Meet Bal, short for Balsam, he’s my HorrorFell Sans.
Do not be fooled by his resting bitch face, he’s just a very tired boi who has social anxiety.
He’s a big softy I assure you. He’s very introverted and needs time to get to know people 🫶
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all the rise boys get done dirty on characterization by fandom in different ways i think. (not ALL the time every fanwork etc etc these are just like, trends i tend to notice?) every fandom suffers from losing character nuance.
- leo i’ve talked about plenty on this blog, how some of his canon traits (genuine belief in his skill and cockiness, capacity for joy, his manipulativeness whether for good or ill) seem to get watered down or wiped off the board and supplemented with generic sad boy. his struggles with purpose and identity and not wanting to fail somehow morph into “he hates and completely holds no value for himself”
- donnie’s canon personality gets blurred out and largely replaced with whatever list of Neurodivergent Traits. and i think there’s such a fine line to walk between exploring a character that’s been word of god confirmed as on the spectrum and overwriting what’s canonically there. it’s a hard needle to thread. it also feels like a lot of his canon emotiveness gets left off the table for some reason. bc he does have his moments of flat/deadpan delivery, but a lot of the time he’s honestly very emotive. he has the passion of a theatre kid and the vindictiveness of... also a theatre kid. and the mind of a scientist.
- raph loses so much of his rowdy teen boy energy it’s kind of wild? like interpretations sand off that he’s also impulsive and can be reckless and dumb and LOVES fighting and roughhousing and isn’t the most eloquent person. suddenly there’s this pitch perfect soft boy big bro who would never hurt a fly and always says the exact right supportive thing and singlehandedly raised his 3 brothers (which simultaneously sands off all the nuance of splinter’s issues emotionally connecting with his sons and how that affected all of them). and like i LOVE raph, he’s so full of love and care and anxiety, he clearly has learned to put a lot of work into being aware of his strength and size. but there’s a difference you know?
- mikey is like. where raph gets overparentified by fanon, mikey gets over “family therapist”-ed IMO. the impulsiveness, the goofiness, the powerful emotions including a VERY powerful temper, the flat-out dumb teen boy choices... they get ignored. suddenly there’s this only very sweet and earnest boy who has read a hundred psychology books and runs group family therapy weekly or something. he is crying in his room bc leo and raph are arguing about something. which is so. he IS very sweet and can be very earnest and is full of love! he HAS come in with his opinions and unsolicited advice a couple of times and life coached for the greater good. but there’s a difference between what he does in canon and the role he gets in fanon.
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man laios and toshiro's/shuro's dynamic is incredibly compelling to me on multiple levels
when you look at them, you can see the cultural and personal barriers that drive almost every single aspect of their relationship, both positively and negatively. laios is incredibly outspoken and driven by his passions, which he expresses freely even in the face of annoyance and/or criticism- he's allowed to be as authentically himself as he pleases, and it's this drive that allows him and the others to survive as long as they have, especially due to the fact that these passions and interests are intertwined with his skills as a dungeon diver. toshiro, in contrast, is incredibly reserved, not only due to his eastern upbringing but also his status as nobility- a combo of cultures that both demand that one save face, to avoid conflict at any cost, even at the expense of one's own feelings and individuality. this, in turn, has made toshiro the perfect samurai, as he's politely-spoken, agreeable, and an honorable, skilled man. both are also incredibly devoted to falin on different levels, having come to accomplish the same mission of her rescue despite drifting apart from the party.
on the flipside, it's these same strengths that cause them to clash- laios is outspoken but unable to truly decipher the emotions of others, leading to a lot of false assumptions and frustration from those who interact with him. toshiro is stoic but to the point of complacency, leading to a aggressively neutral disposition that's ushered by the needs and wants of others, rather than himself. neither man truly knows where they stand with the people important to them in their lives, and hold the ones that they do know how they feel with a fierce admiration expressed in ways that aren't always traditional.
in the end, they both share a growing feeling of isolation from other people that comes to a head when they meet again in the depths of the dungeon, and they both have different ways of coping with the frustrations that arise, seeing the other as only the things they have seen face to face.
it's laios' ability to express himself emotionally without consequence that sparks jealousy in toshiro, leading to a physical fight born out of miscommunication and envy. while toshiro is a driving force in the conflict, it should be noted that the actual fight is started by laios, breaking the dam of indirect communication through force. nothing is more direct than a slap to the face, and it's only after they start hitting each other that toshiro's true feelings come to light.
however, at the end of it all, toshiro is the one who stops torturing himself, listening to laios and giving him the bell, allowing laios and his party entrance into his homeland should they need it, and ultimately giving him support in his mission to defeat the dungeon mage, albeit in his own way. despite it all, they're still good friends with a conflict that boiled over, but came out the other end with a slightly better understanding of each other. the fight was painful for both of them, but it was a necessity for their dynamic to improve, and for them to be made aware of their faults and improve as individuals as well.
but also, if you think about it, their dynamic is literally just this
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