ways_back_room | Tuesday DE

Easy....until it's not.

To try and be more specific:
Ahsoka is easy to get the dialog for. She's a talker. But as to things she's doing beyond talking? Oddly enough, for a character that is very physically active, she can be hard for me to see doing things or coming up with things she's doing. This is both for OOMs or threads. I find I get myself in a spot where she's a talking head and I need to remember to have her move.

Jess is another talker and usually is easy to do dialog for. She's also easy for body language and such. I think when I have trouble coming up with things for her, it's more my own insecurity feedback loop than anything difficult with the character.

Hank has recently woken back up in my head and he's definitely becoming easier to write again. Thing is, he adapts to situations so quickly or at least the present one he's in, that I need to remember to check my assumptions about him and let him drive the thread. He's also a nice change of pace as I need to think about how he can move, which means I need to think about where he is physically.

Viv is fun to write. Thanks to her voice actress, Ivy Dupler, from the Avengers Academy game, I have a clear idea of what she sounds like, which helps to get the calm computer bit. I do need to be careful to not just have the Star Trek computer voice, cause Viv is a teen and her language is very much influenced by current internet and meatspace culture.

I feel like I drifted away from answering your question. Oops.

I've been writing for the Master of Ceremonies for a long time now so it's fairly easy for me to get his voice down and to convey his personality through his actions. What's difficult is the subject matter that often comes up, and I have to decide how he talks about his past and his current situation in his own world. When you are as attached to a character that you've been playing for years, it gets emotional on my end.

Though I haven't been playing Cassidy for very long, he is among the easiest of my pups to write for. Again, I'm emotionally attached to him, so I think it just comes more naturally. I adore disaster dumpster fires.

I need to be in a certain headspace to write for Pam, because she has zero filters, and everyone who tags in has to be sure they want to deal with that (OOC communication is key!) But it can be liberating to unleash all the bitter sarcasm and irritability that Pam has to offer.

Floki is the hardest for me to write because I also have to be in the right headspace, and plus I need to be ready to talk about Norse mythology at any given moment. He has a specific way of speaking and moving, which I often have to make clear with colorful metaphors and similes as it's so much a part of who he is.

I find that writing dialogue for Yamato comes a lot easier if I compose it in my head in Yuto Kazama or Yoshimasa Hosoya's voice (depending on if it's 01/02 or tri/LE:K Yamato) first, with the Japanese pronoun and word usage that might not translate over very well, and then basically fansub it back into English. A lot of it ends up not being relevant -- it's not really important in English what pronoun he's using for people, or what specific word for 'kid' he's using, for example, but it provides useful context for me to work with.

Sometimes that works out fine, and sometimes, if he's in a particularly heightened mood or he's distressed, it's a much more awkward and involved process, especially because when he's flustered or upset he often has trouble working up coherent sentences.

In terms of body language, he's fairly easy to write for, it's just a matter of finding the middle ground between 'moves quite a lot' and 'but not in a fidgety way, unless he's nervous' and that's not too difficult.

Eden is pretty easy. He's got a cadence to his dialogue that makes slipping into writing him speaking quite natural, with the main problem being that playing him while playing anybody else can lead to his speech patterns bleeding over to them.

The biggest thing with him is remembering that he's not actually feeling anything, he's just putting in the minimum amount of effort to act like he is, and writing that kind of flat affect where he's always kind of blankly cheerful except for the moments where he drops the act entirely.

For my more active characters, it's easy up until I get stuck. Then I have to really think about their answer to a question that their canon has nothing to say about. (That's when the threading delays happen, because I need a quiet moment to think and access to a physical keyboard, and often I have only one of the two.)

Cirava and Wilson's manners of speech come pretty naturally to me, though I do have to double-check that the dialogue shows their personalities and isn't just what I would say. Bastion's translated dialogue is idiosyncratic enough that it takes more thought to construct how they say something.

Aradia and Thurlow are more rusty, because it's been so long since I regularly played them.

Klaus is both ridiculously fun to write, and often ridiculously hard. He's... almost my complete opposite, at least on how he projects himself (I have opinions about what he'd be like if he didn't grow up Hargreeves, but that's a different topic). He's loud, impulsive, overtly and casually sexual, and flamboyant AF.

...

I'm not. On any of those counts. So a lot of my writing is going 'what is the exact opposite I'd do in this situation' and choosing that. He also has an absolute shit-ton of trauma that creates a lot of quirks I have to make sure I don't forget (he can manage a decent 'normal' when sober for a short period of time but that tends to warp the longer he has to put up with the ghosts, he can and will flash back and have panic attacks, modesty stopped being a thing in the early Naughts other than, y'know, going for bare minimum so he isn't arrested... Oh, and figuring out wtf all of the combinations of drugs he takes will do to him at any given moment is... fun. ... Dear Homeland Security/FBI/whoever watches the internet these days: Promise this is all research. Solemn swear. Honestly, even my at-home alcohol selection is fairly wussy, the strongest thing I have is a bottle of port... mmm. I lie. There's some Scottish cream whiskey in there too. Yum. >.>

But yeah.

Also this is why, Lucifer-mun and Emcee-mun, that I am the absolute worst and haven't tagged our threads in a bit, I promise I'm trying I just suck at it. ... And yes. Klaus in my head has taken that last sentence and is doing horrible, horrible things to it.

To riff off a comment above, I do have to put more effort into not letting Klaus be a talking head. While it is canon (hi Diego!) that Klaus does not know how to shut up unless made to be silent, he also doesn't know how to hold still for more than five seconds unless made to. Like, out of all the Academy kids I think the only one who moves around the screen more is Five, and he's like... 13, half-into an panic attack at all times, and impatient AF. So. Unless Klaus is blitzed half out of his skull, he's moving somehow. Gotta remember to put that in.

...

For someone who's harder to write, I have a lot of opinions, yes.

Ohh it's fine! I assure you. And I want to help make writing such scenes easier to get through, so please don't worry or feel bad! <3

Awwww, thanks! I promise as soon as i have something that I'm at least somewhat hopeful won't get me auto-banned from the RP community as a whole for sheer atrociousness, I will tag. Because holy shit, there's been... there's been some really bad writing. >.

Psssh, it really isn't! And just so you know, always feel free to ftb/time jump if you're stuck. Sometimes that's all you need to do to get moving again in the direction you want.

And I'm in complete agreement with Emcee-mun here.
Neither I, Lucifer (or Elrond for that m matter) are in a hurry. As you will have noticed.

I adore Klaus.

Best quality: his wiggles

Tuesday DE

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