Bagava Plagal Review
Alternian gal for yis
@ancientvacation
Name: Bagava Plagal - ‘Bagava’ is from the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu script which was quoted by Robert J Oppenheimer at the Trinity nuclear test site; “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” ‘Plagal’ is in reference to a plagal cadence in music, where you move from a 4 chord to the tonic 1 chord. This sense of impending finality, use of the unlucky number 4, as well as it sounding like ‘plague-ill’ makes this feel rather strong for her as it touches upon her major themes and aspect.
Ohhhh this is so good. Also as someone who’s actually read the Gita that always struck as such a weird-ass thing to say then but I LOVE the connotation even more because this is Krishna’s speech to Arjuna int he midst of the Kurukshetra war! How dare you halt your killing because a loved one could be on the other side! Do you understand what it means to be a kshatriya??? It also expands significantly on the concept of dharma, which has a lot to do with fate and choices. God, I LOVE this name. I don’t have any criticisms it’s just so good.
Strife Specibus:Nothing at the moment. Toyed with the idea of a modus that allows her to make something out of scrap but it has limited uses?
Thinking back to roach-killing spray, how about aerosolkind? It gives the gritty post-apocalyptic aesthetic while remaining flexible enough to do spray paint, pepper spray, a really expired tin of butter-flavored canola oil, etc. Seems like a good specibus if you’re prone to scavenging.
Fetch Modus:Encumberancemodus - Basically the item weight system from Fallout; items have a weight and Bagava has a limit to how much she can effectively carry.
If you’re open to an alternate, you could also do a Diffuse Modus, where each captcha card has a countdown to its destruction unless she disarms them in time. It means she’d need to have extras ready, get really really good at quickly diffusing bombs, and think carefully about when she might next need an item when she allocates it to a card.
Blood color:I have her as a Cerulean based on her weird eye mutation/powers as well as the connection of 'Cobalt Radiation’.
Design:Bagava is supposed to look like an outdoors-y type. Someone always a little bit dirty with some well-worn, dirty hiking boots. The camo trousers was me practising a method of making a good camo pattern for sprites, which I feel went well! Her hair is something I’m really proud of. Super simple in shape, but captures exactly what I want. There’s also a hidden lil motif on her sprite. The combination of her horns (antennae), the buttons on her beanie, and her bangs make an insect face! That being said, I kinda half-assed it on the beanie, I was thinking a bandana may be better for her?
Iiiii’ll work on something. For the camo I still hold that we don’t really knoooow if those patterns are really available outside of subjugglators, so I may change ‘em back to plain ones.
Symbol and meaning:It’s a custom symbol that I’d like to keep. It’s meant to represent: a cockroach in profile, a microchip, and the number '13’. Bagava actually started as a character symbol-first. 'Huh, a cockroach could look like a microchip…’. Despite having moved on from her old symbol, I kept the evocations.
Are you joking I LOVE her symbol!!! The depth! The symbolism! The fact that it already fits cerulean sign language. It’s GREAT.
Trolltag:calenderAftermath - Refers to the idea of a post-apocalypse. Things that happen after a calendar. Aftermath also seems like a nice Doom-y word.
“Aftermath” is a good word! The first word is a little bit tame, though. How about cataclysmicAftermath to keep the same initialism?
Quirk:She replaces 'a’s with the number '4’, and 'b’s with the number '13’. These are the Eastern and Western unlucky numbers. Of course, her own name of '134g4v4’ is butchered in the process, so any advice on implementation would be nice. To emphasise things, she’ll exteeeend them four times. The same goes for her ellipses…. Finally, [she encloses her words in bunkers and lices to make bug puns in a cheery manner!]
[the quick 13rown fox jumps oooover the l4zy dog!]
I don’t know that you actually need to add anything to her quirks! You basically have Terezi’s quirk but lowercase, so any difficulty in reading can be excused after poring over hours of her capitalized L33TSP34K.
Special Abilities (if any):She has VISION 4-FOLD. She has visions of doom and misfortune very often of various things. By focusing, she can also see things at their 'worst’. Despite this grim power, Bagava doesn’t seem affected by it at all, which I’ll explain later.
Lusus: Cockroachmom - A COLOSSAL Cockroach that died when Bagava was younger. She has since been completely mechanised and now Bagava both lives inside of her and pilots her corpse. This is in reference not only to a symbol of plague and rot, but also to the idea that Cockroaches can survive a nuclear bomb, true or not.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. I lived with a roach infestation for the first month of grad school and this is TERRIFYING.
Personality: Happy! Bagava is cheery, chipper and very often smiling. She doesn’t seem ever down or dour, and seems to be having a blast near-constantly! Her chipper outlook is a result of her VISION 4-FOLD. Because she’s seen so much misfortune and doom, she now takes happiness and joy from even the most minuscule of things. She’ll know when things are going to get worse, so why bother worrying about this minor hiccup? Unfortunately, this philosophy has taken a rather grander scale, seeing any misfortune as minor compared to an apocalyptic event, meaning that her advice for getting over hardship or sadness my come off as extremely patronising, not that she’d intend to.
Interests:Survivalism in general: foraging, scavenging and cooking (terrible things like hardtack or pemmican). She’s a tinkerer, often building things out of scraps, and has even ventured into amateur wetware crafting. She’ll use dead bodies in her work, her grandest one being mechanising her dead lusus into a walking bunker/fortress. When she’s not scavenging, cooking or such, she’ll play a lot of video games, specifically survival ones or her favourite series [Incredibly clever title for troll Fallout games here].
Fallout: New Plague-us.
Also if you wanna add a fun weird one I was thinking maybe ice cream since her symbol can be read as a sideways 31.
Title:Witch of Doom. Lemme explain despite if she may seem like a Seer.
Bagava’s approach to Doom is that of redefining it, stretching it’s ideas and rules to places they aren’t supposed to go naturally. She looks at the idea that Doom is broken, stagnant, and lacking potential and completely flips that around, using broken and dead things in her successful crafts and pastimes. Bagava is very much the type of person who’d wish for a zombie apocalypse to come just because of how much fun it’d be and how it’d let people grow in ways they wouldn’t have been able to in a non-zombied world. “I know a nuclear apocalypse may seem bad, but think of it like [The same clever title for troll Fallout here]!” She is literally trying to redefine Doom to other people, showing it as a positive thing that isn’t all pain and suffering!
Hmmmmmmm I think you make a convincing argument there, especially given that it would make her inverse Seer of Life, which works with her ever-present perspective that things are currently fine. It also kinda reminds me of how Jade was a nearly fully-realized Seer of Time before she got thrust into the game and had to track herself into becoming a Witch of Space. I think this could be interesting, especially since if she does play the game she will be able to use her knowledge of all possible horrid outcomes to actively change the path on which her team finds themselves! She’ll be forced to get some new perspective!
Land:
I kind of like Land of Fame and Fortune to play into Bagava’s view of inevitability as a playground! It would be a very casino-looking land that focuses on luck and the roll of the dice. The way forward would be to consciously ignore the various distractions of wealth to advance to her denizen.
Dream Planet:
I thiiiink she might be a Prospit player? Like she looks at the bigger picture and is a very “go with the flow” kind of person instead of trying to avert anything.
If we were assigning her a sign, this would make her Scormino, Sign of the Fatalistic. Not only does it fit her as a troll, but the sign looks really similar to the one you designed! Fantastic!
Your bio was cohesive as hell so obviously I wanted her visual design to match.
Horns - I curled ‘em up a little both to cement the “antennae” association and to match the curl of her sign!
Beanie - I added a cuff to it (with 13 sections, natch), a little floppy bit at the end so it didn’t look so much like a helmet, and some extra buttons (big ones courtesy of Lemonsnout RIP) both to send home the insect eyes visual and to match her arc number!
Eyes - just added one more lash so now she has 1 down, 3 up, 4 total.
Mouth - I wanted to give her fangs to match the insect mouth you sprited in her hair, mostly because I am a very strong proponent of troll girls with teef. I also made her lips black because giving her all blue makeup made her hit just a liiiittle too close to Vriska.
Pants - I killed the camo :’( I am sorry. I will put it back if you want but it’s really uncommon to see patterns that aren’t just colorblocking among non-purplebloods.
Shoes - I just added the red to the laces because the red buttons seemed a little unbalanced with no echo in other parts of the design.
Anyway, that’s it! I love love love love Bagava she’s a friend.
-TR
