Aimé · 10h

Hi Robbie what do you think is the most interesting part of Dottore's character and also what do you think is the most common misconception about his character

thank you Aimé.i could cry.

I think the most common misconception is that he's sadistic or pure evil. I've touched on this before but a lot of people have this image of Dottore that he's a cartoonishly evil villain that hurts people for the sake of hurting people, when that's not the case. Especially after 6.3 it's clear that his main goal is to obtain knowledge, it's just that he doesn't care if he has to play the "villain" to get to it. On a similar page people also seem to have the misconception that he's a brute when he's shown to be having discussions with people multiple times instead of fighting them (Tighnari, Nahida, Traveler).

As for the most interesting part of his character, my personal favorite thing about him is his backstory as an outcast, and I think his paralells with other characters are one of the most interesting parts of him.

I don't know if you know his backstory but basically his thing is that he was chased out of his hometown as a child (for reasons we don't know at the moment), then later expelled when he was in the Akademiya (for suspicious activity), and then he has history with other characters that were also "outcasts". He found solace in Scaramouche when he first met him (as the Kabukimono) and later feels kinship towards Columbina.

(On a random note, I find it interesting how everyone that's been close to Dottore on some level ends up leaving him. Sohreh, a girl he was getting along with in his Akademiya days, died from unclear reasons [the Zandik's legacy notes suggests Dottore might have killed her, but we don't really know for sure]. Scaramouche had his whole Irminsul erasure arc [who was pretty justified in being mad at Dottore, to be fair]. Columbina just left him. It really highlights his whole outcast status.)

I find myself resonating with Dottore's backstory in the same way I resonated with Scaramouche's. There's always that theme of being an outcast, of not being able to fit quite in; being treated as the Weird One or being treated badly unfairly*. He's an autistic transgender man to me...

(His real name is "Zandik", which is a term that refers to a heretic in Zoroastrianism. People like to make jokes about "who would name their name heretic" but I think it would make sense for Dottore to give the name to himself.)

(* = I'm aware that Dottore Is Evil and characters right now are justified in their problems with him, but I struggle to believe that a child could've done something so heinous that a whole town would choose to chase him away instead of sit down and parent him properly.)

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