#she’s a naiad and she literally just swims around and flirts with this philosopher all day

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who are they tell me everything

Okay so uh, warnings in order of appearance for mentions of suicide, kidnapping, and murder. I’ll try to keep the descriptions simple to avoid too many spoilers & getting too gritty & stuff, and obligatory “these characters are problematic and while I love them because they’re my babies, being a sexist jerk & kidnapping & murder is bad” disclaimer in case this breaches containment. Anyway, the repressed characters in question…

I mentioned a sleazy businessman in a previous post. That’s Richard! He has this stupid idea that being a callous misogynist asshole is the best way to get respect as a guy and it’s just…not. He knows that deep down but he got in too deep and doesn’t know how to stop. He used to be an investor but when his stocks plummeted in value and he owed some really shady people a lot of money, he opted to take his own life rather than get taken out by a hitman. He got the chance to come back to his body a few decades later and took it. He’ll tell you he came back because he can’t get laid or drunk without a body. While kinda true, that’s not the only reason he came back. He wants to be a good person again and maybe make up for the mistakes he made, but he’s terrified of giving up the façade of a confident jerk. It’s like his social armor. So he just keeps procrastinating on his own development.

Viv (short for Vivienne) is a grouchy shut-in who doesn’t know how to connect with people in a fulfilling way (for reference one of her favorite pastimes is starting fights on the internet), and eventually falls madly in love with and kidnaps a guy at the bar she used to frequent. He’s kept in her basement. She feels better having someone around even if he hates her guts, but she knows it’s not really meaningful, and she also knows she majorly messed up and can’t undo what she did without facing the consequences. She also has a lot of stuff to unpack regarding not knowing how to make and keep friends, since she usually just blames everyone else for everything that goes wrong.

Maxwell murders people out of a sense of necessity, like it’s an itch he has to scratch, and while he enjoys himself in the moment, he’s otherwise extremely nervous about it. Why does he feel this way? Can he make himself stop? Would he even want to if he could? How long until he gets caught? Like Viv he’s very conflicted about the crimes he continues to commit and is scared of the consequences, and like Richard he hides behind a façade, though Maxwell’s is deadpan and aloof rather than charming and crude, acting like he doesn’t care.

None of them are meant to be all that deep thematically, I suppose they could be read as exaggerations of people that get addicted to being assholes & maybe eventually realize how exhausting it is, but really they’re just some of my nasty little guys that I gave existential crises to