OOC Muse Inquiries 2 & 3: Work and Conflict
Crossposted from muse_academy, originally posted Mar. 30. OOC post.
Prompt Number: Week 2 and 3
Title: Muse Inquiries
Muse Inquiries 2 - Work
1. What is your character's career or job? Did you determine this, or is this their job in canon?
It is actually very difficult to determine from canon if Q has a "job", or what it is if he does. What we see is that on four separate occasions, he interacts with the Enterprise crew while at least ostensibly representing the Q Continuum. On three of those occasions he is clearly performing a test; on the fourth, he is attempting to teach a Q child about her powers in order to persuade her to come to the Q Continuum, but this turns out to be a test as well -- he's supposed to determine whether or not she is truly a Q and get her to return to the Continuum if she is, or else kill her. On another occasion, he acts as a representative of the Continuum to the crew of Voyager while trying to recapture a renegade Q. On all other occasions, he appears to be on personal business of some sort, but three of his "personal business" stunts *also* resemble tests of some kind. So it does seem evident that Q acts as a representative of the Continuum, at least sometimes, and performs tests on other species, usually at their behest but sometimes on his own initiative.
From this, I guessed that Q's "job" is to study other species and perform tests on them, or to act as a representative of the Continuum to "lesser races", or both at the same time. We know that he does not have any "friends" among the "lesser races", or at least no one he would trust to take care of him if he were helpless except for Picard, and we know that other races feel he has tormented them, and that the Continuum itself has accused him of "spreading chaos throughout the universe." This looks like his modus operandi is probably usually to conduct tests by presenting himself as an antagonist and forcing beings to solve problems to escape the situations he puts them in, and that he enjoys doing this enough that he does it even when he's not specifically authorized to do it.
I ended up deriving from this, and from other things we see or hear, that originally Q's "job", the role he was created for, was as an explorer. The Q Continuum did not always know everything, and on the road to knowing everything it was important to have agents who would go out into the universe, explore it, and learn. Nowadays there is nothing left for them to explore -- they pretty much know everything. So now, Q's "job" is to study certain "lesser species" in depth by performing tests on them, and occasionally he goes overboard with it.
2. Is your character good at their job? Describe how you can see this, not only in their canon, but in how you play them.
It depends who's asking. Q appears to do things that his "superiors" did not authorize, frequently. I gather that while he enjoys his "job", his general frustration with the boredom of his existence leads him to go out and find excuses to do what he does even when he's not authorized to do it, and we know that he skirts around the spirit of the law pretty much all the time. The closest analogy would probably be a cross between the rogue vigilante cop archetype and the rogue scientist archetype. His own people don't consider him "good" at his job because he keeps breaking the rules while he does it, but he's probably very effective at getting the results he's trying to achieve.
When I play Q, I introduce elements to his backstory, incidents he played a role in for other species, that seem to me to be fundamentally similar to the things we know he did. Since I do tend to play him as a sympathetic character, albeit an asshole, most of these things are of the form "Q saves a planet by pretending to be a bad guy", "Q does something nasty to someone that ends up saving their species", "Q punishes beings that are doing something the readers would find morally reprehensible", or "Q mocks a species for some sort of failing (usually that the human author sees in humans and wants to mock) by putting them through a test that calls attention to this failing." Occasionally my Q does something very dark and conducts a test he knew ahead of time would almost certainly destroy the beings he was working with, or does something for personal amusement that ends up setting off a war or a disaster. Also, occasionally he does something completely benevolent... which he usually regrets, because this results in him being worshipped as a god, and as I play Q, he *hates* that.
3. Did you change or add a career to your character? If they are canon, did you change them from the career they had in the source material? If they are an OC, did you start out with one career for them, then change? If you changed their career, how much do you think this changed the character?
Canon appears to have changed Q's career. In the second-to-last episode he appears in, he fights in a civil war within his people for greater freedom; in the last episode we see him in, he is both an incredibly harried father with a bratty teenage son, and also appears to have much greater status among his own people than he used to. So as I write Q, his winning the war resulted in him becoming one of the leaders of the Continuum, and his having a child made one of the primary focuses of his life raising that child.
4. How much of your character's core personality is shaped by their career?
It's more interactive than that. His job was in part designed around his personality, and he was created in part to have the job that he has. So it's impossible to tell how much *having* the job has shaped him, when he was at least in part designed to do it and has been doing it for aeons.
5. How often do you write them in their work setting? Do you do research about the workplace and job that they do?
Well, obviously the kind of "work" that Q does is not something that any human being can or should do. :-) So I can't really do research. I do, reasonably often, write Q as acting in his capacity as an official representative of the Continuum or conducting an authorized test or intervention.
6. Is your character in a job that you do? Is it a job that you wish you could do, or admire?
No, Q's job is totally unrelated to mine, except that I trained in the social sciences and Q's job relies on them heavily. But no, no human could do his job, and I'm not sure anyone *should*, including him. :-) His job is one of the biggest moral ambiguities about him.
7. If your character is engaged in a career that involves criminal behavior, do you feel that you show the consequences in a balanced manner?
Yes. Q often does Very Bad Things in the course of trying to achieve a good result, and in several of my stories I explore what might end up happening to him as a result. In the RP journal, I mostly deal with the biggest canonical Very Bad Thing he did, and what he feels the repercussions were.
8. Do you write about the daily tasks and performance of this job?
Not really. It's not mundane enough to pull that off. Q doesn't punch a time clock or sit around a cubicle or fill out paperwork (well, actually, according to him he *does* fill out paperwork, but that's metaphorical as obviously there is no actual paper involved; he has to compose "reports", but his reports really consist more of editing together his memories and experiences and the facts that he has learned into a whole that supports his argument.)
9. How does the career of the character affect their relationships with others? Do you write about them?
Yes. Q's career makes him disliked pretty much everywhere, including at home, where he sees one of his major roles as being the guy who brings up everything that's wrong with everyone else's ideas.
10. Do you show the relation between the work the character does and how he pays his bills and meets his needs?
Only in a very abstract sense. Q doesn't have bills to pay, but he has pointed out in the RP journal that everything he owns, everything he *is*, is on loan from the Continuum, and should they decide to cut him off he would have nothing at all. So he sometimes has to modify the way he *wants* to do his job to match what his superiors expect of him.
1. Is your character actively engaged in fighting, battle or conflict with others? This does not have to be combat, per se, such as a warrior or soldier. It can also mean fighting with persons in authority, or domestic violence, or tense relations with teachers and others. Describe the types and frequency of conflict or battle that your character does.
Q *is* conflict. It's what he does. Not in the sense of war (although it's not really all that surprising that he was one of the major reasons for the only time his people have *ever* had a war), but in the sense of interpersonal conflict. He's essentially an omnipotent internet troll; he shows up in people's lives specifically to stir things up. He argues points that later episodes reveal he never agreed with in the first place. Even when he is *trying* to be conciliatory and beg others for help, he does obnoxious things and insults people; it's as if his whole persona was designed around how to generate as much interpersonal conflict as possible.
From this I decided that conflict is one of the driving forces of Q's life. He's in conflict with his own people -- both because the only way he can maintain his individuality is to stir up a certain degree of conflict, which is a trait all his people share (my fanon, not canon, but it bears out given that every other Q we've met who was raised in the Continuum has been arrogant and, if not insulting, at least totally unconcerned with the opinions of others... even the nicest one), and because it's his nature to challenge authority. He's in conflict with mortals because he foments it. He prefers to teach or guide mortals by presenting challenges for them to overcome rather than by being a mentor or educator. He plays devil's advocate, he adopts poses that are not what he believes, and he enjoys attracting negative attention.
2. Who is the primary antagonist (either individual or group) to your character?
Everyone. :-) I would say that while in the series we primarily see him pitted against Captain Jean-Luc Picard, he does not in fact think of Picard as his antagonist; he thinks of Picard as his gaming partner, someone he plays against who can actually occasionally beat him. I think *he* thinks of his primary antagonist as the Q Continuum... which is also the source of his power, his family, and the interpersonal relationships he's had for millions of years.
3. Does your character enjoy this conflict? Does he/she seek it out or instigate it? Do they gain from it?
Yes. Q enjoys conflict and instigates it as often as he can. What he gains from it, mostly, is entertainment... which, given that he is immortal, nigh-omniscient (at least, he can know anything he wants to know), and virtually omnipotent, yet he seems to be driven to try to learn and explore, may be sanity-saving for him. Boredom is Q's chief threat, the true "antagonist" of his entire existence, and anything he can do to assuage the boredom for even a little while has great appeal for him. When he enters conflict with the Continuum, it's either because he wants to do something to relieve his boredom that they don't want to let him do, in which case they kind of start it, or it's because he wants to reinforce his own independence and individuality, in which case he starts it.
4. What do you believe is their primary motivation for engaging in conflict, whether that is verbal or physical? Do they fight for money? Do they fight to keep people at a distance? Do they battle for a cause? Is the motivation different in different situations, or with different people?
Q is definitely interested in keeping people at a distance, to a certain extent. I believe that he wants to keep the other Q from being too close to him, because the Continuum functions as an overmind and if he's too close to any other Q he will start to be influenced by that person, and start to change to match who they are. With mortals, his poses and postures seem designed to keep mortals from really understanding who he is as a person, while at the same time reflecting enough of his true nature that it's not completely dissonant. He also may have as a goal that he should not be worshipped -- a godlike entity probably gets a *lot* of mortals trying to worship him, and his strong interest in Picard, who never worshipped him and never even tried to propitiate him and nowadays doesn't even particularly treat him with respect, may reflect that. As I write Q, he hates worship because mortals who claim to worship you ignore what you actually say in favor of what they want to do and then claim you told them to do it. If people are going to commit atrocities in his name, he'd prefer that they actually believe him to be demonic; then at least they're acknowledging that they're doing something bad. So one of his motives for stirring up conflict with mortals is to prevent them from worshipping him.
5. What has your character lost in conflicts/battles? What have they gained?
Mostly, Q gets what he wants out of conflict -- he gets to keep himself separate from the rest of the Continuum, keep mortals from worshipping him, and avoid boredom. But there are negative consequences to these things. The rest of the Continuum doesn't like him so much, respect him, or listen to him, which has to be wearying over the centuries. He avoids mortals' worship, but at the price of ever making them his friends, and since his behavior back home keeps him from keeping other Q as friends, he seems to *want* to make emotional connections with mortals. At one point, he was actually thrown out of the Continuum for his behavior, which terrified him into toeing the line and obeying the Continuum for a while.
Right now, in the time of his life that I play him, he's fought and won a civil war, so he's got a position of leadership and respect in the Continuum... which he doesn't know how to handle because he's never had any such thing. He also has a son, who he's frequently in conflict with, and he has lost his relationship with the mother of his son because she was so unhappy with how the son was turning out that she left both of them.
6. How do they handle conflict with persons closest to them?
Frequently. :-) It would probably be a nightmare to actually be close to Q, since his idea of fun is starting arguments, but since those who are closest to him are also Q, they're probably more comfortable with it.
7. Does your character handle defeat or loss in conflict/battle well? Are they a sore loser?
Not only is Q not a sore loser, he actually seems to outright enjoy losing -- or at least the possibility that he could lose. Although his *words* suggest petulance and anger when he loses a contest, the next time we see him he seems to be excited about starting a new one. He once described two incidents, one where Picard's crew passed his test and another where he was humiliated by losing a bid to make a human into a Q, as "all the good times I had with you!" (meaning Picard's crew.) Q handles *rejection* poorly -- at his best, he just keeps ignoring the rejection and showing up over and over again; at his worst he puts people who rejected him in life-threatening situations -- but losing a challenge doesn't seem to bother him.
8. Is your character able to move on after a fight/battle? Do they hold grudges?
Mostly, no, Q does not hold grudges. When he was turned human and begged sanctuary with Picard, Picard threw him in the brig, and while he was given the sanctuary and protection he was asking for, everyone treated him like an enormous annoyance and burden. Despite this, when he got his powers back he attempted to celebrate with Picard's crew, fixed a falling moon they'd been trying to save, and later showed up insisting that he wanted to give Picard a gift to repay him for saving his life (the "gift" turned kind of ugly, but this was after Picard had told him repeatedly that the only gift he wanted from Q was for Q to go away.) However, he does seem to have some sort of long-standing problem with a long-lived woman named Guinan.
9. How much of your muse's character and personality has been forged by conflict? For example, did they grow up in a hostile or violent atmosphere? Did they grow in a society where fighting was expected? Are they battle scarred or hardened by a defeat? Are they afraid of authority?
I believe that verbal conflict -- argument, sparring, manipulation, insults, and so forth -- is one of the dominant modes of communication within the Q Continuum, so in that sense Q has been forged in conflict his entire life. In other senses, not so much. It is very difficult to threaten a Q or cause them pain, and even after having suffered being turned into a human, Q doesn't seem to have much sense of fear or self-preservation when in *other* situations that could threaten him. In an actual physical fight against someone who could match him, Q behaves like someone who's been sheltered from suffering most of his life. He can display bravery, but it's the kind of bravery where people struggle to do the right thing despite being visibly terrified out of their wits, not the kind that's often shown on TV where people act like they're not even afraid.
10. When you write or roleplay conflict for your muse, do you enjoy it? Do you like writing fight scenes or emotionally charged conflict? Do you get upset, yourself, when your muse is in a fight? Do you find yourself "powergaming" or making other mistakes in conflict scenes?
I rarely get a chance to roleplay Q, but when I do I'm very, very conscious of the fact that he's usually the most powerful character there, and in journal roleplay, where there is no real game master, this means I have to moderate myself. I *can't* have Q do the kinds of things Q does unless I get the consent of the other players, which can slow things down. However, when everyone's on the same page I do enjoy playing him in conflict -- one time I had him appear on the NX-01 Enterprise (for RP reasons, Picard and Vash were there too), where he provoked the security officer, Malcolm Reed, into punching him, and then applauded and claimed to be happy because he'd actually gotten that reaction so quickly. Also, when the captain, Archer, told him to get off his ship, Q claimed that he was collecting starship captains telling him this. Q is a fun character to play in interpersonal conflict because he's *such* an asshole... as long as I feel like the other players are comfortable with that and are enjoying having their characters respond to his provocations.
When I write Q, I *love* putting him in situations where he's in genuine danger, because he's so much worse at dealing with it than most Star Trek characters are. But I've never had him in a roleplay situation where he was in actual danger. I'd love to do it sometime, though.
Prompt Number: Week 2 and 3
Title: Muse Inquiries
Muse Inquiries 2 - Work
1. What is your character's career or job? Did you determine this, or is this their job in canon?
It is actually very difficult to determine from canon if Q has a "job", or what it is if he does. What we see is that on four separate occasions, he interacts with the Enterprise crew while at least ostensibly representing the Q Continuum. On three of those occasions he is clearly performing a test; on the fourth, he is attempting to teach a Q child about her powers in order to persuade her to come to the Q Continuum, but this turns out to be a test as well -- he's supposed to determine whether or not she is truly a Q and get her to return to the Continuum if she is, or else kill her. On another occasion, he acts as a representative of the Continuum to the crew of Voyager while trying to recapture a renegade Q. On all other occasions, he appears to be on personal business of some sort, but three of his "personal business" stunts *also* resemble tests of some kind. So it does seem evident that Q acts as a representative of the Continuum, at least sometimes, and performs tests on other species, usually at their behest but sometimes on his own initiative.
From this, I guessed that Q's "job" is to study other species and perform tests on them, or to act as a representative of the Continuum to "lesser races", or both at the same time. We know that he does not have any "friends" among the "lesser races", or at least no one he would trust to take care of him if he were helpless except for Picard, and we know that other races feel he has tormented them, and that the Continuum itself has accused him of "spreading chaos throughout the universe." This looks like his modus operandi is probably usually to conduct tests by presenting himself as an antagonist and forcing beings to solve problems to escape the situations he puts them in, and that he enjoys doing this enough that he does it even when he's not specifically authorized to do it.
I ended up deriving from this, and from other things we see or hear, that originally Q's "job", the role he was created for, was as an explorer. The Q Continuum did not always know everything, and on the road to knowing everything it was important to have agents who would go out into the universe, explore it, and learn. Nowadays there is nothing left for them to explore -- they pretty much know everything. So now, Q's "job" is to study certain "lesser species" in depth by performing tests on them, and occasionally he goes overboard with it.
2. Is your character good at their job? Describe how you can see this, not only in their canon, but in how you play them.
It depends who's asking. Q appears to do things that his "superiors" did not authorize, frequently. I gather that while he enjoys his "job", his general frustration with the boredom of his existence leads him to go out and find excuses to do what he does even when he's not authorized to do it, and we know that he skirts around the spirit of the law pretty much all the time. The closest analogy would probably be a cross between the rogue vigilante cop archetype and the rogue scientist archetype. His own people don't consider him "good" at his job because he keeps breaking the rules while he does it, but he's probably very effective at getting the results he's trying to achieve.
When I play Q, I introduce elements to his backstory, incidents he played a role in for other species, that seem to me to be fundamentally similar to the things we know he did. Since I do tend to play him as a sympathetic character, albeit an asshole, most of these things are of the form "Q saves a planet by pretending to be a bad guy", "Q does something nasty to someone that ends up saving their species", "Q punishes beings that are doing something the readers would find morally reprehensible", or "Q mocks a species for some sort of failing (usually that the human author sees in humans and wants to mock) by putting them through a test that calls attention to this failing." Occasionally my Q does something very dark and conducts a test he knew ahead of time would almost certainly destroy the beings he was working with, or does something for personal amusement that ends up setting off a war or a disaster. Also, occasionally he does something completely benevolent... which he usually regrets, because this results in him being worshipped as a god, and as I play Q, he *hates* that.
3. Did you change or add a career to your character? If they are canon, did you change them from the career they had in the source material? If they are an OC, did you start out with one career for them, then change? If you changed their career, how much do you think this changed the character?
Canon appears to have changed Q's career. In the second-to-last episode he appears in, he fights in a civil war within his people for greater freedom; in the last episode we see him in, he is both an incredibly harried father with a bratty teenage son, and also appears to have much greater status among his own people than he used to. So as I write Q, his winning the war resulted in him becoming one of the leaders of the Continuum, and his having a child made one of the primary focuses of his life raising that child.
4. How much of your character's core personality is shaped by their career?
It's more interactive than that. His job was in part designed around his personality, and he was created in part to have the job that he has. So it's impossible to tell how much *having* the job has shaped him, when he was at least in part designed to do it and has been doing it for aeons.
5. How often do you write them in their work setting? Do you do research about the workplace and job that they do?
Well, obviously the kind of "work" that Q does is not something that any human being can or should do. :-) So I can't really do research. I do, reasonably often, write Q as acting in his capacity as an official representative of the Continuum or conducting an authorized test or intervention.
6. Is your character in a job that you do? Is it a job that you wish you could do, or admire?
No, Q's job is totally unrelated to mine, except that I trained in the social sciences and Q's job relies on them heavily. But no, no human could do his job, and I'm not sure anyone *should*, including him. :-) His job is one of the biggest moral ambiguities about him.
7. If your character is engaged in a career that involves criminal behavior, do you feel that you show the consequences in a balanced manner?
Yes. Q often does Very Bad Things in the course of trying to achieve a good result, and in several of my stories I explore what might end up happening to him as a result. In the RP journal, I mostly deal with the biggest canonical Very Bad Thing he did, and what he feels the repercussions were.
8. Do you write about the daily tasks and performance of this job?
Not really. It's not mundane enough to pull that off. Q doesn't punch a time clock or sit around a cubicle or fill out paperwork (well, actually, according to him he *does* fill out paperwork, but that's metaphorical as obviously there is no actual paper involved; he has to compose "reports", but his reports really consist more of editing together his memories and experiences and the facts that he has learned into a whole that supports his argument.)
9. How does the career of the character affect their relationships with others? Do you write about them?
Yes. Q's career makes him disliked pretty much everywhere, including at home, where he sees one of his major roles as being the guy who brings up everything that's wrong with everyone else's ideas.
10. Do you show the relation between the work the character does and how he pays his bills and meets his needs?
Only in a very abstract sense. Q doesn't have bills to pay, but he has pointed out in the RP journal that everything he owns, everything he *is*, is on loan from the Continuum, and should they decide to cut him off he would have nothing at all. So he sometimes has to modify the way he *wants* to do his job to match what his superiors expect of him.
1. Is your character actively engaged in fighting, battle or conflict with others? This does not have to be combat, per se, such as a warrior or soldier. It can also mean fighting with persons in authority, or domestic violence, or tense relations with teachers and others. Describe the types and frequency of conflict or battle that your character does.
Q *is* conflict. It's what he does. Not in the sense of war (although it's not really all that surprising that he was one of the major reasons for the only time his people have *ever* had a war), but in the sense of interpersonal conflict. He's essentially an omnipotent internet troll; he shows up in people's lives specifically to stir things up. He argues points that later episodes reveal he never agreed with in the first place. Even when he is *trying* to be conciliatory and beg others for help, he does obnoxious things and insults people; it's as if his whole persona was designed around how to generate as much interpersonal conflict as possible.
From this I decided that conflict is one of the driving forces of Q's life. He's in conflict with his own people -- both because the only way he can maintain his individuality is to stir up a certain degree of conflict, which is a trait all his people share (my fanon, not canon, but it bears out given that every other Q we've met who was raised in the Continuum has been arrogant and, if not insulting, at least totally unconcerned with the opinions of others... even the nicest one), and because it's his nature to challenge authority. He's in conflict with mortals because he foments it. He prefers to teach or guide mortals by presenting challenges for them to overcome rather than by being a mentor or educator. He plays devil's advocate, he adopts poses that are not what he believes, and he enjoys attracting negative attention.
2. Who is the primary antagonist (either individual or group) to your character?
Everyone. :-) I would say that while in the series we primarily see him pitted against Captain Jean-Luc Picard, he does not in fact think of Picard as his antagonist; he thinks of Picard as his gaming partner, someone he plays against who can actually occasionally beat him. I think *he* thinks of his primary antagonist as the Q Continuum... which is also the source of his power, his family, and the interpersonal relationships he's had for millions of years.
3. Does your character enjoy this conflict? Does he/she seek it out or instigate it? Do they gain from it?
Yes. Q enjoys conflict and instigates it as often as he can. What he gains from it, mostly, is entertainment... which, given that he is immortal, nigh-omniscient (at least, he can know anything he wants to know), and virtually omnipotent, yet he seems to be driven to try to learn and explore, may be sanity-saving for him. Boredom is Q's chief threat, the true "antagonist" of his entire existence, and anything he can do to assuage the boredom for even a little while has great appeal for him. When he enters conflict with the Continuum, it's either because he wants to do something to relieve his boredom that they don't want to let him do, in which case they kind of start it, or it's because he wants to reinforce his own independence and individuality, in which case he starts it.
4. What do you believe is their primary motivation for engaging in conflict, whether that is verbal or physical? Do they fight for money? Do they fight to keep people at a distance? Do they battle for a cause? Is the motivation different in different situations, or with different people?
Q is definitely interested in keeping people at a distance, to a certain extent. I believe that he wants to keep the other Q from being too close to him, because the Continuum functions as an overmind and if he's too close to any other Q he will start to be influenced by that person, and start to change to match who they are. With mortals, his poses and postures seem designed to keep mortals from really understanding who he is as a person, while at the same time reflecting enough of his true nature that it's not completely dissonant. He also may have as a goal that he should not be worshipped -- a godlike entity probably gets a *lot* of mortals trying to worship him, and his strong interest in Picard, who never worshipped him and never even tried to propitiate him and nowadays doesn't even particularly treat him with respect, may reflect that. As I write Q, he hates worship because mortals who claim to worship you ignore what you actually say in favor of what they want to do and then claim you told them to do it. If people are going to commit atrocities in his name, he'd prefer that they actually believe him to be demonic; then at least they're acknowledging that they're doing something bad. So one of his motives for stirring up conflict with mortals is to prevent them from worshipping him.
5. What has your character lost in conflicts/battles? What have they gained?
Mostly, Q gets what he wants out of conflict -- he gets to keep himself separate from the rest of the Continuum, keep mortals from worshipping him, and avoid boredom. But there are negative consequences to these things. The rest of the Continuum doesn't like him so much, respect him, or listen to him, which has to be wearying over the centuries. He avoids mortals' worship, but at the price of ever making them his friends, and since his behavior back home keeps him from keeping other Q as friends, he seems to *want* to make emotional connections with mortals. At one point, he was actually thrown out of the Continuum for his behavior, which terrified him into toeing the line and obeying the Continuum for a while.
Right now, in the time of his life that I play him, he's fought and won a civil war, so he's got a position of leadership and respect in the Continuum... which he doesn't know how to handle because he's never had any such thing. He also has a son, who he's frequently in conflict with, and he has lost his relationship with the mother of his son because she was so unhappy with how the son was turning out that she left both of them.
6. How do they handle conflict with persons closest to them?
Frequently. :-) It would probably be a nightmare to actually be close to Q, since his idea of fun is starting arguments, but since those who are closest to him are also Q, they're probably more comfortable with it.
7. Does your character handle defeat or loss in conflict/battle well? Are they a sore loser?
Not only is Q not a sore loser, he actually seems to outright enjoy losing -- or at least the possibility that he could lose. Although his *words* suggest petulance and anger when he loses a contest, the next time we see him he seems to be excited about starting a new one. He once described two incidents, one where Picard's crew passed his test and another where he was humiliated by losing a bid to make a human into a Q, as "all the good times I had with you!" (meaning Picard's crew.) Q handles *rejection* poorly -- at his best, he just keeps ignoring the rejection and showing up over and over again; at his worst he puts people who rejected him in life-threatening situations -- but losing a challenge doesn't seem to bother him.
8. Is your character able to move on after a fight/battle? Do they hold grudges?
Mostly, no, Q does not hold grudges. When he was turned human and begged sanctuary with Picard, Picard threw him in the brig, and while he was given the sanctuary and protection he was asking for, everyone treated him like an enormous annoyance and burden. Despite this, when he got his powers back he attempted to celebrate with Picard's crew, fixed a falling moon they'd been trying to save, and later showed up insisting that he wanted to give Picard a gift to repay him for saving his life (the "gift" turned kind of ugly, but this was after Picard had told him repeatedly that the only gift he wanted from Q was for Q to go away.) However, he does seem to have some sort of long-standing problem with a long-lived woman named Guinan.
9. How much of your muse's character and personality has been forged by conflict? For example, did they grow up in a hostile or violent atmosphere? Did they grow in a society where fighting was expected? Are they battle scarred or hardened by a defeat? Are they afraid of authority?
I believe that verbal conflict -- argument, sparring, manipulation, insults, and so forth -- is one of the dominant modes of communication within the Q Continuum, so in that sense Q has been forged in conflict his entire life. In other senses, not so much. It is very difficult to threaten a Q or cause them pain, and even after having suffered being turned into a human, Q doesn't seem to have much sense of fear or self-preservation when in *other* situations that could threaten him. In an actual physical fight against someone who could match him, Q behaves like someone who's been sheltered from suffering most of his life. He can display bravery, but it's the kind of bravery where people struggle to do the right thing despite being visibly terrified out of their wits, not the kind that's often shown on TV where people act like they're not even afraid.
10. When you write or roleplay conflict for your muse, do you enjoy it? Do you like writing fight scenes or emotionally charged conflict? Do you get upset, yourself, when your muse is in a fight? Do you find yourself "powergaming" or making other mistakes in conflict scenes?
I rarely get a chance to roleplay Q, but when I do I'm very, very conscious of the fact that he's usually the most powerful character there, and in journal roleplay, where there is no real game master, this means I have to moderate myself. I *can't* have Q do the kinds of things Q does unless I get the consent of the other players, which can slow things down. However, when everyone's on the same page I do enjoy playing him in conflict -- one time I had him appear on the NX-01 Enterprise (for RP reasons, Picard and Vash were there too), where he provoked the security officer, Malcolm Reed, into punching him, and then applauded and claimed to be happy because he'd actually gotten that reaction so quickly. Also, when the captain, Archer, told him to get off his ship, Q claimed that he was collecting starship captains telling him this. Q is a fun character to play in interpersonal conflict because he's *such* an asshole... as long as I feel like the other players are comfortable with that and are enjoying having their characters respond to his provocations.
When I write Q, I *love* putting him in situations where he's in genuine danger, because he's so much worse at dealing with it than most Star Trek characters are. But I've never had him in a roleplay situation where he was in actual danger. I'd love to do it sometime, though.