Character Analysis
I've done this once or twice before. I think it's time to do it again, because I think that Song has finally settled on a plan that cannot be changed by events around her. For once. This is why she went very suddenly from being her usual emotionally and mentally distraught self to being bizarrely content and confident.
(please note my extremely appropriate userpic :p )
The thing about playing Songbird is that I simply cannot make any reliable plans for her future, because, just like me, she changes her mind with almost every new bit of information she gains. However, certain things have been set in stone now - if very obscurely - and I do believe that Song has made up her mind about one thing, and that it will determine her future.
Allow me to explain something about myself, which i may have explained before, but it's especially pertinent now. I am not a leader by nature. I prefer to follow, but not in a sense of being inferior. I simply latch on to someone with similar interests and let that person make most of the decisions about where to go and what to do. Meanwhile, I sit back and think, because while I'm always thinking and theorizing, I take my time to do so and am more efficient at it when I don't also have to focus on making the more immediate decisions. I might come up with great ideas, but I am admittedly rather slow.
The point is that I need other people in order to function at my best, or preferably one other person who is a more proficient leader than myself. When with a group of friends, I am the one who walks at the back and doesn't talk much, but listens, until a chance for that great idea comes up. Otherwise I act like a loner, but stay in close contact with at least one friend. For example, I've following Aurora throughout high school (even setting myself a year behind because she's a year younger than me, which I was able to do because I had been homeschooled up until that point) and keeping her as my roommate while I'm half a country away from everyone else I know, out here hunting my own ambitions.
Here's how this all relates to Song. I am letting my instincts guide me in order to play her, as I always have. Letting her "play herself" in a way, and though it was quite hard up until recently, she is done mourning for Xemnas. It wasn't my decision, but my feelings on the matter. Thinking about Xemnas while letting myself sink into the Songbird character has suddenly stopped hurting so much, so she's done.
Her feelings toward Orpheus are still... rather odd. It's not the same love that she felt for Xemnas, and it never really was, but she does care about him very deeply. Exactly how much so I can't even find the word for. There isn't really a sexual aspect to it as there was for Xemnas, but it's a more desperate feeling than the love for a sibling or best friend. She yearns to see him, to touch his face, to give him chaste kisses, to be held by him, but anything more physically intimate than that would only be to please him. She wouldn't mind, but she doesn't need it. The intimacy she wants is with his mind and heart.
Not friend, not lover. The only word that fits in my mind is companion, and that probably has to do with the Companions in my favorite book series, who share deep, lifelong bonds with their Heralds. And again, this is all based on what I feel when I do that empathy thing. Nothing planned.
Whatever it is she feels, he is the person she's latched onto. The fact that Orpheus actually asked her to follow him, where previously he wanted to be alone, really settles the whole thing in her mind.
For the curious and because I find it somewhat interesting myself, the chain of people whom she's attached herself to throughout her entire life and mine goes like this: Mabry (starting after I met her at five years old)
Aurora (starting around twelve, though I knew her all my life)
Ryuu (starting after Song lost her heart)
Xemnas (starting when she joined the Organization)
She only switched over to Orpheus completely a week or two ago. Five people in a lifetime of 22 years (-2 months), and three of those within the last two, kind of shows how important the person has to be.
As a follower, she needs to be needed.
This is why she's practically desperate to help people, solve problems, and generally try to make things better, why she's trying so hard to get her Element working efficiently again, and why she came back to the Refugees in the first place.
Thus, her plan - once she is finished helping the Refugees fix a few things (she will most likely NOT stay to the end of Final Mix) - is to follow Orpheus into the other world he's found and stay by his side wherever he goes. Despite all that mind-changing, when she does settle on something like this, she is very determined to stick with it unless circumstances change enough to shake her off, which means that as long as he lets her and there is no other pressing reason to stop, she will find him and stay with him, or die trying.
It is said that one must find one's own way into Waking, and that the journey is part of the destination. I get the sense that simply tagging along after someone else, wanting to stay with that person more than actually wanting to Wake, wouldn't normally be the best way to go about it, and might not even work, but I also think that my very nature as the sort of follower I've described may serve as something of a counter to that, along with Song's past experience and intuition about such things. Once she realizes what the Wake is and how it works, she will want it as much as she currently wants to be with him, naturally.
I am so TL;DR when I start talking psychology. Sorry.
But aside from explaining what's going on in my character's head right now for anyone who happens to care or is just really bored and wants something long to read, this is also directed at Ryuu and Ryune, because this is why I am so curious about Orpheus in the Wake. It was never that I expected him to appear in it, but that whatever his fate was, it determines Song's, if she is able to follow him that far.
And as a side note while I'm talking character development... about the name use, it should really be Robin now, but it's just terribly awkward to use my own name in third-person so much, and the nickname Song has really stuck. It's kind of funny, because I didn't like that shortening at first. It seemed too simple and somehow generic. Now I like it better than Songbird.
(please note my extremely appropriate userpic :p )
The thing about playing Songbird is that I simply cannot make any reliable plans for her future, because, just like me, she changes her mind with almost every new bit of information she gains. However, certain things have been set in stone now - if very obscurely - and I do believe that Song has made up her mind about one thing, and that it will determine her future.
Allow me to explain something about myself, which i may have explained before, but it's especially pertinent now. I am not a leader by nature. I prefer to follow, but not in a sense of being inferior. I simply latch on to someone with similar interests and let that person make most of the decisions about where to go and what to do. Meanwhile, I sit back and think, because while I'm always thinking and theorizing, I take my time to do so and am more efficient at it when I don't also have to focus on making the more immediate decisions. I might come up with great ideas, but I am admittedly rather slow.
The point is that I need other people in order to function at my best, or preferably one other person who is a more proficient leader than myself. When with a group of friends, I am the one who walks at the back and doesn't talk much, but listens, until a chance for that great idea comes up. Otherwise I act like a loner, but stay in close contact with at least one friend. For example, I've following Aurora throughout high school (even setting myself a year behind because she's a year younger than me, which I was able to do because I had been homeschooled up until that point) and keeping her as my roommate while I'm half a country away from everyone else I know, out here hunting my own ambitions.
Here's how this all relates to Song. I am letting my instincts guide me in order to play her, as I always have. Letting her "play herself" in a way, and though it was quite hard up until recently, she is done mourning for Xemnas. It wasn't my decision, but my feelings on the matter. Thinking about Xemnas while letting myself sink into the Songbird character has suddenly stopped hurting so much, so she's done.
Her feelings toward Orpheus are still... rather odd. It's not the same love that she felt for Xemnas, and it never really was, but she does care about him very deeply. Exactly how much so I can't even find the word for. There isn't really a sexual aspect to it as there was for Xemnas, but it's a more desperate feeling than the love for a sibling or best friend. She yearns to see him, to touch his face, to give him chaste kisses, to be held by him, but anything more physically intimate than that would only be to please him. She wouldn't mind, but she doesn't need it. The intimacy she wants is with his mind and heart.
Not friend, not lover. The only word that fits in my mind is companion, and that probably has to do with the Companions in my favorite book series, who share deep, lifelong bonds with their Heralds. And again, this is all based on what I feel when I do that empathy thing. Nothing planned.
Whatever it is she feels, he is the person she's latched onto. The fact that Orpheus actually asked her to follow him, where previously he wanted to be alone, really settles the whole thing in her mind.
For the curious and because I find it somewhat interesting myself, the chain of people whom she's attached herself to throughout her entire life and mine goes like this: Mabry (starting after I met her at five years old)
Aurora (starting around twelve, though I knew her all my life)
Ryuu (starting after Song lost her heart)
Xemnas (starting when she joined the Organization)
She only switched over to Orpheus completely a week or two ago. Five people in a lifetime of 22 years (-2 months), and three of those within the last two, kind of shows how important the person has to be.
As a follower, she needs to be needed.
This is why she's practically desperate to help people, solve problems, and generally try to make things better, why she's trying so hard to get her Element working efficiently again, and why she came back to the Refugees in the first place.
Thus, her plan - once she is finished helping the Refugees fix a few things (she will most likely NOT stay to the end of Final Mix) - is to follow Orpheus into the other world he's found and stay by his side wherever he goes. Despite all that mind-changing, when she does settle on something like this, she is very determined to stick with it unless circumstances change enough to shake her off, which means that as long as he lets her and there is no other pressing reason to stop, she will find him and stay with him, or die trying.
It is said that one must find one's own way into Waking, and that the journey is part of the destination. I get the sense that simply tagging along after someone else, wanting to stay with that person more than actually wanting to Wake, wouldn't normally be the best way to go about it, and might not even work, but I also think that my very nature as the sort of follower I've described may serve as something of a counter to that, along with Song's past experience and intuition about such things. Once she realizes what the Wake is and how it works, she will want it as much as she currently wants to be with him, naturally.
I am so TL;DR when I start talking psychology. Sorry.
But aside from explaining what's going on in my character's head right now for anyone who happens to care or is just really bored and wants something long to read, this is also directed at Ryuu and Ryune, because this is why I am so curious about Orpheus in the Wake. It was never that I expected him to appear in it, but that whatever his fate was, it determines Song's, if she is able to follow him that far.
And as a side note while I'm talking character development... about the name use, it should really be Robin now, but it's just terribly awkward to use my own name in third-person so much, and the nickname Song has really stuck. It's kind of funny, because I didn't like that shortening at first. It seemed too simple and somehow generic. Now I like it better than Songbird.