Eachdraidh: Angelise “Ange” Ikaruga Misurugi | Cross Ange: Rondo of Angels and Dragons | Reserved

[ragnarock]

( PLAYER ★ INFORMATION )

NAME: Emily
AGE: 26
CONTACT: leapsthroughspace[at]gmail.com
CURRENT CHARACTERS & LATEST AC: N/A

RESERVATION LINK: http://fairyfoes.dreamwidth.org/2216.html?thread=2135208#cmt2135208

( CHARACTER ★ INFORMATION )

DOES THIS CHARACTER MEET SKELETAL BASICS? Yes
NAME & AGE: Angelise Ikaruga Misurugi (“Ange”), 16
CANON & CANON POINT: Cross Ange: Rondo of Angel and Dragon, end of series
CANON INFORMATION:

Ange: I saw a Norma for the first time today. A Mana-destroying mutant… why does such a thing exist? We know nothing, but I hope to find answers. If we can exterminate the Norma, the world should become even more beautiful.

First Princess Angelise Ikaruga Misurugi grew up in the peaceful and prosperous Empire of Misurugi. The empire was blessed by the “Light of Mana,” an infinite energy source that powered marvelous technology and allowed near-magical feats of shielding, levitation, and instantaneous communication. But Misurugi had a perpetual problem: every so often, a girl would be born who couldn’t use Mana, and who dissipated any Mana she came into contact with. Everyone knew these girls, “Norma,” were violent, antisocial monsters, and so the people of Misurugi were careful to uncover Norma as small children, exile them, and forget they had ever been born. Princess Angelise went even further, and vowed to discovery the mystery of why Norma were born and get rid of them completely. But on the day Angelise came of age, her brother Julio revealed to the kingdom that Angelise herself was secretly a Norma. The emperor, empress, and Angelise’s maid had conspired to fake the princess’s Mana abilities for years so that even Angelise herself never knew she was a Norma. Princess Angelise was shoved on a plane and dumped at the end of the world.

Jill: You have nothing now – neither the privileges of royalty nor any rights as a person. Welcome to hell.

As it turned out, all those exiled and forgotten Norma girls had all been shipped off to “Arzenal,” an island that was half prison, half military base. Life on Arzenal was harsh. All Norma were enlisted into Arzenal’s combat operations, and, without Mana-enabled technology, Norma lived simple and Spartan lives. But the real horror of Arzenal was the enemy it was built to repel: every so often, rips in the fabric of space-time would open near Arzenal, and hordes of enormous dragons would surge in from another dimension. Norma were expected to pilot giant transforming robots called “Paramail” and fight off the dragons – all for the sake of protecting the Mana kingdoms, where only a select few knew about Arzenal’s existence or the dragon threat.

For Angelise, raised until sixteen in bountiful Misurugi, Arzenal was hell. Aside from the rough lifestyle, she couldn’t believe that she was a Norma, and was convinced that her exile was some sort of mistake. She quickly earned the annoyance of her assigned squad by talking down to them and repeatedly insisting that she was a normal human, and they were all violent monsters. The squad’s annoyance turned to hatred after Angelise’s first real sortie against a dragon attack: Angelise attempted to desert, panicked when she came face to face with her first live dragon, and got two rookies and the squad’s beloved captain killed. Badly injured and faced with a life of killing monsters to survive, Angelise concluded she might as well just die fighting and get things over with. The base commander, Jill, seemed happy to send Angelise to her death in combat, and in the next attack, allowed Angelise to sortie in Arzenal’s most ancient, battered Paramail, “Villkiss”… but, on the verge of death, Angelise remembered her mother’s plea to live on, and couldn’t bring herself to die. And when Angelise’s tears fell onto her dead mother’s ring, battered old Villkiss began to glow, and suddenly it was a kickass shining Paramail and Angelise defeated the dragon!

Finally, Angelise accepted that she really was a Norma, and that since she wanted to stay alive, she was going to spend the rest of her life fighting to stay in one piece. She chopped off her hair to symbolize the death of old Princess Angelise, and accepted her coarse Norma identity: Ange.

Ange: I will survive. Kill, and survive.

But, because she’d gotten three squadmates killed, a mean trio of the squad members weren’t ready to accept her, and repeatedly tried to shoot her in the back in combat. Because these girls kept trying to kill her, Ange decided that she couldn’t trust anyone at Arzenal. Thus, even when the kinder members of her squad tried to befriend her, Ange lashed out and rejected them.

The intra-squad conflict came to a head when the squad’s second-in-command, Hilda, sabotaged Villkiss’s engine, and Ange went down in combat. Fortunately, Ange and Villkiss washed ashore on a small island with a single inhabitant: a boy named Tusk, who was strangely familiar with Villkiss. As the days passed without any contact from Arzenal, Ange resigned herself to the idea that her worst fears about her squad were right: no one at Arzenal wanted her. Because Tusk was adorkable and clearly infatuated with her, Ange even began to wonder if she should just accept life alone on the island with him. But when the Arzenal rescue team finally found her, Ange realized that there were at least two people who wanted her, and that she was happy to have a place where she was accepted. She returned to Arzenal.

Ange: It doesn’t matter to me what you do.
Salia: It doesn’t matter? You give me so much trouble, and it doesn’t matter to you? We’re a team! Yet you keep going on by yourself.
Ange: You people tried to shoot me down from behind. Team, my ass! You never stop them. You want me to die too, don’t you? Well I’m not going to be killed by the likes of you. That’s why I fight alone.
Salia: Quit being so selfish!
Ange: Look who’s talking!

Life even improved when her former maid, a fiercely loyal Mana-user named Momoka, managed to sneak into Arzenal. At first, Ange resented Momoka’s presence as a reminder of her old, cast-off life and wished that Momoka would leave. But when Ange found out that Momoka would be killed if she left Arzenal, in order to keep Arzenal and the dragon threat a secret, Ange cashed in all the favors she’d earned by being a top-tier dragon-killer and convinced Arzenal command to let Momoka stay with her. For a while, life was good. Ange even won over the last bitter hold-outs in her squad after saving them. Arzenal was disgusting, and the people were crude, but it was a place that wanted and accepted her, and Ange started to like it.

Ange probably would have stayed happily on Arzenal, except that Momoka received a Mana-powered transmission from Ange’s little sister, Princess Sylvia, begging Ange to rescue her. Though Ange had settled into life at Arzenal and come to like her squad, she was even more passionately protective of her little sister. So Ange and Momoka (and Hilda, who joined the escape at the last minute) successfully hijacked a supply shuttle and returned to the mainland. Ange and Momoka fought their way through Misurugi to Sylvia… only to discover that Sylvia and Julio had planned the whole thing so they could vent their hatred for Ange’s hidden Norma-ness and publicly execute and torture Ange for the “crime” of being a royal Norma. During the public whipping-and-booing session, Ange realized that the Mana world was a hypocritical, bullshit-ridden dystopia filled with people more hateful and cruel than any Norma on Arzenal.

Hilda: Aaaah, I’ve lost everything. My room, my money, my reason to live. Everything. I wish they’d just kill me.
Ange: No. You can’t die.
Hilda: You’re telling me to live? Haha! That’s right, you were royalty. You talk different. I’m a piece of shit at rock bottom, and you still tell me to live? Not to give up hope? You do?
Ange: You’ll stink if you die. So don’t. Not in this tiny cell.
Hilda: That’s all?
Ange: That’s all.
Hilda: How selfish are you, bitch?
Ange: You’re one to talk, loser.

Luckily for Ange, Tusk showed up, rescued her and Momoka, and flew them back to Arzenal, where Jill threw Ange (and Hilda, who’d been recaptured) in the brig. In a cell together, Ange and Hilda mused about what a crapsack the world was, expecting them to fight and die for a bunch of ungrateful hypocrites. United by their respective misadventures the idea of destroying their bullshit society, Ange and Hilda bantered rudely and finally made up.

But only a few days after returning to Arzenal, the biggest dragon swarm of all time attacked Arzenal – and the dragons were accompanied by three Paramails of their own! Ange sortied against the new Paramail enemies – and heard one of the Paramail pilots singing a song that powered up the woman’s Paramail. The song was strangely similar to the “Eternal Song” Ange’s mother had always sung her, so Ange started singing, and Ange’s song and ring made Villkiss power up and shoot super-lasers, too! And the dragons all retreated through a portal.

Ange: I’m grateful to you. Thanks to you, I learned how spoiled, pampered, and sheltered I was. So, my answer is no.
Jill: Oh?
Ange: Even if everything you say about God and Libertus is true, my path is my own to choose. No matter how glorious the duty, I’ll see things with my own eyes and decide for myself. I won’t let anyone make me do anything.

When the battle was over, Jill finally began to explain how Norma had wound up on Arzenal, and what she wanted Ange to do. Years ago, “God” had become sick of human wars, and decided to create a new, bountiful, peaceful, Mana-using humanity. But girl children unable to use Mana – Norma children – kept being born. God spread the notion that these girls were violent monsters bent on destroying Mana society and had them shipped off to Arzenal, and it seemed like God’s new world might work out. But some survivors of pre-Mana humanity, the Ancient People, continued to wage war against God – until, one day, they captured one of God’s legendary, world-destroying weapons, the “Ragnamail” Bilquis. But none of the Ancient People could activate the machine, which they renamed Villkiss, and when they heard that Norma were being forced to fight with Paramails, the Ancient People teamed up with the Norma. Turned out, Villkiss needed to be activated by one of the royal family rings – and soon after, a Norma princess was born. The Norma and Ancient People rebelled against God and Mana-world, but were defeated and lost the ring, and the Norma princess changed her name to… Jill!

Former-Princess Jill told Ange that Ange had a special role: with her royal blood and royal ring, she could be the one who piloted Villkiss in the next rebellion! Ange shot her down, partly out of independence and partly because Ange liked just plain liked her life in Arzenal (mass-murdering dragons for cash and buying whatever she wanted). Then Jill’s storytime was interrupted by a dragon getting loose in Arzenal. Except, the dragon was actually one of Ange’s squadmates, Vivian, who had somehow turned into a dragon, and only turned back into a human when Ange sang to her! Also, when Ange and her friends went to see all the dead dragon bodies from the last fight, they saw that when the dragons were cremated they all turned into winged women! Ange was horrified that she’d been killing people for money without knowing it, but she had no time to dwell on it…

… because a military fleet of Mana users who had been spooked by Villkiss revealing its true superlaser power, led by Ange’s brother Julio, attacked Arzenal. Jill demanded that Ange escape with her and preserve Villkiss’s power for another attempt at rebellion. But Ange still refused to be anyone’s pawn. She went out to fight and avenge Arzenal – but just before she could kill Julio, a new Paramail appeared in front of her, glowing similar to Villkiss and piloted by a man who knew Ange’s Eternal Song. The man told Ange that he couldn’t allow her to sully herself killing her brother… so he killed Julio for her! But then the man also tried to kill Tusk, and Ange raced to save him, except that Villkiss responded to her desire to save Tusk by teleporting Ange, Tusk, and Vivian away from the battlefield. Neither Ange, Tusk, nor Vivian recognized the place Villkiss had transported them to. Without anything to do but infodump, Tusk revealed that he was the last of the Ancient People, he had a hereditary position and was supposed to protect Villkiss’s pilot, and the “God” Jill had talked about was the same guy who’d killed Ange’s brother: an immortal reality-warping scientist named Embryo.

After exploring, Team Ange thought they had travelled to a post-apocalyptic future and were the only people left alive in the world. Ange once again thought that she was going to live the rest of her life alone with Tusk, and realized that would probably be okay. But then they were interrupted… by dragons! Yes, Team Ange hadn’t gone forward in time, they had just jumped dimensions to dragon world! The trio was taken to the dragon princess Salamandinay, who turned out to be the singing pilot who had led the recent dragon attack on Arzenal.

Salamandinay had an ulterior motive: knowing Villkiss’s power, she wanted Ange to team up with her people. She tried to persuade Ange by infodumping about the dragon planet. This world, Original Earth, had discovered a super-particle called “dracunium,” which was promptly used for war that polluted the whole world. Embryo had led one group of humans to another dimension: Earth Prime, the world where Ange was born. Meanwhile, a scientist on Original Earth genetically modified herself into a dragon, in which form she could ingest dracunium and convert it into a stable form. She taught this to other survivors, and they formed a peaceful society built around cleaning up the Earth. But then Embryo kidnapped Aura to Earth Prime and used her as a battery to power Mana society! And when Norma killed invading dragons, those dragons’ hearts were ripped out so the dracunium in them could be used to sustain Aura!

Ange reacted to this news by completely failing to give a damn, because she didn’t see herself as having a personal stake in this dragons-versus-Embryo fight. Since Ange wouldn’t join her willingly, Salamandinay challenged Ange to a competition: if Ange won, Salamandinay would let her go. If Ange lost, she would stay a prisoner and have to fight for the dragon-people. Ange took the chance to snatch her freedom and won! But in the process, Ange recognized Salamandinay as someone worthy of respect and friendship. Just then, Embryo opened a rift in the space-time continuum that started destroying the dragon city. Ange and Salaminday had to work together to stop it.

The attack, and the dragons’ response in carrying out their lives in the wake of the attack, cemented things for Ange: dragons were pretty cool, and she wasn’t going to fight them anymore. She, Tusk, and Vivian hitched a ride home with a flotilla of dragons trying to attack Embryo directly. However, the whole group was ambushed by several strange Paramail as soon as they passed into Earth Prime. Turned out, in the last battle at Arzenal, Embryo had recruited several of Ange’s former squad mates, including Captain Salia, to work for him. Also he’d given them mecha upgrades. Salamandinay and the dragons barely managed to retreat back to their own dimension, and Ange, Vivian, and Tusk only escaped by using Villkiss’s teleportation ability.

Villkiss’s teleportation brought Team Arzenal, after which they rendezvoused with Jill and the remaining Norma. By this point, Ange had decided that Norma and dragons were cool, and Embryo and Mana-users sucked. She proposed that Jill and the Norma work together with the dragons to take down Embryo and free Aura. Jill pretended to go along with this – but drafted a battle plan that would use the dragons as cannon fodder. Ange refused to let her new friends be used like that — or to be Jill’s tool herself — so she deserted (again), informing Jill that, while defeating Embryo was a good goal, Jill’s methods and attempts to shamelessly use people were disgusting.

Ange: That pervert stalker asked me to destroy the world and make a new one. But I like this world. No matter how incomplete and foolish it is… I like this world.
Tusk: I’m the same. No matter what.
Ange: Because you’re my knight?
Tusk: Because I love you.

Unfortunately, as soon as she escaped Jill’s submarine, Ange was ambushed by Salia’s band again and taken to Embryo. Embryo asked Ange to join his band of pilots, but Ange firmly refused by shooting him in the head. He revealed that he could respawn when killed and asked again, this time with mind control, and she shook the mind control off and attacked him again. Instead of making Embryo mad, this made him fall wildly in love with her, basically because she was a strong-minded throwback to old humanity instead of a Mana-using sheeple. Embryo professed that the current Mana world was a failure, and he wanted to destroy it by using Aura’s energy to smash Original Earth and Earth Prime together, and asked Ange to marry him. Ange responded by killing him with a letter opener, and that’s when things got creepy and Embryo started torturing her so she’d agree to be his wife. Ange only escaped the torture room because Salia, jealous at all the attention Embryo was giving Ange, let her go. The escape went horribly. Momoka and Tusk finally managed to get Ange to safety, apparently both getting blown up in the process. Ange wound up on Tusk’s island because her best friend and her love interest were dead. But not very long, because Tusk and Momoka had actually survived.

Anyway, Ange didn’t have much time to question these miraculous non-deaths, because Embryo started using Aura’s energy to merge Original Earth and Earth Prime, and the start of the merger was already creating a super-storm that was starting to destroy both planets. Ange took control of the remaining resistance factions – the Norma, dragons, Tusk, and a few Mana users – and led this coalition to rescue Aura and stop the merger. They succeeded in freeing Aura, but by that time it was too late for Aura to stop the space-time merger by herself.

Ange: I understand now why Norma were born – because human genes won’t be controlled by the likes of you. Why are Norma all women? So they can bear children to those they love, and reject your world in doing it! And that’s why Mother handed down the song and the ring to me: so I could destroy this rotten world, made by a rotten creator.

Embryo captured Ange again. Jill died after a skirmish, but not before revealing to the Norma that Embryo’s respawn ability was tied to his Ragnamail, and he couldn’t be killed unless his mecha and body were destroyed simultaneously. Aura informed the team that Embryo had taken Ange to a pocket of non-linear space that had enabled his immortality in the first place, and Salamandinay used the power of song to track Ange through space-time and lead a band of Ange’s friends to her rescue. Ange and her friends destroyed Embryo’s mecha and body at the same time, stopping the time-space merger before it could completely destroy the two Earths – although not before Earth Prime was devastated by super-storms.

All the Norma (and Tusk) went through a space-time portal and moved to the dragons’ peaceful Original Earth. When questioned about what would happen to Earth Prime, Ange shrugged and said it wasn’t her problem: the former Mana-users (who had no more Mana, because Aura returned to Original Earth) would have to learn to stand on their own two feet. She resolved to build a country where all people could live together, if they were willing to do some hard work. She worked with the dragons to carve out a new nation for the Norma. Then she opened a café with Tusk.

And, in the end, Ange did exactly what Princess Angelise decided to do in episode one: she discovered why Norma were born, and removed all the Norma from Misurugi.

*

PERSONALITY:

Embryo: My infinite time and infinite love… why won’t you let me control you!
Ange: Because I’m human! Anti-authoritarian, aggressive, rebellious misfits – that’s what humans are!

Ange’s story is about change. She starts as a princess, but when she arrives at Arzenal, she’s told that she’s not a human, that she’s only kept alive to fight dragons, and that she’s not Princess Angelise anymore – she’s just Ange. Having been rejected by society and stripped of her identity, Ange has to rebuild herself stronger. So, Ange’s personality follows a clear trajectory: she starts as a dignified princess, falls into denial and despair, remakes herself as a crude loner, and gradually starts to let friends into her life again (which is good, because it takes all her friends working together to accomplish their goal). Along the way, she has some defining traits that stick through her journey (most importantly, personal loyalty and independence). However, she also undergoes significant shifts (namely to her demeanor and to her willingness to shoulder responsibility).

Some constants

Angelise/Ange’s first constant is a deep-rooted sense of loyalty.

One of the first scenes of the series is Angelise throwing a championship sports match to save a friend from injury, and even as a child Angelise vocally treasured her maid Momoka more than any of the trappings of royalty. The loyalty trait seems to disappear for several episodes after Ange arrives at Arzenal, because for a while she doesn’t feel like anyone there deserves her loyalty – her squadmates keep trying to shoot her down, so why should she be loyal to any of them? But after half her squad rescues her from Tusk’s island, she starts to see Arzenal as a place where she belongs, with at least a few people who care about her. Shortly after Ange’s return, her mechanic, Mei, remarks that she thinks Ange disobeys orders and takes all the risks herself during dragon battles so that no one else in her squad will die, making it pretty clear that Ange’s put-your-friends-first attitude has survived her exile to Arzenal. Ange cashing out everything she’s earned at Arzenal to buy Momoka’s life also shows that Ange’s old loyalty instincts are intact.

The difficult thing about activating Ange’s loyalty trait is that, after settling into Arzenal, Ange is such an unpleasant person (more on that below) that she’s terrible at making friends and comrades to feel loyalty toward. (Her strongest friendships all tend to be formed by fighting alongside someone in a battle, then bantering with that person afterward, as shown with the First Squad, Hilda, and Salamandinay.) Once she forms a tight connection with someone, she’ll move heaven and earth to help them, with barely any regard for her own safety (when she thinks Sylvia is in danger, she accomplishes the unthinkable and breaks out of Arzenal and then storms an entire army with only Momoka for backup to rescue her sister). One of the crowning moments of Ange’s loyalty comes during her first escape from Embryo: she knows that Embryo can mind-control Momoka, but she refuses to be separated from Momoka anyway.

So! The little seed of loyalty you see in Princess Angelise in the first episode flourishes in the life-or-death situations Ange faces later in the series. (Note: this intense personal loyalty shouldn’t be confused with duty, with which Ange has a much more tenuous relationship. More on that on a bit.)

Ange’s second big constant is that she never stops asserting her independence.

She spends most of the series refusing to follow orders, or deserting organizations that try to give her orders. This ties back to two issues: first, her self-confidence, and second, her sense that her family repeatedly lied to her (by covering up that she was a Norma). Because she feels like there have been so many lies in her life, she’d rather see things with her own eyes and make her own decisions than blindly trust anyone again. Whether it’s with Salia, Jill, Salamandinay, or Embryo, Ange just refuses to be ordered around. She’s happy to fight alongside friends, but to fight for someone, as a tool or minion or soldier? Nope.

Development

Angelise/Ange’s demeanor is the most obvious change in the series.

In the beginning, there’s Princess Angelise. Angelise is a well-spoken, confident, self-assured young woman with a polite, regal manner. (She makes a gracious speech about the power of friendship that almost moves people to tears!) Her independence hasn’t completely surfaced at this point: she’s a young woman clearly seeking something to do with her life (first she throws herself into the magic sport of Iaria, then she gets caught up in the idea of improving the world by getting rid of Norma), and she holds herself to impossibly high standards (after a sports championship, she privately expresses frustration that, as a princess, she should be able to keep her friends safe and win everything she puts her mind to).

When Angelise first arrives at Arzenal, she cycles through denial and then to despair. Initially, she starts off in denial about her Norma-ness, and haughtily talks down to those around her by insisting that she’s normal, and they’re violent, anti-social monsters. Her independent streak shows in flashes, as she initially refuses to take orders (“I’m a princess!”) and she tries to desert during her first sortie. After her attempted desertion and disastrous first fight gets three squad members killed, Angelise collapses into despair, and she only snaps out of it because of her mom’s dying wish.

But after the denial-and-despair phase, Angelise commits herself to being a new, stronger person – a survivor. She embraces the identity Arzenal assigned her – plain, unfussy “Ange” – and does a dramatic haircut to symbolize her break with her old self. In becoming Ange, she accepts that her life is rough and crude now: she’ll be living in a prison and killing to survive. And she abandons royal propriety and embraces Arzenal’s coarseness to suit her new life.

One of the major changes is Ange’s way of speaking to people. Angelise was proper and well-spoken. Ange is blunt, rude, and devoid of any niceties. She screams, she swears, she speaks her mind without worrying how people will react. (Angelise would have never screamed “Piss off, cockroach!” at anyone. For Ange, it’s just a normal way of venting.) She’s smug, she talks down to people, she refuses to be intimidated, and she’ll mouth off to anyone, no matter what danger she’s in. On a strange world, surrounded by enemies? Shout at them. Face to face with an apparently unkillable god-figure? Laugh derisively in his face. Ange’s retorts aren’t usually snarky or particularly clever – they’re just brash and bold-spoken.

Ange is also wild, impulsive, and short-tempered. Her tendency to act on these traits is exacerbated by her self-importance and her cockiness about her own talent. As shown repeatedly through the series (pulling a knife on Rosalie, her two attacks on Salamandinay, her several attacks on Embryo and the Diamond Rose Knights, half her interactions with Tusk), she’s quick to resort to physical violence when she’s angry – because she’s confident in her own skills. She rarely makes plans before launching into something violent or daring, trusting in her own skills and ingenuity to carry her through (at one point, she takes out three armed guards by stabbing one in the chest with a pen and just rolling with the chaos that follows). Her impulsiveness means that she only reflects after she’s lashed out.

This does bite her in the butt when she faces enemies with unforeseen skills (Salamandinay flying, Embryo regenerating), because she doesn’t know when to quit or run. She’s not a sadist or cruelly violent – she wouldn’t wander into a town and start knifing people for no reason – but she’s got a hair trigger and will get into a brawl on minimum provocation. (On a related note, she doesn’t have any qualms about killing. She’s horrified when, halfway through the series, she learns that the dragons she’s been mass-murdering for money were actually shapeshifting humanoids – but that shock is clearly more about the secret and the scale of her killing than about killing generally, because she shows zero compunction about trying to kill Embryo, about the collateral civilian deaths in her final attempt to rescue Aura, or about the guy she shoots in the head in the last episode. She’s a fighter and she’ll kill people who threaten her or get between her and an important goal.)

This isn’t to say she’s all bark and bite. Even after a hard life of killing to stay alive, she takes pleasure in little things like cute hair decorations, seeing her friends find happiness, and rare but precious moments of peace on Earth Prime. She loves the thrill of a challenge (shown, in its purest form, by her exhilaration at the end of Salamandinay’s sports battle) and bantering with her friends. She laughs, she smiles, she tries to enjoy what she has – even though it’s not the overabundant luxury she knew in Misurugi. If Ange belatedly realizes that she was rude (which admittedly doesn’t happen often – she usually thinks she’s in the right), she blushes but sucks it up and apologizes. (She apologizes to Hilda for vanishing off to Earth Prime, to Tusk for “going too far” in chucking him off a bridge and putting him in a cast). When she realizes that she was in the wrong, or that someone is doing something nice for her, she tries to make it up to them (bringing Tusk a token after their fight about Libertus, trying to help Tusk with Villkiss’s repairs). She has a gentle, sweet, vulnerable side that she shows to a few select friends: around Momoka and eventually Tusk she openly expresses love, fear, uncertainty about her path and methods, and unconditional gratitude for their support. With other people, she tends to be more flippant and hide her concerns. (Instead of telling Hilda honestly not to give up on life, she tells Hilda not to die because it would stink up their tiny jail cell.)

In short, Princess Angelise was a determined, dignified embodiment of noblesse oblige. After Ange accepts her lot in life as a Norma, that lofty upbringing combines with her smugness about her own skills and Arzenal’s crude but energetic vibe to turn Ange into a smug, self-confident, willful young woman who 1) acts like no one is her better, and 2) isn’t afraid to express that opinion, even to people who clearly have the power of life and death over her. She’s not a brat all the time, but it’s her default front until she becomes friends with people, at which point she shows a softer side. And Ange thinks that this change was for the better: she tells Jill that she’s glad to have shed her soft, spoiled way of life, and later expresses to Tusk that she enjoys how Arzenal and the dragons both live life to the fullest.

Ange’s second big development is her relationship to leadership and responsibility.

While Princess Angelise is a clear leader who inspires her teammates and wants to make Misurugi better for its people, once Ange gets to Arzenal… she aggressively doesn’t care about leadership. For the first half of the series, she bucks other people’s orders, but makes no movement toward taking any sort of responsible role for herself. She discusses possibly wrecking Mana-user society because it’s so damn hypocritical with Hilda, but there’s no “I’m going to lead a revolution!” to that conversation, just “man it would be cathartic to take our giant robots and show those hypocrites what’s up.” Leadership and the role of a princess stay out of the picture until Salamandinay (herself a dragon princess) presses:

Salamandinay: Do you not feel anything about a world as twisted as yours? I know that as a princess, you were once in a position to lead others. Is it not your duty as a leader to right the world’s wrongs?
Ange: How convenient for you. I’m not a princess anymore. Leadership, duty – that’s none of my business. Besides, some people are content with that twisted world, so who cares? In the end, it’s you people who want to change the world. Embryo and Aura have nothing to do with me.

And Ange is right in pointing out that Salamandinay’s appeal to duty is actually self-centered: Salamandinay want Ange to take up a leadership role among the Norma because Ange rebelling against Embryo on Earth Prime would make things a lot easier for Salamandinay to swoop into Earth Prime and rescue Aura. But despite shooting Salamandinay down, the notion of a leader’s role clearly gets under Ange’s skin: in the next two episodes, Ange makes two separate entreaties to Salamandinay to act like a responsible leader. (“Aren’t you a princess, Salamanman? Stop the crisis and save your people. That’s the duty of a ruler” and “Retreat while you still can. You’re the lieutenant-guardian, aren’t you? Look around you. Do you really think you’re going to get Aura back now?”)

The issue of leadership disappears from Ange’s consciousness for the next few episodes, as she focuses on escaping Jill and then Embryo. But when she comes back to the Norma to find Jill deposed and Hilda as active commander, and Hilda says “Hey, you should be the commander instead,” Ange finally slides into the role without much of a fuss. It’s really serendipity: 1) there’s a coalition of people she has personal relationships with (Norma and dragons), 2) that coalition is ready to fight for a cause that Ange has a personal stake in (wrecking Embryo), and 3) no one expects her to do anything administrative, just give kickass speeches and lead from the vanguard. Ange doesn’t go looking for leadership, but when all the stars align, Ange finally circles back to square one, as though she’s a high school sports team captain all over again: she takes a leadership role, and is determined to keep her friends safe and win everything she puts her mind to.

Ange: We Norma, the so-called violent, anti-social monsters, and our enemies the People of Aura, those who follow us, and the Ancient People… Isn’t it wonderful that, after suffering so much, we can join forces to save the world? Let’s fight. So that we can one day live our own lives. It wouldn’t be like us to go down without a fight. This is Operation Last Libertus. Whether he’s God or anything else, we’ll kill him, win, and survive. All of us!

At this point, Ange doesn’t do much leading besides giving inspiring speeches and being the person who happened to draw these disparate factions together. Her leadership involves being in the vanguard and kicking ass. Still, after dipping her feet in being a leader during the final battle against Embryo, Ange shows a greater willingness to step into the role again, at least where her friends are involved. At the end of the series, she emphatically states that she’s going to found a new nation for her followers on Original Earth, and is shown reaching a formal peace agreement with dragon leadership.

However, again, that willingness to be a leader is quite clearly constrained to leading her friends and people who she has an emotional investment in, rather having feeling that she needs to help and lead everyone. During the battle to save Aura, some Misurugi civilians recognize her as “Princess Angelise” and ask her to save them; she refuses (and… shoots the guy who pulls a gun on her dead). After the battle to save Aura, she emphatically says that whatever is happening on Earth Prime isn’t her problem.

So: Ange doesn’t go looking for leadership roles, but when they fall into her lap, and it’s her friends who want her in charge, she’s willing to step into the role.

*

COURT ALLIANCE & REASONING: Unseelie.

Ange is impulsive, wild, and values her own freedom highly. Her story culminates in her leading a rebellion against the entire social order of her world and killing the guy playing god. And, although she initially resists change in her life, the show is about how the world brings change to her and she brings change to the world(s). After she sheds her “Princess Angelise” identity and recreates herself as “Ange,” she stops giving a rat’s ass about honor or duty (“No matter how glorious the duty, I want to see things with my own eyes and decide for myself!”). When she assumes a leadership position, it’s only because she’s leading a posse of her friends against someone they all have a personal grude against. She ignores orders and attempts to control or use her – from Salia, from Jill, from Salamandinay, from Embryo – and does whatever she thinks is right or necessary to help her important people.

But in addition to hitting the change, impulsivity, and passion-before-duty parts of Unseelie culture, Ange just fits Unseelie’s attitude toward the Void. Unlike Embryo, who destroys worlds and starts afresh, Ange likes parts of the current world – so instead of destroying the whole world, she just wants to destroy the parts of society that she thinks are bullshit. In the end, she and her friends succeed in revolutionizing the world(s) and stopping Embryo’s habit of destruction and rebirth.

*

ABILITIES:

• Combat training and general agility. Ange is exceptional in hand-to-hand combat, as well as using a knife and throwing stars. She’s also excellent with a wide variety of firearms and using explosives. She’s a quick improviser (she fights with a pot as a shield, a broom as a staff, a shard of pottery as a knife, and a letter opener as a dagger at various points). She also jumps off a moving giant robot onto another moving giant robot at one point. She’s an all-around Badass Normal.
• Piloting and riding things. Ange is a superb pilot of hoverbikes and giant robots. She can ride a horse, and has no trouble when she starts riding dragons bareback. In a comedic montage, she drives a professional race car.
• Sports. The cool high school sport in Misurugi, Iaria, is lacrosse played on hoverbikes; Ange is excellent at it. In a comedic montage, Ange also plays tennis, baseball, golf, Twister, and a claw machine game well.
• Anti-Mana. Norma shut down any Mana constructs they come into direct contact with. It has to be direct contact, though. For instance: if Ange touches a Mana shield or Mana rope, it will shatter and disappear. By contrast, Ange can ride in a car or plane that’s powered by Mana and it will run fine (apparently unless she touches the engine); additionally, some magic can be performed on things that are attached to her (Momoka uses Mana to unlock Ange’s handcuffs). However! Norma Mana-rejection isn’t a universal anti-magic for two reasons. First, Mana is technically “information technology” rather than magic, and is generated by the “scientific” process of Aura stabilizing dracunium within her body. Second, Norma negation only works against Mana, not any of the other kinds of science-so-absurd-it-borders-on-magic that appears in the show (e.g., Villkiss responds to Ange's emotions, and Embryo can teleport her). So, there’s no reason for Ange to have any functional general anti-magic abilities coming into Eachdraidh.
• The Eternal Song. The Eternal Song embodies physical law, set to a tune. When Ange sings it without the ring or Villkiss, its most notable feature is that it can carry across time and space (Ange sings it while trapped in a bubble outside space-time, and her friends hear it in another universe). When Ange sings it while piloting a Ragnamail and wearing a Ragnamail royal activation ring, the Eternal Song is the final key which enables Villkiss’s strongest cannons to activate.
• High willpower stats. She’s not invulnerable to mind control, but she is able to shake off Embryo’s mind control after a minute. She also holds it together through torture.
• Tea snob? She can recognize tea type and flush by taste.

INVENTORY:
• Ikaruga family royal ring. Ragnamail activation ring, passed down through the Ikaruga royal family for generations. Appears to be a large green stone set in silver. Ange can also use the ring to summon Villkiss. (Although, clearly not between her home world and Each).
• Completely normal knife. Arzenal uniforms carry one at the hip.

*

( WRITING ★ SAMPLES )

NETWORK SAMPLE:

[ The locket’s video function opens up on a small, wiry young woman in one of Caer Scima’s courtyards, speaking over the hubbub of daily castle life and waving an arm in the direction of the Great Hall. She speaks casually, conversationally, and her voice is filled with easy, natural confidence. ]

Isn’t having a queen and king for a bunch of people who like chaos and change stupid? Everyone here is supposed to buy into “change is good” and “passion before duty.” But you’ve had the same people in charge for ages without winning this big war, and nobody’s been passionate enough to start rebelling about them not getting things done. Is it because they’re strong? Because you think making them happy is the only way home?

[ Her chin lifts a bit with vestigial imperiousness, and the hand not holding the locket clasps into a fist. ]

Because humans can make weapons and open doors between worlds, too. You don’t need to do tricks and beg for wishes to win this war and save your world or whatever you’re here for.

[ She huffs and runs a hand through her hair, and when she looks back at the screen a moment later her lips are pursed in a tiny, annoyed frown, and her voice has picked up a grouchy edge. ]

If you’d rather be their pets, it’s not like I can change your mind. But it’s still bullshit.


LOG SAMPLE: TDM

NOTE: I’m going to be travelling and mostly unavailable from the 26th to the 30th. I’m not sure what the schedule for revisions looks like, but if mine could please not be due until the 31st, that would be great. Thanks!