Love Me Do

Question: What do you think would happen if someone cursed Sangria with supernatural, uncontrollable empathy? Meaning, she was forced to feel the emotions of others around her.

Most of the time, violence, probably.

We actually messed around with this idea some way back in the day when the Better Next Time band were still demigods; Goze picked up Perfect Actor and we all went on a short binge of trying to figure out what Sangria would do if he dropped various emotions on her. It turned out to be mostly a non-issue because Goze never got all that much Appearance and Sangria's resistance roll is beastly, but for a while it was a fun issue to debate. We busted out Plutchik's wheel and everything. It was intense.

But the quick and easy answer is probably confusion and violence, most of the time. Sangria's not just standoffish or reserved; she is actually schizoid. She is broken. Her brain chemistry does not work properly. That means that these aren't just going to be emotional events she isn't ready for or won't enjoy, but often things that have legitimately never happened to her before and that she has no frame of reference for how to deal with. Add to that the fact that she's a hair-trigger quick destructive force, and throwing emotional crisis into her face is kind of like throwing a lit match into a bottle of grain alcohol.

So unless she was living on the planet of the happy flower people where nobody ever had negative emotions and she could just wander around confused about what was happening, she'd probably roll over into psychotic death machine pretty quickly. Something would suddenly be happening to her that had never happened before, she couldn't stop, she didn't understand and that was hurting and confusing her; the immediate instinctual response would be to destroy whatever was doing this obviously malevolent thing, which would just cause more negative emotions to build up around her, which would keep on fueling her until she'd either cleared the area or was unconscious. It would be a vicious cycle.

Sangria's not an entire emotional blank; she does have a limited spectrum of responses, including confusion ("something's not normal"), surprise ("something I didn't expect just happened"), respect ("something is in charge of me"), determination ("something is in my way"), dismay ("something I did failed") and disapproval ("something is wrong"). They're just a lot more muted than most peoples' reactions, and they leave out most of the emotions that involve heavy interaction with others. And she actually does occasionally have supernatural empathy foisted on her; Geoff's frequent use of Engender Love sparks very direct, strong emotion, which she understands as "a thing that happens when you're married to somebody" (Geoff's explanation), and when something goes really, really wrong she touches off Riastrad, in basically the same kind of reaction I was describing above.

Basically, if there weren't someone really, really skilled helping her manage the situation on deck with a lot of armor, dropping supernatural empathy on Sangria would make her full-blown crazy. She might be able to get used to it over time, but the collateral damage in the meantime would be off the charts.