~This is the Truth About It~

Or, Why It’s Perfectly Okay For Two People To Play The Same Character Completely Differently, And The Challenges Of Figuring Out What The Fuck They're Actually Thinking

( Yes, this is another wall of text essay thing. )

(My personal epiphany? I’ve been realizing that all the characters I play consistently and keep an interest in are some degree of calculating and plotting, even if they’re fluffy about it or still learning it. I’m a Rhetoric major that’s done in depth study in that area of language/psychology/philosophy. Go figure that the characters that fascinate me the most are the ones that basically require taking my field of study and interest, and putting it into "practical use".)

One of the most bitter things Dave Carter ever wrote...

And one of my favorite songs of his, if only for personal experience/truth.

Because let's face it - if anything is worth being slightly bitter about, it's the tendency of society at large to treat anyone who doesn't fit stereotypical rubricks of "normal" as if it's a disorder and there's something massively wrong with them - the gifted kid that the school put on medication for ADD because they finished their reading assignments ahead of the class and didn't have anything else to do, because they were reading novels when their classmates were reading "See Spot Run". The high-school writer that got kicked out of class and given a criminal record for writing a zombie story set at a generic high school, treated as a terrorist threat. The gamer honors-student with a clean record that hangs out with maybe two or three friends and gets bullied and abused by the "popular good kids", then pointed out in college as "An example of a dangerous student with something WRONG with them" because they dress in black and don't want to be a social butterfly mindlessly seeking the approval of peers they have nothing in common with.
And everyone reduced to a stereotype or a bad internet joke because of a religious choice; spiritual belief; sexuality choice; dysphoria of gender, species, time, or place; or any number of other things outside the ordinary where they'd be perfectly happy and functional as such, and the greatest source of neuroses and stress is worrying about being treated as insane, fake, "just an attention-seeker", or the pressure to believe that something is wrong with you because you're not "ordinary".

On a not entirely unrelated note, I think I got renewed appreciation for one of my mother's historical heroes while uploading photos of Neuschwanstein to facebook -
And god if remembering that place doesn't make what happened to Ludwig II, and Neuschwanstein, damn depressing. Ludwig was the last king of Bavaria, you see, and wasn't very interested in ruling; much more interested in the arts and in trying to build various palaces and castles as works of art and homages to the legends and history he'd grown up with. He was one of Wagner's main patrons, and Neuschwanstein was his last castle, where he rebuilt the ruined foundations of an old knight's castle in the mountains, then decorated the interior as an homage to Wagner's operas and the legends they were based on.
He was declared insane, falsely accused of bankrupting public funds, deposed, restricted, and found dead within a year of such.
Neuschwanstein was never completed - most of the physical structure is there, but there was supposed to be a central keep and chapel that only exists as a flagstone outline in the upper courtyard; of the interior, only one third of it was actually completed.

This ends up being a very, very sad thing on a fairly profound level if you have any knowledge of what that one third is, and then stop and wonder just what the rest would have been.
This is the Singer's Hall; the walls are covered in murals of the tale of Parcival and the Holy Grail. The murals cover what's completed; walking through the finished areas, every room has the story of some myth or legend spread out across the wall. Like one of the hallways here - the scene with the blacksmith is the forging of Gram the dragon-slaying blade from the saga of the Nibelungen. As you keep walking, the entire saga of Siegfried is laid out in paintings.
If you go there, you get a tour of the parts that are finished...and get to spend some time looking at how huge the structure is, and how most of it is empty and bare walls where things never got made.