Character Musings: Reading Rainbow

Today we're going to be looking at Gloria Encarta, everyone's favorite summoner librarian.

Like Josephine, Gloria was initially designed to kind of just be there in the background to show that Sarah's sisters were "making it" with their own identities. While Josephine was built around being "average", Gloria was built around being "boring". Quiet, studious, uninterested in pairings, and considers sitting all day while looking at books to be an ideal way to spend an afternoon. It even extended to her physical appearance - I wound up designing Gloria as such that almost any question about her looks could be answered with vagueness, like so:

Is she short? Nah, not really. So she's tall? Ehh, guess so. Is she chubby? Mmnh, not particularly. So she's skinny, then? Wellll, I wouldn't use those exact words. And so on. Gloria was just kind of... there.

Gloria wasn't completely dull as dirt, though. She actually managed to acquire a bit of characterization early on - very early on, when she was still "White Mage 1" - that she has held onto ever since, that being that she is the "leader" of the four sisters. Individually, Sarah, Josephine, and Ariel are competent but flawed. Add in the eldest sister, and they become a cohesive unit that is much more difficult to break down than any of the girls alone. Gloria was the closest thing to a parental figure the other girls had when they lost both parents as teens. Even today, the others seek out Gloria for advice on occasion.

Then, as so often happens with my secondary characters, something happened to make Gloria more important than planned. In this case, it was The Tractor. Gloria went on a hot streak in her first few battles in Season 2, and her reputation as a tractor goddess was cemented in a fight against some of Cornwind's Mavericks, where she rolled multiple 20s and 21s in a single fight, including her finisher, in which she teleported using Exit and reappeared next to a Maverick (Earthrock Trilobyte), calculated so that her staff would materialize inside the Maverick's head. Later, in Season 3, Gloria went on another streak during my Castle Crashers-themed plot and utterly wrecked a bunch of mooks in a cave with rolls ranging from the high teens to 21, including a moment where she rolled a 1 and a 21 back-to-back, just to fake them out. Since then, Gloria's luck has not been as good, but her early runs left a lasting impression.

Gloria has something of a following, now (though all of the sisters seem to nowadays with the possible exception of Ariel) and when I asked Chao one day why he likes Gloria so much, he gave a pretty sensible answer: Gloria is down-to-earth, grounded, and multifaceted. She quietly became one of my most well-rounded characters, with unique aspects to her rarely seen elsewhere. Her and Chao's shared love of books doesn't hurt.

I put a bit of myself into each of the four sisters. Gloria reflects my childhood obsession with books. Although I certainly have nothing against books today, when I was a child they were incredibly important to me. I had and still have a seriously big library of books, and I had dozens of favorites as a kid that I read over and over. In a broader sense, Gloria also embodies my love of nostalgia. I'm a nostalgic sort of person who often reflects fondly on days gone by, and Gloria's loves of tradition, old books, and museums and distaste of any new technology that replaces an old standby is part of that (Widow Maker's love of retro video games and Sarah enjoying old Garfield comics is another aspect of said nostalgia).

Like virtually everyone else covered in these Character Musings posts, Gloria is going to return once again in Season 5. How much she'll do remains to be seen, and I actually have no real plan for her right now, but she's already shown up in Vegas thanks to my "The Very Best" blog story, so she'll be doing SOMETHING... I just don't know what, yet.