#my understanding of shading and lighting is still a bit ✨questionable✨

[peskellence]

Starboy

worked out how to do glow and star effects in my drawing software, so now I need to try all of them (bonus: i was quite proud of this so i sent the below variant to my loved ones)

[regionalpancake]

Character ask game!

For Seven:

What’s the lie your character says most often? What’s something that makes them laugh every single time? Be specific!

For Soji: What phrases, pronunciations, or mannerisms did they pick up from someone / somewhere else?

If invited to a TED Talk, what topic would they present on? What would the title of their presentation be?

For Seven:   What’s the lie your character says most often?

Any shade of “I’m ok / I’ll be fine / I don’t need help / I can do it by myself”, which makes sense not only in light of her past in the Collective, but also because of the people on Voyager who model that behaviour for her (cough Janeway cough)

What’s something that makes them laugh every single time? Be specific!

Had an amazing chat with @curator-on-ao3 and @procrastinatorproject about this one, and I reckon there must be some pretty dark xB humour. Something about humour making a shared trauma lighter, easier to process or less taboo to openly discuss. I (hopefully) looked at that in my Hugh fic Crow’s Feet :

“Hugh laughed.  // He laughed at the smell of barbecue from a dead man. He laughed at the bed he couldn’t sleep in it. He laughed at himself holding his face together in the shower and the fact that an arm that he didn’t even have anymore still hurt every day. // He laughed at the absurdity of the pain. // At the banality of the suffering. // And the laughing didn’t stop any of it hurting, but it did suddenly hurt less.”

One of the bits of (problematic sci-fi fav) Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein that always stuck with me, was when the biologically-human-but-raised-by-aliens character laughs for the first time.

“I’ve found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much … because it’s the only thing that’ll make it stop hurting”

The whole section is here, and feels very 'Seven' to me. Seven and the other xB’s have been through so much, a lot of which would be just unspeakable levels of suffering to the average Federation citizen. Having a community of people to share and process that traumatic history with, to know that you’re not alone, must help. 

Please imagine an post-reclimation xB with a Starfleet doctor in Lower Decks animation style:

Doctor: Have you taken in any of the sights since you arrived? I recommend the Klingon opera - those costumes? I couldn’t tear my eyes away! xBs: Bet I could. Doctor: … Doctor: … Doctor: Well I Think We’re All Done Here For Today

For Soji: What phrases, pronunciations, or mannerisms did they pick up from someone / somewhere else?

Of course there’s the Data-head-tilt™️ but the more interesting and horrifying answer to think about for this one is MADDOX (*muffled screaming*). What it must be like for Soji knowing that her personality was handmade? Did Maddox programme everything or was there algorithms involved that he just sort of tweaked as he went? Poor Soji. I love this narratively, and I loathe that they threw it all out the window in Season 2.

If invited to a TED Talk, what topic would they present on? What would the title of their presentation be?

I think she might be invited to do a talk with the hope that she’d speak on Synth Experience, or the implications of the lifting of the Synth ban. But really Agnes would be a better candidate for that, and Soji’s only very new to her understanding of Synths anyway. I think instead she’d speak on her specialism/ her research from the Borg Reclamation Project:

“Reclaimed Identity - An Exploration of Emerging Romulan Folkways in the BRP” And I would have a front row seat 🤓😎

✨Send me a Picard character and I'll answer some of these WEIRDLY SPECIFIC BUT HELPFUL CHARACTER BUILDING QUESTIONS ✨