thecircus | Teal Deer About Your CR Meme

Working on grad school application stuff, may be slow, but hit me up

Meow

Ohhh man where do I start??? I am so overtired holy shit I'm sorry if this is disjointed and doesn't make sense.

At the start of the VLR anime Sigma's meeting with Phi is narrated with a dramatic "And that... was how we met." As if it were a meeting of absolute historic significance. And while the anime isn't canon and it pretty bad in general, it pretty much sums it up. Sigma meeting Phi changed his life and even if they technically only knew eachother for a grand total of like, eight days at the absolute most counting the mars mission and not counting re-dos, Phi is his best friend.

Based on no canon evidence whatsoever, I have the impression that pre-Game Sigma didn't have a lot of close friendships in his life. His pre-Game long-term girlfriend is so intimidated by Akane's lies about him (or something) that she won't even give him the decency of a face-to-face break up. When Sigma mentions the word friend, while it may mean a lot to him, it's not what the reader would typically consider a friendship. He calls Alice, who humiliated and tried to kill him, a friend. He's only known Luna for several hours at most and has reason to suspect that she's a killer, but in the middle of Luna's ending, he mentions how it feels to see a friend dead. He is constantly desperate for affection. I think he's just too good and gets used more often than someone gives back to him in a relationship, and I think Phi is one of the first people who saw his goodness and didn't think 'what a tool' but 'you're a good person.' He has probably never heard that from someone before and probably never will again.

Akane is different - Akane is a million year old goddess of space time who doesn't care who lives and who dies as long as she gets her perfect quantum universe. Despite being a baby space time god, Sigma can't morally agree with that, even if he has a job to do. Phi understands. Phi knows that every universe counts and that their actions in other universes matter, especially if they were unethical. Phi knows that he's in the last position he ever wanted to be in and knows that he can't get out. Even Diana and Luna will abandon him, even espers like Clover and Tenmyouji who have the capacity to understand don't. Phi is the only one who understands him. Phi is the only person who calls him "Sigma" in his old age and considers them the same person.

As much as he ribs her and picks on her, he adores her. We already know that is prepared to die for her, and when he stepped in front of Akane's knife for her, he thought he did. Now that she's in Panem, he wants to keep her safe. Their powers are locked. There's no do-overs anymore. Sure, he may have been paranoid when he showed up at the D4 house to make sure she didn't drink herself to death, but as far as he was concerned that was the least he could do.

He's so pissed that this father-daughter rumour shit has ruined her opinion of him, but not at her. He's pissed at the Capitol machine for hurting her feelings over such a sensitive subject and he's ever more determined to fuck it over, now. While he's considered the possibility, not once has he looked at Phi and thought of her as a daughter. Even if she's done some things he considers cold, she's a lot stronger than him, and she's his hero. One can't look up to their child the same way one looks up to their hero, that's not how it works. The only way he'd consider changing his mind is if she asked him to - and if that were the case, he'd be the first to apologize for everything. In the end, it doesn't matter what the truth is - he'll look out for her like he always does.

Them's a lot of words to say redundant shit you already knew! :D

Oh man, so many words, and I don't even know where to start! I love it.

I think if Phi knew how much he looked up to her, she'd be even more touched by him. She probably wouldn't think nearly as badly about the rumors. The part that grates on her the most is that it makes her feel like a child next to Sigma, when before she did consider them partners and friends. And children (to her) are weak. They're there to be protected because they can't protect themselves. And she doesn't want anyone to look at her that way--but especially Sigma. Because she actually cares about Sigma and about what he thinks.

I really hope she'll get to the point of accepting it somehow. If she could work it out, she might actually let Sigma be her father. He's miles ahead of what she originally imagined her father to be like--even despite how things went down with her mother. But the first step to that would be to actually prove it to her... Which is arguably the hardest part, considering her level of denial when talking about sensitive subjects.

Huff B(

lmao Terezi.

Sigma was pretty salty about dying, even if he was being manipulated by the pseudo-Majora's Mask at that point and it was probably for the best that he got axed. Terezi's explanation didn't really mollify him - hey, if you thought I had the same power, we should have been friends! Not enemies! DUH!- it was Initiate's trust in her that did. Of course, he forgave her, because that's what he does. After that, he got to know her a little better, and came out thinking that Terezi was one of the coolest people ever. He really wanted to get to know her better before everything went to shit.

And sadly, he does believe he will, someday. He just expects to apologize to Terezi and that will make everything right and they can go on to be besties and everything will be fine. He'll consider Terezi turning him the betrayal of someone that was supposed to be his friend. He'll persist after the war with trying to patch things up and will be just crushed when he eventually learns that there's nothing he can do to fix things.

He thought she might be the only person in Panem who had the capacity to understand him like Phi did.

c8

You already know Sigma's feelings about cool female leaders so let's do cool female leaders: the sequel.

Sigma bases a lot of his opinions on people on his gut feelings about them and Shepard is just a person that he has a good feeling about. He saw her rally the troops during the Xenomorph attack, he knows she's a good leader with a good head on her shoulders. When Tabris showed up at the bar he was like "Uuuuuuhhhhh" and when she got all lap dancy with him he was like "UHHHHH WHAT IS THIS ABOUT, 'CAUSE IT'S NOT ABOUT ME!" Tabris seemed like a nice lady, if mischievous, but he hadn't seen her in the heat the way he had seen Shepard and he didn't know enough about her to form an opinion of her. So when he saw that Shepard was with her, he instantly trusted Tabris. If it had been anyone else, he probably would have burned the note without reading it for fear of being anthraxed or something. And thank god he didn't, because he now wears that feather around his neck. He's eternally grateful to Shepard, especially. He owes her big time and knows it. She could leak the fact that he's a spy at any time she wanted and she doesn't, even though he's going to go on to do increasingly shitty things, and that takes some real strength and he probably wouldn't do the same in her shoes. So cheers to you, Shep. Let's hope they do a cool thing sometime together in the future.

Good luck on the applications, you can do it!

Thank you <3

Welp, Luna.

Sigma's feelings for Luna are very complicated. /meme

On one hand, Sigma knows that Luna is his creation, that he literally gave her life from metal and plastic and that he programmed every part of what makes her her. However, he sincerely believes that robots are a new form of sentient life. After all, if her programming is like the Chinese Room, couldn't that be said of all sentient life? Neuroscience suggests that our decisions are made for us before we are consciously aware that we have made a decision. Isn't it just our own electrical impulses and hormones that make up who we are, make all of our choices and give the illusion of free will while we sit back and watch? Can you prove otherwise? Of course, Sigma doesn't actually believe that, but that's what he would argue in a robot's defense. Part of the Alan Turing case for Artificial Intelligence: So I can't prove a Robot has thoughts of their own free will, but I can't prove that you do, either, so let's give everyone the benefit of the doubt! (Hilariously, when told that robots can't be intelligent because they don't have ESP powers like humans, Turing said "well, I'll just put everyone in an ESP-proof room." Plot of ZE3 confirmed. Just kidding.) As far as he is concerned, there is no difference between programming and physiology other than the former is a lot easier to change. But Luna was programmed to have free will, not to be his puppet. She does what he asks because he asks her, not because he forces her to do it. She is free to refuse, and eventually does. Because of this, Luna is alive.

Luna is someone irreplaceable to him. Sigma's feelings are pretty ambiguous in Luna's ending, but I think it's fair to say that he had a romantic interest in her back then, even, perhaps, loved her by the end of the route. These feelings didn't change because he created her. It changed because he fell in love with someone else, and that someone else happened to be her precursor.

Sigma considers Diana his soulmate even though she left him (probably in outrage for discovering he was Zero) and finds it difficult to move on, even in Panem, where romantic relationships weren't impossible for him. Luna may have been created in his grief to ease the pain of her disappearance, but it ended up making it worse. Is it fair to Luna if he loves her for being like the person he modeled her after, the person he wanted to spend the rest of his life with? Is it fair to Luna to love her for who she is... with the intention to turn his back on this timeline, return to Diana in the past, save the world, and stay with her instead? Now that Diana is dead, is it fair to her memory to love Luna and be relieved that the decision was made for him with her death? It isn't so much that Sigma doesn't love Luna romantically anymore, like it disappeared somewhere between both Nonary Games, it's that he does not let himself. Luna isn't forward enough to tip his decision either way and they just go around and around and around.

Still, she is very dear to him. He wants more than anything for her to be happy, but he's caught in the awkward no-win situation of "tell her and the Capitol wins" and "keep quiet and she's miserable." He does what little he can, like showing up to give her the music box or telling her about Diana. Behind closed doors, Sigma definitely shed a few tears worrying about her. When this is over, he'll do anything to make it up to her. Literally anything. Luna didn't do anything wrong and deserves to live a happy life. He'll be sad if that life doesn't involve him, but will understand why it needs to be that way.

Nnnnngh that hurts to read, just so you know. I alluded to this a bit in my own TL;DR to you (though gosh, I tried to condense it to avoid teal, teal deers and you gave me all this beauty!) but Luna does catch a little of his desire for her happiness because of what happened her first day in Panem, although she hasn't realized it as such because of her ideas about robot compliance. She certainly doesn't see any potential romantic overtones as anything but wishful thinking. :( They really are going to keep going around in circles, although maybe in the end they can settle on something even if it doesn't go beyond companionship (emotionally if not physically, given your endgame ideas). That would be enough of a happy ending in Luna's book, anyway - I like to think whatever form of love she feels for Sigma, just getting to be close to/with him would be a major fulfillment.

Also can I please express my gratitude that you read all my dumb rambly tech/philosophical talk about how Luna's nature as an AI works and then throw out your own for this meme? Because it makes me happy and I just want to say so.

Awww, that's sweet. Sigma wants her to be happy and he would also be very happy to have her around, so I think they can reach a compromise in companionship... endgame plans kept in mind, heheh :D Maybe if they get a golden ending they can be like the Rhizome but instead of him asking her to help him murder people it'll be the two of them working together to help other people in need, and also way happier. But we'll see how that goes ;D

Thanks! :D I'm glad! I really enjoy your thoughts on it, too. I say I minored in English but it was actually half Postcolonial Writing and half Digital Humanities which includes philosophies of technology and the history of human and computer interaction so that shit is my jam. I love reading what you have to say. If I didn't want to live a life of poverty I would definitely get a Masters of English in Digital Humanities instead, lmao.

Hay

If there's one person in the Capitol who is Sigma's threat number one, it's Quintus. Quintus could single-handedly knock over Sigma's house of cards if he wanted to. Every interaction of theirs has been pretty much built on lies, from turning in the Initiate to reporting the Arena damage... Sigma even got his Capitol defense job by sucking up to his homeworld game building job which he hated with every ounce of his soul. What's worse, Sigma can be a bad liar, and it's Quintus' job to see through people. Quintus terrifies him because every time they talk his head is on the chopping block. As paranoid as he is, I'm sure Sigma knows that Quintus is onto him, and that scares him to death.

And yet...

He doesn't get a bad impression from Quintus like he does with Black Tom. As far as Sigma is concerned, Quintus is not a bad person. He's just a guy doing his job. He'd be loath to consider him an enemy at the end of things just because he worked for the Capitol. He thinks that if Quintus did turn him in, it would not be because he wanted a piece of fame, or because he was being malicious, it would be because he was doing his job right. Because of this, Sigma would never be able to kill him if it came down to Quintus or his own life, and his plans would topple. District 13 was almost torn to shreds before Sigma stepped in to stop it, who knows what else they have planned? Maybe District 13 can't survive without a spy in the Capitol. And that's what makes Quintus a very scary enemy...

I'm really looking forward to Sigma's interrogation. :D Of course, I think we should wait until after you're done finals because I know what it's like trying to thread during that season, aha. Stress for everyone. I'll be done my application stuff by then, anyway, so it'll be good.

Black Tom please!

Good luck!

\o/

\o

^_^

Cyrus!

Teal Deer About Your CR Meme

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