[Pumpkin] Alma Karma (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
imaginemeandyuu) wrote2012-01-20 04:16 pm
imaginemeandyuu) wrote2012-01-20 04:16 pm
Entry tags:
Player Info / Alma Karma's stats & permissions / Essays
Player Info
Basic Player Bio
Name: Harukami
Age: 28
Other characters at Thusia: N/A
Other Games:
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cfud: Umeda Hokuto - Hana Kimi | Heat - Digital Devil Saga | Agatsuma Soubi - LOVELESS | Shindou Hikaru - Hikaru no Go
aather: Kanji Tatsumi - Persona 4 | Rolo Lamperouge - Code Geass
backalley: Rolo Lamperouge - Code Geass (PG: Sabra la Tau)
Contact Info
Hi, I'mharukami! You can contact me at harukami at gmail, or on plurk under diabolicalmoe (add freely, just drop me a line to let me know who you are). If it's urgent and for some reason I am inaccessible at either of these places (which is not very likely), you can find me via my lovely wife zazzle. If she can't find me either, I am probably dead.
I'm in PST, and work 8:30-5:30 Monday through Friday, so I'm not very accessible for play during weekdays (though I will sometimes, unreliably and slowly, do so anyway). I'll be around most evenings and weekends, however.
Please feel free to grab me for a thread at any time!
Alma Karma Info
Basic Character Bio
(Bio information comes from the Gray Chara book)
Name: Alma Karma (アルマ=カルマ ...yes, the equal sign is part of his name technically. So his name means approximately "Nurturing Mother = The Fated Result of your Choice of Actions. Which, given that after he rebelled he was turned into a comatose womb for production of half-akuma, is really depressing...??)
Apparent Age: ~20 (But his age is. Comp...licated... by being a science experiment, with past life memories, but who spent approx 90% of his life in a coma...)
Date of Birth: December 6th
Innocence: Parasite Type (Unnamed)
Blood Type: B
Height: 178 cm (5'10")
Weight: 60 kg (132 lbs)
Appearance
Fairly tall and lean but wiry, Alma's body is covered in swirling black patterns (including two fang-shaped downward black marks below his eyes); only the marks around his upper arms and ankles have color to them, like a colorized tattoo. He doesn't appear to wear clothes but also has no apparent external sex -- so either he's wearing tight shorts that blend into his skin or ...he isn't! I LEAVE IT TO YOU TO ICLY ASSUME ONE OR THE OTHER. Although Ticky already asked about the state of his parts thank you Ticky. ALMA ASSURED HIM IT WAS FINE. I am a terrible person so I favor a sheathe over camouflaged pants but I assume nobody's here to expect me to not be terrible. Frankly with everything else going on with Alma, a little xeno is nothing. (Unsure).
His ears are pointed, and his teeth and nails are slightly sharper than human's. He has a demon-like tail which is prehensile and which he can lengthen and shorten at will. Once, he tied Allen Walker up with it. As well, he has a literal glowing halo over his head. Like, it actually glows... So... I guess on the up side you can have a light source whenever! And on the downside you can't turn it off so you want nice comforting darkness you're out of luck. As I said in the app, you may need to put a bag over his head to sleep. His shoulder, elbow, and knee joints all have a bony spur or plate emerging from them.
Alma has pale blue eyes, thick black brows and ragged black hair with long eartails. There is a horizontal hairline scar over the bridge of his nose, just trailing down onto his cheeks on either side.
Notes for the Psychics/Magical/Soul-detecting-types/etc
* Alma is all fucked up on God Matter and Dark Matter. Basically as an exorcist he has an Innocence (an anti-akuma weapon) inside him which can produce blades from his right arm; however, he also has turned into an akuma, so he has dark matter coursing through his system. Both are somewhat suppressed by the power-cap (preventing him from turning into a huge blorting mass as happened previously, at least). TBH I am not sure how he survives as a parasite-type accomodator and an akuma but it's not like his innocence was removed and since he's a parasite-type that means it's inside him, and he definitely has a blade-edge emerge from his arm when he's in close combat with Kanda, which is also the form of his innocence so he was probably using it there. I DON'T KNOW Boxy and I and Terra and I theorized at each other about this, Allen, and other HOW DOES THIS FUNCTION things for a while. idk it's totally possible that they would have killed him if he'd survived the incident, or that he'd have fallen, and it's also totally possible that the two opposites would end up in enough balance to suspend him. What I do think is that it's REALLY REALLY likely Hoshino is going to whip out some amazing twist on innocence and akuma and how they work because she's been teasing it since vol 1. SO I DON'T KNOW HOW IT WORKS. In conclusion: ALL FUCKED UP ON GOD MATTER AND DARK MATTER.
* Alma has two souls! One is a young boy and the other is a woman in her late twenties or early thirties. Actually delving into his mind will reveal a mix of both minds and both memories (with the woman's memories somewhat more free-floating/vague/etc). This does NOT feel like separate identities, multiple personalities, or otherwise distinct people -- the only separation is in that they obviously can't belong to the same "life" because of the experiences they gesture to. However, they both feel 'like Alma' -- they both belong to him and are part of him. It's less like two distinct parts and more like puzzle parts making up an interlocked whole.
* Going into his mind/sending his emotions will also show you an approximate metric fuckton of trauma, a massive and focused totally unrelenting hatred, and a desperate loneliness and overwhelming love. Pppplus a lot of obsession. He is not terribly sane at this point, also. Lucid! But not really all... okay.
* Alma keeps up a constant, unending running monologue in his head. While Kanda might literally stop thinking when things are too painful, Alma is the other way. It's not that he's particularly smart or analytic, or that his mental monologues necessarily show understanding of what he's thinking about, it's more like an unending mental babble. Usually it's following whatever they're talking about, but it'll bounce to new topics quickly as well. Topic Pinball.
* He has a regenerative power within him but it's pretty badly strained. Basically it's running on fumes but it's still running at this point, and unless he gets badly hacked to pieces or exploded again (n-not impossible) it should keep fumbling along. Between that and the power-cap he's likely to be pretty darn fragile after larger regenerations and things like that, though, and it'll get less effective rapidly the more he has to do large regenerations.
* Being Alma is suffering.
Permissions:
Sure whatever just grab me if you want to do anything at all ever to Alma! Generally I am cool with absolutely whatever but may postpone or avoid something if it's bad timing for me (bed, too busy with work, w/e) so I just want a check first. I'm easiest to grab by email -- harukami at gmail.
Random character essay shit
BECAUSE I APPARENTLY CANNOT STOP TALKING ABOUT ALMA KARMA.
Alma the Akuma
There's a variety of Akuma types in D.Gray-Man but the way they're made is basically this: Persona A dies. Person B, grief-stricken, begs anyone to help bring them back. The Earl of the Millennium swoops in and is like "I CAN HELP YOU BUDDY ♥" and gets them to call the soul of Person A back into a metal skeleton frame -- in which that soul is trapped forever, forced to obey the Earl of the Millennium's bidding. Then the metal skeleton with the trapped soul of Person A climbs into the skin of Person B, murdering them and pretending to be them as they go about killing humans. These mechanical akuma start as level 1s (no will or consciousness of their own) and level up the more humans they kill (to max level 4 so far). At level 2 they develop their own ego, which gets more refined the more they level up. The more they level up, the more their trapped soul deteriorates as well -- and only by destroying an akuma through Innocence can the soul be freed; otherwise the soul is just obliterated. The way the Earl manufactures these akuma machine skeletons is by somehow interacting with the "Akuma egg", which is a mysterious device that had been located on Noah's Ark. It's also said that the dark matter comes from the earl himself. (idk did he lay that egg I don't actually want to know)
("Also man, I read this line... there is that bit where he dresses up as a rooster. WAKE UP ALMA KARMA! No Earl no" -nekokoban)
So, Alma is actually quite different from every other akuma because he is not part of the akuma process at all and actually basically the way he technically functions is, if not the opposite of normal akuma, very unusual. Generally. Despite being one for sure. BASICALLY WHAT HAPPENS TO ALMA IS THIS: After Kanda hacks him to the point he appears to not be regenerating, the Science Division gathers enough of him up and sticks him back together (where he does indeed begin to regenerate again) and then later they stick a shard of the Akuma Egg into his body to mutate it. While keeping him in a coma, and referring to him as the "Womb", they inject his mutated cells into some people who work for them (from a unit known as the Crow) to generate a new series of half-akuma, half-humans (who can thus 'eat' other akuma to get rid of them). When the Noah Clan and the Earl eventually wake Alma up, he chooses to become an akuma -- letting his hate fire up the the dark matter from the egg so it takes over his body.
However, because of this, he seems to lack some of the usual restrictions or definitions that normal akuma have. He's high-powered (being a tough fight for Allen and Kanda despite them having taken on high-level akuma at this point), but his soul (that woman's soul, rather) doesn't appear like an Akuma's soul -- at worst it looks most similar to a level 1 (tethered by chains) but still looking like her living self (while level 1 akuma souls appear skeletal). Basically even though he's an akuma his soul isn't deteriorating visibly. This is even more notable because when trying to get Kanda to kill him he emphasizes GEE AKUMA ARE SO MUCH BETTER THAN EXORCISTS LOOK I JUST HAVE TO DETERIORATE MY OWN SOUL TO LEVEL UP only... his soul isn't deteriorated. My theory is that with that, he is a lying liar who is trying to emphasize how much of an Akuma he is so they try to put him down, but isn't actually... deteriorating his soul through the use of dark matter. I MEAN, HE HAS KILLED PEOPLE. WITH THE AKUMA VIRUS. AND ALL. But no soul deterioration. The situations seem not-applicable, or at least partially not-applicable.
Likewise, he has no actual 'level' as an akuma. He has no evolutionary path (it seems; since he hasn't gone on killing humans it's hard to say, but he doesn't have the appearance of most of the leveled Akuma, who tend to have really distinct appearances.) And he has no mechanical part, nor has he climbed inside anyone else's skin. The dark matter inside him doesn't come from a machine, just from the original egg shard. He has no foreign soul a mechanical akuma with its own identity, only his own souls (and although the second soul is technically a transplant, she was transplanted into him not through dark means but through science -- see Alma's "Past Life" below) and his own identity. Becoming an Akuma gives power to the Earl, and he can hear the Earl's voice, but we don't see him react to the Earl overly much otherwise. (I mean, it's the Earl, I imagine he could exert his will over Alma's dark matter if he wanted, but he doesn't even have the reactions to the Earl talking which the altered Akuma did). Most importantly, he has his own personality still, not a new Akuma's "ego". While most Akuma develop their own unique personalities and have no resemblance to either the soul that is tethered to their frame, nor to the body they wear, Alma is just Alma. Absolutely everything he does after becoming an Akuma is still driven by his own personality and situations of the past.
Most of all, what shows that he's not restricted like any other akuma into the usual elements of "being an akuma" is that when he dies, it's not through use of Innocence -- he specifically makes Kanda promise not to use Innocence but to let the dark matter crush his soul -- but we (and Kanda) see both souls leave and pass on. (* ETA: Why I read it that way I ramble about here)
So basically Alma Karma still is an akuma -- he can feel the Earl, identify the Noah on sight, use dark matter skills, gives power to the Earl by existing -- he apparently is kinda non-standard and not bound to the fate of the akuma. I GUESS. IT'S CONFUSING. I GOT NOTHIN'. This essay isn't going anywhere to argue a point or anything so much as just be like THIS IS HOW IT SEEMS TO BE?!
Additional note on this is that between the power cap suppressing the dark matter somewhat and how weird he is as an akuma, I'm playing him with a mild bloodlust -- nothing he can't resist, and closer to the mild urge towards violence that the half-akuma have than the suppressed bloodlust of the altered akuma. Still, he's going to want to be out on groups dealing with wildlife at least partially to help sate that background appetite to kill.
Alma's "Past Life"
I put "past life" in quotes here because technically what happened to them didn't even slightly resemble actual reincarnation. It wasn't fate that their souls meet again -- it was sheer gothic "science", body horror, and human intervention all the way.
So, Accomodators have been around for quite some time, and the battle vs the Earl and the Akuma likewise. Despite many torturous attempts to make it work otherwise, only the chosen Accomodator can use a specific Innocence. Since there's so few Innocences (109 total, many of those already destroyed by the Earl and many not yet discovered), losing an Accomodator is kind of a a huge deal. So, the Science Division developed a program to transplant the brains of dead Accomodators into new bodies and see if they could get the person that results to re-synchronize with their Innocence.
Two Accomodators were a male and female pair, completely in love with each other (with some implication if it being a liiiiittle obsessive given the memories we see Kanda get), who both eventually fell in battle to akuma. Sometime later, Alma woke up from the crazy mud science birthing pit and began Accomodator training -- and not too long after (half a year), Kanda did too. Alma didn't have flashbacks to who he used to be; Kanda, however, started having severe ones -- hallucinating a beautiful woman, seeing lotus flowers around. The Science Division had made a habit of killing the ones who got to that point, but Alma broke Kanda out and then fled himself. When Alma fell into the depths of the Accomodator training room, he was confronted with the original bodies that had been brought back and realized what had happened. He recovered memories of that past self -- enough to have a sudden full awareness of what had happened to That Woman and what that meant for himself (though he didn't realize until later that Kanda had been in love with That Woman). He went insane with complete despair, betrayal, and hate, killed basically the entire Science Division, and attempted a murder-suicide on Kanda.
(I use "That Woman" here just because since nobody remembers her name, that's how she's referred to throughout the text, so it's the easiest way to gesture to this female past/soul).
When the Noah wake him up again after he's been in a coma for years and has had the akuma egg shard implanted, he has just been sent through a psychic roller-coaster ride of his own memories and Kanda's view of the events, thanks to the Noah Wisely. This means that he wakes with an awareness of why Kanda chose to betray him, fight him and live -- he knows that Kanda was doing it because he'd promised to find "that woman" from his visions. Annnd even though his very first response on seeing Kanda is to beam and weep with joy, he is terrified that Kanda will realize that he is "that woman" and reject him again and her along with him. If that happens, Alma would lose Kanda completely (in that "Alma" has already lost Kanda but "That Woman" hasn't -- so if Kanda realizes they're the same Alma fears Kanda will lose that drive and desire). Which is why he fakes bloodlust and acts as an akuma that would genuinely need to be destroyed. In order to hide the truth without Kanda eventually figuring it out, he has to just be a vicious akuma who needs to be put down, not someone anyone can have sympathy for. If he hides that he is That Woman and takes the secret to the grave, he still dies in part loved and not alone, but if Kanda finds out and still rejects Alma, then he has lost everything. Her soul is afraid of being seen, and Alma is afraid of the soul being seen -- basically, Alma/The Woman are the same being. This person has two souls but one "self". Two lives contained in one person. It's not multiple personalities and it's not reincarnation -- Alma is Alma; Alma is also That Woman. He refers to her as "me" as opposed to "her" -- in Japanese he switches between boku for 'this' self and 'watashi' for 'that' self (as in, Kanda killed "me" so he could keep his promise to find "me" - thank you for the reference on this,nekokoban!). There is no experience in Alma's life that was separate from the reality of having been That Woman; there is only the experience of a time when he was separate from awareness that he was That Woman.
At any rate, it's clear that Alma remembers enough to know he's "That Woman", know what that means, know what her relationship to Kanda's past was, etc. I'll be playing him in Thusia with the assumption of a partial awareness of this "past life" -- loose, disconnected memories of romance and love and fighting and being that exorcist and how she died and general life experiences informing things and all that, without real directed flow.
As well, as with Kanda's inexplicable background drive to find and keep his promise with "That Woman", Alma too has a background drive to be at Kanda's side -- the promise she had made before she died was to be together with him. Again, as with Kanda, this doesn't cause their feelings or change who they are now and how they interact (Alma's main and original drive to be with Kanda was to not be alone anymore and dealing with things all by himself and lonely etc), but it's a constant background push overlaid on TOP of the things they feel and deal with now. Which is part of why he is so freaking obsessive and driven. Yuu Yuu Yuu Yuu Yuu I don't want to lose you Yuu. Both his feelings and her old ones are in total alignment -- there's no discord between what he wants and what her past drives him to want. IT IS ALL ABOUT YUU UP IN HERE.
That all said, it's very unlikely he'll talk about anything regarding his past life in much detail regardless of what happens.
Alma Karma and Physicality/Love
One really cool thing which D.Gray-Man does around the whole Alma and Kanda storyline is to explicitly refer to the key driving issue between them as 'love' (Wisely refers to their story as being about "love and tragedy", the chapter headers are things like "Memory of love", and of course Alma confesses that he loves Kanda as he passes). And yet DGM never makes a big deal about the fact that these are both guys, and also totally avoids any sketchiness around the fact that Alma has a woman's brain transplanted into him. These are both areas where I think a lot of series would mishandle it pretty severely either by making the fact they're both guys a schism instead of having the issue be the schism, or by trying to make a skeevy point that it's "because" Alma's brain is a woman's or something, and tbh I really, really appreciate DGM for not doing that. Hoshino very much leaves their love as basically, Alma and Kanda are Alma and Kanda and love each other for Alma and Kanda, but ended up caught up in the fact that they used to be other people. When I first started writing this I was trying to talk about Alma's gender and sexuality, which I'm torn on doing because on the one hand, I think Alma's fascinating in that regard, but on the other hand I also don't want to undercut how openly "this is just how things are" DGM is. So instead of going into any great lengths, I'll just say that the way I play him Alma identifies ~75% male and ~25% female and thus generally sort of androgynous, and once he gets a fuller awareness of sexuality he would probably be functionally bisexual.
The reason I say "Fuller awareness of sexuality" is that, well... Alma's not totally innocent, exactly, but he also kind of is. He read a LOT OF BOOKS owned by the Science Division so I imagine the concepts are not totally foreign to him, and he also has the (hazy/partial) memories of being a woman who was in a relationship. As far as experiences in his own life go, though, he has only had maybe ~500 days of conscious living in his entire life and 99.9% of those were wavering on the verge of puberty. He was sleeping in a creepy science mud pit until he was 10 or so, spent mmmaybe half a year with the Science Division by himself, then spent around another year with Kanda before he got put into a coma. (Kanda's birthday is exactly 6 months after Alma's, and it's winter when the narration provides that just under 200 days later Kanda would hack Alma to pieces. ) Then he was kept unconscious/sealed through magic/science, during which time he was probably semi-conscious but not able to interact with the world (see Alma's Coma below). When the Noah woke him up, he had maybe another hour or two of life as an adult.
SO UHHH yeah he kind of missed it as his body went through puberty without really being able to do more than just dream. This doesn't mean that he isn't aware of some of the technicalities, nor that he isn't open to the idea. But as far as being aware of his own reactions and interests and desires and how to act on them and how not to and so on (rather than past-self memories thereof)... a lot of that issss not really something he knows yet because they can only be learned through experience, and "life experience" is something more or less completely absent for him. And it's perfectly likely that he'll want to explore this, just because -- well, he's free to do so, and he's now on the other side of puberty, and probably a little high on gosh actually living his own life, but right now it's sort of a big "? Oh um ///" thing.
He is also a pretty physical person! Albeit with some restraint. In general, holding onto and clinging to people he cares about is something he'd be quite happy to do nnnonstop but he's reluctant to initiate. So how touchy-feely he is is more or less going to be in flux based on how he is...ffffeeeling and what is going on in his life at the time and so on. It's a craving but sometimes he is like NOPE NOT INDULGING CRAVING NOPE NOPE.
That all said, Alma has been a romantic basically ffforever. While he was stalking after Kanda because he wanted a friend, he was also demonstrating all the signs of a crush -- blushing and fidgeting when they were alone together, etc. I mean, the devotion and love was devotion and love, and as I mentioned above, some of the drive to beeee with Yuuuu was probably similar to Kanda's completely out-of-his-own-control need to find "that woman" -- some carry over from the past possessing them. But given that in the end he's swearing his love I'm preeettty sure it was a crush from very early on and that is at least how I am playing it on Alma's side: an enormous crush that bursts into love around the time the two of them break down laughing together and genuinely spending time together. He's pretty aware of this fact, too, at least now. He's just like BOY I SURE AM IN LOVE WITH YUU :|. That doesn't mean he'll talk about it much if he doesn't think the romantic side is reciprocated because... talking about things?? No no. That is for far less stupid people than these boys.
ANYWAY so he is super romantic and love-love about Kanda in particular even if he sort of feels that he's already been overly blessed far beyond what he deserves in just having Kanda actually be a real friend after everything. He also believes in love as a feeeeel generally (though he's also incredibly bitter, hateful, and twisted about people's intentions). Friendship, love, hope, strength in unity, etc, are all incredibly important things to him, but at the same time his ability to hold thees feelings in his heart generally are incredibly damaged by ...well... deep personal betrayal, as well as the fact that he'd shared a mix of hate and affection for a lot of people in the first place. It's sort of a difference between his ideals and his ability to enact these ideals. IN CONCLUSION HE IS KIND OF A YANDERE. ("Kind of...")
Alma's Grief/Hate/Grudge
So Alma has a kind of enormous grudge. It is such an enormous grudge that when he turned into an akuma, his cells that had been put into the Thirds mutated into enormous killing monstrosities that wailed about how much he hated everything. It's such an enormous grudge that when he died his grudge continued to live on without him. That is kind of a big feel.
So basically what the situation was is this: From the moment of his "birth" he lived with this group of scientists. And on the one hand, they were good to him! Very affectionate. When Kanda would reject him they got him a copy of a book called "How to make 100 friends" (not even making this up) so he could try to use the techniques on Kanda. They laughed and joked with him and taught him things he wanted to know and fed him and fussed over him when he went out into the cold underdressed and so on.
But at the same time, he was a science experiment with no right to live on his own. He never saw the sky. He wasn't permitted to meet with anyone but the scientists. Over and over he was told that his fate was to become an exorcist to fight in a war. And of course, they were testing his ability to sync with the Innocence. This test is torture. Literally. He was tortured to death over and over again, with his recovery time between shock and death timed. We see scenes of this from Kanda's perspective, (but Alma was doing the same thing) where blood literally exploded out of his body far enough to spatter someone standing 5-6 feet behind. He was completely alone for part of (most of?) a year, going through this. And then someone else came out of the ground who he completely attached to and that other person also got tortured to death. And he tried to hide his own pain -- Kanda didn't even realize Alma was doing this too until he heard over the wireless that Alma's tests had sent him into cardiac arrest. The torture didn't end with these sessions, either; the result of going through them was that their bodies were cracked and fragile, so any strain to them would make them fall apart (ex, he helps Kanda out of a pit and both their arms fall off).
Still, the hatred and rage he felt over this was something he was willing to swallow as long as he wasn't alone, and for the sake of the people around him. But when they were going to permanently kill Kanda he just -- lost it. Tried to save Kanda, tried to get his innocence to sync so he could protect Kanda. Dr. Edgar, probably one of the doctors he was closest to, tried to stop him, and he ended up yelling at Edgar, "You're animals!" Which -- it was obvious that it hurt Edgar. And it was obvious that hurting Edgar hurt Alma. But it's also what he's been thinking all this time. That people who could do this to them aren't people he could really be friends with. That they don't understand what he's going through. That they're monsters.
So there's a lot there, already simmering under the surface, which exploded when Alma found out the truth -- that they were freaking brain transplants, that they'd been lied to this entire time, that they were trying to kill Kanda just because he started to remember his past life. And he just -- completely lost control. Synchronized with his innocence and completely lost control and all of his resentment and anger and pain exploded everywhere. He killed every scientist he came across -- I don't have the books with me as I'm typing this, but I think it said 45 people or so? His trust was completely broken, he lashed out, and he hated himself so much for it. When Kanda showed up he was sobbing about it and trying and failing to kill himself, then decided to kill Kanda too because if they didn't die, the Order would just continue to use them and use them and use them. Which Kanda almost went along with, then ended up killing Alma himself.
Well, when he gets woken up again so does his hate and betrayal -- but along with it is guilt. The situation with the scientists may have been pretty darn stockholm syndromey (sure they torture us to death but they're so nice and they take care of us too and really it's all in the name of a greater good!) but he still did care about them and hate himself already for killing them even as he found himself completely unable to forgive them and found himself hating them. Incredibly strong m-mixed feelings. Even as he dies he's upset that he can't forgive them, still feels betrayed, and he still hates them. As a result he feels like should die, and do so with the dark matter crushing his soul.
So he's still got all that baggage here right now in Thusia -- this sense that he killed people he cared about and that they deserved it. His grudge is still enormous but so is his guilt and self-hatred. It's leading to a sort of manic hysteria in a lot of his interactions because HA HA HOW DO I TALK ABOUT MYSELF AT ALL WITHOUT REALLY CREEPY OVERTONES yeah I heard about this from a guy I BRUTALLY MURDERED this one time!1 Oh you want to know about me? I was born in a mud puddle AFTER PEOPLE I THOUGHT I COULD TRUST HAD ACTUALLY MUTILATED MY LAST BODY AND PUT MY BRAIN IN SOME KID'S BODY. Abluhbluhbluh.
Alma's Coma
I KNOW I SHOULD STOP SOON BUT THERE IS ONE MORE THING I WANT TO TALK ABOUT: The degree of 'awareness' Alma had during his coma.
Which is definitely not zero.
This entire part actually creeps me out all to hell but basically, let me put it this way: Road is able to find Alma Karma, and Road's area is dreams. After he wakes up, Alma has zero ramp up time. He knows what had happened to him. He knows it was the Noah's doing, and he knows that Allen and Kanda had a walk through his brain (as a matter of fact, everything that he did after waking up other than the initial smile and tears was to try to quickly deal with what Kanda would have seen in there before Kanda could realize what it meant). He becomes an akuma IMMEDIATELY on waking up to hide the truth. He knows that his cells were used in production of the thirds and understands what is happening to them as a result. He has zero confusion about where he is, why the Noah and the Earl are here, or why the scientists are here.
That means he was conscious enough to understand what was going on around him.
This means he was held semi-conscious and semi-vegetative, unable to move, sealed just below the surface of full consciousness until he drew on the dark matter to wake up after Wisely's hold over his mind shattered.
Which means he spent nine years trapped in an unresponsive body that was being experimented on, with nothing to do but dream and think about what had happened to him. This is already bodyhorror nightmare scenario max.
Then, when you consider that what happened right before that was getting hacked to pieces by the person he loved (admittedly totally justifiably, one does not just murder-suicide on others, Alma), this turns from a nightmare scenario to a full-on hell.
It is actually kind of marvelous he is as sane as he is, all things considered. He's manic and hysterical and unable to control his feelings well (not that he was ever good at that) and miserable and desperate and all of that but he is lucid and taking action based on his decisions (even if it's action like BECOME AN AKUMA, MAKE YUU KILL ME). This is also affecting things in Thusia, obviously, because for him it's also only been a matter of hours so far since a nine-year-long nightmare. He's still really coping with the aftermath. The catharsis of how he died, accepted by Kanda, has helped him find peace at the time, but with an actual life ahead of him there's a lot more feelings to feel.
That all said, under the ccccracked sanity and manic tendencies, a lot of his personalty is very similar to how much he was as a kid. We see it start to come out at the end of his fight, when he's just talking honestly and not pretending any more -- how he talks and acts falls very much back into who he was as a kid. A lot of behaviors will be the same too. Which makes sense, given that he never had a life after to try to redefine himself and his personality -- there was no growing up and changing, only a bad semi-lucid dream and terrible experiences. So basically he's very much the same type of person he was as a child -- just also twisted up in his horrific experiences, loss of ability to handle reality properly, and manic attempts to keep up with himself.
AND THEN I STOPPED RAMBLING FOREVER AND JUST WENT AHEAD AND POSTED, GOD HARU!1 Questions, comments, and psyducking at DGM all welcome.
Basic Player Bio
Name: Harukami
Age: 28
Other characters at Thusia: N/A
Other Games:
cfud: Umeda Hokuto - Hana Kimi | Heat - Digital Devil Saga | Agatsuma Soubi - LOVELESS | Shindou Hikaru - Hikaru no Goaather: Kanji Tatsumi - Persona 4 | Rolo Lamperouge - Code Geassbackalley: Rolo Lamperouge - Code Geass (PG: Sabra la Tau)Contact Info
Hi, I'm
harukami! You can contact me at harukami at gmail, or on plurk under diabolicalmoe (add freely, just drop me a line to let me know who you are). If it's urgent and for some reason I am inaccessible at either of these places (which is not very likely), you can find me via my lovely wife zazzle. If she can't find me either, I am probably dead.I'm in PST, and work 8:30-5:30 Monday through Friday, so I'm not very accessible for play during weekdays (though I will sometimes, unreliably and slowly, do so anyway). I'll be around most evenings and weekends, however.
Please feel free to grab me for a thread at any time!
Alma Karma Info
Basic Character Bio
(Bio information comes from the Gray Chara book)
Name: Alma Karma (アルマ=カルマ ...yes, the equal sign is part of his name technically. So his name means approximately "Nurturing Mother = The Fated Result of your Choice of Actions. Which, given that after he rebelled he was turned into a comatose womb for production of half-akuma, is really depressing...??)
Apparent Age: ~20 (But his age is. Comp...licated... by being a science experiment, with past life memories, but who spent approx 90% of his life in a coma...)
Date of Birth: December 6th
Innocence: Parasite Type (Unnamed)
Blood Type: B
Height: 178 cm (5'10")
Weight: 60 kg (132 lbs)
Appearance
Fairly tall and lean but wiry, Alma's body is covered in swirling black patterns (including two fang-shaped downward black marks below his eyes); only the marks around his upper arms and ankles have color to them, like a colorized tattoo. He doesn't appear to wear clothes but also has no apparent external sex -- so either he's wearing tight shorts that blend into his skin or ...he isn't! I LEAVE IT TO YOU TO ICLY ASSUME ONE OR THE OTHER. Although Ticky already asked about the state of his parts thank you Ticky. ALMA ASSURED HIM IT WAS FINE. I am a terrible person so I favor a sheathe over camouflaged pants but I assume nobody's here to expect me to not be terrible. Frankly with everything else going on with Alma, a little xeno is nothing. (Unsure).
His ears are pointed, and his teeth and nails are slightly sharper than human's. He has a demon-like tail which is prehensile and which he can lengthen and shorten at will. Once, he tied Allen Walker up with it. As well, he has a literal glowing halo over his head. Like, it actually glows... So... I guess on the up side you can have a light source whenever! And on the downside you can't turn it off so you want nice comforting darkness you're out of luck. As I said in the app, you may need to put a bag over his head to sleep. His shoulder, elbow, and knee joints all have a bony spur or plate emerging from them.
Alma has pale blue eyes, thick black brows and ragged black hair with long eartails. There is a horizontal hairline scar over the bridge of his nose, just trailing down onto his cheeks on either side.
Notes for the Psychics/Magical/Soul-detecting-types/etc
* Alma is all fucked up on God Matter and Dark Matter. Basically as an exorcist he has an Innocence (an anti-akuma weapon) inside him which can produce blades from his right arm; however, he also has turned into an akuma, so he has dark matter coursing through his system. Both are somewhat suppressed by the power-cap (preventing him from turning into a huge blorting mass as happened previously, at least). TBH I am not sure how he survives as a parasite-type accomodator and an akuma but it's not like his innocence was removed and since he's a parasite-type that means it's inside him, and he definitely has a blade-edge emerge from his arm when he's in close combat with Kanda, which is also the form of his innocence so he was probably using it there. I DON'T KNOW Boxy and I and Terra and I theorized at each other about this, Allen, and other HOW DOES THIS FUNCTION things for a while. idk it's totally possible that they would have killed him if he'd survived the incident, or that he'd have fallen, and it's also totally possible that the two opposites would end up in enough balance to suspend him. What I do think is that it's REALLY REALLY likely Hoshino is going to whip out some amazing twist on innocence and akuma and how they work because she's been teasing it since vol 1. SO I DON'T KNOW HOW IT WORKS. In conclusion: ALL FUCKED UP ON GOD MATTER AND DARK MATTER.
* Alma has two souls! One is a young boy and the other is a woman in her late twenties or early thirties. Actually delving into his mind will reveal a mix of both minds and both memories (with the woman's memories somewhat more free-floating/vague/etc). This does NOT feel like separate identities, multiple personalities, or otherwise distinct people -- the only separation is in that they obviously can't belong to the same "life" because of the experiences they gesture to. However, they both feel 'like Alma' -- they both belong to him and are part of him. It's less like two distinct parts and more like puzzle parts making up an interlocked whole.
* Going into his mind/sending his emotions will also show you an approximate metric fuckton of trauma, a massive and focused totally unrelenting hatred, and a desperate loneliness and overwhelming love. Pppplus a lot of obsession. He is not terribly sane at this point, also. Lucid! But not really all... okay.
* Alma keeps up a constant, unending running monologue in his head. While Kanda might literally stop thinking when things are too painful, Alma is the other way. It's not that he's particularly smart or analytic, or that his mental monologues necessarily show understanding of what he's thinking about, it's more like an unending mental babble. Usually it's following whatever they're talking about, but it'll bounce to new topics quickly as well. Topic Pinball.
* He has a regenerative power within him but it's pretty badly strained. Basically it's running on fumes but it's still running at this point, and unless he gets badly hacked to pieces or exploded again (n-not impossible) it should keep fumbling along. Between that and the power-cap he's likely to be pretty darn fragile after larger regenerations and things like that, though, and it'll get less effective rapidly the more he has to do large regenerations.
* Being Alma is suffering.
Permissions:
Sure whatever just grab me if you want to do anything at all ever to Alma! Generally I am cool with absolutely whatever but may postpone or avoid something if it's bad timing for me (bed, too busy with work, w/e) so I just want a check first. I'm easiest to grab by email -- harukami at gmail.
Random character essay shit
BECAUSE I APPARENTLY CANNOT STOP TALKING ABOUT ALMA KARMA.
Alma the Akuma
There's a variety of Akuma types in D.Gray-Man but the way they're made is basically this: Persona A dies. Person B, grief-stricken, begs anyone to help bring them back. The Earl of the Millennium swoops in and is like "I CAN HELP YOU BUDDY ♥" and gets them to call the soul of Person A back into a metal skeleton frame -- in which that soul is trapped forever, forced to obey the Earl of the Millennium's bidding. Then the metal skeleton with the trapped soul of Person A climbs into the skin of Person B, murdering them and pretending to be them as they go about killing humans. These mechanical akuma start as level 1s (no will or consciousness of their own) and level up the more humans they kill (to max level 4 so far). At level 2 they develop their own ego, which gets more refined the more they level up. The more they level up, the more their trapped soul deteriorates as well -- and only by destroying an akuma through Innocence can the soul be freed; otherwise the soul is just obliterated. The way the Earl manufactures these akuma machine skeletons is by somehow interacting with the "Akuma egg", which is a mysterious device that had been located on Noah's Ark. It's also said that the dark matter comes from the earl himself. (idk did he lay that egg I don't actually want to know)
("Also man, I read this line... there is that bit where he dresses up as a rooster. WAKE UP ALMA KARMA! No Earl no" -
nekokoban)So, Alma is actually quite different from every other akuma because he is not part of the akuma process at all and actually basically the way he technically functions is, if not the opposite of normal akuma, very unusual. Generally. Despite being one for sure. BASICALLY WHAT HAPPENS TO ALMA IS THIS: After Kanda hacks him to the point he appears to not be regenerating, the Science Division gathers enough of him up and sticks him back together (where he does indeed begin to regenerate again) and then later they stick a shard of the Akuma Egg into his body to mutate it. While keeping him in a coma, and referring to him as the "Womb", they inject his mutated cells into some people who work for them (from a unit known as the Crow) to generate a new series of half-akuma, half-humans (who can thus 'eat' other akuma to get rid of them). When the Noah Clan and the Earl eventually wake Alma up, he chooses to become an akuma -- letting his hate fire up the the dark matter from the egg so it takes over his body.
However, because of this, he seems to lack some of the usual restrictions or definitions that normal akuma have. He's high-powered (being a tough fight for Allen and Kanda despite them having taken on high-level akuma at this point), but his soul (that woman's soul, rather) doesn't appear like an Akuma's soul -- at worst it looks most similar to a level 1 (tethered by chains) but still looking like her living self (while level 1 akuma souls appear skeletal). Basically even though he's an akuma his soul isn't deteriorating visibly. This is even more notable because when trying to get Kanda to kill him he emphasizes GEE AKUMA ARE SO MUCH BETTER THAN EXORCISTS LOOK I JUST HAVE TO DETERIORATE MY OWN SOUL TO LEVEL UP only... his soul isn't deteriorated. My theory is that with that, he is a lying liar who is trying to emphasize how much of an Akuma he is so they try to put him down, but isn't actually... deteriorating his soul through the use of dark matter. I MEAN, HE HAS KILLED PEOPLE. WITH THE AKUMA VIRUS. AND ALL. But no soul deterioration. The situations seem not-applicable, or at least partially not-applicable.
Likewise, he has no actual 'level' as an akuma. He has no evolutionary path (it seems; since he hasn't gone on killing humans it's hard to say, but he doesn't have the appearance of most of the leveled Akuma, who tend to have really distinct appearances.) And he has no mechanical part, nor has he climbed inside anyone else's skin. The dark matter inside him doesn't come from a machine, just from the original egg shard. He has no foreign soul a mechanical akuma with its own identity, only his own souls (and although the second soul is technically a transplant, she was transplanted into him not through dark means but through science -- see Alma's "Past Life" below) and his own identity. Becoming an Akuma gives power to the Earl, and he can hear the Earl's voice, but we don't see him react to the Earl overly much otherwise. (I mean, it's the Earl, I imagine he could exert his will over Alma's dark matter if he wanted, but he doesn't even have the reactions to the Earl talking which the altered Akuma did). Most importantly, he has his own personality still, not a new Akuma's "ego". While most Akuma develop their own unique personalities and have no resemblance to either the soul that is tethered to their frame, nor to the body they wear, Alma is just Alma. Absolutely everything he does after becoming an Akuma is still driven by his own personality and situations of the past.
Most of all, what shows that he's not restricted like any other akuma into the usual elements of "being an akuma" is that when he dies, it's not through use of Innocence -- he specifically makes Kanda promise not to use Innocence but to let the dark matter crush his soul -- but we (and Kanda) see both souls leave and pass on. (* ETA: Why I read it that way I ramble about here)
So basically Alma Karma still is an akuma -- he can feel the Earl, identify the Noah on sight, use dark matter skills, gives power to the Earl by existing -- he apparently is kinda non-standard and not bound to the fate of the akuma. I GUESS. IT'S CONFUSING. I GOT NOTHIN'. This essay isn't going anywhere to argue a point or anything so much as just be like THIS IS HOW IT SEEMS TO BE?!
Additional note on this is that between the power cap suppressing the dark matter somewhat and how weird he is as an akuma, I'm playing him with a mild bloodlust -- nothing he can't resist, and closer to the mild urge towards violence that the half-akuma have than the suppressed bloodlust of the altered akuma. Still, he's going to want to be out on groups dealing with wildlife at least partially to help sate that background appetite to kill.
Alma's "Past Life"
I put "past life" in quotes here because technically what happened to them didn't even slightly resemble actual reincarnation. It wasn't fate that their souls meet again -- it was sheer gothic "science", body horror, and human intervention all the way.
So, Accomodators have been around for quite some time, and the battle vs the Earl and the Akuma likewise. Despite many torturous attempts to make it work otherwise, only the chosen Accomodator can use a specific Innocence. Since there's so few Innocences (109 total, many of those already destroyed by the Earl and many not yet discovered), losing an Accomodator is kind of a a huge deal. So, the Science Division developed a program to transplant the brains of dead Accomodators into new bodies and see if they could get the person that results to re-synchronize with their Innocence.
Two Accomodators were a male and female pair, completely in love with each other (with some implication if it being a liiiiittle obsessive given the memories we see Kanda get), who both eventually fell in battle to akuma. Sometime later, Alma woke up from the crazy mud science birthing pit and began Accomodator training -- and not too long after (half a year), Kanda did too. Alma didn't have flashbacks to who he used to be; Kanda, however, started having severe ones -- hallucinating a beautiful woman, seeing lotus flowers around. The Science Division had made a habit of killing the ones who got to that point, but Alma broke Kanda out and then fled himself. When Alma fell into the depths of the Accomodator training room, he was confronted with the original bodies that had been brought back and realized what had happened. He recovered memories of that past self -- enough to have a sudden full awareness of what had happened to That Woman and what that meant for himself (though he didn't realize until later that Kanda had been in love with That Woman). He went insane with complete despair, betrayal, and hate, killed basically the entire Science Division, and attempted a murder-suicide on Kanda.
(I use "That Woman" here just because since nobody remembers her name, that's how she's referred to throughout the text, so it's the easiest way to gesture to this female past/soul).
When the Noah wake him up again after he's been in a coma for years and has had the akuma egg shard implanted, he has just been sent through a psychic roller-coaster ride of his own memories and Kanda's view of the events, thanks to the Noah Wisely. This means that he wakes with an awareness of why Kanda chose to betray him, fight him and live -- he knows that Kanda was doing it because he'd promised to find "that woman" from his visions. Annnd even though his very first response on seeing Kanda is to beam and weep with joy, he is terrified that Kanda will realize that he is "that woman" and reject him again and her along with him. If that happens, Alma would lose Kanda completely (in that "Alma" has already lost Kanda but "That Woman" hasn't -- so if Kanda realizes they're the same Alma fears Kanda will lose that drive and desire). Which is why he fakes bloodlust and acts as an akuma that would genuinely need to be destroyed. In order to hide the truth without Kanda eventually figuring it out, he has to just be a vicious akuma who needs to be put down, not someone anyone can have sympathy for. If he hides that he is That Woman and takes the secret to the grave, he still dies in part loved and not alone, but if Kanda finds out and still rejects Alma, then he has lost everything. Her soul is afraid of being seen, and Alma is afraid of the soul being seen -- basically, Alma/The Woman are the same being. This person has two souls but one "self". Two lives contained in one person. It's not multiple personalities and it's not reincarnation -- Alma is Alma; Alma is also That Woman. He refers to her as "me" as opposed to "her" -- in Japanese he switches between boku for 'this' self and 'watashi' for 'that' self (as in, Kanda killed "me" so he could keep his promise to find "me" - thank you for the reference on this,
nekokoban!). There is no experience in Alma's life that was separate from the reality of having been That Woman; there is only the experience of a time when he was separate from awareness that he was That Woman.At any rate, it's clear that Alma remembers enough to know he's "That Woman", know what that means, know what her relationship to Kanda's past was, etc. I'll be playing him in Thusia with the assumption of a partial awareness of this "past life" -- loose, disconnected memories of romance and love and fighting and being that exorcist and how she died and general life experiences informing things and all that, without real directed flow.
As well, as with Kanda's inexplicable background drive to find and keep his promise with "That Woman", Alma too has a background drive to be at Kanda's side -- the promise she had made before she died was to be together with him. Again, as with Kanda, this doesn't cause their feelings or change who they are now and how they interact (Alma's main and original drive to be with Kanda was to not be alone anymore and dealing with things all by himself and lonely etc), but it's a constant background push overlaid on TOP of the things they feel and deal with now. Which is part of why he is so freaking obsessive and driven. Yuu Yuu Yuu Yuu Yuu I don't want to lose you Yuu. Both his feelings and her old ones are in total alignment -- there's no discord between what he wants and what her past drives him to want. IT IS ALL ABOUT YUU UP IN HERE.
That all said, it's very unlikely he'll talk about anything regarding his past life in much detail regardless of what happens.
Alma Karma and Physicality/Love
One really cool thing which D.Gray-Man does around the whole Alma and Kanda storyline is to explicitly refer to the key driving issue between them as 'love' (Wisely refers to their story as being about "love and tragedy", the chapter headers are things like "Memory of love", and of course Alma confesses that he loves Kanda as he passes). And yet DGM never makes a big deal about the fact that these are both guys, and also totally avoids any sketchiness around the fact that Alma has a woman's brain transplanted into him. These are both areas where I think a lot of series would mishandle it pretty severely either by making the fact they're both guys a schism instead of having the issue be the schism, or by trying to make a skeevy point that it's "because" Alma's brain is a woman's or something, and tbh I really, really appreciate DGM for not doing that. Hoshino very much leaves their love as basically, Alma and Kanda are Alma and Kanda and love each other for Alma and Kanda, but ended up caught up in the fact that they used to be other people. When I first started writing this I was trying to talk about Alma's gender and sexuality, which I'm torn on doing because on the one hand, I think Alma's fascinating in that regard, but on the other hand I also don't want to undercut how openly "this is just how things are" DGM is. So instead of going into any great lengths, I'll just say that the way I play him Alma identifies ~75% male and ~25% female and thus generally sort of androgynous, and once he gets a fuller awareness of sexuality he would probably be functionally bisexual.
The reason I say "Fuller awareness of sexuality" is that, well... Alma's not totally innocent, exactly, but he also kind of is. He read a LOT OF BOOKS owned by the Science Division so I imagine the concepts are not totally foreign to him, and he also has the (hazy/partial) memories of being a woman who was in a relationship. As far as experiences in his own life go, though, he has only had maybe ~500 days of conscious living in his entire life and 99.9% of those were wavering on the verge of puberty. He was sleeping in a creepy science mud pit until he was 10 or so, spent mmmaybe half a year with the Science Division by himself, then spent around another year with Kanda before he got put into a coma. (Kanda's birthday is exactly 6 months after Alma's, and it's winter when the narration provides that just under 200 days later Kanda would hack Alma to pieces. ) Then he was kept unconscious/sealed through magic/science, during which time he was probably semi-conscious but not able to interact with the world (see Alma's Coma below). When the Noah woke him up, he had maybe another hour or two of life as an adult.
SO UHHH yeah he kind of missed it as his body went through puberty without really being able to do more than just dream. This doesn't mean that he isn't aware of some of the technicalities, nor that he isn't open to the idea. But as far as being aware of his own reactions and interests and desires and how to act on them and how not to and so on (rather than past-self memories thereof)... a lot of that issss not really something he knows yet because they can only be learned through experience, and "life experience" is something more or less completely absent for him. And it's perfectly likely that he'll want to explore this, just because -- well, he's free to do so, and he's now on the other side of puberty, and probably a little high on gosh actually living his own life, but right now it's sort of a big "? Oh um ///" thing.
He is also a pretty physical person! Albeit with some restraint. In general, holding onto and clinging to people he cares about is something he'd be quite happy to do nnnonstop but he's reluctant to initiate. So how touchy-feely he is is more or less going to be in flux based on how he is...ffffeeeling and what is going on in his life at the time and so on. It's a craving but sometimes he is like NOPE NOT INDULGING CRAVING NOPE NOPE.
That all said, Alma has been a romantic basically ffforever. While he was stalking after Kanda because he wanted a friend, he was also demonstrating all the signs of a crush -- blushing and fidgeting when they were alone together, etc. I mean, the devotion and love was devotion and love, and as I mentioned above, some of the drive to beeee with Yuuuu was probably similar to Kanda's completely out-of-his-own-control need to find "that woman" -- some carry over from the past possessing them. But given that in the end he's swearing his love I'm preeettty sure it was a crush from very early on and that is at least how I am playing it on Alma's side: an enormous crush that bursts into love around the time the two of them break down laughing together and genuinely spending time together. He's pretty aware of this fact, too, at least now. He's just like BOY I SURE AM IN LOVE WITH YUU :|. That doesn't mean he'll talk about it much if he doesn't think the romantic side is reciprocated because... talking about things?? No no. That is for far less stupid people than these boys.
ANYWAY so he is super romantic and love-love about Kanda in particular even if he sort of feels that he's already been overly blessed far beyond what he deserves in just having Kanda actually be a real friend after everything. He also believes in love as a feeeeel generally (though he's also incredibly bitter, hateful, and twisted about people's intentions). Friendship, love, hope, strength in unity, etc, are all incredibly important things to him, but at the same time his ability to hold thees feelings in his heart generally are incredibly damaged by ...well... deep personal betrayal, as well as the fact that he'd shared a mix of hate and affection for a lot of people in the first place. It's sort of a difference between his ideals and his ability to enact these ideals. IN CONCLUSION HE IS KIND OF A YANDERE. ("Kind of...")
Alma's Grief/Hate/Grudge
So Alma has a kind of enormous grudge. It is such an enormous grudge that when he turned into an akuma, his cells that had been put into the Thirds mutated into enormous killing monstrosities that wailed about how much he hated everything. It's such an enormous grudge that when he died his grudge continued to live on without him. That is kind of a big feel.
So basically what the situation was is this: From the moment of his "birth" he lived with this group of scientists. And on the one hand, they were good to him! Very affectionate. When Kanda would reject him they got him a copy of a book called "How to make 100 friends" (not even making this up) so he could try to use the techniques on Kanda. They laughed and joked with him and taught him things he wanted to know and fed him and fussed over him when he went out into the cold underdressed and so on.
But at the same time, he was a science experiment with no right to live on his own. He never saw the sky. He wasn't permitted to meet with anyone but the scientists. Over and over he was told that his fate was to become an exorcist to fight in a war. And of course, they were testing his ability to sync with the Innocence. This test is torture. Literally. He was tortured to death over and over again, with his recovery time between shock and death timed. We see scenes of this from Kanda's perspective, (but Alma was doing the same thing) where blood literally exploded out of his body far enough to spatter someone standing 5-6 feet behind. He was completely alone for part of (most of?) a year, going through this. And then someone else came out of the ground who he completely attached to and that other person also got tortured to death. And he tried to hide his own pain -- Kanda didn't even realize Alma was doing this too until he heard over the wireless that Alma's tests had sent him into cardiac arrest. The torture didn't end with these sessions, either; the result of going through them was that their bodies were cracked and fragile, so any strain to them would make them fall apart (ex, he helps Kanda out of a pit and both their arms fall off).
Still, the hatred and rage he felt over this was something he was willing to swallow as long as he wasn't alone, and for the sake of the people around him. But when they were going to permanently kill Kanda he just -- lost it. Tried to save Kanda, tried to get his innocence to sync so he could protect Kanda. Dr. Edgar, probably one of the doctors he was closest to, tried to stop him, and he ended up yelling at Edgar, "You're animals!" Which -- it was obvious that it hurt Edgar. And it was obvious that hurting Edgar hurt Alma. But it's also what he's been thinking all this time. That people who could do this to them aren't people he could really be friends with. That they don't understand what he's going through. That they're monsters.
So there's a lot there, already simmering under the surface, which exploded when Alma found out the truth -- that they were freaking brain transplants, that they'd been lied to this entire time, that they were trying to kill Kanda just because he started to remember his past life. And he just -- completely lost control. Synchronized with his innocence and completely lost control and all of his resentment and anger and pain exploded everywhere. He killed every scientist he came across -- I don't have the books with me as I'm typing this, but I think it said 45 people or so? His trust was completely broken, he lashed out, and he hated himself so much for it. When Kanda showed up he was sobbing about it and trying and failing to kill himself, then decided to kill Kanda too because if they didn't die, the Order would just continue to use them and use them and use them. Which Kanda almost went along with, then ended up killing Alma himself.
Well, when he gets woken up again so does his hate and betrayal -- but along with it is guilt. The situation with the scientists may have been pretty darn stockholm syndromey (sure they torture us to death but they're so nice and they take care of us too and really it's all in the name of a greater good!) but he still did care about them and hate himself already for killing them even as he found himself completely unable to forgive them and found himself hating them. Incredibly strong m-mixed feelings. Even as he dies he's upset that he can't forgive them, still feels betrayed, and he still hates them. As a result he feels like should die, and do so with the dark matter crushing his soul.
So he's still got all that baggage here right now in Thusia -- this sense that he killed people he cared about and that they deserved it. His grudge is still enormous but so is his guilt and self-hatred. It's leading to a sort of manic hysteria in a lot of his interactions because HA HA HOW DO I TALK ABOUT MYSELF AT ALL WITHOUT REALLY CREEPY OVERTONES yeah I heard about this from a guy I BRUTALLY MURDERED this one time!1 Oh you want to know about me? I was born in a mud puddle AFTER PEOPLE I THOUGHT I COULD TRUST HAD ACTUALLY MUTILATED MY LAST BODY AND PUT MY BRAIN IN SOME KID'S BODY. Abluhbluhbluh.
Alma's Coma
I KNOW I SHOULD STOP SOON BUT THERE IS ONE MORE THING I WANT TO TALK ABOUT: The degree of 'awareness' Alma had during his coma.
Which is definitely not zero.
This entire part actually creeps me out all to hell but basically, let me put it this way: Road is able to find Alma Karma, and Road's area is dreams. After he wakes up, Alma has zero ramp up time. He knows what had happened to him. He knows it was the Noah's doing, and he knows that Allen and Kanda had a walk through his brain (as a matter of fact, everything that he did after waking up other than the initial smile and tears was to try to quickly deal with what Kanda would have seen in there before Kanda could realize what it meant). He becomes an akuma IMMEDIATELY on waking up to hide the truth. He knows that his cells were used in production of the thirds and understands what is happening to them as a result. He has zero confusion about where he is, why the Noah and the Earl are here, or why the scientists are here.
That means he was conscious enough to understand what was going on around him.
This means he was held semi-conscious and semi-vegetative, unable to move, sealed just below the surface of full consciousness until he drew on the dark matter to wake up after Wisely's hold over his mind shattered.
Which means he spent nine years trapped in an unresponsive body that was being experimented on, with nothing to do but dream and think about what had happened to him. This is already bodyhorror nightmare scenario max.
Then, when you consider that what happened right before that was getting hacked to pieces by the person he loved (admittedly totally justifiably, one does not just murder-suicide on others, Alma), this turns from a nightmare scenario to a full-on hell.
It is actually kind of marvelous he is as sane as he is, all things considered. He's manic and hysterical and unable to control his feelings well (not that he was ever good at that) and miserable and desperate and all of that but he is lucid and taking action based on his decisions (even if it's action like BECOME AN AKUMA, MAKE YUU KILL ME). This is also affecting things in Thusia, obviously, because for him it's also only been a matter of hours so far since a nine-year-long nightmare. He's still really coping with the aftermath. The catharsis of how he died, accepted by Kanda, has helped him find peace at the time, but with an actual life ahead of him there's a lot more feelings to feel.
That all said, under the ccccracked sanity and manic tendencies, a lot of his personalty is very similar to how much he was as a kid. We see it start to come out at the end of his fight, when he's just talking honestly and not pretending any more -- how he talks and acts falls very much back into who he was as a kid. A lot of behaviors will be the same too. Which makes sense, given that he never had a life after to try to redefine himself and his personality -- there was no growing up and changing, only a bad semi-lucid dream and terrible experiences. So basically he's very much the same type of person he was as a child -- just also twisted up in his horrific experiences, loss of ability to handle reality properly, and manic attempts to keep up with himself.
AND THEN I STOPPED RAMBLING FOREVER AND JUST WENT AHEAD AND POSTED, GOD HARU!1 Questions, comments, and psyducking at DGM all welcome.
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