Dean Winchester (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
single_man_tear) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomhigh_ooc2024-10-14 09:55 am
single_man_tear) wrote in fandomhigh_ooc2024-10-14 09:55 am
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Meme: How did you pick your characters?
Was a meme requested? No. Did I want a meme? Yes. So I picked through the list of meme and found this one, which apparently hasn't been done since 2012.
Why did you pick the characters you play?
Be it because they're just your favorite, or you thought they'd be a challenge, or someone dared you or something, go ahead and tell us what made you want to bring them to the game.
Why did you pick the characters you play?
Be it because they're just your favorite, or you thought they'd be a challenge, or someone dared you or something, go ahead and tell us what made you want to bring them to the game.
Buckle Up, This Is Long, It's Not My Fault, You Got Me Talking Meta, Now Suffer
As has been so RUDELY mentioned upthread, I have several types, one of which being hypercompetent mage full of hubris (the others being: magic-adjacent badass femmes here to kick ass and pretend they're normal, doe-eyed ingenue on a journey of self-discovery, random crack characters, and "dudes? sometimes? I guess???"). But secretly, what I really love are narrative arcs.
(Which is why the occasional crack character shows up, because they are easy and do not require narrative arcs and then I can send them away when they start trying to become real three-dimensional characters.)
I have real difficulty taking tossing a character into the ring just to see what they'll do. My characters don't need to have a goal, but I do. So I am drawn to characters that have a large, obvious narrative arc that I can chart towards. It's not a static goal, as people change with circumstances and that's a huge part of the fun of FH, and I like being flexible so I can incorporate other characters and changes of circumstances, but I like knowing that my character will start here and end up somewhere over around there(-ish), so even if the character itself is getting no traction with folks, there's still always something for me to poke at.
Liliana is entirely my catnip. Apped in 2022 after 2020 & 2021 made me flame out entirely (trying to go through those years undiagnosed and unmedicated like lol) and then promptly vanished again. But she kept calling me back to play for a bit, then I'd drop, then I'd come back...on and on until finally, in September of 23, I settled back into the groove for good.
But why, beyond "hypercompetent mage full of hubris"? Because she's perfect. Just ask her.
At least, she's perfect for me. She's layered. She's got flaws. And, more importantly, she's got a narrative arc that I find intensely satisfying. So, like, when she debuted in 2007, her personality was "Sexy, but make it evil." Again, her name is an anagram of "A Villainess." We're not talking subtle here. The Lorwyn 5 were the first playable Planeswalkers released and were, "Our Hero, The Telepath," "Perky, Hot-Headed Tomboy," "Check Out My Tits, I'm Evil," "Furries' Wet Dream With Uncomfortable 'Noble Savage' Undertones," and "Me Hunter, Commune With Animals." We knew that Liliana had made a pact with four demons for immortality and eternal youth (suck it, Endymion in the Greek myth), and also a ton of power, and her first comic debut is fetching an incredibly powerful artifact, cursing and nearly killing Me Hunter, Commune With Animals (in fairness, he absolutely tried to kill her first). Then we had Agents of Artifice (which, funnily enough, she's talking about in today's Consortium post with Dean), where she is scheming and manipulating to try to get out of her demonic pacts, but fucks up by falling for Our Hero, The Telepath (which I maintain is just a serious case of bleed for having to pretend to be in love with him for six months). This is the first time we see her a little more humanized, like yes, she's a scheming and manipulative liar and her actions absolutely get Jace tortured and people killed, but she also sabotages herself at the end, because just before the finish line, she realizes that, fuck, she really does love that guy. Then we go back to Check Out My Tits, I'm Evil when she tests out the power of the Chain Veil by razing an entire plane pretty much to the ground. Then there was a novel so bad that Magic refused to publish it even though they'd already paid the writer they'd commissioned to write it. I don't know the details there, either of the book or the decision-making process to refuse to publish, but damn I wanna.
Finally, in 2010, The Raven's Eye is published, a 3 part comic (though the 2nd part is forgettable and only exists to show that Liliana has been unwittingly in the Chain Veil's orbit for a long time) and it changed EVERYTHING. In it, we get the backstory of Liliana as a white mana-using healing cleric that worshipped the progenitor of angels. One who was dabbling in necromancy, yes, but because she thought that harnessing the power of death could make her life magic so much better and more effective in this time of war, and one who loved her big brother more than anything else. And then she was lied to and manipulated to not only give him a potion that would kill him, but then would also raise him back up as an undead creature trapped in an unlife of torment, who swore he would be waiting for her after she died so he could repay the favor. That her Planeswalker sparked kicked in so she could get AWAY from all the death and destruction and the horror of what she'd done, as her brother strangled the life out of her.
That's when I sat up and took notice. Like, I'd always loved Liliana because I am a black/blue deck girlie and she was a) the black Planeswalker, b) a woman in a male-dominated game, and c) I'm shallow. But suddenly, by giving her this backstory, they complicated her beyond Check Out My Tits, I'm Evil (except for how Our Hero, The Telepath, can make her not be with the power of loooove *eyeroll emoji*). Suddenly, there's a narrative there. How did she get from angel-worshipping healing cleric to Elvira, Mistress of the Dark? What happened? Sure, a reaction to losing her brother, but why go necromancy and not full healer? What happened? As a Planeswalker, she had godlike, reality-warping powers, but she couldn't fix Josu. Why not? How would that make her feel?
We never (and likely will never) get the full answer to that (which means, ooooh noooo an empty sandbox for me to play in, wooooe), but we did get another few stories. One was the Innistrad plot that I adapted in January where Liliana literally tortures and war crimes her way into getting what she wants, and then, another g(G)ame c(C)hanger with "The Fourth Pact" which is a slight retelling of her tragic backstory, as well as showing her reaction to the Mending, where she lost her godlike powers and is an old woman in her late 80s/early 90s, trying to stave off death (and the specter of seeing her brother again) and, yes, lamenting her lost powers.
And at some point, I realized that though the team at WotC had certainly not intended it that way, the Mending is actually a good analogue for suddenly becoming disabled. In an instant, Liliana's body and powers betrayed her. The world as she knows it turns upside down and inside out. She could do some of the things she'd been able to do before, but it took far more effort and for something that was a pale shadow of what it was. Some things, she had to relearn, finding a different way to do them. Some things were entirely out of reach for her. And it took years to find out why. One minute, everything was normal. The next, life as she knew it was irrevocably changed.
This is a very powerful thing for me because I suddenly became disabled, via a lot of medical nonsense I'm not going into here. I couldn't walk. For awhile, I was in a wheelchair. Then I was on crutches. Then I was on crutches for so long, I had to go back into a wheelchair because I'd managed to fuck up my other leg. I had to relearn to walk. I had to spend a lot of time thinking about my future, my plans, my hobbies. I can't drive anymore and the loss of that independence is often maddening - the simple freedom of going wherever I want to, whenever I please is gone. If I knew I could make some pacts with demons to gain back what I lost...I can't say I wouldn't take it.
Was vanity and selfishness and a love of power part of the reason Liliana made those pacts? Hell yeah. But so was a fear of dying, and - what motivates her even more than that - so was the idea of helplessness. Black mana is about agency. It's about gaining enough power that you have the final say over your own life. It's about wanting and hoping and feeling so hard that you will let nothing stand in your way.
(from The Color of Hope, an excellent tumblr post)
I'm just saying, I could vibe with that, especially in a post-Covid world.
And then, WOTC did the unimaginable. They let her grow. While still remaining quintessentially Liliana Vess (and sometimes Serafina Onyx). It was a slow process, with numerous setbacks, but she grew. And she grew without the motivation of Our Hero, The Telepath's love or approval, she grew because she started letting people back in. She started peeling away the callouses of isolation and refusing to care, the shields she'd put up to keep from feeling vulnerable, from feeling helpless, the shields she put up because her self-loathing (which is roughly on par with her legitimate arrogance) tried to tell her she was unworthy of love and friendship.
But you put Liliana into a populated are for more than twenty minutes, she'll have adopted at least three people while firmly telling herself no she didn't. She starts fighting for people beyond herself. Hell, she chooses to sacrifice herself to save the Multiverse.
That, my good people, is one fuck of a narrative arc.
So yeah, I love her because she's my bullshit. I love that she's powerful, that she takes no shit from people, that she's arrogant and charming, that she's ride-or-
diemurder for her people but she'll also sell out almost this whole island without batting an eye if she had to. I love that she's a giant fucking nerd who would be so happy sitting around talking magic and philosophy and literature and music and working on things in her workroom. (shout out to Tony) I love that she's unrepentant about so many things and that she genuinely believes she has no soul to lose when she makes her pacts. I love that losing Josu was the greatest loss in her life and I love that if, given the option, she wouldn't change it, because that would mean never having ignited her Planeswalker spark. I love that she derides people for throwing themselves into danger and then does the same thing, but it's different. I love that she's a liar, a schemer, a manipulative bitch. I love that she learned that from other people and turned them into weapons to wield herself. I love that she lies to herself more than she lies to anyone else.I love that she's a mage who carries knives around and will stab someone if she has to. I love that she knows how to break bones and doesn't need magic to do it. I love that she is a walking ball of contradictions, that she laughs when she's hurting, and that her two guiding principles are "Look Out For Number One" and "Never Let 'Em See You Sweat."
I love that she gets to be a person, not just Check Out My Tits, I'm Evil.
And that, dear ones, is my incredibly long-winded essay on why I apped Liliana Vess.
(I'm so sorry, rest of my roster, you're not getting this treatment.)
And, finally, the requested curly tail.
Re: Buckle Up, This Is Long, It's Not My Fault, You Got Me Talking Meta, Now Suffer
Re: Buckle Up, This Is Long, It's Not My Fault, You Got Me Talking Meta, Now Suffer
And that, folks, is what we call 'a Nuance character'.
(Thanks babe, I had been wondering how you go from card game to Nu's brain to fully fleshed-out character...)
Re: Buckle Up, This Is Long, It's Not My Fault, You Got Me Talking Meta, Now Suffer
(But yeah, Magic has an extensive library of fiction, dating back to the earliest years. Comic books, novels, fiction posted on the site. Liliana's wiki page conveniently has the list of all her story appearances, though some are so old, the links don't work anymore and you have to dig to find them. Some are only accessible through the Internet Archives so *grimace emoji.* I also enjoy pulling from flavor text whenever possible, because it's another fun minigame for myself.)
Re: Buckle Up, This Is Long, It's Not My Fault, You Got Me Talking Meta, Now Suffer
(If definitely an evolving one. I feel like you've been growing towards a Liliana, if that makes any sense? Like a digivolution from Karla through several stages or something.)
Re: Buckle Up, This Is Long, It's Not My Fault, You Got Me Talking Meta, Now Suffer
I refuse to examine any of the above statements further, thank you.
But yeah, I had to grow as a writer and RPer to be able to do justice to Liliana and Karla was a good training wheel (especially since it's not like Anne Bishop knew what subtlety was either.)