(no subject)

[moonflower77]

THE UNIVERSE

- crapsack world
- war is hell
- lovecraft lite
- dysfunction junction
- there are no therapists
- ragtag bunch of misfits (the mission team)

THE T'ELX

- mental fusion/hive mind, type i
- mindlink mates (what the constituents are to each other)
- synchronization (it wasn't the gunshot wound to the shoulder that made azila lose consciousness - it was the death of her fellow guardian drone)

AZILA

general:

- rogue drone (her entire character premise is this trope inverted and subverted)
- catch-22 (the whole situation: if she doesn't reassimilate, she will inevitably face a prolonged and agonizing death, but if she does, she will lose touch with herself and her memories of the people she has come to hold dear)
- you can't go home again (when she is held captive in the beginning)
- i choose to stay (after she makes a conscious choice to stay until initran has worked through his grief)
- fish out of water
- cast out of lifespan (the lifespan of the average separated joiner is a meager 7 months; compared to that, azila's three and a half years were a record)
- stranger in a familiar land (assimilation has turned her into a member of an alien species - her physiology and body language are inhuman, she lost most human social skills, can no longer relate to what used to be her culture and has even forgotten her native language)
- body horror (her reaction to losing the antennae and part of the scales; continued in a milder form with her new hair)
- brought down to subnormal
- fate worse than death (deassimilation is that to azila as much as assimilation to most humans)
- heroic fatigue
- (not so) secretly dying
- five stages of grief (with the loss of initran and the realization that she cannot remain in the human world)
- guardian entity (her role with the t'elx)
- the caretaker
- badass pacifist (violence makes her sick in every possible sense of the word; that said, if she needs to protect those she cares for, she will fight and even kill)
- heroic BSOD (a few, but the most massive one came toward the end)
- defrosting ice queen
- the empath (on the level of scent and pheromones)
- iron woobie/stoic woobie
- not so stoic (whenever the facade cracks)
- that woman is dead ("remove the photographs. that woman died fifteen years ago. i am not her")
- you are number three
- the spock
- good is not nice
- good is not soft
- the reliable one
- undying loyalty (to the team as a whole, most notably to initran)
- workaholic (so much she literally lives in the lab and looks like another piece of equipment)
- married to the job
- emotionless girl (what she often seems, but most certainly is not)
- femininity failure (between being covered in scutes and sensory hairs and having a deafening voice, claws longer than those of a grizzly bear and no fashion sense whatsoever)
- epiphany therapy (after losing initran)
- madness mantra ("one, one, one alone")

relationships:

- replacement goldfish (to initran at first, later grew to be much more than that)
- only sane woman
- surrounded by idiots/assholes/the criminally insane
- with friends like these... (most of her co-workers qualify)
- battle couple (with initran)
- belligerent sexual tension (with initran, culminating in an actual fight instead of sex)
- single-target sexuality
- not good with people (comes across as closer to type ii, actually closer to type i)
- friend to all children
- foil (to initran and fadherad)
- mirror self (to fadherad)
- mama bear (to anyone on the team but especially initran)
- headbutting heroes (with initran and ibye)
- clenched-teeth teamwork (with ibye and fadherad)
- token alien teammate

everyday interaction:

- no social skills
- fee fi faux pas (the whole assorted range - innocently insensitive, right in front of you, right behind you, that came out wrong, did i just say that aloud?)
- limited wardrobe
- trademark favorite food ("she ate nothing but raw eggs and plain couscous for a year, every single fucking day")
- constantly curious
- hates being alone (so much she grows delirious)
- go mad from the isolation
- berserk button (if you want to harm initran, go ahead and try - you won't live long enough to regret it)
- deadpan snarker (sometimes, involuntarily)
- backhanded compliment (often, involuntarily)
- hates small talk
- no sense of personal space
- no indoor voice
- spockspeak
- speaks in allele sequences
- literal-minded
- cannot/will not tell a lie
- machine monotone
- brutal honesty
- blunt "yes"/blunt "no" (typical response to questions; very effective for cutting any irrelevant conversation short)
- death glare/thousand-mile stare
- nonverbal miscommunication
- third-person person (mostly her awkward attempts to translate what essentially is an intranslatable pronoun meaning "the one of us who speaks now")
- pronoun trouble (understandably)
- comically missing the point
- the un-smile (her attempts to smile the "regular human" way)
- when she smiles (when she allows herself to smile naturally)
- quizzical tilt (trademark gesture)
- perpetual frowner (looks like one on account of her facial features and eyebrow shape)
- verbal tic/mad libs catchphrase ("i am t'elx/we are t'elx")
- pardon my klingon (all the time)
- it tastes like feet (her reaction to some foods the human hawa used to like)
- reason-you-suck speech (fewer of those than it would seem on first sight)
- security cling (every time she has a panic attack around initran; reversed when she holds him in an attempt to get him to express his grief)
- nightmare sequence (her delirium while running through the desert and after the final battle)
- hallucinations (extremely real ones)

FADHERAD

general:

- tsundere
- broken bird (under the tough exterior)
- deadpan snarker
- snark knight
- foil (to azila)
- clenched-teeth teamwork (with azila)
- green-eyed monster (toward azila for stealing her job)
- fantastic racism (toward azila)
- jerkass ("that - bitch, or witch, whatever")
- jerk with a heart of gold/hidden heart of gold
- good is not nice
- boomerang bigot (regarding being ihr)
- death seeker/death wish
- leave me alone! (typical response when facing a problem)
- survivor's guilt
- big breast pride (in contrast to the unattractive and alien azila)
- buxom is better
- guttural growler
- angry fist-shake/talk to the fist (at azila; "how about i explain with this?")
- technically a smile (most of her "smiles" are like this)
- perpetual frowner

by default as an ihr with a purple ribbon:

- blood knight
- proud warrior race girl
- beastess
- you wouldn't like me when i'm angry
- hair-trigger temper
- berserk buttons (a whole keyboard's worth, but the worst is bringing up the circumstances under which her comrades were killed)
- hot-blooded
- eyes of gold (in game face)

INITRAN

general:

- badass bookworm
- sesquipedalian loquaciousness
- no sense of personal space
- no indoor voice (initially, before developing a chronic inflammation of the vocal chords)
- no social skills (he is autistic after all)
- hates small talk
- brutal honesty
- machine monotone
- death glare/thousand-mile stare
- extraverted nerd
- badass normal
- good is not nice
- good is not soft
- stoic woobie
- abusive parents (his father sold him to the cadet corpus to "have the folly knocked out of him")
- workaholic
- married to the job (when his wife dies, many are surprised to find out he had a family in the first place)
- gunslinger
- must have caffeine
- stoic spectacles
- scary shiny glasses
- adjusting his glasses (trademark gesture)
- nice skullcap
- cooldown hug (a lot of those from him to azila; somewhat subverted in that he often has to struggle with her and is injured in the process)
- survival mantra (direct response to azila's madness mantra; "we are two")

toward the end:

- not so stoic
- despair event horizon (losing his wife)
- the lost lenore (sunim)
- the unfettered
- unscrupulous hero
- alcoholic
- drowning his sorrows
- death seeker/death wish
- well-intentioned extremist/knight templar
- cruel to be kind
- trigger-happy
- mood-swinger
- moral ambiguity sounds raspy (has all but lost his voice after overstraining his vocal chords due to speaking at a raised volume)
- guttural growler ("he has a voice like sandpaper")
- beard of sorrow/perma-stubble
- what the hell, hero? (a big one from mbuta)
- nice job breaking it, hero (a few of those, most notably with azila)
- epiphany therapy (in the final hours before he dies)