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TLV - Graduations & Demotions
Inmate graduation is a vital aspect of the game, and occasionally, warden demotion crops up in play as well. If you're planning to graduate your inmate or demote your warden in the near future, please fill out this short form!
Graduations and demotions are character decisions made at player discretion, but in the rare situation that we find ourselves concerned that a graduation or demotion is premise-breaking, the player will be contacted privately. Once we've read through a comment and confirmed that it doesn't contain anything premise-breaking, we'll reply with a confirmation.
Once a graduation comment has been confirmed, the warden of the graduating inmate should reply to their inmate's comment either confirming that their character will be fulfilling the deal laid out in their application, or - in situations where they changed their mind about their deal during their time in-game - receive a verdict about whether the new deal idea is doable.
GRADUATION
DEMOTION
lmao part 1
Character Name: Shuos Jedao
Path to Graduation: From his app:
When Jedao first arrived on the barge, he was deeply suicidal, compulsively dishonest about his actual emotions and vulnerabilities, viciously paranoid, compartmentalized to the point of true dissociation, with very little self-worth or concept of personal boundaries, and full of a bottomless cynical desperation that precluded the possibility of balking at any moral line in pursuit of victory, which seemed from personally imposed mission into every aspect of his interaction with others. He was high-handed, controlling, and manipulative even (and in some ways especially) at his most earnest or kind; he also had truly skewed perspective in terms of what counts as cruel, wrong, or painful.
Arriving at the barge at all was a huge shift for him - he was furious at not being allowed to stay dead, and despairing over his apparent failure, but because it was wholly outside the toxic world he came from and all its stakes, and was so overwhelming in terms of sudden physical agency and absence of torture, that he both couldn't help clinging to the newfound luxuries, and reached a sort of zen 'fuck it, nothing matters here, I can just tell people things and they can't torture me forever for treason or stop the revolution I already think I lost.'
A magical accident left him briefly struck blind, which was a pure panic trigger for him. This is when he met Horseriver, and the two bitter revolutionary old monsters immediately bonded.
During an early flood, he was split into his emotionally driven Kel-self and his calculating Shuos-self, which - because almost everything he does is motivated by both - he didn't actually notice. But his Kel-self was slightly more impulsive, and tried to mercy-kill Scott Summers, who was in the process of losing his selfhood and rapidly deteriorating into a hollow tool due to a different flood effect. Unfortunately, instead of resetting the effect as Jedao hoped/assumed, the death toll fully completed Scott's transformation into a faceless barge servitor. Jedao went into shock, partially dissociating in the face of accidentally making things worse, and submitted to Jean Grey's (in her Phoenix half) judgement. Afterward, Scott asked if he had learned anything. Jedao says he should have known better than to be so impulsive, to jump to violence without at least doing more research about whether the mercy killing would, in fact, be a mercy. None of his principles changed, but it made him slightly more careful in the moment.
Jedao learned about the clone slave children still on Kamino, broke the edifice of Fives' loyalty to the Republic, and pledged himself to the cause of their rescue. Jedao has always had a weakness for children, and they hit him in precisely the right way to trigger his revolutionary fervor. This gave him something worth doing, a cause worth living and graduating for. It also gave him something he never had during his fight against the hept/hexarchate: a partner and confidante. At this point he still thought of Fives in some cruel and manipulative terms despite simultaneously adoring him and having a huge amount of empathy for him, but nevertheless it was an unprecedented break in his isolation, to have someone he truly shared a cause with.
During a port stop on Deep Space Nine station, Jedao had a confrontation with Odd Thomas, a fierce young idealist whom Jedao rather liked and respected. Odd refused to let Jedao bring a crate of weapons back onto the barge, so Jedao knocked him out, stole his communicator, and left him tied up in a closet. Jedao actively considered this to be the kind/friendly option, and was shocked and off-balance - even, perversely, a little hurt - when not only Thomas but also his temporary warden Scott were angry with him. This was the first time on the barge Jedao really got smacked in the face with "the things you think aren't bad are often still kinda bad, even if they're nice compared to the horrors you're used to."
Shortly afterward, Jedao was paired with his first permanent warden, James Holden. Holden didn't condemn him for trying to fight the Heptarchate, and did his best to be consistently kind and open. He gave Jedao emergency lights in case he were ever stuck in the dark again, a gesture Jedao found emotionally overwhelming but appreciated. Jedao came to trust Holden as much as almost anyone - partially because Holden was extremely bad at lying or even attempting to conceal things by omission - and cooperated with him as much as he could, judging it his best chance of graduating.
Fives and Jedao moved in together when Obi-Wan Kenobi briefly came to the barge; Jedao struggled with his hang-ups and trauma around consent and fraternization, vs his and Fives mutual attraction and devotion. Fives was scrupulously careful of Jedao's comfort and consent - far more than Jedao himself - even when he didn't understand Jedao's fear or shame. Jedao confides in Holden, who forces him to confront some of his assumptions and victim-blaming feelings, and eventually they start a tentative relationship.
Meanwhile, Jedao helped persuade Horseriver's warden to give him some of his powers back, and they started a weird telepathic bond D/s relationship. When Jedao is in a coma, Horseriver lets slip that they have a psychic connection & power dynamic, Fives loses his shit, and Horseriver - known bastard - nearly provokes him into demotable violence. When he wakes, Jedao has both an extremely pointed object lesson about why it's good to tell important things to people in his life instead of being reflexively secretive and compartmentalized, and has a conversation with Horseriver in which the idea that his consent still matters even (especially) if he's given his service to someone, and that he is allowed to relax and not be in charge of E V E R Y T H I N G but still have boundaries at the same time, and that he can make requests without having it used against him, is introduced to him for the first time.
During a 4th wall/comms glitch event, Jedao managed to contact Ajewen Cheris, and discovered that she survived him, and had a chance to escape the siege of Scattered Needles and continue the fight against the Hexarchate. This had an enormous impact on him, relieving a huge weight of painful, cynical futility. It might seem like this sort of vindication would be bad for him, in an ends-justifying-the-means way, but it didn't relieve him of the burden of guilt, and even if he had failed, he would still feel like he was morally obligated to try, no matter how pointless it rendered his atrocities. Vindicating hope encouraged the part of him that cared to make the world better. Vindicating that he could trust the future into other hands that his own, was the first crack in some of his deep reflexive tendencies for manipulation and control.
Throughout several different events, Jedao grew closer to Nico and Quentin Coldwater, both of whom were smart enough to challenge him, kind and hurt enough to make him feel very protective, and uncomfortable enough with physical violence that Jedao started to put effort into monitoring his reactions for their comfort. In his relationships with Quentin, Fives, and Jean especially, Jedao slowly worked on not having a reflexive panic reaction to his own vulnerability or boundary setting.
During a VIP flood, his soul copy/weird son arrived on the barge, with further news that Cheris did succeed, and that he had killed Nirai Kujen, Jedao's longest and most emotionally fraught owner/abuser. This further widened the crack in Jedao's (once necessary) paranoia and egocentrism about fixing the whole universe himself begun by Cheris, and gave Jedao his first bit of closure about Kujen. It also gave Jedao more reasons to live, and even to face the fears of his old universe - to rescue to the strangely lonely son who hated him.
After the bargeyard, Teddy Flood went on a killing spree that by chance targeted most of Jedao's family. Ultimately, any ambitions he had toward revenge were quashed when Teddy was subsequently paired with Harry Goodsir, whom Jedao already adored, and didn't wish to deprive of his deal.
A short while later, Jedao has an excuse to take out his ire on Hux, whom he already hated for a complicated array of both tactical (if he graduates, does that mean the history of the GFFA is preserved up to the point of his existence?) and personal (his early dismissal of Fives' personhood and attack on Selina.) Jedao experiences some incredibly predictable personal consequences for being a vicious asshole with reflexive overkill.
After the discovery, through a few different means, that Kujen had erased large portions of Jedao's memories, his warden, Holden, disappeared from the barge. His next temporary warden, Newt Scamander, assisted Jedao with the request to get his memories back. It goes about as well as could be expected, and he promptly falls overboard in Fantasia, which makes for some extremely literal metaphors and a pro-oblivion rampage.
While nearly catatonic trying to process the memories, Jedao quits the kitchen shift, and attempts to confide in his supervisor, Matt Murdock, who doesn't quite get it. Jedao - bitter and in a particularly volatile frame of mind - regrets trusting him with his current weakness. When Matt is assigned his temporary warden after Newt and refuses to leave Jedao alone, leaving Jedao feeling terribly trapped by the locating powers of the warden item, prone to violence against Matt and/or himself, but exhausted enough to ask for help instead of going through with it. The barge, more or less, obliges. In the same post he also encounters a boggart in Kujen's shape, and gets a little more closure about him.
Awhile after that, in the aftermath of a dream flood, Jedao and Fives get married. Jedao accidentally bruises some feelings in the rush and while organizing the subsequent ceremony, and continues to accumulate lessons on not assuming he always knows best and can manage everything, especially when it comes to other people's emotions.
After the terrible Island of Doctor Moreau Port, Jedao consensually murders Fives to remove the horns grafted onto him, and manages to puncture one of his own self-sabotaging hang-ups that he's always doomed to kill people he loves, because it's done and the world didn't end and they're still together.
Jedao has a further series of temporary wardens, including Harry Goodsir, which is just as ruthlessly insightful as Jedao himself; Jedao asks Goodsir to push him, and the results of that conversation continue to challenge Jedao's assumptions about himself, about violence, and about choices for the next two and a half years.
part 2
Jedao and Hux find each other mutually extremely frustrating, but Hux's dogged straightforwardness slowly wears Jedao down. While Jedao never entirely trusts him with the intricacies of Jedao's hang-ups, he does end up starting to let go of some of his vindictiveness and judgemental grudges in spite of himself.
He officially adopts Nico and changes his name to match it, mentally giving himself a little more freedom from and agency around the Shuos role/identity, and permission to not hold himself to parts of it that aren't working for him, even though he'll never abandon it entirely.
On top of a few other stressors, hen someone who has badly hurt Jedao's family graduates before him for the fifth or sixth time, Jedao loses his head; he partially dissociates, just like he did at Hellspin, and attacks Hux as part of a self-destructive lashing out. When Bodhi and Rhys interrupt, Jedao ends up hurting them too, although he only stuns Bodhi, whom he'd promised Hux earlier he wouldn't go after. As he moved through the barge to stash Bodhi somewhere safe, he ran into several other people and the violence escalated as Jedao compulsively killed and restrained to keep anyone from raising the alarm before he could return to Hux's cabin and complete his suicide.
This was more or less Jedao's rock bottom; a lot of people are quite upset with him, but it also forces him to really confront his suicidal impulses and depression. It also allows him to finally deal with some of his larger-scale issues around violence, when he generally avoided it on the barge for purely tactical rather than moral reasons.
He and Hux are depaired after Jedao's six month limit, although for different reasons than Jedao originally set the deadline, having come to a weird appreciation for what Hux was able to do for him.
In the latter part of the aftermath, Quentin gives Jedao a start on learning formal psychiatry so that he can have some tools to fight his depression even though he would struggle to trust another doctor, and he asks Jedao to do the same for him. Jedao spends the next several months eyebrow-deep in the material, and takes meticulous notes to work out his own best medication regimen, which helps quite a lot.
Eventually, Jedao and Miles re-open the Barge counseling office - perhaps the first major project of Jedao's life to involve no violence whatsoever. Despite their clients being few and sporadic, it shifts Jedao's entire perspective, not just of himself, as someone capable of using his genius for things other than war, but also of all his interactions on the barge. Anyone he wants to scheme against, dismiss, tease, or hurt, is suddenly a potential future patience. Where he once viewed everyone as a potentially enemy, with all his empathy and understanding potentially turned toward judging, manipulating, or striking them, he starts to approach almost everyone as someone whom he is duty bound to protect from his own worst impulses. Jedao spent so long considering himself a monster for atrocities he felt he had no better recourse than to attempt, and consequently he was capable of keenly feeling something to be cruel and immoral but simply doing it anyway, based on whatever cocktail of bitterness, disdain, and panicked impulse might lead him to it. But duty has always been one of his strongest motivators; linking his duty more fully to his empathy pushed him to finally, really, and regularly restrain himself.
He also had a conversation with Odd Thomas that involved an apology and some closure for their long ago confrontation.
Eventually, Jedao receives his third permanent pairing, with Zhao Yunlan, a tenacious cop who Jedao took an immediate liking to, who understands terrible sacrifices and strange stakes, and also has better infosec than any of Jedao's previous wardens. They speak the same language; he lets Jedao get away with a lot less, and Jedao is finally relaxed enough to not immediately clam up over it. With Jedao mostly in a good place in terms of the small-scale personal interactions, Yunlan is finally able to push Jedao on the issue of his atrocities: not that he should regret anything in the no-win scenario of the Hexarchate, but that he needs new limits to be a good person now that he is out of it.
Around the same time, Jedao also strikes up an extremely intense friendship with Godric who, like Harry Goodsir, reminds Jedao of himself, and in even more ways; they are old monsters in a similar mold, and Jedao's consistent advocacy for Godric to forgive himself, to be proud of his progress, and allow himself to enjoy the good things in his life also necessarily involves Jedao considering and taking a little bit of his own medicine.
Jedao goes into a slump for awhile, losing Yunlan, Holden (again), his girlfriend Taura, boyfriend Larry, fiancé Quentin, and son Nico over the course of a few months, among others. Finally, Jedao is paired with his final permanent warden, Tris, one of the first people to be kind to him on the barge all those years ago, and a member of his family whom he cared for, and whose integrity he respected. As they settled into their new dynamic, Jedao learned that Cornelius Hickey, whom they both hated on Harry's behalf, had been harassing her. Jedao tried not to slide into bad habits, but definitely considered it, putting some of his masks back on to inspect and prod at Hickey's ego. Ultimately, he let it go, focusing on himself and his own issues not because he felt tactically stuck, but simply because he didn't want to go down that path. With all those pieces in place, Jedao was finally ready to head home.
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