Wednesday DE: What got you hooked

[angry_friendship_wolf]

Continuing on the theme of yesterday's DE: What initially got you interested in your canon? What first got you interested in your pup? And, as time has gone by, what else have you ended up finding interesting about your canon or character?

Comments

[cottoncandypink]

I was already watching the channel in question, and it's always been one of the channels where I pretty much click on anything that gets posted. The first few videos were pretty dumb. Then it ripped off an SNL sketch and turned into an episode of porno cops. It wasn't until things started getting really meta with the Phone Guy and Markiplier interviews that something about it clicked with me, and made me really want to write fic. And then I looked out of the fandom and immediately noped out and decided to put in an app instead.

Really, in hindsight, I should have seen a massive shift in tone and direction coming, because that seemed to happen every other video.

[inlovewithwords]

Eriond: Gosh, I honestly don't know why I first picked up the Belgariad anymore. Cornerstone of Bad Fantasy Tropes, I guess? Eriond was a sweetie and I think with Belar leaving it felt kinda nice to maybe play one of his brothers, and Eriond is the only one I had any interest in. The thing I find interesting is that he's just so compassionate and generous without actually being totally non-judgmental. He does believe some folks are bad, and sometimes those people have negative consequences--but he has no animosity and always hopes they'll make better choices for themselves and the world.

Evelyn Trevelyan: Dragon Age seemed cool when Origins came out. It remained cool. Inquisition was awesome. I liked the plotline for the Mage Inquisitor and just loved her and wanted to see. I like her because she's got a more open ending than most of my characters and a super-complex and messed up canon.

Lois Lane: Well... when I was a very small child and Lois and Clark was always on the air, I always wanted to watch it. Then I forgot about that. Then, in 2010, I came back from DragonCon with a 102F fever and decided to watch a Dumb Movie to get through the delusional part of the fever. There was something that went from black and white to color over the course of the movie that my mom hated that I decided to look for... so I was very surprised to find it was a nine-season TV show? And started off in color?? About space rocks???

I thought Pleasantville was called Smallville. Oops.

Well I slammed that pause button so fast when I heard the name Clark Kent. And was like OH MY GOD IT IS A SHOW ABOUT BABY SUPERMAN I WANT IT. I had never had much interest in comics before but... I wanted it? And spent three seasons wondering where Lois was? And she just won me over with her sass and her honesty and her flaws and courage literally in the first five minutes she was on screen. So I played SV Lois for a long time. I still love her for being an openly very broken person who heals and grows into herself.

On the other hand, Smallville has some writing problems and, uh, is... difficult to watch, these days, for reasons. So when I heard that there was a YA novel about teen Lois Lane coming out it sounded cool, and then I read it, and... it's perfect. It's the most wonderful thing. Aaaaaaaah so great. It is a very similar Lois in personality to Smallville with a little less angst and a lot better writing. So, you know, I stick with her these days. She is also easier for me to play sans her closest cast mates, which is helpful.

Anakin Skywalker and R2-D2: Look, I cannot begin to tell you, because I was four years old the first time I saw Star Wars. It's Star Wars, what isn't fun about it. I know that I was the rare child who crushed on Luke instead of Han Solo. (And on Leia, probably, but like, who doesn't crush on Leia.) I know I skipped the prequel trilogy until the late naughts, saw it then, and was like WHAT IS THIS NONSENSE.

Later, I started reading webcomics and fell deep into Darths and Droids, and then the summer before Episode VII came out, I was thinking about dipping my toe back into the canon because hey, new canon, and discovered Clone Wars, which I had not seen before. And I was hooked. This, finally, was the prequel we had always wanted. And I was amazed that they actually wrote Anakin Skywalker believably, as a hero to those around him and deeply dangerous and already spiraling badly towards the Fall (and also deeply mentally ill and kind of controlling). He was just so great. And I started wanting to play him.

And it's hard to play him without R2 in those years, and R2 has the benefit of getting to continue on the hero side while Vader goes spelunking in Imperial bureaucracy, so it seemed appropriate to do the trash can droid too. Plus, beeps.

Tavi and Desiderius: Funnily enough, the first time I tried Alera, it didn't grab me at all (fall 08). In spring 09 I was having a rough time, and I'd enjoyed Dresden Files in the fall and tried to get back to it, but it just wouldn't click. So, on the theory that what I needed was some Jim Butcher writing, I gave Codex Alera another spin. Initially book one was really, really enjoyable--I have a Thing for elemental magic systems and for ancient Greece/Rome and for Certain Fantasy Tropes, so it was scratching a lot of itches--until a specific fight scene towards the end, with Fade and Aldrick ex Gladius. And I was enthralled by it, it made me feel exactly like Aragorn at the end of Fellowship of the Ring taking on the orcs did (contributes heavily to my fancasting of Viggo as Fade). Just total breathless exhilaration.

And then the meeting between Tavi and Sextus just made me go oh. OH. I WAS NOT IMAGINING WHAT THE PLOT WAS BECAUSE OF THE OBVIOUS ROMAN PUN I WAS RIGHT OH MY GOD THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER IT REALLY IS SMART!GARION WITH ROMANS WITH POKEMON. Tavi hit a bunch of trope buttons that I really can't resist, plus being smart and caring instead of big and strong, and also growing up into big and strong and the power creep was just my style as a gamer, and he was just so clever. I love cleverness. And the mix of politics, war, and regular adventure story, plus the idealism built into Tavi, was just irresistible. It's a wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Initially, because someone else had Tavi in Milliways at the time, I considered maybe playing Fade myself, or possibly Gaius Septimus, but I noticed they didn't play much and decided what the hey, I'll ask, and somehow made the Persuasion check to adopt Tavi myself and I just. Well. Ten years later, Alera is absolutely still my primary canon.

Once I knew about Derius, I knew I'd eventually have dad!Tavi in Bar and need to pick up Derius as well, and then it seemed like a nice way to maybe explore parts of the future Tavi will take a long time getting to. Also Desiderius is super interesting for being mixed-race and one of the first Alerans to have any sense of spirituality in a long time, and his dad doesn't get that so the things Derius does and doesn't discuss with him is interesting to play with, as is how he honors parts of his heritage and builds on the foundation his father leaves for him.

I just love Alera for all the questions I can ask about the worldbuilding, all the answers I can extrapolate and interpolate from canon and the stories waiting to be told there. And I love telling it through this family that's so complicated and has so much power and is so devoted to something higher--and not always the right things, either, but how they grow and learn and try to help their world grow (or not) is just so much fun to explore.

[configuration_birdwatcher]

Beeps are always nice!

[childofrebellion]

I'm sticking with only answering the first two questions, the second is fascinating and one I want to think on. Could we maybe have it on its own another day? Since Milliways is great at providing new angles at looking at canon.

Cassian and Star Wars: I've always had a lot of love for Star Wars with it being slightly more at different times. Rogue One came out at a point when I was all ready to love it. The Clone Wars had reminded me how fascinating and grey the galaxy could be, the Force Awakens was fun and then Rogue One stole my heart. Though what really pulled me fully into this is a world I want to write in was the novelization. After that I was all in.

Quentin and October Daye: I don't remember exactly why I picked up the first one, it was in the browsing section of my university library but I loved it. Then I was hooked since Fae in the modern world has been a favorite trope of mine since I played Changeling the Dreaming and read Charles de Lint. Toby Daye had it all, then Quentin kind of snuck up on me.

X-Men: This is one of those canons that I've always liked for the variety of characters and how it takes on the world. The movies caught me more than the comics.

Will Scarlett: I read Paul Creswick's Robin Hood with illustrations by N. C. Wyeth in elementary school and fell in love. Then there was a really old school Young Robin Hood cartoon show and Errol Flynn and its still one of the worlds that is just there for me. I get weird about Robin Hood adaptations because I've had my own version of Sherwood since I was in elementary school.

William Evans: All Ali and Crystal's fault, they introduced me to Yuma and I enjoyed it. Westerns have always been something I find interesting and the movie is so well done. Then I rewatched the movie on the Fourth of July and created a William journal.

Moist and Discworld: Discworld is a place that I'm always visiting since I read the first book on my semester abroad. I constantly reread them but never felt like I could do any character justice. Then after moving, I was thinking giving away Going Postal so I sat down and reread and realized I could play Moist. He's just fun with how amoral he is and he's an excuse to play in Discworld.

Sameth and Abhorsen: I read these books because of Mogget and Sabriel in Milliways. I wanted to know where they came from and loved them. Then I met Sameth and was like oh yes, you're my kind of character. I love that there's been new canon.

Demeter: I have a BA in classics and did the research for a masters in it, Greek mythology has always been a love of mine. Demeter is harder to trace, why her. Some of it was that Ashie was playing Persephone and then suddenly Demeter was there.

Ivan and Vorkosigan: I was introduced to these books in college and inhaled them, then kept reading the newest ones as they came out. I've always had such respect for the players in Milliways since its a world I didn't think I could do justice. Then Captain Vorpatril's Alliance came out and I was like oh yes, I could do Ivan.

Tumnus and Narnia: I fell in love with Narnia as a little girl and its a world I've often reread and in the last few years written fic for. Tumnus has always been my favorite. I didn't feel brave enough to play in Narnia when I first started in Milliways as the Narnian cast was so good. I don't remember what made me change my mind but he's one of those characters that makes me happy.

[angry_friendship_wolf]

Yamato and Gabumon: So, I remember that I accidentally caught the last twelve minutes or so of episode four (vaguely ironically meaning I missed Yamato's first focus episode, since that was episode three), and then proceeded to watch the rest of Digimon Adventure 01 fairly religiously, but I can't actually remember what it was that got me initially hooked, although I think part of it was that for the first four arcs of Adventure, there was a lot of genuine fun for small-me in seeing exactly what each of the eight partners would evolve into, since each evolution would occupy that interesting juncture between 'yeah that makes sense' and 'a bit of a curveball.' Nobody could predict Togemon, after all, unless they were paying attention during the opening.

For the series as a whole, watching it the first time through, Iii think what got me hooked is probably the reason why Adventure seems to have endured in popularity in twenty years or so, that being the pretty large ensemble cast of varied, interesting characters. The writers cast a pretty wide net with eight main characters, and as a result it's easy to find one to fall in love with -- and then it's even easier to be horribly frustrated with how much the writers forget about everyone who's not Taichi and Yamato in the final arc! Hooray? In the longer term, what's largely kept me invested is that all those characters have a good amount of depth to them that means you can kind of keep picking away and finding new stuff about them, and the world is much the same -- and since the various different retellings always tend to present that world from a grounds-view perspective from characters who never have the whole story, you can do a fair bit of joining-the-dots and figure out a lot of that world yourself.

For Yamato as a character, Iii honestly cannot remember why I liked him when I was a kid. He became my favourite character pretty quickly, though, and as an adult, I appreciate his weird, contradictory mix of traits: That he can simultaneously be proud, honourable, loyal, kind, fearless, etc; and just a massive bundle of self-esteem issues, insecurities, and social ineptitude at the same time, and that none of these things cancel out each other. When he's at his best, he still has a critical lack of self-confidence; and when he's at his lowest, he's still pretty heroic.


Eden: I think I got into Kingdom Hearts because I liked Final Fantasy. The PS3 was well into its life cycle by the time I got a used PS2, and I mostly got that used PS2 to play Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XII. Which I did! And I really loved them, and since Kingdom Hearts II was also on the PS2 and was kind of Final Fantasy, I got that and played it as well, and enjoyed it well enough. I still to this day haven't played the first Kingdom Hearts game, and also I never will.

So, KHX eventually came out on mobile around the time when Square-Enix was bleeding money and needed a few low-cost mobile games to rake in enough cash to keep itself afloat, and it managed to have a story that was actually genuinely really interesting. A lot of that was the same reason I like Digimon's worldbuilding, or the same reason I like Bloodborne's story -- you're given a minimum of story details and context clues, and the result is that there's a lot of room for piecing things together yourself.

The difference here is, as is becoming increasingly obvious, KHX's spartan storytelling is largely down to the fact that literally nobody knew where the story was going, even in the short term, and they still don't. Absolutely anything can happen, and it's probably not going to be very satisfying when it does.

[sticktothemission]

I'm a big Blizzard nerd. I remember watching Blizzcon (2014?! Has it really been that long?) when they revealed the first trailer for Overwatch, really more of an animated short, and being interested in this new world they were developing. I remember how strange a word 'Overwatch' was and loving the style we were shown. The game trundled along towards its release date, slowly releasing more tidbits of lore in the form of an in-universe blog/news report and we gradually began to learn more about these colorful, vibrant characters. I expected Blizzard to build an amazing universe because they had done the same for Azeroth, the Koprulu Sector, and Sanctuary.

In retrospect, those worlds have all had multiple decades to build their lore. Maybe Overwatch will get there one day (and I'm hopeful for big news at this year's Blizzcon), but they're certainly keeping their cards close to their vest for now.

A lot of my fascination with and interpretation of Reaper is inspired by Coelasquid's take on the character (author/artist of Manly Guys Doing Manly Things). Well, more her take on Gabriel Reyes. She's the one who really got me thinking about him on a regular basis and trying to figure out who he is/was and what led to him becoming Reaper. To really think about the inconsistencies in the lore as it had been presented to us and paying close attention to things devs say about Overwatch lore being full of unreliable narrators.

I kinda have a love/hate relationship with OW canon right now. I knew it was going to be slow coming out, I just didn't think it was going to be this slow. I guess it doesn't help that it's starting with decades of lore but's only had time for a few years of story. But hey, I'm enjoying it when it does come.

For Khadgar, I love his character and I love his world (I'm definitely interested in a World of Warcraft tattoo at some point). His reintroduction in the Warlords expansion got me to read his original book stories to learn more about him. His decades of story have already been laid out and he's a known quantity compared to Reyes. I was interested in telling the story from his point of view, this mage who always seems hopeful and cheerful and confident in the face of terrible odds. In retrospect it sometimes feels like I've bitten off more than I can chew. Especially since in Warlords, from his point of view, he actually takes something of a dark turn for a while and I've been trying to figure out how to get him there because player characters only see glimpses of it.

[configuration_birdwatcher]

I got swept up in the tide of Overwatch launch enthusiasm when it released in the spring of 2016; I had never played a Blizzard game before in my life. I read everyone's character profiles and Bastion stole my heart (I also very much liked D.Va and Tracer from the beginning; I never expected to love Zenyatta and Reinhardt as much as I do now). I also have a marked and persistent tendency to love characters more when the rest of the fanbase doesn't, and before their cinematic (which mostly just took information that was in their character profile and portrayed it visually and in more detail, but did a fantastic job of that, and also a lot of people didn't bother to read the character profiles) Bastion's combination of no intelligible dialogue and a tendency to easily mow down entire teams in turret form and then get Play of the Game for it led to them being ignored by a lot of fans and hated by most of the rest. I saw a minimally-anthropomorphic, genderless, unintelligible robot with a tragic backstory who the fandom didn't like and went "My child now."

After The Last Bastion I had the idea of apping them here, after like three years of not participating in the comm (I still had two characters on the roster but solely because we don't have activity requirements here), but I wanted to A, make sure it wasn't a passing whim, and B, get readjusted to keeping up with the bar activity, so I didn't actually do so for another year. And a couple months dedicated to research and coming up with headcanons once I made up my mind.

Nowadays one interesting part of playing Bastion is the chance to humanise the ranks of nameless Bastion units while still maintaining logical motivations for them to try to kill all the humans they saw during the Omnic Crisis (easier for mid-Crisis units like Bastion who were born into the war than the ones that started it, admittedly), because the way I play the character is that circumstance and dumb luck is the only thing separating them from every other Bastion unit. Like, they've learned to think for themself instead of doing as they're told, but they're not the only one to be sapient or capable of free will, whether by a manufacturing defect, a result of self-improving software surviving for an unusually long time, or a fluke of hardware damage like in Short Circuit. They just had the good fortune to sleep through the end of the war, wake up in a world without their commanders telling them what to do, and make a friend who was able to pull them back from the brink when their combat programming reasserted itself. (...I really hope Blizzard doesn't contradict me on any of this, but I don't think the inner workings of Bastion's mind are really a priority for them.)

I love OW canon when I get to have some. It was never plentiful to begin with except to build up hype for the launch, and it kind of seems like the budget for new comics went straight into the Overwatch League fund when Blizzard launched that; now it's just little drips spaced several months apart, and the only thing the devs will tell us outside of that drip-feed of story are things that have absolutely no bearing on the story like their preference in pizza toppings. Though on the other hand, I came into the fandom from a background of webcomics and Valve games, so I'm at least used to waiting an eternity for story progression and it hasn't driven me away from the series like it has for some fans. And it kind of seems like looking deep into the lore and doing your own theorycrafting (or following along with someone who does) is the only way to make sense of what's been given to us, since a lot of more casual fans have written the story off as totally incoherent.

[takethatnature]

It was the aesthetic of the game that got me into Don't Starve, and the lively cast of characters that got me actually invested. I got attached to Wilson in particular because his dialogue is very relatable; I too am full of scientific curiosity yet also petty complaints and grumpiness, preoccupied with my hair, and a bit of a space cadet. He's the first character you play as but I liked him enough to keep him even after unlocking the others.

The first time I heard of Homestuck was in fact crabbycustomer in one of the sandboxes back in the LJ days. I was fascinated by Karkat's world, which brought me to the TV Tropes page for Homestuck to get some context for what he was saying, and somehow or other I ended up reading the actual comic a year or two before it got megapopular. I've never had one standout favourite character head-and-shoulders above the rest for that canon, but someone in crackchat was talking about how it'd be entertaining to have Aradia be the first character apped after the Allpocalypse, and my thought process was like "I like Aradia! I know what she's like! I could do that!" Though I took long enough that she wasn't the first to debut post-Allpocalypse.

Several years later along came Hiveswap Act 2 announcing a boatload of new troll characters and Hiveswap Friendsim introducing the audience to them, and I was delighted with Cirava because of their combination of a fun aesthetic, a laid-back attitude, and a tragic backstory semi-literally written across their face. Being nonbinary like me (and having almost the same hairdo) didn't hurt either.

What got me into Fallen London was the bizarre yet humorous lore, and that's pretty much held steady for me for 7 years. Also getting into a historical-fiction fandom prompted me to actually learn things about Victorian times, so that's neat.

[elegantdisaster]

I think Wilson being your first companion, as it were, in this hellish adventure is why I have such a soft spot for him too. I do something when I play Don't Starve that I don't do in any other game: I talk to Wilson. It's never, "Oh no, I forgot to do this thing!" It's "Oh no, we forgot to do this thing!" And I think it's because he kind of directly sasses and snipes at you sometimes. He is my buddy through this, and when he's feeling bad, I have this overwhelming need to make him feel better.

[i_am_your_host]

I blame Alan Cumming 100% for my obsession with Cabaret. Although it hit a few years too late for me to see him in the 1998 Broadway production, I did manage to catch a couple of the final performances with another actor as the Master of Ceremonies. When it came back five years ago, I was able to see Alan in the role for the first time (and then several times more -- did I mention that I was obsessed?) and it was everything I could have wanted. I loved the character because he was sexy and dark and enigmatic, and completely without a backstory. He existed as an entity by himself, and it was up to me to create his history and personality. And in doing so I've discovered that he has become a far more complex character than I started with.

I blame Eric Northman-mun 100% for getting me into True Blood, but let me explain. When I first tagged Eric with Emcee, I hadn't watched a single episode. But after a few more tags, and as their "relationship" progressed, I took the plunge and ended up bingeing six seasons in about two weeks, no joke. It was then that I decided to app Pam, because I loved her and Milliways Eric needed a Pam. Playing Pam off of him just feels like one of the most natural things and I never feel like I have to hold back, so thank you to Eric-mun for that. (And I swear, I have been thinking about continuing canon. I almost have an outline in my head!)

Funny story about Preacher. Way back when, I had started reading The Boys, a comic book series also by Garth Ennis. I even apped a character from it; the old-timers here may or may not remember a Simon Pegg-faced pup called Wee Hughie (now deleted). A co-worker of mine then suggested that I read Preacher, which Ennis has written before The Boys, and he let me borrow the first two volumes. And never did I ever think that these two titles, as graphic and violent and blasphemous and bloody as they are, would be turned into TV shows, but here we are. In any case, I did like the comics version of Preacher, but I would never have apped that version of Cassidy. The TV version, though? Instant irrational love. I have yet to find out in the upcoming final season if my love will endure (changes to backstory and all). But I genuinely enjoy writing a character like Cassidy, someone who can be completely batshit but is a big softie deep down inside.

I honestly can't remember how I got into Vikings! I know I binged at least the first season online, and then started to watch the episodes as they aired on the History Channel. I think around this time I had become enamored with Alexander Skarsgård, so hey, this show has his brother Gustaf. And it was Gustaf's character Floki that really stole the show for me. Floki was the eccentric, misunderstood, misfit genius -- the viking geek, really. But he had a very dark side to him that was interesting to explore, relative to viking culture and beliefs. I'm not an expert, but I did read lots of Wikipedia entries and lots of Norse sagas! So it was definitely a learning experience as well.