[OOC][PLOT] The Seventh Thread of Planning for Arc 1 - Arrivals

[robkelk]

May as well share the entire page...


Drosselmeyer

Residence: deliberately homeless
Original ficton: Princess Tutu


"Now, tell me the best story that was ever told! Tell it to me with no regard for your lives!"

Antagonist NPC

Canon Description

Quoting from All The Tropes:

Years before the opening of the series, Drosselmeyer was a writer who was working on his masterpiece, The Prince and the Raven. However, before he could complete his story, he died, leaving his story unfinished and the two title characters trapped in an endless battle. Eventually, the characters were able to escape the story—and it turned out that Drosselmeyer, while dead, could somehow control the story even from the grave...

In the series, Drosselmeyer takes a mostly passive role (or at least seems to be), commenting on the action and giving Ahiru (and occasionally other characters) little pushes in the directions he'd like to see the story go. At first, he appears to be mostly on Ahiru's side, trying to encourage her to continue in her task to recover Mytho's lost heart, even when things become difficult for her. But he has a sadistic streak that's obvious from the start, and it soon becomes clear that the sort of story Drosselmeyer finds entertaining likely won't be as happy as the characters might want.

Thanks to being a writer and storyteller in the series, Drosselmeyer is often very Genre Savvy, particularly when it comes to fairy tales. He takes great delight in telling the other characters what they should be doing per their "roles" in the story, and will sometimes even scold the characters for subverting their roles and trying to do something beyond what's expected for them. However, even when things seem to be going against what he'd wanted, after a brief moment of frustration he chippers back up as long as the twist is at least entertaining.

This is, perhaps, the part of Drosselmeyer that is most chilling: Although his "characters" are real people trapped in a story, he's fine with anything happening to them—as long as the story is entertaining. While this is a perfectly reasonable reaction towards fictional characters (as tropers that love The Woobie will often admit), the sociopathic personality needed to treat real people this way can be quite frightening, indeed.

Changes in the Metacontinuity

He awakened... somewhere, exactly where matters little... hale and hearty, alive in a body complete with working hands, and with the certain knowledge that his idle musings about possibly being a character in somebody else's story were correct. He is certain that this "somebody else" is either a goddess or a she-devil, mainly because he awoke with a list, written by a feminine hand (he could tell), of the places in this strange new world where others like him, characters from other stories, had appeared.

If he is (as he assumes) to be a character in someone else's story, then it behooves him to be the best character that he can be, within the limits of his characterization and abilities. After all, he expects nothing less from his own characters; to fail to live up to his own rule would be rude.

And thus he walks the Earth, traveling from town to town (if one can call cities where over a million people live "towns"), adjusting the plots to create more interesting stories.


Original Skills and Powers

Drosselmeyer is a reality warper - he can write stories that become true.

However, he has to write his stories on paper, with a pen (or a quill). He's too set in his ways to think that pushing buttons on a keyboard counts as "writing".


In-Universe Power-Ups

When one can write stories that become true, the concept of a "power-up" becomes meaningless. However, he has become familiar with the modern world, picking up the basic skills that everybody has.


Relationships

Somebody left that note for him... Marller? Satan? Salem? Some random Princess Tutu fangirl? Somebody else? Who knows?

"Drosselmeyer is often very Genre Savvy, particularly when it comes to fairy tales." He'll find the characters from RWBY to be fascinating.