Only one of my characters would be able to do the sexy questions that also went around yesterday.

Medb 10 36, Leslie 4 21, and do 5 for both

Ooh, all right. (A question for both Medb and Leslie. That doesn't happen much.)

I think 5 in general is a neat question for any character, haha

Yeah, I looked at it and I can see why.

Medb:
10. What is their greatest mental weakness?
The meme answer is her libido. The real answer is that she just Does Not Want To Lose Ever.

Like the cattle raid is entirely "I can't lose out to my husband in wealth." Her interlude is entirely because she can't stand she lost in America. She just Will Not Lose and will do whatever it takes to make that a reality, and if she can't it bothers her forever.

36. Are they in control of their emotions, or are their emotions in control of them?
That's...actually tricky. The simple answer is I think her emotions are in control of her more than the other way around, but I also don't think her reasons for having those emotions is always for the most obvious reason

and she is very controlled in how she does the things that she does because of those emotions.

Like, take her obsession with Cú. I don't bring it up in threads because it is not something I can be certain of how much canon supports it, but the impression I get is that it's not that she's actually in love with Cú so much as she's obsessed with not admitting there is someone who she tried to seduce who sleeps with other women.

But once she has that obsession, she is very unlikely to go against that obsession. Like she says in the America singularity: "That's fine. I don't mind being a bitch. I don't mind at all. I mean, I fell in love. What am I supposed to do?"

I don't personally buy that it's love when other things about Medb hint that she's not really experienced love. I think she's just obsessed with him and that can look like love. Being useful to Cú Alter, I think, was about finally being able to cross off Cú as "has reacted to her." Again, I think she really, really hates to lose.

Yeah lol

5. List 3 fears; one “surface level” fear, one “repressed” fear, and one “deep dark” fear.
Surface level is easy. Cheese.

iirc the whole cattle raid was because Medb didn't want to lose to her husband

Oh, it absolutely was that.

She just refused to have less wealth than someone she's married to.

Which ties into...I think I might put it as her "deep dark" fear, because the way I interpret Medb is that one of her primary motivations is that she does not want to be in a position of powerlessness ever.

I don't usually think about it in terms of the fear aspect of it. I usually think of it as the opposite end of "she wants power super badly," but the level to which she takes it makes me think I could probably set it as a fear if she lost it.

Like, not wanting to have less wealth than the man she marries? She wants to be the one who has the most power in this relationship. Loving to watch strong heroes submit to their lust of her? ...Look, it's also a kink and she enjoys it so much, but I also think there's some level of seeing strong people be powerless before her.

No matter how strong the hero might be, if they can't control their lust for her and she can control when sex happens, she's actually the more powerful one, right?

Again to underline: she also just really likes sex.

She would do this anyway.

But also it helps that it gives her a power trip, in my interpretation.

I have to be careful about how far to take this, though, because, like. It's really cool how unapologetically sex-having Medb is! She's very confident in herself as a valuable person who has lots and lots of sex. So I don't want to undercut it by giving some psychological reason for it!

But I think it influences who she chooses to chase and how she chooses to bed them, beyond just "muscles are hot okay."

Which leaves me with a third, repressed fear.....that's difficult, because Medb doesn't have a lot of fears, in my mind. She's extremely confident in her own value, so while she could probably USE to be slightly more fearful that people won't like her, she Does Not Care about it.

She loves being important, but she doesn't fear not being important, because she can't conceive of not being so. She hates to lose, but she doesn't fear losing so much as she's frustrated by losing.

She doesn't fear losing her beauty, because she's going to be hot forever if she has to squeeze beauty out of life itself.

Like there are a bunch of things in what I've read by looking around about Queen Medb's lore where I'd be scared after it, but I think she just gets angry.

I think I've got one, but I need to finish a battle in FGO so I can check her interlude text.

I think she is a little afraid of Ritsuka dying by the time she gets to higher bond levels. Near the end of her angry rant over losing in the interlude, she says,

"All you guys at Chaldea are just a bunch of wimps! Put me in charge and the restoration of humanity would be done in no time! And Ritsuka wouldn't have to go to the front lines, but fight from somewhere safe!"

I don't think it's a huge fear. If Ritsuka died, I think that Medb would move on no problem. But she wouldn't like it!

And that's a look under the hood of how I play Medb, despite the fact that 99% of the time I'm doing comedy.

I'M GLAD

Your Medb is a lot of fun and I am glad to read all of this /)'-'(\

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoy her, because I have a lot of fun being so very different from basically anyone else I've ever played.

Self-centred villain with a gigantic sex drive power!!

Leslie
4. Describe their worst nightmare.
...Like I mean literally you could just go to chapter 14 and look at the dream of being chased around by a Marquis Sperado made of flames and that's pretty bad, even if the marquis seems less frightening now that she's seen the Salvatores laugh at him and kick him out.

And it's like. Not even that far from the answer you're looking for.

I think that, by the time we get to the 20s for comic chapters, it would probably be -- like, fire is still a huge one. Don't get me wrong. But I think the bigger nightmare would be Marquis Sperado being able to legally reclaim her and the Salvatores aren't able to stop her from being taken back to that house, and then she has to live there again.

She is scared stiff of fire, so, like, if she got put in a fire again that would be basically the worst, but I think at this point, dying in a fire might not even be as bad as having to return to being under the Sperados' control and having to live like she had for the 12 years.

.......Fire is still a big one though.

21. What is something that causes them great anxiety?
AGAIN, FIRE IS THE EASY ANSWER (and yet I somehow put Leslie on a bonefire meme without thinking about it because when I look at the campfire picture on the page, I smile and think fondly of sitting around similar fires in the past lmao sorry Leslie).

.......Actually like it's probably faster to say what DOESN'T cause her great anxiety.

bonfire memes

I put Leslie on one and sent the link to my sibling because they wanted to tag with me and then as I was reading the description of the fire I went OH NO and talked to them about what they wanted. Since they wanted a less trauma-filled thing, I went with one of the AUs where she wasn't thrown in fire.

But yes, bonfire memes.

Anyway, hmm. Another example beyond fire is that she is extremely anxious about being inadequate. It got drilled into her head that she's inadequate, so when she is working with the new tutors she has with the Salvatores, there's a point early on in all three of them where there's a moment of silence as the tutor realizes what state Leslie's education is in

(with her brother, he realizes that she's better than a lot of the seniors at his academy; with her theology tutor, the tutor is just drinking some tea; with her etiquette tutor, she's realizing that Leslie's behaviour towards her is very subservient even though, once Leslie becomes the daughter of the Salvatores, there's only 5 women above her in rank),

and in that silence, each time, Leslie thinks that the silence is because she is inadequate (the first and last because she thinks she doesn't know enough for her age; the second because she thinks that if she fails at socializing with the member of an important family, it will reflect badly on the Salvatores).

And it gets very bad in her head until the tutor speaks up and clarifies that she's not inadequate. In fact, her brother who is tutoring her says that she could be called a genius for how well she knows languages, history, and especially philosophy at her age, her reaction is just "so I'm not inadequate" with a great deal of relief.

...but yeah fire will make her freak out in basically every form. She might be okay with candles.

(In the FE3H AUs, this gets replaced with a fear of dark, confined spaces, but the inadequate anxiety remains.)

5. List 3 fears; one “surface level” fear, one “repressed” fear, and one “deep dark” fear.
I am not going to let myself say fire this time.

I'll also cross off inadequacy, because I've discussed that one at length.

Her surface level fear...it's faded quite a bit in the latter half of the chapters I currently have access to, but she spent most of her life afraid of Marquis Sperado -- i.e. her birth father. He was someone who was, for most of her life, impossible to go against.

When she prepares to leave, she defies him several times, but I think that she would have still been terrified. She just couldn't afford to back down and powered through on anger.

And, like. This is a guy who flew into a rage and threw things at the servants when his plan to pretend that he was now loving and accepting and protecting her from her mother and sister when he had, like...as far as I can tell, it had been less than a week since he HIT HER IN THE STOMACH WITH THE BUTT OF A SPEAR INTO A HUGE FIRE AND TOLD HER TO DIE,

when that plan failed, he flew into a rage because his daughter defied him.

( o_o)

More recently, when he's thought about Leslie thinking "A daughter should listen to her father's words as if they were god's words!"

So like I expect that it'll take a while for that fear to completely drain, even if it helped when he brought some "kidnap specialists from the guild" (what the fuck is that even) to attack the Salvatore mansion to get Leslie back at a time when only the Duchess and Leslie were at home.

And then the duchess beat all of the thugs into the ground with what appeared to be just a thick wooden stick of some kind (it kind of looked like a wooden sword but it had no hilt), grabbed the Marquis by the arm, and told him it would be his neck if he tried that again while breaking his arm (and, we find out later, magicing it to not be magically healed),

And as she's told this story by her (adoptive and thus excellent) father and oldest brother, the dad calls the marquis an idiot for messing with his wife, and Leslie realizes that, while he seemed impossible to go against to her, to the Salvatores, he was just an idiot who they could kick around like nothing in a fight.

And it was a huge relief to her.

Let me see. Again, I'm going to go to deep dark fear next, because I've been interpreting this as a fear that underlies a lot of the character's actions, and I think a deep dark fear is that the Sperados will get away with this and just continue to do the same thing to the next generation.

Because oh yeah, throwing your younger kid into the fire in a magical ritual? It's an old family tradition.

Even though the ghosts of the previous children who saved her told her from the fire of the ritual that they wanted her to live, she believes that they gave her the magic she has in order to get vengeance on the Sperados for all that was done to them.

When the duchess says that she doesn't think that's why Leslie got saved by them, she legitimately cannot think of any other reason for a bunch of children who went through the same thing to want to save her.

She really thinks she has to get revenge on the Sperados for the sake of all of the victims, to the point that she thinks about using her magic to consume them with the shadows under her control, and the reason she doesn't is not that she thinks she couldn't do it -- it's that she thinks this isn't enough of a punishment for them.

She really does not want them to escape justice.

As for a repressed fear...this can be hard because her fears are often centre-stage in the comic, but I think I could say that one fear of hers is the idea that maybe she doesn't deserve to be loved. She wants to be treated as the Salvatore's real daughter, but she thinks she can't act spoiled like that for a long time.

I think she's starting to realize that this family loves her enough that she can actually be their daughter, but she really thought that she would only be able to rely on the fact that she made a contract with the duchess to trade the duchess's desire to adopt a daughter and the power Leslie holds for Leslie's request to be protected under adulthood.

(The duchess wanted to adopt a daughter because (for the adoption part) her oldest son is too much of a jock and her younger son is too brash for either to be able to run the Salvatore estate in the future and (for the daughter specifically) her husband really, really, really wanted a daughter.

The duchess has to talk her husband down from giving Leslie an entire floor of the mansion to just giving her a second room outside of her bedroom to be her personal room.

Her oldest is named Bethrion because the dad was so hoping for a daughter they'd already decided on the name Elizabeth.

This guy wants to spoil a daughter.

So like it's starting to get through to Leslie that she can relax a bit about it, but I also don't think she's entirely realized that she is allowed to be selfish or like a child.

So yeah, I think those would be some reasonable fears to put on that, but like. Leslie is so anxious, you guys. For obvious reasons because I think I could give as many ways she was abused as there are chapters, because new chapters come with a new way the Sperados are scumbags most of the time. Chapter 29, the last I read, had two real bad ones.

Thank you for the prompts, Terra, and I hope you enjoyed my standard expansive responses.

I did!

I LIKE READING PEOPLE'S META RAMBLINGS A LOT

I don't always have a lot of input but I think it's neat when people put a lot of thought into characters

It can be difficult to have much to say beyond “neat!” Or at least that’s what I find when I prompt others. But I appreciate the feedback you gave!

Also like I take about half an hour on the average tag, so I have to fill up that time with something so I think about my characters, haha.

I enjoyed reading a lot, for sure! and I mean I'm very used to sort of talking endlessly about character meta, haha

my gf used to be (lovingly) infamous among our friends because she could and would write long character essays on various topics back in the day of ljrp

LMAO I didn’t do it very often, but I did similar back in my ljrp days.

Long-winded life