watchtower

█ option 1 (HONIR)

This one is basically a given. Lalli is, first and foremost, The Scout. He's the one exploring out ahead, forging new paths, clearing danger for others who come after him. He's also the one who takes off into the woods to find some peace and quiet, on many an occasion. The description says, "Honir's district in Asgard is devoted to the exploration of Yggdrasil's newly developing land," and that's 100% the job he's suited to. Also, "Thus Honir laid out his domain with the intent to find the Mother's children, to take them on an adventure, to offer them a path home." Ironically, this touches on his second primary canon role: As a Finnish mage, his abilities in canon were all roundaboutly dedicated to the guiding of souls home to the beyond before lingering in the infected world could corrupt them.

█ option 2 (NJORD)

Honestly, Lalli is just Really Big On Privacy. He tends to play his cards close to his chest, mostly because it's much more comfortable to keep people at arm's length where he can at least vaguely understand them. He also uses somewhat poetic language to invoke his mage spells in canon, though he'd bristle a bit to hear it dismissed as 'art'. (It's also worth noting that Necromancy, one of Njord's realms of power, is one of the closer ones to his actual canon magic.)

█ lalli hotakainen is different.

He's strange, he's clueless, and as his own cousin Tuuri says, he doesn't really like anything. Basically everyone they meet in the first couple of chapters seems to reach that same general understanding of Lalli as a person. The thing is, 'strange' is the only one of those descriptive terms that actually sincerely applies - a misconception arising from the fact that the source of the descriptions (people) is also the thing Lalli is pretty much the worst at (he's so, so bad at people). You can see the problem, yeah? So in this section, I'll be talking about how he is at his worst baseline - surrounded by strangers, in an unfamiliar place, with no sense of purpose or reason - and then work into what he's like when he finds his niche and his people. So anyway, from the top!

█ yes, lalli is generally pretty clueless.

It's... honestly pretty fair to assume that he has no idea what's going on around him at any given time. (It's even in his introductory bio.) This has two causes, probably equal in effect:

• Lalli has had basically no education and very limited social interaction. Basically, his own personal world has always been very small, and is only incrementally larger now that they've been traveling. This is pretty plain on a couple of occasions, like when he has to ask what a train is before he can follow Tuuri's request that he catch it before it leaves, or his obvious bewilderment at sight of the larger ship they intended to switch to from the smaller boat that ferried them thus far, or the time he sat down on a moving walkway like some kind of magic carpet. As far as technology and civilization go, he just... doesn't know what many things are or how to use them, nor is he learned in any kind of mathematics, literature, history, etc. So in that sense, he's literally kind of clueless sometimes. This is only compounded by the fact that due to a lack of education, he speaks exclusively Finnish, leaving him out of the loop in almost all of the nonvital conversations throughout the comic.
  
  
• Lalli has a pretty obvious case of selective hearing, even if it's not always deliberate. This, to me, boils down to the fact that social interaction regularly seems to either subtly overwhelm him or be on the brink of it, so he really has to pick and choose his battles regarding what conversations to tune into. The ones he doesn't understand or doesn't care about, he pretty much just default tunes them out unless they're obviously Extremely Important, because he doesn't have the extra energy to spare for trying.

All of which brings me to:

█ he also has pretty much no social skills.

This is pretty much what happens when you're improperly socialized for most of not all of your life. Unfortunately, Lalli's a bit inept on both the 'giving' and the 'receiving' ends of the social interactions teeter-totter. This is something he's semi-reluctantly learning to remedy in very specific cases, but it's hardly a wholesale improvement yet.

He typically recoils from unnecessary physical contact (backing out of an attempted hug from his cousin Tuuri, for example, to settle for a pat on the head), though 'unnecessary' typically just means 'initiated by someone other than Lalli', as he sees fit to pat or touch people much more frequently than he's chill with them touching him. He's come to accept Mikkel manhandling him in the name of decontamination after scouting trips, but job-related instances are some of the only exceptions he'll seem to make. Most unspoken social cues are totally lost on him - like when a couple of teammates punch his arm or shoulder in a light, congratulatory way, but after the second one, he demands for Tuuri to tell him why they keep hitting him.

But a lot of instances aren't even Lalli failing to understand how others are trying to communicate or interact with him. Pretty often, Lalli actively fails to comprehend or adhere to any kind of social graces whatsoever. Like okay, let's run down the list:

• He doesn't see why it's a problem to stare at someone while they eat and then shamelessly steal their food while they aren't looking (in fact, he steals Mikkel's cookies later too).
  
  
• After his first scouting mission of their expedition, his return is heralded not by a knock or a shout, but by the incessant scritching of nails on the tank-vehicle's metal door until they finally let him in.
  
  
• When Reynir first shows up in a crate meant to have food and supplies, Lalli circles him for a decent few panels.
  
  
• He hisses at small children who won't leave him be.
  
  
• He regularly falls asleep or even walks away while others are talking to him, as if they aren't even talking.

His lack of social graces actually simplifies things a lot in this sense: because he has no real social standards to uphold, what would for most people be tempting speculations ('what would happen if I....') are just... his actions. He just straight-up does them. He also makes absolutely zero effort to be nice to other people. That's not to say that he isn't nice to some people - it's just the behavior that they naturally inspire in him at the moment. For the most part, aside from the select few people he is actually somehow a little attached to, he ignores everyone that he can ignore and is kind of a rude butt to everyone he can't ignore. He has no issue saying that someone/something is stupid and he doesn't like them/it. He can also be a petty little shit. The main instance coming to mind is after he basically saves their asses and has to sleep it off for like 70 pages, has a dream that he woke up to a shower of appreciation, then actually woke up and was basically unnoticed. Though the others did nothing wrong, he basically punishes them off and on for ten or fifteen pages. He put a dead rodent in Mikkel's cooking, fur and all, and when Emil notices him alone and brings him soup, Lalli flips the bowl of soup up in Emil's stunned face. Honestly, he just doesn't know how to properly express that his feelings are hurt so he just pulls this shit like a child. He's also this petty with Reynir, stemming from insecurities we'll talk about in a bit.

Though it may sound counter-intuitive, the language barrier really just helps him deal with this. It's easier to just blanket ignore people you can't understand and aren't expected to be able to successfully communicate with regardless.

It's also worth noting that most of the time, he doesn't actually care that his social skills are strongly lacking. Oh, he knows he's 'unsocialized', Tuuri well-meaningly won't let him forget it. It's just... not on his list of things that are important enough for him to work on, at least not yet. For most of his life, Lalli has been pretty okay with himself, or at least insurmountably resistant to changing himself in any way... But that was before the harsh reality of the expedition pushed him to figure out who he really plans to be. (We'll talk about his character development a bit later.)

█ he has ways of reconciling with the world.

Like I said: The vast majority of the civilized world, he either doesn't understand or it doesn't understand him. It's a disconnect that Lalli has long since learned methods to deal with. He investigates shit in his own way, at his own pace, typically alone. He honestly prefers being alone, because nature is where he is truly in his element. He works alone whenever possible (even if others would rather he not), and in fact, he prefers to do now what he's always done: Scout at night, deliver his report, sleep through the day when other humans are awake. This limits the amount of time spent awake in a populated world he doesn't understand or enjoy.

If at all possible, he wears clothing that covers as much of him as possible. Even when he's just in a regular jacket or sweater, he zips or pulls the neck all the way up and ducks his chin down into it so that just his eyes and nose stick out. On the one hand, it's definitely cold enough outside to warrant bundling up, but that's far from the only reason he does it, especially when many of his layers of clothing are ineffectually thin. Along those lines, he also kind of physically closes in on himself when he's overwhelmed. He ducks his head, and oftentimes his hands come up to his face to sort of 'hide' himself in. Hiding is not an uncommon strategy in general - like I said, he sleeps all day a lot of the time. When they're awake, he wanders off on his own when possible and hangs back from the group a little bit otherwise.

When Lalli does engage with something, it's typically broken down into the most practical and black-and-white terms. The Engineer's Flowchart comes to mind as a good example of Lalli Logic, though obviously neither duct tape nor WD40 exist in their canon. But in the very beginning, when he finds out they are, in fact, heading out into the world, his only question for the person who hired them is "can I go home?". When the answer is no, he sleeps under the table because fuck it. Similarly, during the briefing for his first scouting mission, his entire assessment of their location is "a weird scary foreign country" and that's all he needs to know. Lalli is not an individual who will discuss semantics with you. Hell, he isn't even an individual who will contemplate semantics, most of the time. Things are very 'this is how it is' with Lalli and his worldview. (And 'worldview' is even pretty literal, in one case - he finds out globes are round because the Earth is round, and he proceeds to not only say that 'he can feel it', but also to condemn normal flat maps for being 'misleading'.)

So based on everything so far, he isn't necessarily the kind of bro you'd choose to bring along on an expedition into terrifying parts unknown, is he?

Let's change that.

█ lalli is an amazing scout.

Like, I feel like that's an understatement. He is basically fearless, as far as actual danger is concerned. And the fucking things they're up against? Not exactly B-movie scary, even discounting their ability to infect you and turn you into one of them. But that's barely a blip on Lalli's radar, until the thing they're up against is at least three times his size. In group expeditions into dark and creepy places, most of the crew are jumping at shadows but Lalli will regularly go off on his own in order to stealthily find and destroy whatever's lurking in the dark so that his allies never know they were even in danger. There are times when the exact thing the team's afraid of is stalking them and Lalli (the only one who knows it's there) is pretending not to see it, baiting it along, closing doors carefully behind him until the right opportunity arises.

On top of that, he's actually incredibly perceptive to the things that actually matter to him. Between his mage abilities and his natural perception capabilities, he can basically sense when something's nebulously wrong in the air or when danger is lurking nearby, and he can do so long before anyone but the resident cat even begins to suspect. It's to the point where everyone has a pretty solid sense of personal security as long as Lalli 'doesn't look scared'. As such, he's more than willing to go on scouting trips with other people, because most of the trip is spent pretending they don't even exist - tailing them or even poking ahead of them but fully immersed in the environment, not his companions. It's also worth mentioning that when he does tune into a conversation, he's perceptive enough to get an immediate read on generally what the mood is and what's happening, regardless of language barriers.

And in fact, being briefed on a mission is about the only time he listens when long strings of words are coming at him. He retains that shit. Similarly, reporting after a scouting mission is one of the only times he'll actively talk to someone at length. It helps that in these scenarios, he's exclusively discussing his job and the results thereof, so he's not expected to actually talk-talk to anyone. Also, while he typically can't remember more than a quarter of what Tuuri says to him, he can remember incredibly elaborate scouting routes and never takes more than an initial passing glance at a map.

When it comes down to it, he really and truly cares about being a scout, and about living up to others' expectations of his ability to fulfill that role. In short, Lalli doesn't fail. If it seems like he's going to, he won't accept an 'everyone makes mistakes' or a 'you'll get it next time' - he'll fucking solve it, whatever it takes. A key example of this (referred to above as 'saving their asses') was when he mapped the expedition team a route into a big city, but the snow was deeper than anticipated and his mapped route was impossible to navigate once they arrived. Instead of letting them turn back, he ran himself ragged to find an alternative route, eventually resorting to clearing out a very dubious cave with every ounce of mage ability he has. He then returns to the team and tells them the new route before sleep finally claims him. His first smile of the entire comic is at this point, some 300+ pages in, when he exhaustedly realizes he's not failed everyone after all.

Note that he doesn't actually 'care what people think of him'. He doesn't care, for example, when Emil doubts he's a mage at all in Book 1, nor does he really care when most people assume he's lazy or weird. What he cares about is that when people count on him to do his actual job - one which is basically 75% of what keeps them alive at all, out in the Silent World - then he actually does that job. This definitely stems from a particular incident in his past, in which he failed to properly fill out a scouting report (he literally just wrote 'yes' - like, yes what?? come on, Lalli) and it got a number of people killed. What's worse, his cousin Onni implies in that same flashback that their grandma (who had trained Lalli in scouting and Finnish magic) had been killed by 'just one mistake' too, so this is kind of a reoccurring theme for Lalli... One which solidifies his determination to persevere in any scouting/mage job he's faced with. And actually, one of the few things that outright irritates him aside from blatantly doubting his scouting ability is when others try to oversee or hinder him doing his job. Which, for the record, doesn't just apply to official missions. 'His job' is any situation in which his abilities as a scout or a mage will keep his people alive and safe, whether or not they or anyone else ask him to do so and regardless of who may actually be in charge of the situation. When a giant attacks the train on which they're riding, the staff are rushing to herd everyone back to bed and Lalli marches past the guards, pinpoints the giant before it even breaks through, and points directly to it's location.

This drive to be the best scout that he can be is the impetus for some of his earlier character development. It's so much easier to reconcile with compromising and doing better for the sake of the mission rather than for any specific individuals, and that's exactly what he does. One of the earliest changes is when we, after a two-week timeskip, see him returning from scouting a town to report back in Swedish that there's no danger. Rather than forcing the team to work around his difficulties, he's actually putting in effort and meeting them partway. It's pretty huge, and stems entirely from the fact that he feels at home and appreciated in his role as the scout.

█ additionally, lalli cares about his people.

By 'his people', I mean individuals with whom he actually forges a connection. Like, he'll protect the entire group, but he won't actively show that he kind of might care about anyone but a select couple of people.

Which means it's time to talk about Emil, the only person outside of his family that Lalli has verbally acknowledged that he cares about. Lalli starts off approximately as prejudiced against Emil ("the messy Swedish person") as he is against pretty much the rest of the population. But despite his general strangeness and lack of decorum, Emil fails to dismiss Lalli like so many others have, instead trying to meet him halfway from the beginning. When Lalli steals his sandwich, he simply gets up and gets them each another one. Also, when Emil's family's children swarm Lalli and he's clearly uncomfortable, Emil outright scolds them for it. On top of that, pretty early in the story you'll find Emil beginning to turn to Lalli to vent when shit's stupid - like when his explosives are confiscated in Customs - and Lalli doesn't understand a single word of it, but y'know what? He does actively go through the motions of listening, which is more even than he offers his own cousin a lot of the time. Emil is also the only one to make an effort to patiently work his way back to Lalli when the mage is angry and isolating himself midway through the arc, which is kind of Big.

Emil proceeds to be the only person whom Lalli proactively responds to in any way. When they're bunked together on the train, he says goodnight and pats Emil's head (voluntary human contact!), and when he senses the troll preparing to attack the train, he urgently gives Emil a seatbelt to hold onto before clinging tightly to his own. Almost more surprisingly, once the troll attack is over and they're back in bed, Lalli notes that Emil is visibly shaken and fixes Emil's hair the way he's noticed that Emil likes it. Comforting him in the only way Lalli really knows how. Later, when Emil is visibly distressed over a dog-beast that followed him home to die, Lalli takes some pretty painstaking efforts to do the proper mage ritual to allow the dog's spirit to ascend and be reborn. All of this occurs with the language barrier firmly in place between them. Their communications almost entirely limited to gestures, body language, and facial expressions, but Emil doesn't really seem to mind and the simplicity of that in contrast with verbal speech is kind of refreshing for Lalli.

What we start to see in the friendship between Emil and Lalli is what happens when someone treats Lalli like a normal human being without being deterred by his strangeness or making him feel even stranger for it. Emil recognizes Lalli's needs (for the most part) and tries to accommodate them without babying him, and in return, Lalli begins to step out of his comfort zone in a way that he only really feels comfortable doing with Emil thus far.

This is only compounded once Tuuri dies and Emil is the only one to stay behind with Lalli while he mourns, separating them from the group and ushering in the most difficult stretch of each of their lives so far. Early on, Lalli nearly kills himself to protect Emil from an infected giant, driving his soul out of his body and rendering him unconscious for much of the chapter. During that time, his soul finds refuge in Emil's subconscious (it's a mage thing), and is able to speak to Emil in his head while Emil drags Lalli's body across frozen wastelandic Denmark. They very nearly die on a couple of other occasions, both of which are prevented by Lalli nearly tearing himself apart to protect Emil - and it has Lalli teaching Emil how to defend his mind against the voices of the infection, which he seems to be decently patient at in the one glimpse we get. (Meanwhile, in their now-shared dreams, Emil also kind of starts to teach him social skills.)

But while Emil was the first that he truly showed that he cared about, he's far from the only one. His family (consisting of Onni and Tuuri, his two cousins) is very important to him - and in fact, is kind of his lifeline through the first book, before he gets to know Emil a little bit. Onni is also a mage, and though he opted to stay behind instead of joining them on the expedition, Lalli consults him as often as possible in their semi-shared mage dreamscape. He trusts Onni implicitly, and with both that and language barriers in mind, Onni is basically the one person that Lalli can kind of be passably conversational with. Onni is the one who asks him if he's made any friends, to which Lalli admits that he's maybe made one, though he doesn't name any names.

The other half of Lalli's immediate family is his cousin Tuuri, a fellow protagonist and member of their expedition. This is kind of a difficult relationship to put your finger on, because the way she seems to care about him and lead him around in the first book, you'd think they're almost sibling-level close... But regularly throughout the comic, you find out that she doesn't really know him that well and that she doesn't know how to get through to him when he's mad, aside from leaving him alone for literally months on end (which she has apparently done). It seems to me like she has a specific way that she's taken to mothering Lalli and she isn't sure how to go any deeper than that, and in turn, he kind of tunes her out and shuts himself away from her a lot of the time. This isn't to say they don't care about each other - it's incredibly obvious how much she cares about him, and when she dies midway through the arc, he's deeply fucked up over it - just that despite caring, they have little in common and don't quite know how to relate.

By the end of the journey, he also cares for the rest of the crew, each in their own way. He's shown to experience a bit of quiet happiness at their captain Sigrun's exuberant praise, which was a bit too overbearing for him early in the journey. He trusts Mikkel even more deeply, running directly to him and begging for help as soon as he realizes Tuuri's in trouble, as if Mikkel could fix it regardless of severity. Even Reynir, whom Lalli is perpetually irritated by and judgmental of, is starting to grow on him enough that Lalli no longer vehemently insists he go away when they encounter one another in the shared mage dreamscape.

█ a final overview of his character development.

The Lalli that comes back from the expedition is hardly the Lalli that departed months ago. When he left, he seemed clueless and bored. Now, his distance comes in a more weary, jaded flavor, with Tuuri's loss and his own failure to protect her weighing heavy on his shoulders. After the expedition, things can no longer be quite so black-and-white anymore. There just isn't room for that, not all the time. So many parts of him are now in direct conflict with one another, most prominently the fact that empathy kills mages no longer does anything to stop the empathy he can't help but feel for the people he cares about.

The journey, despite (or maybe because of) its hardship, really helped Lalli come into his own. A lot of his idiosyncrasies and ways of coping with the world disappear as the journey goes on, largely because he's found himself in the situation that works for him. He's doing a job that he's good at, filling a valuable role on the team, surrounded by people that more-or-less come to understand and embrace his differences, all in an environment that he innately understands far better than he'll ever understand a bustling city. It's as if he's spent the entirety of his life cramped in a metaphorical cage and now he's finally allowed to stretch his wings, and it finds him so much more at ease than he was at the start of the journey. He no longer sleeps to avoid his crewmates or ducks into his thick hood whenever he's touched. He's also far more confident in his roles as both a scout and a mage thanks to the validating effect of being appreciated by his team.

Which leads to: Lalli has come leaps and bounds in his ability to tolerate and even connect with others. Instead of bristling at the slightest push, he's started letting himself learn How To Person under Emil's fine tutelage. While he'd normally still rather work alone than with a stranger, he'd rather have one of His People with him than even that, which is something that likely hasn't been true since his grandmother died a decade ago. Once upon a time, his default mode was to push others away and then slowly let them creep back in when he's ready. Now, despite his general antisocial tendencies, he gravitates toward others even when he's trying to push everyone away. He's even starting to learn how to be an actual legitimate friend. (Remember way up top when he was super confused about fond shoulder-punches? It comes back in the best possible way.)

ROLEPLAY SAMPLE: his tdm top-level + this tdm thread should have enough total comments in various scenarios!