Eridan Ampora (character)

Overview
GAME INFORMATION Current player: Kiva Canon: MSPaintadventures: Homesuck Canon point: Post-death Unit Number: 206 Chosen weapon: Wand

PERSONAL INFORMATION Name: Eridan Ampora Age: Six Solar Sweeps [13 Human Years] Species: Troll [Sea dweller] Title: Prince Of Hope''' Alignment: Lawful Evil Notable Features:''' Grey Skin, Horns, Fins, Claws, Fanged teeth, Goofy Scarf/Cape combo, striped pants

Break The Haughty, Despair Event Horizon, From nobody to nightmare, Large Ham, Light is not Good

Personality
To fully understand Eridan's personality, there are a few things to take into account mostly regarding his upbringing, and how they have influenced his ideals and views to differ from the thought process of an average human.

The troll's home planet of Alternia is a dangerous place, filled with deadly fauna such as giant spiders, flying whales, bicyclopes, dragons and eldritch abominations, so survival of the fittest applies here without a doubt. Trolls aren't just threatened by the wildlife, however, but by other trolls as well. Their entire species is violent and aggressive, with murder being commonplace and something that's just accepted as it happens. They don't even bury their dead.

The nature of their culture doesn't help much either, with emphasis being placed on those who aren't exceptional simply being killed for being useless to the species as a whole. Younger trolls are even expected to have found a mate in the Red and Black quadrants of troll relationships before a certain age, or are deemed to be inferior and have nothing to contribute to the gene pool(for more info on that go here,) and are killed. Trolls have to be exceptional and the trolls who don't make the cut don't have a place in troll society.

Troll society is also dictated by a hierarchy known as the hemospectrum, a caste system based on the color of a troll's blood. Lower colors tend to be on the warm side of spectrum, with red, orange/brown and yellow being the worst, greens being average, blue being good and purples being the top of the system. The lower blooded trolls tend to be oppressed by their superiors, and the blood color of a troll dictates many things about them, including their biology. Trolls lowest on the spectrum tend to live shorter lives, with maroon blooded trolls living only one or two dozen solar sweeps (25-50 years), whereas a blueblooded troll is expected to live for centuries.

The higher a troll is on the spectrum, the stronger they are physically in terms of actual raw strength and durability. Lower blooded trolls are weaker, but to counter this are more likely to have psychic powers. However, higher blooded trolls have shown to be more resistant to psychic powers whereas the trolls with psychic powers are more susceptible to being influenced by them, such as being manipulated through mind control, presumably one of the ways the highblood trolls keep the lower ones in check. Lowbloods are more common, so they do outnumber the higher blooded trolls, but live much shorter lifespans and are weaker without being able to make use of (most of) their powers against them, making the chances of successfully rebelling against them slim to none.

Finally, the blood color of a troll can have affect their personality in terms of upbringing and biology. The higher on the spectrum a troll is, the more unstable they are. Aradia, a maroonblood and lowest on the spectrum, doesn't really display violent tendencies and appears to be a pretty calm individual. From tealblood and upwards, things start to get a little...unhinged. Terezi(teal) displays deranged behavior, Vriska(cerulean) manipulates trolls frequently and has crippled one, blinded one and murdered another for revenge. Equius(blue) displays incredible fits of irrational anger and he needs to violently tear apart robots he builds in order to relieve himself of these emotions. Gamzee(indigo) is a complete fucking psycho, and Eridan has been described as 'genocidal'. As a result of this, the angrier and higher blooded trolls are energetic and restless, frequently becoming agitated because of their own inherent instability. Higherblooded trolls are also raised thinking they are more important than the ones below them, so tend to be more egotistical and care more for their pride than the lowerbloods, who believe themselves to be expendable(generally, not all of the series 'main' trolls believe this, especially considering the circumstances of the plot).

So with all of this in mind, LET'S GET STARTED.

The thing about Eridan is the way he carries himself and the way he wishes to be percieved by others are two totally different things. You see, Eridan has a fascination with history, specifically military history. Stories of conquest(both the glory of victory and sting of defeat), romantic intrigue and political machinations. He admires many of Alternia's greatest conquerers and fashioned a persona based off of many of them, but when this ties with his over the top emotional theatrics, it doesn't appear impressive or something others would find interesting; he's just a complete douchebag.

One of the things that betrays his whole persona is Eridan's feelings, which motivate him a lot more than his desire to be like the legendary trolls whose behavior he is trying to emulate. In trying to keep with the natural animosity seadwelling trolls have with landdwelling trolls, Eridan has made it his goal in life to wipe out all of the land dwelling trolls through the use of doomsday devices and weapons he acquired through various means. The only problems with this is he always fails, every device is always useless and doesn't work. You might just call this a series of failed attempts, but he also befriended quite a few land dwelling trolls, namely Kanaya, Karkat and Vriska. Suspicious, right? But then he brushes it off as 'civility'. He's even shown to acknowledge that were he to go easy on assisting Feferi with feeding her lusus, which would then become agitated and raise it's voice, the lower caste trolls would all be wiped out by the psychic shockwaves her lusus creates with it's voice, problem solved, but he decided against it because "it would upset her", so again, excuses.

The fact is, he's a shitty racist. He tries to be this over the top and dramatic troll who believes in the purity of the seadwelling race as the one true way things should be, but at the same time he's too reliant on his friends to actually harm them, so he hides behind excuses as to why he hasn't achieved his diabolical goals yet in order to keep up his persona of genocidal seadweller while not giving his friends a real reason to abandon him. He's torn between just being a kid and being the troll he's supposed to be, so he tries to reach the middleground of two extremes that just doesn't work, causing others to become weary of his personality and never want to put up with his behavior. He doesn't realize this, so often laments the fact people are pushing him away and isolating him for no real reason, when in truth he's the problem. The issue is he's so utterly dependent on others, but he doesn't want to appear that way. The problem is he can't hide this, because it's just so horribly obvious.

Eridan has feelings. A lot of them. In fact, Eridan's behavior is erratic and histrionic, with his emotions dictating almost all of his behavior, which are everchanging. He'll focus on something and suddenly it becomes the biggest deal of his life at which point he will run to the nearest person he can find and complain about it to them. If noone is willing to listen, he'll either try and discuss it with someone in a decisively roundabout way or just think about it himself, stewing in his own emotions. However, the latter is a really awful scenario, because when Eridan decides to do things by himself, bad things happen. He makes bad scenarios occur, sometimes not even intentionally. He can have good intentions, but because of his personality he can and usually will fuck it up somehow. The situation will snowball and he'll stick with it no matter how bad it gets, which can end very badly for him(and ultimately, lead to his death in canon.) He can't admit he's wrong after all; he has to be exceptional, as a seadweller, it's expected of him.

The reason he tries so hard to be amazing is a result of his upbringing, and the fact that seadwellers are meant to be part of the ruling caste. He doesn't have any room to fail, because he's supposed to be a leader. Unfortunately he's completely aware of the fact he very much isn't exceptional, but tries so hard to keep up a facade of arrogance and self-assuredness. This has created a very fragile ego in him. Although his egotism is to the point of being completely overbearing, it's also very easy to break him. Once that happens, he becomes a miserable wreck and shows his true colours; the fact is, he hates himself. He loathes his own failings and his inability to live up to the standards his caste, he acknowledges the fact that everything he gets so worked up about is stupid and meaningless, and even that his own emotional theatrics are difficult to put up with and are what drives everyone away. He tries way too hard to prove himself to his peers, and to himself, which can get him into dangerous or otherwise completely stupid situations.

Sadly, he has a hard time learning from this, even if he has moments where he realizes it. He wants, desperately and more than anything, for people to accept him for who he is. If they can't accept him, if they pick out and jab at his flaws, if they criticize his personality, he finds it difficult to simply shrug it off and feels offended by it. As a result, he actually acts out even more in an attempt to keep up his confidence. He raises his emotional barriers to avoid being hurt by others, but the barriers themselves simply entail being even more overbearing and defending his own actions to the bitter end, which infuriates other people even more and they become even more harsh towards him in response. His attempts at protecting himself don't really help, but just make things worse, and he becomes even more worked up and upset about situations afterwards. He never really realizes this either, so a lot of his personalty and behavior is incredibly self-destructive. As it says in canon;

"Trolls are a very angry and violent race. Some are more hot-tempered and dangerous than others, to the extent that if left to their own devices, they would present a serious threat to society, or even to themselves."

This is pretty much him in a nutshell.

Just before his death, there's a distinct change in his personality as a result of the course the story took; he lost all hope. He couldn't handle waiting around anymore, he couldn't handle the tension or his own pent up feelings. He couldn't handle anything anymore. The way he saw it, either wait around for Jack to show up and kill them, or take a chance at trying to join him. Either way death seemed pretty certain, even described as 'Nihilistic' by Doc Scratch. Even in his moment of hopelessness however, he didn't give up on how much he cared about Feferi. He offered her the chance to come with him, wanting to give her that slim chance of hope he thought was there, and after she turned on him for defeating Sollux, he completely lost it. It was because he felt so strongly about her that the betrayal hurt all the more. Here was a troll who was against the violent ways of Alternia, raising her weapon to him, someone who had been her friend for several years, over a guy who she had known for a very short amount of time in comparison, and ended up having to kill her lest she kill him first.

Enraged, he then went on to destroy the matriorb in order to prove his point. If he felt there's no hope, then there is none. Hope was his jurisdiction and if he has to destroy hope to prove he's right, he will. Which he did. This enraged Kanaya, who of course he simply thought of as having betrayed him and killed her too. Having murdered Feferi and Kanaya, plus considering the reactions he got from what he did to Sollux, he definitely couldn't stay now. He left with the intention of joining Jack. It was all he had left.

So all in all, he really is just overemotional and impulsive. Even when he takes the time to sit back and think about how to go about things, even if he has a plan, his otherwise reckless and erratic personality tends to work against him. Things won't go how he wanted them to, but he'll stick with it as long as he can salvage something from it and make it seem like he knows what he's doing. He has to be exceptional. Failure is not an option.

Abilities
As a troll Eridan is naturally a lot tougher than a human. A certain ceruleanblooded troll survived this and lived, so considering trolls higher on the spectrum have more durable bodies the higher you go up and he's penultimate on the scale, he could probably take a lot before going down(unless you do something drastic like decapitation or BIFURCATION AT THE WAIST). He could also theoretically be a lot stronger physically than most other trolls, as again highblood biology has that affect. He'd be the weakest of the four highest trolls, with Gamzee's status as an Indigo blood, Equius' freaky mutant strength and Feferi being above him, but he can handle the recoil of a weapon longer than he is tall with enough firepower to OHKO a giant flying whale so that's something to remember. Finally, as a seadweller, he's an adept swimmer and can survive underwater indefinitely.

He also commands deadly white magic science powers through the use of his wand. For a more in-depth explanation, check this shit out.

Exsilium History
When Eridan first showed up, he caused a lot of drama and bullshit. He made a few bad first impressions, confirmed to Sollux that he killed Feferi and blinded him in the future, told Equius about Nepeta's death, almost got into a fight with Gamzee(if it weren't for Karkat's intervention)...yeah, not the best start.

After seeing someone address purple text, despite having not spoken to this person before, he assumed it was personal and jumped right on it. Once they worked passed that, he used the information gathered by Willard to find out that Feferi was already here but hadn't contacted him yet. He felt a little hurt by that, but ignored it. A part of him expected it anyway.

Following this, he argued with the newly arrived Roxy then with Vriska the former because she was a drunk human and he thought she was stupid, and the latter because she lied about defeating the masked.

Later, once the masked attacked, he failed to actually defeat them, but managed to hold them off long enough to escape. However, he felt admitting to that would look really bad on his part, so he of course lied about it to the best of his ability, a beautiful act of hypocrisy really. Noone really believed him since he couldn't go into details about it, but it didn't do much to improve his reputation with the other captives, being a tremendous obnoxious douchebag.

Then Sollux showed up again, this time from another world as opposed to the veil like everyone else, and man was Eridan pissed about that. We also got to see what an excellent roommate Eridan is. He then went on to be infuriated by Dave Strider, fail to remain incognito from feferi annnnnd make his shaky friendship with Karkat even worse.

After Sollux showed up, Eridan got caught in the middle of the troll's attempt at angering Equius to the point he'd consider getting into a kismesissitude, assumed it was a personal attack on him and complained to everyone about it over the network, making as many threats as he could and assuming one by one that everyone who replied had some involvement in it.

Pissed off to an extreme, he then found somewhere he could vent a little but gave up quickly because Martin's attitude was making him angrier. He was pleasantly surprised by Nepeta's arrival, mostly because she didn't seem all that bothered to see him, but he wasn't too happy to see a certain other troll show up soon after.

Then the empress showed up. This caused a whole load of problems for everyone. Not only was he terrified of her, but it also made things worse between him and Feferi moreso than they were already. At the very least he was going to try and use it to patch things up with Karkat but nothing came from that either.

BUT THEN HE FINALLY GOT A CHANCE TO RELIEVE HIS ANGER and it was good. He ran into Roslyn on the battlefield, their first in person meeting, and realized that for all his bragging and vicious defense of his fragile ego, he was genuinely powerful in a fight with that wand of his, which you don't usually expect from the loudmouth braggarts.

Following the first mission they were sent on and the weeks of doing nothing that followed, Eridan grew restless. He was agitated, bored, anxious, angry...a lot of things. So he spent a week alone to try and sort out his thoughts. which completely failed and he felt even worse after it. So, in an attempt to get social contact from people, he made the most paranoid post he could think of to the network to attract attention, even though they were his genuine thoughts on the matter it did seem pretty...desperate. So not a lot of people bought into it.

After his conversation with feferi, she decided it might be for the best if they talk things out but it didn't really do much good, or get them anywhere.

Things are a little less stressful now, as he's been dealing with Kanji who seemed to know him from wherever he was before Exsilium, trying to get rid of SAD HALLUCINATING ROBOT CHILDREN, having tea with cannibal murderer Takegami, getting into arguments with his hivemates and stumbling upon an introspective Darkov. FUN TIMES FOR ALL.

Relationships
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