#this is an entirely subjective opinion of personal taste. but i really think the concept could have been executed way better

[encrucijada]

i was gonna let fate decide my next read but i think annihilation is going to be wilder girls but good

[mingos]

For the question about my character meme, how do you personally think Doffy felt about the situation when he was a child and St Homing decided to give up his status to live with the common folk. We saw how badly they were treated, but I'd like your opinion on how it personally affected Doffy, if you don't mind?

　oh, it psychologically fucked him up. no doubt. not even just the beatings & extreme poverty that would come later, i'm talking everything about that situation from start-to-finish. (before i start, just to be clear, this is not a 'uwu poor doffy uwu' analysis, this is a child psychology analysis.)

-

i know his shock & anger at the beginning before anything 'bad' happened was meant to illustrate "see, he's always been an evil little shit" but honestly, his base reaction is perfectly within the realms for a kid who has had his entire life & belief system essentially just upended. he wasn't an adult with a fully developed brain, he was a child with a child's brain. eight years old is actually around the time kids start thinking logically & understanding the world around them on a deeper level.

picture it: you're essentially one of the richest, most powerful children in the world, raised in an environment where you are deified & you can do no wrong, that everyone beneath you (humans) is less than dirt (whether that's right is not the point) and one day your dad is like... "hey, i want to be that". and you overhear your peers mocking your dad and essentially kicking you all out of your home and forcing you to move to an unfamiliar environment. like, moving schools as a child, but worse.

you've also been conditioned to think you are entitled to anything you want, and are allowed to be as nasty as you want to humans without consequence. but, suddenly, not only are they not serving you anymore... the moment you talk to these humans the way you have been conditioned by the adults in your life to talk to them when they 'disrespect' youーthey burn down your new house & start threatening to murder you. they are essentially in the position you used to be in now.

-

yeah sure "taste of your own medicine" and all thatーbut doflamingo is eight. he barely knows what that even means, at that age children are still learning basic concepts of morality & social norms, and at that point basically every social norm doflamingo has been conditioned into for those first eight years of his life were turned on their head & now all the sudden he was punished for believing them rather than praised. for the first time in his life, he's starving. for the first time in his life, he's been hit. he's poor. he's forced to wear rags. nothing he has been taught makes sense anymore.

also, at that age, your world tends to revolve around one thingーyour parents. they understand the roles of "child" and "adult" and understand that the adult's purpose is to give them guidance & protect them. homing, in doflamingo's eyes, did the opposite. he put them in harms’ way. another thing in his world that has been proven totally wrong.

-

child brains generally do not handle stress or trauma well; i forget the exact wording or study so don't quote me, but i've read articles over the years that make the argument that children who grow up in violent home environments (like witnessing/being subjected to domestic violence) or split home environments (like parents undergoing a messy divorce) essentially can have levels of ptsd equivalent to war veterans.

(on a personal note) as a very ill child who spent my first 12 years in & out of hospitals, i have medical ptsd; just hearing a heart rate monitor, seeing a needle, or smelling that very specific 'hospital' or 'anesthesia' smell is enough to give me a panic attack sometimes, even at 27.

that kind of trauma really does stick with youーeverything goes back to your childhood.

　taking his power back was, in part, to ensure that nothing close to that ever happens to him again.

[escarlatafox]

6, 11, 13, 25, B!

Uncommon Questions for OCs and their creators

Thanks so much for the ask! I wrote a Lot. 😅 So I'll put it all under a readmore :P

Will answer for my OCs Patrick and Vincent.

6. Do they consider laws flexible, or immovable?

Immovable! (Answer applies to both).

11. How do they cope with confusion (seek clarification, pretend they understand, etc)?

Vincent would seek clarification if the situation allows/calls for it – he generally wants to make sure he understands things thoroughly and correctly. For Patrick, it depends. For things he 100% doesn’t understand (e.g. an entirely new concept gets mentioned, or someone making a statement that seemingly doesn’t make any sense at all without context he doesn’t have), he would seek clarification, but for things he only partially doesn’t understand, he is likely to just sit with the confusion instead and try and “figure it out on his own” or otherwise just accept that there are elements he doesn’t quite understand, or understand yet, at least. However, he certainly wouldn’t “pretend to understand”, so sometimes if someone realises he still doesn’t quite get something, they might offer more information even if it isn’t requested, but they’d have to be able to notice…

13. What colour do they think they look best in? Do they actually look best in that colour?

HAH, I’m not really a fashion person + I have a very “taste/aesthetics are subjective” point of view where I wouldn’t want to try and assert my subjective opinion as fact, but I’m not sure I necessarily have an opinion to begin with here, so…

In any case, Vincent would have Opinions on this and those Opinions would be “correct” because I consider him to have good aesthetic judgement (he’s from a family with good social standing who also associates with/has connections with many families of good standing in turn, this kind of thing would somewhat come with the socialisation I think…). I don’t personally know what his opinions are, since I’d consider his aesthetic judgement to be way “better” than my own in its alignment with society/general views, LOL.

Patrick doesn’t really have an opinion about this. His/his family’s strand of Christianity has some level of focus on plain/modest dress where it would be bad to intentionally stand out or w/e, so in the end, looking “good” isn’t really the point (though looking presentable is). So, the standard outfit that I depict him in features shades of brown (as in my icon). But yeah I don’t really know for sure what he’d look “best” in, but I guess I think the brown(s) of his standard outfit does suit him fine imo. But yeah, he doesn’t really think about questions like “what colour do I look best in”, so.

25. What are their thoughts on marriage?

So, they both are from an older era of like 100 years ago, and they both come from conservative type families. They’re very much surrounded by and growing up in an environment where marriage is the standard expected thing of everyone.

Vincent has a romanticised view of marriage and wants/expects to be married when he is older (he’s 17).

When Patrick was very little (as in, around 6 years old or under), back then I think he would have just considered marriage to be the default state of adulthood that would simply “happen”/that simply “happens” to basically everyone as this standard thing, something expected/compulsory of everyone like how kids are required to attend school – not really associating it with romance or really understanding much about what marriage is (understandable at that age). He’d just know that his parents are married, other adults he’s aware of are married, probably pick up this general notion from family/society that Marriage Is Good, etc. There wouldn’t be a whole lot of awareness that it’s this active choice that two people make and (ideally) want for themselves, he’d just see it as, again, a standard/default state of Grown-Up Existence. He might have some notion back then as well that being unmarried as an adult is “bad” or a “failed state”, and that an adult who has not yet “achieved” that status would need to “achieve” it.

Obviously as he gets older, he would understand the concept more and know better what marriage actually is. And… he’s never been attracted to anyone, and the idea of a relationship doesn’t really appeal to him in the slightest. But Good Citizens Get Married, and he wants to be a Good Citizen. He does not want to be a Bad Citizen. From an early age he’d just assumed marriage would be in his future because of what I discussed above, and now that he’s older… well. He’s certainly not openly advertising that he doesn’t want to be married, nor does he really think about or acknowledge that much. There’s a bit of cognitive dissonance there. For a while, on some level he’s been able to simply not think about the matter at all because he’s “too young to be thinking about it/too young for it to be relevant to him”, kicking the can down the road as if anything is gonna change (it isn’t). But he’s getting older… (Like Vincent, he’s 17). Yeah, he can still get away with avoiding the topic. For now.

(There is a possible avenue of acceptable escape, which, more and more, he’s also starting to figure is the route he will go down: he’s extremely religious, so he can simply assert that he’s devoting his life so much to God that he can’t make room for marriage. Which wouldn’t even be a lie. The fact that his own father is a pastor might dampen that excuse a bit though. His dad devoted his life to God, and he still got married. Plus, he’s their only kid. So I think his parents kinda want/expect him to get married… lol. Oh well, 1 Corinthians 7:1. Good luck being a confirmed bachelor back in those days though).

(All of this becomes moot, of course, because he won’t ever need to face The Future anyway - since his storyline has him going away from the world, society, and basically everyone, to a pocket dimension and effectively remaining 17 forever.)

B) What inspired you to create them?

For Patrick, it was Milan Kundera’s concept of “totalitarian kitsch”.

“In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.”

The concept, discussed at length in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, made me want to take the basic idea and run with it and put my own spin on it: what if there was a “realm of totalitarian kitsch” that actually physically existed (see: the “pocket dimension” I mentioned above) as opposed to being a more metaphorical language descriptor of absolutist-style ideology? What if there was someone who could, and did, embody the concept of totalitarian kitsch – (or at least, the specific take I chose to spin on it?). This work of Kundera's comments on the duality/conflict of body and soul, so I really drew on that for his character.

For Vincent, I wanted a character to embody traits/characteristics that I like and/or want to explore which the character of Patrick couldn’t really get at. But inspiration was also drawn from Kundera for him too – namely, the concepts of “categorical agreement with being” and “the laughter of angels”, which I essentially think have some overlap anyway:

“Behind all the European faiths, religious and political, we find the first chapter of Genesis, which tells us that the world was created properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply. Let us call this basic faith a categorical agreement with being.” (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

“[…] whereas the devil’s laughter denoted the absurdity of things, the angel on the contrary meant to rejoice over how well ordered, wisely conceived, good and meaningful everything here below was.” (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

Vincent is able to find a certain resonance and contentment in regular everyday existence in a way Patrick never could. The two characters share some important similarities (that’s why they’re good friends), but also some good contrasts.