phantasmods | APPLICATIONS

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IC Information

Character name: Asch ~~the Bloody~~ - he's really rather redacted that last bit
Character canon: Tales of the Abyss + LifeAftr CRAU
Canon point: DEAD + after all his LifeAftr adventures
Physical Description: A somewhat short (by JRPG protagonist standards) boy in his late teens, with green eyes, generally European features, and brilliant crimson hair hanging to his waist. He usually secures the hair up these days with an assortment of Very Long cactus spines, and prefers to dress in loose clothes (tunics and the like) over tights and boots. Muscular of the strength over speed variety, actually has a six pack, fat chance of you seeing it since he rarely uncovers anything but his hands and head. Yuri Lowenthal/English voice, tending to be a bit rough; headcanon for accent is "vaguely musical, drawls things out when stressed/relaxed enough that his Kimlascan accent comes out."
About the Character: Original LA app - LA thread tracker + CR chart - please note that I didn't bother updating his last round of inventory stuff.

To summarize the canonical bits: Asch is a teenage not!prince who was born because a prophecy some lady made two thousand years before he was born said that if he was born, his kingdom would reach 'unprecedented prosperity.' As a part of that prophecy, he "inherits the power of Lorelei" aka has the power of the only god-being of the setting that actually appears in the game. Also, he's supposed to use that power to destroy himself and a city at the age of seventeen.

Understandably, his family doesn't tell him this.

Instead, Asch finds out the whole thing from his swordmanship instructor in the aftermath of a horribly traumatic kidnapping in which he was hooked to a magitech machine in order to create a perfect living replica of him - a perfect replica aside from thoughts and memories, anyway. This replica would be sent back to the royal family in place of the real "Luke," who Van wanted unrestricted access to for his own plots and purposes. Given the name Asch at that time, the traumatized 9-10 year old was taken to the religious city of Daath, and Various Forms of Isolating Psychological Abuse happened over the next approximately seven years.

Cut to game start, where Asch, now seventeen, the Commander of Oracle Knights Special Operations (under Van's thumb), has his first encounter with the replica now called Luke. Who... doesn't exactly leave a good impression, but this isn't about Luke's character arc. Suffice it to say that he's a total brat and Asch tries multiple times to kill him out of misdirected anger and need to avenge the life that was stolen from him by Van.

And then there's Akzeriuth - where Van uses Luke to fulfill the prophecy re: destroying the town and kickstarting the war that follows - and I'm not summarizing the whole of the rest of Tales of the Abyss here because we'll be here all day. If you want all the dirty details I've got seven thousand words about it on my journal, so we'll boil it down to this:

After dueling Luke a final time in the final dungeon in order to decide which of them has control over their collective identities (and losing), Asch dies, his character development painfully neglected by the bit of a clusterfuck that the characterization of pretty much everyone at the end of Abyss turned into. Aside from growing more intensely stressed and, as a result, more aggressive, Asch does not much change from the beginning of Abyss to the end; every time he seems to be on the cusp of growth, he self-sabotages himself with one of his other myriad of issues.

Aaaaand then he wakes up on a tropical island jamjar surrounded by strangers from other worlds, and has to figure out where the fuck to go from there.

Over his time at LA, and in particular due to the nature of Storytelling and the memory sharing event, Asch began to find commonalities with people from other worlds (most notably Ardyn and Akechi), and, as a result, began the slow process of opening up and learning to trust people again, in a way he never bothered to in canon. Ardyn, in particular, was unintentionally an extremely validating force simply by doing what he does best (getting angry); while to him, the expression of the one emotion he could normally feel wasn't particularly noteworthy, for Asch it was the first time anyone had really gotten angry about the whole thing on his behalf, rather than on Luke's or their own.

The month and a half that followed on the island of Monsun, which brought out characters' best traits on one half of the island and their worst traits on the other, cemented the development of Asch trying to overcome the barriers to trust that Van left him with on a conscious level - because at his best, he didn't have those issues, and at his worst he was downright paranoid and aggressive and generally a danger to be around other people. Though Asch kept up a relatively nomadic lifestyle in the name of gathering supplies and just having an intense wanderlust born of "I ran around the entire planet and now you expect me to stay here?," he kept in close contact with the desert camp on the positive traits side of Monsun. This period solidified his weird, Asch-is-afraid-of-paternal-attachment relationship with Ardyn (who was... considerably changed by having his daemonic side suppressed on the island) as well as his friendships with Ignis and Muffet.

The other notable bit of CR from this time period was Xion/Aster and, eventually, Shion - themselves CRAUs from Tower of Animus, where they had known a different version of Asch and been very close with him. In a callback to Animus Asch himself deciding to trust Luke because his future self had (because I also played Asch at Animus and I love callbacks), the Asch on the islands made the decision to trust in his other self's judgement and started up a (somewhat awkward, a bit hesitant) friendship with the two.

The last event that Asch participated in at LA was a sort of wish-granting event that granted a character's subconscious desires - in Asch's case, the desire to see what happened to Auldrant after his death. This was ultimately a bit of a Madoka Wish for him (if the shoe fits, call it a duck), as while it did reveal that Van had been defeated, it also revealed that Asch's family erected a grave for him under the name of 'Luke,' even as they held out hope for his replica's impossible return from death. Feeling thus that his family had neglected his own identity as Asch, and generally scorned overall, Asch cut ties with his blood family in terms of his own regard for them. Ironically, where he once considered Luke an imposter and nuisance at best, as things stand now, Luke is likely the only person Asch would acknowledge as any sort of blood family (though that is, of course, tenuous based on whatever might happen should he actually ever encounter his replica again).

The lack of save-the-world pressure hanging over his head at LA gave Asch a chance to mellow a bit; additionally, the fact that his own death on Auldrant is come and gone has allowed him to finally let go of the need to carry duty to the world on his shoulders. Or, at least, try, as it's hard to let go of something that's been ingrained in you since birth, as first a royal heir, then as Van's chosen tool for saving the world, and then finally as one of the only people who could stop that 'salvation.' Asch finally has the freedom to work some of his shit out as a result, and he's been... trying, mostly out of a resolve to get closer to that 'best self' he had on Monsun, the one capable of laughing and having friends. But that doesn't leave him without many, many issues (in particular, the father-figure issues that he refused to confront in his relationship with Ardyn, and his inability to accept that most people are kind simply because they want to help, not because they're out to take advantage of you), but... Well, he's a work in progress.

Good luck, kid.

APPLICATIONS

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