Monday DE

[bjornwilde]

 Happy Monday peeps. So we play with other people's toys here at Milliways but I was wondering about any original characters we might have running about our brain meats. I figure between writing and RPG in general, we have to have some tucked away. Now is your chance to tell us about them. 

Comments

[bjornwilde]

Let's get things started shall we?

Sara is a middle schooler and quite forthright. She is not afraid to share her opinion and tends to be the leader of her group of friends. A little nerdy, she values good grades (as if her parents would allow anything else), all things SciFi & Fantasy, pop culture references, and discovering new music that is not in the top 40. She is also from an Indian family but doesn't think there is much to Indian culture since she was born in America and considers herself American. Sara is actually short for Saraswarti and she worries very much about fitting in.

Then she gets kidnapped by a faerie Lord who loves Bollywood movies. She is taken because all humans who look like Indians sing and dance like in the movies right? Sara's friends end up finding their way to Faerie to rescue her but in turn need to be rescued by her and then they all make their escape.

There is more to it of course, and I do mean to work in Sara wanting to learn about her families culture after these events, but I am not certain of the bridge that leads to this.

Honestly, I am nervous about playing with culture this way and am likely to shift it so traditional Indian things just aren't a priority to Sara rather than her rejecting them to seem more "normal". I do mean to paint this rejection as a bad thing.

[cottoncandypink]

Well, I think it all comes down to her age, and where she lives. Being in middle school, she's likely to want to fit in with her peers, especially if her school or social group isn't particularly diverse. And part of fitting in for a lot of people is completely ignoring the parts of their heritage, and even home life, that's completely different from their peers. In the West, we are trained to see white culture as the "normal," while everything else is "weird." No middle schooler wants to seem weird, because middle schoolers are jerks to weird kids.

[bjornwilde]

This is very true and a great thing for you to point out! I plan on the school she attends being in San Jose, which is pretty diverse but still "white" culture is seen as the norm. And yes, middle schoolers can jerks to weird kids, even other middle schoolers who are weird kids can treat weird kids poorly.

Funny enough Sara became Indian by a friend asking if any of the characters in this story were POC. Just that simple question made a lot of Sara's friends explode into life in my head.

[cottoncandypink]

Yeah, that's sort of how Wilbur became Korean. You almost never see anything set in this area where the cast isn't almost entirely white. Which just goes back to the gentrified hipster culture that's choking everything, and it's getting boring.

[cottoncandypink]

This is why I've not been around much lately, actually. I've got a new book I'm working on that I'd like to publlish by the end of the year, so it's been consuming all of my time.

It's about Wilbur, a Korean-American high school student from Portland. He's very lazy and unambitious, and his plans for the future don't extend much farther than getting a job at the mall after he graduates. He's also very curious, and doesn't really process fear properly, so he winds up doing really stupid things like breaking into haunted houses just to see if he can get pictures of the ghosts that are in there.

The place he breaks into in the book is an old sanatorium that isn't as haunted as he wanted it to be. But haunted is still haunted, so breaking in wasn't exactly a good idea either way.

Though, one of the things I'm having the most fun with isn't the ghosts or anything like that, but slamming the gentrified hipster culture that's just making everything that's bad about Portland even worse. I'm getting so sick of all of the "come to Portland! We're weird!" pseudo-advertising that happens with every piece of media set here. Don't come to Portland. We're broke and sick of paying $1000 a month for a studio apartment.

[bjornwilde]

Your story sounds like my jam! And I hear you on the rent. Even in the Bay Area, where rent has always been jacked, it's getting rediculous. Like $2500 for a 2 bedroom apartment which is barely 900 sq feet.

[cottoncandypink]

There's actually measure on the ballot this year (I'm not sure if it's the City of Portland, or one of the rare Portland Metro ones though) for rent control. On the locals group on Facebook, almost every day someone's posting about how they need to move right now, because some dickbag landlord doubled their rent.

Projections are pointing to Portland overtaking the Bay Area in unaffordability in the next few years if this shit doesn't stop. They've just painted our building this month, so we're looking for a new place already. Rent's for sure going to double when we renew our lease.

[likeroaringlions]

oh maaaan i miss playing with some of my OCs so bad

AU Week here lets me trot out Mr. Tetu, stoner hippie art teacher who is secretly an avatar of Thoth, charged with protecting the students of his Silenty-Hill-ish/Lovecraftish/horror-infused high school in central Pennsylvania.

Indivar Herron recently moved to the US with his busy and mostly-absent English professor dad; his mom is busy being a high-powered international lawyer shuttling between England and India (they Skype a lot and she makes book and film recs that usually turn out to have artsy mature content that is super embarrassing to discuss with your mom). He embarrassedly babysits the kids down the hall in his apartment building and embarrassedly runs errands for his old-lady neighbor and just wants to have a normal life. Unfortunately, he has moved into a Silenty Hill-ish/Lovecraftish/horror-infused town in central Pennsylvania. Sorry, dude. (At least he ended up with a cute boyfriend whose dad is with the Russian Mafia.)

Off in other worlds...hm, I had Isaac, the ghost of a WWI soldier who used to write for the Wipers Times and now is a journalist in a thriving supernatural community that tunnels beneath the Chunnel.

9-Foxtrot, experimental lab rat turned human, she was fun.

Johnny, the short, pissy, southern vampire who was reluctantly having to be a goodguy under the stern eye of his hot French werewolf boyfriend.

OH MAN I forget her name but she was an owl-headed demon who was a dorm RA in Hell University

[bjornwilde]

I am here for any modern take of ancient deities!

[likeroaringlions]

In the old LJ comm where I first played Djehuty, aaages ago, he was from the present time. It's been interesting playing him coming in from the height of Ancient Egypt, but I might pull him more along in time--it made for a different RP feel. I dunno, I just haven't quite found his footing in Milliways yet.

[i_am_your_host]

I once played a nice werewolf and a grumpy vampire who were roommates and best friends. Their PBs were Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, respectively.

But way, way back in the day I played an ex-gangster from New York who ended up in the Kit Kat Klub as the bassist in the band. Yes, it was a Cabaret RPG. I eventually fleshed him out into longer pieces of fiction while exploring the culture and history of New York during the 1920s and '30s.

[ceitfianna]

Most of my OCs are inspired by World of Darkness as that's where I first got into roleplaying, Tiwa, piwakawaka, a fantail pooka from New Zealand and Changeling: The Dreaming. I haven't played her in a while as I worry about messing up her Maori heritage but I do love her.

There was another OC who I RPed ages that inspired my screen name on AIM, an Irish werewolf from the 1500s. She was created during a strange Werewolf the Apocalypse game which happened at sea. I found she didn't quite work online.

Other OCs are incidental characters I've created in various fanfics or headcanons such as Harath, the smith who taught Sameth, so more NPCs.

[mightbeagoodone]

Well...a lot of my original characters end up in my published stores, so here's where you can find the ones I've let loose on the world.

One of my favorite ongoing characters is Barnaby Sloan, an anthropology grad student who works as a docent in a natural history museum. He was raised by his grandmother after his parents were killed in a flash flood in Ecuador when he was very young. He likes musicals, he can't cook, he's an atheist, and is working on a Ph.D on translating hieroglyphics. I've published four of his stories so far; number 5 is in progress, and I have two more planned to wrap it all up. (I like series. They make me happy.)

Let's see... some others that are just sketches at the moment are Cotton, the heir to a camping/hiking equipment company looking for something to rejuvenate the brand; Roland, a Big Name Fan whose offline life is an utter mess; and an unnamed cellist who I think is going to meet his love interest at a terrible wedding.

I am legion; I contain multitudes :D.