remindmeofthe | (no subject)

Crossposts: http://remindmeofthe.livejournal.com/486230.html

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I'm pretty sure it's been a couple years since I've done this one, so:

Pick a character* I've written and I will give and explain the top five** ideas/concepts/etc I keep in mind while writing that character that I believe are essential to accurately depicting them.

* Try to make it someone I've written either often (including characters I RP'ed) or recently in order for me to answer.
** May not actually be five.

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ahahaha hmm. jim or cal, jim or cal, jim or cal?

no wait BELLA.

Ooh, surprise left-field choice! Ha, I thought this would be hard, but once I started it just all spilled out at once.

1. It is not possible for me to go into too much detail. Often when I'm writing a longer tag, I'll wonder if I'm just cramming too much stuff in, observing too much, if my character would really be thinking/noticing/giving a fuck about that, and so I stop myself and try to focus. With Bella, I can leave all that shit in and should keep right on going until I run out, and then I probably still missed things. It's exhausting and freeing at the same time.

2. Stuff needs to make sense. If it doesn't make sense, Bella will either pick it apart, look for new information, or just lose interest.

3. Bella would rather be herself than be polite. If that means dropping a conversation in the middle because she needs to think about it, or digging into something that's none of her damn business, then so be it.

4. Bella needs to know all the things. Because she's forever curious, and because she wants to be sure she's making informed decisions.

5. Bella always needs to know who she is. It's always worth the time and effort. Always.

Jim and I loved that last thread.

guess who I suddenly miss very much <3 <3 <3

:D I won't have time to do this tonight, but I did want to say that I'm still trying to come up with a tag. For some reason, Jim is much harder to play when he's decided to be civil.

Yeaaah, me too. XD

that icon omg <3

Heh, no worries, sometimes tags are tricky. I found some of Charles' quite a challenge.

the undignified snorting noise i made when i read this

you don't even know

PS: Cal

So here is Jim!

1. Everything Jim does - everything - is to avoid boredom. Boredom is Jim's greatest fear, probably his only fear. When it gets bad enough, as it does on a regular basis, he spirals down until he's trapped in his own head and it can take days for him to escape. So, everything he does is in the service of putting off that next fit of boredom just a little longer. Sometimes this means playing the long game and enduring the minutiae for the sake of the payoff. Sometimes it means putting himself in an insanely dangerous situation. He's desperate for intellectual stimulation, for anything that can keep his mind occupied and quiet. He has no other goal in life. All he wants is not to be bored.

2. Jim is an asshole. Obvious, I know, but important. Balancing that with my own desire to avoid awkward threads or OOC issues can be interesting, and it has a lot to do with why I tend not to publicly EP him much. It's easier on me if I have some control over who he interacts with.

3. Jim is a sociopath. Not necessarily synonymous with item two! While Jim has an excellent understanding of how people work and how to manipulate them, he does not experience empathy. On the rare occasion that he genuinely likes someone, it isn't because of who they are, it's because there is something unique about them that he can use to keep boredom at bay. There can be sort-of-exceptions to this - I've found he's not entirely incapable of bonding with people, in his own fucked-up way - but as a rule Jim sees people not as people, but as tools. And most of them are too boring to bother with.

4. Jim is capable of tremendous patience and restraint. Just because he doesn't always choose to use them doesn't mean they aren't there. After all, he runs an international criminal network and is canonically shown to not break under torture. A person has to have some deep (and perhaps a bit terrifying) resources to be able to do those things.

A subset of this is that Jim is sensible. Just because he wants to break something doesn't mean he's going to, not if the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. Jim does not want to set the world on fire just to watch it burn, because if he burns the world down, what will be left to keep him entertained?

(I may have a lot of feelings about this as a result of some really frustrating trends in fanfic characterizations. ARGH.)

5. Jim is smarter than I am and he knows what he's fucking doing, so I should just shut up and let him do it. This one was hardest to accept, because it goes against so much of what I've learned to do as an RPer. You know how sometimes you'll realize your character is being OOC because you're writing something wrong and it needs fixing, or how you sometimes have to stop and think to make sure your OOC knowledge isn't influencing their actions? Yeah, throw that shit out the window with Jim. If I think he's being OOC, then chances are he's doing something he hasn't bothered to tell me about and I'm just going to have to wait to see where it's going. And as for OOC knowledge, nine times out of ten he can figure it out on his own anyway. The tenth time, he just steals it right out of my brain. "Because it's Jim, that's why" is sometimes the best explanation I have to give when I'm talking to other RPers. The normal rules of RPing just flat-out do not apply.

I completely understand how 5 can get since I get it sometimes with Charles for other reasons. I love your Jim.

The Devil!

Paul Smecker (blast from the past)

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