bunchoflosers | oh what the heck

Alfred
Elsa
Mari
Miach
Rhea
Ullr

Does Alfred have any ambitions? What are they?

How does Elsa cope with her curse? Does she know that it was caused by one of her ancestors? If so, how does she feel about that?

Is there really nothing that can kill Mari or is this just an assumption she's made? What does she think about being immortal?

How did Miach first react to losing his Spirit abilities?

Hey, Rhea, what does the future look like? Are there any amenities that she doesn't know how she ever lived without?

What is Ullr's biggest fear?

Alfred's big problem with Life is his lack of ambition. It's not something he's ever critically examined. He's never looked at it and thought, well damn, maybe that's why I'm always feeling so low. I don't know what to do.

He's pretty lost. He doesn't know what he wants to do or how things he likes doing might one day be things he is paid to do. He likes building things, but he doesn't want to be a builder. He likes woodwork, but he doesn't want to be a carpenter. He likes writing but he doesn't want to show anyone his work. So he drifts from dead end job to dead end job and wishes he was doing something else.

At least once he's woken up at the alarm, weighed up the pros and cons of going to work versus staying, and given in his notice by going back to bed. He's listless because he has no clear wants or desires.

I guess an overarching desire would be to get into a position where he can just stay in by himself all day and make stuff. But he's so used to strangling his creative side and repressing himself, he's a little afraid it must be dying. So he loses the motivation to do that too. Alf is the sort of person who'd have just drifted into a civil service job about 20 years ago, but these days there's no place for him, so he temps and temps and temps and every new job, ever day he wakes up and doesn't know what to do with himself, every time he realises he has nothing really tethering him to anything - no dreams, no hopes, no desires - he just feels tired. He's given up on the idea of ever having ambition.

His younger reroll on the other hand, has plenty. The only difference between them is that Leonard has found something to really dedicate himself to - the guitar. So he's not listless or unenthusiastic because he's found that thing, that ambition, to tether him to a course. Just what Alfie lacks.

I'm not even certain, even if he did find something, he could truly feel ambitious. Alf is the sort of person who can't find anything that really suits them until they're retired and then get big into hobbies, once almost their entire life is behind them. Another person might help tether him or give him direction or ambition, but that ship may have sailed. It might be too late to save him from himself that way.

Short answer: he has no ambition.

The future's so bright she's gotta wear glasses! Also no comment because what if you stole whatever amenity it was and patented it and the entire future changed and she went back to a future ravaged by velociraptors???

(it's a breakfast sandwich maker)

(there's an option for bread selection, an option for meats, eggs, vegetables and breakfast sauces)

(it's a time saver in the morning getting everyone out the door but so far nobody is interested in her porridge and scrambled egg sandwiches)

Ullr was once worshiped pretty widely as a Germanic/Scandinavian God. But he was lost in the sands of time; when people finally recorded the Norse myths, they didn't believe in them and many of the actual stories and sources had been lost. If a god is only a god as long as people believe in him, what use is a god with no believers? How can he define himself, when he has gone from major god to "Thor's step-son, god of snowshoes" in written mythology?

What happens if he's forgotten completely?

That's a terrible fear for him. He's not vain, only desperate; he googles himself idly when he's near an internet connection, edits his wikipedia page to correct things and tries to live as a god might, with glory, in order to be someone believed in and worshiped once more. But more and more he's having to define himself as "Thor's stepson" when introducing himself. What happens when he is forgotten completely? Will he disappear? Will he have to leave?

He doesn't want to be just a nameless spirit, when he's been so much before.

Edited 2013-04-05 22:38 (UTC)

The rest of this essay should be pretty easy to guess.

Mari knows she can't die because she's been trying to get herself killed for four hundred years. Her life sucks. Nobody loves her. She wants to be over the wall already, but she can't kill herself directly because suicide is a sin. So she tries to do it by proxy. It doesn't work. Whatever happens to her body, she regenerates. She can try to stop it, but the second she loses consciousness or falls asleep, her power goes into overdrive. It's keeping her alive, whether she wants to be or not.

Mari doesn't want to die alone. That's the big problem with immortality; when the human race is all burned out and gone, she'll still be there and she doesn't know if anyone else will be. She's been on her own for a long time already but she doesn't want to be, even if she tells herself she does. She gets pretty desperate for company - this is the kid who when lonely, fed a werewolf her arm just so she could have a conversation. The only thing that keeps her going are her occasional brushes with humanity, even though she's pretty bitter when it comes to people. It's half 'i do so much for you apes with this power why am i not lauded in the streets #ingrates' and half wondering if, like Alfred, it's too late for her to be helped by humanity.

Without anything, without humanity, she'll just be a thing floating through space, forever cut off from anyone else. She doesn't want to be anything other than dead and in purgatory! That's where her father is, it's where her mother is, it's where her siblings are. Nobody is down here for her. She has nothing to live for, but she's forced to live it anyway. So immortality blows donkey dick.

Can you go into more detail about Mari's views on humanity? She oscillates between calling humans apes and calling herself a monster, so I'm guessing it's a pretty complicated topic for her. Also, why does she think of herself as completely inhuman? How will interacting with powered people (ala AM) who would never in a million years consider themselves a separate species affect her?

Also, just cause I'm curious, could you answer my first question a little more technically? Like... if Mari was thrown into a volcano, she'd make it out? Is there no limit to her power?

I always get worried about writing out character motivations for specific actions in big detail. I hope this doesn't come off as me approving of the things she does or glorifying them in any way. she's supposed to be a traumatised kid who makes bad decisions because she doesn't know how to make right ones anymore. I hope that comes across here and in play. I'll reply in two batches since I have something written up already for the second somewhere.

Her view on people has always been pretty mixed. I'm trying to find the thread but in GH somebody called her on hating people and wanting to be a doctor at the same time. Oh, nope I was called out on it! It's difficult to really explain the mindset which I guess opens it up to accusations of me being whimsical with regards to characterisation, but I guess what I'm trying to do with the whole issue is...get across a mindset in my own pretty imperfect way?

I'm worried about how long this will be. Here it is, though: her views on people are pretty much always going to be negative since whenever her hopes are raised, they're dashed fairly quickly. Her family was killed violently, after she tried to help Aldo and killed him she was blackmailed pretty intensively by Silence and Tobias, her friends were put in serious physical danger several times due to humans (humans keeping werewolves in the Hour, humans attacking the hour, humans killing other humans for science, Rhys was murdered by humans); it feels like every chance of happiness she's had has been dashed by humanity (notice she gives the Others involved in those events a pass - I'll get to that in a moment). Mari has been exposed to the absolute very worst of human nature as a young child and as a teenager. By the end of GH, she's seen and been a part of awful acts of violence, onscreen and off.

Her emotional development has been stalled since she was a kid; when it comes to actually going, "hey, maybe it's time to go deal with the fact that I feel awful pretty much every day," she can't do it because as she told Hyun, she's not sure what it's like to exist as herself - by which I mean, exist without feeling awful about it. There's also the fact that mental health didn't exactly exist in the ren era and her support system crumbled after Rhys's death. These things formed a perfect storm and made her a giant festering bruise of pain.

She doesn't trust people. First she didn't trust anyone with power because of her family, then that was reinforced by Tobias, and then her trust was breached in little ways by the humans around her until Mari and Moirine's final big fight. This is the reason why she went to Cristo instead of Elia, when Elia had shown himself to be sensible, sensitive and emphatic - she trusted the werewolf who'd told her he was going to murder her, had already broken her ear and eaten her thumb, more. In her view, humanity's violence against themselves (and most importantly, against her) is unpredictable; she can trust an Other more. I'll go into depth into why this is bullshit in a moment.

But here it comes, this is the crux: the recurring problem in Mari's narrative is that she doesn't take responsibility for herself, not in the way she needs to. She pins every hope of happiness on other people. It was Marijke, then it was Moirine, then it was Rhys. It probably would have been Janus after that if the game hadn't stopped. She doesn't take on the responsibility of growing, or helping herself. She doesn't think critically about what she needs; when it comes to emotion, she can't analyse her thoughts properly and act on them. Trying to pin down her thoughts...urgh, the best example I can give is listening to the ramblings of someone really feverish.

Note that all of those (except Janus, which she didn't know about) were human. She pins her hopes for happiness on humanity. When I've been writing her these past few days I'm writing with...don't laugh. I'm writing with 'I crush everything' in the background because a love song about a giant squid's unrequited love for a ship is a pretty excellent metaphor for Mari's relationship to humanity. She pretty much spews out insults like 'ape' and says things like 'all humans are bastards' because she wants to be one. Not the one she before (whoa i wrote that line and then JoCo sang it). She wants to be human and happy.

Here's the thing about Mari and happiness: she's always associated it with being taken care of. Because when she was a little kid, she was both happy and taken care of. And then she was all alone and not so happy. All of her happiness lies in people promising to take care of her: Marijke, although things were tense after the kidnapping, Moirine's promise to get her a pardon, Rhys in general. She careens into danger because she wants someone to come after her; everything in GH that happened after Rhys's death was a cry for help; actions because she can't use words efficiently. Confronting the real reasons for the things she does ("I need you to help me" would be a lot safer than jumping into a bear cage but guess which option she'd choose out of those two?) is nearly impossible for her; she's not emotionally fluent or mature enough to actually ask for help.

I've always read her as a sort of girl who cries wolf character; she needs to know people are there and so she pushes them and pushes them and pushes them. By the time she really needs them, they're not there. So she gets bitter and angry because she's all alone and blames things that are her own fault on the whole of humanity. But I don't think she's ever known how to change.

I'm going too in deep here I think. Let me boil it down: Mari tends to blame humanity for things that aren't their fault, including: her loneliness, violence of all stripes and the fact that nobody wants to look after her the way her siblings did. She's desperate pretty much and finds herself locked into a love-hate relationship with humans. "Nobody came to save me from this, nobody helped so I hate you all." She's sort of like a feral cat, I guess. Angry and mistrustful but would not mind being given a home somewhere with a nice human.

Here's the thing about Others: she trusts them. This is because she has never spent the sort of unlimited time staring into their abysses as she has staring into humanity's. As far as she was concerned, they are honest with her; they'll kill her or eat her if they got the chance. That's preferable to the anxiety she feels when she doesn't know what a human is up to. It's bullshit but she also tends to almost dismiss Others. They cannot be placed into a single homogeneous group the way humans can be and so she doesn't hold the same prejudices; a succubus is different from a vampire which is different from a mermaid. On the contrary to her eyes, all men are either the same or capable of going the same way.

She's desperate for human company because she wants someone to come in and dust her off and give the feral cat a home, someone to give her a hand. She wants to feel human again and she doesn't think anyone but a human can help with that. But she hates herself and humans are full of bullshit and violence and all the worst things she's ever seen. So she takes out her bitterness and pain on other people.

I'll answer the "why she doesn't see herself as human" question quickly because i'm falling asleep on my keyboard fuck. then i will answer the others.

Mari doesn't see herself as human because she feels like a monster. She's been feeling like one ever since she killed Aldo and it's gotten worse and worse. It's at the point where she doesn't even feel remotely human. It's a difficult thing to quantify, how human you feel; more than likely what she actually feels is self-loathing, brought on by trauma and depression! It feels like the depression version of self-loathing because it has that nice streak of "I hate me, you'll hate me soon, let's just get it over with and I'll make you hate me quickly so we don't waste any time." That sort of shooting yourself in the foot, over and over.

She calls herself a monster because she hates herself and because that's pretty much what she sees when she looks into the mirror.

Aw shit I'm sorry. I just know I'm going to come back to this in the morning and see a bunch of stuff that makes no sense. If I do I'll rewrite it. But that should be the gist of it.

She's interacted with powered people/people who know about powers before, mostly in memes. It usually follows the same pattern: 'well, i'm a monster' 'no that's not true my buddy breathes fire he's human' 'but I'M special, I'M the monster!'

See above for her thoughts on being a monster (which are pretty vague, looking at them after i fell asleep but lbr her reasoning is very flimsy). It comes down to a question of individual identification. She thinks of herself as monstrous, there for she'll identify as a monster.

I guess the soullessness comes into play here. I'm working on the assumption that nobody has corrected her since Erme told her she probably didn't have a soul after performing sin-eating duties. Sin eating was an important part of the burial process, ensuring the deceased could not rise, but it was believed to come at the cost of the sin eater's soul as they took on the sins of the deceased. A soul is the best and most perfect part of the human - if that is gone, what is left inside her? Nothing good.

Maybe the more human amongst Others and power users can identify as human and she's fine with them doing that. If she's particularly pleased with one she might try and convince them they're not human, they're just like her! Come be her monster friend, fellow monster! But other than that-- I think it comes down to the point in the previous comment, about how Mari views humans as one great clump and Others as separate little clusters who all differ from each other. Who's to say if people with magic identify as one thing over another? Most of the time it doesn't affect her; she doesn't give a good goddamn.

Anyone trying to convince her otherwise...I don't think she'll listen. The more adamant they become the more she'll shout and scream and kick at the idea of being part of humanity. It has to be a decision she comes to by herself, a reconciliation with her own humanity.

In conclusion, she won't be affected too much.

ETA: urgh fuck i'm just going to add the answer to the last question to this so this post isn't 90% elaboration on mari being fucked in the head!

I sort of see her power as being a weaker, more limited version of Miach's? Whereas he heals anything via magic, she only regenerates - that is, her body kick starts the growth of new and healthy cells via magic. She can't magically go in and heal someone if they're, say, laid up with a mild case of poison. Her ability is to regenerate dead or damage (or lost) tissue back to its healthy state - it's a sort of blend of the actual biological process and magic itself? Since magic is the thing that kick starts it and she is the source of the magic, her body tends to grow back when injured. I'm playing around w/ how the curse effects this too (is she being kept alive somehow?) but the basic hard and fast rules are:

Mari's power creates healthy tissue

The faster it works, the more energy it consumes. The slower it goes, the more she can do.

I literally have no idea how Mari would react to being thrown in a volcano. That's a very specific request for information. I have a vague kind of idea? But I need to research matter vs lava first. If I come back to a post by moirine set on a volcano locked to mari i will be...displeased.

Edited 2013-04-06 20:04 (UTC)

...dammit, my plan is ruined!

thanks for writing all that. very interesting!

she is not the one ring!!

i expect all of your answers to be as long as that.

o god. i'll try tonight if my boss hasn't left me a total mess.

Elsa's sort of....really distant from her curse? She was born in Wales and lived there until her parents/older siblings died and she was moved to live with her great aunt in Durham. She doesn't even remember the place. It's lasting effect has been that she's gone from a naturally shy person to out and out scared of people, although this is more to do with the fact that her great aunt has kept her nearly under lock and key her entire life. She's grown up incredibly sheltered and she's more interested, now that she's in her first year of university, in attempting to cut loose and become independent than thinking about any curse.

The effects of the curse on Llewelyn descendants is basically that, whenever a Llewelyn has a family, they're all slaughtered but one kid! Elsa isn't too afraid of that! Maybe the WWYD meme gave it away but she's about a 4-5 on the Kinsey scale which means she's not worried about getting accidentally pregnant, and has no plans to adopt kids. As far as she's concerned, the curse doesn't affect her too much.

She's vaguely aware of the fact that some ancestor caused it. Some papers left to her have made her aware of the situation. Quoting Anchorman for a Llewelyn discussion seems like a good idea: she's not even mad. That's amazing. The fact that somebody from her line could have been so brave is shocking and exciting. Yeah, it fucked everyone else over but...wow! They stood up to some great, frightening Other! That's so great!

Whereas Mari seeks comfort and to be taken care of, Elsa wants adventure and independence. And she wants to be brave, like her ancestors obviously were. Not neurotic and frightened of everything. So I guess all the curse has done is underline the deep genetic links between Llewelyns and bad decisions.

Matty
Leo
Rhea (Countshire, circa 2008)
Richie

Marnie
Pearle
Umeka
Dmitri
Adam
Hyun

(you earned that throne...)

Memetacular

What pieces does Marnie really want to do? Theatre? Art house films? Blockbusters so she can buy a yacht?

How does Pearle cope with her power and the things she's denied by having it?

What's new with Umeka since Countshire? How do you see the Countshire tensions between the Order-Nebelrose-everything else going and if the answer as I suspect it might be is just you leaning back in your chair and cackling while yelling "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD" what part would Umeka play in the war?

Tell me about Dmitri's band.

Tell me about adam's daughter

Tell me more about hyun's development into bitter

I think getting lead roles in blockbusters and/or Oscar-bait would be her end goal, not because she's really interested in buying a yacht (though that would be cool), but that's where most 'successful' actors end up. Like Moirine, she's not a very thoughtful person: she loves to act, wants to make her living as an actress and doesn't want to be seen as a failure. She could be given a terrible review for a minor part in a super hero movie and it would mean more than a sparkling review for a blackbox theater production. Fame isn't something she's seeking out, but it's such an easy way to measure her progress.

That's just her thinking now, though. She's still young and shallow and far too preoccupied with how other people view her. I think if she ever became a well-known actress (she never will), or if she stopped getting work altogether, she'd reevaluate just what the hell she wanted to get out of her career. But, since she's in that 'I'm somehow managing to pay my bills' actor limbo, Marnie is content with her pipe dream, no matter how unrealistic or unfulfilling it might be.

She remembers that short period during the timeskip when she was normal. She remembers her family back on Earth 2. It's a basic 'better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all' situation, as trite as it sounds. Sometimes she even wonders why she's not more upset about having tastes of normalcy then having them taken away. But the last thing she wants is to tarnish her good memories.

The older she gets, the more resigned she becomes. This is her life. She'll probably never have a family of her own. She'll probably never even be able to leave AM now that she's admitted to being such a security risk, so she's got to be positive when she can. Downplaying how much her power affects her life is one coping method she's been using lately. It works so long as she's extremely mindful of herself. As soon as someone is affected by her power, Pearle crumbles.

The saddest thing to me is, though she relies on memories where she's holding hands, giving hugs, even just sharing a meal with someone without worry, she's forgotten what those things actually feel like. Pearle can remember being happy, but if her power disappeared right this second, she might not change anything about how she behaves. Readjusting would be too overwhelming.

Issac (post-Capesize)
Gulliver (pre-Capesize by about 10 years)

Rowan
Briar
Sanna
Uriel
Amata
Mallory
Danute

anyone I'm forgetting

What are Rowan's feelings on the Hour, after everything that's happened?

Why does Briar want a daycare?

How is Sanna adapting to life on the ship over life back on her planet?

How does Uriel keep his court in check?

Amata's favourite memory.

How would Mal feel about interacting with things with powers that appear but are not human? I'm thinking Miach and Airmed, along those lines.

What flusters Danute?

Briar wants a daycare because he does want children, a lot. He may have logically accepted that the risk of passing on his ability (and the issues that come with it) means he will not have any, but emotionally the want is still there. Having a daycare solves that problem for him in theory. Having a daycare especially for powered children is mostly due to a lot of stuff that happened shortly after the game ended but I had intended to bring in.

The short version is that his dad, while on his business trips, was having an affair with a young graduate student who got pregnant on accident. The affair ended, no one but the oldest (who lives in CA and is pseudo-estranged from the family) knew and wasn't telling, so no harm, no foul.

Said graduate student, named Isabell/Izzie, was in the psychology program and decided to specialize in psychiatric care for powered since her now-five year old daughter is powered, and then moves to Victory and the whole thing comes out and causes a bunch of drama. Everyone's pissed at their dad, Briar gets in the very rare huge fight with his brother for not telling him, most of the family goes into deep anti-powered rhetoric because haha none knew Briar was powered and it was easy to target Izzie with it, his dad is trying desperately to ignore his Giant Mistake, Briar's insomnia gets worse and he ends up locking himself into a sleep coma for two months due to exhaustion and stress. Izzie ends up being instrumental in bringing him back (dream psychiatric sessions are the best), his family finds out about his power, and there is a lot more drama.

During this whole clusterfuck, he does attempt to bond with Harmony and discovers how hard it is for Izzie to find stable daycare for her because even if the daycare provider is cool with powers, inevitably one or more parents throws a bitchfit and Harmony is kicked out. So, he is now looking into one because he gets the whole parcel of it (medication, learning to deal with the powers, the therapy, etc) more than most people.

(for the record he does have at least one child, who doesn't have near as many issues as he does)

wow briarfamily way to be totally dysfunctional

I think the only functional member of his family was his mother

wow briar ma way to die

Amata's favorite memory is the first time she danced with Yuu, which included both a smile and an acceptance of a kiss on the cheek.

Amata was created primarily for plot and she was meant to be the shallow, vain, air-headed second to the queen bee. She then logged with Yuu and quickly gained depth and careened her onto the path that made her much less shallow than her original concept and turned her into the Amata that we know today.

This is her favorite memory because it is the first time she danced with the man who she'd end up marrying in like ten years, and it was really her first indication he wasn't nearly as stoic and unfeeling as he came across. He danced with her, he smiled (a little), he did a minor fond grooming motion, and he let her kiss his cheek. This is on top of their earlier conversation, where he gives her his jacket and they talk about the fact they're both running away from something.

The only thing it's missing is him agreeing to practice the waltz with her and that she'd owe him some future favor. She assumed it would be along the lines of 'stay away from me from now on'.

It ended up being, after he proposed and she agreed, "You do still owe me that favor for dancing."

Better! You know, considering her world was overrun by monsters and she lived in a cave and hadn't seen a person for a year or two. A spaceship with a limited number of people who will accept her relearning how to be human is much easier. She can speak in full sentences again and can talk to Marco, Maggie, and Captain easily.

She makes more effort to go off-ship for hunting and the like and prefers Midgard-esque places to go. She's made at least one trip to talk to her father, or at least the one that ended up on Capesize previously, and telling him about what happened to his daughter. Mostly she goes for food and makes sure people are eating more than cakes and cookies.

oh what the heck

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tw: suicide mentions, death (ofc)

follow up question aaa this is an experiment of using dw on my phone

TOUGH ISN'T IT also this is long and hopefully not incoherent

i forgot the third part in my first book length answer

Re: i forgot the third part in my first book length answer

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adding to the list:

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I did this all on my iPod because I was too lazy to cross the room to my laptop

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crap, there's more

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