lalli hotakainen

HAD A CRISIS OF FAITH.
Realms removed from his Finnish gods and no longer able to access the mage world-sense which they lent him, Lalli was forced to learn how to guide himself. Results varied.


Lalli's role as a Noita has been the predominant influence on who he is as a person for most of his life. His magic stems from his Finnish gods (there's arguably no proof that they exist, but there's a wealth of evidence + all magic in SSSS reacts as though ultimately controlled by someone/something beyond the mages), with whom he has a distantly familiar working relationship with. This relationship often lent him an instinctive sense of the natural world, a sort of 'mage sense' which could allow him to navigate most practical decisions or dangerous situations with gut instinct.

But in Asgard, he was closed off from his gods entirely and had to learn how to functionally guide himself for the first time in as long as he could remember. Lalli has always thought himself fairly independent, but losing the safety net of his Finnish gods taught him that he was a lot less so than he realized. Worse yet, those who knew him still expected from him that unwavering sense of what to do and when - and he couldn't let them down, of course, so quite often he ended up having to make a snap decision based on his best understanding of the situation and just be prepared to effectively handle whatever consequences might unfold.

As another side effect of this distance from his gods, Lalli had a particularly fraught relationship with Honir, the god whom he was tied to within Asgard. At first, he mostly skeptical and wary (of all the gods, but especially of Honir, who outwardly seemed much more clueless and inept than he actually was)... But before long, they had developed somewhat of a working relationship too, and Lalli found himself relying on Honir a lot more for guidance than he might have liked. Never as much as he once did with his Finnish gods, but enough that zipping off to Honir was one of his first instincts in times of trouble. (The rest of the gods never really stopped being chopped liver to him, but it is what it is.)





LEARNED HOW TO BE A PERSON.
His upbringing as a mage left him ingrained with the understanding that to be a mage and to be a person were mutually exclusive. Asgard allowed him to start to deprogram that a little.


This is honestly the biggest change he underwent during his time in Asgard. Growing up, he was whisked off by his Noita grandmother basically as soon as he manifested mage capabilities, and she began his training right then and there. But Grandma Ensi was not a warm or loving parent substitute, and rather than raising a child, she raised a weapon - or a shield, more accurately, whose perception of his own value lies exclusively in the ability to keep others alive. He Could Not Make A Mistake, not a single one (mistakes get people killed), and when someone in Asgard asked if he had been happy throughout his training, he wasn't sure how to answer this question that had never really held relevance in his life.

Enter: Asgard. Detached from the daily life-or-death pressures of life as a mage (especially a mage scout), the slow formation of a decently strong support system who engaged with him voluntarily for non-mage reasons was foreign and confusing, but it also to very slowly begin to rewire his concept of self and self-value. This in turn allowed him to (warily, gracelessly) explore a range of emotions which had always been seen as a liability within post-apocalyptic Scandinavia where the Infected could claw their way into your very thoughts.

He didn't have time to get too deep into this particular subconscious journey of self-discovery, in part due to the short time they were there and in part due to a pretty sizeable setback he experienced in approximately October (2/3 through his time in Asgard). The foundation was laid for a great deal of character growth already, manifesting in part in the choice to (for once) not obstinately try to handle everything on his own. Instead, he helped Emil train up his god-given magic and the combat capability thereof - and when most of the combatants in Asgard marched off in mid-October to face down an army of the frigid dead (Game of Thrones style) which threatened the city, he had little trepidation in bringing Emil to fight alongside him.

This proved ultimately to be a mistake: Emil absolutely died in that fight in a split-second's lapse in Lalli's vigilance, and Lalli then had to re-kill Emil's furious reanimated corpse. At this point, they knew nothing about the game's IC respawn mechanic, and he assumed Emil was dead-dead for the week until everyone respawned. And it, like.... it fucked him up. It fucked them both up for a bit, so there was like a month of them both feeling like they devastatingly failed one another and being distant and miserable, all through which Lalli sank hard back into the inwardly frustrated mindset that his only purpose is to keep others alive which he will also never be able to succeed at.

By his CRAU canonpoint, he has mostly recovered from that - he and Emil figured their shit out a few weeks prior, and The Incident seems to impact him very little in daily life, but a significant crack does remain in the otherwise promising foundation he was building. It's only really smoothed over by the fact that his generally increasing ability to people has broadened his concept of purpose a bit beyond simply his utility as a guardian.

Speaking of that...





LEARNED HOW TO PEOPLE.
As a result of his developing sense of self, he also has slowly but steadily developed a bit more of a capacity to function socially.


So as you'll see in his personality section, there are things that he's great at and things that he's passably decent at but dealing with people is neither of those.

But as the above section has begun to explain, his time in Asgard and the personal growth he has undergone since he left post-apoc Scandinavia have led to some marked improvements in his social skills. He's still antisocial - you can take the gremlin out of the forest but you can't take the forest out of the gremlin - but in less dire daily circumstances, he can afford to learn how to relax just a little and to become more tolerant of the prevailing existence of other people. You'll read in his Personality section a bit about how he kind of 'checks out' to deal with the overstimulation that humanity in general tends to induce. By the end of his time in Asgard, though, he has come far enough that he only rarely needs to do so.

He also speaks quite a bit more now than he once did, offering markedly longer and less choppy sentences and sometimes failing to cut conversations as short as humanely possible. He also now makes a slightly more deliberate effort to adjust or add to his words in the name of clarity, or even of being slightly less rude. These were things he didn't really give a fuck about before, but Emil has been a pretty decent influence on him and (alarmingly) so has Klaus Hargreeves, so here he is, doing the thing. Lastly, with folks that he genuinely cares about, he now actually goes out of his way to try to offer empathy or comfort when a situation seems to call for it. There was a time in which he'd largely just awkwardly side-eye and hope that it stops, but that time has largely passed.





DEVELOPED A SOLID SUPPORT SYSTEM (AMONG OTHER CR).
Somehow, he has ended up surrounded by people who choose to be around him for reasons entirely unrelated to his utility as a mage or a scout, and that's wild but also very good for him.


A lot of CR has developed in a way which impacted him personally. Most notably, he and Emil ultimately (after a lot of them each making shit worse by being A Mess) worked their way to one another in an unconventionally romantic way. They're definitely not... a typical couple, but they're each other's Person now - and though Lalli is still unconvinced that he is actually legitimately able to meet Emil's needs, it's pretty great in the month-ish they've been at it so far. The two of them somehow managed to become a sort of found-family trio with Klaus Hargreeves (The Umbrella Academy), and they're pretty ride-or-die for each other.

Klaus specifically has actually been incredibly interesting CR, because he has zero trouble pushing Lalli. Emil still balks at it a little, tending to worry too much about upsetting Lalli, but Klaus never really had that apprehension despite Lalli's strong initial distaste for Klaus's as a person. As a result, Klaus has actually does wonders in dragging Lalli out of his comfort zone socially and helping him learn to function more like a normal human being on an emotional level.

Namine (Kingdom Hearts, as played by Kitty who plays Namine here in Songerein) was another great bit of CR, since she was functionally not someone that he had any practical reason to ally with and yet her unexpectedly shrewd brand of kindness worked her patient way under his skin. This managed to earn her the spot of 'the person Lalli hesitated the least to talk to about emotion-related topics', even over Emil and Klaus.

The final CR of note was Ivar the Boneless (Vikings). Lalli and Ivar threatened each other semi-actively for multiple months, then after one confrontation they accidentally bonded over the inevitability of everyone around them dying. This established an odd grudging sort of respect between them, which placed Ivar as an outlier to his typically more black-and-white classification of people as threats, friends, coworkers or irrelevant.

• Common first impressions: Strange, (sometimes) clueless, and "doesn't really like anything".
  
• Had a poorly-socialized upbringing - little social interaction or education beyond magework/scouting. His world has always been very small (though it grew significantly throughout the expedition). His understanding of technology is very limited. His educational deficit also means that he speaks exclusively Finnish, leaving him out of the loop in most nonvital conversations throughout the comic. (He'd rather tune most of them out, anyway.)
  
• Upbringing also left him inept on both the 'giving' and 'receiving' ends of social interaction. He's semi-reluctantly learning to remedy this in select cases.
  
• Typically recoils from unnecessary physical contact. "Unnecessary" meaning "initiated by non-Lalli" - he pats or touches others more frequently than he lets himself be touched. Pragmatic touch is tolerated with visible discomfort (e.g. post-scouting decontamination).
  
• Most unspoken social cues are lost on him (e.g. congratulatory arm-punches).
  
• Actively fails to comprehend/adhere to social graces in any capacity. (e.g. staring, stealing food, scritching .vs. knocking, mistrustful circling, hissing at children, or walking away/napping while being spoken to.)
  
• Very blunt. Makes no attempt to be less rude or unkind - he can be nice, but never deliberately tries to be. He has no issue saying that someone/something is stupid and he doesn't like them/it.
  
• Can be petty, especially when his work goes unappreciated. At such times, he tends to Cause Problems On Purpose. Lalli really just doesn't know how to express that his feelings are hurt, so he just pulls this childish shit.
  
• Is aware that he's 'unsocialized'. He's reminded not-infrequently. It's just irrelevant to mage/scout duties, thus irrelevant to him.

• Most of the civilized world, he either doesn't understand or it doesn't understand him. Lalli has long since learned methods to handle this disconnect.
  
• Investigates shit in his own way, at his own pace, often alone. Works alone whenever possible, preferring to scout at night, report back, and sleep through the crew's waking hours.
  
• Most comfortable in layered clothes with long sleeves/high necks to cover as much of him as possible. Prefers to sleep in hidden nooks. Relatedly, he physically closes in on himself when overwhelmed.
  
• Typically engages with things in practical/black-and-white terms. Think: Engineer's Flowchart. Very 'this is how it is', and he won't debate semantics. Learns globes are round because Earth is, then declares that he 'can feel it' and condemns flat maps as 'misleading'. Doesn't complicate scouting with unnecessary research or tools (re: forgoing a map: "I know where we are. A weird scary foreign country.").
  
• Has some obvious selective hearing, sometimes involuntary. Social interaction tend to to overwhelm him (or threaten to), and he picks his battles regarding which conversations to tune into.

• Sees this as his purpose, and faces it fearlessly. In group expeditions, his squadmates jump at shadows while Lalli goes off alone to stealthily find and destroy anything lurking in the dark. There are times when something stalks them unnoticed by anyone but Lalli, who pretends not to see it while baiting it along until the strategic moment to strike.
  
• Deeply perceptive (naturally and via magehood). Can sense when something's nebulously wrong in the air/when danger lurks nearby, well before the others sense anything's amiss. Squadmates generally feel safe as long as Lalli 'doesn't look scared'.
  
• Tolerates infodumps for pre-mission briefings, retaining it all regardless of complexity. Reporting after scouting is, likewise, one of the only times he'll talk at length.
  
• Doesn't fail. If failure seems likely, he won't accept 'everyone makes mistakes' - he'll solve it, even at great personal cost.
  
• Doesn't care if people think he's weird or lazy or even doubt his mage status - but does care that when people count on him to do his job and keep them alive, he does it. Can't accept making even minor mistakes, which stems from a particular incident in his past.
  
• Biggest irritants: Doubting his scouting ability and trying to oversee/hinder him doing his job - which gets tricky, since he has no concept of jurisdiction. If it's scout/mage-relevant, he'll march past whoever's in charge and do his job there too.
  
• Finds it easier to reconcile with compromising his tendencies for the mission .vs. for specific individuals. (e.g. learning relevant Swedish) Makes himself much easier to work with if he feels respected in his job.

• Protects the squad as duty, but only actively shows caring for the rare person he connects to.
  
• Key example: Emil, the only non-family that Lalli has acknowledged caring for, and whose friendship reveals (even changes) parts of Lalli previously unseen. It took ~4 instances of Emil making him feel valid rather than dismissed/chastised for Lalli to begin to proactively reciprocate the friendship - from head-pats to preparing Emil for oncoming danger. Then, Lalli sees that Emil is shaken and fixes his hair the way Emil likes it, his first Attempt To Comfort thus far.
  
• Later, Lalli (feeling unappreciated) self-isolates in wounded anger, and the others just let him do it... But Emil patiently bridges the gap. So Lalli lets him. There's a bewildering sort of value in people who don't let him push them away. Emil taught him that.
  
• Will put significant effort in alleviating any pain/upset his people feel. Example: Emil's upset about a dead dog-beast, so Lalli takes some pretty painstaking efforts to perform the ritual allowing its spirit to return to the skies..
  
• Stops at nothing to protect those he loves, as illustrated vividly by Chapters 17-18 - Lalli nearly kills himself to protect Emil from an infected giant, driving his own soul from his body and rendering him unconscious for days. His soul finds refuge in Emil's subconscious, and can speak in Emil's head while Emil drags Lalli's body across frozen wastelandic Denmark. He then prevents their deaths again by nearly tearing himself apart to shake Emil out of the Infected's thrall. This sparks Lalli teaches Emil to defend his mind against the voices, which he's actually decently patient at. (In their shared dreams, Emil starts teaching him social skills in exchange.)
  
• What remains of his family (cousins Onni and Tuuri) is incredibly important to him. Onni is a fellow mage, and Lalli trusts him implicitly, consulting his insight frequently. Onni is also the one person that Lalli can be semi-conversational with. Things with Tuuri are more complex. Her obvious care and guidance first suggests that they're sibling-close, but actually she barely knows him and has no idea how to get through to him. Tuuri has a specific way that she's taken to mothering Lalli, and she doesn't seem to know how to go any deeper than that. In exchange, he often tends to tune her out and shut himself away from her. They do care for each other - it's obvious how much she cares about him, and her mid-arc death has him deeply fucked up - but despite caring, they have little in common and no clue how to relate.
  
• By the journey's end, the crew have become a bit like found family too. (Captain) Sigrun's exuberant praise becomes pleasing instead of overwhelming. When Tuuri is infected, Lalli zooms to (medic/cook) Mikkel for help, as if he could fix anything regardless of severity. Even Reynir (mage/irritant) is getting more tolerable.

• The Lalli that comes back from the expedition is hardly the Lalli that departed months ago. He once seemed clueless and bored, but now his distance is weary, jaded, and heavy with Tuuri's loss and his own failure to protect her. Things are no longer so black-and-white, and so many parts of him now conflict with one another - like how knowing that empathy kills mages no longer does anything to stop the involuntary empathy he feels for those he cares for.
  
• Many idiosyncrasies and coping mechanisms disappear as the journey goes on. Despite all hardship, he 's found what works for him. Doing a job he's good at, filling a valuable role on the team, surrounded by people that (mostly) come to accept his differences, all in the wildlands (which he understands far better than a bustling city). As if he's spent his life in a cramped little cage and now he's finally allowed to stretch his legs, putting him infinitely more at ease than he was at the journey's start. No more sleeping to avoid crewmates or bristling at touch.
  
• He's no longer alone - nor does he want to be. Rather than self-isolating, he now tends to gravitate toward others even when trying to push them away. He's even starting to learn how "friendship" works. (Remember way up top when he was super confused about fond shoulder-punches? It comes back in the best possible way.)

RUNO.
By performing an incantation in which he invokes a God, a benevolent spirit, or a force of nature, Lalli is shown to have some influence on the world around him.

These incantations are called runo, and are typically made up on the spot to suit the needs of the moment. Some runo, such as those addressed to gods, are almost like prayers of entreaty. Other runo, such as those used against troublesome spirits, are more like poetic but very real threats. Examples include:


• Runo to invoke the protection of the moon, seen here and translated into English here. Upon conclusion, clouds uncover the moon, and Lalli appears to be satisfied with his handiwork.
  
  — ( It's worth noting that runo never seem to offer a perfect solution - just enough to get by. In this case, that night a giant monstrosity did indeed attack their train, though luckily no one was killed. In theory, the 'protection' lay in the nonlethality of it - Lalli in no way expected the train to go entirely unperturbed. )
  
  
• Runo to invoke the Kallohonka and allow the spirit of an infected dog-beast to return to the sky and be reborn, seen here. This is, in essence, a funerary rite applicable mostly to beasts, especially beasts which have been corrupted in some form (such as by the Illness). I'm not positive if the elaborate gore pattern he enacted in the rest of the carcass or the act of wearing the skull on his head as he climbed a tree are part of it? I'm going to assume 'yes', at least to Lalli.
  
  
• Runo to banish the spirits from inhabiting or interfering with their radio, found here and translated here in a couple of slightly-varying ways. The first two paragraphs of the translation are featured in the top panel, and they begin as a more benign plea for the 'lost spirits' to depart voluntarily. It does nothing, however, and we see the rest of the runo shift quickly into a threat to quite literally send his own spirit to hunt them down. The radio gives a loud crack and begins to function normally as the spirits choose to heed his threats.
  
  — ( The sorts of runo which threaten lingering/corrupted spirits like this are interesting to me because technically, they hold no power in and of themselves - they're basically just spiritually-charged dick-waving, and if the entity/entities at the other end choose not to heed whatever threat is issued, the mage will then have to take further steps to make good on that threat if they want results. )
  
  
Not a terribly thorough compilation of examples so far, but this is all we currently have to work with.


( ! ) Though it's unnecessary, Lalli (a creature of habit) will likely continue to utilize runo as a conduit through which to activate his dreamotion magic. Because using runo also includes an aspect of channeling his force of will into it, it would basically serve as dreamotion with extra steps.

Also, more specifically discussing the runo above: I'm not honestly sure how things like invoking Kuutar (the moon)'s protection would apply to dreamotion, since it's not like dreamotion is some sort of god to ask to keep an eye on them. If anything, that one will likely just live on in spirit as the things which Lalli does do with dreamotion aesthetically change the environment alongside the practical magical aspect - for example (a bit silly but the first thing to mind), Kuutar is also one of the twin origin-mothers of bees and hornets, and if he happened to invoke her to send in the hornets, the clouds might appear to shift a bit away from the moon first like in the comic. Basically: It just adds flavor. (As for spirits, there's a section on those below!)

It's worth noting that any appearance of successfully entreating his Finnish gods will be entirely illusive. He's simply too far from home for his pleas to reach them. This may give him a bit of a scare at first - his dreamotion magic

SEE & INFLUENCE DARK SPIRITS.
BLURB HERE.

As most Finns are actually capable of invoking weak runo, it's actually the ability to see and influence spirits which is used to figure out whether or not someone's a mage.

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BLURB HERE.

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