find out where it all went wrong.
Apr. 1st, 2022 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cogitatiocanon information. Arknights is a wonderful game with an intense plot that is unfortunately gated behind "get good scrub" and a zillion different mini-events! Operator stories are also gated behind Trust, aka general usage, and as such, it can honestly be really difficult to find different bits of character lore even if you're a seasoned veteran of the game (which I am not: I've actually only been playing since May 2022). |
PRTS: Dr. {nickname} fell silent. Whether silent protest or refusal to communicate, I believe it is an expression of an autism spectrum disorder. Please, by all means. The system treats all equally.
I know, I know, autism headcanons can be controversial, but this is explicitly stated in-game. For the canonblind, PRTS is an advanced AI program that, uh, runs on the Doctor's phone, but it is also capable of establishing a direct neural connection to the Doctor's brain; as such, even though it's being a little smarmy here, I assume that its diagnosis of the Doctor as being on the autism spectrum is unbiased and probably correct. The Doctor's autism mostly manifests as a tendency to fall silent and hyperfocus on tasks that have been assigned to them, but I also hypothesize that their autism is largely why the Doctor has a tendency to overwork, stick to a set routine, and is rather particular when it comes to food. More on the food topic later. I'm too lazy to collect all the various citations for this, but the Doctor also rarely stops reading even while having conversations with other people. I'd surmise that the medical suit gives them the excuse of avoiding eye contact, which they probably don't really care about or enjoy.
The Doctor's official concept art reveals that they're always wearing their combat headset, which comes equipped with a throat mic. This isn't uncommon equipment for combat operations where people might have to whisper or just talk over loud explosions, but since the Doctor is usually kept out of the line of fire and not usually involved in stealth missions, my guess is that the mic is needed because the Doctor's voice is extremely husky (as it is in the anime), making the throat equipment an actual necessity to pick up their voice in the quality needed for any battlefield comms system. The headset also functions as a normal music player, according to Ebenholz's comment about wanting to find out what music the Doctor listens to. I haven't been able to figure out what that bracelet-looking thing is, to be honest. The note next to the long piece of equipment on the bracelet simply reads "old" — after some thought, I think it's actually a case for a recording device, and they normally store it in their ponytail like a pen. (The Doctor, having amnesia, is probably exactly paranoid enough to record every single conversation they've ever had.)
A normal day.
Before your eyes is the ceiling of an ordinary living room in Rhodes Island. The furnishings look just as ordinary, though the hum of the ventilation system seems a bit deeper than in other cabins.
You know why. It is one of the most inconspicuous parts of your many peculiarities.
You wash up perfunctorily. This part isn't so different from ordinary people. You take special medication to maintain your condition. This part is a bit different from ordinary people.
Next, you don the full-body protective clothing that hampers your normal activities, but considering your physical condition, it is necessary. It may also be temporary, depending on your recovery.
These are all orders from Dr. Kal'tsit. According to her, you used to know more about these things than she did; but now, only she can look after your health.
'What about it...?'
'Wait, I think I see it.'
'The Doctor's putting on some muscle?!'
'Even though it's just a little bit, that is unmistakably muscle!'
This isn't really obscure information or anything — it's obvious from the very beginning of the game that the Doctor is physically frail, and in the anime, they had to be literally carried throughout most of the evacuation from Chernobog. The Doctor is most likely physically frail due to muscle atrophy from their time in the Sarcophagus; however, I would like to point out that Kal'tsit has given them full physical clearance to do most things. Their current fragility is mostly just due to a lack of desire to exercise and apply themselves to even getting to a normal baseline of adult human strength. Why work out when there are books and reports to read? Sideroca's story and dialogue with the Doctor suggests that the only way to coerce the Doctor into going to the gym is by bribing them with home-cooked food.
The exact reason as to why the Doctor has to stay in their medical suit isn't really laid out in Vigilo itself, but Roberta's interactions with them suggest that they're extremely sensitive to allergens. They don't seem to have issues eating different and dangerous things, so I guess it's just that their skin is very delicate. (Roberta's interactions with the Doctor are really cute in general! They tend to dodge her more often than not, but I like the idea that the Doctor just goes around with non-comedogenic, hypoallergenic makeup on whenever Roberta's caught them sleeping.)
This is sort of obvious from the anime, but the Doctor's hair is actually pretty long; their bangs have grown out past their eyes a fair bit and their concept art shows that it reaches their shoulders. Goldenglow's dialogue implies that they're in need of a trim. Since it's usually encased in their hood, I'd surmise that it also tends to be a bit unkempt and unstyled. At least Susie and Roberta are around to keep them looking decent...
headcanons. The headcanons below generally draw from canon but contain quite a bit of my own inferences, so I've sorted them in the headcanon section instead. |
Kal'tsit: Those memories are episodic, chiefly concerning the subjective awareness of your identity, and even more so about all your experiences before you fell asleep in the Chernobog sarcophagus.
This is basically canon — the Doctor is shown suddenly flashbacking to various pre-amnesia memories a number of times — but I'm putting it in headcanon due to the exact nature of how I write it: I think that the Doctor is actually quite regularly seized by pre-amnesia flashbacks but just kind of keeps it to themselves. Living in a hell of their own creation, etc. Sometimes they try to push their mind to remember more, but it usually doesn't turn up anything more than a few bits of dialogue or the faces of people they don't know anymore. It's emotionally stressful and is part of why they'll stay up late and then sleep at any opportune moment: their dreams aren't really a safe haven from their weird war PTSD flashbacks, either.
I don't have a specific citation for this because of how regularly it's mentioned by various Operators, particularly the Medics: the Doctor actually doesn't dislike eating. The Doctor will actually binge eat snacks and generally enjoys delicious food. However, they have a tendency to neglect to actually eat when they're distracted by their daily tasks, which means they more often than not wind up eating... like shit, to put it bluntly. Most of the time, the Doctor only eats emergency rations or instant noodles. If they're actively working, they'll usually do whatever it takes to ingest food in less than two minutes and then go back to work. Their tendency to binge eat snacks — even poor Rosmontis's snacks! — is also a manifestation of this unfortunate habit of being unwilling to stop doing something to make themselves a real meal. Funnily enough, I also feel like it's implied that the "extremely dangerous" sanity potions are actually just... sugary energy drinks? Doctor, please eat properly...
This is really stupid because the canonicity of trust taps are a little dubious, but since most Operators tend to react as though they were actually touched... the Doctor will actually, genuinely, randomly give out hugs, touches, and headpats to their Operators as needed. Why? Literally just because they think it's funny. A couple of Operators are probably under the assumption that the Doctor is bad at reading social cues, but the truth is, the Doctor absolutely knows it's weird. They just like being unabashedly, unashamedly weird on occasion. Accept your trust-building touches. Enjoy headpats.
Some other scenes in Vigilo basically establish this, but the Doctor, despite being supremely confident in other matters, is actually not particularly self-assured. It's still not clear whether the mysterious voice that torments them in their dreams is their own self-doubt or something else — the voice being female implies it might be Priestess? — but either way, the Doctor does not have particularly pleasant dreams and pretty much constantly wakes up more stressed than when they fell asleep.
Probably the most controversial thing I'm going to put here. There's this very common idea in the fandom that Babel-era Doctor was a monster who didn't mind sacrificing people for the greater good, but I'm going to be honest: I think that this is a misunderstanding of the pre-amnesia character and I personally don't read them that way. My take on pre-amnesia, Babel-era Doctor is that they were actually a fairly normal, gentle person who had become somewhat twisted due to the war, and also, I would argue, that they had become rather suicidal and just didn't really like themselves anymore. The interaction that they have with Marco suggests that they were trying to be merciful but had sort of lost the capacity to be empathetic. I should note that "a good person who became a machine" is more or less what Scout says about the Doctor as well, and he would have been a little closer to them than Ines, who looked at them briefly with her Arts and instead got the idea that they were more like a megalomaniac "chess player" who was above it all. I think that the Doctor had grown rather suicidal and detached from life due to the cyclical nature of the war and the god complex that arose after being entrusted with Babel's military strategy; the Doctor's lack of concern over the assassination attempt points to this as well. Moreover, in the post-amnesia era, PRTS also makes some humorous yet mildly disturbing comments about keeping the Doctor in line, which feeds into this theory that whatever happened between them and Theresa was possibly a suicidal act on their part.
Depression and homicidal-suicidal behavior would explain why almost all of the Babel-era Rhodes Island employees have a tacit pact to never tell post-amnesia Doctor what they were like. This is one of the things I find the strangest about the way Rhodes Island treats the Doctor, because even accounting for things like NDAs and secret pacts, the writing in this game is pretty realistic, and "don't tell the Doctor what they were like during the Babel era" is a situation that would almost be impossible to enforce if there wasn't a very, very good reason for it. (Let's put it this way: a lot of people would still feel a need to tell an amnesiac axe murderer that they used to be an axe murderer, but most decent people wouldn't want to remind someone who used to have crippling depression that they had crippling depression, right?)
The current Doctor does not remember their pre-amnesia depression and they really shouldn't find out for their own mental health.
