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amorremanet · 7 years ago

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10 facts about Sara Grace?

“ten facts about my characters” meme

1. Her birthday is March 20th, 1993 — she was born on the Pisces side of the Pisces/Aries cusp (the Cusp of Renewal), on the day that The Secret Language of Birthdays (Gary Goldschneider & Joost Elffers) calls, “The Day of the Labyrinth.”

Unlike most of the other characters (whose opinions on astrology differ but largely boil down to, “It’s silly, but it’s harmless”), Sara Grace actually cares about it and kind of does believe in it. She can’t decide if she agrees with the, “It’s silly” crowd, if she genuinely believes, or if she wants to believe in it so much that she’s made herself feel like she genuinely believes.

2. She and Lucy have been dating for a little over two years by the time they get introduced about midway through the first book, and Sara Grace…… she doesn’t NOT care about their anniversary? But she puts more effort into their matching Halloween costumes.

Their first Halloween together (2013), she was the fem!Mulder and Lucy was Scully.

Last year (2014), Sara Grace was Ariel and Lucy was her “kinda experimenting with butch but really unsure of herself in it and also trying not to be too obviously gay because her parents are on Facebook and privacy settings are a crapshoot” fem!Eric.

This year, they’re planning to go as Lady and Lady Macbeth — i.e., Sara Grace will be the Lady Macbeth we all know as Lady Macbeth, and Lucy will be her “still unsure about this butch thing but curious and trying it out” fem!Macbeth.

Mulder and Scully was a joint idea, inspired by one of the sororities on their campus holding a, “dress as your favorite 90’s TV characters”-themed Halloween party, but the other two Halloween costumes were all Sara Grace’s idea.

3. Her full given name is Sara Grace Nichelle Kelley — with “Sara Grace” being a double-name like “Mary Ellen” or, “Seung Gil” or so on. Her mother picked all of it out, Nichelle for Nichelle Nichols (…because Amanda is an old school Trekkie), and “Sara Grace” because she always wanted to name her first daughter, “Sara Grace,” and then thought it was extra amusing after she married Bryce Kelley, because the spelling might be different, but it made her name sound like the better-known maiden name of Princess Grace of Monaco.

Sara Grace herself has mixed feelings about this. Like, on one hand, it made using her full given first name hard to successfully do when she was in trouble because Amanda and Bryce never stopped kind of finding the, “Grace Kelley” part of their first daughter’s name hilarious (and “Sara Grace Nichelle Kelley” is admittedly kind of a mouthful, so it also wasn’t ideal for when she was in trouble).

But on the other hand, it’s made Sara Grace kind of hate things like going to the DMV or filling out forms, because other people will notice the, “Grace Kelley” thing and find it funny or cool, and yeah, it was pretty cool for a while when she was younger — especially because she totally wanted to be a princess when she grew up and still kind of has a Thing for princesses, and hey, her Mom named her after a real life princess, kind of — but now, it’s just tedious.

Like, please, she’s either “Sara Grace” or, “Ms. Kelley,” not the full thing, if it can be avoided, please, please, please.

(And this isn’t an in-universe fact, but OOCly, Sara Grace was named for my older goddaughter, and her surname came from my aunt [who is the mother of both of my goddaughters], I just added the ‘E’ because I’ve always seen, “Kelley” more often for when it’s a surname, and then I read the whole thing and saw the “Grace Kelly” business and went, “lmao, I’m keeping it”)

4. Sara Grace’s mutant superpowers are primarily based in either speed and, well, grace (as in: balance, equilibrium, steadiness, etc), OR in sound.

She’s not quite a potentially game-breaking speedster on the level of the Flash or XMCU!Quicksilver, but a big reason for this is that she hasn’t ventured out into mutant superheroics. Up until she makes the choice to do that in the story, she’s been one of the mutants who just want to go to school or work, hang out with their friends, watch The Daily Show or whatever they like, and live their lives without all of the crime-fighting stuff — so, she hasn’t trained everything up as much as she could do.

What this means is that…… yeah, she’s still fast, and it still falls outside three standard deviations of the human mean, even though she’s not a trained sprinter or anything (which is the most common test for, “is this thing a mutant superpower or is someone just really good at whatever they’re doing”), but she’s not as fast as she could be and doesn’t always have the hang of things like stopping, maneuvering at high speeds, not getting hit in the face by insects, etc.

Her biggest reason why she initially didn’t want to run headlong into superheroics came down to protecting and taking care of herself, because her abilities have serious downsides that can be difficult for her to manage and that can be really stress-inducing. But they’re also going to be under the read-more because they involve why it sucks to be a speedster who’s struggled with eating disorders.

Her sonic powers are a bit more trained up, partly because it’s easier to do that without getting on the wrong side of what she is and isn’t allowed to do with her class of superpower license — and partly because, although she’s primarily a dancer, she does love to sing and she’s usually pretty vocally expressive.

For the most part, she tends to limit her use of these powers to the ones that have cool potential uses but are a lot less awesome than, say, debilitating super-screams (which she can do, but would usually prefer not to, not least because she’s not trained up in it so she can’t really control it).

Like, one of her favorite party tricks and “getting to know you” ice-breakers is admitting she’s a mutant just enough to do a perfect imitation of different celebrity voices (as in, “you could have experts compare a legit recording of any given celebrity to Sara Grace’s superpowered recreation of their voice, and the experts would almost definitely NOT be able to tell the difference, because superpowers”)

Lucy first noticed her because Sara Grace was at a party being hosted by mutual friends, and during some game that Lucy wasn’t actually participating in, one of the other players asked Sara Grace to do a William Shatner voice and read some selection for a purple prose-y bodice ripper…… and she did, and it was awesome, and Lucy had to go find out who that girl was, holy shit

But yeah. All up, Sara Grace has the potential to be a serious power-house — she’s not going to get quite to Flash-levels of game-breaking speedster, but that’s on the world-building, not her, because there are some things that super-speedsters can do that I’m just not letting anybody do — but when she’s first introduced, she lacks training.

Even without training, she shouldn’t be dismissed as a possible threat (which Conrad is going to do, but in fairness, the only team members he sees as potential threats are Seb and Josie, because Josie is a telepath like Conrad and ruling Josie out as a threat might require Conrad to admit that maybe he’s not that great, and if you ask Conrad, Seb can’t overpower him or get any kind of jump on him, not least since he’s proven himself to be incredibly vulnerable to telepathy, but he might ruin things with his insistence on refusing all of Conrad’s offers to team up as proper nemeses in the name of the Greater Good and by being all concerned about other people and shit)

Like, seriously. If you ask Conrad: Todd, Stephen, Margot, and Pete are in no way threats to him because none of them is a mutant, and the only reason that he deigns to acknowledge them at all is that Sebastian insists on being a bleeding heart weirdo and won’t let Conrad ignore them

Lucy isn’t a threat to him because she’s inexperienced and confused and more likely to hurt herself than anyone else because she tries to run headlong into things like she lives in a Silver Age comic book and then gets in over her head and reality kicks her in the shins and takes her lunch money

Alexandra isn’t a threat because her ability to resist any telepathic attacks isn’t as strong as Conrad assumed it was at first, and she tries harder to stick to the rules than any of the other major cast members, save Holmes, who kinda has to respect the rules because he’s the resident boss man

(—this is not actually true of Alex, and the fact is that she favors her own personally determined code of ethics over externally imposed rules, but Conrad is wrong about a lot of things, so…… his opinions are just bad in general, so it’s not exactly weird that he’s wrong about Alex)

Julian, Annie, and Dylan aren’t threats because they’re on the same team as Conrad, despite all of them having some major disagreements and differences of opinion with him, and even when S.T.R.O.M.A. gets Dylan (which they would not have done if not for Conrad tipping Julian and Annie off about a bust that S.T.R.O.M.A. and the DEA are collaborating on, but completely forgetting Dylan as more than, “Julian’s sidekick who constantly looks like he’s only two seconds off from crying, whatever, Julian will handle it”), Conrad doesn’t think it’s any kind of problem because he assumes that these three are his minions and that, all disagreements aside, their loyalty is absolute

This………… really doesn’t work out so well

And you’d think that Conrad might get a reality check after getting arrested before Julian does and before Annie is even properly on the radar as more than, “one of the daughters of that one douchebag who’s trying to get the Republican nomination; she’s the party girl to her eldest sister’s Responsible Adult With A Cool Head and her twin’s, ‘well she wants to think she’s a serious journalist but lbr she just has a webshow where she yells at people and throws a lot of conservative buzzwords around like she knows what she’s talking about’”

—and you would be wrong. Like, yeah, you would be completely wrong.

But Conrad’s refusal to get a reality check is a totally different story

and Sara Grace isn’t a threat to him because she’s nothing but a pretty face with an anxiety disorder, who’s too scared of her true, untapped power to use it, even in the name of the Greater Good, and too scared of her own potential to accomplish anything, and probably just pretending to be a lesbian because she wants to piss off her parents or she thinks it makes her more interesting to guys or something

………Actually, Amanda and Bryce have never been anything but completely supportive, and Sara Grace has no interest in making men find her interesting because (and this gets complicated, Conrad, so you might want to sit down) she is not attracted to men

But, again, Conrad’s opinions are usually fifty shades of wrong and gross, so him dismissing Sara Grace as a potential threat because she’s untrained and has an anxiety disorder is just another example of him being completely full of shit

5. Okay, so. I want to try to keep this one brief, because I’m doing it last and this post is already long enough that it’s starting to make Firefox lag on me while I’m typing and there’s a lot of potential angst in this post already. But one of the things that a lot of people don’t acknowledge about a lot of superpowers, especially speedy powers, is that it’d take a LOT of calories to fuel those. Even in some works where they do deal with it, they underestimate just how much energy it would actually take.

To be fair, I’m not going to manage this perfectly either because at a certain point, you have to suspend some parts of real-world physics and biology to make superpowers work, and it’s just not feasible to have almost all of your mutant heroes and villains constantly hooked up to IV lines so that they don’t die of malnutrition by simply existing while having superpowers

But I am going to deal with it more than a lot of superhero stuff tends to do, and Sara Grace is one of the characters who has more problems with it than average.

The big reason why she has more problems than average is that before her mutant abilities fully manifested (which was when she was about 17), she dealt with an eating disorder. This is also a big reason why she wound up not going into dance professionally, because one of her biggest triggers was how much pressure she felt to force her body to fit certain ideals and standards — and dude, she’s 5’10” and has been really tall for her entire life, so it was even harder to do this, because she was basically trying to restrict her diet and starve herself down to a weight that would’ve been on the low side for someone with her build who was six inches shorter

—but by the time her mutant superpowers started to manifest in full, Sara Grace had actually done really well in her therapy and treatment (and unlike some of the other characters who’ve dealt with similar kinds of struggles, whether ED’s or the more general, “problem where there’s some very obvious unhealthy manifestation that needs to get dealt with, but there are a lot of underlying emotional issues you need to address too”), and she had gotten to a place where she felt more or less okay…… and suddenly, superpowers everywhere

Like, it was hard enough for her to adjust her diet and her routines to accommodate the most basic-level, “existing with superpowers even if you don’t really use them that often” stuff, and then she knew she’d have to be adjusting to college in the near future — and she really, really didn’t want to end up in a hardcore relapse

So, from her perspective, the choices here kind of boiled down to, “You can get more training and a license that lets you be what is basically a superhero and help people, but do it at the expense of your own health,” and, “You can pass on that and take care of yourself” — and she picked taking care of herself

By the time she gets another choice to get involved in mutant superheroics or not, Sara Grace is at a more secure place than she was at 17/18, and she’s going to acknowledge that this is a potential risk but it’s one that she feels up to handling.

She’s not going to be wrong, but it’s going to be a mixed bag for her, mostly because…… well. She’s a human being and this means that she can’t perfectly predict anything, so there are some things that she’s prepared to deal with, some that she knew might happen and wasn’t entirely prepared for but she’s better equipped to handle them than she would’ve been back at 17/18, and some that totally blindside her

But she’s going to grow and deal with things because…… well, that’s what fictional characters do

6. Her top three favorite songs for karaoke night are “I Will Survive,” “Baby One More Time,” and “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” (if she can get Lauryn Hill’s version of it, then awesome, but if not, then any version of it will work just fine)

She has learned, however, that she should not try to sing “Freakum Dress” at karaoke while tipsy.

Honestly, the conclusion that Sara Grace should’ve drawn from the incident that led to that lesson? Was, “don’t try to do some complicated dance moves in hella high heels while so drunk that most other people would be flat on their asses, which for you means that you’re too drunk to pay attention to where your feet are, so you get tangled in the wires and fall over in the middle of your song”

But she was singing “Freakum Dress” at the time, and while she doesn’t generally do karaoke night while drunk most of the time anyway, she primarily took it to, “Don’t do drunk karaoke with ‘Freakum Dress’ as your song” because if you ask her, she only tried to do such complicated dance moves because she was singing “Freakum Dress”

That…… isn’t necessarily true, but it’s also not entirely untrue, either? It felt true to her at the time, at least.

She has also learned that making Lucy do a duet of, “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart” won’t work exactly how she imagined that it would, because Lucy isn’t quite tone-deaf? But she can’t really sing that well, either, and in Sara Grace’s daydream that led to her doing this, they sounded great and had perfect harmonies and it was totally awesome…… but in reality, Lucy was off-beat and off-key, her tone wasn’t that great, and it was still pretty fun, but okay, her girlfriend can’t sing, lesson learned

7. She wouldn’t call herself the, “selfie queen,” exactly…… but literally only because she would prefer to be the, “selfie princess,” because yeah, okay, she has adult goals and dreams now (she’s working toward becoming a therapist with a specialty in art therapy), but she still kinda wants to be a princess when she grows up

8. As far as superpowers licenses go, Sara Grace has one that has more allowance for power incontinence and for using her abilities in to help out in emergency situations, but that is closer to the, “I’m seriously not going to do more than use heat vision to reheat my coffee, I don’t want this and would prefer to ignore it”

Power incontinence is like… okay, example: if Superman were minding his own business but one of his Kryptonian allergies got aggravated and he sneezed out ice breath or something? That would be power incontinence.

The term, in-universe, is usually used to cover things that might happen when someone can’t fully control their powers (e.g., Seb has to work to figure out what makes La Bête tick and get control over his beast-mode shifts)

or things that might happen in highly stressful situations (e.g., Josie usually has their telepathic and empathic abilities pretty well-controlled but can start slipping when they’re dealing with a lot of shit if they aren’t properly taking care of themself emotionally; and Yael might be in her eighties and one of the most respected mutants on the planet, but she still has a tendency to make electronics with magnetic parts start malfunctioning when she gets really angry)

This comes in handy because it covers things like all the times when Sara Grace doesn’t mean to rely on her super-attuned send of balance but she also can’t really turn it off

Like, if she were ever in the position to do so (which she doesn’t plan to be, but that’s another story), she could pass the physical parts of field sobriety test while totally drunk, but she’d stumble on anything that involves any talking to the officer

Because her body might be way more stable than it should be but that won’t rein in how easily distracted she gets when she’s drunk (like… no, honey, the officer did not ask for you to do your dramatic reenactment of Det. Olivia Benson’s entire personal history through wherever you are in watching SVU if you aren’t up to date on it, complete with doing Mariska Hargitay’s voice, and this really isn’t helpful)

…and being able to walk in a straight line while her head is reeling and her perception is distorted doesn’t mean that she won’t be slurring her words

—And if she had a more restrictive license, she could get in trouble for relying on her super-balance in this situation because in most places, “using superpowers to pass a field sobriety test, even if you don’t actually pass it” would count as more than, “I just want to go home and use heat vision to reheat my coffee”

Not that this means that having coverage in her license type is a guarantee for her or anybody, because unfortunately, as we already know, way too many cops in the U.S. are complete fuck-wads against anyone who isn’t a straight, non-disabled, gender-conforming white guy

And since Sara Grace is a black femme lesbian who has mutant superpowers and no arrest record but some past involvement in protests and social activism, she would personally rather not test whether or not any given cops would be deterred from trying to charge her for violating the terms of her superpowers license by the fact that hers covers her super-balance because she cannot turn it off

Her introductory scene is actually going to address these fears, somewhat. See, Sara Grace and Lucy are brought into the story’s narrative on October 15th, 2015 — a Thursday evening, which they had planned to spend at an open-air concert at a park in Baltimore, and then they wanted to go back to Lucy’s together because she’s lived at home after their graduation in May, but her parents are out of town and the only other member of the Murphy family who might come around is Damien, who already knows that Lucy and Sara Grace are together.

Incidentally, that Thursday evening was also going to be date-night for Seb and Stephen, who were going to the symphony because Seb’s parents had tickets that they couldn’t use and eldest brother Max would need a third for his daughter (and for the show to not be at 8PM on a school night), sister Addie doesn’t have anyone she’d actually want to take, and middle brother Ambrose moved to Vermont when he got a job teaching at a private school up there. Much like Lucy and Sara Grace, Seb and Stephen really just wanted to have a nice time together.

Sucks for them, though, because there was a supervillain attack at the concert.

I’m still hammering out the exact details of what actually happens in said attack, but the really important point, plot-wise, is that the perp (who wound up apprehended pretty quickly) wasn’t acting of his own free will, but had gotten telepathically taken over and forced to do it by everyone’s least favorite douchebag, Conrad.

That’s not immediately apparent, though, and for the time being, Sara Grace is more concerned with the shit that’s going on right now — a list that includes:

how she used her powers to try and get some of the other civilians out of harm’s way

how the supervillain of the day tried to stop her and wound up with damaged eardrums because Sara Grace screamed and couldn’t control how powerful it was

(it’s frankly a miracle that it only hurt the supervillain, since one of the potential risks of sonic abilities is how they can affect people other than the intended target and Sara Grace wasn’t consciously targeting anyone)

how she and Lucy wound up incapacitating the villain long enough for cops to get him in cuffs so they could eventually hand him off to S.T.R.O.M.A. officials (which is a GOOD thing, yes, and this kind of situation should fall under the emergency provisions that Sara Grace’s license has, but she’s incredibly wary and also kind of an anxious mess following all of this, so that wariness gets magnified by a power of ten)

and how Lucy did so with powers she didn’t even know she had, got injured in the process, and then passed out while her healing factor kicked in, but was still injured enough to get stitches after getting taken to the hospital

So, suffice it to say, Sara Grace is not exactly in the best and calmest state of mind when a beautiful dark-skinned woman (who kind of looks like she’d gotten home, taken off her work clothes, gotten relaxed, and then abruptly had to throw them back on…… largely because that is exactly what happened to Alex tonight) asks her to please leave her girlfriend’s bedside for a couple minutes, then brings her into the hallway, where she introduces Sara Grace to a really tall white guy in a nice suit and another white person who’s only slightly taller than Sara Grace, looks more like a guy than not, and has barely-noticeable lace on the trim of their collar, and all three of them pull out S.T.R.O.M.A. identification

Like, her immediate fear here is, “Oh, shit, are you going to arrest me, I didn’t do anything wrong, did I, hey, I can cite all the rules that say what I did was okay, I keep up on all of this…… did I do anything wrong? Did my screaming hurt someone else or something? What’s going on?”

……Actually, based on all the witnesses they’ve already heard from, Alex, Josie, and Seb are not even thinking of bringing Sara Grace into custody for anything. They more or less get why she’s scared (given that Alex and Josie have both dealt with S.T.R.O.M.A. officials being seriously unethical about recruitment and making it seem like they had to accept recruitment or get slapped with charges for violating their licenses, they’re REALLY not interested in doing that to someone else, especially not a terrified girl who’s trying really, really hard to talk tough and not doing as well as she could if she weren’t currently an anxious mess)

They’re literally just here to (loosely in order, but it’s really not official): 1. see if Sara Grace and Lucy are alright, or as alright as they can be after this horrible experience (which, frankly, most people aren’t prepared for because most supervillains don’t do this kind of out-in-the-open, Silver Age bullshit);

2. thank both of them for their assistance in saving lives and preventing more injuries and destruction;

3. collect their statements about the evening’s events, which neither of them is not obligated to give but they’d appreciate it anyway (and Sara Grace in particular has Alex’s promise that, whatever Sara Grace decides, Alex will do everything that she can to make sure that no one twists that choice to use it against her when she acted like a heroine tonight and should be praised, not punished);

and 4. offer them some information on counseling services, if they want it.

Like, the reason why Seb heads in to see Lucy alone is that Sara Grace does decide to share her recollection of what happened, but she’s still pretty tense as she tells it, so Josie asks if she’d feel more comfortable going to a different room, rather than a sofa in a visitors’ lounge, but her response is that she’d feel more comfortable if it was one-on-one or two-on-one, instead of three-on-one

Since Seb is standing, and more so because he’s the tall white guy, who Sara Grace can’t get a read on right away, so she’s not sure how she feels about him right now and, at the moment, that makes her feel uneasiest about him being around, Josie asks him to go see if the evening’s other heroine is alright and up for a talk

And Seb doesn’t mind because…… hey, if it makes Sara Grace feel a little less ill-at-ease after what she just went through? Then it’s not a big deal. He might mind a little more if he knew exactly who he’s going to see, but he literally only heard that Sara Grace’s girlfriend is named Lucy (which is a common enough name that he doesn’t even think, “Oh, she could be the Lucy who I used to know”)

—But this is only about four months after he went through his own episode of, “suddenly, superpowers everywhere, then S.T.R.O.M.A. gets involved and oh holy shit,” so while he’s definitely not in the same boat as Sara Grace, he appreciates that her comfort > his, right now

So, yeah.

Sara Grace is going to spend her introductory scene being an anxious mess and trying to keep it together, only to probably succeed for a while and then end up crying on either Alex or Josie, because she’s 22 and even after being reassured that she is absolutely not in trouble, she’s just had a very stressful evening when it was supposed to be a relaxing night with her girlfriend without Lucy’s Mom and Dad there to be homophobic and force the two of them to act like they’re Just Gals Being Pals, Totally Not Lesbians Or Dating Each Other, Nope, and she’s scared for herself and scared for her girlfriend and now that she’s thought about the idea that her scream could’ve hurt an innocent person, she’s scared that it might’ve happened, and jesus fucking christ, she’s a champ for making it all the way through her statement to Josie and Alex before she cries, I’d like to see any hypothetical naysayers do better in her position

9. Although she didn’t go into dancing professionally, like she wanted to when she was younger, dancing is still one of her favorite forms of stress-relief. Much like how Lucy sometimes hits a wall where she needs to tap out and go play Tetris until she can handle things like an adult again, Sara Grace hits walls where she needs to tap out and go work out her feelings and clear her head, and she prefers to do so with dancing, when she can.

Oddly enough, her love for dance made people think that she might be autistic when she was younger, even though she isn’t, while Lucy, who actually is autistic, went completely unnoticed

See, one of the more common and easily noticeable stims that kids on the spectrum engage in sometimes? Is walking on your toes for no reason that makes itself readily apparent to allistic adults.

Sara Grace, as a kid, wasn’t actually trying to walk on her toes. She was just in love with her kiddie ballet lessons, to the point that she turned every moment when no one stopped her into an excuse to practice something that she’d learned in class, and it sometimes looked like she was walking on her toes to the adults who had no idea what was going on.

Which led to her parents getting her tested, and granted, those tests are by no means 100% reliable…… but in this case, when the psychologist who talked to Sara Grace went, “Yeah, she isn’t autistic, she’s just really into her dancing and invested in giving it her all,” Dr. So-and-So happened to be right

10. She’s a cat person. If she could have a hundred cats without it becoming an issue for some reason, she would totally have a hundred cats, and then probably try to have more.

As it stands, she already has two of them — a tabby shorthair named Valerie (whether she named Val after the Zutons’ song or Valerie Brown of Josie and the Pussycats will depend on when you ask her, because Sara Grace has said both things before, as well as, “I don’t know, I just thought she felt like a Valerie, y’know?”) and a fluffy black longhair named Peppermint Patty (who doesn’t look like the Peanuts character and the resemblance between them is only apparent to Sara Grace, but when she found Patty at the shelter, she went, “You remind me of Peppermint Patty, that’s your name now”)

—and about the only reason she doesn’t have more babies is that it would cost money, and her current internship may not be unpaid but it still doesn’t pay very well. (Strictly speaking, the cousins she lives with would prefer it if she didn’t try to bring another cat home because of space concerns, but Sara Grace insists that she could find a way to make it work.)

Like, seriously? Much like Seb isn’t usually allowed to go to an ASPCA shelter alone because he might try to adopt yet another dog (even though he already has six and would have seven if his Chewie hadn’t passed away in March 2015), Sara Grace is not allowed near a shelter without a chaperone because she might try to do the same with kitties. When they get to know each other, they won’t be allowed to act as chaperones either, because Margot, Lucy, and Pete correctly assume that they’d enable each other, rather than act as impulse control.

Stephen is sorta kinda allowed to act as chaperone, but only for one of them at a time. It could be either one (though he’d have an easier time telling Sebastian that he doesn’t need another dog, simply because…… dude. six. it’s enough, you’re good.)

(Also, while Stephen likes all of his boyfriend’s dogs, he’s somewhat less fond of things like, “accidentally startling a nine-pound Yorkie because Achilles decided to take a nap on top of Stephen while he was taking a nap and Stephen didn’t notice”

or, “being woken up by a corgi-husky crossbreed trying, maybe succeeding but maybe not, to jump up into bed with Seb and Stephen, and trying to make Stephen come play with him, because Oscar has decided that Stephen is the new non-Seb favorite (at least, he’s tied with Seb’s Mom) and no, no, no, it’s not time for sleeping, it’s time for playing”

or, “eventually, trying to have an ~intimate moment~ — whether that means sex or not — with his boyfriend, only to get interrupted by Oscar waddling into Seb’s bedroom like he was invited by virtue of his Dad and New Favorite both being there, or by pit-mix Lola sticking her head in like, ‘Do you guys need anything? Snacks? A condom? Let me know!,’ or by Achilles whining at them for attention because he feels ignored”

—but that’s sort of beside the point, which was just that…… Yeah, no, Stephen would have a way easier time telling his boyfriend not to adopt another dog than he would, if he tried to tell Sara Grace that she doesn’t need another cat)

Anyway, Stephen won’t be allowed to chaperone both of them to the ASPCA shelter at once, because his reason will get overridden by how cute both of them are when they start looking at cute animals, and Sara Grace started getting teary about this one cat who’d been rescued off the streets after going through some vaguely defined Hell that Stephen didn’t hear all the details about, and Seb got making heart eyes at a little Jack Russell mix because they reminded him of his first dog (Toby), and Stephen tried to tell them not to, okay, he really tried, but they were being so cute and the animals’ stories were so sad and that’s why the team has two new animal companions???

—Fortunately, that’s never going to happen for realskis, because the rest of the team will veto the idea before it even gets off the ground, but…… yeah.

All three of these characters are actual facts adults, I swear

They just can’t act like it very well around cute things and especially not if the cute things involve animals

Sara Grace is also going to be low-key jealous that Seb can kind of talk to animals (…it’s not quite that simple, but that’s how this ability of his looks to her), and at some point, she’s probably going to ask him to translate her cats for her because she really wants to know that Peppermint Patty and Valerie know that she loves them, and then, she will be told that it doesn’t really work that way, but okay, he can try to do his best for her, if it makes her feel better? :/

And it does make her feel better, Seb. Thank you.

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amorremanet · 7 years ago

Note

OC asks/questions: 8, 15, 21, 25, 32? Also if that's not already too much: finish the sentence meme for Lucy?

Okay, I did intend to do the finish the sentence meme, but as it stands, it’s almost 4AM and I’ve been binge-watching old Outside X-Box list videos to stay awake, so…… I’ll get back to that one

8: What’s the most common physical characteristic of your OCs? What about personality trait?

Physically, a lot of my OCs are ridiculously tall. I blame having my concept of average human heights skewed when I was a child, due to having several ridiculously tall relatives, and then having my ideas further skewed in my adolescence by a mix of shoujo and magical girl anime/manga (where the hottest characters, like Tenou Haruka, or designated love interest characters, like Chiba Mamoru and Kashino Rei, the “troubled but cute” pretty boy from MARS, are tall), and the Vampire Chronicles (where most of the vampires are tall, beautiful, and incredibly gay or bisexual)

Personality-wise, “troubled but cute” is probably my most overused character type. Even more specifically, “troubled, but cute, and they have a good heart, they’re trying their best, but they’re still troubled and sometimes (often) make incredibly bad decisions because I felt like it would be a fun time to make them do so”

15: Do you have any AUs? — Short answer: yes. Longer answer: yes, and some of them are going to be canon, because I have the self-restraint of a magpie, and figured that…… eh, whatever, screw it, I’m nixing several of the other more credulity-straining and ridiculous elements of the by-its-very-nature ridiculous and credulity-straining superhero genre, so I can have a canon multiverse if I please. Which I do, because it’s fun. For me. Anyway, some of the canon AUs are:

The AU where most of the major points are still the same, but also, Silent Hill. Not that it will actually be called, “Silent Hill” because of blah blah copyright, but I primarily got the idea of, “horrible demonic monsters conjured out of people’s guilt and psychological issues” from the Silent Hill series, and I’m not going to pretend I didn’t.

Also, unlike Silent Hill proper, the nasty pieces of work in this universe do not have the decency to just stay confined to one small town in Middle of Nowhere, Maine. They’re everywhere.

Anyway, some of the characters from this AU get dragged into the prime timeline (tentatively) in book three, as part of a Totally Brilliant (not really) scheme by a handful of the fascist supervillain douchebags to distract that annoying ragtag band of misfit anti-fascist heroes from the actual evil plan going on. Nobody is happy about this.

Especially not when some of the monsters decide to join in on the universe-hopping fun-times. Whoops.

The AU where a lot of the major points are more or less the same, but human technology is more advanced and, in keeping with some of the more idealistic mid-20th century sci-fi concepts, while our cast in the prime timeline are dealing with neo-fascism and shit, humans in this AU are getting welcomed into It’s Not The Federation From Star Trek Because I Don’t Want to Get Sued, But It Is Basically The Same Idea, and dating aliens.

Pete’s AU counterpart got into what is basically an alien university’s MFA program in theatre. He’s the first Terran to do so, period. He has an alien boyfriend, he has never been to rehab (though, uh. He’s still an addict. And still using. So, there’s that), and his prime-timeline counterpart is going to initially think he’s pretty awesome, and progressively get super sick of basically everything about him.

The AU where Seb, Pete, Stephen, Josie, and Todd are essentially a boy band. Because of reasons. Anyone who gets dragged into the prime timeline from this AU is going to be really confused by literally everything else, because this AU is probably the closest one to how our own universe works, so like…… Imagine that you abruptly get yanked into [pick a superhero comic book universe], after a lifetime of believing that it’s all, “just stories.” It would be confusing and more than a bit alienating.

Which is not to say that this AU is all rainbows and kittens or whatever, but the problems facing the main cast are things like, “Everyone in the band has to be closeted because there’s still homophobia and transphobia,”

“Pete and Josie have probably never gotten treatment for their respective eating disorders, and Stephen may well have developed one from the fact that, boy bands are generally not allowed to have fat members, which would also mean that he’s ridiculously unhealthy since his body’s happy, healthy place? Just so happens to be fat,”

“On one hand, Todd and maybe Pete have probably never had substance abuse problems. But on the other hand, Seb still has and it’s probably very seriously exacerbated by several factors,” and so on.

Which isn’t to say that those things aren’t important and complicated problems, or that the prime timeline characters DON’T have to deal with similar things just because they’re in a superhero world (since…… they DO have to deal with those things or at least very similar ones)

But there’s a pretty significant difference between things like, “trying to stay clean” and, “trying to prevent a bunch of neo-fascist supervillain douchebags from staging a bullshit fake attack at a debate between potential Republican nominees for the US presidency, which will probably end up killing a bunch of people if it’s allowed to go on, and is part of a longer-running, slow-burn scheme to essentially make this dickbag senator from Virginia the President-in-All-But-Name”

And the boy band AU characters are super-unprepared to deal with the latter sort of problem

The AU where it’s a vaguely cyberpunk dystopia because I felt like it, that’s why.

The AU where instead of superpowers, everyone has magic

Which is going to frustrate Lucy to no end, when she has to meet her AU self from this universe, because sure, this AU has different systems and rules for how the magic works, but no one can tell her what the Hell makes it go aside from, “idk, it’s magic” and that’s not an acceptable explanation to her

—But, as she’s going to hear from someone, this isn’t actually any different from how superpowers work in the main timeline, like? They know that the superpowers are caused by genetic mutations. They can figure out different ways of handling said superpowers and systems of how to approach and understand them……

But if we look at Josie’s telepathy/empathy, Lucy’s hemokinesis, Sara Grace’s super-speed and neato super-voice tricks, Seb’s “they don’t call it lycanthropy but only because that’s already a thing; it’s essentially lycanthropy with a shot of therianthropy, animal empathy, and a healing factor that would make Deadpool jealous,” Yael’s ferrokinesis and magnetism powers, All-Star Doctor Delphi’s status as the resident flying brick with heat vision, Elizabeth’s telepathy/telekinesis, Conrad’s telepathy/mental manipulation, Julian’s empathic abilities and emotional manipulation that can be a super-effective Jedi Mind Trick and then some when used effectively, Sylvia and Vince’s essentially omni-shapeshifting, the fact that Annie can turn her own tears, saliva, and blood into all kinds of fun chemicals (from toxins and acids, to myriad medicines), ET CETERA?

……Yeah, uh. In the end, the best explanation that anyone has for why any of that works, in-universe, is essentially, “Because it just does.”

So… essentially the same explanation as, “A wizard did it,” but it’s pretending to be scientific.

Lucy does not like being confronted with this hypocrisy, but she’s just gonna need to put on her big girl shoes and deal with it.

The AU where I don’t actually have most of the details about it worked out, but in the prime timeline’s December 2007, it abruptly became the new home of All-Stars member Penumbra (nee Victoria Brandt) and supervillains Dr. Neutron and Necrotara. They all got dumped in it when Penumbra stopped them from unleashing a super-plague on New York City… by opening up a rift in space-time, throwing them into it, and plunging after them because that was the only way she knew to seal it before it ate New York.

This AU will also get dragged into the prime timeline, though: 1. that’s more of an accident because Titus, Dezi, Eddie, and Tamsin have no goddamn idea what they’re doing and are meddling with forces they can’t control (especially not Dezi and Eddie, who have no powers to speak of and are miserably inept at pretty much everything);

and 2. It’s a bigger deal to the All-Stars than to the main cast, especially to Ruby Marvel (Penumbra’s on-off girlfriend), Zephyr Haze (who really looked up to Penumbra, and she was one of the few team members who believed that he was ready to be anything more than Doctor Delphi’s sidekick), and Slingshot (her on-off boyfriend, who has totally failed to move on from what happened, and if not for Captain Firebrand and Platinum Man revoking his ability to get into R&D without a babysitter, he likely would’ve broken space-time to get Penumbra back years ago)

Like, I’m not saying, “He has handled this like Silver Age Spiderman trying to kill the Green Goblin as vengeance for Norman Osborne murdering Gwen Stacy.”

I’m saying, “Slingshot has handled Penumbra’s effective death like that thing I just said magnified by a power of ten because, as far as he knows, getting her back into the prime timeline could potentially be cataclysmic, and he does not care. He has also spectacularly failed to listen to any and all attempts at getting him to respect her choice here, and the only reason he hasn’t gone full grimdark like a mid-90’s to mid-2000’s Dark Age drama-bomb of toxic masculinity and manpain? Is that he isn’t allowed into R&D at All-Stars Tower without a babysitter.”

However this AU works, Adelaide’s AU counterpart is going to be kind of a mess at getting dragged into the prime timeline, on one hand because her prime timeline self doesn’t have powers but decided to affiliate herself with a bunch of heroes anyway (while dumpster fire AU!Adelaide has superpowers and has been a hero and it’s gone Other Than Well for her), and on the other because her prime timeline brothers are alive and haven’t gotten killed by her supervillain nemeses

Dumpster fire AU!Adelaide is going to be more of a mess over a lot of things like, “On one hand, her little brother lived past 20 and swears he’s got a good life and his boyfriend is nice (yay!), but on the other, he’s a mentally ill recovering addict and also a superhero and for some reason, her prime timeline self is, as far as dumpster fire AU!Adelaide can tell, just okay with this”

And, “Her prime timeline self has a niece who actually knows what it’s like to have a father in her life, because dumpster fire AU!Adelaide’s Max got killed off while Linda was pregnant and Linda is probably a great single mom, but dumpster fire AU!Adelaide wouldn’t know because after Seb and Ambrose had both gotten killed (albeit by different villains), the common theme that emerged was the boys getting killed by supervillains and having a superhero sister, and okay, Linda did not explicitly blame Adelaide (Linda’s feelings about all of this are conflicted and messy)

“—but dumpster fire!Adelaide decided that the best thing to do was to basically cut herself off from friends, family, and loved ones, barring her AU’s Pete, who has become her co-hero, and a dog, because like her baby brother, Adelaide loves dogs and sometimes uses them as a substitute for interpersonal contact and connections”

Prime timeline Addie is seriously weirded out by her AU self’s complete lack of chill. Which says a lot, because Addie-prime actively repels anything that even vaguely resembles chill.

The AU where Margot and Seb didn’t get to be friends in undergrad, and her parents never disowned her, and she wound up filthy rich in her own right and having far fewer near brushes with death…… but also wound up: closeted and basically leading a double-life to keep from getting outed; very lonely; more miserable than she would like to think; and taking more than a few cues from Adrian “Ozymandias” Veidt of Watchmen

—Which is to say that, while she still doesn’t have any literal superpowers, she is deeply closeted and convinced that the only way to save humanity from itself might just need to involve doing something extreme that successfully makes humanity put aside their differences and unite against a perceived larger threat (and also distracts them so that Margot and her loosely affiliated AU associates can, “solve the underlying problems” unimpeded)

As prime timeline Margot will definitely point out: ideas like that literally only work on paper or in theory. In practice, humans are chaotic and messy and impossible to predict with any real accuracy, so there is no possible way to guarantee that killing a bunch of people and blaming it on aliens or whatever will make everyone decide to get along and sing songs underneath of a rainbow like some vintage Coca-Cola commercial.

Oh, and if Ozymandias AU!Margot actually thinks that nobody will notice if she and her cohorts, what, like…… use the world banks to redistribute the world’s wealth and make sure that the 1% can’t get it back (which would include AU!Margot herself and her cohorts, even though most of them don’t know she’s planning to do that), change a bunch of laws and policies they don’t agree with, and institute some kind of secret shadow government over the entire world?

Here’s a hint, Ozymandias AU!Margot: people will definitely notice that, and a lot of them won’t be too keen on letting you get away with it.

Furthermore, not only will people definitely notice that, but it won’t actually fix things as much as you want it to do. It would have some benefits, sure, and some of the ideas you’re trying to put into practice here are not inherently bad — like redistributing the wealth and putting hella restrictions on the same patterns of capitalist exploitation that made you rich in the first place — but one of the underlying flaws in AU!Margot’s approach is that, again, she’s ignoring the human element of everything

In other words: sure, redistributing the wealth is a nice idea and it would definitely have some positive benefits, but you cannot magic away the scars of aforementioned capitalist exploitation by throwing money at them, nor should you expect people who have been exploited, dehumanized, murdered, etc. under said patterns to not be upset about their suffering just because they now have money.

More generally, expecting people to always react in predictable ways is a bad idea. Expecting people to be okay with things that you erroneously think you would totally be okay with, if you were in their position is a bad idea. Behaving like a supervillain, even if you think you’re doing it for the right reasons and even if there might be some temporary short-term benefits? Is a BAD IDEA (especially when your plans have some major, egregious oversights).

Also, ew, Ozymandias AU!self, but out of all the ladies with whom you could be having a secret affair, why the fuck are you having it with your AU’s Melanie Drake (the firstborn daughter of the guy who the prime timeline Biggest Bad wants to put in power as his puppet, who is, herself, an active and enthusiastic participant in fascist supervillain hijinks).

In Ozymandias AU!Margot’s defense, her universe’s Melanie still has the conviction that everything she’s doing is for the Greater Good, but although she hasn’t gotten away from her nuclear reactor meltdown of an abusive shit-show family, she did come to believe in a different vision of, “the Greater Good.”

I mean. The nicest thing that can be said about it is that her vision of, “the Greater Good” isn’t a fascistic one and is, much like Ozymandias AU!Margot’s entire scheme, largely born out of good or at least okay-ish intentions, but really fucked up wrt the execution. But it’s not like Ozymandias AU!Margot is having a secret sexy affair with a neo-fascist supervillain.

She’s…… uh. Having a secret sexy affair with someone else who, in their AU, considers herself to be, “one of the heroes that this world needs but won’t accept,” and both of them are pretty fucked up, morally and ethically speaking, though not so much so that they wouldn’t be horrified by the Melanie of the prime timeline (who is, in fairness, pretty horrific. She’s also engaged to Titus, who is equally horrible but for some different reasons)

Anyway, the point is that Margot-prime super doesn’t expect any Melanie to be the secret girlfriend for any of her AU selves, and she’s really not happy about it, but also biased due to shit like, “Melanie-prime is an actual facts fascist supervillain”

And shit like, “Melanie-prime has hurt Margot-prime’s friends, and no, she doesn’t care that it was always in a superhero vs. supervillain fight, or that Seb has a healing factor, or that Pete accidentally made shit get violent on at least one occasion by running his mouth when he knew that he should have shut up, or that Lucy has run headlong into situations where a little bit of chill could’ve gone a long way and then people started throwing punches, la la la, go away context, Margot can’t hear you, Melanie has hurt her friends And That’s Terrible”

The mundane AU where, in addition to not being superheroes, Seb and Stephen met each other about ten years earlier and were a lot less gun-shy about being super into each other, not least because neither of them had been burned too badly in romance before (even given that they’d both had some negative experiences with it), and while both of them still had some big deal underlying issues with self-esteem, neither of them played any weird little head-games with himself to the tune of, “Oh, I shouldn’t voice my interest because he’s probably not interested in me because reasons, he’s probably just being nice”

On one hand, this AU wound up sparing both of them certain shitty experiences that their prime-timeline counterparts dealt with in their 20’s (not all of them, granted, and like — this AU’s Seb is still a recovering addict, and this AU’s Stephen has still dealt with a ton of bullshit about body image and fatphobia).

But on the other, they broke up and it’s…… amicable? Mostly? But still kind of emotionally tense for several reasons, not least of which is how instead of playing any, “he’s probably not really interested” head-games with themselves at the outset of their relationship and working through it, they were together for a long time, and danced around the idea of getting married…

…but neither of them told the other about wanting to get married because each of them thought that the other would never be into that idea because Reasons. Presumptions were made, miscommunication ensued, they eventually split up, each of them took it as a definite sign of, “I was right, he never would’ve been into getting married,” and they’ve mostly moved on and repaired the non-romantic friendship parts here.

Until they get dragged into the prime timeline and find that their counterparts are significantly more messed up as individuals but actually making a relationship work, but also at a point of, “They’ve been having some issues that have nothing to do with the superhero thing, and each of them is kind of seriously thinking about proposing but keeps getting cold feet about it”

Watching your alternate universe selves get engaged in the middle of a drag show on one of their birthdays is…… special.

Doing so after telling one or the other of them why you ever broke up is…… uh. Let’s just call it, “double special” and move on.

Also, powerless AU!Seb…… will be really conflicted about his prime timeline self being a superhero, partly out of concern (since this hero business seems to be working out okay, but it all sounds stressful and dangerous, and yes, Seb-prime literally can’t get intoxicated anymore — at least, not on any of the, “normal stuff,” i.e., “psychoactive substances that were not created by other mutants” — but…… how is being a superhero NOT a relapse trigger waiting to happen. To paraphrase Joan Watson, how is being a superhero NOT a giant gun filled with drugs and alcohol, pointed right at Seb-prime)

…partly out admiration (because the superhero stuff actually is working out decently, and powerless AU!Seb has to respect his prime timeline counterpart’s hijinks and dedication to helping people)

……and partly out of jealousy and getting kicked in the, “you’re kind of a worthless fuck-up, aren’t you?” feelings

because yes, powerless!Seb has found his own bliss in academia, and he is more or less at peace with it, most of the time……

but he’s torn because he wants to be helping people, and he largely went down the academic track to help himself

—which, in this case, means, “to something to work on and do with himself that wouldn’t feel like a complete waste of time, even if it didn’t exactly make him feel fulfilled, because he needed something to do other than, ‘try to find peace and sobriety by isolating himself from as much of life as possible,’” so it’s not like he is being selfish in a way that actively screws over anyone else; he is being selfish in a way that displays self-preservation—

—and okay, powerless!Seb has a list of things that he tries to tell himself about how this life-choice isn’t antithetical to the idea of helping people because he mentors students, and his research helps in X or Y or Z convoluted fashion, and he uses his access to academic databases to get around paywalls for other people who don’t have that access and to then hook them up with what they need……

But that’s still not the kind of helping people that he wanted to get into and it doesn’t really feel like he’s helping anyone, and it’s a pretty big kick in the stomach for him to get yanked into the prime timeline and see Seb-prime… actively helping other people as a superhero and ostensibly doing better at staying sober because of the superhero thing, rather than in spite of it, and what the fuck, how is this FAIR, how come he can do that and powerless!Seb CAN’T)

Even without the part where Seb-prime literally can’t get intoxicated on, “the normal stuff” anymore, the situation is a lot more complicated than powerless!Seb thinks it is, but in fairness to him, he’s probably only been stuck in this unfamiliar timeline for two weeks, max, when he has this little jealousy-induced meltdown

He probably ends up getting helped to chill out by Stephen-prime, which is its own messy and confusing kettle of monkeys for both parties because of intricate, complicated ontological questions like, “Is it cheating if I don’t actually do anything with my (ex-)boyfriend’s alternate universe counterpart, but feel attracted to him and definitely THINK about doing things with him?”

……The sad part is that all four of these losers WOULD actually make that complicated question, but it would be less because of the actual thorny issues about being and the nature of existence, and more because all of them would have a mental double-standard like, “Well, if I did it, then it would definitely be wrong, but it wouldn’t be wrong if my boyfriend did it because of reasons”

Seb and Stephen-prime may not need to deal with that specific question but the whole underlying, “Things that other people are allowed to do are wrong when I do them because of reasons” business is something they have to suck it up and work on, as individuals and in the context of their relationship

The AU where Josie actually got to go into fashion design, because they didn’t have their entire career ruined before it began by a mix of a douchebag ex-boyfriend whose parents were in good with Anna Wintour, and an abrupt, stress-triggered anorexic relapse that led to an even more stressful superpower awakening

Keeping with the, “mirror mirror on the wall, it’s fuck with my characters o’clock, let’s go…… all” theme among a lot of these AUs and the different respective versions of the characters, fashionista AU!Josie has a lot of things that Josie-prime wants and a lot of aspects of their life make Josie-prime jealous, but they are actually a huge mess in their own right

I’m still working out how, exactly, they are a huge mess, and so far, all I’ve really thought of is that it would amuse me if they were dating their AU’s Todd, but I’m not sure where I want to go with that and it’s also not actually going to be an issue for a while yet, so the idea has time to percolate

and the canonical coffee-shop AU.

The canonical coffee-shop AU is a horrifying dystopia where the bad guys won before most of the main cast were even ten years old — like, that AU’s Lucy and Sara Grace literally have no conscious memories of life ever being any different, they were that young when everything went to Hell — and that AU’s version of Senator Huntington (R-Virginia), the aforementioned Biggest Bad, took a lot of cues from Brave New World about how to run his dystopia

Like, there are several things that he would nix

e.g., the ostensible sex-positivity and alleged sexual equality of Aldous Huxley’s dystopia that is, in its own way, just another way of creating sex/gender-based INequality and blah blah blah

That would go right out the window because as far as dystopias go, wrt sex and the (im)morality thereof? Huntington thinks that Margaret Atwood’s Republic of Gideon from The Handmaid’s Tale had more or less the right idea, though he would also acquiesce that, if you want it to work, you’d need to build up to that, rather than dumping it on everyone all at once

He would also nix some of the more scientific aspects of the BNW dystopia, because he realizes that they’re not actually as likely to work out decently as Huxley seems to have thought in the novel

Like, Huntington would definitely still want there to be several strata of social inequalities that all serve to support a big pyramid that he can be on top of

……but he wouldn’t want to have those things artificially created in a lab because he thinks that sex is the best way to control a lot of the people under his power because even the ones who aren’t “perverts” — which, to him, means basically everyone who isn’t a heterosexual who only ever wants to have sex in the missionary position for the express purpose of procreation — are still “weakened” by their dependence on human connections (read: any desire to have meaningful human connections), and all of them inevitably want those connections to be expressed through sex because they’re all idiots in the end

For the record: Huntington’s attitude about sex is derived from the attitudes of real-world right-wing Christians in the States who love to play the game of shaming anyone who has any sexual desires, ever, because even though they also say that said desires come from God because they’re expressions of love and whatnot, they could just as easily come from Satan if the preacher in question doesn’t approve of them, personally.

The religious aspect only seems pasted-on whenever Huntington talks about any of this because…… Well, for him? It is. He doesn’t actually believe in God, or Jesus, or much of anything beyond his own power and his own right to have whatever he wants because he showed up and decided he deserves it.

Any time he talks about God or religion, he’s merely catering to his constituents by playing a version of himself who DOES believe in God because he’s reasonably certain he would never hold any elected office if he didn’t project the image of being a righteous, God-fearing man who is filled with the love of Jesus. But I digress.

So, yeah. Brave New!Huntington wouldn’t want to have all of his social inequalities baked into the population due to how people are grown in laboratories, but the general idea of, “keep the populace medicated into submission, throw them some bread and circuses and maybe a bit of pasted-on happiness, don’t let them think for themselves but give them the illusion of thinking for themselves, etc.”? Huntington is all about that.

Another reason why he vetoes the, “let’s grow all humans in laboratory test tubes lmao” idea is that he figures he can better play into the idea of all people being essentially equal, which helps keep the populace docile as long as they believe in it, if he lets them handle their own relationships and procreation. Like, regulate it in certain ways, and only give The Gay Agenda (i.e., everyone who isn’t straight) as much wiggle room as will keep them from noticing that equality is a lie, but don’t interfere too much because getting hung up on all that interpersonal drama keeps them from noticing the actual problems

Either way, the canonical coffee-shop AU is a horrid, dystopian hellscape and the main cast’s counterparts in that AU are okay with their lots in life — where, for example, Conrad actually is just a wacky eccentric uncle and not using that façade to try and teach Marie a kiddie version of Why Fascism Is Totally Cool, just in case she ends up being a mutant too, and Julian is a provocateur in that he argues with anyone who tries to sit in His Spot at the coffee-shop, rather than because he uses his platform and charisma to pick at prejudices and stir the pot in ways that incite violence — because they’re all drugged, they’re all being lied to, some of them don’t remember life ever being anything else, and when some of them get yanked into the prime timeline, uh.

Well.

That will be interesting to me, personally, because there’s going to be a lot of disagreement among all involved parties about all of this and what it all means

But ngl, this canonical AU literally started because I was reading coffee-shop AU superhero fics, looking at my own ragtag bunch of superheroic misfits, and going, “God, what WOULD it take for them to actually exist in a coffee-shop AU? Because the conventional coffee-shop AU set-up wouldn’t even allow for any of them to be recovering addicts or abuse survivors, much less actively upset about any injustices in the world (beyond maybe being a Soapbox Sadie type for a scene or two before getting swept up in the inevitable romance that will dominate literally everything about the fic) or affected by shit like homophobia, racism, ableism, sexism, etc. (because if we dealt with those issues, it might not be sexy or romantic, or at the very least, it would seriously distract from the OTP and their amazing love story). The most anyone is ever allowed to be in a coffee-shop AU is pleasantly eccentric or Troubled But Cute With The Emphasis On Cute”

Which is all a long-form way of saying that I came up with an entire canonical dystopian coffee-shop AU in a thought exercise that came out of being tolerant of coffee-shop AUs but also really bored with them and low-key frustrated about their dominance of fanfiction things for the past few years because while I understand the appeal of the escapism that’s inherent in most of them (and there are some that I even enjoy), I find it kind of depressing that so many of them end up being such that you could probably find and replace the names of one fandom’s characters with another fandom’s characters and it would essentially be the same story, and all of the things that drew people to the original stories will be gone while almost none of the problems of the original stories will actually be fixed (—and at that, the most likely, “fixing” is probably going to be, “a white cis M/M otp is injected into things where, in their respective canon, they are Just Dudes Bein’ Bros”)

……Which is a long-form way of saying that I did the thing out of frustration with coffee-shop AUs (and probably a bit because rereading all the classic dystopian lit pieces at once isn’t really the best idea ever, whoops)

21: Describe each of your OCs as shittily as possible.

okay, I did these all out of order, and after going in so hard on the AUs and polyships questions, it’s 3:15 in the morning and I’m just going to phone this in

Sebastian: yes, he’s a human disaster and a serious mess, but at least he’s trying, okay

Pete: local man delivers scathing verbal smackdown and makes you say, “thanks” for the honor

Margot: the mean chain-smoking lesbian with a heart of gold that your parents didn’t warn you about but should have, probably

Josie: local goth makes everyone else look under-dressed, feels bad about things

Todd: hipster garbage who isn’t nearly as underground as he thinks

Lucy: okay but have you guys considered how superpowers could be used to address public health crises

Stephen: the human embodiment of that moment when you get so excited about the punchline of the joke you’re telling that you laugh at it preemptively and can’t finish the joke but hey, at least everyone is smiling now, right

Sara Grace: local ballerina princess will probably never get over her physical inability to cuddle every cat on the planet

Conrad: “hey why are you getting upset i’m just trying to deny your right to be considered fully human unless you fit my specific ideas about what that is lmao”

Julian: sinnamon roll that you bought at a backwoods gas station at three in the morning, then lost on the floor of your car for two years, and now it’s all grody and probably a biohazard

Annie: perpetually screaming, just at life in general

Adelaide: she’s not telling you what to do, she’s just saying that her way is probably better even when it likely isn’t

Yael: is probably your favorite Jewish lesbian grandma, unless you think that she should chill, in which case not so much

Max: had his younger sister be his best man when he got married, out of his depth with most things, *glinting glasses of intimidation*

25: What sorts of symbols/items/~aesthetics~/colours represent each OC?

and it is now 3:30 and I’ve got absolutely nothing for this one beyond the fact that Margot, Josie, and Pete all wear a lot of black

Josie because they’re still something of a teenage goth queen at heart despite being a responsible adult

Margot because it’s both professional and somewhat intimidating, which she likes because she’s compensating for only being 4’11”

and Pete says it’s because he works in the theatre, which isn’t wrong, but even if he didn’t, he’d still wear a lot of black because he thinks it looks good on him (which is fair enough because it does)

Conrad and Max are associated with gray (though Conrad is also associated with white and “that annoying shade of blonde that is very nearly white but not exactly; the Draco Malfoy or Any Given Member Of House Targaryen shade of blonde”)

Sebastian gets a lot of dog associations (partly because he has six of them and partly because he is, as mentioned, essentially a werewolf though that does slightly depend on your definition of, “werewolf”)

and Stephen loves hot pink and eye-searing acid green, sometimes simultaneously

32: Do you have any polyam ships with your OCs?

Well, I already sort of went there in the AUs question, but personally, I would love Seb-prime/powerless!Seb/powerless!Stephen/Stephen-prime — but in general, I always love any and all ships that involve selfcest, whether they’re polyships or not, so I don’t really think this one counts

The polyship that I’ve probably given the most thought to so far is Seb/Stephen/Todd, and ngl, I’ve given it said thought largely due to the fact that……… well.

I wouldn’t call them a love triangle, exactly, but let’s be real: SMeyer and SCollins didn’t want to call Bella/Edward/Jacob and Gale/Katniss/Peeta, “love triangles” either, and while I’d agree that the latter case is a bit more complicated due to how Katniss spends the majority of the series having no interest in either one of the boys involved, the Twilight example is definitely a love triangle, and anyway, my point is that I’m no better than SMeyer and SCollins about going, “Oh, it’s not a love triangle!” because I fear the messy associations that come with accusations of writing love triangles even when I am blatantly doing so

And in general, I do believe in the sentiment of, “Less love triangles, more functional polyamory” — but the, “functional” part of that is a big reason why Seb/Stephen/Todd is not going to canonically go in the polyamory direction. It could, and given the canonical multiverse, there are definitely a few universes where it does

But in the prime timeline, a polyamorous relationship with those three would probably be a disaster — and frankly, a lot of it would be on Todd because Seb and Stephen both also have issues with communicating, self-esteem, honesty (with Stephen’s issue being more that he encourages everyone else to be honest while also trying to at least partially censor his own feelings in the interests of keeping the peace, while Seb’s issue is that he constantly lies to himself to try and convince himself that everything is fine because he feels like he’d just muck up everything for everyone by ever being Not Fine), and a laundry list of other things

But they’re also trying to work on those things.

Stephen is at a better place, wrt self-awareness and working on things, than Seb is, but he’s also been working on it longer and, for all the missteps he’s admittedly had in it because that’s just a part of this process for everyone, he didn’t have to deal with things like, “the aftermath of being kidnapped and shot by ecoterrorist ex-boyfriend who was not happy about getting dumped by a junky”

Or things like, “help, my brother’s unctuous brother-in-law keeps trying to befriend me after I drunkenly sucked his dick at my brother’s wedding reception and unwittingly broke up the marriage that I didn’t know the brother-in-law had, he keeps trying to befriend me despite my vocal lack of interest in being friends with him, also he’s been telepathically fucking with me for about eleven years”

Todd, on the other hand, has the self-awareness of a toothbrush, and that is a massive insult to toothbrushes.

He has worked on SOME things about himself, but usually only to the extent that he needs to work on them in order to feel like he’s doing an okay job on his own sobriety (which, in fairness, he is, but acting like sobriety is his only problem ever is disingenuous as Hell), and he isn’t working on most of his non-sobriety-related problems because, bless his heart, he doesn’t realize that they are problems.

I mean, this is a guy who is going to crash Seb and Stephen’s first morning after by showing up on Seb’s doorstep on a Sunday morning with a bunch of junk from his apartment, going, “Hey, so, I don’t mean to be a buzzkill when you look weirdly happy for once because it’s good that you look happy, I support you being happy, but also I might be getting kicked out of my place tomorrow and may also have been lying to you for several months about whether or not I needed money because I was totally sure that I could get everything figured out and then I didn’t but I didn’t want you to worry or try to pay for everything like a sugar daddy just because you CAN pay for it, and anyway, is one of your spare rooms open and…… oh. Hi, Stephen. ……He’s pretty shirtless for coming over for breakfast, isn’t he. Why are you wearing a shirt and he’s not.”

“Because he wasn’t cooking bacon and I was?”

“…………*slowly puts two and two together and realizes what he’s crashing* Ohhhh. Um. ……I can go bug Pete or Margot—”

“They don’t have room for you at their places—”

“So, can I stay?”

“Yes, obviously, but can we also talk about this? Like, maybe not right now, but in general, there are a lot of things that I’d like to talk about here???”

“………Why? Do you want to, like, charge rent or something?”

“No, god, why would I want to do that to you, but????”

So, yeah.

In fairness, Todd has a lot of good points. But he is also really bad at a lot of the things that you NEED if you don’t want a polyamorous relationship to completely implode — like communication, honesty, self-awareness, etc. — and he’s only going to start working on any of this when he finally realizes that…… oh. He’s jealous of Stephen and has been jealous of all of Seb’s previous boyfriends too, but in most of those cases, he also had some other reason to dislike them

For example: Harry was cheating on Seb with a Julliard violinist (who knew that Harry was also sleeping with Seb, but Seb had no idea that Harry’s violinist friend was his “real boyfriend”);

Francis was an ecoterrorist and admitted as much on their first date (though, as Seb has pointed out to several people, what kind of ecoterrorist actually admits to being one on a first date, so he feels he was justified in not believing Francis here), then shot Seb in the back, after kidnapping him and holding him for ransom in a basement in Ossining, all because Francis didn’t appreciate being dumped, especially not by a junky;

Josh didn’t really see the difference between rough sex and domestic violence, and was inadvertently responsible for Seb being the first family member to show up for the birth of his niece…… because he took Seb to the ER after giving him a concussion that made him seem to lose consciousness during sex (not that Josh stopped fucking him during), and then left him there “because he had something big to handle for work” (i.e., because he didn’t want to be there in case anyone called the cops), and while Seb was going to leave, he happened to see Max and Linda checking in and decided to just stay;

Rémy liked erotic asphyxiation but did not like asking for consent, and also had a thing for giving his partners rohypnol (again, without their consent), and he got away with it with Seb because, by the time they dated, Seb was no stranger to having intoxication-induced blackouts, and it was easy to tell him that he must’ve had too much to drink (and because of the way his half-latent healing factor and toxin filtering handled rohypnol, it was basically impossible for him to tell the difference between that and any of his more usual mixes of intoxicants);

Byron was a supervillain henchman-for-hire and also had a stunning lack of boundaries;

and Julian was mostly just annoying when he and Seb dated, and the worst part, at the time, was that they both tried to be helpful and supportive for each other but actually wound up exacerbating a lot of their respective issues, and now, he’s one of the less-bad exes but only because, “sends drunk texts to a recovering addict and unsolicited dick pics” is clearly on a very different level from, “gave Seb a concussion and ditched him at the ER” and, “literally shot him in the back”

(and then, when his involvement with the baddies comes out, he sort of skyrockets up the list of bad idea exes, but in fairness to Seb here, Julian didn’t get recruited by said baddies until after the second time that they broke up).

So, yeah, Todd has not been short on legitimate reasons to hate a lot of Seb’s boyfriends, and said legitimate reasons have allowed him to avoid dealing with his own jealousy for a while.

The fact that he and Seb have full-on dated before also helped for a while, as did the standing friends with benefits/“it’s complicated” that they’re in at the start of the story…… but see, Todd has always kind of been hoping that this would turn back into romance at some point

See, for all he isn’t self-aware about most things, he’s done enough work on himself to know that he is still in love with Seb (who does reciprocate but has an easier time reading Latin, or Proust in the original French, than he does of knowing what his feelings are doing and being able to verbalize it effectively)

So, Todd’s been leaving their relationship open-ended so he won’t have to feel like he’s tying Seb down to something Seb might not want. The idea that Seb might actually want it does occur to Todd, but he also dismisses the idea as completely ridiculous and silly, all out of some ridiculous idea that of course Seb wouldn’t want to be with him again for real, not until he perfectly self-actualizes in some completely unattainable way (which he doesn’t realize is completely unattainable because, bless his heart, Todd doesn’t get that he will never be satisfied with his ridiculous and ill-defined goalposts on the path to becoming his idea of what Seb’s perfect version of him is)

This is made all the worse by the fact that all Seb wants Todd to be, and all that he has ever wanted Todd to be, is himself.

He has said so practically since their first ever conversation, and the romantic subtext was there for him from the start of it all because when he went up to the cute bespectacled chubby guy in the Pink Flamingos t-shirt after the freshman orientation week meeting of the campus LGBTQ student union, Seb totally meant to ask Todd out.

Unfortunately, he got nervous, excited, an odd and potent mix of tongue-tied and rambling, and overwhelmed by how starved he was to make more friends (seeing as his only friend, at that time, was Pete, who was about an hour or so north, once you factor in getting to Grand Central, taking the Metro North to the right stop, and then either meeting him at the station or getting to his campus)

So, the romantic intentions got rather garbled and turned into a platonic-sounding coffee invitation, and as much as Seb had wanted to ask Todd out, he was okay with this at the time because he was en eighteen-year-old extrovert who’d spent his last two years of high school with only one real friend, who wasn’t even at his school because Pete was already in college, and in a school environment that was so emotionally shitty that his parents saw facilitating his trips down to see Pete and all their weird misadventures in the City not as a special treat but as what they needed to do for the sake of their son’s wellbeing

Either way, Todd misses the, “be yourself, that’s it, that’s all he has ever wanted, you colossal tool” point by a long-shot

So, by the time the story starts, Todd is working (he thinks) on his amazing and totally foolproof plan to become exactly what Seb deserves even if (he maintains) Seb doesn’t realize that he deserves it, Seb feels like there’s no way that Todd is still into him and feels like Todd is probably only hooking up with him until someone better comes along and is a hopeless romantic who’s pessimistic about love but also about most things in general, and their lack of talking about things is a Problem

It’s a Problem that Pete calls Seb out on, though in fairness, he brings that up less as a dig at the relationship and more because it’s part of Seb’s larger problems

But then, as part of his, “I am totally going to get my shit together, yeah!” “““plan””” (read: half-baked notion that he is at least really committed to), Seb decides to ask Stephen out (because Pete was just going down a list of things Seb could work on and one of them was, “Figure out your shit with Todd and either work things out with him or move the fuck on instead of mooning over him like you’re fucking twelve,” and Seb did the impulsive thing to go, “Oooh, look, not mooning over Todd now, am I”)

Seb doesn’t expect it to go anywhere because he doesn’t think Stephen could actually be interested in him literally ever, so he’s trying not to get his hopes up or end up feeling anything — except he does both of those things AND, due to how the events play out leading up to things, Seb’s just realized that he does still have feelings for Todd, and now, he’s not sure what to do and has to figure out his shit

The final nail in the coffin is that Todd, after several weeks of blowing off Seb’s attempts to talk about things (because you don’t need to talk about things if you just pretend they’re fine and stay the course, right?), gives him what is essentially an, “It’s not you, it’s me” line, and because, “It’s not you, it’s me” is so often used to break up with someone gently (including by Seb in different previous relationships), Seb takes it as them being done romantically and decides that they should stop having sex, too, so he can get serious with Stephen.

So, Todd has to live with the fact that he’s the one who opened the door to let Seb get serious with Stephen, and deal with his jealousy, which he can’t get out of at least recognizing because he can’t find a single thing about Stephen that indicates that he isn’t as kind and good as he seems. It’ll be good for him. He gets to grow as a person thanks to fucking this up for himself and unwittingly getting one of his best friends to commit to an actual decent relationship.

Then there’s the issue of Todd and Stephen’s leg of the relationship, but once Todd sorts his shit out about being a jealous little turd, they will actually get along just fine

They will probably end up having a bonding moment where they get laughing about weird or mildly irksome but not troublesome things that Sebastian does, because I love scenes like that

But, still. As a poly ship, I don’t actually see them working out in the prime timeline.

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