Weekends is ~*MEME TIME*~

[makeste]

From mikenno (who has the best fucking memes lately):

Pick a character I write, and I will give you the top five ideas or concepts or factoids I keep in mind while writing that character that I believe are essential to depicting him or her accurately. This includes original characters and characters about whom I write fanfic.I WANT TO DO THIIIIIS

Comments

[makeste]

I'm so happy I get to ramble about the big 3 right off. :D ♥

Hmm, Tsuna...

1. Tsuna is not a saint. He's a good person--could be a great person, someday, with a little growing time--but for all my jokes about shounen Jesii, Tsuna still has a long way to go before he reaches that level. It's the bad situations that always (ironically) bring out the best in him, but under normal, every day circumstances, those times when he isn't being asked to rise to the occasion, he's alternatingly selfish, whiny, derpy, lazy, and self-pitying. Despite my love for the character, when I'm writing him I try my best to remember those imperfections because they're also a part of what makes Tsuna who he is. (I don't always succeed at this, though; I'm sorry to say that lots of times when I'm writing him I fall into the trap of making him too Wonder Boss-ish, orz.)

2. Keeping the above in mind, I've noticed that I kind of give Tsuna this slightly sarcastic, ironic edge to his thoughts when I write him. That's because in canon he does have that WHY ME FUCK MY LIIIIIIIFE side to him, and oftentimes he's the one observing an insane situation and being all, "what the jesus is this" while everyone else is just "OH HA HA, THE MAFIA IS DOING SOMETHING CRAZY AGAIN. *GOES ALONG WITH*" or else they're the ones who started the craziness in the first place. So because Tsuna is usually the straight man in all this, and because it's reached the point where he is used to being the straight man and almost resigned to the weirdness at this point, the sarcasm comes out. Well, not really sarcasm so much as "oh brother, here we go again :|", I guess.

3. When I write Boss!Tsuna, I try to give him an air of reluctance, keeping in mind that he's never wanted this job and the only circumstances under which I can see him accepting it are if he finally realized that if he doesn't man up and become the Vongola Tenth, it would be the same as turning his back on all the people that he could have helped through that position, and all the people whose lives would probably be destroyed if some other, unkinder soul took up the position instead. He's the hero who never wanted to be a hero, basically, and at any given moment he would probably be a lot happier just living a normal life instead of making these life and death decisions or wasting away in business meetings. He doesn't regret his choice, and usually when I write older Tsuna he's at a point where he's finally starting to accept that this is his life, but all the same he's never truly going to be happy until he's finally allowed to retire, so I try to put some of that resignation in there somehow. I think he's a better leader for it, though.

[makeste]

4. Tsuna is so mild-mannered and polite and constantly worried that he's going to say or do the wrong thing. Probably the main side-effect of all this is that he is extremely hesitant to say or do anything ever. If left to his own devices he would probably fizzle out and procrastinate everything and never willingly interact with another human being or do anything ever that could potentially result in a negative outcome. He hates taking any kind of risk because he feels like he's usually liable to just screw things up.

Happily, he has people like Reborn to assist him with this crippling problem. I think at least 90% of what Reborn actually does is just push Tsuna to do things and stop worrying about the consequences. Because he does worry, a lot, always, and he tends toward the same overthinking things problem that Gokudera has, only he usually lacks the brashness to say "fuck it" and go ahead and do things anyway. He starts a lot of his sentences with "Uh..." or "Haah..." and makes a lot of stressed-out noises and is just generally a nervous wreck a lot of the time.

5. Lastly, Tsuna loves normality. I think his idea of a perfect day is "sleep in, wake up and flop around in my pajamas, maybe play videogames with Yamamoto and Gokudera and Lambo and then watch some TV wile putting off homework, and then drinking some milk and going back to bed yay. |D" Anything that is remotely out of the ordinary makes him :/, and that includes himself in superhero mode. When he got back from the future, he hid his ring in a shoebox under his bed IIRC. XD Even knowing that he's capable of kicking ass and actually saving the world when things get rough, he'd much rather be an ordinary boy going to school with his friends and vegging out in his spare time.

And yet, there is a contradiction there, because he isn't quite content being a loser anymore, either. Having had a taste of greatness, he may not be aiming for the stars anytime soon, but he's said in canon that he likes the fact that people actually have expectations of him now, that he's not automatically dismissed as a failure. He has confidence that he didn't have before, and I think that deep down, some part of him is actually grateful for the constant chaos in his life because he realizes that it brings out the best of him and forces him to be a better person. Hence, even when he's complaining about all the insanity that goes on around him, he's secretly pleased by it too, and would be unhappy if it ever all went away, even though he doesn't consciously realize any of this yet.

Anyway, so I guess I'm done rambling about him now, and that was a pretty interesting exercise. I don't write about him as often as I do Yamamoto and Gokudera, so I haven't had as much of a chance to really think about these things. I don't think I always follow all of these guidelines very well, either, but there you go. XD

[ekmisao]

Said this way, I totally agree, and this is one of the reasons I like this series. In a gentle, unobtrusive way through all the wackiness, people GROW and there are changes within the sameness. ^^

[teruame]

This...THIS. :D This is why I love reading your Tsunas. ;)

I think that's exactly why Tsuna never aspires to be above average in ways: because he is afraid of what would happen and the disappointment that will show up from it, since he is now used to having expectations placed on him to some level, but...if he were to ever be expected to handle really heavy duty things, he would probably think twice before stepping into the fire. He doesn't want to go back to his old self anymore, since he knows that going back means a lot of changes he might not be okay with, and at the same time he is a bit frustrated that he can't be too normal anymore. XD At the same time, he wonders what it might be like for him to go forwards a bit more, and yet he doesn't like to change too much. Which is a problem, because being in a world like his means having to change a lot and constantly.

Oh, well...I'm rambling on and on again. -_- Sorry about that...