#side note to p3- that callout post where the person called ME “cassey” was kinda funny though

[masschase]

I absolutely get what you mean and FWIW I think you have excellent ties between who Anteros is as a developed oc and as an in-game character. I'm thinking of moments like the post-Revelation art that we can so clearly see fitting into the in-game world while still giving this glimpse of who Anteros is. I honestly assume all the in-game Boss stuff just happens unless told otherwise by rewrites and stuff.

Bit of a tangent but I think about this a lot myself. I don't show an awful lot of Casey being the way she is in-game because I've already seen that, I've played it. I take it all as a given. I also don't show her laying out tactical plans or doing paperwork or leading large-scale battles or any of the other stuff I say she's good at. I don't really portray like, "the Boss shit", and I worry that makes her character seem off-putting bc "fucking about making silly jokes in space and fucking Matt Miller" is not a personality.

I never intended to make an OC and I did so by filling the gaps, so in my head I'm fairly confident in her charactersation, at least in my writing. Unfortunately those are the gaps between all games. I worry my work is seen as a complete joke for following SR4 canon in the first place. But also when I only show the gaps I recognise that paints a certain picture that I can't really escape from. I realise it shouldn't matter if someone likes my OC but I also recognise that it highly affects how people see me and what I have to say.

I come on here to do whatever's fun for me at the time. Fun can and does include serious takes on things. But a lot of the time my hcs on here are often jokey, contradictory, frivolous. Sometimes I worry people will see stuff I talk about in a jokey/memey way or even stuff that's direct from sr4 and dislike me for those "hcs" even though it's tumblr so people are usually nice enough not to say these things.

Making this a space where I can try and stop being so anxious and sensitive and just be passionate about things is the only reason I've generally been able to be so enthusiastic about others' work. I guess recently I've gone back to doubting myself so much that it's making it harder to reblog new people and such. I'm going to stop talking bc this feels less like an interesting addition and more like hijacking now!

But yeah, honestly, I think you have a really good balance with Anteros!

one thing i’ve been concerned about as of late is that i worry people may misinterpret anteros slightly and perhaps read him as being too far off from the boss character itself, citing his tendency to cry easily and just general overemotional-ness. and i think that overshadows a lot of the truly terrifying actions he commits. like i may have a specific canon i’ve written, but to be 100% clear, the events of the first two games in particular still happened pretty much as shown. anteros is still the one who blew up angelo’s plane, he’s the one who locked jessica in a trunk and let her get crushed to death, the one who helped bury shogo alive.

where in sr1 he’s more just doing as he’s told to get the approval of julius, by sr2 he is much more noticeably intense. his unpredictability comes from a place of uncertainty; i characterize him as someone who is driven by his emotions, however due to both the stress of being a newfound leader and the permanent physical and mental effects of having been in a coma for literal years, his emotions become much more intense and initially much more difficult to manage. now to be fair, he’s never been the best at managing his emotions even before he joined the saints, but it definitely gets exasperated post-sr1. and i think that fragile unpredictability, especially in sr2, is what cements him as a genuinely intimidating leader.

i suppose all that to say i wanted to go a different route with the boss character than what’s just kinda given. the boss is interesting in and of themselves, but i wanted to go the route of like. somewhat combining the boss of the first two games with the boss of the latter two. humanizing them a little more without removing the fact they’ve still done horrible things. additionally sliding in that i think anteros is someone who was made leader when he didn’t really want to be but has just accepted it anyway. he makes bad decisions, he hides things from his friends, and he inadvertently drags others into his identity crisis.

but i think that’s what makes him interesting, at least for me when i’m writing him. he’s someone who, at his core, has always had little sense of self. he put on a face for most of his life—he’s a performer—and just when he was potentially figuring himself out, he dies. but he comes back five years later, and he’s come back to everything changed. when he looks at himself in the mirror, is he himself? he doesn’t know. that’s why he continually falls for authoritative people in his life—they’re telling him what to do, who to be, how to act. but suddenly he’s in charge and he has no one to hold him accountable but himself.