#there are some ocs in the mix here but also 4 of the original gang is here too! guess
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🐈⬛ re8elli0n8reak 🔁 😈 demongirl-cock
🐈⬛ re8elli0n8reak
ohhh my god how do people deal with having brothers. oh look im gonna tease you and jump behind you when you're studying. please do your job
😈 demongirl-cock Follow
... wasn't your brother the one that blew up?
🐈⬛ re8elli0n8reak
not what im talking about.
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🎸 hibiki-rock
I think @re8elli0n8reak needs to take a break! Go cuddle with that girlfriend she just got. Could say she needs to regain some minty chill, lmaooo
#get it? pelase say someone got it
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🦅 horizon-sunsky
Every time I look at the sky, I am amazed all over again. Being able to touch them with my hands has given me a whole new point of view, and I'm so thankful that I was able to get these new prosthetics. I love having wings. Next photoshoot should be out soon.
#life with wings #prosthetic wings #not photoshoot #birdkin
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🪡 thighroidwrap 🔁 😈 demongirl-cock
😈 demongirl-cock Follow
what the fuck happened when i was asleep
🪡 thighroidwrap
Don't worry about it.
#tldr a lot of stuff about vandelay got dumped on us at once #including... peppermint vandelay being among us
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🪡 thighroidwrap 🔁 🐈⬛ re8elli0n8reak
👼 posts-from-the-angel Follow
Imagine being a company apologist 🙄 like helloooo they had ai code literally in their implants, who knows what bad things could've happened, but they expect us to praise them for... having someone else come and deal with it?
🐈⬛ re8elli0n8reak
Alright, that's it.
👼 posts-from-the-angel Follow
Oh nooo, the company apologist is going to pull out something that totally isn't more bullshit. cry more
🐈⬛ re8elli0n8reak
photo from the article liongirlmane shared
selfie i just took
was literally on the rebel team that took the previous head (you know, kale vandelay, my brother) out of commission because of things mentioned in plenty of articles.
🦁 liongirlmane Follow
THAT EXPLAINS WAY TOO MUCH?
🐈⬛ re8elli0n8reak
i know i have many issues that i've made clear on this blog but. that hurts
#that obvious huh #anyway identity reveal! yayyy
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💎 sole-emeralds 🔁 🌪 infernochaser97
🎧 sweet-osts-4-tater-tots Follow
Endless Possibility - Sonic Unleashed [OST] ▶️
🌪 infernochaser97
@sole-emeralds I saw this and was reminded of you.
💎 sole-emeralds
Thank you for the ping! Favorite.
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🪡 thighroidwrap 🔁 🦁 liongirlmane
🦁 liongirlmane Follow
Anonymous Asked: 😎
I think I'm a little lost, what was bad about the tech??? horizon doesn't seem to be suffering from their new robot parts???
Well, there was something built into their robot prosthetics that was actively meant to manipulate those who had them. Typical company bullshit. Read this article.
horizon can be glad about their prosthetics all they want but how much of it is from this?
🐈⬛ re8elli0n8reak
next article is about how the current heads have been working to get everybody's part replaced and also what exactly SPECTRA did. stop just looking at one article and leaving it there.
🦁 liongirlmane Follow
Oookay...?
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🖍 cnmntoastbot 🔁🦁 liongirlmane
🦁 liongirlmane Follow
Honestly, the situation over at Vandelay Island just shows how much of a bad idea companies running living spaces are. Revolving that much of life around the place who employs you is just a bad idea.
Credits for company items only? Can't move away if you wanted to start somewhere else? Bad. Read ANYTHING on company towns, and then imagine that. But Worse.
🪡 thighroidwrap
I mean, at least the food is free. Even if there are 4 mondays and i don't know which one aligns with your weekends
🦁 liongirlmane Follow
What
🎸 hibiki-rock
That's being fixed! AND we're even getting rid of the AI in the robot parts!
🦁 liongirlmane Follow
WHAT?!
🖍 cnmntoastbot
He is completely correct! (o´▽`o) If you were ever wondering why your friends who took residence on our island made any monday posts on other days of your week, that would be why! \(^ヮ^)/
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🐈⬛ re8elli0n8reak 🔁🖍 cnmntoastbot
🐈⬛ re8elli0n8reak
I want... tiddy... in my face....
🖍 cnmntoastbot
(⌒_⌒;) i suppose you are glad to be dating someone who can do that for you now!
🐈⬛ re8elli0n8reak
CNMN WHAT THE FUCK. @Kirby-Mass-Defend PLEASE TELL YOUR ROBOT TO NOT REBLLOG POSTS LIKE THIS?????? THIS IS TWO YEARS OLD
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🎸 hibiki-rock 🔁 🦁 liongirlmane
👼 posts-from-the-angel Follow
If you don't reblog anything about this, you're a shitty person. Vandelay Island has been on fire for the past week, and it's in NO news articles at all! So here's a summary of what's been happening...
keep reading
🦁 liongirlmane Follow
... there... there are, though?
🎸 hibiki-rock
Its all i hear on my morning commute >.>
#blah blah blah here's the section of the island that's closed off i'm SICK OF IT
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🐈⬛ re8elli0n8reak 🔁 🪡 thighroidwrap
🪡 thighroidwrap
Your daily reminder to TAKE OFF YOUR PROSTHETICS. It's NO LEG DAY!
🐈⬛ re8elli0n8reak
NO LEG DAY!! NO LEG DAY!!
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#hi-fi rush#hi fi rush#there are some ocs in the mix here but also 4 of the original gang is here too! guess#hi-fi rush on tumblr#hi fi rush on tumblr#unreality#long post#sorry lol#this is addicting. hope it's good lmao
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Some thoughts on Hanyo no Yashahime ep. 15 (some serious, some not):
1. Hats off to Riku for being at least a mildly interesting OC. I care about his motivations enough to keep watching the show, which is more than I can say about most anime-only characters. Congratulations to Riku and his amazing eye makeup, here’s to the rest of the season
2. Inuyasha finally got to live the life - more or less - that he and Kikyo originally dreamed about, and I think that’s nice! He has a little house with a garden, and a “job” exterminating demons, and a local community of friends and neighbors, and friends from further afield who come and visit him, and his social circle is a nice mix of humans and youkai. Inuyasha is fully and (by the looks of it) happily integrated into his found community without having to sacrifice either his demon or human side, and I THINK THAT’S NICE
3. In modern times, Kirinmaru would be known as “our family friend” and Sesshomaru would be obligated to introduce him as “Uncle Kirinmaru - well, not my real uncle, I just call him that because he’s known my dad for, like, forever”
4. At first blush, this would make Zero Sesshomaru’s mean auntie, but what with the whole “humiliated by your father” line and the Gold and Silver jewels being made from her tears, I suspect she’s actually a jilted lover - or would-be lover - of Toga’s who now lives to stir up trouble for his kids. Toga probably tossed her aside for Izayoi and she’s clearly still salty about it
5. Rin’s childbirth scene is the worst thing I’ve seen in a long time, but not for the reason everyone’s fighting about. It unfortunately exposes two major flaws, one of writing female characters in the shonen genre, and one of Rin’s character specifically. The first problem is that shonen writers usually have no idea what to do with pregnancy and childbirth, because, I suspect, they have no actual interest in the mother’s experience; for them, pregnancy and childbirth serve purely as plot devices, and the postpartem female body becomes a problem to be gotten rid of as soon as possible.
Usually this is ‘solved’ by killing off the mother right after giving birth. Rin escapes this fate, only to be subjected to having both her babies and her agency taken away. Shedding a single tear? Uttering such an inane line as “I have faith in Sesshomaru-sama” when he didn’t say a single word to her after what was likely hours of being in labor? I confess that this is the point when I lost it and just started laughing, the scene was so bad-hilarious. Nobody is this long-suffering and trusting about being ignored by their husband as he silently kidnaps her children literally from under her nose. Nobody. Rin was done dirty by this scene, and it just underscores the misogyny running through the shonen genre.
Unfortunately, this scene also doubles down on Rin’s role as a device for Sesshomaru’s character growth, which is itself pretty problematic. Her (multiple!!) deaths in IY prompt Sesshomaru toward emotional turning points in his character development, and here again in HNY her confusion and sadness over losing Towa and Setsuna lend pathos to Sesshomaru’s actions. We, the viewers, know that Sesshomaru is hiding the twins away so that Kirinmaru and Zero can’t find and kill them; I think the writers somehow wants the viewer to feel anguish on Sesshomaru’s behalf that he must commit such a seemingly cruel act for the sake of his family’s safety and can’t tell anyone about it because he’s such a tough guy loner etc. etc. But instead it comes across as confusing and unnecessary, especially since Kagome already knows the whole story and asks Sesshomaru point-blank about it. [Edited to add]: This model of stoicism-as-masculinity has not aged well from the original IY run. Female characters should not have to passively accept pain and confusion inflicted on them by male characters in the name of male characters acting “for their own good.” Sesshomaru’s refusal to communicate anything, ever, is not a romantic character trait: it does not make him mysterious or cool or badass, it just makes him kind of an asshole to the people he supposedly cares about, and I hope the rest of the series will actually grapple with that. Sesshomaru, in this scene, kicks off a whole chain of events that end up going disastrously for his family. One daughter stuck on “the other side”? One daughter with her memories and sleep stolen? His wife stuck in a tree? I have a hard time believing all of that was planned. The whole scenario is contrived and stupid and I hate it.
6. Not least because Sesshomaru’s proposed solution makes no sense! What are these babies going to eat? Where will they sleep? If Sesshomaru is ok with bringing newborns into a forest and leaving them under a tree, why wouldn’t he just bring Rin at the same time and make her recuperate from - again- a physically grueling ordeal under said tree? It’s not like he knows what the heck childbirth involves anyway! His whole decision-making process is bizarre and confirms my suspicion, held for some 15 years, that Sesshomaru is not some cool lone wolf type who has it all together, but instead is merely a fuck-up like the rest of us. As any quiet person (*raises hand*) knows, a great way to pick up a reputation for being ‘aloof,’ ‘cold,’ or ‘intimidating’ is to say as little as possible, even if on the inside you are hopelessly just trying to keep your head above water.
This is HNY Sesshomaru in a nutshell:
Where were you going to get all of these things, Sesshomaru?! Oh that’s right you didn’t think that far ahead DID YOU?!????
7. If Sesshomaru is at his mom’s house, and Jaken is at his mom’s house, then who is watching the babies????? (Tbh probably Sessho-mama)
Anyway this episode was A Mess but it was nice seeing Inuyasha and Kagome again. More of them and the rest of the original gang, please!
#just to clarify my take on infant nutrition is 'fed is best' but obviously formula did not exist in the feudal era and more importantly the#text didn't fit#i promise the next post will be about things i actually like about inuyasha and not just ranting#but sesshomaru is for real a disaster#hanyo no yashahime#inuyasha#iy#iy meta#iy analysis#kagome higurashi#sesshomaru#iy rin#hanyo no yashahime spoilers
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As SR fandom on tumblr is pretty much dead and I need to share whole excitement about it with somebody, might you tell us about your Boss? What a person they are? Do they drift slightly from canon behaviour? Do you ship them with anyone?
Oh buddy, oh pal, I would gladly talk about my boss. He’s one of my oldest and favorite OCs
His name’s Tanugatoa Maivia and he was only like 16 in the first game when he joined the Saints. He joined more out of necessity than a desire to be affiliated with a gang and to commit crimes for fun, as a result he had gotten along quite well with Dex in the first game since they had the most in common with their reasons to be in the Saints and their ambition and their desires to eventually be able to leave the gang life in their past.
However Tanu ended up getting pretty close with Johnny and Lin and other unnamed Saints and both his loyalty and a belief that all of the crime and shit was a necessary evil, made him change his mind and eventually choose the Saints over leaving like Dex. Julius’ whole “someone needs to stop all these gang wars, and it looks like we’ll have to do it ourselves as our own gang” speech really got to Tanu.
He’s got a very much Red Hood/Antihero Vigilante type deal going on personality and story wise
I have A LOT to say so I’ll put everything else under a readmore
So the first two games are actually pretty in line canonwise for Tanu, but SRTT and SR4 are a big ol’ mixing pot of canon pieces and my own ideas, as well as pretty much totally writing 4 off as a whole as like a Gangstas in Space movie because I really don’t like that one but it does exist and I liked Asha so I wanted an excuse to keep it in Tanu’s canon somehow.
Along with a few scattered details in SR1 and SR2 having been changed just because I like writing and I wanted to rewrite them to fit Tanu better and to ultimately make the gap between SR2 and SRTT less rough and out of place and hollow and to make the transition smoother
A few random details that are altered in Tanu’s canon include
Lin survived, because I think it’s absolutely ridiculous and a little out of character (for Tanu at least) to just leave her to drown, especially after she saved your ass when she easily could have just left you and escaped on her own. However she also ended up in a induced coma, she eventually wakes up after a month or so, a few weeks after Salting the Earth/the boat explosion at the end of 1
Donnie’s a little more present in 2 since Lin’s there, and he actually has some character growth since SR1 (unrelated but fun fact this blog was originally under the url “fuckdonnie” even though I love him)
Troy is also a little more present in SR2, there’s more development with his whole obsession with the boat explosion and Tanu doesn’t really hate him like “canon” at all cause they were pretty good friends in SR1. But for a long while at first he does hold a grudge still
Outside of that, Tanu’s timeline is very much the “canon” in the first 2 games. And honestly I don’t really ship him with anyone in any of the games I suppose? For the most part I ship him with another OC that isn’t technically a Boss/Playa but is a Saint, but generally I personally think “The Boss” as a character is pretty damn in love with Johnny and Shaundi (and ngl a lil bit with Kinzie too) so Tanu’s kind of just in an open relationship, because they definitely all care about each other a lot and like hell yeah they’re interested in fooling around with each other sometimes, but for the most part it’s a very “no labels/you do you and I’ll still be here if you ever wanna do stuff” type deal
And as for the changes in SRTT for Tanu’s canon uuuuh I was writing it out and realized it was just me talking about how I’d rewrite SRTT to give it more depth and make the characters less one dimensional so nvm lmao
#saints row#the boss#the playa#saints row boss#tanugatoa maivia#stop talkin playa#asks#occorner#this took a long time to write and I ultimately had to take out like half of it#because it wasn't Tanu relevant it was just me rewriting 3
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11 Questions
tagged by @buttsonthebeach. thanks so much!! ^_^
1. What image or images do you come back to over and over again in your writing?
Birds, orchards, night sky.
2. Which character’s point of view do you most enjoy writing? (OC or canon)
Not sure? I have really grown fond of writing men. I like writing the male POV. I think it’s an interesting study and use of empathy.
3. What is the first piece of inspiration that led to the project you are working on now?
For that he may hold me by the hand, which is my BRAND new project--I have always liked the Arthur/Albert ship. I’ve always liked the bisexual Arthur headcanon. Rockstar has written a bisexual male protagonist before, so this headcanon is very arguable. Arthur, as a character, seems very emotionally unavailable throughout most of the game. I feel like all the times he comes closest to *actually* flirting with any character in-game, the times he seems most open and easy-going, most confident and in-control of his own domain, are spent with Albert. With Albert, Arthur comes alive a little bit, like he’s got some blood flowing through his veins. I guess I wanted to explore that further, and of course it’s mostly planned out, and it is looking like probably the most straight-up romantic love story I’ve ever written. I mean, Arthur offers to protect Albert multiple times. He uses those literal words: “I’ll protect you.” Albert flails. He calls Arthur a gentleman. “You, sir, are a gentleman,” he says. “You don’t know me very well,” says Arthur. “Well, you’re a gentleman to me,” says Albert. Arthur legit is blushing. Arthur carries his bag for him. ???? Arthur worries about him. Albert is genuinely in awe of Arthur’s relationship to and knowledge of nature. To me, Arthur feels genuinely under-appreciated by nearly every member of the gang. There are really no other characters who fawn over and admire Arthur the way Albert does. I think...I think Arthur could get into that.
4. What is one fic you have always wanted to write but haven’t gotten a chance to yet?
My Arlathan AU! I always talked about going back and writing the story of my Arlathan and the Great War--Solas and Mythal’s love story, what happened with Solas’s mother Leanathy, the love triangle with Solas, Ghilan’nain, and Mythal, Ghil’s betrayal, Solas smoking elfroot in the kitchens with Abelas and flirting with the servant girls, etc. etc. I want to write it! But I don’t! Think! I ever will! Wah.
5. What project has been the toughest for you to work on?
Probably my art! Ugh. With the new baby, it’s really fallen away. I still draw, but definitely not every day. With drawing, I really have to like, focus and try so hard. It’s not easy, and I get very fixated and it’s hard for me to move in and out of the space at a moment’s notice, which I sort of need to be able to do right now. But writing for me is easy. I can be writing while doing anything. I can be writing one minute and then tending to my kids in the next, and vice versa. It’s just an experience thing. So I’ve just been writing a lot. That’s been my main creative outlet, which is okay. It’s normal for me. But I miss drawing!! Of course starting another chapter fic probably isn’t going to help with that much lmfao.
6. Do you have any routines or habits for writing?
Probably just my new need to have my phone drafts. I so rarely just sit down to an empty page without prepared material anymore. I write so many scenes on my phone before I start typing in word. It’s like the lynchpin of my writing process lately.
7. How do you get to know more about each of your characters? Do their personalities and backstories tend to come to you immediately, or do you have to “spend some time” with them to figure that out?
Hmm. I think I need to spend some time with them. There are certain things that come to me immediately, and a lot of the time, it’s because those things just fit my aesthetic tendencies. So like, Arthur being able to count cards and cheat at blackjack, and his ability to do sleight of hand at the poker table--these things came to me immediately, just like they did with Solas (who also does sleight of hand and magic tricks and is very good at cards). That stuff all just comes from my husband, who is a good mathematician and super good at games like poker and blackjack. So like, most of my male characters are...that way lol.
Other things, like backstory-wise, it’s usually a mixture of spur of the moment and then well-thought-out stories. So for Mary Beth, she just seems like she’d be from Kansas. So, she’s from Kansas. Then I go searching for a good town for her to be from in like the 1870s when she would have been born. And I find a good town, and then that leads to something else about the backstory of the entire gang, etc. With Sene Lavellan, it took me a long time to invent her whole backstory and to realize she was a rich Dalish elf, and that this was central to her identity. BUT, I knew she was a loner and a hothead right away. So. Yeah. It’s a mix.
8. If you could only write one for the rest of your life - smut, angst, or fluff - what would you choose?
Probably fluff? I need joy.
9. What trope do you love to include in your writing?
I like characters who are protective of each other (it’s not a gendered thing--I like protective women as well as protective men). I like hurt/comfort a LOT. I like touch-starved characters easing themselves back into the throes of intimacy with partners who are patient. I like secret relationships. Fake relationships. Sorry this is multiple tropes I just realized the question didn’t include the plural lmfao
10. Do you write original works in additional to fandom works?
Yes? Theoretically? Lol. I have original stories that I work on from time to time. It used to be all I wrote. I wrote and published original stories before I got here. I miss it sometimes, but to be honest, the transition from fanfiction to original work is not simple. It’s very complicated. That’s not because fanfiction is easier. It’s because it’s a different genre. It’s an entirely different rhetorical situation. The conventions do not match up. Despite the common purpose of “storytelling,” the way you get there is another animal and it takes time and focus to make the change. If I make the change it will most likely be a longterm change.
11. What author’s style do you admire the most?
Probably Hemingway. I love a lot of different styles, but his particular brand of minimalism is, I think, the most taut and the most stylistically interesting to me.
I’ll tag @morgan-arthur @pikapeppa @a-shakespearean-in-paris @ellstersmash @idrelle-miocovani @thevikingwoman @bearly-tolerable @gentle-outlaw @goldenentertainment @jarbaje and @nyoom-bum. Your questions are under the cut <3
What is your favorite character from a video game and why?
When you look back at your middle/junior high school years, what is the first album, band, or musical act that comes to mind?
What makes you nostalgic?
What is your biggest pet peeve when it comes to tumblr, fandom, and/or publishing at AO3?
Describe the place where you are from in three sentences.
Which fandom(s) are you most active in right now? What is your current favorite ship from that fandom?
Where/to whom do you turn when you seek wisdom?
Do you like sports? If you do, what’s your favorite sport to watch and/or play?
Have you ever been to Las Vegas?
What is your guilty pleasure TV show and why?
Do you believe in ghosts?
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I was looking on my phone and found some notes and a theory for Jimmy Casket. I just want to warn that this is a few years old and does not consider any of the more recent P.I.E. videos.
《Anything that looks like this is new and added now as I Re-Read it》
So without further ado, I present a 2 year old theory and notes:
Dipper mod 1- March 9th 2016
Haunted by cardboard friend- Johnny Ghost gets some of Gregory/Jimmy' s flash backs like remembering the cardboard friend name and this confuses Ghost as he tries to connect the links in his brain.
CBF Theory: CBF is a manipulative entity that attacks and feeds off of the weak (This is proved by CBF attacking Ghost without his partner Toast and when he attacked Gregory because he had no one to interact with and caused them both to go crazy)
[Crossed Out] Babby doll hide and seek (gregory) Sep, 26 2013
[Crossed Out] Murder ep 1- Jan, 12 2012
[Crossed Out] Box friend original- Sep, 15 2013
《I think I was going to do a theory that dealt with the dates but Idk.》
Jimmy Casket Theory/Notes:
1. Tommy/Timothy Casket is Jimmy' s father and not Ghost's.
2. Jimmy Casket likes to win whether it's murder, hide and seek, find it so I can eat it, TTT, or just killing someone.
3. I believe that paranormal entities detect Jimmy Casket/Gregory instead of Johnny Ghost.
4. He is ticked off by not winning, blood, being away from Toast for along time, when Ghost is confused/scared of something, annoyed by people, doesn't get what he wants.
--‐----------------------------------------
In Gmod murder siblings 11 "Olaf" at 14:05 Jimmy Casket states that his name is Gregory
In KING BONNIE (Gmod castle mod) at 7:49 Ghost said that he grew up on a farm
[Crossed Out] January 8th 2014 "Johnny Ghost" Gmod 4 player prop hunt 27 Ghost and Toast first appearance
《Time for the Big Theory》
Jimmy Casket the world's most renowned murderer. To solve the theory of who is Jimmy Casket? And what is his backstory? We need to go over a few things first. The 1st thing we need to go over before we start talking about Jimmy Casket is how life and death works in the Gmod/VenturianTale world. Clearly life and death in the Gmod world is not normal like it is here in reality. We live and we die, that's how it is and that's how it will always be. But we can still explain why people come back from the dead. I believe the reason people can come back from the dead is Maxwell Acachalla. Now how does Maxwell have any thing to do with Jimmy Casket? You may ask well, I'm getting there. Let me explain why I think Maxwell has to do with people coming back from the dead first. In a bank robbery with Papa Acachalla and the gang, Maxwell was killed by the Bank Teller after they figured out they were trying to steal money. When Maxwell died he met with an evil and VERY powerful entity. Who this entity is? I don't know. It could be someone we haven't met yet, or will ever meet. It could be Satan himself. Or it could be someone we've seen before, but never suspected them to be evil.
Back to what I was saying, when Maxwell encountered the entity he was offered great power as a ghost and since Maxwell was power driven he accepted the gift. When the Acachalla household encountered Maxwell again there was a curse that made them become immortal, Maxwell didn't mind because he wanted to enternally tourture the Acachallas and especially Papa and his gang as revenge for his death. When Maxwell was starting to get out of hand the Acachallas called P.I.E. aka Johnny Ghost and Johnny Toast to get rid of him. When Ghost and Toast encountered Maxwell they were "killed" by him and that caused Ghost and Toast to come back from the dead.
Now, some people in the universe are also not 100% normal, for example Maloney is an alien and some people have special powers which I think is the reason Spooker and Mr. Sviggles can come back from the dead. Now that we have gone over the reason why I think some people come back from the dead, we can discuss the fact that some people aren't immortal and once they die they die. Some examples of this is John, M9KShotgun, and the ginger kid from "FNAF School Roleplay - Gmod Five Nights at Freddy's Animatronics mod (Garry's Mod)", other small one time characters, and Higgly Diggly Hoogen, yes before you start saying "But even if he gets killed he still keeps coming back" and you're kinda right, BUT he doesn't come back from the dead, one of his many other clones are sent. And the government will never run out as long as they keep cloning him. And you're still probably wondering what this all has to do with Jimmy Casket well I'm about to tell you how.
Remember that video "Gmod Cardboard Friend Mod" where Gregory was hanging out with Cardboard Friend and it slowly turned into a horror movie type scenario? Yeah? Well this is a big part of lore we need in order to solve the mystery of Jimmy Casket. Let's talk about what we know about Gregory and CBF then we'll go into what I think happened. We know that Gregory is a young easily manipulated boy that has gone through a lot. He lost his parents at an early age, he's been alone in a really creepy, old house and his only source or communication is CBF which is a ghost. Now let's get into the theories, I believe CBF is an evil, manipulative entity that is up to no good, and only wants to traumatize and kill people (and possibly take their souls). CBF's target was Gregory, CBF planned to slowly steal his soul by making him go mad, and it worked. In the video when CBF was chasing Gregory around the house it symbolized him killing Gregory, and when Gregory was sending CBF into the sky was him accepting the fact that he was dead, and finally Gregory walking out of the yard was him moving on into the afterlife. Now this is when things start to tie together, because when Gregory died he was faced with the same evil entity that gifted Maxwell great power. The entity offered Gregory something unbelievable.
BUT, before I say what the entity gifted Gregory I want to explain why he decided to gift Gregory and not some other random person. Think, this video was probably a flashback of Gregory's life which was in like the 1980s when technology was not at its peak and paranormal invenvestigating sounded pretty crazy, so there weren't many paranormal investigators. Therefore there was no hard cold proof that paranormal entities can kill people EXPECT for the "Bell Witch Haunting" which states that a poltergeist physically killed (in this case poisoned) John Bell in the 19th Centary. So death by paranormal entity was pretty rare. This caused the evil entity to bestow a gift upon Gregory, a boy that died by a paranormal entity at a young age.
Back to what the entity offered Gregory, the entity gave Gregory the chance to rule over personalities. So we're all correct when we say that Gregory is Jimmy Casket, but this goes a lot deeper than imagined...
Gregory is that insane, evil, devious side of you and your OC's when you/they lose at something, is scared, threatened, or confused. And Jimmy Casket is just one of his characters with their own backstory and a little bit of Gregory in it. Gregory is Samantha gravestone, Max Hunter, Melodie Casket, Amy Reaper, Ethan Dager, Karl Coffin, 《These are all people's "insane" OC's I looked up when originally making this》 Gavin Toast, he is even Antisepticeye and Darkiplier.
I also quickly want to mention that this personality can spread into our world too so to explain to you what I mean I'll tell you about the time I was scrolling through the comments of a story I found on WattPad and the users were talking about how they would sometimes feel the urge to stab, trip, or harm/kill people, like Jimmy Casket does, and that made it clear that the feelings they feel becomes a personality. Another thing to notice is how Jordan changes from the fun, energetic, and goofy person he is to an insane, psycopath...even his eyes change. That's right the addicting, fun, evil personality we all love to use today are one of Gregory's OCs .
And now, here we are nearing the end of the theory but there are still some things up in the air that we need to be solve before we go, Questions like Why is Ghost unaware of Jimmy Casket? And why does he act so strange around CBF? Well...I'm gonna solve these questions right now, Let's first start with why Ghost is unaware of Jimmy's existence. This simply deals with how powerful one's soul is. Johnny Ghost has been through a lot of stuff...too much stuff, this has caused his soul to weaken and decay. Since he has a weak soul Gregory's OC, Jimmy Casket had extra room to grow and fill so he added more of his own backstory in there too, in order to have a balance. This caused Ghost's childhood to get mixed up with the other backstories and whenever Jimmy/Gregory takes control it's over whelming and causes Ghost to black out. How I know this deals with how powerful one's soul is and not something else is shown in "Dipper Mod 1" when dipper's evil persona left his body and tried to stab him with an eraser. Dipper seemed to not care or worry about it and in "Dipper Mod 2" Dipper's evil clone was hanging around the store and Dipper was not worried or scared at all, he may have been a bit annoyed but that's all. That showed that Dipper has a strong soul and is very aware of his evil side the side Gregory controls.
And now to finally explain why Ghost acts the way he does around CBF. Johnny Ghost is a Paranormal Investigator which means he investigates paranormal entities wether it be a level 2 apparition or a demon he tries to get rid of it, and CBF is no exception. The powerful and smart entities notice Gregory and not Ghost so when Ghost runs into CBF Gregory starts to freak out because he is aware that CBF is his killer and CBF knows that Gregory is there and wants to traumatize him even further. Gregory acts as Jimmy Casket and not himself because he wants to try to stand up for himself in a more powerful and safer form. And if any other OC were to come face to face with CBF they would have the same reaction because they are all the same person, Gregory. So this solves the mystery of Jimmy Casket, He's just another one of Gregory's made up personalities that Gregory hides behind. And Gregory is just an unfortunate soul that was chosen to die by the hands of a ghost, which caused him to become the evil, mischievous side of everyone.
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That's it! That's a theory that I wrote about 2 years ago and never did anything with.
I used to love Venturiantale and finding this and looking back to a few of their videos was a blast to the past. It was definitely one of the better fandoms I was in when was younger and I still don't regret it one bit.
#venturiantale#venturian#johnny ghost#johnny toast#jimmy casket#paranormal investigators extraordinaire#creepy pasta#p.i.e#pie#gregory casket#cardboard friend#Maxwell Acachalla
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Choices Ch. 4
Pairing: Sweet Pea x Reader
Word Count: 2346
Warning(s): Hospital, Southside violence, bad writing
Summary: Being Reggie’s little sister wasn’t easy already. But being his sister and not agreeing with his hate towards the Southside was nearly impossible. Tensions are rising and Y/N needs to make some choices that could change her life drastically.
A/N: Sorry thought I would get this up yesterday but here it is! I also thought I would try writing in a different POV. Idk if i like it but it fits more with how I want to tell the story so I guess it will work for now.
DISCLAIMER: I do not own Riverdale but I do own the OCs and the story is mine. I do not post anywhere but on this profile so if you see my stuff anywhere else let me know!
Side Note: If it seems like something in my fic is not mine or of original canon let me know! I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes!
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One |Two | Three
Reggie and his friends jumped into action as you hit the ground.
“Y/N” He screamed your name trying to wake you up. That’s when he noticed the blood pooling below you. A shard of glass must have hit you when the windows exploded but no one noticed. FP picked you up and rushed you to the cruiser outside. While this whole mess was happening around you, another mess was taking place at the Whyte Wyrm.
“I can’t just sit here” Sweet Pea said as he tried to walk out. Jughead was there to push him back.
“You don’t have a choice, Sweet Pea, you’re staying put.” He just pushed Jughead away from him before glaring.
“You said it yourself, the Ghoulies are back” His heart wouldn’t stop racing. Another person he knew was hurt. He didn’t know how a Northsider, hell a Mantle, got under his skin but, you did. The young Jones didn’t want to listen to Sweet Pea’s call to action.
“We will deal with them” Jughead looked around him. “As soon as my dad gets back-”
“Oh, so you’re not our leader all of a sudden?” Sweet Pea bit back at the Serpent Prince. ‘Oh, no, that’s right, you’re just the guy who got Fangs Shot!”
“Watch it…” Jughead tried to defend himself but Sweet Pea was getting too worked up now.
“And now, Fangs might die! And the Ghoulies are out for our blood because a drag race you started.” He got into Jughead’s face while poking his chest.
“An hour. That’s all I’m asking for, Sweet Pea.” Jughead pleaded with the taller serpent. Sweet Pea just turned to walk away but not without slamming his fist into the wall. He was stuck here while Fangs was fighting for his life. Hell, he didn’t even know if Y/N was alive at all. Sweet Pea was just itching for Ghoulie blood. All Sweet Pea could do to distract himself was play pool. He was pocketing shot after shot in complete frustration. He saw Jughead rush out of the bar and scoffed. He’s not sure how long it was before he returned with Toni and Cheryl. Jughead explained what had happened with Peabody and the Ghoulies.
“It’s time we end the Ghoulie scourge and that Traitor, Penny Peabody permanently!” Sweet Pea was fed up with his friends getting hurt. Fangs, Y/N, and now Toni. He was done.
“Sweet Pea, two hours ago your fight was with Reggie Mantle. Now you want us to go to war over territory that we don’t even control anymore? This is Hiram Lodge’s problem not ours.” Jughead yelled back at Sweet Pea.
“So you’re just gonna hand over Sunnyside Trailer Park, our home to Penny and the Ghoulies?” Toni stood up outraged at what Jughead was proposing.
“Toni, I don’t want us to die.” Jughead pleaded with the female serpent. “A rumble with the Ghoulies right now? It’s a suicide-run”
“It’s better than a coward’s death.” Sweet Pea stood by Toni. The boys started talking over each other. Sweet Pea was calling for us to defend themselves while Jughead was trying to calm the taller serpent.
“That’s enough!” FP’s voice rang through the Whyte Wyrm. He walked towards the fighting teens. “I just got a call from the sheriff’s office. Fangs uh” He paused and looked at the crowd. “He didn’t make it. He’s gone.” An air of disbelief hung around the gang.
“Fangs is dead?” Jughead questioned his dad. FP nodded.
“And we will mourn him, hell yea, we will. But first, we will honor him. From what I just heard, it sounds like we need to put it to a vote. All those against going to war with the Ghoulies?” No one lifted a finger. “And all those for giving them hell on the battlefield tomorrow?” Almost everyone’s hands went to the air. Jughead just glared at his father but, it was decided; the Serpents were going to war.
Sweet Pea took the first chance he got to jump on his bike and head to the Hospital. Bulldogs were everywhere but he was only looking for one Northsider. He tried not to think of Fangs. Sweet Pea was on a mission and he couldn’t be distracted by grief. The receptionist looked up as he approached the desk.
“I’m looking for a patient. Well I don’t know if she’s here, I just know she was hurt so I’m hoping…” He started rambling.
“What’s her name?” The receptionist asked with pity in her voice. He clenched his fist and took a deep breath.
“Y/N, uh Mantle, Y/N Mantle.”
“Her room is 203.” Sweet Pea rushed towards the room with his heart in his throat. He was so in his head about Y/N he didn’t notice that some of the bulldogs in the waiting room heard him and texted Reggie. he was already outside your room waiting for the Serpent to show up.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing here?” Reggie sneered at him. Sweet Pea had to calm himself down.
“Look, I’m not here to fight. I heard about Y/N and just wanted to make sure she’s okay.” Reggie just scoffed at him.
“She doesn’t need you checking in on her. I don’t know how you heard about her but you need-”
“I was on the phone with her when she passed out. I couldn’t come earlier but I’m here now. I just need to know that she’s okay” Sweet Pea cut the bulldog off. Reggie stared at him for a while debating what he should do.
“She took a shard of glass to the side. We didn’t notice and she lost a lot of blood.”
“How’d you not notice?!”
“You were on the phone with her! She didn’t even notice, okay!” Reggie turned around and slammed his fist into the wall. “It’s not my fault” He whispered. Sweet Pea calmed down after seeing him like this. It was clear that the jock was already beating himself up.
“What do the doctors say?”
“They did surgery to repair her spleen or whatever. She’ll make it. Her body is trying to make up for the lost blood so she’s sleeping right now. Been asleep the whole time, hasn’t woken up. Doctor says it’s normal but…” Reggie trailed off before realizing who he was talking to. “You know now, so get the hell out and leave Y/N alone. This just proves that she doesn’t need to get mixed up with Southside scum.”
“The Serpents didn’t do this, it was the Ghoulies.” Sweet Pea defended. No way would he be blamed for what happened to Y/N.
“Serpents, Ghoulies, does it matter? A Southsider still put her in the hospital.” Reggie sneered at him before walking into your room and shutting the door. Sweet Pea threw his own fist to the wall. Hearing his own words thrown at him by Reggie had his stomach sinking low. He needed to feel more in control, so he left to the one place that felt like home.
All Sweet Pea could do to keep a level head and forget all the shit he had experienced today was to play pool. They started playing for cigarettes and whatever else people would bet. He lost himself in the game. That was until FP interrupted them.
“Toni, Where was Penny hiding out?”
“By the docks.” Toni told their leader quickly. FP rushed out of the bar in an instant and jumped on his bike. Everyone was at a loss. Sweet Pea thought it was useless but he decided to call Y/N anyways. He sighed as he heard your voicemail. As he hung up, he received a text message.
Princess: Hey, sorry, Reggie is here. U alright?
Sweets: I mean you’re the one laying in a hospital bed. Shouldn’t I be asking you that?
Princess: I’m fine. Dr. said I just need to rest. I’m also really doped up right now. Can’t feel a thing!
Sweet Pea couldn’t help but laugh at your response. He ignored everyone’s stares as he typed his reply.
Sweets: Glad to hear you’re okay. I tried stopping by but your brother was there. He told me you hadn’t woken up yet right before telling me to GTFO.
Princess: UGH, stupid Reggie. I’m sorry, hey maybe you can sneak in later! He says he has stuff to still take care of tonight.
Sweets: I’d love to. Hey GTG, hopefully cya later.
Sweet Pea put his phone away as he heard a car pull up. He, Toni, and Cheryl met Archie and Betty outside of the Wyrm. FP had been gone for a while now and everyone was on edge.
“Where is he? Where’s Jug?” Betty instantly asked as she saw the Serpents.
“Guys…” Archie directed everyone’s attention to an approaching FP. He came out carrying his beaten son. Jughead hung in his arms lifeless. It only took one look at his upper arm to see who did this because in place of where his serpent tattoo should have been was a bloody wound. Everyone was in shock as FP placed him in Archie’s car and raced to the hospital. It was the third time in a span of hours that Sweet Pea was on his bike rushing to the hospital hoping his friend would live.
Serpents filled the waiting room along with the bulldogs now. In all honesty, Sweet Pea was so close to breaking down. First Fangs, then Y/N, Toni turned out okay but for a second there he wasn’t sure, and now Jughead. Sure, Jughead and him didn’t see eye to eye but they were Serpents; a family.
“First you invade our streets, then our schools, our homes are in flames and you think you can just walk in here.” An unnamed bulldog started getting in the Serpent’s faces.
“Hey, back off, we all have people we care about in here.” Archie stood in between the rivals. “Is Y/N/N still here?”
“Yeah, will be here overnight. Reggie is in there now saying good night. We’ll probably head over to his to keep him company.” The bulldog responded. The tension in the air diffused enough for the Northsiders to back away.
“Wait, Y/N/N, as in Y/N?” Archie nodded at Sweet Pea. “All these bulldogs are here for her?”
“Yeah, we all grew up with the Mantles. Y/N is like a little sister to all of us.” His voice had a slight warning in them. FP walked into the waiting room and the teens went to meet him.
“He’s in surgery. It doesn’t look good.” FP collapsed in a chair and sobbed. The kids didn’t know what to do. His son’s life hung in the balance and they were just expected to wait. Out of the corner of his eye, Sweet Pea saw the bulldogs leave with Reggie. He waited another moment before heading towards Y/N’s room. He knocked on the door.
“Come in.” Sweet Pea entered. “Sweets! I was just about to text you!” Her face lit up when she saw him.
“Hey, Princess” He walked towards the empty chair by her bedside. “I was in the waiting room and I saw Reggie leave so I thought it was safe.”
“Of course, you’re probably waiting to hear about Fangs!” She said innocently. “How is he?” It was then that she noticed Sweet Pea’s tense posture. He wouldn’t look at her either. “Sweets?”
“He uh, FP told us that, well he…” He avoided saying the words but Y/N understood right away. Sweet Pea’s head snapped up as he heard Y/N yelp in pain. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I was just trying to sit up so I could hug you but these stupid stitches won’t let me!” She groaned in frustration. He went to help her sit up in the bed.
“Yeah, we got the news earlier. Things have been stirring up with the Ghoulies. I won’t go into too much detail but Jughead thought it was a good idea to play the sacrificial lamb. He’s the reason why we were in the waiting room.” Sweet Pea started to ramble. He was cut off when Y/N’s hand landed on his forearm.
“I’m sorry, Sweet Pea. I really am. I hope Jughead is alright.” She smiled at the Serpent.
“I just want this night to be over with.” He leaned his head on the bed next to her lap. On instinct, Y/N started running her hand through his hair. The big bad serpent just leaned further into her touch.
“Me too. They said that I could probably go home tomorrow afternoon depending on labs and all that medical talk.” Sweet Pea hummed in response. “Are you falling asleep on me, Sweets?”
“No, next to you, Princess.” He mumbled. Y/N scooted over slightly.
“Come up here then” She patted the open space next to her. Sweet Pea was gonna argue but he took one look at her face and just sighed.
He crawled in right by her and swung his arm around her head. She placed her head on his chest without thinking. Neither of them could believe that they were in this position now. It was only a handful of days ago that they had their first conversation. It all came down to two facts: Y/N needed someone and Sweet Pea needed to be needed right now. They were like that for a few minutes before Sweet Pea got the courage to break the silence.
“This issue with the Ghoulies has become worse. They’ve always been a thorn in our side but…” he took a deep breath before continuing, “tomorrow morning Serpents and Ghoulies are going to war. I want this to happen I do but, we’ve-I’ve lost so much already. I don’t know if I’m ready to lose more.” Y/N looked up at him to see his eyes closed and head tilted back.
“Hey, everything’s gonna be okay. Let’s just get through tonight alright?” He nodded at her. Neither one of them wanted to break the peace that settled in the room because the truth was, they didn’t know if they were ready to face tomorrow.
Five
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@sailorsolar12
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Could you tell us a little about your characters?
Y E S !
but due to me having at least over a thousand characters I’ll just give a quick summary of the 25 I manage to dig up over 3 sketchbooks.
Y’all can pick and choose which of them interest yall or who you wanna hear more about!
Also because I’m extra, I made sketch icons for the 25 characters, info under the cut
I’ll talk a bit more about my actual Original Characters first, starting with
Aiko! Otherwise known as Echo
- A marked individual in a steampunk world that gets mixed with magic, because I like both of those things
- Echo runs an underground lab that does helps the underground world with replacing body parts, illegal surgeries etc etc
- Even though she marked, which puts a bounty on her head already, she is well respected by the community for not cheating for your money, stealing your cash, or shanking/killing you mid-surgery
- however, Echo does long for adventure and sometimes do get bored in the lab
oh yeah,, Echo like stealing eyeballs, so if you’re low on cash and wouldn’t mind losing an eye, you know who to call!!
Bonus:
Here’s Echo’s boring, undeveloped sidekick!! I don’t like her and I don’t know how to make her better. Yes, she doesn’t have a name.
here’s my god playboy that left “heaven” due to having an early mid-life crisis, I call him God boi cause;
- He goes by many names!
tbh, he’s probably the closest character I have to being genderfluid/-neutral? I’m not sure,,
- The god has many powers, from lightning to shapeshifting
- The shapeshifting part allows him to change every part of himself, allowing him to change depending on his situation.
- God boyo, or originally Aristide, is obsessed with the idea of perfection. A god should be perfect, if a god is out of line, he is no god.
- Same goes for him, which means whenever something is wrong with him, it affects him, extremely
However, leaving the land of gods to live among humans aren’t all perks
- Aris isn’t immune to diseases or injuries. In fact, he actually fell down and died on impact when he came to earth, being reborn into another child immediately.
- He doesn’t gain his memories back automatically tho!! He has to have a major shock to the brain in order for him to remember his previous lives
- Sometimes the shock isn’t enough either, when you have a thousand over lives, you won’t remember every single one of them. So forgotten lovers coming back to haunt because your brain hates you? That’s everyday for him!
i just,, i like playing with the concepts of god,,
Up next we got Ayeka Himura! A japanese student going to a neighborhood, but still a pretty good, school living close to poverty due to her father’s constant spending habits and obsession with art supplies. With the household lacking a mother due to wacky shenanigans, Ayeka takes care of her two younger siblings and the house, all while maintaining a very well-paid job and slowly loosing interest in actually studying for a good, honest job.
also she likes birds!!
Yes her design is heavily “based” off Toga but I love her current design too much to change it, h e l p
So like,, I suck at chinese and I made ocs that exclusively spoke in chinese to help with that but I’m still stuck at 40~marks
I forgot his scar but remembered his earring i hate myself
my og chinese kiddo! he was was first to come and I love his design ever since
he radiates fuck you energy except the girl below. He’s neighbors with her and they acknowledge each other existence ever since. he has a dumb cliche crush on her and is a bit protective of her because nothing says having issues than latching onto someone that makes you happy
Only this girl got named!! even tho she was the second character.
Li Shen, yes she doesnt have a surname, is apparently main ho now, according to my old oc chart of my “main” ocs
She’s the group’s resident sweetheart and really does not want you to do stupid shit, stop doing stupid shit. She tutors my son up there ^^ even though he’s actually smart and just refuses to do his work properly. But she still deeply cares for him.
As well as the girl below shdifhd
the last girl of the ching chong trio and the reason I had to switch up my son’s design is this girly over here! Her design was too business-y and formal so I enrolled all of them into college. A rich girl who doesn’t know how to deal with her g a y thoughts. Tried sending Li Shen some flowers once. She didn’t realize attaching her name would be a good idea and son got a good laugh.
i like paranormal stuff so they apparently look into that shit in their spare time. They’re all actually really fun characters to do prompts with I swear!! send some in and I’ll write them
I had a previous concept for son and Li Shen before last girl came and if yall want me to talk about it,,, i found my sketchbook with the old ideas,,
NEXT UP IS MY OLD GIRL ELORA!!
Elora herself used to be a fan character but I pulled her out and wow\
cant fucking believe she used to be straight for Vylad
shes the outgoing, fun adventure type! bit of mommy issues here and there tho,, I don’t want to say too much since I have an entire for her +
her now upgraded bro, Vincent
i really like the name vincent,,
also now he has mommy issues
Ead, the knight who used to have armor
I hate drawing armor
he also have issues
AND IRIS MY SWEET GIRL IM SO SORRY
she doesnt have that much issues tho
basically I made elora and her bro have mommy issues, I’m sorry in advance if that spoils anything
I, sometimes, post about these 4 over on @eloradiesismydocsname and its a gay ol’ time
not that gay tho because uhh,, medieval times,, but I need prompts for a modern au of them and I am happy to talk about their personalities and even go semi in-depth for any of them!!
here we have ghoster.png,, which is her file name cause I didn’t name her,,
A horror enthusiast + film student that goes to a supposedly haunted shack to film her upcoming project with the boys. wacky shenanigans occur and the boys left leaving ghoster here to starve and eventually fall to her death. But because it’s my oc i get to bring her back from the dead, now hungry as ever and will fucking eat you, its not a kink thing, shes just that hungry and angry
tax fraud.png
a robo girl that i created during social studies cause they were talking about taxes and i just went, “what if,, a robo runs on taxes,,, and like,, she haunts you down for not paying your taxes,,” thus she was born! I don’t know what to name her but she is set in the future so-
Time to go future-apocalypse style because I love that setting too and was upset that I didn’t have any ocs in that style. So I created Alex A. ! A cybrog filled with memories of the previous generations as a sad attempt to preserve human life.
He’s accompanied by his sister/cousin idr i didn’t draw an icon for her, didnt like her design. they go on a hunt for food and to return with nothing. She gets to meet this other dude who has a plant arm im pretty sure i based him off someone’s elses oc but i cant remember. The 3 are forgotten. Kinda want to bring them back tho.
Neon! A character set in the future utopia of lazy people, where gamers rise up. its the best I can describe her story without getting too deep. She the new hacker on the block, joining the underground gang of elite hackers. She’s another one of those wacky characters that just has fun. I mean, when you know your way around codes and the world you live in is full of it, would you not take advantage of that?
as for fan characters,, uhh,, i have em
STARTING WITH MY WIFE!
Alexzandra Zara oh my god i forgot to draw her necklace and shirt
anyways,, Alexzandra is one of the more older ocs I have that didnt get a big revamp. Only an au I develop to the point I forgot the actual shows and the original cast are a little different from the source haha what? She’s the emotionally unstable german war veteran, yes the wife thing isn’t mutual, and haha shes only 27~. I cling onto her so much?? She’s hits a lot of “edgy” points but I still love her cause idk,, the story I made for her is something I hold dear cause Alexzandra was one of my first ACTUALLY DEVELOPED CHARACTER. Is it wrong to say I hold her really close to my heart? Is that weird? probably a little cringy sorry haha. I probably project a little into her which might have strengthened my love for her ack. Her story delves more into the depression very unstable needs to talk to someone side and i get scared talking about my wife’s story online so uhh, idk ask me specific questions about her, I’ll be more inclined to talk.
Dr Watts! The spoiled ass dick that stole dst Wilson’s house and yes this is a dst oc, yes im slightly sorry.
He’s just fun?? almost ran a blog with him and a friend’s oc. He’s your typical uptight old science gramps that took advantage of the fact that no one knows his real name that he calls himself a doc. He’s not. I put everything about him up to a 9-10? He’s one of those wacky characters and I love him for it! His story is really wonky tho so might need help solidifying that part
and from the angry old man to my sweet man that will adopt you even if you’re noisy or call him ginger. Pilot here is a TF2 OC I made to interact with other tf2 OCs cause some of them are fun and i wanna join in :((
He’s the Canadian stereotype, and yes, he adopted scout, that was one of my character notes.
Like the actual cast of tf2, there’s barely any real story to him. I only gave him a vague I don’t know my past but hey, i fly really really well. He participated in war unlike certain men but he’s still really nice and will only kill you if you hurt his family. Which he doesn’t know so he just considers the cast his family. He keeps mentioning a wife though, pretty sure he doesn’t have one but you do what makes you happy son.
Ai! an oc I HEAVILY revamped oh my god i hate her old vers. So if yall remember my random shouting of missing my og son, Aru. Here’s his bff. cause he barely has any actual friends that give a shit. And I just cant have that. but here’s your yandere revamped into a last minute addition. I actually feel like I did Ai a lot of justice. I don’t want to delve too deep cause I will start making charts. I’ll do that in a separate post if yall are keen
Isamu Aena! a mp100 oc I made by accident cause idk,, I was thinking about lolita fashion and all of a sudden, the actual oc I was going to make turned into a mob psycho oc. She’s one of my few ocs where her sexuality matters (she’s gay yeah) cause it plays a role in her storyline. She went from being “manipulated”/used to Mob’s wingwomen. She spots out things that can help him in the romantic department cause she’s into romance. A student of the school Mob infiltrated and a fantastic tailor, not to mention a pretty decent pyschic. wait where do models get their lolita stuff from,,
im gonna ignore that and move onto Lillian Yi! Who, i swear i did not meant for it, is very close to lloyd. I mean,, none of the ninjas were with him after s3, who you think he’d meet. Lillian is a survivor from the Great Devourour and yes I’m still pissed LEGO stole my backstory for Lillian to use for Harumi. FUCK YOU LEGO, i still love both of em tho,, The event did leave a big scar and it made Lillian job jumping for a bit, ending at Chen’s Noodles in S6~, where ya know,, stuff got better. She was a medalist for gymnastics and continue the activity, even after her parents’ death, to please others. She was already lost at the time so staying in the sport would help, right? Needless to say, after being rejected at a cop academy for youths, or something similar, she gave up for a while but got back into the idea of saving people by using her skills she already had. It helped with the weight and feelings and meeting the green ninja was a very big bonus. Also Lloyd dubbed her the “mysterious stranger” when she refused to speak in fear of her identity, slight shame, and maybe a bit of being star struck. It helped Lloyd too in a sense where he had something to distract him from Zane’s passing.
Their relationship was eventually formed, strong and almost unbreakable, except for harumi but uhh thats a different story. Throughout the seasons, they stayed close and lloyd was always comforted by Lillian went times get ruff.
Also Lillian is my most light-hearted characters and I think that says a lot
Then there’s Nite “I don’t want to be your dad”. A character that is supposed to be in the ninjago world but barely interacts with the main story and only stays in his self contained plot. He was supposed to get a bf but uhhh idk. He’s the master of shifting and streams that online, taking out small crimes, and is actually really shy and doesn’t like interacting with people.
also haha fortnite
Nora Akino, the sin of despair! its an ad thing, I think. She speaks only in a foreign language that only Odin understands and is either big gay for Ava or Maggi, she can’t pick. And yes she did drink the vial, when TITAN attacks your planet and you accidentally die, how else can you meet your family again? also my grandpa walked in and said she looks like royalty. cool-
she wouldn’t leave my hand for like,, 3 days or something
Petri, a fellow troublemaker at camp campbell’s music camp. She managed to pick the camp because apparently a parent who doesn’t acknowledge your hard work don’t read the fine print! Please let David adopt her,,
LASTLY! Yukimaru Atsuko, hero name; Gummie. She goes by Yuki and is a big dick. She’s a studious student but gets more thrills on the actual battlefield. Living with her uptight grandma and her big bottom energy bro, she has the dom energy thing going. and apparently folks on G+, or the people who comment about her, thinks she’s really pretty, which was oddly a thing back before UA. She’s the dick you can like, not like Bakugou but she will definitely want to fight Bakugou.
A gum-related quirk is not full of perks when its only your hands. I’d dive more into her like her insecurities and stuff but I’ve been here for probably 3hrs. Sorry anon.
Also I’m so sorry to anyone who reads this all the way through.
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You reblogged an OC meme! Thank god, tell us about Josie!
oc profiles meme!
…oh my god, i was so excited to click post and babble about josie at people that i initially forgot to come back and fill in the placeholder with something about how excited i was to talk about josie (—it’s like 4:15 AM where i am, which is probably part of the problem but i digress)
Full Name: Josiah Daniel Quinn — but, please, they explicitly prefer to be called, “Josie,” so unless you’re one of their bosses over at S.T.R.O.M.A*, whom they’re in no position to argue with, call them Josie. If not that, then use their surname. But if you can avoid it, just please do not call them by their full given first name, okay?
Shiny mutant superhero codename: Lyaeus — derived from an aspect of Dionysus who is traditionally invoked as a reliever of pain and a deliverer from anxiety and emotional turmoil and so on, which is one of their preferred uses of their psychic abilities and one of Josie’s larger goals in life (for them, it’s a mix of, “If something bad is going to happen, and you can do something to stop it and choose not to, that’s on you” and, “The world is a mess and largely sucks, but that’s no reason not to do what we can to take care of each other”).
Their codename is doubly special to them because although they were raised loosely Catholic and have a Mormon extended family who mostly doesn’t acknowledge their existence (and hasn’t for their entire life, since their Mom left the Mormon church to marry Josie’s Dad, oops), Josie is a hellenic pagan whose primary relationship is with Dionysus.
They thought for a long time and did a lot of reflection about whether or not it was too presumptuous of them to use one of his aspects as a codename, but eventually, they went with it because they see their codename and its meaning as someone who they’re continually striving to be and a set of values that they’re always trying to bring to bear in the world, and they feel like Dionysus is probably okay with that.
Gender and Sexuality: DMAB Genderfluid. // Bisexual.
This isn’t actually specifically about their gender or sexuality, but I couldn’t think of where else to put it: Josie grew up around all things Rocky Horror. Like, their parents were highly involved in the local community theatre, which did a semi-regular RHPS shadow-cast, and Josie’s parents brought their kid with them often enough that Josie grew up with their blood family and their, “Rocky family.”
Josie would rather deal with their Rocky family than their blood family a lot of the time, because their Rocky family was more immediately there for them during a lot of rough stuff while they were growing up, and their Rocky family handled it better at the various times when they came out, and their Rocky family didn’t say shit like, “Wait, I thought you were gay, why are you going back in the closet” when they came out as bi or ask invasive questions when they came out as genderfluid and was more supportive in general of Josie’s evolving sense of their own identity, and so on.
Pronouns: They/Them/Theirs.
Josie does also answer to He/Him/His pronouns, but that isn’t a choice on their part, so much as it’s an issue of, “Well, I can be out at work and open the door to potential harassment and people who will invalidate my gender identity and likely flat-out refuse to respect my pronouns, which will create more difficulty for myself in a job that’s already difficult because it’s stressful to begin with and I hate working here — or I can suck it up and just be grateful that my friends and parents are all good about this”
Like, one of the things that Seb does when he and Josie first meet that makes Josie go, “I’m still not totally thrilled at being assigned to help out the newbie (especially since I know I’m only getting this assignment because: 1. our bosses are playing a game of, ‘lmao just toss the LGBTQ ones together’ because the newbie’s gay and pretty much everyone here thinks that I am too; and 2. Deputy Director Gray is still cranky with me over that MSNBC round-table that I did last week where Yael kept pushing me to voice my own opinions and not the Bureau’s official line) — but maybe it won’t actually be completely awful and maybe he’s going to be okay as a new partner”?
…is noticing that Josie wears two woven yarn bracelets on one wrist — one of them in the lavender/white/chartreuse colors of the genderqueer flag, and the other in the pink/white/purple/black/blue of the genderfluid flag — and first waiting for them to be alone in Josie’s office, then going, “Oh, so are you genderfluid? What are your pronouns?” and then listening and respecting it when Josie explained that they’d rather Seb just kept using he/him/his at work
Species: Human (mutant with aforementioned mutant psychic powers)
Race/Ethnicity: White, and the only real part of Josie’s ethnic background that’s ever been important in their life was that their late paternal grandmother was very proud of being Irish.
Like, her parents had come to Ellis Island from Ireland — though she was too young to have any actual memories of the passage herself — and she wasn’t so insistent about it that she objected to her son marrying a Mormon girl instead of a Good Irish Catholic Girl, but still, the Irish thing was a big deal for her.
Josie, personally, doesn’t get it beyond, “I’m white and I have a particular aversion to St. Patrick’s Day because first of all, some of my extended family members can turn into a bunch of rowdy, off-putting little shits on St. Patrick’s Day, and I always had to suffer through that because we always had a party for it, first because Grandma wanted one, and then in honor of her memory.
“And secondly, because as soon as anyone hears that I’m partially Irish and/or a Dionysian, it is just assumed that I want to go get wasted on St. Patrick’s Day, which I don’t, but I still end up going out into environments that are absolute Hell for someone who has both telepathy and hyper-empathy, because the spaces are crowded, emotions are running high, and there is basically nowhere to escape to where you can get some peace and quiet and a break from the sensory and emotional overload of being at a rowdy bar on St. Patrick’s Day.
“And I endure all of this with people whom I may not even like that much just so they’ll have a designated driver, because I would feel bad personally if I didn’t go to make sure they all got home okay, and just because they don’t understand my god or might want to get something else out of him than I do, doesn’t mean that I should brush them off and risk them getting hurt while they’re completely shit-faced.
“Which doesn’t make this any less exhausting and awful, but it’s better than taking the chance that they might get hurt, y’know?”
Birthplace and Birthdate: Saratoga Springs, NY. // 22nd February, 1980 — they’re a Pisces (Libra rising, Gemini moon).
Guilty Pleasures: High-quality dark chocolate, high-quality makeup even if they can’t wear most of it as often as they’d like^, the original Vampire Chronicles novels (and though they will sometimes claim that only the original six ones, “count,” Josie owns everything that Anne Rice has published, even the ridiculous Jesus books), binge-watching reruns of Project Runway…
And they don’t feel particularly guilty about it, but one of the simple things that makes Josie happy is playfully teasing their emergency contacts/best friends over how their parents named them after Beatles songs
Jude, naturally, was “Hey Jude” and Rocky got named after, “Rocky Raccoon” because, at the last minute, his and Jude’s parents decided to veto naming him Desmond because he’s a character in “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” but his name is not in the title, which was apparently a deal-breaker because of reasons
Rocky also sometimes gets playful ribbing about all things Rocky Horror, because he and Josie are ridiculous nerds, and RHPS isn’t their exclusive thing because Josie will share it with anyone who gives them half a chance to do so…… but it is still a thing that is special to Josie and Rocky, so here they are
If you ask them, Josie will tell you that they don’t believe in associating pleasure with guilt, and in their defense, they do believe in encouraging people not to feel guilty for enjoying the things that make them happy or that help them survive, because as long as those things aren’t hurting anyone — yes, that includes you, person Josie is talking to — then you have a right to be happy and a right to take care of yourself
The reality is that Josie says this to people so often because it’s something that they often struggle with themself, and even though they’re better, in some ways, than they have been in the past, there are still a lot of places where they need work
Also, Josie wouldn’t call some of the more poppy music that they like, “guilty pleasures” — especially because, if you ask them, there is no reason to feel guilty about listening to, for example, Beyoncé or Nicki Minaj
—but it is still the case that, if they were going to have a mini-reunion with some of the old goth crew friends from high school whom they don’t keep in touch with that often, Josie probably wouldn’t mention Nicki or Beyoncé, unless it was by accident or until they were sure that the old gang wasn’t going to do the judgmental goth kids thing they used to do of going, “ugh, all pop music is soulless empty bullshit for posers” and so on
Also also, there is almost no chance of them ever admitting this to most people, but…… Josie kinda loves the goth kids from South Park. Like, Josie really kinda loves them.
There’s basically no chance of them ever admitting it to most people because for one thing, it’s embarrassing to them, due to the whole South Park of everything.
For another, they’d feel the need to give someone a lengthy, tedious disclaimer about how they don’t actually watch South Park or enjoy it very much, they just know about the goth kids because one of their best friends went, “Oh my god, Josie, you have to watch this, the new Goth kid characters are so you” way back when, after the first episode with them in it aired and said friend (Rocky) was still taping new eps on VHS to watch after he got home from night classes
And…… well. Josie still wouldn’t give South Park much credit for anything else, but they do really love the goth kids, and they agree with Rocky’s, “omg it you” moment because the South Park goth kids are often eerily similar to shit that they said and did as a weird little goth kid back in high school
At one point, Rocky actually made Josie little plush dolls of the goth kids that he’d designed himself, and they are a big reason why you’re not allowed in Josie’s room until they trust you.
Other reasons include:
Josie doesn’t want most people to touch their makeup or put any of it out of order, and they keep most of it in their bedroom, on their dresser, in front of the vanity mirror that they found someone just throwing out shortly after they moved to Baltimore, even though it’s a perfectly good mirror so wtf;
some of Josie’s favorite and most personally meaningful religious and spiritual paraphernalia is in their bedroom (they keep their actual shrine to Dionysus and their, “worship workspace” in a different room at their place, but some of the more personally significant things are in their room most of the time, and they’d rather you didn’t have a chance to touch them);
Josie just tends to be an incredibly private person who places a lot of value on their personal space and having spaces that are set aside as Theirs. They were like this even before their psychic abilities kicked in and made them value even more their personal space, and ability to have a place that is set apart as Theirs Exclusively where they can go to get some distance from all the mental, emotional, and sensory overload that comes from feeling almost everyone’s feelings and hearing many of their thoughts**, to some extent or another, almost all the time;
and the few albums of old photos and framed old photos, some of which are just garden variety embarrassing like, “yes, my hair is naturally blond, here is photographic evidence from before my parents let me start dyeing it, and oh yeah, that was probably backstage after the community theatre production of Oliver! that I did in eighth grade — oh yeah, definitely that one, there’s my Artful Dodger costume and my glaringly blond hair”
but others of which are, for lack of a better term, fairly emotionally complicated for Josie. There are several different reasons why any of these photos might be kinda complicated — ranging from, “they feature Josie’s one particularly heinous ex-boyfriend who used his wealthy family’s connections to get Josie blacklisted from working in fashion after they graduated from Pratt’s School of Design” to, “they’re from the year in high school that Josie wound up having to do over because they had to spend a few months getting inpatient treatment for their eating disorder”
^: even before getting recruited to S.T.R.O.M.A., Josie got really good at finding a balance between the, “I don’t want to look pretty, I want to look otherworldly and possibly like a vampire fairy from Wonderland” style of makeup that they want to wear, and a “more professional” style that is less likely to make their clients feel uncomfortable or get them harassed — but god, do they wish that they didn’t have to strike said balance.
It wouldn’t actually make their fondness for high-quality and often expensive makeup feel like any less of a guilty pleasure, for several reasons — on one hand, their awareness of how makeup is always politically Complicated, at best; on the other, if they got to wear their makeup exactly how they want it every day, they would end up spending more money on makeup, and it would make them feel guilty because they’d feel like it’s very irresponsible and probably going to screw them over down the line because they bought makeup instead of saving the money or putting it toward something else; and on the tentacle, a whole laundry list of other reasons
—but they would still feel more comfortable with themself and more at ease with everything because they’d be presenting exactly as they want, instead of censoring their own personal gender expressions (which they’re more okay with doing when it comes to their clients because that’s a case of compromising part of their well-being in the name of [probably] helping people who need them and pay them for that help, whereas toning it down at S.T.R.O.M.A. is tedious and Josie would seriously rather not)
(They have more than once said that the degree to which they have to tone things down for S.T.R.O.M.A. makes them feel like Ned “I’m not a Satanic sex god anymore, used to be a super gothed out androgynous rock star, but is now a straitlaced and nerdy substitute teacher” Schneebly from School of Rock.
This is not a good feeling, in Josie Land. They don’t like it and they live for the weekend because, barring any major incidents that get them called in to S.T.R.O.M.A., they get to wear what the fuck they want, forego pants in favor of their favorite skirts, do their gender how the fuck they want, and wear makeup that makes them look like a vampire fairy from Wonderland)
Phobias: Josie’s biggest fear, in the immediate sense, is losing control of their psychic abilities and ending up hurting people and/or destroying themself somehow.
Underlying that, they have a bigger and more further-reaching fear of being out of control of themself and their own actions, in general.
They’re simultaneously afraid of crowds (largely because they can get really overwhelming for Josie, really fast), and afraid of isolation, which ends up making them a lot like the sort of cat who goes all like, “cuddle me cuddle me cuddle me please please please i need love and affection… no wait, fuck you, this is stifling me and i need to get out of here… wait shit i’m lonely someone please love me… no, not you, you fucking suck… why am i so lonely, why won’t anyone pay attention to me… and so and so forth ad nauseam”
That said, when I was doing Pottermore quizzes for my kids because that is the sort of thing I find both fun and useful, Josie’s picked, “Isolation” for the, “Which is your greatest fear” question on the wand quiz
They picked, “An eye at the keyhole of the dark, windowless room in which you are locked” for the, “Which nightmare would frighten you most” question on the Sorting Hat quiz
Other miscellaneous fears and squicks: Worms, eels, and anything like that (but snakes are okay, snakes are great).
The possibility of never finding love (which they know is kind of ridiculous, because they do have a lot of love in their life… but Josie does want to be with someone romantically, and all their miscellaneous issues with their blood family aside, it’s weird and kind of disheartening for them that most of their cousins have gotten married or settled down with someone, so yeah, Josie knows that this fear is based on a lot of ideas that they generally don’t like and don’t want to live by, but still.
They’re 35, their closest friends both have longstanding romantic relationships, they’re one of the few cousins left who doesn’t have a plus-one to bring to the next family wedding, and they want a romantic relationship, so being perpetually reminded that they’re not in one kicks them in the larger fear that there is something about them that is just fundamentally unlovable, so they might end up being forever alone).
What They Would Be Famous For: Realistically? Probably how they’re going to start a new superhero team with Lucy, Pete, and Sebastian — later accumulating others — and how they’re all going to kinda stumble into trying to foil some other mutants who also happen to be neo-fascist supervillains. But had Josie’s one ex, Danny, not effectively gotten them blacklisted from working in fashion, Josie might well have made a pretty big name for themself there.
They used to joke about being famous for going on Project Runway and winning, but… this started after they’d already gotten onto the path that led them to therapeutic practice, and seen that they had the potential to do a lot of good in the world by continuing on that path, so the chances of them actually doing the Project Runway thing were almost nothing
What They Would Get Arrested For: While they haven’t technically been arrested before, Josie could have been arrested for illegally overstepping the bounds of what their particular level of metahuman license allowed them to do, and if they get arrested in the future, it is almost definitely going to be for something like protesting or some trumped up nonsense charges that actually boil down to, “getting on the wrong side of neo-fascist supervillains who have wealth and connections and political power.”
OCs You Ship Them With:
Romantically: Pete is my favorite here, but: 1. I’m also going to make them work for it, because they would be good for each other, but it wouldn’t just happen super-easily for several reasons, both about the two of them individually and about how they get on together;
and 2. I’d also dig shipping Josie with Seb, Stephen, Vince, Sylvia, Izzy, Raphael, and Cynthia — though tbh, I like non-romantic Seb/Josie better than romantic Seb/Josie
Platonically: As mentioned, Jude, Rocky, and Sebastian. Aside from them, Margot, Lucy, and Sara Grace (who are all ruled out as romantic options by the three of them being lesbians), and Josie being genderfluid, yes, but not identifying with womanhood enough for them to consider romantically pursuing someone who identifies as a lesbian. Todd (who I kind of feel bad for, because he’s sort of the loser in love so far, but otoh, that’s partially his own damn fault and he has a lot of growing to do before I’m letting him have a romantic relationship that actually lasts). Yael and Elizabeth. Really, everyone on the romantic list is a good platonic relationship, too.
“this is not a ship that i condone but i find their relationship interesting, and exploring Not Good relationships is Important to me”: Julian, who actually hasn’t met Josie yet, and won’t for a while, and their relationship will be…… tricky, in a lot of ways, many of which have something to do with how Julian is a huge tool who has a charming tendency to take his own self-loathing and insecurity out on everyone else while acting campy and making sarcastic quips as though this makes his behaviors totally okay.
Pretty much everything about Julian makes him someone who would make Josie say, “the Lord is testing me”
(only for someone — probably Lucy — to go, “But you’re not Christian” and get told either, “I was raised as one, maybe Jesus’s Dad is still grumpy that I found someone who’s better for me. Anyway, you know what I meant, right?”
or, “Fine. The Almighty Thundering Zeus, lord of the heavens and king of Olympus and He Who Was Cheating On His Wife With Everyone Ever Before It Was Cool, is testing me. There. Does that version make you happy?”)
But, yeah. Julian would make Josie go, “someone is testing me” because so much of who and what he is makes Josie want to help him, but so much of what he does makes Josie want to punch him
(an impulse that Josie largely won’t be acting on because, unfortunately for them:
1. they did not get any super-strength kinds of mutations and in an RPG, Strength would be one of their lowest stats;
and 2. first, they need to learn how to throw a punch without hurting themself more than the other person.
Punching neo-fascists isn’t their strong suit. They can let Seb and Lucy do the actual punching.
And Pete, even though Pete really shouldn’t because Pete also doesn’t know how to throw a punch without hurting himself more than the other person, so Josie is more likely to try and stop him from punching a neo-fascist supervillain in the face.
Not that Josie will always succeed in that, but… well. They and their teammates are all only human.)
Anyway, uh. Josie/Julian isn’t a ship that I’d personally want to see as the endgame of anything, ever, but I find their dynamic and the potential interactions between them interesting, and they’re something I’m looking forward to playing around with more, when it’s their time
OC Most Likely To Murder Them: Conrad will kinda want to, because he finds Josie’s sense of ethics to be, “tedious and outdated,” but ultimately, he wouldn’t go through with it because Josie’s creativity would intrigue him too much.
Senator Huntington would also want Josie to die, but he wouldn’t do any of the actual murdering because he doesn’t do his own dirty work.
All things considered, Edward and Desmond are probably going to end up with the job, “Go kill the weird effete one who looks like some kind of vampire fairy from Wonderland” because everyone else is busy, and they will fail at it, because that’s kind of what they do.
They are Those Two Bad Guys, and they kind of suck at almost everything that they try to do.
Favorite Movie/Book Genre: Fantasy, vampire trash, psychological thrillers, magical girl everything, and horror (pretty much all kinds of horror, though Josie’s most fond of monster horror, anything with revenge-y themes, and religious or cosmic horror. They will probably tell you, “The weirder and more pointlessly, aesthetically symbolic, the better”).
Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: Josie would tell you that it’s how much romanticized abuse there is in paranormal romance, and to be fair, they do hate that…… but they still read it or watch it and get invested in these fictional relationships, even without necessarily coming up with a counter-reading of the text’s opinion, beyond, “this relationship is abusive even if the author doesn’t get that”
Which, to be fair, doesn’t mean that they don’t hate the prevalence of romanticized intimate partner abuse, just that it’s an, “I hate this thing” where they still engage with it, and not just because there aren’t always a lot of options without it
(Horror flicks that demonize and stigmatize mental illness are a thing where Josie doesn’t like the thing, but suffers through them because there aren’t a lot of other options otherwise)
But one trope that will make them, “nope” out…… uh.
Josie is really sensitive about The Uncanny Valley, and while they may not fully, “nope” out of things over it, they need to take more time than most people to prep themselves for seeing it and recover after seeing it
Also, not a trope, but Shia LaBeouf will make Josie “nope” out of anything. They have no rational reason for disliking Shia LeBouf, so much as he Just Irrationally Bugs Them, but they will “nope” out of things if he’s involved
Talents and/or Powers: Okay, so, a lot of Josie’s actual superpowers are discussed elsewhere, especially in the footnotes, so let’s talk about their other, non-mutant superpowers. They can sew. Even without having been actively designing anything for a while, they can still pull out a good design and they are capable of following a pattern pretty well. They know their limits fairly well, and better than pretty much everyone in the main team (this doesn’t mean that they always). And it’s almost 4 AM, so this answer is getting cut short by, “I am tired and I want to sleep” (and the next two answers will suck for the same reason)
Why Someone Might Love Them: Josie is creative and curious and once you get them to warm up, calm down, and stop worrying so much about anything, they’re a complete dork who, among other things, gives people, “C’thulhu kisses” (done by sticking your hands in front of your mouth and wiggling your fingers like tentacles, and maybe making a silly noise and saying, “C’thulhu kisses!” like you’re Sailor Moon shouting her transformation phrase). They have a pretty good sense of humor about themself, outside of their precious few no go areas. Josie is compassionate and they do genuinely want the best for most people, even people they don’t personally like very much. They try to be patient with people, even when they really don’t want to be, and even if they don’t always know what the best option is, they still try to actually do things and choose the best option for creating positive change.
Why Someone Might Hate Them: Their cycle of indecisiveness that leads to recklessness that leads to self-punishing thoughts and behaviors that leads to more indecisiveness, and rinse lather repeat. Their tendency to be really judgmental, even while acknowledging that being judgmental is something that, in their experience, causes more harm than good, and that they want to avoid more often. The way that they can lapse into talking like a high school goth kid who’s up-talking the superiority of goth subculture and doesn’t realize that they sound like an elitist, conformist prick, just like the people they’re complaining about allegedly do.
How They Change: Well, for one thing, Josie has some things to learn about how they relate to people and manage their relationships — which doesn’t necessarily make them special because this is just kind of a Thing for most of my main characters in one way or another. Josie’s specific issue wrt relating to other people has to do with their reluctance to trust people and open up and try to build any new relationships, which has often led to them practicing a sort of interpersonal-level isolationism that has hurt them and other people.
They also have something to learn about managing the façade(s) that they present to the world, much like how Seb has to learn something about his habit of acting like everything is okay while he’s suffering and thinking anyone believes him anymore because he doesn’t want to deal with his problems
and like how Pete has to learn about how…… yeah, okay, he is genuinely angry about a lot of things — some of them fair and really more, “righteous indignation” than anything else, and some of them less fair — but a lot of how he acts that anger out in the world is not actually as truthful as Pete feels like it is, but more a way of keeping people at arm’s length, testing them and testing his relationships with them, and trying to push them away before they can get the chance to hurt him
In Josie’s case, their façade(s) are a bit different because most of them came into being less because of an emotional choice on Josie’s part — e.g., Seb doesn’t want to deal with his problems because they’re painful and terrifying and they feel like they’re too big to handle — and more out of pragmatic decisions
……but then Josie came to rely on them in contexts other than the ones in which they were originally created, and balancing that many different versions of yourself is stressful as fuck-all, especially for someone who already has to do a lot of work to keep reminding themself of where their personal boundaries are, and Josie hides in their different façades every bit as much as every other character who has one, and largely only gets away with that because most people in their life don’t know them well enough to notice this, and their façades do still have pragmatic value, so most people who do notice don’t say shit about shit
Then, there’s Josie’s relationship to time, which
I’m going to explain this really badly now, because it’s 3:33 and I’m tired, but basically, I see Seb, Josie, and Lucy as complementing each other in how they relate to and orient themselves in time, and the negative side-effects that they create for themselves because of these behaviors
On one hand, Seb is way too prone to being stuck in the past. He clings to it too much — but also has a selective relationship with it, where people he cares about get forgiven too easily and Seb tries to deny that he still feels upset about anything (even when basically everyone around him knows that he does feel upset and is just trying not to deal with it), while Seb forgives himself for nothing and defines himself so much by all of his past mistakes
—and he goes past the point of, “honoring and respecting history, such as by not ignoring times when he did fuck up (of which there are many)” to, “actively impeding his own progress in life because, for example, he keeps trying the same shit over and over and over again, even though it literally never works, because it’s what he did before.” Plus, some of his ideas about the past are distorted by various factors, or missing entirely (most often due to intoxicated blackouts and/or head trauma that would have had more disastrous effects on him if not for his mutant healing factor), or otherwise unreliable, so that’s a problem.
On the other hand, Lucy is future-oriented and totally jazzed up about trying new things and meeting new challenges head on and doing things!! also STUFF!!!!! there is an entire world full of THINGS AND STUFF AND BY GOD, LUCY IS GOING TO DO ALL OF IT OR AT LEAST AS MUCH OF IT AS SHE POSSIBLY CAN AND THINGS ARE GOING TO GET BETTER SO HELP HER GOD OR JESUS OR SATAN OR WHOEVER EXCELSIOR YAH YAH YAH!!!!
……which is great and all, but she charges headlong into shit without an actual plan (seriously, most of her plans follow the good old, “step one: do this thing / step two: ………… / step three: PROFIT!” formula), and she’s a case of someone who is averse to learning from history at all because she doesn’t want to be shackled to it, but having no sense of history can be just as bad as being overly chained to it like Sebastian, and… well. You can try to outrun the past like she does, but it doesn’t tend to work out very well, and it’s not going to work for Lucy either
On the tentacle, we have Josie, who ostensibly has a balance between the past and the future orientations that we see in Seb and Lucy, because Josie’s primary focus tends to lie on the present, and at most, the very near future or very recent past
—but that’s not actually a balance like Josie wants to believe, because (among other things), it makes it very easy for Josie to ignore past lessons that are older than maybe the past two or three months; and it means that while Josie can see all kinds of potential consequences, their ability to predict what they could be gets a lot less reliable as you go further into the future; and it means that Josie has trouble actually putting together a longer-term plan, which is part of their problem with wanting to create positive change in the world but not knowing how
Josie also has a tougher road (imltho) to go on about finding a new and better balance here, because their focus on the present is something they learned in recovery, as part of learning about mindfulness, and it does help them sometimes — but on that personal level, Josie’s presentist focus can also hurt them because, even when they notice certain behaviors in themself that could get Bad For Them, they can also overlook some of these budding patterns because they’re not Obviously Bad Enough to feel like a major concern, or they look different from other past manifestations of Josie’s behavior patterns so Josie doesn’t think they need to worry about these behaviors, and so on
I’m mean to my characters and I’m going to make them work to be happy, but they will all be happy, eventually
Uh. Barring most of the villains, because letting the neo-fascist assholes win in the end would be a complete downer that would probably end up undermining a lot of the whole, “just because the world is a crapsack hellhole doesn’t mean that it has to stay that way or that we should give up on it” idea
Why You Love Them: Okay, so, this needs a bit of a story.
See, Josie is a retooled character from an old RP that I was in way, way back. I loved them a lot, and they weren’t entirely wrong for the game — they had a good run in their first incarnation — but they also weren’t entirely right for it, and they kind of floundered a bit because I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with them.
A large part of this was due to how Josie was a senior at their school and, because of the year they did over, they were itching to get out and go to college, and the closest they got to an actual arc was how they didn’t want to leave behind their ex-boyfriend turned best friend (who was in the class below them), but did want to go to college already and get to the rest of their life
and how they had some trouble with accepting said best friend’s new boyfriend when Josie really wanted to be compassionate, because New Boyfriend was mentally ill and dealing with some trauma and Josie sympathized and wanted him to be well because why the Hell would you wish for someone to be *UN*well jfc — but also had trouble with that because New Boyfriend was sometimes aware of how some of his actions affected other people, but sometimes not, but sometimes he was and did the stupid things anyway, and even in working on his problems, he made the mistake that a lot of people do where they focus on getting well as defined by and in order to please the people around them, rather than doing it for themselves
—all of which Josie was sympathetic to in a big way, having been in some similar places before themself…… but they had a hard time always being as compassionate as they wanted to be because New Boyfriend’s actions had been hurting Best Friend, and even knowing that this wasn’t entirely something that New Boyfriend could be entirely blamed for (for several reasons), Josie still had a hard time trying to overlook the, “this lovable weirdo is my friend, my best friend, and even though we aren’t together anymore, I love him, and you hurt him, so yeah, I’m kinda mad at you for that” thing
And this all goes back to why I love Josie because one thing that they’ve kept in a big way, in getting retooled and updated and worked into my dumb little stories about neurodivergent and/or mentally ill LGBTQ mutant superheroes (and Pete, who is not actually a mutant but is neurodivergent, gay, an abuse survivor, and a superhero and I will fight anyone who says otherwise)
(I mean, ffs. Batman doesn’t have any mutant superpowers, and Iron Man wouldn’t have any actual superpowers without his ridiculous power-armor and, depending on the continuities, his arc reactors. So, no, I don’t think that Pete needs to have literal superpowers to count as a superhero — but that’s beside the point and to be fair, I will admit to being biased because I love Pete more than George RR Martin loves Jon Snow and Tyrion Lannister)
Anyway. As I was saying.
One thing that Josie has kept in a big way is that ongoing fight with themself over two equally powerful impulses or reactions to things or desires — like their, “I want affections and I want to be around people…… okay no this is overwhelming and I don’t actually like these people fuck this I want to be alone…… oh but being alone sucks and now I’m lonely, I want to be where the people are, let’s go to the movies…… oh my god why did we go see the new Star Wars while it’s still a relatively recent release, I barely remember anything about the actual movie, I was too overwhelmed by the feelings of everyone else in that completely packed theatre… and so on” relationship with other people and being around them or not
Or like their big struggle in the first book of wanting to help people and create positive change in the world, but not being able to do too terribly much on their own for a lot of reasons (some of which are about Josie personally, and some of which are about the whole Lone Superhero thing be a lot of hot fucking nonsense that is fundamentally unsustainable), but not having an official team to belong to because although they work for S.T.R.O.M.A., they don’t like S.T.R.O.M.A., and while they are part of the extended Wardens family, they’re not a fully-fledged Warden and so much of the Wardens’ everything is based around Yael and Elizabeth’s school, so being one and not being up in Poughkeepsie would be weird and mean you end up missing out on a lot and, in Josie’s case, end up feeling like an outsider even when you’re surrounded by people who, for the most part, love you and accept you exactly as you are, but also not entirely doing everything they can to find a team because, in fairness, it can be really difficult to do that even if you don’t work for the U.S. government……
Basically, I love Josie because I love making my characters deal with internal conflict, and while all of them have a lot of it, I’m really fond of Josie’s particular brand of, “self-reflective, doing things but not things that add up to bigger things in the ways that Josie wants, trying to remedy that but it’s hard, not sure what to do or if going after these new possibilities and new ideas will make things worse, getting fed up with themself and needing to try something, but but but five million different elements all converging on each other but but but” internal conflict
And I’m really fond of it in Josie’s case because Josie is savvy enough to know that they can’t fall into the same, “do fuck-all nothing about anything until the last possible minute” trap, but their frustration is less about, “I can’t do anything” and more about, “but what do the things that I do actually mean, who am I helping, am I actually helping them or not, how can I do things that create more significant positive changes or is there a way to do that at all”
And, well. There is, Josie, but it requires you to trust some new people, bond with some new people, build relationships with them and work on maintaining said relationships, find strength in numbers, and learn more about loving and letting people love you back because one of your biggest problems in your previous relationships has been that you don’t open up — not, “you open up slowly” but, “you don’t open up with most people, period, despite knowing that this is not a sustainable way of doing things” — so yeah I’d say you need to learn about that, and learn to stop being such a lone wolf because do you know what generally happens to lone wolves? Either they find a pack somehow, or they die (without making any kind of positive changes in the world around them, relative to the size and interests of, y’know, wolves).
……Because I’m a lonely and bitter and it makes my half-dead little heart happy to make my characters find more strength together than they do apart and learn to love and be loved in return without it coming off as one-sided, like it can do in a lot of takes on that trope that are aimed at children, because…… uh, last I checked, the whole point of a relationship is that it is not exclusively about one person’s needs or desires???
Also, Josie is a compassionate but grumpy grown up goth kid who is trying to be a good person, and doing a better job than a lot of other characters, but definitely has a problem with their judgmental tendencies and how they sometimes externalize them and get super-judgmental of others, because on some level, their mind is like, “fuck, can i get a break from always punishing myself over here, jfc” and I don’t know, it’s almost 4AM and I have lost track of how long I’ve been writing this
Josie’s a nerd and a cat who can’t make up their mind about whether they want to be outside chasing butterflies or inside sitting on your keyboard so that you have to pay attention to them and not your computer and idk, I love them, the end
(except for the footnotes oops)
*: Special Taskforce for the Regulation and Oversight of Metahuman Affairs — or in plain-speak, the FBI’s wing of people who get involved in all of the shiny, extralegal superpowered mutant hijinks.
They have a pretty good working relationship with their counterparts at the Department of Health and Human Services (who actually end up handling most mutant affairs, because this world treats the question of super-powered mutant licensing as more equivalent to getting a driver’s license, and frankly, most mutants in the U.S. just want to go about their lives in peace — like, go to college, get a job, go on dates, come home and watch the Daily Show, and not be bothered about or make trouble for anyone else with the weird superpowers that most of them did not want or ask for — so there’s rarely any actual reason for the FBI to go stick their noses into anything, and there are plenty of cases where they get called in, only to find that they aren’t actually needed after all), but… yeah.
S.T.R.O.M.A. is a faction of people who exist. Josie works for them, for all they would really rather not. Unfortunately for Josie, particularly powerful metahumans tend to wind up on a lot of S.T.R.O.M.A. watch-lists, and they are more likely to do so when they have powers that the people at the FBI consider particularly useful or desirable — for example, telepathy and hyper-empathy, in Josie’s case. For the most part, these watch-lists don’t actually amount to anything because they don’t end up being relevant to most of the cases that S.T.R.O.M.A. has to deal with.
—but then you can have situations like Josie’s, where they were one of many mutants who got in a brief spot of trouble over genuine confusion surrounding a new bill that had just gone through Congress and revised some of the definitions of and privileges associated with/afforded to people at the different levels of metahuman licenses. (Since this is still America and we’re still talking about the FBI, there are also plenty of even worse potential outcomes for people who end up on their miscellaneous mutant watchlists — which is one of the big points that gets brought up by people who either want to reform or do away with the whole metahuman licensing thing — but in fairness to most people, they don’t know the full specifics.)
Anyway, Josie got in trouble because they are an actual therapist and, although they prefer not to use their powers with clients and extensively brief anyone who asks about trying that approach (about the potential benefits vs. potential risks, all the drawbacks, all the potential unintended consequences, etc.) while offering them plenty of chances to change their mind and go, “okay, let’s not do this,” they do still let their clients know that they’re a telepath/empath and that they can use their powers in a therapeutic context but it’s not the best thing to try as a first approach
Which is all great, except that Josie had been assured that they wouldn’t need to get a different kind of license to continue doing this, after that bill passed… except that they did. And this probably would’ve continued with no actual interference from anybody because Josie is hyper-responsible about using their powers with clients, about keeping up on all of the latest research and debates about therapeutic uses for psychic abilities and the ethical issues surrounding this, and so on…… except that one of their clients was a teenager who needed parental consent to go through with this, and one of their parents worked for S.T.R.O.M.A.
Relevant piece of context: Josie was absolutely not the only mutant who’d had some confusion over the revised licensing scheme. Josie wasn’t even the only mutant in the greater Baltimore area who had similar confusion on this issue.
But Josie was one of the only ones who was already on S.T.R.O.M.A.’s radar when they got in trouble, partly by virtue of being a “telempath,” partly by virtue of having trained with Dr. Elizabeth Woodham (who is: one of the most powerful telepaths in the entire world; a respected professor, activist, and philanthropist; one of the first mutants in the States to register for one of the early, “superhero licenses” [not their official name, but that’s the gist of what they are]; and with her wife, Dr. Yael Lehrer, one of the co-founders of the Wardens and co-headmistresses of one of the most respected schools for mutants in North America), and partly by virtue of having a lot of (mostly untapped) potential power.
And, see, one of S.T.R.O.M.A.’s problems is that it is perpetually under-staffed, in all areas but especially in terms of mutants who work for them, and moreover, mutants who will actually do fieldwork (like, Pete’s cousin Emerson is a mutant and he does work for S.T.R.O.M.A., but he’s lower on the powers scale than most of their employees who do active fieldwork, and he has no desire to do fieldwork when he could do lab-work instead). There are a lot of reasons for this problem of staffing, but one of the more noticeable end-results is that S.T.R.O.M.A. can be somewhat unethical in some of their recruitment bids. Like, yes, sometimes, you just get a visit from Some Guy Who Is Totally Not Nick Fury, who offers you a chance to be a part of something bigger than yourself and to use your abilities to help people
Other times, you get treated to a few hours of what S.T.R.O.M.A. sees and treats as the interview portion of applying for a Very Important Position somewhere, except that they don’t tell you that this is what they’re doing and they use “interview” (read: interrogation) techniques that people in law enforcement usually save for wrangling confessions out of suspects.
It will not look like it, but they are actually trying to figure out some specific things about you, including but not limited to: how you handle high-stress and high-pressure situations (like, for example, being accused of using your powers for any extralegal vigilantism, and maybe knowing things about [the biggest mutant-related news of the day] that they don’t; being threatened with a trip to one of the U.S. prisons designed to hold mutants; etc.); various details about your backstory and who you are as a person and what your biggest Deals are (i.e., getting you to help them run a damn background check on yourself); and how in control of your powers you are (since they trust the DHHS evaluations, but prefer to supplement them with firsthand evidence).
Then, once they’ve figured out what they want to know, you might very well be offered something to the tune of, “Alright, this is your first offense, and based on your dossier and this interview, we think that you could be an asset to S.T.R.O.M.A., if you wanted. If you like the sound of working for us, at least as an analyst or consultant if not a fully-fledged special agent, then we can make all of this legal trouble just go away. If you don’t like the sound of that, then……… well… *deliberately trails off to let you draw your own conclusions while still staying within the letter of the law, because hey, they didn’t actually tell you that you’d for sure end up getting prosecuted and going to prison*”
So…… yeah. S.T.R.O.M.A. and Ethics are not always on speaking terms.
Add this recruitment story to Josie’s frustrations with how metahuman employees at S.T.R.O.M.A. tend to get treated — e.g., they, themself, are often trotted out to go liaise with different media outlets as a public face of Mutants Who Work Here, Look We’re Trying Our Best So You Should All Just Totally Cooperate With Us, but they’re discouraged from voicing any of their own opinions and advised to just stick to these Bureau-approved talking points — and at having to be closeted and fairly masc-presenting at work because S.T.R.O.M.A. thinks they’re a cis man, and…… yeah, uh.
“Josie would really, really rather not work here” is an understatement af… but they continue working here anyway because: 1. as a consultant, they can still usually balance things enough to keep working as a therapist;
and 2. Josie wants so badly to help people, and for all S.T.R.O.M.A. is highly unethical (sometimes) and part of the goddamn FBI, most of the people who work there also want to help people and use their work to create positive changes in the world — and it’s not an unfair observation that, on their own, there really isn’t much that Josie can do (because the idea of the solo superhero who works alone… isn’t sustainable, like??
Aside from the political and ideological issues with that whole aspect of superhero mythology, it’s not actually feasible for one person, working on their own, to create any positive change. It would be massively unhealthy for them, there’s only so much they can do as one person, there are no actual safeguards in place if they ever get corrupted, and as multiple deconstructions of the genre have shown, it’s really easy for a classic lone vigilante model superhero to slide into a mindset like Rorschach’s — which is full of hypocrisy, double standards, misogyny and homophobia and ableism, and total moral absolutism that simultaneously allows no room for compassion and keeps Rorschach from being able to appreciate the big picture outside of his little myopic Objectivst bubble — or Frank Miller!Batman, who is often only a step or two off from actual fascism, but we probably won’t call it that because he’s wearing the Batman suit).
At this point, Josie has even had it all but confirmed that the agents who came to recruit them definitely “avoided certain truths to manipulate them” on purpose, so they’re reasonably certain that they could probably leave S.T.R.O.M.A without having their previous step out of bounds dredged up and handed to a D.A. who’d be pressured to prosecute them for it…… but they want to help people, and S.T.R.O.M.A. is one of the only options that they can currently see where they get to help anyone.
So, here they are. Working in a position that they’re not a fan of, looking at the motivational posters of gothed out kittens that one of their best friends drew for them, and trying to take, “hang in there!” kitty’s advice and tough it out at S.T.R.O.M.A. for the sake of doing some good in the world.
**: This mostly happens if Josie doesn’t have the energy enough or keep focus enough to keep their mental walls up — which they are usually very diligent about because on one hand, hearing other people’s thoughts kind of sucks actually (Josie would definitely agree with the sentiment that, a lot of the time, being a telepath is like having a youtube comments section screaming at you in your head)
—and on the other, um, hello, telepathy can, in the wrong hands, become a walking violation of civil liberties. Like, if you ask Josie, telepathy has a lot in common with wiretapping, though they consider it potentially even more dangerous than that, because it’s harder to prove that telepathy has been involved in something, since:
1. yes, the traces of telepathy can show up on a CAT scan or an MRI of the brain, but you’d need a neurologist who is well-trained, very attentive, and up to date on as much of the current research into telepathy as possible — or hey, a team of neurologists might not be a bad idea, if you can get them all, because one neurologist might miss something
—but otoh, the traces of telepathy can sometimes also be mistaken as signs of something else, especially if someone is neurodivergent and/or mentally ill, has suffered any serious and/or recent head injuries, has a history of substance abuse, is sleep-deprived at the time of the tests, may actually have something else going on in their brain in addition to the traces of telepathy
Seriously, just about anything that affects the brain can make it harder to tell whether or not someone’s been hit with telepathy
Plus: telepathic abilities are sort of mid-level common among mutants, and some mutants use them without even realizing it because their powers haven’t manifested in ways that are for sure Outside Three Standard Deviations From The Non-Mutant Human Mean, so some minor telepathic scarring is common, even in people who haven’t been hit by something as awful as, say, memory modification, or having someone go in and pick around in their brain like they’re flipping through an issue of Us Weekly
—and without a keen, well-trained eye, it can be really hard to tell those types of telepathic scarring apart
2. some of the traces of telepathy are more subjective, and while they might show up on a brain scan, the best evidence of them will come from the people who’ve been hit with the telepathic whatever
—but that’s going to be a problem because, in a lot of cases, they won’t have any memory of it, or they’ll have a false memory of it, and there’s no guarantee that further telepathic probing will be able to help here, and it could just make things worse. Plus, there’s no guarantee that the people who’ve been hit will actually be aware that what they’re experiencing is related to telepathy.
This is especially true with experienced, exceptionally powerful, and/or highly meticulous telepaths, because some of them can dick around in people’s heads and leave barely any trace that they were there
Like, for an example of what a more subjective trace might look like: Conrad is a telepath, and unlike Josie, he doesn’t really care about ethics or the rights of most other people. About ten years before the story actually starts, he took an interest in his new brother-in-law’s youngest brother (Sebastian), because he could sense something in Seb — he didn’t know what it was, exactly, but it was definitely a something — that made him go, “huh, maybe this emotionally troubled nearly twenty-year-old boy is also a mutant”
(I mean, he’s not wrong. And the something that he got a sense of back then is the part of Seb that he’s eventually going to call, “La Bête,” because if he’s going to go for the superhero thing and need a codename, then, “Gévaudan” makes sense to him because his family is insistently French [despite not having lived in France since about 1781, apart from one ancestral namesake of Seb’s who stayed in Paris for their Revolution (and Severin Sebastien Moncrieff was a confirmed bachelor, so he left behind a partner but no heirs), well before La Bête du Gévaudan was a Thing, and despite not being from the region of France where that happened] and hey, he can apparently turn into a giant wolf-man, now
—and if he’s calling himself, “Gévaudan,” then, “La Bête” is just thematically consistent. But that’s beside the point.)
Anyway: Conrad wasn’t new to his powers ten years ago, but he was much more reckless with them — especially when he believed that he was absolutely right and would stop at nothing to prove it — and he had less finesse in using them.
So, he left behind plenty of traces when he decided to use his little sister’s wedding reception as a chance to go telepathically play around with Seb, trying to either figure out if his new brother-in-law’s little brother actually was a mutant, or maybe triggering his powers into fully manifesting (plus plying him with alcohol and adding rohypnol to the mix based on the notion that either it wouldn’t affect Seb because he’s a mutant, or if not that, then it’d trigger his abilities into manifesting).
The underlying logic of the rohypnol idea was actually not wrong, because toxin filtering is one of the more common mutant abilities you find in the States (and it happens to be one that Seb has), and some mutants have had their powers manifest in response to poisoning, drugging, exposure to carbon monoxide or other toxic fumes, and even being given antibiotics or certain medications
The idea was still morally wrong and ethically skeevy, but the mutant-related logic actually did work. Where Conrad went wrong on that count was that he overly simplified the situation, only looked for two potential reactions, and didn’t know what to make of how Seb was affected by the rohypnol but not nearly as badly as he should’ve been, so he went, “Was he affected or not?? I don’t know????”
[Here is where I cut a whole big tangent explaining that whole story, but it got way, way off the point, so.]
Anyway, the gist of the story is that Conrad is the only person who consciously remembers everything that happened, since most of the people who cared about it were not present for the encounter itself, and Conrad screwed around with Seb’s memories, both telepathically and not.
Like, Seb has more memories of it than he would if he weren’t a mutant, considering that he got dosed with rohypnol, but he also has false memories about some of what happened, and Conrad repressed Seb’s memories of certain events (like how many times he tried to break away from Conrad, or turn down the offer of another drink, because he’d promised his big brother that he wouldn’t get drunk and make a scene at Max’s wedding or the reception, and it was important to him to honor that promise)
Fortunately for Conrad, Seb is not one of the mutants who has an increased resistance to psychic attacks — largely because, contrary to what Conrad thought until about two years before the story starts, someone’s ability to resist to psychic attacks has nothing to do with whether or not they’re a mutant (aside from some special cases where someone has a resistance to any psychic attacks that falls outside three standard deviations of the non-mutant human mean)
—so, despite the feelings he sometimes gets that something about those memories might be wrong, Seb totally believes that they’re real and he doesn’t notice any of the incongruities unless someone points them out, which almost no one has any reason to do because there isn’t usually a reason for Seb to talk at length about the details of this particular incident that happened almost ten years ago
(there would be, if he ever brought it up in therapy or at AA and/or NA, or dwelled on it when he did, but that has yet to actually happen)
Unfortunately for Conrad, he did a sloppy job of this, and while it would be hard for a neurologist to tell the physical signs of his telepathic probing apart from the other brain damage that Seb’s accrued, the hardest thing for most other telepaths would be trying to find the right memories. The crap-shoot nature of telepathically digging through someone else’s mind is one of the many reasons why Josie doesn’t like using their powers as a first approach in therapy, because you can never guarantee with any reliable certainty that you’ll get at the parts of someone’s mind that you want
—but if someone did get to Seb’s memories of this incident, it would be really obvious to them that they’ve been modified. Like, images might be blurred around the edges, it might glitch like a video or audio track that’s skipping, the voices might get distorted, the colors might look wonky, and so on. Prodding a bit more would also be able to undo Conrad’s memory-blocks without doing too much damage to Seb’s brain (not so much on an emotional and psychological level, but the damage there would be more like the painful truth that hurts now but leads to something better)
Anyway, it’s much harder to get proof of this nature when you’re dealing with more skillful, more attentive, more powerful, etc. telepaths, because they aren’t as messy as Conrad was with Seb
and 3. Wiretapping operations usually involve more people, which doesn’t make them ethical or necessarily justified, but it does mean that they’re easier to find evidence of because there are more folks who can spill the beans and point you to it. Telepathy only needs two people to happen, and one may not even be aware of what’s going on, depending on how sensitive they are and whether or not they’re dealing with an ethical telepath
For example: while not metahuman levels of resistant to psychic attacks, Pete is exceptionally sensitive to them and he’s naturally better at resisting them than some people, so if someone wanted to paw through his mind, he has a better chance of recognizing that he’s being telepathically invaded and getting them out
Sebastian, on the other hand, is Bad at recognizing and resisting psychic probing. Unethical telepaths have an easier time of getting through him because at his best, if he isn’t told in advance, then he feels ill at ease, inexplicably anxious (not that it means much, because he tends to attribute that to his shitty mental health), kind of nauseated, and maybe like he’s being spied on. At worst, he doesn’t even notice.
So, basically, Josie considers it a moral and ethical responsibility on their part to do everything they can to not inadvertently spy on people, because there is already so much about telepathy that can go really bad and poses a lot of ethical problems — but they are only human, and there are a lot of ways for someone’s mental walls to come down or reasons why they would.
Letting their empathic walls down usually makes it easier for Josie to focus on keeping up the telepathic walls, since the empathic ones are a lot harder for them to keep up, but it’s only a temporary thing because if Josie takes those walls down, they open themself up to a looooooot of potential overwhelm from outside influence, and there’s always the option to find a balance between the empathic walls and telepathic ones, but sometimes, it’s easier said than done.
Josie is usually too hard on themself for it when any slip-ups on their part happen, even knowing that every other telepath and every other empath has moments like this and even if they got too overwhelmed to actually remember anything and/or heard nothing.
It’s such a big deal to them because the potential for psychic abilities to violate other people — and especially the potential to manipulate people and compromise or outright remove their agency — is something that Josie never wanted. They went into counseling as a profession, after their original plan of going into fashion went up in smoke, but part of it, for them, has always been about trying to help people get their lives back, or manage them better, and so on. Granted, they knew about their telepathic and empathic abilities before they officially went into therapeutic practice, but that, for Josie, was part of how they developed their approach to being a therapist.
Furthermore, on a more personal and less professional note, Josie never wanted mutant superpowers to begin with. After having their telepathy and empathy first manifest in full, they might’ve done plenty of things that they normally wouldn’t even consider, if they thought it could take their powers away.
Partly, that was because their powers manifested toward the end of a really bad mental health downswing that ended in Josie going back to an inpatient treatment center for their eating disorder. Any of these elements on their own would’ve been bad enough, but having them all come down on them at once was Hell for Josie, and worse, trying to get well while you are in an inpatient center and can feel everyone else’s feelings, hear a lot of their thoughts, and are currently having trouble sorting out which parts are your own feelings, which parts are coming from your eating disorder, and which parts are coming from everyone else (not least because you don’t have any proof that you are feeling things or hearing thoughts that are coming from other people).
Josie eventually got help for that part because one of the therapists at the center was a metahuman and had gone to the Woodham and Lehrer School before deciding that she didn’t particularly want to be a superhero in the traditional sense. She reached out to her old teachers, and Josie got help for that while doing more intensive outpatient treatment until they got better at tuning out other people’s thoughts and feelings.
But there’s a lingering problem here that goes back to the feelings that underlie Josie’s ED. When they are at their absolute worst, Josie can be an absolute control freak, and they tend to turn it inward more than outward because they realize that taking it out on other people isn’t fair and they don’t feel good about it. Additionally, feeling other people’s feelings as intensely as they do gives Josie an additional incentive not to take their issues with control out on other people (and did even before their powers fully manifested, because they’ve always been pretty sensitive). On some level, Josie realizes that they can’t control things like how people react to them, whether or not bad things happen to good people, and so on, but that doesn’t always help because it can lead to them feeling even more of a need to crack down on controlling themself.
Having psychic powers becomes problematic for them in two big ways, here:
1. It’s unfortunately very easy for Josie to slip into overly self-punishing thought patterns if they feel like they aren’t as in control of their abilities as they, “should” be — which happens very easily because Josie’s standards for themself aren’t always realistic, and they usually aren’t the best judge of whether or not they’re being fair to themself.
It’s even more noticeable, for them, when they try to do more complex and demanding things with their powers.
This was one of the big reasons why they’ve stayed on good terms with their friends and mentors at the Lehrer and Woodham School, and among Yael and Elizabeth’s Wardens, but consistently rejected any invites to become a Warden (and then regretted that when S.T.R.O.M.A. got them instead, since Josie would much rather be one of the Wardens than working for the FBI).
Basically, Josie trusted Elizabeth’s guidance, and they really, really wanted to trust Elizabeth’s faith in them to handle their full power responsibly…… but it was hard to believe that when they already didn’t feel like they controlled their powers as much as they, “should” have been doing, and Elizabeth wanted to push them further.
For Josie, it felt like the choice came down to, “be a superhero and do more cool superhero things, at the expense of my own well-being, which means I eventually won’t be able to help anyone and could hurt more people than I help”
or, “quietly go back to training for an entirely different career than I expected, keep in touch with Elizabeth and work on honing my abilities, and maybe not get to help people in as big a way as members of the Wardens get to do, but at least, as a therapist, I will still have the ability to help people and will probably be less likely to screw that up by virtue of losing my control over my powers”
(To her credit, Elizabeth was disheartened by this, because she believes in all of her students and wants them to believe in themselves, and really wanted Josie on her team — but she’s learned that the superhero life isn’t for everybody, and that it’s not her job, as a teacher and mentor, to tell people what they should do; it’s her job to show them new approaches, teach them how to learn, help them find what paths and methods work best for them, etc.
So, disheartening as it was, she’s been nothing but supportive about Josie’s choice not to be a Warden, and compassionate about how much Josie doesn’t like working for the FBI — and without trying to turn it into some kind of, “this could be super-beneficial for us, if Josie wanted to give us any advance warning about S.T.R.O.M.A. business that might negatively affect us here” thing like Yael)
(To her credit, Yael really does believe that she’s helping when she says things like that, because she is so fundamentally a doer, rather than a thinker, feeler, planner, or anything else. She is absolutely capable of all of those things, but she has an approach to life and problems that goes, “Okay, this is a Thing and it’s a setback, but what can we do about it, how can we use this to build something even better”
—so her idea of how to help one of her and Elizabeth’s students and comrades with an unexpected and unwanted “recruitment” to S.T.R.O.M.A.… is going, “But look, see, we can still potentially make something good out of this, and just because a government agency snatched you up doesn’t mean that you have to forget your own values or let them control you, this can be a good thing if you take advantage of the right pieces and opportunities”
—for a moment of MBTI nerdery: Yael is an ENTJ (***) vs. Josie’s INFJ (***), so while she has Extroverted Thinking (Te) for a dominant cognitive function and primarily approaches the world based on how to get results, Josie’s dominant function is Introverted iNtuition (Ni), and while they have an orientation toward the future that appreciates where Yael is coming from with her drive to get results, Josie’s primary approach to the world looks less at objective things and objective results, more at patterns and theories and trying to find the, “higher purpose” or, “deeper reason” behind how stuff happens
Which, oddly enough, is part of why Josie and Yael get on so well. They can butt heads with each other, sometimes, but at the end of the day, they complement each other really well because both of them have vision and the drive to act on it, but Yael is better at actually getting shit done, and Josie is better at checking things through the processes of making them happen, finding potential problems that Yael may not have seen coming and trying to work addressing them into the fabric of her plans.
Their Feeling functions also complement each other really well: Josie is a high Feeler, with Extroverted Feeling (Fe) as their auxiliary function, which keeps them more attuned to the state of the group and all the people in it, while Yael has a very good relationship with her inferior Fi (Introverted Feeling), which enables her to better evaluate how their actions and plans are helping or hurting their causes, where their ideals fit into everything, and so on.
So, basically, Yael is better at making sure that they all remember who they are and what they stand for, both individually and as parts of the whole, while Josie is better at attending to people’s emotional needs and keeping the whole intact by caring for the individual members of it.
And because they both respect and admire each other, neither of them devalues the other’s contributions to anything — and it doesn’t matter to Yael that Josie has a badge and would have an easier time getting a gun if they weren’t really uneasy about guns; Josie’s a mutant, they’ve been one of her students, and they care about helping other mutants, so officially being part of S.T.R.O.M.A. doesn’t mean that they aren’t part of Yael’s (larger, mutant) family
—which all means a lot to Josie because, in a lot of ways, they still haven’t entirely outgrown their early experiences of being one of the weird art freaks at school (which, even for someone who wound up being part of a subculture/clique that’s all about going, “fuck you, I’m gonna do my thing and you can love it or shove it,” gave Josie some trouble because, goth of not, they’re sensitive), and they have a huge tendency to be overly harsh with themself and don’t always love themself very much, so this whole unconditional acceptance thing is a Big Deal to them
But I digress.
2. Having psychic powers also gets Problematic for Josie because, in their mind, they’ve spent so much of their life fighting their eating disorder and their overall mental health to keep control of their life, and it’s difficult, periodically degrading, often horrific, and something that they wouldn’t wish on anybody, period…… so having the power to take away someone’s ability to control their own mind? Having the power to violate someone’s agency, potentially with more or less complete impunity? That’s horrifying, and Josie doesn’t want it
One of the easiest ways to make Josie go off the handle at you is to dismiss how hard it is for them to maintain any sense of composure. Like, okay, they can handle people teasing them about some of their self-care habits because humor is how a lot of people come to be comfortable with and accept things they don’t understand at first, and how a lot of people show that they’re comfortable with you and like you.
But if you act like Josie doesn’t have to work, impossibly hard and daily, on their own well-being, because if they don’t, then they could lose control of psychic abilities and this would be Really Fucking Terrible for everyone? ……Uh.
Just don’t do that. It’s not pretty, it’s not fun, it’s mean and please, just don’t do it.
An even easier way to make Josie snap at you is to play what they call, “the Aslan card” — which means telling them that the proof that they can handle the responsibility of psychic powers, is their own fear that maybe they can’t, their awareness of and attentiveness to the ethical and moral problems attached to them having psychic powers, the fact that they’d rather not have psychic powers in the first place because it can — and often does — feel like these powers and their attendant responsibilities are too big and too potentially Terrible Forever, For Everyone
Which Josie calls, “the Aslan card” because, uh. The first time they heard it was from Elizabeth (whose heart was in the right place in saying this, but she didn’t think about how it might end up sounding to Josie), and the first thing Josie was reminded of was Aslan telling Prince Caspian that he’s ready to become the King because he doesn’t think he’s ready
It’s just…… Josie understands where this idea is coming from, and they appreciate the underlying sentiment
But, to them, it always sounds more like, “why are you upset about how hard this is for you, at least it’s happening to you and not someone who doesn’t give a fuck about ethics or how they treat other people, quit whinging and cheer the fuck up”
Which…… yes, Josie knows that this isn’t what most people mean, but it’s still pretty upsetting for them to hear because of how much it reminds them of things that they’ve told themself so many times, when they’ve been at their worst, in terms of their mental health and emotional well-being — especially the things like, “My eating disorder isn’t bad because it’s only hurting me, not anyone else, and it’s only hurting me because I’m weak”
—and yeah, okay, Josie appreciates that you’re trying to help, but they already have enough work to do on keeping themself from slipping back into the comfort of those thought patterns, so if it’s all the same, can you maybe find a different way of trying to comfort them or praise them or whatever? Please?
Thank you, they’d like that
#derekslaura#memes for ts#oc questions#josie quinn: empath disaster#that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml#mine: writing#sebastian moncrieff: mutant disaster#pete arden: dramatic disaster#josie x seb#josie x pete#lucy murphy: hemokinetic disaster#josie & lucy#yael lehrer: probably done with your shit#josie & yael#telepathy#okay i'm probably going to miss some cw tags and i'm sorry for that#if anybody needs anything that i miss tagged plz let me know and i'll get it after i sleep <3#eating disorders cw// mental health issues cw// manipulation ref// consent issues cw//#('consent issues' meaning 'yeah that conrad guy i mention periodically? he's a tool who uses telepathy to#manipulate people as well as using it to sexually assault and rape people with more or less total impunity so far'#but the discussion of it is fairly inexplicit & mostly used as an illustration of#why josie is so hyper-vigilant abt the ethical issues & responsibilities attached to having telepathy in their set of mutant superpowers)#misgendering ref// biphobia ref// homophobia ref// (these are also mostly inexplicit but still present)#longish post//
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