Quarterfinals: Parcelsus (Darkest Dungeon) vs The Collector (Aurora)
Parcelsus
The Collector
PROPAGANDA
Parcelsus:
A brilliant and promising medical student, the Plague Doctor had unconventional theories about life and death. Mocked by her peers and professors, she needed a sufficiently fresh cadaver to put her conclusions into practice. When she found her professor slumped over dead in his office, she took the opportunity to revive him - temporarily. The horrific, wailing thing she had created could not recover, and would not die, until she tore it apart with her scalpel. The memories of that dreadful wailing drove her out of the university and into the depths of the Darkest Dungeon.
The Collector:
A human-turned-immortal witch who has dedicated her life to the study of souls. She's trying to find a reliable method of unweaving souls in order to free the trapped and suffering Primordial Life by killing every living thing on the planet, including herself. She's known as the collector because she regularly kidnaps nature spirits for study, but she recently upgraded to city-gods. My favorite part of her characterization as a mad scientist is that her reasons for doing the fucked-up things she does are entirely selfless, informed by having touched the mind of an entity on a planetary scale. The best analogy i can think of is really gross so warning and apologies for that, but it's like a maggot living in a thoroughly rotten human corpse accidentally waking up that human and having their immediate agony and disgust projected into its mind. You know the human could reconstitute themself and go back to a normal life if what used to be their body's cells weren't being used to sustain smaller creatures, so the only moral option is to give back the flesh the maggots consumed. Right?
