#...also. unrelatedly. every character here is on some level (ranging from doe [only a little bit] to will and alice [A Lot]) a self insert

[sp1resong]

pleasepleaseplease talk about your ocs i am so curious

OKAY SO

i have... four? ish? main oc stories/universe atm, not counting random fandom ocs i make on the side that aren't linked to any big overarching story

those four are Dr. Paradise's Theory of the Self, Tales of Godborn (<- title i am planning to change but do not yet have anything to change to), The Poison Beneath, and Onelight's Dawn. the latter two are warrior cats, and the former two are generic cat furries (...and both started as wc. Me when i got the warrior cats autism instead of the good at math or science autism)

im just going to go off about dptots because.Good lord. i am so infodumping. my hands would shrivel up and fall off if i wrote any more of this i hope you understand

DPTotS is a story about identity, personhood, and necromancy, i guess. at its bare basics.

um. The titular Dr. Willow "Will" Paradise (she/her) is a reclusive scientist and self-proclaimed alchemist. In her younger days, she found some manner of fame as "Miracle Worker Will", a so-called genius who claimed to be seeking immortality itself.

she very suddenly fell out of the public eye in what can only be described as "the identity crisis of a century" following which she threw herself into the sea to test a theory of hers. and promptly drowned to death. (she got better)

now with a bond to the Abyss (yeah the ocean is a whole entire eldritch horror in this universe), along with several new and unknown neuroses and complexes, Will shuts herself away in her lighthouse (for the most part! she still occasionally attends social events--but it's odd, her demeanor has changed entirely almost overnight...)

eventually she drops her titular Theory of the Self, which proclaims that identity is invariably a facade, and that true selfhood is guided by motivation; by which parts of your mind drive your choices.

she splits the Self [or; the abstract entity who is capable of making choices] into three distinct guiding factors:

the Heart [representing emotion]

the Mind [representing logic]

the Will [representing desire]

(...before you ask, i promise i am not lying when i say i wrote that part long before i even knew who chonny jash was)

though it is not a part of her in-universe theory, on a more meta level there is a fourth factor, the Mask, which represents the charade of a cohesive identity, or the urge to adhere to social norms and etiquette even when every other part of you is screaming against it.

anyways! wow there are. Actually three more main characters. good lord. i am the fucking infodumper

um! the other main characters are Doe (it/its), Alice Grey (she/her), and Dorian Winters (he/him).

Doe is... the sole inhabitant of the corpse of John Doe. John died of a stab wound in a back alley and Will stumbled upon his corpse some time later. She wasn't about to look a gift corpse in the mouth, bringing his body back and attempting to recreate the conditions of her own resurrection in the controlled environment of her lab. If this worked--why, she would have earned her title of Miracle Worker! she would have found the key to eternity, to conquer death itself--

and work it did, or so it seemed, at first.

truth is, Doe does not remember being John. perhaps it lost its memory as some consequence of the trauma of dying and being resurrected, or perhaps John's mind could not be saved at all, and another was constructed in its stead.

whether a broken John or a new soul entirely, it doesn't matter, really! because we have Doe now. Doe, identity issues connoisseur (in other news i fuckign hate spelling connoisseur why does french have so many god damn fucking letters in it. Spellcheck save me), who lives life as a failed copy, a dead man's shadow, a mere shard of what it should be. does it imagine the disappointment in will's gaze when it lingers on its eyes (bright blue; her same color. john's were amber)? is the face in the mirror truly its own? when it looks down, are those its hands by right?

it knows the answer, of course. or... 'know' is not the right word. it does not know anything. it feels. that is all it can do.

alice, meanwhile, is a Completely Normal Cat with an Ordinary Life--which is to say, her issues at the beginning of the story are fairly mundane in comparison to whatever the fuck is going on with the other two (this fact will change).

her in-laws dragged her to some fancy party, once. she did not have a good time at all, and just kind of stood uncomfortably in the corner the whole time until she was approached by an Odd Stranger dot dot dot... just kidding it's will fucking paradise. Will decides to spare alice from the woes of Standing There Awkwardly and strikes up a conversation. alice is nervous at first, but will is like. scarily good at figuring people out (and figuring out how to get other people to trust her as a result), and alice quickly becomes comfortable around her.

they become fast friends! alice learns more about will, while will hears of alice's assorted wiles and woes.

she wants a lot of things, but she's too nervous to get them. she doesn't like her family, she doesn't like the city, she doesn't like the life she is living, she feels like everything goes by too fast and she will never be able to do all she wants to with her time on this earth.

will is sympathetic, of course. she hears her out and offers a shoulder to cry on, and offers carefully-picked bits and pieces of her own history and struggles that alice might be able to relate to. until...

um. long story short will pushes alice off a cliff into the ocean, thereby granting her will's brand of quasi-immortality (she does not age, and she is very difficult to kill; so long as abyss doesn't decide to pull the plug, so to speak. which it can do at any time).

now, alice, who literally fucking died and had her soul pledged to an eldritch horror without her consent at the hands of someone she thought was her friend, is rightfully fucking pissed about this. and one thing about alice is that once she's gotten over her initial fear of rocking the boat she is stubborn.

alice swears revenge. she misses will, she hates will, she never wantts to see will again, she wants will to apologize, she doesn't know what to feel or think. this all hardens into one thought: will has to die. she has to. she has to.

um.Admittedly this part of the story is Way less planned out due to being fairly close to the ending, but whateverr

oh yeah also doe has a character arc where it learns to accept that it isn't John, and that it doesn't have to be John, and just being Doe is enough. also it befriends John's widowed husband. long story.

anyways! some shtuff happens (i'm not... sure what yet), the three of them are brought to the seafloor by abyss in a dream. btw theyre all associated with some small element of abyss's imagery because fuck you that's why (alice has tridents, will has ink, and doe has.I haven't decided yet).

now, in this dream-state these bits of imagery become more real--will's palms are ink-stained, doe... ...i'll figure it out, and, most importantly, alice gets an actual trident because.First of all haha chonny jash hyperfixation and second of all. she deserves a large stabbing weapon okay

alice proceeds to threaten will's life! and yet will... doesn't react at all. alice holds her trident to her throat and will looks back, unmoved, looking, if anything, slightly bored as she stares at her death. and alice all but begs will for a reaction, anything to bring some catharsis into this bloodshed, anything to make this all worth it. by the end of it, she's sobbing on the floor and will is looking down at her.

and will apologizes, and alice doesn't forgive her. and she cant bring herself to do it anymore. and nothing will ever be the same again

and then some more stuff happens idk i dont even know how the story ends it just exists as a Cluster of Scenes That I Want To Animate featuring the Guys (gender neutral)

...oh yeah. and dorian. i forgot about dorian. fuckin uhh. dorian is will's college friend and a former singer slash musician, who had the misfortune of becoming rather famous for his music. and now he's a public figure no matter what he does and he fucking hates it. but he'd never go up front and say he fucking hates it, of course. he is passive aggressive forever and ever and

will crashes on his couch sometimes, as the most Normal of her friend group, and by Most Normal i mean literally just the only one not involved with the horrors (very low bar)

anyways.

the story also functions as something of a... parable, i suppose, about will's titular theory! will represents the mind, doe represents the heart, alice represents the will (...yeah, the character named will isn't the will. lmao. look, this was a later addition. and, to be fair, if she were writing the story, im fairly certain she would do this on purpose), and dorian represents the mask.

...and the abyss represents The ocean is really really fucked up /silly

nah, abyss's position in the metaphor is Up To Interpretation tm. as i see it, theyre a vague representation of mental illness, but eh. the author is dead here.

tl;dr: if there were three guys at the bottom of the ocean and two of them tried to kill each other would that be fucked up or what