ways_back_room | Daily Entertainment.

After Data, I feel like I app'd all my pups specifically for the purposes of expressing other sides of my personality. Which left a lot of room, because I think Data is by far the pup that I'm the least like.

So that's a lot of the reason why my pups are so varied in personality. Eiji is my childish, emotional side. Rosalie is my feminine, unsociable, easily-made-jealous side. Lore is my dark, sarcastic side.

In MM, too: Julia is my cynical side. Frederick is the diva and the flirt in me (which doesn't come out nearly often enough in RL, though I've always felt it's a huge part of who I am). Captain Abrams is my bitchy side, and Julian is my quiet, artistic side. And the one time I played Nny, he was the dichotomy of a sugar high and the urge I think we all have sometimes to just go homicidal. XD

Oh, but that thread with Nny and Dexter was pure awesome. ♥

It was. I really should play him again. XD

You and I haven't had a thread in a while! I miss it. ♥

I suck lately. I think I've still got a slow in my inbox with Ford and Frederick.

I am tempted to put Dexter in MM again, just to see if he goes nuts on anyone else. I'm also way behind on his canon, because I suck lately. So it all comes full circle.

Ha, no worries! XD To be honest I've been so swamped with tags lately I'd forgotten about that one. >///< *fails also*

And you should! He's fun. :3

I don't really know if there's a pattern in my pups that's replicated in myself. With Castle, I think I hit on all of the creative parts of me that are constantly wiggling around in my brain like a litter of puppies; he's also got a bit of an ego, which I can relate to at times. But, overall, Castle's the kind of guy that will stick with you no matter what -- I admire that kind of loyalty in people and hope that I have some of it in me.

With Arthur and Sara Pezzini? I don't know. Arthur's an organizer. A planner. He's the Point Man, so he's got yards and yards of background information on you and your history and your dental habits before you even walk into the room. I guess that speaks to the part of me that's slightly anal retentive -- I have to have things a certain way or it all falls apart. (Plus, I gotta' tell you that I don't mind looking at all of the icons of Arthur in three-piece suits, either.) Sara Pezzini's a tough-as-nails supernatural heroine/NYC cop with a softer side -- you know, hidden somewhere underneath all of that armor. I don't get a lot of chances to play her, but I think I initially chose to app her because I admired her strength and fortitude.

Many of my pups use humor as a preventative measure or remedy against awkwardness, which is something I do - although they don't all use the same flavor of humor.

An exception is Ed, who is simply an expression of my inner hyperactive five-year-old.

A mix of M'ways, past and present, and MM.

Ford is definitely my reckless side. Failure to plan ahead, doing things because they sound fun, doing things because someone says it's a bad idea? I spent six months pretending to be Jack Kerouac about five years ago, living on way less than 30 Altarian dollars a day.

Harold is my morbid side. I keep things in jars (actually dead and fake things that look real), use a human skeleton as a coat rack. I find the macabre insanely fascinating, and have filled my flat with it, much to my husband's annoyance. Ask me sometime, and I'll tell you about the time I covered the bathroom in (fake) blood.

Mycroft is my obsessive side. If I don't know something, I need to go find out as much as possible about it. I don't care if I never use this information; I just need to know it. I'll often use writing as an excuse for the stuff I look up, but more often than not a question just forms in my brain, and I need to have it answered.

I'm not even going to get into why I relate with Gus. Suffice to say, I do. And should probably put him in the bar again soon.

Jools was my complete inability to understand people. He was never on the autism spectrum in canon, but I put him there because he needed to make sense to me. I was an adult diagnosis, so I really felt for him, and how confused about everything he always was.

Rusty... again. I relate to him. Hesitate to go into it.

Penn and Teller are in the same category as Ford and Harold. When I was pretending to be Jack Kerouac, I kept money in my pockets by table hopping at diners, working for tips. Later, when I landed in Vegas, I got a job at a magic shop, and started doing open stages. Every now and again, I'll do a home seance, in which I debunk seances.

Nicholas is my hatred of anything changing or being just the slightest bit out of order. Everything has to be done a very specific way, or it is WRONG. Even if I'm not around when Ryan does something innocent, like doing the dishes, I can tell that he did them wrong, and wind up re-doing them all over again.

Brock is... Well, who DOESN'T want to just go nuts and smash someone's face in from time to time?

John (Wonko) is me when I've got my head in outer space, or when I get hyper focused on something.

Dexter is in the same camp as Gus and Rusty. Boy, do I ever relate to him.

And Manny is my jumpy, scared of my own shadow side. I can be a bit dopey at times, and can startle quite badly. I can honestly say, however, that I have never gotten high and eaten a bunch of bees.

By and large my pups tend to follow certain patterns so far. Good guys, and usually outright heroes. Intelligent, capable if not outright hypercompetent. Basically, the kind of person I am and the kind of person I like to be.

Gibbs is the exception, but he was someone I played as an NPC first. And in his own way, he's hypercompetent (when sober).

Um.

*Eyes them*

...Not much, I hope?

(Manipulative bastards all!)

Sabriel isn't manipulative just very dedicated. We should thread her and Sam again.

I think I'll leave out those characters I've dropped, since I mostly did so because I turned out not to have a handle on their voices. I will, though, include those unappeds whose voices I'm currently trying to get.

Felix is, in many ways, what I'd like to think I am. He's very serious about things, almost never makes jokes, he follows through on everything he can, and he can deal with the world on his terms.

Kain, by contrast, is... not me. Basically at all. I don't have his self-loathing, his need for height/speed/wind, or his determination to deny himself things. I'm most like him where he is like Felix. Which is one reason it's odd that he showed up and stuck around the way he has.

Rose is... not so much serious as deadpan. She's very smart, moreso than most of the people around her, and enjoys little more than letting them know that. She also has a curiosity that may well verge on the dangerous.

One thing I like about Karis is that she allows me to explore Weyard in a different way than Felix, even if it is a somewhat different Weyard. She has a fascination with knowledge, with understanding, that Felix doesn't have - at least not in the same way. (Curiously, I managed to get some of this right in plotting out a fic, still unwritten, over a month before the game came out - before we had more than a few words about her personality.)

Most of mine tend to be fairly private people. I'm not half so obsessive about self-control as most of mine, thank heavens -- hi, Lan and Trowa and Hawkeye, how are you doing today? Ah, stonefaced? -- but it is something I find important, and I think my character choices do reflect that. I like to think I'm coolheaded in a crisis, too, but my characters' lives tend to test that a whole lot more.

None of them have a sense of humor that exactly matches mine, which is again a thing I'm sometimes thankful for (hi Trowa), but there's a certain overlap in the deadpan. I can't play a character with no sense of humor. Some of them fake it very well, and some of them have no sense of whimsy (which I both have and cherish!), but their humor has to be able to sneak in somewhere.

Also, River has my tendency to make ridiculous faces. Or so I'm told; I've been accused several times of making River-faces at people when I am in fact making Gen-faces.

Edited 2011-02-22 15:48 (UTC)

It takes a lot for me to get off my metaphorical laurels and app a character -- mostly because I don't get headvoices easily. (I have so much admiration for writers like Rog and Carly, who can juggle dozens of characters at once and make it look effortless.)

I do like to keep a definite distance between myself and who I'm writing, because I never want to superimpose myself to the detriment of their characterization; that's why I tend toward pups who have an altogether different mindset and different backgrounds than my own. (The exception being Raylan Givens; we're both from Kentucky, but I grew up in the south-central part of the state, as opposed to the hollers in the heart of coal country.)

'Course, with that said, you have to pinpoint some aspect of the character, some way to identify with them, and hang your writing hat on that peg.

With Kate Warner (

justdidntseeit), her character clicked into place for me when I realized just how much of herself she's given up for her family. After her mom died, she left grad school at Stanford to be there for her dad and her younger sister, Marie; during Day Two, Marie blasts Kate for using family and work as excuses to keep herself distanced from romantic relationships.

As a former caregiver for my mom -- and as someone who has been shoehorned into the role of The Responsible One, and then worn the role like a badge of bitter honor (yay, Stockholm syndrome?) -- I can certainly relate.

For Ben Wade (

almosthonorable), though? Ben is just plain fun. I fell in love with his shades of gray, and his quiet, calculating charm. His sense of humor absolutely sold me. (I'm a pretty sarcastic person, anyway, and when I'm writing Ben, the zingers fly right off the keyboard.)

Mary Morstan (

intendtotake), well, I have no real excuse for, other than I love, love, love her so much. (And the Holmes crew -- oh, my. Talk about a roster of kickass!) She's poise and resilience personified, and the woman can go toe-to-toe with Sherlock Holmes, throw wine in his face, and leave the table with all the grace she sat down with.

And then there's Raylan Givens (

itwasjustified), conflicted U.S. marshal. Oh, Ray-Ray.

What sold me on Justified, right from the pilot, was how right it gets Kentucky. I'm tired of seeing my state represented as a bunch of knuckle-dragging, barefoot, backwoods rednecks. I'm not saying those people don't exist -- they certainly do, and I'm related to a few of them -- but for the most part, we are not Man Forced To Eat Own Beard.

It's smart writing, and it doesn't take the cheap way out, giving us caricatures of stereotyped perceptions; instead, we're getting dynamic characters with real, believable motivations. And with Raylan, what truly, truly spurred me to app him was how well the push-pull aspect of Kentucky is woven in: you may be desperate to get out, but you never truly leave.

Ooh, almost forgot Gina Cowell (

deadlinedriven). I've been a Gina empathizer for a while now, and the tumblers clicked into place when we got to hear a one-sided phone conversation between Castle and Gina, with Castle waving off her demands for more copy for the Nikki Heat book he's supposed to be writing. Castle, who's at the 12th, tells her he's working. We don't hear Gina's response, but it's presumably something similar to, "No, you're not, you're at the precinct; you're a writer, not a cop."

With my journalism background, I'm wincing all over the place for Gina. I know how frustrating deadline pressure can be, as a writer and as an editor. Riding the line between friend and boss (and, in Gina's case, ex-wife) is rough, and when you're wrangling Richard Castle? He's as likely to be gambling online in his boxers, or playing laser tag, than wrapping up the latest chapter of his next best-seller.

Uh.

SORRY, GUYS. TL;DR?

(I will survive this audit if it kills meee.)

Actually, as I look at this list, it occurs to me that each one of these darlings has at least some degree of deep-seated anger and/or resentment to work out.

BRB, couch-surfing with Freud.

I just picked up a cd called Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile at Borders today. Its one I've had my eye on for a while. Do you have it?

This is fascinating to see the connections and disconnections that you've made with your characters. We also should try and schedule a thread or something, I miss you.

*hugs* Being responsible is tiring.

Edited 2011-02-22 20:26 (UTC)

I do! (Or, at least, I did -- I'll have to fire up the Dell and double-check that iTunes library to be sure.) BFF M and I caught the INCREDIBLE that was Meyer-Thile when they played a Woodsongs Old Time Radio Hour downtown at the Kentucky, back in July '09. We didn't realize it was going to be completely instrumental when we snagged tickets, but NO MATTER; the show was awesome.

(Fun fact: Current Punch Brothers bassist Paul Kowert studied under Meyer at the Curtis Institute, before he replaced original bassist Greg ohgodIhaveforgottenhislastname.)

Anyhoo, the point is, that album is boss.

Ahaha, I need to make more disconnections than connections, if only for the sake of my own sanity. ;D Benjamin alone is a pocketful of dangerous, let alone Raylan and his anger issues.

Re: threading, man, oh man, this week is doing its level best to kill me; we're all looking at overtime while we slog through an FDA inspection. I'll be around for a least a little bit tonight, though, once I'm home from the gym and caught up with Castle.

I owe tags left and right -- hee, I'm still adoring every single blessed one of Raylan's bartending threads! -- so I'll be about. I'll hop on AIM, and catch you if you're there. <3

*hugs* I hear you so much. I'm about to have a break and I feel like I've completely earned it. Just connecting over aim or phone would be wonderful. *cheers you through the audit*

I know the Curtis Institute, one of my parents good friends has actually taught there and worked with lots of students.

Well in nice news, I don't have class tonight so I have more time tonight which makes me so happy. I also just got Sherlock Holmes from Netflix since I need me some RDJ and Jude Law, someday I will own this but Borders keeps never having it.

GINA.

I'm so excited to see where we take this. :D

:D!

You and me both.

(Do you have my e-mail, sweets? You can get me anytime at sardonicynic [at] gmail; my AIM handle's the same, but I'm hit-or-miss there. My inbox is always open, though, even on Christmas. ;D)

Taking mixed_muse pups into acount:

Clementine is the part of me who's loud and flamboyant and reckless, though not too reckless; in her case it conceals a good, passionate heart, who, in her own words 'just wants someone to come home to at night'. Canon Clem does Not Give a Crap, Will Never Give a Crap until she does. THEN Stuff is On.

mixed_muses pups:

Ash Everyone tends to play him as this loud, one liner-spouting machine, but I like to dig underneath all of that for the parts of him that're still Ashley, that I can relate to - the thwarted artist who's so attached to his sister he actually brought her along on a booze soaked sexfest of a weekend with his girlfriend; . He may be that macho lady-killing Deadite-slaying machine, but that's not all he is.

Dixie Cousins: Is big and bold and loud and musical and self-possessed, all qualities I admire or possess myself. She's in love with Brisco, but he's not her whole life, which is a romantic philosophy I subscribe to.

Dorothy Zbornak: When I was a wee girl, I had four fictional idols: Dorothy, Murphy Brown, Julia Sugarbaker (from Designing Women) and Julia Wainwright (Santa Barbabra). As much flack as Dorothy got, I wanted to be wise and smart and droll when I grew up. Dorothy was just the MOST, and I so wanted to be like her.

Molotov Cocktease: Mol's the character I'm least like, but the one thing we have in common is our sense of self-preservation, though I'm far less selfish than she is (or so I hope).

Lenny Kosnowski: Oh God, I'm far too much like Lenny. Quiet, artistic, romantic to the point of extremity, probably too naive, supportive of friends to the death.

AWW CLEM!

<3! She's surprisingly complex, at least to me.

I'm enjoying our Jack and Molotov thread! Even if it is progressing slowly. :-)

Ditto! Will hopefully be able to get in multiple tags on Saturday!

Staying within the current:

Alba is the quirky, the coffee-drinker, the moody, and the extrovert that I am half-the-time.

Josie takes up the morbid interests.

Sadly, Duo and Coyote share different aspects of my terrible, terrible, sense of humor.

All of my characters are highly social- which I am- and most are extroverted, which I am not.

This is a perfect DE for today since I just updated my big ol' beautiful chart of character journals. This includes characters that I've only played a couple of times, or that I've played off LJ and then made journals for just in case I ever felt like picking them up here, or about which I thought "it would be awesome to play X and I have a great journal name in mind" and then made the journal BECAUSE I CAN.

My first instinct was to think that I was drawn to characters with a moral sense that deviates from the norm in some way—

listeningin's casual invasion of privacy,

watching_you's mistrust of the justice system that she works within, etc, but that doesn't quite cover everyone. That did help lead me toward what I think is the right answer, though.

Each of these characters is secretive, deceptive in some way. They will likely lie to you when they first met you, and probably not stop lying until they are sure they can trust you—and it's probably not the easiest to earn the trust of these people.

This secret might be an identity—see

withsuperpowers,

passionandflame,

watching_them,

godspowerranger,

spacebatman,

cplbloodsucker,

its_ironic,

winged_eros (the way I play him),

define_hinky, or even

clownbullet.

Or it might be some kind of ability—

listeningin,

soilcollector, plus any of the ones above where ability and identity go hand-in-hand, like Rei or Anna.

Or they might just be deceptive people, the kind for whom lying is a part of life—like

watching_you,

tuxaftersix,

dontcryemodoc (though she was never a fan of it), or (the way I play him)

sullen_seeker.

My OCs fit into this paradigm as well.

The only odd ones out are

voxapocalyptica and

justicarnage, so I guess they stick around on the strength of their badassery.

A lot of my characters will have traits I want or ones I wish I didn't have. Most of mine tend to be uncertain of themselves in some area of their life and this fits me. I wish I had more of Will and Jane's certainty about what they're doing and that idea of this is where I fit in the world. Demeter makes me wish I was far more sensual and just out there connecting with people. Moist has an impulsiveness that I do have at times just taken to an absurd degree.

Lately though I feel much more like Sameth and William who can see what they want to do but aren't sure if they can manage it and worry too much.

I don't go out looking for characters that are a lot like me but I tend to find them. I see myself as a support person, not the main character but someone who will be there and helping, which is why many of my characters fall into that role.

In terms of my day to day life, I think Tiwa is actually the most like me. She's constantly juggling the urge to just have fun and enjoy the joys of life with responsibilities. I have a problem with procrastination and have times when I would much rather talk about books or be silly than be an adult. I can be one and can find those balances, she just is me and more.

Edited 2011-02-22 20:22 (UTC)

My wall flowerness: let me show you it.

This comes with bonus book learning and piles of odd facts.

Not that it holds up well if I actually app Wasp a.k.a. Janet van Dyne. She's there pretty much for snark.

Daily Entertainment.

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In which Zed is revealed to be a bit mental.

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