#AND MAN BEING CHARACTERS IN A DARK ACADEMIA MURDER MYSTERY FITS THEM SO WELL

[linalilia]

ngl it's very funny how my twst and milgram ocs are very similar (akio and hayden, kei and seth, riku and vance (+ he kinda reminds me of seth too), kei's muse is very similar to riley too), but it's like..

me with twst ocs: am i allowed to do this. like, i know twst characters are literally based on villains, but am i allowed to do this. most people i know have very cute and sweet twst ocs, my characters are way too edgy compared to them OH NO-

me with milgram ocs: GOD YOU ALL ARE HORRIBLE. AS YOU SHOULD BE.

[ackerfics]

hi, rory! <3 what majors would the sc veterans take if they were in the modern world?

hi, anon !! thank you so much for this ask, this is heaven in disguise from all my schoolwork. tbh, the whole time i was working for a lab report, my mind will go back to this ask bc i wanted to have the association as accurate as possible hhhajshw

i asked one of my friends for help and thank God for them bc my single brain cell really said 'it's time for you to rest' after staring at one backlog. without further ado, here are the veterans' majors if they're studying in university:

first off, hange zoe, because if you ask me this question in real life, they would be the only one i can answer. every damn time i would think of them in a college setting, being a biology major is really hange's forte. at this point, this is what everyone would associate them with.

hange is all about experimenting and doing brilliant breakthroughs in any field of science but knowing that they have this unparalleled fascination with the unusual and unexpected life-forms (ahem titans ahem), the biology lab would be the surest place where you could find hange. i feel like biology is too broad so i will add that microbiology or bacteriology are just some of the specializations they will be taking in their time in college.

imagine, being lab partners with hange and immediately knowing that you will have one of the highest grades in the class because they're that well-versed in a specific lab report. and if you're partners with them for the rest of the academic year, you might as well have a shot at an immaculate grade. i'm not saying that you should depend on them too much though hHHHH, hange is still a member of the majority of the student body who relies heavily on caffeine to keep them invigorated. who isn't at this point?

so far, some of the biology majors that i encountered (well, more like chatted behind a screen — online classes suck), they have this energy that could drain my social battery too quickly and hange fits that description. (note that this doesn't apply to any college bc i observed this in mine soooo 🤭) they're the type to always go on a tangent on a certain science article or coerce you into joining this org thing. i can imagine levi just looking at hange like they're the one sucking his brain cells out whenever they speak about a documentary in bbc they watched the night before.

and if you're stuck on anything biology-related, hange will be the best person to ask help from. they're the first ray of sunlight you get while waking up. they're that approachable.

okay, so erwin smith.

don't come at me but he just radiates this ceo vibes and with that, one of his probably majors is business administration. i know this is so stereotypical of me but let's face it, erwin is a smooth talker through and through and if he doesn't take up marketing, business is one way to spend his college years. knowing his personality in attack on titan of establishing deals easily with a determined resolve, he fits the broadest description of being a business administration major. (again, don't come at me because my consultant for this statement is google and nobody comes after google sometimes hhhhh)

just for the benefit of myself, i will add what google says about this major, "[they] learn the mechanics of business through classes in fundamentals, such as finance, accounting and marketing ... students find ways to solve problems using data and they develop communication and managerial skills." and i thank you.

he's also probably the most well-spoken and most professional when conversing with others among his friends (and i'm not saying this to drag the other characters but this is what i pick up on) and that is exactly the qualities his major specializes. it is expected for them to strike deals and be a people person and who better character for the job than our very own erwin smith 🤩

now i mentioned 'one of the probable majors' and yes, aside from business administration, philosophy just exudes erwin smith. ngl, when i imagined erwin in a college setting, this major will always come first. his mind is just so sexy to me??? and i hope you guys think the same, too, because i don't want to be the only one who thinks that 👀 kidding aside, erwin is one of the smartest people in attack on titan and every time he speaks in one episode, my brain will instantly go mush, and that's what i feel when i hear philosophy majors talk.

philosophy majors (according to any other youtuber who does lookbooks for various majors hhhhhh) challenge what is unanswerable and analyze questions with no right answer. i feel like erwin, like hange, will talk all night to explain a theory. just imagine a date with him and you just listen to him rant about a topic that they should be making a report on. just listen to this man, okay?? it's adorable when he lets his guard down to include you in his little bubble of philosophies. he would also mention random things that he learned in classes, sometimes finding joy in knowing the philosophies of other people, or even deciphering levi's dream of an apocalyptic world. (it pisses levi off but he just leave him be.)

if you want a man who can do both of these majors, erwin smith is the answer 😉

sigh, mike zacharias.

this man holds so many talents and will forever amaze me.

i assume all of us here watched the movie perfume. and no, i'm not saying that mike is going to be a murderer but just like the main character of that film, making perfumes will be his forte with that sense of smell of his. and here, i conclude that mike will definitely take up chemical engineering.

he gives me the vibes that if it covers the one thing he does best, he will love his major. (mr. zacharias, can you please spare me that quality because i really need that now 😩) being in the labs while experimenting mundane things that can be found in the environment to create different scents is also a likely situation you can find him in, again, very much like hange. he's the type of student who really puts so much effort in staying afloat the honors list, even to the point of topping midterms in his major, for the sake of his dream. there will never be a moment where you will catch him complain about his major and professors.

he's that type of friend in college who agrees to any rant you say but in reality, he's got his life easy 😭

i headcanon mike owning a perfume shop after college just like how levi always dreamed of having a tea shop.

okay, imagine this little scenario if you're dating mike where he creates this unique perfumes as random gifts for you. they're not the typical perfumes that can seep through the room and can make you gag for no reason, they're subtle scents that will stay for the duration of the day. because again, he's got a sensitive nose, so making perfumes according to what his sense of smell dictates will always result in a revolutionary experiment. if you're randomly blurting out that you want a fusion of flowers and fruits as your perfume, say no more, he's your man.

now, the veteran who i find the hardest to associate a major with — levi ackerman.

after much deliberation and a break from plant physiology, i see him taking up law or criminology.

(i asked some of this from my mom because she attended law school :>>>)

levi is so organized and detailed in the things that he do and he fits in either of these majors since they require tedious memorizations and analysis of laws and crime scenes while being assertive enough to defend someone. he's the typical person who blurts out the true situation of a crime scene when watching film adaptations. yeah, he's that person, the one who sucks the enthusiasm out of you while watching a movie because he just had to correct some of the scenes. nevertheless, he means well though, he just wanted you to understand the reality unlike how films portray gruesome murders. movie nights always end up with levi ranting about half-assed mystery clichés.

levi's binder of readings are always too bright for everyone's good. his notes are full of highlighters and scribbles that it can blind someone. for one, he's always up all night studying his readings and cases for a practice court so by choosing neon highlighters, it's a way for him to wake up. there isn't one book in his possession that he doesn't highlight like it's a fricking coloring book. hange once jokingly said that his binder now acts like his bible and for once, he agrees because he was never seen without one. hange had a field day since levi never agrees with them.

when doing practice courts though, his go-to resting bitch face always come in handy when carrying out his role as one of the lawyers. he's just so sexy with his hands in the pockets of his slacks as he tries to justify his supposed client. the way he questions the accused definitely isn't hot because he's like one of the panelists in your thesis defense, the one who just comes up with questions that have you melting on the spot. he's dangerous i tell you. it also doesn't help if you accidentally hurt one of his friends or just landed randomly in his blacklist for being annoying as hell. relax though, he doesn't mean harm other than the fact that he's ready to throw some hands from all the pent-up rage he gathered in his body.

of course, i couldn't forget how he dresses up like a typical dark academia fanatic so look out for eye-candy.

if you want someone who can recite articles from the constitution, this man is perfect for you 😌

i had so much fun doing this !! again, i'm not generalizing every major i've talked about in these little headcanons, this is all for fun and based on the people i encountered in college. if you want more of this, don't hesitate to ask !! 😚

[maggotmouth]

          hello, i’m nora ( she / her, 24, gmt ) and i almost exclusively join dark academia rps. please find below everything i have thus far on otto ballantyne, a theatre and classics student who was arranged to be married to one of the students who disappeared. i’ve honestly been itching to write otto again for months, so thanks to this lil group for giving me the opportunity. can’t wait to get my teeth stuck into him again. please bombard me with discord messages for plots. here is his  pinterest.

act one: application.

THOMAS DOHERTY   ,   CIS-MALE   ,   HE/HIM         →         according   to   the   school   records   ,   OTTO HORATIO BALLANTYNE   has   been   attending   sacred   heart   for   the   past   four   years   .   i   last   saw   them   hanging   around  the  cliffs   ;   i   think   they   were  reciting   shakespearean  soliloquies  to   the   wind   and   a   weathered   old   skull.   at   twenty   -   three   years   old   ,   otto   has   been   studying   theatre   &   classics   and   get   this   ,   i   heard   that   he   was   arranged   to   be   married   to  alice   rosseau   before   her   untimely   disappearance  ,   and  was   desperate   to   call   off   the   affair  —   figure   it’s   true   ?   everyone   around   here   always   associates   them   with    an   aged   bottle  of   malbec   glugged   carelessly   at   the   after - show  ,  the   kind   of   confidence   that   only   a   private   education gives ,  white   lines   of   powder   snorted   off  a   marble  sink  with    lovers  you’ll   later   deny  .   in   the   time   since   these   strange   happenings   ,   they   have   have   not   encountered   any   unexplained   occurrences   .         (   written   by   nora   ,   24   ,   she/her   ,   gmt   )

act two: the muse !

ok so lemme start off by saying otto is heavily inspired by if we were villains by m l rio and the secret history by donna tartt. very serious actor. into the classical plays, but would definitely fit in a production of posh by laura wade. originally i wrote him for a murder mystery dark academia group but when the group ended i missed him so much i decided to bring him here.

born in south london, but raised in cheltenham. went to eton or harrow or one of those posh english boarding schools for boys. we love the homoeroticism of learning latin with your homies and chanting sonnets in caves by candlelight.

youngest son in his family. was fiercely competitive with his brother nathaniel growing up. having an older brother who was incredibly intelligent and successful made otto learn to treat his life like it was a fight. constantly trying to be better and ‘prove himself’.

otto’s a brat. filthy rich public school boy vibes, very riot club. champagne all over the ceiling and driving well over the limit. custom-made cuff links he loses in taverns when he rolls up his sleeves to lean on the bar. needing to know so much about a character you’re playing that it consumes you ; you can no longer tell which parts of you are otto and which parts are macbeth.

characters who have inspired him:  alistair ryle in the riot club, francis abernathy in the secret history, anthony marston in and then there were none, oliver marks in if we were villains, achilles in the song of achilles, dorian gray in tpodg.

a fun fact is he is a natural blonde and spent most of his childhood that way but he now dyes it dark because he thinks that’ll give him more versatility in terms of the roles he can play. blonde ppl are usually cast as only the lover or the innocent n he wants to play villains and heroes and leading men as well.

very gay, n that’s pretty much a known thing by everyone but his family?? his family have arranged to have him married to women twice n both times its not worked out. the first time he basically drove her away with his reckless hedonism and alcoholism, and the second arranged marriage was to alice, one of the four students who went missing

archetypes: the figurehead. the challenger. the magician. the knight. the underdog.

ENTP-T / the debater personality. 

theatre arts major, minoring in classics.

trigger warning for internalised homophobia / familial prejudice.

act three: the biography !

     heavy is the head that wears the crown, though yours is the size of a tennis ball when you are born three weeks premature, barely formed enough to open your eyes. for those first few weeks all your parents knew were fear and love — fear that you would leave them, love that you had made it through so much, hooked up to wires like a fish in a cryogenic tank. to them your heart that learned one day to beat of its own accord was a miracle. perhaps that’s why you became their golden boy.

     being born as a boy on the brink of death makes you invulnerable. you were achilles and the world couldn’t touch you for you were shielded from harm by a mother’s protective spell. should nathaniel lay so much as a finger on your skin, a voice would raise like the sound of a god from the veranda where she sat sipping her wine, play nice, boys! the sound of it thick with merlot. in every fight they took your side ; angel-headed creatures never lied. you soon learned that adults would believe anything if they liked you, that flattery will get you anywhere and to the well-trained mind, conversation was little more than a parlour game.

     you harboured your mother’s beauty, the softness of her voice, the firmness of her skin and light in the corners of her smile. of your father, they’d say you inherited his wit, though that was your own — as was the golden hair that tousled your head, taken not from ambrose ballantyne but rather the bout of his three-week business trip to germany when your mother had bedded the gardener. if he knew, he never mentioned it. to believe such a fate would imply that he was not enough for her. though you noticed one day when you were nearing five and the sun was ripe on your freckle-flecked skin that the gardener had stopped coming at all. the grass, once shaven to its scalp, now grew to your knees.

     at school, you learned with porridge still clinging to your mouth that the way to win over your teachers was through your smile. yours was the kind of school where the christmas play was not the nativity but rather the story of the gods, and stardom came to you in the role of apollo, sun shining from your beaming face, a bright halo of hair around your head. this was the first time you noticed a coldness in nathaniel’s eyes as your father threw you over his shoulder and your mother drenched you in praise. a bout of food-poisoning on your brother’s part rendered the italian restaurant, visited in your honour, abandoned. you never did find out if he was faking.

     the room to his door remained shut after that and you learned to wile away your hours in the company of nannies and children from neighbouring castles, played at knights and rescued princesses from nearby dungeons, a tin-foil crown lopsided on your head. you learned to seek influence in the faces of those around you, how their eyes would widen as they hung like stalactites to your words. storyteller. prophet. riddler. prince. you cut your tongue into a well-kept sword and sparred with it thrice a day.

     by nine you had read all of dickens novels. by eleven, all of shakespeare’s comedies — though you understood them as much as a cricket knows the meaning of the cosmos. still, it sounded rich and impressive when asked by aunties at dinner parties, what are you reading in school, otto? he finds the curriculum tiring, your mother would say, stroking a hand through your thick head of hair. otto’s just finished the merchant of venice. soon you grew to ignore your brother’s glowers at your back. your mother’s was the only smile you needed.

     in cap and blazer your mother would drop you off at school, gated and turreted, the kind that was the envy of poorer neighborhood wives. when you were young, you were sure the gifts that came your way were yours alone, though as you grew older, you learned to expect them in the same way the school expected cheques from your parents. they named them benefactors, you noticed one day, on the wooden plaques fixed to the common room walls. the same plaques you would one day notice their names engraved upon in the arching hallways of sacred heart. acclaim was bought, not earned, and your success was littered with blood money.

     what’s a king without a kingdom? your father surely wanted you to inherit his, though it was not in law and corporal finance that you found yourself a castle, but rather upon the stage. when red curtains split, you found you could become anything with the power of your will — boy, man, lion, snake, each of them wrung out by wordsmiths dead in their graves, a certain romance in the dusky smell of stage lights. when every eye in the room was focused on you — that was when you felt most powerful. like a piece of art, you were something to be looked at and admired — and perhaps in the absence of self-earned merit your vanity blossomed, for even if the trophies that lined your cabinets and the a-grades in columns on a sheet came from heavy pockets, your parents could never buy the sound of applause.

     actors are by nature volatile. though your facade was swifter than an arrow, backstage they would call you tempestuous, bigoted, vain. still, it never left the wings of the theatre. there was a kind of reverence surrounding you that words could not taper, godliness following you from school to college, a peer admired in the practice rooms of sacred heart where you poured over chekhov and ibsen but yearned to read sophocles and euripides.

     you learned to pride yourself on your looks — a sharpened jawline and a sharper tongue — and found that people would do almost anything for a beautiful face. in the beginning, alice was one so much. first colleagues, then friends, then a frequenter to the table in your family’s house. with arrogance carried in the curve of your brow, you only ever saw her as an accessory. that changed when you met her brother, let yourself stumble, brogues in a size that differed from your own kicked beneath your bed, a shirt with a larger neck size, pulled sheets, the smell of a foreign cologne.

      talk travelled. it wouldn’t do to have word of your deviance spread further than the ballantyne house. while your parents would claim they were forward-thinking, more lenient than their parents had been, there was a conservative priggishness to the way they’d brush such matters under the rug, your father scarcely able to meet your eye over the dinner table. soon after, the arrangement was set with you all but exalted from the plans until alice had been informed. too late to back out, neither of you all that eager to be wed, though your families would coo when you fixed your hair or she, in keeping with the role, adjusted your tie. at first it amused you to play house with one such as alice, but soon you grew listless. like a caged beast you felt suffocated by the falseness of it all. you’d leave the dinners held by your joint households and return bedraggled, smelling of whiskey and sex. you’re not sure alice ever knew the reason why you couldn’t love her, though perhaps she suspected. at night, the names that would fall from your lips would never be hers. oliver. daniel. mason. rupert. charles.

act four: character investigation !

        otto’s an extremely materialistic character who obtains pleasure through the things you can buy in life rather than that which comes to you by way of humble experience. he likes rolex watches, armani suits, louis vuitton travel bags, silk scarves imported from india. he likes to drink wine from decades gone by, where he can almost taste the funk of a victorian farmer hand pressing the grapes into a pulp, or to read a manuscript from the special collections section of the library that he knows has passed through hands which have gone on to achieve greatness. to otto, alice was always an extension of this hedonistic, pleasure-seeking attitude — she was something to be paraded like the equestrian trophies on his bookshelf, or his name on the honour roll. it’s not that he didn’t see her as a person — he’s hardly a chauvinist, although it could easily be inferred from the disdain with which he talks to some women — but rather that he saw her as someone ethereal and admirable and of high social standing who would elevate his social standing, by extension, were he to spend time with her. (this was such a convoluted sentence omg sorry)

         the engagement was not his choice. even the idea of it had never crossed his mind. he had never thought to marry – marriage to otto was a tool used for financial gain — and being already wealthy, he was content to live out his days as a bachelor. he would take lovers, of course, but it would be on his own terms without the involvement of the law. alice was chosen as a match for otto because she was from a wealthy, well-liked family and the two had been friends since childhood. it seemed to their parents inevitable that they would marry, and so all that was left was the agreed arrangement between the families and the exchanging of rings. strictly speaking, if the marriage between otto and alice had gone ahead, then alice would have been nothing more than a trophy wife to otto. it would have been a miserable marriage for her, and he would have grown to resent her for it — not resent her for the fact that he could never truly be free to love someone he wanted (for he still would) but resent her, and by extension his family, for taking the option to do that openly and publicly away from him. she would always be seen as the beard, the scorned lover, the cuckold, and it would dampen any future relationships he held with the stain of that upset.

act five: wanted plots !

people who he was friends with as a child (either in london or cheltenham if anyone in this group has a muse from there) but grew apart from when he was sent to private school / they view him as entitled now and the two no longer have much in common

someone who auditioned for the same role as him, but otto got it, and they’ve resented him for it ever since !  want this bad. or put your thang down flip it and reverse it: someone who got the role otto wanted and he loathes them for it.

hasn’t really dated anyone? at college, he tends to hook up with people in a vapid sort of way? so he wouldn’t rEALly have past relationships with boys unless it was….. incredibly quiet and on the DL, literally meeting up in the woods after school to read plato and play with each others hair. suddenly realised i want this. someone give me someone he reads plato in the woods with and kisses up against tree bark because even though everyone basically KnOWS otto isn’t out n probably never will be :/

alternatively someone who he had a vapid, senseless hook up with and grew attached to  :/ rude.   in this house we lov angst

i guess some friends he actually likes would be cool. maybe someone who he has a hold over, because he’s quite an engaging character with good leadership qualities, like at parties he’ll be the one telling the story and gesticulating wildly and everyone’s watching him or looking to him for where they’ll go next / how the night will pan out. if he has a hold over someone maybe he has some sort of leverage whereby they’ll complete his work for him if he’s out getting drunk which he usually is. if tht sounds like ur character is naive n could be coerced, hit me up

people he knows on a very superficial and base level in the fact that their only interactions together involve doing coke off someone’s sink and stumbling home in the dark. otto’s a massive hedonist. if he were a greek god, he’d be a mix between dionysus and apollo, but he has achilles’ vanity.