history & personality cool ref

[illequipped]

Character Background

• History: Here, it's brief but tbh they just scream and hit things in this comic. After the wiki stops, the fearless heroes get chased by ghosts for about two chapters, Emil is the only person panicking over Lalli being in a coma for like two days, and he gets food spilled all over himself later on. The gang also studies languages so they can talk to each other, finally. Emil makes his best effort to be Lalli's Best Friend Ever to mixed results, meanwhile a series of misfortunes lead to Tuuri, their teammate who is Not Immune to troll disease getting bitten and consequently infected, which then leads her to commit suicide rather than succumb to a lifetime of diseased madness.

The team splits to go meet their pickup boat; Emil stays behind with Lalli for what should only be a few extra hours, but winds up being several days when they're attacked by a troll and stranded in the middle of a frozen lake. Lalli also magics himself too hard and so his soul, like... takes refuge in Emil's head, kind of... it sounds ridiculous because it is, but basically, Lalli rides shotgun in Emil's mindspace for the duration of this juncture while Emil hauls his body around the frozen wastes. Lalli wakes up again when they're cornered by dozens of hungry trolls, they barely escape, and they catch up with the others in time to go home instead of being left for dead for real. Yay!!

The crew is then in quarantine for a whole month, which means that for a month Emil sat in a glass box and somehow had to entertain himself. Terrible. When they reach Iceland they spend the summer with sort-of-teammate Reynir and his family, during which time Emil learns Finnish, kind of, and gets menaced by sheep. The team then sets off on a mission to find Lalli's cousin, who has gone off alone on a dangerous journey. They've reached Finland and are mucking around looking for cousin Onni while constantly avoiding other, even worse monsters than before. There are also bears. Emil is not involved with the main boss fight of this part of the adventure and spends most of it hiding from mutated beast bears. It happens.

• Core Relationships:

-Lalli, Best Friend: As it says, Lalli is Emil's best friend, specifically his best friend in the whole world, given that both of them were more or less friendless loners for one reason or another prior to meeting. In Emil's case, he was homeschooled and then, during his brief tenure in public school, did not make any friends because of an extremely poor attitude and entitlement, so! He made it all the way to 17 with no friends, and then in the army (joining the Cleansers), he was an unprepared late starter (most career military in this world join the army much closer to 13). As such, Lalli's importance in Emil's life is manifold: his first friend, his best friend, The Friend, he's got it all; Emil has been attached to him since they met, before they could even communicate in the same language. He believes he and Lalli have a connection unmatched by others, and as a result he's more or less ride or die for him. He's willing to run into burning buildings for Lalli or straight up throw punches when other people bother him; he brings him food, he takes care of him when he's in a magic coma (multiple times)... They're very good friends (tm).

-Sigrun & Mikkel & Tuuri, fellow adventurers: His crew! While he isn't as close to any of them as he is to Lalli, in particular Tuuri because she has since passed, they are people he trusts with his life because they've had his back in a crisis before. Sigrun and Mikkel, by virtue of being above him in both age and hierarchy on the team, are people he respects. He can be dismissive of them when, say, Mikkel plays jokes on him or Sigrun unfairly takes her bad attitude out on him, but they have a close-knit, mostly-well-functioning team. He might not say it out loud, but he's willing to walk into danger for these people after the various journeys through danger they've been through before.

-Reynir, annoyance: A civilian who accidentally stowed away on their team, Reynir is a pain. Emil flubbed his first impression on Reynir thanks to a translating error and his pride never recovered— now he merely snaps at Reynir most of the times they interact. He's very insistent that they're Not Friends and Reynir is A Civilian if not just an irritant (this is the guy he punched in the face for bothering Lalli for maybe a minute tops). When they stay in his family's home in Iceland, Emil is a polite enough guest, but he's loudly annoyed when the adults are absent about having to share Reynir's bedroom and be called his Friend. No, thanks... Even so: if Reynir needed to be pulled out of danger, Emil would be there for him. They might stumble through it, being as they are of lesser competence than their crewmates, but he's only petty when the stakes are low.

-Extended family (aunt, uncle, three little cousins): In short, Emil loves his family. His interactions with his family show him having a soft spot for kids no matter how annoying they are, going as far as delighting in how the little cousins are called "changelings" and all their babysitters quit. He's loving and sweet with his aunt and uncle, and though his father is never actually "on screen," Emil speaks of him highly when he mentions him.

-Being a loner besides this: Much as Emil is a sweet kid, this... is it. He doesn't have other friends; he has 3-4 work friends and Lalli, and that's it. It's shaped him in probably not the worst way, but not the best one either: he's often a brat about it. He was raised rich and spoiled, so he handles criticism poorly and usually gets it from new people, because his upbringing did not demand competence from him in any area. As a result he's kind of prickly with new people, both because he's had bad experiences being judged or criticized/mocked, but also because he puts on airs to impress new people, and it just comes off as arrogant. Emil is a person who wants to be liked very much all the time, but thanks to his lack of relationships/specifically friendships growing up, he's quite clumsy in cultivating any. He tries. Usually. He's a work in progress.

Character Personality Through Key Moments

(2+) Positive Experiences:

The Warmth: Emil is a highly empathetic person, almost to a fault—mainly in that psychic eldritch horrors very easily take advantage of him almost as soon as they're able. But besides that, Emil's empathy is his greatest strength; what he lacks in social graces and, often, patience for other people he makes up for with a genuine drive to understand and support the people he cares about. It sounds like a contradiction because it kind of is: an earnestly warm little man is also impatient and quick to judge others, but! He's got a soft center; this empathy comes out in the way he gravitates toward people who don't fit in, or don't seem to be understood by those around them: Emil definitely knows what that feels like. He's relentless about befriending Lalli when he picks up on Lalli being the oddball of their team due in large part to a language barrier: when he assumes Lalli is mad at him for unknown reasons, he asks Lalli's cousin Tuuri, who tells him quite plainly to just leave Lalli alone until he forgets what he was mad about. Emil's aggressive need to Care About Loners comes out here when he literally says "I'm not going to do that" and proceeds to reconcile with Lalli on his own terms, because just letting it fester bothers him viscerally.

It works, anyway, so in short: Emil's relentless need to be soft and tender at the people he likes has made him at least one friend, and he thinks that's pretty much the best thing to ever happen to him. He even says this to Lalli, too, citing just the fact that their friendship exists as proof that they'll be happier on the other side of their adventure than they started. For Emil, once he gets his hands on a proper friendship, he's in it 100%. While he doesn't necessarily have the critical self-awareness to think about his own innate warmth, it's not something that's popped out of nowhere; he easily starts up a tentative friendship with Tuuri when they meet, and his baby cousins miss his presence more than they miss their own parents. So he's good and caring and warm, but he will be relentless and nosy about it to get there.

The Growth: Despite Emil's many faults, he is capable of growth. The entire journey into the Silent World is one of personal growth for him, and as stated, he genuinely believes he will be happier on the other side of it because of the good parts of the adventure. While a large part of this is the relationship he's cultivated with Best Buddy Lalli, the journey pushes Emil into maturing— somewhat. While he begins the journey arrogant, selfish, tactless, even somewhat of a coward— repeatedly seeing danger and talking to people outside the limited scope of his rich boy experiences has made him more worldly and capable. Raw experience makes him a hardier warrior, although he still whines about uncomfortable accommodations, and the gentler downtime parts of the journey ensure that he hasn't become entirely jaded. He has come out better off on the other side of his deadly adventure, thanks to a somewhat open mind for change. The cowardly Emil who would have thrown up after battling his first dog-sized troll becomes the much more capable Emil who can parkour up onto a truck (with a troll in it, like a big hermit crab) and stuff it full of explosives without missing a beat.

And he's better emotionally, too. He's less insecure now that he has a best friend and a handful of trusted Work Friends, which has mellowed out the bratty and tactless part of him. Before, his personality was much too annoying and self-centered to make him lasting friendships; he's better now, not perfect, but the support system of a few good people has pushed him in the right direction. Does he still have issues interacting with other people? For sure! For the most part, his personal growth has been solely internal; his inner growth and increased confidence in himself has not yet synced up with how he treats other people, but more on that later. As far as the positives go: just having people to talk to and being tossed out of his comfort zone has immeasurably boosted his self confidence and started him on an overall positive journey.

(2+) Negative Experiences:

The Immaturity: Emil is too soft, often. Functionally it's immaturity: he's never experienced great adversity or loss beyond "used to be rich" and "was told 'no' in public school," so his ability to function in the face of real problems is underdeveloped. This can be seen when he immediately shuts down upon finding a litter of feral kittens has drowned, then immediately shifts into fierce determination when one kitten is still alive... then lapses back into despair when the mother cat is put down for an injury. Emil's over-empathizing and immaturity come out here in the form of pretending he doesn't care about the cats at all and refusing to be comforted about them; he's the only person on the team who needs it explained that sometimes, animals just die even if one tries very hard. For Emil, that he tried very hard is supposed to be enough— he's too emotional and unworldly to process difficult emotions like this very quickly or tidily.

These complicated and unaddressed feelings also linger, as shown in the way he casually mentions having issues with a particular kind of beast (in this canon, just a diseased animal) months after he mercy kills one. It's the mercy kill that haunts him, rather than being attacked by the thing; the amount of times Emil apologizes earnestly to things that want to kill him is quite a lot, actually! There's a spark of something pure and innocent in him that wants to save sick kittens and doesn't want to hurt anything, but unfortunately for Emil, it usually manifests when he fails. He gets too emotional, and having come from an upbringing where throwing a fit like a child always got him what he wanted, it's plain to see why he still does that, to a lesser extent. Now that he's an adult, however, there's nothing left to shield his oversensitive and immature side from the harshness of reality, and if pushed just right, he will simply shut down.

The Bad First Impression: Or: The way Emil treats people who aren't Lalli or his crewmates. As mentioned above, his experience in the Silent World thus far in the comic has defanged a lot of his aggression towards other people; he no longer yells at his family in public for stupid and petty reasons, for example, and he has far fewer breakdowns in public bathrooms. That said: he doesn't think before he speaks a lot of the time, and merely wanting to be liked doesn't make the process automatic. Emil is still very often prickly and rude, if not outright aggressive; in canon this is especially demonstrated where it pertains to Reynir. In Emil's eyes, his own fumbling of his and Reynir's first interactions (in which Emil treated him like a prisoner for no reason) are Reynir's fault, and because Lalli also doesn't like Reynir, Emil is rude to him just about all the time. Asks him to leave as soon as he enters a room, takes out his frustration with other things on Reynir through insults, shouts at him about how they aren't friends... It's more of that classic immaturity, although not with a soft center this time.

The Reynir Behavior applies broadly to other people who aren't in Emil's inner circle, is the problem. If Lalli doesn't like someone, it's game over— and the same if Emil decides for any reason, sensical or not, that they hate him or something. He's judgmental and quick to assume the worst, and spending months in close quarters with his favorite person and someone he decided hates him did not help. While he may be more grounded and capable of socializing with people he actually likes, he has yet to break this bad habit of being a petty child to everyone else who isn't liked.