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OKAY I GIVE. And I'm bored at workstudy.
Pick a character I write or RP, and I will give you the top five ideas/concepts/other I keep in mind while writing that character that I believe are essential to depicting them accurately.
Just from current games/recent fic, please - I may not remember enough foror be too embarrassed by older characters.
Pick a character I write or RP, and I will give you the top five ideas/concepts/other I keep in mind while writing that character that I believe are essential to depicting them accurately.
Just from current games/recent fic, please - I may not remember enough for
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2. Applegate loves what he does. He is not one of your jaded, grim Devil types. He loves fucking with people and gathering souls, and is overall a very happy and satisfied individual.
3. Applegate is a fallen angel. It doesn't crop up much, because he long ago burned the angelic part of him away so thoroughly it's like it was never there, and he doesn't do angst, but it's still part of his past. It can indeed come up when I least expect it.
4. Applegate gets the best lines in his canon. I have to remember to make jokes. If he's not cracking wise, there is probably going to be something (hopefully) funny in his narrative.
5. Applegate's canon is a musical comedy. This means his world is pretty much black and white, without a lot of shades of gray. There are rules he has to follow to ensure that his contracts are valid, and he is just as beholden to them as his victim is. There's plenty of darkness to be found in his world, and I can get away with having him be creepy (because: he is the Devil), but ultimately the light prevails. This also means the Rule of Funny applies: if it's funny, I should do it, even if it contradicts something I've already established.
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1. Cal is massively insecure. I could just stop there, because it informs pretty much everything he does. His spent his life before living with a family who did virtually nothing but pick on his faults and make up additional ones to attribute to him. As a result, Cal's sense of self-worth is not very strong - it's been slowly getting better in Milliways, where for the first time he's had quite a few real friends who genuinely care about him, but it's still far from healthy. And it can have really weird effects on how he interacts with people sometimes. Just ask poor Kate Barlow.
2. Cal is a former politician and member of a VERY socially elite family. This means that he himself is quite socially adept. He's good at chatting with strangers, he's good at guiding small talk, he's good at all that surface-y stuff that makes for a good party host or the kind of politician people who don't think too deeply like to vote for. He can also cover up what he's thinking and feeling on the turn of a dime, though this is more obvious to the kinds of people who tend to end up in Milliways than he'd like it to be. And if your pup has politician-y qualities, even if they're not in politics per se, Cal is going to pick up on it pretty quickly. He knows the signs.
3. But, he fails at expressing emotions. You know, the deeper positive stuff. Cal is never going to be comfortable with, or necessarily even able to, tell his friends how important they are to him. They're just gonna have to pick it up from his actions.
4. Cal hates lying. Everything wrong in his life before, as far as he's concerned, is because he lied, or someone else lied and he stood by and said nothing, which in his mind is just as bad. Now he does his level best to be completely truthful, even when it complicates a conversation unnecessarily or makes him look bad. Part of the difficulty he's had in adjusting to his new life on his new world is the cover story. He knows he can't exactly tell the truth in this instance, but he hates it anyway. He's gotten pretty used to it through sheer repetition (he's met a lot of new people since he got Penny; cute dog + good-looking guy = scarcely a moment to oneself when out and about), and he's not very happy about that, either.
5. Cal is is uncomfortable with male homosexuality, especially when the male in question appears to be interested in him. A lot of that is just your standard "ignorant straight guy" syndrome, plus being a product of his time (born in 1959, died in 1997, spent that life in the upper upper class where things are Just So), but not all of it. The deeper roots of it are related to his uncle's attraction to him (canon), which he learned of when he was seventeen (Millicanon), and never disappeared (canon). He used it to his advantage when situations seemed desperate enough that he had no other option, and much as he enjoyed the power that gave him over a man who made his life hell, its legacy is an overwhelming feeling of ick. He's spent a lot of time dealing with the complications of that relationship, but he's got a little ways to go yet. He does have a sexual friendship with Sam Linnfer, but it took him months to get to the point where he was comfortable with even admitting to his attraction to Sam, never mind acting on it, and that attraction itself has some vaguely questionable origins.
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1. Cal has an inherently addictive personality. Without the reason MilliCal has to resist that part of him, he's still going to give in to it. The cigarettes aren't a temporary replacement for pot that he'll eventually give up - they're what he focuses his addiction on now instead of pot. He'll probably always smoke, and if he didn't he'd find something worse. He has to learn to kick addiction the hard way, or not at all.
2. Cal is learning early about the reserves of strength he has to draw on, and the things he has been through have caused a radical redefinition of what frightens him, but he's not untouchable. The same buttons can still be pushed; it may take a lot more work, but it's not impossible. I explored this in particular with Obadiah's last visit - he was able to take control of the direct confrontation in a way that had been impossible for him before, but when he had to be careful around Tony, Obadiah still managed to put him on edge. He's going to be more relieved than he'll want to admit when Grahame leaves for LA.
3. He still doesn't think all that highly of himself. Sorry, Sherlock, that's going to be a very long-term project.
4. He's not as stupid as he thinks he is. He's not a genius, either, but he can think, and under Sherlock's influence he does it a lot more than he used to.
5. That sexuality stuff? Yep. And of course, as the clueless and privileged will do, he conflates it with gender issues. Thus, his jumpiness about male homosexuality and tendency to chide himself for being a "bad boyfriend" because he doesn't get jealous like real men are supposed to all sort of stems from the same tangled-up ball of fuckery.
Bonus item, because that reminded me: He's also basically the definition of privileged, and I will totally own up to not always being as good at dealing with that as I should because sometimes it just nails my embarrassment squick. "NO OH GOD CAL DON'T DO/SAY/BE THAT." So I do try to remember it, but it tends to get filtered through my own view of the world and limitations as an RPer.
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