folkmore Application

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★ Character Information ★

Character Name: Rezo Greywords
Character Age: Unspecified in canon beyond “over a century,” I estimate he’d be somewhere around 120. Appears to be maybe in his thirties.
Character Species: Human.
Current Health: Dead.
Outfit: Red priest robes with blue pauldrons. Here are some visual references.

Character Canon: Slayers, specifically the anime series.
Link to History: Here is his fanwiki page.
Canon Point: End of Slayers EVOLUTION-R, which came out in 2009.
Canon Iteration: OU
Canon Iteration Explanation: n/a

★ Folkmore Roles & Attributes ★

Skills: Camping and related travel/survival skills such as navigation, fishing, doing laundry by hand, etc; fingerspelling (used primarily to communicate with deaf patients); a very strong knowledge base, albeit antiquated, on all matters STEM; antiquated first aid and nursing skills; he’s a fairly good actor (re: liar) and public speaker; and he has experience taking care of small children and is actually pretty good at it when he’s not using them as test subjects for horrific magiscience experiments.
Canon Abilities: Rezo primarily uses shamanistic magic and is known in particular for using white magic, but he can also cast black magic. Increasing his efficiency as a sorcerer, he has a borderline encyclopedic knowledge of both and an unusually high magic capacity (basically, his MP stat is ridiculously large and his magic is very effective).

Having a piece of Shabranigdu inside him increases his power to the point where he can go toe-to-toe with characters like Xelloss. (For context, if we were to rank the nonhuman characters in terms of power, Xelloss would be one of the third or fourth most powerful entities in the setting as a whole.) I’d actually like to nerf him somewhat by ruling that, while the seal that makes him blind is still in place, the entity sealed within is no longer there to enhance his magic capacity, with the tradeoff for still being blind and now being weaker being that he’s a) still extremely powerful, just by a more human standard, and b) a bit more emotionally stable without Shabranigdu influencing his psyche.
Role: Myth
Role Qualities/Attributes: A set of four horns, two shorter, slim, straight ones just behind his ears and two larger curved ones sprouting from the crown of his head; a draconic tail with dark red scales and a strip of purple fur running down the top of it and ending in a fluffy tuft; pointy fangy eyeteeth.
Role Reasoning: Myth is really the most obvious role for him in that, in canon, Rezo is a villain, and Myths are the “villain” role. Rezo selfishly pursues a goal and destroys numerous lives, including his own, along the way before ultimately dying; he is spiritually connected to the setting equivalent of Satan; he is enigmatic and prone to manipulation over direct communication.

Also “vulnerable to isolating relationships and becoming hyperfocused on goals that they become emotionally unavailable and lose sight of their own morals,” is the most Rezo thing I have ever read.

Also, also I just think he’d look sick as hell with horns and fangs and stuff.

Rezo himself will actually be surprisingly accepting of his assigned role; he’s well aware that “summoning world destroying demons and unleashing plagues” are not generally considered Good Things, and he has a self-deprecating streak that suggests he knows he falls short of his saintly reputation, so being given the demonic traits of a Myth will only be an outward affirmation of unfortunate things he already knows of himself. He’ll be vexed by the possibility of it affecting how others perceive him, though.

★ Personality ★

Picking Option 2 for the personality section, and answering the following questions:

What was the most traumatic experience your character endured? How did this change them?

Because he believed a fragment of Ruby Eye Shabranigdu to be sealed within an ancient tower and that he could use Shabranigdu’s power to cure his blindness, Rezo underwent a ritual to break the seal and summon Shabranigdu. When the seal was broken he was able to see, but that was immediately followed by the realization that Shabranigdu had been sealed within himself, not the tower where the ritual took place; and then Shabranigdu almost completely took over Rezo’s body and mind, painfully transforming Rezo’s body in the process.

Rezo regained awareness when his grandson appealed to the remnants of his consciousness, and helped to hold Shabranigdu back so that the demon lord could be destroyed, but then Rezo’s soul and the fragment of Shabranigdu attached to him got sealed within a magic jar for several years, and it’s pretty clear Rezo had a certain degree of awareness while he was stuck in there, which was likely traumatic as well- waiting around helplessly, with little ability to meaningfully interact with the outside world, trapped with the kind of spiritual poison that is Shabranigdu, and plenty of time to brood about your situation.

The results of all this are primarily just that Rezo finally, after over a hundred years, gained some horrible, horrible context for his blindness and who he is as a person, and this probably contributed to the fatalistic, depressed streak he shows in the last season. He ultimately accepts his destruction as an inevitable necessity and while he certainly had self-destructive tendencies before then, Shabranigdu’s revival thoroughly reinforced them.

What is a headcanon (or two) you feel strongly about and that you prefer playing your character with? How is this supported in canon and why do you think it benefits the character's story?

In canon we get next to nothing about Rezo’s backstory beyond that he’s Zelgadis’s grandfather or maybe great-grandfather and that he was born blind. So for Rezo’s very early life, I go with the idea that he was a foundling, likely abandoned specifically because of his blindness, raised in an impoverished orphanage run primarily by priestesses.

You could probably make up a lot of different origin stories for Rezo and come up with reasons to justify them, but I like this one because it ties into various elements of his character. It sets up, from very early on, a reason for him to be ashamed of his blindness, if it was seen as problematic enough to justify abandoning him; coming from relatively lowly origins reinforces the idea that Rezo is incredibly stubborn to have worked his way out of that and into his status as a Great Sage; giving him personal experience with the social issues he’d have encountered growing up in this environment adds to his motivation to pursue charity work; and being raised in close proximity to priestesses means he’d have had a very easy way to start learning white magic at a young age.

Plus I think there’s just something funny about the mental image of Rezo having been raised by the setting equivalent of a bunch of Catholic nuns.

What is your character's moral code? Do they have one? Why or why not?

One of Rezo’s defining characteristics is his ruthlessness, but he does have a moral code of sorts; as someone who lives by “the ends justify the means” he does place importance on what those ends are and wants them to be good ends, though he may lie to himself that something he wants is more necessary than it is. (e.g. telling himself that if he were sighted he could help far more people than he already does, rather than admitting how much it has to do with his own feelings.)

At the same time he will help other people whenever and wherever he can, from curing their chronic maladies to their minor aches and pains, and even attempt to provide solutions for non-health related issues (e.g. marital conflicts, bandits stole your stuff, need help setting up a guild HQ, etc. etc.) even when this is of no benefit to his end goals, as long as it doesn’t actively hinder his goals. In fact, he enjoys and prides himself on helping people, and likes to define himself by his ability to serve others.

This odd mixture of ruthlessness and charitability is likely a reflection of Rezo’s own internal conflicts; innate compassion warring with pragmatism exacerbated by the challenges he’s had to overcome as a blind man, the human desire to connect and be needed by others while also struggling with his own perception of himself as an outsider, and the ambiguous influences of a demon king residing in his soul.

What does your character feel like they struggle with still? Where could they improve? This could be physically, mentally, emotionally, or otherwise.

The most obvious answer to this is Rezo’s blindness. Rezo has a deep seated sense of frustration and shame with regards to his disability, and how it limits what he can do as a healer and a sorcerer, how it isolates him from other people, and how it prevents him from- in Rezo’s opinion- fully experiencing and engaging with the world around him. He has been trying to heal his eyesight his entire life and curing his blindness is his most prominent character motivation.

More subtly, he also struggles with a sense of… personal dehumanization, you could say. He personally states that he sometimes loses his “sense of what it is to be a person” and at one point outright describes himself as an outsider. This likely ties into his issues with internalized ableism, although it isn’t wholly related to his awareness of his lack of sight; his comment about losing his sense of personhood, for example, is prompted by a conversation about emotions and morality. So there’s a definite sense that he feels bad at Being A Person in general.

What famous folklore, legend, or myth would you associate your character with? Are they literally inspired by Snow White? Do they have similar struggles or energy as Red Riding Hood?

I tend to associate Rezo with Don Quixote, or more accurately, the popular symbol of Don Quixote as someone who chases after an impossibility and is prone to self-delusion. You can see how this connects to his story of summoning and believing he can control Shabranigdu in a foolish bid to cure his disability.

Meanwhile, Rezo presents himself and is usually perceived in his own world as a Merlin or Fairy Godmother type figure, the magical helper and occasional mentor who swoops in to provide a magical fix to a problem, then quietly leaves the narrative once their assistance is no longer necessary.

I think it’s worth mentioning that in an even broader sense Rezo, in his canon, is a very straight example of the Disabled Villain (or more crudely, “Evil Cripple”) archetype. (Some fairly classic examples include Shakespeare’s take on Richard III, Captain Hook from Peter Pan, and Long John Silver from Treasure Island.)

He is an antagonist whose depravity is deeply linked to his disability, both in how his villainous actions are motivated by his desperate desire to cure his blindness, and how his disability is quite literally caused by the presence of an actual wholeass demon stuck inside him, as opposed to like, glaucoma. His characterization as a manipulator is also fairly typical of Disabled Villains, as is the way he is alternately played as a figure of horror and of pity.

I’ll go ahead and admit that part of my motivation for writing Rezo- besides the fact I just genuinely like him as a character despite the Issues- is out of a desire to have a little conversation with this trope and hopefully at least develop him a little outside of this particular problematic archetype.

★ Player Information ★

Player Name: Ro
Pronouns: She/He/They
Are you over 18?: Yes.
Contact(s): rynet_iii or DM here. I am willing to give out my discord address privately.
Who Invited You?: Elle!
Current Characters: n/a
Permissions: Here!
Writing Samples: Test Drive Meme time.