Friend of mine asked me what the difference between Ash and Tyrian would be, considering everything she had heard from me made them seem similar, just with different interests. Both are aggressive fighters who seem to enjoy inflicting brutallity and pain on their foes and who consider Hunters an annoyance rather than a threat.
Honestly thats not a bad comparison, I’d say, with the main difference really being training, and goals.
Tyrian is pretty much a self-made psychopath. Probably twisted at some point during childhood for being a faunus and as a result ended up just wanting to murder people. Salem stepped in and used him as she saw fit because if there’s one thing about psychopaths its that while they tend to be smart and detached they can also become obsessive or even compulsive about things.
For Tyrian that obsession is Salem. Hence why he follows her like he does.
He’s also not the most tactical. He fights well, yes, but he doesnt THINK when he does, his style is more instinctive (benefitting him having a tail he can use as well). Facing three on one instead of retreating he went hard and for his trouble he got his ass kicked.
It worked out for him, yes, but thats only because Clover’s orders were, for some unknowable reason, NOT to murder his ass on the spot Commissar style even though theres no reason to keep him alive, let alone take him back to Atlas, except maybe to ship his corpse back to Salem loaded with enough plastic to reduce a hospital and everyone inside it to a grey liquid pulp
Ash is as aggressive as Tyrian is, yes, and undeniable at least a little bit sociopathic...but in the same way that any special operations soldier is.
If you talk to one in real life, they aren’t boisterous or loud or anything. They’re just soldiers, they do their job, they do it well, and anything that happens after is a nice bonus. Take a read through American Sniper for example sometime, Chris Kyle’s views on everything he did (which by civilian standards are frankly terrifying as this is a man who singlehandedly ended more human lives with his weapon than quite a few serial killers did) were simple and modest, and while he did actively acknowledge he did well, he didn't BASK in it. It was just part of the job.
While Ash does take probably a bit too much pride in being a Hunter-Killer, and in how he fights, thats more a result of his existing wounding from his family history and a need to live up to the presumably god-like example of his father. If he can fight harder than Hood Vulcan did then he’ll be good enough to make Hood proud of him, and if in doing so he as a benefit happens to break a foes mind or two so that they can no longer fight properly, well that’s a nice benefit. As opposed to Tyrian, who fights like he does because he enjoys it and little else.
Tyrian is hot aggressive and he lets it get ahead of him (though not control him as we saw). Ash is more cold and directed aggressive, with his moves measured and his tactical understanding of the situation VERY clear. It just so happens that Remnant is not a world hardened to the madness of brutality that his fighting style embodies, and part of why it embodies it is because of that.
And of course, Tyrian is completely and utterly insane (though he fakes sanity well enough to pass, and he doesnt let his madness control him) and Ash isnt. Presumably this is why Tyrians weapons are Hunter equivilents and Ash carts around a magnetic acceleration weapon as his ranged option.
