Tl;dr Mega Meme Bonanza

[angermanaging]

THE TL;DR MEGA MEME BONANZA

Comment with a list of your characters, receive questions, or just tl;dr on your own unprompted! Here's some suggestions. ◘ What does your character think of mine? ◘ What goes on during our handwaved CR? How much handwaved CR do we have? ◘ Canon information, for those unfamiliar with your canon. ◘ All sorts of headcanon questions-- sleeping positions, childhoods, past sexual or romantic history, etc. ◘ Would your character date mine? ◘ If they were put under a truth spell, what would come out? ◘ Where do you want to go with your character, story arc wise? ◘ Give an example of their daily routine in Keeliai. ◘ Who do they miss most from home? Would they go back if they could? ◘ What kind of music do you listen to while tagging? What does your character listen to ICly? ◘ Elaborate on what you've been working on improving in your writing style lately. ◘ What would their daemon spirit animal be, as from His Dark Materials? ◘ What have been your favorite threads with me? ◘ What do their dragons look like in Flight Rising? And much, much more! Go wild! I recommend making a plain top level comment with just your list of characters, and replying to yourself to fill out things on your own.

Comments

[depicted]

so how do you feel about adapted versions of Lord Henry

First! Favourite beverages for each of them. Like, what kinds of coffees, teas, alcoholic drinks, and other kinds of drinks do they like? Tell me about preferences and dislikes!

Now: how does Una feel about being all linear-like here?

Also, how do you feel about how Harry has developed here, and what do you want to explore in him/where do you want to go with him?

[una_persson]

are you trying to torture me

Favourite beverages: Henry likes to start his day with tea, and he's done his level best to get the nearest Keeliai equivalent of a decent English Breakfast-style black tea. He can now make said tea without setting anything on fire. This is an improvement. He likes any kind of good wine, especially champagne, as well as port and fine cognac. He's managed to find near equivalents for most of his favourites in Keeliai, but he misses good French champagne like burning; he would do almost anything for a good vintage Krug.

Una has a taste for instant coffee, originally born of necessity and now just a habit, and she actually likes the stuff—to the extent that she actually misses it here. She likes good Scottish whiskys and wine, and isn't so much a fan of beer (though in a proper pub, she'll have a pint of bitter because that's what you do).

Una and living in a linear mode: She's okay with it for now; there has been a generous amount of excitement and intrigue to keep boredom at bay, and she also hasn't been here long enough to get itchy feet. She is mildly frustrated at not being able to move through this world's history, because she knows it would be extremely helpful if she could. Eventually she's probably going to start getting twitchy. Also, luckily, so far nothing has happened to disrupt her current sense of time, place, and identity—the upshot of which is that no one has really seen her frayed out of all recognition. Yet. She's going to get out of Sinbrilee with her sanity largely intact, despite the Dreaming adventures, so that's a plus.

Harry's development here: Ah, this is the big one. Okay.

So right now the poor guy is actually depressed. He brought this on himself, of course, what with his insistence on learning his own future, which is forcing him to grapple with both betrayals that have happened and those that haven't happened yet for him, and it's finally starting to truly sink in for him just how much of a gap there is between him and Dorian—temporally, psychologically, in every other respect. And his usual defences—to keep everything at arm's length and try to be a spectator in his own life—they're not working as well as they used to.

I feel like he's maybe one to three major incidents away from a proper nervous breakdown, where he can no longer hide from the reality that 1. his erstwhile protégé murdered his oldest friend, 2. said erstwhile protégé will betray the shit out of him by abandoning him in extremis after revealing all his secrets to Oscar which are then published, 3. he's going to die alone and worn out, 4. nothing he does in Keeliai can possibly change any of this. And he's got to own up to his own responsibility in his own downfall, and in Dorian's.

There's a very real question as to whether he'd survive this, frankly, and if so, how.

There's just no escaping the fact that he is a hideously tragic figure, and he can only evade this fuckupery for so long. I'm not sure if he will ever be in a position to truly repent? Or if he can understand the full magnitude of what he might have to repent for? I feel like there's a very deep pit into which he's inevitably going to fall, and it's unclear to me whether he can be raised out of it. He's so fucking paradoxical—like, I believe he actually understands himself quite well, but he refuses to admit that he is affected by his own actions, if that makes any sense? To say nothing of how hard it is for him to recognise that anything he's ever said (and he's only ever talked, as we keep reminding ourselves) has led to so much pain in both his own life and Dorian's.

...I don't even know if any of that made any sense because I'm still really emotional about the BFA PoDG and that's definitely messing with my analytical abilities right now.

tl;dr: Henry is teetering on the edge of the abyss; something is going to make him fall; and I am genuinely curious whether he can be extracted from it, and if so, how. I don't know, but I think I'd like to find out.

[depicted]

so I might've started grinning like a monster at "There's a very real question as to whether he'd survive this, frankly, and if so, how" I'm just so excited for this horribleness. PROPER FOLLOWUP QUESTIONS (and probably unrelated bonus questions) MOMENTARILY.

[una_persson]

I suppose I could have summed up Henry with "ERRYTHING TERRIBLE" but that would probably have been slightly less amusing than my Kermit-flailing.

...also, sometimes I am slightly astounded at the extent to which I've somehow managed to work out a semi-coherent argument that someone who everyone else sees as one of literature's great amoral villains is actually a tragic figure.

(With more than a little help from my friends, it must be said.)

[depicted]

I enjoy the beverage answers. I always find that just fun to read how people like their drinks. Especially love Una about instant coffee.

I instantly want to make Una fray somehow It's good she's handling it well so far! No surprise that adventure helps. It will be fun to see what here shakes her out of her comfort zone, or I suppose out of her comfort zone of being in danger in a positive way? ...Una's love of danger makes this hard to discuss.

[una_persson]

Her thing about instant coffee has amused me forever. In "Elric at the End of Time", right before she sets off: "She opened her bag and made sure of her jar of instant coffee. It was the one thing she couldn't get at the End of Time."

me too The main thing that will shake her up, most likely, is intense personal tragedy related to a close friend, OR some kind of psychic/temporal event that really digs into her sense of self and her location in spacetime. Ordinary crisis and threats from supernatural entities are one thing; when it gets personal, that's another altogether.

[depicted]

That's so endearing.

How about both I look forward to seeing it happen. And facilitating wherever necessary.

[una_persson]

that would certainly be efficient One prerequisite is that she needs to have enough close relationships that something going down with one would really affect her. But there's a lot of potential along those lines, so.

[depicted]

It's okay. I'm still emotional too. It does make sense that he understands but refuses to admit to it!

But... yeah. It's been in his threads, I've noticed, and progressively so, as thing upon thing is set upon him. Well, at least a breakdown will be a new experience! It's been great to watch him though, if very sad. And I'm interested to see where you'll take it on there, and how he'll recover. Would he be difficult to play if he never pulled out of that pit?

[epigrammatical]

If he never pulled out, I think he'd be extremely difficult; playing him depressed is a weird enough experience as it is, and despair would be fairly agonising. The trick would be to not turn it into a replay of Oscar's last days at the Hotel d'Alsace, because it's a similar sort of path. (Once again I'm reminded that Oscar and Harry dislike each other because they are far too similar.)

I think it is possible for him to get back out of the depths, though. Possibly because he has relationships that are very different to those he has at home, for all that he tries to fit them into the same general boxes. If nothing else, if he can find a purpose and a direction, it would help him get out of that place.

Of course, he's not even there yet, so this is still largely speculative on my part, but. It does seem like this is where we're headed.

[depicted]

That all makes perfect sense to me. (It is so rough playing characters stuck in despair.) Any comments on the differentness of his relationships here as compared to at home?

[epigrammatical]

Home vs. Keeliai: for one thing, he doesn't rule the societal roost the way he does in London. He hasn't got a rival like Oscar, but he hasn't got much of anything to be a rival over, and so there's a certain amount of big-fish-small-pond syndrome going on.

He also has business associates now. This is slightly horrifying to him and he stil refuses to think of himself as a tradesman, but he does actually like some of his coworkers and the like (e.g. Stocking, Arthur). As long as he doesn't dwell on the whole working-for-a-wage thing, he can cope. But he definitely feels the difference in how he relates to people like that here, versus at home.

Then there's Bryn, with whom he is repeating some of the same patterns of behaviour that he used with Dorian. But there's the added frisson in the fact that she's a woman, and Henry still has a shitty attitude about women at heart. (Some of the things that have happened between them have not helped this attitude, not that Bryn is necessarily aware of that.) She's actually quite unclassifiable according to his usual schema for women in society—but at least he enjoys it?

[oathwalk]

BUSINESS ASSOCIATES. The dreaded. It is interesting to me. Such a very different situation and so yes, it seems like a lot of these really are not like the sorts of relationships he's been able to have before. (It's a growing experience, Henry!)