#I can't believe I rambled on this long sdflkjjlk;

[atrabclla]

[ this headcanon meme | still accepting ]

@chantlight​​ said: hc + emotions?

Cut for length bc I was really feeling this and it got long.

          I’m gonna break this up into tl;dr sections to hopefully make the read easier because I got super inspired and rambled about several different things, but they all center around Daeris and her emotions / emotional health.

          Daeris is desensitized, but not a stone-cold assassin.

          Daeris's biggest failing as an assassin is her inability to kill off her emotions. She was trained from early childhood by her caretakers in the Dark Brotherhood to be a perfect weapon in both body and mind, but while she found success in the former, the latter was a failure. Daeris feels emotions intensely. She wishes she could be the perfect machine that everyone wants her to be, but no matter how hard she tries, she cannot do so. Not completely. 

          This unhealthy mindset forced upon her has only made her emotional turmoil worse. Daeris is, with the exception of her conscience, the perfect assassin. At a young age, she became desensitized to death and the act of killing. She has learned how to put her emotions aside for as long as she needs to get the job done, but being desensitized to her own actions as she does the deed doesn’t mean that she does not feel the emotional consequences later on. And oh boy, does she. It’s even worse because she was taught that she shouldn’t have remorse and that it was a sign of weakness, so she never learned how to express it or cope with it in a healthy manner.

          Daeris’s relationship with her own emotions is extremely unhealthy.

          There is a pent-up hurricane of emotions within her that she does not know how to release. It manifests in night terrors, depression, self-loathing, insomnia, and other PTSD-like symptoms that she does not understand. She’s developed a hypersexual, pleasure and adrenaline-seeking lifestyle as an unhealthy coping mechanism in response because she cannot make any of these negative symptoms go away; she’s found she can only stave them off for a short while, and the best way to do so is to overload her senses with cheap thrills.

          Daeris KNOWS that her emotional state is super unhealthy, but she feels so entrapped that she cannot imagine a healthy future for herself. Thus she perpetuates her own cycle of self-loathing.

          In a way, she does have a surface-level understanding of where it’s coming from. She’s self-aware enough to recognize what she is and what she’s doing. If she had been able to make the choice herself, she would have never become an assassin. If she could leave, she would, but what else is out there for her? This is the only family she’s ever known. This is the path her own mother set her on. She stays faithful to the Brotherhood, doing these horrid things and inflicting more self-hatred upon herself, all in hope that one day she will get to put the blade down. That one day her mother will keep her promise and pull Daeris away from the Brotherhood to fulfill whatever secretive purpose she had in store for her daughter. But the more realistic part of her knows that, even when the day comes that she joins Nocturnal at her side, she’ll never be able to put the blade down. Why would Nocturnal make her into a weapon if she didn’t plan on using her, after all? It’s hopeless and she knows it, but she has to keep herself going because she feels she can’t change things otherwise.

          In spite of everything, there’s still a lot of good left in Daeris. But thanks to Imposter Syndrome (or something similar to it), she struggles recognizing her good qualities as genuine parts of herself.

          Daeris’s strong emotions may be a weakness in her profession, but they are also a strength she does not realize she has, and she could flourish if she would give in and accept that part of herself. She is deeply empathetic and has an incredibly loving nature. Even tainted by the darkness in her veins and the blood on her hands, that part of her remains, desperately waiting for a chance to move away from the dark path she’s on and heal. 

          She is kind. She is compassionate. She loves people. But she is also an assassin. A murderer. And it has an effect on her that’s similar to Imposter Syndrome. There is such a drastic contrast between the two sides of Daeris that she cannot reason within herself that it’s possible for both versions of herself to exist at the same time. Though her better qualities are as much a part of her as her darker ones are, because these darker qualities exist in an environment where they are encouraged and as such dominate her life, it makes the better qualities feel fake. She is kind and loving, but she feels like it’s a fraud; that truly she is incapable of being like that as the real her is horrible. When she has good experiences, she feels like a monster playing pretend. She feels like she’s akin to the Big Bad Wolf disguised as the grandmother in the tale of Red Riding Hood. Like all the happiness that comes to her is fake, or that she does not deserve any of it.

          Honestly? Her morality could swing either way in most verses, and it wholly depends on the influences she interacts with. 

          A strong example of Daeris finally accepting the good in herself and choosing to follow a better path is her ESO verse played out in it’s full, developed storyline. Even then the darkness in her nature is strong, and it always will be, but the true change is that she also accepts the good things. She sees herself as a complete person instead of a fragmented being at war with herself. And she can thrive amidst the heavy losses she has suffered, whereas a younger Daeris who had not experienced that level of self-realization would not have been able to handle what happened and would self-destruct. On the other hand, since most of her verses do not have this kind of development pre-built into them, she is also susceptible to giving in completely to the darker aspects; of truly becoming a powerful Daedric Lord who pursues self-interests above all else, which is exactly what her mother is grooming her to be. I love Daeris’s development in ESO and her reaching that point in her actualization will always be the best outcome for her (and her canon outcome), but as a writer, I am also interested in what would happen if the pendulum swings the other way. And that’s what really excites me about Daeris: getting to watch her adapt and change and discover things about herself, whether for better or worse.