STATE OF THE PUPS

[respectorcist]

SPOCK

RECENT: Spock is definitely suffering from some kind of entrenchment. I've had him so long my security for the voice is strong enough that I can always reliably pull him out, but besides getting a house with Jim, I haven't been doing anything with Spock. Even with Jim, the storyline there hasn't been played out recently, because of my health issues followed by Sarah's hiatus, which sucks, but isn't my fault or anyone else's. I just have to acknowledge that I need to earnestly pick my brain for direction for Spock I still definitely want him to have some sort of Pygmalion snap-back in Darrow, where he realizes that he's becoming more human because Darrow's society is really human (I don't want to hear any bull about how Darrow isn't particularly human, either -- playing from a lot of inhuman character perspectives, yeah, Darrow is hella North American.) The most interesting thing about Spock's character in ToS was that he recognized the usefulness of both objective and subjective thinking, but in the end always believed that Surak's Logic was the superior course for himself. My alien needs to be written as the alien he is, at the end of the day, and I need to point him in that direction.

SOON: A plot in which Spock royally slips up and makes a mistake. He needs something to shake him to the foundation after two years in Darrow. Spock needs a tag into Andrea's EP, since she's got the new baby.

DROP LIKELIHOOD: 0/10, but I need a re-watch and some plot.

NEXT EP: Pending hearing from the mods about a question I had, he will be on the beach doing experiments with the albedo of Darrow's moon.

ROBIN GOODFELLOW

RECENT: I'm stalling out with Robin badly. His voice comes, but sometimes gives me trouble, and to me it feels like his interactions are lackluster. They are superficially Robin but lacking a sort of deep energy that the character often possesses. He's a busybody, and I really need this to show in my writing. From the canon-point I took him from, later in the series, he's certainly a little more settled than in the first couple novels, but he's still not the same sort of stable he's been in Darrow. He needs more emotional shake-ups. He's capricious, so he's only sometimes logical, and other times he just wants to stir up shit. It's that shit-stirring that's missing, maybe.

SOON: Some action plots, something that will get him more close, emotional CR. Robin has a lot of casual acquaintances, which he loves, but it's also healthier for him to have more closer friends. People that he earnestly loves bring out the best and worst sides of him. With everyone else, he tends to default to breezy, which makes eventually for boring, repetitive play.

DROP LIKELIHOOD: 3/10, a re-read is a must.

NEXT EP: Perhaps I'll give him a run-in with the cops to be rescued from.

OKUMURA RIN

RECENT: Good. Rin is working on a lot of good relationships in Darrow, and a lot of them are genuinely healthy for him, which is nice. He's a good character to play because his youth and character arc mean that his opinions and behaviors are always being course-corrected ashe gains wisdom and experience. It also helps keep him fresh to play that he starts out standoffish and then warms up to almost clingy pretty quickly. His girlfriend, Nuriko, is recently experimenting with getting a living, female body. Nuriko being bigendered, both male and female, but born male and preferring to have a female body. So that will be something for him to work over in his narrative. He's young enough that he's still uncertain about his own sexual identity, and even now that Nuriko has a female body to utilize, he will probably just considering himself 'the person who loves Nuriko,' in any form she comes in. It does play into his own issues, to an extent, because he has some struggles in general over how to identify himself, being half-demon. At the end of the day, it's nice to say he's half-demon like the half matters, but he knows that without the context of having his own body that exists in Assiah, there is functionally no difference between Rin and any other demon in his universe. He's just possessing his own body.

SOON: Been working on a private plotty thing, not a big one, with Di and SarahV and SarahK, which is slowly going and un-posted, which is ... fine, actually, because it's a turning point for Rin but it can happen at any time in the game timeline, when it's posted. I definitely intentionally back-burnered moving this forward so that Castiel's storyline could play out some, and so could Dean and Urahara's thing, but I want to bring it back now that I am well.

DROP LIKELIHOOD: 0/10

NEXT EP: He's had some cute stuff lately, so I want to give him a good EP in Ao-Ex style. I want to stretch my horror-writing muscles and give him something a little fucked up. And get myself boo'd out of Darrow for writing seventeen year old boys being disembowled or something.

LAFAYETTE REYNOLDS

RECENT: At least picked up some activity with him recently, although his EP is going sloooow because I was hospitalized four days early for my surgery. A slowtime is fine too. Still stubbornly refuse to drop Lafayette although sometimes I feel like Darrow doesn't quite know what to do with him. Like House, he's one that I want to play to the hilt, if possible. I want to shake the feeling that I need to calm him down somehow and make his characterization more neutral just for worry that I might upset someone Which is not to say that people will be upset, but that I've been burned in the past by people taking what I do ICly and applying it to my beliefs and etc oocly. Lafayette, like Robin, just needs more energy. I'm not communicating his energy satisfactorily. He's learning a bit of magic with Hermione and working at Semele's. He may get a job with Ichihara Yuuko soon, also, which will give him some interesting char development

SOON: Job with Yuuko. Maybe get him into some trouble for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, actual story of Lafayette's life.

DROP LIKELIHOOD: 2/10, just tag more people relentlessly, Lys.

NEXT EP: Maybe Laffy getting into some trouble inside Semele's? Although he was in a bad mood in his last EP. Then again, nothing is wrong with that.

REMUS LUPIN

RECENT: What am I doing. Nothing. I have no direction for Remus, really. It's a little hard to get him out. Character power dynamics make it a little strange to thread him with Normals, and there are limited things which he can do with the other werewolf pups in Darrow because he's not going to be someone who's rubbed the right way by their lifestyles, although he will be polite. He is VERY polite. Which is almost the trouble. He doesn't want to impose on other characters.

SOON: Hopefully I'll figure out a plot for him that will create the strong character relationships, the sort of bonds that Remus needs to flourish. He's a private person, who it's important that I do my best to not just tag around but follow up until trust is built.

DROP LIKELIHOOD: 7/10

NEXT EP: Maybe today. I should think about what kind of shitty night he had over the full moon.

URAHARA KISUKE

RECENT: Kisuke has been busy. Which suits him fine. Although he likes to relax, he likes to relax when he's in the mood for relaxing. Having tons of things going on keeps his character voice alive for me. I'm really pleased with him in general in Darrow. He always has interesting interactions with his canonmate, Rukia, and he recently helped create a weapon for Dean that is somewhere between a Zanpakutou and a Fullbring. He'll want to follow up with Dean about that, although the minutia of helping Dean train it bores him, as does all detail work. He met some interesting people lately, like Mike, and I want to follow up on those in the future.

SOON: He's going to make himself some kids by inserting the ghosts of NPC children into artificial bodies and binding those souls to his own so that they don't Hollowfy. Instead of helping them to pass on. Because what's a moral code.

DROP LIKELIHOOD: 0/10

NEXT EP: Giving him an action EP next where he deals with a Hollow, because all his EPs lately have been understated.

UZUMAKI NARUTO

RECENT: Quieter. Which is maybe mostly my fault, but I also think there just haven't been as many EPs lately in the community the last couple months. Or maybe it's that a lot of them have been debuts. Either way, I don't feel discontent with Naruto, but I really want to get him out and about more always. I have a huge urge to play him pretty evenly because Naruto as a canon right now is pretty exciting, so my excitement for the canon carries over into my play. I hope that keeps freshness there.

SOON: I know I want to do more with Kurama, and also involve Naruto in both some more NINJA-Y stuff as well as work with dealing with the spirituality of the character. Naruto's character is deeply philosophical, despite superficially being kind of bog standard young male protag. He's informed by Buddhism, Hinduism, and most especially Daoism, and I want to weave these things into his dialogue and his relationships with others. I did recently re-read The Buddhist Catechism while in the hospital because di is a butt. He's going to have a run-in with an NPC baddie I'm working on who is a member of an organization I'm poking at. Someone who's been genetically modified. It'll give him Orochimaru feels.

He's going to be a daddy, sometime in the next couple months, after I finish NaruKorra threads with Di related to that, soooo, he will be happy about that.

DROP LIKELIHOOD: 0/10

NEXT EP: I want to give him a moral dilemma. Naruto is interesting when faced with moral dilemmas.

TEMARI

RECENT: Still pretty much nothing. She's been doing some flirty with Shikamaru. Neither one of them has yet really made any effort to officialize their relationship, buuut it is a relationship. She met some lovely ladies at Gutters, I'll try to follow up with them. Generally, I need to tag her in places and stop giving a shit whether or not people are tired of my manga characters. I know that my ability to handle genre characters is decent enough that the canon source of a character shouldn't matter that much if I work on being an active player.

SOON: Tag all the EPs. I want to EP her but at the same time, I'm doubtful I'll get a ton of tag-ins on such an obscure character with her personality, so I should hold off maybe until I have her meet more folks.

DROP LIKELIHOOD: 7/10

NEXT EP: Nope.

ABEL NIGHTROAD

RECENT: My newest. Nobody liked his last EP, so I'll have to do something there pft. I realize he's going to be a hard sell For whatever reason, a lot of people get uncomfortable with the idea of people playing characters that are members of clergy (unless that clergy is Eastern, but we're not going to get into that here because I don't want to soapbox). I never really understand that, because clergy members are people too and there's no reason not to portray them, and portray them as human beings with faults, but I am aware it makes a lot of folks uncomfortable. Abel's met a lot of people he really likes so far though, including Rayojini, Marius and Tara. I'll make sure to follow up with them. He's been bounty hunting off and on with Faye, but never accepts any of the bounty payment. He's opening a food pantry/shelter.

SOON: I want to let him do some things less related to his more pleasant life choices. The point of Abel's character is that all people do ill at points in their lives, whether by intent or necessity, and that the goal of a person is not to be good but to become better. The character also is an excellent tool for illustrating the definition of 'sin' as 'ignorance.' Whereby, the root of all evil that we do to one another is our own ignorance, willful or otherwise. I want to have him deal with the realities of needing to consume blood in Darrow, as he had back home. Having Esther in Darrow makes things interesting for him. She holds him back emotionally from taking care of his needs as a vampire.

DROP LIKELIHOOD: 0/10

NEXT EP: He's gonna nom a vamp, because it's about time Darrow's vampires felt a little pressure from the food chain.

S O O N

BARNABY BROOKS, JR.

I love TIGER&BUNNY. To death. It's a deconstruction of the superhero genre, but not a mean-spirited one. Darrow has plenty of superhero types around and lots more possibly being apped soon, so he can always lean on making CR with those sorts of characters. He's a little like a combination of Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne, but he's a real beginner, and a lot of his ideas are theory, more than practice. Darrow will let him grow, and growth like that is great for steady character arcs. I'm also going to be playing him interpreted as gay. His sexuality is left intentionally up in the air by the writers in canon, and I both REALLY like shipping him with Wild Tiger (come on di come on just do it) and personally think that Darrow's super-folks could use a less heteronormative member in their bunch.

"Tiger & Bunny - Tik Tok" (Watch on YouTube)

Also just. TIGER&BUNNY. Go watch it gaiz. Even if you've never seen an anime before, if you like DC/Marvel comics, you'll get a kick out of it. Easily one of the most genuinely entertaining things I've ever watched. It's available free both subbed and dubbed on Hulu and is only 24 episodes long and completed.

GINKO

Mushi-shi: Zoku-sho, Mushi-shi's second season, is airing CURRENTLY, so I won't be apping Ginko until it completes after the end of the season. But I really want to play Ginko for personal reasons. I've loved the character for ages, but the recent loss of vision in my left eye has made me want to app one-eyed Ginko even more. Also, Mushi-shi is just a ridiculously opulent, artful and bittersweet series, with a distinctly Japanese pathos about it. It makes my heart ache how lovely it is. If I can communicate even 1/10th of that je ne sais quoi in my narrative for him, I will be satisfied with my descriptive writing, from a writerly perspective.

Also in consideration currently are Tres Iqus from Trinity Blood, Peregrin Took from The Lord Of The Rings, Gimel Metatronim from Burying The Shadow and Megamind from Megamind. GIMEL is almost a certainty; the others may have to wait until I decide whether or not I will go through with potential drops.

ANYBODY WANT THREADS FOR APRIL/MAY? I'm working on the former and planning the latter.

Comments

[thetidebreaks]

LOL we thread so often idek what to ask for but that we just keep tagging each other. xD I really am enjoying Rin's with Jodie though, I think they'd be an interesting pair to continue playing off each other. Also anyone else you wanted to throw at Jodie, she's always available. Also, moar Layfette with Jennifer and Riley, pls. (Riley really liked him, in her way, LOL)

I don't know much about Temari but you can always throw her at any one of mine. xD Also always up for private threads, just poke me.