#but also bc i love writing sumi's perspective on ppl bc she's just...she has strong feelings abt things ASDFGFDSA

[cosmicmoved]

HEADCANON for SUMI

actually, this is a headcanon for karam too but this specific post is more sumi-centric so maybe i’ll talk about the karam end of things later. for now, though, it’s sumi’s turn bc i don’t talk about her enough (:

Okay, so I’ve decided to drag Sumi into Karam’s plotline for no reason besides that...I Wanted To but it also helps his plotline make more sense if he has a sort-of go-between character like Sumi in there somewhere. This post will explain what that means and why I’ve come to this decision! Until now, Sumi was kind of just her own character and she wasn’t really tied to any plot besides her own but I didn’t really know what to do with her beyond her backstory. I think this was definitely limiting her as a character so I’d like to use this chance to give her more direction! So, from hereon out, she’s going to be part of the Karam plotline! She’s still her own character but I like making my muses know each other bc,,,idk,...it feels like a more complete universe in my head. Anyway, with that out of the way, I’ll get on to explaining the story behind this connection! Full disclosure though, I’m sticking it under a Read More because it got kind of lengthy. I did TRY to be more succinct but maybe it’s about time I just accept that I’m not capable of that /:

First off, a lot of stuff might be setting or verse-dependent. I guess I’ve written stuff where these muses aren’t strictly based in one country and there’s always the chance of one of them moving somewhere else for the sake of a certain plotline? But the fun thing about rp is its fluidity so I’m going to try and stop getting overly concerned about details that don’t really matter too much. Sumi travels a lot. Maybe Karam tags along sometimes. Shit gets vague. It’s fine. ASDFGHGFDS......

To keep things simple, Sumi is the one who first found Karam when he wound up in the city after his forest was destroyed -- or, rather, she was the first person to try and help him. Other people had likely found/seen him but ignored him one reason or other (he would’ve been pretty dishevelled and tbh,,,probably naked bc what the fuck is he gonna wear clothes in the forest for). As I’ve said before, Sumi can tell when people aren’t human. Her senses aren’t especially strong so she can’t always place what somebody actually is, only if they’re a human or a ghost; she doesn’t have an inherently ability to sense what somebody is but, because she’s spent so much time learning to separate living humans from the spirits of the dead, she’s developed the ability to tell when somebody is neither, even if she can’t say for certain What they are. Because it’s a feat of applied knowledge and not a natural ability, mistakes happen. Now, Karam is a spirit. Not remotely human, despite his appearance. Still, long story short, Sumi mistook him for a ghost and, despite her charging humans for help with their ghostly issues, she’s often willing to help a ghost in need free of charge (because um...ghosts don’t have money). When she found Karam, he was in a state of obvious distress so she assumed he must have been a pretty new ghost, the sort who haven’t at all come to terms with the fact that they are, y’know, dead. Much to her shock, he wasn’t dead and was instead very much alive and tangible but still very much in need of help. More in need of help than she’d expected, in fact.

Sumi has always been the sisterly type so it felt natural to reach out a hand to somebody in need, mostly out of the goodness for heart and because she felt bad for him but also partly because Karam reminds her a little bit of Chulsoo, her late brother (despite being much much older, Karam looks about the age Chulsoo would be if he were still alive) with whom she is in no longer contact despite his being a ghost because he decided to use the afterlife to See The World until he was ready for Sumi to exorcise him. Yikes. That’s another story for another post. She was able to offer Karam a place to stay, a spare room in her apartment (where he’d start this new experience by staying in his room for a fortnight straight, only leaving to slink his way in and out of the bathroom), and help him make sense of a new and confusing world. First, she would offer him her brother’s old clothes to wear and then she would eventually resign herself to the reality of the situation and agree to buy Karam his own clothes, letting him pick out what he liked but also giving him tips wherever possible (financially speaking, this wasn’t her smartest move but she has a guilty pleasure in clothes shopping and the knowledge that she was doing it to help somebody else made her feel better about the whole thing).

In fact, she helped him get tidied up in general. Let him pick out a hairstyle from a pile of magazine and used her experience with hairdressing to replicate it for him. Maybe it’s because Sumi’s rather vain herself (and proud of it, mind you) but she’d fully believed a good start for Karam was to help him discover his own image and use that to regain confidence. Well...that, and the fact he’d looked an absolute state when she found him and she was of the firm belief that it was a shame for him to be wasting his pretty face on dishevelled hair and ill-fitting clothes that hung off him. But, really, Sumi sees her image as the ultimate form of self-expression. The way she styles herself is her way of telling the world who she is --- and, for someone who spends so much time with ghosts, looking as bright and lively as possible means a lot to her --- so she believed that helping Karam with that sort of thing might help him with this strange transition into a new world and come into his own. Yes, she was aware that this plan might fail and Karam might have been distinctly uninterested in his own looks but it ended up working out well. Karam is slow to warm to most very human things but he picked up on this quite quickly and was very willing to engage with it. For Karam, it was a matter of everything changing too fast and those changes being so overwhelming that making these dramatic changes over which he had full control, changes that he made himself and that weren’t forced on him, helped him to process the situation --- but I’ll talk about that in more detail another time, this is Sumi’s post.

Karam is very distrustful of humans and, although he trusts Sumi more than most on account of her having helped him so much, there’s a part of him that is paranoid it’s some kind of trick. Because of this, he tends to keep Sumi at an emotional distance. After all, despite her abilities, she’s still essentially just human and he’s been forced to regretting humans in the past (that is also another story for another time because, again, this is not Karam’s post so I won’t be going into details here). Although it’s frustrating, Sumi understands this and lets Karam keep his distance. She understands that he’s grateful regardless and she doesn’t want to cause any unnecessary discomfort. But, even besides that, their relationship is a little odd simply because they butt heads a lot. She kind of just lets him away with shit because she finds him endearing. Often, Karam won’t even stick around at her place. He’ll just disappear for days on end and resurface when he feels like it but it’s more about the choice to have somewhere he can return. Y’know, the illusion of home. 

Perhaps it’s because of that initial comparison she made between him and Chulsoo or perhaps it’s because he has such a young appearance but, despite the large age gap (wherein Karam is just under 240 years older than her), Karam brings out the big sister in Sumi. Maybe this is also why Karam doesn’t like her that much LMAO...............actually, he kinds of HATES it but asdfghgfd. In the time since she’s met him, she’s seen him struggle with things; she’s seen that he does have good moments and that he’s not intentionally rude in any way so much as he just has a hard time with certain social rules. She’s grown fond of him and feels that she has to try and help him out. Again, it’s hard to say if this is because of the time she spends helping ghosts or if it’s because he ignites the part of her that feels guilty for not being able to protect Chulsoo. It could just be that she’s sincerely worried about Karam. Maybe it’s a combination of them all, Sumi can’t quite tell for herself.