I TL;DR AT THEE. YAY USOPP.
On Being Luceti's Bitch: or How Mama-Usopp Was Born.
It was...a simple enough beginning. Not even really a developed tendency to hover over crewmates like a bastard, just a bit of exasperation coupled with his natural ability to spaz over any and everything. Namely, Brook was dropped into a lake in winter. The next best step, obviously, was to scold him for trying to swim, in winter, when he can't even swim to begin with. And then to drag him back to the apartment to get clothes and tea and a bath and all that.
Worrywarting, mother-henning Usopp has become a much more long-standing instinct than I'd thought it would initially.
One of the things I've been finding really hard to balance out in Usopp, Luceti-wise, are his reactions to the token stressful/potentially traumatizing situations that pop up. I sometimes sit for over an hour thinking “what the hell is he going to do in response to this,” because the boy is up and down and sideways like an emotional crazy straw so often that I can't keep track. The game has definitely proven to be an exercise in all directions of it.
I swear, guys, he really does not want to emo this much. It just sort of tends to happen. Which, actually, is why he can often be found taking great efforts to distract himself. Master of negativity (or, uh, maybe negativity's bitch depending on how one looks at it) he may be, but Usopp is also the master of denial, bullshit and distraction tactics. When Chopper got mallynapped, he was in those defaults like a drowning man the next day. I think it's kind of a canon gift of his to push shit aside and smile, for all that he hasn't gotten to do much of it in-game. It's on the same level where he doesn't like seeing other people upset, and Usopp has had about ten years of practice in the art of “I swear it isn't getting to me, I'm telling stories and playing jokes and it isn't effecting me at all.”
Open book that he tends to be, and as often as his nakama seem to see through it (they know him, after all), he's damn good at lying when it really matters that he doesn't get caught doing it.
… and then Vash got killed. Which I will admit didn't hit him as hard as it would if it were to happen this week. But still- Vash was a good guy, a friend of the crew, and he'd just talked to him earlier that day. Actually, that conversation put to use some of his de-emoing measures as well. It hurts more than you think when not long ago you were talking to someone about how they think no one should have to die. And then they die.
Sanji had a mini-breakdown following Vash's death, and this is another of those times when I had to think about what exactly Usopp was going to do (I link because I'm too lazy to summarize, ahem). As can be seen, he shot for distraction- the “don't be emo” method, which was somewhat successful. It seemed to me that while he could plausibly have joined in on that angst-fest, maybe doing what he ended up doing was more IC in the long run. Distracting Sanji also served to distract himself. And he even got a laugh out of it.
Next on the list was Nami getting kidnapped.
With all the kidnappings and murders and natural disasters that go down, his default three from above? Well, they stopped being so useful to him. When this shit just happens and happens and keeps happening, it stops being the kind of thing you can really hide from. I've found he began with getting progressively angrier and depressed about it all. The phrase “when it rains, it pours” comes to mind as the best description of drama in Luceti-- meaning that when it comes there is no break to be seen. These are the times when his negativity really just rears its ugly head and makes all efforts to drown out everything else. It's like a constant underscoring tearing in his heart, a little chant in the back of his mind. “Useless. You were already useless and now it's even worse.” No more throwing himself into distracting situations- Luceti is no longer shiny and new and relatively safe. He knows his way around all the places that could be poked around in without threat of being attacked, so what does that leave him?
Nami's kidnapping hit him a lot harder than I think he'd be likely to admit. Right there in the house, again, with a small mountain's worth of pre-existing Shit That Has Gone Down to boot. Not to mention the fact that it was Nami, who generally keeps everyone in line and reminds him that he really does know someone with logic and sanity. I like to muse that the Arlong Park arc instilled within him a little bit of protectiveness regarding her, actually. As much as it accentuated his tendency to ball up and do something when innocent people are in danger. You know, going to those lengths just to keep everyone safe? Respect, man. But I can write an essay on that some other day when I'm not lazy.
Back to the kidnapping. It was round two of his recurring negativity battle and he felt that he might just lose. This, my friends, was the beginning of the great 'hiding from everyone' trend. Believe it or not, Usopp doesn't like other people knowing when things start to really take a toll on him deep down. Like I said above, he defaults to happy, lying to your face because he is fine; someone has to be fine so that they can work on making everyone else fine, too. Ties in to hating seeing other people emo, actually. Since he couldn't quite do that, he switched to default number two: running away. Usopp spent the next few nights at the Welcome Center, which left him there for the giant blizzard fiasco.
Now by this point Usopp has had his worrywart moments here and there. He's taken his desire to be useful to anyone, in any way, and applied it to the retrieval of New Feathers upon their arrival. And he's been sure to ask everyone and anyone if they have shoes and a coat because damn, he knows what it's like not to in winter and it sucks. Luceti-blizzard sees him in a very rare fit of stupid shonen recklessness. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, he went out into a blizzard on multiple occasions to drag people to the Welcome Center.
He then got sick and scolded by “Nami is kidnapped, I'm feeling the stress, goddamnit you are supposed to have common sense” Sanji. We can safely judge that hero-Usopp was short-lived and caused more worry than he managed to prove useful.
I think that the blizzard and sort-of conversation was something of a turning point for him, as far as all that mothering he gets into goes.
Usopp has never been much of a protector. He can certainly try and sometimes succeed, but when it gets down to it, he's not a physical rescuer at all. Does this contribute to his issues? Yes. Not being able to defend the people who defend him hurts (not to say it's always like that, which I must point to Thriller Bark for, coupled with a dosage of Shabondy, perhaps?). It's...not a conversation he's really had with anyone, actually. It happens- he can't help and what good is he, then- and then he buries it until it claws its way back up, at which point he obviously just has to bury it again. Because this is what he does and how he copes. This mini-event was sort of a driving-home of the fact that he's not really cut out for that kind of thing and being in Luceti doesn't really change that.
Which begins the legacy of 'mama-Usopp.' I believe his logic was something along the lines of...even if you can't keep your nakama safe physically, you can make sure they dress right for the weather so they don't get sick. If you can't stop the kidnappings, you can still try damn hard to keep everyone at home from dwelling on it. And if you can't stop dwelling on it yourself, you can at least try to make sure that nobody sees you being stuck on it.
If someone gets injured and Chopper's not around, he's got a first aid kit. If they return from a kidnapping without shoes, he'll go out and get them a pair with a great deal of ranting-at-the-Malnosso as he does so. It's kind of hard for me to really pinpoint where and when he's doing this kind of thing, actually. Some of it I think is more of just a general feeling- fondness or protectiveness, a lot of tutting and less-serious anger. Sometimes it's blatant and kind of stupid, and sometimes it's just doing things that he'd do on any other day.
Brook's kidnapping may actually have been a cementer for all of that. Usopp was still being a blatant worrywart around then, of course, but Brook got a hell of a lot more of that side than anyone else at that point. You know, it was sort of back in the one, maybe two duckling days of Luceti. And then there was all that worry and fidgeting and that urge to do something still hanging around, but without the guy he usually threw it at there to receive the brunt. It has since been spread to the crew and even to a few people outside of the crew, which I imagine is very exasperating. He just can't help himself.
Even with all this mothering added to his arsenal, kidnappings still proved to piss Usopp off to no level for a while. Sanji's first kidnapping led to a lot less getting out to find something to do and a lot more trashing his half of their room. And then cleaning it up and possibly repeating just once more for good measure. He made yet another crew announcer/angsty post, which seems to be something of a specialty. I've been trying to break him of it lately, but sometimes he just insists. After that post, he went for the hiding option again, only to find it broken by a Nami-napping.
This is the term for a post in which one is dragged to the bar by Nami for de-emoing, kicking and screaming. He did a lot of selfish, bratty, whining kinds of things in that post- and have you ever had a moment with your character where reading a tag made you wince but at the same time you can't help but feel it is horribly IC? Yeah, I was doing that a lot.
Because let's face it, Usopp is a brat and he hadn't done a great deal of spoiled-rotten whining before then. It never seemed like there was much of a time for selfishness given everything that kept happening. That day was kind of a weak spot for him, because it was him giving in and riding the negative self-pity train. And the post actually sort of drove home for him that maybe all that hiding in his room, even if it served to avoid people seeing him being depressed, was also just him not being man enough to accept that this stuff was happening. That it was going to keep happening and he had to just learn to accept it. And that feeling guilty didn't help anything- it wasn't his fault.
He also got to get drunk, which went very well in my head.
Sanji's second kidnapping showed a surprisingly seme side of Usopp. He did a lot more ordering than unfounded background flailing, even growing enough backbone to tell Nami what to do. By the way- I take this moment to note that while he was certainly in something of a foul mood, he didn't go back to being a shut-in. No more blatantly indulging in the urge to feel sorry for himself, no sir. There were things to be done and things (note: more like people) Sanji would likely want him to keep an eye on. He could do a hell of a lot more good keeping up with that than he could sitting around dwelling on it all.
And then Sanji came back and things were decent. Far better than they normally tended to be in Luceti, anyway.
I think that since then, he's been getting to be more and more himself than he's gotten to be since he first showed up in Luceti. Usopp's finally starting to get it through his retardedly thick skull that loads of angst won't do anything but drag other people into the water. He tries not to let it hit him on more than surface levels. It doesn't really work out that way, but instead of focusing on it he's leaving it where it is. A gift born of all that inset negativity, really- it's always there but he can just let it sink and smile through it. He might have to take the liberty of beating it down once in a while, but he's realizing this is something that he's actually equipped to handle.
Take, for instance, his reaction to Chopper's second kidnapping. Was there anger there? Yes. Of course, because if you mess with Chopper Usopp will use all the powers of his formidable imagination to think up creative, unique and extremely painful demises for you. But it's a louder anger, maybe a lighter kind of anger, the kind of background going on that you'd see him doing in canon. Does that mean it didn't really effect him? Not at all. It just means he's getting back into the habit of handling these things like he used to.
It's a very strange situation here, but he won't let it throw him so off-balance anymore. He's getting back to his canonical characterization roots: some bragging, casual lying, flailing, getting his ass saved and hiding behind people. And if the time comes for him to stand up and fight for his crew, he knows he will, because he always has. Until then, he'll be more than glad to fill his comic relief, distraction tactic, immature scaredy-cat shoes once more.
So maybe he's actually working on not being Luceti's bitch right now.
Usopp still reserves the right to mother-hen any and everyone that he feels he should. He also reserves the right to be horribly offended when he gets drafted, plus the right to temporarily fake a disease before taking it like a man.
...when I once said I'd essay on Usopp's development, I swear I'd meant canon 8|
It was...a simple enough beginning. Not even really a developed tendency to hover over crewmates like a bastard, just a bit of exasperation coupled with his natural ability to spaz over any and everything. Namely, Brook was dropped into a lake in winter. The next best step, obviously, was to scold him for trying to swim, in winter, when he can't even swim to begin with. And then to drag him back to the apartment to get clothes and tea and a bath and all that.
Worrywarting, mother-henning Usopp has become a much more long-standing instinct than I'd thought it would initially.
One of the things I've been finding really hard to balance out in Usopp, Luceti-wise, are his reactions to the token stressful/potentially traumatizing situations that pop up. I sometimes sit for over an hour thinking “what the hell is he going to do in response to this,” because the boy is up and down and sideways like an emotional crazy straw so often that I can't keep track. The game has definitely proven to be an exercise in all directions of it.
I swear, guys, he really does not want to emo this much. It just sort of tends to happen. Which, actually, is why he can often be found taking great efforts to distract himself. Master of negativity (or, uh, maybe negativity's bitch depending on how one looks at it) he may be, but Usopp is also the master of denial, bullshit and distraction tactics. When Chopper got mallynapped, he was in those defaults like a drowning man the next day. I think it's kind of a canon gift of his to push shit aside and smile, for all that he hasn't gotten to do much of it in-game. It's on the same level where he doesn't like seeing other people upset, and Usopp has had about ten years of practice in the art of “I swear it isn't getting to me, I'm telling stories and playing jokes and it isn't effecting me at all.”
Open book that he tends to be, and as often as his nakama seem to see through it (they know him, after all), he's damn good at lying when it really matters that he doesn't get caught doing it.
… and then Vash got killed. Which I will admit didn't hit him as hard as it would if it were to happen this week. But still- Vash was a good guy, a friend of the crew, and he'd just talked to him earlier that day. Actually, that conversation put to use some of his de-emoing measures as well. It hurts more than you think when not long ago you were talking to someone about how they think no one should have to die. And then they die.
Sanji had a mini-breakdown following Vash's death, and this is another of those times when I had to think about what exactly Usopp was going to do (I link because I'm too lazy to summarize, ahem). As can be seen, he shot for distraction- the “don't be emo” method, which was somewhat successful. It seemed to me that while he could plausibly have joined in on that angst-fest, maybe doing what he ended up doing was more IC in the long run. Distracting Sanji also served to distract himself. And he even got a laugh out of it.
Next on the list was Nami getting kidnapped.
With all the kidnappings and murders and natural disasters that go down, his default three from above? Well, they stopped being so useful to him. When this shit just happens and happens and keeps happening, it stops being the kind of thing you can really hide from. I've found he began with getting progressively angrier and depressed about it all. The phrase “when it rains, it pours” comes to mind as the best description of drama in Luceti-- meaning that when it comes there is no break to be seen. These are the times when his negativity really just rears its ugly head and makes all efforts to drown out everything else. It's like a constant underscoring tearing in his heart, a little chant in the back of his mind. “Useless. You were already useless and now it's even worse.” No more throwing himself into distracting situations- Luceti is no longer shiny and new and relatively safe. He knows his way around all the places that could be poked around in without threat of being attacked, so what does that leave him?
Nami's kidnapping hit him a lot harder than I think he'd be likely to admit. Right there in the house, again, with a small mountain's worth of pre-existing Shit That Has Gone Down to boot. Not to mention the fact that it was Nami, who generally keeps everyone in line and reminds him that he really does know someone with logic and sanity. I like to muse that the Arlong Park arc instilled within him a little bit of protectiveness regarding her, actually. As much as it accentuated his tendency to ball up and do something when innocent people are in danger. You know, going to those lengths just to keep everyone safe? Respect, man. But I can write an essay on that some other day when I'm not lazy.
Back to the kidnapping. It was round two of his recurring negativity battle and he felt that he might just lose. This, my friends, was the beginning of the great 'hiding from everyone' trend. Believe it or not, Usopp doesn't like other people knowing when things start to really take a toll on him deep down. Like I said above, he defaults to happy, lying to your face because he is fine; someone has to be fine so that they can work on making everyone else fine, too. Ties in to hating seeing other people emo, actually. Since he couldn't quite do that, he switched to default number two: running away. Usopp spent the next few nights at the Welcome Center, which left him there for the giant blizzard fiasco.
Now by this point Usopp has had his worrywart moments here and there. He's taken his desire to be useful to anyone, in any way, and applied it to the retrieval of New Feathers upon their arrival. And he's been sure to ask everyone and anyone if they have shoes and a coat because damn, he knows what it's like not to in winter and it sucks. Luceti-blizzard sees him in a very rare fit of stupid shonen recklessness. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, he went out into a blizzard on multiple occasions to drag people to the Welcome Center.
He then got sick and scolded by “Nami is kidnapped, I'm feeling the stress, goddamnit you are supposed to have common sense” Sanji. We can safely judge that hero-Usopp was short-lived and caused more worry than he managed to prove useful.
I think that the blizzard and sort-of conversation was something of a turning point for him, as far as all that mothering he gets into goes.
Usopp has never been much of a protector. He can certainly try and sometimes succeed, but when it gets down to it, he's not a physical rescuer at all. Does this contribute to his issues? Yes. Not being able to defend the people who defend him hurts (not to say it's always like that, which I must point to Thriller Bark for, coupled with a dosage of Shabondy, perhaps?). It's...not a conversation he's really had with anyone, actually. It happens- he can't help and what good is he, then- and then he buries it until it claws its way back up, at which point he obviously just has to bury it again. Because this is what he does and how he copes. This mini-event was sort of a driving-home of the fact that he's not really cut out for that kind of thing and being in Luceti doesn't really change that.
Which begins the legacy of 'mama-Usopp.' I believe his logic was something along the lines of...even if you can't keep your nakama safe physically, you can make sure they dress right for the weather so they don't get sick. If you can't stop the kidnappings, you can still try damn hard to keep everyone at home from dwelling on it. And if you can't stop dwelling on it yourself, you can at least try to make sure that nobody sees you being stuck on it.
If someone gets injured and Chopper's not around, he's got a first aid kit. If they return from a kidnapping without shoes, he'll go out and get them a pair with a great deal of ranting-at-the-Malnosso as he does so. It's kind of hard for me to really pinpoint where and when he's doing this kind of thing, actually. Some of it I think is more of just a general feeling- fondness or protectiveness, a lot of tutting and less-serious anger. Sometimes it's blatant and kind of stupid, and sometimes it's just doing things that he'd do on any other day.
Brook's kidnapping may actually have been a cementer for all of that. Usopp was still being a blatant worrywart around then, of course, but Brook got a hell of a lot more of that side than anyone else at that point. You know, it was sort of back in the one, maybe two duckling days of Luceti. And then there was all that worry and fidgeting and that urge to do something still hanging around, but without the guy he usually threw it at there to receive the brunt. It has since been spread to the crew and even to a few people outside of the crew, which I imagine is very exasperating. He just can't help himself.
Even with all this mothering added to his arsenal, kidnappings still proved to piss Usopp off to no level for a while. Sanji's first kidnapping led to a lot less getting out to find something to do and a lot more trashing his half of their room. And then cleaning it up and possibly repeating just once more for good measure. He made yet another crew announcer/angsty post, which seems to be something of a specialty. I've been trying to break him of it lately, but sometimes he just insists. After that post, he went for the hiding option again, only to find it broken by a Nami-napping.
This is the term for a post in which one is dragged to the bar by Nami for de-emoing, kicking and screaming. He did a lot of selfish, bratty, whining kinds of things in that post- and have you ever had a moment with your character where reading a tag made you wince but at the same time you can't help but feel it is horribly IC? Yeah, I was doing that a lot.
Because let's face it, Usopp is a brat and he hadn't done a great deal of spoiled-rotten whining before then. It never seemed like there was much of a time for selfishness given everything that kept happening. That day was kind of a weak spot for him, because it was him giving in and riding the negative self-pity train. And the post actually sort of drove home for him that maybe all that hiding in his room, even if it served to avoid people seeing him being depressed, was also just him not being man enough to accept that this stuff was happening. That it was going to keep happening and he had to just learn to accept it. And that feeling guilty didn't help anything- it wasn't his fault.
He also got to get drunk, which went very well in my head.
Sanji's second kidnapping showed a surprisingly seme side of Usopp. He did a lot more ordering than unfounded background flailing, even growing enough backbone to tell Nami what to do. By the way- I take this moment to note that while he was certainly in something of a foul mood, he didn't go back to being a shut-in. No more blatantly indulging in the urge to feel sorry for himself, no sir. There were things to be done and things (note: more like people) Sanji would likely want him to keep an eye on. He could do a hell of a lot more good keeping up with that than he could sitting around dwelling on it all.
And then Sanji came back and things were decent. Far better than they normally tended to be in Luceti, anyway.
I think that since then, he's been getting to be more and more himself than he's gotten to be since he first showed up in Luceti. Usopp's finally starting to get it through his retardedly thick skull that loads of angst won't do anything but drag other people into the water. He tries not to let it hit him on more than surface levels. It doesn't really work out that way, but instead of focusing on it he's leaving it where it is. A gift born of all that inset negativity, really- it's always there but he can just let it sink and smile through it. He might have to take the liberty of beating it down once in a while, but he's realizing this is something that he's actually equipped to handle.
Take, for instance, his reaction to Chopper's second kidnapping. Was there anger there? Yes. Of course, because if you mess with Chopper Usopp will use all the powers of his formidable imagination to think up creative, unique and extremely painful demises for you. But it's a louder anger, maybe a lighter kind of anger, the kind of background going on that you'd see him doing in canon. Does that mean it didn't really effect him? Not at all. It just means he's getting back into the habit of handling these things like he used to.
It's a very strange situation here, but he won't let it throw him so off-balance anymore. He's getting back to his canonical characterization roots: some bragging, casual lying, flailing, getting his ass saved and hiding behind people. And if the time comes for him to stand up and fight for his crew, he knows he will, because he always has. Until then, he'll be more than glad to fill his comic relief, distraction tactic, immature scaredy-cat shoes once more.
So maybe he's actually working on not being Luceti's bitch right now.
Usopp still reserves the right to mother-hen any and everyone that he feels he should. He also reserves the right to be horribly offended when he gets drafted, plus the right to temporarily fake a disease before taking it like a man.
...when I once said I'd essay on Usopp's development, I swear I'd meant canon 8|