Tales Of Rambling
EDITED because I am tired of feeling guilty all the time for the contents of this post. It wasn't, when I started it, supposed to be an attack -- and that is kind of what it turned into. So, I'm sorry for that. It's just... I really loved talesofdressing, I really enjoyed the interactions of some of its characters. (And the others, it wasn't like I disliked them, just that I couldn't really get into them, since I wasn't familiar with their games; I've played Symphonia, and Abyss, so I'm a newbie to the series, no question.)
So it hurt and frustrated me to see things go kind of downhill -- especially when they were going downhill for a particular Peony, who I picked out early on as being the best of a couple of quite decent Peonies, and a particular Natalia, the strength of whose Natalia voice I admired.
Yeah; that's right. My multipage rant about Natalia alone stemmed from love, and feeling kind of betrayed. And terrible for Peony, because a lot of what's happened to and with Natalia recently has detrimentally affected him. Which just... sucks, for pretty much everyone involved.
But let's see if we can try this again without the name-calling. :(
I like dissecting AUs. I like shoving the pieces around, and seeing how they'd fit together differently. I like to change one event in a character's personal history and watch it spiral out to change everything. It's interesting.
talesofdressing makes it a bit harder to do that -- as I kind of now know from personal experience. It's really easy to slot a character in there, thinking you pretty much know where you're going with it, and realizing as they start interacting with other characters that you were pretty much totally wrong. You find yourself flying by the seat of your pants, and details change pretty quickly.
Some Thoughts on the Maid-Type Characters
1. Jade, the "Personal Entertainer"
She came first, so in a way I suppose she's The Original. (It's disorienting for me to think that this Jade, the chibi!Guy, and one of the more evil Guys, are all played by the same person, so kudos to you, Mun.) It's hard to be totally sure, but I think she was one of the seat-of-my-pants characters in terms of development; I seem to remember some details of her personal canon didn't quite fit together in her first thread, but later formed a semi-cohesive whole.
I'm actually kind of curious about this Jade; she quickly establishes herself as the personal entertainer to His Imperial Majesty, apologizes for leaving her room, and eventually shows us that "entertain" pretty much means "striptease with a happy ending". Dressing-Room!Peony is at first nervous about taking too much advantage -- certain that Jade's Peony will exact bloody vengeance -- but Jade soon establishes that he's a lot nicer to her than the Peony from her world; among other things, he cares about what she wants. The Peony from her world, as far as she's aware, isn't in love with her -- and so, presumably, has sex with her while thinking of her sister.
Gawd, I feel bad for this Jade. Even though she's a little retarded.
According to her, female!Jade was brilliant as a child, but, because she wasn't educated past the age of 15, is not on the same level as her canon counterpart. This is somewhat improbable.
Putting aside for a moment the concept of potential intelligence, and how no amount of not getting an education should have resulted in the slightly-goofy-and-naive "What? :O" shtick this Jade seems to have going on, Jade is also a child prodigy, and to the Japanese that pretty much means he should have already had a doctorate or two by the age of 15 -- EVA's Asuka Langley Soryuu, for example, was a university graduate at 14, and Resident Evil's Alexia Ashford managed the same at age 10. So... What gives?
One idea that occurred to me which would neatly explain everything is that Jade might have been partially lobotomized. No, really! The other part of her backstory -- the reason for her being a "personal entertainer" -- is that she was, apparently, pardoned by Peony for "her crimes". Given canon, one assumes this is somehow a reference to Hod, but if more specifics were ever given, I didn't see them, and I can't help thinking that a Fon Slot Seal, at the very least, would make a lot of sense for a war criminal. To partially lobotomize someone like Jade, whose brain should really be tagged by airport security as a lethal weapon, would make even more sense.
And, remember, her Peony has been established as Not That Nice.
It might take the character to a darker place than the mun intends, and it would probably nix some of her appeal to DR!Peony -- now touching her is not only potential adultery, but also kind of sort of statutory rape -- but. It'd be interesting.
The maid's uniform is one of implicitly several costumes donned by Jade for the performance of her... job.
2. Luke, Servant to the House of Garlos
I actually don't have any complaints about this Luke, except that it's always sad to imagine a fantasy world totally unlike Earth that still has problems with homosexuality. Dammit.
Suffice to say, certain similarities to the Jade are present; increased submission from canon, sex-toy of sorts for someone from his world (Guy, in this case), and in love with said someone. I think his Guy is a little nicer, oddly, than Jade's Peony.
The maid's uniform is worn by Luke to somewhat disguise his masculinity from the aforementioned folks around town who take issue with -- whatever it was he used to wear that made him look like something other than a typical servant. (I guess it's also possible that Guy groped Luke in front of people, which would make a slight dent in my earlier "nice guy" impression.)
3. Saphir, ....?
It's hard to say what Saphir is, aside from Jade's wife, and I'll admit that that's my own fault -- I watched her first thread, and I've seen her once or twice since then, but that was pretty much my only exposure to her, so if she's explained what she is or how she came to be, I wouldn't know. I don't, as an example, have any idea why she's dressed like a maid; I mean, again, she's Jade's wife, so ostensibly she's wouldn't be as easily talked into ridiculous costumes.
Well. Wait. It is still Dist. If Jade had a real yen for maid-based cosplay...
Anyway, you might be wondering how I could possibly talk much about Saphir's AU when I don't know that much about it -- and the answer is really easy, because she did establish at least one detail that bugs the heck out of me.
She and Peony are female; Jade and Nephry are male. (I don't know what his name is, but I have a female Jade with a male Nephry, and I latched onto Nephrit almost immediately; I don't know, it just appeals to me as a name. FEEL FREE TO TAKE IT, SAPHIR! :D) Male!Nephry and female!Peony are married.
Despite my Jade/Peony bent, I have nothing against Peony/Nephry, but this is a little bit... unlikely.
Remember: the reason why Peony was unable to marry Nephry in canon is because she was a commoner. Making Peony female won't fix that problem -- it will actually make it a little worse, because Luke makes it clear that inheritance in Malkuth passes from father to son. (This is an interesting thing to ask about specifically, and has always made me wonder if Kimlasca is matrilinear.) As such, Peony can't directly inherit -- she needs a husband to be emperor, and a commoner can't. I remember this, oddly enough, because of an MST of a Sonic the Hedgehog 'fic, where one of the MSTers commented that if he married Princess Sally, it wouldn't be King Sonic, it would be Prince Consort Sonic.
(This is actually a good reason for female!Peony to avoid ever getting married, because once she has a husband, she'll essentially lose her real power; it's one of the reasons that Queen Elizabeth refused to marry. If she managed to have a son, though... well, that's part of the reason why my FemDomAU!Natalia's father is allowed to keep ruling -- if you're the guardian of a proper heir, you're allowed to hold the throne, theoretically acting on your child's behalf until they're old enough to ascend themselves.)
Anyway, the point of all this is that female!Peony and male!Nephry might be seeing each other secretly, but they could never just get married, not as long as Peony remains the Empress of Malkuth (and she does in this AU). I know it's kind of depressing, but...
Now, bend the script a little more -- have a different Score, give the throne to one of Peony's now still-living brothers and take her out of the line of succession entirely -- and you're good to go! But as things stand, no.
I've mentioned I feel bad for the female Jade, and I actually feel almost worse for this female Saphir. (I'm not the only one, either.) The other maid characters were promptly semi-pounced upon by Dressing Room versions of their owners, and Saphir got a -- very polite welcome from the resident Jades (and here's the sympathy, because most of these Jades were being played very close to canon, and canonically Jade has never been polite to Saphir, and would probably find a gender-bent version really horrifying claiming to be his wife really horrifying), but she was not pounced. I did notice a Jade player at one point offering to make a new Jade to be the one from her universe, so... hopefully she's happy now. Aside from her very reasonable slight fixation on Jade, this girl was totally inoffensive and nice to pretty much everyone, so... yeah, she deserves her happiness, however improbable.
Natalia, Pregnancies, and Marriage
I can't pretend I've enjoyed this storyline -- it's been like torture to watch Natalia spiral from what seemed like merely a brief period of poor judgment to alcohol-induced sex to hypnotism-related nymphomania to an extremely fast-moving pregnancy (she seems to have gone from the first week or so of pregnancy to the first month in only a couple of days) with twins by two different fathers (a bit unlikely, for her age and physical fitness), to a well-intentioned but essentially shotgun wedding with Peony (who isn't even either baby's father).
I know drama can be fun; I like crack, to a certain extent, and I can wince and laugh at the same time. But -- and this is a chronic problem, really, for ToD -- Natalia crossed the line, right around the time when she announced her pregnancy, into the type of crack!drama that is less fun: the permanent kind.
Other things that have similarly lacked in awesome fun for all include the graphic rape of several characters, some of them small children.
Now, far be it from me to say that a crack game can't occasionally tackle serious situations -- a dash of seriousness now and then can anchor a crack game, keep it from floating off into total irrelevance, and make the rest of the game that much more fun. But we're talking about things here that should have consequences longer-lasting than awkwardness the next day -- we're talking about things that should change a character's entire life, possibly their entire personality. In the case of the rapes, we're talking about something that should involve lasting trauma.
Basically, I would never do these things to a character I was playing, because then I'd feel like every single interaction that character had from that point on would have to revolve around the event. Rape, especially for children, is not easily recovered from. It breaks you a little, and you have to work hard to get back to where you were. I wouldn't do it, because I wouldn't want the heaviness, and I would feel like not making it into a heavy thing would be trivializing rape, which is just flat-out wrong to do.
(Of course, on the other hand, I know that some of the "casual" stories dealing with rape are written by its victims, trying to assimilate and deal with what happened to them, so I try not to judge too harshly; in a way, it even makes sense that there'd be such a high prevalence of rape on a board largely populated by women. The numbers say that something like one in three of us will be raped at some point in our lives, so... it's an issue, and it's there, in our subconsciousnesses, needing some expression... Man, what can I yell about, if I've talked myself down from even being upset about the rape?)
I've totally drifted away from the topic of Natalia -- if there's one thing she hasn't yet gone through, it's rape -- so I'll wander back again to talk about her children.
Aside from helping to essentially hide Natalia's shame -- I'd add in something about providing for her, but as a princess, Natalia's equally as equipped to raise children -- Peony also mentioned at one point that he'd always wanted to join their kingdoms, bring peace through matrimony. At first, this made perfect sense to me, but the more I thought about it...
Well. I've had a history class recently, and one of the definite patterns you start to see if you look at the history of the world is that kings tend to hold on to only as much land as they can effectively rule. Alexander the Great, for example, conquered a large portion of the known world, an enormous kingdom for one man, but much of his conquered land was lost during his campaign, and had to be essentially reclaimed on his way home. His death, fairly early in his life, left four heirs to rule the kingdom.
And they promptly broke it down into more manageable chunks.
To use an in-game example, the backstory of Auldrant tells us that all its nations were once one big nation, the nation of Eldrant. The meaning of this name -- "the old continent" -- suggests that, among other differences, it existed back before the continental drift that separated Auldrant into its current nations. Kimlasca and Malkuth both fought, at separate points in history, for independence from Eldrant's oppressive regime, and both successfully broke away.
Currently, Kimlasca is a minuscule portion of the world, and Malkuth makes up more or less the rest of it, but Kimlasca is fighting to take over bit sand pieces of Malkuth territory, and it isn't meeting all that much resistance. This, plus statements in game about Kimlasca's military might, give me the mental image of Malkuth as a kind of Russia, and Kimlasca as another part of Europe.
Peony is a charismatic ruler, and his people love her; Natalia is much the same. The two of them might be able to unite their countries and keep them under control, through sheer force of personality. But the moment there's a weaker ruler in their family, a nation of that size would fall apart. Sure, the awesome might ordinarily be hereditary (although I doubt it, somehow), but Natalia's babies won't be Peony's children, so even that won't help them much.
And that's another problem, really. Kimlasca's rulership has historically been determined by the reddest hair and greenest eyes, but Natalia won't help with that, since she's not really of royal blood -- and when she has babies who aren't Malkuth's blond and blue-eyed, either, I kind of think the populace might throw a serious fit. Eeurgh.
About Attention-Whoring
This goes for lots of different people all around the board! I don't know, I kind of figure, one major infraction per character per every... two weeks, say. A lot of what's overwhelming about the drama on ToD is that you've got a lot of characters having major infractions every day. Characters will get raped one night, and then raped again the night after that.
It's numbing, it makes it hard to care about the character without also getting kind of irritated at the player.
(Frankly, I imagine it would also be boring to play! Your character would just get mired, after a while, in Trauma Mode, and interactions with other characters would get really same-y... And yeah, unsurprisingly, this is why I would never do anything permanently traumatizing to my characters, too.)
Also, I now make this vow: If I ever make a post where one of my characters is doing something damaging to them but fun, and someone shows up to rescue them from themselves, I will let them. It'd be nice to see, just for a change. ;)
And, I guess that's everything.
Ooh, I feel better now. ♥
So it hurt and frustrated me to see things go kind of downhill -- especially when they were going downhill for a particular Peony, who I picked out early on as being the best of a couple of quite decent Peonies, and a particular Natalia, the strength of whose Natalia voice I admired.
Yeah; that's right. My multipage rant about Natalia alone stemmed from love, and feeling kind of betrayed. And terrible for Peony, because a lot of what's happened to and with Natalia recently has detrimentally affected him. Which just... sucks, for pretty much everyone involved.
But let's see if we can try this again without the name-calling. :(
I like dissecting AUs. I like shoving the pieces around, and seeing how they'd fit together differently. I like to change one event in a character's personal history and watch it spiral out to change everything. It's interesting.
talesofdressing makes it a bit harder to do that -- as I kind of now know from personal experience. It's really easy to slot a character in there, thinking you pretty much know where you're going with it, and realizing as they start interacting with other characters that you were pretty much totally wrong. You find yourself flying by the seat of your pants, and details change pretty quickly.
Some Thoughts on the Maid-Type Characters
1. Jade, the "Personal Entertainer"
She came first, so in a way I suppose she's The Original. (It's disorienting for me to think that this Jade, the chibi!Guy, and one of the more evil Guys, are all played by the same person, so kudos to you, Mun.) It's hard to be totally sure, but I think she was one of the seat-of-my-pants characters in terms of development; I seem to remember some details of her personal canon didn't quite fit together in her first thread, but later formed a semi-cohesive whole.
I'm actually kind of curious about this Jade; she quickly establishes herself as the personal entertainer to His Imperial Majesty, apologizes for leaving her room, and eventually shows us that "entertain" pretty much means "striptease with a happy ending". Dressing-Room!Peony is at first nervous about taking too much advantage -- certain that Jade's Peony will exact bloody vengeance -- but Jade soon establishes that he's a lot nicer to her than the Peony from her world; among other things, he cares about what she wants. The Peony from her world, as far as she's aware, isn't in love with her -- and so, presumably, has sex with her while thinking of her sister.
Gawd, I feel bad for this Jade. Even though she's a little retarded.
According to her, female!Jade was brilliant as a child, but, because she wasn't educated past the age of 15, is not on the same level as her canon counterpart. This is somewhat improbable.
Putting aside for a moment the concept of potential intelligence, and how no amount of not getting an education should have resulted in the slightly-goofy-and-naive "What? :O" shtick this Jade seems to have going on, Jade is also a child prodigy, and to the Japanese that pretty much means he should have already had a doctorate or two by the age of 15 -- EVA's Asuka Langley Soryuu, for example, was a university graduate at 14, and Resident Evil's Alexia Ashford managed the same at age 10. So... What gives?
One idea that occurred to me which would neatly explain everything is that Jade might have been partially lobotomized. No, really! The other part of her backstory -- the reason for her being a "personal entertainer" -- is that she was, apparently, pardoned by Peony for "her crimes". Given canon, one assumes this is somehow a reference to Hod, but if more specifics were ever given, I didn't see them, and I can't help thinking that a Fon Slot Seal, at the very least, would make a lot of sense for a war criminal. To partially lobotomize someone like Jade, whose brain should really be tagged by airport security as a lethal weapon, would make even more sense.
And, remember, her Peony has been established as Not That Nice.
It might take the character to a darker place than the mun intends, and it would probably nix some of her appeal to DR!Peony -- now touching her is not only potential adultery, but also kind of sort of statutory rape -- but. It'd be interesting.
The maid's uniform is one of implicitly several costumes donned by Jade for the performance of her... job.
2. Luke, Servant to the House of Garlos
I actually don't have any complaints about this Luke, except that it's always sad to imagine a fantasy world totally unlike Earth that still has problems with homosexuality. Dammit.
Suffice to say, certain similarities to the Jade are present; increased submission from canon, sex-toy of sorts for someone from his world (Guy, in this case), and in love with said someone. I think his Guy is a little nicer, oddly, than Jade's Peony.
The maid's uniform is worn by Luke to somewhat disguise his masculinity from the aforementioned folks around town who take issue with -- whatever it was he used to wear that made him look like something other than a typical servant. (I guess it's also possible that Guy groped Luke in front of people, which would make a slight dent in my earlier "nice guy" impression.)
3. Saphir, ....?
It's hard to say what Saphir is, aside from Jade's wife, and I'll admit that that's my own fault -- I watched her first thread, and I've seen her once or twice since then, but that was pretty much my only exposure to her, so if she's explained what she is or how she came to be, I wouldn't know. I don't, as an example, have any idea why she's dressed like a maid; I mean, again, she's Jade's wife, so ostensibly she's wouldn't be as easily talked into ridiculous costumes.
Well. Wait. It is still Dist. If Jade had a real yen for maid-based cosplay...
Anyway, you might be wondering how I could possibly talk much about Saphir's AU when I don't know that much about it -- and the answer is really easy, because she did establish at least one detail that bugs the heck out of me.
She and Peony are female; Jade and Nephry are male. (I don't know what his name is, but I have a female Jade with a male Nephry, and I latched onto Nephrit almost immediately; I don't know, it just appeals to me as a name. FEEL FREE TO TAKE IT, SAPHIR! :D) Male!Nephry and female!Peony are married.
Despite my Jade/Peony bent, I have nothing against Peony/Nephry, but this is a little bit... unlikely.
Remember: the reason why Peony was unable to marry Nephry in canon is because she was a commoner. Making Peony female won't fix that problem -- it will actually make it a little worse, because Luke makes it clear that inheritance in Malkuth passes from father to son. (This is an interesting thing to ask about specifically, and has always made me wonder if Kimlasca is matrilinear.) As such, Peony can't directly inherit -- she needs a husband to be emperor, and a commoner can't. I remember this, oddly enough, because of an MST of a Sonic the Hedgehog 'fic, where one of the MSTers commented that if he married Princess Sally, it wouldn't be King Sonic, it would be Prince Consort Sonic.
(This is actually a good reason for female!Peony to avoid ever getting married, because once she has a husband, she'll essentially lose her real power; it's one of the reasons that Queen Elizabeth refused to marry. If she managed to have a son, though... well, that's part of the reason why my FemDomAU!Natalia's father is allowed to keep ruling -- if you're the guardian of a proper heir, you're allowed to hold the throne, theoretically acting on your child's behalf until they're old enough to ascend themselves.)
Anyway, the point of all this is that female!Peony and male!Nephry might be seeing each other secretly, but they could never just get married, not as long as Peony remains the Empress of Malkuth (and she does in this AU). I know it's kind of depressing, but...
Now, bend the script a little more -- have a different Score, give the throne to one of Peony's now still-living brothers and take her out of the line of succession entirely -- and you're good to go! But as things stand, no.
I've mentioned I feel bad for the female Jade, and I actually feel almost worse for this female Saphir. (I'm not the only one, either.) The other maid characters were promptly semi-pounced upon by Dressing Room versions of their owners, and Saphir got a -- very polite welcome from the resident Jades (and here's the sympathy, because most of these Jades were being played very close to canon, and canonically Jade has never been polite to Saphir, and would probably find a gender-bent version really horrifying claiming to be his wife really horrifying), but she was not pounced. I did notice a Jade player at one point offering to make a new Jade to be the one from her universe, so... hopefully she's happy now. Aside from her very reasonable slight fixation on Jade, this girl was totally inoffensive and nice to pretty much everyone, so... yeah, she deserves her happiness, however improbable.
Natalia, Pregnancies, and Marriage
I can't pretend I've enjoyed this storyline -- it's been like torture to watch Natalia spiral from what seemed like merely a brief period of poor judgment to alcohol-induced sex to hypnotism-related nymphomania to an extremely fast-moving pregnancy (she seems to have gone from the first week or so of pregnancy to the first month in only a couple of days) with twins by two different fathers (a bit unlikely, for her age and physical fitness), to a well-intentioned but essentially shotgun wedding with Peony (who isn't even either baby's father).
I know drama can be fun; I like crack, to a certain extent, and I can wince and laugh at the same time. But -- and this is a chronic problem, really, for ToD -- Natalia crossed the line, right around the time when she announced her pregnancy, into the type of crack!drama that is less fun: the permanent kind.
Other things that have similarly lacked in awesome fun for all include the graphic rape of several characters, some of them small children.
Now, far be it from me to say that a crack game can't occasionally tackle serious situations -- a dash of seriousness now and then can anchor a crack game, keep it from floating off into total irrelevance, and make the rest of the game that much more fun. But we're talking about things here that should have consequences longer-lasting than awkwardness the next day -- we're talking about things that should change a character's entire life, possibly their entire personality. In the case of the rapes, we're talking about something that should involve lasting trauma.
Basically, I would never do these things to a character I was playing, because then I'd feel like every single interaction that character had from that point on would have to revolve around the event. Rape, especially for children, is not easily recovered from. It breaks you a little, and you have to work hard to get back to where you were. I wouldn't do it, because I wouldn't want the heaviness, and I would feel like not making it into a heavy thing would be trivializing rape, which is just flat-out wrong to do.
(Of course, on the other hand, I know that some of the "casual" stories dealing with rape are written by its victims, trying to assimilate and deal with what happened to them, so I try not to judge too harshly; in a way, it even makes sense that there'd be such a high prevalence of rape on a board largely populated by women. The numbers say that something like one in three of us will be raped at some point in our lives, so... it's an issue, and it's there, in our subconsciousnesses, needing some expression... Man, what can I yell about, if I've talked myself down from even being upset about the rape?)
I've totally drifted away from the topic of Natalia -- if there's one thing she hasn't yet gone through, it's rape -- so I'll wander back again to talk about her children.
Aside from helping to essentially hide Natalia's shame -- I'd add in something about providing for her, but as a princess, Natalia's equally as equipped to raise children -- Peony also mentioned at one point that he'd always wanted to join their kingdoms, bring peace through matrimony. At first, this made perfect sense to me, but the more I thought about it...
Well. I've had a history class recently, and one of the definite patterns you start to see if you look at the history of the world is that kings tend to hold on to only as much land as they can effectively rule. Alexander the Great, for example, conquered a large portion of the known world, an enormous kingdom for one man, but much of his conquered land was lost during his campaign, and had to be essentially reclaimed on his way home. His death, fairly early in his life, left four heirs to rule the kingdom.
And they promptly broke it down into more manageable chunks.
To use an in-game example, the backstory of Auldrant tells us that all its nations were once one big nation, the nation of Eldrant. The meaning of this name -- "the old continent" -- suggests that, among other differences, it existed back before the continental drift that separated Auldrant into its current nations. Kimlasca and Malkuth both fought, at separate points in history, for independence from Eldrant's oppressive regime, and both successfully broke away.
Currently, Kimlasca is a minuscule portion of the world, and Malkuth makes up more or less the rest of it, but Kimlasca is fighting to take over bit sand pieces of Malkuth territory, and it isn't meeting all that much resistance. This, plus statements in game about Kimlasca's military might, give me the mental image of Malkuth as a kind of Russia, and Kimlasca as another part of Europe.
Peony is a charismatic ruler, and his people love her; Natalia is much the same. The two of them might be able to unite their countries and keep them under control, through sheer force of personality. But the moment there's a weaker ruler in their family, a nation of that size would fall apart. Sure, the awesome might ordinarily be hereditary (although I doubt it, somehow), but Natalia's babies won't be Peony's children, so even that won't help them much.
And that's another problem, really. Kimlasca's rulership has historically been determined by the reddest hair and greenest eyes, but Natalia won't help with that, since she's not really of royal blood -- and when she has babies who aren't Malkuth's blond and blue-eyed, either, I kind of think the populace might throw a serious fit. Eeurgh.
About Attention-Whoring
This goes for lots of different people all around the board! I don't know, I kind of figure, one major infraction per character per every... two weeks, say. A lot of what's overwhelming about the drama on ToD is that you've got a lot of characters having major infractions every day. Characters will get raped one night, and then raped again the night after that.
It's numbing, it makes it hard to care about the character without also getting kind of irritated at the player.
(Frankly, I imagine it would also be boring to play! Your character would just get mired, after a while, in Trauma Mode, and interactions with other characters would get really same-y... And yeah, unsurprisingly, this is why I would never do anything permanently traumatizing to my characters, too.)
Also, I now make this vow: If I ever make a post where one of my characters is doing something damaging to them but fun, and someone shows up to rescue them from themselves, I will let them. It'd be nice to see, just for a change. ;)
And, I guess that's everything.
Ooh, I feel better now. ♥