I want blorbo for like. Everyone. I want blorbo for Duck for Tessa (also Tessa and Dog ship. Tessa and anyone. Honestly.) for Dasein. Ofc. I want it for Mellori for Buck I want it for every beautiful soul. <3. oh and 🫵 that gay little ship right there (Stalliold I’m making you give me your thoughts on the internet).
I’m splitting this up for brevities sake, so this one’s the Tessa Truehart special
Where to start haha . God I love Tessa. While Duck, Buck, and her are all tied up with my favorite hero (and well favorite character… you know my biases by now) I think objectively she’s the best written, honestly one of the most interesting and well written characters in this entire game.
My asterisk around her name is because I adore the heroes as a group and I also adore her 1 on 1 dynamic with Dog, but she’s also just very good stand-alone, I don’t want to say she isn’t. But really, she’s such a fun character. She’s so dedicated to her community, Heap isn’t without its troubles she herself admits but its people are good people. That line, with crime mine, “You dress up and fight crime with understanding because no one ever understood you. Wait, that’s me.” God I love her.
It’s important to me she isn’t the “put together one” mothering Dog or any of the other heroes, she’s just as dysfunctional. I think honestly when she gets on Dog for working too much she’s a total hypocrite. She’s pulling her shifts at the forensics lab, staying overtime, and then immediately clocking in to Shadoe business overnight. She’s eating dinner but depends a bit too much on eating out I imagine. She’s telling Dog off for smoking and telling him to quit like she did but since the sky changed and Heap went crazy and she decided to become a vigilante about it she’s picked the habit back up in secret.
Little things little things. Love the grumpy voice she does when she mimics Dog, how she’s so clearly frustrated with him but she also loves him so deeply. I LOVE the touch of her having an (attempt at) a transatlantic accent as a nod to The Shadow being a radio show character from the 30s. In a similar vain how she gets carried away monologuing and narrating to herself. I LOVE that the “scary” laugh is just genuinely how she laughs.
Her being trans is very important to my reading of her, I could go off on my litany of backstory headcanons but I’ll refrain for the most part here, for brevity. But I do imagine she transitioned a later in her life. (I have specific age hcs for all the heros, I peg her around 39) Voice training has prepared her for swapping between the Shadoe voice and her natural voice. Also noting when we meet up with her in Wallaru she sounds closer to her natural voice than in Lemuria, and in my mind she’s gotten more comfortable around the heroes to fall into a bit of an inbetween. Also she can’t see shit because she’s not wearing her glasses, hence the menacing squinting. Also, I think she’s decent at sewing and mending because well it’s Heap, it’s a handy skill to have, and she cobbled together the costume and sewed the cape herself.
