Your world has been destroyed. I saved you. Let's all be happy here.
Tower of Animus
is a Journal Roleplay which began on Livejournal but moved to Dreamwidth, and concluded in 2014.
Somewhere, in a world not associated with any other, there's a lone Tower surrounded by fog. This Tower has no entrances and no exits; people simply wake up in a bed provided for them, and are given some of their possessions in a trunk and a couple of letters explaining the situation. From there, they are trapped in the Tower and expected to live there, under the watchful eyes of the Tower administration; for better or for worse.
Tower of Animus provides examples of:
- Apocalypse How: Class 4 across a multitude of worlds. At least, according to the administrators of the Tower.
- Bears Are Bad News:
- The Hitori Kakurenbo event featured living teddy bears that killed whoever they encountered.
- Kanji Tatsumi was slowly turned into a bear during the Infighting event. Which ended with him being covered in pink fur, having no organs, his entire body being stuffed in fluff and his brain taken out.
- Book Ends: Jason's death. The first time the Labyrinth appeared, Jason killed Zelda. The second time it appeared, Zelda killed Jason. Zelda also killed Jason by making precise strikes at weak points, something Jason himself is famous for.
- Brainwashed and Crazy: There's quite a few examples.
- Ryoji and Jun both, while under the effect of a Witch's Kiss.
- AU!Minato had an entire episode of this thanks to a combination of a Trauma Conga Line and AU!Karkat's Mind Control abilities telling him to murder people and just generally cause havoc. He did not disappoint.
- Minami had this happen to her as well many moons ago, when the fragment of Death inside her used her to murder plenty of people.
- OU!Minato also had this happen, though he was under Lelouch's control. It leads one to wonder if any Persona user is safe from mind control at this point.
- Came Back Wrong:
- A large likelihood if a character dies during an event.
- Every single soul from the universe your character originates from has been revealed to be in the Tower, too. Except they're not really themselves, anymore. Rather, they've become Psychelysis Phantoms.
- Clingy Costume: During the Trick-or-Treat event, characters woke up dressed in various Halloween costumes that could not be taken off.
- Colour-Coded Characters: The collar colors of all the different characters (which are assigned by the mods upon acceptance into the game), though why characters get the colors they do is up for debate.
- Cosmopolitan Council: Ganondorf set up a council where the villains can meet and be villainous.
- Cyborg: Jin gradually became one of these over the course of the Infighting event, thanks to Jason.
- Dark World: Parts of the tower were made into the dark world during a plot orchestrated by Ganondorf and Richtofen.
- Deadly Game: The Labyrinth event and the Hitori Kakurenbo event, and thanks to Ruana, the Infighting event as well. Animus really likes these.
- Death of a Child: Kids can and do die in this game. For example, during the Branch of Sin event, Yotsuba Koiwai was killed once she stumbled across Wretched Egg and Hagire Rinichiro.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: The attitude a handful of characters have taken because of the tower respawn.
- Death Is Not Permanent: Characters typically wake up the next day after suffering a death.
- The Determinator: So many players have lost track of how many times Tohko Amano has died, but despite this, she still insists on acting as a relationship counselor to Yukiteru Amano and Yuno Gasai, trying to scold some of the worst villains in the Tower including the Administrators, and hanging out with almost every Omnicidal Maniac in the game.
- Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: When Dark Pit put Sheba on his shoulders and tried to lance Jason, allowing Xion to run past him which successfully distracted him enough to let their entire group escape.
- Evil Gloating: An increasingly popular use of the network for the villains (particularly Ganondorf and Dr. Doom).
- Evil Is One Big, Happy Family: Subverted and joked about by the playerbase in a Godfather variant. Join once, and you are a member until the end...
- Faux Yay: The Daves have been in a game of Spartan Gay Chicken for a few months now, all for irony's sake. It's getting out of hand.
- Floating Continent: Floors 32, 33, 34 and 35 (31 and 36 if you include the floors that border the floating island floors) inexplicably, with a stair winding around the outside.
- "Freaky Friday" Flip: Happened under Jason, with horrible side effects.
- Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The Pandemic event saw a giant whale crash into the Tower from the outside. It returned for a brief encore during the Rumor Has It event.
- Heroic BSoD: Anyone who still could feel emotions during the Infighting event. Notably:
- Honorary Uncle: Zett Takajo dubbed both Enoch and Lucifel as his. Given that he is a demon and they are the scribe of Heaven and an archangel respectively, the relationship is a little strange.
- Horrible Judge of Character: There are a lot of these.
- AU!Xion and Justice Arcana Strega!Ken think Master Xehanort is a nice old man who can teach them lots of things. AU!Kanaya is also in the boat of thinking Master Xehanort is a pretty cool old dude. Of course, she also thought stabbing was just Jack Noir's way of saying hello.
- Self-proclaimed Ally of Justice Sayaka gets along really well with the members of the villainous group Strega.
- Fem!Link thinks Kuja is a nice, considerate person with great magic ability.
- AU!Dave, between Lelouch, Master Xehanort, and Strega...in all fairness, he's not one to care.
- KARIYA MATOU. He's friends with Doctor Doom.
- Labrys seems to think Monomaru is an upstanding student council member.
- Ryoji thought that Ganondorf and his allies worked to save everyone and helped them in the Dark World Plot. It hit him back, hard.
- Horror Hunger: The aftermath of dying and regenerating without meeting the candy quota for the day during the Trick Or Treat event.
- A House Divided:
- The managers have begun to turn on each other, and are now getting the residents caught up in their antics.
- The admins appear to be attempting to invoke this in the Tower residents as well, including things like brainwashing people at random to try to discover resistance efforts, and a rather pointed reference to Pandora in the Idealism event.
- "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight:
- Quite a few of these have happened during brainwashing or mass-murder player plots, or during other events.
- Almost guaranteed to happen whenever Shiro goes Wretched Egg.
- Involuntary Battle to the Death: The Labyrinth Experiment took several characters into a labyrinth where they had to kill each other until only one was left standing. And just to make everything better, each character already had a collar around their neck.
- It's All Upstairs From Here: The Tower occasionally expands itself a few floors at a time, and always upward.
- Joke Item: Some characters received these as randomized weapons in the Labyrinth event. France getting a megaphone is notable.
- Knight in Sour Armor: With her experience from the Facility combined with living in the Tower, Remilia has started to turn into one of these.
- La Résistance:
- Dax's Army, as it's been dubbed by the muns.
- The entirety of Jason's pod became this during the Infighting event. Their success got Jason disqualified.
- Mad Doctor: Jason is in charge of the medical needs of the Tower. He is also kind of a sociopath.
- Mercy Kill:
- Some members of Jason's pod in the Infighting event (notably, AU!Minato) plan to try this, since being in Jason's pod is a Fate Worse than Death.
- Sayaka succeeded in one. Temporarily.
- Pretty much how Jade!Eridan got his arm back, via Teal!Feferi.
- AU!Minato ended up lobotomized for trying during the Infighting event, but he somewhat succeeded when he went on a mass-murdering Ax-Crazy rampage after AU!Karkat's mind and emotional manipulation abilities took hold of him. Sadly, it did no good.
- Lina Inverse attempted this, on the whole tower, but was prevented by the tower itself.
- Luke attempted this with corrupted Yu during the Halloween event, only to be stopped short by the fact that Yu was far more powerful.
- England did one for colonial America during the Idealism event, though it was without America's knowledge.
- Mundane Solution: Many elements of the Ex Machina event, where the characters - and their players - tried to find many complex solutions to the puzzles, only to find out it was something rather simple they overlooked.
- My God, What Have I Done?: The SMT/Persona cast has many, many characters going through this. To name a few:
- Yu upon seeing the results of voting (which included his own vote) in the Infighting event.
- Minami after her fragment of Death took over and she killed several people.
- AU!Minato after his brainwashed murder rampage.
- AU!Jin had a particularly heartbreaking moment of this at the end of the Infighting event.
- Non-Player Character:
- The five 'administrators' of the tower, most of them unpleasant to deal with.
- In a more straight-up example, there are multitudes of identity-less tower drones - people with red or clear collars who seem to lack any will of their own, that perform various tasks and busywork about the place.
- Our Souls Are Different: Directly invoked. According to the research Dax left after his death, the soul in Animus' world seems to be defined best as the sense of self/identity, so that even characters who might not have their world's definition of a "soul" have one in the Tower
- Plot-Relevant Age-Up: The Tower is Forever Event, where everyone was made to believe they had gone through a Time Skip.
- Power Incontinence:
- What happened to anyone whose collar went down the color spectrum during the swap event.
- In a slightly different flavor, it happens when around certain monsters or during certain events, as well.
- The red-collared retrieval units and the administrators can disable all abilities, too.
- Secret Project Refugee Family:
- Yu Narukami pretty much adopted Luke after the Infighting event, and made it official after the Shadows player event. Asch ended up adopted later by extension. Then he added Xion to this family when Reno disappeared from the tower. This was made official during the Massive Infiltration plot.
- Zero Lancer adopted ProtoLancer as his younger brother and Ryoji, Labrys, Suzaku, and Mami as his children.
- Space Whale: One had attacked the Tower and made the normally enigmatic admins crap their pants.
- The Starscream: Ganondorf's ambition and plan is to overthrow the administrators and rule over the tower himself.
- Suicide by Cop: Strega!Ken did this his second day with an event-addled Minami's 'aid', as he was just off of Shinjiro's death in his canon. He got better due to tower respawn.
- Surrounded by Idiots:
- Gandalf has a meltdown at THE ENTIRE TOWER after a month of questionable decisions from other characters.
- Luke, of all people, while he doesn't say it, definitely has one of these moments during the Power Dungeon boss fight in the Dark World player event.
- OU!Riku Replica continued the trend when Ryoji learned he misjudged Ganondorf and the villains' intentions the hard way.
- Gandalf has a meltdown at THE ENTIRE TOWER
- Title Drop: The Tower was finally named in-character during a conversation with Ruana as "Tower Designation Animus." Later on in that post we get an even more blatant one:"it's better to drown or burn to death in a fire or be skinned and roasted alive than to lose your soul in the tower of animus"
- Token Good Teammate: Oftentimes it seems like Dax is the only manager of the Tower with any sense of common morality.
- Tomato in the Mirror: All characters are just a little ball of light (their soul) trapped in a wireframe body full of their collar color liquid. Everything else about them is an illusion
- Universal Translator: It doesn't matter what language you see, speak, or hear: the Tower somehow translates it, though everything in the game is written mostly in English.
- With Friends Like These...:
- Jaderi and Gamzee started out as rather cute, friendly morons who got high and did cute, friendly things. Then the Tower happened and now they are self-declared murderbros. Would be Vitriolic Best Buds, if not for the bit where they wantonly murder each other. Suffice it to say, though, that trying to hurt one while the other is around is not a very smart thing to do.
- Tohko Amano thought she'd give Yukiteru Amano a gift to give to Yuno Gasai for White Day, to show her approval of their relationship. The only thing about this that registered in Yuno's mind was "Tohko gave Yukiteru a gift."
