Thursday DE

[needsmoreresearch]

First off, aaaaah, I'm sorry to all the people I bailed on Halloween threads with, I got a little overwhelmed with the quantity of internet and halloween and real life all over the place. I should know by now not to overextend myself...

BUT hey, taking that as inspiration for today's DE: How are your characters about starting new endeavors? What about seeing them through? New projects, adventures, big or little life changes, it all counts. Is your character there from the start with a calendar and all the equipment, meeting every deadline? Or are they the one who stumbled into the plot by mistake? Lots of half-finished work sitting around the office for years, or do they have their handmade holiday presents ready a month in advance?

Comments

[bjornwilde]

Ahsoka likes to have plans but is learning from her master that plans don't last very long, no matter how simple or complicated. She will stick with the endeavor until the end though.

Quin tends towards loose plans and adapting along the way. He also tends towards impulsive and not thinking through the consequences. I wonder if this is a Jedi thing.

Luidaeg is a long term planner. She has lots of tool she brings into play and can seem like she's not even helping when she really is.

Hank is there with flowcharts and all the tools. He might get sidetracked by other projects or drift into tangents from the project, but he will finish the thing.

[harryhotspur]

Hotspur is the last one to the plotting party but he is also THE MOST READY. WHAT A GREAT SOUNDING PLAN LET'S GO LET'S GO GOOD PLOT EXCELLENT FRIENDS

Viola has a distinct willingness to let momentum carry her until outside events force her to actually take action. Once this happens, though, her problem-solving instincts kick in, though she has a tendency to find solutions that are more like holding patterns than actually sustainable in the long term. (you can't live as a boy forever, viola)

The others I have to think about.

[tire_moi_mes_bottes]

HOTSPUR PLOTS ONLY IN ALLCAPS BOLD

[harryhotspur]

AN EXCELLENT PLOT, FULL OF EXPECTATION

[tire_moi_mes_bottes]

I SMELL IT

[harryhotspur]

sorry i'm laughing too hard to respond to this

[tu_vas_triompher]

"I don't always plot to overthrow the king. But when I do, I prefer to do it at top volume in the palace hallways."

[freedom_is_grey]

It's certainly one way to get the ball rolling.

[harryhotspur]

You can also train a starling to remind of the king of that one thing he told you to never mention again, that's also an idea.

[creator_raven]

Better, perhaps, to turn yourself into a starling to make sure the message is accurate.

[tu_vas_triompher]

Feuilly is, let's face it, the guy you wish you were when it comes to getting shit done. If he wants to find out about something, he doesn't let little a lack of any formal education at all stop him. Make a fan? Build a barricade? Start a revolution? He's there and he'll see it through or die trying.

Bossuet is not that guy. He's the guy who happens to be standing there just in time for Important Plot to come riding by in a cab, and he has an eye out for it. But I don't see him as much of a project-starter, or really a project-finisher, without a strong social framework for whatever it is. Team projects? Hell yes.

The Chief runs a massive multinational crime-fighting agency. I'm going to guess she has some hobby projects that get picked up and abandoned along the way, but if it's important, then hell yes she's a planner and a worker and a delegater and a project-completer.

Helen Ramirez looks like she's kind of drifting in life right now, but we see that she's ready to round up a thousand dollars and get out of town at a moment's notice, so I'm guessing she has lots of business going on in the back of her mind.

Hal is a long-term con kind of a person, despite all outward appearances at the moment. Underestimate at your own risk.

Aaaand Djehuty fucking invented the calendar and won some extra days to add to it to make everything work better.

[genarti]

Enjolras is a community organizer and an determinedly democratic leader, by personality and by experience. He is absolutely the one with a calendar and a timeline and a list of tasks, going "Okay, you do this and you do this and I'll do this and we'll meet up again next week to touch base and make sure we're on top of things well ahead of time." One of his canonical scenes is, in fact, doing just that.

That said, there's plenty of stuff he just doesn't ever prioritize enough to start. But if he commits to an endeavor, he commits to it.

Cosette... hmm. Somewhere in the middle, I'd say. She's enthusiastic, and she can be very focused, but she's also totally willing to pick up a hobby and try it out for a while and then go "enh, well, maybe I'll pick that up again sometime but not right now." If she's made a commitment to someone else she sticks to it, though. Definitely handmade holiday presents ready a month in advance and wrapped up all pretty, but also a certain amount of "I'll surprise Dad by knitting him a scarf!! ...Wow, no, knitting is dead boring, how about I surprise him with something else instead." or the equivalent.

Kazul is also somewhere in the middle. If she considers something important, she'll see it through. But her home is, uh, kind of a cluttered mess -- there's a reason she had to acquire a princess to organize things for her. It's not quite "half-finished decades-old knitting project stored in a drawer marked Beware Of Leopard" level of clutter, but it's pretty close to that. She's better with endeavors than things, but still: either she'll focus in and accomplish it in short order, or she'll stick it on a mental back burner and revisit it in a few decades.

Thor is actually pretty good at assessing his commitment level and sticking to it, which is partly by trial and error but also largely because he's from a my-word-is-my-bond kind of culture. That is to say, if he starts an endeavor, he'll stick to it. If he isn't sure if he'll want to stick to it, all he'll commit to doing is "giving it a try" or "letting you have a try at teaching me how to do the thing" or "doing this for the near future, until something changes" or whatever, and then reassess a little ways down the road. So he definitely has things he's tried once and left at that, but not half-finished work shoved into corners.

[maid_of_tarth]

Combeferre is really, really great at starting new endeavors and finishing them. He is a thorough, diligent, committed polymath, whose track record for both experimentation and follow-through is scarily good. Correcting the dictionary, learning hieroglyphics, studying moths well enough to draw them from memory, community organizing, plotting an uprising...dude can start and finish a wide range of extremely difficult projects (sometimes the finish isn't happy, though).

Jehan Prouvaire starts new projects all the time, mostly doesn't finish them, but when he finishes them he goes to the farthest possible extreme with them. Hence him knowing several dead languages really well, and using them to thoroughly master the works of a handful of poets.

Fantine doesn't start new things all that often, but when she does, she does so on spontaneous impulse or because of some deep emotional reason, and follows through with them all the way. Sometimes with disastrous consequences.

Brienne of Tarth also doesn't start new things all that often, because for most of her life, she's had some project to which she's dedicated her focus. When she starts some new project, it's usually because the old one has been mooted or changed by circumstances (Renly going to war, Renly dying and Catelyn saving Brienne's life, Catelyn dying). As for seeing them through...hahahahaha OF COURSE SHE DOES even if she has to spend months traveling alone through a war zone, based on the slimmest of leads, with the faintest hope of success.

[rudderless]

Clementine starts with good intentions, flunks the execution, then blames everyone around her for her failures.

Juliet and Dixie are excellent at the follow through, Juliet in particular - she's a great planner.

Pinkie is good at planning too but is a frequent victim of Oooh Shiny syndrome.

Eponine is pretty dogged once she's determined when it comes to basically anything.