Application | Recolle
PLAYER
YOUR NAME: Dal
18+?: Yes!
CONTACT:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
InstantEternity
CHARACTERS IN GAME: Albert Wesker (Resident Evil)
RESERVATION LINK: Here!
YOUR NAME: Dal
18+?: Yes!
CONTACT:
CHARACTERS IN GAME: Albert Wesker (Resident Evil)
RESERVATION LINK: Here!
CHARACTER: CANON SECTION
NAME: Alexander von Cumore
AGE: No canon age given; while he seems older than Yuri and Flynn and more or less has his life together, he still acts fairly young and as such I'd place him in his late twenties.
CANON: Tales of Vesperia
NAME: Alexander von Cumore
AGE: No canon age given; while he seems older than Yuri and Flynn and more or less has his life together, he still acts fairly young and as such I'd place him in his late twenties.
CANON: Tales of Vesperia
CANON HISTORY:
CANON PERSONALITY:
"Alexander von Cumore is the man destined to be Commandant of the Imperial Knights."
What a man thinks of himself is likely to tell you a lot about that man, and if you were to ask Cumore what he thinks of himself, that's likely the response you would get – Alexander von Cumore is the man destined to be Commandant, and as far as he's concerned, that says everything that anyone really needs to know about him. And in fairness, he does try his hardest to live up to what he believes that sort of position would require of him – for better or worse, he's authoritative, efficient, and utterly ruthless in everything he does; he doesn't tolerate mistakes or failure, and even the way he carries himself seems to have been deliberately practiced in order to give off the impression that he's in control of both himself and any situation he may happen to find himself in.
And honestly, it's a good thing that he got all that practice in, because underneath it all he's a shrieking, neurotic mess.
That isn't to say that Cumore doesn't have his good traits, because he certainly does; he's an intensely driven person, one that sees a goal and pursues it with everything he's got, and he's diligent in carrying out work that he considers worthwhile. While he was born into aristocracy and therefore one of those that was explicitly targeted by Commandant Alexei to be recruited into the Imperial Knights, he wasn't content to take the position and be done with it; rather, Cumore is the only captain we see in the game that was born into nobility – it isn't a position that can be bought with money, nor is it something that's more easily granted to people based on social status. There isn't any shame in not seeking promotion, either, as most that are brought in from the aristocracy to serve as Imperial Knights remain low-ranking and under the service of their assigned captain; high-ranking knights are all shown to have earned their positions through their own merit.
And Cumore does have a handful of favorable traits that are desirable in those taking a leadership position; outside of a naturally large amount of drive and ambition, he's also highly efficient at what he does. He gets results and he gets them quickly, regardless of the task at hand; he negotiates well enough to be able to convince people to join causes that he proposes without reading the fine print first, he's skilled enough politically to guarantee his installation as magistrate of a city against even the current Commandant's orders, and if he can't get his desired outcome by way of diplomacy and playing nice...well, he's proven himself to be authoritative and capable enough to ensure that the job gets done anyway. (Everyone is just decidedly less happy about it, when he goes about it that way.)
His particular skillset, however, appears to lie in tracking and hunting people down; captains are generally assigned tasks that play to their strengths, and Cumore specifically is sent to find people that don't want to be found. While this usually involves apprehending and punishing criminals, some of whom have fled to other continents entirely, he's also given the task of finding and killing an entelexeia – a sentient and highly dangerous monster that's notoriously difficult to locate, and usually requires either a decent number of people or a specially-created mechanized tank to destroy.
However, his relentlessness is one of many things that has a tendency to get him into trouble; while he prides himself on being thorough and efficient in pursuit of the hunt, he's shown to utterly lack empathy and compassion when it comes to carrying out his duties. He's openly criticized outside the ruins of Caer Bocram for treating people as blood sport, to which he just glibly replies that he sees nothing wrong with torturing and killing people that he knows to be criminals; his kneejerk response to being defied (or interpreting people's actions as causing more problems than they solve) is to suggest killing them or otherwise removing them from the equation. He places almost no intrinsic value on human lives; at best, he sees other people as tools or weapons, and at worst they're commodities – things to be bought and sold and burned through, and ultimately discarded when he has no further use for them.
A fair amount of these views and behavior is rooted in the nature of the city of Zaphias itself, where Cumore was born and raised as a member of the aristocracy; the city is divided into a caste system, and that brings with it a strict understanding of the social hierarchy – the aristocracy enjoy all the luxuries that money can buy and have more material wealth than tbey can conceivably use in their lifetimes, while the members of the lower classes live in abject poverty, with very little resources or protection allocated to them. The general understanding among the nobles is that the "commoners" somehow deserve that sort of treatment – it's an incredibly simplified view deeply rooted in classism, that more or less comes down to "if they wanted better treatment, then they wouldn't be poor." Some seem to pity the impoverished members of the lower classes, albeit in an incredibly tactless and condescending way, while others either treat them as novelties to be gawked at or are more openly hostile about their derision; regardless of how the behavior manifests, there's a common belief at the root of it – namely, as far as those born into aristocracy in Zaphias are concerned, they receive better treatment not because of a random circumstance that they had no control over at birth, but rather because they simply are better. They're wealthy because they deserve to be, because there must be some inherent trait bred into them that makes them special and better than others – and logically, it follows that those lacking that inherent trait (whatever that trait may be) must be worth less from the start.
After all, why else would they be poor?
That isn't to say that Cumore literally doesn't know better, or shouldn't be held accountable for his actions. His behavior goes well above and beyond the sort of accidental cruelty that can be attributed to ignorance, and at one point late in the game it's mentioned by another member of the Knights that Cumore's actions were seen as extreme and that he's always had difficulties with his conduct. However, his upbringing has definitely influenced his personality and the way he sees fit to treat people that he considers to be below him in any way; this is likely most evident in what he ends up doing to the people living in the cities of Heliord and Mantaic.
What he does there can really be called nothing less than atrocities. He sets up a forced labor ring in the former, conscripting commoners to do hard labor below the city in order to complete and strengthen it; while it's something that would have been done eventually anyway, in the end he's pushing for the city's completion so hard for his own personal gain, seeing he intends to use it as his base to instigate a war that literally no one else wants – something that, incidentally, is going to result in a massive amount of human deaths, but those are trivial to him compared to his end goal of becoming Commandant. As it stands, the path to starting the war itself isn't without its losses already, as he's shown to be working the people down there until they die – he's giving them very little provisions and almost no pay, he's forcing them to work obscenely long hours with no rest, and he's refusing to let them leave for any reason in order to keep everything quiet and out of sight of the rest of the people living in the city. It's that latter part that implies that he knows full well that what he's doing is wrong in some capacity, or at the very least that other people will consider it to be such; at the same time, he shows no personal remorse or care for what he's doing – someone literally collapses from overexertion and exhaustion in front of him, and Cumore's reaction is to kick the guy in the face and tell him to get up.
His actions in Mantaic are arguably even worse; he uses his power and authority to put the entire city under martial law and forces the people living there to go on suicide missions into the desert in order to flush out the entelexeia he's after. Despite the fact that he received the mission in the first place because he's presumably capable of completing it on his own, he makes it incredibly clear that he simply can't be bothered to do it – while he usually meets his tasks with a good amount of eagerness and insists on being punctual about doing them, he procrastinates on reporting to Mantaic at all because he doesn't consider completing this particular order to be what he should be doing; even after he gets there, he makes it clear that he's going to do absolutely everything in his power to not go out into the desert himself, going so far as to conscript children to do it before he will. Once again, his lack of empathy is on full display with pretty much everyone he interacts with in Mantaic; he orders one of the members of his own brigade sent out into the desert to die as well because the guy wasn't doing his job to Cumore's unreasonably high standards, and when the order is protested, he threatens to kill the man's family instead. It's clear that even the people that are loyal to him don't really mean much; their loyalty is appreciated for as long as it's convenient, but in the end they have no real worth as people – they're simply tools to be used and then discarded, and once he's done that...well, he can always obtain more.
Even people on Cumore's own level aren't spared from this sort of treatment and general degradation – he makes no secret of the fact that he despises two of the other captains - both of which were born into poverty but were able to gain a high ranking position through hard work; even though they earned everything they have, Cumore still considers them undeserving due to their origins being what they were in the first place. The idea that people that are, to the best of his understanding, inherently inferior to him could be considered his equals is repulsive to him, and as such he never passes up an opportunity to openly talk shit about them and blame them for everything that doesn't go his way. If he's being reprimanded, it's never his fault; it's clearly theirs, for not knowing their place and staying in their lane. If his plans don't work out or things slip out of his control even slightly, well, that's their fault too - everything would have been fine if it weren't for interference from a pair of people who had nothing to do with him outside of existing in his general vicinity.
Of course, even if he didn't have a convenient scapegoat in the form of those who worked their way up out of the lower classes, he would likely find someone else to blame for his own failures and shortcomings. Cumore simply doesn't tolerate things not working the way he needs them to; his emotional stability is largely based around how much control he has over a given situation, and the second he doesn't have complete control is the second that more extreme behavior begins to surface. He's quick to anger and likewise quick to violence and threats, going so far as to tell a member of the royal family to her face that he'll make her "disappear" if she doesn't stop causing problems for him; his insistence on efficiency is fervent to the point of full-on insanity, given the fact that he'll order his own men killed for things like "not doing their job fast enough," which was what happened to the poor damn guy out in Mantaic.
Despite the fact that he's obviously spoiled and narcissistic, however, his standards for himself are likewise unreasonably high, which is another large contributing factor to his treatment of others; everything that happens while he's in control of a situation is a reflection on him, and as such everything needs to be perfect. After all, he's going to be Commandant one day, and it's fairly common knowledge that the Commandant is tasked with literally saving the world, should he be called upon to do it; if he can't handle commoners or his own brigade firmly enough to ensure that they do what he wants, then that's obviously not going to be anywhere near good enough for his future endeavors. He's also shown to have highly abusive and deeply-ingrained views on what punishment should entail, and what's deserving it – he expresses that people won't learn without severe punishment and the threat of death, and the things that warrant said punishments are things like slacking off when there's a job to complete. It's never shown exactly where these views originated from, but given his general obsession with efficiency and control, as well as the fact that he seems to be holding himself to standards that are already unreasonable, it's fair to assume that he's got a good amount of lowkey neuroses going on.
If anything, those particular thoughts are more or less key to holding him in check at all; while Cumore doesn't respond particularly well to authority, the fact remains that he does respond to it. If anything, he doesn't seem to like confrontation very much; he can instigate it and be fine, and he can argue his points in contained situations without being unreasonable about it, but if someone steps up and gets in his face from out of nowhere he's surprisingly quick to back down – a behavior that comes back to the need for control under all circumstances. He doesn't seem to know what to do once his control over a situation is removed, and as such confrontation like that tends to throw him; if someone is authoritative enough with him in their reprimands or in telling him what to do, he tends to become visibly nervous before storming off to save face. This is shown at its logical extreme in his final confrontation with Yuri Lowell, a situation where he has no control whatsoever – while normally he handles everything to do with Yuri with a cold, disdainful demeanor, the second that it becomes obvious that he has no way to rein in Yuri's behavior and can't assert authority over him, Cumore dissolves rather quickly into a bundle of shaking, nerves, and excuses, along with occasionally trying to re-assert himself only to revert back into shrieking and fear every time that fails. It's notable, however, that even when he's got no control over anything that's happening, his first instinct is still to draw his sword and try to square up. Even when he's openly terrified, he still tries to make himself fight; this is most visible at the start of that final confrontation. Cumore is disarmed almost immediately and shoved to the ground, but the fact remains that he did try to accept Yuri's challenge to a fight, even though it was the middle of the night, he had no idea what was going on, he was very openly wigging out and shaking violently, and he had none of his protective armor on at the moment; he only runs after he's disarmed and shoved down, and Yuri advances on him with a weapon and threatens to kill him anyway.
Of course, in situations where he does have some semblance of control, he's decidedly more stable; when things are going well, a fair amount of his decisions are rooted in reasonable notions, though the way he carries them out tends to be strange and erratic. While he does tend to trend more towards ruling through fear than through love, he also seems to understand that he doesn't want to be hated by those working under him, and as such he'll make attempts at ensuring that he's seen as reasonable and benevolent, even when that's clearly not the case. The results of these attempts are often straight-out bizarre; after one of his workers collapses in Heliord, Cumore continues to promise him that he'll soon have all the wealth and status that he could possibly want and more money than he can use...while he's in the process of shrieking at the guy to get back to work and kicking him in the head. He also tries to justify his actions at Mantaic to the townspeople by promising that their children will be taken care of, and that once the mission is done everyone will be able to live high and give their children everything that they could possibly want – something that would probably be more effective if he didn't punctuate it by yelling at them to get a move on and stop fucking up his timetable. The weird thing about the promises he's making in both circumstances is that he seems to be making them in complete earnest – he doesn't seem sarcastic when he says any of it – and he continues making them even when it's evident that he doesn't have to anymore; it's presented more as an incredibly odd attempt at being liked and seen as reasonable, even when committing atrocities against the same people that he's trying to garner the approval of.
Needless to say, most people don't like Cumore very much.
However, he does have two relationships that are shown to be positive (on his end, anyway); the first is the only one that we're explicitly shown, and that would be his working relationship with Yeager. While Yeager himself doesn't seem all that crazy about him, Cumore does seem to be trying to play nice in Yeager's general direction, despite the fact that Yeager is from the guilds and therefore someone that should be considered beneath him in terms of status; Cumore is casual and conversational with him in a way that he isn't with most other people, offering compliments and implicitly asking for Yeager's thoughts on things, and he'll directly tell him things that he believes to be important but that he doesn't really talk about with anyone else – he freely discusses his actual plans when he believes they're alone, as well as openly expressing his desire to become Commandant by way of just straight-up overthrowing Alexei.
It seems information-sharing seems to be how Cumore expresses that he likes people; after his death in Mantaic, it becomes known that Cumore has a sister, Mimura – she shows up in a guild quest late in the game, and the reason she's relevant is because he apparently showed her something of great importance and let her know where he was keeping it for the sake of...the hell of it, really. He had no real reason to share it with her outside of the fact that she's his sister, and he presumably cares about her about as much as he can care about anybody; even if they're never shown directly interacting, they seem fairly ride-or-die with each other, given that it's made plain that Cumore was using his status and a good amount of money to provide for her, making sure she was taken care of and giving her whatever she wanted, and Mimura later plans on blowing up parts of Zaphias in part because she doesn't like the amount of shit people were talking about her brother after he died.
(Obviously, the tendency toward totally rational responses to things they don't like runs in the family.)
Either way, whether he is or isn't liked by most people doesn't really matter much to Cumore in the end; after all, he cares for very few people himself. What matters to him is how much he's respected – because with respect comes control, and with control comes power. And given enough power, money, and ambition...well, as far as he's concerned, that might just be enough to influence destiny.
And Alexander von Cumore is the man destined to be Commandant – or at least, he was. Shame about the whole vigilante justice thing.
SKILLS/ABILITIES:
- Tales of Vesperia @ Wikipedia - which tries valiantly to make sense of this game's plot, but sacrifices things like authorial intent and, you know, being factually correct along the way. It's competent enough to give some indication of what the basic story is about, at least, but not too much else, and it tends to connect things in weird ways that may or may not be accurate.
- In-depth summary of Cumore's appearances - because the Wikipedia page manages to not even mention him by name at all, somehow, despite Cumore being a primary antagonizing force for half the game. Good hustle, everybody.
CANON PERSONALITY:
"Alexander von Cumore is the man destined to be Commandant of the Imperial Knights."
What a man thinks of himself is likely to tell you a lot about that man, and if you were to ask Cumore what he thinks of himself, that's likely the response you would get – Alexander von Cumore is the man destined to be Commandant, and as far as he's concerned, that says everything that anyone really needs to know about him. And in fairness, he does try his hardest to live up to what he believes that sort of position would require of him – for better or worse, he's authoritative, efficient, and utterly ruthless in everything he does; he doesn't tolerate mistakes or failure, and even the way he carries himself seems to have been deliberately practiced in order to give off the impression that he's in control of both himself and any situation he may happen to find himself in.
And honestly, it's a good thing that he got all that practice in, because underneath it all he's a shrieking, neurotic mess.
That isn't to say that Cumore doesn't have his good traits, because he certainly does; he's an intensely driven person, one that sees a goal and pursues it with everything he's got, and he's diligent in carrying out work that he considers worthwhile. While he was born into aristocracy and therefore one of those that was explicitly targeted by Commandant Alexei to be recruited into the Imperial Knights, he wasn't content to take the position and be done with it; rather, Cumore is the only captain we see in the game that was born into nobility – it isn't a position that can be bought with money, nor is it something that's more easily granted to people based on social status. There isn't any shame in not seeking promotion, either, as most that are brought in from the aristocracy to serve as Imperial Knights remain low-ranking and under the service of their assigned captain; high-ranking knights are all shown to have earned their positions through their own merit.
And Cumore does have a handful of favorable traits that are desirable in those taking a leadership position; outside of a naturally large amount of drive and ambition, he's also highly efficient at what he does. He gets results and he gets them quickly, regardless of the task at hand; he negotiates well enough to be able to convince people to join causes that he proposes without reading the fine print first, he's skilled enough politically to guarantee his installation as magistrate of a city against even the current Commandant's orders, and if he can't get his desired outcome by way of diplomacy and playing nice...well, he's proven himself to be authoritative and capable enough to ensure that the job gets done anyway. (Everyone is just decidedly less happy about it, when he goes about it that way.)
His particular skillset, however, appears to lie in tracking and hunting people down; captains are generally assigned tasks that play to their strengths, and Cumore specifically is sent to find people that don't want to be found. While this usually involves apprehending and punishing criminals, some of whom have fled to other continents entirely, he's also given the task of finding and killing an entelexeia – a sentient and highly dangerous monster that's notoriously difficult to locate, and usually requires either a decent number of people or a specially-created mechanized tank to destroy.
However, his relentlessness is one of many things that has a tendency to get him into trouble; while he prides himself on being thorough and efficient in pursuit of the hunt, he's shown to utterly lack empathy and compassion when it comes to carrying out his duties. He's openly criticized outside the ruins of Caer Bocram for treating people as blood sport, to which he just glibly replies that he sees nothing wrong with torturing and killing people that he knows to be criminals; his kneejerk response to being defied (or interpreting people's actions as causing more problems than they solve) is to suggest killing them or otherwise removing them from the equation. He places almost no intrinsic value on human lives; at best, he sees other people as tools or weapons, and at worst they're commodities – things to be bought and sold and burned through, and ultimately discarded when he has no further use for them.
A fair amount of these views and behavior is rooted in the nature of the city of Zaphias itself, where Cumore was born and raised as a member of the aristocracy; the city is divided into a caste system, and that brings with it a strict understanding of the social hierarchy – the aristocracy enjoy all the luxuries that money can buy and have more material wealth than tbey can conceivably use in their lifetimes, while the members of the lower classes live in abject poverty, with very little resources or protection allocated to them. The general understanding among the nobles is that the "commoners" somehow deserve that sort of treatment – it's an incredibly simplified view deeply rooted in classism, that more or less comes down to "if they wanted better treatment, then they wouldn't be poor." Some seem to pity the impoverished members of the lower classes, albeit in an incredibly tactless and condescending way, while others either treat them as novelties to be gawked at or are more openly hostile about their derision; regardless of how the behavior manifests, there's a common belief at the root of it – namely, as far as those born into aristocracy in Zaphias are concerned, they receive better treatment not because of a random circumstance that they had no control over at birth, but rather because they simply are better. They're wealthy because they deserve to be, because there must be some inherent trait bred into them that makes them special and better than others – and logically, it follows that those lacking that inherent trait (whatever that trait may be) must be worth less from the start.
After all, why else would they be poor?
That isn't to say that Cumore literally doesn't know better, or shouldn't be held accountable for his actions. His behavior goes well above and beyond the sort of accidental cruelty that can be attributed to ignorance, and at one point late in the game it's mentioned by another member of the Knights that Cumore's actions were seen as extreme and that he's always had difficulties with his conduct. However, his upbringing has definitely influenced his personality and the way he sees fit to treat people that he considers to be below him in any way; this is likely most evident in what he ends up doing to the people living in the cities of Heliord and Mantaic.
What he does there can really be called nothing less than atrocities. He sets up a forced labor ring in the former, conscripting commoners to do hard labor below the city in order to complete and strengthen it; while it's something that would have been done eventually anyway, in the end he's pushing for the city's completion so hard for his own personal gain, seeing he intends to use it as his base to instigate a war that literally no one else wants – something that, incidentally, is going to result in a massive amount of human deaths, but those are trivial to him compared to his end goal of becoming Commandant. As it stands, the path to starting the war itself isn't without its losses already, as he's shown to be working the people down there until they die – he's giving them very little provisions and almost no pay, he's forcing them to work obscenely long hours with no rest, and he's refusing to let them leave for any reason in order to keep everything quiet and out of sight of the rest of the people living in the city. It's that latter part that implies that he knows full well that what he's doing is wrong in some capacity, or at the very least that other people will consider it to be such; at the same time, he shows no personal remorse or care for what he's doing – someone literally collapses from overexertion and exhaustion in front of him, and Cumore's reaction is to kick the guy in the face and tell him to get up.
His actions in Mantaic are arguably even worse; he uses his power and authority to put the entire city under martial law and forces the people living there to go on suicide missions into the desert in order to flush out the entelexeia he's after. Despite the fact that he received the mission in the first place because he's presumably capable of completing it on his own, he makes it incredibly clear that he simply can't be bothered to do it – while he usually meets his tasks with a good amount of eagerness and insists on being punctual about doing them, he procrastinates on reporting to Mantaic at all because he doesn't consider completing this particular order to be what he should be doing; even after he gets there, he makes it clear that he's going to do absolutely everything in his power to not go out into the desert himself, going so far as to conscript children to do it before he will. Once again, his lack of empathy is on full display with pretty much everyone he interacts with in Mantaic; he orders one of the members of his own brigade sent out into the desert to die as well because the guy wasn't doing his job to Cumore's unreasonably high standards, and when the order is protested, he threatens to kill the man's family instead. It's clear that even the people that are loyal to him don't really mean much; their loyalty is appreciated for as long as it's convenient, but in the end they have no real worth as people – they're simply tools to be used and then discarded, and once he's done that...well, he can always obtain more.
Even people on Cumore's own level aren't spared from this sort of treatment and general degradation – he makes no secret of the fact that he despises two of the other captains - both of which were born into poverty but were able to gain a high ranking position through hard work; even though they earned everything they have, Cumore still considers them undeserving due to their origins being what they were in the first place. The idea that people that are, to the best of his understanding, inherently inferior to him could be considered his equals is repulsive to him, and as such he never passes up an opportunity to openly talk shit about them and blame them for everything that doesn't go his way. If he's being reprimanded, it's never his fault; it's clearly theirs, for not knowing their place and staying in their lane. If his plans don't work out or things slip out of his control even slightly, well, that's their fault too - everything would have been fine if it weren't for interference from a pair of people who had nothing to do with him outside of existing in his general vicinity.
Of course, even if he didn't have a convenient scapegoat in the form of those who worked their way up out of the lower classes, he would likely find someone else to blame for his own failures and shortcomings. Cumore simply doesn't tolerate things not working the way he needs them to; his emotional stability is largely based around how much control he has over a given situation, and the second he doesn't have complete control is the second that more extreme behavior begins to surface. He's quick to anger and likewise quick to violence and threats, going so far as to tell a member of the royal family to her face that he'll make her "disappear" if she doesn't stop causing problems for him; his insistence on efficiency is fervent to the point of full-on insanity, given the fact that he'll order his own men killed for things like "not doing their job fast enough," which was what happened to the poor damn guy out in Mantaic.
Despite the fact that he's obviously spoiled and narcissistic, however, his standards for himself are likewise unreasonably high, which is another large contributing factor to his treatment of others; everything that happens while he's in control of a situation is a reflection on him, and as such everything needs to be perfect. After all, he's going to be Commandant one day, and it's fairly common knowledge that the Commandant is tasked with literally saving the world, should he be called upon to do it; if he can't handle commoners or his own brigade firmly enough to ensure that they do what he wants, then that's obviously not going to be anywhere near good enough for his future endeavors. He's also shown to have highly abusive and deeply-ingrained views on what punishment should entail, and what's deserving it – he expresses that people won't learn without severe punishment and the threat of death, and the things that warrant said punishments are things like slacking off when there's a job to complete. It's never shown exactly where these views originated from, but given his general obsession with efficiency and control, as well as the fact that he seems to be holding himself to standards that are already unreasonable, it's fair to assume that he's got a good amount of lowkey neuroses going on.
If anything, those particular thoughts are more or less key to holding him in check at all; while Cumore doesn't respond particularly well to authority, the fact remains that he does respond to it. If anything, he doesn't seem to like confrontation very much; he can instigate it and be fine, and he can argue his points in contained situations without being unreasonable about it, but if someone steps up and gets in his face from out of nowhere he's surprisingly quick to back down – a behavior that comes back to the need for control under all circumstances. He doesn't seem to know what to do once his control over a situation is removed, and as such confrontation like that tends to throw him; if someone is authoritative enough with him in their reprimands or in telling him what to do, he tends to become visibly nervous before storming off to save face. This is shown at its logical extreme in his final confrontation with Yuri Lowell, a situation where he has no control whatsoever – while normally he handles everything to do with Yuri with a cold, disdainful demeanor, the second that it becomes obvious that he has no way to rein in Yuri's behavior and can't assert authority over him, Cumore dissolves rather quickly into a bundle of shaking, nerves, and excuses, along with occasionally trying to re-assert himself only to revert back into shrieking and fear every time that fails. It's notable, however, that even when he's got no control over anything that's happening, his first instinct is still to draw his sword and try to square up. Even when he's openly terrified, he still tries to make himself fight; this is most visible at the start of that final confrontation. Cumore is disarmed almost immediately and shoved to the ground, but the fact remains that he did try to accept Yuri's challenge to a fight, even though it was the middle of the night, he had no idea what was going on, he was very openly wigging out and shaking violently, and he had none of his protective armor on at the moment; he only runs after he's disarmed and shoved down, and Yuri advances on him with a weapon and threatens to kill him anyway.
Of course, in situations where he does have some semblance of control, he's decidedly more stable; when things are going well, a fair amount of his decisions are rooted in reasonable notions, though the way he carries them out tends to be strange and erratic. While he does tend to trend more towards ruling through fear than through love, he also seems to understand that he doesn't want to be hated by those working under him, and as such he'll make attempts at ensuring that he's seen as reasonable and benevolent, even when that's clearly not the case. The results of these attempts are often straight-out bizarre; after one of his workers collapses in Heliord, Cumore continues to promise him that he'll soon have all the wealth and status that he could possibly want and more money than he can use...while he's in the process of shrieking at the guy to get back to work and kicking him in the head. He also tries to justify his actions at Mantaic to the townspeople by promising that their children will be taken care of, and that once the mission is done everyone will be able to live high and give their children everything that they could possibly want – something that would probably be more effective if he didn't punctuate it by yelling at them to get a move on and stop fucking up his timetable. The weird thing about the promises he's making in both circumstances is that he seems to be making them in complete earnest – he doesn't seem sarcastic when he says any of it – and he continues making them even when it's evident that he doesn't have to anymore; it's presented more as an incredibly odd attempt at being liked and seen as reasonable, even when committing atrocities against the same people that he's trying to garner the approval of.
Needless to say, most people don't like Cumore very much.
However, he does have two relationships that are shown to be positive (on his end, anyway); the first is the only one that we're explicitly shown, and that would be his working relationship with Yeager. While Yeager himself doesn't seem all that crazy about him, Cumore does seem to be trying to play nice in Yeager's general direction, despite the fact that Yeager is from the guilds and therefore someone that should be considered beneath him in terms of status; Cumore is casual and conversational with him in a way that he isn't with most other people, offering compliments and implicitly asking for Yeager's thoughts on things, and he'll directly tell him things that he believes to be important but that he doesn't really talk about with anyone else – he freely discusses his actual plans when he believes they're alone, as well as openly expressing his desire to become Commandant by way of just straight-up overthrowing Alexei.
It seems information-sharing seems to be how Cumore expresses that he likes people; after his death in Mantaic, it becomes known that Cumore has a sister, Mimura – she shows up in a guild quest late in the game, and the reason she's relevant is because he apparently showed her something of great importance and let her know where he was keeping it for the sake of...the hell of it, really. He had no real reason to share it with her outside of the fact that she's his sister, and he presumably cares about her about as much as he can care about anybody; even if they're never shown directly interacting, they seem fairly ride-or-die with each other, given that it's made plain that Cumore was using his status and a good amount of money to provide for her, making sure she was taken care of and giving her whatever she wanted, and Mimura later plans on blowing up parts of Zaphias in part because she doesn't like the amount of shit people were talking about her brother after he died.
(Obviously, the tendency toward totally rational responses to things they don't like runs in the family.)
Either way, whether he is or isn't liked by most people doesn't really matter much to Cumore in the end; after all, he cares for very few people himself. What matters to him is how much he's respected – because with respect comes control, and with control comes power. And given enough power, money, and ambition...well, as far as he's concerned, that might just be enough to influence destiny.
And Alexander von Cumore is the man destined to be Commandant – or at least, he was. Shame about the whole vigilante justice thing.
SKILLS/ABILITIES:
- Swordmanship abilities – Cumore is visibly very comfortable handling a sword; while he's never utilized as a boss fight, he's fully prepared to square up on multiple occasions throughout the game and seems rather confident in his ability to actually wreck people with a blade. As an Imperial Knight, he uses the...imaginatively-named Knight Sword; the particular version Cumore has is a four-foot broadsword, double-edged with a large crossguard.
- Base artes – All Imperial Knights are equipped with a personal blastia of some sort, and there are certain artes that all of them are capable of using. They're nothing special or overpowered, as they're all reasonably simple strike artes. Demon Fang is probably the fanciest thing they've got and it's so common that it's used in the series logo – it consists of using your sword in a certain way to send a projectile along the ground to keep your enemies off of you. Meanwhile, Sonic Thrust is "you stab people and shove them back with your pointy thing", and Sword Rain is the functional difference between "I stab you once" and "I stab you a lot." The other one everyone of Cumore's ranking knows is Demonic Circle, which is more or less an upgrade to Demon Fang, and instead of projectiles it produces shockwaves. As far as this series is concerned, they're more along the lines of general swordsmanship skills as opposed to any sort of specialized moves; we just need to be pretentious about them because Tales is like that.
- Tracking/Huntsmanship skills – I'm not precisely sure how else to classify this, but given his role in the plot Cumore is heavily implied to be skilled at finding people and things that generally don't want to be found and dealing with them summarily. He's tasked with finding Estelle early on in the game and he manages to find her without outside assistance – not only out in the middle of nowhere, but in the middle of nowhere on a different continent entirely than the one they both started out on; later, he's specifically entrusted with locating an extremely powerful being that's notoriously difficult to find and either killing or capturing it.
- ...Not much else, honestly? – Cumore is otherwise a perfectly normal human being; he's got generally average intelligence, he doesn't have any supernatural abilities (nor does he do magic, blastia-assisted or otherwise), and while he does have all the training one would expect an Imperial Knight to have, he's sort of an idiot when it comes to actually using it and so he's no more or less capable in an unarmed fight than your average person.
CHARACTER: AU SECTION
AU NAME: Alexander Cumore
AU AGE: 28
PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES:
As far as Cumore's appearance goes, there are several noticeable differences – as opposed to the mid-shoulderblade length that it is in canon, his hair is cut short and kept slicked back, about what one would expect for a man entering the legal field that's trying very hard to look respectable; it's also black, instead of the light blue/lavender color, and his eyes are a dark brown instead of the bright red that they are in canon. (The color doesn't mean anything special, he's just got anime eyes.) He still wears makeup, only it's entirely natural shades as opposed to the flamboyant reds and purples that he wears in canon; his clothes are also decidedly less of a disaster – he'll still accent with bright colors here and there, but they're only accents against an otherwise black suit. He seems to have found a basic understanding that bright screaming pinks and purples are 'sometimes' colors, and also that color theory in general is your friend and not something to stand in ardent defiance of. And while he was never particularly strongly-built even in canon, he's got pretty much no mass to him in Recollé; he's kind of a rail and he likes it that way, honestly.
AU NAME: Alexander Cumore
AU AGE: 28
PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES:
As far as Cumore's appearance goes, there are several noticeable differences – as opposed to the mid-shoulderblade length that it is in canon, his hair is cut short and kept slicked back, about what one would expect for a man entering the legal field that's trying very hard to look respectable; it's also black, instead of the light blue/lavender color, and his eyes are a dark brown instead of the bright red that they are in canon. (The color doesn't mean anything special, he's just got anime eyes.) He still wears makeup, only it's entirely natural shades as opposed to the flamboyant reds and purples that he wears in canon; his clothes are also decidedly less of a disaster – he'll still accent with bright colors here and there, but they're only accents against an otherwise black suit. He seems to have found a basic understanding that bright screaming pinks and purples are 'sometimes' colors, and also that color theory in general is your friend and not something to stand in ardent defiance of. And while he was never particularly strongly-built even in canon, he's got pretty much no mass to him in Recollé; he's kind of a rail and he likes it that way, honestly.
AU HISTORY:
All mentions of other characters have been cleared with the players!
AU PERSONALITY:
One of the most immediately pressing things to point out here is probably that in Recollé, Cumore is a lot better on the ethics front.
Cumore was still born and raised into a wealthy family, and has literally never wanted for money or possessions; as such, there's still a definite disconnect between how the world works for him and how it works for those from lower-class backgrounds. He's still an elitist, and is generally of the opinion that if people don't want their lives to be terrible then they should just find a way to not be poor. However, Recollé is far more tolerant than Zaphias is and doesn't operate on a caste system, and as such Cumore hasn't been indoctrinated with the belief that he's inherently special and worth more than everyone else, or that he deserves to treat people in any way that he pleases simply because of his status. He also doesn't have the same amount of power that he did back in his canon setting, and he's subject to Recollé's collective concept of what's right and wrong and socially acceptable as opposed to that of the Empire; a more modern setting comes with an entirely different set of rules, and an entirely different understanding of what's going to fly and what isn't. As such, he's far less open about his biases regarding class, and he's certainly nowhere near the point of deciding that the Geneva Convention was a nice suggestion but ultimately useless, thank you very much.
In terms of personality and expression, Cumore is also decidedly less aggressive in Recollé, given that he can't get his way through death threats and instigating fights – rather, he handles it through less direct means. He's still quick to anger and doesn't take people challenging him very well, but he prefers passive-aggressiveness to direct confrontation, choosing to cover his displeasure with vague cattiness and backhanded compliments rather than letting anyone see him be openly angry or upset. Which isn't to say that his temper doesn't flare up from time to time, because it certainly does, especially given his lack of patience; he still fixates on having control of a situation and being efficient, and this doesn't lend itself well to not snapping at people, especially those he perceives as being below him or otherwise lesser.
Similarly, his dedication to the hunt is being channeled into a slightly less murderous outlet; the legal field allows him to pursue criminals at his discretion, and he chose to work as a prosecutor because he finds it more acceptable to risk condemning the innocent than possibly exonerating the guilty. He tends to push for particularly strict sentences for those convicted, and he tends to be about as relentless in the courtroom as his canon counterpart is in the field; even if he doesn't intend to ultimately stay in the legal profession, he's fiercely dedicated to both his research and his appearances in court. It isn't out of love for the people or for the sake of doing the right thing; just the same, it's a job he can do and one that he can do well, and he derives a large amount of satisfaction from it.
He still flaunts his status by way of surface presentation, though he goes about it differently than he does in canon. Whereas before he would communicate his tendencies toward extravagance by way of flamboyant makeup and odd clothing styles in flashy colors, in Recollé he prefers more subdued but blatant displays of power and wealth – expensive suits and luxury cars, manicured nails and makeup that's still definitely present but decidedly more natural-looking. And of course, there's the socialization aspect of things - he still prefers people to overall have a positive impression of him, but he's decidedly less strange in how he goes about it. He's fond of throwing parties and trying to garner and keep the attention of influential people, and somewhere in there he does want to be liked and respected, moreso than he did in canon. He isn't interested in making actual friends, per se, because his capacity for empathy and genuine attachment is still incredibly poor, but he also hasn't quite solidified himself in his chosen field yet and is still working towards establishing his ultimate goal, he isn't as close to his sister here as he was to Mimura, and he doesn't quite have any of the professional connections he otherwise had back then. Saying he's lonely is a stretch, but he's fairly detached and as such feels the need to assert himself on a social level.
In the end, Cumore in Recollé is less "human rights violations" and more "the customer service experience from hell"; he's less "murdering criminals because he is the law" and more "unbelievably ruthless in pursuing criminals to the fullest extent the law will allow." His behavior stems from similar biases, desires, and experiences, it's just far more toned down and closer to something that's socially acceptable.
...There's not much to be done about the levels of smarm he exudes, though, that's kind of a permanent fixture.
All mentions of other characters have been cleared with the players!
- Born and raised in Recollé to a wealthy family, Cumore is the younger of two children; despite being spoiled and doted on by his parents, he was deeply shy when he was young – the sort that spent most of his time staring at people while hiding behind his mother's skirts, that kind of thing.
- He had an odd relationship with his sister; she was a lot more outspoken than he was from the start, and she decided that she was going to teach him how to not be a horrendously quiet little mess by making him stand up for himself. ...Which is to say that she picked on him horribly, in the interest of life lessons. (And also rather liked dressing him up and putting makeup on him, because what else are younger siblings for.) He looked up to her, though, and by merit of her being older and more sociable he considered her just the coolest thing and wanted to please her, so he tolerated a lot from her; if asked, he would say their relationship was good.
- Needless to say, his interpersonal relationships with other children were not the greatest as a result of all of that – his behavior tended to be odd due to both naturally wanting to avoid confrontation and dealing with others negatively, but also not really having much frame of reference of what to do with people other than push them around. The result was a socially confused mess that he never quite sorted out; he would have patience for people until he quite suddenly didn't, and it was difficult to tell what was going to set him off and what wasn't. Lashing out tended to happen, suddenly and unexpectedly; he wasn't above physically striking people, though anything he did that was too much of an issue was more or less made to "go away" through the power of a lot of private donations to the school from his parents.
- He managed to settle down when he discovered the debate and mock trial teams in high school, however; he enjoyed them greatly and they ensured that he got decidedly better at talking to people without having some sort of weird stress-induced meltdown, and that's when he began considering law and politics as an option. It's also when he learned to handle things by being really, really passive-aggressive and acting like he's the only intelligent person in the room. So he traded being a social trainwreck for being something of a douchebag, but he considers it an improvement anyway.
- He eventually left the city for a few years to attend university, majoring in Political Science, and law school beyond that. While he enjoyed his major and turned out to be suited enough to the legal field, it wasn't without a fair amount of stress and nigh-on breakdowns due to pressure; he managed to come out of it more or less all right, albeit not without the help of just so much adderall.
- He returned to Recollé to be closer to his sister after their parents died unexpectedly; he isn't altogether sure what she did to be written out of the will, but apparently she did something, because the inheritance went solely to him. Regardless, the inheritance itself was massive and he's put her up in a residence that he's paid for; he continues to provide for her in various ways, though they don't talk as much nowadays for various interpersonal reasons – mostly resentment on her part over the whole will thing, to say nothing of the fact that he prefers to have something occupying his time more or less constantly, whether it's work or socializing, and as such they've grown apart quite a bit.
- He's currently working as a criminal prosecutor; he still plans on trying to enter politics one day, considering law more of a gateway to that than a permanent profession that he's interested in because he wants to actually help people. (That said, though, he surprisingly does like the research aspect of the job more than he thought he would.) He's competent at what he does, though he's still in the process of establishing himself.
- He works in the District Attorney's office, along with Matt Murdock (
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
blessmefather); due to an unfortunate combination of Cumore being incredibly competitive and Matt coming from a lower-class background and...happening to exist in Cumore's presence while being actually good at his job, Cumore hates his face. He's willing to be civil and supportive in a professional capacity! But he definitely hates Matt's face. - He's at least professionally familiar with a couple of people in the CSI office as well; he knows but isn't particularly close to Tatsuo Kihara (thisloveisjustice), and he's currently best friends with Derek Matthews (blondferret).
- Outside of work, he does try to keep up something of a social life that isn't just his cat (who is an excellent dignified old lady of a cat, but not exactly the best for actually socializing with); he tends to host parties when he has time, mostly large socialite affairs and high-profile get-togethers for the other wealthy people in Recollé. ...The man throws balls because he can, is what it comes down to.
- He previously spent eight months on the Retrospec app, from November 2017 to July 2018; he didn't like his time on the app very much, though he'd generally adjusted to most of the weirdness Retrospec tends to bring with it. (He complained a lot, but that doesn't mean he wasn't handling it; he just likes to whine, honestly.) He shattered his own heart stone in 2018, which messed with his personality a bit in that he lost a fair amount of his personal drive, but it also generally served to actually calm him down on some fronts and make him less aggressive in dealing with people, so it was something of a mixed blessing; he didn't handle memories of his death well in January 2018, but he somehow managed to make friends with his castmate Jaeger (scythegun) along the way somehow, so at least there was that. He was also familiar with Rossiu Adai (onemillion), who has since been taken off the network, but he still makes a point of checking on him once in a while. ...He's also back on his shit with the stimulants when he's stressed out and not getting his way, but at the very least he's still functional and it's not interfering with his work.
AU PERSONALITY:
One of the most immediately pressing things to point out here is probably that in Recollé, Cumore is a lot better on the ethics front.
Cumore was still born and raised into a wealthy family, and has literally never wanted for money or possessions; as such, there's still a definite disconnect between how the world works for him and how it works for those from lower-class backgrounds. He's still an elitist, and is generally of the opinion that if people don't want their lives to be terrible then they should just find a way to not be poor. However, Recollé is far more tolerant than Zaphias is and doesn't operate on a caste system, and as such Cumore hasn't been indoctrinated with the belief that he's inherently special and worth more than everyone else, or that he deserves to treat people in any way that he pleases simply because of his status. He also doesn't have the same amount of power that he did back in his canon setting, and he's subject to Recollé's collective concept of what's right and wrong and socially acceptable as opposed to that of the Empire; a more modern setting comes with an entirely different set of rules, and an entirely different understanding of what's going to fly and what isn't. As such, he's far less open about his biases regarding class, and he's certainly nowhere near the point of deciding that the Geneva Convention was a nice suggestion but ultimately useless, thank you very much.
In terms of personality and expression, Cumore is also decidedly less aggressive in Recollé, given that he can't get his way through death threats and instigating fights – rather, he handles it through less direct means. He's still quick to anger and doesn't take people challenging him very well, but he prefers passive-aggressiveness to direct confrontation, choosing to cover his displeasure with vague cattiness and backhanded compliments rather than letting anyone see him be openly angry or upset. Which isn't to say that his temper doesn't flare up from time to time, because it certainly does, especially given his lack of patience; he still fixates on having control of a situation and being efficient, and this doesn't lend itself well to not snapping at people, especially those he perceives as being below him or otherwise lesser.
Similarly, his dedication to the hunt is being channeled into a slightly less murderous outlet; the legal field allows him to pursue criminals at his discretion, and he chose to work as a prosecutor because he finds it more acceptable to risk condemning the innocent than possibly exonerating the guilty. He tends to push for particularly strict sentences for those convicted, and he tends to be about as relentless in the courtroom as his canon counterpart is in the field; even if he doesn't intend to ultimately stay in the legal profession, he's fiercely dedicated to both his research and his appearances in court. It isn't out of love for the people or for the sake of doing the right thing; just the same, it's a job he can do and one that he can do well, and he derives a large amount of satisfaction from it.
He still flaunts his status by way of surface presentation, though he goes about it differently than he does in canon. Whereas before he would communicate his tendencies toward extravagance by way of flamboyant makeup and odd clothing styles in flashy colors, in Recollé he prefers more subdued but blatant displays of power and wealth – expensive suits and luxury cars, manicured nails and makeup that's still definitely present but decidedly more natural-looking. And of course, there's the socialization aspect of things - he still prefers people to overall have a positive impression of him, but he's decidedly less strange in how he goes about it. He's fond of throwing parties and trying to garner and keep the attention of influential people, and somewhere in there he does want to be liked and respected, moreso than he did in canon. He isn't interested in making actual friends, per se, because his capacity for empathy and genuine attachment is still incredibly poor, but he also hasn't quite solidified himself in his chosen field yet and is still working towards establishing his ultimate goal, he isn't as close to his sister here as he was to Mimura, and he doesn't quite have any of the professional connections he otherwise had back then. Saying he's lonely is a stretch, but he's fairly detached and as such feels the need to assert himself on a social level.
In the end, Cumore in Recollé is less "human rights violations" and more "the customer service experience from hell"; he's less "murdering criminals because he is the law" and more "unbelievably ruthless in pursuing criminals to the fullest extent the law will allow." His behavior stems from similar biases, desires, and experiences, it's just far more toned down and closer to something that's socially acceptable.
...There's not much to be done about the levels of smarm he exudes, though, that's kind of a permanent fixture.