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amorremanet · 8 years ago

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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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amorremanet · 8 years ago

Note

Let's go for 25 for the "Most Likely To" meme, please.

“oc most likely to” meme

25. most likely to make questionable fashion decisions

Thaaaat…… sort of depends on how you define “questionable” but

Sebastian has questionable taste in that he doesn’t know how to dress himself for certain situations (usually, they’re ones that require him to look professional or fancy), and unless he has someone who will help him or an outfit that he’s given (like the tux he wore when he stood up in his brother’s wedding), he’ll likely show up in whatever he felt the least uncomfortable in, and it might not be a terrible outfit or anything, but it won’t be appropriate for the situation

One time, he wasn’t paying attention and threw on a black t-shirt with the Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey label printed on it… before going to an AA meeting. His solution when Pete pointed this out to him? Was to take the shirt off in the middle of their favorite coffee-shop, turn it inside out, and put it back on.

Julian has questionable taste in that his preference in all things is, “loud and tacky.” If he ever looks even remotely respectable, there is a 500% chance that one of his bosses, “teammates” (Conrad and Annie), or paid entourage members told him what to wear and there will be a 50% chance that he wasn’t given an option. He’ll probably also look incredibly uncomfortable in whatever outfit that is, even if it is literally just a white button-up and a black blazer (and depending on who he’s with, he might express that discomfort, very probably by whining).

Given his druthers, Julian would just live in brightly colored tank-tops (give or take “clever” snarky comments on them, or tacky bullshit designs like a Confederate flag with rainbow stripes) (he’s not even from the South, he’s from Minnesota; his obsession with the Confederate flag comes from how it offends people), jeans or short shorts, and reflective Aviator shades like he thinks he’s such a bad-ass.

(Granted, he does think he is a bad-ass. But he is distinctly not a bad-ass. At all. He’s a human headache, he is a strung out Internet troll with superpowers who confuses any attention with love and feels like it’s okay to hurt people without compunction because he’s been hurt before, and overall, he is basically the embodiment of, “Well, I’m gay and it doesn’t offend ME, so no one else is allowed to be offended, ever”)

Stephen has questionable taste in most people’s minds, but tbh, most of them only think so because they’re offended by a fat gay mixed-race Latinx having any self-esteem and wearing what makes him happy, which is usually brightly-colored and a mix of masculine and feminine elements. Blending hot pink and acid green is probably not always as good-looking as Stephen thinks it is, but hey, he’s happy and he looks better than his boyfriend and Julian.

and Lucy has questionable taste because of sartorial opinions like, “Okay, I know those boots are not exactly stylish, but I think they look cool and more comfortable than high heels, so why can’t I wear them to winter formal, where is there a rule against wearing those so-called, ‘lesbian hiking boots’ to winter formal, I’m putting on a dumb fancy dress for it, aren’t I” and, “Black plaid flannel is totally acceptable for Grandma’s funeral because it’s black, and anyway, I put on a skirt, so no one can complain.”

She’ll develop marginally better taste once she accepts that she’s a little baby butch, in her heart of hearts, and stops trying to please everyone at once, including herself, which usually ends up making a mess of elements that don’t go together at all. But she’s still not going to be a particularly stylish butch. She’s trying, just… Bless her heart, she is trying her best.

Also: yes, Lucy, capes look cool. But unless you end up in a crossover with DC (which isn’t happening in canon because I don’t want to get sued) and can go talk to Bruce Wayne about getting some of the cool capes he has, you will literally just be wearing brightly colored fabric fastened to your shoulders, and it’s not a good idea.

Much like having long hair, wearing a cape gives people you’re fighting something else to pull on. It can also trip you up, get caught in a revolving door or an engine turbine, and no. Just no. Absolutely no capes. It’s for your own good, sweetheart, I promise.

#faeriviera #memes for ts #oc questions #……and this is called 'i lost track of time working on the novel and forgot about the meme i posted whoops'#that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #ocs tag #sebastian moncrieff: mutant disaster #julian richter #stephen gardener: precious disaster #lucy murphy: hemokinetic disaster #mine: writing

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amorremanet · 8 years ago

Text

“finish the sentence” meme: lucy murphy

Template from this post, prompted by @builttobalance

When someone gets in my way… I have an opportunity to grow.

When someone treats me unfairly… I probably tell myself that I’m overreacting, and keep doing so until I finally do overreact for real.

Rules are… plus ten points for a good idea, but minus several million for the execution.

I couldn’t possibly… tell you what I couldn’t possibly do, because I might underestimate me.

I once felt guilty when… Do you want me to go chronologically or alphabetically? Because I grew up Catholic, and guilt and shame are kind of like our things.

Women think… that you should stop trying to definitively say what all women think, zing!

People embarrass me when they… argue about things they don’t know anything about and try to act like authorities on the subjects in question, what the Hell.

I would get really angry if… someone tried to tell me that I was being too angry. Or called me, “Lucia” when I’m not in trouble.

Men are… well, they sure are, and isn’t that nice for them, I assume?

Perfection… is remembering to include a verb if you’re going to call something a sentence and not a sentence fragment.

Failure… is the fact that my previous answer probably isn’t funny to anyone who doesn’t know my brother and our Mom, and probably looks like I’m being serious when I’m actually not.

Family… is definitely a thing, isn’t it.

Intuition… is apparently a song by Jewel but I’ve been thinking it was Madonna since forever because it sure doesn’t sound like all of the sad girl with an acoustic guitar Jewel songs that Allison and Bastian used to make Damian listen to when they were all at St. Andrew’s together.

It’s better to… stop telling people what may or may not have been better than whatever they’re going through as if you actually know anything about their lives, GOD.

Sex… Well, what kind of sex are you talking about, though? Like, do you mean physical sex with chromosomes and all that, or do you mean sexual intercourse? Because I have very different thoughts about both of them and I just want to know where you expect me to go with this.

It really annoys me when… people ask you a question and then don’t listen to your answer. Or when they won’t tell you about something that’s a problem and then won’t let you help. Like, I don’t even want to charge in roughshod or anything, tell me what I can do and I’ll do that, but come on, why can’t I help, too?

Experience… overwhelmingly sucks, but it’s better than not knowing anything.

Life… is probably not divine in origin, and that’s okay because it doesn’t need to come from a divine being to be interesting and worthwhile. I mean, if you think about it, all of the, “God has a Plan” and, “Everything was designed by an allegedly benevolent, intelligent creator being” ideas sort of fall apart at one juncture or another, (at least, they do for me) and if you think about it, wouldn’t it make more sense for God to be like a scientist who was trying to grow something in a petri dish, then He wandered away to microwave a Hot Pocket for dinner or whatever, and came back to find that He’d accidentally created a zombie plague? I don’t know about you, but personally, I’d rather be part of the latest stage in an ever-changing evolutionary process spanning several million years, than a part of God’s accidental zombie plague, but maybe that’s just me.

Children ought to… be allowed to be kids, jesus, how is that even a question?

It scares me that… things can be going on with me that I don’t even begin to understand, and can affect everything, and I can’t do anything about it because I don’t understand them, and how is this even FAIR.

Logic… dictates that my girlfriend is cuter than yours. I can prove it, too. Sit back, let me go get some markers and my giant notepad.

Fun can… get out of hand really quickly, and then it starts being awesome.

#builttobalance #that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #lucy murphy: hemokinetic disaster #oc questions #oc development #ocs tag #mine: writing #religion for ts

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amorremanet · 8 years ago

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10 facts about meme: Lucy? And Adelaide, if you don't mind doing two?

send me one of my oc’s and i tell you ten facts about them

This is the shitty, “I fell asleep instead of doing this last night, and then, when I was almost fucking done, trying to make tumblr instant messenger stop doing something made it decide to click over somewhere else, and Firefox apparently doesn’t let the Lazarus extension work anymore, so I lost everything and am completely skimming out of frustration because the original was detailed and cool, and I lost basically all of it” version

LUCY

1. Has never completed a Pokémon game with a grass or water starter. She just doesn’t bond with them as much as she does with the fire starters, and any time she tries to pick a grass or water starter, she inevitably gives up, restarts, and picks the fire starter instead.

2. Since she turned 18, she’s made a point of giving blood as often as possible, because she’s type-O negative (the universal donor), and the Red Cross is pretty much always running short on blood, which can leave a lot of people totally screwed when they need to get transfusions.

3. Doesn’t believe in astrology and dismisses most of things in that vein as a cold-reading scam that’s based on exploiting people’s ability to project themselves onto anything…… but she does have an interest in dream interpretation.

4. She finds recipes confusing, and is even more befuddled by the Food Network and, “how to make [x baked goods]” videos on youtube, to the point that she finds them more stressful than getting a, “We need to talk” text from her parents. And yet, she is not confused by instructions in a chemistry lab.

5. She loves her red hair, but hates being called, “ginger.” It’s not that she thinks the word is offensive or anything; she just thinks that it sounds weird and slightly disgusting.

6. One of her favorite forms of, “teenage rebellion” was watching televangelists (or more accurately, having them on while she did other stuff because it’s really easy for Lucy to tune them out), which Lucy wouldn’t have liked so much if she’d actually paid attention to any of them (because of how televangelists exploit their viewers’ pain and suffering, get rich off of it, and don’t have to pay taxes on most of that money because they call it, “religious donations”) — but it did successfully annoy her very Catholic parents and very Catholic, “he’s a legit priest and everything” uncle.

7. A horror movie can be as political or politically coded as it wants. Unless it does something truly novel with the genre, like Get Out, then Lucy will probably just roll her eyes, complain about how many people value, “edginess” over quality, and then go watch The Great Mouse Detective for the umpteenth time. It’s not even that she gets squicked by horror movies, because she stops at dismissing all of them as edgelord garbage and doesn’t give them a chance.

8. She has even less patience for the films of Christopher Nolan, and literally the only one that she doesn’t go in too hard on is The Dark Knight, which only gets any consideration because Heath Ledger died not that long after making it, in ways that were pretty heavily associated with the movie in popular culture.

Not that she really cares about Heath Ledger, or even about the taboo on speaking ill of the dead, but she figures that he isn’t Ronald Reagan levels of terrible, or worse, so it’s easier to just not get into it with people over Heath Ledger when all that she wanted to say was that The Dark Knight isn’t actually that great

She will, however, talk shit about Ronald Reagan pretty much any time she’s given an opportunity, and especially if her Mom and Dad are around (because they were big Reaganites, back in the day, and annoying them with her hatred of the Gipper keeps them from paying attention to things like how her, “best friend” Sara Grace is actually her girlfriend)

9. Her answer to the question of whether she prefers cats or dogs will probably be something like, “iguanas” because she hates the assumption that it’s not possible to love cats and dogs more or less equally, but she also has better things to argue with people about.

10. She can’t whistle, she’s not really a very good dancer, and the last time she tried to tie a cherry stem in a knot with her tongue, she wound up swallowing it.

ADELAIDE

1. At 5’11”, Addie is taller than her big brother and their Mom (who are both 5’10”), and when standing up as best man when Max and Linda got married, she didn’t try to make him feel short, but she did wear a nice pair of heels and didn’t really go out of her way not to make him feel short, either.

2. By all rights, Addie probably should’ve been diagnosed with ADHD a while ago, but because her childhood and adolescence lasted from about 1986-2000 (when she turned 18), and because in 2017, ADHD is still badly misunderstood and under-diagnosed in AFAB kids, Addie got missed and made it to 33, thinking that all of her ADHD symptoms are just personal quirks or failings.

3. Her favorite color is purple. The darker the shade, the better.

4. Her ability to interpret song lyrics is often questionable. Like, on one hand, she’s totally made the mistake of hearing, “There’s a bathroom on the right” instead of, “There’s a bad moon on the rise” during the chorus of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising”

—and on the other hand, she completely missed that most of Missy Elliot’s “Work It” is explicitly about cunnilingus until Pete asked her what the Hell she thought the lyric, “Go downtown and eat it like a vulture” was referring to, especially given its proximity to Ms. Elliot talking about shaving her chocha. (All Addie has to say for herself is that she got caught up on the, “Girls, girls, get that cash / If it’s 9 to 5 or shakin’ your ass” verse.)

She also thought that Spice Girls were singing about group sex in “Wannabe,” rather than singing about making sure that your significant other can get along with your gal pals, and she kept thinking this until mid-September 2012.

5. As far as her family knows, Addie almost got arrested on her 18th birthday and had to run from the cops while she and a few friends were kinda drunk and screwing around in New York City. What really happened was that her birthday was on a Saturday, so they signed themselves out of school for the weekend, went to NYC, and saw the revival of Jesus Christ Superstar because her parents bought them tickets.

Then, they used fake ID’s to get some alcohol and got kinda drunk. Then, while they were screwing around in Brooklyn instead of going to cousin Jeremy’s place and crashing for the night, they wound up going by a gay bar, where Addie tripped over her own feet and got caught by a cute butch lesbian who happened to be dressed as a sexy cop for a themed party at said gay bar and had gone outside for a smoke break.

Then, one of Addie’s friends mistook this poor woman for a real cop and insisted that they run, and despite putting it together in the cold, sober light of day that there had been no actual danger, Addie told Sebastian the, “We so totally almost got arrested” story because she thought it sounded cooler, and at this point, it’s been 15 years, and she doesn’t see a point in correcting her family when her younger cousins get the, “Don’t get too rowdy on your 18th birthday or you may end up running from the cops like Adelaide” cautionary tale.

6. She would probably try to play real-world Quidditch, if she could get anyone to play with her, but that’s not going to happen, because everyone who knows her also knows that Addie is competitive as fuck, and that playing “muggle Quidditch” with her is a good way to get at least mildly injured.

7. She can see where the dislike that a lot of people in her life have for the All-Stars comes from, but personally, Addie doesn’t buy into it herself. She doesn’t really care to defend them, either, but at this point, she feels like most of the world’s problems can’t be solved with super-strength or heat vision, and they’re more complicated than the All-Stars’ image would allow them to handle, so it’s best to see the All-Stars as entertainers, rather than actual heroes.

Not that she begrudges anyone their annoyance with the fact that the All-Stars make, “we are actual heroes” a cornerstone of their so-called “brand,” but if you ask Addie, it’s not all that much different from how U.S. politicians lie up one side and down the other about basically everything, and how much of U.S. politics is increasingly little more than a theatre spectacle to cover up what’s actually going on

Oddly enough, Addie is accidentally on to something with that, because a lot of the supervillains in this universe are not truly participating in any shadowy conspiracy…… but they are being manipulated by members of one, and alternately being used as a source of talking points, or as distractions, so that the folks in said shadowy conspiracy (who are a mix of mutants and not) can push through their own agendas and try to secure their own power at the expense of anyone who gets in their way

Not that it’s really here or there at the moment, but this is totally going to bite them in the ass, partly from the people they’ve been exploiting and screwing over for decades putting shit together and pushing back, and partly because they decide to bank on installing a puppet who isn’t as easily controlled or as easily made to serve their agendas as they think. Anyway, as I was saying.

8. If Adelaide hadn’t gone into the family business and started vying with Max to see who’s going to become CEO when their Dad retires, she probably would’ve gone into advertising. If not that, she most likely would’ve gone to law school.

However, despite the fact that her Mom and several of her cousins are lawyers, Addie’s notions about how being a lawyer works are mostly derived from Legally Blonde, Ally McBeal, and Law and Order: SVU, so it might be a good thing that she has no idea what she’d actually want to do at law school.

9. Popular wisdom holds that she only isn’t the worst driver out of her siblings because Sebastian is the one who should’ve racked up multiple DUI charges by now, by all rights shouldn’t have his license anymore, and rarely uses it these days anyway because he, “doesn’t have PTSD, he just doesn’t like driving okay, it kinda freaks him out” (…which it does because of the PTSD that he allegedly doesn’t have but that’s another matter)

Addie holds that this popular wisdom is misogynistic bullshit being passed off as familial teasing, because actually, she’s a much better driver than all three of her brothers (with both cars and motorcycles, though only she and Seb have ever driven one of those, so it’s a little unfair to Max and Ambrose)

—and she may not know how to fix more complicated car problems, but she can at least get a better grasp on what might be wrong than, ��I don’t know, it keeps making a thunka thunka thunka sound if you go above 60 mph” and she has more than once fixed something for her brothers that turned out to be something like, “You were driving with the parking brake on, dumb-ass”

10. Her go-to karaoke night songs are Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” — the latter of which would be funnier to Adelaide if she’d intended to sound hella bi when she first started doing it, rather than picking it because she was kinda drunk and knew all the words, then getting really into singing it and having no conscious idea where those emotions were coming from

#builttobalance #ask box tag #memes for ts #ocs tag #that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #adelaide moncrieff: ambitious disaster #lucy murphy: hemokinetic disaster #alcohol ref//#ten facts meme

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amorremanet · 8 years ago

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"Most likely to" asks: 1, 6, 27, 28?

“oc most likely to” meme

1. most likely to clean up everybody’s crap without asking

Josie or Lucy — with the former doing it because they have to be on top of this shit in their own self-care regimens or things can get bad, which would be messy anyway and is even worse when keeping your own mental health in order is one of the only ways to keep from losing control of your psychic powers and, among other things, mentally spying on people and being overloaded by all their feelings, to the point that you forget where yours are.

So, Josie isn’t a fan of just letting messes accumulate, and if you happen to benefit from them picking up your stuff, that’s nice and they’re happy for you, but they primarily did it for themself. Not that they don’t care about you, but they care a lot more about staying centered and not losing control of their powers, so. Yeah.

……and the latter would do it because putting things in order helps her clear her head, sometimes.

6. most likely to survive the zombie apocalypse

Probably Pete. Like, the mutants who have healing factors would probably be okay, too, since… well, they have healing factors. But Pete is the one who’d survive by sheer resourcefulness, ingenuity, adaptability, random knowledge that he doesn’t even remember how he learned it or why he knows it but he does, inability to forget some of the stuff he learned as a kid when his Dad made him go to Boy Scouts, refusal to die as long as he has someone to spite by living, and so on.

Of the mutants who have healing factors, Sara Grace is the one who could most easily survive the zombie apocalypse without it, in large part because she knows how to keep her wits about her in stressful situations, she’s creative (and while she could definitely get in trouble due to periodic inattention, she can usually figure her way out of the trouble she gets into. Usually), she’d be a really good post-zombie apocalypse McGyver (“I have some twine, some pine needles, some duct tape, a pocketknife, and a paperclip. Let’s do this”), and she was a Girl Scout who actually wanted to be there (unlike Pete and Boy Scouts)

27. most likely to listen to one song for four days in a row

Margot and Lucy.

28. most likely to eat cake for breakfast

Todd, Stephen, Margot, Lucy, Annie, and Julian — and aside from Julian, all of them would be pretty chill about it. Todd would grouse at himself like, “God, would Wes Anderson or Jean-Luc Godard eat cake for breakfast, what kind of auteur are you” (you’re an auteur who eats cake for breakfast, Todd. It’s okay, you’re allowed), but he wouldn’t really be a dick to himself over it.

Julian, on the other hand, would absolutely be a dick to himself over eating cake for breakfast. He would also be obnoxious about it while doing the thing, and while debating whether or not he wanted to do it, and afterward…… but in fairness, he’s pretty much always at least a little bit obnoxious, so that’s not particularly noteworthy.

#builttobalance #memes for ts #oc questions #ocs tag #that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #josie quinn: empath disaster #lucy murphy: hemokinetic disaster #pete arden: dramatic disaster #sara grace kelley #todd burroughs: art film disaster #julian richter #mine: writing

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amorremanet · 8 years ago

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describing my oc’s like a, “tag urself” meme because i felt like it:

Sebastian:

is full of love but also sadness and confusion

too soft to be Chaotic Gay, too chaotic to be Soft Gay

doesn’t get why his morbid, self-deprecating “jokes” aren’t funny

the, “hey hold my beer/coffee” friend but also the, “hey hold me, if i’m alone with my thoughts, i go to a Bad Place™” friend

high-key human disaster but he’s trying his best, okay

looks like a sinnamon roll, is actually a burned cinnamon roll, has literally been to hell and back, slightly charred

Pete:

constantly Dramatic™, perpetually Extra™, fluent in sarcasm and talking shit

Theatre Gay to end all Theatre Gays, he will fight you; acts like a Mean Gay™, but is soft inside and scared of getting hurt

aggressively supportive AND supportively aggressive

acts like he has it all together, but doesn’t think before starting shit

says he doesn’t care, actually does tho

stale cinnamon roll, has been in this world too long, too cynical

Margot:

high-key Judging You™, always Done with everything and three days past her bedtime

stone-hearted ice witch with a citrus-flavored center

Mean Gay™, but hey, she has a set of ethics

hums the mission impossible theme song when she’s working, it makes her feel cool

probably the Vodka Aunt friend

looks like she could kill you, is actually a stale sinnamon roll

Josie:

looks calm, but screaming on the inside

Neutral Goth, Chaotic Bi, Mom Friend™

dresses so nice because they have to be in control of something

their life is like trying to avoid the youtube comments, then seeing them anyway

too beautiful for 90% of the shit they go through

looks like a cinnamon roll (too good for this world), actually is a cinnamon roll; would give you their cinnamon rolls

Lucy:

HEY YOU GUYS LET’S TRY SCIENCE

CHAPSTICK FUTCH BABY LESBIAN SHE’S JUST HAPPY TO BE HERE

NO EDGELORDS ALLOWED, IT’S GOOD TO BE NICE AND EXCITED ABOUT THINGS, LET PEOPLE BE EXCITED, JEEZ.

doesn’t need to use all caps but she has SO!! MUCH!!!! ENTHUSIASM!!!!!!

get her on your team for roller derby or the scavenger hunt. seriously. do it.

looks like a cinnamon roll but could actually kill you (but she’d rather not)

Stephen:

low-key Art Gay™, high-key Soft Gay™, the Dad Jokes Friend

laughs at his own jokes before he says the punchline

single, trying really hard to mingle, he may have misinterpreted?? ………or did he??? was that flirting or did he imagine it, like???? someone please help him??????

drag queen, sister of perpetual indulgence, wants to dance with somebody who loves him

would hum the pink panther theme for extra stealth

looks like he could kill you with his cinnamon rolls… and his tembleque… and his homemade ice cream…… aaaaand………

Sara Grace:

High Femme Ballet Lesbian, high-key Art Gay, Fruity Cocktails Cousin friend

says she speaks fluent cat, mostly just makes, “prrrrrfb” noises at her kitty

doesn’t think it’s pretentious to want to make out in an art museum, fuck you

one time, she won a law and order: svu trivia contest while totally shit-faced

she’s beauty, she’s grace, if she has an issue with you, she’ll bring it right to your busted face

looks like a cinnamon roll, is actually a princess

Todd:

tries too hard, really needs to chill

high-key Hipster Bullshit Gay

that white boy in every philosophy class who thinks he knows what he’s talking about, but doesn’t

bashes all the things he loves for fear of being mainstream

please do not confuse the problematic fave

looks like a cinnamon roll, is actually a low-key sinnamon roll

Conrad:

have u ever met the human version of a headache

don’t call him Hetero Satan, satan did nothing to deserve that

thinks loki is the true hero of the thor movies and the avengers

hey come on, he said, “no offense,” so why are you offended

doesn’t get why, “for the greater good” and, “some animals are more equal than others” are bullshit

garbage. like, really, he’s just………… trash

Adelaide:

Neutral Bi, Lawful Prep, Wine Mom Friend

always ready to DO ALL THE THINGS!!! JUST YOU WAIT.

is everybody’s cool big sister, whether they particularly want her to be or not

snarkmaster 5000 from the planet Done™

but if she keeps her mind active and her body moving at all times, she will avoid falling into a bottomless pit of despair and/or punching someone in the face

looks like a sinnamon roll and actually is a sinnamon roll

Max:

tries too hard, always stressed

the Dad Friend, also a literal dad

how do you interpersonal skills, we just don’t know

my god, does he try

here’s your token hetero character who doesn’t suck, straight people. the rest of them are pretty much garbage.

looks like a jerk, is actually a stale cinnamon roll

Yael:

Low-Key Femme Protest Lesbian, Mama Bear Friend, Badass Grandma, loves her wife so much

Chaotic Gay, Political Angry, actively repels anything even remotely resembling chill

always looks like she’s plotting and/or up to something, but that’s because she usually is

excuse you, children, but she and her wife and so many fallen friends didn’t spend their lives fighting against oppressive systems for you to hate yourself, you are a star and you don’t have to listen any white hetero-capitalist patriarchal pigs who say otherwise, don’t you dare let the bastards get you down for too long, because that is NOT what these fights have been about — yes, she is do re mi fa so done with your shit, but in like, a loving and supportive way

isn’t allowed to chaperone the girl scouts when they go sell cookies at the stop and shop anymore, she got too enthusiastic, people got scared

looks like a sinnamon roll, and probably wouldn’t kill you. ……probably. but you are cordially invited not to test her on this.

Elizabeth:

Soft Butch Library Lesbian, Whisky Grandma Friend

Neutral Gay, Chaotic Prep, calm but terrifying when enraged

has a constant twinkle in her eye, especially while being subtly snarky at people who don’t get it

she’s very sorry for her wife’s lack of chill, but also usually thinks Yael is right, sooooo……… she’ll only rein Yael in if things get really out of hand

isn’t like a regular teacher, she’s a cool teacher, right, kids? gets a rush of excitement whenever she gets an excuse to make a dirty joke while teaching

looks like a cinnamon roll, is actually a sinnamon roll

Julian:

hiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeee! he’s here to ruin everything!!

high-key Chaotic Neutral Gay, high-key Nihilistic Gay

got a “cease and desist” letter from kesha this one time

is the Tequila Cousin friend

got sick of people hurting him and decided to hurt other people for a change

sinnamon roll that you bought two years ago at a backwoods gas station, then lost on the floor of your car, and now it’s all grody and there’s mildew inside the wrapper and ugh, gross

Annie (Antoinette):

genuinely doesn’t understand how Extra™ she is

feels like the fuck-up twin because she’s always treated like the fuck-up twin

smiles like a stepford daughter, is actually made of rage and sadness

Chaotic Bi, but she’s so deep in the closet that the Narnians are charging her rent

says she’s just happy to be here, but only because her bullshit family made her say that

is exempted from the cinnamon roll meme pending attempts to get her away from her abusers and into therapy

#ocs tag #oc development #mine: writing #sebastian moncrieff: mutant disaster #pete arden: dramatic disaster #margot gabriel: chainsmoking disaster #josie quinn: empath disaster #lucy murphy: hemokinetic disaster #stephen gardener: precious disaster #sara grace kelley #todd burroughs: art film disaster #conrad hennen #adelaide moncrieff: ambitious disaster #maximilien moncrieff #yael lehrer: probably done with your shit #elizabeth woodham #julian richter #antoinette chamberlain #longish post//

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amorremanet · 8 years ago

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Seb: 07, 43, 48; Pete: 02, 29, 38; Margot: 22, 35; Lucy: 08, 40?

“get to know my characters” meme — and after a day that got unexpectedly stressful, I fell asleep on my keyboard while finishing this last night, but here we are.

02. What is one of your character’s biggest insecurities? Are they able to hide it easily or can others easily exploit this weakness?

Long story short: Pete’s biggest insecurity changes constantly, but the underlying fear is whether or not he’s completely unlovable, or if he’s only going to be loved if he changes literally everything about himself or massively censors his entire personality and spends the rest of his life pretending to be someone he’s not, the way he’s done for most of his life, in all kinds of contexts, from, “Playing up certain parts of his personality to the point of borderline distortion because it made people like him in high school”

…to, “Developing a problem with substance abuse for several reasons, many of which are at best complicated and messy, but one of them was that faking for other people’s benefit/approval felt a lot less awful and soul-destroying when he was sufficiently intoxicated, and if he got into what he called the, ‘Golden Zone’ of intoxication, then he could effectively pretend that some other, ‘better’ Pete who everybody likes better had come in and taken his place”

From, “Faking for his abusive shit paternal Grandmother because she was one of the few family members who didn’t compare Pete to his older brother constantly, so if he had to lie about everything and hate himself to keep her love, then so be it”

…to, “Lying to his parents about most things as a kid, because his dad was a nasty piece of work who berated his children for most of their interests and passions, berated them when they didn’t do well enough by his impossible, unreachable standards, punished them for some of their interests (meaning that he did things like destroying Salt n Pepa CDs that Pete had saved money for himself because Dad Arden didn’t approve of rap music), and punished them for lying but at least you could buy a bit of a lull in everything by faking like you were the model child he thought he wanted”

All of which can zero in on all kinds of different parts of Pete’s overall being, from his hair to his low tolerance for frustration to his dislike of being emotionally vulnerable to his weight or how his body looks

The mutability of his insecurities is actually one of the biggest things that gives Pete some protection here, which is a good thing because it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that he totally does care what people think of him. It takes paying more attention than his brother does, but even that isn’t especially hard because Jimmy and Pete are both guilty of taking each other at face-value. But have fun trying to pick out which specific part of himself Pete doesn’t like today.

07. Is there a catchphrase or sound that they tend to make a lot (likely without being aware of it)?

I don’t know that I’d call it a catchphrase exactly, but Sebastian says, “I don’t know” an awful lot. Which is sometimes fair enough, because he often doesn’t know things, but at the same time, he also says it by way of devaluing his own feelings on a not-irregular basis, so. There’s that.

He also says, “What’s the point?” and, “What’s the use of [fill in the blank]?” rather often, which is equally reflective of his problems, just different ones. In this case, the pervasive sense of helplessness and hopelessness that he hasn’t pegged as a symptom of depression until mid-morning of the day when he first turns into a nine-foot-tall wolf-man because of, tl;dr, internalized ableism.

08. What is, perhaps, their biggest flaw? Are they aware of this or oblivious to it?

Lucy’s biggest flaw is probably her habit of putting her ideas, ideals, and desires before those of other people, even when she’s trying to help.

Like, when I said that her Deadly Sin would be Gluttony, I had to clarify that I don’t mean Gluttony solely in the sense of eating all the things (which is a reductive understanding of the Deadly Sin that completely misses why it’s supposed to be a Deadly Sin, from a theological standpoint, and is pretty fucked up, from a humanistic standpoint, because it tries to make blanket statements about what all people should or shouldn’t eat, based on presumptions that can’t and don’t apply to everyone, which isn’t fair to anyone or actually going to help).

(Plus, historically speaking, the Catholic Church and some of the different Protestant denominations have used that definition of Gluttony to essentially shame poor people for wanting to eat because ~lmao if u were meant to have food, God would have given you food, duh doi!!~)

So, yeah, Lucy’s Deadly Sin is Gluttony because of how she willfully doesn’t listen in situations where she should, because she has such a strong moral compass and such strong commitment to her ideals that it can overwhelm her better judgment and lead to her doing shit that might work out in the short-term but that could create more of a mess down the line (and sometimes only doesn’t create that mess because she doesn’t get caught breaking the rules, or she manages to contain the mess before it spreads, or similar), because she goes, “DON’T WORRY, I TOTALLY GOT THIS!!” when she totally does not have this because she’s so determined to save everyone on her own or to at least play a major role in the saving people thing, because she wants to be a hero and doesn’t usually stop to think about what that means until after she’s already done something, because she’s doesn’t usually interrogate her ideas about The Greater Good or ask the right kinds of questions about what that means, and so on.

TL;DR: a lot of the less-than-positive aspects of why she’s such a little Gryffindor are why her Deadly Sin is Gluttony, and collectively, they make up her biggest flaw. She could stand to be more aware of this, but she’s also 23 and relatively sheltered, so she has a lot to learn in general

22. What kind of tattoos, piercings, birthmarks, freckles, and other such unique physical features do they have?

Piercings: Two in each ear, a “snakebite” set of lip piercings (option number four on this chart, the “two rings in the lower lip, around the locations of your canine teeth” one), and one in her left nipple.

She used to have nose ring and a septum piercing for a while, but she got sick of turning her septum ring up into her nostrils while at work and didn’t like any of the, “more professional” options for the side-of-the-nose piercing, so those holes closed up a while ago.

Strictly speaking, Margot isn’t entirely fond of the, “more professional” options for her lip piercings, either, but she’s a bit happier with wearing small, classy-looking studs on her lips than she was with wearing them in the fold of her nose, where it gets hard for people to tell if you have something on your nose or just a piercing.

Tattoos: She’s not quite as inked up as Sebastian, but yes, she does have tattoos.

Around her right ear and dropping onto her neck, she has a noose where the loop in the rope is shaped like a heart

On her left bicep, she has a Winnie the Pooh (Disney version, as opposed to the version from EH Shepard illustrations) that matches Seb’s tattoo of Tigger

“The two of you do quote-unquote, ‘extralegal imports’ — read: playing middleman to various smuggling operations — because you [*pointing at Margot*] won’t just let him (or really his parents) pay your tuition, and you [*pointing at Seb*] just nearly died six weeks ago because you took PCP and decided to fight five fucking skinheads at once — yes! I know you intervened to save the kids they jumped outside the bar but you got shot and you’ll understand why I might be a bit upset about that still! — and you just…… Neither of you notices any kind of oddity or disconnect here? Like, both of you can just shift, without missing a beat, from all that to making Todd take dorky pictures of you so you can show off your matching Winnie the Pooh and Tigger tattoos on Myspace and Facebook?” — Pete, right after Seb and Margot did that thing exactly, c. mid-September 2006.

She has a lower back tattoo of Judith beheading Holofernes, based on Artemesia Gentileschi’s painting of that scene

She has a clutch of violets on the inside of her left wrist (she’s thought about adding a line or two from Sappho to it, to make it more obvious why she has this tattoo, but she hasn’t been able to pick which lines, and as Pete’s pointed out, it might not be more obvious to most people)

And on her left ankle, she has the, “Darwin fish” variant of the Ichthys symbol (but without the word, “Darwin” in the center of it), with the subtitle, “this is not a ghoti” (the idea for which she totally and knowingly ripped off from René Magritte’s La Trahison des Images — the, “this is not a pipe” painting — and mashed it up with an alternate spelling of, “fish” that is only possible because English is a bullshit language)

Freckles, etc.: She does freckle in the sun, but they’re mostly faded at present because she doesn’t get a lot of sunlight. More noticeable is the mole on her left cheek, and the mole on her back, by her right shoulderblade.

29. What is one of the most courageous things your character has ever done for a loved one?

If asked, Pete would probably tell you that he is a grade-A selfish bitch who has never done a single courageous thing for anybody ever in his entire life and he is offended that you would even suggest such a thing

This is absolute nonsense, and the general response that he gets to it (at least from Seb, Stephen, and Margot) is, “*nods* Of course not, honey. Do you want your eggs sunny-side up today or something else?” or, “*nods* Of course, Pete. I’m sure that the people you’ve ever helped just imagined that” — so, deadpan at him and let him get it out of his system until he’s calmed down

Because he’ll be fine if you just let him get this shit out of his system and calm down, instead of trying to argue with him like Todd does

In fairness to Pete, though, this isn’t entirely coming out of him trying to overcompensate for his messy feelings re: self-worth. Part of this comes out of how his particular approach to being courageous isn’t always one that’s easily understood as such, because of how people tend to devalue things like emotional labor and more understated visions of bravery and being there for someone. So, it’s not right, but he’s working based on the ideas he’s been raised around

But some examples of Pete’s brand of courageousness for his loved ones include, but are not limited to:

Deliberately breaking one of his Dad’s old trophies in order to draw attention off of his big sister Cora, because she was sixteen and she’d just gotten dumped and the last thing that she needed was Dad Arden digging at her about everyone, and Pete was willing to be the scapegoat instead

Standing by Seb during the fiasco that ensued after he took the fall, outed himself at Catholic school, and made it sound like he’d seduced an unwilling Damian, rather than how they were actually dating on the sly — and more than just giving up most of his own popularity to stand by his friend, Pete did it without outing Damian, which was a lot of effort for him because he really wanted to do the “spiteful but satisfying” thing instead of the, “probably less wrong” thing

(Granted, Pete doing the right thing in this situation was less out of any moral or ethical objections to outing people, because he’s generally against it, yeah, and these days, he would probably smack his 18-year-old self for even thinking about it doing it.

But if you’d asked Pete for his opinion at the time, Damian threw his right to ask for consideration out the window when he decided to help spread it around the grapevine that he’d been totally unwilling in all of this when he’d usually been the one going, “Oh, who cares that we could get caught, just kiss me already” while they dated.

Really, Pete didn’t out Damian mostly out of loyalty to Seb — because it was important to him not to out Damian, since his parents were bad enough and his uncle was their school’s priest — and knowing that he wouldn’t want to get outed at Catholic school either)

Going with Margot during the one incident where Seb dropped off the radar and Todd eventually found him in the vicinity of a gutter, because she was enough of a mess that she really shouldn’t have been out looking on her own. After Todd found Seb and middle brother Ambrose dragged him up to their parents’ place, Pete then went to Seb’s place with Margot, again so she wouldn’t need to be alone.

Granted, he was high himself, and drinking from a hip flask while talking about how Seb had a problem, and she eventually kind of lost it and chewed him out for that, but:

1. Pete still tried to be there for her during a Really Bad stretch, when he really needed someone to be there for him too and unfortunately, the person he most wanted to be there for him was Seb, so…… that was a mess;

and 2. high and drinking though he was, Pete was also trying to moderate it and only get intoxicated enough to not start detoxing or be non-functional, which was a hard balance to find and something he only would’ve done for a handful of people

and going to rehab. Also, admitting that he needed help more generally, but going to an inpatient rehab took a lot of courage for Pete because there were a lot of reasons why it sounded like Hell on Earth to him.

35. Is your character afraid of death? If they got to choose how to die, how would they want to go?

Margot…… has a messy relationship with her fear of death. Like, she is afraid of death, and when she tries to sound tough, she says that her only fears are fear itself, “the crushing inevitability of death,” hypothetically being rejected by any of Seb’s dogs, and the possibility that the Loch Ness Monster might be real.

Which are, in order: a lie (Margot thinks fear is useful and valuable, its entire purpose is to help keep you from dying, so shut up and be grateful that your ancestral beings developed the capacity to feel fear) (which, context, she says as someone with an undiagnosed anxiety disorder); messy; a true fear for her, but none of Seb’s dogs has ever disliked her and Angel, his incredibly skittish “mutt with strong shades of Labrador Retriever and German Shepherd,” likes Margot better than she likes most other people, which is a big deal; and a straight up lie because Margot thinks Nessie being real would be cool.

If pressed to be honest, she would claim that that her fear of death doesn’t count as, “a real fear” because she allegedly only fears it in an abstract and primal way that she shares with most other animal organisms on the planet, because on a very deep level, right down to our genes, living things generally want to continue being alive and generally fight tooth-and-nail against death.

The biggest linchpin in her argument here is, “Well, but I haven’t been confronted with the reality of my own potential death” — which is a big lie. Margot has definitely been confronted with that. She just hasn’t had any experiences that ended in her nearly dying herself, in part because some of her confrontations with it were not actually that dangerous but they seemed to be at the moment, and largely because most of these experiences, for her, have involved her 6’3” best friend, who dives into harm’s way for her, gets her out of the way with the full intent to take a literal bullet, and otherwise lets the harm fall on him so it won’t fall on Margot.

So, ultimately, Margot’s, “I only fear death in a primal, instinctual way that is shared by most if not all living things” nonsense is something she tells herself to try and distance herself from how visceral the fear actually is here, and to try and get out of dealing with the fact that her fear of death applies more to someone else than to herself

(which, in fairness, it probably wouldn’t if her best friend had fewer near-death experiences and fewer self-destructive tendencies, but as it stands, Seb has racked up sixteen brushes with death, two of which did involve him briefly dying, and has a habit of putting his fingers in his ears and going, “La la la, I can’t hear you, this is normal and fine” when confronted with how this is neither fine nor normal)

If given the choice in how she dies, Margot would pick, “I don’t want to die, fuck you”

If she had to pick, then…… Nah, she’s fine dying at an advanced age, while asleep in bed but not after a prolonged painful struggle with cancer or something. You can keep your cool, heroic deaths, she wants to live and accomplish shit before she kicks it, thanks

38. What kind of weather does your character like? Cloudy skies, rainy days, sunshine, etc?

Sunshine, but not too warm. Pete likes spring, basically. He doesn’t actually mind the heat as much as he says he does, but he does mind that summer makes it harder for him to wear some of his most favorite pieces of clothing, like the longer and heavier and more dramatic pieces, and his, “totally not a hipster scarf because Cora made it for him, it’s not some fake pashmina bullshit like Todd wore for way too long a few years back” scarf

He won’t argue with a free excuse to wear some of his hot pants or booty shorts, though, even if he can usually only do that on the weekends because if he wore them to the theatre: A. he might end up getting hurt; and B. his boss, Mitch, would object because he could get hurt

40. Does your OC have any guilty pleasures they enjoy? Hobbies, past times, music, etc that they wouldn’t want known by others?

Long story short: yes, she does, but she also insists to most people that she doesn’t believe in guilty pleasures, and she also doesn’t really have any semblance of secrecy about any of these things

Like, she may not appreciate you finding out that she likes to binge watch Scooby Doo cartoons when she feels stressed out and sad, because she doesn’t want to be teased about it like her big brother sometimes does, but Lucy also doesn’t go out of her way to hide any of this

She’s way more likely to #Nope out of a situation where she really just can’t with this anymore by going, “Okay, I can’t do this right now, I’m gonna go play Final Fantasy 7 for a few hours until I either finish the game again or regain my ability to do this”

43. Does your character have a switch that changes aspects of their personality whether they are around friends, family, etc. Is there someone who gets to see their true self?

Eh, it’s less that Seb changes anything about his personality for the benefit of other people, and more that he emphasizes some parts of it with some folks while downplaying others, which makes him about as out of the ordinary as oxygen (which is to say, “Not at all”)

—I mean, think about it: do most people act the same around their parents as they do around their friends? their coworkers? friends of their friends whom they don’t know very well? random strangers on the bus? etc.

Like, I’m not trying to be an edgy mcedgelord and say that all people are lying bastards, or trying to channel Holden fucking Caulfield to call everyone ever a phony.

I’m just saying, as a human person who likes to make up stories about other human persons and write them down, that most people have different patterns of behavior around the different people in their lives, and it doesn’t make them fakes or liars or whatever. It means that people are, in general, affected by their environments and choose how to behave based on who they’re with, what’s going on, etc.

Someone doesn’t become a wholly different person just because they try not to cuss around their younger cousins or because they’re more comfortable with their friends so they can be less high-strung — but as I was saying.

This behavior on Seb’s part only gets to be any different from most people’s habit of doing the exact same thing because some of the contexts in his life make his patterns of doing this more unhealthy — not because the underlying behavior is inherently unhealthy, but because of how he uses these behaviors to hide things from people, including himself

One of the worst ways in which this comes out is with regard to Seb’s extroversion. Strictly speaking, he’s an extrovert less because he’s super-social and wants to be where the people are (though those things are also true), and more because he’s more attuned to the world outside of himself than to his inner life. This can be a problem because he ends up being hypersensitive to other people’s feelings (hyper-empathy, if not to the same extent as genuine mutant superpowered empaths like Josie and Julian), and he misconstrues a lot of things as potential rejections.

Between that, how much he does genuinely want to be where the people are and wants for people to like him, and how much he wants to make people feel better and avoid hurting them, he gets super high-strung when he’s talking to people. He used to be even worse about that, like back in high school, when it was easier for him to try and escape his undiagnosed depression

—and it led into one of the biggest reasons why he started drinking in earnest and liked it so much. Namely: when he was drunk, he was less high-strung and other people thought that he was fun to have around, instead of regarding him as, like, “well, he’s in the theatre club so we have to tolerate him, and he got matched up with Pete in Sister Mary Ignatius’s weird ass peer mentorship thing, and Pete kinda likes him, so we have to be nice”

—and because Seb was fourteen and already pretty down on himself as a general rule, and prone to assuming that there is nothing good or worthwhile about him, he concluded not that people liked him because he loosened up and stopped trying so hard to fit in and be just like them and doing a really bad job of it because, in that situation, he WAS legitimately trying to be someone he wasn’t (and he wasn’t as good at it as Pete)

Instead, he concluded that alcohol was a magical potion that made him cool and made people like him

(In retrospect, he is definitely ashamed of how he did exactly what he was warned not to do in all of the, “drink responsibly, here is how you do that, here is what alcohol is and isn’t, here is what it does and doesn’t, ffs don’t drink to make people like you, it doesn’t really work, etc.” talks he got from his parents, but he would also rather not talk about it, please and thanks)

Likewise, Seb doesn’t mean to be a manipulative little shit and often doesn’t even notice that he’s doing it, or think he’s manipulating any of his loved ones, but his attitude toward a lot of this is, “Well, okay, I didn’t tell the whole truth, but I didn’t lie” or, “Maybe I stretched the truth a little bit, but it’s still technically true, right” or, “Okay, I left out a lot of shit just now, but I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true, so it’s not the same as lying”

Unfortunately, he usually justifies that behavior with rationale like, “But I only told them what they wanted to hear and what would make them happy. Telling them the whole truth wouldn’t make them happy; it’d just make them get upset and worried about things that aren’t their problems and that they can’t help with. Isn’t it better to let them be happy? Isn’t that what they deserve?”

Which makes it really hard for him to break this habit, for a lot of reasons, which include but are not limited to:

1. His rationale largely lets him get out of acknowledging and dealing with the “understandable but still selfish and potentially very Not Good” aspects of his behaviors (e.g., how his habit of letting people believe things are better than they are lets him off the hook for dealing with things that actually need to be dealt with; how he wants to connect with people, so he tells them what he thinks they want to hear, which doesn’t always reflect reality or allow a genuine connection to develop, so if and/or when things fall apart, he takes it as confirmation that he was right about being broken and unlovable, etc.)

—Like, there are a lot of reasons why he didn’t forge that many meaningful connections with anyone during the years that he would call his, “downward spiral” period (which ranges from either age 15 to age 28, or age 18 to age 28, depending on who’s asking and how Seb feels about it today).

Some of them are due to circumstances beyond his control and/or can’t really be termed, “his fault” without getting into victim-blaming territory.

For example, Seb didn’t make a lot of friends in his last two years of high school because he spent them at his Dad’s, Max’s, and Addie’s old boarding school, where he almost immediately got outed (thanks to some other students overhearing the faculty talking about it, because Seb was from a legacy family and his abrupt transfer at the start of junior year was a big deal)

……and where he spent a lot of time getting bullied for being gay and “imperfectly” masculine (not that his bullies used that term, but they also had a hard time trying to accuse him of being exactly feminine, and usually went more for the insults like, “sissy,” “queer,” and the homophobic slur that starts with F), accused of being a predator for not outing himself (which he really wasn’t keen on doing because he came to Saxon fresh off of getting outed at Catholic school), and most looking forward to the weekends when he could get on a train and fuck off down to Pete’s campus and spend time with someone who actually liked him

Or for another example: while Seb hasn’t handled the fallout from some of his abusive relationships well (which is to say that he largely hasn’t handled it and would rather act like these relationships had no lasting effects on him whatsoever), you can’t exactly fault him for not keeping in touch with any of those guys after the respective breakups (or after three of them wound up in prison for various reasons)

But otoh, some of the reasons why Seb didn’t forge a lot of lasting and meaningful connections go back to his bad habit of telling people what they want to hear in order to make them like him, not because he’s consciously being a manipulative little shit but because he wants to connect with people and feel like he belongs somewhere and have friends

Seriously, that is the biggest difference between him and Jeff, “I would say anything to get what I want and I want you to like me” Winger, when it comes to telling people what they want to hear. Both of them do it on purpose. Both of them do it because they care an inordinate amount about what people think of them.

But Jeff wants to control what people think of him so he can use it to his advantage, and even after being with the Study Group starts to open him up, he has a habit of devaluing interpersonal connections (largely because he’s terrified of them, yes, but still) and kind of continuing to see them as tools, rather than as relationships.

For Seb, those interpersonal connections are pretty much everything. He loves love, he loves friendship, he loves community and connecting with people and making people feel good by being friendly and kind, he just loves people in general. At heart, he is a big sap, a hopeless romantic, a marshmallow made of affection and rainbows, and a kids TV show platitude about the power of friendship given human form.

But because he hates himself and loves all of those things and probably venerates all of them more than is good for him, he feels like he doesn’t deserve any of them and like he has to constantly tailor how he presents himself until it perfectly fits what he thinks everybody else wants from him

Which makes it sort of hard to form connections with someone, especially when Seb was pretty good at deflecting suspicion, distracting people, and caring about them, but less than good at sharing himself enough to make the connections last, which often works for a little bit, but ultimately runs afoul of that Perks of Being A Wallflower, “you can’t just just sit there and put everyone's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love” problem

Like, you have to at least share something with other people so they feel like they’re getting something out of the relationship (aside from you always catering to them and to their needs, expecting them to be open when they have little to no reason to feel like you’re reciprocating)

You can even share something that is some kind of untrue, like Conrad (who mostly shares lies but doesn’t see them as lies because they have some basis in reality, they’re just ““enhanced reality””), Pete (who’s spent a lot of his life playing different versions of himself to get people’s approval, which is different from Seb’s approach because when Pete does this, it has the appearance of being open and sharing, rather than a lot of deflecting and hiding)

But Seb’s approach was more, “bury everything and pretend it isn’t there and try to make it look like I am exactly what these people think I am”

It doesn’t help that he has a lot of trouble knowing who he is without someone helping him, and easily slips into a way of thinking where he feels like he’s a blank slate and nothing more so why is it a bad thing for him to just let people project what they want him to be onto him

which is partly a depression thing for him, and partly the result of how Seb has spent most of his life denying, repressing, refusing, and trying to erase or ignore huge parts of his own identity and his own sense of personhood because he feels like he’d be better and everyone would like him more if he were someone else

which…… is a mess. Like, he figured out early enough that he’s not very good at being other people outside the context of the theatre club — the classic example for him is how much he’s hurt himself by trying to be Max and fit the exact same standards as Max, which has never worked because they’re different people, and they can do and need very different things

—but Seb’s still wound up with very little stable sense of his own identity and who he is, and a lot of his questioning tends to end up back at, “I’m a broken mess, I’m kinda like God spilled a person but considering how many things I’ve lived though, I’m too amusing for Him to let me die, I guess”

He’s working on it. But it’s still a mess.

This mess of shit is one of aspect of the bag of emotional and psychological wet cats that makes up, “La Bête” — i.e., the part of his mind that is vaguely analogous to the Hulk, except that La Bête isn’t really a separate personality inside of Seb like the Hulk is often portrayed with Bruce Banner, and superpowered though she is, La Bête isn’t fueled by anger and destruction so much as protective impulses, the desire to live, love and the desire to form connections and defend those connections, the pack-building impulse

Basically, La Bête is more like actual irl wolves than most ideas of how wolves are that you find in werewolf or werewolf-themed fiction. Destruction isn’t really her endgame goal or a thing she particularly enjoys, so much as a side-effect of some of her other impulses since, once she decides to go and do something, she is admittedly not quite so good at being 100% careful

If she ever seems to be fueled by anger (which, in fairness, she is going to do, early on), it’s less about actual anger and more about either that protective impulse again (such as when Seb’s first full transformation gets triggered by one of Conrad’s lackeys inducing three simultaneous heart attacks, which would manage to kill him if La Bête didn’t take over, so she wanted to save him, and then their immediate impulse was to run and get Margot out of harm’s way)

……or it’s like the story of St. Francis of Assisi and the Wolf of Gubbio, where the titular wolf only looks angry and violent and dangerous to the villagers he’s been in conflict with because he is starving and they’ve been treating him like a monster

Or, in other words, the whole, “hey, maybe your superpowered transformation is triggered by anger and fear, so maybe you need to do more work on controlling that” idea leads to Seb trying to muzzle La Bête, which goes Not Well, largely because it means he’s not learning how to control his transformations, while also being a complete dick to himself and her, which makes her feel threatened and then makes her lash out

Not that I have any particular issues with the literal millennia of misrepresentation that wolves have had to suffer in Western literature, art, and culture, or with how all of those gross caricatures have affected werewolf fiction, or with how different layers of sociopolitical nuance, usually involving shades of misogyny, homophobia, and/or ableism, have been more explicitly woven into the figure of the werewolf in recent decades, only to come up with deeply mixed messages, like JKR casting lycanthropy as an HIV/AIDS metaphor and making Remus Lupin a sympathetic character but also keeping up this idea that the thing that subtextually ties him GBQ men… has an uncontrollable appetite for destruction, makes him a complete monster one night a month and must be repressed and controlled, and otherwise perpetuating a bunch of homophobic bullshit (to say nothing of how she did that even worse with Fenrir Greyback)

……Except, y’know. I totally have issues with all of that stuff I just said, and a big part of the struggle in working out La Bête and writing her has been trying to keep it from getting too preachy and pedantic, whoops

(also, for the record: La Bête gets called, “she” and “her” because:

1. the French noun is feminine, and Seb starts calling her, “La Bête” because he decides to take, “Gévaudan” as his nom de spandex, so he figures, “La Bête” would be a thematically consistent name;

2. Josie gets assigned to help guide Seb through the, “how to have mutant superpowers and not kill people or break the law or anything” stuff, and they try to approach the issue of how to understand and control Seb’s transformation with a bit of a Jungian-influenced approach, so they try to examine La Bête through the lens of the Shadow and the Anima

—which Josie does admit is sort of a mess with regard to gender roles and ideas about how gender even works, since Jung was a product of his culture and his time period like that, but since the Anima is talked about in she/her terms, Josie slips into doing the same to La Bête, and neither Seb nor La Bête particularly object to this;

(personally, Seb doesn’t see it as being any different from Pete’s nickname for him being, “[my] Princess,” and to him, it’s all like…… okay, La Bête is a part of his mind and psyche that’s been rather abruptly crystallized into a more cohesive entity by sudden onset superpowers — though she hasn’t been rendered separate from him, the way that a lot of depictions of Bruce Banner like to imagine the Hulk being more or less entirely separate from him, just cursed to inhabit the same body — and we’re apparently going to call La Bête with she/her pronouns now, okay cool)

3. “I don’t know? She-wolves usually get a bit more sympathy when you look at how they’re depicted in art and stories, like? Yeah, okay, you can easily find them being just as maligned as he-wolves, if not more so, but you also have stories like the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, or stories of she-wolves adopting abandoned babies of other species, so like? I don’t know, it just feels nicer to call La Bête a she-wolf?” — Seb, before he’s completely put it together how his transformations work, but when he’s at the middling point of realizing that the overwhelming emotion that La Bête brings with her is never anger)

But anyway, I was saying something about him and his patterns of connecting with others

Like, seriously, here are the meaningful and lasting connections he’s made from ages 15 to 28(ish): Margot, Todd, Fr. Teddy (one of the priests at Seb’s cool, socially progressive LGBTQ church, who technically isn’t a priest in the Vatican’s eyes because he dropped out of seminary and hasn’t actually gone through the ordination process, but he serves at a church that the Vatican kinda doesn’t acknowledge anyway, so… yeah, that’s a thing), and Julian kinda (if you stretch your definition of “meaningful and lasting” a bit)

If you expand a bit, you could add Pete (though they got to be friends before Seb’s “downward spiral” period, i.e. most of his adult life and all of his late adolescence), Nick (his and Pete’s sponsor, who Seb technically met after the “downward spiral” period), Stephen (who Seb met after he met Nick, so…… yeah), and Genevieve (his and Pete’s therapist, who they didn’t start seeing until after both of them had been to rehab, so hey)

—apparently, before I went off on that tangent about how La Bête fits into all of this, I was working on a better organized list of reasons why it’s hard for Seb to break his habit of playing up the parts of situations that he thinks people want to hear while hiding all the stuff that actually needs to get dealt with

The other reasons I was going to go into sort of got danced around in that huge tirade, but to make them a bit more explicit here: despite the selfish parts of this behavior, Seb genuinely does want to protect the people who he loves and make them happy, and getting him to understand that it would make them happy for him to be well, which means he needs to stop hiding things like he does…… well, that’s been an uphill struggle for a lot of reasons, including Seb’s assumption that he’s too broken to ever be well and he’s probably never going to get better so the best he can do is keep the people he loves from realizing it and blaming themselves for his problems;

(which he has decent enough reason to be afraid of them doing, since everyone he loves has had at least one big moment of what I call, “acknowledging how they might have shaped circumstances here and didn’t exactly help, but are still not actually responsible for shit anything in this because Sebastian made his own choices” but Seb feels like it’s more, “blaming themselves for his problems, and unfairly so because he made his own choices and the burden of responsibility shouldn’t fall on them”

—the major difference between the two approaches here being that Seb wants to blame himself for everything, and feels like it’s justified because of the, “he made his own bad choices and now he’s accepting responsibility” thing, but he doesn’t entirely get the difference between, “really accepting responsibility” and, “using acknowledgment of his fuck-ups as an excuse to be an overly self-punishing dick to himself and cut himself off from most things”

and there are some circumstances that he legitimately can’t take responsibility for.

They’re largely situations that had problems but that aren’t anyone’s “fault” — like, how his parents tried their best with him and were unconditionally loving, supportive, and accepting, but they’re still only human and didn’t always know what the best approach was. So, they did things like overly praise him so he wouldn’t feel overshadowed by his three older siblings, or like he was terrible and they were all awesome — but instead of feeling reassured and self-confident, Seb noticed the disparity and felt like his parents were lying to spare his feelings because he was actually terrible, and then felt like he couldn’t tell them so because they loved him enough to try and make him feel better about being probably worthless, and it’d be super ungrateful of him to

Or they had situations where Abe and Marceline didn’t know that some of the things they accepted as, “just odd little Sebastian things” were really how depression can manifest in children — and frankly, given that it was the late 1980’s to early/mid 1990’s, they couldn’t have known this. Hell, juvenile/adolescent depression is still not understood very well and still faced with a lot of nonsense about how it’s not possible for kids to have depression because we don’t want that to happen to kids. (The same goes for pretty much all juvenile/adolescent presentations of mental illnesses, too.)

All of this was even less understood when Seb was a kid, and it would have taken a lot of ridiculously implausible shit for Abe and Marceline to even think that, “Maybe our youngest has a mental illness” was on the table as a potential explanation for some of Seb’s behaviors, most of which seemed different from other kids but nothing to call a doctor about.

Like, okay, he was very emotionally sensitive and he cried easily and did things like insist that they could only adopt dogs from the ASPCA anymore because he saw different news specials about how shitty puppy mills are and how some people abuse their dogs, who end up getting put up for adoption — big deal, some kids are just more sensitive than others, shaming him for having emotions would be a bad idea, and shaming him for caring about the welfare of other living beings just doesn’t make sense, doesn’t that mean they’re doing a good job of raising a kid who cares about others

(Well, yes, but the problem there wasn’t actually the caring so much as how distressed Seb got about this, but unfortunately, by that point in his early life, Abe and Marceline were already pretty used to him being sensitive and maybe a little bit dramatic, and his level of distress about abused animals who really needed loving homes didn’t actually register as odd by his standards)

So, yeah. Ultimately, Abe and Marceline could have done a lot of things differently while raising Seb, and they could have put his depression together sooner, and so on — but nobody can be faulted for the situation because based on the circumstances and the knowledge that they actually had available to him at the time, they tried to make what they thought were the best choices in raising their son, like not shaming him for having emotions or putting him in therapy that they weren’t sure he needed — since, to be fair, any of his early self-destructive patterns of behavior looked either like he was a curious, energetic kid who was just being a curious, energetic kid, or like he was a good kid who, being more sensitive than his siblings, needed a bit more approval, and worked hard at school because he wanted his Mom and Dad to be proud of him — which, if he hadn’t needed it, might have made him feel like having feelings was some kind of pathology, which would also be pretty bad

Either way, they can’t be blamed for that situation, and Seb can’t be blamed for it either, but this does not stop him from trying to blame himself for, “being ungrateful” or, “being too broken,” when the actual problem is that no one has gotten to the root cause of a lot of his issues until recently, so they’ve been throwing different solutions at all of this and cobbling together different ideas for how to help that don’t fully address the cause and will, as such, always end up being incomplete)

—also, there is the problem of how Seb doesn’t really have the best idea of who he actually is, and trying to make him reflect on that… has a history of ending badly.

Like, if he doesn’t end up going down a rabbit hole wherein he starts feeling like he might not be anybody and might not even be real, and then goes and does something self-destructive in the name of remembering if he’s real or not

……then he’s liable to hit the point of going like, “Do I like this thing because I really do enjoy it or because everybody else does? Do I act this way because it’s true to being me or is it because I’m trying to fit into this or that idea about how gay men [or any other identity marker he might apply to himself; it’s usually either gay men or, something like, “the best friend Pete deserves,” “the uncle Marie deserves,” “the son my parents deserve,” etc.] act, or because I realize that I can’t ever be that for them and do the exact opposite? How much of me is really me and how much of it is dictated by culture and other people’s expectations of me? Who?? Am??? I, really???? Who are ANY of us????? Are any of us real or are we all just ideas of each other interacting in a void onto which we project meaning that might not actually mean fuck anything??????”

And if he gets there, he is going to short-circuit

Personally, Pete doesn’t like it when Seb goes and does any of his old self-destructive shit, but in a way, it’s preferable to the latter option, because trying to talk Seb down or trying to clean it up if he punched out a window or cut himself? Sucks. And Pete isn’t going to deny that it sucks. Arguing about whether or not he should go to the ER sucks, picking glass out of his hand with tweezers sucks, all of it really fucking sucks.

But trying to get Seb out of an existential crisis that usually ends with him flopped out on his sofa, or in his bed, staring at the ceiling in abject terror, probably with music or the TV on but not really listening to it, and where any answer could potentially have really unpleasant effects, either now or at some point down the line, because this has gone beyond the realm of Seb’s own issues and his own demons, and while it is still really about those things, it’s gotten into debates about very the nature of existence, and before you can do literally anything else, you first have to drag him out of the ontological and/or metaphysical rabbit hole?

………Yeah, that’s way more stressful, if you ask Pete. Not that he feels he can really talk, considering how many times Seb’s ever talked him down from something, or pulled him out of one of his own rabbit holes, or at least come with Pete while he was doing something stupid and self-destructive so he wouldn’t be alone — and at least these existential crises have been getting much less frequent and less severe since Seb started going to therapy — but still.

Okay, I’ve lost the plot of this way too many times, I’m going to shut up now

TL;DR: Yes, Seb does kind of do the personality switching thing with the people he loves, but at the same time: 1. If not for all of the other pieces of context here about why him doing this is really Not Good, it would be no different from the typical amount of switching that most people do based on who they’re with and what situations they find themselves in;

2. In a way, it’s even less of a complete personality-switch thing — e.g., acting reserved and polite around your parents, but then being rowdy and snarky and party-happy with your friends — and more of a situation where he shows more or less the same behaviors and personality traits to everyone he loves, including the same pattern of “I’m not technically lying, I’m just not being 100% truthful either and that’s different,” and the variance comes from what he chooses to hide or not (e.g., he’s more willing to admit to his friends than to his parents that he’d really like to have a drink instead of dealing with any given stressful situation)

And even given that variance, very few people will hear him say something like, “Is, ‘I want to down six shots of tequila at once and go 90 MPH down an open stretch of highway’ a feeling? Because I think I feel that.”

A large part of why he does that is to make other people happy, but an equally large part of why he does it is so he can get out of dealing with shit that is scary and complicated and ew, how about no, why can’t he just repress it and fake a smile and act like everything is fine

and 3. He’s trying to hide his behaviors, feelings, and impulses, yes, but it would technically be inaccurate to say that Seb is trying to hide his true self from people, because in order to deliberately hide his true self, he would need to know who the fuck that is, and he is not entirely sure (which is one of the many bones that La Bête has to pick with him, but that’s another rant entirely)

Either way, Pete is consistently the best at getting Seb to be honest with himself and, consequentially, with everyone else.

True, Max, Adelaide, Ambrose, and their parents have known Seb longest and arguably seen his more of his tricks than Pete has…… but the funny thing about that idea is how it assumes that blood family will always trump found family, and how it assumes that, “We’ve known him for longer” is automatically going to mean they know him better when… uh, no.

Max and Seb prove that pretty well, given that they’ve spent most of their lives not knowing how to best communicate and deal with each other, which totally spilled over into Max kinda developing a resentment toward cousin Jeremy for a while, because Jeremy was between Max and Adelaide, age-wise, and he got on Seb’s level better than Max ever did, apparently without even trying, so from Max’s perspective, it felt a lot like he was getting stuck with all the crappy parts of being Seb’s big brother while Jeremy got promoted to Replacement Max and got all of the good parts

Bad parts meaning, like, having to take him to the ER because he didn’t listen about being told not to climb one of the trellises at their grandparents’ place and he fell off, and getting the, “why didn’t you keep a closer eye on him” talk when Abe got there — to which the appropriate answer was apparently not, “Have you EVER tried to tell Sebastian NOT to do something? Has he EVER listened to you when you did?” — until Seb backed him up and agreed that Max had done everything he was supposed to do and Seb climbed the trellis anyway

While good parts meant, like, having Seb confide in you. Having him trust you. Having him look up to you, but not in a way that turns you into some unreachable ideal that he uses to be a jerk to himself (though at the time, Max would’ve just said, “Having him look up to you” because he didn’t really get that Seb did look up to him, just… not in a good way).

And yeah, Seb was a weirdly honest teenager who asked permission to take some of his parents’ booze to theatre club cast parties, and who knew he was loved and supported enough at home to come out when he was twelve, but he also didn’t tell his parents about the shit that fell on him after he outed himself to spare Damian because he didn’t want them to think he couldn’t handle it on his own, and had it not been for Pete and Ambrose telling them some of it (though not all of it, out of respect for Seb’s wishes), Abe and Marceline might have remained ignorant of what was going on, beyond, “He says that he’s stressed about final exams, and for some reason, he doesn’t talk about Damian or Allison anymore, but won’t talk about why”

So, it’s not for nothing, because Pete does realize that Seb’s family is actually pretty tight with each other and that, for all they’re a bunch of human beings and thus messy by nature and prone to screwing up, they all actually love each other and try to more or less do right by each other — which he is totally jealous of, by the way, though he would be more so if not for how Seb considers him basically a brother and he’s pretty much always invited to Moncrieff family gatherings or parties, since the family inexplicably (in Pete’s mind) likes him

—but at the same time, he’s pretty sure that he knows more about his Princess and in more contexts than the blood family does.

And he’s right.

Not that this means Pete’s awareness and his powers of Seb-related deduction are literally ever perfect, but…… y’know. He’s working with a more comprehensive playbook than Seb’s blood family.

This was a really pathetic excuse for, “I’m going to shut up now, TL;DR summary time”

Whoops

48. Is there anything in particular that would ignite your character’s jealousy? Or does your character not get envious?

Yes, but also no?

I mean, I feel like saying that any character never gets envious is at best disingenuous, though I’m biased because I’ve literally never met anyone who doesn’t experience jealousy, whether it dominates them like it does with Todd or not, and like…… The fact that Seb isn’t as overwhelmed by jealousy as Todd doesn’t mean much

He definitely experiences jealousy; it’s just that he doesn’t really focus on it or do that much with it beyond let it simmer and possibly use it as an excuse to be a jerk to himself

(—which is also a bit because he usually doesn’t feel it strongly enough to do much with it, but that’s not really a, “Seb is a good person who doesn’t let his jealousy consume him” thing; it’s a, “Seb is seriously depressed and doesn’t feel most things strongly enough to do much with them, which is going to change somewhat when he gets medicated and his brain chemistry starts getting evened out, but that’s another matter”)

His biggest envy buttons tend to be things like:

“Pete and Todd have had it easier than I have at staying sober, why can’t I do that, what is wrong with me that makes it so much harder for me than it is them”

(To answer his question: neither Pete nor Todd has actually had it easy with their sobriety — which Seb does know and he feels bad about even remotely feeling like they’ve had it, “easier,” but asking emotions to be rational is a losing game for everybody — but they’ve had more success than he has because they haven’t been doing the psychological equivalent of trying to fight Ganondorf with a butter knife)

“My dumb older brother has a good relationship with his wife, who is a good person and loves him, and I’m never going to have anything like that”

“My sponsor and his husband are so in love with each other even after so long together and it’s so beautiful and I wish I could have something like that, but it’s never going to happen for me because why would it”

and so on.

And here we see one of the reasons why he’s spent the past year and a half doing the psychological equivalent of fighting Ganondorf with a butter knife: he looks at these patterns of thought and doesn’t see them as indicative of anything beyond him being, “broken,” so he hasn’t been entirely open with them, and his loved ones and therapist haven’t had all the knowledge that they need to figure out how to help him

Some of them have put it together that all involved parties have been missing something that means all of their approaches aren’t working as well as they could do, but most of them don’t know what that is. Pete has the best idea (because Seb’s too attached to all his denial to have an accurate idea and he pretty much stops at, “I am broken, that explains everything”), and even he isn’t entirely right

Right about Seb being a mutant, right about thinking like, “Maybe he’s depressed? I mean, we keep overlooking that option for all kinds of reasons, but maybe that’s part of it all,” right about thinking that Seb is more affected by some of the shit he’s been through than he wants to be, right about Seb needing to try something new since a lot of his previously attempted ideas haven’t helped in the ways he needs, right about going, “You’re flatbacked on the sofa, staring at the ceiling like it just threatened to kill your dogs, and listening to ‘Last Christmas’ in the middle of June. It’s not hard to figure out that something’s wrong”

—but Pete is somewhat less than right about, for example: Seb’s emotional trigger for kicking into Beast Mode probably being fear and/or anger (but in fairness to Pete, he hears, “my best friend can hulk out into a nine-foot-tall wolf-man” and concludes that it’s most likely going to work like the Incredible Hulk or in-universe heroes like The Myrmidon of the All-Stars and Dr. Lydia “Promethia” Yates of the Wardens); reacting to sudden-onset superpowers by going, “HI OMG I’M YOUR SIDEKICK NOW FUCK YEAH LET’S ROCK THIS BITCH”; Seb’s confused feelings after his date with Stephen (because Seb ends up genuinely unsure what he wants to do about his situation with Todd vs. starting something new with Stephen, and Pete’s initial reaction is, “Oh, bullshit, you’re just trying to chicken out on this because you’re actually interested someone NICE for once, you just learned that he likes you back, and now, you’re SCARED”)

……Granted, he’s also not entirely wrong on that last point, but Seb being scared doesn’t negate the fact that he’s also confused about his feelings

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amorremanet · 8 years ago

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Sorry if this is a weird question but Is Sebastian the only one of your OCs you have a fancast(?) for or are there more 👀

Well, he’s the one whose fancast is the most set in my mind, but that’s mostly a function of: 1. him being around the longest (since… this whole thing got started, originally, as me writing background for him when he was an RP character, so my DM could have more ammunition for future plots and/or character torture);

and 2. me going, “Kassie, no, do not imagine him looking like Hayden Christensen, istg” — which clearly worked out about as well as telling a goat to do your calculus homework, since going, “don’t do this thing” only made me continue thinking about it so much that it stuck

But some other fancast thoughts I’ve had are:

Todd initially looked like Aidan Turner, but that’s currently in a state of, “ehhhhh, not quite so much” — they still have a few things in common but not enough that I like the fancast anymore

I’m annoyed that Margot, in my head, looks basically like Scar*Jo in Ghost World, if she were about 4’11”, less skinny (like, Margot is in that irritating, “in-betweenie” body type where you’re not really thin, but you’re not fat, but your weight isn’t distributed in the right way for people to mean it in a nice way when they call you, “curvy”), and had black hair and glasses

I’m annoyed with this because I’m annoyed with Scar*Jo in general — but I’m mostly letting it go and hoping that someone else comes to mind, because the last time I fought myself too hard on fancasting these losers, I went, “No, stop it, no Hayden Christensen”…… and now Seb looks like Hayden Christensen, so?

Maybe if I don’t argue with myself too hard, Margot won’t look like Scar*Jo forever.

Lucy changes between Kat McNamara and Sophie Turner, because I really do like both of them for her.

That said, I wish I knew what either of them looks like with short hair, because the long hair works for a little while, but eventually, she’s going to cut it short (because if you’re going to run headlong into things where fights could ensue, then giving your hypothetical opponents something they can easily grab onto, like long hair, is a really bad idea)

(also because I personally find the idea of an eager beaver go-getting young autistic hemokinetic with short, bright red hair and no chill…… super cute)

For Sara Grace, I really love Asha Bromfield, who’s currently playing Melody Valentine on Riverdale

I am perpetually cranky that I don’t have a fancast for Pete, because I love him more than GRRM loves Jon Snow and Tyrion Lannister — and I initially thought of Karl “Manila Luzon” Westerberg, because Manila and Pete are both white/Filipinx biracial (and as I just found out, they are apparently the same height)…… but Manila’s skin is a few shades lighter than I see Pete’s, and their respective tones are pretty different, too

Convenient points of comparison: I see Pete’s skin tones and shades being closer to Bianca “Jiggly Caliente” Castro’s or Ryan “Ongina” Ong Palao’s (who are both also Filipinx, though not biracial afaik) than to Manila’s

Pete’s older brother Jimmy is closer to Manila in terms of shading, though their skin-tones are still different

I do know that Emerson, one of Pete’s cousins from his Dad’s side of the family, looks like Eddie Redmayne, but that’s just because Emerson used to be in a different project, and I moved him to this one, and he’s looked like Eddie Redmayne since, like, 2009.

He’s also a really secondary/tertiary character, so it’s kind of a cheap consolation prize to not having a fancast for Pete that makes me happy

Like, Emerson is not quite to, “I could replace him with an interesting lamp and have the same effect” levels, but he’s not a big deal.

I mean?? He’s Pete’s cousin. Both of them are the gay cousin, but Emerson is a gay Libertarian who works for the FBI and Pete is completely certain that he’s making up his alleged boyfriend because why would someone who sounds so cool and nice want to date Emerson

He’s not making up his boyfriend. But Pete’s enjoying himself in trying to prove that Emerson is making Asa up, just like how he made up two separate girlfriends before he accepted that he’s gay, and Pete’s had a pretty rough time of things in the past few years, and he really is Em’s favorite cousin, so Emerson figures he can let Pete enjoy the, “prove that Emerson’s boyfriend is a big conspiracy theory” thing until about Thanksgiving

But that’s beside the point, and seriously, about the most relevance that Emerson has is being Pete’s cousin and being employed by the FBI’s department of mutant shenanigans

Josie, once upon a time, looked like this goth model who I’ve never seen anywhere else but the face-claim suggestions/resources blog where I found the banner and icons that I used for Josie, back when they were a character in an all-dudeslash RPG because in those days, all-slash games were one of the only ways you could play any characters who weren’t 100% hetero without it being hella mocked and/or hella policed

—unfortunately, said goth model’s name is, “Aaron Gilmore” which makes him impossible to Google because there are a ton of people named, “Aaron Gilmore” and none of them has ever been the one I want, excepting the one of whom very few pictures actually exist

He’s also only good for Josie c. high school and undergrad, and?? idk, I kinda like Ben Whishaw, but I also have reasons why I don’t entirely like him for Josie

Another minor character whose face I know: Nick, who is Seb and Pete’s sponsor and Stephen’s boss, looks like Nathan Lane, and pretty much wandered into my head looking like Nathan Lane as soon as I decided that Seb and Pete’s sponsor existed, his name was Nick, and he has an art gallery

I’m kind of annoyed that I have no freaking clue where to start looking for Stephen’s fancast, but I’m also not surprised because he’s tall, and chubby, and a dork whose favorite colors are hot pink and acid green, and who laughs at his own jokes so much that he cannot finish telling the damn joke, and his Dad is black/white biracial while his Mom is Puerto Rican mestizx, and here we are

There is, to the surprise of absolutely no one, a side-character who looks like Tyler Posey. He… needs to be renamed, because I named him at like three in the morning and only just realized why I felt weird about him being named, “Rafael Delgado” (…because Melissa McCall’s maiden name is Delgado, and Scott’s blobfish-shaped gene donor was named Rafael, oh jeez)

—but anyway, he’s a member of the Wardens, who are “totally not” a middle finger to a lot of my issues with how Marvel has handled the X-Men over the years, and he teaches music at their attached school for “the gifted”

This wasn’t the first time that I did something like this, either.

For example: Pete has an ex-boyfriend, who is very much an, “I could replace him with an interesting lamp and it would be essentially the same”-level character. I named him Wade, first as a placeholder, and then I liked it so it stuck but something felt a little off about it

It took me about a month to remember that Spidey*pool is a Thing, and their civvies names are Peter and Wade, respectively, and ohhhhh, that’s why it felt weird…… well, shit. (Interesting Lamp Ex-Boyfriend has since been renamed Blake)

I also have “fancasts” for all of Sebastian’s dogs (Lola, Achilles, Angel, Oscar, Renly, Chewie, Toby, Biscuit, and Cat) and for Nick’s cat (Ms. Dorothy), but that literally just means, “I decided what breed I wanted Ms. Dorothy and Seb’s dogs to be, I went on Google Image Search, and I found the ones I liked the best, yay cute animals”

#nonny #ask box tag #that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #*casually fancasts my own oc's because why not*#mine: writing #mine: asks #longish post//#Anonymous #sebastian moncrieff: mutant disaster #pete arden: dramatic disaster #margot gabriel: chainsmoking disaster #todd burroughs: art film disaster #lucy murphy: hemokinetic disaster #sara grace kelley #stephen gardener: precious disaster #josie quinn: empath disaster

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amorremanet · 8 years ago

Photo

Things I did tonight: blah blah writing, and then also screwing around with some of those, ”toggle the settings to make the dolls look like however you want them” to put together images for some of my loser nerd OC’s

Headshots (L to R, top to bottom): Sebastian, Josie, Pete, Stephen (who got screwed by the lack of body type diversity in these games because he’s supposed to be fat with an undercut and a fondness for cute pink shirts), Lucy, Sara Grace — and the twosome shot is of Seb and Pete, because loser nerd best friends are perpetually my aesthetic, even when that game doesn’t have a lot of variety in clothing choice

Josie would be the token blonde, if they didn’t dye their hair, but their hair hasn’t been its natural color since they were like thirteen. Stephen only looks calm and composed because he’s not currently trying to tell a joke and laughing at his own punchline before he gets it out. Also, I did make little ones for Margot and Todd, but I didn’t like how they came out, so here we are

#ocs tag #oc development #sebastian moncrieff: mutant disaster #josie quinn: empath disaster #pete arden: dramatic disaster #stephen gardener: precious disaster #lucy murphy: hemokinetic disaster #sara grace kelley #pete x seb #kassie hush #that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #*shares things with the intervoid and then goes to bed*

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amorremanet · 8 years ago

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Lucy for the oc meme if you're still doing it :)

oc profiles meme!

*facepalms @ me* I apparently really suck at remembering to fill in my placeholders before clicking post because I get too excited about clicking “post,” this is the second time that’s happened

Full Name: Lucia Raven Murphy.

Lucy is one of my kids who got stuck having a Significant Name in universe, because unfortunately for her, her parents liked significant names. (Not quite as much as Sebastian’s entire family, but… it’s kinda hard to top them without getting into, “James Sirius, Albus Severus, and Lily Luna” territory.)

Anyway. Lucy’s parents picked, “Lucia” for Saint Lucia of Syracuse, one of the early Christian female martyrs who went, “Mmm, pass” at the non-Christian dude she was betrothed to because of Jesus reasons and wound up getting killed for it, who is traditionally invoked against blindness and eye disease, but also against, “spiritual blindness” because the Catholic Church loves playing on concepts like that — one of the things I remember from Sunday school basically went, “Saint Lucy lost her sight but it gave her better insight into spiritual matters because of Jesus.”

One of Saint Lucia’s other claims to fame is that Dante invoked her throughout the Divine Comedy, and she was one of the saints in Heaven whom Beatrice went to in search of help to go save Dante’s self-insert from himself. This reference was 500% intentional, on the part of Lucy’s Mom.

And the in-universe significance of, “Raven” is that it was one of her Grandmothers’ middle names, but the meta significance is that I meant to use Mystique’s given name as a placeholder until I found a different middle name for Lucy, but then I really liked how, “Lucia Raven Murphy” rolled off the tongue and had to make up an in-character reason for it because Lucy’s parents were big on significantly significant names.

They named her big brother Damian Alexander Murphy, after one of his grandfathers (Grandpa Alex is one of Damian’s least favorite family members) and the Saint Damian of the brother pair, Saints Cosmas and Damian, the Holy Unmercernaries, who are traditionally invoked by physicians, pharmacists, surgeons, apothecaries, and veterinarians, and for protection against pestilence and plague.

Damian has still not lived down the fact that he got the, “we want our kid to go to medical school” name, but Lucy is the one who actually wanted that, herself. (Not that she wound up going down the med school track, but she did consider it very seriously and for a couple years before deciding that she liked the sound of public health advocacy better.)

Gender and Sexuality: Cis girl. // Lesbian.

Pronouns: She/Her/Hers.

Species/Race & Ethnicity: Human (mutant). // White, and if you ask her, she will claim to have no idea what her background is beyond, “I don’t know? White?”

She does this specifically because it annoys her parents and the one uncle who happens to be a priest. Lucy knows damn well that her family is mostly Irish.

Birthplace and Birthdate: November 21st, 1992. // Baltimore, MD.

Guilty Pleasures: Lucy would tell you that she doesn’t have guilty pleasures because, as part of her project of giving the Catholic church a massive, “Fuck you” for a laundry list of reasons, she does not believe in guilty pleasures. Sadly, and unfortunately for her, the Catholic guilt is not actually that easy to shake, and Lucy definitely has guilty pleasures.

Just, for her, they’re usually guilty pleasures because she feels like she’s supposed to be, “above” this or “better than” this, or she’s not supposed to like these things because she’s an adult now, right? And these are kid stuff things, so she shouldn’t be liking them anymore.

For an incomplete list: the High School Musical movies.

Scooby Doo cartoons. All of them. Even the ones that heavily feature Scrappy Doo. Even A Pup Named Scooby Doo.

Carnival games. Lucy knows damn well that they’re rigged, but they get her almost every time, because dkffjfh, she’s REALLY going to get it this time, okay.

Similarly: skill cranes.

You know the episode of Spongebob where Squidward gets obsessed with playing the skill crane and ends up giving Mr. Krabs everything he has, in exchange for more quarters, so he can play the skill crane, and drives himself into the ground with it?

Yeah, that’s why Lucy isn’t allowed to play skill cranes

Because there is precedent that suggests that she could all too easily end up doing essentially that

The old Gameboy Color that she used to steal from Damian, because it was technically his and it was more fun to play with his than to play with her own, because she got to feel like she was super-sneaky and cool (and because it made her big brother actually pay attention to her, even if it was to go, “brat, that is MY Gameboy, you have your own”).

She still has her own old Gameboy, too, but it’s more fun to play with Damian’s.

Either way, some of her favorite games on it are:

the first and second gen Pokémon games

(because she was the right age to be part of the target audience for Gold/Silver/Crystal, but she also wanted to take Damian’s copies of Red/Blue/Yellow, for the same reason why she took his Gameboy).

The Pokémon TCG for Gameboy thing.

Tetris (which usually involves a lot of yelling wordlessly, but vaguely in tune with the theme music).

Frogger.

Link’s Awakening DX, and the Oracle games.

Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man.

Centipede and Millipede, and Space Invaders (the old arcade games that are older than Lucy, put on a Gameboy cartridge because why not).

The Powerpuff Girls trio of games.

and Super Mario Land.

In addition to the whole, “this is kid stuff for children and I’m supposed to be an adult“ thing, Lucy sometimes feels guilty about her Gameboy because when she gets really overwhelmed by ALL THE THINGS, she wants to be doing something, but if she can’t handle doing actual, real-world somethings now, she’ll go zone out with her Gameboy for a while, which will feel better to her than doing nothing…

…right up until she starts berating herself for being okay enough to fight Whitney’s Miltank or get through a few levels of Tetris, but not enough to do something for real

And it’s not a guilty pleasure at all (most of the time), but if the Gameboy coping strategy doesn’t work, then Lucy becomes the person who goes jogging when she’s upset, except for when it kinda stops being, “jogging” and starts being, “running until she feels like she’s going to pass out because she might”

Phobias: Not being good enough (this is one of the big ones for her, and there isn’t really an answer to, “good enough for what or whom, exactly?” because there will be either thousands of answers all at once, or none whatsoever because Lucy is fixated on the general, overall sentiment right now).

Not living life to the fullest or achieving her full potential or doing everything that she wants to do in life

Her Dad — but to be more specific: she’s afraid of letting him down (and kind of hates that she’s afraid of letting him down, because she knows that he’s a homophobic douchebag who may not have been an outright abusive father but certainly has not been exemplary, either, and she knows that she’d probably be better off if she stopped caring what he thought, and she’s kinda tried, but it’s been rough going and she’s gotten a whole lot of nothing for it);

she’s afraid of both what might happen if he finds out that she’s a lesbian, and of the possibility that he might die without knowing, which would mean that she never gets the chance to confront him about it and fight that dragon ever again — and on the off-chance that he didn’t just cut her out of his life (since, sadly, we are talking about a guy for whom, “well, at least he doesn’t believe in reparative therapy anymore”), then she’d end up missing out on the time they could’ve had without that secret hanging over everything;

and she’s afraid of what her Dad means to her and of what it might mean that she can find him reprehensible on several counts, and acknowledge the chance that he could very well turn on his own daughter and erase her from his life, or his conscious daily life anyway, and yet, she does still love him and care what he thinks and want to not let him down

and extraterrestrial life — but not in that she fears an invasion, exactly? Lucy would probably actually welcome an invasion by extraterrestrial aliens, because then she’d be right and they’d be out there for real, and that would be cool…… but in the big picture sense where she doesn’t really deal with it every day but when it does crop up, it derails whatever else she’s doing very easily? She’s afraid of the possibility that aliens are real, but they just don’t want anything to do with humans

Were that the case, Lucy supposes that she could see why and all…… but it would still suck, and think about how much we’d all be missing out on with the aliens, all because we just had to be a bunch of shit-sticks to each other

What They Would Be Famous For: This answer is starting to feel a little bit repetitive, but…… I mean. Lucy’s going to be part of a team of heroes who get together because they just want to do some real good in the world and help people, but then stumble into fighting a shadowy cabal of neo-fascist super-villains (most of whom have their own shiny cool mutant superpowers, though some of them do not and get treated as if they’re, like…… pets, more than people and full team members).

If that hadn’t happened, though, Lucy probably wouldn’t get famous and she’d be okay with that. But if she did get famous without superpowers, it’d probably be due to rabble-rousing in Washington, D.C., or being particularly loud and obnoxious in order to draw people’s attention onto the public health crises and causes that she would’ve thrown herself behind.

She probably would’ve wound up making a lot of enemies, in that way, or at least getting on the bad sides of several people — and to be fair, she’s going to end up on the bad sides of a few choice douchebags anyway — but if she’d stayed on the public health advocacy track instead of the superhero track, she would’ve definitely had a Leslie Knope moment of saying something like, “What I hear, when I’m being yelled at, is people caring loudly at me.”

What They Would Get Arrested For: Breaking and entering, trespassing, unlawful surveillance, assault maybe — basically, a lot of shit that most vigilante superheroes should be getting arrested for (and that Lucy only won’t be getting arrested for because she has a team of people who care about her enough to go, “Sweetie, no. You don’t have your license yet. If you really care about the work and the helping, and not just about running headlong into doing ALL THE THINGS because you’re bored? Then you won’t risk getting arrested just to go out there right now, unlicensed”)

OCs You Ship Them With: Lucy has Sara Grace, her girlfriend, and I don’t know if they’re going to be endgame or not, but if they’re not, then it’s going to be because they’re 22 and 23, and just getting out into the world after going to college, so growing up happens, and it’s not fun, but…… Sometimes, people can love each other and still not work out best for themselves and each other in a romantic relationship (which is pretty much Seb/Todd in a nutshell, too, right down to them having first met each other in college).

But the Lucy/Sara Grace relationship, if it doesn’t go all the way to endgame, is not going to be broken up because one of them died, because that’s rubbish and I’d rather not because it’s more fun for me to write about people who love each other trying to work through difficult times, and maybe coming out of them not loving each other romantically anymore, but without the whole, “bury your lesbians” thing because

I mean

Are we done with that trope, or are we done with that trope

Anyway. If not Sara Grace, then I’ve also been shipping Lucy with Layla, Antoinette (which would be really complicated, in a potentially bad way, because she’s kind of with the villains, for all she’s one of the ones who could be redeemed or at least brought around to work for the non-villainous side, since Annie mostly got dragged into this because of her family… but still), Helena (which would also be complicated, but mostly by virtue of Helena being one of the All-Stars — and no, she’s not one of the big movers and shakers on that team, but she’s still on the team of superheroes who have a reality show and that does tend to complicate things)

aaaaand a little bit with Allison, though that one is more like, “Lucy had a crush on Allison for a while, but pursuing any kind of romantic relationship would’ve been awkward, because first, Allison was one of her big brother’s best friends, and then, Allison was Damian’s girlfriend, and now, Allison and Damian are engaged, soooo…”

OC Most Likely To Murder Them: Conrad will probably try, on the grounds that he, “wants to believe in her potential, but then suffers through watching her squander it” (which is his way of saying, “ugh why don’t you just want to give up on doing good things or helping people and come be a super-powered neo-fascist, uggggggggh”), but I already know that he’s not allowed to win that one because I’ve got other plans for both him and Lucy.

And, as with most of the people on the main team, Senator Huntington will want Lucy dead, but he isn’t going to go after her himself. He will send people after her, sure, but he hasn’t done his own dirty work since about 1984, and he has no intentions of starting it up again now.

Favorite Movie/Book Genre: Science-fiction. All the science-fiction (and probably an ensuing round of, “but do the aliens believe in me” and, “what if aliens ARE real but we haven’t found them because they think we’re a bunch of fuck ups and no one else in the universe wants anything to do with us”).

Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliches: Protagonist-centered morality.

Edgy mcedgelord grimdark antiheroes who are all like, “rawr, I am so doing what needs to be done and therefore I am morally justified in acting like a douchebag and doing all of these skeevy-ass things and raaaawr, fuck you that’s why, I think I’m the goddamn Batman, but like all of the stories where Bruce Wayne is at his worst, or maybe like that run in the 90’s where Jean-Paul Valley got to be Batman because Bruce was busy having a broken spine, thanks to Bane.”

Lucy is just kind of averse to people acting like edgy mcedgelords in general

She has been for a long time, like. When Damian was in his early to mid teens, and Lucy was about five to nine, she was right there, getting on her cranky goth trash edgy mcedgelord big brother’s case and being all, “Yeah right, blah blah blah, the darkness in the depth of your soul truly knows no bounds, that’s totally why you turned into a big dumb puddle of mush because Allison’s new cat likes you. Calm down, edgelord.”

There’s a reason why she got, “if i were a drink i’d be a cherry vanilla coke / if you were a drink what would you be / everyone’s like, ‘bleach’ or ‘sewage’ please calm down edgelords” on the textpost meme

And that reason is that Lucy doesn’t have much patience for it when people start acting like edgelords

This can be sort of hypocritical of her, sometimes, but not that often, and if she’s going to have an edgy mcedgelord moment, she’ll usually preface it by going, “At the risk of sounding like I’m trying too hard to be edgy…” or similar

Torture being not only condoned but treated as if it’s actually effective at doing anything but causing pain and traumatizing people into telling you what you want to hear, whether it’s true or not — just…… don’t go there.

Do not try to justify torture to Lucy.

Because she’s done her homework and she knows that it doesn’t actually work, so anyone who engages in torture is just violating human rights and civil liberties for no freaking reason, and excuse you but no. She does not believe that the only way to uphold and protect your ideals and values is to violate them in one of the worst ways that you can possibly violate them.

She may not actually argue her case very well in the heat of the moment, because she is very passionate about this and about how Torture Is Straight-Up Wrong, Period, End of Discussion, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200, and it’s really easy for Lucy to lose track of a logical argument when she’s wound up

But she will, however, tap into pathos pretty well and make an argument that makes people feel bad for even thinking of supporting torture, because for having such a problem with her Catholic upbringing over the entire thing of Catholic guilt? Lucy is pretty good at sending someone on a guilt-trip

While she will acquiesce that he is not a trope, Lucy can’t stand Deadpool. She doesn’t think he’s funny, she doesn’t think that he’s saying anything particularly insightful or constructive or fun, and if you’re going to be a satire of your genre that doesn’t contribute to the discussion but rather mocks the discussion and makes fun of literally everyone having it, then the least you could do is be enjoyable in your pointlessness.

Lucy is annoyed by hipsters, poststructuralism, dada, and Deadpool, who is, to her, the worst possible conflagration of the other three things on that list, except dressed in red spandex and annoying the shit out of her.

(This is really only relevant because: 1. I’m watching Deadpool right now, and 2. at least two of her teammates think Deadpool is cool and fun, and she is judging you so hard right now, Petebastian. Why are you like this. Why.)

And Lucy says that she hates forced love triangles in stories that did not need to have love triangles — she would point at The Hunger Games series as an example — but the reality is less that she objects to the love triangles, and more that she’s just not a fan of the two boys involved, but if the love triangle were between three girls (like, Johanna/Katniss/Madge, in this example), then she’d be all over it.

Talents and/or Powers: Well, non-superpower talents first. Lucy is a go-getter and while her rousing speeches have room to get better (because, y’know… she’s 23, and has more time to learn about the art of the rousing speech), she’s getting good at giving rousing speeches. She’s almost always ready, willing, and eager to get out in the world and try absolutely everything.

If you have her on your team for a competition like, “who can sell the most raffle tickets,” then you stand a good chance of winning, because she has dedication, enthusiasm, and persistence, plus a few of the Gifts of Gab (they aren’t really her strongest suit, but she is pretty good at them).

She’s also good at scavenger hunts, for a few reasons, one of which is the way that she’s totally cool with trying to scale the side of a building, or going and digging around in a muddy field on her hands and knees, or going and bothering strangers at the mall to pose for some ridiculous selfie with her, and so on — like, whatever weird scavenger hunt shit you can throw at her (or weird shit in non-scavenger hunt contexts), Lucy is here for it because that sounds fun and heck yes, she’d love to do it

She does have a problem of needing to learn better from the past and from previous mistakes (whether they’re hers or other people’s), but the flip-side of that problem is that Lucy doesn’t usually let setbacks get her down. She should let them get her down just a little bit more, so that she can learn from them a bit better, but…… well.

When people are yelling at her, she hears them caring loudly at her, and when things go wrong, Lucy will do her damnedest to find some way to turn this messy situation into something useful and constructive, and and then drag it into the realm of Good Things, kicking and screaming if necessary. Also, she’s 23 and she’s learning, and despite having some real world and real life experiences, she’s still naive about a lot of things, so… yeah. She’s learning.

And now for the superpowers

Lucy’s most notable power is hemokinesis — which is the term that I’m using because, “blood-bending” doesn’t really work outside the world of ATLA, where it actually makes sense as a term, but that’s the gist of it.

The ATLA conception of blood-bending is also inaccurate for Lucy because their blood-bending works by having the water-benders manipulate the water in someone’s blood, which is a really neat concept, but as Lucy learns more about how to control her powers, she’s going to learn that she has control over more than just the water in someone’s blood

For example: one of the applications of her hemokinesis that she’s going to rely on a lot is manipulating platelets in order to make smaller wounds scab over quicker. (In the case of larger wounds, she’s going to have to learn how to simulate the outer walls of ruptured blood vessels by directing blood-flow in certain directions, and then how to stimulate the body’s regeneration of the different kinds of blood cells.)

(The latter power is going to make her go, “!!!!!!!” when she learns that she can do it because OH MY GOD YOU GUYS. SHE NEEDS SOME PEOPLE WHO ARE ALLOWED TO DONATE BLOOD AND WILLING TO LET HER DO THIS, COME ON, WE NEED TO GO TO THE RED CROSS RIGHT NOW AND DONATE ALL THE BLOOD, BLOOD BANKS ARE PERPETUALLY IN NEED AND LUCY CAN USE HER POWERS TO GENERATE BLOOD SO COME ON YOU GUYS, SERIOUSLY. SEB, PETE, YOUR TATTOOS AND PIERCINGS ARE OLD ENOUGH TO NOT BE AN ISSUE SO CAN YOU JUST LIE AND PLEASE PRETEND YOU DON’T HAVE SEX WITH GUYS, AND SEB PRETEND THAT YOU’VE BEEN CLEAN FOR AT LEAST A YEAR, FOR THE SAKE OF THIS, IT IS REALLY IMPORTANT.)

(strictly speaking, both of them would do so, since neither of them has hepatitis or HIV, and they agree that this is important… but Lucy’s argument would work better on Seb before he learns that he’s a mutant.

Once he learns that, though, he would need to be sat down and given a thorough powerpoint presentation about how… yes, he has a healing factor, and yes, he would definitely be dead if he didn’t have it, with everything he’s ever done to himself, but it doesn’t actually mean that he’s secretly harboring hepatitis and/or HIV and just not feeling it because of his healing factor. If his tests come up clean, then he’s clean.

And… nb: they’d be having this conversation before the FDA changes the lifetime ban on giving blood for MSM, to, “you must abstain from having sex with other men for a year or you can’t donate blood.”

Seb, however, would still have to lie about the intravenous drug use, since…… yeah, he much preferred getting high without using a needle, because despite having multiple tattoos, he’s really easy to squick with needles — like he’s fainted a few times while watching other people shoot up because needles freak him out — but easily squicked by needles or not, Seb has used IV drugs that were not prescribed by a doctor, much less monitored by one, and he’d need to lie about that.

But Pete would only need to lie about the sex with other guys, and he thinks lying about his sex life in order to donate blood is okay, given that he knows he doesn’t have hepatitis or HIV.)

(This whole thing is just going to get a lot worse when Lucy learns how to regenerate plasma. Just.

She cares so much about this particular application of her powers and YOU GUYS SHE KNOWS THAT IT’S IMPORTANT TO WORK ON TAKING DOWN THE FASCIST MUTANTS BUT CAN WE PLEASE GO DONATE BLOOD COME ON IT’S IMPORTANT.)

Anywho. Some other uses of hemokinesis are going to scare Lucy a lot more, because, for example, she can use this power to heal…… but she could also create a blood clot and give someone a heart attack or stroke, and if she isn’t in control of it, she could do that without necessarily meaning to (e.g., if it happens as a panic response to being attacked by someone else)

And, uh. While it’s kind of cool to be able to generate the blood enough to make a sword, then make it dense, hard, and sharp enough to actually function as one? It’s also… kinda gross? And unless Lucy gets injured and gets her blood from there, her options are ““borrowing”” someone else’s blood — which she’d rather not do because what the fuck, that blood isn’t hers to go turning into a sword just because she can — or self-harming, which?

Even granted that she could get away with just pricking her finger or something, uh.

That’s pretty scary for Lucy, and more so because her girlfriend has dealt with self-harm before and it’s just?? Lucy isn’t sure if her belief in the greater good and getting shit done to benefit everyone would be enough to get her through self-harming in the name of creating a blood weapon when this could end up hurting Sara Grace

If she had no other options that would work, Lucy would probably do it, but…… seriously. Creating a blood weapon is going to be one something she’s only going to pull out if the other options have been exhausted and she’s basically down to, “surrender,” “die,” or, “make the damn blood weapon.”

Tangentially related to her hemokinesis, Lucy is eventually going to be able to tap into different uses of osteokinesis (or bone manipulation).

If she weren’t so excited about science and medicine, she might not make the connection on her own, but… blood is generated in bone marrow (which is why, if you get a bone marrow transplant, your body will generate blood that looks like it belongs to someone else, genetically).

Lucy’s going to have a lot on her mind for a while that’s more immediately pressing and that keeps her from fully making this connection — and getting into manipulating bones and bone marrow in more ways than, “generate ALL THE BLOOD for the Red Cross!!!” and so on, Lucy is going to have a harder time learning to control these powers and making them do what she wants

—but she will get a handle on her osteokinesis eventually, and be able to use it to heal broken bones (and several other things, but healing broken bones will probably be one of her preferred uses because…… no, seriously, a lot of the other uses of bone manipulation are going to freak her out kind of a lot).

(And at the risk of sounding like she’s trying too hard to be edgy, but? Holy shit, why did she have to get a bunch of edgelord powers like she’s just languishing outside a fucking Hot Topic, dressed all in black and complaining about all the goddamn conformists like how dare they listen to Beyoncé and Britney Spears instead of “Wake Me Up Inside” or Korn or whatever the fuck goth kids listen to, UGH.)

(Josie: “……Actually? It’s called, ‘Bring Me To Life.’”

Lucy: “………Huh?”

Josie: “The song that has, ‘wake me up inside’ as part of its chorus. Its actual title is, ‘Bring Me To Life,’ and…… eh? It isn’t not-Goth, but you would find quite a few Goth kids who’d rather not be associated with it because it was too big a hit when it first came out and they feel like this makes it a conformist song.”

Lucy: “…………Okay, question. Did I ask for a lesson about how you used to be a goth kid fairy princess back when you were in high school or whatever?”

Josie: “Okay, that song came out well after I’d finished high school, but who’s counting—”

Lucy: “Or did I ask for someone to please listen to me vent about how my powers are such freaking edgelord trash and it’s annoying?”

Josie: “……Neither, technically. You didn’t ask, you just kind of started venting.”

Lucy: “……*folds arms over her chest and just gives Josie an incredibly unimpressed face*”

Josie: “……I’m sorry. You were venting. Please, go on. I’m listening.”

Lucy: “Nah, I’m gonna go vent to Pete instead, he doesn’t correct me about songs I don’t care about when I’m mid-vent.”

………and then, about two hours later, Margot had to stop Pete and Lucy from going to stake out the nearest Hot Topic because…… no, you two. No. There is nothing untoward happening at Hot Topic.

Margot generally agrees with the grievances that you both have with Hot Topic, but there is not actually anything criminal going on at Hot Topic; you’re both just looking for something to be happening so you can justify wasting time on what is essentially a glorified game of you two hanging around outside Hot Topic, people-watching, and making pointlessly judgmental comments about the people who work or shop there.

Which Margot isn’t actually against, most of the time or in principle — except she is against it when you’re calling it work and wasting time that you’re really supposed to be spending on following up on leads about real supervillain problems.)

Other miscellaneous powers that Lucy has: a healing factor (it’s nigh impossible to find a mutant who doesn’t have one, and hers isn’t as intense as Seb’s, but that’s just because his has been through worse shit and it’s gotten a lot tougher as a result because environment and experiences have an important role in shaping if, how, and/or when the mutations that are coded in someone’s genes fully manifest and what the full extents of these manifestations will end up being)

Heightened senses (which is going to help contribute to Lucy finally finding out that she’s on the autistic spectrum, because the sensory overwhelm Hell is going to finally outstrip her ability to cope with things and make herself seem more or less neurotypical)

Increased stamina (which her healing factor helps with, yeah, but they are technically separate)

Super-strength (……ish. Like, she does end up with enhanced strength, yes, but the things is, she also ends up supplementing it with two things:

1. working out and strength training — and asking Seb to teach her how to fight because he knows how, and he didn’t learn it in any organized martial arts or boxing or whatever blah blah blah, he learned it from an actual need to defend himself and others, which means that he knows how to fight effectively, and come on come on come on, it’s not like Lucy’s asking him to start a Fight Club with her, she just wants to be a good superhero, pleeeeease?;

and 2. temporarily increasing the density and weight of her own blood to make her punches hit harder — which is a very specific way of supplementing her enhanced strength that doesn’t actually translate to most uses of it that don’t involve hitting things, and it may not hurt her as quickly and obviously as, say, trying to punch someone when you don’t know the right way to make a fist, don’t have your knuckles taped and/or can’t prep yourself for the pain that will come if you don’t have your knuckles taped, etc.

…but a couple hours after she does this, Lucy will have to deal side-effects as her blood tries to shift back to its normal density, and as her body tries to catch up with that, and all of it will suck)

And (in Sara Grace’s words), “a super-mutant refusal to give up in the face of things that are terrifying and difficult and might make other people run screaming” and, “the most super-mutant cutest little nose-wrinkle ever in all of the history of the entire planet ever”

Why Someone Might Love Them: …it’s late and I’m tired, so fair warning, we’re getting into, “this is where the crappy answers start up” territory right now but with that being said:

Lucy is enthusiastic, and completely earnest about it. Like, she has some semblance of tact, but it’s really difficult for Lucy to fake being enthused about something when she isn’t, so when she’s all excited and eager and everything? It’s for real, and it can be contagious, because she just believes so much in how cool it is to care about stuff and give them your all and fight for what you believe in and so on, and her energy and enthusiasm rub off on other people

(Which, admittedly, some people don’t like very much, but other people do, so.)

She may not be perfect, but she does always try to be a better person. This is hindered most by how slow she is to learn from past mistakes, and by her eagerness to keep plowing forward and to get up, dust herself up, and get back in the fray as soon as possible — but she’s the member of the main cast who is most likely to give a, “You know, I learned something today!” type of speech about how they can all take the most recent odd miscellaneous misadventures and turn them into practical self-improvement and being better people for real

(One problem that she needs to work on here is that she’s a definite Gryffindor, and she has that Gryffindor tendency to sometimes steamroll over people because she’s made a decision about what the Greater Good is or what’s best for everyone — and to Lucy’s credit, she can be stopped if you’re patient with her and go, “No. Here is what you’re doing, now stop”… but, still. She’s trying to work on the whole steamroller problem, but…… it’s a process for her.)

(Also, she’s not exactly a Pollyanna, but Lucy does believe in trying to find the bright side and the potentially useful aspects of everything, even if it kills her, so she can kinda seem like it, sometimes.)

For all she puts up a front as much as most of the rest of my characters — and Lucy’s front generally tends to be a version of herself that is more competent than she necessarily feels and definitely more self-assured than she feels at any given moment — Lucy is also more comfortable with being genuine and real with people, without it having to be that she’s breaking character or slipping up or something.

Like, her front isn’t one she uses to try and push people away or keep them from seeing her vulnerabilities; she uses it to try and convince people that she’s okay, and she’s got this, and you should take her seriously because she knows what she’s doing and she’s got this and if you don’t believe her, just watch

(Who listens to “Uptown Funk” when she needs a pep talk? Uh, yeah, that would be Lucy.)

So, she’s not one of my characters who’s going to go to ridiculous lengths to try and keep her true self from coming out — aside from: 1. trying to minimize some of her vulnerable spots. specifically the ones that make her; and 2. the balancing act she has with being half-closeted, but that’s not based on trying to push people away; it’s about being genuinely terrified of what her parents would do to her if she came out to them

—and when she wants to get to know someone, then she she’s more comfortable sharing parts of herself with them than most of her teammates

And she’s dedicated. Like, really, really dedicated. She tires not to expect the same level of dedication from other people… but Lucy herself won’t feel good about her efforts on something ‘til she’s given it 5,010% percent of what she has to offer and then tried to give more

Why Someone Might Hate Them: She can be overwhelming to deal with, even when she doesn’t mean to be. Her dedication can be exhausting to deal with, and she sometimes doesn’t really get that seriously, Lucy: it’s okay to chill out a little bit and not try to go charging headlong into absolutely everything. She often doesn’t get that she’s being a steamroller until someone points it out to her, and while she is genuinely sorry for that (most of the time), the whole thing where she doesn’t learn from her mistakes very easily is kind of a problem.

And, on the (usually) less understandable end, some people find her earnestness off-putting, and genuine belief in always doing the best that you can, trying to be the best that you can be, and trying to do the most good in the world that you can possibly do.

Sometimes, this is understandable, because Lucy can do this without being as sensitive as she could be about everything that’s going on in any given situation — most likely because she thinks that she’s right and hasn’t stopped to consider the other perspectives in play right now — and is being a giant, runaway steamroller with no brakes and a lead foot on the gas pedal.

Other times, though, people have gone after her earnestness and her attempts to be a good person, and a hero in her own right, because they’re being cynical dicks and going, “ugh, you are so naive and it’s annoying, stop it”

How They Change: Probably the biggest things that Lucy’s going to deal with as part of her character growth are: 1. learning how to learn from her mistakes, or other people’s mistakes, or the past in general because she really needs a better balance between her, “YEAH LET’S GO FUTURE YAY LET’S WORK FOR THE FUTURE IT’S ALL GOING TO BE SO MUCH COOLER THERE, I DO NOT WANT TO BE CHAINED TO THE PAST BECAUSE IT SUCKED, YAY FOR THE FUTURE” positive view of and approach to life, and the truth at the heart of, “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”;

and 2. her naivete is going to get kicked in the teeth. It’s not as clear-cut as, “the naivete is completely wrong and all of the cynical dicks in her life have been right all along” — it’s more the case that everyone involved in this discussion is being too extreme and/or too absolutist about something in how they approach life, they all have some fair and valid points (some of them more than others), and they all have places where they’re really in need of some changes to better themselves and to do better by the other people in their lives

—but Lucy is still really naive about some pretty important shit, and her naivete is going to get kicked in the teeth, and then her commitment to positivity and finding the bright side of things or a way to make them useful and so on? Yeah, that’s all going to be tested. A lot.

A big part of her development is going to be about finding a balance between her ideals and commitment to trying to be a positive force in the universe, and needing to pay better attention to the practical details and actual reality of what’s going on around her and what she’s sticking her superpowered bunny nose into.

Also, she’s going to learn that she’s on the autistic spectrum and have to deal with that, and like.

Mutant superpowers? She didn’t expect those, but she has thought about what she might do in this kind of situation because she’s grown up in a world where mutants with superpowers are real and fairly well-known and so it’s entirely plausible that she or someone she knows could turn out to be a mutant, so there are some aspects of this that Lucy hasn’t really prepared herself for and wouldn’t have seen coming and so on and so forth, and it’s not like the adjustment will be that easy for her, but it won’t take long to find a groove to settle into

But she really didn’t see being on the autistic spectrum coming and she consequentially has no idea what to make of it when it comes to her awareness

Why You Love Them: 3:11 AM crappy answer time, but… because Lucy is, in a lot of ways, kind of a mess — not as much as some of her teammates, but to be fair here, among the main team and with the exception of Sara Grace, they’re all 7 to 12 years older than Lucy is, so they’ve had more time to get themselves into a ton of shit and make themselves into different kinds of human disasters — but she’s trying and so freaking help her, she’s going to do it all with a positive attitude and a mind to help create good changes in the world wherever and whenever she can. And I admire that dedication in her

#saralanceing #lucy murphy: hemokinetic disaster #oc questions #that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #mine: writing #memes for ts #ask box tag #lucy x sara grace #damien & lucy #allison & lucy #lucy & margot #lucy & seb #lucy & pete #josie & lucy #religion ref// homophobia ref// mental health issues ref//#……this is probably the tamest answer to one of these memes so far oops #anyway lucy is trying her best and she's my daughter and i love her

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amorremanet · 8 years ago

Note

Margot!

oc profiles meme!

sdkfgshff, 1. eeee yay, thank you for asking! and 2. sldgfjdgfj, eeee YAY, thank you for asking about Margot in particular!!

Full Name: Margot Temperance Gabriel.

Gender and Sexuality: Cis woman. // Lesbian.

Pronouns: She/Her/Hers.

Species/Race (Ethnicity): Human (non-mutant) // White (Quebecois French).

There’s probably a mix of other white European ancestry in Margot’s family tree somewhere, but the Quebecois French part is the one that was actually important to her growing up

It’s even more important to her now. Despite all the times she says that she’s okay with having been disowned by her parents and how she hasn’t been back to Canada in about eight years — and despite how, on a day to day basis, she does seem more or less okay with it all — Margot was very deeply hurt by that loss, and it’s less that she’s dealt with it, more that she has done everything she can to distract herself from those feelings and bury them under anything and everything.

Which makes her Quebecois heritage more important to her — and leads to things like how she plays up her accent and throws more gratuitous French into her speech when she’s not having a good day (or when someone is annoying her) — because it’s like…… Well.

She can’t go back to the place she used to call home, and she can’t have her blood family in her life since they want nothing to do with her, but she still has the comfort of the rituals, superstitions, and so on that she grew up with.

Birthplace and Birthdate: Montreal, Quebec. // May 4th, 1985 — she’s a Taurus (Scorpio Moon, Cancer Rising).

Guilty Pleasures: Arguing (which, to be fair, she doesn’t actually feel guilty about most of the time, but she does admit that arguing with people has caused more problems for her than not). Making people watch hockey, even though she doesn’t actually care about hockey, because she’s not having a good day.

Drawing up elaborate plans for ridiculous heists that she’s never going to act on because, for example, she knows that there’s no way she can get away with trying to boost the Mona Lisa (“And that one isn’t even worth the trouble to steal. One of the most important lessons I learned on mine and Bastian’s study abroad year in Paris? Is that the real life Mona Lisa is completely and utterly, in all ways, unimpressive”)

—but fuck off, it’s still fun to have an elaborate fantasy life where she’s a masterclass art thief or similar.

(That said, there are some things that aren’t invited to her fantasy life, for various reasons.

Like, she doesn’t even dream about stealing Ancient Egyptian artifacts because reading up on the history of how white archaeologists dug them up and stole them made her go, “Okay, they are most likely not cursed, but if they were, then those people would deserve it, because that’s fucked up”

But the Hope Diamond, on the other hand, isn’t invited because Margot knows that the alleged curse probably isn’t real, but just in case it is, she’d rather not invite that into her life, thanks.)

Looking at different options she might have for taking art classes, because one of her alternate fantasy lives involves art forgery — but ultimately, only looking, sighing, then going to make coffee and distract herself because, as far as she’s concerned, she has no artistic ability whatsoever, so what’s the point

The whole process of hunting for horror movies she hasn’t seen yet (she’s especially fond of campy and schlocky horror that takes itself too seriously, but she’ll watch anything, and the more obscure, the better), getting copies of them, and watching them on Sebastian’s TV because it’s better than her own TV

(though she doesn’t make Seb watch them with her, because he scares easily and usually doesn’t sleep well after watching most horror flicks, he’s grossed out even more easily, there is a fairly long list of horror movies that have made him vomit because he was just that grossed out, and most importantly?

Ever since getting clean, he’s had enough trouble sleeping without horror movies freaking him out and making it worse. Making it worse will make it harder for him to stay sober, because unfortunately, his periodic grousing about how he could sleep just fine if he could get high or have a couple drinks? isn’t entirely wrong.

If you ask her about this, Margot will probably try to insist that she’s doing this primarily because, best friend or not, Sebastian is also her partner in, “extralegal activities that are only crimes if you get caught,” and him falling off the wagon is bad for both of them and worse for business.

The reality, however, is that despite her claims to be cold and heartless and out for herself above all others, Margot does care about other people, she does have a heart, and it’s more that she wishes she could be as cold and selfish to the detriment of others as she says she is, because she thinks that her life would be a lot easier.

And it might be easier, but in that life, she’d also be even lonelier than she already is, and she does not handle loneliness nearly as well as she wants people to think.

In the matter of Seb’s sobriety, Margot used to genuinely believe that, best friend or not, her primary concern here was whether or not Seb’s substance abuse — which, at the time, neither of them acknowledged as substance abuse — impacted their “business.”

Even when it did, though, as long as the effects weren’t that bad, she had a pretty easy time hand-waving it all and going, “This isn’t a problem, he’s fine, nothing’s wrong, it’s under control and that means I don’t have to be harsh with him in ways that will not make me feel good because they’ll upset him and risk losing me one of the only real friends I’ve ever had”

—and then she had a pretty easy time of ignoring her own feelings about it all and going, “Nope, it’s all about how our business is going, and not about a lot of potential problems that might be going on under all the substance abuse and motivating it, or making it worse, or anything like that — it is definitely not about those problems at all, because there are a lot of potential problems that could be going on, and what if we can’t do anything about them and they never get better? But they can’t get worse if we don’t acknowledge that they’re problems, because then they won’t be problems, and then he’ll be okay and things will be in control and I won’t lose one of the only friends I’ve ever had.”

And then everything was really, really not in control, and things did get worse because it turns out that ignoring the problems in life does not make them magically stop being problems

And then there were the couple days that happened a few weeks before Seb went to rehab, on the heels of his cousin Jeremy’s death, where Seb overdosed and had no idea if he’d done it intentionally or not, checked out of the hospital AMA as soon as he possibly could, went right the fuck back to trying to get as fucked up as possible, kinda dropped off the radar and made people panic and then Todd found him in the general vicinity of a literal gutter, and then, during an argument with Max and Ambrose to the tune of, “you just almost died, you are GOING to die if you keep doing this” “so the fuck what,” inexplicably passed out in the middle of a word, and just

That whole incident was a huge wake-up call to Margot, in some pretty bad ways, and while Seb was busy fighting with his brothers and having fainting spells because his mutant healing factor was well and truly sick of his shit and stretched too thin to keep him alive without knocking him out so it could work on undoing all the shit he was doing to himself…

…Margot was busy babysitting Seb’s dogs with Todd and Pete, trying to keep it together and trying not to snap at Pete for being high himself and talking about the obvious problem that Seb had while ignoring his own, and trying not to snap at Todd for turning into human platitude instead of a person and just dropping a bunch of lines he cribbed from AA, NA, pop-self-help books, and fucking Trainspotting which was apparently making him feel better but not actually helping because he wasn’t dealing with the situation or Sebastian on their own fucking terms, and trying not to snap at both of them for acting like they had any idea how to work on making anything right when they really blatantly didn’t, and oh yeah, trying not to have her own crying breakdown where they could see her do it

She failed on all of the, “trying not to” counts, though the order of events was a little different

First, she called out Todd for mashing up the, “choose life” speech from the movie adaptation of Trainspotting with some, “one day at a time” speech that he’d heard in rehab, which Pete laughed at because he’d been thinking the same thing, and then Margot chewed him out for how he’d been going on about trying to address the issue here and get Seb help while drinking from a hip flask and after admitting that he’d gotten high during this ordeal, because, in his own words, he “couldn’t do this sober,” then she chewed out both of them, and then came the crying breakdown of emotional overwhelm, guilt, fear, anger, more fear, more guilt, and “everything happens so much”

—which all goes back to horror movies and not making Seb watch them with her, because Margot doesn’t always act like she takes Sebastian’s sobriety seriously — because if you let people know that you take something so seriously, they can figure out that it’s a vulnerable spot for you and use that knowledge to hurt you — but she does. There are a lot of counts where she doesn’t know what the best way to help him is, but she wants to.

Because Margot knows that she can survive a lot, and that she can get through a lot and manage to thrive (or feel like she’s thriving, anyway) — but she’d really prefer to do that with her best friend, rather than without him, and so, in the average week, she puts more time and effort into trying to help him avoid or deal with potential relapse triggers than she spends on most other people in six months.)

Another guilty pleasure, though? All three of her boys don’t really care about Harry Potter that much. Like, they’re familiar with the series, but Pete thought the first three books were way overrated and has only seen a couple of the movies because of friends or boyfriends dragging him to them, and Seb’s opinion of it all is, “…eh? I mean, it’s okay, but I guess I’m not really the target audience, because I wasn’t wowed or anything,” and Todd’s biggest reason for caring about the series is that Bianca, his 15-year-old niece, loves it, and he likes sharing it with her even if it’s not really his first choice

Margot…… genuinely enjoys all the books. She’s a bit more, “eh” about the movies, but she does enjoy the books. It took concentrated effort not to come off as too excited when Todd went, “Hey, would you be open to, er. Making a Pottermore account as part of helping me apologize to my niece for missing her birthday while I was in rehab? And then being her friend on it and stuff? Like, please? Pretty please?”

Phobias: Margot would probably tell you that she fears nothing but fear itself, “the crushing inevitability of death,” being rejected by any of Seb’s dogs (which hasn’t happened yet, but Margot doesn’t rule it out as something that could happen), and the possibility that the Loch Ness Monster might be real. But that isn’t entirely accurate and most of these are some kind of lie.

Death technically isn’t a lie, because Margot does fear death, but she holds that it’s different and “doesn’t count” because she has confronted and dealt with Death, but she doesn’t feel like she’s ever “*really*” been confronted with the reality of her own mortality. That is based in a lot of Margot lying to herself, but still, she says that Death doesn’t count as a “real” fear for her because it’s not really a conscious fear for her, so much as the basic-level instinct to survive.

Fearing that the Loch Ness Monster is real is just an outright lie, because Margot thinks that would actually be pretty cool. (Just don’t ask her to choose between being a beautiful green mermaids lesbian or a beautiful green space babes lesbian, because she likes mermaids and space aliens equally and her answer would be, “what about beautiful outer space mermaids, can I be an outer space mermaids lesbian?”)

And, “fear itself” is a straight-up lie for her, too, because fuck you, fear is good and useful, okay? Fear exists to warn us that things might go badly for us, and it exists to protect us from stuff that might try to kill us. True, it’s not always right, and yes, it can be hyper-vigilant or irrational, and it can cross a lot of lines into being more harmful than useful, but Margot actually values her fear and thinks it’s completely ridiculous to wish that you didn’t feel fear.

She would also argue that, for all of the bad shit that has come out of humans being afraid and letting their fear run rampant and mess up everything, most of humanity’s big achievements — the good ones, she means — wouldn’t exist without humans experiencing fear and being driven to create something bigger than themselves, something that could comfort or help or at the very least outlive them

So, shut up about how great it is to be liberated from fear.

Margot would agree that too much fear is bad (though, good luck getting her to just admit to having an anxiety disorder, because nope, she’s pretty sure that she’s fine; she’s had problems like this for her entire life, which in her mind means that she can’t have a problem, because she still thinks that disorders have to come out of nowhere or be a reaction to something that happens to you)

—but in general, she sees a lot of value in fear, and she’s not sure where the line is between, “things Margot really does believe” and “things Margot tells herself to avoid all the problems that she doesn’t want to deal with.”

(I’d say that it’s about 75-25, in favor of, “things Margot really does believe,” but that’s beside the point)

Being rejected by one of Seb’s dogs is a genuine, conscious fear on Margot’s part — especially because Seb has broken it off with guys before because his dogs didn’t like them or they didn’t like his dogs, because dogs are more reliable and better overall, in Seb’s experience, than boyfriends — but this is just one part of a larger fear, and that fear is rejection in general, the threat of being alone, the chance that maybe she really isn’t worth all the trouble to love, and so on

If anyone wants to accuse me of having a lot of characters for whom this fear is a Thing, then

Well, yes. Duh. I haven’t exactly tried to hide it, and a lot of human beings are afraid of being alone, of not being good enough, of being rejected, of being unlovable, and so on

So…… *shrugs*

I wouldn’t say that it’s every character’s biggest and deepest, most powerful fear, or something they’d all see if they had to fight a Boggart — but it’s a recurring Thing for my characters because these are common fears irl, and they resonate with me so I like writing about them

But I digress

Margot is in a position, with these fears, where she’s afraid of ending up alone, but also assumes that it’s probably inevitable — like, she was opposed to making actual friends in undergrad until Seb decided that she was cool and he was going to be a friend to her, because Margot’s feelings on it all went, “why even bother making friends, they’re not going to last?”…

…and then she spent a lot of time being deeply confused about why the weird, unfairly tall (he’s 6’3” vs. her 4’11”) guy from their RA’s “getting to know your hall-mates” exercise was being so nice to her, like actually trying to talk to her and get to know her, and seeming genuinely happy when she went, “I’m going to the library and I need someone tall to get me the books that I want and then carry them for me, you are literally the tallest person on our hall and you work out so I’m guessing that you have a decent carrying capacity”…

…and then she thought that, because he’s a guy, it probably had something to do with wanting a date, and they had the, “Sebastian? I’m gay” “Oh, really? Me, too!” talk, which was even more confusing for Margot, because if he wasn’t trying to get a date with her, then why the Hell was he being so nice and trying to get to know her

(The eventual, “I’m just trying to be nice? And, y’know, act like a friend?” / “Yes, Sebastian, we’ve established that. But why.” / “……Because I want to be your friend?” / “………but WHY?!” talk was a little bit of a mess, but it worked out okay in the end)

—and for all this worked out with her making an actual friend, Margot still assumes that Seb is the exception, not the rule. She took a long time warming up to Pete and Todd, for instance, because her thoughts here went, “They’re just being friendly because they’re Sebastian’s friends, not because they actually like me”

Even now that she’s long since accepted that Pete and Todd see her as a friend, and that she feels similarly about them, Margot still has a periodically overwhelming fear of not actually being a True Part of her Fab Four

This fear is actually the reason why she simultaneously hates Wormtail while feeling for him a lot

To explain: once upon a time, Margot noticed, very fairly, that Seb and Pete’s relationship reminded her a lot of the James-Sirius relationship, with Seb as the James (comes from a wealthy, loving, supportive family; more or less a good person, but trips over his own feet and makes a lot of stupid choices, though James was actively a bully while Seb only got into altercations with bullies when they started it; the “heart” of their Fab Four, in a lot of ways; doesn’t always think about the consequences of his actions or how people may not necessarily agree with how he sees himself [though James was more in love with himself vs. Seb feeling like he’s garbage and not getting it when people disagree])

and Pete as the Sirius (acts flippant and cool but actually cares a lot; has a great capacity for kindness that’s rivaled by his great capacity for wrath; tenuous and complicated relationships with his siblings, and those complications have a lot to do with their abusive, racist father [who was, at the time, still alive]; will probably destroy you if you try to fuck with his friends, or at least he’ll try; doesn’t always think about the consequences of his actions or account for the fact that his idea of “helping” is not always going to be considered helpful by anyone else; can pretend to be polite or heterosexual, but not both at once; would probably go, “ugh, I’m too gay for this,” flip his hair, and leave, if he really didn’t want to be somewhere right now; not a drama queen, a drama khaleesi)

—and then, that led to Margot pinning Todd down as Remus and herself as Peter. Her rationale for the latter was based entirely on two points: 1. fear that her boys don’t necessarily consider her a “real” part of their Fab Four (they do, but good luck telling that to Margot’s anxiety disorder and making it stick); and 2. fear that she could turn out to be the, “weak link” in the four of them, the one who’s most susceptible to outside corruption or influence and ends up getting everyone else hurt, screwed over, dead, or all of the above

Which makes her look at Wormtail with mixed sympathy and revulsion, because she looks at him and sees herself

(And here, I editorialize really quickly: Margot’s reasons for pinning herself as her Fab Four’s Peter make sense to her and they have underlying logic and all, but she’s still wrong.

In reality, she’s much more the Remus of their Fab Four, and Todd would be the Peter because he wastes so much time and energy trying to be whatever mixed caricature of himself and the version of him he thinks that people want, and it makes him way easier to lead astray because, even as their Fab Four’s Ravenclaw, he has a big tendency to think critically in the face of peer pressure but about the wrong things and usually coming to the wrong conclusions.

Like, even granted that Sebastian is the one who has a history of dating abusive douchebags that gives everyone else fair reason to be relieved when he actually falls for a good guy? Todd is the one out of the four of them who is most likely to notice literally nothing about how he’s started dating a supervillain henchman or similar, and in the face of evidence, would have like a million and ten excuses that sound plausible enough until you hold them up to scrutiny.

Because he wants so badly to be accepted that he would ignore his own better instincts about this and make himself believe that his new boyfriend is really got that black eye when he got mugged after leaving the nursing home where he went to visit his grandmother.

Margot has a similar desire to be accepted and have a group of friends, but the fact that she handles that desire and the attached fear of abandonment by trying to push people away before they can hurt her? Totally not a Peter Pettigrew way of dealing with things. But I digress.)

And on one hand, she gets that her ways of handling these fears and assumptions create a self-fulfilling prophecy… but on the other hand, she has been hurt by people she was close to, before, and she hates being alone but still believes that, “Sometimes it’s better to be alone because no one can hurt you” is probably one of the truest things that has ever been said by anyone

And on the tentacle, her Boggart would probably take the shape of Marceline, Seb’s Mom.

For a while, it would’ve looked like her own parents, but after they cut her off and Margot met her best friend’s Mom, her Boggart would’ve started looking like Marceline. Initially, this would’ve happened because she was afraid of getting on her best friend’s Mom’s bad side and consequentially losing her best friend, since Sebastian is a certifiable Mama’s Boy™

These days, though, Margot’s Boggart would look like Marceline because she’s gotten onto Marceline’s bad side before, several times over, and the threat of losing her best friend due to maternal intervention is still there, even though it hasn’t happened yet (and, barring something completely and utterly catastrophic, it won’t)… but now, Margot kinda thinks of Marceline as someone who could, in five minutes or less, rip to shreds Margot’s ego, her sense of self, all of her self-defense mechanisms, and so on, and completely destroy all of the lies she tells herself on a daily basis, and probably do it without losing her cool

She’s not wrong

Marceline could totally do that, if she wanted

But to be fair, Marceline would at least try to be tactful about it and do it in a more constructive way than just giving Margot a, “Reasons Why You Suck” Speech, because Margot’s important to Marceline’s wayward youngest, and she isn’t a bad person, so it’s better, if you ask Marceline, to try and do this in a way that nudges Margot in the, “being a better version of yourself” direction

Which is only marginally less terrifying a prospect for Margot than the one where she just gets emotionally eviscerated and left to pick up whatever Marceline left of her sense of self while forced-smiling through the face-crack of the century

What They Would Be Famous For: Realistically? If she gets any fame, then it’s going to be because she ends up being one of the non-mutant members of a new superhero team. But if that hadn’t happened, then Margot wouldn’t have wanted to be famous, like? She would’ve wanted a reputation enough for some people to know her name and for it to command respect, but she’d much prefer to work from behind the scenes. Fame makes that plan very difficult.

What They Would Get Arrested For: Trespassing, breaking and entering, theft and/or burglary (and she would be pointedly insistent about how it wasn’t robbery because she didn’t use deadly force), myriad conspiracy charges, miscellaneous charges related to her and Seb’s “extralegal business activities” (read: smuggling and playing small-time but well established middle-folks in distributing various controlled or illegal substances to people who want them)

OC You Ship Them With: Adelaide, but… uh. I go back and forth on whether or not a romantic relationship between the two of them would be good in the long run, or if it would mostly be a hot damn mess, or what.

But, uh, aside from this possibility, most of Margot’s most significant relationships so far have been platonic in nature, even with other ladies.

Like, for instance, Lucy has a girlfriend (Sara Grace) and is too young for Margot’s comfort (23 to Margot’s 30, so Margot feels like, “yeah, it could be worse, but I would feel skeevy about dating her”) — but Lucy and Margot are going to get to be friends, and Margot is actually going to make an effort to reach out to her in a positive way, because she feels for Lucy and her current position of being closeted with her homophobic parents and relatives, but out to almost everyone else, and trying to find herself as a young lesbian and her place in the world, and ugh, Margot is so not used to actually wanting to be nice and help someone, but…… she wants to be nice and she wants to help Lucy out where she can

So, currently, Adelaide is the big answer to this question, but I keep going back and forth between several possibilities for how that might play out

OC Most Likely To Murder Them: Hmm. Well, Senator Huntington is the one who’s most likely to order the hit — and frankly, much like Josie, Margot is most likely to deal with Edward and Desmond, at first, because they are Those Two Bad Guys who just kind of suck at most things, and they’re usually the ones who get sent on, “the Senator is displeased with this person, go murder them for him” runs first — but if someone were going to murder Margot, the antagonist who’s most likely to actually put in effort is either Joan or Tammy.

Margot, personally, would be way more worried about it if Marceline ever wanted her dead.

That’s never actually going to happen, because, for one thing, Marceline might get annoyed by Margot, but she doesn’t want her dead, and doesn’t have the right kinds of connections to the wrong people that she’d need to call out a hit on someone.

But even if she did have said connections, Marceline wouldn’t call out a hit on Margot because, for all she is vexed by Margot and by the fact that she’s important to Sebastian on a fairly regular basis, Marceline also knows that her youngest son’s myriad problems are not actually Margot’s fault, and that they have a habit of enabling each other, rather than the one-sided, “Margot enables Seb in dangerous, self-destructive bullshit and it’s not like he’s entirely innocent but at least he’s not being an enabler for her” view of their friendship that Seb’s brothers have.

Still, though?

In Margot’s mind, when Marceline wants something done, then it gets done. Somehow, someway, it gets done. And she might not want Margot dead right now, but that could change, if she ever decides that maybe it’s not wrong to blame Margot for all of Seb’s problems, or Margot fucks up badly enough to earn her no romo soulmate’s wrath, or something.

(Seb kinda feels like Margot is getting to this fear based on ideas about Marceline that aren’t entirely accurate, and to be fair, she will agree that yes, her fear of Marceline isn’t entirely rational and yes, her view of Marceline is not necessarily as accurate as it could be because she’s afraid of Marceline…

…but she’ll only agree to that as long as Seb is willing to admit that his own view of Marceline is also inaccurate in places, and distorted by virtue of him being one of the world’s biggest mama’s boys, so he can maybe understand why Margot takes his opinions about his Mother with a few ten-pound bags of salt? :))))

—and to his credit, Seb will agree to that without question, since…… yeah, no, he would have no case if he tried to say that he isn’t a mama’s boy, and it’s not fair on Margot to act like he has some pure, objective view of the situation or of his Mom or any of it, especially when Margot can get very upset about this very easily, even if there isn’t a proximate cause for that, at least not one that actually has anything to do with Marceline

—for example, a situation like, “Margot is sleep-deprived and anxious about a lot of things in general, and focusing on this one right now because it’s more familiar, so it’s easier, and there’s more of a chance that focusing on this thing will ultimately make it easier for her to calm down, because she and Seb have been over this often enough that it’s easier for Margot to remember the reasons why this fear is irrational and talk herself down — and if she can’t do it herself tonight, then it’s easier for Seb to talk her through the anxiety spiral if they focus on this thing, and then they can try to deal with anything else that she’s worried about tonight”)

Favorite Movie/Book Genre: Horror of all stripes, Harry Potter, and literally anything with WLW in it, even if it ends up just baiting her, just…… jeez, she wants to watch something with other WLW in it, is that so wrong?!

Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: She’d tell you that it’s romantic happy-endings, because she is trying way too hard to seem like she is trying too hard edgy so you will be disinclined to ask any more questions about this. In reality, the way that a lot of popular media mistreats lesbians and WLW affects her more than she lets on, and more than she even lets herself be consciously aware of because it makes her feel weak, so she tries to repress and ignore those feelings.

But if pressed about the romantic happy-endings thing, she might tell you that her least favorite cliche is boring, bookish brunettes with inexplicable superiority complexes who talk a lot about how they’re totally not like all the other girls

She will probably not tell you that she hates that cliche because she has been that girl so many times before, and can slip into back it really easily when she doesn’t pay attention to her own behaviors, but…… well. If you got her to admit that she hates that trope, you’ve gotten further than most people will ever get, for whatever that’s worth?

Talents and/or Powers: …Okay, I answered these out of order, and a lot of Margot’s talents wound up being discussed in the next point, oops. And in the conventional sense, she doesn’t have any actual superpowers, but Sebastian would tell you that she has the gifts of super-wit, super-observation, and super-patience (most of the time)

Margot would tell you and Sebastian that awww, he has the gift of being super full of shit, but she appreciates the compliments nevertheless :)

Why Someone Might Love Them: She may not give her loyalty out easily, but once she does give it to someone, she actively makes an effort not to push their relationship or push them away like she does with most people, almost all the time, and she may not fight for you in the conventional sense — because she’s a 4’11” chain-smoker who doesn’t know how to throw a punch and doesn’t particularly enjoy most physical activity — but she will cheat, manipulate, make veiled or not-too-veiled threats, and several other things in the name of advancing your interests.

She’s intelligent, attentive, and thorough (though, in fairness, she can also skim over details that are actually pretty important because they weren’t interesting enough right now). She’s witty and, once you get her to warm up a little, she can actually be pretty fun to be around, even if she doesn’t think so.

She’s kind of trying to be a better person, even if it’s not always going so well for her, but she does care about making that effort (and she would probably say something like Peter Quill’s, “I’m an asshole, but I’m not 100% a dick” bit from Guardians of the Galaxy, though she and my Pete might have to share it, since both of them would probably say something like that).

Also, uh. These are some of the things that Margot has used in the name of making herself useful, potentially indispensable, because she doesn’t feel like people would want to keep her around on her own merits, but… She could be more organized (she kind of goes through cycles of being hyper-organized and then falling into “creative chaos”), but she manages to make sense out of her “creative chaos” and keep a lot of important details straight.

She knows a lot about legal loopholes and how to exploit them. She also keeps up to date on who the best lawyers to call are, based on how much people can afford (and/or whether or not they’re willing to just let Seb pay for it), and if you’re in trouble with the cops, she will very calmly remind you that you have the right to not talk to them and should definitely exercise it, and then she’ll handle getting you a lawyer.

While not exactly a paragon of communicating openly and honestly with people, Margot is very good at making sure that everyone is on the right and relevant pages… and at judiciously choosing which pages may not be exactly necessary in case it seems to be more in her and/or her Fab Four’s best interests to avoid certain truths in order to manipulate someone else (and at listening to arguments for why that’s not the best way of handling things, even if she isn’t always convinced by them)

Why Someone Might Hate Them: Well, in terms of, “fandoms gonna wank” (because statistically, I’m not likely to end up with a fandom but this is where my mind went first), I would expect hypothetical fans to hate Margot because:

1. she’s a lesbian, so she and Sebastian aren’t going to be a Thing romantically, period (even though both of them are gay, so that was never going to happen), and this would get construed as Margot’s fault because she’s the lesbian here, instead of the white gay boy;

2. the fact that she and Sebastian nevertheless have a deep, close relationship that’s incredibly important to both of them, which precedent says some fans would turn into, “ugh, she’s so clingy and why is she trying to get with a gay man” (even though she isn’t because both of them are gay, and do they love each other? Yes. But not romantically, and frankly? If either of them is, “the clingy one,” it’s Sebastian.

Like, in cat terms, Margot is the huffy cat who will run an intense kitty background check before deigning to let you pet her, and she’ll huff and stomp off as soon as you do anything to bother her ever-so-slightly, and Seb is a nervous, clingy cat who sleeps on your face so he can be close to you, sits on your wrists while you’re typing because he’s afraid that you don’t love him, and probably wrecks up the place a little if you’re gone for too long because he thought you were never coming back);

3. her life doesn’t revolve around Sebastian, she calls him on his shit and tries to hold him accountable for it (never mind how this is a thing that he needs more of in his life and generally, she does this when he deserves to be called out on something, and…… uh, yeah, last I checked? The whole, “You have a right to tell the people you love when they aren’t doing right by you and ask them to stop” thing applies to lesbians, too)

—and the list could go on, because I’m a cynic about this and I expect this shit out of people (just like I expect that people would probably be kind of shitty about Holmes — the unit chief and supervising agent on Seb and Josie’s team of mutants at S.T.R.O.M.A. — because he’s an older, black, bisexual mutant who isn’t intentionally cruel or over-harsh with people, but also doesn’t coddle the people on his team, expects them to do their jobs and stay professional, and doesn’t talk much about his personal life at work because that’s not what work is for and, in his mind, maintaining professionalism can help them keep their work as ethically sound and morally sound as possible)

But in terms of Margot’s personality, uh

There are a lot of reasons why most of the people she meets don’t like her:

She’s abrasive and often deliberately off-putting, because she doesn’t like most people — and sometimes she decides that she doesn’t like them without giving them a real chance — and assumes that they don’t or won’t like her, so she tries to push them away first.

She can be an elitist, and it’s not like she tries to be — sometimes, people don’t notice it at first, because she’s not always an elitist in more conventionally understood ways — but, still.

Not only can she be an elitist, she can also be a huge snob to people who don’t meet her standards (which are often unpredictable because a lot of them are based on absolutely nothing, at least nothing concrete), and she has an attitude about all of it like, “*shrugs* Sure, it’s not my best side, but I’m not doing anything too horribly bad over here and… what, like other people don’t have flaws? Uh huh. Right. *rolls her eyes and continues as she was before*”

She has a tendency to tune out of conversations when she thinks someone’s being tedious, and she handles it in one of two ways: 1. she outright admits that she wasn’t listening because someone was being boring and has the tact of a brick about it because she probably doesn’t care if you’re upset by being told that you were being boring, and she’d say that you should’ve been more interesting in the first place or this wouldn’t have happened;

or 2. she pretends that she was listening and plows ahead with things, no matter how many important details she may have missed

(TO BE FAIR: Margot does know that this is kind of a problem and it’s one of the few flaws that she cares about working on at all…… but she only cares about working on it because on one hand, she has gotten herself into trouble with it before

and on the other hand, she has exactly three friends at the start of the story and she’s hurt all of them by doing this, and Margot doesn’t feel good about that. So, she wants to do better by her friends and for herself.

But the rest of humanity…… well, uh. They can get some of the benefits of Margot trying to do better about this, sometimes, but she’s not doing it for them and trying to make her do it for them will not work because she’ll probably just stop cooperating.)

And true, most of her ambitions in life aren’t really huge things that she’d run roughshod over other people to see accomplished — though, in fairness, if she puts time and effort into not running roughshod over other people, then her primary concern is almost definitely, “it would be a lot harder and more annoying for me, in the long run, if I ran roughshod over them” give or take a dash of, “at least one of my three friends might get hurt or be I’m Not Mad, I’m Disappointed at me” — but…… uh.

Margot is the sort of person who would go, “Okay, the last two times the Dwarves got really OTT gold-hungry, they awoke a Balrog and summoned Smaug — but fuck it, I’m sure that nothing bad will happen this time and I want to go deeper than they did because there’s probably even cooler stuff that we haven’t unearthed yet”

She is also one of the main cast members who’s most likely to accidentally end up in a bad fanfiction trope (be it sex pollen or something else) because she found the Shiny Magical McGuffin that she wanted of the day, she saw the warning signs all around it that said, “DO NOT OPEN, VERY DANGEROUS,” and then she went, “Pffft, what*EVER*, that sounds like loser talk” and opened it

She is definitely the main cast member who is most likely to end up unleashing C’thulhu or some similar entity because she found an Ancient Tome Of Evil And/Or Things That Humanity Was Not Meant To Know, and well, she knew it was possibly a bad idea, but she did not bust ass and invest countless hours of work and put herself and Sebastian in several potentially dangerous situations to NOT open the book that she needs, so in her mind, the only thing to do was open the book and oh hey there, Nyarlathotep, how’s it going

(In fairness to Margot, though? She and Seb get each other into messy situations more or less equally because neither one of them is particularly good at being a responsible adult or making life choices like a responsible adult)

Also: Seb made her see Little Miss Sunshine when it first came out, and she expected to hate it. She wound up not hating it — it’s probably in her top ten favorite movies list, somewhere — but anyone who ever talks to her about it comes away with the impression that she really missed the point of the whole subplot with Greg Kinnear’s Richard Hoover and his attempts to get a book deal that blow up in his face.

That is not entirely true. It’s understandable that people get that impression, because Margot has been known to say a lot of things that either come straight from Richard’s mouth or sound like they should be lines of his — mostly in the, “how he talks about losers” vein — and most of the people who’ve ever gone, “Oh, wow, she missed the point of that subplot” before have thought she could only do this in earnest if she missed the point.

Which she didn’t. She understood the point of, “Richard’s attitudes about winners and losers are dangerous, based on faulty assumptions, and hurting him and everyone else around him too” perfectly well.

She just thought that point was stupid, and that it should have actually been, “Richard has some good ideas but the specific ways in which he pursues them are stupid; he fails because he doesn’t think about more practical things like how to market yourself to an audience, how people interpret your demeanor, how to make it sound like you’re telling people what they want to hear when actually you aren’t, and so on.”

About the only thing that she won’t say is, “Sarcasm is losers trying to bring winners down to their level,” because she’s at least aware of how she’s too sarcastic to be able to say that unironically without opening the door to people judging her in ways that she would totally deserve

And she’s not entirely sure that she believes Pete’s reversal of it — “Dismissal of sarcasm is the last refuge of losers who aren’t smart or creative enough to be witty” — though she does think that it sounds a lot better

But, yeah. Most of the, “winners this, losers that, blah blah blah winning is everything” shit? She does believe that it’s probably more or less true.

Mostly, she ends up taking this out on herself, rather than anyone else (such as by trying to psych herself up with a, “pep talk” about how it is unacceptable to be a loser, so she has to go get this shit right and don’t be a loser) — and to be fair, she has learned the hard way that what works for her doesn’t necessarily work for anyone else (…not that it actually works for her as much as she thinks it does, but she hasn’t yet had to deal with the fact that it’s not actually helping her that much

—so she’s still stuck at point, “Okay, saying these things to Pete and Todd is pointless because neither of them will buy into a definition of, ‘winners’ and, ‘losers’ that they didn’t come up with. Saying these things to Sebastian has pretty much the exact opposite of the intended effect because he’s emotionally sensitive, gets terrified that we who love him don’t actually love him and will, ‘realize that we can do better’ and leave him, and doesn’t handle the pressure well. But I like this style of motivating myself and it’s perfectly fine for me, yep”)

But on one hand, she does take it out on other people sometimes, even in situations where she does make an effort not to.

And on the other hand, even when she doesn’t directly take it out on other people, they wind up dealing with the side-effects of her self-aimed, “pep talks” because Margot’s usual style of dealing with them is calmly ignoring them until they go away. Which they never do.

Anyway, yeah. Uh. I love her, but there are plenty of reasons why other characters find her off-putting

How They Change: Okay, it’s past 2AM and I’m exhausted, so it’s crappy answers time (especially since I kind of touched on where she needs to grow and change throughout this meme). But TL;DR version is that Margot needs to learn about using her capacity for manipulation and finagling the legal system for good, she needs to learn about being nicer and fairer to herself while taking care of herself better (and without doing it at the expense of others), she needs to make more friends and doing better with and for others

Why You Love Them: …I just fell asleep on the table, so really crappy answer time, but Margot is fun for me because I enjoy her inner conflict and how she’s working on learning how to love and let people love her back

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amorremanet · 8 years ago

Note

You reblogged an OC meme! Thank god, tell us about Josie!

oc profiles meme!

…oh my god, i was so excited to click post and babble about josie at people that i initially forgot to come back and fill in the placeholder with something about how excited i was to talk about josie (—it’s like 4:15 AM where i am, which is probably part of the problem but i digress)

Full Name: Josiah Daniel Quinn — but, please, they explicitly prefer to be called, “Josie,” so unless you’re one of their bosses over at S.T.R.O.M.A*, whom they’re in no position to argue with, call them Josie. If not that, then use their surname. But if you can avoid it, just please do not call them by their full given first name, okay?

Shiny mutant superhero codename: Lyaeus — derived from an aspect of Dionysus who is traditionally invoked as a reliever of pain and a deliverer from anxiety and emotional turmoil and so on, which is one of their preferred uses of their psychic abilities and one of Josie’s larger goals in life (for them, it’s a mix of, “If something bad is going to happen, and you can do something to stop it and choose not to, that’s on you” and, “The world is a mess and largely sucks, but that’s no reason not to do what we can to take care of each other”).

Their codename is doubly special to them because although they were raised loosely Catholic and have a Mormon extended family who mostly doesn’t acknowledge their existence (and hasn’t for their entire life, since their Mom left the Mormon church to marry Josie’s Dad, oops), Josie is a hellenic pagan whose primary relationship is with Dionysus.

They thought for a long time and did a lot of reflection about whether or not it was too presumptuous of them to use one of his aspects as a codename, but eventually, they went with it because they see their codename and its meaning as someone who they’re continually striving to be and a set of values that they’re always trying to bring to bear in the world, and they feel like Dionysus is probably okay with that.

Gender and Sexuality: DMAB Genderfluid. // Bisexual.

This isn’t actually specifically about their gender or sexuality, but I couldn’t think of where else to put it: Josie grew up around all things Rocky Horror. Like, their parents were highly involved in the local community theatre, which did a semi-regular RHPS shadow-cast, and Josie’s parents brought their kid with them often enough that Josie grew up with their blood family and their, “Rocky family.”

Josie would rather deal with their Rocky family than their blood family a lot of the time, because their Rocky family was more immediately there for them during a lot of rough stuff while they were growing up, and their Rocky family handled it better at the various times when they came out, and their Rocky family didn’t say shit like, “Wait, I thought you were gay, why are you going back in the closet” when they came out as bi or ask invasive questions when they came out as genderfluid and was more supportive in general of Josie’s evolving sense of their own identity, and so on.

Pronouns: They/Them/Theirs.

Josie does also answer to He/Him/His pronouns, but that isn’t a choice on their part, so much as it’s an issue of, “Well, I can be out at work and open the door to potential harassment and people who will invalidate my gender identity and likely flat-out refuse to respect my pronouns, which will create more difficulty for myself in a job that’s already difficult because it’s stressful to begin with and I hate working here — or I can suck it up and just be grateful that my friends and parents are all good about this”

Like, one of the things that Seb does when he and Josie first meet that makes Josie go, “I’m still not totally thrilled at being assigned to help out the newbie (especially since I know I’m only getting this assignment because: 1. our bosses are playing a game of, ‘lmao just toss the LGBTQ ones together’ because the newbie’s gay and pretty much everyone here thinks that I am too; and 2. Deputy Director Gray is still cranky with me over that MSNBC round-table that I did last week where Yael kept pushing me to voice my own opinions and not the Bureau’s official line) — but maybe it won’t actually be completely awful and maybe he’s going to be okay as a new partner”?

…is noticing that Josie wears two woven yarn bracelets on one wrist — one of them in the lavender/white/chartreuse colors of the genderqueer flag, and the other in the pink/white/purple/black/blue of the genderfluid flag — and first waiting for them to be alone in Josie’s office, then going, “Oh, so are you genderfluid? What are your pronouns?” and then listening and respecting it when Josie explained that they’d rather Seb just kept using he/him/his at work

Species: Human (mutant with aforementioned mutant psychic powers)

Race/Ethnicity: White, and the only real part of Josie’s ethnic background that’s ever been important in their life was that their late paternal grandmother was very proud of being Irish.

Like, her parents had come to Ellis Island from Ireland — though she was too young to have any actual memories of the passage herself — and she wasn’t so insistent about it that she objected to her son marrying a Mormon girl instead of a Good Irish Catholic Girl, but still, the Irish thing was a big deal for her.

Josie, personally, doesn’t get it beyond, “I’m white and I have a particular aversion to St. Patrick’s Day because first of all, some of my extended family members can turn into a bunch of rowdy, off-putting little shits on St. Patrick’s Day, and I always had to suffer through that because we always had a party for it, first because Grandma wanted one, and then in honor of her memory.

“And secondly, because as soon as anyone hears that I’m partially Irish and/or a Dionysian, it is just assumed that I want to go get wasted on St. Patrick’s Day, which I don’t, but I still end up going out into environments that are absolute Hell for someone who has both telepathy and hyper-empathy, because the spaces are crowded, emotions are running high, and there is basically nowhere to escape to where you can get some peace and quiet and a break from the sensory and emotional overload of being at a rowdy bar on St. Patrick’s Day.

“And I endure all of this with people whom I may not even like that much just so they’ll have a designated driver, because I would feel bad personally if I didn’t go to make sure they all got home okay, and just because they don’t understand my god or might want to get something else out of him than I do, doesn’t mean that I should brush them off and risk them getting hurt while they’re completely shit-faced.

“Which doesn’t make this any less exhausting and awful, but it’s better than taking the chance that they might get hurt, y’know?”

Birthplace and Birthdate: Saratoga Springs, NY. // 22nd February, 1980 — they’re a Pisces (Libra rising, Gemini moon).

Guilty Pleasures: High-quality dark chocolate, high-quality makeup even if they can’t wear most of it as often as they’d like^, the original Vampire Chronicles novels (and though they will sometimes claim that only the original six ones, “count,” Josie owns everything that Anne Rice has published, even the ridiculous Jesus books), binge-watching reruns of Project Runway…

And they don’t feel particularly guilty about it, but one of the simple things that makes Josie happy is playfully teasing their emergency contacts/best friends over how their parents named them after Beatles songs

Jude, naturally, was “Hey Jude” and Rocky got named after, “Rocky Raccoon” because, at the last minute, his and Jude’s parents decided to veto naming him Desmond because he’s a character in “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” but his name is not in the title, which was apparently a deal-breaker because of reasons

Rocky also sometimes gets playful ribbing about all things Rocky Horror, because he and Josie are ridiculous nerds, and RHPS isn’t their exclusive thing because Josie will share it with anyone who gives them half a chance to do so…… but it is still a thing that is special to Josie and Rocky, so here they are

If you ask them, Josie will tell you that they don’t believe in associating pleasure with guilt, and in their defense, they do believe in encouraging people not to feel guilty for enjoying the things that make them happy or that help them survive, because as long as those things aren’t hurting anyone — yes, that includes you, person Josie is talking to — then you have a right to be happy and a right to take care of yourself

The reality is that Josie says this to people so often because it’s something that they often struggle with themself, and even though they’re better, in some ways, than they have been in the past, there are still a lot of places where they need work

Also, Josie wouldn’t call some of the more poppy music that they like, “guilty pleasures” — especially because, if you ask them, there is no reason to feel guilty about listening to, for example, Beyoncé or Nicki Minaj

—but it is still the case that, if they were going to have a mini-reunion with some of the old goth crew friends from high school whom they don’t keep in touch with that often, Josie probably wouldn’t mention Nicki or Beyoncé, unless it was by accident or until they were sure that the old gang wasn’t going to do the judgmental goth kids thing they used to do of going, “ugh, all pop music is soulless empty bullshit for posers” and so on

Also also, there is almost no chance of them ever admitting this to most people, but…… Josie kinda loves the goth kids from South Park. Like, Josie really kinda loves them.

There’s basically no chance of them ever admitting it to most people because for one thing, it’s embarrassing to them, due to the whole South Park of everything.

For another, they’d feel the need to give someone a lengthy, tedious disclaimer about how they don’t actually watch South Park or enjoy it very much, they just know about the goth kids because one of their best friends went, “Oh my god, Josie, you have to watch this, the new Goth kid characters are so you” way back when, after the first episode with them in it aired and said friend (Rocky) was still taping new eps on VHS to watch after he got home from night classes

And…… well. Josie still wouldn’t give South Park much credit for anything else, but they do really love the goth kids, and they agree with Rocky’s, “omg it you” moment because the South Park goth kids are often eerily similar to shit that they said and did as a weird little goth kid back in high school

At one point, Rocky actually made Josie little plush dolls of the goth kids that he’d designed himself, and they are a big reason why you’re not allowed in Josie’s room until they trust you.

Other reasons include:

Josie doesn’t want most people to touch their makeup or put any of it out of order, and they keep most of it in their bedroom, on their dresser, in front of the vanity mirror that they found someone just throwing out shortly after they moved to Baltimore, even though it’s a perfectly good mirror so wtf;

some of Josie’s favorite and most personally meaningful religious and spiritual paraphernalia is in their bedroom (they keep their actual shrine to Dionysus and their, “worship workspace” in a different room at their place, but some of the more personally significant things are in their room most of the time, and they’d rather you didn’t have a chance to touch them);

Josie just tends to be an incredibly private person who places a lot of value on their personal space and having spaces that are set aside as Theirs. They were like this even before their psychic abilities kicked in and made them value even more their personal space, and ability to have a place that is set apart as Theirs Exclusively where they can go to get some distance from all the mental, emotional, and sensory overload that comes from feeling almost everyone’s feelings and hearing many of their thoughts**, to some extent or another, almost all the time;

and the few albums of old photos and framed old photos, some of which are just garden variety embarrassing like, “yes, my hair is naturally blond, here is photographic evidence from before my parents let me start dyeing it, and oh yeah, that was probably backstage after the community theatre production of Oliver! that I did in eighth grade — oh yeah, definitely that one, there’s my Artful Dodger costume and my glaringly blond hair”

but others of which are, for lack of a better term, fairly emotionally complicated for Josie. There are several different reasons why any of these photos might be kinda complicated — ranging from, “they feature Josie’s one particularly heinous ex-boyfriend who used his wealthy family’s connections to get Josie blacklisted from working in fashion after they graduated from Pratt’s School of Design” to, “they’re from the year in high school that Josie wound up having to do over because they had to spend a few months getting inpatient treatment for their eating disorder”

^: even before getting recruited to S.T.R.O.M.A., Josie got really good at finding a balance between the, “I don’t want to look pretty, I want to look otherworldly and possibly like a vampire fairy from Wonderland” style of makeup that they want to wear, and a “more professional” style that is less likely to make their clients feel uncomfortable or get them harassed — but god, do they wish that they didn’t have to strike said balance.

It wouldn’t actually make their fondness for high-quality and often expensive makeup feel like any less of a guilty pleasure, for several reasons — on one hand, their awareness of how makeup is always politically Complicated, at best; on the other, if they got to wear their makeup exactly how they want it every day, they would end up spending more money on makeup, and it would make them feel guilty because they’d feel like it’s very irresponsible and probably going to screw them over down the line because they bought makeup instead of saving the money or putting it toward something else; and on the tentacle, a whole laundry list of other reasons

—but they would still feel more comfortable with themself and more at ease with everything because they’d be presenting exactly as they want, instead of censoring their own personal gender expressions (which they’re more okay with doing when it comes to their clients because that’s a case of compromising part of their well-being in the name of [probably] helping people who need them and pay them for that help, whereas toning it down at S.T.R.O.M.A. is tedious and Josie would seriously rather not)

(They have more than once said that the degree to which they have to tone things down for S.T.R.O.M.A. makes them feel like Ned “I’m not a Satanic sex god anymore, used to be a super gothed out androgynous rock star, but is now a straitlaced and nerdy substitute teacher” Schneebly from School of Rock.

This is not a good feeling, in Josie Land. They don’t like it and they live for the weekend because, barring any major incidents that get them called in to S.T.R.O.M.A., they get to wear what the fuck they want, forego pants in favor of their favorite skirts, do their gender how the fuck they want, and wear makeup that makes them look like a vampire fairy from Wonderland)

Phobias: Josie’s biggest fear, in the immediate sense, is losing control of their psychic abilities and ending up hurting people and/or destroying themself somehow.

Underlying that, they have a bigger and more further-reaching fear of being out of control of themself and their own actions, in general.

They’re simultaneously afraid of crowds (largely because they can get really overwhelming for Josie, really fast), and afraid of isolation, which ends up making them a lot like the sort of cat who goes all like, “cuddle me cuddle me cuddle me please please please i need love and affection… no wait, fuck you, this is stifling me and i need to get out of here… wait shit i’m lonely someone please love me… no, not you, you fucking suck… why am i so lonely, why won’t anyone pay attention to me… and so and so forth ad nauseam”

That said, when I was doing Pottermore quizzes for my kids because that is the sort of thing I find both fun and useful, Josie’s picked, “Isolation” for the, “Which is your greatest fear” question on the wand quiz

They picked, “An eye at the keyhole of the dark, windowless room in which you are locked” for the, “Which nightmare would frighten you most” question on the Sorting Hat quiz

Other miscellaneous fears and squicks: Worms, eels, and anything like that (but snakes are okay, snakes are great).

The possibility of never finding love (which they know is kind of ridiculous, because they do have a lot of love in their life… but Josie does want to be with someone romantically, and all their miscellaneous issues with their blood family aside, it’s weird and kind of disheartening for them that most of their cousins have gotten married or settled down with someone, so yeah, Josie knows that this fear is based on a lot of ideas that they generally don’t like and don’t want to live by, but still.

They’re 35, their closest friends both have longstanding romantic relationships, they’re one of the few cousins left who doesn’t have a plus-one to bring to the next family wedding, and they want a romantic relationship, so being perpetually reminded that they’re not in one kicks them in the larger fear that there is something about them that is just fundamentally unlovable, so they might end up being forever alone).

What They Would Be Famous For: Realistically? Probably how they’re going to start a new superhero team with Lucy, Pete, and Sebastian — later accumulating others — and how they’re all going to kinda stumble into trying to foil some other mutants who also happen to be neo-fascist supervillains. But had Josie’s one ex, Danny, not effectively gotten them blacklisted from working in fashion, Josie might well have made a pretty big name for themself there.

They used to joke about being famous for going on Project Runway and winning, but… this started after they’d already gotten onto the path that led them to therapeutic practice, and seen that they had the potential to do a lot of good in the world by continuing on that path, so the chances of them actually doing the Project Runway thing were almost nothing

What They Would Get Arrested For: While they haven’t technically been arrested before, Josie could have been arrested for illegally overstepping the bounds of what their particular level of metahuman license allowed them to do, and if they get arrested in the future, it is almost definitely going to be for something like protesting or some trumped up nonsense charges that actually boil down to, “getting on the wrong side of neo-fascist supervillains who have wealth and connections and political power.”

OCs You Ship Them With:

Romantically: Pete is my favorite here, but: 1. I’m also going to make them work for it, because they would be good for each other, but it wouldn’t just happen super-easily for several reasons, both about the two of them individually and about how they get on together;

and 2. I’d also dig shipping Josie with Seb, Stephen, Vince, Sylvia, Izzy, Raphael, and Cynthia — though tbh, I like non-romantic Seb/Josie better than romantic Seb/Josie

Platonically: As mentioned, Jude, Rocky, and Sebastian. Aside from them, Margot, Lucy, and Sara Grace (who are all ruled out as romantic options by the three of them being lesbians), and Josie being genderfluid, yes, but not identifying with womanhood enough for them to consider romantically pursuing someone who identifies as a lesbian. Todd (who I kind of feel bad for, because he’s sort of the loser in love so far, but otoh, that’s partially his own damn fault and he has a lot of growing to do before I’m letting him have a romantic relationship that actually lasts). Yael and Elizabeth. Really, everyone on the romantic list is a good platonic relationship, too.

“this is not a ship that i condone but i find their relationship interesting, and exploring Not Good relationships is Important to me”: Julian, who actually hasn’t met Josie yet, and won’t for a while, and their relationship will be…… tricky, in a lot of ways, many of which have something to do with how Julian is a huge tool who has a charming tendency to take his own self-loathing and insecurity out on everyone else while acting campy and making sarcastic quips as though this makes his behaviors totally okay.

Pretty much everything about Julian makes him someone who would make Josie say, “the Lord is testing me”

(only for someone — probably Lucy — to go, “But you’re not Christian” and get told either, “I was raised as one, maybe Jesus’s Dad is still grumpy that I found someone who’s better for me. Anyway, you know what I meant, right?”

or, “Fine. The Almighty Thundering Zeus, lord of the heavens and king of Olympus and He Who Was Cheating On His Wife With Everyone Ever Before It Was Cool, is testing me. There. Does that version make you happy?”)

But, yeah. Julian would make Josie go, “someone is testing me” because so much of who and what he is makes Josie want to help him, but so much of what he does makes Josie want to punch him

(an impulse that Josie largely won’t be acting on because, unfortunately for them:

1. they did not get any super-strength kinds of mutations and in an RPG, Strength would be one of their lowest stats;

and 2. first, they need to learn how to throw a punch without hurting themself more than the other person.

Punching neo-fascists isn’t their strong suit. They can let Seb and Lucy do the actual punching.

And Pete, even though Pete really shouldn’t because Pete also doesn’t know how to throw a punch without hurting himself more than the other person, so Josie is more likely to try and stop him from punching a neo-fascist supervillain in the face.

Not that Josie will always succeed in that, but… well. They and their teammates are all only human.)

Anyway, uh. Josie/Julian isn’t a ship that I’d personally want to see as the endgame of anything, ever, but I find their dynamic and the potential interactions between them interesting, and they’re something I’m looking forward to playing around with more, when it’s their time

OC Most Likely To Murder Them: Conrad will kinda want to, because he finds Josie’s sense of ethics to be, “tedious and outdated,” but ultimately, he wouldn’t go through with it because Josie’s creativity would intrigue him too much.

Senator Huntington would also want Josie to die, but he wouldn’t do any of the actual murdering because he doesn’t do his own dirty work.

All things considered, Edward and Desmond are probably going to end up with the job, “Go kill the weird effete one who looks like some kind of vampire fairy from Wonderland” because everyone else is busy, and they will fail at it, because that’s kind of what they do.

They are Those Two Bad Guys, and they kind of suck at almost everything that they try to do.

Favorite Movie/Book Genre: Fantasy, vampire trash, psychological thrillers, magical girl everything, and horror (pretty much all kinds of horror, though Josie’s most fond of monster horror, anything with revenge-y themes, and religious or cosmic horror. They will probably tell you, “The weirder and more pointlessly, aesthetically symbolic, the better”).

Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: Josie would tell you that it’s how much romanticized abuse there is in paranormal romance, and to be fair, they do hate that…… but they still read it or watch it and get invested in these fictional relationships, even without necessarily coming up with a counter-reading of the text’s opinion, beyond, “this relationship is abusive even if the author doesn’t get that”

Which, to be fair, doesn’t mean that they don’t hate the prevalence of romanticized intimate partner abuse, just that it’s an, “I hate this thing” where they still engage with it, and not just because there aren’t always a lot of options without it

(Horror flicks that demonize and stigmatize mental illness are a thing where Josie doesn’t like the thing, but suffers through them because there aren’t a lot of other options otherwise)

But one trope that will make them, “nope” out…… uh.

Josie is really sensitive about The Uncanny Valley, and while they may not fully, “nope” out of things over it, they need to take more time than most people to prep themselves for seeing it and recover after seeing it

Also, not a trope, but Shia LaBeouf will make Josie “nope” out of anything. They have no rational reason for disliking Shia LeBouf, so much as he Just Irrationally Bugs Them, but they will “nope” out of things if he’s involved

Talents and/or Powers: Okay, so, a lot of Josie’s actual superpowers are discussed elsewhere, especially in the footnotes, so let’s talk about their other, non-mutant superpowers. They can sew. Even without having been actively designing anything for a while, they can still pull out a good design and they are capable of following a pattern pretty well. They know their limits fairly well, and better than pretty much everyone in the main team (this doesn’t mean that they always). And it’s almost 4 AM, so this answer is getting cut short by, “I am tired and I want to sleep” (and the next two answers will suck for the same reason)

Why Someone Might Love Them: Josie is creative and curious and once you get them to warm up, calm down, and stop worrying so much about anything, they’re a complete dork who, among other things, gives people, “C’thulhu kisses” (done by sticking your hands in front of your mouth and wiggling your fingers like tentacles, and maybe making a silly noise and saying, “C’thulhu kisses!” like you’re Sailor Moon shouting her transformation phrase). They have a pretty good sense of humor about themself, outside of their precious few no go areas. Josie is compassionate and they do genuinely want the best for most people, even people they don’t personally like very much. They try to be patient with people, even when they really don’t want to be, and even if they don’t always know what the best option is, they still try to actually do things and choose the best option for creating positive change.

Why Someone Might Hate Them: Their cycle of indecisiveness that leads to recklessness that leads to self-punishing thoughts and behaviors that leads to more indecisiveness, and rinse lather repeat. Their tendency to be really judgmental, even while acknowledging that being judgmental is something that, in their experience, causes more harm than good, and that they want to avoid more often. The way that they can lapse into talking like a high school goth kid who’s up-talking the superiority of goth subculture and doesn’t realize that they sound like an elitist, conformist prick, just like the people they’re complaining about allegedly do.

How They Change: Well, for one thing, Josie has some things to learn about how they relate to people and manage their relationships — which doesn’t necessarily make them special because this is just kind of a Thing for most of my main characters in one way or another. Josie’s specific issue wrt relating to other people has to do with their reluctance to trust people and open up and try to build any new relationships, which has often led to them practicing a sort of interpersonal-level isolationism that has hurt them and other people.

They also have something to learn about managing the façade(s) that they present to the world, much like how Seb has to learn something about his habit of acting like everything is okay while he’s suffering and thinking anyone believes him anymore because he doesn’t want to deal with his problems

and like how Pete has to learn about how…… yeah, okay, he is genuinely angry about a lot of things — some of them fair and really more, “righteous indignation” than anything else, and some of them less fair — but a lot of how he acts that anger out in the world is not actually as truthful as Pete feels like it is, but more a way of keeping people at arm’s length, testing them and testing his relationships with them, and trying to push them away before they can get the chance to hurt him

In Josie’s case, their façade(s) are a bit different because most of them came into being less because of an emotional choice on Josie’s part — e.g., Seb doesn’t want to deal with his problems because they’re painful and terrifying and they feel like they’re too big to handle — and more out of pragmatic decisions

……but then Josie came to rely on them in contexts other than the ones in which they were originally created, and balancing that many different versions of yourself is stressful as fuck-all, especially for someone who already has to do a lot of work to keep reminding themself of where their personal boundaries are, and Josie hides in their different façades every bit as much as every other character who has one, and largely only gets away with that because most people in their life don’t know them well enough to notice this, and their façades do still have pragmatic value, so most people who do notice don’t say shit about shit

Then, there’s Josie’s relationship to time, which

I’m going to explain this really badly now, because it’s 3:33 and I’m tired, but basically, I see Seb, Josie, and Lucy as complementing each other in how they relate to and orient themselves in time, and the negative side-effects that they create for themselves because of these behaviors

On one hand, Seb is way too prone to being stuck in the past. He clings to it too much — but also has a selective relationship with it, where people he cares about get forgiven too easily and Seb tries to deny that he still feels upset about anything (even when basically everyone around him knows that he does feel upset and is just trying not to deal with it), while Seb forgives himself for nothing and defines himself so much by all of his past mistakes

—and he goes past the point of, “honoring and respecting history, such as by not ignoring times when he did fuck up (of which there are many)” to, “actively impeding his own progress in life because, for example, he keeps trying the same shit over and over and over again, even though it literally never works, because it’s what he did before.” Plus, some of his ideas about the past are distorted by various factors, or missing entirely (most often due to intoxicated blackouts and/or head trauma that would have had more disastrous effects on him if not for his mutant healing factor), or otherwise unreliable, so that’s a problem.

On the other hand, Lucy is future-oriented and totally jazzed up about trying new things and meeting new challenges head on and doing things!! also STUFF!!!!! there is an entire world full of THINGS AND STUFF AND BY GOD, LUCY IS GOING TO DO ALL OF IT OR AT LEAST AS MUCH OF IT AS SHE POSSIBLY CAN AND THINGS ARE GOING TO GET BETTER SO HELP HER GOD OR JESUS OR SATAN OR WHOEVER EXCELSIOR YAH YAH YAH!!!!

……which is great and all, but she charges headlong into shit without an actual plan (seriously, most of her plans follow the good old, “step one: do this thing / step two: ………… / step three: PROFIT!” formula), and she’s a case of someone who is averse to learning from history at all because she doesn’t want to be shackled to it, but having no sense of history can be just as bad as being overly chained to it like Sebastian, and… well. You can try to outrun the past like she does, but it doesn’t tend to work out very well, and it’s not going to work for Lucy either

On the tentacle, we have Josie, who ostensibly has a balance between the past and the future orientations that we see in Seb and Lucy, because Josie’s primary focus tends to lie on the present, and at most, the very near future or very recent past

—but that’s not actually a balance like Josie wants to believe, because (among other things), it makes it very easy for Josie to ignore past lessons that are older than maybe the past two or three months; and it means that while Josie can see all kinds of potential consequences, their ability to predict what they could be gets a lot less reliable as you go further into the future; and it means that Josie has trouble actually putting together a longer-term plan, which is part of their problem with wanting to create positive change in the world but not knowing how

Josie also has a tougher road (imltho) to go on about finding a new and better balance here, because their focus on the present is something they learned in recovery, as part of learning about mindfulness, and it does help them sometimes — but on that personal level, Josie’s presentist focus can also hurt them because, even when they notice certain behaviors in themself that could get Bad For Them, they can also overlook some of these budding patterns because they’re not Obviously Bad Enough to feel like a major concern, or they look different from other past manifestations of Josie’s behavior patterns so Josie doesn’t think they need to worry about these behaviors, and so on

I’m mean to my characters and I’m going to make them work to be happy, but they will all be happy, eventually

Uh. Barring most of the villains, because letting the neo-fascist assholes win in the end would be a complete downer that would probably end up undermining a lot of the whole, “just because the world is a crapsack hellhole doesn’t mean that it has to stay that way or that we should give up on it” idea

Why You Love Them: Okay, so, this needs a bit of a story.

See, Josie is a retooled character from an old RP that I was in way, way back. I loved them a lot, and they weren’t entirely wrong for the game — they had a good run in their first incarnation — but they also weren’t entirely right for it, and they kind of floundered a bit because I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with them.

A large part of this was due to how Josie was a senior at their school and, because of the year they did over, they were itching to get out and go to college, and the closest they got to an actual arc was how they didn’t want to leave behind their ex-boyfriend turned best friend (who was in the class below them), but did want to go to college already and get to the rest of their life

and how they had some trouble with accepting said best friend’s new boyfriend when Josie really wanted to be compassionate, because New Boyfriend was mentally ill and dealing with some trauma and Josie sympathized and wanted him to be well because why the Hell would you wish for someone to be *UN*well jfc — but also had trouble with that because New Boyfriend was sometimes aware of how some of his actions affected other people, but sometimes not, but sometimes he was and did the stupid things anyway, and even in working on his problems, he made the mistake that a lot of people do where they focus on getting well as defined by and in order to please the people around them, rather than doing it for themselves

—all of which Josie was sympathetic to in a big way, having been in some similar places before themself…… but they had a hard time always being as compassionate as they wanted to be because New Boyfriend’s actions had been hurting Best Friend, and even knowing that this wasn’t entirely something that New Boyfriend could be entirely blamed for (for several reasons), Josie still had a hard time trying to overlook the, “this lovable weirdo is my friend, my best friend, and even though we aren’t together anymore, I love him, and you hurt him, so yeah, I’m kinda mad at you for that” thing

And this all goes back to why I love Josie because one thing that they’ve kept in a big way, in getting retooled and updated and worked into my dumb little stories about neurodivergent and/or mentally ill LGBTQ mutant superheroes (and Pete, who is not actually a mutant but is neurodivergent, gay, an abuse survivor, and a superhero and I will fight anyone who says otherwise)

(I mean, ffs. Batman doesn’t have any mutant superpowers, and Iron Man wouldn’t have any actual superpowers without his ridiculous power-armor and, depending on the continuities, his arc reactors. So, no, I don’t think that Pete needs to have literal superpowers to count as a superhero — but that’s beside the point and to be fair, I will admit to being biased because I love Pete more than George RR Martin loves Jon Snow and Tyrion Lannister)

Anyway. As I was saying.

One thing that Josie has kept in a big way is that ongoing fight with themself over two equally powerful impulses or reactions to things or desires — like their, “I want affections and I want to be around people…… okay no this is overwhelming and I don’t actually like these people fuck this I want to be alone…… oh but being alone sucks and now I’m lonely, I want to be where the people are, let’s go to the movies…… oh my god why did we go see the new Star Wars while it’s still a relatively recent release, I barely remember anything about the actual movie, I was too overwhelmed by the feelings of everyone else in that completely packed theatre… and so on” relationship with other people and being around them or not

Or like their big struggle in the first book of wanting to help people and create positive change in the world, but not being able to do too terribly much on their own for a lot of reasons (some of which are about Josie personally, and some of which are about the whole Lone Superhero thing be a lot of hot fucking nonsense that is fundamentally unsustainable), but not having an official team to belong to because although they work for S.T.R.O.M.A., they don’t like S.T.R.O.M.A., and while they are part of the extended Wardens family, they’re not a fully-fledged Warden and so much of the Wardens’ everything is based around Yael and Elizabeth’s school, so being one and not being up in Poughkeepsie would be weird and mean you end up missing out on a lot and, in Josie’s case, end up feeling like an outsider even when you’re surrounded by people who, for the most part, love you and accept you exactly as you are, but also not entirely doing everything they can to find a team because, in fairness, it can be really difficult to do that even if you don’t work for the U.S. government……

Basically, I love Josie because I love making my characters deal with internal conflict, and while all of them have a lot of it, I’m really fond of Josie’s particular brand of, “self-reflective, doing things but not things that add up to bigger things in the ways that Josie wants, trying to remedy that but it’s hard, not sure what to do or if going after these new possibilities and new ideas will make things worse, getting fed up with themself and needing to try something, but but but five million different elements all converging on each other but but but” internal conflict

And I’m really fond of it in Josie’s case because Josie is savvy enough to know that they can’t fall into the same, “do fuck-all nothing about anything until the last possible minute” trap, but their frustration is less about, “I can’t do anything” and more about, “but what do the things that I do actually mean, who am I helping, am I actually helping them or not, how can I do things that create more significant positive changes or is there a way to do that at all”

And, well. There is, Josie, but it requires you to trust some new people, bond with some new people, build relationships with them and work on maintaining said relationships, find strength in numbers, and learn more about loving and letting people love you back because one of your biggest problems in your previous relationships has been that you don’t open up — not, “you open up slowly” but, “you don’t open up with most people, period, despite knowing that this is not a sustainable way of doing things” — so yeah I’d say you need to learn about that, and learn to stop being such a lone wolf because do you know what generally happens to lone wolves? Either they find a pack somehow, or they die (without making any kind of positive changes in the world around them, relative to the size and interests of, y’know, wolves).

……Because I’m a lonely and bitter and it makes my half-dead little heart happy to make my characters find more strength together than they do apart and learn to love and be loved in return without it coming off as one-sided, like it can do in a lot of takes on that trope that are aimed at children, because…… uh, last I checked, the whole point of a relationship is that it is not exclusively about one person’s needs or desires???

Also, Josie is a compassionate but grumpy grown up goth kid who is trying to be a good person, and doing a better job than a lot of other characters, but definitely has a problem with their judgmental tendencies and how they sometimes externalize them and get super-judgmental of others, because on some level, their mind is like, “fuck, can i get a break from always punishing myself over here, jfc” and I don’t know, it’s almost 4AM and I have lost track of how long I’ve been writing this

Josie’s a nerd and a cat who can’t make up their mind about whether they want to be outside chasing butterflies or inside sitting on your keyboard so that you have to pay attention to them and not your computer and idk, I love them, the end

(except for the footnotes oops)

*: Special Taskforce for the Regulation and Oversight of Metahuman Affairs — or in plain-speak, the FBI’s wing of people who get involved in all of the shiny, extralegal superpowered mutant hijinks.

They have a pretty good working relationship with their counterparts at the Department of Health and Human Services (who actually end up handling most mutant affairs, because this world treats the question of super-powered mutant licensing as more equivalent to getting a driver’s license, and frankly, most mutants in the U.S. just want to go about their lives in peace — like, go to college, get a job, go on dates, come home and watch the Daily Show, and not be bothered about or make trouble for anyone else with the weird superpowers that most of them did not want or ask for — so there’s rarely any actual reason for the FBI to go stick their noses into anything, and there are plenty of cases where they get called in, only to find that they aren’t actually needed after all), but… yeah.

S.T.R.O.M.A. is a faction of people who exist. Josie works for them, for all they would really rather not. Unfortunately for Josie, particularly powerful metahumans tend to wind up on a lot of S.T.R.O.M.A. watch-lists, and they are more likely to do so when they have powers that the people at the FBI consider particularly useful or desirable — for example, telepathy and hyper-empathy, in Josie’s case. For the most part, these watch-lists don’t actually amount to anything because they don’t end up being relevant to most of the cases that S.T.R.O.M.A. has to deal with.

—but then you can have situations like Josie’s, where they were one of many mutants who got in a brief spot of trouble over genuine confusion surrounding a new bill that had just gone through Congress and revised some of the definitions of and privileges associated with/afforded to people at the different levels of metahuman licenses. (Since this is still America and we’re still talking about the FBI, there are also plenty of even worse potential outcomes for people who end up on their miscellaneous mutant watchlists — which is one of the big points that gets brought up by people who either want to reform or do away with the whole metahuman licensing thing — but in fairness to most people, they don’t know the full specifics.)

Anyway, Josie got in trouble because they are an actual therapist and, although they prefer not to use their powers with clients and extensively brief anyone who asks about trying that approach (about the potential benefits vs. potential risks, all the drawbacks, all the potential unintended consequences, etc.) while offering them plenty of chances to change their mind and go, “okay, let’s not do this,” they do still let their clients know that they’re a telepath/empath and that they can use their powers in a therapeutic context but it’s not the best thing to try as a first approach

Which is all great, except that Josie had been assured that they wouldn’t need to get a different kind of license to continue doing this, after that bill passed… except that they did. And this probably would’ve continued with no actual interference from anybody because Josie is hyper-responsible about using their powers with clients, about keeping up on all of the latest research and debates about therapeutic uses for psychic abilities and the ethical issues surrounding this, and so on…… except that one of their clients was a teenager who needed parental consent to go through with this, and one of their parents worked for S.T.R.O.M.A.

Relevant piece of context: Josie was absolutely not the only mutant who’d had some confusion over the revised licensing scheme. Josie wasn’t even the only mutant in the greater Baltimore area who had similar confusion on this issue.

But Josie was one of the only ones who was already on S.T.R.O.M.A.’s radar when they got in trouble, partly by virtue of being a “telempath,” partly by virtue of having trained with Dr. Elizabeth Woodham (who is: one of the most powerful telepaths in the entire world; a respected professor, activist, and philanthropist; one of the first mutants in the States to register for one of the early, “superhero licenses” [not their official name, but that’s the gist of what they are]; and with her wife, Dr. Yael Lehrer, one of the co-founders of the Wardens and co-headmistresses of one of the most respected schools for mutants in North America), and partly by virtue of having a lot of (mostly untapped) potential power.

And, see, one of S.T.R.O.M.A.’s problems is that it is perpetually under-staffed, in all areas but especially in terms of mutants who work for them, and moreover, mutants who will actually do fieldwork (like, Pete’s cousin Emerson is a mutant and he does work for S.T.R.O.M.A., but he’s lower on the powers scale than most of their employees who do active fieldwork, and he has no desire to do fieldwork when he could do lab-work instead). There are a lot of reasons for this problem of staffing, but one of the more noticeable end-results is that S.T.R.O.M.A. can be somewhat unethical in some of their recruitment bids. Like, yes, sometimes, you just get a visit from Some Guy Who Is Totally Not Nick Fury, who offers you a chance to be a part of something bigger than yourself and to use your abilities to help people

Other times, you get treated to a few hours of what S.T.R.O.M.A. sees and treats as the interview portion of applying for a Very Important Position somewhere, except that they don’t tell you that this is what they’re doing and they use “interview” (read: interrogation) techniques that people in law enforcement usually save for wrangling confessions out of suspects.

It will not look like it, but they are actually trying to figure out some specific things about you, including but not limited to: how you handle high-stress and high-pressure situations (like, for example, being accused of using your powers for any extralegal vigilantism, and maybe knowing things about [the biggest mutant-related news of the day] that they don’t; being threatened with a trip to one of the U.S. prisons designed to hold mutants; etc.); various details about your backstory and who you are as a person and what your biggest Deals are (i.e., getting you to help them run a damn background check on yourself); and how in control of your powers you are (since they trust the DHHS evaluations, but prefer to supplement them with firsthand evidence).

Then, once they’ve figured out what they want to know, you might very well be offered something to the tune of, “Alright, this is your first offense, and based on your dossier and this interview, we think that you could be an asset to S.T.R.O.M.A., if you wanted. If you like the sound of working for us, at least as an analyst or consultant if not a fully-fledged special agent, then we can make all of this legal trouble just go away. If you don’t like the sound of that, then……… well… *deliberately trails off to let you draw your own conclusions while still staying within the letter of the law, because hey, they didn’t actually tell you that you’d for sure end up getting prosecuted and going to prison*”

So…… yeah. S.T.R.O.M.A. and Ethics are not always on speaking terms.

Add this recruitment story to Josie’s frustrations with how metahuman employees at S.T.R.O.M.A. tend to get treated — e.g., they, themself, are often trotted out to go liaise with different media outlets as a public face of Mutants Who Work Here, Look We’re Trying Our Best So You Should All Just Totally Cooperate With Us, but they’re discouraged from voicing any of their own opinions and advised to just stick to these Bureau-approved talking points — and at having to be closeted and fairly masc-presenting at work because S.T.R.O.M.A. thinks they’re a cis man, and…… yeah, uh.

“Josie would really, really rather not work here” is an understatement af… but they continue working here anyway because: 1. as a consultant, they can still usually balance things enough to keep working as a therapist;

and 2. Josie wants so badly to help people, and for all S.T.R.O.M.A. is highly unethical (sometimes) and part of the goddamn FBI, most of the people who work there also want to help people and use their work to create positive changes in the world — and it’s not an unfair observation that, on their own, there really isn’t much that Josie can do (because the idea of the solo superhero who works alone… isn’t sustainable, like??

Aside from the political and ideological issues with that whole aspect of superhero mythology, it’s not actually feasible for one person, working on their own, to create any positive change. It would be massively unhealthy for them, there’s only so much they can do as one person, there are no actual safeguards in place if they ever get corrupted, and as multiple deconstructions of the genre have shown, it’s really easy for a classic lone vigilante model superhero to slide into a mindset like Rorschach’s — which is full of hypocrisy, double standards, misogyny and homophobia and ableism, and total moral absolutism that simultaneously allows no room for compassion and keeps Rorschach from being able to appreciate the big picture outside of his little myopic Objectivst bubble — or Frank Miller!Batman, who is often only a step or two off from actual fascism, but we probably won’t call it that because he’s wearing the Batman suit).

At this point, Josie has even had it all but confirmed that the agents who came to recruit them definitely “avoided certain truths to manipulate them” on purpose, so they’re reasonably certain that they could probably leave S.T.R.O.M.A without having their previous step out of bounds dredged up and handed to a D.A. who’d be pressured to prosecute them for it…… but they want to help people, and S.T.R.O.M.A. is one of the only options that they can currently see where they get to help anyone.

So, here they are. Working in a position that they’re not a fan of, looking at the motivational posters of gothed out kittens that one of their best friends drew for them, and trying to take, “hang in there!” kitty’s advice and tough it out at S.T.R.O.M.A. for the sake of doing some good in the world.

**: This mostly happens if Josie doesn’t have the energy enough or keep focus enough to keep their mental walls up — which they are usually very diligent about because on one hand, hearing other people’s thoughts kind of sucks actually (Josie would definitely agree with the sentiment that, a lot of the time, being a telepath is like having a youtube comments section screaming at you in your head)

—and on the other, um, hello, telepathy can, in the wrong hands, become a walking violation of civil liberties. Like, if you ask Josie, telepathy has a lot in common with wiretapping, though they consider it potentially even more dangerous than that, because it’s harder to prove that telepathy has been involved in something, since:

1. yes, the traces of telepathy can show up on a CAT scan or an MRI of the brain, but you’d need a neurologist who is well-trained, very attentive, and up to date on as much of the current research into telepathy as possible — or hey, a team of neurologists might not be a bad idea, if you can get them all, because one neurologist might miss something

—but otoh, the traces of telepathy can sometimes also be mistaken as signs of something else, especially if someone is neurodivergent and/or mentally ill, has suffered any serious and/or recent head injuries, has a history of substance abuse, is sleep-deprived at the time of the tests, may actually have something else going on in their brain in addition to the traces of telepathy

Seriously, just about anything that affects the brain can make it harder to tell whether or not someone’s been hit with telepathy

Plus: telepathic abilities are sort of mid-level common among mutants, and some mutants use them without even realizing it because their powers haven’t manifested in ways that are for sure Outside Three Standard Deviations From The Non-Mutant Human Mean, so some minor telepathic scarring is common, even in people who haven’t been hit by something as awful as, say, memory modification, or having someone go in and pick around in their brain like they’re flipping through an issue of Us Weekly

—and without a keen, well-trained eye, it can be really hard to tell those types of telepathic scarring apart

2. some of the traces of telepathy are more subjective, and while they might show up on a brain scan, the best evidence of them will come from the people who’ve been hit with the telepathic whatever

—but that’s going to be a problem because, in a lot of cases, they won’t have any memory of it, or they’ll have a false memory of it, and there’s no guarantee that further telepathic probing will be able to help here, and it could just make things worse. Plus, there’s no guarantee that the people who’ve been hit will actually be aware that what they’re experiencing is related to telepathy.

This is especially true with experienced, exceptionally powerful, and/or highly meticulous telepaths, because some of them can dick around in people’s heads and leave barely any trace that they were there

Like, for an example of what a more subjective trace might look like: Conrad is a telepath, and unlike Josie, he doesn’t really care about ethics or the rights of most other people. About ten years before the story actually starts, he took an interest in his new brother-in-law’s youngest brother (Sebastian), because he could sense something in Seb — he didn’t know what it was, exactly, but it was definitely a something — that made him go, “huh, maybe this emotionally troubled nearly twenty-year-old boy is also a mutant”

(I mean, he’s not wrong. And the something that he got a sense of back then is the part of Seb that he’s eventually going to call, “La Bête,” because if he’s going to go for the superhero thing and need a codename, then, “Gévaudan” makes sense to him because his family is insistently French [despite not having lived in France since about 1781, apart from one ancestral namesake of Seb’s who stayed in Paris for their Revolution (and Severin Sebastien Moncrieff was a confirmed bachelor, so he left behind a partner but no heirs), well before La Bête du Gévaudan was a Thing, and despite not being from the region of France where that happened] and hey, he can apparently turn into a giant wolf-man, now

—and if he’s calling himself, “Gévaudan,” then, “La Bête” is just thematically consistent. But that’s beside the point.)

Anyway: Conrad wasn’t new to his powers ten years ago, but he was much more reckless with them — especially when he believed that he was absolutely right and would stop at nothing to prove it — and he had less finesse in using them.

So, he left behind plenty of traces when he decided to use his little sister’s wedding reception as a chance to go telepathically play around with Seb, trying to either figure out if his new brother-in-law’s little brother actually was a mutant, or maybe triggering his powers into fully manifesting (plus plying him with alcohol and adding rohypnol to the mix based on the notion that either it wouldn’t affect Seb because he’s a mutant, or if not that, then it’d trigger his abilities into manifesting).

The underlying logic of the rohypnol idea was actually not wrong, because toxin filtering is one of the more common mutant abilities you find in the States (and it happens to be one that Seb has), and some mutants have had their powers manifest in response to poisoning, drugging, exposure to carbon monoxide or other toxic fumes, and even being given antibiotics or certain medications

The idea was still morally wrong and ethically skeevy, but the mutant-related logic actually did work. Where Conrad went wrong on that count was that he overly simplified the situation, only looked for two potential reactions, and didn’t know what to make of how Seb was affected by the rohypnol but not nearly as badly as he should’ve been, so he went, “Was he affected or not?? I don’t know????”

[Here is where I cut a whole big tangent explaining that whole story, but it got way, way off the point, so.]

Anyway, the gist of the story is that Conrad is the only person who consciously remembers everything that happened, since most of the people who cared about it were not present for the encounter itself, and Conrad screwed around with Seb’s memories, both telepathically and not.

Like, Seb has more memories of it than he would if he weren’t a mutant, considering that he got dosed with rohypnol, but he also has false memories about some of what happened, and Conrad repressed Seb’s memories of certain events (like how many times he tried to break away from Conrad, or turn down the offer of another drink, because he’d promised his big brother that he wouldn’t get drunk and make a scene at Max’s wedding or the reception, and it was important to him to honor that promise)

Fortunately for Conrad, Seb is not one of the mutants who has an increased resistance to psychic attacks — largely because, contrary to what Conrad thought until about two years before the story starts, someone’s ability to resist to psychic attacks has nothing to do with whether or not they’re a mutant (aside from some special cases where someone has a resistance to any psychic attacks that falls outside three standard deviations of the non-mutant human mean)

—so, despite the feelings he sometimes gets that something about those memories might be wrong, Seb totally believes that they’re real and he doesn’t notice any of the incongruities unless someone points them out, which almost no one has any reason to do because there isn’t usually a reason for Seb to talk at length about the details of this particular incident that happened almost ten years ago

(there would be, if he ever brought it up in therapy or at AA and/or NA, or dwelled on it when he did, but that has yet to actually happen)

Unfortunately for Conrad, he did a sloppy job of this, and while it would be hard for a neurologist to tell the physical signs of his telepathic probing apart from the other brain damage that Seb’s accrued, the hardest thing for most other telepaths would be trying to find the right memories. The crap-shoot nature of telepathically digging through someone else’s mind is one of the many reasons why Josie doesn’t like using their powers as a first approach in therapy, because you can never guarantee with any reliable certainty that you’ll get at the parts of someone’s mind that you want

—but if someone did get to Seb’s memories of this incident, it would be really obvious to them that they’ve been modified. Like, images might be blurred around the edges, it might glitch like a video or audio track that’s skipping, the voices might get distorted, the colors might look wonky, and so on. Prodding a bit more would also be able to undo Conrad’s memory-blocks without doing too much damage to Seb’s brain (not so much on an emotional and psychological level, but the damage there would be more like the painful truth that hurts now but leads to something better)

Anyway, it’s much harder to get proof of this nature when you’re dealing with more skillful, more attentive, more powerful, etc. telepaths, because they aren’t as messy as Conrad was with Seb

and 3. Wiretapping operations usually involve more people, which doesn’t make them ethical or necessarily justified, but it does mean that they’re easier to find evidence of because there are more folks who can spill the beans and point you to it. Telepathy only needs two people to happen, and one may not even be aware of what’s going on, depending on how sensitive they are and whether or not they’re dealing with an ethical telepath

For example: while not metahuman levels of resistant to psychic attacks, Pete is exceptionally sensitive to them and he’s naturally better at resisting them than some people, so if someone wanted to paw through his mind, he has a better chance of recognizing that he’s being telepathically invaded and getting them out

Sebastian, on the other hand, is Bad at recognizing and resisting psychic probing. Unethical telepaths have an easier time of getting through him because at his best, if he isn’t told in advance, then he feels ill at ease, inexplicably anxious (not that it means much, because he tends to attribute that to his shitty mental health), kind of nauseated, and maybe like he’s being spied on. At worst, he doesn’t even notice.

So, basically, Josie considers it a moral and ethical responsibility on their part to do everything they can to not inadvertently spy on people, because there is already so much about telepathy that can go really bad and poses a lot of ethical problems — but they are only human, and there are a lot of ways for someone’s mental walls to come down or reasons why they would.

Letting their empathic walls down usually makes it easier for Josie to focus on keeping up the telepathic walls, since the empathic ones are a lot harder for them to keep up, but it’s only a temporary thing because if Josie takes those walls down, they open themself up to a looooooot of potential overwhelm from outside influence, and there’s always the option to find a balance between the empathic walls and telepathic ones, but sometimes, it’s easier said than done.

Josie is usually too hard on themself for it when any slip-ups on their part happen, even knowing that every other telepath and every other empath has moments like this and even if they got too overwhelmed to actually remember anything and/or heard nothing.

It’s such a big deal to them because the potential for psychic abilities to violate other people — and especially the potential to manipulate people and compromise or outright remove their agency — is something that Josie never wanted. They went into counseling as a profession, after their original plan of going into fashion went up in smoke, but part of it, for them, has always been about trying to help people get their lives back, or manage them better, and so on. Granted, they knew about their telepathic and empathic abilities before they officially went into therapeutic practice, but that, for Josie, was part of how they developed their approach to being a therapist.

Furthermore, on a more personal and less professional note, Josie never wanted mutant superpowers to begin with. After having their telepathy and empathy first manifest in full, they might’ve done plenty of things that they normally wouldn’t even consider, if they thought it could take their powers away.

Partly, that was because their powers manifested toward the end of a really bad mental health downswing that ended in Josie going back to an inpatient treatment center for their eating disorder. Any of these elements on their own would’ve been bad enough, but having them all come down on them at once was Hell for Josie, and worse, trying to get well while you are in an inpatient center and can feel everyone else’s feelings, hear a lot of their thoughts, and are currently having trouble sorting out which parts are your own feelings, which parts are coming from your eating disorder, and which parts are coming from everyone else (not least because you don’t have any proof that you are feeling things or hearing thoughts that are coming from other people).

Josie eventually got help for that part because one of the therapists at the center was a metahuman and had gone to the Woodham and Lehrer School before deciding that she didn’t particularly want to be a superhero in the traditional sense. She reached out to her old teachers, and Josie got help for that while doing more intensive outpatient treatment until they got better at tuning out other people’s thoughts and feelings.

But there’s a lingering problem here that goes back to the feelings that underlie Josie’s ED. When they are at their absolute worst, Josie can be an absolute control freak, and they tend to turn it inward more than outward because they realize that taking it out on other people isn’t fair and they don’t feel good about it. Additionally, feeling other people’s feelings as intensely as they do gives Josie an additional incentive not to take their issues with control out on other people (and did even before their powers fully manifested, because they’ve always been pretty sensitive). On some level, Josie realizes that they can’t control things like how people react to them, whether or not bad things happen to good people, and so on, but that doesn’t always help because it can lead to them feeling even more of a need to crack down on controlling themself.

Having psychic powers becomes problematic for them in two big ways, here:

1. It’s unfortunately very easy for Josie to slip into overly self-punishing thought patterns if they feel like they aren’t as in control of their abilities as they, “should” be — which happens very easily because Josie’s standards for themself aren’t always realistic, and they usually aren’t the best judge of whether or not they’re being fair to themself.

It’s even more noticeable, for them, when they try to do more complex and demanding things with their powers.

This was one of the big reasons why they’ve stayed on good terms with their friends and mentors at the Lehrer and Woodham School, and among Yael and Elizabeth’s Wardens, but consistently rejected any invites to become a Warden (and then regretted that when S.T.R.O.M.A. got them instead, since Josie would much rather be one of the Wardens than working for the FBI).

Basically, Josie trusted Elizabeth’s guidance, and they really, really wanted to trust Elizabeth’s faith in them to handle their full power responsibly…… but it was hard to believe that when they already didn’t feel like they controlled their powers as much as they, “should” have been doing, and Elizabeth wanted to push them further.

For Josie, it felt like the choice came down to, “be a superhero and do more cool superhero things, at the expense of my own well-being, which means I eventually won’t be able to help anyone and could hurt more people than I help”

or, “quietly go back to training for an entirely different career than I expected, keep in touch with Elizabeth and work on honing my abilities, and maybe not get to help people in as big a way as members of the Wardens get to do, but at least, as a therapist, I will still have the ability to help people and will probably be less likely to screw that up by virtue of losing my control over my powers”

(To her credit, Elizabeth was disheartened by this, because she believes in all of her students and wants them to believe in themselves, and really wanted Josie on her team — but she’s learned that the superhero life isn’t for everybody, and that it’s not her job, as a teacher and mentor, to tell people what they should do; it’s her job to show them new approaches, teach them how to learn, help them find what paths and methods work best for them, etc.

So, disheartening as it was, she’s been nothing but supportive about Josie’s choice not to be a Warden, and compassionate about how much Josie doesn’t like working for the FBI — and without trying to turn it into some kind of, “this could be super-beneficial for us, if Josie wanted to give us any advance warning about S.T.R.O.M.A. business that might negatively affect us here” thing like Yael)

(To her credit, Yael really does believe that she’s helping when she says things like that, because she is so fundamentally a doer, rather than a thinker, feeler, planner, or anything else. She is absolutely capable of all of those things, but she has an approach to life and problems that goes, “Okay, this is a Thing and it’s a setback, but what can we do about it, how can we use this to build something even better”

—so her idea of how to help one of her and Elizabeth’s students and comrades with an unexpected and unwanted “recruitment” to S.T.R.O.M.A.… is going, “But look, see, we can still potentially make something good out of this, and just because a government agency snatched you up doesn’t mean that you have to forget your own values or let them control you, this can be a good thing if you take advantage of the right pieces and opportunities”

—for a moment of MBTI nerdery: Yael is an ENTJ (***) vs. Josie’s INFJ (***), so while she has Extroverted Thinking (Te) for a dominant cognitive function and primarily approaches the world based on how to get results, Josie’s dominant function is Introverted iNtuition (Ni), and while they have an orientation toward the future that appreciates where Yael is coming from with her drive to get results, Josie’s primary approach to the world looks less at objective things and objective results, more at patterns and theories and trying to find the, “higher purpose” or, “deeper reason” behind how stuff happens

Which, oddly enough, is part of why Josie and Yael get on so well. They can butt heads with each other, sometimes, but at the end of the day, they complement each other really well because both of them have vision and the drive to act on it, but Yael is better at actually getting shit done, and Josie is better at checking things through the processes of making them happen, finding potential problems that Yael may not have seen coming and trying to work addressing them into the fabric of her plans.

Their Feeling functions also complement each other really well: Josie is a high Feeler, with Extroverted Feeling (Fe) as their auxiliary function, which keeps them more attuned to the state of the group and all the people in it, while Yael has a very good relationship with her inferior Fi (Introverted Feeling), which enables her to better evaluate how their actions and plans are helping or hurting their causes, where their ideals fit into everything, and so on.

So, basically, Yael is better at making sure that they all remember who they are and what they stand for, both individually and as parts of the whole, while Josie is better at attending to people’s emotional needs and keeping the whole intact by caring for the individual members of it.

And because they both respect and admire each other, neither of them devalues the other’s contributions to anything — and it doesn’t matter to Yael that Josie has a badge and would have an easier time getting a gun if they weren’t really uneasy about guns; Josie’s a mutant, they’ve been one of her students, and they care about helping other mutants, so officially being part of S.T.R.O.M.A. doesn’t mean that they aren’t part of Yael’s (larger, mutant) family

—which all means a lot to Josie because, in a lot of ways, they still haven’t entirely outgrown their early experiences of being one of the weird art freaks at school (which, even for someone who wound up being part of a subculture/clique that’s all about going, “fuck you, I’m gonna do my thing and you can love it or shove it,” gave Josie some trouble because, goth of not, they’re sensitive), and they have a huge tendency to be overly harsh with themself and don’t always love themself very much, so this whole unconditional acceptance thing is a Big Deal to them

But I digress.

2. Having psychic powers also gets Problematic for Josie because, in their mind, they’ve spent so much of their life fighting their eating disorder and their overall mental health to keep control of their life, and it’s difficult, periodically degrading, often horrific, and something that they wouldn’t wish on anybody, period…… so having the power to take away someone’s ability to control their own mind? Having the power to violate someone’s agency, potentially with more or less complete impunity? That’s horrifying, and Josie doesn’t want it

One of the easiest ways to make Josie go off the handle at you is to dismiss how hard it is for them to maintain any sense of composure. Like, okay, they can handle people teasing them about some of their self-care habits because humor is how a lot of people come to be comfortable with and accept things they don’t understand at first, and how a lot of people show that they’re comfortable with you and like you.

But if you act like Josie doesn’t have to work, impossibly hard and daily, on their own well-being, because if they don’t, then they could lose control of psychic abilities and this would be Really Fucking Terrible for everyone? ……Uh.

Just don’t do that. It’s not pretty, it’s not fun, it’s mean and please, just don’t do it.

An even easier way to make Josie snap at you is to play what they call, “the Aslan card” — which means telling them that the proof that they can handle the responsibility of psychic powers, is their own fear that maybe they can’t, their awareness of and attentiveness to the ethical and moral problems attached to them having psychic powers, the fact that they’d rather not have psychic powers in the first place because it can — and often does — feel like these powers and their attendant responsibilities are too big and too potentially Terrible Forever, For Everyone

Which Josie calls, “the Aslan card” because, uh. The first time they heard it was from Elizabeth (whose heart was in the right place in saying this, but she didn’t think about how it might end up sounding to Josie), and the first thing Josie was reminded of was Aslan telling Prince Caspian that he’s ready to become the King because he doesn’t think he’s ready

It’s just…… Josie understands where this idea is coming from, and they appreciate the underlying sentiment

But, to them, it always sounds more like, “why are you upset about how hard this is for you, at least it’s happening to you and not someone who doesn’t give a fuck about ethics or how they treat other people, quit whinging and cheer the fuck up”

Which…… yes, Josie knows that this isn’t what most people mean, but it’s still pretty upsetting for them to hear because of how much it reminds them of things that they’ve told themself so many times, when they’ve been at their worst, in terms of their mental health and emotional well-being — especially the things like, “My eating disorder isn’t bad because it’s only hurting me, not anyone else, and it’s only hurting me because I’m weak”

—and yeah, okay, Josie appreciates that you’re trying to help, but they already have enough work to do on keeping themself from slipping back into the comfort of those thought patterns, so if it’s all the same, can you maybe find a different way of trying to comfort them or praise them or whatever? Please?

Thank you, they’d like that

#derekslaura #memes for ts #oc questions #josie quinn: empath disaster #that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #mine: writing #sebastian moncrieff: mutant disaster #pete arden: dramatic disaster #josie x seb #josie x pete #lucy murphy: hemokinetic disaster #josie & lucy #yael lehrer: probably done with your shit #josie & yael #telepathy #okay i'm probably going to miss some cw tags and i'm sorry for that #if anybody needs anything that i miss tagged plz let me know and i'll get it after i sleep <3 #eating disorders cw// mental health issues cw// manipulation ref// consent issues cw//#('consent issues' meaning 'yeah that conrad guy i mention periodically? he's a tool who uses telepathy to #manipulate people as well as using it to sexually assault and rape people with more or less total impunity so far'#but the discussion of it is fairly inexplicit & mostly used as an illustration of #why josie is so hyper-vigilant abt the ethical issues & responsibilities attached to having telepathy in their set of mutant superpowers)#misgendering ref// biphobia ref// homophobia ref// (these are also mostly inexplicit but still present)#longish post//

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amorremanet · 8 years ago

Note

Sebastian: 2 + 38; Pete: 5 + 45; Margot: 25; Lucy: 26; Sara Grace: 13; Adelaide: 50? (...I apologize if this is just too many questions.)

oc questions meme that i totally didn’t forget about (except for how i kinda did, but mostly i was just lazy about typing up my longhand from saturday night)

SEBASTIAN2: What's a movie your character really, really doesn't enjoy?

Pretty much any and all horror is probably going to be on Seb’s, “can we please not” list, because he squicks really easily and does not have a good gag reflex when it comes to movies. He also gets emotionally affected and upset really easily, and arguably has an even worse gag reflex when that gets involved.

Like, seriously, even Shaun of the Dead is kinda pushing it, for him

That said? Of the Three Flavours Cornetto movies, the one that really sicks him out is The World’s End, not because the movie itself is that gross, but because he can’t help identifying in really self-loathing ways with Gary King.

So, watching Gary go on his increasingly destructive quest to drink a pint in each of the twelve pubs along Newton Haven’s Golden Mile, even while the world is going to sci-fi Hell and all his old friends are getting really upset with him, makes Seb get unhappy, then distressed, and then violently ill in the nearest wastebasket.

That being said, Requiem for a Dream gets a very special mention on his list because, unfortunately for him, his “it’s complicated” is a hipster fuck who went to film school and thinks it’s cool to brag about having seen RFAD more than once.

(I mean? It is an actual facts accomplishment, Todd, but calm down. Just because it’s an accomplishment doesn’t mean that it’s one that you should brag about, because it mostly makes people think you’re kind of an asshole.

……Which isn’t unfair, bc Todd is kind of an asshole, and unlike Pete, he isn’t self-aware about it, buuuut that’s another matter.)

Either way, Todd being one of Seb’s favorite people means that Seb first had to see RFAD once. To the surprise of no one but Todd (but in fairness, this was still early into their friendship), Seb got violently ill in the nearest wastebasket, cried, and wasn’t impressed when Todd thought him saying, “The horror, the horror” was a, “trying to cope with the movie through grim humor”-style joke based on how, earlier that night, Todd had been complaining about having to read Heart of Darkness for a lit class.

(I mean, it was a Heart of Darkness reference, but…… no, Seb was being completely serious about it. If they hadn’t brought up Heart of Darkness earlier, he would’ve expressed it in some other way, but that was what he came up with in the moment.)

Then, Seb had to see it again, even though once was really more than enough. He could’ve opted out, sure, but unfortunately, there isn’t a lot that he wouldn’t do for the people he loves, which makes him kind of a doormat sometimes, and in this instance, meant that he was easily swayed by Todd promising him that maybe he’d make it through without getting sick this time, since he already knew what was going to happen

(not quite) spoilers: ……Noooot really, nope. If anything, the rewatch made things even worse for Seb.

Then, they tried a third time, and that was the last time Seb ever attempted to sit through the whole thing, largely because Todd got it through his head that…… okay, no, this isn’t a one-time thing, or a coincidence, or anything like that. Seb will always get physically ill at RFAD and when that happens, he definitely ends up puking. So, after the third time, Todd finally quit trying to make Seb sit through it with him.

38: Your character's general opinion on kids. What if they were to have a kid? What if something happened and someone had a kid and your character was the only one who could take care of that child?

In general, Seb likes kids a lot and, when he’s doing okay, he gets along with them pretty well. There are several reasons why he is one of his seven-year-old niece’s favorite uncles, and one of them is that he’s genuinely better than either of his brothers at getting on Marie’s level without either condescending to her, or treating her like a tiny adult just because she’s intellectually gifted.

(To be fair to Max and Ambrose, they try their best — especially Max since, y’know, Marie is his daughter and he is such a dorky, “proud of everything his kid does, ever” dad — but both of them have trouble finding the balance here, which is also fair because lbr? It’s a difficult balance to find, much less maintain.)

The problem is that Seb is not always doing okay. More often than not, he’s way more likely to be Not Okay, and when he’s Not Okay, one of his first impulses is to withdraw from absolutely everyone.

For most of Marie’s life thus far, that has also tended to involve him getting intoxicated — and increasingly, it was, “intoxicated to the point where, at best, it should be termed, ‘getting really fucked up’; and at worst, he would probably be dead if not for his shiny mutant healing factor” — which made him actively avoid being around her, for a laundry list of reasons, including but not limited to:

“What if something happens and I get left alone with her, she could get hurt”

“What if something happens, I get left alone with her, and something happens to me, so she has to watch that and she now doesn’t have a guardian”

“What if I finally run out of extra lives around her, because as someone who has discovered the corpse of someone who died by overdose, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, especially not her and especially not when she’s so young; even if she might not remember her, finding someone’s corpse will fuck you up and she doesn’t need that in her life”

(—he said, feeling bad about all the broken promises that this usually involved, but also feeling like breaking them and disappointing her was better than potentially dying in some place where his tiny niece could find him, like?

Dying itself? Didn’t sound too bad or like that much of a problem. But dying where the sight of his corpse could potentially traumatize Marie? That would be Terrible.)

“What if I can’t fake like I’m sober well enough for her to believe it — I mean, Max and Linda probably wouldn’t believe it even if I were, but if I’m so obviously not-sober that even Marie gets it, what if she sees it and blames herself for it? She’s gifted but she’s still a kid, and she’s a sensitive kid, and even adults have trouble understanding when something about a person they love being a fuck-up isn’t their fault”

and, “I don’t want her to see me like that, she’s probably one of the only people on the planet who still doesn’t think I’m totally worthless”

(—he said while: 1. not getting it that none of the people who are saved as favorites on his phone — i.e., a grand total of 14 contacts, at that point, out of 1,000+

[though that number includes things like favorite takeout places and NYU campus security, even though he hasn’t been an NYU student since May 2007 and has changed his phone multiple freaking times since then, and even given that he has had good luck with SIM cards, there is no reason for him to still have the number for NYU campus security]

—just…… yeah. None of the people he cares about most actually think that he’s completely worthless. He is literally the only person whom he deals with on a regular basis who thinks that;

and 2. ……uh, yeah, no. Cool intentions, Seb, but at this point, your niece had definitely seen you in a state that you would describe as, “like that.” She’d even seen you, “like that” more than once.

Maybe Marie didn’t entirely get it or understand what was going on — and bc she was a grand total of five when you went to rehab, the initial explanation that she would’ve gotten out of her parents would’ve been something like, “Uncle Bastian is very sick right now, and he’s going to be okay, but he had to go away to see the doctors who have special training to help him get better”

—but she still definitely saw you, “like that.”

And then, a few days before Christmas 2014, Marie got to see him while he was, courtesy of some regrettable heat of the moment decision-making, cold turkey detoxing because she had been promised a playdate, and Seb was cognizant enough to do that if Max and Marie came to his place instead (on the plus: six dogs), and Pete was free to come over as chaperone (since Max trusts him, but not Todd or Margot)

And that playdate did involve an attempt at explaining an idea that even adults sometimes have trouble with, in a way that a six-year-old would understand, but oddly enough, the concept had to do with why pit bulls have a bad reputation that they do not deserve, and why some people are assholes who abuse their dogs

The concept of, “Uncle Bastian is sick right now because he decided to recommit himself to sobriety and broke up with his latest bad idea, but instead of trying to do this a bit more responsibly — i.e., talking to a doctor and getting weaned off of everything safely — he just got rid of all of his pills, alcohol, and assorted paraphernalia, and didn’t remember why this might’ve been a bad way to handle things until he started getting sick at church on Sunday morning”?

Like, yeah, they had to change the wording a bit, but that made perfect sense to Marie

(—which her uncle is really not proud of, since the fact that she understands this as well as she does at her age is pretty much entirely his fault, but…… it’s not like he can undo any of his decisions here)

(nor can anybody else undo theirs, because none of my mutants are allowed to have time travel powers, period.

Any “minor time manipulation” is exclusively limited to shit like, “it’s actually enhanced speed that goes so fast that they essentially enter bullet-time, or have GOTTA GO FAST!! super-moments, like the Days of Future Past and X-Men: Apocalypse movies did with their whitewashed Quicksilver, or like the one bit of the “Three Hundred Big Boys” episode of classic Futurama, where Fry drinks so much coffee that he speeds up into a magical super-fast state of calm or something)”

But they are not actually examples of, “time manipulation,” much less time travel, because time travel powers are silly and they too easily either destroy all semblance of continuity or turn into hella over-powered game-breakers that violate the agency of literally everyone who isn’t using them

—or, worse, cause all kinds of moral and ethical dilemmas like, “well, if Superman can turn back time by flying really fast around the Earth because that makes sense, then why doesn’t he just go back and kill Hitler? why is it more morally defensible for him to let the Holocaust happen than not?”

—and because frankly, I don’t want to deal with that, so, no one in my universe gets to have any legitimate time travel or time manipulation-related powers, end of discussion

But anyway, I was saying)

Right. So, Marie generally understood the concept of, “so, your uncle was once more abusing his substances of choice for a sustained period of time, but now he isn’t, and rather than doing the safe thing, he did the quick thing based on heat of the moment, emotional decision-making, which involves him being sick for several days”

Animal abuse, on the other hand, did not make any sense to her at all

But that’s an entirely different matter and I’m so far off the point right now that it’s not even funny.

BACK ON THE ORIGINAL, ORIGINAL TOPIC

……so, yeah, uh.

Seb has some hangups about being around kids, but they mostly involve, “oh my god, I don’t have my life together at all and what if I am actively detrimental to the well-being of the kid(s)” — and for all some of this is an understandable fear for him to have, based on a lot of precedent from him…… uh?

Other parts of it are legitimate nonsense, based in a potent mix of hella self-loathing, hella bullheaded refusal to forgive himself for just about anything, hella letting his imagination get the better of him and rationalizing justifications for this without realizing that they’re not as accurate to reality as he thinks, and holy unrecognized generalized anxiety disorder, batman

At the moment, he’s fine with the only kids who are actually his being his six dogs, and has given essentially no thought to ever being a parent to human children, partly because he assumes that it won’t ever happen (bc he can’t see anyone wanting to have kids with him, and feels like, “it wouldn’t be fair on the kids to stick them with me, like that’s just unconscionable”), and partly because what little thought he has given the idea? Has been deeply terrifying

He’s marginally less terrified of something happening to Max and Linda, at least from a practical standpoint, because Seb knows that custody of Marie goes to his and Max’s parents, first, should anything happen to both of Marie’s parents

Like, he doesn’t WANT anything to happen to either his brother or his sister-in-law, much less both of them, and he might not admit it to himself, but if something happened to Max, Seb would be a Mess about it.

But at the same time, he could cope with it better because as much as he loves Marie, he wouldn’t be her legal guardian and she’d be in the competent, caring hands of her grandparents

If it ever happened that he wound up with custody of her and any potential future siblings she ends up with…… well.

There are three major possibilities for why that might happen: 1. Seb somehow redeemed himself to Max and Linda so much that the part where he’s Marie’s godfather became more than a ceremonial thing, and he actually did get switched to the person who gets custody of Marie if anything happens to both of her parents;

2. Abe and Marceline both died, and Seb had redeemed himself to Max and Linda enough to be the first-alternate to his and Max’s parents on the, “who gets custody of Marie” hierarchy;

or 3. Whether he redeemed himself or not, nothing was actually made official, but everybody else died or couldn’t be contacted (or is kind of stuck in mutant supermax, awaiting trial for various charges of fraud, conspiracy, bribery, election-related tampering, rape, sexual assault, torture, murder, illicit use of metahuman abilities, tax evasion, and possibly treason, as Conrad eventually will be), so Seb ends up as Marie’s guardian by default

Regardless of the situation here, uh. His first reaction is going to be to make himself hold it together as best as he can until Marie is in bed and asleep for the night, and then just try to have a meltdown as quietly as possible so as not to wake her up. Because, even in the situations where he did something to redeem himself to Max and Linda, abruptly being saddled with custody of his tiny niece after an undefined something happened to his big brother and his sister-in-law?

……Yeah, Seb’s not going to handle that well, at first

I mean, he will step up and try to keep it together and try to do his absolute best to take care of Marie and be a good, responsible, and loving guardian to her

But he’s an easily stressed out Disaster, and he would not handle the initial shock of losing Max and Linda well (+/- the rest of their family, too), and he would really, really need a lot of help with this, both in terms of, “keeping it together emotionally because he needs to grieve and deal with the stress here or it’s not going to make any of this less horrible for the tiny human who just lost her parents”

and in terms of, “Seb has never cared for a tiny human for any real extended period of time before, and there is a HUUUUGE difference between being a favored uncle who spends time with her, usually with at least one more consistently responsible chaperone, and can make lunch and take her to the zoo and whatnot……… and actually being a parent”

PETE5: Your character is partial to people who _____? (Are tall, have blue eyes, tend to be rowdy, etc)

In general, Pete tends to be partial to people who are, “interesting,” “different,” or at the very least, “not boring,” which is about all he ever says on the subject because his opinion is, “lmao, I don’t need to explain myself to you.” In fairness to him, “interesting” could mean a lot of things for Pete.

e.g., Aside from them just having been through a lot together since, Seb first went from, “freshman I’m supposed to babysit and ‘mentor’ or whatever because Sister Mary Ignatius said so” to, “actual friend” because of his reactions to seeing sides of Pete other than the witty, effervescent, charming façade that he put on in high school.

Like, the side of Pete that was a karaoke prince, which usually only came out at parties when he was sufficiently drunk, or in the sanctity of his bedroom with his cassette player and his sister Cora’s hairbrush;

the side of Pete that professes that his music taste is, “I don’t care anything but country” and yet adores Dolly Parton, and says that she doesn’t count as country because she is a Diva and divas transcend genre, obviously;

the side of Pete that was anxiously hyper-protective of the shoebox under his bed where he kept his collection of pics of cute guys that he clipped out of Cora’s discarded teen girly and, “young ladies’ interests” magazines (Luke Perry circa 90210 and the guys of Buffy made a lot of appearances in said shoebox because Pete collected said pics in 1995-2001);

the side of Pete that has a lot of insecurities, many of which are grounded in how he has trouble reconciling how much he loves being around people and wants to be popular, with how much he, A., doesn’t actually like most people, and B., is terrified that his shit-bag Dad was probably right and he is fundamentally unlovable;

and the side of Pete that baby-talks at cats for 10+ minutes without getting bored, or showing any signs of stopping at all until said cats get tired of him and leave.

And it’s not like Pete let Seb see said sides of him as some kind of test or anything like that. Some of them came out by happy accident

While others came out because Pete still thought of Seb as, “that freshman who is my peer mentorship kid now or whatever, I guess, and wouldn’t you know it, I got matched up with the one who might be the only other gay kid at St. Andrew’s who doesn’t think he needs to hate himself for it,” and Seb really wanted Pete to like him and tried so hard to be accommodating and unobtrusive that Pete did, sometimes, kinda forget he was still there.

But then Seb found most of these things genuinely endearing in one way or another, which Pete found deeply confusing, so he took more of an active interest because he wanted to find out what Seb’s deal was…… and eventually, he had to conclude that Seb’s deal was just wanting to be his friend, and not because he got anything extra out of it or because of the version of himself that Pete played at school, but because he liked Pete exactly as he was.

By that time, Pete had learned about enough of Seb’s quirks to say that he was, “different and not boring” for other reasons, but… yeah, no. The big reason why Seb was initially, “different and not boring” was that he genuinely wanted to be Pete’s friend

Romantically, though, Pete tends to insist that his preference is, “Chris Evans or at least Chris Evans-adjacent.” It’s true that he has a big Thing for Chris Evans, but it’s nowhere near as all-consuming as he likes to make it out to be (but most people probably don’t get to know that because…… mmm, nah. Pete doesn’t want to talk about it with you, probably).

Historically speaking, he has tended to date other guys in theatre, but that’s more due to proximity than actual preference. He likes people who can keep him on his toes, in general but especially intellectually.

Being, “taller than him but not by as much as Sebastian” is also a good thing, because while he likes guys who are taller (and… I mean. He’s 5’10”, so it’s not like he’s short or anything), being over 6’3” is a deal-breaker because he already has a best friend who’s 6’3” (and the guy he wants his best friend to please date already is 6’1”), and being around too many people who are noticeably taller than Pete kinda makes him feel short and potentially threatened.

But, seriously, if anyone has Chris Evans’s number? Pete wants it. Please.

………What?! He said, “Please.”

45: Your character would _______ for a klondike bar.

Pete would not go out of his way or really do anything in particular for a klondike bar because he doesn’t want one, because if he’s going to eat ice cream, then it’s going to be interesting and quality ice cream, and not something cheap and kinda gross that he could get at 7-11 at 2 AM.

He would, however, invite everyone else to do all manner of ridiculous shit for a klondike bar. Just wait for him to make popcorn before you start, okay?

MARGOT25: When put into X situation, your character is calm and collected and patient, while others may be anywhere from confused to panicking and screaming. Talk about X-Situation and why it means what it does to your character.

This could be said about Margot in most situations, really. She’s an example of someone who could definitely be called an introverted extrovert, because she has superficial ease at dealing with people

Despite how she, like Pete, doesn’t really like most people, she’d actually rather be around people than not because she hates feeling unproductive and mentally sluggish, and one of the ways that she gets the most mental stimulation is being around people and listening to them, if not always talking to them

Also, when she’s not around people, it’s easy for her to slip into, “this is why you don’t leave some people alone with their thoughts” territory (which, for Margot, generally involves forcing herself to come up with ideas, which most often means schemes that are probably really bad ideas, but she doesn’t fact-check very well, and when she goes over them for holes, she’ll put safety measures and backups in place for the wrong things — which would be fine, if these things stayed limited to the realm of her elaborate fantasy life as a masterclass art thief, but they usually don’t. Whoops.)

(Pete, on the other hand, would rather be around people than not because he thrives off of social stimulation and affection [though good luck getting him to admit that], and when he slides into, “this is why you don’t leave some people alone with their thoughts” territory, it tends to involve the, “maybe my Dad was right and I’m just unlovable” thing)

—but either way, despite having ostensible ease in dealing with people (and being Extroverted in the MBTI sense, being an ENTP), she’s nevertheless introverted in the sense of playing her actual feelings close to her chest, not opening up to most people (even her boys — Seb, Pete, and Todd — have trouble getting her to be more open about her feelings or what’s going on for her without needing to either needle her a bit, or wait for Margot to open up or get too emotionally overwhelmed to keep it down on her own)

The flip-side of this is that it’s easy for her to go into an intellectual mode while everyone else is losing their heads, even when they are, for example, stuck in the middle of a super-villain’s attack on her office (which, seeing as she’s an accountant and her firm has some pretty big deal contracts with companies like Lockheed and Boeing, plus a handful of contracts with local government in Baltimore as well as the U.S. Federal government, happens…

…eh, it’s not something that happens every month? But there’s an Incident of some kind at her office more regularly than there would be if she worked at Coca-Cola, Nestlé, or D.H. Morgan, but less regularly than there would be if she worked at somewhere that’s way more immediately accessible or target-able, like a bank or a Walmart or a Starbucks or the production company that makes the All-Stars’ big shiny reality show)

Frankly, she should lose her head more often, because it’s pretty damn unhealthy to force herself to repress everything and stay cool while, for example, keeping her head down and just trying to ignore it while Those Two Super-Tools are fumbling all over the pre-written speeches they were given to throw at the people they’re trying to get certain invoices and books from, and it would be laughable if they didn’t have, y’know, guns and possibly henchmen who are infinitely more competent than they are

(which is usually what happens when Those Two Super-Tools go on any given job, because seriously, Edward and Dezi are just BAD. at EVERYTHING. if they weren’t super-fascists with deeply off-putting personalities and over-inflated senses of white straight male entitlement, you could almost feel bad for them because they want so much to be good at something but they suck at everything, like they are just terrible)

—or, like. If your no romo soulmate person has been kidnapped by ecoterrorists because he didn’t believe his ex when said ex flat-out admitted to being an ecoterrorist (because, “seriously, what kind of ecoterrorist admits to being an ecoterrorist on the first date?”), then it would be understandable to, like…… take a break and not work on your own attempts at finding and saving him, working behind the backs of the people who are trying to do so in an official capacity, and doing it with tools of your own devising or purchasing that aren’t necessarily reliable

Buuuuuut y’know what Margot did when that happened?

Yeah, she stayed awake for several days, doing that thing that I just said with the unsanctioned attempts at finding Seb on her own, and only crashed out after Seb had been retrieved, when she and Todd got on a train up to Penn Station (where they needed to switch to a train to Ossining)

LUCY26: Conversely, when put into Z-Situation, your character faints/screams/freezes with terror/is otherwise unable to respond properly in the situation and should probably not be allowed to lead here. Talk about Z-Situation and what it means to your character.

On one hand, it’s not that Lucy shouldn’t be allowed to go clubbing, and she’ll handle it just fine once you give her a couple minutes to adjust to it

But her initial reaction to a club environment — and to most places that are loud and full of people, whether they’re clubs or Times Square or Disney World or a music festival or whatever — is to kind of freeze up and go, “ehhhhhhh” for reasons involving there being a lot of sensory information that’s suddenly swooping in to be all, “HELLO THERE LUCY YOU SO WANT TO BE OVERWHELMED RIGHT NOW, YEAH? :DDDDD”

—which also sucks for her because she really LOVES new sensory experiences. They excite her, she wants to DO ALL THE THINGS and stick her hands into everything and LEARN STUFF OMG THIS IS ALL SO COOL OKAY, and she thrives on new experiences like this…… but when they actually start happening, she needs a bit of time to adjust before she can actually enjoy any of it because all of that sensory input will be overwhelming at first, and she hasn’t really learned how to slowly slip into things or strategies for managing all of the sensory overload, yet

—and on the other hand, public speaking. She shouldn’t be wholly barred from this either, because, again? Give her a moment to just get herself acclimated, and she’ll be fine. But public speaking is still nerve-inducing and scary, especially since she’s usually doing this for reasons she thinks of as Super Important, so she doesn’t want to screw anything up, and that perfectionism makes it worse, so she gets nervous and awkward and starts trying to force things, and she can easily end up putting her foot in her mouth if she tries to improvise without thinking

But really, if you just give her a couple moments or help her to get ready, she should be fine

SARA GRACE13: Your character does ____ or avoids ____ because they associate it with having a good/bad day.

Sara Grace is one of those people who dresses better, does more elaborate makeup (which sometimes stays in “natural look” territory; sometimes goes in “there’s contouring but it’s otherwise not too far off from the ‘natural look’ makeup that she does”; and sometimes straight up goes into, “i want to look otherworldly and possibly from the moon” territory), and puts more effort into her appearance in general as she gets more and more stressed, because she has to have control over something, jeez

—which, on one hand, means that she associates these kinds of behaviors with having a bad day or a bad time of things in general, and if she shows up to something in higher heels than she’d usually wear, a cute dress with a frilly short petticoat, and makeup that she describes as, “pastel vampire princess” or, “queen of the Unseelie Court” or similar, then it’s a really good bet that she isn’t feeling well, and she might not want to talk about it, but you should probably be gentler with her than usual

for the sake of helping with visualization: I’ve been picturing Asha Bromfield as Sara Grace

ADELAIDE50: Some people take all the paperclips out of the box and chain them together. Name something useless your character does but never bothered to stop.

Alphabetizing M&M’s and Skittles by color before eating them

Which is even more useless because she’ll then portion them off into groups of five to actually eat them, and they get mixed up all over again

Saving all the orange Starbursts for last

Silently naming the animals she sees — e.g., ducks at the park — and then concocting moderately elaborate little soap operas for all of them in her head, unless someone interrupts her and keeps her attention focused elsewhere

#builttobalance #memes for ts #mine: writing #that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #oc questions #sebastian moncrieff: mutant disaster #pete arden: dramatic disaster #sara grace kelley #adelaide moncrieff: ambitious disaster #margot gabriel: chainsmoking disaster #lucy murphy: hemokinetic disaster #drugs cw// addiction cw// death ref//#shitty tags i'm sorry i'm running out the door for therapy i'll fix them later <3

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amorremanet · 8 years ago

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11, 14 & 17? ^.^

asks for fanfic writers.

I did 17 over here, but!

11. do you listen to music when writing?

Sometimes, yes! It sort of depends on what I’m writing and what kind of mood I’m in, but I pretty much always listen to something. It’s more just a matter of whether I’m going to listen to music or TV/movies.

And then in each case, there’s the issue of like, “do I want to listen to the Twilight Princess OST or the Silent Hill 2 OST?” (because video game OSTs are great at both evoking mood and increasing focus), or, “do I want a video game OST, or my playlist for [character, ship, project, the mood I’m in, whatever; I have playlists for everything]”

—or if I’m going to listen to TV/movies, then it’s like, “TV or movies?” and then, “Disney movie or superhero movie? Marvel movie or DC movie? Pink Flamingos, Hairspray, or Female Trouble? The Prince of Egypt or Crimson Peak? Star Wars” or in TV Land, it’s more, “Well, I can’t work and listen to something relatively new [which is one of the biggest reasons why I’m perpetually late to everything new on TV], so… House or Criminal Minds? Yuri on Ice dub [because I can’t watch the subs and write at the same time] or SVU reruns? Firefly or Futurama?”

14. easiest character to write

Oh gosh, that’s…… hard. And it often depends on the fandom, and sometimes it depends on what kind of mood I’m in, but…

Barty Crouch Jr. has always been really easy for me (partly because he has Favorite advantage, and partly because I’ve put 16+ years into his character at this point, so like. JKR could drop all of her notes about his family and backstory and everything on us tomorrow — not that I really think said notes exist, but if they did — and I’d probably just go, “Yeah, that’s nice, but with all due respect, Mum? My version’s better, and I’m just going to continue treating it as if it’s canon because bite me, that’s why”).

AlSev Potter and Scorpius Malfoy are both really easy, too, but tbh, I think that’s because my versions of them are essentially glorified OC’s, since my attitude toward Cursed Child with regard to characterization is, “*nods mildly* That’s nice, but I’m going to pick and choose at my leisure, thanks. No offense, but I’ve been working on these kids since DH first came out, and I much prefer my headcanon Scorpius who is the biggest, loudest, gayest Drama Princess you have ever met in your life and has been trying to shock Lucius into having a heart attack and dying since he was like six,

“and my headcanon AlSev who’s sometimes Ruby Minerva Severus, most often genderfluid but sometimes a binary trans girl and other time a gay cis boy, loves Ginny but has a complicated and often strained relationship with her (but in fairness, AlSev-Ruby talks to Godfather Neville and Hagrid about their problems more than they talk to either Harry or Ginny), has a complicated relationship with Harry too but for other reasons and when Harry and Ginny eventually divorce each other, AlSev-Ruby is going to stay at their Dad’s more often than their Mum’s, and never lets anyone forget that their middle name is Severus because AlSev-Ruby likes pissing them off with that fact — especially their Weasley grandparents

“Ron but AlSev-Ruby usually feels bad about this because they know on some level that they’re usually lashing out at Ron unfairly because it’s not about their name in most of these scenarios and entirely about other emotions that AlSev-Ruby has no earthly idea how to handle or express in a healthy or constructive way, and they boil over very easily when people needle them about their name (and if it weren’t Ron on the receiving end of this, it would probably be James)

“and Snape’s portrait, whom AlSev-Ruby accidentally made respect them by going, ‘You’re a painting. You are oil on canvas, magically imbued with the real Severus Snape’s personality and memories. Snap at me all you want, but you can’t do anything to me that’s worse than what Rita Skeeter and Molly have been doing for my entire life so far. If you want to get to know me, instead of using me as some conduit for all of your lingering issues with my Dad, then cool, I’d like to get to know you, too. You’re the closest I can get to getting to know my real middle-namesake instead of the myth of him that’s been built up since the War. But if you’ve got nothing interesting to say, then please shut up and let me wait for the Headmistress in peace’ in their first year, if not as eloquently because they were eleven and being Sulky™”

As much as I still hate being compared to her, even accepting that I totally deserve it, Hermione Granger is another easy one for me to get into and always has been. The hard thing with her is not reducing her to either Perfectly Perfect Hermione (which JKR can even fall into some times, like when Hermione hexed the DA sign-up sheet and it scarred Marietta’s face without regard for how Umbridge is the one to blame in that situation and not Marietta) or some joke about some of the times in canon when she was Over The Top about something, in ways that Harry didn’t entirely get so the narrative treats them as Totally Hilarious, even though SPEW (for example) is actually not funny when held up to scrutiny and Hermione works so hard at school out of deep-set fear of failure and being dispensable, and probably also fear that maybe she doesn’t belong in the magical world

Luna Lovegood is also pretty easy for me, though the hard thing with her is trying to make sure that I write her thought processes honestly but in a way that makes sense for the reader (it’s a variation on the big problem of stream of consciousness writing, where writing actual facts stream of consciousness looks like Finnegan’s Wake and is tedious as fuck to read, so Luna has to be close to stream of consciousness but tamed enough so that the experience of reading anything written from her POV is more likely to be enjoyable, and less likely to be like getting hit upside the head with a tire iron labeled, “IT’S ART OKAY, IT’S NOT FOR YOU”).

Then, Remus Lupin is by far the easiest of the Marauders for me to write, and Andromeda Black Tonks can actually be pretty hard for me sometimes, but she’s easier than either of her sisters and still one of the easiest MWPP-era characters for me, period.

And as far as non-HP characters go: well, my other biggest source of fandom writing in the past while has been Teen Wolf, and the top five easiest kids for me there are Scott McCall (to the surprise of no one ever), Kira Yukimura (#still bitter),

“Camden Lahey (but lbr, he’s pretty much just an OC with a canon name because literally all we know about him in canon is, “Isaac’s older brother, on the 2005/6 swim team, died in the military” so the rest of it is shit that I wholesale made up and of course he’s easier for me to get into character with than, say, Allison — who is probably the third easiest of the ladies for me to get into character with, after either Braeden or Malia but it depends on the day — because Allison has, like, actual canon shit to deal with and Cam…… kinda doesn’t.

Like, all of the vaguely Actual Canon shit that he has to deal with is stuff that’s off in the realm of extrapolation, interpretation, and, “Hey, nothing in canon says that he DIDN’T visit Derek and Laura in New York on his way back from his first visit home during his service, or that he DIDN’T drag Derek uptown to see Patti Lupone as Mama Rose because Cam is a Fanboy for reasons relating to his and Isaac’s late Mother, or that they didn’t argue at the intermission about how IT’S A MUSICAL DEREK STOP TRYING TO QUESTION WHY THE CHARACTERS SING JFC IT’S LIKE I DON’T EVEN KNOW YOU”

or, “lbr, Derek is as subtle as a brick hitting you in the face at 5,000 mph and Paige canonically figured out that he was a werewolf anyway, so I don’t think it’s entirely implausible that, if we accept the idea of him and Cam being friends — and Cam being one of the only people who, like, genuinely likes Derek, instead of tolerating him because he’s okay at basketball and his family is rich — then Cam probably figured out that Derek and Laura are werewolves, and if that’s the case, he probably got trotted over to the Hales’ place so Talia could give him third-degree about whether or not he’s with the Argents or any other hunters.

“And, because he was like fifteen and had literally just found out that supernatural shit is real, Cam probably showed that he wasn’t a hunter by getting way too excited about hearing which magical creatures are real and temporarily shelving his hate-on for Talia to be all, ‘oh my god, are vampires real? can they infect werewolves? could Derek be like, a vampire werewolf, how would that even work’ or, ‘so silver bullets don’t hurt you, but what about someone saying your True Name? is True Name magic real?’ or, ‘do seances actually work? I’m totally not asking because I want to try and perform one to contact my dead Mom, I just want to know, like. For curiosity’s sake. Yeah……’”

[spoilers: Cam was TOTALLY asking because he wanted to try and use a seance to contact Eleanor. Derek and Laura had to stop him from trying to do the thing no fewer than eight times before Cam and Derek graduated. To his credit, Derek at least skipped trying to give Cam any kind of lecture, but tbf, he did that because he knew Cam would argue back at him about how Derek had no right to tell Cam that he was doing something stupid and dangerous and playing with things that he didn’t understand, and that Cam’s argument would probably be more than fair.

This did not stop Laura from giving Cam the lectures that he completely deserved, though, because: 1. he was essentially walking up to a big red button labeled, “do not push” and trying to push it without even reading the owner’s manual or the informational plaque on the wall that had a full explanation of why you shouldn’t push the button, and he KNEW that he was doing this, but he felt like it was all going to work out TOTALLY FINE because he wanted his Mom to be not dead and in lieu of that, why can’t he have a seance, Laura, UGH;

and 2. because, unlike Cam and Derek, Larua generally doesn’t do shit that’s too horribly stupid or that has completely awful consequences (…mostly), so she had an actual high-ground from which to give Cam these, “don’t screw around the magic, what the fuck are you thinking” lectures and wasn’t intimidated by Derek’s loudmouth little friend who, like, actively repels everything that even vaguely resembles chill.]

—so, anyway, the point is that I can pretty much do whatever I want with Cam and it makes him a lot easier to write. Laura is a similar case of, “this character is easy for me to write because I made her up,” and in fairness, a lot of my characterization for Braeden is headcanon, too. It’s just headcanon that has more of a basis in canon than Camden and Laura do.

I mean.

Except for parts like Braeden’s twin sister Belladonna who is a ballerina because fuck Jeff Davis, that’s why and also the only family member Braeden still talks to on any regular basis, and their parents who teach at Miskatonic University because I’m pretty sure it’s in the public domain at this point so nyeh, I’m gonna use it, and also they’re in the know about the supernatural but part of a group who has a policy of strict non-intervention, which Braeden thought was bullshit so she set out to do her own thing, which initially involved more plans to help people…… but then she learned that a girl’s gotta eat, and the mercenary work got started.

Also, she will wipe the floor with you at karaoke. Because I felt like it, that’s why.

Yeah, that’s all pretty, “this is not even remotely implied by canon and I wholesale made it up because canon wasn’t giving me like any damn Braeden backstory beyond the barest implications and I fucking felt like it, so there. PS: fuck Jeff Davis.”)

Derek Hale (I’m not always proud of this fact or entirely thrilled about it because when I get into Derek’s head, I take a lot of things from his canon characterization — especially in earlier episodes, before he started trying to be less of a jerk and discovered that: 1. he sucks as an Alpha, and 2. he loves Scott sooooo much — to their logical conclusions and his head is usually not a very pleasant place to be.

Like, he’s my werewolf disaster and I begrudgingly love him but we’re still talking about a guy who, when I write him, makes leaps of logic like, “Well, Cam said to look out for Isaac because he’s not here to do it himself. That is totally the same thing as giving me verbal permission to stalk his baby brother and manipulate him into accepting the Bite, very good plan, way to go, Derek!! :D” and thinks that, “Scott kissed ME first and didn’t explicitly SAY that he’s NOT 17, therefore I’m totally not obligated to ask him shit about shit or consider whether or not he’s having sex with me as a form of emotional self-harm” is a completely valid conclusion and way of doing things

He’s also a guy who would do things like cheat on Braeden with Cam and Cam with Braeden, while telling neither of them about this, and then when he gets arrested for doing something ridiculous, he would call both of them to come get him at the Sheriff’s station because he’s pretty sure that one of them will be mad and decide to just leave him there to think about what he’s done this time — which would end up in both of them coming, and figuring out that they’ve both been getting cheated on, and skip right past the, “being mad at the other cheated upon party” part to the part that’s more like,

“going for coffee and complaining about the fuck-up they’ve both been dating and making fun of things like his secret One Direction blog, or the Star Wars fanfic he writes where his blatant self-insert OC gets to bang Han, Leia, Mara Jade, Lando, both of the Solo twins, and Padmé (in some wonky shenanigans involving time travel) — oh and sucks for Derek, but Cam and Braeden decided to tell Parrish to just leave him in his holding cell because fuck him, they’ve been getting cheated on so he can just call Laura and beg her to come save his ass tonight”

negl, one of my favorite places to put Derek in non-supernatural AUs is prison. How he wound up there usually involved him killing Peter, and it sometimes involved him panicking and hiding Peter’s body under the floorboards because he’s a loser who thinks Edgar Allan Poe is actually a good model for How To Handle Murdering Someone, and…… yeah, I just. I love Derek, he’s easy for me to write, but he’s a disaster in ways I don’t always feel like dealing with, so sometimes, he gets to just go the fuck to prison so I don’t have to deal with him today.)

and……… ugh, I can’t pick between Danny Mahealani and Jackson Whittemore for the number five spot, but both of them are really easy for me, and like. Jackson, I am still vaguely ashamed of, but I don’t feel that bad about it because I got here by virtue of writing him when Astrid and I RP’d TW stuff together and she didn’t want to just talk to herself for ages by writing Isaac and Jackson, and I refused to half-ass it with Jackson and found a way into his head and here we are.

And Danny as I write him is, in a lot of ways, only somewhat less of an OC than Cam and Laura, so…… basically, that.

And bonuses, because I like talking about my legitimate OC’s, oops: Margot, Pete, and Sebastian are the easiest for me to write at the moment but in fairness, that’s largely because I’ve done the most work developing them as characters, relative to everyone else in the cast.

Like, Todd (who is officially Seb’s “it’s complicated,” and Seb’s Gawain Stacy, if you ask Pete — or sometimes even if you don’t ask Pete, because he will totally tell you this whether you like hearing it or not, especially if your name is Sebastian) — Todd has this notion that he, Margot, and Seb are basically gay boy!Hermione (Todd), lesbian!Harry (Margot), and, “Ron but like what if his family had Malfoy money and he was gay” (Seb). He’s not entirely wrong (and their Houses map onto the Trio’s secondary Houses because of course I know my OCs’ Hogwarts Houses, like why would I not know that)

(This whole Thing of Todd’s actually STARTED because I knew that he is a Ravenclaw, Seb’s a Hufflepuff, and Margot’s a Slytherin, and went, “lol, it’s like the Golden Trio in an AU where none of them wound up in Gryffindor, heh”)

and it makes sense that this is how Todd sees things with them because the three of them found each other in undergrad (though Seb found Margot when their RA paired them up for some “getting to know you” thing during orientation because they were the tallest and the shortest people on the hall, and he found Todd at the first meeting of the campus LGBTIQ students organization, had a crush at first sight on the cute chubby guy in the hot pink t-shirt with the screenprint of the Pink Flamingos poster, and totally meant to go be Super Cool about asking Todd out……

……buuuuuut he got excited and instead it came out like, “Hi, oh my god, I love your shirt, you like John Waters, I love John Waters, he’s my hometown hero, oh my god hi hi hi, my name’s Sebastian what is yours do you want to go get coffee, please be my friend, do you like Rocky Horror too? there’s a theatre a couple blocks from here that does a regular shadow-cast, we should totally check it out, I have just met you and I like you please be my friend” instead of like an actual date invite. And he totally called his Mom later that night to go, “MOM, I MADE ANOTHER FRIEND. TWO IN TWO DAYS, MOM. yeah no i still kind of hate my roommate he’s a jerk BUT I HAVE TWO NEW FRIENDS MOM”

………He was very lonely before undergrad because his only constant friend who wasn’t one of his siblings and didn’t shun him after he got outed at Catholic school [though technically, he sort of outed himself in an attempt to spare his boyfriend/best friend from being outed because Seb’s parents already knew he was gay and were totally cool about it, but Damian’s parents believed in reparative therapy and his uncle was the priest at their Catholic school, so him getting outed was really not an option]? Yeah, that only friend was Pete. But I digress.)

Anyway, Todd’s view of things is a little skewed by how he’s lived them, and strictly speaking, trying to map any of my kids onto the Golden Trio and Company is going to end up being a discussion of archetypes and tropes more than anything else because…… But they’re not the Golden Trio and Company.

There are some similarities, but they are mostly in the realm of archetypes AND the ones that aren’t quite as trope-y happened by accident (like, when I noticed that Seb actually does have quite a few similarities with Ron, aside from having Malfoy money — right down to his dad having an A name (Abraham) and his mom having an M name (Marceline) — I went, “well, FUCK” and started trying to get some of those similarities to be…… less so? Because…… Seb’s not Ron. And I don’t want him to be too overly similar to Ron because I want him to be himself, in his own right.

Fortunately, though, Ron isn’t a filthy rich, gay recovering addict who’s been living with undiagnosed major depression for his entire life and sort of accidentally stumbles into finding his mutant superpowers, and whose abusers aren’t his parents — because Abe and Marceline are pretty chill and have been fab to all four of their kids — but rather a series of douchebag ex-boyfriends who [unlike Molly and Arthur] are for real in-text acknowledged as being abusive jerks, and that’s a pretty solid start on Seb Is Not Ron)

But if you were going to try to do the Golden Trio And Company map here, then Todd would probably be Ginny, actually. They don’t have a lot in common, but there are some points of crossover, and the biggest one for me at the moment? Is that right now, I’m guilty of something that I bag on JKR for doing all the time, which is, “Ginny is a great idea for a character but you didn’t fully actualize her like she deserved in the text, you regularly reduced her existence to being Harry’s Significant Other, and it’s frankly bogus, Joanne” — and I’m aware of this, so I’m trying to fix it by working on Todd as a character

But I’m also trying to not spend forever fine-tuning every last detail about a story and then not having a draft of it so much as I have a two-foot stack of print-outs about different parts of it that kinda sorta look like a complete picture when you arrange them just so and tilt your head slightly to the left. So, basically, at the moment? Getting Todd to be more fully realized is on my List Of Shit To Do, but it’s way less of a priority than, “actual complete draft of this train-wreck” because I can do some of this work in revisions and rewriting

But since I opened this door anyway and want to complete the thought for the amusement factor:

Seb, obviously, is Harry in the bigger picture, even if this is mostly based on, “Harry is The Protagonist of his series, and although MY series is ultimately going to be more of an ensemble cast thing, Seb is the focal character for the first book because, in fairness to all the others, he was here first”

Todd is Ginny for the reasons that I just said

Pete and Margot both have very fair claim to being either Ron or Hermione, so they could arguably take turns, and ultimately, the big reason why I’m going to say Pete’s Ron and Margot’s Hermione?

is that Pete has two older siblings and some Issues with both of them (though he’s working them out with his sister, and not so much with his older brother) and has been Seb’s friend longer

while Margot’s an only child and they have totally used the, “we’re both gay, we love each other like brother and sister” line when they don’t feel like explaining their no romo soulmates kind of relationship to people (and sometimes when trying to make Seb’s siblings be less…… not pleased that Margot is so important to him, because to varying degrees, all three of them kinda sorta blame her for some of his problems in ways that she doesn’t entirely deserve)

Lucy is Neville but, like, a plucky ginger lesbian. This is probably one of the comparisons that looks a lot more like reaching, because on the surface, Lucy has a lot more in common with Ginny outside of their roles in the plot — but the thing is?

Even once I get Todd to be more developed, and even if he and Seb aren’t endgame (which was my original plan and I might stick to it but they have a LOT of shit to work on before they can go there so we’ll see how that goes), Todd is still going to be Ginny’s closest analogue to me because the ideas of them and their arcs are closer than anyone else’s (though in fairness, my idea of Ginny and her arc isn’t necessarily anybody else’s because JKR botched writing Ginny so much that this is almost, “room for wild mass guessing” instead of, “room for interpretation”)

Whereas…… yes. Lucy comes on strong, she’s a plucky go-getter who would probably try to fight the sun if she thought the sun was looking at her girlfriend funny, she’s a complete loudmouth and not always in ways that are conducive to anything, she’ll call you on your shit but usually without realizing that she’s saying something she needs to be hearing too, she tries too hard to do everything on her own and usually needs to experience some kind of big setback before she’ll consider accepting help with anything, and she will probably shout at someone while telling them to go calm down because they told HER to calm down.

Also, she’s the only one in my main ensemble cast who’s a legit Gryffindor, for better and for worse (Pete is a Slytherin — though in fairness, Gryffindor is his secondary House [he is aware of this, thanks to an ex of his who made him get Pottermore Sorted and was dead shocked when he wound up in Slytherin, but he has no idea what this means but he’s offended by it because Gryffindor’s colors are red and gold and no thanks, he doesn’t like how he looks in red and gold. He loves how he looks in green and silver, though] — and Josie’s a Ravenclaw)

—but a lot of how Over-The-Top Extra™ she is? that comes out of insecurity and trying to be various things that aren’t true to herself, because she deeply believes that she isn’t good enough. Granted, a big difference between her and Neville is that, while Neville spends a lot of time in the early books being terrified of his potential because he might screw up and prove right everyone who’s ever called him useless, Lucy instead tries to outrun her all of feelings of self-doubt and self-loathing instead of dealing with them, and basically plays a game of, “if I ignore them and just act like the popular idea of me — or like the me I want to be — but louder, maybe they will go away!!”

She’s going to be shocked when this catches up to her, because when she first shows up in the story, she’s of the mind that hey, she has accepted that she’s a lesbian — even if she’s only out to a small handful of people because…… uh, she’s Damian’s baby sister and their parents are still Not Really Very Safe to come out to. Their dad is probably going to die without Lucy coming out to him and she has VERY fair reasons for being afraid that he’d disown her for this — but!!! She has still accepted this!!!! Clearly it was the ONLY THING in her life that she wasn’t at peace with and now she IS so everything is going to magically be ALL BETTER NOW RIGHT!!!!!

No, not really, Lucy. Your sexuality is just one of the things about yourself that you aren’t at peace with.

Lucy’s response: *throws herself even harder into trying to outrun her self-doubt and being completely disingenuous to herself in the process, while trying to smile and laugh like nothing is wrong even though it really blatantly is*

So, that’s all going over about as well as you’d expect (i.e., not very well, not even a little bit whoops), and a lot of her arc in the series is going to be about finding peace with herself and finding her own ways of being a hero that may not necessarily line up with any more conventional expectations thereof, or even her own preconceived ideas of How To Hero Good, and yeah. She’s Neville, but like, a plucky ginger lesbian.

Also, she and Seb are foils for each other in a loooooot of ways that make them mapping onto Harry and Neville make more sense than trying to make Lucy map onto Ginny, in structural terms

Josie is Luna, and I’m short-changing my genderfluid empath child a lot right now but I’ve also been writing this post for WAAAAAY longer than I intended and ahahaha, everyone’s probably bored

And Conrad is Draco Malfoy, but absent any of the excuses that fans love making for Draco (especially not the age thing, like. Draco behaves in a LOT of ways that are completely unacceptable for any person of ANY age, but I will acquiesce that his age is a contributing factor in some instances because he’s a freaking CHILD. Conrad’s not, though. Like, Conrad is 46 and the oldest member of the main cast in the first book. Conrad gets no excuse for his bullshit based on his age.

He also doesn’t get to claim anything about being terrified for the safety of the people he cares about, because…… uh. While I think that the HP fandom oversells that point re: Draco in HBP because at first, he was completely gung-ho and proud of himself for joining a group of Pureblood supremacist domestic terrorist fascists, Draco was still abused and manipulated by Voldemort here — and during the entirety of HBP and DH — and…… well. Conrad was lied to and played by people who are even bigger douchebags than he is, yeah. But he wasn’t sold on joining the neo-fascist supervillains by having his loved ones threatened; he was sold on it by having his ego stroked and only giving a fuck about how this could benefit him)

So, basically, Conrad is Draco with even fewer redeeming qualities

Given that I think Draco only has, like, TWO redeeming qualities, or maybe three on a good day (and that’s debatable because at least one point here is, “it’s not really a quality of his own so much as the fact that I hate victim blaming more than I dislike Draco”), uh

Yeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaah, no.

Conrad is only not The Literal WORST EVER because there are other douchebags in his neo-fascist supervillain club who are even worse than he is.

i just love my oc mutant weirdos a lot, thank u for reading

#bizeke #that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #mine: asks #memes for ts #mine: writing #mine: teen wolf #mine: hp #mine: headcanons #mine: meta #(for a very very loose definition of the term 'meta' oops)#sebastian moncrieff: mutant disaster #pete arden: dramatic disaster #lucy murphy: hemokinetic disaster #todd burroughs: art film disaster #josie quinn: empath disaster #margot gabriel: chainsmoking disaster #kassie hush #opinions for ts #asks for fanfic writers

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