RP memeage!

[adiva_calandia]

Ganked from metaphor and madbonnycaptain:

Ask my characters anything. IC, OOC, OC, fandom, random mixed_muses headvoices, past or present -- go nuts.

For reference, I play or have played:

Henry Fitzroy, Nita Callahan (specify current or future, and which future ^_^), Guinevere*, Eustace Clarence Scrubb, Charles Wallace Murry, Valerie, Tom (Re: Your Brains), Nirupam Singh, Epimetheus, Kim Merrill, Jennifer Lowell*, Ann Darrow, Russ Harris, Journey. Random m_m headvoices include Zoe Bell, the Queen of the Fairies, Prior Walter, Matt Ferrell, and Malcolm son of Duncan.


*I FOUND OUT WHY I LIKE EGWENE BEST. I mean, besides the fact that she is, in fact, awesomer than anyone else in the series except possibly Thom Merrilin (OH, HI, I HADN'T NOTICED THAT EITHER, WTF SELF WHEN DID YOU STOP PAYING ATTENTION) and Loial. e-GWAIN al-VEER. NOT SUBTLE, RJ. *giggling* No wonder I briefly considered apping her. Except that the sheer volume of convoluted canon is distressing. But did I mention that she's AWESOME?

*cough* I really need to pick up WoT again. Once I'm done with Lovecraft, maybe.

Comments

[aberration]

Why does Tom want to go back to his world, besides not having any money?

[adiva_calandia]

ICly, it's . . . an odd sense of duty. He left Detroit intending to get to New York to see if things were better there, and Milliways interrupted. He'd like to finish that trip quest kinda thing. Before everything went down, he wasn't the most impressive guy -- not the guy you'd rely on in a crisis -- and now he has a chance to prove that he can start something big and really really hard and finish it and do a good job.

Plus, he misses his world. He misses his old life, and he doesn't want to give up on the idea that things might go back the way they were. After all, accepting that your whole world has gone to hell is kinda hard. Plus, this is a guy who's never really left the Midwest -- born and raised in Michigan, went to school in Iowa, probably never got farther east than Ohio.

Finally -- he still thinks he might be crazy, and having made friends at Milliways, he'd like to not hurt anyone if he really goes nuts. Which, really, is a dumb excuse, seeing as how even at his nuttiest, he wouldn't stand a chance against the majority of the bar's population, but on the paranoid scale, Tom measures about three out of five Yossarians.

OOCly, well, I'm mean.

[ashen_key]

There...might be more questions to more people later. But. To Epimetheus:

So, Medusa. Feelings towards, and does her confession really change anything?

[adiva_calandia]

Heh. See, the thing is, I know that in the right circumstances, he would be willing to have fun with Medusa. But the timing thus far has been awkward. Back in the day, there was either Pandora or massive amounts of angst; when she confessed, well, he'd very recently had awesome sex with Coyote, and talk about awkward.

Given the right circumstance, though, yeah -- they could have something, if briefly. I'm not entirely sure what the right circumstances are, but I'm sure they exist. I suspect sometime when he's in a celebratory mood, and Medusa's not recovering from her latest trauma, and possibly with some amount of Atlantean involved.

All her confession really changes is that he fully intends to watch himself a little more carefully so that he doesn't unintentionally make it worse. Of course, this is Epimetheus, so the chances that he actually will keep himself from doing anything dumb that makes it worse are slim.

[ashen_key]

*amused* Occasionally, I do think we share a brain.

they could have something, if briefly

That I could already see happening. Given right circumstances.

[kali921.livejournal.com]

Is Tom scared of Kendra? :-)

Do you think he'll ever start to deal with his PTSD?

Will zombie killing be therapeutic for him?

Also, Charles Wallace Murry: Hard to write?

[adiva_calandia]

Just a little. *grin* On two levels -- first, and more seriously, is the fact that she's clearly much more suited to the asskicking life than he is -- she's experienced, she's talented, she's dangerous. And Tom has not spent six months running through a post-apocalyptic world honing his paranoia to a fine point just to throw that ingrained wariness away for a hot, funny, smart, caring woman, when she could clearly kill him three times before he knew he was dead.

And secondly, he doesn't want to look like an idiot in front of her, 'cause she's hot and funny and smart and caring and he likes her and Tom is basically still that guy in high school who wanted to ask the girl out to prom and got there thirty seconds after she'd agreed to go with the quarterback.

If he gets out of his world permanently, yeah, I think he'll deal with it. I don't think he'll ever be entirely over it, though, no matter what -- because unless he ever gets proof otherwise, he's always going to be a little afraid that he's insane, or was insane and might be again. I wish I could get him to freaking talk about that, because -- besides that it would be fun to write -- it might help if he knew he had people watching out for his sanity. But, well, he's afraid of people thinking he's crazy, too.

Relatedly! No, zombie killing's not very therapeutic for him. What's nagging at him right now in-bar is less that there are zombies out there and more that he left his own world (see upthread). Now, if he were brought face to face with Bob, and could shoot that singing asshole in the head, that might be therapeutic.

*hits post before this gets too long*

Don't shorten it!

[kali921.livejournal.com]

Don't shorten it, I love your Tom meta. YOUR meta I will always read.

In Kendra's mind, she wants to gently push him to eventually open up gradually and maybe talk about it just a bit. You're only as sick as your secrets, as they say in the PTSD community. She won't be obnoxious, and she knows what it's like to be sitting on tangled snarl of trauma and issues and just want to be left alone and not deal with it, dammit (God, does she know!), but she also knows that bottling it up permanently is a road to disaster. So she'll be there should he ever want to talk about it. :-)

Edit: Kendra has a lot of respect for Tom. Anyone that survives what he did and isn't a blubbering heap is worthy of some serious kudos.

Re: Don't shorten it!

[adiva_calandia]

He actually finally opened up a very little bit to Shaun, which made me happy. He might be on a track now to start talking about it more. And -- leaving aside the crush for the moment -- of the people he knows in Milliways, I think Kendra has the best chance, along with Shaun, of getting him to open up. Like you say, she knows. And judging from her reactions to things like, say, when their Christmas mistletoe thread took a nosedive into bad memories, him freaking out doesn't freak her out.

Heh. I'm not sure Tom would get that very well -- the kudos. I mean, it's 100% true; he's a hell of a lot tougher than he gives himself credit for. He just doesn't see it that way, because, well, he sucks at seeing the big picture. All he can think of it as is surviving one day, and then the next, and not breaking down because it just won't help anything. (Which is possibly bleed from me and how I deal with stressful situations. >.>)

And thanks to you quoting "you're only as sick as your secrets," I'm now surfing around this article rather than doing my homework, and facepalming vaguely that I'm doing this sort of really, really serious research and have so many Srs Bsns meta thoughts for a pup who came from a comedy song. What the hell, me. *amused*

Re: Don't shorten it!

[kali921.livejournal.com]

Kendra will have to pull the Ultimate Weapon out, the weapon that you use when people refuse to see their own intrinsic awesomeness, resilience, and wallow in low self-esteem, namely this:

Kendra: "Hey, Tom. You respect me, right? You value my opinion? My opinion is that you're the opposite of 'total loser.' My opinion is that you're pretty damned competent and together. Don't you dare insult my ability to judge people."

*gently smacks Tom on the back of the head*

PH34R her logic bomb!

And no, she doesn't get freaked out. Internally she feels a little helpless and sad that she can't help RIGHT THEN, but she also knows that the best way to deal with freakouts is to 1) remain calm, 2) reassure people that their behavior is perfectly within the range of "normal and understandable" given the sitch, and let them know that she's not weirded out by it in the least, because she's not. :-)

Also, WHOA

[kali921.livejournal.com]

Also, whoa, that thread with Shaun is good reading! *reads more*

Also redux, the crush is mutual.

[adiva_calandia]

As to Charles: Sometimes, very. It's not that his voice is hard, exactly -- I mean, I feel like I have a good idea of how his thought processes go -- it's just that he's so serious, and he tries so hard to be good. And while I love that about him, and I'm a sadomasochistic little angst-hound and like writing serious stuff . . . sometimes I just want to have fun. And Charles is pretty much the anti-crack.

[kali921.livejournal.com]

Charles is serious, yes. God, I had so much love for him and Meg as a child. I'd be too intimidated to write him, because he's so freakin' brilliant.

[blackswanevent.livejournal.com]

Valerie- If you were voting in the 2008 election, who would you vote for and what's your stance on certain...*cough* issues?

Zoe- Favorite animal? :D

[evryinchbut1.livejournal.com]

In the American election, you mean? I'm not sure. I didn't pay much attention to the global political world back then -- I was twenty-three, and still putting myself through university, and it simply didn't seem so important.

Now, though . . . *rueful smile* They say hindsight's 20/20, don't they. In any case, if I'd been voting over there, I'd have chosen whoever I thought had the best chance of ending the war in the Middle East, and bringing some sliver of peace there. That's what gave the Norsefire party the opportunity to gain so much power, you see. The war kept escalating, and oil prices were simply sky-high, and people were frightened. And with the sort of precedent America had set for detaining undesirables in so-called "wartime" . . .

I suppose at the time, though, I would have voted for whoever sounded like they had the best chance of defeating that ridiculous marriage amendment. But I'm not sure that's any of them right now, is it?

[mm-adiva.livejournal.com]

I love cats -- big cats -- which of course Abernathy and Kim think is hilarious. For pets, though, dogs. You can't go running with a cat.