Eridan Ampora has really grown on me. Like mold. I’m kidding - he really is a great character.
Okay, first things first. Eridan doesn’t capitalize things unless he’s really excited. He doesn’t use punctuation outside of exclamation points. He curses a whole lot. He gives “fucks” galore. He removes a lot of consonants from his speech - “weeping” and “posing” become “weepin” and “posin,” he changes “of” and occasionally “to” into “a,” and other hard words like “and” become “an” or “them” into “em.” Because all of these consonants are missing, his words melt into each other, and they acquire a rhythm like beating waves. The extra w’s and v’s only accentuate that rhythm. But that cool rhythm was the plus side of his quirk - the minus side is that Eridan doesn’t really care about proper grammar. He says “should of” when it ought to be “should have,” which is one of my biggest pet peeves ever. He sometimes says “your” instead of “you’re.” When you’re roleplaying Eridan, you can basically throw away all of your fastidious grammar habits.
Let’s talk content. As you can see in the quote above, Eridan is totally obsessed with magic. Many times throughout canon, Eridan says things like “magic isn’t real,” “it can’t be magic,” “i may have a wand but i use it FOR SCIENCE,” blah blah blah. Honestly I think that Eridan desperately wants magic to be real, but he believes it isn’t physically possible, so he’s ashamed of that desire, and he lashes out against any mention of magic. He does have a vast collection of shitty wands, though.
Speaking of his obsession with magic, Eridan is really childlike at heart. He is astoundingly romantic. Of course I mean that in the quadrant sense, but I also mean that he loves tales of “the GLORY OF VICTORY and the STING OF DEFEAT and POLITICAL MACHINATIONS” (all of which is from his introduction). He read all of the stories that he could find about his ancestor, Orphaner Dualscar, and he’s just a big history buff in general. This means that as a roleplayer, you should try to reference “the great tacticians and warriors of Alternia” or “the most important traits in a soldier/general” or something like that whenever you can.
Because Eridan has this idea of himself as a marvelous tactician and the best-educated of the trolls, he takes himself incredibly seriously. I don’t think he cracks even one joke in all of Homestuck. However, although he doesn’t try to be funny, he really is. He’s just so… so… I can’t even describe it.
My goodness. He has the soul of a crotchety old man, stuck in the body of a hormonal teenager.
Now, Eridan constantly professes his desire to kill all landdwellers, but I don’t believe he actually wants to go through with it. You can certainly say things like “my plans to destroy all landdwellers are coming to fruition” or something, but just know that Eridan probably wasn’t sincere about those intentions. He admits at one point that his doomsday device was never going to work. He just asked Vriska to make the faulty thing so that he could continue to work with her. Of course he is pretty rude to the lower-caste trolls, but I think that’s normal behavior for a purple-blood.
One thing to keep in mind when you roleplay any highblood is that they use Earth terms for devices, while the lower bloods have strange Alternian names for them. If you’re talking to someone and they call a bath tub an “ablution trap,” or a toilet a “load gaper,” Eridan would certainly call them out on the vulgar behavior.
Also, these pesky seadwellers are notorious for their use of fish puns. Keep in mind that Eridan is much more subtle about his puns than Feferi is. He only says things like “glub” and “anemone” for “enemy” etc., when he’s trying to get on her good terms. The rest of the time, his fish puns are slipped in like normal speech. Try not to go too overboard with yours.
In terms of his interactions with other characters, Eridan is really good friends with Karkat. They often gossip about their friends together, and Eridan mentions at one point that they have a “pact” to treat each other well. Kanaya is another friend of Eridan’s. In fact, she’s one of the only people who supports him. Outside of those two and Feferi, Eridan doesn’t really have any strong friendships with anyone. Gamzee wants to be his bud, but Eridan wants nothing to do with him.
Eridan doesn’t have many friends, but he does have lots of love interests! He is, as I said, astoundingly romantic. He has this idea in his head of what a perfect quadrant would look like, and he aches and pines to have that perfect quadrant for himself.
But he hasn’t had such good luck in getting other people to return his feelings. He had Feferi as a moirail, and Vriska as a kismesis, but they moved on. That really broke his heart. After all, it seems like the only reason they would want to leave him is that they didn’t want to deal with him anymore. He ends up with a crippling self-hatred.
Roleplaying Eridan can be a really nice stress reliever. If you have ever felt unsure of yourself, this is your chance to voice some of those inner thoughts. Don’t be ashamed. If Eridan can whine every now and then, so can you. :) (But, random PSA, don’t let those bad thoughts bring you down. You are an amazing human being. You are an amazing human being. You don’t deserve to be sad.)
But Eridan has become desperate. He no longer cares about who is in his quadrants - he just wants someone, anyone, to be in them.
And that’s where the problems begin. He doesn’t even introduce himself before beginning to flirt with someone. Of course the subject of his attention isn’t going to respond eagerly when he’s coming on so strong. So Eridan is constantly rejected. With every rejection, he just gets more and more tired, and more and more lonely… But I do want to remind you that Eridan is not Cronus. Roleplay Eridan’s flirting responsibly. He isn’t asking people to pail him. He’s only asking them to spend some time with him, to get to know him. And although he never tells Rose his name when he flirts with her, he is respectful of her feelings. (I mean, he insults her magic, but he doesn’t insult her when she turns him down.) He doesn’t force himself on anyone.
So Eridan ends up being alone in his Land of Wrath and Angels. None of his friends want to hang out with him because his angels are fricking creepy - but they don’t stop to think that maybe Eridan doesn’t want to be stuck with the creepy angels, either. He was absolutely terrified of them! They took “a minute of sustained fire” to kill, and the entire time they were “fast and angry as shit.” Yeah, he shouldn’t have been killing them to begin with, but he honestly believed that it’s what he needed to do. And the angels made prophecies about this crazy Lord who was coming to wreak havoc - so naturally, Eridan assumed the Lord was Bec Noir. Eridan believed that joining Jack Noir was his only chance of survival. He asked Feferi to come with him because he still loved her and wanted her to be safe by his side. He fought Sollux because Sollux challenged him to a duel, not because he was jealous of their matespritship. And yes, he killed Feferi, and yes, he tried to kill Kanaya, but try to remember this: they were charging at him, trident and chainsaw raised to strike. Eridan is not a bloodthirsty killer. He is a man who will do anything to survive. Unfortunately, his survival required that he kill two of his closest friends. Is that the choice that I would have made? Probably not. But it’s the choice that he made. Please don’t paint Eridan as a crazy psychopath. Try to portray him as he actually is: incredibly lonely, and blindingly reckless.
I think Eridan assumed that just because he was a hope player, he knew everything there was to know about it.
But he was wrong. There is always hope, as long as you believe there is even a remote chance of success. Only when Eridan stopped believing did he lose the game.
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