Stand in DE: I'm doing what now?

[bjornwilde]

 You character has a plan. It is a good plan and like most plans, it goes South or pear shaped sooner or later. How do they feel about this? Is it something they expect or count on, or are they surprised when it happens?

Maaaaybe inspired by real life...

Comments

[angry_friendship_wolf]

Yamato's fairly good at dealing with plans going pear-shaped at the time -- when he's in the moment, he can usually formulate a new plan pretty sharp-like and go from there, and he's pretty comfortable playing proverbial speed-chess against an enemy.

It's when things slow down and he actually has a chance to rest that The Problems start arising -- the combination of cripplingly low self-worth; an (paradoxically) extremely fierce sense of pride; and being a chronically neglected kid who simultaneously desperately wants his friends to be proud of him and has trouble believing they ever would be, are all a really poor mix with failed plans. Given the opportunity to actually dwell on a failed plan, he's liable to both withdraw into himself and become obsessed with setting things right.

Even if it's not his fault, he'll usually pretty firmly believe that there was some failing on his part. In a dazzlingly hypocritical turn, he'll almost never accept that a failed plan was someone else's fault unless they truly, indisputably screwed up.

But when he's in the middle of a plan, things going wrong just means he changes tacks and pursues a different angle, or picks out something else that he can exploit. If nobody's getting hurt, and if the plan going south is down to another planner working against him, he might even enjoy himself.

[death_gone_mad]

Amascut either burns the evidence, throws around mind-control spells until things start working again, or just stews and plots her next move.

Not sure how to answer for Fairy Fixit. I almost said that she's good at letting things go but there are some big exceptions.

Now I wish I had a Reboot-ish pup that starts hurling errors and exceptions at users when they are frustrated.

[splash_of_blue]

Molly and Sam are both honestly more surprised when a plan goes right. Sam normally deals with it by rolling with the punches and improvising on the fly; Molly copes by keeping plans simple in the first place. She is, unsurprisingly, mostly a 'jump in and punch things' kind of girl - partly because that's just how she is, but also because it just... simplifies cause and effect.

McGonagall, too, mostly expects things to go wrong; let's just call it the natural result of a life lived in far too close proximity to the Marauders and the Weasleys. She mostly deals with it by having cultivated a Look that can put fear into the heart of the stroppiest teenager, and having a reputation for unpleasantly creative detentions. She can plan and strategise, but in her experience there's no planning in the world that a bunch of teenage magic-users can't screw up.

Raoul is an excellent tactician and strategist - he ought to be, he was specifically trained in those skills. He also has an extremely healthy sense of cynicism when it comes to how quickly those wonderful tactics and strategies will inevitably go belly-up...

Poe, like Raoul, has been trained in tactics and strategy as part of officer training. But he's also younger and significantly less inclined to trust senior authority (mainly because he's not senior authority, unlike Raoul), so he's a lot more inclined to play the wild card. Not always with great results...

Victoria always has a plan. Usually with Plans B through at least E as back-up, but the benefit of a long, long life of interesting experiences is the ability to plan on the fly.

Coulson prefers to have a plan, and feels much more comfortable when he does have one (and a lot of back-ups). On the other hand, the existence of superheroes is the quickest way in the multiverse to wreck those plans, so... improv it is?

War is the reason for plans going wrong. Snow Leopard Woman, on the other hand, is the reason they might just go right after all...