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tseng "assigned service top at birth" ff7r (q♦) ([personal profile] nonvoting) wrote2024-03-21 09:44 pm

[ etraya / app ]

⏵ player information
name and pronouns: min (she/they)
age: 30+
contact: pm or [plurk.com profile] maehwa

⏵ character information
name: tseng
canon: final fantasy vii remake
age: 30
canon point: end of remake, after rufus has become president
history: tseng is not crau, and his history can be found here!
abilities: in terms of supernatural abilities, tseng has no supernatural abilities! he is hypercompetent in many ways, but they're all normal human things. he can use magic by way of a materia, but that's not a skill unique to tseng as theoretically anybody in the final fantasy vii universe could use magic the same way. i would argue that tseng's key skills are strategy (as he is the leader of the turks and responsible for their strategic movements), firearms and other weapons, and close-combat fighting. he can also pilot a helicopter, if that counts!
personality: tseng is extremely coolheaded and always collected as a matter of necessity. in his position as the leader of the turks, tseng's job is essentially spymaster, strategist, and bodyguard all rolled into one. it's not unusual for there to be several lives depending on him making the most efficient decisions possible. he is tasked with juggling the wellbeing of rufus shinra as well as the safety of his own team and then again the goals and ambitions of the shinra company executives. tseng is constantly walking a razor's edge trying to keep all parties happy, and he is shown to be an expert at playing these various forces against each other to achieve the balance he needs to do his job well and to enable his people to do their jobs too.

the way that tseng has chosen to train himself into that coolheadedness is essentially to become completely calculated and ruthless. in one scene in before crisis, tseng has made a deal with rufus for the location of verdot, who is being held in a secret facility until he can be executed on trumped-up charges. tseng and the turks have found verdot and his daughter, elfe, but are outnumbered by shinra troops sent to track them down. the only option tseng has this: kill verdot and elfe, and shinra will consider not executing the turks for their insubordination—so tseng points his gun at verdot and elfe and he shoots them both dead. he doesn't hesitate, because the choice is either to kill them and save the turks, or to refuse and kill them all. even though tseng was in possession of a full cure materia at the time, which would allow him to revive verdot and elfe to full health, the fact that he didn't so much as blink before shooting them through the head demonstrates that he's able and willing to do brutal things if that's what the situation calls for.

with his ability to strategize also comes an ability to manipulate situations for his own ends. platefall takes place 3-4 days after the turks are saved from execution by rufus shinra's hail mary, so tseng is operating in a narrow margin between "loyalty to rufus & the turks" and "what he must do to keep the execs happy and his people alive." he's told to drop the plate, so he drops the plate, but afterward we see rude and reno stewing in self-doubt while tseng puts his head down and does paperwork. when the tension finally boils over, and rude and reno begin to question what they've done, tseng offers increasingly absurd excuses for the mass murder they've just committed. none of these excuses hold water, and tseng knows that, but what they do achieve is taking the turks' guilt and turning it into anger at tseng. he assesses the situation, identifies the problem, and then fairly straightforwardly manipulates his people to reach the result he wants.

despite being levelheaded to a fault, ruthless, cold, and calculating, tseng also has his virtues. he is, for example, absolutely loyal. his trust has to be earned, and that isn't an easy process, but once someone has given him a reason, tseng will never waver. he is also more idealistic than he lets on. in his early days under verdot's tutelage, tseng had a rosy view of his job. at least once, he proclaimed that he thought there was nothing in the world more valuable than a human life. he struggled to balance the demands of the mission with his desire not to let anyone be hurt, and would sometimes put his missions in jeopardy trying to rescue everyone at any cost. verdot ultimately had to teach him that to a turk, the mission must come first every time, no matter the human toll. this was a difficult lesson for tseng to learn, and he had a hard time reconciling it for years to come.

finally, despite all the trauma he's endured, the brutality he's learned, and the atrocities he's committed, there are parts of tseng that remain sentimental despite his best efforts to kill them, which comes across in his relationships with zack and aerith. tseng and zack are friends, which makes it complicated when tseng is given the order to take zack and cloud to nibelheim for experimentation. he doesn't like the order, but he executes it anyway, because his loyalty is to shinra. however, the sentimental part of him still exists, which means that when zack asks tseng to take care of aerith in his absence, tseng does that the only way he knows how: by collecting all 88 of the letters that aerith gives him for zack and keeping them safe until they can be delivered. of course, they never do end up getting to zack.


samples: one, two (contains nsfw)

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