(no subject)

[bjornwilde]

Oh right, today's my day isn't it? OK, I actually remembered but then got distracted by work and a headache.

So, not to get Joseph Campbell on you, but how about you tell us about when your character's call to adventure. Did they answer the first time or ignore it? Have they gotten many calls or are they still waiting for the call? Would they rather they hadn't gotten the call or would they do it all over again? What was the source of the call?

Feel free to answer any of these or spin the topic in your own way of course.

Comments

[holdingacat]

So I thought of multiple answers to this, so... >.>

If we're talking about Cecil's raison d'être, he's know he'll be a radio host since he was young. And possibly for longer than that. Time is weird in Night Vale, and getting weirder all the time. I'm not sure he could have ignored this call if he tried. But he didn't try. He flung himself headlong into radio broadcasting and all that entails.

If we're talking about the first time Night Vale is truly in trouble (as one's listening to the show, anyway, turns out we can be retroactive about this too, WHEE)... no, he missed that call entirely. So did most of Night Vale. Up until then, problems usually either a) happened to them, and then went away, like the Street Cleaners, or b) happened to them, and were fixed by chance, like the Shape That No One Talks About In Mission Grove Park or the feral dogs. They just aren't used to the idea that sometimes, Night Valeans need to be the ones doing the saving. And OMG it's the most heartbreaking. Actually, that... like, I think, 5ish episode run (from Parade Day to Old Oak Doors Part B) is the most heartbreaking and viciously retributive part of the whole series to date. AKA Cecil's going to have a Bad Time, yo, with a side of 'There's Something Not Right About Kevin'.
(And the, like, idk, 6? 7? I don't have the list in front of me, but, anyway, there's a long run of Episodes That Hurt More Than You Thought. Yeah. This is gonna be fun. :D)
Though, when the call comes again, Cecil (and Night Vale) answer in spades.

[fairy_fixit]

Given that I don't play any main characters, this is difficult since it's rare that stories about a side or background character's first call or subsequent calls to adventure get told. Unless it's a particularly rich and detailed story, but there is a point where the storyteller starts worrying about the effect of all that detail on the story's pacing. Antagonists get their call to adventure story's told a bit more often, though.

Anyhow, my simplest answer is for Fairy Fixit. She didn't need much convincing to hide away the Fairy Resistance in a nearly inaccessible part of the Fairy Ring Network, but it wasn't much of an adventure; she didn't even have to abandon her job. It just required her to do it a bit more poorly and to engage in some subtle subterfuge. I think she is still pretty quick to act, she's not the type to ignore calls to adventure if she's the right person for the job.

Amascut, in her backstory, seems to have acted as a moderating influence on her brother. I think, when her brother proposed searching the universe for warriors to defend the Kharid from invasions of demons and vampires from the north, she probably resisted, wanting to defend the homeland herself or training mortals to do it (which she eventually did anyways after she got back when she trained the first slayers). But she did join him eventually to make sure that the warriors they brought back were able to fight off the demons but weren't worse than the demons themselves.

In a way, for every planet they visited, Icthlarin was the call to adventure, but Amascut shot the call to adventure down with a "Nope, too weak," or "Nope, too evil". She never approved of any group they came across, though, and the only way he brought the Mahjarrat home was because they evacuated the planet with him after Amascut walked off to calm down after their demonstration/debate/ritualistic murder and deliberate because her brother and she were on the literal last planet before the end of their universe. As I said before, she was left behind when the evacuation happened.

She is still cautious about calls to adventure of course, and not only because of trauma from being left behind on an adventure. Amascut was always deliberate about her actions and she knows how bad adventures can end without careful planning and investigating first. She spends part of her time tricking adventurers into evil acts and early graves, after all. Her caution and fear doesn't keep her frozen and unable to act. Except when there is a cat involved. She still manages to wreck major shit, she just doesn't do it by the seat of her pants.

[angry_friendship_wolf]

I'm not sure if you'd call the Call to Adventure moment in Digimon a call, because that implies that refusal is an option -- and it's not, in this instance: They're at summer camp, and then the Gate above that camp opens, drags them all in, and dumps them on File Island in the middle of Devimon's reign, leaving them to either answer the call and fight, or just die.

(And as much as it's Gennai's plan -- sort of, he seemed to plan to draw the kids through to Castle Homeostasis, except that had been attacked and taken over a few thousand years prior -- it's not clear whether the abruptness of that is his idea, or the Crests just doing their own thing on their own timetable.)

Since so much of Digimon Adventure has what amounts to a gun to the kids' heads, of the 'either you kill the Digimon that Gennai wants dead, or you can't go home,' variety, it isn't until something like episode forty-two that they get an willing Call to Adventure. It turns out that given an actual choice, Yamato immediately jumps at the call and doesn't even consider refusing it.

[inlovewithwords]

I mean, honestly, that is a choice to answer or not: there's fight or die (or maybe try to find a way around it, which is answering in a v e r y different way).

And like, refusing the call like that doesn't actually make for an interesting story, because it ends too abruptly. Lots of heroes--Tavi included, honestly--face similar "do something about this or die" as the only options. But it is definitely a choice! Just, you know, not much of one and in Yamato's case a holy crap super terrible bad one.

[inlovewithwords]

Eriond: ... Not really applicable. Complicated.

Evelyn: Wrong place, wrong time, wrong artifact. The call chased her. She'd do it again, mostly to piss off Solas.

Lois: I'd say the call was seeing a girl get bullied. Lois more or less chased the call down.

R2: On the ship when his Queen needed help, didn't die. Took on the babysitting for the rest of forever.

Anakin: Padme walked in. :shrugemoji: He answered. Most of the galaxy regrets this.

Tavi: Hmm. There are kind of iterative, slightly different calls to adventure in book one, honestly. Like, his first book gives him multiple chances to back the hell out of this nonsense, in different ways, and just keeps checking with him that this is really what he wants even when he doesn't fully understand what it's asking him for:

1) The actual initial call: he discovers the Marat are about to invade. His options are basically: refuse the call, do nothing, die; run away from the call with his family, possibly have an adventure, lots of people die but maybe they live; try to warn someone or stop it. He doesn't hesitate for a moment to go with option three--and it's notable that even with an eye to survival, the second doesn't occur to him for an instant. But it's very much a localized call of "you're gonna be in trouble no matter what you do, how are you going to handle it?" But, honestly, he mostly thought of it as "CRAP HAVE TO WARN SOMEONE WITH ABILITY TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS" rather than a call to adventure.

2) The stealth, meta call: just before he takes the mushroom in the Wax Forest, his precog kicks in to warn him that taking this will activate the Vord arc and call down unending war, and is he sure? He doesn't understand that's what's happening, but he goes for it anyway--and I'm not sure he wouldn't have done it if he had understood, because the only other option was he and his whole family dies. Solve today's problem and figure out tomorrow's later.

3) The overt call: At the height of the climax, he sees the proof that an Aleran lord committed treason, and he has a chance to just let it be. He lets the traitors take the evidence, his family lives and the battle's over, he's already done so spectacularly that no one would blame him and he'd be highly rewarded by Gaius anyway at that point, it would be fine, this was far out of his league. Or... he could try to keep the proof in face of almost certain death and failure. For no really good reason. Just because those guys are jerks and were wrong and nearly got his family killed. And he knows that two days earlier he would have done just that, and literally says to himself, out loud, "Two days ago, I had a lot more sense."

And then he takes the knife and runs. Honestly, he'd already done enough that even without being Septimus' son he would have earned patronage from Gaius. But that was reckless and bold and for no other reason than he thought it was right, and it kind of sealed a lot of things for him.

4) Arguably the final call is Sextus' offer of patronage; he could have faded into obscurity right then if he'd really wanted. But no, he takes Sextus up on his offer, to "see what [he] can make of [himself] given a chance."

There's... also kind of a reiteration of the call in book four, where the universe more or less asks of him, "yeah, that plot is the meta-arc and it will be your problem, and also all the politics will be your problem, if you go ahead and take on this challenge, are you still willing now that you're fully informed and can properly consent?"

And his response to that particular call is to more or less ask if it really thinks it wants him to face it down, because if it does, he will come for it personally and blacken its sky with crows.