Hello and happy rt appreciation week : )) I'm so glad you started playing and got infected with the Heinrix mind virus ... you're such a wonderful artist and I've been eating up the RT art you've posted <3 and I also rlly enjoyed your fic and I can't wait to see what's next for Vespers, the bits of her backstory that you wove in were so interesting !!
<3<3!!!!!
thank YOU for heinrix posting so much i went "well i cant not check out this guy" and didnt wait for anyone to stop me
i cant wait to dive back into RT, i miss thinking about vesper so much! holy name... yet has a strong distaste for those so holy... looks at heinrix like he is a fool devoting his life to serve the god emperor while also very aware that she was built to do the same... oughhh i need to have free time again to throw her around in my brain. or maybe i should just throw all my thoughts about her into a post and cast it out to sea (the tumblr void)
take some vesper (& heinrix) meme drawings because this is yet another ship of mine where i must meme-ify them or i become violently ill
Ty for giving me an excuse to ramble @andrigyn 💖 under a cut bc I talk too much always
So with the caveat that I haven't finished my first playthrough yet and haven't fully nailed down everything -- I picked death world for Lazarus however he was a commissar and I learned from browsing the 40k wiki that commissars are all picked from orphans raised in the schola progenium, whose facilities are all on imperial worlds, so to get around that I think he was on the older side (10-12 ish) when he lost his parents. I haven't fully decided what they did but I think one or both of them were war heroes, someone he idolised and looked up to and strived to emulate during his training and early career. Hell, maybe one of them was even a commissar themselves!
He was a model student, graduated second in his class (not first -- and yes he absolutely does have a complex about this fact), and went on to have a very illustrious career in the officio prefectus. He won enough battles and gained enough renown that he became a poster girl for the imperium, with his face plastered on propaganda posters and stories of the battles whose tides he'd single handedly turned told to encourage and inspire both new recruits and veterans of the astra militarum.
He had a solid 10-15 years to enjoy his career (I'm not fully settled on his age yet, he's somewhere late thirties to early forties) before a disastrous campaign of which he was the only survivor left him facing accusations of cowardice. He was dragged through a long, humiliating, very public trial, and although he was eventually acquitted the damage to his reputation had been done.
He's spent the past five years hidden away in a desk job on some backwater planet, during which time he's transitioned, had a crisis of faith, and slowly become more and more disillusioned with the imperium as a whole. He sees becoming a rogue trader as a fresh start, and a way to finally claim the power and status he believes he deserves.
He's very, very touchy about his past, or about any insinuation of cowardice. He's trying to consolidate as much power as he can, both for himself individually and for the dynasty as a whole, which is both a buffer against any potential future falls from grace and a bone deep need for subjugation. He needs to take -- from individuals, from colonies, from organisations -- in order to feel secure in his own position, and although he can convince himself that he's fine with being equals that's certainly not the case at all. On a business level, he and Jae get on well, since she's indebted to him and is, for the moment at least, content to defer to him where necessary. But they won't work out romantically, since she would be unwilling to give up the amount of control he would want to exercise over her in the long term (and she shouldn't! He's a bad dude!)
He sees both Yrliet and Marazhai (and Idira, to a lesser degree) as trophies more than people, which is both a sexual thing and not: he's developed a fascination with and fetish for the forbidden, and the fact that keeping not one but two xenos as his pets, let alone an unsanctioned psyker, is contradictory to like all of the imperium's laws only makes him more into the idea of it.
With all his insecurities and disillusionment fuelled by what he perceives as the god-emperor failing him when he needed him most, Lazarus is a perfect breeding ground for heresy. He has a sadistic streak a mile wide and if he can exert power over someone, particularly if it makes them afraid of or subservient to him, he'll do it. He's fully convinced that he'll be able to harness the ruinous powers for himself and I assume he's gonna end up dead in a space ditch by the end of this playthrough with Slaanesh chowing down on his soul 🥰
🐑 Do you listen to / watch anything while you draw
Yes!! Often i have a long show that ive seen before playing in the background (not watching the good stuff bc im not paying attention lol). If not, i have extensive monthly and character playlists to choose from (sometimes you NEED three different playlists for one character/ship...)
🍄 What is something you should have focused on more when you first started, and now pay more attention to?
COLORS!! WITHOUT A DOUBT!! I never took art serious / dared to post online so i never finished stuff either, only half done sketches for all my life 💀 its my biggest bottleneck when it comes to creating the things i want to rn. My general color insecurity makes me double doubt everything and i am very cautious and self critical esp regarding skin tones and lighting. Working hard to learn that shit!!
Answering these rogue trader character building questions, thank you!!
10. How do they feel about becoming a Rogue Trader? How easily do they take to being the head of the von Valancius dynasty?
He very much sees it as something well deserved, something turning out Right And Good at long last. Lazarus has spent the past year or so prior to the start of the game being kept neatly out of the spotlight and he is desperate to prove himself. He very much meets Edelthrad and immediately starts plotting ways to get him alone so he can take him out of the picture lol. As for actually running things...well, he's okay. But despite his arrogance and obsession with his own image he does at least know how to listen to advice and sometimes even takes it! All in all, not the worst possible choice, though certainly not the best
11. Who amongst their retinue are they closest to?
So, admittedly, I am not very far into the game and so far excluding the companions you start with, I've only met Cassia 😅 so for right now, it's Abelard, who treats him with the respect he deserves, as is befitting his station. I haven't seen very much about most of the companions so will be interesting to see who he clicks with!
15. How do they feel towards Theodora? Had they met before? Were they close?
She's The Authority when they meet, and so he needs her on side. He respects her, but it doesn't go much further than surface level appreciation for her title; he doesn't waste any time replacing her portrait with his own. He resents that she wasn't around long enough to give him a better idea of what he's supposed to do as a rogue trader, but it's wholly self serving and her death ultimately does not affect him at all
Andy, we've only been mutuals for a few months, but if anything happened to you I'd kill everyone on this website and then myself. I've never followed anyone back faster than when I got the email to say your second blog started following me, and the only thing on my mind was oh no I hope she's okay. I love seeing you on my dash, and I love the openness with which you post about Mette, the way you examine her from all angles to paint a clearer picture of her for us all to enjoy. And I love that you have aus for her too!! You should post about knight pilot more I love getting a front row seat to the diabolical situations you cook up in your head :)
Send me a 💌 and I'll tell you something I love about you
Happy RT appreciation week < 3 You're an A+ mutual, and I love your writing / learning more about Eva! Also your blog is one of the #1 ways I discover new art/fics/headcanons because you are always reblogging them !! Which is sooo important for the fandom ecosystem : ))
this is just a scene dump doc but you can have a lil taste:
They had been just a child when they had met his father, dragged along on matters of diplomacy, old enough to accompany their own father to the slice of the burnt out husk of the hells Mephistopheles reigned over but too young to be included in their talks. Labrys had spent most of their time in the hells wandering vast, empty corridors, peering up at the portraits that lined the walls, trying to imagine the kind of people a former archdevil would find important enough to display in his home.
Raphael had not been among them.
They care little for him now, either, turning away from the provost's attempts to catch their gaze in search of a more important target: Korilla, headmistress of this establishment. Her sister, to be more precise, but those introductions can come later. They will have plenty of time to conduct their investigations during the academic year; better to take the time to make a good impression first, to secure their good standing later on when they start reopening old wounds.
