royallyshafted | Purpling up your network

LET ME PREMISE THIS by saying this is not OOCly or ICly a declaration of Amethyst leadership, I (and Sugata) maintain that atm he is really more of a babysitter than anything. However, it's coming up a lot ICly and I and Sugata have a lot of thoughts on the matter!

On Leadership - Star Driver

First of all, Sugata is not a leader in his own canon. He is a 'master', an has two servants who are sort of loyalty to him in a roundabout manner, but he never really takes command of them. There are also quite a few people with long standing loyalties to him, but again, he is definitely not taking command of any of those relationships and in many cases seems to just pretend they do not exist.

He does bear the mark of a King, can control the most powerful cybody in canon (in theory), and is offered the leadership of the villain group. However, those first two are just symbolic and even if Sugata had/does accept leadership of the Glittering Crux, he would almost certainly only be the leader in name, and that would/will be a better indicator of his ability to manipulate a situation to his advantage than his ability to lead anything.

Basically, even though he seems to be falling into, at the very least, a decision making role for Amethyst, there isn't any canon to indicate he is inclined toward leadership or has any skill for it.

On Leadership - Tide

As I said, Tide thinks of himself as more of a babysitter than a leader, although he is too polite to say that to anyone on his team except for Pride. His first few days in Aather consisted of trying to keep Pride from curling up inside a shell, and doing his best to obtain information and an understanding of the world so he would be better prepared to use it to help his team. As I mentioned in a previous essay, Sugata is a HELPER. But he really isn't a jesus or anything. Everything he does is, to him, very mild and not worth any particular note. Is not giving up kidneys, here. He's gotten the appreciation of people for doing things like helping Pride cope with his blindness, making Souya eat, being full of helpful guidance for his teammates, and listening to people's memories and problems, but honestly all of that is no big deal. They are just minor things he can do for others fairly easily, and he does it as much because he prefers to keep busy as because he really cares.

As such, to him none of this is particularly leadership-y and he didn't do any of it with that in mind, though he can't deny the fact that he is put together and proactive and probably the most capable at nudging his teammates around, which he supposes are things a leader does.

On Bossiness

Probably the MOST 'leaderlike' quality Tide displays is a tendency to just tell people to do things, and then they get done. While I would not say Tide has a natural inclination toward leading, I do think he has a natural inclination toward ruling. This is born out of a mixture of his inherent personality, which is really kind of to-the-point, and the fact that he is from a noble family and has had servants his entire life.

Sugata is naturally very polite. I don't think he is ACTUALLY as pleasant as he appears to be, but he is actually very courteous and thus he acts so by being pleasant! But the smiling, polite, faintly hesitant persona tends to wear off gradually as he gets to know people more. He continues to be fairly courteous, but is also more straightforward, and less prone to needless assurances or apologies. You can probably see this best with Souya, who he starts off being very polite to, and has gradually been less so, until now and then he just tells Souya what to do, like "Bring me stuff so I can feed you" and "Stop being a moron". But he's also not suddenly all bossiness all the time, and he really isn't particularly inclined to control anyone's life.

However, the "just tell them what to do" tactic doooes work, if employed sparingly. He really wasn't sure it would at first! Though fairly confident in himself, Tide doesn't have a lot in the way of expectations of people. So when he first started bossing Pride around periodically, he was very prepared to be ignored (and sometimes he is). Same with Souya, and it will continue to be the same for anyone he just bosses around. BUT, most of the time it works. To be fair he pretty much only employs it reasonably, but none-the-less the idea of being able to avoid a complicated situation by just telling someone to do something instead of trying to lead them to that answer themselves is getting regularly reinforced as a good method of doing things, thus increasing Tide's willingness to use it.

On Using

So as much as Sugata hates being helpless, and is naturally a helper, he is absolutely a user over a used. This is displayed less in his actions and more, I think, in his mentality on the subject. There are characters like Break and Souya, whose egoes, I think, are heavily tied into how much use they can be to others, whether it is to a specific master or to a general populace. And then there is Sugata who, even if he both goes out of his way to help people and sacrifice for those he care about, really does not judge his own worth based on his ability to do so. Sugata judges his worth on his ability to make things happen. In the case of canon, what he wants to 'make happen' is free Wako from Southern Cross Island, and his ego suffers a lot for his inability to do so. It's not a matter of "I am worthless if I can't help her" it's a matter of "what do I need to be strong enough to accomplish this". He has a natural boner for power, and an inclination to do whatever is necessary to accomplish the task at hand.

Sugata only mildly manipulates people in canon. However, to be fair, Star Driver is a very mild sort of canon. That said, if Sugata had the resources to free Wako, he would have used them. When he does have the resources (Takuto), 'using' isn't really relevant, because Takuo is doing it regardless of Sugata's stance on the matter, and Sugata ultimately lends his support. Theirs is an equal relationship, and canon has not gone down the path of 'How far would Sugata go if it could get him what he wanted' yeeeet. But I think it probably will in the future.

What this comes around to is when people like Pride decide Tide is their 'lord' or when Souya insists he is a meatshield, a certain part of Tide's brain goes to "How can I best make use of that in this situation". It is, atm, only a theoretical matter and he hasn't put a lot of thought into it. But once Bad Games Happen it will probably be much more of A Thing.

On Responsibility

I suppose this is sort of the heart of the matter. As I've said, Tide isn't naturally all that inclined to lead, and while he is a helper he is not a jesus. When Misato an others mention, straight forward or roundabout, that he is the leader his mental response is kind of a "Why...?", because he really doesn't particularly want it. He doesn't particularly want anyone else to have it either, as he certainly isn't a follower, and in such a case at the very best Tide would go along with said leader as long as said leader agreed with him, but unless said leader was his bff he wouldn't hesitate to completely ignore said leader's orders whenever they did not align with his goals. Basically, loyalty to a position is not a thing he has.

Anyway, the point being he doesn't really think of himself that way, nor is he particularly excited about it. However, bringing it up to him got him thinking about it, and subsequently added actually a lot of pressure on him. Up until now, Tide has been helping because that is what he does. However, he was really only working to meet his own standards. Like I said earlier, he doesn't think any of his helper actions are particularly worth commenting on him. To him they are easy and obvious, and even if most people wouldn't bother, that doesn't make it particularly special that he did. But now, with LEADERSHIP words, there are expectations.

For example:

Immediately after Misato brought up 'lol you are our leader' to Tide, Pride took his memory and went kind of crazy, or at least, tried to convince Sugata he was kind of crazy, and at least partially succeeded. In most situations, Tide would think that is probably bad but also not reallly care, as he isn't a big worrier and isn't really that invested in other people's futures. Due to being on a TEAM and thus having automatic allegiances for teammates, he probably would have been mooore concerned, but would have seen it as a team problem, or even just Pride's problem. But once he is thinking in a 'I am the leader?' mentality, it is now just Sugata's problem.

Now, Tide is not really a balker, or a shirker. Even if Misato only meant it jokingly, and even if he still thinks of himself as mostly a babysitter, he is certainly adding a lot of leader responsibilities to the ones he already had. Things like keeping tabs on what people remember in case it becomes a thing later (Tide didn't ask the details of either of Pride's memories until after this mentality shift), and testing the boundaries of his control on certain people (Pride) so he knows what their limits are when it actually counts, and doing things that are important to his teammates even if he thinks it's retarded (digging ponds in the woods) so they don't feel like their values are disregarded.

However, despite keeping a cool head he is not totally immune to all of this sudden pressure, even if it only exists in his head. This is part of the reason Pride was able to top him a lot, both in his roundabout declarations of loyalty, and his just nagging mockery. He is really a little off balance because of it and will probably be so sporadically, whenever something happens that he feels is suddenly his responsibility to deal with.

In Conclusion

And basically, I guess that is it. The combination of someone saying 'you're our leader' to him, Pride's sideways loyalty, being generally able to get people to do things, and getting back a memory of not being a regular highschool student after all have condensed into Tide mentally assuming a leadership position while still not actually wanting to claim it or even thinking it is necessarily correct or best. But he will be doing his best to live up to it anyway, even if not an obvious way, mostly because what he wants to make happen in Aather is to keep his team together and safe regardless of any future obstacles.