TL;CR MEME

[retellers]

1. Comment with your character.
2. Receive comments from others.
3. Reply to their comments with long ballads and explanations of your characters' relationship throughout the game.
4. Suffer as we have suffered over your CR.

Comments

[exercisms]

Chiron!

The first couple weeks, he was really lost, and Mob is someone who is very used to having people he can rely on. He specifically, when he's unsure or scared or grappling with something upsetting, is very used to having adults he can go to with his problems. So he made a lot of CR early on that was based on filling that space. He appreciated Chiron because he was so patient and kind. He'd let him run his ideas and fears against him and would give him gentle advice that didn't coddle him.

Kano's execution really shocked him because of that. He is really not down with murder, and is innately a forgiving person, and the mentor whose shoes Chiron was partially helping to fill is also extremely anti-murder and violence. So it was just shocking to him, that Chiron was willing to hurt Kano, someone who Mob actually cared for a lot. Before that point he had taken it as a given that he could forgive these terrible things that were happening because the Realm was forcing these things to happen. If Jeanne killed Kano, or Kano killed Jeanne, it would be another terrible thing the Realm forced to happen. But Chiron's threats against Kano were the first time he realized that some of the people here would use violence even when the Realm didn't force them to, and coming from someone he trusted and admired it was a pretty blunt wake up call.

I think it's important that he wasn't exactly angry with Chiron. When he's angry with someone, he's inclined to speak his mind, which he did at the execution. But when he feels disappointed or confused by someone's actions, he tends to withdraw. That's especially true when it comes to mentor figures - something he's aware of in himself is how much he overly relies on mentor figures to tell him right from wrong and how to handle situations. This is a kid who, back home in his ordinary life, has an incredible amount of power and is very afraid of making mistakes as a result, so he has a tendency to prefer people who seem wiser than him to tell him what to do. But when he gets an inkling that someone he's been relying on to tell him what to do actually has values that are different than his or may do things he doesn't agree with, he's pretty quick to cut out that reliance because of his fears of making mistakes; he doesn't want to rely on the wrong person. That has nothing to do with whether or not he cares about the person.

As a result of that decision not to rely on Chiron as a mentor anymore, as well as his disappointment and confusion about what happened, he avoided him for a while. He just doesn't know how to have a conversation with an adult he admires and likes that basically goes 'you let me down.' He's got a lot of anxiety and doesn't have a lot of faith in his ability to clearly express those thoughts, and tends to approach personal conflict very passively when it's not a situation he feels like he needs to say something to prevent others from being hurt. He has a tendency to wait for people to come to him instead, but it didn't really happen.

When he reached out to Chiron, none of this had been cleared up for him; he still felt the same way. He just had a reason to talk to Chiron other than his confused feelings, so instantly did. But it later did get cleared up for him, because he had a conversation with Jeanne about it. Mob basically trusted Jeanne an incredibly high amount for various reasons, so when Jeanne explained to him that she wasn't against what he did, and there were circumstances where she also would have killed Kano even if the Realm hadn't forced her to, he actually listened. Jeanne pointed out to him that there were sides to Kano as a person Mob wasn't aware of, and that he'd never really asked Chiron why he'd done what he'd done. In addition to that, around this time, he was getting to know Chiron as a Rabbit. They were all dealing with the need to kill, and Chiron was so protective and kind to everybody. So considering that, and considering that everyone was dealing with incredibly hard decisions, he made a decision to try to understand better and not judge people before asking them their reasons.

And then he died, so I never really got to follow up on that! But after that point he always felt like he made a mistake to pull away from Chiron and went back to trusting him. He also still thinks that they probably have different values and wouldn't rely on his advice without questioning it, but he's gotten much better this game at taking advice from people and considering it for himself rather than listening to it blindly, so that's kind of okay.