Who's your favourite character and why? (Spoilers)

Clouded Veil

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Apr 11, 2022
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If you know me well, I don't think you have to ask who mine is! x'D

If you don't, it's Albedo. ❤️

I'm curious to hear what everyone's favourite character is and why?
I haven't been able to fully digest everything, and maybe by hearing everyones opinions, it'd help open me up into researching and understanding the other characters. Beyond the URTV's themselves.
 
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I see another Albedo Enjoyer. Good taste. He's a very entertaining villain and one of my favorites. The URTV Dynamic is my favorite.

As I have grown older, I find myself relating to Shion a lot more as well. I (unfortunately) don't have a special robot woman in my life, but I do relate to being a burnt out and traumatized adult.

chaos is very chill and Ziggy is best dad.
 
Jr.'s always been my favorite, though I love him more as part of the web of relationships that form the Kukai Foundation than as a lone character. Though I will never not think he's darling. XD And I find his bibliophilia utterly charming.

I've become very fond of the Godwin Sisters, probably a side effect of writing about them. But their devotion to Jr. and Gaignun, and to each other, is just beautiful.

I have a deep affection for Ziggy as well, and love his father/daughter dynamic with MOMO. (When I think of Ziggy, the very first thing that comes to mind is him asking MOMO if she has another name she'd rather be called by: she was never a chore or burden.)

Ziggy is best dad.

I cherish a headcanon that Jr. secretly also views Ziggy as a father-figure. :D Jr. might lock horns with Ziggy, but Ziggy's input matters very much!

My affections for the other characters tend to shift with my moods.
 
Jr.'s always been my favorite, though I love him more as part of the web of relationships that form the Kukai Foundation than as a lone character. Though I will never not think he's darling. XD And I find his bibliophilia utterly charming.

I've become very fond of the Godwin Sisters, probably a side effect of writing about them. But their devotion to Jr. and Gaignun, and to each other, is just beautiful.

I have a deep affection for Ziggy as well, and love his father/daughter dynamic with MOMO. (When I think of Ziggy, the very first thing that comes to mind is him asking MOMO if she has another name she'd rather be called by: she was never a chore or burden.)



I cherish a headcanon that Jr. secretly also views Ziggy as a father-figure. :D Jr. might lock horns with Ziggy, but Ziggy's input matters very much!

My affections for the other characters tend to shift with my moods.
Yeah I agree, I still mentally argue with myself every day on who's the cooler twin x'D. Jr.'s badass and awesome, on the other hand Albedo is awesome too but in a godly/fearful way. There's so many reasons why I love these two, but yet those reasons conflict with each other.
 
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I like Albedo too(Maybe because I sometimes will be a little evil and crazy.)

KOS-MOS is always my favorite character...Even when I didn't even get into XS (I've been in love with her since I first saw her in XB2!)

And since I finished playing XS1 and watching XS2 and making a fan writing plan with Xie, Nephilim is also a character I like because she is very kind, understands her people, and more probably because of her mystery .
 
This may be slightly obvious to anyone who's suffered through hearing me talk about it, but I fell in love with Ziggy the first time I played XSI, in 2003-04, and I would say that he's my favorite fictional character in any media ever. :V I love characters who are surrogate/adoptive dad figures, and who look intimidating but are actually super chill and compassionate, so he's kind of my ideal for those archetypes.

I also feel like I can relate to him on a personal level, because
I've struggled a lot with self-destructive thoughts, particularly in my late teens and early twenties when I was dealing with mental illness on top of body image issues and gender dysphoria in college, and I worked out some of it indirectly by drawing/writing about him. I always thought that the way Ziggy wanted to erase himself by having his memories wiped and becoming a "machine" was a pretty good analogy for how I felt at the time. I could also sympathize with him being embarrassed of his appearance (even though I think he's attractive and I kinda wish I were 6'3" with robo legs too). orz
Also, in Pied Piper he apologizes for apologizing too much and if that ain't the most relatable thing ever.

I also love MOMO and Juli and their chosen-family dynamic with Ziggy and the rest of the cast. Since I grew up in a pretty dysfunctional family, it means a lot to me when a bunch of traumatized people get together and make their own weird family and actually make it work, and I love that as a theme in Xenosaga generally.

More recently, and in particular since talking to Elendraug, I've started to appreciate Jr. and Gaignun and the Foundation side of the family more than I used to. (Which is weird, because as a 4'10" adult who constantly gets mistaken for a teenager despite being Cherenkov years old, and treated like a little kid even by people who know better, you'd think I'd have gravitated toward Jr. first.) I love Jr.'s and Gaignun's relationship, and I love what the Kukai Foundation stands for and the work they do to protect the most marginalized and outcast people in Xenosaga's universe.

Also, speaking of Cherenkov, he's another one of my favs for extremely relatable reasons, and his last scene with Shion has some of my favorite dialogue in the entire series. ;A;

... I could go on for a while, but this is probably tl;dr enough already. orz
 
I love everyone on the Foundation because they are leftists who protect systemically exploited, vulnerable people from religious zealots

I may have clunkily attempted to articulate something to this effect on the 20th anniversary episode of Xenochat, but really does feel as though the political and social themes in the series keep getting more relevant with time (see also uhh *gestures vaguely at all of Pied Piper*). Talking to you about the Foundation has definitely helped me to appreciate them even more. I think part of why I'm still drawn to these stories and characters after all this time is that there's so much there that's relevant and relatable even 20 years later that it feels prophetic, as good science fiction generally does.
 
This may be slightly obvious to anyone who's suffered through hearing me talk about it, but I fell in love with Ziggy the first time I played XSI, in 2003-04, and I would say that he's my favorite fictional character in any media ever. :V I love characters who are surrogate/adoptive dad figures, and who look intimidating but are actually super chill and compassionate, so he's kind of my ideal for those archetypes.

I also feel like I can relate to him on a personal level, because
I've struggled a lot with self-destructive thoughts, particularly in my late teens and early twenties when I was dealing with mental illness on top of body image issues and gender dysphoria in college, and I worked out some of it indirectly by drawing/writing about him. I always thought that the way Ziggy wanted to erase himself by having his memories wiped and becoming a "machine" was a pretty good analogy for how I felt at the time. I could also sympathize with him being embarrassed of his appearance (even though I think he's attractive and I kinda wish I were 6'3" with robo legs too). orz
Also, in Pied Piper he apologizes for apologizing too much and if that ain't the most relatable thing ever.

I also love MOMO and Juli and their chosen-family dynamic with Ziggy and the rest of the cast. Since I grew up in a pretty dysfunctional family, it means a lot to me when a bunch of traumatized people get together and make their own weird family and actually make it work, and I love that as a theme in Xenosaga generally.

More recently, and in particular since talking to Elendraug, I've started to appreciate Jr. and Gaignun and the Foundation side of the family more than I used to. (Which is weird, because as a 4'10" adult who constantly gets mistaken for a teenager despite being Cherenkov years old, and treated like a little kid even by people who know better, you'd think I'd have gravitated toward Jr. first.) I love Jr.'s and Gaignun's relationship, and I love what the Kukai Foundation stands for and the work they do to protect the most marginalized and outcast people in Xenosaga's universe.

Also, speaking of Cherenkov, he's another one of my favs for extremely relatable reasons, and his last scene with Shion has some of my favorite dialogue in the entire series. ;A;

... I could go on for a while, but this is probably tl;dr enough already. orz
Ziggy is one of those characters that I really want to write, but I can never get more than 95 words on the draft.
Complicated characters are really difficult, even doing my regular research for kinda got me stumped since in the game there's so many relationships and connections, it pretty much fried up my brain. Eventually, I only ended up learning about his "stepson" if that's correct, and Sharon his wife. Correct me if I'm wrong.
 
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He can be pretty challenging to write! I think part of it is that his backstory isn't integrated as much with the main story, and it only really gets explained in Pied Piper and the XSIII database, so it tends to feel peripheral or like a detour from the plot. (I kinda wish XSIII had gone more into his connections with the founder of Scientia, and/or Voyager's connections with Yuriev, because those are directly relevant to the action in XSIII, but it doesn't really get brought up in that context.)

The other thing I've struggled with is how to convey his emotions since he's very understated in his expression of them, and it's easy to mistake that for him being emotionless or robotic. (TMI again, but I guess I also kind of relate to him because I'm neurodivergent and I have some difficulty explaining or describing my own feelings verbally, so my mood at any given time is either "neutral?" or "VOYAGEEEEERRRRRR!!!!!")

One thing I actually found helpful early on was his profile in the Official Design Materials for XSI, where they talk about the main characters' Enneagram types and how a lot of Ziggy's basic motivations derive from wanting to be calm and at peace. I'm a bit skeptical about imposing arbitrary categories on things like personality, but it does help as a kind of shorthand to keep in the back of your mind for "how would this character instinctively react in this situation?"

As far as relationships, it might help to focus on the ones that are relevant to whatever you're writing, rather than feeling like you have to know every detail about everyone. It's difficult with Ziggy, because a lot of people he knew in the past either aren't alive anymore or he doesn't remember or recognize them, but those relationships can still inform how he interacts with other characters in the present. For instance, in XSI we see pretty early on that his feelings about his stepson Joaquin are reflected in the way he acts toward MOMO, even if he doesn't completely remember what happened to his family in the past. Or, like, knowing that he was a captain of the Federation Police in his former life and that he took responsibility for his subordinates, you can see him being protective and supportive of his allies in the present day.

If you do want to research his backstory in more depth, the fan translation of Pied Piper is a good place to start, although it's pretty text-heavy. There's also a playthrough of the actual game that someone uploaded to YouTube a few years ago, and a fan manga adaptation by Forest which has been partly translated (thank you Valkyrie!!). Hope some of that helps! (And oops, I tl;dr'ed again.)
 
I like Albedo too(Maybe because I sometimes will be a little evil and crazy.)

KOS-MOS is always my favorite character...Even when I didn't even get into XS (I've been in love with her since I first saw her in XB2!)

And since I finished playing XS1 and watching XS2 and making a fan writing plan with Xie, Nephilim is also a character I like because she is very kind, understands her people, and more probably because of her mystery .
My favorite character is like my avatar - nephilim, and for the reason @writing brush said, she is mysterious and gentle.
I also like KOSMOS. There is also a very interesting story: when I was in junior high school, I joined the VEX robot competition team in Zhejiang Province. In 2019, before the epidemic, I went abroad for the last competition (and the last time I went abroad),
Went to the Texas game in the US, during the game, when we were taking a break, I saw a lot of magazines placed next to them, and since they were all in English, no one wanted to touch them except me and one other person them
, but in my magazine, there was a story about robots appearing in fictional games/novels/movies, and KOSMOS was seen among them, but there seemed to be a big problem with the information in that magazine at that time, but she still left it to me
left a deep impression. She is so beautiful and perfect that there is a huge gap between the big things in our game, so, from then on, I fell in love with her!
 
I like Albedo too(Maybe because I sometimes will be a little evil and crazy.)
Very relatable ;)

I like Albedo too(Maybe because I sometimes will be a little evil and crazy.)

KOS-MOS is always my favorite character...Even when I didn't even get into XS (I've been in love with her since I first saw her in XB2!)
I also like KOSMOS. There is also a very interesting story: when I was in junior high school, I joined the VEX robot competition team in Zhejiang Province. In 2019, before the epidemic, I went abroad for the last competition (and the last time I went abroad),
Went to the Texas game in the US, during the game, when we were taking a break, I saw a lot of magazines placed next to them, and since they were all in English, no one wanted to touch them except me and one other person them
, but in my magazine, there was a story about robots appearing in fictional games/novels/movies, and KOSMOS was seen among them, but there seemed to be a big problem with the information in that magazine at that time, but she still left it to me
left a deep impression. She is so beautiful and perfect that there is a huge gap between the big things in our game, so, from then on, I fell in love with her!
I think KOS-MOS has such an allure to her, she has one of the single best designs in gaming. There's a reason why she has endured all this time even as the series has faded. I remember first seeing her in a Game Informer magazine (may have even been the same one who knows!). Years later my mom got me the game when it was on sale cheap bc she knew I liked anime looking games. She has stuck with me all this time.
 
KOS-MOS. Easily. She’s such an interesting character over the course of the trilogy. Whether she’s being an absolute badass or learning more about humanity, she was just awesome to see throughout one of the best pieces of fiction ever (and easily one of the best trilogies ever). She’s also legitimately the reason I’m happy in life right now because ever since seeing her on the Elsa in Episode 1, I’ve been deeply in love with her.
 
With KOS-MOS I feel there was potential for much more, for much of the first 2 episodes (IIRC, it's been a while since I last played XS) she was just there but didn't have much development.

I think a lot of it was probably in buildup to the later episodes so we may have lost the best parts.

I liked Ziggy for mostly the same reasons as whyfish.
 
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