5, 9, 31?

5: hmmm, that's damn near impossible for me to answer ... i'm not sure i'm ever satisfied enough to be proud of any of mine. i always think i could do better. either be more faithful, or more creative, in the case of characters from a source text; or more compelling, more interesting, more memorable, in the case of an OC.

i'm constantly dissatisfied with my performance, and my ability to really do the things that stick in anyone's memory always feels lacking compared to most of my peers. i'm not sure i've ever managed to play any character i'm proud of how i played them, much less the most proud of; i always end up accumulating too many regrets.

i guess the closest i've ever come to that is, like, the window of time i was playing gazelle, from air gear. there was a lot i still feel like i could've done more of or managed a more ... i dunno, something with her, but she's maybe the only one i've ever played where i look back on playing her and think, i did it right, and i liked it.

which is ironic, given gazelle is the one character anyone ever tried to start shit directly with me over how fucking upset they were with how i played her, rather than scurrying off to w*nkgate to cry into an edgelord salad about it, so you'd think i'd remember her less fondly.

9. every character i've ever played gets fucking crushingly impossible to write for a while after a certain point because see previous answer. i eventually just get so upset at feeling like i've written myself into a corner where i don't know what the fuck to fix it starts feeling like i'm eating cardboard just to shit out a sentence.

but i think ... as much as i love playing her, akito from fire candy takes this one, hands down. it's so hard for me to maintain that ... hmmm, specific kind of character that she is. she's just barely at the edge of what i consider my "wheelhouse" of types, just enough that i always find her rejuvenating to play, but ...

just barely enough that the self-consciousness and fear of either going "too far" or "not far enough" with her gunks up my ability to trust i can execute on her voice at all like no other character i've ever played.

31. you just want me to talk about the sword of heaven again don't you i'm onto your tricks

i love the sword of heaven, though, so i very well might still do that in a bit.

idk if my ffxiv and warframe ocs count for this but if they do i can always talk about checheyigen or ibera, sure. hmmmm. i used to play a shitton of OCs and then i started channeling most of that energy into trying to publish the ideas i wanted to use them for instead, and this is a meme about characters i'd play ...

oh right i do have caoimhe, angry foxgirl druid, and "arellys" (not her real name, but i've misplaced her character sheet and can never remember the full one because it's fucking long), drow-ling hexblade sworn to an old form of death itself, from tabletop campaigns that have sadly sputtered to an end. and also drum, a ratel shifter cleric of the grave.

checheyigen's a weird old warrior of light, to say the least, but if you know what most WoLs are like she's not too different from that, i suppose. she was born to and raised by a malaguld, and she follows the malaguld habit of letting other people from other "tribes" hang themselves with their own ropes if they must, while never refusing an entreaty of aid

if offered to her.

14, 16, 27

for most of her life she neither cared to nor needed to learn her letters, as the xaela never gave a shit about what their "civilized" neighbors got on with so long as they didn't bother the xaela about it, after all, and the malagulds were no different in that respect.

which is deeply funny considering that while she multiclasses into several disciplines, she's primarily comfiest as a black mage and literally every other black mage she knows learns their spells from books while checheyigen spent most of her time learning the craft picking shit up from context and guessing.

she just looked at most of the warnings about the black arts of destruction and more or less literally said "that sign can't stop me because i can't read." which, honestly, given the whole reasons she ended up being hailed as the warrior of light, is maybe not as surprising as it sounds, per se ...

checheyigen manifested a partial symbol in front of her face in faint, pale coloring, a shape that she had to have described to her once she was old enough to take the formal rites of adulthood and claim the honor of a malaguld as her own, but a shape that she'd eventually recognize as being quite similar to an ascian's mark.

she manifested this when she was about five years old, and in the process reflexively panicked and cast Fire and blew up a storage yurt. she had a bit of a rep as "probably an avatar of destruction" for all of her childhood, as a result, which meant she worked twice as hard to prove she was a worthy daughter of the malaguld for all of her childhood, as well.

what tribes traded regularly with the malaguld also passed on the gossip about checheyigen because xaela tribes love nothing more than being given excuses to talk shit about other xaela tribe members and other xaela tribes, and understandably so.

so as a result a bunch of xaela only know of, or knew of, checheyigen by name as "she will certainly bring a great notoriety to the name of malaguld, for her capacity for destruction is a kind more commonly seen in undisciplined dotharl children, though whether it will be the good kind or the bad remains to be seen."

i didn't mean to ask for more about sword of heaven, but i certainly wouldn't say no 8D

anyway this occasionally means xaela elders get to act smugly knowing at checheyigen now whenever she has occasion to return to the steppe because haha she's the first malaguld in roughly a century's span to actually fucking win the naadam and stand as khagan over all xaela tribes, to say nothing of the means by which she entered it to begin with.

checheyigen sounds really interesting though!

malaguld do not, as a rule, generally enter the naadam to win. they enter because it would be dishonorable to participate, but few malaguld believe the honor is anything more than a burden, by their code of morals. ironically, those malaguld that have won the honor inevitably prove aggressively fair hands in the role, and thus remembered with deep respect.

*dishonorable not to participate

checheyigen has done nothing in her stewardship of the steppe as naadam, including the part where she cedes the immediate concerns of the steppe to cirina of the mol in her stead when her calling inevitably demands she stand in absence, to change the rep of her tribe's service in the role, which she has to concede is better than the alternative on her part.

*as khagan

that said she's done a lot of psychological shifting in the years since she left the steppe on a journey of discovery to find out what the weird dream she had meant and if the weird mask she could manifest was connected to it.

not least of which because as of shadowbringers she knows the answer to both those questions, and actually grasped the ability to call the mark up at will, as a result of [spoiler thing].

anyway enough about that let's talk about her social life, which is deeply embarrassing, because checheyigen is an absolute bumblefuck of an idiot lesbian.

SO, BRIEF DIGRESSION INTO MALAGULD TRIBAL WORLDBUILDING DETAILS: malaguld women, if they choose to give respect to tradition or necessity and follow the traditional ways, are only ever expected to marry one husband in their life, to be the sire of their children and thus ensure the continued strength of the tribe, and do by custom

remain faithful to that man in the matter of husbandry till they die, but by tradition are neither prevented from claiming other men or women as their spouse for life in all other respects nor limited to sharing their bed with only one such partner.

thankfully malaguld matriarchs tend to have lots of children, both because children are expected to die very young and fairly often on the steppe and often specifically to relieve the responsibility of their surviving children to the tribe in these regards. DIGRESSION OVER.

her mother, matriarch of her household, is the sort of woman you might tactfully describe as "violently pragmatic", as you might expect from a woman who has raised at least eight children, counting checheyigen.

which is why, upon managing to get checheyigen to admit she was never going to be the traditionally marrying sort by these standards, contacted a doman friend (and former partner, so that sort of "doman friend") of hers, an expat raen working in a massage parlor

and paid her what such a kindness on her behalf would be worth to ensure that even if she could do nothing about checheyigen's ignorance of how to talk to girls (because checheyigen's mother is nothing if not pragmatic), checheyigen at least wouldn't be able to disgrace the malaguld name in bed with one.

which was necessary in her mind, because she knew that checheyigen was eventually going to make a damnfool of herself with that asako girl from the raen family the malagulds had taken into their care with the way she kept mooning after her.

meanwhile checheyigen, a moron, did not have a clue that asako was crushing equally hard on herself and was resigned to being happy to be good friends forever with her.

checheyigen, please,

her mom sounds like a smart woman

this is important to emphasize, because checheyigen's extremely thick auri skull did not even comprehend the feelings might be mutual even after asako chased her all the way across the fucking continent and showed up to beg checheyigen take her into her service as a retainer so she could help with checheyigen's adventuring duties in eorzea.

checheyigen then proceeded to get flirted with by damn near every eligible and adventurous woman in eorzea she ran into, and didn't grasp that she had any reason to like, refuse the offers, and

anyway the other scions have a betting pool going on the side that everyone is absolutely sworn to secrecy about mentioning in either checheyigen, y'shtola, or yugiri's presence on fear of death, as to whether checheyigen is going to make an honest woman of her retainer or if her retainer is going to murder her out of sheer sexual frustration.

as in which will happen first

urianger won the betting pool after shadowbringers by betting the former was going to happen first from the very start, because almost as soon as checheyigen set foot back on the source without any immediate responsibilities to anyone in either norvrandt, eorzea, doma, or anywhere else, she told asako she wanted to meet her at the rising stones

and when asako showed up half furious with worry over everything she was hearing via hearsay from the other scions, and strode up to give her a piece of her mind, checheyigen just up and kissed her finally and the entire room erupted loud enough a couple longtimers in revenant's toll came running in to see what fresh hell'd broken loose this time

urianger has not stopped being infuriatingly smug about it all in weeks.

i could keep going but i was asked another set of questions some time ago and i need to stop and move on to those at some point.

ivoryandhorn: checheyigen's mother is mercilessly perceptive, a trait which she has been known to bemoan, infuriatingly often, in checheyigen's presence, her most accomplished of daughters nevertheless decidedly failed to inherit from her

14. i'm not sure i have an answer to this, or at least not ... a "fandom", per se; every source material i've ever drawn on, my own imagination included, has its unique strengths and unique drawbacks, in ways where i enjoy different things from them immensely and get annoyed by other aspects equally so.

but i think the character whose world i most enjoy playing from is the sword of heaven's, largely because it's a setting i made specifically to both be potentially open to other people playing from if any of the other characters connected to her drew their interest while also being a setting full of things i full-stop derive nothing but enjoyment from.

it's a world shaped and constrained by omnipotent/omnipresent forms of roiling narrative magic, where the knowledge of narrative patterns can literally be power and the concept of consensus reality is a literal metaphysical law of how the universe functions, but also most people on a ground level in most places won't ever be affected by these things.

and this is because there are great and terrible Powers that are capable of forcing a "setting", for lack of a better word, on the zones of the world that they can gain and maintain influence over, and for most of these Powers it's very useful to maintain the consensus that nothing's really fundamentally changed for most of the populace.

because that makes it far easier to make their personal interests the overriding flavor of how life is lived within their zones of influence quietly, over long stretches of generational time, entrenching themselves further and further as an immutable fact of life within the minds of the populace, further strengthening themselves as a result.

and that's a very wide-angle view of it all, which maybe misrepresents it on a basic day to day level even for people on the sword of heaven's level, i.e. Empowered Aspects serving a given Power as a way of relegating some of a given Power's personal definitions onto someone else to make it more present to the people and thus more powerful

and also less demanding on the Power they serve, by removing the Power's need to focus on maintaining its definition themselves.

they mostly lead actual lives, as people - the sword ofc having a wife she loves very much, and many, uh, girls, some of whom she thinks of as "daughters" in a weird way - but they're also something both more and less than that.

(the sword also infamously constantly annoying mages by swanning into their universities and both being impossible to ignore given her position and wealth of firsthand experience with the forces mages dedicate themselves to studying and utterly inattentive to matters of propriety or tradition in the process of making herself "useful" to them.)

the sword is great

one of the things that occasionally annoys the sword about sidereal is that she can't just go anywhere without having to travel there via normal means or by stretching herself to get there

because one of the pieces of folk wisdom the High Court established when they helped their Dark Lady take the Power away from the imperial monstrosity that had it before then was the kind of thing designed to spread like a kind of soothing threat, you know, like what we call urban legends now, except there aren't very many cities at their cultural epoch, so.

if you call on the High Court by name, they will come.

without hesitation, without obstacle, your plea will be heard, and it will be judged.

which essentially provided them the benefit of being able to go literally anywhere provided it was under the Lady's influence, but also obligates them to a duty of consideration and care, towards anyone that calls them by name.

which is occasionally immensely annoying because the sword may be a polite and considerate sociopath who genuinely prefers keeping the people under her protection healthy and happy and unbothered by the shit that she's rated to deal with but the sword is still a fucking sociopath who gets tired of trying to understand other people all the time.

she has a very small orbit of people whose opinions she actually gives a shit about and thank god for that because if the rest of the High Court weren't basically the world's most sympathetic group of villains ever assembled it would be going a lot worse for everyone not them and also the sword would not give a shit about things like basic ethical principles

which are things she kind of only learned to care about because the handful of people she cared about cared about them

and now she's literally bound to observe that sort of thing, as part of the ascension process that made the sorcerer she was obsessively devoted into the Dark Lady and all of them into her High Court. when it comes to serving her literal purpose as an Aspect and therefore being alive, at all, she literally can't not act according to such principles.

also while the High Court are very into simple, purposeful names for themselves, as a way of defining the nature of what they do as extremely straightforward applications of fundamental principles and narrative archetypes, and operate accordingly. that is not true for every Power, which is a good illustration of how that sort of thing differs

there's the sword's favorite ideological pincushion and the Lady's nearest rival Power, His Eyes Were a Thousand Pricks of Starlight Burning Deep in the Wine-Dark Sea of Night, for example, whose Aspects take names like the Grief of Masks, Unquenched and exist in such opposition to how the Court works

that touching places that fall under their influence literally feels like slowly being poisoned does, to the Court

the sword hates them and thinks they're stupid and that they suck.

27. the nicest compliment i've ever received, huh ... when i reconnect with someone after we haven't spoken in a long time, and they tell me they missed me, and missed being able to talk to me, and wondered how i was doing - i don't think any other compliment feels as nice to receive as that does, for me. i often feel like a drag on other people's good time

and at this point i kind of feel like caring as much as i do about the things i chose to care about makes that position inevitable for me to fall into for most of the people that pay attention to me at all, so ... hearing that they wanted, and want, me around, is kind of the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me.

so yeah.

unfortunately while this successfully unfucked my brain it also accidentally exhausted all my writing energy and now i have none mojo with left tags

apparently i skipped answering #16.

16. i ... like ... coercion play, in fiction. it's a deeply guilty pleasure of mine, especially because one time i got a little ahead of myself in playing it out with someone and crossed their boundaries in a way that like, at the time we both thought they were okay with but then after having done it they realized they were in fact deeply not.

and, y'know, that ruined that friendship, and that rp relationship, entirely.

oof

and ever since then i've never really been able to do that again without being in a position of such absolute certainty that both myself and the other player know where our limits must be that it's practically impossible to like. actually ask or earn from just about anybody, especially because i'm like.

instantly jittery about even bringing it up one on one, because it makes me feel like a predatory creep, because that's how i feel like i deserve to feel about it, after upsetting that person so badly.

but unfortunately it is both something i know, intimately, that i enjoy playing out, on either side of the scenario.

so it's something that genuinely fits the phrase "guilty pleasure", because it is something that would bring me pleasure to play out, but it is something i simultaneously feel such intense guilt over that it's easier not to acknowledge liking it on my part at all, most of the time, because ... i never want to make people i rp with feel that way.

That's a little more on the guilt side than I anticipated, sorry.

fundamentally if either part of an rp scene in any context feels scared or threatened in a way they don't want to be that's on the other party to take responsibility for, and i've never really forgiven myself for having done it, that time. i could say "it wasn't that bad" because this all maybe sounds like i'm euphemizing around it dangerously in a bad way

but even so that's no real excuse imo.

indulging in those desires to the point that someone who trusted me to handle them with respect looked back on the scenario and instead decided they should be afraid of me for it is wholly and forever on me, and i so intensely never want to make anyone feel like that again i'd rather break my own head in grief than risk it, and that's the honest truth.

sorry if that's A Bit Much lol

it's just, i don't ... really believe in the commonplace usage of "guilty pleasure" to begin with. if it brings you joy, unless it actively hurts someone, you shouldn't feel embarrassed or ashamed of it in any way. you should love that you have that joy in your life.

and i act accordingly. so the only times i ever feel guilt about liking the things i like is, well ... if i realize i've hurt someone, and badly, with them. with or without meaning to.