Dahlia has a penchant for dance. There is joy in movement, a beauty that can only be found while in motion. It is one thing to look pretty in a picture or on a shelf, but quite another to perform a task with the effortless grace that only comes from practice. Improvisation and innovation are important, of course, though the ability to express either requires a firm grounding in the foundations and the muscle memory to intuitively act upon. With two skilled practitioners, dancing with a partner becomes as much about learning to read and anticipate their movements as it is about recitation, each dance its own unique, fleeting creation never seen before or after.

Years spent studying why and how things move the way they do has served Dahlia exceedingly well in the field of robotics, and she is quick to credit her successes in the field with her unique perspective. In her eyes, too many engineers tend to focus exclusively on the their own craft, losing sight of the forest by studying the trees too closely. Even science is an art form, she believes, and art thrives through the introduction of new ideas and outlooks.

This fundamental clash is likely what eventually drove her to leave Ignis Dextremeties for BTI; the university is more than happy to give her plenty of room to experiment in exchange for maintaining robots that she already had a hand in designing originally.

I've been trying to find ways to understand Dahlia as a character, and help separate her out from the various Balinas. She's meant to be a sona for things that Balina can't do, after all, and as Balina's just me with fur and robot bits it's a little difficult to get into her head! I stumbled upon this unifying thread of movement when thinking about her a few days ago, and it's been wonderfully useful in fleshing her out beyond just a very pretty lady with nice arms.

I also will continue to praise BossLeBlanc for inspiring Dahlia in the first place, and while I owe him much more than a dance, he was a natural choice for a partner.

Art: OtherWords (original)
Dev: BossLeblanc