#i'm of the opinion that OCs in the context a lot of us make online should

[counterfictional]

Playing ask games single player style.

Link to to the prompt post

I cannot do this for oc, because there is nothing to say about me. There's no funny past, just me is me. So here is shark me.

🎨 How do you feel about fanart?

They make me feel funny inside. Neutral experience, but a good way to feel that pull.... I don't like most ship art. Especiallly of me in maid dress. Sowwy.

📝 How do you feel about fanfiction?

I don't read a lot... but used to younger. They're .. okay. I don't prefer them anymore. They make me uncomfortable now, aha.

✅ What does the fandom usually get right?

When they make me look cool.

❌ What does the fandom usually get wrong?

When they haaaaaate me soooo muuuuuuch. I suppose that's on me though. I always find calling the sea the "red sea" annoyiiing when it's called the sea of death. Is it an edgy name, yes. Would it make sense to call it red sea to contrast the blue one? Oh yes. But hey, I don't make the rules.

🗺️ What do you miss about your world?

My wife. and sea

💔 Who are you missing right now?

My wife.

🚫 Is there anyone you hope to never see again?

I'm fine with seeing everyone! Even those I hated <3

🔀 How canon-divergent vs. canon-compliant are you?

I'm from the ending where I won. My mind likes canon compliance, so I'm a bit compliant until the ending diverges.

⚧ What were your gender and orientation in your timeline; was your identity canon?

Cis male, bi or something.

💗 What helps you feel closer to your source (in a positive way)?

is there a positive way? The ocean, maybe. Maybe interacting with the media but I have not done that in awhile.

🖊️ Do you use your name from your source?

Perhaps...

👬 How do you feel about doubles?

A handshake and hats off to them.

⭐ Is your fiction-based identity spiritual, psychological, or something else?

Both spiritual and psychological. My brain wants to believe it as some kind of metaphysic non-psychologic, so who am I to complain?

🎙️ What’s the biggest difference between you and your canon self?

I don't know. I really don't know.

💞 What’s the biggest similarity between you and your canon self?

I haven't a clue.

❓ Do you prefer when people are familiar or unfamiliar with your source when they meet you?

That depends who they are meeting in what context are we meeting. I think I'm very fine with unfamiliarity considering the source material. As much as the creator's work has meant to me and my sanity, her work can be very uncomfortable and I do not blame people for disliking the creations.

👍 What’s your favorite thing about your source?

The art style<3

👎 What’s your least favorite thing about your source?

Some things.

💸 Do you own any merch of your source?

Yes. It was the best feeling to get merchandise for it, including the manga in-stores.

🌸 Do you feel comfortable in your fiction-based identity?

Yes and no. Yes because I am trapped in it. And no, because source material is source material. I don't hate source material, just don't want to be judged for it. Being a villain-type is tedious

🌻 Who are you open with about your fiction-based identity?

Online. You don't have to dig far to find it.

I'll also add on that I do not think bad things are good things. I do not think morally wrong things are OK. Please do not try to get my opinion on source problematicness. Do not hassle me. I want to talk about my experiences but I get worried, so now there is this panicked paragraph at the bottom!

[reallyhardydraws]

Are there any other important characters in stage crypt crew’s universe? Love interests, rival band, family, side characters, etc.?

there definitely should be!

right now it's all sort of nebulous in my mind - there are definitely other bands playing around their same scene, but not a lot, because i'm picturing where they live as relatively small. i got an anon recently suggesting their rival band might consider them Actual Nemeses when they’re like ‘hey there’s that other band, we consider them at the very least on the level of work friends’

love interests: well, the crypt crew have each other :') ronnie and hector fell in love within a week and they've been together ever since. nico has a thing for annie, and she's still making up her mind. it's a real slow-burn.

family is the thing i've considered the most, though still nothing's nailed down too firmly. nico has a younger sister (her name is lina, she's still a tweenager) and they both live with their aunt, joy.

annie has a huge family that live out past the beach, one of those big multi-generational families with heaps of cousins. she's not that close with any of them, but goes to visit on the major holidays. none of them are that enamoured with life on land the way she is, but every so often her siblings might surface to hang out with her and her friends on beach days. i’d draw them, but there’s too many. imagine like, ponyo and her sisters, honestly.

hector and ronnie just have each other. ronnie remembers nothing of her human life and doesn’t care to, and hector is a guy made of dead body parts jolted back into kind-of-life, and his creator was none too pleased with the result. as such, they don’t talk.

as for side characters... maybe their various day job co-workers and stuff? ronnie's boss at the vintage store. annie's manager at the record shop. i’ll have to think them up when i get another free minute!

[hyacinthuspetals]

I desperately hope this does not come off as preachy, these are just my thoughts regarding some stuff I've seen! I am not trying to vague anyone or talk about any specific individuals, it's something that has circled around this space for a while and I just want to share my own personal feelings and what I want to avoid before a problem actually starts.

For a good while I've seen some posts floating around about Apollo's portrayal in online spaces and how many newer, less informed people tend to view him. People are concerned that he's not being treated with respect or being seen as himself, and that he's kind of been treated like a character or "blorbo" in many cases.

I think that they're right! There's a lot of his depth and complexity that gets lost like we're all playing a really long game of telephone. Worshipping the gods without delving into their history and context can be tricky (example the BLOOD SACRIFICE TIKTOK DEBAUCLE GOOD LORD) and there needs to be a good foundation and understanding of the gods if you're going to worship them. We don't see a lot of him being portrayed as Slayer of Python, god of plagues with his silver bow and his love for knowledge.

That being said, I hope this doesn't turn into something where people who do worship Apollo are seen as like, fandomifying him just because of what gets seen on their blogs? People's worship may go way deeper than what we see from their online presence. I post some goofy stuff about him and some of the others from time to time with their permission.

My "cowboy Apollo" doodle was a silly inside joke between the two of us about his story with Hermes taking his cattle. I don't want to be constantly worried that someone will see that and immediately judge me and my relationship with him, assuming I'm treating him like an OC or not taking him seriously. My relationship with the gods I worship is very friendly and often informal (depending on my kharis with them) because that is what brings the most comfort to me based on my own negative experiences being forced to grow up in a Catholic home. I'm so thankful the gods are understanding of my situation and are willing to meet me in the middle. Apollo especially has brought me so much comfort, and I talk to him the way I would talk to any person I'm close to that I respect. I tag him in memes that remind me of him, I draw silly doodles of him, and I laugh with him. From the outside, someone who stumbles across my blog and doesn't know me or the relationship I share with him may scoff and brush me off as someone who is "treating him like my blorbo'. That makes me really sad, and quite paranoid actually. It makes me feel like I have to censor myself and my relationship with him in order not to be labeled as someone like that.

People are absolutely valid and right to be concerned about the way he may be portrayed, and I've seen this concern about Dionysus as well. I don't think they are wrong! It's a shame that what's happened to him has put some people off from worshipping and appreciating him, and I do not want anyone to think I am discrediting them, their feelings, or frowning at their opinions. I agree with those opinions wholeheartedly! Apollo is amazing, he's my world, and I love him so much. I want people to love ALL parts of him, not just the bright and happy parts.

I just hope that as we criticize this reduced version of him, we try to avoid making snap judgements about others based on what we see of their relationship with him. It hasn't been a major problem from what I've seen, but I wanted to put in my two cent before it even gets to that point. I hope that as a community, we practice Xenia and show our fellow polytheists kindness and help educate them rather than rolling our eyes. There are a lot of very dedicated, kind, and wonderful Apollo worshippers on here. Moving forward I want to help educate and help people who may not be as informed to understand how fantastically diverse and complex he is!

Again, I truly hope this doesn't sound preachy, or like I'm angry or trying to start something with anyone in particular. I have so much respect for my fellow Hellenic polytheists, ESPECIALLY reconstructionist worshippers. I've learned so much from the amazing people on here who devote their time and energy to sharing their knowledge FOR FREE, that's so great! All of us have a lot to learn from one another, and no one's practice will be exactly the same as someone else's. I think that's beautiful.

Hail to Apollo, the Far Shooter, Protector of Roads, Healer, God of Plagues, and the god who helped save my life. 💛

[mean-scarlet-deceiver]

Ik know this isn't a ask but this is the person who asked you about your opinion on tugs idk how or why you got so mad when I was just asking about tugs but I wasn't to bark orders at you or anything like that

I appreciate this communication. That helps me get a better sense of where you're coming from. I don't believe you were trying to be rude.

However, I know you sent four Tugs asks in two days. I am reasonably sure you are the same anon who also sent at least four other asks over the course of the past week (including the one about OCs and then the follow-up on ERS that I have answered). Plus it's quite possible you are behind three other anon asks.

(I could be mistaken about the additional 4-7 asks. The confusion is one of the risks you run when you send things anonymously. All 11 of these asks have a very similar style.)

Sending four asks in 48 hours is spamming the inbox. And I said (rather angrily, yes—I was feeling heated that day, in more ways than one) that they were "demands" because when you repeat your request four times with no explanation then it does rise to the level of a demand. Anyone would be offended. If you wanted to avoid giving offense or being annoyed, a little extra effort to communicate goes a long way — Sorry if you get this multiple times, I'm not sure this ask went through. Okay, cool. If you had said that, that would be different. I'd have known your motives were uncertainty rather than impatience.

But this miscommunication didn't happen in a vacuum, either. Sending 8 (possibly more) asks in a week is also spamming. It did not predispose me to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Final pro tip: Communication should have a give and take to it. In person this happens more naturally. Online, it takes a bit more effort (though the rules are easier to learn.)

When it comes to dropping asks (or just notes or comments! I know they're called "asks," but it's totally fine to use inboxes the way you did unless the blogger makes it clear otherwise!) the ask-er can frontload a lot of "their end" of the communication when they just have a profile that the ask-ee can click on. That gives me an idea of where you're coming from. Even so, ask-ers often give some context for their asks. Like, they'll say "Hi."

Or "X is my favorite, (s)he's so Y."

Or "I saw your post about X or "Your fic/art is really cool."

Or "lol i didn't realize there was a Thomas the Tank Engine fandom till tonight, this is crazy."

Then they go on to ask a question (if they have one. It's OK not to, really.)

It's not required, but it does help you to come across as friendly.

And it's probably an especially good idea to make this extra effort on anon. Sometimes anons who send more than one ask will literally say "Hey, I was the anon who asked about X." It's just part of building a relationship, even if you are anonymous.

And that sort of relationship can be helpful in establishing yourself as a friendly sort who has basic respect for the people they are talking to online.

*

(Also... just to reiterate... just plain don't send someone that many asks at once. Not unless they're actually answering them as fast as you're sending them.)

[garden-of-succulents]

Wait, so you don't have BPD but you want to write parse with bpd as your representation? How does that work? I'm really sorry, I like your Parse stories and read them and I don't mean to say that you shouldn't write them, but I don't understand where you're coming from on this. Is it really that difficult to identify with any of the characters of color on the same level?

I’ll answer your questions backwards so the long personal story can go under a readmore:

“Is it really that difficult to identify with any of the characters of color on the same level?“

That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last few weeks. Like, mental health is my wheelhouse, that’s a huge thing I write about; what about writing mentally ill characters of colour?  I can do it pretty easily with my OCs (cf. Luis and Maida) but feeling my way into mental health themes with canon characters of colour is more difficult while Kent and Jack are kind of like... low-hanging fruit, for me.

It’s why I’ve started bugging @abominableobriens with thoughts about BPD Nursey, gone back to trying to work my way into Ransom’s anxiety (I can’t find the post where I talk about where I was with this a couple months ago).  It’s not a smooth process, though--I’m flopping around being like “but how do I respect Ransom’s personality and preferences but get him some TREATMENT and REST” and “Okay but I haaate conflict-laden relationships and Nursey and Dex’s canon relationship is so full of sniping, how do I write Nursey without Dex?” and that’s the kind of flailing and experimentation I have to do internally or talking to a few people. Mostly the for-public-consumption stuff that’s come out of that process so far has been fluffy romantic headcanons.

So we’ll see how that goes. It’s partly that positive depictions of BPD/the kind of complex trauma I’m interested in are really rare. Before OMGCP, I spent most of my time writing straight-up OCs in fandom contexts because I couldn’t find what I wanted in the source material. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oookay, and now for the long bit: Why I care really personally about representations of BPD even though I don’t have it myself.

So basically, I’ve been depressed/mentally ill since elementary school, but growing up I kind of internalized the idea that letting my family know I was suffering would be so awful and unbearable for them that I could NOT do it. So I hated myself and I was miserable and was convinced that I couldn’t tell any adults about it. The big lifeline for me were young adult problem novels--books about teens in treatment programs for eating disorders or self-injury or, heck, kidney disease or parapalegia--I never saw myself in the symptoms, precisely, which was confusing, but I did see myself in the emotional experience of overwhelming pain, and I was captivated by the idea that feeling so awful all the time wasn’t normal, it was a disease; and a disease that could be treated. There were people who could help me be Not-That--but I couldn’t ask my parents to see a therapist, since that would be too awful for them, so I tried to soak up what knowledge I could through those books (or the nonfiction books that were available to me).  The books... were very  bland, whitewashed, rendered down to be acceptable; the girls were very soft, very fragile, would never hurt a fly (except themselves). I kind of internalized that as what a Good Mentally Ill Person should look like, and didn’t realize there was any other sort of mental illness.

In junior high school I started being able to articulate this depression to other kids and started making friends, online and in real life, who were also mentally ill like me. We could talk together about feeling worthless and unlovable, and participate in a conspiracy of silence Not To Let The Adults Know.

I’m struggling to explain this and keep my narrative somehow concise, not an essay about my entire childhood--long story short, I’m not Borderline; I was a lot more emotionally stable, even if my stability was in absolute fucking misery. I could take an emotion like a punch to the gut and sit with it, when a lot of my friends would have to get it out somehow--it drove them to do crazy and self-destructive things. (As an adult I know this difference is a lot about genetics and our lives before the age of three.)  And also, long story short, I learned that one way to make people like me was to pay attention to them and take care of them. I nurtured out of self-defense and because it was the only way I knew how to socialize. So I was the person all my friends told about their problems.

And I thought they were like me, that we had the same problems, the same illness? I tried to take what I learned from books and apply it, which was all about being patient and giving and empathetic and loyal and A Good Friend. I thought friendship could cure anything.  No matter what anybody did to me, I was totally disconnected from my anger and self-protective instincts; I thought I had to be a sponge, soaking up all their bad emotions and loving them no matter what.

So I was totally unprepared for them to split on me. I didn’t know anything about the idealization/devaluation cycle.

Splitting is... so, Borderline Personality Disorder is basically an inability to self-regulate, to integrate, to tolerate ambiguity. Either the person with it is an amazing perfect god, or a destructive piece of shit. Either their friend is a wonderful loving angel, or an evil demon who hates them and wants them to suffer. And this is an opinion that can flip on a dime, depending on how the person feels in that moment. So like--

I was maybe 16 or 17, and made a friend through a speech and debate club I was part of. From out of nowhere she liked me, thought I was pretty and smart and special. I stayed up until 3am one weekend and talked with her; we shared our hopes, our dreams, our favourite books. She sang a Scottish ballad that she said reminded her of me (”black is the colour of my true love’s hair”). The next time we met she gave me a little teddy bear with a hand-written note about what a good friend I was.

Then in the club, it was my job to make sure everyone got to meetings on time and was properly dressed and everything, and someone pointed out to me that my friend was wearing a skirt that was way shorter than dress guidelines allowed for. I had to go tell her that she was supposed to change and said, squirmingly uncomfortable, “People have talked to me...”  She stalked off.

That night was a ceremony where people who aged out of the group got to talk a little bit about what the group meant to them, and say goodbye to people, and play or sing a song. Her turn came, and she announced that our entire group was full of fake, awful, petty monsters, two-faced liars, almost as hurtful, hateful, and abusive as her foster parents. The song she played was “Just Like You” by Three Days Grace. I sobbed the entire time and tried to apologize to her, but it didn’t work. 

About a month later, she emailed someone in the group to say she’d been angry and hadn’t meant it, and she was sorry for ruining the ceremony.

That kind of thing happened to me with... maybe five or six different people, to greater or lesser degrees, from the time I was 12 to the time I was 20, which is when I finally got a handle on what was going on and how to predict it and keep it from happening. Friendships where everything was fine, wonderful, great thanks, how are you, fine, wonderf--KABOOM YOU’RE A FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT LIS YOU ABUSER (oh wait sorry i didn’t mean it where are you going).

It took a lot of work to learn that I had to get my sense of self from something other than helping other people, to look after my own needs as well as other peoples’, to learn (GASP) to accept and even ask for help. A lot of things changed when my mom told us, when I was 15, that she was depressed and going into therapy, because that meant we were allowed to do these things in our family. I immediately blurted out, “Can I see a therapist too?”  So I got more centred in myself, and also finally figured out what was going on with my friends, and got better at maintaining friendships with people with BPD that did not explode, at making friendships that were not based around me being a pseudo-therapist, and at getting my helping-people jonesing out with actual paid work.

So you might notice that a lot of my fics about Kent and BPD aren’t actually from Kent’s perspective or about him--they’re about people trying to live with him. Hurricane or Campsites are stories about people who know what to expect, who have some understanding of what he’s like and how to keep themselves safe. They can find ways to love him for his good parts without letting his bad parts hurt them, can love him without letting themselves be sucked in by the extreme warmth of his regard, can maintain their own boundaries and make their own decisions.

(To be honest, I was initially really amazed to find that people with BPD appreciate my fics or me talking about the subject? Because I am an outsider, because I am writing from this perspective--a medical perspective, no less! The voice of the Establishment! But a lot of people have been really receptive to my POV--which might just be, again, the paucity of positive representations at all.)

I didn’t really think about it this way until I got this ask and started trying to explain it, but... I’m trying to write the kind of story I could have used when I was a kid.

(So then you ask, Lis, you’re still writing about other people, about meeting other peoples’ needs--when are you going to write about children like you were, about experiences like yours? When are you going to tell your own story? and then I change the topic and sidle awkwardly out of the room. I’m not ready for that yet.)