Collection of images that part of the council has deemed "If Taro wasn't such a bitch and Ko was alive" core. The council has ignored the fact some of these are wedding photos and that they are in FACT not romantic.
Absolutely not set in stone let alone ACCURATE at all because I rushed this (like Her's canonical voice to me would be way deeper💚) but for Diony and Taro those are their actual voice claims for now, I just haven't chosen one proper for Her...
yes!! he is an oc in Void & Platinum, which is a story my brother and I are writing :3
if you have ever seen the #taroposting tag on some of my posts, those are the ones where i talk about Void & Platinum or the characters/plot/worlds in it!
In Void & Platinum, there are two universes (as in, two universes the story takes place in; there are infinite in the multiverse): Taro, a fantasy world, and Eden, a sci-fi world roughly meant to represent one potential Earth in some very distant future. Midas is from Eden.
huuuuge infodump under here vvv
In Eden, cybernetic implants are the norm, and almost everyone has some. Midas specifically has both of his arms and part of his chest replaced with cybernetics (reason? not really sure. my bro designed him) and a computer chip implanted in his brain that helps him calculate things called the M.I.C.U. I forget what the first two letters stand for but C.U. stands for Combat Unit. Pretty sure he got MICU from the government.
(In Eden, megacorporations are the ruling government. There are three: Brinc, Forerunner, and Crusader. They all specialize in different technology developments and military weapons. Midas works for Forerunner; he was the leading developer on the dimension travel project and due to his prominence and his parents' money, he was also chosen as the main strategist for the first foray into a new dimension.)
Midas was 15 when he first crossed into Taro. Eden doesn't really have child labor laws, and even if it did, his parents own 99% of all land farms on Eden so they hold a lot of sway over the law. because money, yk- they provide a lot of funding for forerunner.
Initially, Midas is very cold and calculated.... and isolated. He spends most of his time in the orbiting space station that his crew set up, running numbers and preparing forces, and doesn't get a lot of face-to-face interaction. That, plus his upbringing with his parents, leads him to mostly think of people as a series of numbers. He doesn't particularly care if some of his people die outside of losing raw force, and he doesn't even think about the people already on the land that his project is invading and colonizing.
(which, yeah, this is a manifest destiny type of thing. a few hundred years ago eden governments were trying to colonize space and incited a war with aliens. eden lost and they were henceforth banned from going further than their own moon. hence why they started working on dimension travel to find other places they could conquer and claim the resources of.)
His worldview only starts to change when Meiros, who is from Taro and is the main POV character of Void and Platinum, realizes Midas exists and starts trying to track him down. (this is some 4 or 5 years after their initial travel) It eventually culminates in Midas trying to kill Meiros with an orbital laser (didn't work), Meiros using wind magic to boost his leap and try to jump all the way to the space station, and Midas quickly reacting by putting on his mech suit (yeah he has a mech suit btw) and jumping out of his space station to meet Meiros mid-air and spike him into the ground (that one does work).
They keep fighting and Meiros is even able to destroy Midas's mech suit, but Midas actually has a second, secret mech suit underneath (yeah, for real) that's harder to destroy. Eventually Meiros loses. Midas has him pinned, and is standing over him, preparing to make the final blow......
but even though Midas has been responsible for many deaths before this, both directly through orders and indirectly through... well, the dimensional colonization as a whole, none were by his own two hands. none were looking at a real person, with a face and a voice and staring up at him. and Midas.... can't do it.
He leaves and flies back to his orbital base. and thinks a lot about stuff. he probably stops doing work and passes it off to others- it doesn't impede their flow too much, there are other strategists, but he just can't look at it right now. not after this.
blah blah blah, character development stuff, he and Meiros have to learn how to diplomatically interact with each other because they need to prevent a war with the merfolk of Taro, who are very irritated at all of the landfolk polluting the oceans. Midas probably gets put on the job because his commanding officers do not like him very much (on account of being much younger than any of the other people there, acting like their equal, and outclassing them in strategy by leagues. and also not doing very much of his job for the last few months because he's been having a moral crisis). Meiros gets put on the job for reasons it would take too much time to fully explain but let's just say he is seen as the most representative of the rest of Taro due to some weird 'government' reasons and also a lot of people dying, even though he's a year younger than Midas so he's like... 19? 20? (the exact reason may be retconned in the future. so don't count on that)
they succeed, of course, and in the process Midas has decided to desert the military and take all his gear with him, including the spaceship base (which he actually owns himself; it wasn't government-given. he probably would have stolen it anyways though)
He and Meiros have this sort of quasi-friendship "I don't love or trust you but I spend a lot of time with you and I think I'm starting to understand why you're like this" alliance with each other for a while, slowly growing to actually enjoy each other's company. Iroth the dragonmaster, aka the best character of all time, also joins the group at some point, turning their weird vaguely homoerotic duo into a weird vaguely homoerotic duo + aromantic lesbian who is Not involved in all that but nonetheless is vital to their dynamics.
In book 7, Midas makes his first huge leap of trust and agrees to help Meiros pull off a risky plan during the climax, even though it ran the risk of both him and Meiros losing their lives and they had no guarentee it would work. But Meiros trusted that Midas would be able to use his extremely fine control over his own soul to mitigate the downsides-
(Yeah souls are a thing in Taro. The nuances of how they work are both complicated and very plot-important but suffice to say Midas can consciously control what parts of his body contain his soul. Theoretically anyone could learn to do that but it's very hard. Normally souls will spread out into their entire "container" based on how much that container feels like part of the person. So if someone wears a prosthetic a lot and sees it as an extension of their body, their soul will expand into that prosthetic when they wear it. Same with someone who sees a tool or weapon as an extension of their body. Or if someone stops registering their own arm as part of their body (like what happens sometimes after a stroke, or maybe if they have really intense long-term depersonalization) then their soul will draw back from it over time. This doesn't have any physical effects, the person can still control their body and such to the same degree they could before, but it will not feel as intuitive or natural and they can't cast magic through a part of their body that doesn't have their soul in it.)
And because Meiros trusted Midas, Midas decided to trust Meiros when Meiros said they could pull it off. And they did!! but whoops, they accidentally tore a hole in space-time and get sucked in. and that's where book 7 ends off
In book 8 it's revealed that the wormhole took them (and Iroth) to Eden. Midas basically gets faced with his past environment after he's had character development. He also officially becomes a traitor to the government literally immediately, because the wormhole spat him, Meiros, and Iroth smack-dab in the middle of a corporate boardroom meeting with all of the higherups.
uhh and more stuff happens. i ran out of steam to keep talking but i love Midas. this fucked up guy with so many problems.
o yeah he is also trans. because i wanted a transgender major character but it wouldn't make sense for meiros to be trans (or, not a trans man at least. options are open for making him realize he's transgender in some way throughout the story, but he just cannot have been raised as a girl for the plot w his father and the village he's raised in) and iroth's current backstory wouldn't work if she was a trans woman (unless..... but i think it might be a little insensitive, as she's extremely tall and buff and i don't want to make her a stereotype. i do like to get a little agender with her but i like getting a little agender with all my characters)
Midas has so much internalized transphobia it's not even funny. because his parents are not supportive in general of queerness. but them having a male heir would look better for them so they accepted him as long as he never ever brought it up, and he transitioned with the goal of fully passing and going stealth. (He realized he was trans and came out either before his first public appearance, or just after it (haven't decided yet) so it wasn't going to be difficult to basically bury everything that mentioned them having a daughter.)
He unlearns a lot of it throughout the story, mostly in book 8 because a lot of the people he and Meiros meet in Eden are openly queer (at least, yk, around the people in the rebel base), but also before then because he and Meiros do a lot of traveling and see a lot of different Taro cultures, most of which don't have the same standards for sex, gender, sexuality, presentation, etc as Eden people do. (Edenites? Edenians? i'll workshop that. Meiros grew up in a human village in an area we're basing off of medieval-era spain, so he is also learning many new concepts, but this ain't about him)
Oh and, the lore reason he was named Midas is because when he was born his parents presented him with a couple lottery tickets and the one he chose was a jackpot winner. Hence Midas, turning everything he touches into gold. (this may no longer be canon-accurate. not sure. but it's what my brother told me back when we were still workshopping him)
the authorial reason for naming him Midas was 1, we needed to rename him before CyberJohn* stuck
*(John being a replacement for my brother's irl name, as Midas was originally based on a different OC of my bro from another dimension but like, a cyborg.)
and 2, uhhh
okay according to my bro who i just asked. "because his actions are greedy and selfish and then it comes back to bite him in the ass. turning things to gold is great until you hug your daughter. being a rich conquorer of a new dimension is even better until you realize theyre people".
and it's true!! Midas as a character is a fundamentally selfish person. That's what he's been taught to be, and that's what he falls back on in stressful situations. Even when it leads him to worse outcomes- even when it leads him to do something he wouldn't normally do. And I love him for that. It's....... something about choosing to do good, I think. It doesn't come naturally for Midas. He can't stomach committing cruelty, not in front of him, but he's very used to ignoring it, and allowing it to perpetuate with his silence. And he's very used to making difficult choices as a strategist- weighing the tradeoffs of a higher success rate at a mission versus the possibility of greater casualties, that sort of thing. (To him, succeeding at the mission is usually much more important. He needs to be able to keep moving forward with his plan. And, to his credit, they do succeed. His calculations aren't wrong, just... callous.)
A lot of his character arc throughout the series is learning when to prioritize other people, and understanding what impacts his actions have on others. I think he struggles with empathy a lot. He struggles to see other people as individual beings with their own lives, thoughts, and goals; just as complex as he is. But he chooses to make the world a better place anyways.
Part of the reason I love Midas so much as a character is that he showcases one of the biggest aspects of Void & Platinum that I worked towards: anyone can change. No matter what they've done, or how "bad" of a person they are, no one is evil.
("i ran out of steam to keep talking" and then i write the full second half of the post. ok. that's all for real tho i've got so many thoughts but words gone.)
