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tenshinoakuma) wrote2008-12-22 09:28 pm
tenshinoakuma) wrote2008-12-22 09:28 pm
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Okay a long time ago I said I had reached my happy place with Joshua. Note that IT STILL APPLIES even if everything I say here may seem to point at otherwise.
Just because I haven't received any crit on Joshua recently doesn't mean that I can't do better on him. It's not that I'm discrediting the praise I've received for him, because I'm really glad people enjoy my playing! I didn't start off absolutely fantastic at him, and there's been a few people who've really helped my RPing, both characterisation wise and writing wise, but that's something I'll talk about another day ♥
I've said before on RP!s that I don't think about the 'audience' while I'm RPing in response to someone's nervousness about LJ RPs since there's always the chance someone will wank on you. Ultimately, I'm playing partially because I want to represent Joshua to his fullest potential. All the other things that come from that, like getting people interested in Twewy, or other people stalking my version of Joshua (either because they just love him or because they're like me and use other people's versions as a basis for theirs), are just extra little perks. This doesn't mean I pretend the audience doesn't exist, rather that I focus fully on my playing and try to bring Joshua out to the best of my ability. The comments I've received are always a pleasant surprise ♥
That said, there are still moments when I feel like I'm failing. This is partially because in canon Joshua is never wrong about anything ever (except when he's doing it on purpose) and wins all his arguments/games. Obviously I'm probably expecting too much of myself because canon's a closed situation yadda yadda, but it'd be great if I could recreate that feeling in an open environment like an RP. (Bonus: I find it funny that the only time you really see him flustered is in the Tin Pin AU when you battle against Tutorial Guy) But I kind of feel the moments that he doesn't? (aside from all relationship stuff oh god I'll get to that later) Were preventable if I was just that little bit sharper of mind. But ehhh, a couple of mistakes doesn't null all the good playing I've done.
Currently, I see my main weaknesses with playing Joshua as these:
1) an inability to make a tl;dr social commentary, or blah blah blah about some obscure fact.
2) difficulty in being able to know how a person works (I hesitate to say true nature) so Joshua is able to manipulate them into reacting the way he wan
3) ffffffffffffffffffuck romance (it's not that I'm unhappy about how things are, but argh this makes me nervous and jumpy sometimes)
1) This is mostly because I don't really follow social/cultural/everything to do with people issues or opinions, and it's probably really bad of me because I usually like seeing other people's opinions on things, but... it's just not something I actively seek out? So my knowledge is rather small and restricting. And this goes for the inability to blah blah blah about obscure shit (I am not EDUCATED enough). This one's solution is fairly easy, but it's something that I can only learn over time. I mean, I can speed up part of it, but some things like life experience, I can't speed up at all.
2) Okay this has been something that I've been a bit D: about for a while, but the recent log with Gin just makes it more obvious (at least, to me anyway :< ). I love Gin so much but ffffff it's a thread that plays on my biggest weakness. And just really makes it clear this is something I need to improve on.
The problem is, I can be pretty dense about people. I don't understand people very well, and that's not a problem! But what IS, is that I don't understand how people work most of the time. Combined with the fact I actually constantly have to struggle with keeping OOC knowledge from leaking into IC and my shonky memory (I constantly have to go back through threads, check EVERYTHING EVER to make sure Joshua would ICly know what he knows), it's always a struggle to rationalise these kinds of interactions.
Because we all know that manipulative bastards don't always make it easy to know they're a manipulative bastard.
So I have to come up with reasons why Joshua thinks of people the way he does. But he's not someone who follows reasoning and logic to the letter, and to be honest I play him as pretty intuitive and following the feelings he gets from people (and while this is not... entirely wrong, I'll admit part of this was to make up for my failure at logic). And my biggest worry about that is that it might seem like I'm metagaming (is that the right term) and using OOC knowledge to come to the conclusions Joshua does. And I guess it doesn't help that my own intuition is not so good at times, so no help there since Joshua has to be right!!1!1!!! I guess I feel like if Joshua isn't right, he at least shouldn't be TOO far off the mark ):
But I was so, so happy at one of the recent tags from Gin because my tag before it? It just. finally CLICKED. I had actually put off replying for ages because I really couldn't think of anything that felt right, but when I finally knuckled down and did it, I actually managed to do a significantly larger tag than I thought I was going to do! I felt like I knew what Joshua thought of Gin RIGHT THEN. And then to have it validated like that ffffff I just felt so happy then ; A; Now I just need to have these moments of clarity more often.
3) Okay I was actually talking about this to one of the other muns recently. But, to get into the reasons why I feel so asd;flkjasdf;kj about this, you have to know that I'm not very good at striking out on my own. I like being babied and having someone hold my hand and just mainly KNOWING WHAT I'M DOING IS RIGHT.
I didn't get to this characterisation of Joshua on my own. When I was first starting out, I was doing SO. MANY. THINGS. to make sure I was getting him right:
- stalking another Joshua. And despite our differences in how we view Joshua, there were a lot of things I learnt from them!
- playing off other twewy chars in the DR!
- those few fanfictions that just made me go asdf;lkjasdfkl;j YES. This is so RIGHT.
- replaying canon x100000000000000
- discussions on the Twewy comm back when there were quite a few
- writing drabbles :|b
Now the thing is, I like having stuff like ummm... flagposts to let me know I'm doing alright. The time I felt like I was doing it right was about the time I read that other Joshua's essay on Joshua and for all the points that were relevant to my characterisation of Joshua, I had come to the same conclusion as they did. And I guess that was a huge confidence boost, because I don't feel like I need to read their threads anymore to get a feel for the characterisation. Because if I did it anymore, then it'd just be me imitating them and for how I've defined Joshua, it just wouldn't be right. But I did learn a lot from them ♥
I also have to admit that some of the responses to the relationship memes I've had, especially Levi's, made me incredibly happy too, because those were like flagposts as well.
However, for romance, I don't have any flagposts. Amongst the multitudes of Joshua/Neku (and the significantly fewer other Joshua pairings) out there, there has only been ONE that I've felt click (even if, again, the mental processes are different from mine). But that one fic ends at the beginning of what could be a relationship (because you can't really tell with Joshua, sometimes), and it looks like it probably won't be finished. Which is a little DDD: for me because I'm PAST that (and I was looking forward to Part 3 too ; A; ).
Canon gives me nothing to base off as well.
I know, I know, I've been told I'm doing fine and god Joshua is both a horrible bastard and a terrible failure at once why does Ness love such a dickhead. But I just feel like... I'm doing the ACTIONS right, but not the thought processes. I kind of feel like I'm not pulling my weight on my half? Especially when it just seems so clear what Ness thinks.
I have no idea if Joshua really should be as apprehensive or confused about all this as I'm making him. If this was JUST Joshua messing around with Ness' head, this would be stupidly easy. But the thing is, it's not, and for all of Joshua's ideas and concepts of love and people, he's really bad at applying it to himself and not very self-aware at all.
He kind of knows what he should be doing to be a better boyfriend (still the worst boyfriend ever), but the thing is, for all he thinks he's cool and chillin' with change, the truth is, he can accept change happening AROUND him, but he is stubbornly resistant to change TO him. As in his character and personality. And while he can laugh off other characters' attempts to change him (because he's a slithery slitherouter), he can't deny that Ness is changing him.
And that's frightening, because Ness is just so... accepting of his faults, and yet Ness is changing him without setting out to do so, while others don't accept his faults and wish he'd change. And Joshua still wants to be who he was before he met Ness, but at the same time he doesn't want to be that person before he met Ness.
I guess the hardest thing about having Joshua in a relationship is that I always see him so, aloof and apart from everything. Distanced. So it's really hard for him to be really close to anyone, because Joshua is the one who creates that distance. Ness managed to encroach a little on that distance, but not even Ness can close the gap if Joshua doesn't allow him to. Given where things are, it's like 3 steps forward, 2 steps back. Just need to get someone to ICly put Joshua on track. Even so, it's not going to be an omg ilu, because with someone like Joshua, it just doesn't happen that way.
And somewhere, buried under all this mental confusion, Ness has hit Joshua's one hormone. Poor, unused hormone ):
Wow, tl;dr much? I really should tag my threads huh.
Just because I haven't received any crit on Joshua recently doesn't mean that I can't do better on him. It's not that I'm discrediting the praise I've received for him, because I'm really glad people enjoy my playing! I didn't start off absolutely fantastic at him, and there's been a few people who've really helped my RPing, both characterisation wise and writing wise, but that's something I'll talk about another day ♥
I've said before on RP!s that I don't think about the 'audience' while I'm RPing in response to someone's nervousness about LJ RPs since there's always the chance someone will wank on you. Ultimately, I'm playing partially because I want to represent Joshua to his fullest potential. All the other things that come from that, like getting people interested in Twewy, or other people stalking my version of Joshua (either because they just love him or because they're like me and use other people's versions as a basis for theirs), are just extra little perks. This doesn't mean I pretend the audience doesn't exist, rather that I focus fully on my playing and try to bring Joshua out to the best of my ability. The comments I've received are always a pleasant surprise ♥
That said, there are still moments when I feel like I'm failing. This is partially because in canon Joshua is never wrong about anything ever (except when he's doing it on purpose) and wins all his arguments/games. Obviously I'm probably expecting too much of myself because canon's a closed situation yadda yadda, but it'd be great if I could recreate that feeling in an open environment like an RP. (Bonus: I find it funny that the only time you really see him flustered is in the Tin Pin AU when you battle against Tutorial Guy) But I kind of feel the moments that he doesn't? (aside from all relationship stuff oh god I'll get to that later) Were preventable if I was just that little bit sharper of mind. But ehhh, a couple of mistakes doesn't null all the good playing I've done.
Currently, I see my main weaknesses with playing Joshua as these:
1) an inability to make a tl;dr social commentary, or blah blah blah about some obscure fact.
2) difficulty in being able to know how a person works (I hesitate to say true nature) so Joshua is able to manipulate them into reacting the way he wan
3) ffffffffffffffffffuck romance (it's not that I'm unhappy about how things are, but argh this makes me nervous and jumpy sometimes)
1) This is mostly because I don't really follow social/cultural/everything to do with people issues or opinions, and it's probably really bad of me because I usually like seeing other people's opinions on things, but... it's just not something I actively seek out? So my knowledge is rather small and restricting. And this goes for the inability to blah blah blah about obscure shit (I am not EDUCATED enough). This one's solution is fairly easy, but it's something that I can only learn over time. I mean, I can speed up part of it, but some things like life experience, I can't speed up at all.
2) Okay this has been something that I've been a bit D: about for a while, but the recent log with Gin just makes it more obvious (at least, to me anyway :< ). I love Gin so much but ffffff it's a thread that plays on my biggest weakness. And just really makes it clear this is something I need to improve on.
The problem is, I can be pretty dense about people. I don't understand people very well, and that's not a problem! But what IS, is that I don't understand how people work most of the time. Combined with the fact I actually constantly have to struggle with keeping OOC knowledge from leaking into IC and my shonky memory (I constantly have to go back through threads, check EVERYTHING EVER to make sure Joshua would ICly know what he knows), it's always a struggle to rationalise these kinds of interactions.
Because we all know that manipulative bastards don't always make it easy to know they're a manipulative bastard.
So I have to come up with reasons why Joshua thinks of people the way he does. But he's not someone who follows reasoning and logic to the letter, and to be honest I play him as pretty intuitive and following the feelings he gets from people (and while this is not... entirely wrong, I'll admit part of this was to make up for my failure at logic). And my biggest worry about that is that it might seem like I'm metagaming (is that the right term) and using OOC knowledge to come to the conclusions Joshua does. And I guess it doesn't help that my own intuition is not so good at times, so no help there since Joshua has to be right!!1!1!!! I guess I feel like if Joshua isn't right, he at least shouldn't be TOO far off the mark ):
But I was so, so happy at one of the recent tags from Gin because my tag before it? It just. finally CLICKED. I had actually put off replying for ages because I really couldn't think of anything that felt right, but when I finally knuckled down and did it, I actually managed to do a significantly larger tag than I thought I was going to do! I felt like I knew what Joshua thought of Gin RIGHT THEN. And then to have it validated like that ffffff I just felt so happy then ; A; Now I just need to have these moments of clarity more often.
3) Okay I was actually talking about this to one of the other muns recently. But, to get into the reasons why I feel so asd;flkjasdf;kj about this, you have to know that I'm not very good at striking out on my own. I like being babied and having someone hold my hand and just mainly KNOWING WHAT I'M DOING IS RIGHT.
I didn't get to this characterisation of Joshua on my own. When I was first starting out, I was doing SO. MANY. THINGS. to make sure I was getting him right:
- stalking another Joshua. And despite our differences in how we view Joshua, there were a lot of things I learnt from them!
- playing off other twewy chars in the DR!
- those few fanfictions that just made me go asdf;lkjasdfkl;j YES. This is so RIGHT.
- replaying canon x100000000000000
- discussions on the Twewy comm back when there were quite a few
- writing drabbles :|b
Now the thing is, I like having stuff like ummm... flagposts to let me know I'm doing alright. The time I felt like I was doing it right was about the time I read that other Joshua's essay on Joshua and for all the points that were relevant to my characterisation of Joshua, I had come to the same conclusion as they did. And I guess that was a huge confidence boost, because I don't feel like I need to read their threads anymore to get a feel for the characterisation. Because if I did it anymore, then it'd just be me imitating them and for how I've defined Joshua, it just wouldn't be right. But I did learn a lot from them ♥
I also have to admit that some of the responses to the relationship memes I've had, especially Levi's, made me incredibly happy too, because those were like flagposts as well.
However, for romance, I don't have any flagposts. Amongst the multitudes of Joshua/Neku (and the significantly fewer other Joshua pairings) out there, there has only been ONE that I've felt click (even if, again, the mental processes are different from mine). But that one fic ends at the beginning of what could be a relationship (because you can't really tell with Joshua, sometimes), and it looks like it probably won't be finished. Which is a little DDD: for me because I'm PAST that (and I was looking forward to Part 3 too ; A; ).
Canon gives me nothing to base off as well.
I know, I know, I've been told I'm doing fine and god Joshua is both a horrible bastard and a terrible failure at once why does Ness love such a dickhead. But I just feel like... I'm doing the ACTIONS right, but not the thought processes. I kind of feel like I'm not pulling my weight on my half? Especially when it just seems so clear what Ness thinks.
I have no idea if Joshua really should be as apprehensive or confused about all this as I'm making him. If this was JUST Joshua messing around with Ness' head, this would be stupidly easy. But the thing is, it's not, and for all of Joshua's ideas and concepts of love and people, he's really bad at applying it to himself and not very self-aware at all.
He kind of knows what he should be doing to be a better boyfriend (still the worst boyfriend ever), but the thing is, for all he thinks he's cool and chillin' with change, the truth is, he can accept change happening AROUND him, but he is stubbornly resistant to change TO him. As in his character and personality. And while he can laugh off other characters' attempts to change him (because he's a slithery slitherouter), he can't deny that Ness is changing him.
And that's frightening, because Ness is just so... accepting of his faults, and yet Ness is changing him without setting out to do so, while others don't accept his faults and wish he'd change. And Joshua still wants to be who he was before he met Ness, but at the same time he doesn't want to be that person before he met Ness.
I guess the hardest thing about having Joshua in a relationship is that I always see him so, aloof and apart from everything. Distanced. So it's really hard for him to be really close to anyone, because Joshua is the one who creates that distance. Ness managed to encroach a little on that distance, but not even Ness can close the gap if Joshua doesn't allow him to. Given where things are, it's like 3 steps forward, 2 steps back. Just need to get someone to ICly put Joshua on track. Even so, it's not going to be an omg ilu, because with someone like Joshua, it just doesn't happen that way.
And somewhere, buried under all this mental confusion, Ness has hit Joshua's one hormone. Poor, unused hormone ):
Wow, tl;dr much? I really should tag my threads huh.