meme: reverse questions (with a twist)

[fjordicswagger]

Hey folks! It's been since November and I keep coming up with ideas for this meme, so what the hell, I thought I'd tack it up myself.

Pose a question (or as many as you'd like, and they don't all have to be in one comment, so you can come back later and add more if you want) to your fellow players about the game or their characters, and they will Wall-of-Text if they want to, look, I know how some of you are answer them. They can be personal or silly. You don't have to answer all of them! Nothing counts in game, of course and etc.

Questions might include "Which of your characters are you the most like?", "Which BDE was your favorite?", "What music do you RP to?", etc.

I'll be in and out today, but I'm going to try and hit this with as many questions as I can. Go ask 'em too.

Comments

[fjordicswagger]

How much of your understanding of your character changes as you play them over a longer period of time? Has anything ever happened to a character that completely upended your understanding of them?

[rebelseekspizza]

Yeaaah so it's not a complete upending or anything, but Kathy's death plot definitely got me digging deeper into this one and finding some off-kilter abandonment issues I didn't know he had. Which was fun.

After the bawling stopped.

[fjordicswagger]

If your canon has supplemental material, such as books for games or adaptations for books, etc, do you read it and use it? Or do you prefer to stick to the main text?

[uncertain_dume]

It really depends on how well the supplemental material ties in to the rest of the canon. Some stuff is just so far out there that it's basically garbage (I'm looking at you, Final Fantasy VII Compilation) and just breaks everything else, but even then there's usually something I can glean from it and make use of.

Star Wars (the new Disneyfied take on it) has been kinder to me, so far as Kanan's comics and novel and cartoon canons have gone. They're paying pretty close attention to the continuity of it all, so I have a nice, linear storyline to pull from if I arrange it all just so. (But then, Greg Weisman had a big hand in what made Kanan Kanan, so I don't find that surprising at all.)

... There are Steven Universe comics and a few cell phone games and so on, but I'm basically assuming they're outside continuity. And there were Generation X novels, but again, ah, they didn't actually marry up with Jono's comic canon well at all, so I basically disregarded them. Gravity Falls was pretty self-contained, but there are neat little tidbits in the journals and other assorted book releases that are fun to chew on. And I will eat my hat if Sparkle ever gets more than the one play script to work with, because honestly.

[fjordicswagger]

Outside of the age-old 'organic or no?' question we've done in these memes before, how do you play relationships? Are there certain themes you keep hitting, or certain ways of build-up?

[furnaceface]

You know, I never really thought of it before, and I'm not completely certain if it's just because of the characters I play, but there seems to be a lot of need for validation with my kids when they fall into a ship. Jono is desperate to be accepted in spite of what he is, both as a mutant and even moreso in the wake of his time spent in Weapon X. Sparkle is basically 'please validate me' issues personified. Warren (Worthington) had the whole daddy issues mutant deal, too, and if I go back far enough, even if Reno was far too Reno to ever admit it, there was a part of him that needed to crawl into the comfort and acceptance that Rikku offered him in the wake of his own canonical traumas and guilt that definitely helped him give in to the idea of a relationship.

I mean, it isn't always that way. Evan and Sholeh were just stinkin' cute together. Momoko was adorable at Warren (Peace) and he really found that endearing - his daddy abandonment issues didn't actually play into that one at all. And Evan and Warren were both characters who needed a fair bit of validation, too. I guess it depends on the angle of approach, a bit, though I really don't deliberately set out to have a ship build in a certain direction.

[fjordicswagger]

What's the most thematically interesting to you about your current crop of characters?

[furnaceface]

For the most part, I think the newest two were very specifically brought in from where they were taken because they both have these sort of redemption arcs ahead of them. Their current morals don't quite marry up with their actual potential later on, and they're both better people than that, dammit. I'm looking forward at poking at the reasons why, for that, and coaxing out that better person in each of them.

Which for some involves more trauma than others, but eh, we all know about me and my feelings on character trauma.

[fjordicswagger]

How do you decide on little details that might not be in the canon itself, like boxers or briefs?

(Alternately: boxers or briefs?)

[furnaceface]

Sometimes it just depends on which way the wind is blowing at the time. If it's a comedic thread, there might be some little tidbit thrown in that feels right even if it isn't hard canon, just to nudge that thread in a more amusing direction. If it's something big, like me connecting the dots to give Reno any sort of background pre-Turks, I'll sit and squint and scrutinize the way a character acts in the canon that is provided until I feel like I can stop waffling about it because, dammit, nobody is going to be half as concerned about it as me.

... Reno wore boxers with stupid print on them because I thought it was funny at the time.

Jono wears boring grey boxer-briefs because he doesn't actually care that much. (Hannibal does care, and has been stealthily replacing the contents of Jono's underwear drawer, to Jono's minor consternation.

[fjordicswagger]

Is there anything coming up for one of your characters you're looking forward to?

[furnaceface]

Jono and Hannibal have picked a wedding day!

... Jono's a Marvel character. You can guess how well this will go.

Plus some nerd has a thing coming up for one of her characters that might affect one of mine in new and interesting ways? You might have heard tell of that one. :D

[fjordicswagger]

What's been your favorite (personal) storyline in game?

[furnaceface]

Can I just point at one of my characters and go, "Him?"

Canon and FH-built relationships combined have given me so much to chew on with Jono, it's hard to remember a time before I played him. I mean, that is also in part because I've been playing him for seven freaking years what the hell now and I have the memory of a goldfish, but there have been heartbreaks and horrors all kind of building onto one another that have lifted Jono up and ground him into the freaking dirt along the way, and it's kind of become a big tangled knot. He's still reeling from things that happened back when he was still a student, and they've become intertwined in things like Weapon X and Fortress X aftermath, and the aftermath of Karla's war in Glacia, and it's hard to separate any of them without acknowledging that one has fed into the rest.

Basically somebody will have to pry Jono from my cold, dead fingers someday.

seven years how the hell

[fjordicswagger]

Which one of your characters would you want to go on a roadtrip with?

[furnaceface]

I have seen Jono's road trips in canon. They involve him wearing stupid fake beards and hitchhiking rides with anthropomorphic ducks.

I'm so down for that.

[fjordicswagger]

For students, do you prefer to app them young (14-15, freshman-sophomore) or older? Why?

[furnaceface]

I usually kind of default in the sophomore-to-junior neck of the woods because two or three years seems less insurmountable if I want to play them through to graduation, but a lot of characters just seem younger, and I can't fathom apping them as anything older than a freshman. I don't tend to app seniors unless I think I'm planning on keeping them around as townies and teachers later, though. I kind of want to get my money's worth, so to speak.

[fjordicswagger]

How did you get into your current canon(s)?

[furnaceface]

I blame Marvel on Fandom, Star Wars on Fandom, Habitat on the Drama 101 class I took in university like eleven years ago, and both Gravity Falls and Steven Universe on my evil, evil animator coworkers who have excellent taste and might actually be more nefarious enablers than the lot of you.

Basically I interacted with awesome people and started exploring things that I had once been interested in but had since wandered away, with Marvel and Star Wars. I had to write a stinkin' essay on Habitat once, but at least I got to see it live as part of my homework. And I was duped - duped into sitting down and watching these amazing character-building episodes of Steven Universe after having already given it a try and brushing it off as vapid drivel. The first episodes of that series were rough, yo. The Jono part of me blames Chuck Austen, who was supervising producer for a lot of the start of it, that Angelo-crucifying 'all mutants are immune to STDs' son-of-a...

Ahem.

I might have been less inclined to give the series a shot after seeing his name in the credits, is all. And coincidentally, it got much better after he left. SO.

[fjordicswagger]

How much time do you spend planning out character arcs, and how much of it is organic?

[myownface]

For the most part, it's pretty organic for me. I mean, there are the obvious canon catchups, and those tend to push a character on to the next point in their development so far as said canon is concerned, but if they've had some sort of big development on the island that doesn't quite marry up, I don't try to snuff it in the name of canon, either. There are some pretty character-building chunks of canon in Kanan and Peridot's futures someday, for example, that would pretty drastically change how they present themselves on the island.

But for all I know, those same things could happen here, or totally different things could happen here and they might veer hard to the left. If it does, eh, I'm not going to stop it, I'll just have to rekerjigger the angle I approach canon from when the time comes, instead.

[fjordicswagger]

Do you get bleed? And if so, what do you feel it does for your writing?

[furnaceface]

You know, I used to get pretty fierce bleed, actually, especially when playing the pretty intense stuff where two characters are butting heads. There was a dark time, back with Reno. A dark, dark time.

But I haven't had bleedy issues that way with my characters in years now, and I think my writing is better for it. If a thread does start to get to me, I step back, and if I come back to it later and look at it more objectively than I was when I was feeling an emotional punch-to-the-gut, I can finish playing it out knowing that it's the character's voice at work and not my own weird knee-jerk reactions to something rubbing me wrong.

Basically, bleed's a jerk. I'm glad it's mostly been taking a hike these days, either because I've done some growing up in the million years since I joined the game or because I just don't have the energy for that crap anymore.

[fjordicswagger]

Does any of your characters have a character trait or bit of headcanon you wish you did more with?

[myownface]

This boy here has a tendency in canon to just make up these horrifying, elaborate stories around people who don't know any better but to take him at his word, mostly just for the shock value, and he doesn't do that nearly so much here in FH. I think that's at least in part because it was a bit of a defense mechanism when stuck with this optimistic former rich kid, and that didn't actually come up around here so often, but if I'm being completely honest, I held him back a little bit in that regard partly because I didn't want to stir up too much shit in game.

Basically, I wish Sparkle had been a slightly more terrible person when he was new, and he's settled in now too much to really go back to that.

[fjordicswagger]

Have you ever gone out of your comfort zone with a character and have it pay off really well? Or not at all?

[myownface]

I actually have a pretty broad comfort zone, but the one thing I could never really get the hang of was playing the shameless, flirty, maybe even kind of pushy about it types.

I have no damn clue how Sparkle does it. A shameless look here, a lick of the lips there. TELL ME YOUR SECRETS SO I CAN DO IT AGAIN ELSEWHERE, SPARKLE.

(I mean, the guy's no Chuck Bass, here. But he has had a few fun flings here and there, which is a few more than most of my other characters have ever had.)

[fjordicswagger]

What really obvious writing quirks do you have?

[myownface]

I, you know, use... ellipses... and commas, like, a lot.

Basically I have to sit back before I hit send on most pings and take a machete to them because WHY. WHAT IS MY FASCINATION WITH DRAMATIC PAUSES?

[fjordicswagger]

Have you ever gotten into a band or a music style or - hell, anything else - purely because your character was into it?

[furnaceface]

...

...

Pearl Jam.

I made friends with the owner of the music shop down the street from where I worked at the time because of it, even.

[fjordicswagger]

Any shipping regrets?

[buzzkillcaptain.livejournal.com]

I once got a box shipped to me from MP which was opened by building security since it mentioned it was "not a head" but it turned out okay.

[fjordicswagger]

Have you ever had a thread go much darker than you expected it to? Or lighter?

[myownface]

... Reno and Ino once brutally tortured a purple rhinoceros costume together. It was supposed to be something silly and stupid and GODDAMN Killaurey and I are twisted people.

My characters tend to veer much darker, overall. I have more than a few threads where I sit back and go, "Well, I did not see that getting so serious all of a sudden," and basically none where I go, "Oh, that was WAY more pleasant than I expected!"

[fjordicswagger]

Which emoticon most closely resembles each of your characters?

[thewrathofkaan.livejournal.com]

Roscoe:

[fjordicswagger]

What's one character trait that really fascinates you in one of your current characters? (Shhh, I like reading people's meta about their characters.)

[era_two_triangle]

Oh my gosh, I could go on for years about this girl. She's got this very literal, very logical view on the way the world works, and she values that rationality more than so much else in her life that she basically hero-worship trusts in her leader on the rationale that she's the greatest decision-maker and most rational Diamond that there ever could be.

But she's not blindly loyal to her, not once she sees her for what she is. She's got this really firm sort of sense of how the world around her should work, and she'll hammer at it in that little dorito-shaped head of hers until she's absolutely certain that it makes sense, and she'll pull in every fact and detail that she possibly can before she'll make a decision about it.

It's just, the Gem Homeworld has given her a pretty raw deal. Of course she's standoffish when she deals with things she doesn't understand - there's such a rigid hierarchy back where she comes from, and there's just no place for anyone who steps outside of it. Being shattered - which is basically a fate infinitely more nightmarish than death - is a punishment that we see trotted out on a few occasions for those Gems who step outside the norm. And Peridot's efforts to validate herself within a new group of people and to figure out her place in their hierarchy while trying to cling to what she knows of her place back on Homeworld all stem from that.

TL;DR: Girl has trauma and might not even realize that's what it is, so she goes out of her way to make perfect sense of every aspect of the world around her and reacts poorly whenever that backfires because she's never learned to approach failure differently.

[fjordicswagger]

If your characters had social media accounts, what would they be and what would they be like? (Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, whichever.)

[rebelseekspizza]

Dante's got a Tumblr account he never used for anything other than tracking down Kathy's porn blog, and he has recently picked up an Instagram that is hilariously inappropriate in a variety of ways (not all of which dirty) that I'm content to leave vague because it's funnier that way. (He also abuses Spotify.)

Atton's got a Twitter account. He goes on Twitter rants a lot. He also frequently uses it to shout abuse at companies that have slighted him in some way. It helps him pass the time. (He also secretly keeps a reading list of journalists and such, but he keeps that to a sockpuppet account.)

Cassandra needs to get a Tumblr, though she doesn't have one yet. I suspect it will be largely about aesthetics and armor and, occasionally, gross misinterpretations of what social justice people are talking about because her cultural perspectives on certain things are VERY DIFFERENT.

I'd like to think Obi-Wan would have a Pinterest or a Tumblr, as a mixture full of zen stuff and quotes from British panel shows.

[throughaphase]

If you've ever brought a character back after time away in alumni land or whatever, what kind of challenges do you find in playing?

[era_two_triangle]

I find my biggest challenge when I bring a character back is momentum. I know better by now than to think that I can pick them up where I left them off, but time away means that the dynamics on the island have changed as well, and it can be difficult to throw a character around to build up relationship dynamics that have changed because life went on without them, or to make up for the fact that everyone is gone when there's still that sort of idealistic nostalgia going on from the last time the were around. It's kind of like building up from square one again, in a way, but with all of that history there to keep track of on top of it all.

This will probably not stop me from resurrecting Reno eleventy more times whenever I get that itch again, mind.

[era_two_triangle]

Are there any characters that you really want to play, but something about their canon means that you haven't figured out how in the world to slot them into Fandom in the first place?

[thewrathofkaan.livejournal.com]

A few. I've had a potential character for a while who is the main character of their canon and I can't see them staying still in a place other than where they're supposed to be.

I also have one potential character who is a minotaur. And IDK where the heck I'd get icons for that.

[thewrathofkaan.livejournal.com]

Have you ever played a character that you didn't understand as well then as you would today?

[era_two_triangle]

You know, I want to say Macbeth, here? I think the only thing keeping me from doing so is the fact that the game itself was a very different creature, and he was being played primarily for the crack in a scenario that was, by and large, primarily about the crack. I occasionally think to myself that I'd like to give him a do-over, to app a far more serious take on the character, and maybe someday I even will. Except that will involve me crawling out from under the couch where I'll be hiding forever because I remembered basically EVERYTHING I ever did with Macbeth.

Jack Frost might fit into this category better, though. He was mostly an experiment to see if I could get him to function even with these heavy canonical restrictions to who could even see him, and he kind of crashed and burned as a result. I don't know that I'd try to play him again - I can't see him functioning as the character that he is without that weird dynamic slapped on - but if I did, I might consider approaching him a little differently, to explore his reactions to actually being noticed instead of to have him maintain that weird 'you can't see me unless you believe in me' status quo.

[throughaphase]

Do you tend to make long term plans for your characters, outside of canon catchups?

[rebelseekspizza]

I usually app my characters with some kind of emotional arc involved, though this also ties into the canon catchups they have along the way. Usually if I *don't* have an arc in my head coming in, I lose interest in the character or at least don't play them as much as I should.