Night of the Living Association Meme
Golly, now trelali is at it, being of the opinion that I am reminiscent of Stephen Bell, Pyth, chasms, shatterverse and long-distance relationships. Good thing I like talking about myself, eh?
1. Stephen Bell (and his geekery)
OH STEVE, HOW I LOVE YOU. Seriously, everyone should have a mad scientist in their brain (however vehemently he objects to being referred to as such); it's so much fun. Steve's personality and a good chunk of his backstory were made up by me, but he originally came about when lienne and alas_a_llama were looking for someone to play Val Bell's brother, the token non-superpowered member of a Toronto branch of the X-Men. After being assured that I didn't actually need an in-depth understanding of the very cool but even more convoluted X-Men canon backstory, I went OH HELL YEAH and promptly made him a ginger dork.
Nowadays he's my favourite OC, just edging Judge Simon away from the top spot. I love him for so many reasons, but to pick a few off the top of my head: he's always trying to work something out, his sense of ethics is unusually strong (though admittedly flexible) for a character of mine, and he's aware of his smarts but he's not bigheaded about them, which makes a refreshing change from the LOOK AT ME LOOK AT MEEEEEEE mentality of West Rosen and the Sylars. Inevitably, he has his darker side -- in his case it comes in the form of being easily-provoked and prone to get carried away with ideas that are actually kind of bad, among other things -- but I like playing someone in whom the good points actually outweigh the bad.
2. Pyth
SPEAKING OF PEOPLE WHOSE GOOD POINTS OUTWEIGH THEIR BAD, if you don't mind my providing you with what might just be the understatement of the entire year. Pyth is just... just amazing. Out of all the peopole I could possibly spend my life with, I would choose her. We met through that well-known kiln of romance, milliways_bar; her character got talking to my character, while in OOC chat she and I competed for the coolest way of saying "tag". Ah, happy days. And now we're girlfriends, and have been for a whole year, which is kind of amazing since I'd pretty much resigned myself to being single forever and ever amen.
She's kind, and works at being kind, and does her best not to hurt anyone -- not for some ulterior motive, but because it goes against her strong morals. She's clever, and witty, and funny, and imaginative, and a freakin' genius writer, and frequently able to pwn me with logic. She's strong, and she doesn't give up on her ideals just because they're difficult to hold to, and she doesn't let depression bring her down. She is honest; I love that we can just have conversations about pretty much anything, whether vitally important or revolving around the molestation of telephones. She is caring; we are Cyth OTP, bb, and when one of us needs to be held, the other is there with open arms. She is awesome, with her twistedness and her perviness and her gay indoctrination and her making up of super-cute words. And she's gorgeous, no matter what she says; she's ridiculously adorable, and some six-foot Barbie-figured supermodel wouldn't have anything on her.
Pyth is the first and only person outside of my immediate family who I know for a fact that I would take a bullet for. She's the only person for whom I'd go against my mum. She's the person for whom I'm going through uni, and the person who I want to earn money to spend time with; she is the sole reason I can imagine anything of my life past graduation. I am just... I am just priviliged to have met her, as is anyone who's ever crossed her path.
3. Chasms (mostly because I sometimes use word associations to remember people's names)
They are deep and you can fall down them! And for some reason, when I read the word my brain leapt from the Grand Canyon to the Crack of Doom to that big toothy sand monster in the Star Wars movies. Obviously, then, I am all of those things! Or, then again, you could be referring to the deep black chasm that is the sable pit of my aching black sable black chasm-like soul. Epic.
4. shatterverse
JUICE FOR SHATTER. I kind of maybe neglect it a little bit -- though I'm working on that, and I'm throwing pups in there more frequently than I was during semester one -- but I love it so very much, and it never lets me down. I love the fact that you can do pretty much anything, and work out your own plots, and effect the setting in massive ways, and also have huge character-building threads and little personal moments. The most recent thing of epic crap-yourself awesome that I can think of is that one ongoing plot where Sylar was killed and his ghost possessed Sparrow, and then everyone else came to Metropolis to lay down an incredible ass-kicking. There is only one word strong enough to describe this plot, and it is FUCKWIN. And holy crap, I can't talk about Shatter without mentioning the muns. YOU GUYS. YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME. HOW ARE YOU GUYS SO AWESOME? IT MUST BE MAGIC OR SOMETHING. AWESOME MAGIC OF ~AWESOME~. ♥♥♥
5. Long distance relationships
Let's face it: when Pyth and I go long-distance, we don't fuck around. Oh, Atlantic Ocean, how do I resent thee? Let me count the ways...
But. You know, before I came to university, a bunch of people (hi, mum) told me that by being in a relationship already I'd be missing out on loads of life experience and opportunities. And I admit that this did worry me for a while, especially when this one teacher I really respect told me the exact same thing, but I've realised something: this is the opposite of a missed opportunity. Sure, I can't go out and get off with random strangers at random clubs; big whoop. I have someone waiting for me, and there aren't many people lucky enough to be able to say that.
And thanks to smeddley, my name is now forever to be linked with public displays of affection, Mary-Sues, love and wank on the astral plane, Heroes and the Canadian national anthem.
1. Sickeningly adorable PDAs... ~.^
Let me just say right now that I am honoured to be linked with these. ^___^ But yes, it does what it says on the tin: Pyth and I are affectionate. Sickeningly adorably affectionate. In public, which here translates to "all over the comments of our own journals and those of consenting third parties". On frequent occasions, the internet has to go away and find a toothbrush. Our public displays of affection are so sickeningly adorable that we even have our own steadily-growing army of official shippers, with whom we may one day take over the world. It's brilliant. :D
2. Mary-Sues (not that your writing is bad, quite the opposite, the first thing of yours I read was mocking them so very well!)
Now I'm trying to work out which story that would have been! My mind is going in the direction of Night Sprinkles on a Doomed Fate, that one PPC challenge thing, although I'm fairly sure that I wrote that a long while before I met you. Oh, jumping up here from a later paragraph because a thought occurred to me, do you mean the one where the girl who isn't a Sue randomly appears on Caradhras, and things go as badly as one might expect? :D
So yes: Mary-Sues and the mocking therof. I admit to having written some horrendous Sues in my time, as I'm sure every budding writer has -- the earliest one I can remember was this Legerdemain (I envisioned it as a kind of fiction wizard) girl who was escaping her pursuers by leaping into works of fiction, waaay back before I even knew what fanfic was; I recall that her kind were the stuff of legend, clumsily infodumped about in the first chapter, and that I had a fun time rewriting this one scene from Animorphs: The Capture from her pursuers' highly confused point of view. And, oh man, this completely insane chick from a Harry Potter/Hulk crossover, where she'd been experimented on by Bruce Banner's father, and her DNA mixed with that of herons and weasels and especially Thestrals. I remember this whole epic interview I wrote with her, where she'd been in St Mungo's for ages and ages and ever and anon, but Dumbledore had pulled some strings and she was finally going to Hogwarts. And she was banned from areas of high Muggle population because she was invisible to people who hadn't seen death. And because of the Thestral connection, some people thought she was bad luck to have around. And she was something like thirty, but still looked thirteen-ish, because "it turns out Thestrals age really slowly". Go figure.
And I haven't even gotten into the million and a half Lord of the Rings Sues who have spawned in my brain over the years. Hi, strangely my-best-friend-like mildly-psychic girl who was the reincarnation of Frodo and had him appear randomly in her kitchen fresh from Amon Hen. Nice to recall you, ensuing plot where she, gradually increasing time-travel-duplicated versions of Frodo, and her strangely me-like older sister Rachel had to try to set everything straight by travelling through wormholes in space, while this one guy and his two lackeys who had also discovered the wormholes attempted to kidnap Frodo and steal the One Ring. Oh, and long time no see, blatant self-insert in an entirely different story who discovered the Ring in the present day atop a mountain which I estimated to be in Mt. Doom's general vicinity, still clutched in the cold dead hand of the climber who had used his last flare to take it by force from his climbing partner.
Of course, those days are long behind me. Nowadays I only write... uh, supergeniuses, snarky guys who can't die again and overpowered bastards. Um. Moving on.
All of that said, I think it's kind of hard to rigidly define what makes a Mary-Sue; Sueiness is largely in the eye of the beholder. I know that some people define all original characters as Sues, which makes very little sense to me, because I don't know what they've been reading but I can't think of a single character who wasn't original when they were first written. (Okay, okay, insert obligatory Eragon and so on jokes here, but my point still stands! :P) I tend to think that a Sue is a character who always has to get one up on all the other characters, whether by being smarter or stronger or more dramatic or more pitiable or more good-looking or more unique -- not because it's a part of their personality, but because the author thinks they're Just That Special. That applies doubly when it gets annoying for the reader. Like so many other words, I also use it as a joke to describe characters (mostly my own) who have traits associated with Sueishness, like incredible powers or a tragic past. And this has been your lesson for today in Caz's own personal vocabulary!
3. Astral plane love (and wank)
...Oh, okay. For those playing along at home, a brief summary, pertaining strictly to aforementioned astral plane shenanigans: I used to know a girl who claimed to certain people privately that she was dating Zachary Quinto, and that they communicated via letters relayed verbally back and forth by two ghosts who could talk to her younger sister. There were a lot of frills and extra details and little adventures, half of which I still don't understand, but that was the core of it. And this all stayed friends-locked for a while, until eventually people started making fandom secrets expressing their doubt or worry or amusement, and the girl commented several times to the last secret post, outing herself as the secrets' unnamed subject and refusing to confirm or deny whether or not she had claimed to date ZQ. About a million screencaps proved that she had claimed it, but hey, what's evidence when you're armed with repetition? Followers of fandomsecrets were having none of this, and arguments exploded all over the comments and in my and her journals, eventually making Fandom Wank.
I don't know whether she believed her stories, or whether she does now. I've had various suspicions, but I have no way of knowing for sure either way. I'm not even sure which I would prefer to be true: if she did believe it, then she was not sane, but if she didn't then she willingly allowed her friends to worry themselves literally into illness over what she knew to be a lie. (And no, I'm not going to name her. If you know who I'm talking about, then you know, and if you don't then she doesn't need her name being dragged up again over this. It happened a year ago now.)
There is, actually, a footnote to this whole story, though I'm not sure how many people are aware of it. There was a hell of a lot of bullying going on, both overt and passive-aggressive, before, during and after the wank storm, and some people were badly hurt by it, including one for whom I care very much. A few months after everything died down, I felt like I should offer the girl the benefit of the doubt, partly because I wanted to hear her side of the story told by her without anger or backtracking. I did hope that she'd changed and wanted to see if we could be friends again, and was pleased to find that she was willing to give the second a try. But after a while, I told her that I was breaking off contact, for a bunch of reasons. She didn't seem to me to have changed at all, although she claimed that she had; nor did she seem to even think that she had done anything wrong. And I felt like by pursuing a friendship with her I was betraying the people who she'd hurt. And, not least, I had not gotten over the whole thing as thoroughly as I'd thought, and I was afraid that with it still raw in my head I might bully her in retroactive retaliation. She didn't reply, but we haven't spoken since then, and I don't think that we will again, although we still have some awesome mutual friends.
I'm not pretending to be some innocent bystander to all of this; I did some bitchy things, and some incredibly, incredibly stupid things, and the morality of my making a post to replace the deleted discussion threads has been questioned. But I just tend to be zen about it these days; it's over, it's not going to happen again, lessons were learned and people grew and so on and so forth. And, most importantly, the people who were being hurt no longer are. So, yeah. That's my take on it.
4. Heroes (esp. icons)
WOO HEROES. But I may fail this association: I've talked about Heroes so many millions of billions of times over the past however-long-since-I-started-watching that I'm really not sure what else I can add here. Aside from the fact that it seems to be swinging lately between terrible and awesome, and that although I need to catch up to the latest couple of episodes (ihu Megavideo) it seems to be solidly entrenched right now in a period of the latter. FOR MUCH WIN. \o/
5. Oh, Canada! (sung in an English accent)
...Gordon Bennet, I may have to record this now, just for the almighty lulz. O Canada! Our home and native land! True patriot love in all thy sons command! It actually reminds me amazingly of one of the English national anthems*. Perhaps it's because they're both all trumpets and suffocating patriotism and use of the word "thee". And, uh, this is probably the point at which I should admit that I have O Canada saved to my computer. Please don't judge me.
*We are greedy and can't agree on just one. Perhaps we think having a bunch of them will make up for no longer ruling a bunch of countries, idk. D'aww, England is in denial. ♥
Man, I love this meme so hard. If anyone's given me associations and I've missed them so far, or if you want me to associate you with stuff, poke me? :D
1. Stephen Bell (and his geekery)
OH STEVE, HOW I LOVE YOU. Seriously, everyone should have a mad scientist in their brain (however vehemently he objects to being referred to as such); it's so much fun. Steve's personality and a good chunk of his backstory were made up by me, but he originally came about when lienne and alas_a_llama were looking for someone to play Val Bell's brother, the token non-superpowered member of a Toronto branch of the X-Men. After being assured that I didn't actually need an in-depth understanding of the very cool but even more convoluted X-Men canon backstory, I went OH HELL YEAH and promptly made him a ginger dork.
Nowadays he's my favourite OC, just edging Judge Simon away from the top spot. I love him for so many reasons, but to pick a few off the top of my head: he's always trying to work something out, his sense of ethics is unusually strong (though admittedly flexible) for a character of mine, and he's aware of his smarts but he's not bigheaded about them, which makes a refreshing change from the LOOK AT ME LOOK AT MEEEEEEE mentality of West Rosen and the Sylars. Inevitably, he has his darker side -- in his case it comes in the form of being easily-provoked and prone to get carried away with ideas that are actually kind of bad, among other things -- but I like playing someone in whom the good points actually outweigh the bad.
2. Pyth
SPEAKING OF PEOPLE WHOSE GOOD POINTS OUTWEIGH THEIR BAD, if you don't mind my providing you with what might just be the understatement of the entire year. Pyth is just... just amazing. Out of all the peopole I could possibly spend my life with, I would choose her. We met through that well-known kiln of romance, milliways_bar; her character got talking to my character, while in OOC chat she and I competed for the coolest way of saying "tag". Ah, happy days. And now we're girlfriends, and have been for a whole year, which is kind of amazing since I'd pretty much resigned myself to being single forever and ever amen.
She's kind, and works at being kind, and does her best not to hurt anyone -- not for some ulterior motive, but because it goes against her strong morals. She's clever, and witty, and funny, and imaginative, and a freakin' genius writer, and frequently able to pwn me with logic. She's strong, and she doesn't give up on her ideals just because they're difficult to hold to, and she doesn't let depression bring her down. She is honest; I love that we can just have conversations about pretty much anything, whether vitally important or revolving around the molestation of telephones. She is caring; we are Cyth OTP, bb, and when one of us needs to be held, the other is there with open arms. She is awesome, with her twistedness and her perviness and her gay indoctrination and her making up of super-cute words. And she's gorgeous, no matter what she says; she's ridiculously adorable, and some six-foot Barbie-figured supermodel wouldn't have anything on her.
Pyth is the first and only person outside of my immediate family who I know for a fact that I would take a bullet for. She's the only person for whom I'd go against my mum. She's the person for whom I'm going through uni, and the person who I want to earn money to spend time with; she is the sole reason I can imagine anything of my life past graduation. I am just... I am just priviliged to have met her, as is anyone who's ever crossed her path.
3. Chasms (mostly because I sometimes use word associations to remember people's names)
They are deep and you can fall down them! And for some reason, when I read the word my brain leapt from the Grand Canyon to the Crack of Doom to that big toothy sand monster in the Star Wars movies. Obviously, then, I am all of those things! Or, then again, you could be referring to the deep black chasm that is the sable pit of my aching black sable black chasm-like soul. Epic.
4. shatterverse
JUICE FOR SHATTER. I kind of maybe neglect it a little bit -- though I'm working on that, and I'm throwing pups in there more frequently than I was during semester one -- but I love it so very much, and it never lets me down. I love the fact that you can do pretty much anything, and work out your own plots, and effect the setting in massive ways, and also have huge character-building threads and little personal moments. The most recent thing of epic crap-yourself awesome that I can think of is that one ongoing plot where Sylar was killed and his ghost possessed Sparrow, and then everyone else came to Metropolis to lay down an incredible ass-kicking. There is only one word strong enough to describe this plot, and it is FUCKWIN. And holy crap, I can't talk about Shatter without mentioning the muns. YOU GUYS. YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME. HOW ARE YOU GUYS SO AWESOME? IT MUST BE MAGIC OR SOMETHING. AWESOME MAGIC OF ~AWESOME~. ♥♥♥
5. Long distance relationships
Let's face it: when Pyth and I go long-distance, we don't fuck around. Oh, Atlantic Ocean, how do I resent thee? Let me count the ways...
But. You know, before I came to university, a bunch of people (hi, mum) told me that by being in a relationship already I'd be missing out on loads of life experience and opportunities. And I admit that this did worry me for a while, especially when this one teacher I really respect told me the exact same thing, but I've realised something: this is the opposite of a missed opportunity. Sure, I can't go out and get off with random strangers at random clubs; big whoop. I have someone waiting for me, and there aren't many people lucky enough to be able to say that.
And thanks to smeddley, my name is now forever to be linked with public displays of affection, Mary-Sues, love and wank on the astral plane, Heroes and the Canadian national anthem.
1. Sickeningly adorable PDAs... ~.^
Let me just say right now that I am honoured to be linked with these. ^___^ But yes, it does what it says on the tin: Pyth and I are affectionate. Sickeningly adorably affectionate. In public, which here translates to "all over the comments of our own journals and those of consenting third parties". On frequent occasions, the internet has to go away and find a toothbrush. Our public displays of affection are so sickeningly adorable that we even have our own steadily-growing army of official shippers, with whom we may one day take over the world. It's brilliant. :D
2. Mary-Sues (not that your writing is bad, quite the opposite, the first thing of yours I read was mocking them so very well!)
Now I'm trying to work out which story that would have been! My mind is going in the direction of Night Sprinkles on a Doomed Fate, that one PPC challenge thing, although I'm fairly sure that I wrote that a long while before I met you. Oh, jumping up here from a later paragraph because a thought occurred to me, do you mean the one where the girl who isn't a Sue randomly appears on Caradhras, and things go as badly as one might expect? :D
So yes: Mary-Sues and the mocking therof. I admit to having written some horrendous Sues in my time, as I'm sure every budding writer has -- the earliest one I can remember was this Legerdemain (I envisioned it as a kind of fiction wizard) girl who was escaping her pursuers by leaping into works of fiction, waaay back before I even knew what fanfic was; I recall that her kind were the stuff of legend, clumsily infodumped about in the first chapter, and that I had a fun time rewriting this one scene from Animorphs: The Capture from her pursuers' highly confused point of view. And, oh man, this completely insane chick from a Harry Potter/Hulk crossover, where she'd been experimented on by Bruce Banner's father, and her DNA mixed with that of herons and weasels and especially Thestrals. I remember this whole epic interview I wrote with her, where she'd been in St Mungo's for ages and ages and ever and anon, but Dumbledore had pulled some strings and she was finally going to Hogwarts. And she was banned from areas of high Muggle population because she was invisible to people who hadn't seen death. And because of the Thestral connection, some people thought she was bad luck to have around. And she was something like thirty, but still looked thirteen-ish, because "it turns out Thestrals age really slowly". Go figure.
And I haven't even gotten into the million and a half Lord of the Rings Sues who have spawned in my brain over the years. Hi, strangely my-best-friend-like mildly-psychic girl who was the reincarnation of Frodo and had him appear randomly in her kitchen fresh from Amon Hen. Nice to recall you, ensuing plot where she, gradually increasing time-travel-duplicated versions of Frodo, and her strangely me-like older sister Rachel had to try to set everything straight by travelling through wormholes in space, while this one guy and his two lackeys who had also discovered the wormholes attempted to kidnap Frodo and steal the One Ring. Oh, and long time no see, blatant self-insert in an entirely different story who discovered the Ring in the present day atop a mountain which I estimated to be in Mt. Doom's general vicinity, still clutched in the cold dead hand of the climber who had used his last flare to take it by force from his climbing partner.
Of course, those days are long behind me. Nowadays I only write... uh, supergeniuses, snarky guys who can't die again and overpowered bastards. Um. Moving on.
All of that said, I think it's kind of hard to rigidly define what makes a Mary-Sue; Sueiness is largely in the eye of the beholder. I know that some people define all original characters as Sues, which makes very little sense to me, because I don't know what they've been reading but I can't think of a single character who wasn't original when they were first written. (Okay, okay, insert obligatory Eragon and so on jokes here, but my point still stands! :P) I tend to think that a Sue is a character who always has to get one up on all the other characters, whether by being smarter or stronger or more dramatic or more pitiable or more good-looking or more unique -- not because it's a part of their personality, but because the author thinks they're Just That Special. That applies doubly when it gets annoying for the reader. Like so many other words, I also use it as a joke to describe characters (mostly my own) who have traits associated with Sueishness, like incredible powers or a tragic past. And this has been your lesson for today in Caz's own personal vocabulary!
3. Astral plane love (and wank)
...Oh, okay. For those playing along at home, a brief summary, pertaining strictly to aforementioned astral plane shenanigans: I used to know a girl who claimed to certain people privately that she was dating Zachary Quinto, and that they communicated via letters relayed verbally back and forth by two ghosts who could talk to her younger sister. There were a lot of frills and extra details and little adventures, half of which I still don't understand, but that was the core of it. And this all stayed friends-locked for a while, until eventually people started making fandom secrets expressing their doubt or worry or amusement, and the girl commented several times to the last secret post, outing herself as the secrets' unnamed subject and refusing to confirm or deny whether or not she had claimed to date ZQ. About a million screencaps proved that she had claimed it, but hey, what's evidence when you're armed with repetition? Followers of fandomsecrets were having none of this, and arguments exploded all over the comments and in my and her journals, eventually making Fandom Wank.
I don't know whether she believed her stories, or whether she does now. I've had various suspicions, but I have no way of knowing for sure either way. I'm not even sure which I would prefer to be true: if she did believe it, then she was not sane, but if she didn't then she willingly allowed her friends to worry themselves literally into illness over what she knew to be a lie. (And no, I'm not going to name her. If you know who I'm talking about, then you know, and if you don't then she doesn't need her name being dragged up again over this. It happened a year ago now.)
There is, actually, a footnote to this whole story, though I'm not sure how many people are aware of it. There was a hell of a lot of bullying going on, both overt and passive-aggressive, before, during and after the wank storm, and some people were badly hurt by it, including one for whom I care very much. A few months after everything died down, I felt like I should offer the girl the benefit of the doubt, partly because I wanted to hear her side of the story told by her without anger or backtracking. I did hope that she'd changed and wanted to see if we could be friends again, and was pleased to find that she was willing to give the second a try. But after a while, I told her that I was breaking off contact, for a bunch of reasons. She didn't seem to me to have changed at all, although she claimed that she had; nor did she seem to even think that she had done anything wrong. And I felt like by pursuing a friendship with her I was betraying the people who she'd hurt. And, not least, I had not gotten over the whole thing as thoroughly as I'd thought, and I was afraid that with it still raw in my head I might bully her in retroactive retaliation. She didn't reply, but we haven't spoken since then, and I don't think that we will again, although we still have some awesome mutual friends.
I'm not pretending to be some innocent bystander to all of this; I did some bitchy things, and some incredibly, incredibly stupid things, and the morality of my making a post to replace the deleted discussion threads has been questioned. But I just tend to be zen about it these days; it's over, it's not going to happen again, lessons were learned and people grew and so on and so forth. And, most importantly, the people who were being hurt no longer are. So, yeah. That's my take on it.
4. Heroes (esp. icons)
WOO HEROES. But I may fail this association: I've talked about Heroes so many millions of billions of times over the past however-long-since-I-started-watching that I'm really not sure what else I can add here. Aside from the fact that it seems to be swinging lately between terrible and awesome, and that although I need to catch up to the latest couple of episodes (ihu Megavideo) it seems to be solidly entrenched right now in a period of the latter. FOR MUCH WIN. \o/
5. Oh, Canada! (sung in an English accent)
...Gordon Bennet, I may have to record this now, just for the almighty lulz. O Canada! Our home and native land! True patriot love in all thy sons command! It actually reminds me amazingly of one of the English national anthems*. Perhaps it's because they're both all trumpets and suffocating patriotism and use of the word "thee". And, uh, this is probably the point at which I should admit that I have O Canada saved to my computer. Please don't judge me.
*We are greedy and can't agree on just one. Perhaps we think having a bunch of them will make up for no longer ruling a bunch of countries, idk. D'aww, England is in denial. ♥
Man, I love this meme so hard. If anyone's given me associations and I've missed them so far, or if you want me to associate you with stuff, poke me? :D