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kwillow · 4 months

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People are too nice to me and send me so many intriguing and prescient questions and scenarios about my imaginary friends. Some of these I would have a hard time responding to with drawings, so I've gotta just use my words (SO MANY WORDS) instead!

So, for all interested parties, in response to those questions, here come some LORE RAMBLES: THEO EDITION.

Asks and answers under the cut!

Thank you! “Strange but interesting” is what I aim for with him.

I don’t think I’ve talked about Theo’s voice before! To be honest, I often struggle to imagine precisely what my character’s voices are; the qualities of my mental performance for them varies from day to day. Still, I think with Theo I can formulate a description of some kind.

I imagine his voice to be on the higher end for a man, though not exaggeratedly so, along the tenor range. He can deepen his pitch purposefully to sound more imposing or masculine, but his voice tends to rise in pitch further and further when he’s tense, like a violin string on the verge of snapping. He speaks clearly and distinctly, sometimes to the point of almost biting off the ends of words rather than having them sloppily run into each other, and only rarely uses contractions. His voice has a slight nasal quality to it at times. When he’s angry, a bit of a rattling growl can edge the end of his words.

When he was young, he was a terrible stutterer. He made a concerted effort to train himself out of stuttering in his adolescent years, but he will still lapse into r-ruh-ruh-repeating his syllables if anxiousness gets the better of him and makes him forget to swallow those extra sounds.

He is an expressive speaker, far more so than he’d prefer. Like his pitch varies, so too does his volume, and he can swing from speaking so softly as to be almost inaudible to screaming with all the volume his lungs can muster in a moment. His cadence is full of exaggerated pauses for effect mixed with swift traipses through less important words said simply for the music of reciting them to himself; his conversational tone sounds more like a performer going through a soliloquy than casual speech. In large part, that’s because he’s had more pleasant experiences with theater than conversation.

As many have noticed, he has also a vocal tic. He makes nasally sounds and guttural grunts and growls involuntarily, more often when he’s nervous or upset about something. As he gets older and his body is less able to shrug off the effects of his little smoking habit, he wheezes and coughs in the middle of his sentences as well.

For most settings, I imagine him speaking in a highly affected Transatlantic accent, but in Amaranthine (which is what I assume people are asking about and what I’m defaulting to for these answers), his accent might be more typically British posh-y, like Received Pronunciation. Or maybe not, I mean, it’s a funny animal fantasy setting, so he could have any accent I like. :P

If you want auditory examples, I think something mixing the high-pitched, sibilant, nasally breathiness of Peter Lorre with the refined yet expressive voice of Vincent Price would get you pretty close to what I imagine. To break from the classic horror actor category, you can also throw in this animated series’ depiction of Doctor Octopus to add the all-important ingredient of “nerd factor” to his voice, haha.

He’s a bookworm, yes, but that means he likes to learn! In his case, he’s also someone who enjoys mastering (or at least getting competent at) new skills and is extremely likely to learn to do something well just because someone thinks he can’t. He also has the benefit of being kicked out of school and extremely unemployed, so for most of his life he had lots and lots of free time to take on all manner of niche hobbies if he so desired!

His drive to learn a new skill is motivated by a combination of practicality, gentlemanliness, a need to know how to handle his own business to have as little outside interference as possible or simple intellectual curiosity (which itself is often a cover for boyish whimsy about Cool Stuff). To give examples of practical skills he taught himself: most people probably wouldn’t expect him to be a good cook, but he learned to do that because his family lost their household staff, and someone had to figure out how to cook beef – and because he wanted to take better care of his mother after she fell ill. He’s a great seamster because he wanted to make alterations to his clothes to better fit his unusual proportions without suffering the indignity of being prodded and measured by some nosy tailor. Where he lives, engines are extremely uncommon, being used only for agriculture if at all, but if Theo did own his own automobile, he would learn how to fix the thing himself as best as he could because he wouldn’t want some stranger poking around in his precious baby. He does know how to repair basic clockwork mechanisms, though! (Even if he won’t fix his own pocket watch for weird sentimental reasons.) He taught himself to be ambidextrous purely because he worried about losing a hand in a freak accident one day. He never wants to be caught unprepared or feel like he can’t handle something on his own if he needs to.

For skills in the “oh but if I could do this it would be so cool – I MEAN GENTLEMANLY” camp… yeah, actually, he does like to fence. He might not be able to hold his own all that well against a trained opponent, partly just because of his own physical limitations, but he knows the footwork and he certainly enjoys fighting stationary enemies while role-playing in his head as a knight. (He would be exceedingly embarrassed if anyone knew that part.) He can dance – but only as half a pair – and play the piano – or at least the chords his fingers can reach. He makes model ships and is familiar with all their parts even though he’s never seen the ocean. He knows a fair bit about women’s fashion and could probably help a lady pick a flattering dress for a gala… if she didn’t mind dressing about decade out of style. He’s a fine marksman, though that does overlap with “practical skills” when you live in a world with monsters creeping around on the edges of towns. And that’s not even getting into his self-taught anatomy lessons! But maybe we shouldn’t get into that, for the sake of our stomachs.

I could keep rambling, but to summarize, Theo lacks worldly experience, but he is a curious little guy and has all kinds of weird skills rattling around in his skull. You never know what he’s gonna know! Except for anything involving successfully interacting with other people. He’s never going to know how to do that.

Theo is the sort of person who enjoys collecting things, in that he is often captivated by the history and sentimental value of objects that catch his eye, likes to have a little hoard he can lord over like a dragon, doesn’t see value in minimalism and is loath to get rid of anything he owns.

However, he’s a homebody who rarely traveled far from his hometown of Northcrest, a small and remote barony, and his family (and therefore he) did not have the kind of financial situation that allowed for many frivolous expenditures. Therefore, he cannot regularly obtain new items for his collections because he would quickly exhaust everything that caught his eye in his own town, and he would be wary of spending his family’s dwindling funds on something that only served to satisfy his own whims. If he were in different circumstances, able and willing to travel more broadly and possessing the kind of wealth that allowed him to fully indulge his fascinations, I’d imagine he’d have quite the collection of art, weapons, antique books, clothing, and other fineries. As it stands, he only rarely adds a new object to his own collections, and he instead contents his inner dragon by attempting to maintain and catalogue the acquisitions made by past Norths that have accrued in their manor over the generations. Still… a toy store in his town has made quite a profit off him by having new model trains in stock around his birthday and holidays.

I don’t think he’d be terribly enthused with an insect collection, regrettably. At least not a live one. Preserved, exotic kinds might at least hold the intrigue of far-off places, but something more mundane (and wrigglier) would repulse him more than fascinate him.

I’m going to say somewhere along the line between “absolutely not” and “it’s complicated.” Theo obviously gets fulfillment from looking after the people he cares about, and in Amaranthine, he’s been in a caregiver role for so long he takes a certain amount of comfort in it. Even so, if he somehow knew people thought that he “wants” the people he’s close with to fall ill, or have chronic poor health, he’d be horrified. Theo’s not exactly the most hale and hearty fellow himself (and he’s also made his health notably worse through the years via his own actions, good job on that bud), so he knows first-hand how miserable frequent illness is. He wouldn’t want someone to suffer through that. Also, witnessing his mother’s slow decline and death was harrowing for him, and part of why he flings himself into caring for Hyden is that he doesn’t want to see something like that again and is doing all he can to keep Hyden stable. It brings him comfort, but the stress of feeling responsible for someone’s health – and the stress of only being able to manage their symptoms and never fix the problem – takes a toll on him, too, even if he wouldn’t say so.

So, he wouldn’t blame a sickly partner for their condition, and he’d be willing to care for them and want to help them, but I don’t think he’d ever say he “wants” someone he cares about to be sick. Would he nonetheless be more likely to get close to someone sick versus someone well? Well, maybe. Theo has a bit of a dependent streak, not in that he needs someone to dote on him, but that he doesn’t feel like he has any worth in a relationship unless he can provide protection or assistance. But someone could easily satisfy his need to be needed in other ways, too. Like someone being clumsy and needing their clothes mended regularly, or having a deadbeat husband they need murdered, you know, stuff like that.

He doesn’t know much, and never cared to ask much either, like you imagine. He mostly just knows they’re not nobility, they do have some mage ancestry and ability, and beyond that aren’t important (according to Jocosa). Besides, as a history nerd, he has little interest in learning about his father’s side when his mother’s side has biographies, tapestries, records of badges and achievements and personal spellbooks in such great measure that he couldn’t hope to go through them all in his lifetime. Does Leonard’s side of the family have even one tapestry? No? How dull.

For his part, Leonard isn’t close to or fond of most of his family and isn’t very candid about his past life before becoming successful, so he was amenable to not talking much about his childhood or ancestry. He would prefer if Jocosa was similar restrained and didn’t extoll the virtues and history of her bloodline constantly, but alas, no. One of the consequences of marrying into snotty nobility, I suppose.

Oh, you’re on to something there! :)

Now, with someone like Theo, whose brain is a Gordian knot of congealing gray matter basting in a cerebral soup of self-deception, neuroticism, and concentrated hatred, it’s hard to point to one thing as the sole cause for any of his many issues. At the same time, I don’t want to just dump the entirety of Theo’s issues with his family and how they impact him psychologically because I worry that I could write a thousand words about it and still have five thousand more in me, and we all have other things to do with our time than read all that. That said, to briefly (ha) touch on what you’ve mentioned…

Many of Theo’s problems with intimacy, with needing to feel useful, with fearing connections with others, and so on do stem from his troubled family history. At least some of his self-loathing is borne from him, at a glance, looking more like the man he most despises instead of being the same long, slim, elegant creatures that form the roots and branches of his mother’s family tree. Although, the irony in that is that all the “bad” genetics that cause him grief and suffering come from his mother’s side – but he alternately blames the cruel gods and himself for being a freak, not his mother or grandpa or any of his weaselly ancestors for that.

It’s also true to say that Theo’s self-sacrificing and self-effacing acts of kindness towards his mother and to others he cares for are done in part to make up for the fact of his own existence. The fact that his beloved mother had to couple with a disgusting, loathsome, degrading, unfaithful cur of a man (have I mentioned Theo really hates his dad yet?) in order to bear him weighs heavily on his mind and warps his self-concept. As much as Theo knows his mother loves him, he also knows – and despises – that he if he’s his mother’s son, he’s also his father’s spawn.

Jocosa doesn’t talk at length about her problems to Theo, or anyone – she wouldn’t want to make Theo feel responsible for her woes and she isn’t the kind of woman to whine about her life’s tribulations besides – but Theo isn’t so ignorant that he can’t pick up on the tension in other’s conversations, read meaning into words left unsaid, or work backwards from what he is told to deduce the rotten truth behind what little he’s told. He knows that everything involving his conception was hard for her, even if she doesn’t say it, and he feels he needs to do everything in his power to make up for the suffering bringing him into existence put her through. ...And I could go on but I think that’s enough to get the picture for now. Have I mentioned I can write a lot of words about Theo??

I think Hyden would know better than to say something like that – out loud. Hyden does try to push Theo into a personal valet role. But Theo has his limits and Hyden is smart enough to not press them (too much, right away). Being referred to as a kind of servant is one of those limits that really pisses him off and would be a one-way ticket to not getting any more pillow fluffing. Also, for as much as he helps Hyden with daily tasks and provides whatever dotage he feels is required of him as an apprentice, caregiver or host, there are tasks a manservant would be responsible for that Theo categorically refuses to do (even though Hyden wishes he would).

I am greatly amused by the thought of someone trying to get a flower crown on Theo. I can’t imagine it’d ever go much better than people trying to put shirts on their cats. He just really doesn’t like situations wherein Stimulus I Have No Control Over Is Happening To Me.

He does tend to flip from fury to (relative) calm depending on the circumstance and the source of annoyance, so you’re spot-on with the variable reactions he could have to a floral intrusion. I would say he isn’t likely to use “witch” as an insult for the same reason as he wouldn’t use “harpy” or “ice queen” as an insult, which is that any kind of derogatory comment his mother was ever called might as well be a compliment in his books. “Harlot” is completely fair game, though.

Thanks a bunch for the kind words on my weird rat guy. So happy you like him!

(Also “dark fantasy rose type flower” made me laugh. God. He’s such an edgelord. Emphasis on the “lord”, with a title and arms and everything.)

Glad you like seeing him! I guess one of the benefits of me not getting particularly exotic with the colors or markings on my furry designs is that you can find associations to actual animals like this! I hope your pet rat had a better temperament than Theo does, though.

…Which sounds a little stupid considering quite a lot of these answers involved me talking at length about Theo being sad and self-sacrificing and crap like that. I swear to God he’s a nasty little bitchboy most of the time. I need to draw him biting someone on the face or insulting someone for being poor or eating someone’s eyeball or something again to balance the scales here.

Note to self.

#WHO WANTS TO READ 2800 WORDS ABOUT THEO?? WAIT COME BACK #i wrote this joke about anonymous letters but actually looking at these -#like half of them were actually sent by people non-anonymously #YOU ARE ALL SO BRAVE #also sorry to those of you who sent in asks months or years ago who either are in this or are worse AREN'T...#i do have plans for the asks I get but well #timeliness is not one of my skills #my draws #doodles #asks #theo #amaranthine

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