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amicia_the_amazonMe: I don't think I'll ever find another teenage character I actually want to play.
2019's A Plague Tale: Innocence: Okay, but what if: a traumatized teenage girl who learns to kill and eventually starts to take things much further than she should?
Me: Wait, no--
2022's A Plague Tale: Requiem: ... who ends her second game at the foot of a mountain called 'recovery'?
Me: You motherfucker.
Ahem. Hi, guys! Meet Amicia de Rune, a French knight's daughter turned protector turned... whatever she is now.
An honest summation of Amicia's two-game character arc: 
1. Le jeu vidéo
A Plague Tale: Innocence was never meant to be a Big Deal Video Game. Rather, it was a chance for a smallish French video game studio, Asobo, to take a break from the support work they were doing on other people's games - and the technical work they were doing for Microsoft's new Flight Simulator - to make something for themselves. Many of the developers at the studio loved narrative adventure games that told a strong story, and yet they'd never had the chance to make one.
And so, a small team within the studio set out to make their own story-based game, set in their own home region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, about two French children on the run from the Inquisition and killer rats during the Black Death epidemic.
Despite their limited resources, the game launched to surprisingly decent Metacritic scores, critical praise for its unusual setting and fantastic storytelling, and a lot more sales than Asobo seems to have anticipated. By all accounts from interviews, the response on Asobo's part was a 'well, fuck, do we have to make a sequel?'. That sequel came out a few months ago and promptly wound up nominated for several Game Awards, including Game of the Year. Whoops? Whoops.
Anywho. A Plague Tale tells the story of Amicia de Rune, daughter of the French knight Robert de Rune and his alchemist wife Beatrice, and her little brother Hugo. They live a relatively happy life on Robert's modest estate in Guyenne (which will one day be a part of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, obviously), except for one thing: Hugo was born with a mysterious illness that is slowly killing him. Beatrice has dedicated herself to curing Hugo, and keeps him locked away from view - including Amicia's.
One day, while hunting out in the woods with her father, Amicia finds a strange hole in the ground that swallows her dog whole. Moments later, the Inquisition arrives to take Hugo. Robert and Beatrice put up a good fight, but are killed; Amicia flees into the countryside with the brother she barely knows.
They quickly discover that a deadly rat plague has taken hold of the villages and cities around them. A rat bite causes the illness we'll come to know as the Black Plague, but there's something worse at play: the rats themselves seem to be magic of a kind, swarming and moving together as one. Find yourself in a room with too many rats, and they'll simply eat you whole.
I'm not kidding about the 'swarms of rats' part.
I won't recap the entire game, but sufficient to say we eventually find out that the rat plague and Hugo's illness are connected. He has the Macula, a magical disease that runs in the blood of particular families, and rears its ugly head every few generations to instigate a new rat plague. Should Hugo pass through all the 'tresholds', he will eventually become one with the rats and could quite possibly wipe out the world.
The first game ends with the Macula apparently calmed as Hugo, Amicia, and their not-quite-dead-after-all mother defeat the Inquisition and find a place of peace.
Unfortunately, that peace is temporary. A Plague Tale: Requiem sees Hugo and Amicia forced to run again, this time chasing visions Hugo is having of a cure on a beautiful island. However, their search drags the French region of Provence into chaos...
... and that's where I'm going to leave it, because spoilers. But do note that speaking to Amicia can result in some spoilers for the end of the second game, so if you still want to play that and would prefer to avoid spoilers, let me know in the comments and I'll do my best to write around it.
2. Le personnage
When we first meet Amicia de Rune, she's an ordinary 15-year-old daddy's girl of privileged background. She likes to hunt in the woods with her father and her dog, and enjoys challenging herself physically. She's particularly taken by the sling, a weapon with which a girl like her can still do a fairly decent amount of damage. But in most things, she's just a child, with all the wonder and the entitlement that comes with that.
When we leave her at the end of A Plague Tale: Requiem, she's been broken and beaten down, has killed at the very least dozens of people in a myriad of ways, has had hope destroyed and reawakened far too many times, and she's looking to the future with an adult's understanding of action and consequence and responsibility. She's also 16.
Honestly, per TVTropes, you can sum up her character development just by looking at how she dresses from the start until the end of the games. And. Well. Fair point:
The Amicia I'm bringing into Fandom comes from about five to six months after the game's climax, and another six or so months before the game's epilogue. She has had some time to process everything she's been through, to tame her moments of violent rage and sudden crying fits, but it's mostly been triage. She was a joyful girl once who liked running around the woods, loved her dog, loved hunting. She maintained an ability to marvel at the beautiful things in the world, if only for her brother, Hugo.
And then came-- everything.
Now that things have calmed, and there are no great things riding on her shoulders, Amicia finds herself at Fandom with a question: who is she now? She can't be the Amicia who played with her sling in the forest and helped her brother pick out flowers, but without anyone's life on the line, there's no longer a need for her to be the violently protective, bull-headed pragmatist on a hair trigger she became.
Thus: high school.
3. Bon à savoir
While Amicia comes from around the very end of her canon, most visual material for her is of course from earlier on in the games. For most of her life, Amicia has worn her hair in a braid, sometimes with ribbons braided in. However, that gets cut off by the climax of the game, and at the point she's entering Fandom, Amicia has a pixie cut so short it's like two glances of a clipper away from being an undercut. So please ignore the braid where it pops up in the icons.
Secondly, she's still suffering from bouts of post-traumatic stress, and in extreme cases, can be violent if provoked. I don't see that really happening at Fandom outside of invasions, but should tensions escalate, I'll reach out to the other player before Amicia tries to shove them into a fire or hit them with a rock or something.
And finally: Amicia is French! I'm not the world's biggest fan of playing translator microbes with languages from my own continent that I'm technically supposed to know, so her French will remain, well, French. However, between her running into English soldiers in the first game and the timeskip, I'm going to say she speaks enough words of English to get by when she first arrives. (If with a noticable French accent.)
I think that's it.
4. Moi
2019's A Plague Tale: Innocence: Okay, but what if: a traumatized teenage girl who learns to kill and eventually starts to take things much further than she should?
Me: Wait, no--
2022's A Plague Tale: Requiem: ... who ends her second game at the foot of a mountain called 'recovery'?
Me: You motherfucker.
Ahem. Hi, guys! Meet Amicia de Rune, a French knight's daughter turned protector turned... whatever she is now.
1. Le jeu vidéo
A Plague Tale: Innocence was never meant to be a Big Deal Video Game. Rather, it was a chance for a smallish French video game studio, Asobo, to take a break from the support work they were doing on other people's games - and the technical work they were doing for Microsoft's new Flight Simulator - to make something for themselves. Many of the developers at the studio loved narrative adventure games that told a strong story, and yet they'd never had the chance to make one.
And so, a small team within the studio set out to make their own story-based game, set in their own home region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, about two French children on the run from the Inquisition and killer rats during the Black Death epidemic.
Despite their limited resources, the game launched to surprisingly decent Metacritic scores, critical praise for its unusual setting and fantastic storytelling, and a lot more sales than Asobo seems to have anticipated. By all accounts from interviews, the response on Asobo's part was a 'well, fuck, do we have to make a sequel?'. That sequel came out a few months ago and promptly wound up nominated for several Game Awards, including Game of the Year. Whoops? Whoops.
Anywho. A Plague Tale tells the story of Amicia de Rune, daughter of the French knight Robert de Rune and his alchemist wife Beatrice, and her little brother Hugo. They live a relatively happy life on Robert's modest estate in Guyenne (which will one day be a part of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, obviously), except for one thing: Hugo was born with a mysterious illness that is slowly killing him. Beatrice has dedicated herself to curing Hugo, and keeps him locked away from view - including Amicia's.
One day, while hunting out in the woods with her father, Amicia finds a strange hole in the ground that swallows her dog whole. Moments later, the Inquisition arrives to take Hugo. Robert and Beatrice put up a good fight, but are killed; Amicia flees into the countryside with the brother she barely knows.
They quickly discover that a deadly rat plague has taken hold of the villages and cities around them. A rat bite causes the illness we'll come to know as the Black Plague, but there's something worse at play: the rats themselves seem to be magic of a kind, swarming and moving together as one. Find yourself in a room with too many rats, and they'll simply eat you whole.
I won't recap the entire game, but sufficient to say we eventually find out that the rat plague and Hugo's illness are connected. He has the Macula, a magical disease that runs in the blood of particular families, and rears its ugly head every few generations to instigate a new rat plague. Should Hugo pass through all the 'tresholds', he will eventually become one with the rats and could quite possibly wipe out the world.
The first game ends with the Macula apparently calmed as Hugo, Amicia, and their not-quite-dead-after-all mother defeat the Inquisition and find a place of peace.
Unfortunately, that peace is temporary. A Plague Tale: Requiem sees Hugo and Amicia forced to run again, this time chasing visions Hugo is having of a cure on a beautiful island. However, their search drags the French region of Provence into chaos...
... and that's where I'm going to leave it, because spoilers. But do note that speaking to Amicia can result in some spoilers for the end of the second game, so if you still want to play that and would prefer to avoid spoilers, let me know in the comments and I'll do my best to write around it.
2. Le personnage
When we first meet Amicia de Rune, she's an ordinary 15-year-old daddy's girl of privileged background. She likes to hunt in the woods with her father and her dog, and enjoys challenging herself physically. She's particularly taken by the sling, a weapon with which a girl like her can still do a fairly decent amount of damage. But in most things, she's just a child, with all the wonder and the entitlement that comes with that.
When we leave her at the end of A Plague Tale: Requiem, she's been broken and beaten down, has killed at the very least dozens of people in a myriad of ways, has had hope destroyed and reawakened far too many times, and she's looking to the future with an adult's understanding of action and consequence and responsibility. She's also 16.
Honestly, per TVTropes, you can sum up her character development just by looking at how she dresses from the start until the end of the games. And. Well. Fair point:
The Amicia I'm bringing into Fandom comes from about five to six months after the game's climax, and another six or so months before the game's epilogue. She has had some time to process everything she's been through, to tame her moments of violent rage and sudden crying fits, but it's mostly been triage. She was a joyful girl once who liked running around the woods, loved her dog, loved hunting. She maintained an ability to marvel at the beautiful things in the world, if only for her brother, Hugo.
And then came-- everything.
Now that things have calmed, and there are no great things riding on her shoulders, Amicia finds herself at Fandom with a question: who is she now? She can't be the Amicia who played with her sling in the forest and helped her brother pick out flowers, but without anyone's life on the line, there's no longer a need for her to be the violently protective, bull-headed pragmatist on a hair trigger she became.
Thus: high school.
3. Bon à savoir
While Amicia comes from around the very end of her canon, most visual material for her is of course from earlier on in the games. For most of her life, Amicia has worn her hair in a braid, sometimes with ribbons braided in. However, that gets cut off by the climax of the game, and at the point she's entering Fandom, Amicia has a pixie cut so short it's like two glances of a clipper away from being an undercut. So please ignore the braid where it pops up in the icons.
Secondly, she's still suffering from bouts of post-traumatic stress, and in extreme cases, can be violent if provoked. I don't see that really happening at Fandom outside of invasions, but should tensions escalate, I'll reach out to the other player before Amicia tries to shove them into a fire or hit them with a rock or something.
And finally: Amicia is French! I'm not the world's biggest fan of playing translator microbes with languages from my own continent that I'm technically supposed to know, so her French will remain, well, French. However, between her running into English soldiers in the first game and the timeskip, I'm going to say she speaks enough words of English to get by when she first arrives. (If with a noticable French accent.)
I think that's it.
- Hi, I'm Len, you know me.
- I live in the CET timezone and am an early riser, so expect to see me check out early and reappear as you're about to go to bed, Americans.
- My past few years have also been insanely busy in both good ways and bad. I'm trying to get back into the game, but sometimes things pass me by quickly. Never hesitate to poke me at prince dot of dot bitca at gmail if you want to do something with any of my characters. Or to poke me again if I fall out, because I'm always up for SP!
- There haven't been a lot of changes with my characters as a result, so you can find their most recent infopost here.
- Yes, I am collecting video game heroines like Pokémon now that we have more than one that isn't Lara Croft, thank you for noticing.
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Date: 2022-12-18 03:47 pm (UTC)Also that username is still cruel, you monster.
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Date: 2022-12-18 03:54 pm (UTC)Also: mwahahahaha