ITT we make edgelords into respectable concepts

Give them relatable traits and qualities outside if their grim situation.
Whether it be a certain attitude, a hobby, a personal vulnerability, or a childish dream or desire, give them a trait and character that exists outside of their edgy disposition and profession

As for how you save an edgelord? The answer is simple: you make them care about something and realize theirs something more important than themselves worth living for, and that being an edgelord is a pointless waste of their life.

Pic related. Guts both pre-Hawk and post-eclipse was a huge edgelord, yet both in Golden Age and post-Conviction to the present, Guts has considerably mellowed out, and has realized that there is more to life than being an edgy murderhobo, with post-Conviction being where we see him finally let go of most of his edgy tendencies and start to care about other people and being happier and more calm

Another good example is Thorfinn from Vinland Saga, who makes the transition from edgiest fuck ever to super-pacifist, due to having let go of his hatred, realizing the truth of his father's conviction, and dedicating himself to his new goal of a new world without fighting

Or if they believed that their own life was more important, or if they believed god will sort it out in the end, or if they believed they'd reincarnate, etc. Nihilism seems a big jump even for a mercenary.

Understand that edge is just an aesthetic with no intrinsic good or bad qualities.
It's only looked down upon because it appeals to the immature, which creates a false sense of maturity from summarily rejecting it.

I didn't say it was the only way, I said it fit very neatly in how it allows the merc to let the consequences of his actions roll off his back.

It's a pretty common trope for mercs to be old soldiers or otherwise stuck in the system. For them it's either continue on with their work or settle down to civvie life where they have no marketable skills, no friends, possible no family, and and after having been made incapable of functioning normally in society. Their options are either continue working or roll over and die, and nihilism fits in very comfortably in that scenario.

I would think nihilism would be equally comfortable with the roll over and die option, so it's not a particularly good motivator to keep going

People just don't like edgy kids. Because it entails that they never really suffered at all to warrant their quiet and brooding personality.

But if you look at guts from berserk he's only 22 right now. He was a teenage soldier for most of the book. He earned the edge.

The only edgelords that people don't like are the ones with no defined goal, acts vain and niave (despite suggesting they are worldly and experienced) and have no basis for morals.
The kinds of stereotypes we think about when we think of an edgy character is some 15 year old that wears all black, thinks he has it all figured out and generally doesn't read the atmosphere, but instead tries and enforce his linked park vibe.

That said, all you need to make them acceptable is define what they are trying to accomplish, have them fit in the theme of the world... and i guess just have a narration explaining their personality. Also to avoid monologues

The acceptance that life is meaningless does not imply that death is welcome. These are two completely different subjects.

Never forget.

...

my current character is definitely the one on the right. I make it clear that every time he makes any decision that might come off as edge lordy that he audibly says "Fuck it" and gives it the old college try, if it fails "Huh, well we know that won't work."

Is right.

The reason people hate edgelord characters is because those characters refuse to play with others. The most obnoxious are the ones who believethey're better than the rest of the party and force their "role" as a reluctant baby sitter. You should never play a character who by your own admission has no reason for being there.

I remember one story here where the user claimed some guy wanted his character introduction to be him attacking the party, defeating them, then declaring they obviously need his help and joining them as a smug, brooding leader and mentor. Obviously we can't tell if this is true or not but it does describe what is really annoying about edgelords: an unwarranted and forced sense of superiority out of character.

Simply being violent and prickly isn't a bad thing as long as you can actually work with the party. Snake Plisskin is fine at the table. Your cringey Sasuke clone isn't.

Tiefling that uses lot of drugs and booze to silence the evil within.

Drunken master edgelord?

He needs to silence the dragon within. And his face is burnt.

>Edgelord
Character created solely around a powerfantasy involving themes of exaggerated grit, self-indulgence and emotional darkness, topped off with the misconception that focusing on those topics alone will give the character depth and a sense of maturity when in truth it's really just a twisted false conclusion by hormonal malfunction caused by puberty, hence why so many edgelords are primarily created by teenagers. Adult people occasionally create them, as well, and it is my personal hypothesis that these grown ass men and women are just eternally stuck in malfunctioning-puberty-brain state and would be better off being put out of their misery.

Possible examples:
>Post-Ledger jokers in film and television, Suicide Squad joker in particular
>Batman when written by idiots
>The Punisher in the 90's
>Every fucking fantasy and furry webcomic in the 2000's had at least the one character. You know him.
>Shadow the Hedgehog, particularly in his own game
>Every Shounen antagonist (YOUR FRIENDS MAKE YOU WEEAAK!)
>The pinkhaired cunt in Elfenlied
>Bunch of Final Fantasy cast members

Visual cues may involve, but are not reduced to: Primarily black and red clothing, any assortment of studded or spiked armbands and belts, chains but not the $waggy rapper kind, tons of belts period, unusually aggressive eye-colour (blood red, ice blue [nearly white], bright fiery orange etc.), full-body tattoos that are supposed to be some demonic incantation but really just look like badly drawn polynesian tribals

Elric already exists, so there's no point to this thread.

The prerequisite is that the character itself has some substance that potentially make him human. If the character was created with the sole purpose of expressing the player's personal emotional distress or twisted perception of coolness and maturity, the character is unsalvageable. In my personal understanding, that is basically what an edgelord is: An unsalvageable mess of a character concept driven to its ridiculous extreme.

>How to relate
This one is very important and what I mean when I say "makes them human". A character needs to be able to make it through the day if he's not adventuring or following his destiny. Basically imagine what your character would do if he was in a filler episode where the heroes and villains just take a day off and do some groceries, go to the movies or have a casual hangout and socialise. If you can't see your character doing any of these things, it's an unsalvageable mess (or you are if you refuse to play along for that thought experiment, you fucking asspie). If you can see your character doing any of these things, it's already fairly balanced and relatable.

>Veteran adventurer turned edgelord
A highly disillusioned and possibly disfunctional person who has seen so much shit and lost so many comrades it has rendered them cripplingly depressed, to the point where they developed a sociopathic disorder in which they revel in their twisted realisation of "the truth" where only meaningless suffering exists in the world. Quite possibly so unhinged from reality and emotions that they are, quite frankly, insane and a danger to everyone including themselves.

>Save edgelords
If it actually constitutes as an edgelord, then the character concept is beyond redemption. To me, the key definition of an edgelord character is that they lack any substance save for whatever they can use to further drive home how much more enlightened they are for their overtly hostile behaviour and apparel to the world. So no, you can't save them.

Didn't one of the main proponents of nihilism wind up blowing his brains out after realizing that all the good times eventually come to an end?

I mean correlation is not causation but let's be careful about pretending that everybody who ascribes to nihilism is a well-adjusted human being who decides that because nothing matters everything is awesome. There are plenty of the left-leaning ones too.

I have a ranger NPC who's gruff and a bit brusque to hide the fact that compared to most adventurers he's still a kid (he's 21). He's socially inept and has some scars from battles, including one over his nose. His father was a mercenary leader, and now he serves as part of a royal guard. He acts tough to ward off people from his charge.
He misses his brother, his father was somewhat abusive to try and toughen him up, and he never knew his mother (who would also have been abusive). So he generally acts like a snarky asshole to help protect his emotional issues.

>Didn't one of the main proponents of nihilism wind up blowing his brains out after realizing that all the good times eventually come to an end?
He merely avoided the absurdity of life rather than accepting it. Your options are to believe in a higher metaphysical power, to blow your brains out or to imagine Sisyphus happy. There is no fourth option.

>Wanting to live to see tomorrow isn't nihilistic.

I see the problem here. You don't know what nihilism is.

A nihilist believes nothing matters, but that doesn't mean they don't care about their own life. What they believe is that there is no intrinsic meaning to their lives or the lives of others. There's no meaning, but they want the experience of life anyway.

Not him, and I base my thoughts entirely on some youtube videos that happened upon my suggestions that summarised Nietzsche's works.

Isn't the main point of Nihilism as intended by Freddy boy that he tried to teach people to remove their preconceptions about what is inherently good and bad just because society pressures you to view it this way? i remember the one example being that upper class people would relish in material wealth and luxury and lower class people would refuse them and claim that a life of hard labour and simple things in life was the only true way to live and both were wrong because in both cases, because the individual didn't have room to find out and choose what to them as a person was important because of reasons to which they themselves subscribed out of their own personal values.

It all comes down to how you play, not what you play. Most edgy characters are bad because the edge is all they have. They don't have any character traits or habits that don't reinforce that.

That one of the default edge characters, a half-vampire assassin. The problem is that people stop at that. As a character they don't feel real because they're really just an archetype. Go a little further, give him a love of bad jokes, an eternally deadpan way of speaking, and a genuine friendship with a big dumb gnoll, and he turns out to be surprisingly fun.

This is how you do a likable edgelord. He pretty much checks all the boxes for being an edgelord, but you could forget what happened in his past while talking to him because he still acts like a human being.

In contrast,the green meanie is a study on how you do an edgelord so hilariously wrong that it rotates around the axis again and become enjoyable.

Camous wasnt a nihilist and neither was Nietzche.
There also isnt one philosophy called nihilism. Nihilism is more like a stance you can have on the various branches of philosophy.
t. triggered philosophy student

Is Vergil an edgelord?

Vergil hates guns and loves his mom.

>The picture

Well played.

Alright, thanks for the correction user, I appreciate it.

Pic related is the perfect "likable edgelord".
Actually, "likable" is a lie.
He's the best boy, best brother, and a fucking nigga all around.
Look up Killua Zoldyck, or watch Hunter x Hunter, he seriously is the stellar example of an edgy character done well.

It would probably be one of the more 'happy go lucky' branches of nihilism, rather than the emo fringe wristcutting branch which is both the most popular and least accurate portrayal.

It still hurts. He deserved better.
RIP God's nii-sama.

Fuc yes he is. He is like a cat. He literally rips peoples hearts out but is the best friend you could ever ask for.

Sounds more like an absurdist or existentialist

>have an very important personal goal (which is fine) that you refuse to do anything but pursue (not fine
The most obnoxious are the ones who believe they're better than the rest of the party and force their "role" as a reluctant baby sitter.

Had both of those in a rogue, wouldn't you believe it, whose interactions consisted almost entirely of lecturing other characters about 'pragmatism', 'realism', and 'maturity'. The rest of the time they spent sitting in a corner playing with knives and giving disapproving glares.

Goal wise, every character had family baggage. The baggage became plot-points at one time or another, but even while they sat idle, the characters would talk about their pasts - except the rogue. It became a common bond, where the party considered each other their new, proper family - including the rogue, despite the feeling not being reciprocated.

While we we're all engaged the rogue seemed to actively avoid any sort of...well, anything, really. The player considered themselves a survivalist and expert detective, and had very clearly voiced wanting an investigative story. Despite this, they refused to do any questioning or investigating, and dungeons ground to a halt since they needed to know every little mechanic detail about a trap so they could come up with a clever solution on how to actually physically dismantle it.

At one point we encountered a design that, according to a quick knowledge check, would reset itself. The player demanded to know 'how it could possibly do that', and magic was not an acceptable answer. Finally one of the other players got bored and tossed a dead enemy onto it. Turns out the trap was deactivated. I think the DM just let it go so we could move on.

Player eventually left, citing that they didn't have the time, and didn't feel like the story and characters were involving them enough.

Saw them later at a different game, not even playing, just distracting the person they came with.

Personally I can tolerate a lot of edge lordiness if there's some level of self-awareness to it.

How do we make a well-rounded 16 year old ninja girl with dead parents who's very sarcastic?

Sure. Make it a joke character. We had a player who inevitably became this because he wanted to edge so hard but wasn't smart enough to pull it off at all.

Is a character classified as edgy if they just want to be left alone? For example

>character is master of something (say kung fu)
> no desire to teach. Just wants to be left alone and live his life
>endlessly pursued and pestered by those seeking tutelage
> character has no care for these prospective pupils, acts terse and dark towards them
>often expresses selfish desires

Provided the character is more fleshed out, with reasonable motivation given the setting would he be classified as an edgelord?

She's being self-aware to a degree.
Things like this happen in the real world - a teenager undergoes some sort of trauma, takes it as justification and starts weaving it more and more into their worldview.
The fact that they've actually been through some kind of traumatic experience reinforces their sense of self-justification and lets them see themselves as a larger-than-life character, which they then flesh out with a ridiculous backstory, forced personal habits and funky taste in clothing.
They're particularly common in 14-17-year-old girls.
So basically, a teenager whose parents died in some ind of accident, and who instead of dealing with the problem maturely panicked and ran away from home with her head full of too many thoughts. She manages to carve out enough of a spot somewhere to not have to return home, and with the police looking for her and the guilt from running away building up, she makes up a setting that she must be the heir to some kind of Ancient Power, that's why her parents died and that's why it makes her something more than a teenager who has to deal with a problem everybody goes through at some point. Instead of dealing with life as just another person, she makes up a big destiny and cover identity for herself, aiming to fight some imaginary organization that she superimposes on anyone she ends up tangling with.
Add in some Hot Topic clothing, some survival-store gear, a little bit of Japanese practice and some dogged but hurried martial arts practice, and you have someone who's a 16-year-old ninja girl with dead parents but isn't necessarily a Mary Sue.

I was an edgelord once. Now I'm an average player

>tfw compelled to make edgy characters
>Only know this because people laugh at me

Recent example was an infertile farmer that made an unwitting deal with a glabrezu to sire children. This backfired obviously. Bereft of family and purpose he tried to join the ranks of paladins to purge the world of fiends but failed since he cared only for the purge and smite and not for any other paladin tenets so he doubled down on the swordsmanship he learned during his time there.

LN human fighter.

I mean, so does Sephiroth.

Naw, that character is either a good comic relief because of situations involving overzealous would-be students or a real arsehole for not just giving a dog a bone.

Now, depending on how you flesh him out, if he's all brooding and somber because of [tragic past] that utterly made him despise the art of Kung Fu and he's running away because of a secret dark society that tries to claim his soul or something, that would probably go edgelord territory.

Most people are nihilists to a degree today, plus nihilism is a fairly positive philosophy, ypu just nerd to read some works and not just the side notes

One of my players plays a self parodying edgelord, complete with assasins creed hood.
Its comedy gold.

I think at the root of it all, Edge is just anything being counterculture for the sake of being cool. Even shit like smoking or riding motorbikes is edge, just such a small dose that no one's gonna be bothered by that much alone, and edgelords are when too much of that stuff builds up.