Meme Responses: 1
With regard to this meme--butterflysteve asked for Robb and
trigeekgirl asked for Dairine, so here are the first couple of answers. :)
Family, Duty, Honour
He is his father's son, yes-but also really, really his mother's. It's easy to see where he's a copy of Ned, what with the suicidal honourableness and saying 'winter is coming' all the time, and it's clear he's been raised to grow up to take over for his dad. But the Tully is strong with this one, and 'family, duty, honour' fits him better, I think, than 'winter is coming' does. Everything he does is ultimately for those reasons, both the good decisions and the bad.
Even later in RP, family basically comes first before everything else. Duty is still way up there, but family is first.
He's really young.
Not so much in RP, obviously, because I've been playing him for going on seven years (holy crap that). But book!Robb is a child. Where Ned is kind of stupidly naïve about how things work, Robb is really just in way over his head, because he's a fifteen-year-old boy who has never been out of the North. It's fortunate that he's clever and has a good head for strategy, or he wouldn't even have got as far as he did, even with advisors, since those advisors didn't always agree on what should be going on either. But the bad decisions Robb makes, and there are some big ones, are, as Catelyn says, 'so very,, very young.'
Most people make stupid mistakes when they're a teenager and then get to look back at them in a kind of 'wow, I can't believe I did that' way. But when most of us look back and wonder how we could have done things differently, we don't have quite the 'how could I have done that and not died' angle. So there's that.
He's lost a lot.
And gained and lost and lost again. Westeros is not a nice world and everybody there seems to be raised to a certain level of disregard for the sanctity of life,, and that''s important too-Westerosi morals are not modern day western morals, and it's completely reasonable to chop someone's head off because they ran away from a fight-- but Starks, man. After a while you get numb to it because you've lost everything it's possible to lose, maybe more than once, and the alternative would be go batcrap crazy. So things just don't hit like they used to; there isn't room for them to.
He used to be happy.
By 'used to be' I mean in canon-Winterfell was a pretty nice place to grow up and being the heir to it had ts perks. But where, say, Rickon is so young that most of his sentient life is conflict and misery, Robb and Jon are adults by their world's standards when things kick off. They had a perfectly happy childhood (though Jon had his issues with Catelyn and his place in the world and all that), where they played and did stupid pranks and got into trouble and ate too many sweets and whatever. So when looking back at Winterfell, yeah, he thinks of the horribleness that was his last year in Westeros, but there are fourteen other years that were pretty awesome, and that's the part he misses.
He's a pretty good guy.
It's interesting playing a non-POV character, because we can only guess what he's thinking and how he really is, filtered through other people-Catelyn mostly, Jon, Bran, but also Tyrion, Jaime, Theon. None of them make him out to be a dick. I read a fic, after last year's gift exchanges I think, that had him being kind of rotten and horrible to Jon (in order to set up Jon/Sam, IIRC) and it was a bit weird, because the fic outright had him behave completely contradictory to canon to the point where Jon even thought about this, and decided it was just what Robb was like when there weren't people around. This is not generally how I like to write characterisations. Robb does some stupid things. On occasion he even does cruel things, but not, I think, out of malice. (A young Robb told Jon he couldn't be a trueborn Stark, for instance, in what appears to have been a fairly standard case of a child repeating what he's been told, because his actions as an adult are rather the opposite. In fact it tends to look like he thinks of Jon and Theon as brothers more than than they do, though that's...well. Theon. Anyway.) But the point is-the bad things he does aren't out of meanness, and tbh in Westeros terms they're not even that bad. I mean, he doesn't throw a kid out of a window or flay anyone's limbs off or anything. The image I get (other than Catelyn's clearly biased one) is of a decent young man who everybody figured would grow up to be like his dad, ended up having a good head for strategy and a certain amount of charisma that earns grudging respect from the people who are trying to kill him. Except for Joffrey, obviously, who is barking and probably a psychopath.
She's not completely human.
This is something canon keeps touching on in little ways. There are spots where she'll wake up in the middle of the night unsure if she's human or machine, like a partially-converted Cyberman or something. It's such a completely different way of looking at the universe-but at the same time, she is human. She doesn't always want to acknowledge or deal with emotions, but she would never deny having them; they're what saved her and the mobiles back on the motherboard planet and let her show Logo, overshadowed by the Lone One, that slowlife is still life. After her mom dies she goes through some pretty serious depression, stops going to school, and has to see a counselor. She feels the hell out of things. But all those feelings go through a very computery filter, investigated, broken down into their component parts, and all that happens on a level that's so subconscious she doesn't even realise it's happening most of the time. In the meantime the rest of the world is made up of very logical strings of wizarding code, and she gets a little frustrated if she can't find a place in that code where new things fit.
She really is a genius.
It's made pretty clear in canon that cleverness, like wizardry, is a little bit genetics and a lot of hard work. The reason Dairine is smarter than Nita is because she set out to be, not out of competition with Nita but to protect her; that said they're both pretty damn smart. Basically everybody in these books is in the gifted class; it's one of the reasons they're awesome books. (I mean, even Carmela, alleged postergirl for bubble gum and the shopping channel, taught herself Japanese and the Speech just by watching TV.) Anyway, the girl was a hacker by the time she was nine; it's explicitly said that she had learned and rejected phreaking and the more destructive hacking habits for moral reasons. At nine. I was in a computer 'programming' class at nine, and you know what I could do? Draw shit with the LOGO turtle. By the time I was eleven, I made a decently cool 'space invaders' kind of game in BASIC. At no point could I emulate War Games.
She really believes the world can be what she wants it to be.
I was going to elaborate on her mule-like stubbornness here, because it is a thing. But it's also a thing with a reason. Nita started kindergarten when Dairine was two-that's when she made a conscious decision to figure the universe out. But the thing is, it works. It's a work in progress-she knows, in HW, that the kids at school are more afraid of her than fond of her, for instance-but she knows she's learning a program. So then, while she's still really a pretty young kid, she gets this crazy amount of power handed to her and uses it to 1) travel time and space, 2) create a whole new race of superintelligent sentient creatures from scratch, and 3) set in motion the rehabilitation of the Lone Power itself, which the Winged Defender tells them outright couldn't be done without her. Then she gets called in to help save the world by being the only person on earth who can extract matter from the core of a star. She's hot stuff and knows it, which can annoy the crap out of everybody around, but she can't be said to have an ego for no reason. That she has to pull it back a bit and learn some finesse is frustrating for her, but in no way dents her certainty that she's pivotal to the universe. Which, you know. She's done some pretty spectacular stuff before the age of twelve. And so far there's only been one fight she couldn't win; she hasn't been given a reason not to believe things will be okay, and that with the right amount of ingenuity and stubbornness, the good guys will always win. She has a really overdeveloped sense of justice--this is what started her wanting to be a Jedi knight in the first place, what made her start beating kids up who picked on her big sister, what keeps her going when things get toughest. It's like in the Sesame Street special, ' Don't eat the pictures', where Big Bird is facing Osiris and just yells, 'but that's not fair!' and Osiris is all, oh, um, okay, I guess we can fix it then.
She's a mother.
This is an easy thing to forget, because it happens when she's nine or ten and the children aren't human. But there's no question that the mobiles think of Dairine as their mother (for one thing, they shout it at her, and refer to her that way all the time) and that she thinks of them as her children. There's a little bit more to it-the way they've made her arrival point on the planet into a shrine suggests a little of the metaphysical sense of 'mother' as well-but the point is, they look up to her, even though they're collectively a zillion times more powerful and knowledgeable because they've evolved. And she feels the need to protect them, even more than she feels the need to protect everything else. So the nest has been empty for a long time (because dude, 46 billion lightyears is something of a commute) but it's an important relationship and one of the harder things to keep in mind.
She is not afraid of you.
There are things that Dairine's afraid of, though most of them are 'the Lone Power' in various shapes and forms. Because the LP is the most terrifying thing in the universe. She is afraid of the sun going out and/or exploding, of the actual end of the world, and of cancer. She's not afraid of monsters, spiders, the dark, or dying. (She's not in a hurry for the dying or anything, but if it happens, there's Timeheart. You don't get to live in the YW universe for long without realising that at some point there is a good chance everyone will have to play the part of Heroic Sacrifice; none of them are especially excited for it but they're okay with it.) And even in the midst of being scared shitless of the Lone Power being inside her brain, she still feels genuinely sorry for It. Then she calls It a 'dumb spud,' because scared or not, she will never actually act like she's afraid of anything, up to and including the Destroyer of Worlds Itself.
trigeekgirl asked for Dairine, so here are the first couple of answers. :)
Family, Duty, Honour
He is his father's son, yes-but also really, really his mother's. It's easy to see where he's a copy of Ned, what with the suicidal honourableness and saying 'winter is coming' all the time, and it's clear he's been raised to grow up to take over for his dad. But the Tully is strong with this one, and 'family, duty, honour' fits him better, I think, than 'winter is coming' does. Everything he does is ultimately for those reasons, both the good decisions and the bad.
Even later in RP, family basically comes first before everything else. Duty is still way up there, but family is first.
He's really young.
Not so much in RP, obviously, because I've been playing him for going on seven years (holy crap that). But book!Robb is a child. Where Ned is kind of stupidly naïve about how things work, Robb is really just in way over his head, because he's a fifteen-year-old boy who has never been out of the North. It's fortunate that he's clever and has a good head for strategy, or he wouldn't even have got as far as he did, even with advisors, since those advisors didn't always agree on what should be going on either. But the bad decisions Robb makes, and there are some big ones, are, as Catelyn says, 'so very,, very young.'
Most people make stupid mistakes when they're a teenager and then get to look back at them in a kind of 'wow, I can't believe I did that' way. But when most of us look back and wonder how we could have done things differently, we don't have quite the 'how could I have done that and not died' angle. So there's that.
He's lost a lot.
And gained and lost and lost again. Westeros is not a nice world and everybody there seems to be raised to a certain level of disregard for the sanctity of life,, and that''s important too-Westerosi morals are not modern day western morals, and it's completely reasonable to chop someone's head off because they ran away from a fight-- but Starks, man. After a while you get numb to it because you've lost everything it's possible to lose, maybe more than once, and the alternative would be go batcrap crazy. So things just don't hit like they used to; there isn't room for them to.
He used to be happy.
By 'used to be' I mean in canon-Winterfell was a pretty nice place to grow up and being the heir to it had ts perks. But where, say, Rickon is so young that most of his sentient life is conflict and misery, Robb and Jon are adults by their world's standards when things kick off. They had a perfectly happy childhood (though Jon had his issues with Catelyn and his place in the world and all that), where they played and did stupid pranks and got into trouble and ate too many sweets and whatever. So when looking back at Winterfell, yeah, he thinks of the horribleness that was his last year in Westeros, but there are fourteen other years that were pretty awesome, and that's the part he misses.
He's a pretty good guy.
It's interesting playing a non-POV character, because we can only guess what he's thinking and how he really is, filtered through other people-Catelyn mostly, Jon, Bran, but also Tyrion, Jaime, Theon. None of them make him out to be a dick. I read a fic, after last year's gift exchanges I think, that had him being kind of rotten and horrible to Jon (in order to set up Jon/Sam, IIRC) and it was a bit weird, because the fic outright had him behave completely contradictory to canon to the point where Jon even thought about this, and decided it was just what Robb was like when there weren't people around. This is not generally how I like to write characterisations. Robb does some stupid things. On occasion he even does cruel things, but not, I think, out of malice. (A young Robb told Jon he couldn't be a trueborn Stark, for instance, in what appears to have been a fairly standard case of a child repeating what he's been told, because his actions as an adult are rather the opposite. In fact it tends to look like he thinks of Jon and Theon as brothers more than than they do, though that's...well. Theon. Anyway.) But the point is-the bad things he does aren't out of meanness, and tbh in Westeros terms they're not even that bad. I mean, he doesn't throw a kid out of a window or flay anyone's limbs off or anything. The image I get (other than Catelyn's clearly biased one) is of a decent young man who everybody figured would grow up to be like his dad, ended up having a good head for strategy and a certain amount of charisma that earns grudging respect from the people who are trying to kill him. Except for Joffrey, obviously, who is barking and probably a psychopath.
She's not completely human.
This is something canon keeps touching on in little ways. There are spots where she'll wake up in the middle of the night unsure if she's human or machine, like a partially-converted Cyberman or something. It's such a completely different way of looking at the universe-but at the same time, she is human. She doesn't always want to acknowledge or deal with emotions, but she would never deny having them; they're what saved her and the mobiles back on the motherboard planet and let her show Logo, overshadowed by the Lone One, that slowlife is still life. After her mom dies she goes through some pretty serious depression, stops going to school, and has to see a counselor. She feels the hell out of things. But all those feelings go through a very computery filter, investigated, broken down into their component parts, and all that happens on a level that's so subconscious she doesn't even realise it's happening most of the time. In the meantime the rest of the world is made up of very logical strings of wizarding code, and she gets a little frustrated if she can't find a place in that code where new things fit.
She really is a genius.
It's made pretty clear in canon that cleverness, like wizardry, is a little bit genetics and a lot of hard work. The reason Dairine is smarter than Nita is because she set out to be, not out of competition with Nita but to protect her; that said they're both pretty damn smart. Basically everybody in these books is in the gifted class; it's one of the reasons they're awesome books. (I mean, even Carmela, alleged postergirl for bubble gum and the shopping channel, taught herself Japanese and the Speech just by watching TV.) Anyway, the girl was a hacker by the time she was nine; it's explicitly said that she had learned and rejected phreaking and the more destructive hacking habits for moral reasons. At nine. I was in a computer 'programming' class at nine, and you know what I could do? Draw shit with the LOGO turtle. By the time I was eleven, I made a decently cool 'space invaders' kind of game in BASIC. At no point could I emulate War Games.
She really believes the world can be what she wants it to be.
I was going to elaborate on her mule-like stubbornness here, because it is a thing. But it's also a thing with a reason. Nita started kindergarten when Dairine was two-that's when she made a conscious decision to figure the universe out. But the thing is, it works. It's a work in progress-she knows, in HW, that the kids at school are more afraid of her than fond of her, for instance-but she knows she's learning a program. So then, while she's still really a pretty young kid, she gets this crazy amount of power handed to her and uses it to 1) travel time and space, 2) create a whole new race of superintelligent sentient creatures from scratch, and 3) set in motion the rehabilitation of the Lone Power itself, which the Winged Defender tells them outright couldn't be done without her. Then she gets called in to help save the world by being the only person on earth who can extract matter from the core of a star. She's hot stuff and knows it, which can annoy the crap out of everybody around, but she can't be said to have an ego for no reason. That she has to pull it back a bit and learn some finesse is frustrating for her, but in no way dents her certainty that she's pivotal to the universe. Which, you know. She's done some pretty spectacular stuff before the age of twelve. And so far there's only been one fight she couldn't win; she hasn't been given a reason not to believe things will be okay, and that with the right amount of ingenuity and stubbornness, the good guys will always win. She has a really overdeveloped sense of justice--this is what started her wanting to be a Jedi knight in the first place, what made her start beating kids up who picked on her big sister, what keeps her going when things get toughest. It's like in the Sesame Street special, ' Don't eat the pictures', where Big Bird is facing Osiris and just yells, 'but that's not fair!' and Osiris is all, oh, um, okay, I guess we can fix it then.
She's a mother.
This is an easy thing to forget, because it happens when she's nine or ten and the children aren't human. But there's no question that the mobiles think of Dairine as their mother (for one thing, they shout it at her, and refer to her that way all the time) and that she thinks of them as her children. There's a little bit more to it-the way they've made her arrival point on the planet into a shrine suggests a little of the metaphysical sense of 'mother' as well-but the point is, they look up to her, even though they're collectively a zillion times more powerful and knowledgeable because they've evolved. And she feels the need to protect them, even more than she feels the need to protect everything else. So the nest has been empty for a long time (because dude, 46 billion lightyears is something of a commute) but it's an important relationship and one of the harder things to keep in mind.
She is not afraid of you.
There are things that Dairine's afraid of, though most of them are 'the Lone Power' in various shapes and forms. Because the LP is the most terrifying thing in the universe. She is afraid of the sun going out and/or exploding, of the actual end of the world, and of cancer. She's not afraid of monsters, spiders, the dark, or dying. (She's not in a hurry for the dying or anything, but if it happens, there's Timeheart. You don't get to live in the YW universe for long without realising that at some point there is a good chance everyone will have to play the part of Heroic Sacrifice; none of them are especially excited for it but they're okay with it.) And even in the midst of being scared shitless of the Lone Power being inside her brain, she still feels genuinely sorry for It. Then she calls It a 'dumb spud,' because scared or not, she will never actually act like she's afraid of anything, up to and including the Destroyer of Worlds Itself.