Sentience is a state of feeling that a character have. It is based on sensation that characters feel. This is a characteristic that is considered when evaluating a character’s ability to perceive their surroundings and themselves. These characters possess consciousness and self-awareness.
This is not to be confused with sapience that focuses on a character’s ability to reason, acquire information and knowledge, and think.
Relation to Moral Agency[]
A character demonstrating only sentience won’t be considered for having clear moral agency since they lack sapience. These characters may express sensations in response to something in their environment, but is likely bounded to their natural instincts or programming. Even though they lack a clear moral agency, these characters may show a personality.
Characters who are Pure Neutral (Rank 0) such as animals and non-human beings also possess sentience and are conscious and self-aware of themselves and their environment even if they do not have sapience.
Relation to Heinous Standards[]
To determine how heinous a villain is, the sentience of their victims is considered. If the villain puts their victims through a terrible experience where they have horrible sensations, then these situations can be used to determine the heinousness of a character. Depending on certain situations and the narrative, if a character does not experience a horrible experience from what the villain put them through, the villain may not be considered heinous by the heinous standards.