#thank you for all the andromeda questions today i'm genuinely touched anyone is interested in my baby <3

[twinkle-art]

hi mads! love your work! super duper normal about it and not insane at all! i wanted to ask what your azem is like in comparison to andromeda; how are they the same, how are they different, and how do those similarities and differences play into her fraught dynamic with emet-selch? thank you for your time and giving me so so so so much psychic damage!

thank you! that’s very high praise! i’d love to!

※perseus uses she/he- i used she in the last post for reading clarity and i’m gonna mostly use he here for the same reason

broadly speaking, my entire basis for perseus’ character is a very meta one. when i first thought her up, andromeda was supposed to be this sexy unflappable butch chad charismatic hero type and then she uh. really, really, really wasn’t that by the time msq was through with her. 

ergo, i thought it'd be fun to make perseus everything andromeda was supposed to be, name and all.

(side note: i first picked andromeda’s name in the character creator on a whim for the sound of it and could not have anticipated what she would become. kind of funny to name your wol Literally The Original Damsel In Fiction though. also you didn't ask but i Also didn't realize that Caecus didn't just mean "blind" but literally is "devoid of light". her garlean name is Damsel von Lightless. girl i'm so sorry.)

okay! similarities first though!

they both have a ravenous zest for life and a persistent good-naturedness that makes them easy to get along with when they let you in. they’re both big ol bleeding hearts who are intensely loyal and the first to throw themselves between danger and anyone in trouble. they’re both cagey about fully opening up, and prefer to fall back on a persona with strangers. they both give 100% to everything they do.

in a poetic sense, you could say the core essences of their souls are the same, beyond just the literal one.  

buuttttttt in practice they are like night and day. perseus’ exterior of an easygoing, almost frat bro-esque guy who doesn’t take anything too seriously may be just as much of an intentional construct as the stoic hero of few words façade that andromeda dons when she’s uncomfortable (that is, with literally everyone for the first three expacs) but it sits, far, far more naturally on him, blending seamlessly with his real self to the point where even he’s not sure where one begins and the other ends. 

where andromeda is deeply insecure, perseus is unwaveringly confident. where she’s easily swayed, he’s frustratingly stubborn. where her persona makes her come off as untouchable to a fault, his makes him effortlessly personable. where she latches on hard in all her relationships, offering her whole heart the second the threshold is breached, he can be flighty-bordering-on-avoidant around meaningfully vulnerable intimacy of any kind. 

and on that note: emet-selch hates andromeda for being, compared to his extremely rose-colored memory of perseus, a downgrade in every way. for better or worse, his azem was someone who would never, ever be cowed into submission, and he has a way of needling his way beneath andromeda’s carefully constructed exterior without even trying. she’s simply not as self-assured as perseus when it really matters, and so he resents every single inch he manages to take from her. he wants, more than anything, for her to fight back.

it’s worth nothing though, that emet-selch knows that perseus possessed a sensitive, complicated interiority beneath all that bravado. in fact, he wasn’t merely among the few privy to her “real” more complicated self, he was pretty uncontestedly the person she confided the most in, like, at all. like when i said the love was intense and practically familial i meant that shit. ironically, his abject refusal to accept andromeda as a worthy successor to someone he was incredibly close with causes him to flatten him in his memory, stripping him of the nuance he was rather special to be trusted with in the first place.

i'm not sure if he ever fully reckoned with that, to be honest. his final and only acknowledgement of andromeda was one of allowing her to stand on her own merits as her own person. even by then, i don't think he could stomach the idea of the two of them meaningfully being the same.

….also, it simply must be said that andromeda gets no bitches due to a brutal combo of terrible luck and self sabotage and perseus was drowning in pussy to the point where he was kind of a menace