Your Colostomy Bag Is A Z-Targetable Weakpoint

I am relieved that I'd left my room tidy

Imagine like… knowing that you can only exist for a brief time, and then you’re reduced to a shadow in someone else’s head or you’re back on the Fucking Zariman Again (in eggman voice)

Even if youre able to take the stage for a bit and feel the sun, you cant stay forever.

Besides. Everybody wants the other you. Youre not even a tenno. You’re tolerated at best. Nobody bothers with the title to replace the name you forgot, even though that title is the closest thing you have to one now. Not even the cephalon programed to love you (not you, dumbass, the other you, the wanted one) ever used it once. Despite you asking. (i checked and it made me go :(

It’s not like anyone you helped out really cared, either. The lotus tried to kill you the moment she could. Nobody bothered with dropping by your little camp until the operator came back. Why would they. Its only you there.

So choose.

Be selfish, demand that you get to feel the real sun on your real face, even though you know nobody wants you here, when they could have a better version?

Be nothing, a bystander in the back of someone elses head, watching as they are loved and used in equal measure? (just like you always wanted- but you could never work hard enough in duviri.)

Or go back to hell.

Back to the Zariman with its infinite angel song that you got to know so well that you handcrafted physical insanity from it. Back to a place youve seen for so long that you stopped seeing it. Back to the root of everything wrong with you.

But it needs you. Right? Needs you until other tenno start showing up, and then you’re not Necessary anymore. Because other people can do your job. Take a break, drifter. Relax. Go stare into the void a little more. Go remember.

Or theres always going back Duviri. The place you spent the last thousand years dreaming of getting out of. The place thats killed you in so many ways you started to forget yesterday. The place you were too useless and helpless to ever be able to escape on your own. (And the lotus didnt care about helping you. Didnt want your help either. Didnt want you. Youre not a tenno.)

Didnt Thrax always say there was nothing out there? Nothing but the Zariman. That there was nothing better than this. You only kept going because you needed it to be wrong.

Was it, though? Was it really?

The more I think about it, the more the Lotus kicking the drifter out of the main timeline and into 1999 has a sad sort of mercy to it, directly in line with it simply reaffirming that thrax was right.

Of course the drifter is a people pleaser to the nth degree. They’d rip their own heart out if it meant there was a chance at anyone seeing it.

Of course they’ll be anything and mould themself to any situation. At least it means they’ll fit *somewhere*. At least it means they’re useful enough to keep around, even if only for a little bit.

Like some of the paths of conversations you can take *really* put out that Drifter is trying to appeal to each Protoframe. From remembering how to appease Arthur is via a pint. Or with Quincy is to be totally ok and fine with him claiming Drifter owes him favors.

I agree that 1000% Drifter is a people pleaser. After millennia of being an apparent disappointment that they needed to be murdered repeatedly, after being insulted, undesired, unremembered, sent to die to hunt the Archons for the Lotus, who sees Drifter the same as Rell. Why *wouldn't* Drifter do what they can to please each and every Protoframe?

It's also no wonder that it would be Drifter to ask them out to date. Because they felt they were finally desired, wanted, deserving of love for once in their lives compared to the Operator, that they felt brave to ask. And don't get me started on how excited the protos are when you ask them out... cuz damn aren't they also are thinking they're undesirable due to being protoframes...

But geez...

Drifter just...

Like. I bet the reason why none of them asked out the drifter first is because they flat out knew the drifter would simply Not Say No. That there’d be no way to ensure consent to it outside of transference digging through the drifters brain to actually tell that they really did want it and they weren’t just auto latching onto whatever would a, make the protos the happiest, and b, would mean they were even just a tiny bit wanted in any way.

Also the whole gifting system is just another showcase of how much of a people pleaser the drifter is. Like. Specially logging things they like, implications that they did something right, (sparkly text) buying stuff to maybe have them like the drifter just a tiny :pinch: bit more even though nobody gets the drifter anything.

Also. As far as the resentment goes, I do think thats a leftover from Duviri acting up, tbh. Like, For so long, anything even remotely genuinely expressive was deemed childish, and that was deemed as grounds to completely dismiss or belittle, right. And now we have someone whos had that beaten into them for hundreds of years dealing with people who are expressive and on occasion childish.

Its a recipe for disaster, and one that I think would be SIGNIFICANTLY worse if the drifter didnt want to be liked so badly.

I do see the triad as progression on the drifter’s side too. Theres a lot more consistency in tone, and… like they genuinely full on crash out at Marie for saying that maybe Albrecht was justified/not horrid for leaving the drifter in Duviri, and we reaaaally dont see the drifter express anger basically at all before the triad. They get pissed, but that normally winds up in terse messages, snappy remarks, and ended chats.