doesnothappen | Question Meme!

Obvious first question: but how is Mau feeling about being a legacy hero?

Anything new relationshipwise?

=3

Mainly good! He really feels like it's the most important thing he can be doing right now; if the Darkness threatens every world, and the fight is here, then being here for the fight is the most direct thing he can do to protect his world, and even before he knew that, he thought he'd probably stay just because he feels responsible for Aather and the people in Aather now, too. He doesn't want to leave a job half done! Besides, he's genuinely happy to get to stay with Sapphire and all his friends here. Aather also continues to present learning opportunities for Mau that he would never have at home, which he plans to take full advantage of for as long as he's around.

So there were a lot of factors to his decision, and he's very confident that it was the right one, and overall he's glad and full of teamdere and brodere and looking forward to the party. It's just that he's also gut-wrenchingly homesick. He could have gone home. He could be home in his Nation right now, today, and he isn't. He saw home for ten seconds like he was really there, and that's going to have to last him until he leaves... and who knows how long it will be until then? So he's going to take a minute to be devastated by himself, and then he'll go back to doing what he's doing.

How is Selenia feeling about Mau legacying?

Well possibly if you count Ned being even more uncomfortable about the fact that he's attracted to Naha now that she's sleeping with Jason, who is sleeping with Dirk. There is just too much sharing going on! He can't kiss the lips that have kissed his kids!! And so on.

But he liiiiiikes her. I feel like you have heard this song before XD

REVERSE?!

THAT'S NOT A QUESTION I will just talk about you.

Ned is actually in a healthier and less codependent place with Rider than the place I thought he was heading to! Mainly his heart was a big boost to his confidence that he can take care of his kids and not do it wrong, plus he no longer fears losing Rider, so there's less impetus to be insanely clingy. He's still super worried about him and he still adores him and feels this ridiculous irrational pride whenever Rider appears to be doing okay with himself, but there's a lot less fear wound through everything.

He just really wants him to be okay and wants to spend time with him and... be his dad okay he probably might acknowledge that that's something he wishes were a reality soon if it doesn't seem terribly inappropriate at the time. '-'

Although he'll probably avoid doing it while Rider is having this many feelings/repressed feelings about Stoic.

Reverse?

Mau. ;;

Selenia is really glad that Mau was able to stay. He started getting worried when Mau was getting strange 'not memories' since that meant Mau likely had all his actual memories by then and was going to finish soon...which meant there was a high chance Mau was going to leave . But that didn't happen and Mau is staying for as long as he Sapphire needs him and Selenia feels as though Mau is still needed .

...There is some slight jealousy over Mau's window but he's making an effort to be reasonable since Mau earned that damn window. He'll probably get over it, or just use it as an incentive to not put off his own memories since he too could someday get a window.

How is Mau feeling about Selenia's "I feel like I have a chance, and I want it" comment? Since they butt heads on the points of chance and want a lot in the past.

That is fair. And yes, you don't have to repeat it. XD

On no, Naha made something feel incestuous. Sob. I feel this is probably IC.

BUT. Yes, some changes, mostly because of heart game stuff. Naha is pretty bad at maintaining the boundaries between family/platonic/sexual love in general, and the family/sexual line is actually prettyyyyyy strong in Aather because of Ruby, but the friendship/sex line was pretty blurry to start with, and between people sleeping with Naha in her heart and boosting that aspect of her it's even worse. So her feelings haven't changed all that much--she likes him! And enjoys his company. And finds him comfortable to be around! More so, even, since Jason boosted his place in her heart! But he's definitely inside the area of "hard to remember that sex is not an appropriate or welcome means of expressing affection." She will try to be mindful of it... but being mindful is not her strong suit, especially when he is attracted to her.

Sob. I will. Try not to be too annoying with this. I just find it both hilarious and... sob.

How do you feel about the way Ned's heart game went?

Pretty thrilled! He doesn't want to put too much weight on it in terms of predicting what Selenia will think about the subject three days from now, but he thinks it's a good sign. He thinks it's a sign of security that Selenia's able to acknowledge that he's taking a chance on something. In Mau's experience, if Selenia is feeling particularly insecure, he'll try to grab for control of anything possible, even miniscule things, and also will make even more ridiculous blanket statements than usual along the lines of "this is the way things are, this is the way they are going to go," when clearly he's just theorizing wildly and should accurately be saying, "I wonder if this is true, do you think we could steer things this way?"

In Mau's mind, this is what Selenia's opinion that if you are offered a 100% chance of death and a 50% chance of death, you should take the 100% boils down to: he doesn't really want the 50% chance of life anyway, and even if he did, it's outweighed by his huge fear of uncertainty. So to him, Selenia saying "I have a chance, and I want it," either means that he wants something (something positive, something belonging to life, something that isn't murder or suicide) enough that it's outweighing his fear, or that he's gained enough general security in his status in the world/team/his own mind that the fear has lightened in proportion to the want, or both. Either way, that's a good thing!

And yeah, I mean, really one of the huge things that Mau hopes for Selenia is that he'll be able to want things in the world even if he can't control them, and will be confident enough to seek them out (and stable enough to accept it and move on and try again if he can't have them after all but you know, Mau is a dreamer) so. HE HOPES THAT IS WHAT IS BEGINNING TO GO ON HERE he hopes Selenia will be happy '-'

NOW TELL ME WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON WITH ALL THAT.

No no it's not annoying, I also find it hilarious, because... it... is...

Anyway! I am overall pretty pleased with how Ned's heart went, because really my goal was to make him less... on the edge of mental collapse... SO THAT SUCCEEDED. I was hoping someone would wake up Chuck, since she is the agent of change and creative self repair, but that didn't happen. There's a terrible part of me that is disappointed that people didn't do... more terrible things... but I did skew the heart in favor of not making it worse, so! Yes.

What were your favorite things that happened in Naha's heart?

JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING? It was the first heart game I've run, and I liked it a lot more than I expected to. I mean I thought it would be cool and I wanted to run it, but I wasn't sure how much I'd enjoy actually running it. But I did.

Generally speaking, I kind of love how not awful things went. Naha's heart was actually pretty fragile, and there were a lot of things that could have gone wrong but didn't, so that was pretty cool.

Specifically, I love that Cass like... started fixing Tempa's CR insofar as it could be fixed, but stopped partway through and then BOOSTED IT LIKE THAT. It is interesting. I'm not sure what it will lead to in the long run. In the short run it's mostly confusing for Naha. But I love that it happened.

I really liked Jason and Oz getting to Sky. That was pretty awesome.

I find it hilarious that Jason had sex and then ran off to get killed, while Spike immediately ran off to get killed and then had sex after he died. The inversion is far more hilarious than the sex itself. ...Though to some degree at that point I was going, HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? HOW DID THIS HAPPEN AGAIN?

It was just a lot of fun.

Were there things in Ned's heart otherwise that you were hoping would be found and weren't?

I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT MUCH in case I run another heart for him sometime, but basically there are whole areas that are only accessible when Chuck is awake and running around in there, so. YES!!!! :U

As for stuff in the rooms that were actually open, no, not really! The accessible areas were pretty small, so.

Tell me about Naha's sex life and also Tempa.

It's kind of hilarious that while Apollo got better, Rider got worse. Apollo is currently getting near Toothless levels of codependence. (It's hard to compete with soul bonded destiny spirit brother thing.) Apollo is basically the reason Rider keeps trying. Mau got him started, but if Rider kept going on his own, he would just stall out and roll back to depression. He can convince himself that anyone else really wouldn't be THAT upset if he just disappeared or something, but he just...can't with Apollo.

I think it's especially so because Apollo is the ONE person who managed to get Rider to accept he really does care that much without any tsun being involved. Mostly because of the parental feels! He keeps doing parental things that Rider can recognize as being that without having gotten much of it and it just gives him so many feels. Yet he doesn't try to be an authority like Stoick does, which is good! Rider hates being seen as incapable, so getting enough respect to not just be ordered means a lot. Even Apollo keeps seeing him do incredibly stupid things and while he's unhappy with Rider getting hurt and such, he's still supporting him and takes care of him afterwards and it's just...FEELS.

And now Rider has remembered his own father disowning him, which while he expected, was not really as prepared as he thought, and was still heart breaking on it's own and there was Apollo, still caring and supporting. And despite the fact Rider doesn't think he deserves anything nice, he can't deny he wants to be close to someone, and Apollo is just always THERE and CARING, no matter what he does and it's actually enough to be kind of painful right now.. He wants it, but doesn't think he deserves it, and he doesn't want to hurt Apollo, so in the end, Rider keeps trying to be get better. Because he wants Apollo to be happy.

He just doesn't know how to do it. There's just those dark little voices and fears in his head and he doesn't know how to deal with it or even form words most of the time. So he bottles. But then he tries to be less so with Apollo. He's also getting more touchy with Apollo because he's the one he's depending on. (Re: that Toothless comparison. Hiccup touches Toothless a lot, doesn't touch others much.) Unless others are visibly distressed, he won't be touching them., He's trying to open up more and he's finding it easier and easier for the same reason. Which is kind of good in getting him functional, unsure how well it'd go for his tendencies to become codependent. I mean, he attacked Dirk because of how protective he was, so...yeah. It could dig up what few violent tendencies Rider does have in him. Rider will not hold grudges on attacks upon himself, but he's kind of holding onto them when it concerns Apollo. So maybe not the most healthy.

MOSTLY THERE IS A LOT OF DERE, AND BEING KIND OF UNHEALTHY, but trying so hard to get better for you, sorry I'm a failure at it. '-'

How about Mau?

Mau really likes Rider! He's smart, he knows how to work iron, he invents stuff, he cares about other people, he's brave, he's friendly... right off the bat, Mau considers him a friend, with potential to be a very good friend and ally. He's also worried about him, because um... wandering around BSODing at the world in the rain is generally a cause for worry... yes...

He's a little bit unsure about all of his speeching at Rider, because it was very personal and he's aware that he was projecting a little, but he also considers that since it wound up with Rider saying full sentences, it was a success, because literally all he was trying to accomplish was to get Rider to express outwardly a bit -- at least that would be better than what he was doing before. He's been wanting to drop by Heliodor and see how Rider's doing, but he's a) not sure he'd be welcome and b) not sure it's any of his business, since it's a bit beyond harassing Rider if he happens to run into him ~~and c) I do not have enough brain to ever tag a team post with one of my other characters~~.

BUT YEAH idk forgebro is a bro, although not a close friend, and it's sad that he remembered something super traumatizing and Mau hopes he'll be okay.

Reverse again!

Interesting that you should mention security cause that is actually what it kind of boils down to. Selenia pretty much entered the ring with the whole disorienting amnesia thing that is frightfully common in these parts and was uncertain to begin with, and then he was surrounded by people giving him these horrified looks and then MORE THAN ONE PERSON felt the need to grab him and hurry him off to Sapphire for his own safety, and all he was able to gather was that apparently he did something terrible and people wanted revenge for it. He also regained memories of being alone or being ostracized fairly early on while he was making various missteps with the Tales of cast and generally just...felt as though his 'second chance' could be taken away at any instant. So he's pretty insecure most of the time and feels as though he could be abandoned at any moment (which results in wonderful things like "I'LL BURN ALL MY BRIDGES BECAUSE THEY'RE INEVITABLY GOING TO BE BURNED AND I WANT TO BE THE ONE HOLDING THE MATCHES").

However, Pandora's game calmed down his intense paranoia of THEY'LL SLAUGHTER SAPPHIRE TO GET REVENGE FROM ME since...Sapphire was obviously not slaughtered, and while he can still twist it to "Well, they just liked my teammates more than they hate me" that's still an acknowledgement that people don't hate him that much.

He's also got some off-team CR that's helping give him purpose in the form of Echo and...Jabberwock. He and Echo had a thread a long while back about how they both had purposes they no longer wanted, and they kind of both talked each other into working together to make Aather a place where people can find their own purposes. Oftentimes Selenia doubts this ideal, but he feels that Echo's well-being is hinging on that ideal being a real possibility so he has to talk about it in ways to make her believe it's an achievable goal and sometimes he manages to convince himself with it when he does. And right now he's helping Echo with a major quest/heart game run to help her deal with Zwei so he has to talk himself into a "Yes, something can be done" state in order to...get stuff done and set aside his own pessimism.

...Then there's Jabberwock, who so far has been the one person that Selenia looked at and went "THIS IS SOMEONE LIKE ME", in the sense that Jabberwock is a currently homeless creature with a moral code that is very different from 'the norm', it doesn't seem to always understand things (as Jabberwock actually admitted it didn't understand why someone would self-sacrifice ~~for all of two comments~~), and it seems to get confused whenever someone does something nice for it or just show interest in its well-being. So Selenia has decided he will be its friend because he can't really see a scenario in which being friendly would somehow make it more murderous.

So yes! It does play into security, in that a lot of different events have led up to him feeling that he both a) has a place in the world and b) can also make a new place for himself and others, if he just kept going for it.

I don't know if you talked about it someplace else, but I know Jill and Amethyst got hit hard during Pandora's game and also talked with Edmund about how weird it was to have adults want to protect you from harm, so I'm curious about how that might've affected her overall view of trauma games. :O

lol I just. YES OKAY.

This is pretty interesting to me at least. Up until relatively recently in Aather, Naha didn't actually have much of a sex life. She'd had sex with two people, and both times were pretty much entirely based on an economy of comfort/self-comfort. Like, Naha had slept with Nii! Pretty much it happened because she was angry and needed a distraction/as a method of self-comfort (since Nii certainly wasn't offering comfort.) She also made a pass at Itachi asking for a somewhat more mutual comfort which he turned down. Probably wisely.

But she kept getting positive sex memories (seriously, so many positive sex memories) and while she's gotten negative memories, few of them were of the stuff that really hurts Naha's relationship with sex. Which means that while Naha is pretty precarious, while she is healthy, and with the memory set she's had, she moved into a place of expanding sex to a means of sharing affection and attention beyond comfort, which eventually led to sleeping with Cass. Their relationship is based a lot of Cass's need for affection and approval, and Naha's desire (for now, at least) to provide that. And Naha enjoys it and cares for Cass, so it was pretty good in that respect!

Jason kind of falls back to comfort a little, but Naha was offering comfort from a very different place. She does like him, and he's surprisingly good at getting her to want to be tender for him. Not to fix him. Naha isn't really a fixer. But yes, offering comfort and companionship in a style with which Naha is confident.

Spike is. How to put this. Like. Entirely for fun. He is totally for funsies. Naha likes him! And I don't say this to say it's shallow exactly. In some ways, Naha is probably the healthiest there because it really is like. We could have fun casual sex let's do that. Yes.

So circling back to Cass, their relationship has been getting to a better place since the whole flare up of jealousy, and Cass has been taking interesting steps with her. So it's. Actually all pretty good! And I wouldn't call it balanced, exactly, but it's in a surprisingly healthy place, which could also be said of all of Naha's sex life at this point. Or Naha in general!

SO LIKE SEGUEING IN TO TEMPA, he is. Difficult. So difficult. And so relevant because Naha still wants him. Naha always wants him. He was her primary lover for pretty much ever, and even when that changed it wasn't in any way or by any means because Naha stopped loving him or being attracted to him. But. Naha. Hates him. A lot. Too. So much hate. And it will probably get worse before it gets better because I have some nice huge sig negs still to come in that respect. And so that's difficult, and something Naha cuts off for now without too much trouble because of the hate.

And in light of that, her sex life in Aather, even if it is surprisingly healthy, is something of a stop gap instead of just being a healthy expression of a very, very sexual god.'-'

And in that vein, she does use it (and uses Ruby), to reinforce a particular version of herself, the healthier version, that she'd rather be. It creates a type of feedback, and expectation, that Naha responds to and helps her put on a good show of being healthier than she actually is. So to a degree it's still a tool which Naha deploys on some level to "control" herself when she can't actually control herself. Similar, in a way, to arranging things so she didn't kill Van. Though less damaging in a lot of ways... um. It still on the one hand keeps her surprisingly healthy, and on the other contributes to that health being very precarious.

...I could babble about this forever. I will stop there.'-'

Canon mates you desperately want?

Jill's view of trauma games is and has always been that they're terrible and shouldn't be allowed and she honestly hasn't really thought about them beyond that. Jill is bright and a quick thinker, but she doesn't tend to examine her own thinking or have deeply thought through opinions on... anything... unless someone actually asks her direct questions and keeps pursuing her to answer more fully. So it didn't have a lot of effect? TRAUMA GAMES ARE STUPID AND I DON'T LIKE IT WHEN WE HAVE TO HURT EACH OTHER :U an essay by Jill Pole the end.

How's Saya doin?

TELL ME ... a cute worldhopping fantasy you have for Mau post-Aather when he does eventually leave '-'

Jill Pole writes the most concise essays, well done.

Saya recently learned that if there is a machine in your teammate's heart, breaking it up is probably not the wisest idea. This is a lesson she has learned the hard way as Azure is currently hurting because she managed to unwittingly destroy his one coping mechanism. And before that, Swift died in Pan's game and was arguing to take another injury since he felt so sure he was going to die, and Saya heard of that second-hand and she still feels guilty for not being there. So she's feeling a little like she's failing her team and is trying harder to make up for it, with slimy hugs and palpable cooking ~~and maybe locking them all inside the cabin one day~~.

What kind of music do you associate with your characters, if you play music associations with them?

I WANT TO KNOW NED'S THOUGHTS ON JASON

Ned, do you still want some drankberries for baking? Should I drop them by sometime?

Uhmmm any updates on Jill and Haruki? JILL HOW IS YOUR LIFE GOING...

Nick's thoughts on nimue?

Hello Apollo '^' Give me your thoughts/feelings/whatever

I guess this is for after game-end, but Jill's first impressions of Roxas?

Question Meme!

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