Application for Empatheias

[devilsworkday]

⌈ PLAYER SECTION ⌉
Player: Dal
Contact: InstantEternity
Age: 29
Current Characters:
Shuu Tsukiyama | Tokyo Ghoul | preybeforemeals
Zolf J Kimbley | Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) | alchemicals


⌈ CHARACTER SECTION ⌉
Character: Kristoph Gavin
Age: 32
Canon: Ace Attorney
Canon Point: Immediately after the final verdict is read during Turnabout Succession, the final case of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney

Background: Wiki link!

Personality: Kristoph Gavin was always one of those people who seemed to have everything going for him.

Since at least the age of 25, he was a respected member of the legal community; seven years later, at 32, his skill as a defense attorney was both noted and undoubted by most, and he was running his own highly successful law firm, even taking on protégés and personally mentoring them, training them to be successful lawyers themselves. He seemed to embody the notion that's repeated throughout the first trilogy of the series – a lawyer is someone who keeps smiling, no matter how bad it gets – even outside of the courtroom; generally gentle and even-tempered, he got along well with children (even those that could be considered 'difficult' for one reason or another) and liked animals, and he seemed to like spending long blocks of time with friends, talking about nothing in particular, really, just checking in.

And if that all sounds a bit saccharine...well, that's because it is.

A lot of Kristoph's superficial personality is based around image – he likes people seeing what he wants them to see, nothing more, and what he wants them to see is nothing short of perfection. He takes incredibly meticulous care of his appearance, indulging in things like high-end nail polish and keeping his long blond hair in an...admittedly confusing braid coiled down over his left shoulder; confidence, intelligence and a keen sense of logic and rationality are highly sought-after in the courtroom and so that's what he presents, to an extent that he's casually called 'the coolest defense in the West' in reference to his ability to keep his demeanor steady and his rationale on-point despite things appearing to shoot themselves directly to hell. People like dealing with positive, upbeat individuals, so that's what he projects at all times, even when he's obviously not really feeling it; one of the more unsettling things about his constant smiling is the fact that it's constant – he often does it at moments that are contextually or conversationally inappropriate, and the result tends to be incredibly passive-aggressive in coming across. He even tries to maintain it even when he's highly stressed and becoming angry, to an extent that he starts developing a nasty tic on the left side of his face.

The dissonant facial expressions are one of the first solid indicators that underneath the calm exterior there might actually be something wrong with him – his displays of contentment are empty and don't mean much, and if anything, they're just something he does because he needs to do something with his face. What matters to Kristoph, however, isn't so much that his affect displays work (though it's obviously nice and preferable when they do); what matters is his ability to maintain them, to keep tight control over his actions and reactions, and to keep his thoughts firmly in his head where they belong in order to prevent people from seeing things that he would quite prefer be kept far away from everyone.

The obvious question, then, is exactly what he's hiding under there.

A fundamental part of how he behaves in the courtroom is owed to his ability to see multiple sources of reasoning behind every action taken in a given scenario – he perpetually seems one step ahead of his student (and the player), insisting that he sees absolutely nothing wrong with the prosecution blowing holes in their argument because he's fully aware of at least one other reason why things may have played out as they did; this apparent ability is likely largely owed to the fact that outside of the courtroom, he's massively paranoid. He doesn't trust anyone, and is constantly seeming to scan people to see who's going to hurt him and who has potential to help him in the long run, and once he decides he doesn't like somebody he'll do everything in his power to both keep an eye on them and keep them away from him. He's quick to assume that if something isn't going his way, it's a personal vendetta rather than because he may have done anything wrong; this is taken to extents that are often downright bizarre to watch, especially considering that over the course of his career, Kristoph Gavin has done plenty of things wrong – it's heavily implied at one point that a lot of his defenses also involved seeking out legal loopholes and winning on technicalities, following the letter of the law and not the spirit, and on at least one occasion when that wasn't going to be enough, his solution to the problem took a far darker turn.

Namely, he hired an artistic prodigy of about twelve years old to forge case-breaking evidence for him, and then he tried to murder her to ensure that she'd remain quiet about it.

The fact that his chosen murder method didn't work (he attempted to poison her twice, and failed both times) did absolutely nothing good for his mental state; he proceeded to spend the next seven years doing damage control when he was fired from the case that he'd effectively became a felon to win and tried to kill a little girl over. His idea of "damage control" was so convolutedly awful that it's sort of a wonder that the world didn't just blip him out of existence for having the audacity to even try it – he proceeded to manipulate his younger brother into helping him get the attorney that had been hired in his place disbarred because he was that pissed off over it, then befriended the disbarred attorney in question in order to keep him from finding out what Kristoph had done; he kept close watch over everyone involved in the case for the next seven years, and as soon as the original defendant who'd fired him showed up again after that entire mess he proceeded to smash the guy's head in with a bottle, both to keep him from talking and because...again, he was just that angry with the entire incident.

Essentially, what we're looking at is someone fueled by spite and paranoia, with no sense of empathy to speak of; when he's arrested for smashing his former client's face in, his response is to ask if this is happening because someone involved in the case is seeking revenge against him, rather than because he just flat-out murdered a guy. When his crimes against the forger (and her family, because her father managed to ingest some of the poison eventually and died as a result) come to light he spends the entire trial being about as classless as a Marxist utopia, speaking ill of both the dead and someone who's currently in a coma at the time of the trial and generally just doing a spectacular job making everyone's lives harder than they really needed to be. He was already on death row at that point in the game for the bludgeoning; literally the only thing he had to gain at that point was the knowledge that if he was able to "win" the case against him with regards to the forgery and the poisoning, the other side would lose.

Even after the cheerful facade started to drop and he was finding a newfound sense of no shame whatsoever, though, Kristoph continued to try to keep up appearances in his own way; he tended to say that he bludgeoned someone to death "because [he's] an evil human being," preferring to look like an utter sociopath as opposed to acknowledging that he more or less lost control over himself and acted through a combination of rage and fear. And even when everything he'd done was being discussed and dragged out into the open in the middle of court, he kept trying to smile until he eventually had a psychotic breakdown on the stand.

Basically, Kristoph is very good at putting on a front and remaining cheerful, calm and at least reasonably pleasant under most circumstances; when things stop going his way, however, he becomes spiteful and passive-aggressive, and at his worst he's uncontrollable and flat-out dangerous – as good as he is at handling people on good days, he's willing to do whatever he deems necessary to preserve the image he's cultivated for the sake of the others. Given that he has no empathy to speak of, is almost utterly amoral and, deep down, is driven by anger and paranoia...well, "whatever he deems necessary" probably won't be pretty for anyone involved.

Abilities: Kristoph actually doesn't have any particularly uncanny or supernatural abilities to assist him, either in the courtroom or outside of it; this is actually noteworthy in a canon where attorneys tend to have powers like channeling the dead, calling up physical manifestations of someone's secrets and "unlocking" them in order to force the truth out of them, or generally being human lie detectors due to having superhuman vision or hearing. What he does have, however, are some very carefully cultivated analytical reasoning and logical skills – most of his talent as a lawyer seems to lie in his ability to argue just about any standpoint and switch direction at a moment's notice, as well as being able to see the same problem from just about any angle necessary to construct said arguments.

...In other words, he actually performs in court like most lawyers are expected to, he's just particularly good at it. Again, though, he is the only defense attorney in this damn series that is not a human lie detector of some sort, so the fact that he's able to hold his own alongside the supernatural whatnot that tends to happen in that courthouse probably says something; he's noted as being particularly talented and sought-after on the legal circuit, and his opinions were taken into serious consideration by the bar association when he was as young as 25.

While it's difficult to say if this counts as an ability (because if it is, it's a passive one that he's consciously unaware of), Kristoph is one of two characters in the series to manifest black psyche-locks when pressed about something he's concealing from the others in the game. Psyche-locks are the visible representations of secrets mentioned earlier – red locks are the "normal" version, easily broken by presenting proper evidence to the person wielding them; black locks, however, are supposedly a sign that the secret hidden behind them is so deeply suppressed by the person's subconscious that unlocking them will do irreparable mental and spiritual damage. Kristoph's are unusual because he unconsciously throws five black locks out in response to a question that he can't possibly have suppressed or forgotten the answer to; there's never any explanation given for why that happened or how he managed to even do that, but the fact that he could do it at all for something that actually had a completely straightforward answer is worth noting anyway.

Outside of lawyering and...that, however, his strongest abilities are not-uncommon things like obviously above-average intelligence (he's neither a genius nor a prodigy, but he's incredibly smart and he knows it – though he's not as clever as he thinks he is) and a damn near unrivaled ability to keep his head in a crisis, with ridiculously few exceptions even managing to visibly unsettle him (emphasis on the 'visibly'). He's fairly average overall, really; just a bit smarter than most and unsettlingly even-tempered to the point of looking like a permanent resident of the Uncanny Valley.

Alignment: Piphron. While most of the defense attorneys in the series adhere to the notion that one should trust in their client regardless of circumstances, Kristoph's life in general is based around pretty much the exact opposite of that; he's deeply paranoid and constantly scanning people, keeping those who are going to hurt him and those who might help him equally close in terms of surveillance and equally distant in terms of emotional connection. He spent seven years convinced that someone would find out what he'd done in terms of forgery and the attempted murder of a child; given how practiced he is at manipulating people and destroying all evidence that something might be off, it's not unreasonable to assume that he's spent even longer thinking that someone would find out that something isn't right with him to begin with.

Other: Nothing for the time being!


⌈ SAMPLE SECTION ⌉
Sample:
Character portrayal
Route 29's fourth wall.

Emotion/game-based
Kristoph Gavin generally doesn't do happiness very well.

That isn't to say that most of the time he's unhappy, because he most certainly isn't; the absence of a thing doesn't imply the opposite's presence, and he's got contentment and confidence and sometimes entirely too much ambition to really be healthy and otherwise just a lot of things to keep him occupied and moving forward and generally all right with his life when he's able to have some semblance of control over it. He's just...usually not happy in any appreciable sort of way, and if we're all going to be honest he's totally okay with that.

...Which is why it's probably a little jarring that he appears to be having the best damn day in this library right now.

It's not as though it's obvious why, if you're just looking at him; he appears to be studying pretty much everything he can get his hands on regarding the general history of this place, as well as the basics behind what's passing for the legal profession around here. It looks tedious as hell, bluntly put. But he's seeming pretty enthralled, and even if it's muted the atmosphere just seems weirdly inviting in his general vicinity – the light's brighter over here, the level of warmth in this area is comfortable as hell, and you are...probably going to get music of some sort stuck in your head at some point or another because what is turning off the telepathy entirely. It's not the shrieking guitar solos that Klavier specializes in, at least; hopefully you like classical.

(At least it's not baroque, because nobody actually likes baroque and Kristoph is not quite pretentious enough to pretend that he does.)

Either he's found some sort of bizarre enlightenment, or he's just reached the THIS IS FINE stage of his tenure in Verens and if he doesn't shut his brain off for a while and just enjoy the one semi-familiar thing that's presented itself in the last two months he's going to explode. It's a bit difficult to say.

(In the interest of full disclosure, the sample was taken from here; I've had him in the game within the last year but I wasn't entirely certain that I could link that and have it count for both the game-based and character portrayal portions of the sample - if this is unacceptable I will gladly provide another sample.)


Questions: None that I can think of at the moment – thank you for your time!