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watchmakers_sonName a character that you know I write or have written, and I'll tell you:
a. What initially prompted me to like the character enough to write about him/her.
b. One of his/her best traits.
c. One of his/her worst traits.
d. How easy/difficult I find it to write the character.
e. The story/thread/chapter/post/paragraph/tag/phrase where I feel that I truly captured the character.
f. My plans (if any) to write the character in the near future.
SYLAR
a) I created his journal the day after "Six Months Ago" aired, which probably says a lot about what drew me in. *g* As I put it in my review post for 6MA way back when, "I have such an intellectual attraction to fictional characters who come up with these horrible, coldly logical rationalizations for the most gruesome things -- the ones who could be likeable, might've been normal if things went the slightest different way or they just didn't step over that moral line." I didn't like Sylar, per se, but I was fascinated by him; it would be way too ironic to say that I wanted to figure out what made him tick, but...it's kinda true. *sheepish* And since my other top choices for Heroes pups had already been apped (Mohinder and Peter), I snatched him up.
b) He really is obscenely good at what his baseline power lets him do: fix things. His compulsion to do that has been so horribly misdirected, but if it hadn't been, it's strong enough that he probably would've been able to do a lot of good in the world.
c) ...ahahahaha oh God, where do you want me to start? *weak laugh* Leaving aside the blatantly obvious -- mass murder, entitlement issues out the wazoo, etc. -- and the fact that some of this really does come down to being genuinely insane, the way he's never able to take responsibility for himself makes me want to grab him by the neck and shake him, hard. It's "evolution's" fault for driving him to kill? It's Chandra's fault for not stopping him? COME THE FUCK ON, JACKASS.
d) It's...easier than it should be at times, which worries me a bit -- though I think some of that might come from the way he can be a rather restrained person in his movements and speech until he feels the need to act. It may also be because I can detach from him a lot more thoroughly than I can from my other pups; during active threads, I usually find the barest minimum of common ground that's required to write the tag, and then I immediately shove the rest of him at arm's length because he creeps me the fuck out. I can count on one hand the number of times I've gotten characterbleed while playing him, and for someone as prone to characterbleed as I am? Oh God is that a relief. Plus, if nothing else, a sociopathic character does have the advantage of simply not caring about a lot of things, which can make it extremely hard for traditionally "breaky" stuff to have a long-lasting impact on him; I've freely stuck him into a lot of plots and situations that I'd never want to put my other pups through.
The most difficult thing for me is predicting his reactions -- Sylar's got such a hair-trigger temper that I've had quite a few threads that'd be going along just fine until a single tag flipped things into a 180 -- and keeping him in check and yet IC when those sudden reactions go south can get brutal.
e) There are a lot of threads with him that I'm unduly fond of -- pretty much the entire amnesiaplot and everything involving Frank and Jordan Black, for starters -- but I think his conversation with Peter while he was in the cells shows his best range of character: angry to curious to kind of frightened to AUGH GOD WHY CAN I NOT FIND MORE LIGHTS IN THIS HOUSE TO TURN ON.
f) Beyond a few mini-plots I've sketched out with people, I'm just going to do what I've been doing: keep pace with canon and weave Milliways into it as I go. I don't want to deviate too wildly from the overarching plots Kring's laying down, since with the way the show links everyone together, having just one pup go AU from the rest (in a non-"Five Years Gone" kind of way) would be a royal pain in the ass -- that, and it takes a lot of personal dissatisfaction with the way an ongoing canon's unfolding for me to ever say, "Fuck it, I'm doing my own thing," and yank my character AU mid-stream. And while yeah, sure, Heroes has its issues as a canon, I still love it dearly. *hugs her show*
MAC
a) She's smart, a computer geek, an introvert, nice yet kind of sarcastic, pretty laid-back, and...okay, to be totally shallow, I loved her hair in the first two seasons. (I had been talking about streaking my hair blue for years before I watched VMars for the first time.) In short, she is so much like me -- and in some ways, what I want to be -- that it was a little unnerving to see her on-screen the first time.
b) Her intelligence and sense of humor.
...okay, technically that's two, but.
c) Mac's got a certain measure of ruthlessness and self-centeredness (S1's purity test scam, anyone?) that, even if it's not as bad as it could be, makes me wince whenever it comes out. It hasn't happened very often in Milliways, granted, but it's still there.
d) Most of the time it's ridiculously easy, see above re: she's basically my TV alter ego. What makes it difficult, though, is that because of that closeness, I'm constantly worried about accidentally having her react or talk in a way that's more like what I would do than what she would do. That means I have to spend a lot more time revisiting canon to reestablish her voice than I do with my other pups, and when VMars was still on the air, that would get really difficult when she wouldn't show up for episodes at a time. I'd slip up a lot. I still think I slip up a lot. (This is also reminding me that it's way past time to dig out my DVDs and do a quick rewatch. *scribbles note to self*)
e) Meeting (and re-meeting) the Winchester brothers makes me all kinds of happy when I re-read it, and is one of the few threads where I feel like I nailed her voice without any slip-ups.
f) I've been kind of adrift with her lately, to be honest, even more so since canon wrapped. There's been some stuff seeded into earlier threads that could lead to her getting out of Neptune, if people are cool with it and I ever decide to take the plunge and go that way -- it'd break her out of the holding pattern she seems to have found herself in, which I think we both need at this point. And then there's the ever present continuing-to-work-through-her-Cassidy-issues thing, which... *sighs* Fuckin' Millicanon. I swear to God, someday she's going to be comfortable around guys again. But in the meantime, it's about to get another quick kick in the arm thanks to some upcoming stuff.
ELLEN HARVELLE
a) About three minutes into her first appearance, when Dean got snippy with her and she fired right back with, "Hey, don't do me any favors -- if you don't want my help, fine, don't let the door smack your ass on the way out" in that utterly matter-of-fact, self-assured tone, I got out my metaphorical pen and started drawing tiny hearts all over her. She's strong, she's capable, she's confident, she's nurturing, and she understands that being nurturing sometimes means you have to give the people you love a smack upside the head as you tell them to cut it out and stop being stupid. As for actually apping her, I blame a post![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
buongiornodaisy made, shortly before I retired Wash, that asked why there were so few older characters in the bar. One free headvoice slot + a type of character I'd never played before = Ellen!
b) Seriously, her complete refusal to take bullshit from anyone? Is awesome.
c) What she's lost in the past makes her cling all the harder to what she's got left, which is something I don't fault her for at all, but...you combine that overprotective streak with the aforementioned inability to tolerate other people's crap, and it can get nasty.
d) I'll defer on answering this until she's actually in the bar. *g*
e) See (d).
f) Getting her in the bar is about as far as my plans extend for now -- it'll probably be happening once the Winchesters have reached "Everybody Loves a Clown." (Though various conversations with people during my big cross-country trip have also led to a short list of potential future threads, including Missouri Mosley, Prometheus, Angela Petrelli, and Bill Adama. *serene*)
WASH
a) I was enamored of him from his very first scene in the pilot episode, where he was chilling out on the bridge during a job, playing with plastic dinosaurs to pass the time, yet able to jump to attention within a split-second when things started going south. What made me fall head-over-heels, though, was the Reaver chase scene in the same episode: "Here's something you can't do." Sweet-hearted, funny guys with that kind of incredible steel core of capability? They are my favorite archetype, and I was stunned that nobody'd apped him yet when I found Milliways.
b) Definitely his sense of humor. It's just as much his job to make people laugh as it is to fly the ship, and wow does Serenity ever need that sometimes.
c) His insecurities. It wouldn't be that bad if he didn't have a mouth the size of a small galaxy, but Wash wears his emotions on his sleeve to begin with -- so when he gets shaken up or frazzled due to his own personal I'm-not-good-enough issues, he'll take it out on other people and get into a lot of trouble. (See pretty much all of "War Stories," for instance.)
d) I did need a certain amount of energy to play Wash, just because he was an extrovert who'd be speaking almost constantly in Whedon-y verbal gymnastics, but by the time I retired him, I'd been playing him for so long that it was usually a snap. I hardly ever had to think about how he'd react to things; most of the challenge was in translating that reaction to appropriate Washisms.
e) ...God, there are honestly too many to choose. (Six hundred and thirty-six threads, and that's just what I've got in his memories. What the hell.) I think, though, I'm going to have to go with outflying the thinny during the Academyplot, because that was the first time I really got to play him being the kickass pilot I loved and I am so pleased with how it turned out.
f) Since he's retired, there's not much I can do. I've volunteered him for OOMs with the Serenity crew due to the close-knit nature of the ship's residents, but beyond that, he's squarely on my list of inactive pups.
ROGER DAVIS
a) While I related to Mark's personality a lot more, I related to Roger's desires, that need to be remembered, the most out of anyone's in the musical. His struggle to overcome what had happened to him -- his grief, his diagnosis, his depression, his addiction -- also grabbed me a lot harder than anything else in the plot. And the fact that as difficult as it was for him, he managed to succeed (or at least get a hell of a lot closer to succeeding) in the end? Made me want to punch the air and hiss, "Yes!" every single time I saw it. His whole arc's about learning to live again after you don't think you'll be able to do it, and that kind of rebirthing is something I tend to gravitate toward.
b) He's an incredibly passionate person. You could say that about almost everyone in his canon, granted, but that doesn't make it any less true.
c) He's got a lot of these, but...let's go with his temper. It goes hand-in-hand with being that passionate: when he's angry, he gets royally pissed, and having so much to be angry about when he was pre-canon just compounded that.
d) Most of my difficulty in playing Roger came from the fact that as much as I liked the character, he was such a bad fit for the bar. Too cranky, too reclusive, too mired in his own issues -- legitimate as they were -- to strike out and really become an active participant in the setting...the list goes on and on. As for actually writing him, though, I didn't find that particularly difficult at all. I'd been a fan of the musical for so long that I practically knew him backwards and forwards years before I apped him. *g*
e) Man, you'd think I'd have an easier time with this, considering how few threads he had. *wrinkles nose at his LJ memories* But I rather liked how Roger and April's second meeting turned out; it's not really an encapsulation of his entire character, but it's got the same kind of despair shifting into hope that makes up a lot of his canonical arc.
f) Another retired one, so my plans are few. And by "few," I mean "nonexistent." *wry grin* I miss playing him, but not to the point where I'd consider pulling him out of retirement or moving him to another game.
a. What initially prompted me to like the character enough to write about him/her.
b. One of his/her best traits.
c. One of his/her worst traits.
d. How easy/difficult I find it to write the character.
e. The story/thread/chapter/post/paragraph/tag/phrase where I feel that I truly captured the character.
f. My plans (if any) to write the character in the near future.
SYLAR
a) I created his journal the day after "Six Months Ago" aired, which probably says a lot about what drew me in. *g* As I put it in my review post for 6MA way back when, "I have such an intellectual attraction to fictional characters who come up with these horrible, coldly logical rationalizations for the most gruesome things -- the ones who could be likeable, might've been normal if things went the slightest different way or they just didn't step over that moral line." I didn't like Sylar, per se, but I was fascinated by him; it would be way too ironic to say that I wanted to figure out what made him tick, but...it's kinda true. *sheepish* And since my other top choices for Heroes pups had already been apped (Mohinder and Peter), I snatched him up.
b) He really is obscenely good at what his baseline power lets him do: fix things. His compulsion to do that has been so horribly misdirected, but if it hadn't been, it's strong enough that he probably would've been able to do a lot of good in the world.
c) ...ahahahaha oh God, where do you want me to start? *weak laugh* Leaving aside the blatantly obvious -- mass murder, entitlement issues out the wazoo, etc. -- and the fact that some of this really does come down to being genuinely insane, the way he's never able to take responsibility for himself makes me want to grab him by the neck and shake him, hard. It's "evolution's" fault for driving him to kill? It's Chandra's fault for not stopping him? COME THE FUCK ON, JACKASS.
d) It's...easier than it should be at times, which worries me a bit -- though I think some of that might come from the way he can be a rather restrained person in his movements and speech until he feels the need to act. It may also be because I can detach from him a lot more thoroughly than I can from my other pups; during active threads, I usually find the barest minimum of common ground that's required to write the tag, and then I immediately shove the rest of him at arm's length because he creeps me the fuck out. I can count on one hand the number of times I've gotten characterbleed while playing him, and for someone as prone to characterbleed as I am? Oh God is that a relief. Plus, if nothing else, a sociopathic character does have the advantage of simply not caring about a lot of things, which can make it extremely hard for traditionally "breaky" stuff to have a long-lasting impact on him; I've freely stuck him into a lot of plots and situations that I'd never want to put my other pups through.
The most difficult thing for me is predicting his reactions -- Sylar's got such a hair-trigger temper that I've had quite a few threads that'd be going along just fine until a single tag flipped things into a 180 -- and keeping him in check and yet IC when those sudden reactions go south can get brutal.
e) There are a lot of threads with him that I'm unduly fond of -- pretty much the entire amnesiaplot and everything involving Frank and Jordan Black, for starters -- but I think his conversation with Peter while he was in the cells shows his best range of character: angry to curious to kind of frightened to AUGH GOD WHY CAN I NOT FIND MORE LIGHTS IN THIS HOUSE TO TURN ON.
f) Beyond a few mini-plots I've sketched out with people, I'm just going to do what I've been doing: keep pace with canon and weave Milliways into it as I go. I don't want to deviate too wildly from the overarching plots Kring's laying down, since with the way the show links everyone together, having just one pup go AU from the rest (in a non-"Five Years Gone" kind of way) would be a royal pain in the ass -- that, and it takes a lot of personal dissatisfaction with the way an ongoing canon's unfolding for me to ever say, "Fuck it, I'm doing my own thing," and yank my character AU mid-stream. And while yeah, sure, Heroes has its issues as a canon, I still love it dearly. *hugs her show*
MAC
a) She's smart, a computer geek, an introvert, nice yet kind of sarcastic, pretty laid-back, and...okay, to be totally shallow, I loved her hair in the first two seasons. (I had been talking about streaking my hair blue for years before I watched VMars for the first time.) In short, she is so much like me -- and in some ways, what I want to be -- that it was a little unnerving to see her on-screen the first time.
b) Her intelligence and sense of humor.
...okay, technically that's two, but.
c) Mac's got a certain measure of ruthlessness and self-centeredness (S1's purity test scam, anyone?) that, even if it's not as bad as it could be, makes me wince whenever it comes out. It hasn't happened very often in Milliways, granted, but it's still there.
d) Most of the time it's ridiculously easy, see above re: she's basically my TV alter ego. What makes it difficult, though, is that because of that closeness, I'm constantly worried about accidentally having her react or talk in a way that's more like what I would do than what she would do. That means I have to spend a lot more time revisiting canon to reestablish her voice than I do with my other pups, and when VMars was still on the air, that would get really difficult when she wouldn't show up for episodes at a time. I'd slip up a lot. I still think I slip up a lot. (This is also reminding me that it's way past time to dig out my DVDs and do a quick rewatch. *scribbles note to self*)
e) Meeting (and re-meeting) the Winchester brothers makes me all kinds of happy when I re-read it, and is one of the few threads where I feel like I nailed her voice without any slip-ups.
f) I've been kind of adrift with her lately, to be honest, even more so since canon wrapped. There's been some stuff seeded into earlier threads that could lead to her getting out of Neptune, if people are cool with it and I ever decide to take the plunge and go that way -- it'd break her out of the holding pattern she seems to have found herself in, which I think we both need at this point. And then there's the ever present continuing-to-work-through-her-Cassidy-issues thing, which... *sighs* Fuckin' Millicanon. I swear to God, someday she's going to be comfortable around guys again. But in the meantime, it's about to get another quick kick in the arm thanks to some upcoming stuff.
ELLEN HARVELLE
a) About three minutes into her first appearance, when Dean got snippy with her and she fired right back with, "Hey, don't do me any favors -- if you don't want my help, fine, don't let the door smack your ass on the way out" in that utterly matter-of-fact, self-assured tone, I got out my metaphorical pen and started drawing tiny hearts all over her. She's strong, she's capable, she's confident, she's nurturing, and she understands that being nurturing sometimes means you have to give the people you love a smack upside the head as you tell them to cut it out and stop being stupid. As for actually apping her, I blame a post
buongiornodaisy made, shortly before I retired Wash, that asked why there were so few older characters in the bar. One free headvoice slot + a type of character I'd never played before = Ellen!b) Seriously, her complete refusal to take bullshit from anyone? Is awesome.
c) What she's lost in the past makes her cling all the harder to what she's got left, which is something I don't fault her for at all, but...you combine that overprotective streak with the aforementioned inability to tolerate other people's crap, and it can get nasty.
d) I'll defer on answering this until she's actually in the bar. *g*
e) See (d).
f) Getting her in the bar is about as far as my plans extend for now -- it'll probably be happening once the Winchesters have reached "Everybody Loves a Clown." (Though various conversations with people during my big cross-country trip have also led to a short list of potential future threads, including Missouri Mosley, Prometheus, Angela Petrelli, and Bill Adama. *serene*)
WASH
a) I was enamored of him from his very first scene in the pilot episode, where he was chilling out on the bridge during a job, playing with plastic dinosaurs to pass the time, yet able to jump to attention within a split-second when things started going south. What made me fall head-over-heels, though, was the Reaver chase scene in the same episode: "Here's something you can't do." Sweet-hearted, funny guys with that kind of incredible steel core of capability? They are my favorite archetype, and I was stunned that nobody'd apped him yet when I found Milliways.
b) Definitely his sense of humor. It's just as much his job to make people laugh as it is to fly the ship, and wow does Serenity ever need that sometimes.
c) His insecurities. It wouldn't be that bad if he didn't have a mouth the size of a small galaxy, but Wash wears his emotions on his sleeve to begin with -- so when he gets shaken up or frazzled due to his own personal I'm-not-good-enough issues, he'll take it out on other people and get into a lot of trouble. (See pretty much all of "War Stories," for instance.)
d) I did need a certain amount of energy to play Wash, just because he was an extrovert who'd be speaking almost constantly in Whedon-y verbal gymnastics, but by the time I retired him, I'd been playing him for so long that it was usually a snap. I hardly ever had to think about how he'd react to things; most of the challenge was in translating that reaction to appropriate Washisms.
e) ...God, there are honestly too many to choose. (Six hundred and thirty-six threads, and that's just what I've got in his memories. What the hell.) I think, though, I'm going to have to go with outflying the thinny during the Academyplot, because that was the first time I really got to play him being the kickass pilot I loved and I am so pleased with how it turned out.
f) Since he's retired, there's not much I can do. I've volunteered him for OOMs with the Serenity crew due to the close-knit nature of the ship's residents, but beyond that, he's squarely on my list of inactive pups.
ROGER DAVIS
a) While I related to Mark's personality a lot more, I related to Roger's desires, that need to be remembered, the most out of anyone's in the musical. His struggle to overcome what had happened to him -- his grief, his diagnosis, his depression, his addiction -- also grabbed me a lot harder than anything else in the plot. And the fact that as difficult as it was for him, he managed to succeed (or at least get a hell of a lot closer to succeeding) in the end? Made me want to punch the air and hiss, "Yes!" every single time I saw it. His whole arc's about learning to live again after you don't think you'll be able to do it, and that kind of rebirthing is something I tend to gravitate toward.
b) He's an incredibly passionate person. You could say that about almost everyone in his canon, granted, but that doesn't make it any less true.
c) He's got a lot of these, but...let's go with his temper. It goes hand-in-hand with being that passionate: when he's angry, he gets royally pissed, and having so much to be angry about when he was pre-canon just compounded that.
d) Most of my difficulty in playing Roger came from the fact that as much as I liked the character, he was such a bad fit for the bar. Too cranky, too reclusive, too mired in his own issues -- legitimate as they were -- to strike out and really become an active participant in the setting...the list goes on and on. As for actually writing him, though, I didn't find that particularly difficult at all. I'd been a fan of the musical for so long that I practically knew him backwards and forwards years before I apped him. *g*
e) Man, you'd think I'd have an easier time with this, considering how few threads he had. *wrinkles nose at his LJ memories* But I rather liked how Roger and April's second meeting turned out; it's not really an encapsulation of his entire character, but it's got the same kind of despair shifting into hope that makes up a lot of his canonical arc.
f) Another retired one, so my plans are few. And by "few," I mean "nonexistent." *wry grin* I miss playing him, but not to the point where I'd consider pulling him out of retirement or moving him to another game.
