#but i headcanon she speaks at least one slavic language
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SOME MORE RAZ THOUGHTS. (Based on my headcanons so don't @ me about things not being confirmed in canon, this is partially about him as an adult anyway so nyeh)
Raz is a perpetual immigrant.
Like, this boy never had a passport, he probably never even had a birth certificate. He's a kid born to a family of "Circus freaks" (a phrase thrown at them that they've adopted with pride, if only to keep the kids from letting it get them down).
Raz's Campster profile set his origin as Lithuania, which was likely just 'where he was born', probably not terribly far from what's left of Grulovia. (I headcanon that Grulovia is little more than a puddle now, but what remained of the land was absorbed by neighboring countries).
Grulovian immigrants scattered after Vallermo, and no-one really wanted to talk about it. It's 'the old country' and 'the dead country'.
After Psychonauts 2, Raz ESPECIALLY doesn't want to talk about it. Not only was his family refugees from Grulovia-- his Nona was the cause of it. (And sure, she's his great-aunt, not actually his grandmother, but that won't make him stop calling her his Nona. Nothing has changed, except that thinking about the home country hurts a little, now. For different reasons.)
Raz was always a wanderer. It comes with the circus background. He travels light, carries just the essentials. A house isn't a home, but it is a place to put stuff for storage, he supposes.
He's spoken English most of his life. Nobody notices the accent unless he's talking about his Nona winning at Gruloky, or how she makes a true Grulovian Herring Bread better than anyone he's ever seen. (nobody he talks to has heard of that, but he swears it's traditional.)
But every now and then, when he goes on missions, his partners hear interesting things.
A language that Lithuanians think is Latvian, Lavtians think is Lithuanian. Raz always claims to be from one or the other when identified as non-American. Otherwise, as far as they're concerned, Raz is just a local from a little hamlet they haven't heard of.
He speaks German in the office with Sasha and Otto. On one memorable occasion he spoke fluent Russian for a mission, and shrugged it off saying it was 'safest that way'. He claimed to be second-generation Russian with family from a nearby country, because he could tell they saw 'foreigner' but wanted to make sure he wasn't seen as 'too foreign'.
He knows a smattering of a bunch of other slavic languages, using several at a time for one sentence, simply because he learned the words but didn't stay in any one place long enough for a whole language to stick, so they got jumbled together.
"How did your Dialect get so strange?"
He spins tall tales that have nothing to do with the truth, of a parent who had a dozen mistresses or a funny anecdote about a language guidebook that had multiple languages without saying which translations went to which language. Anything but the truth.
It's not that he's ashamed of his family, far from it! He loves them, he's proud of them.
But there's nothing quite like admitting to someone that your Nona is a war criminal, or that you come from a family of 'circus freaks' and traveled a lot. He's seen how people treat immigrants. As far as they're concerned, he's a tourist. He's a local. He's from the neighboring region visiting family. he's second-generation.
But when he's at home, in the circus or in Psychonauts HQ, he's Raz. He doesn't have to figure out what accent to put on, or what he has to say to stay safe. He's just a kid (A twenty-something, but a kid nonetheless).
At least the Psychonauts gave him a passport.
#psychonauts#psychonauts 2#Razputin Aquato#I just feel like we don't think about how much of a traveler Raz has always been#So I wanted to have some thoughts about it#He's learned some of the languages for spy work#but sometimes he just kinda picked them up from travel
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The sillies…
Anyways. Decided to start working on body headcanons! I’m adding soldier in the first one too (this is supposed to be a photo for Krogan’s file! Krogan doesn’t know what a camera is and the flash spooked him lol)
And I figured I could throw in my 3k word document on Lycanwings for more context as to what exactly Krogan’s other majority is :
I will also add a few other silly headcanons for the au.
I put Demo as roughly 41-42 in this au, which works out great because Krogan is 23. The cover story for Krogan’s appearance is that he’s Tavish’s son that was born out of wedlock and Demo never really knew about until very recently (mostly since they have some similar features so it is somewhat believable.)
Krogan has a quite odd accent to the other mercs, he rolls his J’s to where they make more of a jshh sound instead of your typical j, as well as having some off amalgamation of a Russian/Slavic and a mix of a few other accents that is quite unfamiliar to anything else (since he fluently speaks and was around people that spoke Norse in his old world.)
He does also speak some ancientt offshoot anscestor language to modern Russian. He understands the vowels and punctuation and wording of modern Russian, but not quite what is being said per se (it would be easy for him to learn though.).
I might do a Christmas peice though soon… Krogan has never seen a Christmas tree and the mercs have a nice big tree in the main room of the base >:]. Krogan was also a sort of gift, is what Demo calls him. Krogan showed up on exactly October 31st? Which is also Krogan’s birthday. They didn’t know that then of course, but they make up for it next year. (This also means Krogan is freshly a 23 year old when he arrives.) He is technically a Norse pagan and celebrates Norse pagan holidays, which Swissmas is considered Yule/snoggletog where he’s from, though he’s never actually celebrated. He didn’t really have anyone to celebrate with.
He thinks he’s not the best at giving gifts, but Krogan whittled each of the mercs a little wooden figurine the first year. Soldier got one of an eagle, made out of American pine (as the founding fathers would have wanted), Tavish got a little frog, since Demoks bomb jumping reminds Krogan of frogs. Medic gets one of archemedes, made from a small chunk of birch. I’m indecisive with Heavy, might have his figurine be one of his mother since she’s so significant to him.
But yes. Other thoughts. Since Krogan is still arguably quite young by even partial lycanwing standards, over time he will slowly get more scales on his body, like on his arms and legs. They don’t really need care, but he does polish them because it makes him feel pretty.
Tavish and Jane are the only who get to actually see him without shoes or without his feet being bound. Except spy. Spy is spy and he sees and knows everything. (Krogan doesn’t care because it’s just spy being nosy as per usual.)
It is a whole note in his file that Krogan is seriously… traumatized and suffers from PTSD and severe night terrors. He doesn’t tell anyone what they are about, and the few times he has tried, his descriptions to Demo are usually jumbles of sound and colors and smells that are all in your face with the feeling of dread and terror that this one singular figure gives him.
Demo found out that a better way for Krogan to express his fears and dreams is through art, though what he’s seen through the dark, heavy shadowed drawings of a man wearing a black dragon skin cloak and wielding a bull hook is that the individual in the man’s past that ripped him away from something at some point. There is a sort of dread that lingers from the way Krogan draws him. Stark shadows where the only thing you can see of the man’s face is a set of beady eyes that seem to search his soul for every single infraction that he’s ever made.
Tavish hopes he does not ever have to meet that man. For Krogan’s sake, at least.
(Backstory. The man is the one who owns and branded Krogan. The branding itself is a completely disgusting thing to the team.)
Soldier though. Soldier still sees the men, women and children marked with numbers in The Camps whenever he sees the brand. It is not a good feeling, anything other than pure rage that makes him want to find the man and take him down himself. No one should be dehumanized to anything but property. Not on his watch.
Anyways. Rambling over. Thoughts are going brain blast rn!!
#httyd#krogan#httyd rtte#krogan rtte#krogan httyd#rtte#httyd fanart#httyd fandom#httyd au#fanart#httyd Krogan#Maea’s tf2 au#rtte krogan#tf2 demoman#Demoman tf2#tavish degroot#yippe#the sillies#tf2 au
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Do we know where Maria is from,exactly? I have the feeling she's from Europe or some shit
She is European. In supplementary materials, it’s stated that she was born in Yugoslavia.
#the country has since broken up but apparently it still exists in the symphoverse#i don't know which of the new nations she'd be from nowadays#but i headcanon she speaks at least one slavic language#Anonymous#dltext
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uh. tua language headcanons i guess.
so since in season two allison said that she spoke seven languages, i figured that applied to everyone, so they speak their native language - the language from where they came from - and one language from each continent excluding antarctica, of course. (for all the eurasia supremacists out there, we're going with europe and asia as separate continents, because that makes it easier). we're not counting english.
i can't guarantee any information is completely accurate, since i did a cursory google search/wikipedia skim and nothing else. please inform me if i'm being offensive in any way!
the name 'luther' has germanic origins, so luther knows german, because it's his language of origin; dutch, because it's a west germanic language like german; kirundi, because that's spoken in burundi, where germany established colonies; tok pisin, because that's spoken in papua new guinea, where germany had colonies; spanish, because argentina and germany have history; the luthigh language from australia, and honestly i just chose this because it started with lu; and finally, lakota, spoken by native americans who lived on the great plains, because it has so many ties to dakota, which diego speaks, that it might as well be the same language, like the differences between british and american english, and this illustrates that diego and luther are more alike than either of them would like to acknowledge
the name 'diego' is, of course, spanish, and since david castaneda is mexican, i decided diego - or, at least, his mother - was too. therefore, he knows mexican spanish, his language of origin; portugese, the second most-spoken language in south america; dakota, because of the reasons mentioned in luther's lakota section; italian, because apparently mexico has an alliance with them; filipino, because before mexico's independence the philippines were governed by them; afrikaans, spoken in south africa, because they have an alliance; and finally, the diyari language from australia, because it started with di
the name 'allison' has its roots in old french*, so the queen herself knows french as her language of origin; german, because in an ironic twist, france and germany are close allies; wolof because that's widely spoken in senegal, which was once a colony of france; algonquin because the french allied with them in the french and indian war; kali'na because the kali'na people are native to french guiana, an overseas department/region and single territorial collectivity of france; khmer, because the french ruled over cambodia for almost a century; and finally, the alawa language from australia, because it started with al
the name 'klaus' is german, so klaus and luther probably took german classes together, since it's their language of origin**. so klaus speaks german; scots, because it's a west germanic language like german; kinyarwanda, because rwanda was part of german east africa for a while; japanese, because germany and japan obviously have history and klaus strikes me as a weeb; kahlihna, a native language of venezuela, which was a german colony for a while; klallam, a north american language chosen because it starts with kl; and finally, the kija language of australia, because it started with k
obviously five is just a number, but a lot of people think the polish woman in the pilot script was meant to be five's mother. so five speaks polish, since it's his language of origin; french, because poles supported napoleon and poland and france were allies during the interwar period, and also because i'm a five + allison frendship supremacist and wanted them to learn it and take classes together; hindi, because wikipedia said relations between poland and india 'have generally been friendly, characterised by understanding and cooperation on an international front'; swahili, because tanzania and poland are allies; cree, spoken in canada, because canada and poland have quite the history; quechua, spoken in peru, because poland and peru are allies; and finally, the ami language of australia, because it starts with a and i couldn't find a not-extinct language that started with f
the name 'ben' is hebrew, so ben speaks hebrew as his language of origin; korean, because that's justin min's ethnicity and if they make ben anything else i'm going to lose it; danish, because israel and denmark have friendly relations; oromo, because ethiopia and israel have close ties; portugese, because brazil and israel are close and once again ben and diego would take classes together; spanish, because mexico and israel had a good relationship, and ben, diego, and luther would all share a class; and finally, the bunuba language of australia, because it started with b
we saw in the pilot that vanya's mom came from russia, and of course the name 'vanya' is slavic, so she speaks russian as her language of origin; mongolian, because mongolia and russia are friends, apparently; arabic, because sudan and russia have close ties; portugese, because brazil and russia have improving relations and i would like you to imagine the chaos of a class involving diego, ben, and vanya; finnish, because finland and russia are friendly; unangam tunuu, because alaska was once russian territory; and finally, the pintupi language of australia, because there were none that started with v
*i wasn't sure if allison was scottish or french, since google had mixed opinions, but i settled the matter by reading this site's page on the name. i don't think they made this history up, but if anyone wants to fact check me/the site, then feel free to!
**so, luther and klaus might actually be the twins here. who would've guessed?
#please reblog this i spent so much time on it#also there's no read more because when i did put it it deleted almost half of my post and i had to redo it#tua#tua hc#luther hargreeves#diego hargreeves#allison hargreeves#klaus hargreeves#five hargreeves#number five#ben hargreeves#vanya hargreeves
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Is Nicky the only one headcanoned by people as bad with languages or are Nile and Booker seen the same way too (Andy is of course excluded from that due to her age and Joe is universally depicted as skilled with languages) ? I would expect Nile to be seen as bad with languages due to the American education system but it doesn’t seem to be the case.
Hello! Post-response me would like to apologise once again for the length of this post :(
I have personally not found a single fic where either Booker or Nile were depicted bad with languages; at most I found fics where Nile cannot speak languages other than English yet and you have the rest of the Guard routinely teaching her this and that idiom.
So, no, in my experience the only one that I saw people actively headcanon as bad at languages is Nicolò. Even though exactly as you point our if we want to go by stereotypes the one that should have been hc’d as such should have been Nile precisely because the large majority of Anglos are monolingual and the way languages are taught in their educational systems is horrendous to say the least (I will never forget my experiences studying Arabic in a Canadian university).
As it stands, Nile is shown using a couple of words of Pashtu, and if I remember correctly it is mentioned that she speaks Spanish in her presentation card, but if it’s the average American knowledge of Spanish “mi casa es su casa” then I would not call that speaking it. But these are just suppositions :)
So canon doesn’t give us much, that we know. And this is where headcanons come in. Like I was saying, usually people would not write Nile as multilingual but as someone who is in the process of learning several languages.
No one is indicated that she is bad at it, although if you ask pratically anyone in the world they will tell you that Americans and Brits are the worst at both learning and speaking other languages, because in those cultures there is a deep imperialist bias engrained – whether they are aware or not – that everyone in the world speaks English, so they can spare the effort to try to pronounce properly another language, or, God forbid, learn it at all. Nothing indicates us that Nile butchers or not other languages, and no one ever takes it into account.
As for Booker, he is French so normally Anglos would have also made fun of his way of talking if it had not been for Matthias.
And now I reach my point. The main reason why Nicolò is consistently depicted as terrible at languages is because of Luca’s Italian accent, and the fact that you can see he is not as fluent in English as Marwan and Matthias are, who are like him not native speakers. This even though the man speaks five languages.
I am not going into the whole mess with interviews with native English speakers who treated him as if he were dumb just because he could not really understand their accent (I myself often have to slow down and ask for a repeat, because some accents are just not as immediately intelligible as Anglos think), given that it has been discussed at length.
The only thing I want to stress is how this headcanon is extremely imperialistic, condescending and plays once again into the harmful stereotype of the dumb, illiterate Southerner.
Linguistic discrimination is a thing, and it’s a thing everywhere. By linguistic discrimination I don’t just mean that against people who cannot speak a major language (or the “official” language of the country they are in), but it also affects accents.Accents have everything to do with geography and class: it is a marker of where you are from, and plays into prejudices linked to the social standing and the class usually associated to that accent. Now, languages are a natural process, in continuous evolution and adaptation, whereas standardised languages (including a standardised pronunciation) are artificial choices. Just think of British vs American English: they are both theoretically the same language, but they diverge in several instances in terms of both vocabulary and pronunciation.Whip this up to the max when it comes to speaking a language that is not your own. The sounds and grammar structures of your mother tongue have an impact on the way you process a different language. That’s why it’s difficult for Spanish-speakers to pronounce S + consonant at the beginning of a word, or why Slavic languages have a harder H sound (again at the beginning of a word). Even when you have the grammar and pronunciation down to a T and are virtually indistinguishable from a native speaker, it does not mean that people who lose their accents and speak like a BBC tv host are any better at languages than people whose accent is still noticeable, or whose speech flow may be slower.
Having an accent does not qualify the level of fluency in a set language. Not speaking like a dictionary does not qualify the level of your intelligence (and I cannot believe I have to even say that).
And yet having an accent is politicised for classist and racist purposes. If someone does not blend in 100% with the majority, it means that something is lacking in them: usually it means they do not have the same level of education, which means they probably come from a lower class, or that they also are foreigners. So they are less than, just because their speech is deemed as not up to par with that of the majority.
@lucyclairedelune meant this when she brought up the example of Gloria from Modern Family, saying “you don’t know how intelligent I am in Spanish”. I want to make an example that is closer to my heart. Elena Ferrante in her wondrous Neapolitan Quartet described the life of a girl who was trying to escape from the material and psychological misery of the slums of Naples in the 60s. To do so she migrates North to study at one of Italy’s most prestigious university: here, however, she is bullied for her accent that clearly marks her origins and (prejudicially, since people of the South were in general poorer) status, class, and, finally, categorises her as less intelligent. Just because of her accent when speaking standard Italian. As a Southern Italian woman, I have often felt like I had to mask my own accent, both in Italy and abroad, to be taken seriously. This regardless of my academic qualifications or how many languages I speak.
When people describe Nicolò as bad at languages simply because Luca has an accent and speaks English slower and less fluently than his co-stars, this is the context that this treatment plays in. Subconsciously (or consciously) it adds to the image that a big chunk of the fandom is painting of him as dumb and ignorant. No one else. And the fact that (luckily) no one ever uses Nile’s monolingualism as a marker for being less intelligent is also because being American is still taken as the standard, as well as the fact that unfortunately Nile (like Yusuf) is going through positive discrimination by which she cannot have any complexity or flaws (starting from hardly ever acknowledging the fact that she herself was part of an invader/occupying foreign force which has bombed and killed civilians in Afghanistan, and was in the midst of a military operation exactly in this sense).
According to that specific discourse, Nicolò is being given every single possible flaw, in order to be opposite to Yusuf. Again, because this fandom, with its Anglocentrism and Puritan incapacity of overcoming black-and-white oppositions, cannot seem to accept that we have a beautiful interracial, interreligious same-sex couple of complex individuals, who can both be smart at the same time. I myself think that Yusuf historically is better at languages than Nicolò, as he was a merchant (and an artist), and I love this difference about them, but conflating intelligence with proficiency in one single language (because it’s only proficiency English that we have been discussing, let’s be honest, if the show had been shot in German we would not be talking about Luca’s issues with the language probably) is an utterly imperialistic, condescending and ridiculous thing to do.
I probably lost the train of my thought (and I had two beers in the meantime, so I am too tired to reread), but what I mainly wanted to highlight is that this mocking attitude towards Nicolò is rooted in both a wider downgrading trend of his character, and on a general approach towards non-English speakers that Anglos have virtually everywhere.
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So this is a weird thing to bring up, but I was thinking about the weirdness regarding the accents of all the Originals and remembered the scene in ATFBBTF where Elena tells Klaus that she knows he is faking the accent. In canon, we know Mikael has a British accent (despite being a viking in a settlement located in current day Virginia) and all of them speak the way they do in the present throughout all their flashbacks. I love all of your charactizations throughout your fics and wanted to know: What are your personal headcanons regarding all the accent stuff and how all the cultures the Originals have lived through have affected the way they speak, think, behave, etc.?
Not a weird thing to bring up at all, because as it turns out, I am hyper-fixated on this franchise and would love to talk about any element of it!
This is kind of long so I put my answer under the cut:
Personal headcanons: I like to think that all of their accents are subtly WEIRD not only because they have moved all over the place but because pronunciation of languages like English have shifted so much over time. Like, I remember an early interview with Daniel Gillies where he said that he tried to make his accent sound like it was from everywhere and nowhere, because the Originals had traveled so extensively over such a long period of time. The other thing is that their syntax tends to lag inevitably behind-- yes, they incorporate new phrasings, like Elijah using “OMG” with such relish in 2x19, but I try to think about the way English was shaped in modernist novels when I’m writing Rebekah-- her idioms are all about a century out of date-- or slip in little anachronisms that aren’t quite off but are no longer common in daily speech like “shan’t” or even older slang like “belle chose.”
The scene in FE where Elena asks Rebekah how many languages she speaks sums it up pretty well-- they’ve been speaking a lot of these languages as they evolved from middle languages to early modern languages to modern and then contemporary language. The slippage amongst them must be pretty extraordinary-- I like the idea that even though the Originals “mostly” sound contemporary that there would be a lot of random archaic forms peppered in.
Another idea I had is that their names are probably different than the ones they originally had, but since they’ve all traveled and evolved linguistically/culturally together, they have changed how they think of each other, and maybe even their original names are getting fuzzy in their mind (Rebekah alludes to this in that same conversation in FE). This is partially born out of my general distaste for the Viking!origins that make no bloody sense to me and the fact that even if they’re all Vikings, why is Klaus’s name Niklaus (the German form of a Greek origin name), and then Elijah, Esther, Mikael, and Rebekah have Hebrew origin names and then mysteriously Finn, Kol, and Freya have Viking names? It makes no sense which is why I came up with the idea that they’ve changed their names over time, adapting and adopting what suited them.
The idea that they grew up in Virginia a thousand years ago is so cringe that I mostly try to block it out (I was writing ATFBBTF while season 3 was airing, which is why I reference it explicitly; that was before I was comfortable just papering over things I don’t like so much)-- like, Elijah, there weren’t wild horses in the Americas a thousand years ago! You’re confused!
I’ve talked about this at detailed length with @icebluecyanide (whose thoughts on this are AMAZING) but I’m really fond of irrevocably attached to the idea that the Originals are actually Russian or some other Slavic country in origin. Playing on the whole “my father was a wealthy landowner in Eastern Europe,” and also in a meta-sense playing with Eastern European vampire folklore. (Also I would love anything that gets rid of that awful Mikaelson “surname”! That name keeps me up at night. Also, why does Rebekah have it. She’s not a son.)
I do think that they all tend to be really, really stuck in the middle ages in terms of their thinking about their place in the world, the roles of men vs. women, fathers vs mothers vs sisters vs brothers, and who has filial duty to whom. Maayyybbbeeee some Humanist ideas sunk in, but honestly, there’s a reason that Rebekah still cleaves to Klaus and it’s because he’s her brother and she very much conceives of herself as lower in the family chain, even though she also rebels against it (but never quite seriously). Klaus is patronizing and domineering because he very much so sees that as his divine right-- he’s the special one, the hybrid, the king of kings. And also, he’s not even aware of his sexism when in SWBS he tells Elena things like “don’t you want to be a nurse or a teacher or a mother” (not that those aren’t critical, difficult, amazing careers!)-- it’s just that his idea of career options for women hasn’t changed in like at least a hundred years so he falls back on to him the obvious standards.
Hmm what else... they’re all definitely cultural chameleons, though, obviously, some places left bigger impacts on them than others. I think of Italy, and England, and New Orleans when I think of their “home” cultures, but that might be because that’s where we see them in flashbacks the most often. It’s easier to blend in for the three who are awake for most of everything, of course, because changes are incremental and fluid from their perspective, happening little by little and organically as they travel.
Oh! And I think my last thing is that I am really fond of the idea that Kol and Finn were both just caught in a supernatural sleep for all that time they were daggered... so Kol is constantly having to reinvent himself and his facility with language since I get the impression he gets daggered pretty often, though also undaggered whenever his siblings decide they miss him, which is often enough to keep him spry and make him really really good at learning language and adapting, but poor Finn has to learn contemporary English from scratch when he’s undaggered and he’s lost and bewildered in the modern world and it’s really only the fact that he already thinks of his whole existence as a bewildering haze of hell on earth that he (eventually) learns enough English and modern customs to cope (so long as no one pays close attention; he blanks a lot on which word he should use.).
I think that’s it???
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17, 26, 30, 56 of the OC asks for Dora?
Do self inserts count? I guess.
17: Does your character have any irrational fears?
She's always afraid somebody is behind her, even in areas where ghost Pokemon are managed.
She is afraid of some monster coming through the doorway or around the corner and jumpscaring her, but that mostly applies to only her appartment. So she runs from room to room as fast as possible, as if afraid something is going to get her, which greatly annoys her family, since she screams if one of them does emerge from a nearby doorway while she is trying to pass.
Whenever even the smallest thing is out of the ordinary she assumes the worst. Someone is a little late, someone is knocking at the door unexpectedly, there is an ambulance going in the general direction of the home of someone she knows, yeah better brace yourself for the worst.
She has a compulsion that is talked about in question 56 that can also be considered an irrational fear.
26: What is your favorite headcanon for your character?
Since the character is a self insert I guess I'll put in a character trope that fits me.
She is the type to believe in redemption arcs and is willing to give a chance to people if they are genuinely sorry, sometimes even when they aren't, but as hopefull as she is, she will still be carefull around them. She is easy to pick on and get thrown off balance but she still won't get manipulated and trapped by them, though that still won't protect her from getting tormented if they do target her. Her Serperior Lipanj does take care of that by glaring at anyone trying to pick on his trainer and scaring them away, and people know she can protect herself considering her history with battling, amongst other stuff, though it has led to jabs about her cowering behind her Pokemon.
But generaly speaking, if the person is genuinely trying to be better and shows no ill intent, she will potentially become friends with them if they otherwise seem cool.
But hurt her in the right places and she will scream at you and try to rip you apart.
She's the type of character that will adopt anyone and anything that gives off "sassy lost child" or "baby" vibes.
She gives of "my last two braincell" vibes but she's actually the voice of reason most of the time, and will prevent her friends from doing something stupid.
30: Would your character have any hobbies?
She often gets herself invested in a new thing like a tv show or game and writes detailed analysis of her favorite characters and comes up with au's.
Recently she's taken up drawing again, having given up when she was around 13 due to not being very good and not getting better due to not knowing how to practice. But now she's so glad she has finally gotten good enough to get her concepts out there.
She also sometimes makes polymer clay figurines.
But of course her main thing is taking care of her Pokemon and divising battle strategies and just exploring and learning more. But recently, she feels all the battling and adventuring isn't for her anymore, at least not as a full time thing. She'd rather be a researcher, like a Pokemon professor.
56: What’s one of your character’s quirks?
Oh you chose the right question cause I've got a lot of answers.
First the more psychological quirks
She daydreams almost all the time, and quite vividly too. Ideas for new drawings or other projects, tons of fully fleshed out storylines and character analysis are in there too, usually about whatever she is currently obsessed with. She often thinks about battle strategies or Pokemon in general too. Occasionally she'll ponder over some deep phylosophical question, and she'll incorporate it into her fanworks if she can. But as much as she loves her little world, sometimes it can distract her from real life a bit too much.
She paces and rocks back and forth a lot, mostly while deep in thought. At home, she has a yoga ball she hops on while listening to music for the ultimate daydream experience.
Her focusing face looks like a cross between confused and angry. She often mumbles to herself too, though she mostly isn't aware of it.
If she gets really immersed into a daydream, she will squeal and maybe even wildly gesture with her arms along with the usual rocking and pacing.
She twirls her hair too, usually while working, sometimes so much that it becomes tangled.
She has this thing where she has a compulsion to run her finger along almost every surface she finds, usually tables and walls. She has a few rituals where every day she has to run her finger across a certain surface a certain way and the texture needs to feel just right or she has to do it again, and if she doesn't do that, she gets filed with dread, like something bad will happen because of it, almost like a superstition of some sort.
Her idea of making friends or holding a conversation is infodumping and sharing her enthusiasm for what she loves and hoping you like what you hear, then forcing herself to shut up so you can actually talk about your own thing.
She often smiles while uncomfortable. This, along with how easily she can be agitated into a meltdown, has caused others to accuse her of faking her distress.
She often gets nervous and her mind gets blocked when she gets put on the spot during classes or similar, though she is eager to put her input at her own volition.
Lipanj has taken to calming her down and grounding her by giving her his vine or tail to hold.
She will say goodbye to you before going your seperate ways no matter what, and depending on who you are, will also make sure to tell you something positive and reassure more to herself than to you that you will see each other again.
Now the more random stuff
She is known to have a lot of useful and just plain random stuff in her bag, in part because she wants to be prepared and in part cause she's a bit of a hoarder. She has all the emergency supplies and at least 5 of every item there is in there.
She is very germophobic and constantly washes her hands.
She is fluent in memes and will not hesitate to reference them in public.
Her regular speaking voice is very loud and she perseverates (repeats herself) a lot.
She squints when smiling.
As someone who learned languages through tv as well as someone who is prone to mimicry cause she does not know how to express her emotions otherwise, she often finds herself switching between accents and speaking styles, depending on her mood, situation and the people she is currently around. She can go from a New Yorker to a middle aged Slavic lady in seconds.
Ok that last one was long but kinda wanted to get her general personality out there. Hope that answered everything and thank you for your ask.
#lindendragon#dora's pokemon adventures#lindenserperior#dora#self insert#oc ask#reference#anonymous#asks#my ask#answer#pokemon
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Before anything.
This eventually will end up on a page on my blog, but I want it to be visible as people find me.
I’ve played Jason Todd since I was 18 years old, and because of that I have a very specific idea of who he is and I have basically told canon to fuck off.
The very basics are the same, so don’t worry its not some super out there take, but still.
here is a list of headcanon to start.
Jason was raised almost entirely on her own by Catherine Todd, who knew she wasn’t his mother, but never did anything but treat him like she was. Before she met Willis Todd; Jason’s father, she was an aspiring actress, and had become to make waves in the local theatre community before developing addiction problems she fought for the rest of her life. After Willis was arrested, Catherine began to fight towards true sobriety, to help support Jason. She died of an overdose when Jason was eight. He, to this day suspects foul play from inside the big house.
Willis Todd is still alive, currently survive two consecutive life sentences, plus 90 days for pissing off a guard. He has an option for parole ever ten years and not once has even come close to gaining said parole.
Willis’s sentence is bogus, he took the fall for Two-Face early on. Jason doesn’t care. He’s glad the old bastard rots.
Jason was killed, and revived before Joker gained the services of Harley Quinn. In fact, during his stint as Arkham Asylums newest John Doe, he was one of her few patients before the fall. He thought she was a good doctor.
Jason hates above all else drug dealers who sell to kids, and anyone who lays their hands on a woman. He’s pretty sour on animal abuse too.
As the Red Hood, Jason takes particular care to make sure sex workers are kept safe, and are able to get out of the life if they wish to do so, for those who chose to do such work, he promises them protection when he is around, and even has purchased and gifted buildings in Gotham to act as safe havens.
Jason has one cat, her name is Stripes. she’s an orange tabby. He was drunk when he named her.
Jason is a problem drinker, whiskey is his posion
Jason is a neat freak. His safe house is intensely cleaned and organized in between every major mission.
Jason’s favorite food is chili dogs.
Jason possesses a genius level intellect, he reads constantly, is a mechanical wizard and a tactical master. He speaks over a dozen languages, and is passible at about ten others.
Jason’s Russian is terrible, as is most of his slavic, but Russian particularly.
Jason is of Irish and Italian descent. His paternal grandmother was a first generation immigrant for Italy, his grandfather, second from Ireland.
He’s not sure about his ancestry from Shelia, his birth mother’s side. She seemed very white when he met her.
Jason drives what, visually at least seems to be, a black 1966 Pontiac GTO, internally of course it is a Batmobile, with all the bells and whistles. He calls her The Deadbird.
Because Catherine was a stage actress, Jason grew up with Showtunes and listens to them to this day, mixed in with the sort of music you’d expect from him.
Catherine was pregnant when Willis was arrested. The baby didn’t make it. It was a girl, her name was going to be Isabel.
Jason keeps a .500 Magnum handgun at all times. He never uses it, he just wants it ready because he wants the biggest, and most comical looking revolver to be the one he uses to pop the Joker’s head off. He’s fired it 4 times. He hates that he missed.
Jason’s helmet houses a micro supercomputer, hooked up to a backdoor version of the Batcomputer’s network. He’s pretty sure Bruce knows he’s there, but its sort of a “don’t ask don’t tell” agreement. He has a running HUD that helps him track, mark, and collect evidence. He had a rudimentary collision detection system as well, but it was just annoying during a fight. The hood can manage a full light spectrum, allowing Jason to detect large heat signatures, and several types of dangerous radiation. The levels of each need to be somewhat high, as fine and minute detection would take more memory than the space of the hood allows. He also has a rebreather present in the hood, which is air tight. He thinks it’s stupid so many people run around with their mouths exposed when so many villains use gases and spores.
Jason is blatantly embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from Bruce, again he’s pretty sure Bruce knows and lets him out of pity.
He really hates being pitied.
In order, from least to most Jason hates the other Robins, Steph, Dami, Dick and Tim.
In fact he’d go so far as it say he enjoys the company of Stephanie Brown.
He loves all the Batgirls. Not like LOVES, but you know what I mean.
At 17 Jason Todd was taken advantage of by Talia al Ghul. He doesn’t like to talk about it.
Jason developed claustrophobia after waking up in his own coffin. Its why his safe houses are all open design.
Jason’s a little bit bisexual.
He won’t let a man top him though. He doesn’t trust other men.
Jason Todd smokes Lucky Strike cigarettes.
Jason chooses to never attempt to fight the Sirens. They’re alright in his book.
Jason tends to stick to the Narrows of Gotham as his stomping ground. He will fight bats and birds who cross into his turf without asking.
#;headcanon#tw; non-con#tw; smoking#tw; sex work#tw; guns#tw; drug mention#tw; miscarriage#tw; death
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Daughter of the Demon: on writing the Al Ghuls
I can’t make any promises about when the next chapter of Gotham Ghoul will go up, but I can make the promise that when it does, it will include the first appearance of Talia Al Ghul into the narrative proper.
She’s been there in the meta-narrative since the beginning, as she always is in stories featuring a younger Damian, but it’s been in hints and allusions. This will be her first chance to speak for herself.
And that got me thinking, about Talia as a character, about her history, and about the way I write her, and I thought I would share those thoughts with you here.
Talia, probably more than any other major DC character (certainly more than any other Major Bat-roster character), is defined by her relationships. Specifically her relationships with men. She is Raas’s daughter, Bruce’s 'one that got away’, Damian’s mother, Jason’s ‘it’s complicated’. She isn’t her own anything.
In her earliest appearances, she’s as close to a strong female character as you were going to get, given the time it was written and her race (more on that below). But’s she’s still a stereotype. She’s a non-white woman, physically strong but emotionally vulnerable, who falls in love with a white man who can’t return her feelings (nominally because of her morality, meta-narratively because she’s not white) and betrays her culture for him, only to be abandoned later on. It’s not a new story - it’s one Hollywood loves. Most often it gets assigned to women from East Asia, but Arab and Indian women got it a lot as well. Talia is certainly one of the better examples of this, she has a lot more freedom than most women trapped in this trope, but ultimately she is still a trope.
After that, she was mostly just... gone. She popped up from time to time, but she’d already played out her assigned role in the hero’s life, so even though Raas stuck around, she was very much shunted into the background.
Then Grant Morrison came along and turned her into a villain by creating Damian. We find out she had a child with Bruce a decade ago and chose not to tell him. She raised Damian to be an assassin, taught him how to kill, and then basically dumps him on Bruce’s doorstep with a note around his neck saying “please look after this child”. And there are a hundred possible reasons for this, but they’re never given. She is made a villain by silence.
She managed to remain morally grey for a few years, but it didn’t take long for the demonisation of Talia to begin in earnest. (Probably didn’t help that this was the mid-2000s - not a good time to be Arab in American media). The recent introduction of Damian into DC’s animated movie universe included the reveal that Talia just straight up didn’t love her only son. Seriously, that’s the big end of movie plot twist - Talia is evil and doesn’t love her son. In more recent comics, Talia actually clones Damian because Damian isn’t the obedient killing machine she had wanted. This clone goes on to kill the original Damian. (It’s okay, he got better).
In between tragic love-interest and evil step-mother stereotypes, she has one other notable appearance. As the mother-figure and lover of a teenage Jason Todd. When Jason is brought back from the dead, it’s Talia who finds him, takes him back to a League of Assasins base and uses a Lazarus pit to heal him. She defies her father to protect him, cares for and comforts him, spends what is probably a fortune in money and favours getting him the training he wants, buys out a major corporation for him, makes no attempt to stop him from killing Batman, and begins a sexual relationship with him. He’s 15 when he dies, and 19 or 20 when he leaves. It’s not clear how old he is when the sexual relationship begins, but given his mental and emotional state, and the age difference between them and her position of power, the answer is too damn young.
When you add all that together, the picture it paints is not a positive one, and there’s a risk of her more recent appearances colouring her earlier storylines. It’s happened a lot, writers both professional and fan, assuming that Talia’s interest in Bruce is mercenary, that she never loved him, that he would never have had unprotected sex with a villain so she must have tricked him in some way in order to get pregnant. (That last one is at least supported by the confused timeline in which it is both 10 years and approximately 12 years between contraception and Damian’s first appearance, leading some to suggest later artificial insemination using Bruce’s sperm collected the night they slept together).
That’s one way to reconcile the various tropes that makeup Talia, but it’s one I hate. I hate that she went from eccentric but loving mother to emotionless monster in only a couple of years. I hate that her story is always one of tragedy or villainy.
For me, the key to writing a Talia who is sympathetic without being unrecognisable is her age. It’s never been established (as far as I’m aware) just how old Talia is. We know Raas is ancient. We know Damian is ten. Given that she appeared to be an adult in her first appearances, that puts her age at 30+. Beyond that, we have no idea, except that a lot of her behaviours make more sense when looked at from the perspective of great age. She kept Damian from his father for ten years, but ten years is an eyeblink if you have access to Lazarus Pits. She began a relationship with someone who was a child by the standards of his own culture, but to her, all mortals are little more than children, and he was a warrior who had seen battle - to her that it probably a far better measure of age than mere years.
Talia, as I write her, is a loving mother with very little idea of what motherhood entails beyond her memories of her own upbringing. She is at least 200 and considers all humans younger than their mid-40s to be little more than children. She kept Damian away partly because to her, ten years is nothing, and partly because she had no real guide for how Bruce as a mortal American human would treat a young child beyond the way he had treated Dick, Jason and Tim, and so waited until Damian was a skilled warrior before allowing them to meet. She is largely amoral, unlike her father, and her primary motivator is, above all else, love. Her life is defined by her relationships to other people by choice, because relationships provide anchor points in time. Technology might change, but from her point of view humanity has remained more or less the same. The reference points, the moments that mark out the years as different from one another, are her relationships. With Bruce, with Jason, with the lovers who came before both men and women (because my Talia is bi), and with her son. Her only son. The only biological child she has allowed herself to have in her long life. Keeping these people safe and well is her only moral code, but she isn’t a monster. She has no reason to be a monster. It offers no advantages (except occasionally when it is useful for protecting her loved-ones).
Her feelings for Bruce were genuine, she would have married him given the chance, but she was also willing to let him walk away, to leave her, because mortal lovers are always fleeting, it is something she has accepted about life before even Alfred was born.
Also she and Scandal Savage have hooked up in the past.
So yeah, this was a bit rambly, and my Talia may not be your Talia, but I wanted to have there here as I begin introducing her into Gotham Ghoul. This is Talia al Ghul as I see her.
Sidenote: I said earlier I was going to talk a little bit about Talia’s race. So. The way Raas collected bits of other cultures he likes and claims them for his own, his utter conviction that he knows what’s best for people better than they do themselves, the fact that we have no idea what his name is, the fact that most of his furthest flashbacks are set in Japan and China have lead me to headcanon Raas as not being Arab. Actually, I headcanon him as being white, and no one has the guts to call him out on it, although in at least one continuity his father is from China. Either way, I don’t think Raas is Arab. He chooses the Arabian peninsula as one of his bases for the same reason traders did - it’s a gateway between Asia, Africa and Europe. His disciples are primarily locals, and it’s them that give him the Arab title, which he likes enough to adopt. (In favour of this is the fact that none of his children have Arab names - Nyssa has an Arabic meaning, but it seems unlikely he’d call his daughter ‘Woman’. Talia is Greek, Nyssa may well be as well, and Dusan is Slavic). Talia’s mother is a local - Melisande is a French name, but it was also the name of a queen of Jerusalem in the 10th century, and I think it’s likely that that is what the writers were referring to when they named her. Alternatively, it may be an assumed name. Either way, Talia is ethnically half Arab, but the Arabian peninsula is her home in a way it isn’t ever really shown to be for Raas. The Cradle (located in the UAE) is her primary base of operations, and I write her with the assumption that Arabic is her mother-tongue. Damian is therefore ethnically a quarter Arab, although culturally it’s much more significant since he spent most of his childhood in the UAE talking to and working with Arabs, and it was the language his mother spoke to him most. He was raised to be totally multi-lingual, but Arabic will always be the language he has the greatest attachment too.
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Sfw for platonic Gibbs and Abby would be amazing 💚
Okay, nonny, kinda love you right now, because I lost that stupid post and didn’t remember it was in my queue to repost, and would not have noticed it had reappeared if you hadn’t left an ask! So not only can I do this, but I will also be able to do the one I owe @swifthorse from weeks ago!
Platonic Gabby is my favourite kind. You didn’t specify numbers, so I’ll do all the ones I have thoughts about!
I’m on mobile, so the formatting may be screwed, hopefully I can edit after if necessary…
1) I feel like they’d both cook sometimes, but mostly Gibbs, because he would just cook regular, down to earth food, whereas with Abby it could be ANYTHING… 😳
2) Gibbs is the tidy one, because you know, squared away Marine. I dare say Abby knows where all her stuff is, but she wouldn’t be tidy per se…
3) Gibbs would be the one to fix a broken-down vehicle, but I bet Abby could if she needed to.
4) Gibbs, in his capacity as hobby plumber, would fix all leaks.
5) I think the grocery buying would pretty much follow the same pattern as the cooking, tbh… 😂
6) Going out to eat: Gibbs is an old-fashioned kinda guy, I bet he insists on paying. They both have healthy appetites, but Abby is the one who orders dessert and probably tries to make Gibbs share it…
7) Abby canonically doesn’t like the sun and I don’t think Gibbs would initiate a beach trip for his own sake, so no.
8) Gibbs is a Marine, he can totally swim, but I bet Abby can, too!
9) My language headcanon for Gibbs is that he is best in Slavic languages (Russian is canon), can speak French but doesn’t like to, has passable Spanish and a smattering of others. I believe Abby canonically has some Spanish? And given where she’s from, I bet she speaks at least some creole French. Plus, they both have ASL! They would definitely sign together. I can see them trying to communicate in French and discovering how different standard and Louisiana French are! I can see Abby being intrigued by Russian, but I don’t know if she’d have the patience to learn it.
10) I doubt Gibbs does plants, though I could see Abby getting him something low maintenance and apropos (a cactus? a really spiky one? 😂); Abby doesn’t have time for anything too high maintenance, floral or fauna. However, I can totally imagine Gibbs getting adopted by a stray cat or dog, claiming to be annoyed by it, but feeding it, looking out for its welfare, and don’t you even dare to mistreat it... he will end you.
11) I think they’re both shower people, though not together 😳😂 Abby would probably be up for bubble bath fights… but maybe not with Gibbs 😜
12) Abby talks, Gibbs listens 😂 but I think even Abby can do silence sometimes.
13) They both stay up late and are a horrible influence on one another in this regard.
14) I think they’re both high maintenance in very different ways; I don’t think either of them minds.
15) Gibbs’ idea of a good vacation and Abby’s would be wildly incompatible, IMO. Not something they’d do together!
Phew! Now I gotta sleep, this has finished my brain off 😜😂😘
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