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ddd_news2012-01-01 12:59 pm
tripled_mods) wrote in ddd_news2012-01-01 12:59 pmAPPLICATIONS | 2012; 01
THIS APPLICATIONS POST IS CLOSED. Please direct your attention to the new one here!
tripled_mods) wrote in ddd_news2012-01-01 12:59 pm
Kotomine Kirei | Fate/Zero | Reserved 1/2
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Email: boxofgrenades@gmail.com
AIM: bardwithnoname
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Are you at least 15?: Yup
Current Characters: The Fifth Doctor, Regulus Black, Marceline
Character: Kotomine Kirei
Fandom: Fate/Zero
Character Notes: MASSIVE SPOILERS BELOW
History:
Kotomine Kirei could’ve had a very successful life. No, really. He was top of his class in university, and excelled at almost any academic subject thrown at him. He even graduated two years ahead of schedule. But just when all the dominoes were all lined up, just waiting for Kirei to hit them, he walked away from the game entirely. He hopped from job to job in a haphazard, meaningless fashion. None of the above success brought him any joy, and the emptiness growing inside him couldn’t be ignored any long. From a very young age, Kirei knew something was wrong with him, and not even the frequent trips with his father Risei to holy grounds made a bit of difference.
So he married someone. Her first name’s not known, but her surname’s Hortensia. He thought that maybe finding a supposed love would help. Hortensia was terminally ill, even before Kirei walked into the picture, and he picked her purposefully for his... little experiment. He even had a daughter with her. And, indeed, if Kirei were a normal sort of person, that might be the end of the story. It isn’t, because for all the love and faith shown to him, all he wanted was to hurt them. His wife helped. Tried her best, even. But even she couldn’t close the gaps in his heart, a fact that Kirei was keenly aware of. This caused Kirei to despair entirely, and he even planned to commit suicide.
He went to tell her, claiming that he couldn’t love her. She protested and beat him to the punch, killing herself in front of him. He cried. Not out of grief, but because he didn’t get to kill her. Not very long after this, a few days at the most, three command spells appeared on his hand. Kirei knew absolutely no magic whatsoever at this point, making him an astonishingly rare Master. Tohsaka Tokiomi, a friend of his father’s, agreed to teach him magic. Tokiomi planned to use Kirei as a subordinate throughout the entire war, using the servant Assassin. Kirei agreed to this, as he had no idea what wish he would even make on the grail, or why he had been chosen at all. For three years, he trained under Tokiomi, only showing clear aptitude for healing spells.
On cusp of the Fourth Holy Grail War, Kirei found something worth focusing on. No, not the grail, but another Master, one named Emiya Kiritsugu. From the information and rumors spread about Kiritsugu and the disasters left in his wake, Kirei became fascinated by what such a man would wish for. Not only that, but he believed Kiritsugu to be exactly like him, incapable of finding happiness and seeking death. Thus, he planned to face Kiritsugu during the war about to ensue to ask him what the worth of a worthless being is.
He summoned Assassin as planned. His opening move in the war was to order him to attack Tokiomi. Assassin then proceeded to get turned into dust and splinters by Gilgamesh, Tokiomi’s Archer class Servant. This was, in fact, entirely the point of the plan. Assassin is something of a hivemind, where there’s multiple copies and versions. However, with his apparent servant removed from the picture, Kirei sought protection from the church. The one his Father operates. You following along with this?
Alright, ‘cause this is where the fun starts. Gilgamesh, out of boredom and disdain for Tokiomi, wanders off and finds Kirei’s wine stash. The two start chatting, and Gilgamesh probes Kirei for what he wants from the Grail. Kirei claims he couldn’t wish for something so sinful, causing Gilgamesh to raise his eyebrows and add 2 + 2 together to get ‘Kirei is kind of fucked up’. He encourages Kirei to live a little. There’s some everything related innuendo here. Still, at Gilgamesh’s pushing, he starts digging into the various Masters and what they want out of the Grail. He reports these findings to Gilgamesh later on, spending way too much time focusing on Matou Kariya. Kariya basically only gets his powers from sadness and worms, and isn’t too much of a threat. Yet, if you hear Kirei tell it, this guy was the heart and soul of the entire Grail War.
He clashes with Team Kiritsugu a few times, once to call them out on planting a familiar to spy on the church and once during a clusterfuck of a battle in the forest by their castle. The Grail War continues on, and when Tokiomi decides to find out just how strong Rider’s Noble Phantasm is, Kirei sends his assassins to zerg rush him. It works well enough, proving that Rider’s made of kickassery and loyalty, but this causes Kirei to be booted from the war.Before he gets time off enough to enjoy it, or even last one conversation without Gilgamesh tempting him, the command spells re-appear on his hand. It seems that the Grail really, really wants Kirei to stick around.
Another clusterfuck of a battle happens, this time vs Caster who’s gone all Lovecraft on a river and his Master, Uryuu Ryuunosuke. Kirei doesn’t take part in the battle, however, Tokiomi and Kariya have a showdown that ends with burninating Kariya in the face. Now, a loyal partner would just let Kariya die. Heck, it’s probably the right thing to do, as it’d put him out of his misery. Instead, Kirei heals him. He isn’t sure why he does this, or why he feels so happy about it, but as his inner demons start piling up, he decides to go to the church and talk with his father.
He doesn’t get the chance to find out what Risei would’ve said. He’s dead by the time he gets there. Risei entrusts the remaining command spells, a very large surplus in fact, solely to him. Kirei doesn’t take it very well, putting it mildly. The revelation that he’s been trying to deny for the better part of his life comes knocking, and this time there’s nobody around to answer the door for him. All it takes is one last push, in the form of Tokiomi almost sending him away from the war entirely, for him to start making moves to qualify him for villain song status.
Gilgamesh never much liked Tokiomi. However, it takes a little bit more convincing to get Archer to voluntarily not protect the guy supplying him with mana at the moment. Kirei, luckily enough, has just such a trump card in his back pocket: Tokiomi was planning to use his command spells to kill Gilgamesh at the end of the War, so he could inherit the Grail. Kirei also has that above mentioned pile of command spells just waiting around for an excuse. And thus Team Yuetsu is born. Kirei literally stabs Tokiomi in the back with the very dagger he’d just been entrusted as a sign of friendship, and Gilgamesh becomes his servant.
And for the afterparty, Kirei even produces a play. He has Kariya use Berserker’s abilities to pretend to be Rider and kidnap Kiritsugu’s wife. In exchange, he offers to set up a meeting with Tokiomi for Kariya. He makes good on his promise. It’s just he left out that Tokiomi’s dead at the time. Tokiomi’s wife, Aoi, shows up at the exact same time Kariya realizes he was set up, and the end result is choking and brain damage for Aoi and the last splinters of Kariya’s sanity going up in smoke. Matou Zouken figures out what Kirei’s up to, and stalks him on the rooftop to gloat about Kariya’s misery. Kirei hasn’t entirely given up on his conscience just yet, so he finds Zouken reprehensible and launches a wolverine knife at him. Doesn’t work, due to various plotty reasons, but the intent’s clear enough.
So after god knows how many paragraphs of tl;dr, we arrive at the ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny: Kirei vs Kiritsugu. Kirei snaps during a talk with Irisviel, and he retaliates by snapping her neck. See, she revealed that Kiritsugu loves her, and Kirei sort of spent the last 23 episodes trying to convince himself otherwise. So, now he wants nothing more than to kick Kiritsugu’s ass until he cries. And it actually seems to work fairly well. We’re talking dodging bullets at triple speed. But then the entire battlefield gets drenched in Evil Grail Juice, and while begging to allow the evil in the grail to be born, Kiritsugu shoots him in the back.
Luckily, the evil grail juice provides Kirei with an extra life. Yay! All it cost him was his heart, which works because he never had one anyway. Kirei finds Gilgmesh in the aftermath of the massive destruction/fireball caused by Kiritsugu attempting to destroy the Grail. He has an hysterical breakdown over it, as he believes this destruction is what he wished for. He spots Kiritsugu in the wreckage, a completely broken man, and Kirei lets him go.
Oh, and he makes Tohsaka Rin cry at Tokiomi’s funeral, when he gifts her the dagger Tokiomi got shanked with. What a bastard.
Personality:
Kotomine Kirei begins dull eyed and blank faced. In fact, it’s entirely possible to forget he even exists in the early episodes. He’s very calm, to the point of appearing robotic. He very seldom talks, and when he does, it’s almost always relatively brief and composed. He even has quite a few doormat tendencies, best demonstrated as his willingness to play second fiddle to Tokiomi. More often than not, Tokiomi’s the one telling him how to use Assassin, and more often than not, he listens. He has beats and rhythms, but on the whole and on the balance, he appears as a non-entity in his own story to begin with.
Kirei is a very thoughtful person. This applies in a few distinct ways: he thinks carefully about what he says, and he thinks carefully in general. He picks his words, rather than having the words come to him. He has a rampant, incessant internal monologue, and it often feels as if he’s only voicing part of it. Philosophy in general seems to interest him, if his chats with Gilgamesh are any indication. He puts great weight on the matters of good, evil, happiness, humanity, choice, you name it, he’s probably got a treatise brewing about it. If he’s not voicing it, he’s probably at the very least thinking it. He’s greatly driven by a desire to understand and be understood, to the point that he’s more interested in what various people will do with the Holy Grail than the Grail itself.
He’s an empty sort of person, and he’s desperate to find something that fulfills him. He’s tried quite a lot of things, most notably the church, his wife, and his father. He’s noted to be an excellent student, but every time he gets close to the top of the class, he disengages. When he gets his Master calling, he proclaims that he has no idea what he wants with the Grail. Even by the end of the series, grail goo interference nonwithstanding, he’s still more concerned with the wishes that can be made with it than a wish for himself. His philosophizing mostly concerns his nature, the isolated existence he leads. Whenever he does find something to latch onto, he gets very single minded to the point of misjudgement. For example, he’s utterly convinced that Kiritsugu is exactly like him, and every bit of evidence that goes against that just serves to spin his hope into hatred.
Of course, he knows damn well what he wants. To see other people suffer. Nothing else brings him joy. It doesn’t matter if it’s trolling via ugly outfits or outright murder, betrayal, and destruction. If people are hurt, and he caused it, it makes him happy. He’s like a black hole. He’s especially good at false reassurances, because he tends to know things other people don’t, and uses that hole against them. For example, he agrees to set up a meeting with Kariya and Tokiomi, and indeed he makes good on his word. Only. Well. Minor detail? Tokiomi’s dead, because Kirei killed him, and the consequences of that meeting lead to brain damage and even further sanity slippage. It’s like the second he decides to stop denying the evil side of him, all bets are off, and within maybe an hour of him starting to shine, he’s crippled half the cast in one way or another.
The only thing worse than being born evil? Being born evil with a conscience. He’s completely and perfectly aware of how messed up he is. It seems that deaths of people close to him hit really hard, if in entirely different ways. Because he can’t love them, their deaths make him sad because he didn’t get the chance to kill them himself. It’s these little realizations that occur after the deaths of his wife and his father that push him down the path he takes. With his wife, there’s the final sign that if he wanted gentle, he could’ve had it, but instead wanted nothing but to hurt her. It’s also worth noting that even ten years after fate/zero, way into /stay night, Kirei still doesn’t even know what he feels regarding his wife. As for his father, he didn’t understand him to begin with, so his death doesn’t drive him so much to despair as to fuck it, I’ll be evil.
Because of this conscience, he starts completely convinced he doesn’t deserve to be happy. When asked outright by Gilgamesh what his wish would be, he says he could never bring himself to want something so sinful. If he were anyone else in the world, this would just be a massive guilt complex. However, since Kirei is an emotional black hole, he isn’t overstating his case in the slightest. Even after he jumps off the moral event horizon, he still has this conscience to him. For example, he almost never justifies the outright evil actions he takes, like the above mentioned Kariya mindscrew or killing Irisviel or murdering Tokiomi. What he instead tries to do is justify his own existence in the first place. He does this by identifying with and defending Angra Mainyu. When the grail actually does corrupts him, and he sees the destruction his wish has wrought, he shifts to more end of the world special type villainy, but he never loses the core of his focus:
2/2
To be understood. This may explain why he hangs out with Gilgamesh so much, as at the time they meet, Kirei has spent years and years trying to deny himself his schadenfreudey happiness and Gilgamesh figures that out in about five lines of dialogue. In fact, it can be said that Gilgamesh is his sparkly salvation. Gilgamesh is the first person to not only understand him, but to accept him for who he is, darkness and all. He does try to resist the clear temptation plot brewing, but it's practically impossible. Kirei's never been as happy in his entire life as when he starts becoming true to himself, and Gilgamesh is the one who encourages and supports and prods this revelation.
The central motivation to be understood doesn't go away, however. Even after being bathed in Evil Grail Juice. This is also why he pins so much hope onto Kiritsugu, because he believes the latter to be exactly like him. He doesn’t understand how someone like him could be allowed to be born, so he seeks out someone that matches him to find out if his entire life wasn’t just a mistake. And when Kiritsugu is shown to be capable of love, something that Kirei wants so desperately to be capable of but isn’t? Yeah. That’s the last straw needed for him to go completely off the deep end.
Kirei is simultaneously a worse person and a better person than he thinks he is. Even when in the middle of a lecture, a trait which only grows as he finds he has more to say, he’ll occasionally make really excellent points. For example, it’s Kiritsugu’s willingness to discard the people he loves in pursuit of his ideals that boggles him the most, as Kirei is very aware of the void inside him. Kirei is a sort of dark reflection of a lot of people, and it’s by contrasting with him that differences and similarities pop up, however unwanted or disliked. For the worsening of the universe, but for the bettering of him, he’ll stop at nothing until he gets the answers he seeks.
Oh, and he likes Mapo Tofu, and he’ll take it extra hot, thank you.
Other: It is impossible to say his full name without a dramatic pause.
Additional Links: Other notes and abilities listed here!
First Person (entry type):
What drives this community?
There must be a reason for its existence, and for the powers it has. Perhaps it’s a side effect from gathering so many here. Indeed, that’s very possible. But even so. There must be purpose behind what it’s doing, if it’s as intelligent as some of you claim. No network like this could sustain itself off mere batteries and cables. I wonder what it could be. Very few things in life are free, after all. Like it or not, we are all paying a price to be here. I’m sure the answer is staring us right in the face, only we refuse to see it. With good reason, I’d imagine. It’d shatter any illusions built up that this place is just harmless entertainment.
Rejoice, all of you. You won’t remain blind forever.
Third Person:
Stained glass. No church is complete without it. He’s known people who come to mass just to look through the colored fragments in the windows. He can tell. It’s in the way they look outside, the way their eyes never meet the altar, the way they sigh. As if they’re escaping through the pieces and into the light. In a way, it makes sense. Churches, after all, are largely built from stone. Imposing. Like being trapped under a weight. Some of them, of course, are the opposite. Freeing. A contradiction, between the heaviness of the stone and the lightness of the air. The thickness of incense and the brightness of candles.
Stained glass mesmerizes people. Enchants them, somehow. Fascinates, at bare minimum. When it’s nothing more than glass in a windowsill, shaped as angels and Mary and the apostles. Red and white, blue and black, the bubbles of oxygen trapped in the glass. The only glimpses of color in a dismal grey world. One well placed rock would shatter it. Sometimes in pieces in the floor. Sometimes just leaving a hole that can’t be filled.
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