Originally Posted by
Cursed by Fortuna
Bellerophon: "Why?" That's a big overarching question I have with this whole sheet and coming back and typing this after having read the Chrysaor sheet I have even more questions than answers. Why does Chrysaor have a NP based on the Chimera despite it only being alluded to in her backstory, but Bellerophon who has both more of a connection to it and it playing more of a role in his backstory not have one? Why does Bellerophon have Harpe (aside from the rather hand-wavy type) explanation given in the sheet when really he doesn't need it and it actually makes him less original and memorable for having it? Why didn't you try to include the other 2 tasks or at least the task of subduing the Amazons as a personal skill or noble phantasm for Bellerophon? Aside from connecting it to the Chrysaor sheet why did you give him mystic eyes (unless he may have had some story about his eyes in myth)?
And aside from pushing the whole anger against the gods angle why claim they were the one's erasing his legend? Why not just say that compared to Heracles, Cadmus, Perseus, Jason, and Achilles alongside others it wasn't as well remembered or recorded and that modern scholars then proceeded to give parts of his legend to Perseus? This could lead to an interesting character development where he envies and dislikes other Greek heroes for overshadowing and partly erasing his legend and modern people for associating his deeds with that of Perseus' own accomplishments. Having a whole "I hate the gods / The gods suck" angle while understandable and it works in this case is one which has been more than a few times before and in cases like Gilgamesh their hatred and anger has been explored and justified as well as linked with their character far better than it really could be done in a standard sheet.
Overall while I wouldn't say that it's bad (I actually like the personality as a whole) and think it has potential I'm fairly lukewarm on this at best. It feels like this could have been so much more but due to you wanting to tie this in with other sheets in the tetralogy, you didn't give it enough room to stand on it's own and this reflects in the sheet itself. As a standalone sheet parts of this are confusing and the personal skills and NPs don't do enough to reflect who Bellerophon is all that well (maybe add one about the amazons, or being the servant to a king or such).
Chrysaor:
"This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."
T.S. Eliot
The Hollow Men
I have to be very blunt here, I have a lot of the same feelings on this as I do a bunch of Nasu & Co's Ideas: Great in concept, and either not properly thought out / developed or flawed / botched in execution.
It comes off as weird as the rest of your Greek sheets were at the very least well done or interesting, this feels like something which needed either more time in the oven or some serious reconsideration in both how it was executed and such. As it is, it feels like it drags down the others sheets it's attached to which is a bit of a shame as even if Perseus may have been based on an existing design of him it still was likeable, Andromeda and Bellerophon are good or okay but flawed servants at the least.
This has all the problems I had with Perseus, except add a few more onto the top of it. To start with, the internal consistency of these sheets is basically thrown into the gutter with this, while I'm not going to say you've always tugged Nasu and Co's line of canon with your works before (your Vortigern and other Arthurian sheets if not overtly defy it, do push against it to an extent), from what I've seen you've been fairly clear on that you've been following Nasu's own designs and explanations to a fairly clear degree in the prior 3 Greek character sheets and any changes more come off as expanding on the deign rather than fundamentally changing the character. This however takes that and basically throws it into a meat grinder. We know what Chrysaor looks like, heck you even threw in one of the prior servant craft essence's the picture of Chrysaor according to Nasu and it certainly wasn't an anime wifu, it was more a pile of gak that basically looked exactly like what you expect something created by Gorgon Medusa to look like.
As a result, I have to ask what did you even want for these sheets? Internal consistency is a thing and if you are going to make a series of sheets that are connected to each other than much like a story you are expected to keep some things consistent between them, design ethos is one of those. This feels almost like it was designed after the fact and taped onto the existing three (although apparently it was done as the first according to you), while it fits in terms of being connected to their stories and design, it's so off in terms of the actual design philosophy and canon compliance of the prior one's it just makes me have to scratch my head as to the "why" of it all.
Even beyond that you have a lot of serious issues which makes it hard for me to like this sheet and frankly a lot of them are the same as Perseus, except here's the thing. What did you even want to go for with this? If you wanted to do something that followed and expanded on Nasu & Co's line of canon that's fine; If you wanted to do something which doesn't follow their line of canon (despite that seeming to be what your prior sheets were going for) that also can be done and gives an opportunity to show a lot of creativity with it. But despite going against Nasu & Co's line of canon, it feels like you chickened out and didn't commit to that, you tried instead to walk the tightrope between the two approaches, and quite you feel off that tightrope as well.
With Perseus there was a reason and the excuse that there already is a Perseus sheet out there you expanding on, this is a sheet I had to drag myself to read through, because it is so dang unoriginal and derivative. I get that's partly the point and that you have the whole "Chrysaor is the fusion between the three gorgon sisters and thus their mortal reincarnation" (something which has its own lore issues as if I recall Medusa's mystic eyes were connected to her being or becoming a demonic beast), however there are much better ways to do this that don't come off as rehashing other people's skills NPs and stuff and trying to Frankenstein together a "new original sheet" out of them. Make it so that the NP have clear variations and changes in how they are used (and while making it so that the Cloak of Hades lacks an effect it did as another character and has the effects which overlap with Breaker Gorgon's ability to function as a mystic eye killer does technically count as making a proper variation or unique usage of that NP, it also counts being pretty unoriginal and doing the bare minimum to try and make something a variation of an existing NP; Same with having the Pegasus basically be able to work just like Bellerophon does; and with Harpe* you didn't even put in that much effort to try making it a variant of Perseus' [not to mention the "why do you have this" aspect as Medusa has it as she was killed by it, Perseus because he used it, Chrysaor's only excuse is that he was technically "birthed by it"]).
* I mean come-on mate, Chrysaor's name literally means "golden sword" he/she is said to have an invincible/indestructible golden sword tempered by or made out of Adamant said to be given to Sir Artegal in The Faerie Queene. It's worth noting Dioscuri is noted to also have a partly golden sword made out of Adamant described as indestructible as well, why not give Chrysaor the sword instead of Harpe and then explain the sword originally belonged to Chrysaor before they were killed and then after they died it was taken by Perseus or someone and then eventually came into the possession of Dioscuri.
So, the NPs aren't very original and don't do a good job selling the character (with Chimera coming off as just weird as to "why do you have this" [particularly since Bellerophon doesn't have it] and some of the others as either ham fisted in giving them to her), that's a bad start. Looking at the personal skills there's the same problem only two/three of them actually seem to say anything about Chrysaor, namely the blessings of a Father (which serves to justify why she has some of her NPs), divinity (which ties into her backstory), and animal communication. The rest are just there because of lore reasons and basically just amount to space filler, they don't tell us anything more about the character we already didn't know form her lore, they don't do anything to make her seem differentiated from her mother's, and much like the NP they just come off as unoriginal, at the minimum you could have played with the idea of Chrysaor's golden sword or given her different mystic eyes, but that's not here.
Next the lore, I will be blunt, this reads like a bad fanfiction OC protagonist's story* (what with basically being CINO [character in name only], that only superficially resembles Chrysaor, being basically a superior successor to Perseus and Medusa, etc.) and I'm not a huge fan (granted I was never a fan of the more casual "down to earth" style dialogue as in excess it always felt grating to me). Perseus managed to kill the Gorgon and Cetus and you're saying that he couldn’t handle Phineas and his followers, the whole Athena situation comes off as trying to write and interaction between god and mortal by someone who really doesn't get the Greek Gods (Athena didn't like Medusa to begin with, and heaven knows she would know exactly who Chrysaor is after that Phineas stunt, plus the Greek gods are not above killing or punishing kids for some beef they have with their parents).
* I will grant you some of my stuff may be no better (I suppose you could make that accusation with Imhotep and Otakemaru and I can understand and respect that Opinion), but at the minimum I didn't split it into 3 different sections and interrupt it with comedy sections, (which largely fail in my mind as sections like that while they can build personality require the characters to have a good / memorable personality to work [I can't even really remember anything about Chrysaor's personality aside from the "I hate the gods thing" and the comedy duo aspect with Pegasus]). As a result, these sections fail to build personality as Chrysaor basically has no memorable personality and the other is a horse which can't speak; As is they just interrupt and waste time trying to drag myself through the lore and really just started to annoy me after a while due to such and lead me to just stopping about 1/2 through the 2nd lore spoiler. However I can say that these problems may have been mitigated if different color text was used for these sections to denote them, as it may have just been my experience of having them interspersed with the lore that soured me on them. As a result, I can also understand and respect why some like DelRey or Master of Chaos one of the strong points of these sheets.
Put bluntly Athena would have killed Chrysaor no questions asked for that stunt, and if Perseus tried to step in she would likely have killed him too (as he basically had served his purpose to her by that point). The Slayer of Belleros point is a neat one, but there just doesn't seem to be anywhere near enough evidence to connect the two figures, and plus it makes your prior Bellerophon sheet just seem weird as an aftereffect. You didn't even bother explaining the whole chimera thing (beyond a brief snipbit in the lore in like 4 sentences) and just threw it in her NPs when that is literally one of Bellerophon biggest feats and if you wanted to sell the whole "Chrysaor = Bellerophon" should have been there as a given. I mean if you're going to go to the effort of claiming Chrysaor = Bellerophon and not cover one of the major feats of Bellerophon's story then why bother having that connection at all?
I feel a bit weird writing this sheet as to be blunt I haven't finished reading it. I don't want to finish reading it and I don't think I ever will (stopped halfway through the Bellerophon after seeing how you barely mentioned the chimera), it's joyless to me, and frankly unless you managed to have the best ending in the world to somehow salvage the rest of the lore, I don't think it will change my opinion on like the first half. I glanced at some of the other stuff like Otera, the Amazons, and Olympus and rolled my eyes. You decided to completely brush over the chimera and deem this more important to discuss at length (I didn't even know the amazons played a role in Bellerophon's legend) when it easily could have been surmised in like 3 or 4 paragraphs tops. That's incredibly weird and bad decision making it's like you're talking deciding to talk about the story of King Arthur and instead of focusing on anything else you decide to talk about his struggles to have a sustainable and sufficient crop yield for his people during his rule. It's a decision so baffling to me as why on earth would you talk about Bellerophon when it's clear you want to talk about Perseus and Athena than actually, you know, talking about Bellerophon / Chrysaor.
Normally this is where I'd give advice on how to make this better as the idea has potential, but here's the thing, from it's fundamental premise, the literally 1st few decisions you made beyond the seed of potential and designed the sheet around are the core of the largest problems I have with it (that this isn't a sheet abut Bellerophon / Chrysaor; If anything this is a sheet about the gorgon sisters, Perseus, and Athena [as well as a lore dump of basically "what happened after Peruses killed the Gorgon"]). In order to fix this sheet, you would literally need to go back, undo those first few decisions you made, uprooting basically everything about the sheet in the process and start again to tell us.
A) Who Bellerophon / Chrysaor is?
B) What their story is (Not Perseus', Not Athena's, Not even the Pegasus' or the Gorgon's story, theirs, this is their sheet and it should be their story), with them as the protagonist and getting center billing.
C) What makes them unique or defines them as both a person and a servant.
This just disappoints me as there is so much potential to the idea; What if Bellerophon / Chrysaor kills monsters due to her seeing them as human and views her actions as putting them out of their misery? What if the reason she flew to Olympus is due to her anger at the gods is for them turning people into monsters in the first place? What if Bellerophon / Chrysaor was both an amalgamate of the 3 gorgon sisters in not just body, but mind, sharing their three personalities and three sets of memories (thus creating a dichotomy between the Chimera a beast which is a mixture of different creatures and Bellerophon / Chrysaor who is the result of the fusion of the 3 gorgons sisters, btu has three different sets of memories or personalities), etc. But as it stands barely any of that is used here. At least with Bellerophon I felt some of the potential there was realized in the sheet, and with a little more work it could be something special, I can't even say that here.
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