THE POSITIVE & NEGATIVE; Mun & Muse - Meme.

fill out & repost ♥ This meme definitely favors canons more, but I hope OC’s still can make it somehow work with their own lore, and lil’ fandom of friends & mutuals. Multi-Muses pick the muse you are the most invested in atm.

My muse is:   canon / oc / au / canon-divergent / fandomless /

Is your character popular in the fandom?  YES / NO / 50-50 (There’s a lot of love and a lot of hate, but I think many are actually pretty neutral on him too!)

Is your character considered hot™ in the fandom?  YES / NO / 50-50 (I’d say he may be an... acquired taste? Of course a lot of people I know here find him sexie so it’s hard to say for certain, heh. We may just be the weirdos of the fandom :P )

Is your character considered strong in the fandom?  YES / NO

Are they underrated?  YES / NO (Not in terms of ability, but underrated for just how complex and multi-layered he is, I’d say)

Were they relevant for the main story?  YES / NO.

Were they relevant for the main character?  YES / NO /

Are they widely known in their world?  YES / NO.

How’s their reputation?  GOOD / BAD / NEUTRAL (I honestly think he’s a man of many reputations, both in canon and in fandom :’D)

How strictly do you follow canon?  —  I’m very much a ‘use the bones of what we got in canon and do my best to flesh them out’ kinda roleplayer. There are some things that can be taken too easily at face value that I see fit to build upon. For example, I think Jiraiya’s feelings on the prophecy and his relationship with Konoha is something that could be too easily played off as simplistic, or like they were immovable constants. But that’s unrealistic for a man of his years and many experiences, so I try to put myself in his emotional setting at various points in his life, and trace how his feelings and behaviours change, if that makes sense? 

I try to avoid saying that any of the writing was straight up wrong because it’s disrespectful to the creator. But especially for Jiraiya, who had such a significant role to play in the narrative that it sometimes took precedence over his actual character, I do find some of his actions, and the way some interactions were handled in the canon to be a little OOC... so I’ll work with it and try to spin it in a way that I feel fits how he was characterised.

Basically, I’d say that I follow canon, but I like to enrich it in areas that were lacking detail or a nuanced view that took in all the surrounding events of the time. After Jiraiya’s canon death, of course, that’s when more divergence comes in to my portrayal... otherwise I wouldn’t be able to play any post-war scenarios! But the essence of his character is the same, which I try to keep as close to canon as possible.

SELL YOUR MUSE! Aka try to list everything, which makes your muse interesting in your opinion to make them spicy for your mutuals.   —  A man of many experiences! You can bet that any topic that comes up, he’ll have some sort of amusing anecdote to share, or be able simply to talk shit about it. He's seen so much, and has a sensitive soul enough that he’ll give anyone a chance; he’s very open-minded and non-judgemental, and honestly is a humanitarian that wants to help those in need. Might leave your muse a little baffled as to how he could hold the status of ‘legend’, only to show it when they least expect it. You never quite know what you’re going to get with him: he’s generous and selfless, yet has many vices that seem selfish at times; he’s both a lover and a fearsome fighter; he’s immensely resilient at the same time as incredibly vulerable and damaged; he’s a himbo and a bit of a jock with the soul of a poet. Love him with no restraint and invite his love in return, and you’ll get not only a lover, but a devotee. Wears his heart on his sleeve... or does he? Chip away at him and find out!

Now the OPPOSITE, list everything why your muse could not be so interesting (even if you may not agree, what does the fandom perhaps think?).  —  The pervy, flirty, jokey schtick could get grating, or come across as disingenuous. In romantic situations, he’ll keep quiet about putting a label on whatever it is, and beneath his overall sweetness and devotion there may be an underlying reek of commitment issues and a fear of admitting he is afraid. He also has a habit of deflecting negativity in general, and playing things off as if they don’t matter or they’re a joke, making him actually rather a difficult person to get to know the heart of. One might feel as if they’re getting nowhere with him...

... Either that, or they get the complete opposite. Yes, as equally as he can be guarded, he can overshare like crazy, and has a tendency to become codependent with those he gets attached to, which is inconsistent with his free-spirited nature, and how adept he is at keeping others at arm’s length from his less sunny side. This inconsistency might make him seem unreliable—if the fact he’s always off who-knows-where doesn’t do the trick already.

What inspired you to rp your muse?  —  I’ve been a big fan of the Sannin ever since I first read the Deadlock, but being a very young person at the time I perhaps couldn’t relate enough to people who had experienced so much to do them justice in my teenage fic-writing endeavours, so I remained on the sidelines enjoying content by other people (there may also have been a little bit of ‘what the fuck, why do I dig the old dude so much’ denial in there haha). I’ve picked up and dropped my obsession with the series several times over the years, and my love for those three seemed to grow each time. They really are ‘the lost generation’, and as the sole survivors—alongside having a huge impact on the plot, how the shinobi world is shaped, and the three main protagonists—there’s a lot of juicy material there, a lot of emotional background, along with decades of history that basically goes untapped in the canon. 

Anyway, I digress. Coming to the Naruto RPC for the first time around this time 2 years ago at the age of 25, I made this blog and my Deidara one on a whim, but focused on the latter at first. Villains were always comfortable territory for me in my other RP experiences, and I think it made me doubt that I could possibly do someone who is frankly a lovely guy any justice, no matter how much I loved him. I even had the intention of making him fully Akatsuki/Missing-Nin AU at first. Yeah. That’s how stuck in my villain/anti-hero zone I was! But, I think in the end, the fact he actually isn’t a two-dimensional typical ‘hero’ was something I chewed over and realised would be incredibly enriching to write, worth stepping out of my comfort zone for. And being a little more mature and less angst-ridden myself by that point, I found I could resonate with his feelings and ideals in a way that I know I couldn’t have as a teen... but I was still tentative. 

Anyway, after leaving his blog empty for a bit (with its placeholder URL ‘frogdaddy’, which sadly got hoarded by someone else), I cosplayed the old bastard, along with my partner as Orochimaru. We’d been stanning that particular ship and talking about how great the Sannin are in general for quite some time by that point, but being casually in character for fun while drunk off my tits at a boat party, was a bit of an epiphanic moment. Not long after that, I threw myself right into writing this chaotic-good old bastard with gusto, and here I still am :’)

What keeps your inspiration going?  —  Taking breaks to recharge as and when I need to. Seriously. The death of all my other blogs has been pressure (mostly from myself) to be there and force myself to put out regular content, so I went into this not thinking that way and it’s really helped! 

Of course, there’s also the fact that there simply seems to be no shortage of areas I can delve into with this guy. Again, it’s his age and all the missing years in canon... but I think it’s also how much love he has and his genuine eagerness to engage with others that makes him one of the most naturally bountiful muses I’ve played. Because honestly? Most of my villain muses wanted people to just fuck off :’D this guy is open to everything.

That aside, I guess I just gel with him more than I ever expected to. I’ve changed a lot as a person and gained more confidence since various areas of my life got better, and I really just vibed with this chill, funny, romantic, pervy, big-hearted energy. I enjoy angst, but my real love is peppering the serious and heartbreaking with romance and comedy—and isn’t that just befitting of him? Writing through his eyes also helps to keep my outlook positive, so that keeps me stuck on him as much as the seemingly limitless content potential. 

And this is without even going into my cross-fandom AU ideas I have on the back-burner. Honestly, they’re there but I want to put a real effort into them while keeping his essence the same, which for some, involves brushing up on my lore!

Some more personal questions for the mun.

Give your mutuals some insight about the way you are in some matters, which could lead them to get more comfortable with you or perhaps not.

Do you think you give your character justice?  YES / NO.

Do you frequently write headcanons? YES / NO.

Do you sometimes write drabbles?  YES / NO / RARELY. (depends on whether I get a flash of inspiration—which mostly comes with random asks that happen to stir up an idea for a scene, such as this one (NSFW warning))

Do you think a lot about your Muse during the day?  YES / NO.

Are you confident in your portrayal?   YES / NO.

Are you confident in your writing?  YES / NO.

Are you a sensitive person?  YES / 50-50 /NO. (I tend not to take things personally but am also very passionate—call it my innate Leo-ness!)

Do you accept criticism well about your portrayal?  —  Hmmm. I haven’t actually had any critique on my portrayal, so I’m not sure haha! I’d say if it’s constructive, then I’ll take it into account and consider it, especially if it’s a case where it helps me realise I’ve perhaps not gotten across what I intended to very well. But I’m also quite fond of my portrayal in its essence, so I may end up just thanking the person for their opinion and carry on as usual :P

Do you like questions, which help you explore your character?  —  Absolutely! I’ve had some wonderful ones recently and it’s exactly the kick I need to get ideas out, some of which I’ve had on the back-burner but not had a framework within which to write it without it getting derailed. I definitely appreciate a question that will keep me at least a little on-topic, otherwise if I go off on my own volition I really tend to... well, go off! Even if a question is a similar topic to something I’ve already done, it’s a good exercise for me to go back to the similar headcanon and see if I can build further on it, deviate, and link it to show what past thoughts I’ve been working with. A great way of keeping some consistency in my portrayal while making improvements, I find! And then of course I’ve had some questions that are entirely new morsels for thought, and it leads me to something new and fresh, which I greatly appreciate.

Basically, any questions at all, fire away! I may take a while but I will get to them eventually!

If someone disagrees to a headcanon of yours, do you want to know why?  —  Yeah. I mean I think it’s just polite to present a reason as to why not, instead of just being like ‘this is wrong/a bad take’ or whatever. Source material is down to personal interpretation, so if I draw different ideas from it to another person after discussion, then we can simply agree to disagree on it. 

If someone disagrees with your portrayal, how would you take it?  —  They are welcome to disagree with me I guess? So long as they’re respectful and don’t then treat me as if my interpretation is ‘AU’ or talk about ‘canon Jiraiya’ as if he’s obviously a different entity to my own, then disagree away. But if prompted enough, know that I will most likely defend my portrayal with what I consider to be justification from the source material :P I did pay close attention to it, after all, and I do consider my portrayal to align well with it.

If someone really hates your character, how do you take it?  —  Depends on the nature of it and the conduct, really? Like, people are allowed to dislike characters. I myself find a couple of characters pretty annoying or don’t particularly care for them (granted, usually it’s in a love-to-hate or simply a ‘this character doesn’t interest me’ way), but that doesn’t affect how I behave towards the RPer of a character. It’s just manners, really. People tend to RP characters because they like them, so why would you take negativity right to their doorstep, in this space they’ve made as an expression of enjoyment for, and to develop said character? 

There’s been some people who admitted to me that they didn’t care much for Jiraiya, but then began to like him more with my portrayal and that’s more than fine; I take it as the highest compliment in fact. It’s also the kind of open-minded attitude I like to have with portrayals of characters I don’t necessarily like or have much interest in, because by and large, people do tend to add more depth and nuance than the busy and character-packed canon allowed.

However, if it’s the type of hate that’s got its own devoted circle of bitter bitches, who seem to use so much energy hating a character... then please, don’t engage me. Doesn’t matter who the character is, don’t expect me to follow/keep following your negative ass if it’s constant on the dash—and if the target character is any of the Sannin then frankly I’ll have probably blocked/blacklisted in a heartbeat. The ‘critical’ views of them tend to diminish them as humans, diminish the context and events that surrounded their choices, and in a way that I find is a gross double standard compared to what people will allow other (read: young, attractive, fandom faves, ‘babies’ or ‘beans’) to get away with and excuse the behaviours of. I don’t need that kinda negative energy sullying my hobby, nor do I need moral superiority that isn’t applied consistently across the board.

Are you okay with people pointing out your grammatical errors?  —  Absolutely! I meticulously fret and check, and cringe when I get a reply and happen to spot errors while rereading what I wrote before it! I edit a lot but don’t always pick up on errors, so I’m more than happy to have it pointed out. Chances are, I’ll be far more brutal to myself about it than anyone else would be!

Do you think you are easy going as a mun?   —  Overall, yeah. I’m not possessive or clingy (I don’t think) and don’t expect the world from people, nor for them to focus on or favour me or be super fast. I just expect the same respect in return. Having said that, I will express it when I don’t like something or it makes me uncomfortable, provided we’re familiar enough, because if we’re strangers I’d feel like I was coming across as entitled to your energy and emotional labour. I do my best to be diplomatic about it though, and rest assured it doesn’t mean I’m forever mad at you or turned off in any way just because I have a small grievance. I just find that being honest with each other rather than letting things pile up and fester makes a friendship more solid, and basically more genuine and long-lasting.

That’s about it, congrats for filling out!

Tagged by: @dokuhebi​ Tagging: Whoever hasn’t done this yet!

this is whiny af. and very long. bit of an explanation of some stuff and a wee request. 

warning, there’s a brief mention of sexual abuse and A LOT of historic drama. I’ve tried really hard not to appear in search tags for the relevant areas, so please try not to cause it to appear by mentioning the fandom or muse name without cutting it up (e.g. sei//fer) because as you’ll see, I don’t want these people near me. sit down and let uncle charlie tell you a horror story.

I’ve been slow again on here, I’M SORRY!! I was making an FFX blog. I know I’m getting a reputation for being a serial blog hopper, but the reason for that is, I’ve had two muses I really really loved and nothing else has ever come close. One was my Chuami, who naturally dropped in intensity as time went on (I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing - you can’t keep forcing a muse into ever more dramatic scenarios without giving them a break or they end up mutated and OP). The other was V//elka. Seifer is the nearest I’ve gotten but there’s still a void. :,(

V//elka did not die naturally. You may have seen me mention “the other fandom I was in” and how it’s a cesspit of bullying asscreases, sexual harassers, liars, stalkers, thieves and assorted other villains. But you have not heard the tale.

There was one other blog for that muse when I made mine. I asked her if she’d be okay with another being around, even though I’m not obliged to ask permission to make a blog, and she completely ignored me. I thought maybe it was a weird thing to ask, and my other blog in that fandom was welcomed and pretty popular with the non-RPer audience we had. I was the only one of that character active. So I just went ahead and did it, thinking it was nbd. I was Wrong. Within not-very-long, the girl and her friends began to employ every trick, tactic and scheme they could to bully me into abandoning, including but not limited to: forcing new RPers to choose between them and me, freezing out anyone who was seen to interact with me, stealing my content, stealing my friends’ muses(! yeah, the whole thing), copying my backstory and ships wherever ridiculing them didn’t work, incorporating my work into their muses in the same way, copying my art (one of them was an art student and I am a very bad beginner - she would take my drawings and redo them with a higher level of skill and collect the praise for it), sending spies to pretend to be my friend so they could try to trick me into insulting them so they could get caps, lying about me (one of them spread the rumour that I was some kind of sex obsessed pervert - LMAO AMARITE?!), making PSA posts about how I’m not entitled to be part of the fandom, and blaming me for their personal issues (e.g. a historically kind and well mannered user who had been absent for months made a callout post and @’d them all, explaining that he couldn’t be there anymore because they had bullied him and made fun of his abusive history - this was somehow my fault. One of them said I put him up to it because I was jealous of her(?) and they actually responded to him by saying “sorry your daddy touched you” and making jokes about how they’d never be friends with someone as low as him). Eventually, even though me and my main ship partner had a shitload of non-RPer fans for the work we were doing and our partnership was very popular, neither of us could even log in anymore. Every time we spoke or moved, some stupid plan was enacted to make sure it backfired on us. We were replicated and our muses turned into pandering caricatures of what they originally were until we left. My muse was a real point of pride for me, she was the best example of a strong, confident female lead I had ever written, and she was made into a sex crazed goth domme by the very people who accused me of that and declared it abhorrent. Hedge’s was turned from a complicated, fiercely proud, genderfluid(?) killer to a fragile little flower with a dick in a dress. It wasn’t just us, by the way. Every good writer who joined the fandom is gone. They were all gone shortly after I arrived. I tracked some down and asked why, and they all told the same story, one of them said it was cyclical and now that I’m gone, they’ll choose someone else in my place. Meanwhile - here’s the kicker - the group responsible don’t even fucking write.The only time they do is when they’re using it as a weapon against somebody, by stealing their plot or their ship and acting it out themselves. Now that the writers have embarked on a mass exodus and none have appeared to take our places, all they do is shitpost because there’s no one left to target. The stolen muses’ blogs are dead. In between all this, as if this wasn’t enough of a problem, three of them have a penchant for little girls. 

Where are you going with this, Charlie? Well, chums, first of all, it goes a little way to explaining my aversion to smut. It explains why I bang on about welcoming other Seifers so much, why I’m so strict on drama now, and why I’ll bite the head off of anyone who claims to be the sole granter of permission to make a certain muse. I instantly block anyone who overdramatises things to make them sound more dramariffic than they are, no discussion, no exceptions. I am extremely wary of anyone with defensive rules, or people who post unprompted PSAs about ~being nice to duplicates~ because in my experience so far, it’s the shady people who do that - they have something to cover up. I handled it pretty badly at the time, because I didn’t want to make things worse so I let myself get steamrollered. If it happened again now, I wouldn’t mind losing every follower I have as a result of telling them to shove it up their festering assholes. ANYWAY I’m telling you all this because my search for a replacement muse has gone cold, and that’s left me feeling a bit dead and uninspired, which leads me to keep losing my flow with Seifer as well. Lately, I’ve had a lot of casual-sleazy smut crossing my dash from sources I don’t follow, and it sorta brings back bad memories. SO I went onto V//elka’s blog with the idea of reclaiming it somehow, because it feels like she’s in a locked room full of dangerous weirdos and I can’t get her out unless I extract her completely. Here’s where the request comes in.  I really want to bring her away from all that and keep her somehow. I wiped away all the content that was bothering me, changed her url, and I might change her theme too, I’m not sure. Her block list is 200 users long because I blocked fucking everyone from that fandom who was on my follower list to ensure a totally clean break. I’ve added in sketched out FFVIII and FFX verses, removed her source ones and put a request-only line on them to deter anyone who joins that fandom in future. I think the only person I’ll write V in her normal, original verse with is Mirna at the minute (she came from this hellhole as well). If I finish giving her a facelift, will I be able to engage the services of my good friends and neighbours here to help me draw her out of that environment? You don’t have to commit to anything, just treat her like any OC. Even if it doesn’t work and I can’t revive her, at least I’ll have tried. If it doesn’t fail and I do manage to scrape back some focus, the blog hopping will cease, lmao.  If anyone feels like doing me a solid. That’d be great. Cos honestly, that whole experience tainted RP as a whole for me and I’ve never really been as into it since.