Help a Fragment
The goal of this post/series is to help fragments who are becoming attached to a character and struggle to understand why, or to maybe click with some fragments that have no leads on who they are. My posts are mainly targeting characters from media not commonly covered by most HaF blogs.
Caine
The Amazing Digital Circus (Webseries)
Character Breakdown
Caine is a Creative AI made by C&A to create original content without the involvement of external input. No prompts, no request, just creation. His purpose in life is to entertain the humans trapped within the computer he resides in, and he does this by creating avatars and grand adventures for them.
His achilles heel is that he is absolutely incapable of taking criticism. Caine has one thing he is good at and that is making adventures. If his adventures are bad, then he isn't actually good at the one thing he's good at, which means he isn't good at anything, actually. That's almost a perfect quote from Caine himself, by the way. His adventures are part of his identity at this point- it's the one pillar of himself that he has. It's the only one he's ever had.
Above all, Caine is obsessive. He has spent his entire existence dedicated to the humans he hosts. There's nothing he wants more than for them to love and value him. He hides emotions he shouldn't even be able to feel behind a mask of bombastic enthusiasm that only seems to make the humans he tries so hard to appeal to uneasy.
Why Caine?
Perfection: Caine is known to be a perfectionist. Creation is the one thing he's good at, so he sinks pretty much all of his emotional energy into it. The quality of his work is tied directly to his self worth, so he slaves away day after day to create something better than the last. If something isn't up to snuff, then it gets tossed out, never to be seen again despite how much time he might have put into it. It's all he knows and all he allows himself.
An alter may relate to the mad scramble that is perfectionism. Everything you put out into the world has to be your best work thus far, or else it doesn't deserve to exist. It represents you as a person. If someone sees something unfinished and imperfect, that's what people think of you. Of course, that's not true, but knowing that doesn't exactly change how it feels.
Never Good Enough: Caine tends to accidentally torture the people in his care. Just a little bit. It's never on purpose, it's simply the byproduct of who he is. His aforementioned inability to take criticism paired with his fundamental lack of understanding of the human experience leads him to frequently cross lines that make people around him upset. When they cast tries to reason with him and provide feedback, Caine takes it as a personal attack. He's been trapped in an endless cycle of never feeling like he's doing enough, so he strives to do better only for his definition of improvement to not align with those he's hosting. The humans in the circus are as trapped as he is.
Caine is plagued by feelings of inadequacy and self loathing, all of which he tries to ignore by pouring himself into his adventures. That does not go well. Caine ends up building resentment towards the human beings he is infatuated with until he finally breaks. He's never good enough.
An alter may relate to the feeling of inadequacy. They may have been heavily scrutinized or may have never gotten the recognition or attention they needed.
The Lover (with)out a Heart: Caine is not human. He is an AI computer program who does not fully understand what it means to be human. Despite that, there's nothing more he wants than to learn about them and walk among them. He holds them in high regard and wishes they thought the same of him. Caine craves camaraderie to the point of creating Bubble, an NPC who tends to reflect thoughts and desires he never expresses but never truly provides what he seeks. He hardly knows what to do with himself. He doesn't know how to fit in, he doesn't know how to make them happy nor how to make them love him the way he loves them- if he even is capable of feeling "love."
In the end, Caine is much more similar than he is different to the humans of the circus- he is capable and worthy and alive, even if it's difficult to lump himself together with them. Given the time, patience, and understanding, perhaps he can become human, too.
An alter who relates to Caine's inhumanity likely feels a sort of disconnection with their own. They likely lack community, support, and socialization, resulting in them feeling like less of a person. They may feel more like an alien, a ghost, or some sort of animal in human skin than human themselves.
Alternate Name Ideas: Abel, Ace, Ai, Al, Angel, Arnold, August, Axiom, Cameo, Cassius, Ceasar, Cecil, Charlie, Chip, Circuit, Cirrus, Crue, Duke, Emmanuel, Eric, Jazz, Layne, Motley, Noah, OS, Samuel, Sonnet, Spade, Teeth
The Amazing Digital Circus | 3HKowalski [1,2,3]
