Friday DE

[bjornwilde]

What realizations have you made about your character since you first started playing them? Or perhaps, about yourself or your style of playing?

Comments

[bjornwilde]

Jess just loves pulling people's metaphorical leg and snarking...like all the damn time. It's how she shows affection and how she tests people's temperament I think.

Hank...I'm still struggling with my picture of Hank and what the films portray, tbh. I'm tempted to shelve him to see if Marvel will do anything with him.

Viv has a very clear voice and is very curious about the world. She is likely willing to talk with anyone if I gave her the chance. She's also a lot more like Data in mannerisms than I had expected.

As for myself, I think the biggest thing I've learned is that yes, I am a writer. Also, there is a huge difference between a character I love and a character I can reliably play. And I always seem to be wanting to play with new voices.

[death_gone_mad]

For a lioness, Amascut is awfully proud of her mane. I noticed that she never disguises the color of her hair (for long, anyhow) and... well, back when she was more comfortable with her feline nature, she was depicted with a mane. When I started seeing articles about actual maned lionesses leading extremely successful prides in Botswana, it finally clicked.

I am not going to declare her trans, or even gender-fluid, cause I haven't lived that life and won't pretend I know enough about it to write about it well, but she's gender-flexible? Not afraid of being androgynous anyhow. Given that gender change spells are an actual thing in canon and there is no surprise when a woman goes on a adventuring or murder spree, this isn't so revolutionary from an in-canon perspective. Also, goddess, but whatever.

I have noticed that all three of the pups I played are athiest to antithiest, and coming from a canon with actual gods that's actually saying something. Well, one's a goddess so she knows ?better? Either that or she's given up on the whole concept of religion and being worshipped. I don't know what that says about me except that I am not that spiritual?

[cottoncandypink]

Wilford is hilariously insecure about pretty much everything, which over time has become more and more backed up by canon. Over time, it's kind of developed into sating a pathological need to be important by collecting strays. Everything he's done in his life has been in an effort to make himself important, and that means buying affection. People have asked me what's going on with him and Klaus, and that's really all it is. He doesn't understand how to have a normal human relationship, so he buys affection. He likes Klaus, and doing things like giving him a safe place to crash and a job that will give him enough cash to more safely facilitate his habit means Klaus will probably keep hanging around. Wilford is absolutely aware that he is the most difficult person in the world to like, but people will overlook a lot when you throw money and gifts at them.


For myself, in all the years I've been picking up and trying new voices, I can't deal with characters who get their happily ever after in canon, or who otherwise just have it all figured out. The characters I have the biggest trouble with in the long term are the ones where their conflicts are trivial or internal. I can't just noodle around for the sake of doing something. If I don't have an end goal in sight, I lose interest almost immediately.

[i_am_your_host]

That's really interesting about Wilford. It sheds some light on that thread we had, the one where Emcee got a little weirded out by Wilford asking if he had anyone to take care of or anyone taking care of him. Like, that is so not Emcee's M.O. in life, but Emcee would find it strange for Wilford to want to 'collect' people.

[cottoncandypink]

It's something that's always kind of been there, in more subtle ways. But it's been really fun over the last year to test just how far that goes. It seems like every time a new situation comes up, the answer is always, "Of course he'd do this. Why wouldn't he?"

Sometimes it backfires, and then someone moves into his house with zero warning, but he's still done nothing to get out of the situation.

[angry_friendship_wolf]

While it's always been pretty clear in canon that Yamato can't imagine anyone wanting to be friends with him if he's not useful to them (which is kind of a deeply cruel thing to think about his friends, that they'd all drop him in a heartbeat if they couldn't use him), I didn't realise before I started playing the flip side of that: That he's very unsteady and uneasy when navigating friendships that started just because the other person enjoyed his company, rather than friendships that started because the other person could make use of him.

It's telling that, at least in canon, his friendships all seem to boil down into one of three types: The Chosen, who need him for his ability to fight; his band, who need him for his ability to sing and play music; and people on sports teams, who need him for his athleticism. Hell, even hobbies he finds relaxing, like cooking and cleaning, are things he can do for other people to make himself more useful to keep around.

For a lot of his friendships in Milliways, though, it tends to be that while he's willing and eager to help them out and make himself useful, that's not why they're friends with him -- they like him as a person first and foremost, and if he can help them out with stuff as well then that's an added bonus -- and as a result, he's wracked with self-doubt over most of his Mways friendships. The kid's abandonment issues are so bad that he really just can't wrap his head around the idea that someone might have genuine affection for him, and it doesn't help that he'd probably react really badly if someone tried to tell him that they did.