Manaka "Girl Scout from Hell" Sajyou (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beastofasister) wrote2013-07-07 12:34 pm
beastofasister) wrote2013-07-07 12:34 pm
[OOC] Profile
PLAYER
Name: Nix
Timezone: EST
Contact: gilded chrysanth [AIM];![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
sakroka
CHARACTER
Name: Manaka Sajyou
Canon: Fate/Prototype
Age: 22 (chronological); 14 (physical)
Timeline: After Misaya's death
Background:
Wiki link. Unfortunately, the wiki article is lacking some key information, so I will write out an overview here.
ROLE
Much of the time, Manaka behaves like a typical, if somewhat precocious, young girl. However, in reality, the idea that she is simply a normal child couldn't be further from the truth. More than anything, Manaka is an extremely warped person. Throughout her entire life, she has been connected to "the Root," something that is most simply described as being the center of all creation; later, at the time of her "death," she was submerged in something containing all of humanity's evil desires. Obviously, neither of these things is going to produce a person with a normal outlook on life!
First and foremost, she is self-centered to the extreme. While she can see and understands other people's wants, she doesn't factor them into her behavior when taking action, and she's perfectly willing to toss aside anyone who comes between her and her goals, no matter what they may mean to her. It isn't that she feels nothing for others; it's just that her desires far outweigh the worth of most people in her mind. For example, in canon, she has expressed a willingness to harm or kill both her sister (whom she has explicitly said she loves) and the closest thing she has to a friend—and acted on it, in both cases.
This disregard for others seems to come from the way she mentally divides people into two categories: "special" and "ordinary." She, of course, goes in the former category, being a magical prodigy and having a miraculous, one in a hundred billion connection to the Root. Meanwhile, someone like her sister, who is mediocre in talent, belongs in the second. Surely, then, there's no loss in using her to advance a higher purpose? Surely, then, her life holds more worth when used as an "ingredient," as she'll accomplish nothing special or important during her life as a human being!
However, despite this, she's stated to be an "innocent monster" that holds no malice toward others, and it's true that her actions weren't bourn from hate or vengeance or any negative feeling at all. Having been constantly aware of the cycle of death and rebirth since infancy, Manaka simply doesn't see the value of a life in the way that most people do, and doesn't understand basic morals others take for granted, such as the idea that killing is wrong. Her callousness comes from a skewed perspective, rather than cruelty.
The only exception to the above is her Saber. She's described as having been "irreparably warped" by her love for him, and it's a hard statement to argue with, seeing as that love has led to her massacring dozens of people without batting an eye. In her mind, he is the most important thing in the universe. She would happily sacrifice every other life on the planet for his sake—and fully intends to do so, given that the action she sees as the fulfillment of his wishes is also one that will consume and extinguish all human life. Retaliating against someone she perceives as having "endangered" Saber is the only time she is seen acting out in anger, too.
She also appears to hold some general level of ennui directed at life, thanks to her connection to the Root. It doesn't come across in her demeanor—she's peppy and upbeat—but even so, it appears as a reoccurring theme in her thoughts and actions. When her father mentions wanting to use the Holy Grail as a means to connect to the Root, she brushes his desire aside as "boring." In the Fate/Labyrinth sidestory, because she is unable to experience surprise any other way, she purposefully induces in herself a special sort of dream. Unsurprisingly, being able to look inside something that houses everything that ever has existed and everything that ever will has made her bored.
In the aftermath of her death, Manaka's innocence has become somewhat warped, a twisted version of what it was originally. While she is still devoid of malice, and still doesn't grasp the idea of moral absolutes, she has gained an intimate understanding of the ugliest of human desires. So, while she doesn't precisely empathize with them, she can speak on them in depth, if prompted. She also has a tendency to view no human as morally better than another, and is unlikely to pass judgment on a person's moral failures, given that she views such dark desires as simply an unpleasant but undeniable part of the human heart.
Her concept of and expressions of love have also been distorted. Following her death at Saber's hands, she seems to have twisted the concepts of violence, death, and love into a single inseparable knot. When speaking of her happiness at the thought of seeing Saber again, she uses gory metaphors, describing the feeling as being one like "[her] insides will fall out of her stomach"; conversely, when speaking of being impaled, she does so in a way that is evocative of sexual intercourse.
As a note, though Manaka's outward manner is often childish, her mental age is a bit more complicated. This can be seen in one of the one-shot comics published in the second official Fate/Prototype artbook, in which she initially behaves very much like a young girl when around others, only to switch to a more adult manner of speaking when alone. How she chooses to present herself when is dependent on whim and the surrounding circumstances; while she generally acts the age she appears to be, she may be more open about her true colors around people she feels some level of connection with.
Abilities:
Manaka is a practitioner of magecraft, and a very skilled one at that. However, information on her strengths and limits are vague. Her family is said to practice and old form of witchcraft; however, Manaka's father notes that she has displayed the ability to use magecraft he never taught her at all on an advanced level. She's also shown to be capable of highly powerful magical blasts, creating shadow-like familiars, and... doing something that traumatizes a grown man, which was left off-screen, probably for the reader's imagination to fill in.
What is know that her magic circuits are highly irregular. She has very few, but those she does possess produce off-the-charts levels of magical energy. She's been shown to be able to supply prana to three separate Servants with no ill effects, so it's safe to say that her energy output is way above what the average mage is capable of.
She's also stated to be connected to the Root, giving her... possible omnipotence and access to information about everything that ever was and everything that will ever be? Presumably she'll be cut off from the Root in-game, so let's not worry about that too much.
Also of note is her apparent ability to hypnotize people, such as the children she sacrificed to the Grail at the end of the previous War. It's not entirely clear how this was done, but I choose to err on the side of simplicity and say Mystic Eyes were involved.
Following her death and resurrection-by-Grail, she is also connected to the Grail in a Master/Servant relationship—or, more accurately, she's connected to the thing inside it, the Beast of Revelation created from all of humanity's evil wishes. This has given her the power to do all sorts of things, from controlling horrible mud tentacles to using the Grail to re-summon all of the Servants used in the previous War, but, again, that only matters if she has the Grail on hand, which she doesn't.
Finally, due to the fact that her body was frozen in the state it was in when she died, she's a horrible zombie, with a permanently bleeding wound where Saber impaled her! She doesn't age, and she doesn't technically need to eat or drink or anything like that—the only way to kill her is to go for the head, like any good zombie. She also carries the Grail's corruption in her body; it's possible for her to manipulate those afflicted similar corruption in various ways (ex: raising Misaya's cursed body as a zombie).
Name: Nix
Timezone: EST
Contact: gilded chrysanth [AIM];
CHARACTER
Name: Manaka Sajyou
Canon: Fate/Prototype
Age: 22 (chronological); 14 (physical)
Timeline: After Misaya's death
Background:
Wiki link. Unfortunately, the wiki article is lacking some key information, so I will write out an overview here.
ROLE
Manaka is the focal character of the first act of the Fate/Prototype prequel, Argent Fragments (variously translated as "Pale Silver Fragments" and "Fragments of Blue and Silver"), and one of the magi participating in the Holy Grail War. In Fate/Prototype, she is initially introduced as a posthumous character seen only through the perspective of the main character, her younger sister, but later on is revealed to be the storyline's ultimate villain.PRE-CANON/CHILDHOOD
Manaka was born the first daughter of the Sajyou family, a old but recently dilapidated family of magi living in Fukutoshin, Japan. Though she and her sister Ayaka both were trained in magecraft, the responsibilities and expectations of being the family's proper heir were given to Manaka—not just due to her age, but also because her prodigious talent far outweighed her sister's. Additionally, the school of magecraft practiced by the Sajyou family was witchcraft, which requires the sacrifice of living things in order to craft spells; the more tenderhearted Ayaka struggled with this, whereas Manaka did not. Secret wizards aside, though, their upbringing was otherwise largely normal.FRAGMENTS
At some point before the beginning of canon, Manaka's mother died under unknown circumstances. In the aftermath of her death, Manaka appears to have taken up a fair portion of the housework in her stead.
(As a note, some of this is covered in the form of flashbacks in Fate/Prototype, but for the sake of a straightforward chronological history it belongs here.)FATE/PROTOTYPE
In 1991, when Manaka was about 14 years of age, something known as the Holy Grail War began in the town of Fukutoshin. The Holy Grail War is, in simplest terms, a ritual required to activate an alleged wish-granting machine called the Holy Grail; it consists of a death match between seven Masters (magi) with seven Servants (spirits of heroes summoned from the past) as their weapons. Despite Manaka's age, due to her exceptional magical power, she served as the Sajyou family's Master rather than her father. Manaka both received the highest rank as a Master and summoned a Servant of the most highly ranked class, Saber.
The particular Heroic Spirit Manaka summoned was Arthur Pendragon. She rapidly became fixated on him, disallowing him from participating in direct combat as much as she could for fear of seeing him placed in danger or harmed. She would be the one to take care of their enemies, she declared, dismissing the strategies her father offered her out of hand. She would, occasionally, make concessions to Saber to prevent him from becoming too restless, but by and large, she seemed intent on handling the War using only her own abilities.
...And, in many ways, her own abilities sufficed. Early in the War, she confronted the enemy Servant Assassin, alone, and came out of the confrontation with a second Servant under her control. Later, she bypassed the Reiroukan family's bounded field while they were under attack by another Servant, using the opportunity to convince their Servant to betray them and join with her. The War as a whole continued in this fashion, with Manaka using her wits, incredible magical power, and expanded arsenal of Servants to pick off the competition until Saber was the only one remaining.
Unfortunately, in order to activate the Grail, all seven Servants were required to die. However, due to her love and obsession, Manaka was unwilling to sacrifice Saber. So, rather than command him to kill himself, she attempted to fill up the Grail through another means: human souls.
Manaka gathered dozens of young girls, including her younger sister and best friend, and led them to the underground cavern where the main body of the Grail was housed. There, she prepared each of them to be sacrificed, then hypnotized them so that their bodies would throw themselves to the Grail one-by-one and be consumed by it, though it's stated that their minds retained consciousness as they did so.
About halfway through the sacrifices, Manaka's father interrupted her and demanded to know what she was doing. She expressed surprise that he hadn't realized the true nature of the Grail and still believed the Church's lie; in truth, the Holy Grail was an object created by the Church not for the purpose of granting a wish, but in order to give birth a being on a higher level of existence (a "God") by putting shape to humanity's collective consciousness. She then brushed aside the idea of using it to reach the Root, revealing she had been connected to that place since her birth. Then, as her father reeled in shock, she calmly killed him, using the "mud" inside the Grail to swallow him up, alongside many of the remaining sacrifices.
However, before Manaka could complete the ritual and release what had been created inside the Grail—the Beast of Revelation—upon the world, Saber intervened, impaling her through the back and chest. She herself fell into the basin of the Grail, apparently dead...
...But, upon making contact with the Grail, Manaka was resurrected as a half-living, half-dead existence linked with the Grail itself. In the eight years between one War and the next, she existed in a dream-like state inside the Grail—though time seems to have passed in her own mind, as she references having been waiting for a long time.Personality:
Throughout most of Fate/Prototype's plot, Manaka exists mostly within the shadows, not directly participating in the main action. However, she doesn't remain entirely separate; about halfway through the story, Misaya is completely consumed by the "curse" place on her, becoming a zombie-like creature under Manaka's control. Manaka is finally thrust fully into the spotlight when it is revealed that Sancraid, who was previously believed be the first ranked Master, is actually an irregularity with the rank of "void." In truth, the highest rank belongs to Manaka, who possesses a Master/Servant bond with the Beast of Revelation rather than one of the normal classes.
With this reveal, Manaka is essentially established as a figurative "final boss fight." She is also shown to have used the Grail to recreate the six Servants aside from Saber that participated in the previous Grail War, which now operate under her control.
Much of the time, Manaka behaves like a typical, if somewhat precocious, young girl. However, in reality, the idea that she is simply a normal child couldn't be further from the truth. More than anything, Manaka is an extremely warped person. Throughout her entire life, she has been connected to "the Root," something that is most simply described as being the center of all creation; later, at the time of her "death," she was submerged in something containing all of humanity's evil desires. Obviously, neither of these things is going to produce a person with a normal outlook on life!
First and foremost, she is self-centered to the extreme. While she can see and understands other people's wants, she doesn't factor them into her behavior when taking action, and she's perfectly willing to toss aside anyone who comes between her and her goals, no matter what they may mean to her. It isn't that she feels nothing for others; it's just that her desires far outweigh the worth of most people in her mind. For example, in canon, she has expressed a willingness to harm or kill both her sister (whom she has explicitly said she loves) and the closest thing she has to a friend—and acted on it, in both cases.
This disregard for others seems to come from the way she mentally divides people into two categories: "special" and "ordinary." She, of course, goes in the former category, being a magical prodigy and having a miraculous, one in a hundred billion connection to the Root. Meanwhile, someone like her sister, who is mediocre in talent, belongs in the second. Surely, then, there's no loss in using her to advance a higher purpose? Surely, then, her life holds more worth when used as an "ingredient," as she'll accomplish nothing special or important during her life as a human being!
However, despite this, she's stated to be an "innocent monster" that holds no malice toward others, and it's true that her actions weren't bourn from hate or vengeance or any negative feeling at all. Having been constantly aware of the cycle of death and rebirth since infancy, Manaka simply doesn't see the value of a life in the way that most people do, and doesn't understand basic morals others take for granted, such as the idea that killing is wrong. Her callousness comes from a skewed perspective, rather than cruelty.
The only exception to the above is her Saber. She's described as having been "irreparably warped" by her love for him, and it's a hard statement to argue with, seeing as that love has led to her massacring dozens of people without batting an eye. In her mind, he is the most important thing in the universe. She would happily sacrifice every other life on the planet for his sake—and fully intends to do so, given that the action she sees as the fulfillment of his wishes is also one that will consume and extinguish all human life. Retaliating against someone she perceives as having "endangered" Saber is the only time she is seen acting out in anger, too.
She also appears to hold some general level of ennui directed at life, thanks to her connection to the Root. It doesn't come across in her demeanor—she's peppy and upbeat—but even so, it appears as a reoccurring theme in her thoughts and actions. When her father mentions wanting to use the Holy Grail as a means to connect to the Root, she brushes his desire aside as "boring." In the Fate/Labyrinth sidestory, because she is unable to experience surprise any other way, she purposefully induces in herself a special sort of dream. Unsurprisingly, being able to look inside something that houses everything that ever has existed and everything that ever will has made her bored.
In the aftermath of her death, Manaka's innocence has become somewhat warped, a twisted version of what it was originally. While she is still devoid of malice, and still doesn't grasp the idea of moral absolutes, she has gained an intimate understanding of the ugliest of human desires. So, while she doesn't precisely empathize with them, she can speak on them in depth, if prompted. She also has a tendency to view no human as morally better than another, and is unlikely to pass judgment on a person's moral failures, given that she views such dark desires as simply an unpleasant but undeniable part of the human heart.
Her concept of and expressions of love have also been distorted. Following her death at Saber's hands, she seems to have twisted the concepts of violence, death, and love into a single inseparable knot. When speaking of her happiness at the thought of seeing Saber again, she uses gory metaphors, describing the feeling as being one like "[her] insides will fall out of her stomach"; conversely, when speaking of being impaled, she does so in a way that is evocative of sexual intercourse.
As a note, though Manaka's outward manner is often childish, her mental age is a bit more complicated. This can be seen in one of the one-shot comics published in the second official Fate/Prototype artbook, in which she initially behaves very much like a young girl when around others, only to switch to a more adult manner of speaking when alone. How she chooses to present herself when is dependent on whim and the surrounding circumstances; while she generally acts the age she appears to be, she may be more open about her true colors around people she feels some level of connection with.
Abilities:
Manaka is a practitioner of magecraft, and a very skilled one at that. However, information on her strengths and limits are vague. Her family is said to practice and old form of witchcraft; however, Manaka's father notes that she has displayed the ability to use magecraft he never taught her at all on an advanced level. She's also shown to be capable of highly powerful magical blasts, creating shadow-like familiars, and... doing something that traumatizes a grown man, which was left off-screen, probably for the reader's imagination to fill in.
What is know that her magic circuits are highly irregular. She has very few, but those she does possess produce off-the-charts levels of magical energy. She's been shown to be able to supply prana to three separate Servants with no ill effects, so it's safe to say that her energy output is way above what the average mage is capable of.
She's also stated to be connected to the Root, giving her... possible omnipotence and access to information about everything that ever was and everything that will ever be? Presumably she'll be cut off from the Root in-game, so let's not worry about that too much.
Also of note is her apparent ability to hypnotize people, such as the children she sacrificed to the Grail at the end of the previous War. It's not entirely clear how this was done, but I choose to err on the side of simplicity and say Mystic Eyes were involved.
Following her death and resurrection-by-Grail, she is also connected to the Grail in a Master/Servant relationship—or, more accurately, she's connected to the thing inside it, the Beast of Revelation created from all of humanity's evil wishes. This has given her the power to do all sorts of things, from controlling horrible mud tentacles to using the Grail to re-summon all of the Servants used in the previous War, but, again, that only matters if she has the Grail on hand, which she doesn't.
Finally, due to the fact that her body was frozen in the state it was in when she died, she's a horrible zombie, with a permanently bleeding wound where Saber impaled her! She doesn't age, and she doesn't technically need to eat or drink or anything like that—the only way to kill her is to go for the head, like any good zombie. She also carries the Grail's corruption in her body; it's possible for her to manipulate those afflicted similar corruption in various ways (ex: raising Misaya's cursed body as a zombie).