as well. They take over the senses in a lot of ways. There is also a certain amount of personal investment in the illusion that matters. Also illusions can pretty much pass for reality AND CAN FOOL... VIDEO CAMERAS......

Mukuro is a good illusionist because he has a rock steady belief in himself and he's not really 'on' the normal wavelength. He's super detached from the objective physical world and probably even if he wasn't an illusionist has a huge amount of investment and flexibility in the mental arena/imagination side. He's willing to believe things he knows aren't real for a certain end but also pretty willing to easily banish them. His personal objective reality is flexible but also super solid. I guess too being crazy helps. I MEAN THERE ARE OTHER REASONS HE IS A GOOD ILLUSIONIST PROBABLY but these are some of them. He also mixes the real and unreal successfully on a few occasions so. ffflexibility...

Anyway. Illusions are about distorting reality and hiding it. Making things out of things that aren't there, as the mist slogan goes. His crazy might help out his illusioning, but his illusioning does no favors to his sanity. He could probably walk most places and get anything he wanted (illusions + mind control, for sure). If he has a real knife and cuts someone it has mostly the same effect as cutting them with a knife he knows is fake. "Real" is defined by his own mind and not something else. At least, functional realism. And on the other side, if he gets fooled he fucks himself over.

SKILL 5. THE HUMAN REALM. This is pretty much a stat boost! Though I usually pair it with a certain amount of . . . making Mukuro crazier. Which is just because in canon when he uses it he kind of . . . loses it. Which could also just be last ditching, etc. BUT I AM THE PERSON WHO LIKES TO OVERANALYZE REBORN I CAN DO WHAT I WANT AMANO WILL NEVER USE THIS AGAIN ANYWAY!1

I tend to play this as a skill that doesn't only make him stronger/faster/whatever. But it also puts him more in touch with his feelings (lol) and forces him to look at "humanity" a bit more and then also intensifies his emotions. Just judging from how his tongue gets a bit looser in canon, he's more expressive, etc. More likely to tell the truth! But also crazier and more volatile. SELF-DISTORTION YESS.

So the skills Acedia has back in Aather are reality distorting and self distorting. I mean and some other skills that don't really impact him personally. Oh noes themes of distortion all up in here!

Because Acedia is a distortion kind of person! He self-distorts all the time. And reality-distorts. Makes shit up. Supplements stuff with stuff he made up. Decides to live in his head for a while and ignore reality. Whatever. It's an amazing thing.

I was going to type up more but then I got distracted by my candy bar. If anyone has questions about anything Moekuro related ever!!11 I guess I will answer them because I have an essay boner but I will probably also STUMBLE INTO IT eventually as I cannot shut up about this character.

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