Character flaws

let's start short to long; we'll start with blue, then letha then dodger.

because dodger... uh... we'll be here a while.

also for the sake of fairness i'm going to ignore any character flaws directly caused by mental illness.

Bluestar: Blue is the product of a messiah complex turned on its' head; she's constantly struggling with the responsibility of knowing that, objectively speaking, she is destined to keep law and order in the forest.

In the books this causes two problems. The first is that she is rather narrow-minded; not in the sense that she isn't welcoming of new cats and their ideas, but rather that once she's made a decision it's extremely difficult to convince her she's made a mistake. She has been bred and trained to think that whatever choice she makes is the action

chosen by StarClan, and doubting herself is only going to cause suffering. So while she's usually willing to listen to the other side of an argument, she thinks it's her moral duty to prove herself right rather than find a compromise.

The other issue is that she's self-sacrificial to a deadly end (literally). She's been brought to believe that anything that benefits her must by definition be harmful to those around her; therefore, if something makes her happy, it must be destroyed or forced into a role that only helps others and not herself.

Also, while she's better with this than most ThunderClan cats, she's still a little kitty racist. But that's to be expected.

In games, another problem is brought up by her messiah status; she's not used to being normal. She's used to being the head motherfucker in charge. And it isn't so much that she doesn't like others having control over her, or has any selfish desire to lead, it really is just that she doesn't know what to do with herself if she isn't leading.

Not just leading, but she's always been looked at with a certain note of expectation and approval. Being brought into a setting where she's regarded as a normal every day cat is just... confusing. She's essentially brought down from being a god among mortals, to a cute lil kitty baby look at the beans. And like... what does she do with that.

Letha: God where do we start. With Letha. I mean, even without her mental illness, she is just. A brat. Legit, one of her inspirations was Sound of Music:

Maria from The Sound of Music

She goes a bit further than the average trope of "period girl who acts too free spirited for her refined peers" - she doesn't just climb trees, read and run through the fields singing (she actually finds all of those to be boring activities), but instead has her fun by grave-robbing, hiding spiders in her family members' beds and

loudly arguing with her mother because she knows she'll win if the alternative is causing a scene in public.

Her preferred method of winning arguments is brandishing a rusty pair of sewing scissors, too, and that's its own flaw. I'm honestly a little sad about how seldom her scissors have come up in RV, but she never really needs them since she doesn't harbor that much negative CR and it's never the special kind of animosity she has with her family.

Letha has almost no sense of danger, which could almost be called courage except that she's actually a complete coward who will happily abandon her companions if she finally realized she's in over her head. Given a choice between abandoning her friends or dying with them, she'll happily skip out on them and decide she can apologize to them later.

She's also prone to exaggerating her own abilities; she claims to be an expert swordswoman despite being average at best, and her natural inclination toward necromancy went to her head immediately, making her pompous and argumentative if anyone questioned it. This also made her dismiss baking as boring, when she actually enjoys it but is terrible at it.

Most of these flaws were fixed through character development in RV, and replaced by some new ones; Letha is rather flighty in RV, and instead of feeling comfortable with what she knows she's rather quick to move from one opinion to the next. Time in Riverview has cemented the idea of avoiding problems rather than facing them...

...And what better way to avoid a problem than by changing your stance on it when someone confronts you. Notice how she hates and fears her daughter right up until someone disapproves of that, and suddenly she loves her daughter but no one understands the danger...

And while it's true that no, no one really knows what Winter's capable of... neither does Letha. And she's a little too quick to claim she does know, when she's never seen a healer in person until Winter. She can't even be sure that healers are real, and Winter doesn't just happen to have the same "symptoms" as her storybooks describe.

Also, a trait she picked up from her mother, Letha is an expert of making compromises and acting like a martyr because of it. Back home, Letha agreed to be married and even went through some lengths to pretend to be happy with Aristeo, just to try and stay in her grandmother's good graces. Most of her posh attitude is built around trying to impress

her mother and grandmother, the two women she hates most in her life. Similarly, in RV she's prone to using the defensive strategy of making friends with her enemies, and being as polite and giving as she can be so that she can find a way to hurt them personally. Unfortunately, a lot of people are too smart for that, but she doesn't mind if they play along.

Dodger: If I really sat down and listed everything that's wrong with Dodger's personality my hands would be shaking by the end of it. Sufficed to say his biggest flaw is that he has a ridiculous amount of power both physically and influentually, and almost none as far as inhibition and emotional stability.

Back home, Dodger is an unpredictable force rather than a man; he's someone that can appear anywhere, at any time, with no warning at all. If someone badmouths Augustine, their days are numbered and they know it. He can pick off the insubordinate just from their paranoia, before he even hears if they've said anything out of line.

In comparison, when put into a game he's effectively cut off from his life support. That being his intricate web of informants, servants and his brain itself, Victor Augustine. Without all of that Dodger is a shadow of his former self and he knows it, but he's never been left to his own devices for more than a month at a time and even then, he was not the

same man by any means the last time he was alone. Augustine has made Dodger so dependent on his presence that Dodger is willing to kill himself rather than face time on his own, no matter how much Augustine abuses him.

On the other hand, Dodger is an extremely impulsive creature; this is a trait that Augustine fosters as much as he fears. On the one hand, surrendering the reigns entirely to someone else gives both of them plausible deniability; Dodger can say 'it wasn't my choice, I did that for Augustine'. And Augustine can say 'it wasn't my choice, Dodger stepped out of

line'. Either of them or both can tell themselves that, and solve it with a beating, and continue as usual. On the other hand, Dodger is impulsive to the point where if anyone, even for a second, convinced him that they would treat him better than Augustine, he is fully capable of killing Augustine and switching sides. The only thing stopping him is

a healthy dose of paranoia that someone might tell him nice things just to get him to kill Augustine and then abandon him, effectively destroying Augustine's gang from the inside.