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Why Emmeline Should Crash Out Hard: more character analysis lads

That little girl who thought fate could spare her by giving out flowers, huh? Emmeline is one of the core party members of a wonderful indie game called Passionstruck and is today’s muse (I say that like I don’t think about her often-). The “insightful apothecary keeping the team on track” in green-clad attire, the supportive pseudo-leader and most serious of the group (not by much), and also the real wildcard of the battlefield among our cast. What’s up with her? Why is she like that? And by that, I mean why is she taking over my brain? All of that and more is discussed under the cut! It’s long and contains spoilers for the entire demo of Passionstruck. Play the game! Or watch a playthrough! Or let my stream of consciousness be the thing that finally gets you to play it and see this beautiful lady in action! Okay okay, here we go, 4.6k words under the cut~

On the surface, Emmeline feels like the group’s guiding force in the heroism department. She’s constantly worrying about not only the party but about the world in the face of the threat of Axiom, this is most readily shown in her battle skills and mannerisms. So, let’s start from there!

Battle skills, color theory, and weapon characterization:

Combat in particular for RPG games is incredibly important to character details and traits, so going down the list of Emmeline’s skills lets us gleam some fun aspects about her character. Before getting into skills though, we should briefly touch on the color system. The combat effectiveness is based on a color wheel where red beats yellow, yellow beats green, green beats blue, and blue beats red. Each of the party members represents one color and Emmeline’s color is green. Generally, green is a color associated with wealth, nature, and luck most readily, however since her particular shade of green is a rather dark one, the color also gives her an air of sophistication. Her outfit is complemented with gold trim and a billowing dark green dress which scream out to the audience to take heed of how refined she presents herself to be. I feel as though the ‘nature’ part of the green identity is the most prominent one for her character which we will cover in a bit, but it’s good just to keep that in mind moving forward. What’s also super fun is that her accessory item is a necklace. For reference, the other character accessories are hats for Ilo, headbands for Borys, and aprons for Clue. Clearly the accessories aren’t armors really but they are more so an identity piece, Ilo’s hat is iconic for their character and presentation as a poet for instance. So, back to Emmeline having a necklace, this just reinforces the idea that she is putting in extra effort to appear proper and nearly regal in a way, even though she’d likely deny that she’s going that far for her appearance. The big takeaway: Emmeline cares deeply about how she is presented to others, the verdant green and gold trim coloring as well as her particular accessory establish that early in the game. Now, it’s time to talk about her move set.

Let’s look at her general ability first, Verdant Tonic. This attack is just pure boosted green damage, but the name is what’s interesting here. Since Emmeline is an apothecary, it makes sense that her main weapon is going to be her tinctures. Emmeline isn’t actually equipped with a real weapon as far as we’ve seen, so her method of fighting isn’t just pure magic like how Ilo has and definitely isn’t any physical item like Clue’s gauntlets or Borys’s sword, and this makes her stand out even more to me. It’s half magic and half brainpower that she uses to protect herself and her friends, and I believe this weapon type points to her associated intelligence and real strength in fights; her ability to support the team. Further supporting this reasoning is that the rest of her skills aren’t actually attacks. For debuff skills, she gets an attack debuff called Soften a Wind’s Blow as well as a very powerful manipulation skill called Dull Skies in a Bottle. The first of which lowers the enemy’s direct attack power and the latter of which forces the enemy of choice to be weak to a color type of her choosing. This skill is not only extremely powerful, but also a very interesting skill based around manipulation of something that seems to be a core trait of creatures. This especially highlights her skill with her craft and makes you think about just how long she’s been training and working to be this effective at what she does. I’d also go so far as to say that since it’s a skill based entirely around manipulating an enemy, it also plays into her secretive nature (WHICH WE WILL GET INTO LATER-) in manipulating situations with friends and foes to mask her secrets. Speaking of manipulating friends, her last two skills are buffs to the party! Hands Over Heart’s and Our Beating Heart are protective and healing skills respectively, both conveniently named after the heart. Emmeline cares deeply not only for her cause but also for her friends, so it’s no surprise that the love she feels would spill out into her skills in this way. Her heart is what guides her hand to her friends and her head is what guides her assault on the enemy. It’s a clever naming convention to illustrate the depth of emotion she is guided by in something like simple combat. You’ll notice the names of all of these skills are borderline poetic (ironic considering she isn’t the designated poet of the group) and have an air of sophistication to them. It feels as though she named her skills in such a particular way so that she can maintain this proper and heroic appearance we touched on earlier that we learn later weighs heavy on her shoulders.

It’s not just that I’m the most lesbian girlthing in the world fawning over a strong and beautiful woman, she’s beautiful in such a purposeful way that there must be something else going on there. She doesn’t look like she is built for combat and yet she’s got a skillset that makes her the most dangerous member of the team in my opinion. She’s the one who first started this dangerous mission to save the world and yet she walks through each challenge with gilded dresses and twinkling jewelry regardless. She seems to worry so openly and yet nobody can quite pinpoint exactly what strikes her at her core. Shrouded in verdant lies of omission, she has gotten me thinking about some deeper parts of her character.

So, here’s an idea: If poets are the secret to success here, and Emmeline didn’t think they’d run into one on their way to fight against Axiom (Emmeline originally didn’t think she’d run into anyone, remember she was going to do this quest alone at the very start), it wouldn’t surprise me if she was going to try and mimic what she did know about poets to give them all the upper hand. Poetic phrasing for her attacks, mysterious and gilded clothing, a heavily supportive toolkit, and skills based around manipulating the world around you in the same way a poet would reinterpret the world through a new lens: All of these really do point to Emmeline trying to tackle a role she wasn’t built for, doing everything she can to appear in a way that presents as someone who can accomplish the daunting task at hand no matter what. It’s worth noting that she’s doing a great job at just that, the rest of the party seems to listen to her intently, respect her, and look to her for knowledge most times. What she lacks in poetic vibes she almost makes up for in sheer intellect with her tonics, what she lacks in raw knowledge she makes up for decently well in her caring and persuasive demeaner. What she lacks, she never wants anyone to know, so she works double-time to ensure nobody will.

Even if there are some things that she so clearly just…misses about poetry and its methodology.

Headcanons but also, maybe canon? Bear with me-

So, Emmeline carries some guilt over something we can’t quite know yet. We know this because we have eyes that can see.

NOW, since I can’t really go into potential big Story Plot™ guilt reasons because we don’t know big plot items yet, I can go into some fun little parts that make Emmeline a wonderful character to me!

First, I want to pitch my headcanon that she has a judgmental edge that she mindfully softens when interacting with people that contributes to her inner guilt. I mostly do this because she exhibits some small behaviors that remind me a little too much of me so I’m projecting. So that you may know my whims, here are some notable parts that make me think this:

1.) Emmeline has a point in the pozzy forest when she claps back at Clue without thinking and then immediately tries to backtrack and apologize. A real thought slipped out and while it was a silly one, I’m willing to bet they aren’t always silly and that thought only slipped out because her guard was down.

2.) Emmeline’s behavior toward Betsy, most notably her obvious discomfort while still being courteous, hits so close to home. It’s to the point where the party notices and Borys asks just how bad school was. She’s trying her best to be nice but there’s a storm brewing in her head for SURE.

3.) This line feels like Emmie correcting a loose thought, letting herself be just a little more honest with Ilo in this moment. This behavior is something I do, thinking of a better way to say a sentence halfway through saying it or trying to rephrase the last half of a thought to land better with my audience. It shows that she’s extra mindful of how her speech is interpreted, not just that it tells the audience how important Ilo’s presence is for her.

4.) Emmeline is not inclined to share her concerns even though the entire group is doing it! She doesn’t want to add to the pile and might hope that just being quiet and neutral will make the others forget that she might be struggling too.

A casual example of the inner judgement I’m talking about goes something like this: Emmeline and a stranger are in proximity when said stranger makes a simple mistake, maybe they drop something on the ground or bump into something. Then, the initial thought in response, completely unbidden, is something like “what a mess” or maybe it’s just a feeling of distaste. Once the unsavory thought occurs, she registers the thought, realizes that it’s mean, and then manually rewrites the thought in her head to be a less judgmental one. This happens often and in the most innocuous environments, but it can also happen with dearly loved ones and that only makes the situation worse. A subconscious edge like this could contribute to Emmeline’s skill in combat as well as her pseudo-leader role (which I can only assume is one of the reasons why Ilo refers to her with higher respect than the others. That and that Emmeline was the first to find them which likely makes Ilo hold a special appreciation for her). But for Emmeline, that slightly mean thought still happened, and she’s the only one who knows it. If she wants to help and truly be a force of good, having this impulsively abhorrent part of her that she can’t beat out could be a major point of internal turmoil for her to deal with. This could contribute to why she seeks to be kind to such a degree that feels so carefully purposeful. Being intimately familiar about the pozzies and their buffs, gifting plants to her childhood village, and gifting Ilo a med kit are all ways to strategically be kind and helpful to her party (If you were curious why two of them were plant themed, I have ideas on that too for later). If it’s your subconscious that acts out of malice, then you can just work twice as hard consciously to counterbalance it, right?

Headcanons aside:

She may not have a judgmental streak at all since we don’t exactly get to see inside her head, even though it would kill me specifically in a really awesome way if that was happening (my headcanons #myheadcanons). However, we still know that she is pretty reserved when it comes to inner thoughts, and we can build off of this.

Take for example her hesitation in answering Ilo’s question about whether they could still travel together in a world where they weren’t a poet. I’m willing to bet that it all started with her acknowledging how useful Ilo was and brought them on only because they were a poet, but now that she cares for them and is starting to hear about how they feel about their place in the world being dependent on the group, I can’t imagine the guilt she feels knowing how shallow her reasons for bringing them along were compared to how much it meant to them. Ilo notes that she looks almost scared at their admission to her. That she’s thinking about something and they don’t know what it is.

“Oh Ilo I…I didn’t even think about that. I’m sorry.”

She hasn’t organized her thoughts together in a way that she thinks will go over well with Ilo yet so she freezes and is unable to say anything at all except “sorry”. It’s like I can watch every single lackluster response and uncomfortable truth filter through her head when she makes this face. This is hardly the only time we see her struggle to voice the clarity of her thought into words meant for the party to hear either.

In the elevator scene right before the Carg-0 fight, she finally talks a tiny bit about her stresses. Keyword being ‘tiny’. Despite Clue and Borys being very open about how spooked they are for the coming fight and Carg-0’s entire deal, she still reels herself in.

That was a hard one for ya, huh Em?

Getting warmer….

Oh boy this is pulling teeth for her.

While it’s funny how she puts it, the few points she lets herself make are things we can expand upon with the idea that she’s purposefully hiding her deeper thoughts from the party. First, she doesn’t like his attitude. Which, yeah okay, Cargo-0’s mannerisms feel almost completely opposite to Emmie’s in every way. Cargo-0 is loud, frenetic, uncaring to everything in the facility that isn’t a plant, and noticeably rude. Emmeline on the other hand is reserved, puts on a heroic front with phrases like “Silence fiend!” when first entering the checkpoint, keeps herself put together at all times, and is an openly kind force. Out of all of the party members, those two are the most at odds on a character level. If Emmeline really is putting in a substantial, conscious effort to be kind and proper, then being met with a serious threat that is just so flippantly her polar opposite would get on her nerves. How dare this cruel and uncaring force cause so much pain for others, for her friends.

Being the hero is an insurmountable task that weighs heavy on her mind, and her current foe is so uncaring in their villainy and yet, he is still a sizable threat while barely even trying. If Emmeline has even an ounce of self-criticism in her body (which I’m sure she does we’ll get to that too a bit) then it must tick her off to know how hard she has to work to combat someone who is so casually devastating.

There’s also this idea of evil and good that gets brought up by Emmie just enough to be noteworthy. She brings up doing things for “the greater good” at some point and now with her simple declaration that Carg-0 is “evil” and thus must be defeated, we can kind of tell that she’s purposefully removing grey areas of morality from her speech. Whether she’s doing this for her own comfort or because she thinks it will be easier for the party to have a less complicated philosophy on their adventure or some other reason, we know at least that it’s important to her that she’s on team good guy. This is another instance of Emmeline’s need to be carefully, particularly, and notably good that I think is important to mention. This is also something that, should my headcanon ever grow teeth, could point to her inner turmoil at the subconscious barbs she has. If she sees the world in less shades of grey, then it’s easier to manage what is “good” and what is “bad”: Her subconscious jagged thoughts are “bad”, Carg-0 is “bad”, her healing skills are “good”, her mission is “good”. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing in the middle. Just “good” and “bad”.

There’s something else though that makes Emmeline interesting when in conversation with Carg-0, and that’s the connection to plants for both characters. Now, Carg-0 not only uses plants to power the entire checkpoint for the demo but he also has a flower growing within him that he has grown obsessed with. Emmeline in her green-clad glory tells Ilo about how when she was a young girl, she’d deliver plants to as many members of her village as she could so that they could have clean air. Again, deliberate “goodness” but also another instance of plants being significant to her. As mentioned in earlier sections, Emmeline likely uses at least some plants in her tonics for battle, when anyone wants information on the pozzies they ask her about them, she’s literally green. Plants are important to her in some capacity, so I’d imagine that seeing someone like Carg-0 who she deems as “bad” also with an affinity for plants that seems to run pretty deep from what we see in the secret log of theirs probably gets on her nerves to a degree. It’s hard to narrow down the lens of good and bad, it grates against her worldview a little. It’s basically “wow it sucks that this thing that I love so much is also a similarly loved thing for the big bad we’re fighting that I fucking hate. Whoops”. The two may be incredibly opposite to each other, but the few scant similarities they have are intensely similar.

Another point with the plant thing, plants are kind of hard to take care of. Plants are put somewhere, ideally in their perfect environment, and attentively cared for by whoever planted them. Gardening is a very careful hobby, one I am pretty bad at but still love and am slowly improving with, so I know just how freakishly hard it is to garden. It’s something you have to commit to, having literally any plant to take care of, and take careful notice of to not screw anything up and endanger the plant in any way. With her history of taking care of plants, especially being so worried about not only the plant but the old would-be-recipient of a particular potted gift once she dropped it as a child, I wonder if she feels the need to be useful.

Her plants would be helpful to people, like with her tonics or with breathable air, but could also help her prove to herself that she can take care of something. That something still needs her around.

She is uncomfortable enough when asked about something she doesn’t know that Clue even takes note, telling her that it’s okay that she doesn’t know all about the poets the party is asking about in the first book in the field. She thinks they need her to know this information and she doesn’t and gets noticeably upset over it.

It clearly bothers her too that their mission to save the world is taking as long as it is, that any rest nags at the edges of her mind and blames her for resting.

Her being useful helps her stay in this powerful, stable-appearing state. It’s subtle but MAN DOES IT GET ME MAN.

So, how do we cope with this?

Emmeline has a lot of self-soothing actions, clasping her hands or holding her arms over her chest are the most commonly seen. This could also be a visual representation of how reserved she is about her inner thoughts and workings, but why can’t it be both? We already know that she has some deep seated guilt over something and worries openly about the state of the world with Axiom about, so there’s plenty to need some soothing over.

In all of her 37 total dialogue portraits, she isn’t physically guarding herself in only 11 of them. So 70% of the time we spend looking at her, we spend looking at her somehow covering herself with her hands. Some of the portraits where she’s physically open are in portraits like E_happy, E_haha and E_gentle which all make sense. She’s feeling good, so she won’t cover herself subconsciously in conversation due to nerves, yippee. Although there are happy portraits where she’s slightly hidden too like in E_laugh or E_surprisedsmile where she is genuinely having a fine time but still crosses her arms. These are examples that could show that the subconscious effort to guard herself isn’t totally due to her discomfort but also due to just habit, it’s in her nature to stay a bit reserved. Now for the times when she’s actually nervous, hooo boy, there’s a lot. If she’s upset, worried, tired, sad, or scared, then her arms are folded in some way, or at least one arm is folded. Most of her portraits are like this. The fun part comes when we look at the few portraits where her arms are open but she’s not having a good time: E_anxious 1 and 2 (not just E_anxious, her arms are folded in just anxious but not the other two), E_shocked, and arguably E_thinking. These are the only ones where she’s exhibiting a clearly not positive emotion and is also not physically guarding herself. It happens when she’s completely caught off guard. When she’s anxious enough, genuinely shocked, or lost deep enough in thought, that makes her distracted from her usual priorities like keeping up appearances or thinking about her secrets and she instead drops her guard. HER DAMN CHIBI HAS ITS HANDS CLASPED EVEN! SHE’S SO CUTE BUT SHE’S SUFFERING FROM SOMETHING.

She’s physically holding something close to her chest, physically hiding and guarding herself in a small way nearly all of the time. She only loosens up if she’s either very comfortable and feeling good or so worried that she drops the protection for a minute, nothing in between. It points to how reserved she can be, how proper she makes herself appear, and how often she tends to self soothe in a way that nobody can notice or worry about openly. It’s subtle, it’s powerful, and it has implications. She worries, and she hides it.

(Even her menu portrait has her hands clasped, but this one feels closer to prayer and hope to me, especially with that expression. She’s hoping for the best. That left one when she shows up after just finding the checkpoint though? Worry. So much worry.)

(bonus tangent because I think this is just neat, but in the menu art only Emmeline has one eye closed. The rest of the party members have both eyes open, but she doesn’t. Is it alluding to something like her narrow vision of the world working with more ideas of “good” and “bad” could be limiting her potential? or is it more like it’s just showing that she’s hiding something from even the party, something closer that we should be paying attention to or preparing for? I’m not entirely sure, I just think it’s neat.)

Don’t YOU worry though, because of course there’s more!!!

Take the lineup for her battle portraits for further example: The top row is mostly what we expect to see from high health battle poses, we’re not in trouble yet so any strain is just normal battle strain. The bottom row, however, shows the low health portraits and the desaturation portraits. Remember how I said the battle mechanics were color themed? Well part of that theming involved stripping a character of their color, or as Clue puts it: “[Punching] the color out of her dress!”. Every party member has desaturated portraits, but they all show different expressions of horror/worry.

Ilo and Borys are very obviously wincing, either already hurting or feeling deep concern for what’s coming. Ilo’s eyes are even watering, pointing ever further to the worry and reservations they’d be taking to protect themselves as much as they can. Clue looks…confused? It’s mostly a mix of shock and resignation to me, she isn’t one to stand down to any challenge, so this does make sense. But Emmeline on the other hand has some extra emotional turmoil mixed in there. Notably at first is her one singular stray hair, one break in the almost-perfect façade she works so hard to keep maintained during every hour of the day that we can see her. Even her low health and fainted portraits don’t have this loose hair. Hmm…

For the actual expression, she’s haunted. Her eyes are wide open, her brows are taut and drawn up high in disbelief and worry, her shoulder is pulled in front of her in a weak attempt to guard herself from oncoming danger (also a similarity in Ilo’s portrait), and she has a clear crease under her right eye that makes her look exhausted. Out of all the portraits, she looks the most devastated by what’s happening. I think the depth of this emotion stems from the fact that being desaturated renders her nearly useless. Her strength in battle is mostly in her tinctures, rendered completely weak in the wake of desaturation. Her carefully kept appearance too is disturbed by desaturation: the green flees from her dress, the gold stops glimmering, her hair quietly unionizes against her. With all the work she puts into being a stable, competent, powerful force, this one event that renders all that work nearly useless in so little time must feel horrific. All of her worries come true at once: That the work she’s put in isn’t enough, that they can’t save everyone, that this is the end. She doesn’t reconcile with that carefully. She levels her demise with a cold-blooded shock like being dunked in an icy lake and watching the muted sunlight fade away all around you. It’s intense, and I really enjoy that a character that feels so mysterious and powerful in the grand scheme of things experiences a heightened sense of worry and fear when it comes to failure. Just a fun thing.

Wrapping it all up (for now…):

Alice when I get you Alice, Alice when I get you-

Passionstruck is a wonderful game that features so many delightful characters, all of which have my whole heart because Alice just writes so gad dang well, but Emmeline has delicious secrets that I want and yearn to know, so she’s the focus for now for me! (besides the Chariot, we all already know how I feel about the Chariot)

Emmeline is a proper-appearing lady with an unseen weight threatening to drown her beneath it, but her always careful composure makes this struggle nearly impossible for the party to spot. She’s the pin cushion, the pseudo-leader, the knowledgeable one, the worrywart but for all the right reasons on the surface. Emmeline has something else going on, maybe a lot of something elses, but for now those are secrets.

Thank you for reading! I hope it was enjoyable! If Alice somehow finds this, uhhhh, you write good and I’m freaking out forever about it and also you’re incredible. If I interpreted your characters in a way that’s evil then you have full rights to kill me with hammers I guess <3

EVERYONE GO PLAY PASSIONSTRUCK NOW!

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