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EMPATHEIAS APP.
Player: Hen
Contact:
Age: 30+
Current Characters: N/A
Character: Lancelot du Lac
Age: ambiguous; likely early 30s
Canon: Fate/Grand Order
Canon Point: After the Halloween 2018 event and the Camelot Singularity
Background: Wiki link!
Personality:
Caring for justice, honoring women, loathing evil—this virtuous figure overflowing with romance was acknowledged as the "ideal knight" by King Arthur [ . . . ] There is no such thing as an eternal ideal.
Let it never be said that Sir Lancelot doesn't understand this better than anyone. Believing that being summoned in his prime, as a so-called ideal knight, is little more than a tasteless joke, Lancelot is intimately aware of how he represents the downfall of the most optimistic human ideals. It is his part in Arthurian legend, and in true Fate/ fashion, the nature of his narrative is synonymous with his own existence. He is both Arthur's greatest knight and the man whose affair with Arthur's wife led to the end of the Round Table. He is both Gawain's greatest friend and a mortal enemy. These things coexist because of the toll that everyday human life takes on idealism over time; so Lancelot himself says, in Garden of Avalon (GoA), a side novel to the canon. The purest and finest human being can age over time into just another guy looking out for his own interests, plagued with ordinary fears and desires.
All Lancelot ever wanted was for his inhumanly perfect king to realize that, and when that never happened, the toll it took on Lancelot's psyche and relationship with Arthur(/Altria) was immense.
Lancelot serves as a foil to Altria in how human he is, and how well he understands humanity in turn. In contrast to the other knights, he's an extremely perceptive man who concerns himself with the personal wellbeing of himself and other people above the lofty "wellbeing" of political entities like the kingdom. As he describes in GoA, it's this tendency of his that allowed him to see the person behind the figurehead of King Arthur in a way none of the rest of the Round Table did—even if that eventually ended up in an unfortunate way. He is deeply aware of the human psychology underlying even the most seemingly perfect people, so much so that, when faced with the truly inhumanly perfect and pure, he reacts with discomfort and disbelief. It was Altria's distant, effortless forgiveness of Lancelot's sins—having an affair with the queen and betraying his own fellows to protect her from punishment for it—that drove Lancelot to the conclusion that the king was a sort of monster in her purity, incapable of ever understanding the imperfections that make people people. The very thought planted a seed of hatred for such idealism in him that never quite healed.
For as much as Lancelot, in his youth, seemed to exemplify the Ideal Knight . . . he never really has been, and he knows it. Much more than the other Knights of the Round, Lancelot is privately given to morose self-centeredness, subterfuge, independence, passive-aggression, and fits of passion. These themes underlie both his ancient legends and his appearances in the Fate/ canon, and run directly counter to the perception of him as Arthur's most perfect hero. Lancelot himself attributes some of this to culture clash—he was a foreign knight, after all, not raised with the same British sensibilities as the others. His interests lie with real people rather than the lofty image of a country as its own being. But some of it, surely, is his own personal nature, as a man who gets lost in his own head and struggles to marry conflicting desires without giving up on either. He has a demonstrable tendency to try and have things both ways wherever he can. In the Camelot chapter of F/GO, he both faithfully serves the Lion King and actively works behind her back to save some of the lives she tries to take, often based on his personal preferences. He will deliver criticism and then immediately take it back or apologize for it, as if trying to get his point across without committing to having spoken up. He will disguise himself at times in his personal ventures so he can accomplish them without taking credit or blame for them—a trait that, like so many of his, can be used for either noble or selfish purposes. In true Lancelot fashion, he does both.
Summoned as a Saber, Lancelot here is the Lancelot of his prime, but as things go for Servants, he is still fully aware of his entire life and what came to pass later: the splitting of the Round Table, the death of Arthur, and the eventual lonely end of his own life. For many Servants in similar situations, they view these things with some distance, as "a problem for Future Me." But Lancelot dwells on them, convinced that his Perfect Knight Saber Self is a fraud, of sorts, compared to his broken Berserker self, the true symbol of his downfall. It makes sense that he would. The traits of his that helped usher in the fall of Camelot are traits he's always had and is more than aware of now. Even this version of him is old enough to have grown out of being a symbol of strength and purity and into being a symbol of infidelity and betrayal. Because of this, his self-loathing is intense; asked in the game what he most dislikes, his answer is simply himself. Lancelot believes, even when summoned into a form before it all happened, that his king's refusal to blame or punish him for his own least forgivable crimes means that he can never truly find salvation from them. Far from a blessing, the lack of catharsis between them is a curse. Lancelot carries with him both the guilt of knowing what he did and the knowledge that the king he served so faithfully can never understand the pain caused by it—to Lancelot, to Guinevere, or even to the king himself. For a man like Lancelot who finds value in human happiness and selfish love, it's unforgivable, on some level.
But despite all of this baggage—and it's a lot—it isn't as if Lancelot isn't just a man, with his own joys, sorrows, pride, and embarrassment. In fact, this is some of the point of him: the perfect figure of a knight who isn't nearly as perfect as he seems, and is more ordinary and relatable than one might expect. He is a man who loves justice and fighting the good fight, but also beautiful women and friendly competition. He regrets his distant relationship with his son and wants to be seen as a much cooler dad than he really is. He looks upon his friends with a deep love, and also some exasperation when they act like idiots, which is frequently. After all, he wouldn't concern himself so much with the happiness of individuals if he didn't know what it felt like himself.
For a supposed "ideal," Lancelot is and always has been a figure far more human than anyone wanted to accept. And like all ideals, that perception of him could never last forever, and the truth of that is a heavy burden for him to carry—but it also makes him a caring and perceptive man, the perfect picture of a knight only trying to live a human life under all that expectation and to encourage the same in everyone else.
Abilities: I have a post for this here, with wiki link references; let me know if this is all right. I think his Noble Phantasm would be the main ability that would need nerfing, in the form that's referenced on that wiki page, where his sword strike can supposedly take down 500 people. It's not used that way in F/GO and I don't plan on ever using it that way here, but either way I'm fine with the setting making it impossible anyway, or altering any of his other abilities as needed!
Alignment: Elios; Lancelot's major role in his legend revolves around his forbidden, consuming love for his queen, and his ultimate fate and assorted summonings in the Fate/verse have been completely shaped by both love and growing hatred for his king, and himself. Those emotions are what drives him as a person.
General Sample: Test drive!
Emotion Sample: Specific scene dealing with emotional effects!
Questions: Just let me know how much nerfing the setting will do to his abilities! I'm fine with any degree of it that the mods deem appropriate.