#they probably do have character sheets anyways? but mostly so they have baselines of personalities

[zephyrises]

character sheet.

full name.  ventus pronunciation.  ven-tuhs (which is not at all how the latin word is actually pronounced but don’t worry about it) nicknames.  venty-wenty

height.  5′5″ age.  verse dependent. 12 in ux, 16 in bbs and going on 17 in post-kh3. zodiac.  taurus, with his new birthday. original unknown. languages.  japanese. everyone understands everyone else in kingdom hearts anyway, though?? doesn’t matter which world they’re on. it’s that Disney Magic(tm), ig.

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS.

hair colour.  golden blonde that edges towards platinum. eye colour.  forest green. skin tone.  pale with yellow undertones. body type.  slight, but athletic. accent.  none, per se, but he will shorten words, mash words together and use some slang. dominant hand.  ambidextrous. he tends to stick with his right, though. posture.  very lax and casual. in battle, he uses a unique and antiquated, backhanded stance. tattoos.  none in any of my canon or canon based verses, even though he likes the idea of it! but in my collegeverse, he’s saving up to get lines drawn between the birthmarks on his back so they look like constellations. most noticeable features.  definitely his eyes, freckles, smile and the armor he wears on his feet, upper arm and abdomen. i’d say that the way he moves around is pretty attention catching in and of itself, considering how speedy, floaty and bouncy he is even without necessarily needing or intending to be. he’s also a bit small for his age, both in terms of height and weight.

CHILDHOOD.

place of “birth.”  daybreak town. hometown.  likely daybreak town. birth weight / height.  unknown.. manner of birth.  as weird as it sounds, necromancy. first words.  unfortunately, “yes, master.” siblings.  luxu could technically constitute in uxverse, depending upon how the both of them would view their situation. otherwise, he starts to think of terra and aqua as his older siblings sometime before the events of birth by sleep and then forever onward. parents.  in a terrihorrible way, the master of masters. if he had any parents before his body was re-animated, then it would be impossible to trace them now. he thinks of eraqus as a father figure, but his feelings on the matter are a big ol’ can of worms. parental involvement.  mom locked him up and used him for experiments. eraqus locked him up, good intentions notwithstanding, and tried to kill him. in other words, not the best!

ADULT LIFE

occupation.  post-kh3, he’s a guardian of light and keyblade master in training. the way aqua and yen sid have it slated, he’ll be taking his mark of mastery exam when he turns 18! current residence.  the land of departure, for now. even though he wouldn’t say it aloud to terra or aqua, he’d really like to leave and live somewhere new someday. close friends.  based off current canon, terra, aqua, lea, isa, sora, minnie, stitch, lilo, cinderella, jaq, hercules and peter pan. i see him having really good chemistry with vanitas, kairi, naminé, roxas, xion, ienzo, riku and demyx too, barring some development and circumstances! relationship status.  i don’t portray ven as having been in any romantic relationship or harboring romantic feelings towards anyone up until post-kh3. what happens from then on is a toss up depending on who i’m interacting with. i.e., right now, he’s dating @midnightpapllion​​ and has a budding crush on @rxcusant​​‘s vanitas! he’s a good-natured cutie, though, so other teenagers have flirted with him plenty during his travels. he’s just inexperienced and completely oblivious to the intent unless it’s spelled out for him, which tends to discourage most. financial status.  eraqus left a small fortune that he, aqua and terra use exclusively for groceries and supplies for missions. otherwise, he’s got a modest amount of spending money from traversing the worlds. he just doesn’t spend it on much aside from snacks and souvenirs. driver’s license.  cars are Completely nonexistent in his world. he only rides a keyblade glider and, even though there prrrrrobably should be, there’s no actual license required for that. criminal record.  this one time, he harassed some old men in the woods and beat up a cat about twenty times his size. those instances aside, he’s not necessarily above crime or violence as long as it isn’t Too uncouth and serves a purpose, so he’s probably got at least a little more on his rap sheet.

SEX & ROMANCE.

sexual orientation.  pansexual. romantic orientation.  demi and panromantic. preferred emotional role. submissive | dominant | switch |  unsure preferred sexual role.  submissive |  dominant  |  switch |  sex repulsed libido. turn on’s. turn off’s. love language.  even though he’d fail to notice a lot of the patterns himself, ven’s would consist predominantly of physical touch, acts of service and gift giving. as of terra and aqua’s involvement in his life, he’s become a huge touchy feely type. shoulder, arm and back touches, hugging and hand holding are all pretty normal for him in any sort of relationship, but lingering touches would be the big cue where romantic attraction is present. longer or more common hugs as opposed to just short lived hugs of greeting, parting or comfort. increasingly consistent tapping, leaning, nudging or hand holding for no particular reason other than because he gets a random urge to instigate it. acts of service would mostly just boil down to doing a lot of cooking or baking, but if he was in a position to and it wouldn’t be Weird to do so, he’d happily tidy up for someone or do their laundry, too! since the person in question would be on his mind a lot, he’d feel inclined to grab something up if it reminds him of them. probably stuff like flowers, pretty rocks or shells, accessories, snacks, things they’ve mentioned/he’s Noticed they enjoy, etc. etc. relationship tendencies.  mileage may vary for all of this depending on his partner’s personality and boundaries, obviously, but i’m willing to bet he’d be doting and clingy. he’s clingy with pretty much everyone once they give him an inch anyway, so i don’t think anybody would be too surprised or put off if they’ve already been hanging around long enough for him to develop feelings. definitely a little shy when it comes time to say i love you, kiss, go out or snuggle non-platonically, but not awkward or uncertain. the friendship that came before would be the foundation, after all, and he wouldn’t view a romance as something separate from that. more like another layer on top that they can navigate and define together. baseline, his flirting style is a combination of undisguised adoration and big time teasing. aaaand generally, he’d also be very attentive! he accounts for the tinier details, even if he can’t always make sense of them without posing a question or two.

MISCELLANEOUS.

character’s theme song.  i love the canon version of his theme, but i’m linking project destati’s version in particular because it’s orchestrated and extended and kills me dead. hobbies to pass the time.  adventures, walks, star gazing, star charting, flower pressing, bird watching, cooking, ukulele, and the biggie.... NAPPING. mental illnesses.  depression and ptsd. physical illnesses.  you could definitely argue that having his darkness stripped from him is more of a spiritual or mental condition, but to me, it’s a physical one. i think of it like having an organ removed from your body (say, a chunk of your goddamn HEART) or being on the receiving end of blunt trauma. there are mental and spiritual effects, sure. it contributed to his ptsd, depression, and an amnesiac episode, but xehanort stabbed him to make it happen and he’s got the scar and near death experience to prove it, so we’re calling it a physical illness in my house. a reaaaally strange, completely unparalleled, chronic fantasy illness. left or right brained.  right brained for sure. he’s really imaginative and artsy. fears.  being abandoned, especially by those he holds dear. not being smart or strong enough to prevent someone from getting hurt or worse. being deprived of control over his own body or decisions.  self confidence level.  veeeeeery low. when he acts confident, he’s just faking it until he makes it,.which, unless he addresses the root of the problem, won’t be anytime soon. but i’m behind the wheel so this kid’s not going to let being abused define him forever. mark my words. vulnerabilities.  impulsive and bad decision prone. he’s not very physically strong or durable, either. fast, sure. definitely determined to stick it out until the very end. but once you get a couple of good hits in, he’s down. he’ll also undermine his own value and throw his life and safety away on the off chance that it could help someone else, so jot that one down.

tagged by: @kissafist​​ THANK YOU!! ♥ i had so much fun with this. tagging: in addition to livi and sammi who i already pinged above, let’s do @localmagicalboi​​, @feraliix​​, @galaxycrxss​​, @blackasteriia​​ and YOU! but only if you feel like it!

[woozapooza]

Black Sails 1x01

Here we go!!! A new show!!! What a good pilot episode. So much happened, I can’t believe it’s only been one episode.

I was apprehensive about starting Black Sails because I’d been anticipating it for months and had built it up in my head. It’s the same apprehension I had starting Wynonna Earp. But once again, I have correctly judged from a tiny bit of information that a show is an excellent match for me. I’m not nearly as good as I’d like to be at following and remembering the events of shows, so after I finished the episode, I recounted as much of the plot as I could remember to myself. While doing that, I realized one thing that made it such a good way to start a show: it’s brimming with the theme of gambling, of making dangerous choices that may pay off hugely down the line or may end in disaster. Combine that with the numerous interesting characters, not to mention the fact that it’s a period drama about pirates I mean come on what’s better than that, and you’ve got the perfect recipe to make me keep watching. I hope everything in the following lil recap/review is factually correct but eh who knows.

Let’s start with Flint. The trope of angsty morally dubious loner captain dude, while cool in theory, does not always go over well for me (see Jack Harkness and Mal Reynolds, neither of whom is as questionable as Flint). But I think in Flint this trope (which probably has a name, or at least is an amalgam of a few tropes that have names) may finally work for me, and I’m not just saying that out of ginger solidarity, nor just because aesthetically Flint is #goals. Flint has been “gambling” for months before the show even starts: he’s been going after ships that don’t seem like good targets because he thinks they’ll lead him to the jackpot, the Urca de Lima. The result of him keeping his plan secret from the crew is low morale and the threat of mutiny. Flint has to walk the line between keeping the crew satisfied and pursuing a goal that will more than make up for the toll its pursuit takes. He fails to walk this line, but Singleton’s mutiny gives Flint the opportunity to change tactics while still very much gambling: by accusing Singleton of stealing the Urca’s schedule, he gets to fight and kill Singleton (he also had to bet on Singleton choosing a duel over a trial, but I’m assuming he knew Singleton well enough that it wasn’t a risky bet) and pretend to recover the schedule from Singleton’s corpse. Until he produced the blank sheet of paper, I really couldn’t guess whether he actually suspected Singleton or he was just looking for an excuse to put down the mutiny. I didn’t expect the trick with the blank paper. Flint may be the main character but you can’t always see into his head, so I expect he’ll be a lot of fun to watch. I enjoy his cleverness, his ruthlessness, and his moments of vulnerability. I’m still unsure whether he meant it at all when he apologized to the crew for keeping secrets from them. I’d like to think it wasn’t a complete lie, even though it was also a ploy to get them to like him again, but it’s not like he’s stopped lying to them. He has his crew’s loyalty back—fortunately he was right to gamble that Billy would play along and pretend Singleton really did have the schedule—but it will only last so long before they realize he doesn’t have it. He also has to hide the fact that Guthrie, who was key to getting the ship, is a) under arrest and b) so far, unwilling to help. Will Flint get the schedule for realsies before the crew figures out that he lied to them again?

Lying now and hoping he’ll have the means to make up for it later is not the worst thing Flint does in this episode. It’s the killing of Singleton that really shows that he’s not a straightforward hero. I wouldn’t say mutiny justifies murder, but then again I’m not a pirate. I also wouldn’t say theft merits the death penalty, but that’s how pirates do. What I’m getting at is, Flint may do questionable things (like, in addition to the very fact of piracy), but he’s not the only one. I guess pirates have their own morality and just because Flint does things I wouldn’t do doesn’t mean he doesn’t have some kind of code. He even acknowledges, speaking to Billy, that pirates have a way of life that makes sense to them but not to mainstream people (I know I’m making pirates sound like hipsters but it was the first phrasing that came to mind): “men who keep what is theirs and fear no one.” 

Speaking of Billy the boatswain, I really like him as well, and not just because he’s played by Tom Hopper. His type of gambling has to do with how much of his faith and loyalty he’s going to put into Flint. He pretends that Flint was correct to accuse Singleton of theft, but he’s by no means a sycophant. When Flint is brutally interrogating Richard Guthrie and tells Billy to point the gun at Guthrie, Billy has no problem pointing it at Flint instead. So if Billy is playing along with Flint’s scheme, he must have weighed the options and decided this was best. Billy, like Flint, thinks, speaks, and acts for himself. Also, he looks like Tom Hopper.

Silver is a bit of a weird character because he’s to some extent our point-of-view character, but he’s also absent for large parts of the episode. Regarding his role as the audience stand-in, it was cool to show him discovering all the information about the Urca de Lima at the same time that Flint’s voiceover was explaining the same information. Regarding Silver’s personality, I really enjoy his unapologetic selfishness and self-preservation. Everyone on the show has their ways of looking out for themselves, and for Silver, that happens to mean hiding below deck, killing the cook (in self-defense, to be fair), stealing the Urca’s schedule because he knows it’s valuable even though he doesn’t know why, and pretending he’s a cook so he gets to join the crew of the Walrus (I’m looking forward to find out whether he actually can cook). But when Flint kills Singleton, do I dare see in Silver’s face a hint of remorse that his actions might have gotten someone killed, or do I need to be more cynical? Anyway, his main gamble is to hold on to the schedule rather than hand it over to Flint. He also has to make the gamble to trust Max.

Max, who is pretty mysterious so far but very alluring, likewise has to gamble to trust Silver. I like their dynamic—good teamwork from two blatantly self-interested people. Her acquisition of the schedule parallels how Silver got it: he could tell the cook really wanted to hold onto it, she could tell he really wanted to hold onto it. Both of them are clearly good at identifying where profit lies and getting there. Silver says that when he sees an opportunity for gain, he can’t help but take it; when given the chance to back out of a partnership with him, Max isn’t tempted, which suggests that she is much the same. As for another of Max’s relationships, as I have said, one of the reasons I wanted to watch this show was that I knew it had quality gay/bi content and WOW it turns out they hit you with it right in the first episode! I ship her and Eleanor by default (and because of the line “Max is your harbor,” I’ve decided my ship tag will be “all I want is to be your harbor”) but their interaction was mostly sex, so I hope we get to see more depth to their relationship soon. However, one of the episode’s few tender moments was Max’s concern when she saw the bruise Vane left on Eleanor’s face, so that bodes well for her and for the two of them.

I think Eleanor might be my favorite character so far, largely because Hannah New is very attractive when she’s swearing. And in general. She gambles by funding Gates’ efforts at bribery (making their interaction also a gamble for Gates) and oops she almost won that gamble but not quite. She also has to choose between loyalty to Vane and loyalty to Flint. She chooses Flint. We’ll see how that turns out. She is undoubtedly and unapologetically self-interested, but without crossing the line into immorality. (I mean immorality relative to the show’s baseline morality.) Same goes for most of these characters, now that I think about it, including Max. In addition to their similarities, these ladies balance each other: Eleanor is gruffer but more emotional, while Max is more subtle and more sanguine. Ship ship ship.

While watching The 100 I often wondered if Roan was just a boring character or if there was an innate boringness to Zach McGowan. Now I can declare that Roan is just a boring character. Vane is not boring. He’s pretty frightening, really. Maybe ZM should just only ever play villains? I don’t know. Anyway, despite being set up as the antagonist, I’m not yet convinced that Vane is really much worse than Flint. We shall see. He’s got a plan of his own, though it doesn’t really fit the gambling theme: he tried to engineer the victory of Singleton’s mutiny so that, once the crew of the Walrus realized they no longer had a competent captain, they’d defect to Vane’s crew. That didn’t pan out since Flint took down Singleton and made up with his crew, but Vane didn’t really lose anything, at least not as far as we’ve seen. For that reason, he’s probably the character who came out of the pilot looking the least vulnerable.

Gates, like Flint, feels like a character type I have seen before: the practical, long-suffering but loyal second-in-command to the headstrong, risk-taking team leader. The only other example I can think of is Bennet Drake from Ripper Street, but I think I’ve seen it elsewhere as well. Gates is the one who puts into words the theme I’ve been talking about: he tells Eleanor that if she loans him money to ensure Flint retains the captaincy, it will be an “investment in the future.” I’m looking forward to seeing whose investments pay off and whose future wins out.

There’s a lot of conflict already, but there’s a lot of overlap of characters’ traits, I guess because they all know this piratey world quite well and what kind of person you have to be to survive and to thrive. Basically, the first episode sets up a rough world where everyone is looking out for themselves and making difficult choices that they think are for their own good but that might have explosive consequences down the line. We get a glimpse of what these characters want and what they’re willing to do to get it. Also there are pirates. What’s not to love?

WHO DOES RACKHAM REMIND ME OF? I looked up Toby Schmitz’s filmography and I don’t think I’ve see him in anything else but I swear he reminds me of someone!

Best dialogue of the episode:

Gates, to Billy: You’re a highly regarded member of this crew. The captain regards your input more than you know.

Gates, to Flint: Billy’s going with you.

Flint: Who’s Billy?

[parentingguide8-blog]

4 Legit Reasons New Parents Are F@cking Annoying

New Post has been published on https://parentinguideto.com/must-see/4-legit-reasons-new-parents-are-fcking-annoying/

4 Legit Reasons New Parents Are F@cking Annoying

I am a father, but I am not so deep into fatherhood that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to hate new parents. I remember having my entire Facebook feed hijacked by indistinguishable, jelly-eyed newborns all wearing the same hospital hat. I remember the 100-percent-sober ponderings between moms and dads over who the baby sneezes like, and their blatant attempts at radicalizing new members during 4:30 p.m. dinners. Every smug, “I didn’t really know what happiness was until I had Boston” or “The things I cared about before seem so inconsequential now that we have Pensacola” is another rip in the seam holding the tenuous relationship together between new parents and their childless friends. I promised myself I’d keep my head up as a new father, that I’d pay close attention and never do any of these things. Then I did all of them anyway.

I’ve lived on both sides of the medical curtain, and I want to least help explain why this phenomenon happens, hopefully salvaging a few friendships. If you don’t have kids, please understand, there are four really good reasons the rest of us are suddenly intolerable.

4

The Hero Of Our Life Story Suddenly Shifts

Everyone is the hero of their own narrative. This may be the fault of movies but it feels more primitive than that. Most people have a vague idea of a story ending they are working toward (finding mutual love, some semblance of career fulfillment, drunkenly beating open the head of an enemy with a bowling pin, etc.). I am generally a deeply selfish person. When I would treat people poorly, or get fired from jobs in my early 20s, I felt fine about every step because I was just completing the wayward Act Two of a coming-of-age story I’d read a hundred times. What I never anticipated and what I don’t think a lot of new parents anticipate is how quickly and completely those goals shift as soon as a child erupts into the world. Something instinctual flips in the brain of a new parent, causing them to willingly demote themselves to ancillary characters who only want to advance the story of this new protagonist.

Pixabay Public Domain Ok, in this scene, your baby will be trying pie for the first time.

Unfortunately for your friendships, that means a lot of what you probably liked about your friends vanishes, at least for a while. They aren’t up for new adventures or building new memories with you because that’s a weird B-plot now that would probably get cut in editing. In those first two years of a child’s life, parents will mentally fast forward through anything that isn’t directly related to their role as a parent. New moms and dads regularly set aside time for themselves every day to just look at pictures of their kid on their phone. They spend most of their downtime while the beast sleeps, sitting in the silent ruins of what used to be their apartment saying, “I just love him so much” or “She’s so great, right? She’s so great.” Not even fiction is so bold as to build a scene where supporting characters do that about the hero.

Part of that is because parents are habituated to the oxytocin their baby’s presence pumps through their brain, but mostly it’s because they are terrified that if they aren’t always thinking of the baby, they will get distracted and fuck up irrevocably.

3

New Parents Are Constantly Afraid Of The World (And Themselves)

This is going to get dark so bear with me. While you may look at a baby and think, “Fine, whatever. Another one that’s just like the millions of others,” you likely don’t even realize that you are tacitly acknowledging that this is “another normal healthy one like all the other normal healthy ones you’ve seen.” New parents are not living by the same baseline. They are still privately calculating the probabilities of this tiny thing’s non-existence. While someone in love may obsess over all the situations in which the other person might leave them, parents know that the only way the baby stops being their baby is through death.

Pixabay Public Domain Don’t ask how I know, but this is exactly how mine will happen.

Having a healthy child makes you feel lucky in a sickening way, a way that seems cosmically undeserved, like at any moment the world will take notice and set itself right again. As a result, we think about death a lot. I walk into a new room and I watch my son die a thousand times based on everything that can poke him, fall on him, electrocute him, or lodge itself in his trachea. Then, despite all of it, I have to turn him loose to explore for himself. I wake up in the middle of the night certain he is in our bed and that he’s suffocating under the sheets somewhere near our feet. These situations play with such clarity in my mind that it’s like I’ve felt it in some non-linear time, like I’m already practiced in losing him. If you can remember the feeling you’d get as a child watching a scary movie and being unable to emotionally divorce yourself from the fiction, it’s the same feeling; the barrier is gone again and you are suddenly vulnerable to your own emotional Killer Klowns From Outer Space.

So if new parents seem like they are never fully present when you’re together or like they’re just not as fun, understand they are regularly weighing death, regardless of how irrational it is. The fear passes, but it takes time for irrational fears to give way to rational because they all look the same at the start.

Now, if you’re thinking, “You’re being over dramatic, I’ve had pets that I love like a child. I can still step outside of that love and live a normal life,” then let me just say …

2

The Love Is All Consuming

Cards on the table, I can’t speak with any authority on the similarity between love for a pet and a child because I’ve never had a cat. I’m always impressed and bewildered by childless friends who tell my wife and me that, in a lot of ways, having a new puppy is harder than having an infant. While they might be right, I want to tell them that the love for a child doesn’t actually feel like love, it feels deeply unhealthy.

Sit down. We’re going to talk about my child’s first steps.

It’s not just that parents love their child more than anything, they love their child more than everything combined. It’s an overpowering, throttling love that has to be tempered just to get through the day. Sure, certain moments help douse the flame, like when a child in your lap spontaneously rears back with their head and pushes your incisors up into your skull. Or when babies throw up in your mouth, or throw up in your eye, or pee in their own mouth while throwing up in their eyes. But during the quiet moments with an infant where you allow yourself to indulge — to bend to the love completely — hugging your baby is like hugging a lost love you would give anything just to see again, and then you got your wish.

There’s just no room for anything else. It’s why strong/healthy relationships can teeter on the verge of collapse in the sudden presence of a newborn; you have to intentionally carve out and set aside love for the other person, or the human larva just absorbs everything.

So if you are a friend to a new parent, the reason they lose their social priorities or context for what’s interesting is because they’ve temporarily lost context for everything. They are so singularly obsessed it’s easier to think of them as addicts. They may go to the movies with you, or dinner, or sit through meetings at work like a normal person, but they are never entirely there because they always know that this is just a detour to that wondrous, beautiful sack of heroine waiting at home.

And like addicts, you can’t just give up on them, because …

1

We’re Trying Not To Lose You

This may seem completely intuitive but new parents don’t want to be this way. They aren’t dragging their baby to your birthday at a bar as an excuse to bail early, they aren’t spinning every conversation toward parenthood because they are narcissists, and they’re not posting 100 photos of the same goddamn trip to the aquarium to be malicious. They do it as a desperate bid to keep you in the loop of their life.

There’s a very good reason it’s so hard to talk to someone you haven’t seen in years and then run into again in a grocery store: you can’t possibly fill them in on everything and it’s all those unshared moments that separate you. We’re scrambling to make sure that never happens. We’re holding the door for you to what’s most important in our lives right now and hoping you’ll follow us in. In the same way someone who starts running regularly, or juice fasting, or reading The Secret won’t shut the fuck up about it, parents are so excited about this new thing and they hope that they can say or do the right thing to make you excited about it too. Granted, those attempts are frequently oblivious and clumsy but we just can’t help ourselves. You need to love our baby, you need to see what this feels like.

When we invite you to our children’s first birthdays or ask if we can bring our babies to your bachelorette party (I do some dancing on the side), we already know these asks are huge inconveniences. We know our presence will make any social situation objectively less fun. The kid aside, we are still secondary characters obsessed with death and dealing with a drug problem.

But we also know this isn’t forever.

We’re trying to do just enough to maintain our relationships through the hard part until our children become more autonomous and their continuing existence helps calibrate our fears. We’re all at least peripherally aware that when we abandon everything in our lives other than parenting, it actually makes us worse parents in the long run. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is, come to my kid’s birthday. Spend some time around him, smell his head. Smell it. He’s great, right? Man, wouldn’t it be crazy if you just decided to have one? Have one.

Soren is a senior writer and editor for Cracked. You can follow him on Twitter here. Also, you don’t really have to go to his kid’s birthday, just say you have a thing.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/