#person of interest rp

[esotericdescent]

Let the hounds GIVE CHASE,

for I do not fear death — I COMMAND IT.

A study not only in fighting for survival, but in healing, carving out your own meaning & cultivating various kinds of love & connections when all odds are against you.

Original & canon character MULTI-MUSE, written &/ or created by MARS. Ft. fandomless original characters & muses from the Grishaverse, Marvel & Person Of Interest.

                                                  CARRD.

[dmbakura]

OK so I want to stress that this is NOT a slight against OP of this post or how they feel about the way the game presents certain options, but I've seen sentiments like this before and I feel like people still aren't quite grasping WHY the game doesn't allow the option to do a "slow burn romance where you can show him you truly care about him beyond sex" if you ascend him. So I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about Astarion's route and objectification, and the very intentional limitations of player choice regarding the ascension path.

Objectification is the act of degrading someone to the status of a mere object. It often involves a sexual component, but not necessarily. It's reducing someone to being a tool or toy, as if they have no feelings/opinions/autonomy of their own. In Astarion's case, his objectification is very much tied to his sexuality, but also his own views on power and control, and how that reflects on both him and his romantic partner.

I think people get too fixated on Welch's quote "it's reducing your relationship with him back to being a kink/form of gratification... it's very much admitting you failed to think of him beyond a sex object" and take this as commentary or judgment on the players choices, when it isn't actually that. It's quite literally the story that is baked into the route and Astarion's character as a whole. There are obviously reasons to ascend him that have nothing to do with how you personally feel about him as a character, ie you want stats, you think it's just more fun, or interesting, or you like the tragedy, etc but in regards to the story itself? It's actually more commentary on how Astarion views himself more than anything else. He is an intentional subversion of the seductive vampire trope. You cannot engage with his story without interacting with this aspect of his character.

Even if you had a dialogue option to try and initiate a romance with him without that first night of sex, Astarion wouldn't take it. If you had a dialogue option to "show him you cared and want to protect him" he would either scoff at it or get angry, as he does if you try and express similar sentiments about protecting him from Cazador. He doesn't want to be coddled. He doesn't trust mindless heroism or altruism. He initiates sex because he uses it as a tool for manipulation and insurance of his own safety. You can either play into that manipulation or don't (and he seems to respect you more if you don't, which says a lot about his self worth). You can't initiate a slow burn romance because Astarion is so distrustful of EVERYONE and has no ability to conceptualize genuine care at this point in the game due to his mistreatment as a vampire spawn. This is an incredibly important aspect to his character and to change the foundation of this is to rewrite his character entirely.

(There is ONE exception to this: Karlach. Karlach is the only character that can initiate more of a slowburn with Astarion and won't sleep with him the first night because she quite literally, physically can't. And Astarion doesn't immediately accept this either. He belittles Karlach, to the point of calling her frigid and basically defective, wondering if he's wasting his time, before she chews him out for being an asshole. Again, he has no idea how to approach a relationship without using sex as a transaction and it shows. He only goes along with it because he quite literally cannot do his normal routine. This is the only reason he won't start a relationship with Karlach using sex.)

So anyways, that choice at the start? The way Astarion's romance initiates on the first night? It intentionally parallels the way ascended!Astarion will offer you an ultimatum: become his spawn or leave him. At the start of the game, Astarion intentionally plays into the sexy vampire trope to get what he wants, is highly paranoid, afraid and distrustful of everyone. At the end of the game in the ascended route... he's intentionally playing into the sexy vampire trope, is highly paranoid, afraid and distrustful of everyone, only this time he has power to back him up. Nothing about his views has been fundamentally challenged if you ascend him; he's completely validated in his beliefs about power and control and entirely in the mindset that he has no value without becoming the ascendant.

It's not about whether you personally find him sexy or not. It's not about having sex at this point. It's not about you or your character. Astarion objectifies himself, fully playing the only hand he knows (as he himself puts it) because that is all he knows how to do. In the ascended path, he has been shown no other option. Your character, good intentions or not, has not given him the tools to see himself as anything else. There is no way too make himself see himself as anything else, except by not ascending him! Either you let this man degrade you as he degrades himself, or don't. That is the option provided, and anything otherwise wouldn't make sense without rewriting his character completely.

Do you value what he actually wants (freedom) or do you value what he says he wants (power, because he views it as the only way to get that freedom)? To me the game makes it obvious (ESPECIALLY with the newly added epilogue) that walking in the sun again or gaining the power of the vampire ascendant aren't the keys to Astarion's happiness. Stuff like that, while nice, doesn't magically grant him peace and it's not a substitute for character growth and self reflection. It honestly just feels like people want the personality and development of spawn Astarion but in the ascended Astarion path, which doesn't make any sense with the way the story unfolds.

Anyways, I just wanted to say that objectification can be more than just seeing someone as a sex object, and doesn't necessarily have to do with sex itself. It can tie into views about power and degradation and a lack of self respect. Furthermore, it's not the game telling you you're a bad person or some sex addled freak if you ascend him, it's asking you to engage with what Astarion's personal story can say about sexuality, cycles of abuse, trauma and recovery - for better or worse.

[nydescynt]

Thematic Analysis of Hades II: Why You Can Never Go Home

(At some point I might make a video on this, but for now sharing my thoughts via textpost. Spoilers ahead!)

So the text of the story of Hades and Hades 2 are Zagreus breaking out of the House, and Melinoë breaking in.

But the wild thing (and the reason Hades 2 is much more interesting to me) is that both games actually have almost inverted themes from that text. Zagreus is intent on uniting a household; Melinoë is discovering the home she's fought to return to is rotten to the core.

Zagreus, despite his entire textual goal being to leave his home and family, is narratively & thematically working to bring the family and household together. His mother comes back and is reunited not just with him but her husband, mother, and entire extended family. Achilles and Patrocles, Orpheus and Eurydice, Asterion and Theseus: Hades is a story of people metaphorically coming home and making peace with where they are (Sisyphus, Thanatos, Orpheus). Everyone basically gets a happy ending, credits roll, problems all resolved or en route to be solved. Everyone is home.

(Important to note: we never see a human in the first game. We see shades, and gods, and monsters, and the closest you get to a mortal living thing is the satyrs. This is a story concerned with the realm of the gods.)

In contrast, Melinoë has no home - besides being estranged from her childhood home, she literally lives in a tent. In case the theme was too subtle, presumably.

Now, she has been fighting her entire life to become powerful enough to return home and reclaim her family - that seems Zagreus-adjacent on its face. However, there isn't a home to return to- Hades is in shackles, the rest of her family trapped in time. At this point in Early Access, on both a metatextual & diegetic level she quite literally can neither make it to Mt Olympus or into Zagreus' room - she cannot go home, she cannot meet her family.

Consider the others: Odysseus' presence seems to tie into the idea of a long journey home, but this is an Odysseus who lived and died and now has other (inhuman) priorities. He loves them, but has no interest in reuniting with Penelope and Telemachus at this point. Nemesis dislikes her siblings, and is more concerned with the equal application of "justice" than whether it has any reforming effect. Narcissus and Echo eventually talk and part more amicably, but that's the best that can be said about their relationship.

Hecate refuses to be called Melinoë's mother: she will not distract from the "true" family that Melinoë has no memory of ever meeting.

Instead of Ares and Dionysus (enjoyers of chaos and least affected by the toxicity of the family in Hades 1) we have Hestia and Hephaestaus- a goddess who helped murder her father and a god constantly belittled by his own family. Their tense and frequently bitter interactions with the other Olympians are evocative of the central theme being explored: what if there isn't a home to go back to? What if your family is unforgivable? (What if you want to forgive them anyways? What if you need to?)

This theme is why Arachne is in the game, and Athena is not: likeable, first-helper-of-Zagreus Athena turned Arachne into a spider out of petty anger. How do you reconcile that?

Moros (lovely, kind Moros, who gushes at Odysseus like a fanboy) and his sisters the Fates did horrible things to mortals out of boredom. The same mortals whose bodies you can see stacked up like cordwood in Ephyra, who you repeatedly claim you are fighting to protect from Chronos. Moros can neither confirm nor deny that the current events could have been set in motion by the Fates. How do you reconcile that?

Polyphemus raises sheep. He genuinely loves and cares for them, is protective of them. He also eats them, and is confused when Melinoë implies a contradiction.

How can you love someone and be willing to kill them? For survival? For fleeting satisfaction? For vengeance?

Is Chronos' willingness to eat his children so morally heinous that it makes him worse than every cruelty the gods have wrought? Worse for who?

[moonshynecybin]

do you have any thoughts on girl marc? and specifically if her being a girl would have made her do certain things differently bc (presumably) she would have faced a lot of shit in the other classes due to being a woman

every thought I have is like that could be true but also the complete opposite, the only thing I'm confident in is that she would be earth shatteringly hot. like I'm talking fuuuucking crazy gorgeous

there's that picture of marc on the podium in aragon in 2019? girl marc would have killed people

see i have a little trouble with getting into the nitty gritty ‘how would x rider fare as a woman’ of it all because. well there are no women in the grid. and i don’t think that’s because generationally talented motogp superstars is a trait defined by being a cis guy. so if we are doing the gender swap i’m gonna have to like. pantomime these guys experiencing sexism which is an interesting cognitive dissonance to inhabit. like i’m not against a good old horny time (and i think a lot of the time it’s women who imagine these scenarios as a mechanism to like. fill a void that exists in the sport in the first place. would we write as many gender swaps like this if there WERE simply women in the premiere class ??) but it is something i think about, so i’m gonna start there. just as a lil food for thought. interesting sociological phenomenon in sports fandom that i have some complex feelings about. not bad not great.

that all being SAID. wheee fun time. um marc as girl. marc. winning above everything but image always at least a consideration. loves to be hot isn’t the MOST concerned with entirely fitting in a gender box about it as he’s gotten older though he’s still pretty conforming. hmm. i think marc starts her career like long hair straightened compulsively smiling at everybody no matter how sexist they get and. the same sort of murderously crazy on the race track.

i ALSO think. marc’s racing behavior has already earned him a significant amount of haters worldwide even BEFORE sepang-gate and he is a handsome white man. uh oh ! like i think this marc learns a lil earlier a lil harder the lesson that you cannot always care what everyone thinks of you even when it rips you up inside and is in fact significantly traumatic. like people were being WILDLY homophobic to marc in 2015 i cannot imagine how bad it would be for him if he was a girl. but uhhhh all this to say i think she gets a sexy undercut post sepang (it was 2015/16. the only option.) and stops straightening her hair. i also think she hardens up a little more. even less friends even more alex. instagram game would be an absolute MINEFIELD bc it’s one thing to post your own slut back and hole out 9000x as a man it is ANOTHERRRR to do it as a public figure who is a WOMAN. especially coupled with that quote from marc when he was younger about how he didn’t like it when people told him to look sexy in pictures (before he realized he could control that himself on his insta shdhgdgs). in that vein. marc’s catastrophic control issues also interesting. perception wise. good lord. controversial queen

it’s also like. what if you’re the chosen one but aren’t. because he wouldn’t be if he were a girl. would her family pin their financial future on teen marc? would they prioritize alex instead? would marc have to take a different route to the premiere class? would she be the first option for casey stoner’s bike? how much worse would the sepang fallout be? what would marc do to keep winning? keep competing? would it be enough ? like there’s a LOT.

[nostalgia-tblr]

I feel like anyone who's about to embark on attempting to type out a character's accent phoentically (at least as well as one can with English) should probably stop for a moment before they get going and ask themselves, "How would I, myself, feel about a fic where the one character who sounds like me had their speech written out like this and every other character just got their dialogue left in standard spelling?" I feel like a lot of people would tone it down a bit, at least, if they'd done that thought experiment first.

(Anyone who answered "but I don't have an accent!" isn't allowed to write out anyone else's accent, ever. This rule may seem harsh but you need it. Really, you do. Because you've never had anyone treat your accent as abnormal or comical or wrong, so you really don't know what you're inflicting on others here.)

[theonetheonlysweetheart]

ooc

will i be yelled at if i say unknowing aspec sweetheart :3

[dcynight]

[[ thinkin about making a lil server where we can yeet memes and talk or stream things,,, would anyone be interested in that? ]]

[prince-liest]

Its so funny realizing you engaged in Homestuck in your development- bc same- and it did raise a certain generation with a baseline enjoyment for alien/monstrous behaviors. Like nonchalant of course this character has rows of fangs and horns and tentacles and strange rituals of engagement in how they proceed sexually or not. And also you did feel like someone who knew what a kismesis and morail are.

And also you did feel like someone who knew what a kismesis and morail are.

Congrats, best compliment anyone's ever given me, ahaHAH—of course I've been called out specifically for my two favorite quadrants.

Honestly, you put it perfectly. There is so much of Homestuck that started out Like That pretty much for the meme before Hussie started putting a lot more thought into it, and the fandom was so deeply goddamn dedicated to taking all of Hussie's bullshit and wrangling it into an actual way of setting up a society, culture, and biology that made meaningful sense. I also tangibly remember the not-very-slow transition of going from "um, tentacles? what?" to "wait, this person drew X character WITHOUT an intersex tentadick set up downstairs? that seems incorrect. dnw."

The quadrant system remains my roman empire and my crowning achievement in that regard is writing an Alternia's-version-of-queer character who got smeared across every tabloid in Alternia not because he got photographed kissed a boy but because he got photographed kissing his moirail.

I just think that Homestuck did great things for my psyche. It's just the most piece of media ever, is all I'm saying.

[seaoftales]

.

[tarnishedinquirer]

Person of Interest: Patches

Name: Patches Title/Alias: The Untethered Race: Seafarer Gender: Male Occupation: Bandit Affiliation: None Notes:

Seems to know me from somewhere.

He does seem familiar to me too.

A trickster. Doubt everything he says.

His tricks tend to lead me to new and interesting places. Not always for the worst.

Margit's Shackle actually worked.

How did he get the shackle?

[valiant-portabella-pirkko]

alright. know what? with Secrets of the Obscure right around the corner and plenty of new Mists-related sky island settings coming with it, I'll just bite the bullet and interest-check a little something I've been turning in my head for a long, long while.

would YOU be interested in a Mists-based GW2 roleplay guild that uses a lore compliant multiverse system to allow canon, canon-adjacent, lore-breaking, and otherwise 'contradictory' muses to coexist in the same setting?

simply put: every writer's cast would be set in their own self-contained universe. as such, everyone could bring whatever muses they want with their own personal headcanons, and no one could dictate what is or isn't canon for anyone else. so long as your muses are GW2-based, you're good to go! bring your Commanders, bring your canon-divergent OCs, bring your canon muses-- and yes, even the ones that are 'supposed' to be dead. who can say what might have happened in a strange world far across the Mists, after all?

neutral hubs and in-character safety guardrails would be in place to keep all muses on a relatively even playing field regardless of their power, history, and prestige, too. play hardball if you like, but it might not end quite the way you'd hope. the main rule would be to maintain good OOC etiquette at all times: no godmodding, no metagaming, no theft, don't blend IC and OOC, and so-on.

if that sounds like something you might have interest in, please interact with this post! and if you've got questions or concerns, I'd love to hear them; feel free to send an ask or a DM, or just reply to this post!

[onioe]

Anyone interested in rping TGCF with me? 👉👈

Must be 19+

[peculiarbeauty]

good morning !! i tend to feel super enamored by people who go out of their way to actually talk to me about plots , ships , our muses in general. there are occasions i might feel like a number to people in their following but there are genuinely so many people here who do not do that and i'm thankful. even if it's something so small as talking about our muses once in a while , developing that bond outside of ic content is really important to me ?? and sometimes i'll admit i have no idea wtf to say in the tags on a thread but . building rapport w/ my fellow writers here is really really important to ME as a person. i wanna be your friend soooo bad. <3

[pekoeboo]

Last Line Game

Rules: in a new post, show the last line you wrote (or drew) and tag as many people as there are words (or as many as you feel like).

tagged by @masterfuldoodler ;0; thank you!

wasn't initially gonna do this because I actually hadn't written anything in over 2 (3?) months, but I finally broke through the writer's block for a brief moment early this morning. not the last line overall, though it is the last one I edited:

I had to play this smart. I had to make a move before our captor did.

tagging @baskervilleshound, @gonturan0, @manebioniclegali, and any other writers who wanna do this! no pressure to do it if you don't wanna tho :'0

[bread-squid-uwu]

What's the crafting dead?

A really REALLY old minecraft roleplay series created by sgcbarbierian, a bunch of other mc youtubers were in it as well, like aphmau, redvacktor, yourpalross, etcetera.

It's exactly what it sounds like, youtubers roleplaying an apocalypse in minecraft, but it's not technically a typical zombie apocalypse because the zombies were created through human experiments done by..... some scientist villain

also there's a cannibal guy

It's absolutely nothing like mys/mcd, everyone in it plays just themselves as a character, like Red the cannibal cult leader, or like Mithzan Max that one weird guy who's immune to the zombies and just wants to play uno with someone, Jess even plays as JESS and not some version of Aphmau.

Uhh more rambling in the tags idk

[the-kipsabian]