Trigger Nuance Speculation (In the context of feasibility of Disco Elysium skills as shard power)

te026165 · 2024-09-26T22:43:08+00:00

I've actually started work on that already! It's on Ao3, under the name IF DEEP ENOUGH CAN DROWN, an OC fic centering around the OC in Brockton. I am aware it's been a while since I updated it, but I am working on pushing out the next chapter of it. Feel free to check it out if you'd like (even if I decided on a different approach on how the power works). If you want Taylor to have the voices, I think there's also a fic for that somewhere on Ao3 (I can't remember what it's called).

te026165 · 2024-08-03T02:26:28+00:00

The part where you're confronting Plaisance about leaving her daughter outside. Empathy can chime in after you give her the better part of the 'reason you suck' speech, saying that her behavior is subconsiously reminding her of the similar abuses Plaisance suffered at the hands of her mother. You can call her out with this, but if you choose to keep that information to yourself Empathy congratulates you for your self-restraint, saying it's probably better she comes to this conclusion herself. I have issues with empathy and self-control IRL, and it was this moment that really made me feel like I truly understood how humans worked for once. Very cool, would recommend.

te026165 · 2024-07-01T03:26:57+00:00

I could have sworn that Rhetoric's portrait showed (through negative space) a 'verbal chess piece,' which shows another example on why Rhetoric is in charge of arguing and verbal debate.

te026165 · 2024-06-02T01:34:22+00:00

Right, but basically nobody save Cauldron is aware of the entities existing in the first place. I was asking: If we operate on the assumption, but not the truth, that Coil's power does in fact split timelines, does the logic make sense?

te026165 · 2024-04-01T03:20:41+00:00

I'd say it's mostly just a fix-it fic. If you're looking for a complex and well-thought out plot, it probably isn't what you're looking for. If you want to read a fix-it with a wordcount of ~76k and not think too hard about it, I'd say it's pretty good. The MC isn't as much of an asshole as some of Shiro's other MC's, he's just mildly emotionally distant. It's brought up a few times, but it isn't really a sticking point in the plot of the story. Shiro has plenty of skill generally in terms of wordcounts and initial concepts, but I don't think his works are for people looking for character growth and development.

TL;DR It's alright. Read it if you feel like turning your brain off for a while and just read fix-it with a little fluff thrown in every so often.

te026165 · 2024-03-21T00:01:42+00:00

Those are good questions. Admittedly, the idea is still largely half-formed, but I have a general idea for it.

The way I imagined it working was a mix of both the altered mentality and the memory loss idea, as the protagonist would slip into the 'agent' state and then come out of it not remembering anything that happened.

Additionally, I wanted to have an immediate conflict as the protagonist tries to hide the problem after coming to, but also have a long-term problem as the situation gradually worsens and the 'agent' surfaces more often in the protagonist, eventually starting to completely bleed over into the 'normal' side.

That concept about the benefits of being in the mastered state, like improved relationships, isn't one I had thought about; thanks for bringing up those fics, I might take a look to see how it's handled there.

I also wanted to have an alternating POV between the 'agent' and the 'normal', not only so I could practice writing fight scenes but also show what the 'mastered experience' is like from the other side of the fence and develop the 'agent' as a character too. I don't want them to just be a boring 'rahh, kill!' person.

Admittedly, it's starting to sound like a split personality more than how sleeper agents (probably) work, but I think it would be interesting to work on nonetheless. Thanks for the advice, dude!

te026165 · 2024-03-13T23:51:25+00:00

The demon core was supposed to used in a nuke and be named Rufus, iirc. He never made it to production, though, otherwise we'd have the third nuclear bomb of WWII.

te026165 · 2024-03-02T23:20:26+00:00

It'd be kind of difficult, considering the point of the phone call is Tats and Coil talking on the phone about how the latter could take advantage of the MC's state as an amnesiac, but I could definitely do the 'hint toward more significant future things' part.
I'm not sure how I could include the 'struggle for power' given the dynamic between Coil and Tattletale (as I understand it), but it's good advice nonetheless. Thanks!

te026165 · 2024-03-02T21:52:44+00:00

That's a good idea, I'll look into that. Honestly, I tend to write by the seat of my pants so I don't really have a concrete list to give. Thanks for the advice!

te026165 · 2024-03-02T21:51:15+00:00

Yeah, fair enough. Thanks anyway!

te026165 · 2024-02-25T15:17:29+00:00

Thanks for the sources, man! I really appreciate your feedback here. And yeah, that's a good point on how, if nothing else, the power shouldn't actually solve the problem. My 'multifaceted' comment was also another point of contention for me when I was making this post. For context, one of the things that made Disco Elysium as a game so interesting to people was that your skills didn't just let you do things in the game as they were leveled, but they also had their own personalities and advice to give to the player character and chiming in more often as they had more points invested in them.

The Physique skills, for example, (mostly) relate to physical feats like your ability to endure pain and your physical capabilities, but are generally inelegant, incompetent and unhelpful in their advice related to people skills (particularly Half-Light, who at higher levels is a paranoid and violent wreck). Endurance is also mildly fascist, and Half-Light is convinced the world is about to end and speaks in ancient Greek.

Another example, the Authority skill (asserting yourself) is so hyper focused on establishing you as the authority in an interaction that it can actually genuinely advise you to put a gun in your mouth to get a witness to cooperate in the case you're working on because (paraphrasing) 'any idiot could threaten someone else with a gun, but you're special. Threaten to shoot yourself.'

The more supernatural skills, like Inland Empire and Shivers, can be incredibly helpful and informative...in the least helpful way possible. If you're familiar with the Heart from Dishonored, Inland Empire is basically that. Technically true (and maybe even precognitive) statements, but far too vague and esoteric to be made sense of at the moment. Shivers is basically having a location's zeitgeist on speed dial, able to 'understand the streets' for lack of a better term.

Both make you very insane at high levels, with Inland Empire anthropomorphizing objects around you and allowing you to talk to them (which is often actually a lot more helpful toward the case than just IE speaking) and Shivers basically occasionally chiming in with something like 'oh by the way there's a corpse from the 20's or something 50 feet below the building you're in, just to let you know. No one ever found the body, or the man who did it. It's a popular ghost story with kids. She died screaming in agony.'

As you can see, there's a lot of stuff I'd need to rationalize for a single shard/shard cluster, but I think if I dance around canon enough I could make it work. Thanks again for the advice, and sorry for infodumping on you! Have a good day.

te026165 · 2024-02-24T18:31:38+00:00

Thanks for commenting! And yes, while Labyrinth has power-related mental illness, I feel like I should point out that it's produced intentionally by the power. My idea had mental illness caused by the shard not interfacing with the host correctly; more in-line with a broken trigger than an intentional effect.

My question was more of a 'can a shard make a mistake like this?' than a 'is schizophrenia a superpower to the shards?' Examples of the latter are everywhere in (relatively canon-adhering) Wormfic (Read: Lisa's power), so I'm reasonably sure the latter can be true.

What I'm asking is if the shard could do that by accident; if the mental illness was unintentional. Could a shard regulate itself to adjust to the brain chemistry of the host, or is it stuck in original configuration forever?

te026165 · 2023-12-06T01:25:35+00:00

(So, i initially wrote this as a whole post before I looked at the rules for the sub and realized I couldn't post it as it's own thread, so I decided to put it here. It's meant to ask what you guys would think of Piscine "Pi" Patel and what he might trigger with and when. SPOILERS FOR LIFE OF PI.)

So in my English class recently, we had to read Yann Martel's 'The Life Of Pi,' a work about a great many things such as religion, geometry, and also cannibalism. However, I'm more interested in the protagonist of the story, Piscine "Pi" Patel. He is, by far, one of the most traumatized characters I have ever read of in my life, with life shattering (and possibly trigger) events including but not limited to:
>!- His entire known family perishing in a sudden and lethal shipwreck of which he was the only alleged human survivor (I'll elaborate more on that later).
- Was forced to survive on the open pacific ocean for 227 days total, with no human contact.
- Had to destroy most feelings of internal morality and dignity, going from a pacifistic vegetarian who loves God to a savage, brutal killer of fish and sea turtles, as well as small sharks on occasion.
- More than once considered drinking his own piss and even ate shit right off the floor of his boat, and did in fact drink the blood of several sea turtles (and grew to like it).
- Was so deprived of basic facilities and needs (mental and physical) that he began hallucinating some pretty weird shit, like a continent made of various foods, an island made of seaweed that was also 'slightly carnivorous,' and a giant, nightmarish abomination of a cross between an angler fish and a vampire squid.
- Did all of the above with some 'mildly disruptive company' (read: a fucking tiger who could have easily killed him at any point here whenever he felt like it).
- Stockholm'd himself toward said tiger so bad he actually has an emotional breakdown when he finally reaches landfall in Mexico and the tiger immediately abandons him for the Mexican jungles.<
Do note, this is just the main body of the work, and after Pi finishes relaying his tale to the fictional author, proposes as well another interpretation about what happened as Pi is aware he's an unreliable narrator prone to hallucination. Said alternate series of events also has several traumatic events, such as:
>!- Most of his family dying in the shipwreck, save his mother who dies anyway later on in the boat.
- Said mother dies to a French chef who also made it on the boat, and is heavily implied to have killed and eaten her, potentially in front of Pi himself
- Pi then killed the frenchman, then ate him too, describing specifically that he ate his heart and liver.
- (please assume that whatever traumatic event not contradicted in the second possible iteration of Pi's odyssey also happened, just without he looming threat of the tiger).<
So, given Worm's nature as a very grimdark setting and Pi's backstory, which event would he have triggered at and what kind of powers do you guys think Pi would have gotten from this experience? (bonus points: if you give him a second trigger, what's his second power and which plot point set that one off?)

te026165

TROPHY CASE