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Entry tags:
Productivity
I was awesomely productive this weekend. Got my car registered in PA, got my epic new license plate with the best default license plate number ever, mailed out all my packages, bought most of my gifts, wrote like 3000 words, did all my Sif tags...! I'm on the ball.
Sadly, I have to go in to work early on Monday and I'm terrified I'm going to be blamed for this latest mishap and I wish I could just live under a rock for the rest of my life.
So it's time for a meme! Since I never do these anymore.
Sadly, I have to go in to work early on Monday and I'm terrified I'm going to be blamed for this latest mishap and I wish I could just live under a rock for the rest of my life.
So it's time for a meme! Since I never do these anymore.
Pick a character I've written and I will explain the top five [or so] ideas/concepts/etc I keep in mind while writing that character that I believe are essential to accurately depicting them.
no subject
Roxas
2. Roxas is an anomaly among Nobodies, but he does consider himself a Nobody. As such, he feels like humans are kind of alien creatures -- he doesn't understand them, and their impulses and emotions are mysterious to him -- he's never actually interacted with any of them before! -- even though he actually is very like them, because he does feel the way other Nobodies don't. But he has deep empathy for characters who had similar backgrounds: memory loss, or less-than-human created creatures, or mission-oriented to the point of obsession. I was amused to find him gravitating toward characters who were even more hollow than Nobodies, and then acting like their guide, more than he was gravitating toward humans and learning from them.
3. He can be super fluffy and sweet to people he cares for. He thinks about his friends all the time, and he takes strength in their support, and he'd die for them in a heartbeat. The "my friends are my power" thing that Sora says is very much true for Roxas -- and it's why his world crumbles in 358/2 Days when his friendships fall apart, and he realizes he can't trust even his best friends. But he's not fluffy and sweet all the time. He can also be super cold and untrusting, and downright mean. His behavior when he walked away from the Organization, and Axel? That was Roxas, too. When he feels betrayed or hurt, he can be cruel, using the full force of that hollow against the people who made him feel it.
4. Before the end when everything gets miserable and tragic, there were only two truly horrible things in Roxas's life (hahaha I say that like it wasn't all in the space of a year!). The first was the way that he felt early on, in that zombie time when he had no memories and no clue and he was empty. He doesn't ever want to go through that again, and so one of his biggest pings is memory loss. The second was the realization that everything he'd thought was true was not: the Organization, and Axel, had lied to and manipulated him his entire life. So his other biggest ping is lying. If you trigger either of those, you either get all of his sympathy, or zero of his sympathy. Those horrible things that shaped his very short life are very black and white to him: anything that involves lying or memory loss sucks, the end.
5. My particular Roxas, in Marina, was a very weird circumstance, because he had no memories of Xion, no memories of Sora, and was just generally in a very vulnerable state, after choosing to reject the Organization, but before he was captured and brainwashed by DiZ, so he was pretty unique. As a result, he was very much shaped by his experiences there: he already had a distrust of his former allies, and had chosen to break away from them, so he learned to be independent, and then stifled again when people tried to boss him around or treat him like a burden.
Now I want to play a deprogramming Roxas -- one that has been through Twilight Town and lived through its breakdown, but the remembering his real life is starting to surface through the Soratastic brainwashing.
BONUS: Roxas is distinct from Sora, and from Ven. He's much harsher than either of them, given the traumatizing way he grew up and the ambivalent people he grew up with, but even aside from that, he's also just kind of quieter and more reserved. He's more introspective and thoughtful, and not as impulsive or outgoing, and he's slower to make friends. I reasoned that out as I played him, so that's another thing I try to keep in mind.
Orihime
1. Orihime thrives on people and family and friends. Take her away from all the people she cares about and she will be miserable for a while, but she will make new friends almost immediately, and shelve the misery. The worst thing, for Orihime, would be somewhere she is completely alone with her own thoughts.
2. Orihime's courage is in struggling through fear. Her bravery is a microcosm of the moment when she saw Ichigo with the Hollow mask, and she had a terrified flashback to when her brother's Hollow attacked her, and then she forced herself to ignore that and just focus on him. She's afraid of hurting people and of getting hurt, and that fear never fades, and so sometimes she decides that passive is a better route than fighting, to minimize hurt: but when she fights, it's because it's just that important, and her fear is not.
3. Orihime can't hold a grudge ever. Within the space of like 24 hours Ulquiorra incited her to violence, something that is nearly impossible, and then murdered Ichigo... and still her heart broke a little when he died. Orihime's grudges last almost precisely as long as the offense. She might be furious at you while you're being horrible, but the moment you're not, Orihime is just mildly troubled by your behavior and will otherwise be happy to convince herself you've turned over a new leaf and give you a second chance.
4. Orihime is her own worst critic. She takes every negative thought and feeling she has and blows it up into something huge: her fear, her jealousy, her inexperience in combat, things that are totally normal and human, and she tells herself that she is a horrible friend and useless. She'd have to be in a really desperate place to let anyone see it, but it would be hard for someone to lash out at Orihime more than she already secretly does.
5. Orihime's feelings for Ichigo are on multiple levels. She admires him, as a person, for being brave and reliable; he was there when her brother died, and she fixated on him a little after that because she needed someone; he also represents, in a way, her ideal life, surrounded by family he is fiercely protective of, caring and cool. It's so easy to think, if she had a family with Ichigo, he would never let any of them be hurt, and he would take care of them. Whether or not Orihime falls in love with someone else, her feelings for Ichigo are as much about herself and her experiences and her desires as they are about him: he's a symbol of the life she wants.
He does also make great srs bizns faces, though.