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thisisalex) wrote2018-07-18 07:33 pm
thisisalex) wrote2018-07-18 07:33 pm
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gooseberryhigh YEAR TWO CHARACTER POST MORTEMS
disclaimer: i did not read over a single one of these before posting them.
CODE BY TESSISAMESS
I’ve talked a lot about how Dinah changed a lot once she got a name, but honestly, I don’t even know what her personality was going to be before she became Dinah Danger. I know that I had her as an only child (at the moment I had two youngest kids and one oldest kid, I needed to change it up), her parents were older, they were marine biologists, and they studied a Canadian cryptid. I think she was always spoiled and in that awkward stage where you’re too old to be precocious, too young to know when you’re being annoying. I also know she was always going to be a Coppersoph, because I had to replace Robin.
But I don’t know what Dinah would have been if we hadn’t been on Rabbit the night before the Y2 cast list came out, on some terrible computer-breaking site with a list of Bad Baby Names, and one of them was Danger. Like, hell yeah I would play a kid named Danger, that’s even better than Braydyn. That was totally just a throwaway comment, but then the next day there was a character in the dorm I wanted with an alliterative D name (I… love alliteration??) and I knew I had to find some dumb reason to name this girl Dinah Danger.
Writing Dinah’s history gave me a lot of trouble, and I basically just wrote it all in one sitting while at work and then never looked at it again. I figured if I needed to, I could ask about adjusting it later. I hadn’t wanted to do another bullied kid (Riley being the bullied at Hogwarts kid), and didn’t think it would come up much, but it dovetailed really nicely with her and Nisha being the aggressively weird kids who have never had such aggressively weird friends before. And then when Chad came in it was??? UGH I’M GETTING CHOKED UP AGAIN, STOP.
God, Dinah went through a fucking lot this year. Sometimes I had to push her aside because she has a REALLY LOUD personality, and she was a lot more combative than I expected at the outset (there was a brief moment before she got a name when I thought she could potentially be a prefect??? lmao), and that can just get exhausting sometimes. Also, her fucking formatting gimmick gave me such hell on the phone. I stuck with her using a lot of bold tags instead of switching to just caps or something like that because it’s a very comic book thing to do, and that’s why she still does it as an adult, but, god, you’d think I would have learned my lesson after Robin. I like to use punctuation or formatting to help me find or refine a character’s voice (Robin doesn’t use apostrophes, Dinah uses bolds, Georgie writes like it’s a poem, Rosy uses the Oxford comma religiously), and I never fucking think about how much time I spend RPing from my damn phone and what hell I’m putting myself through.
But I LOVED all the shit she managed to go through this year. I can’t believe there was a time that Giant Adult was just a joke?? I’m SUPER HAPPY I put her as a Copperquid reserve. Saving and renaming a freshman and claiming him as her child kind of set up a lot of her weirdly parental instincts for the rest of the year. Nisha piercing her ear and being like “wow that’s a lot of blood” turned into such a great Copperquid moment as the seniors realized “jesus fuck we have a lot of dumbass sophomores to save from themselves.” Getting hit with an arrow in the Forbidden Fucking Forest?? Chad’s blood being a running joke the entire year??? ENDGAME?????
GOD I HAVE SO MANY ENDGAME FEELINGS. I have, like, a whole other doc that’s just me rambling senselessly about how much I loved having Dinah in endgame. I mentioned at one point that they were like the middle grade version of the GB easy readers, endgame edition. Bunch of people are getting hella traumatized around here, and these three fuckos are having a blast. There were so many hilarious fucking scenes (Chad forgetting math and just categorizing things as "one" and "more than one," Elkey dropping them ten feet over the gardens, harassing all the Abomination Mimics who are just trying to so their jobs, it's not their fault they're so bad at being mimics!!!, Dinah releasing bludgers the moment she smells smoke???, scaring off one of the mimics because they were too chaotic, Rutabaga the Psychic Oar, RUDEPERT IN GENERAL). It was great to maintain that trauma/fucko thread balance like I had in Y1, too, but this one had some amazing heartwarming moments (Elkey in general and their parental instincts toward this new bird daughter of theirs, Dinah grabbing Nisha's hand when she's about to give up her other one, the three of them breaking down the door to the shed together along with their bludger sons, Mario and Graig) that I would never be able to get with Robin. And, Jesus, I loved the dynamic between the kids. They’re SO GOOD-SLASH-BAD. It was just… so much fun.
I also really liked that since we didn’t have a LOT we needed to accomplish with them, I never felt rushed to get through all the things we wanted or needed to do. Our tags moved pretty quick and they were generally short, so it gave more time to just enjoy ourselves in the scenes. We can fuck around in this equipment shed for a minute, why not??? (because it’s about to catch on fire, Dinah.) Let's make fun of the Abomination Mimic some more because it's not like we need to be anywhere!!
UGH I JUST LOVE THOSE KIDS SO MUCH.
MISCELLANEOUS SHIT:
CODE BY TESSISAMESS
Austin is one of those characters that completely diverged from his written personality but I enjoyed him anyways. I had hoped to make a bad poet who got his heart broken a lot and wrote terrible songs about it. I know his character going sideways was because of his PB. I was going to use a pretty boy with soft eyes and beautiful hair, but I couldn't find one that I liked. So instead we got an anxious guitar kid who doesn't wear shoes and somehow joined the Coppertales.
He ended up being a lot like another character I've played, and once I realized that (thankfully very early on), I leaned into it, because that was one of my favorite characters and at least I knew him. But, man, for a second there I was really worried I just don't know how to play Ebonhide boys.
Around Christmas is when I really started to feel him. It helps a LOT that he stayed over Christmas break and got brought into the Trash Juniors fold. He's the kind of character that could have shied away from all of that and started assuming they hate him and then it's just like, stop getting rid of your only friends dumbass, but Coppertales are good for ignoring your dumb moody social cues. Also, I told Cheryl that he and Fern were friends already because he loves bossy women, which made it easy to keep him in the circle. He got Gaming Club President right after break, because at that point I was consciously trying to do more with him, and giving him a focus broader than just "I like playing Wonderwall" kind of helped me cement him as just a kind of dumb and moody teenage boy in my head.
Also, though it was never really one of those obvious things, Austin got a lot more secure in himself throughout the year, and I was so proud of him. The Coppertales rubbed off on him :x Coppertale is NOT the house I would have expected him to fall in with, he's Ebonhide as fuck and doesn't do well with things like traditional masculinity or people making fun of him, but... hell, it worked.
MISCELLANEOUS SHIT:
CODE BY TESSISAMESS
Georgie was 100% an experiment. I'd wanted to do a Coppertale hippie for a little while, but originally I was going to do an assertive hippie. The kind that argues with you about using plastic straws and gets mad that you would eat meat in front of her. But I was only going to have her for a few months, this was the ninth character I'd apped for GB, I'd already played two combative Coppertales, and the only Ribbonfin I had was more or less a Coppertale at heart. Also, if she was going to be a Coppertale prefect, there was a big risk of her being too much like Rosy.
So I decided to challenge myself! I wanted someone sweet but wasn't a pushover, someone who fit the Coppertale parameters but didn't feel like a copy of anyone else's, and also someone who would........ try and prefect Coppertale, but didn't stomp all over the fact that for the whole year Coppertale had been racing to the bottom points-wise, and honestly they're just more fun when they fuck up constantly.
I think the experiment went pretty well, tbh. I didn't realize until too late that she was actually pretty similar to my Pandora Lovegood, but, funnily enough, with less bite. It would have been interesting to play Pan as a Coppertale (I would have put her in Ebonhide if I was just trying to sort an already made character). But Georgie was cute and fun and just fucking weird. I loved getting to play with the Div kids finally, and adopting Griffy, and winning prom bandit was so fucking good. The weirdest kids who just did not care about the competition and thought Datsun was a cool car name, NATURAL BORN WINNERS.
If I'd had her for longer, I might have found a real arc for Georgie to have. Maybe she would have had to decide between doing something to keep her dreams alive and being a wanderlust kid, or had to actually discipline or take charge of some kids, but for an experiment she was a very enjoyable one.
DINAH DAYO DIXON
DINAH DIXON
Coppertale • Class of 2017
Awkward weirdo with an overactive imagination plays vigilante in her head.
I’ve talked a lot about how Dinah changed a lot once she got a name, but honestly, I don’t even know what her personality was going to be before she became Dinah Danger. I know that I had her as an only child (at the moment I had two youngest kids and one oldest kid, I needed to change it up), her parents were older, they were marine biologists, and they studied a Canadian cryptid. I think she was always spoiled and in that awkward stage where you’re too old to be precocious, too young to know when you’re being annoying. I also know she was always going to be a Coppersoph, because I had to replace Robin.
But I don’t know what Dinah would have been if we hadn’t been on Rabbit the night before the Y2 cast list came out, on some terrible computer-breaking site with a list of Bad Baby Names, and one of them was Danger. Like, hell yeah I would play a kid named Danger, that’s even better than Braydyn. That was totally just a throwaway comment, but then the next day there was a character in the dorm I wanted with an alliterative D name (I… love alliteration??) and I knew I had to find some dumb reason to name this girl Dinah Danger.
Writing Dinah’s history gave me a lot of trouble, and I basically just wrote it all in one sitting while at work and then never looked at it again. I figured if I needed to, I could ask about adjusting it later. I hadn’t wanted to do another bullied kid (Riley being the bullied at Hogwarts kid), and didn’t think it would come up much, but it dovetailed really nicely with her and Nisha being the aggressively weird kids who have never had such aggressively weird friends before. And then when Chad came in it was??? UGH I’M GETTING CHOKED UP AGAIN, STOP.
God, Dinah went through a fucking lot this year. Sometimes I had to push her aside because she has a REALLY LOUD personality, and she was a lot more combative than I expected at the outset (there was a brief moment before she got a name when I thought she could potentially be a prefect??? lmao), and that can just get exhausting sometimes. Also, her fucking formatting gimmick gave me such hell on the phone. I stuck with her using a lot of bold tags instead of switching to just caps or something like that because it’s a very comic book thing to do, and that’s why she still does it as an adult, but, god, you’d think I would have learned my lesson after Robin. I like to use punctuation or formatting to help me find or refine a character’s voice (Robin doesn’t use apostrophes, Dinah uses bolds, Georgie writes like it’s a poem, Rosy uses the Oxford comma religiously), and I never fucking think about how much time I spend RPing from my damn phone and what hell I’m putting myself through.
But I LOVED all the shit she managed to go through this year. I can’t believe there was a time that Giant Adult was just a joke?? I’m SUPER HAPPY I put her as a Copperquid reserve. Saving and renaming a freshman and claiming him as her child kind of set up a lot of her weirdly parental instincts for the rest of the year. Nisha piercing her ear and being like “wow that’s a lot of blood” turned into such a great Copperquid moment as the seniors realized “jesus fuck we have a lot of dumbass sophomores to save from themselves.” Getting hit with an arrow in the Forbidden Fucking Forest?? Chad’s blood being a running joke the entire year??? ENDGAME?????
GOD I HAVE SO MANY ENDGAME FEELINGS. I have, like, a whole other doc that’s just me rambling senselessly about how much I loved having Dinah in endgame. I mentioned at one point that they were like the middle grade version of the GB easy readers, endgame edition. Bunch of people are getting hella traumatized around here, and these three fuckos are having a blast. There were so many hilarious fucking scenes (Chad forgetting math and just categorizing things as "one" and "more than one," Elkey dropping them ten feet over the gardens, harassing all the Abomination Mimics who are just trying to so their jobs, it's not their fault they're so bad at being mimics!!!, Dinah releasing bludgers the moment she smells smoke???, scaring off one of the mimics because they were too chaotic, Rutabaga the Psychic Oar, RUDEPERT IN GENERAL). It was great to maintain that trauma/fucko thread balance like I had in Y1, too, but this one had some amazing heartwarming moments (Elkey in general and their parental instincts toward this new bird daughter of theirs, Dinah grabbing Nisha's hand when she's about to give up her other one, the three of them breaking down the door to the shed together along with their bludger sons, Mario and Graig) that I would never be able to get with Robin. And, Jesus, I loved the dynamic between the kids. They’re SO GOOD-SLASH-BAD. It was just… so much fun.
I also really liked that since we didn’t have a LOT we needed to accomplish with them, I never felt rushed to get through all the things we wanted or needed to do. Our tags moved pretty quick and they were generally short, so it gave more time to just enjoy ourselves in the scenes. We can fuck around in this equipment shed for a minute, why not??? (because it’s about to catch on fire, Dinah.) Let's make fun of the Abomination Mimic some more because it's not like we need to be anywhere!!
UGH I JUST LOVE THOSE KIDS SO MUCH.
MISCELLANEOUS SHIT:
- I wish I’d had Dinah starting to figure out gender identity earlier in the year, but I also don't know exactly how much I would have done with it. Dinah was never really self-conscious about presentation, and I'm mostly glad I got to acknowledge it because she had kind of been playing around the periphery of it for most of the year.
- Oh but she hella wore a ridiculous suit to her wedding. She was 23 so... hopefully she grew out of the wearing a beard with her best friend phase by then but honestly who knows.
- I’m so glad I found Project MC2 right before Y2 because Ysa’s look is just so fucking good? Kind of skate punk, but also just… fucking ridiculous?
- I made my girl really tall because I already had a tiny girl (Riley) and an average height girl (Rosy), and I just had this picture of this tall gangly girl I used to know who wasn’t allowed to pick out her own school clothes until she was 16, at which point she went hard on the neon colors. And making her a tall gangly monster was easily the best decision I made. Especially since she insisted on wearing platform sneakers. It turned her into a fucking Kaiju.
AUSTIN JACOBY MCNAMARA, JR.
AUSTIN MCNAMARA
Ebonhide • Class of 2016
Sensitive singer-songwriter strives to impress classmates, irritates instead.
Austin is one of those characters that completely diverged from his written personality but I enjoyed him anyways. I had hoped to make a bad poet who got his heart broken a lot and wrote terrible songs about it. I know his character going sideways was because of his PB. I was going to use a pretty boy with soft eyes and beautiful hair, but I couldn't find one that I liked. So instead we got an anxious guitar kid who doesn't wear shoes and somehow joined the Coppertales.
He ended up being a lot like another character I've played, and once I realized that (thankfully very early on), I leaned into it, because that was one of my favorite characters and at least I knew him. But, man, for a second there I was really worried I just don't know how to play Ebonhide boys.
Around Christmas is when I really started to feel him. It helps a LOT that he stayed over Christmas break and got brought into the Trash Juniors fold. He's the kind of character that could have shied away from all of that and started assuming they hate him and then it's just like, stop getting rid of your only friends dumbass, but Coppertales are good for ignoring your dumb moody social cues. Also, I told Cheryl that he and Fern were friends already because he loves bossy women, which made it easy to keep him in the circle. He got Gaming Club President right after break, because at that point I was consciously trying to do more with him, and giving him a focus broader than just "I like playing Wonderwall" kind of helped me cement him as just a kind of dumb and moody teenage boy in my head.
Also, though it was never really one of those obvious things, Austin got a lot more secure in himself throughout the year, and I was so proud of him. The Coppertales rubbed off on him :x Coppertale is NOT the house I would have expected him to fall in with, he's Ebonhide as fuck and doesn't do well with things like traditional masculinity or people making fun of him, but... hell, it worked.
MISCELLANEOUS SHIT:
- Austin's RNG luck was one of my favorite things omg. It wasn't 100% of the time, but a solid 75% of the time he fucking KILLED at RNG.
- Ophelia the Todd and Austin bully made me love her at least twice as much as I think I would have loved her anyway, and that's already an awful lot.
- I almost forgot about his plot with Molly the Ghost and GOD I LOVED THAT SO MUCH. Austin threw a fucking FIT and I'm sorry to everyone who tried to be rational with him then because he was NOT HAVING IT.
GEORGIANA DAYDREAM MILLS
GEORGIANA MILLS
Coppertale • Class of 2015
Semi-professional dreamer salutes the sun, learns how to be the Man, man.
Georgie was 100% an experiment. I'd wanted to do a Coppertale hippie for a little while, but originally I was going to do an assertive hippie. The kind that argues with you about using plastic straws and gets mad that you would eat meat in front of her. But I was only going to have her for a few months, this was the ninth character I'd apped for GB, I'd already played two combative Coppertales, and the only Ribbonfin I had was more or less a Coppertale at heart. Also, if she was going to be a Coppertale prefect, there was a big risk of her being too much like Rosy.
So I decided to challenge myself! I wanted someone sweet but wasn't a pushover, someone who fit the Coppertale parameters but didn't feel like a copy of anyone else's, and also someone who would........ try and prefect Coppertale, but didn't stomp all over the fact that for the whole year Coppertale had been racing to the bottom points-wise, and honestly they're just more fun when they fuck up constantly.
I think the experiment went pretty well, tbh. I didn't realize until too late that she was actually pretty similar to my Pandora Lovegood, but, funnily enough, with less bite. It would have been interesting to play Pan as a Coppertale (I would have put her in Ebonhide if I was just trying to sort an already made character). But Georgie was cute and fun and just fucking weird. I loved getting to play with the Div kids finally, and adopting Griffy, and winning prom bandit was so fucking good. The weirdest kids who just did not care about the competition and thought Datsun was a cool car name, NATURAL BORN WINNERS.
If I'd had her for longer, I might have found a real arc for Georgie to have. Maybe she would have had to decide between doing something to keep her dreams alive and being a wanderlust kid, or had to actually discipline or take charge of some kids, but for an experiment she was a very enjoyable one.