#mama by mcr in her head on a 24hr loop

[cream-and-tea]

happy sts! what would happen if your main characters swapped roles?

@rydykg

oohhhhh this is a really interesting one i’m actually gonna have to think about it for a bit. ty for the ask!!! apologies in advance for how long this will probably get!!!!!

hmm okay okay okay. i’d imagine an agnes who was put in pallases place would like. extremely worn down and probably a lot more jaded. i don’t think she really has the propensity towards lashing out and biting sharpness that pallas does and it’s a LOT harder for her to feign indifference, but she definitely wouldn’t be soft in any way either. her position as The Library’s top student and being used to do everything the director doesn’t want to dirty her hands with would leave her just. incredibly depressed and lethargic. and don’t get me wrong pallas is experiencing depths of self hatred uncategorizable by man, but i feel like roleswap!agnes would lack a lot of the persona they try to put on to cover it. she wouldn’t put time into the I Feel Like I’m The Worst So I Act Like I’m The Best act or effort into trying to seem cruel and controlled, mostly being very straightforward and grim in the work she does. agnes is absolutely desperate to be Seen and Loved and if anything, considering how her relationship with pallas plays out in canon, she’d be even more codependently attached to the director than they are and place her in much more of a surrogate parent role, probably bothering her a lot and wanting to spend time with her even when it’s not mission or training related. in general a roleswap!agnes would be much more likely to try and seek out connection and relationships instead of self-sabotaging every single social interaction the way pallas does. pallas tries to see everything as impersonal where agnes sees EVERYTHING as personal and that wouldn’t really change. i can definitely see her sadly spying on the regular students and classes and leaning on fiver for company in a way pallas would never do. she’d be much quieter, much more withdrawn and just incredibly weary with the world and her place in it. she’s even more aware than pallas that something is Fundamentally Wrong here, but is just so exhausted that she can’t bring herself to try and fix it. also for some reason the idea of her doing so much violent murder is funny to me like. the gawky teenage girl with the biggest, wettest, saddest brown eyes you have ever seen walks up to you and then bam. 50000000 ghosts ripping u apart limb from limb.

as for PALLAS i feel like so many of their already-existing neuroses would become greatly exasperated if they switched places with agnes and as a result somehow managed to have even LESS regular human contact than they already did before. especially in terms of their social ineptitude like. if you thought they were garbage at interacting with people before then prepare to be horrified and amazed at how roleswap!pallas, who has only interacted with two Actual Living People in their entire life, can run any and all conversations into the ground without even trying! there’s. uh. also the fact that agnes was raised Very Very fantasy-apocalypse-flavoured-catholic and i can see that kinda filling the place of The Library Cause that pallas clings to in canon. it would also make the gender thing a whole new flavour of Fucked Up And Incredibly Complicated that would play a pretty massive role in their arc that it doesn’t really in lmd proper. i do think that the whole not-having-committed-actual-murder thing would go a long way towards pallas not being as guarded, so they’d probably be a lot more unabashedly annoying and awkward and not so absolutely beaten down, but their relationship to their powers would almost be completely flipped on it’s head. they’d still be basing their entire identity and self worth off of them don’t get me wrong, expect instead of their magic being something they strive to perfect and control and being seen as prodigy roleswap!pallas would like. pull their powers out with their bare hands if they could. there’s no way with the general Atmosphere of agness upbringing combined with pallas paranoia would result in anything less then a violent repulsion towards any and all magic. and this would lead to a really interesting change of in events at the beginning of the story. because listen. agnes is a good kid but she’s also hardwired for Survival At All costs, which is what enabled her to join The Library and also do so (kinda sorta not really) of her own volition. in contrast pallas will pick a hill and die on it no matter how much it’ll damage them in the long term, so in a roleswap they’d probably have to be very literally dragged there kicking and screaming and resisting basically every step of the way, trying to deny that they see agnes as a person, much less that they’re starting to grow close to her and care about her wellbeing. which like. i didn’t think i could make that relationship any more fucked up then it already is but here we are ig.