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Gaius ; Tales of Xillia Series ([personal profile] bige) wrote2015-06-05 02:19 pm
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OOC INFO
_NAME: Senel
_PLURK: PM
_AGE: 24
_CURRENT/PAST CHARACTERS: N/A

Disclaimer: My computer decided to do this cute thing and make my "r" and "y" keys stop working while I was supposed to be writing this so if I didn't catch fixing any errors where I didn't notice the keyboard not working I'm very sorry.

IC INFO
_CHARACTER'S NAME: Erston Outway, King Gaius (title)
_CANON: Tales of Xillia Series
_CANON POINT: Tales of Xillia 2, Normal Ending
_CHARACTER'S (ACTUAL) AGE: 33
_CHARACTER'S (APPARENT) AGE: 33
_CHARACTER'S HAIR COLOR: Dark Brown
_TANAGURA (elite) OR MIDAS (mongrel)?: Mongrel, but I think it’s changed since I first wrote this so he’s an Elite now?
_HOUSING PREFERENCE: On the TDM, Jude ([personal profile] poppinpills) and Gaius decided to share an apartment in Eos Tower.

_HISTORY: In brief.

After becoming the king of Auj Oule, Gaius worked his way through each clan to support them and unify their country after centuries of unrest. At the start of the game, he is working on a way to take over the neighboring country of Rashugal because his power boner cannot be stopped. Nachtigal uses (or rather, Gillan uses) the Lance of Kresnik to destroy Hamil, Gaius calls to war. When the king of Rashugal, Nachtigal, dies he takes over the country. He uses his Chimeriad to obtain the Lance of Kresnik and with Muzét’s help he starts attacking Elympios too because they’re assholes and tried to kill everyone in Rieze Maxia. He kills Maxwell to try and take his seat as the Lord of Spirits. Gaius says a bunch of stuff about becoming a god. The first game ends when Milla and crew fight Gaius and Muzét and defeat him. He comes away from the experience humbled and orders them to make Rieze Maxia a better place if they will not let him save it in his own way.

In ToX2, Gaius is much more comical. Demoted from villain to playable character, Gaius is living in Elympios to try and understand their culture and a better way to get along with them (anything is better than trying to blow each other up though.) He goes incognito as Erston Outway, using his birth name to keep his true identity hidden. He does everything from playing with children to taking down “no less than three” crime syndicates. The narrative makes it obvious everyone knows who he is though. He helps Ludger, the new protagonist, go through Fractured Dimensions and obtain Divergence Catalysts so he can help to save both worlds with them all, knowing he can’t let Rieze Maxia suffer because of them. Through the course of the game and Gaius’s side story you find out he never really had any friends and he’s making his first few with Ludger’s help. He befriends a gang of young men and helps them learn about Rieze Maxia. Eventually they find out he’s the king, after they’ve all bad mouthed Rieze Maxia, and his cover is blown when he finds out one of them killed a Rieze Maxian soldier. They give him a camera as a token of their friendship and at the end of the game Gaius takes a picture of the whole party, telling the player that he’s become good friends with them all.

When they’re fighting Chronos and Bisley at the end and there’s a huge explosion Gaius is the only one who doesn’t get thrown back off screen he just stands there with his arms crossed that’s basically all you need to know about this guy. In the Bad End when Ludger attacks the party he’s the only human to survive.

_ABILITIES: All Artes

Gaius’s artes are based in Fire and Light mana, but most of his force is found in physical strike artes. He uses his nodachi (the proper term for his “katana,”) as an extension of himself and can strike precisely and deadly at any given time. Gaius is the Brick Wall of the team, being the sturdiest and the hardest to knock back. This also makes him slow to move across the field, though. He has some of the highest defense in the game and is one of the strongest attackers. He has an ability, Chivalry, that lets him take damage from others attacking who he’s linked to, bumping them out of the way so he can take the hit instead. When Gaius is K.O.’d in battle he has the longest animation of any one to fall over, like he’s struggling to stay up even with 0HP. Like… Gaius, calm down?

Lots of Gaius’s skills lie in oration. As king, he can give strong, motivational speeches to his people and lead his armies into battle headfirst. It’s also stated that Gaius beat the coliseum (a tradition upheld in Auj Oule every ten years to test the strength and ability of each clan, as well as to decide the ruling clan’s leader,) at age twelve without the use of a Lilium Orb… which is like what teaches them their artes and skills. It seems Gaius rolled out of the womb fighting. Being only 33 in canon and the notion that he won wars at only the age of 12, the idea that he had mastered or was fast tracked on his way to mastering his nodachi at that age is telling of his skill and his precision as a fighter. If he was using the same weapon at the time, he was twelve years old and still fighting (and winning) with a sword just over five feet long.

_PERSONALITY:

Gaius uses two names in canon, his birth name Erston and his title of Gaius. I’ll be using Gaius predominantly throughout this to be consistent and prevent any confusion.

Gaius is the straight man. In a room full of people with outrageous personalities, he’s probably one of the more serious and contemplative people there. He’s literal to a fault, making him hard to talk to at times. He takes things far too seriously because of this and it can be hugely comical. Some of the characters remark that he’s just like Milla Maxwell, referring to their bullheadedness and their bluntness, and he only wonders if it’s because they both wear something to the side of their head. As king, he’s focused on helping the people of Rieze Maxia as well as those in Elympios. He works hard, long hours to make the most of his time on the throne, both in his home city of Kanbalar and all over the world while he travels with Ludger. He mentions in a skit to Muzét and Ludger that he only gets one half hour of sleep a day due to all of his work taking all of his time. He ends up falling asleep standing up though, showing that it does take a lot out of him. While he has immense physical strength and endurance, he is still human. (They let him sleep for a while.) His seriousness definitely stems from having to grow up too quickly and this also adds to the notion he may be more socially inept than he lets on. For a king, he can get pretty nervous when it comes to personal matters.

His serious personality can get him into trouble too, especially when it comes to his younger sister Karla who dislikes how being king has made her older brother and wishes he would be more like the friendly child she once knew. When he was only twelve (Karla is probably two or four years younger than her brother) he went away to war and returned “King Gaius,” throwing away his old name to save her from harm in relation to him. His relationship with Karla is extremely strained because of this and while we never see them on screen together they do talk about each other. Karla mentions that Gaius is not so serious (and the second game proves this, which I talk about below) and Gaius says more than once that he’s frightened of his sister when she’s angry. Despite them both having been young, it’s also said that Gaius was extremely doting with his sister and spent a lot of his time playing with her and buying her things. This shows a softer side to the grumpy old king, and why he treats younger girls in the party like Elle and even Elize, later on, with more leniency and tends to side with their opinions.

The way Gaius treats his friendships show that he can’t open up to people, at least not for a long time. He’s closed himself off to avoid feeling that loss again and avoid hurting others in the same way he’s hurt his sister. Up until his character arc in the second game, Gaius treats people as way to earn gains or to use them as subordinates. This is how he treats the Chimeriad, who work for him in the first game. They attend to his every need, revere him, and yet he can’t comprehend that they are truly friends. He thinks of himself as their better, even if he respects them all the same. This is especially true with Wingul, his right hand man, who dies for him and he doesn’t even react to it immediately. He simply thinks, of course he died for me, that was his duty. He thinks of no one as his equal, beyond Milla Maxwell who is his rival in many ways. His relationship with her is not one of friendship either, but unadulterated competition due to their stubborn natures. After learning more about what it feels to be a companion rather than a leader, Gaius opens up more to the party and becomes more sensitive to their words and their feelings. At the end of the game, he takes a picture of everyone and decides that collecting his memories is more important than closing himself off to making any.

Because death is so common in Gaius’s life (or at least, his young life) he doesn’t connect to people well. When his father died, Gaius gave up on the current standing in Auj Oule and fought to bring down the Long Dau tribe. He saw so much death by the time he was fifteen, leading armies and slaughtering his foes, that he became mostly numb to it. This is just another reason that Gaius doesn’t consider his companions his friends, at least not for a long time. People die and leave and to become strong he had to overcome all of that and look beyond it. There’s nothing particularly angsty about Gaius’s feelings on death, it’s just that he knows it’s coming. Weak people die. Gaius is strong, and so he casts aside death. In doing so, he can’t relate well to others. Because he was introduced to death at such a young age, he grew a thick skin to almost everything. He proclaims himself king, and conquered all beneath him. Even when he has his close companions, the Chimeriad, he doesn’t consider them friends. He’s closest to them but he doesn’t get that they care about him out of passion and companionship rather than simple loyalty. He seems to combine a lot of emotions together into what he feels “loyalty” is and considers friendship just something that coincides with it. As king, he looks passed his personal relationships and instead cultivates ones that will help him move forward.

All that serious doesn’t mean Gaius isn’t outrageous though. He’s awkward when asked personal questions and sometimes even shy because of it. He won’t eat spicy food and has a picky sense of taste over all. Even catsup is too much flavor for him. He would rather eat food made for children and becomes the butt of a joke more than once for it. He has an insane sense of masculinity, being the first to jump into physical challenges and gets overly excited when they come to the Xian Du Coliseum for tag battles. He also gets extremely competitive at things like poker, and when Elle suggests that Rollo is a Cat Emperor and better than him he challenges the feline to a duel. For all his seriousness, and even if he was only being silly for Elle’s sake, a huge and grumpy guy like Gaius chasing a cat around for a battle is hilarious. All these things add into the fact that Gaius is a genuine, fun person unlike how we saw only his kingly powerful front in Tales of Xillia 1. We also see him being much kinder and gentler than his initial self. With Elle, he talks to her calmly and validates her opinions despite her being a child and talks with her at her own level. When he talks to her about Fractured Milla, he’s honest with her about what happened but he also helps to comfort her and help her think more positively. We also see him joking around in many of the skits, especially when Muzét is involved. One of them will say something ridiculous and the other will go along with it, like telling Ludger that he and Milla fought the boss battles at the end of Tales of Xillia 1 by wrestling and he lost by tapping out of a suplex. (None of this ever happened.)

Gaius’s mentality can be divided pretty simply; these things are weak but useble, these things are strong but not as strong as me, and these things are as strong as me and I like these things. He cannot understand weak people, but he knows he can use them to his advantage. Weak people need protection and he can respect them as a whole, as any good king would do for his subjects. In the first game this is extremely apparent with the characters Jude Mathis and Elize Lutus. Gaius perceives Jude as weak for simply following at Maxwell’s bidding and not siding with who will ultimately win (of course, Gaius is just so sure that’s him.) Gaius perceives Elize as weak because she’s been so traumatized by her upbringing and the effect that Jiao’s death has on her. The difference, however, is clear. Jude is of use to Gaius. He has a strong mind and a willing body, able to push himself to his limits for others. He has the skill to fix the problems in Rieze Maxia and, later, Elympios and Gaius can see the potential in him. In Elize, unfortunately, Gaius thinks of her as a lost cause. When he was twelve, like her, he conquered tribes and fought his battles to the fullest and won and won and never lost. A crying little girl is not strong or useful to him and he even sends her to her death whereas he offers Jude a chance to fight at his side instead. Even if he eventually learns to trust Elize and become friends with her, he views her in this way outside of a personal level. Above all, Gaius values strength. He doesn’t think that many people as close to being as strong as him and those that are as strong as him he puts at a level of competition rather than one of respect. Only Milla Maxwell truly earns his respect in the end.

Sometimes Gaius can be nervous. With Leia, who wants to interview the big bad king of Rieze Maxia, he prefers not to tell her anything. She hounds him relentlessly and he tries to kind of… scoot out of the picture. He doesn’t like talking about his personal life at all. This makes more people see him as just a stone cold ruffian type, literally called the “barbarian king” at times by those in Rashugal. This is disproven by his people in Kanbalar though, Auj Oule’s capital. They’re loyal to their king to a fault and he listens to the needs of the people daily, setting aside time to meet with them and hear them speak. He’s a gentle ruler, despite his hostile takeover, and after Rashugal is overtaken by him in the war with Auj Oule the general consensus is basically, “oh, he’s so nice!” It’s a pretty quick flip, especially with how happy everyone seems with the set up in the second game, but Gaius has obviously been making huge efforts to make that happen. He goes around with Rowen, his prime minister, observing the people in both Elympios and Rieze Maxia under the guise of his real name to see how the average person lives and dies. He humbles himself in the second game this way.

_ITEMS:

All of his outfits, his nodachi, and a camera with extra film.

WRITING SAMPLES

_GEN SAMPLE:

In progress on the TDM

_SMUT SAMPLE:

PSL
really super in character anon dare challenge meme
I'm sorry these are all with castmates

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I ACKNOWLEDGE THAT MY CHARACTER IS THE FOLLOWING:
_SENTIENT: Yes
_MENTALLY ADULT: Yes
_CAPABLE OF CONSENT: Yes
_CAPABLE OF SEXUAL AROUSAL: Yes