OMG! Ive Been Thinking About This For A While. Probably Because I Was Tagged In This A While Ago XD.

OMG!  I’ve been thinking about this for a while.   Probably because I was tagged in this a while ago XD. (Thank you, @bleachbleachbleach!)  However, I did not ignore the tag game.  It’s just… what’s the meme?... “The horrors persist but so do I.”  Yes.  That! 

The Horrors got me.

But, I do, indeed, persist.  For now.

Digressing…. 

High concept, I, too, am struggling with what it means to have a “comfort character.”  If it is in terms of writing, then occupying the heads of any of the lunatics who are frequently my POV characters has never been “comfortable” or “comforting.”  Because… well… no one’s head is that comfortable to be in.  In my opinion.  According to me.  (Starting to see how the Horrors found me as I read that paragraph back.) 

BUT IN MY DEFENSE… I think it’s really the structure of fiction to blame for that view.  While I like to write fluffy things occasionally, fluffy things aren’t a story.  They won’t keep me coming back to tweak and poke at as an idea to be developed.  I need CONFLICT!  The characters need to struggle!  I need to feel their struggle and struggle with them!  Investment!  None of that, however, is comforting.  And, well, it probably shouldn’t be.  At least for my “process” (HA! let’s be real, I have no process), I generally need to feel the character’s confusion, anger, rage, pain, outrage, indignation, humor, joy, excitement, etc. to write it.  Otherwise, what am I even doing?  If I can’t get excitement or feeling from writing, then I’m pretty sure no one else will, either.  And, fanfic is really something I do primarily for my enjoyment and experience since I’ll never truly know how many of the random numbers on the page are people versus bots or how many of those people immediately noped out of the story or got sucked in and walked away feeling something.

If, perhaps, “comfort character” is a character who I feel the most at home writing about (or from the perspective of), then… well… that’s less “comfort” and more like “I spent 10+ years writing these five characters over and over and over so there is comfort in that I have a good sense of who these characters are, what makes them tick generally speaking, and their general background.”  And, that answer is pretty easy, but it isn’t the full breadth/scope/meat of what drives me to write, draw, or read about these characters, which is why I hesitate to full-throatedly give that list because… well… what interests me about these characters is less them in a silo and more them in context (*cue the ‘You Think You Just Fell Out of a Coconut Tree?’ sound*) and what that context means for the past and what it means going forward for these characters.   

Ultimately, Bleach, like many stories, has a lot of relationships that affect the storyline.  And, it’s those relationships that I wonder about.  Specifically, the arithmetic of those relationships is what grips me the most and makes me wonder and “what if” until I lose track of time.  To that end, those relationships are, in no particular order:

Rukia – Byakuya (platonic)

Rukia – Byakuya – Renji (platonic)

Byakuya – Hisana (platonic and romantic)

Byakuya – Hisana – Rukia (platonic)

Renji – Rukia (platonic and romantic)

I could spend all my days in fiction writing pondering those relationship dynamics, and I think the reason for it is because there is so much delicious gray space.  I’ve probably mentioned this already on this blog, but in case not:  While I am a fan of many fandoms, I rarely feel the urge to create anything in those fandoms because I feel the storylines and character arcs that I liked got perfectly wrapped up.  What more can I, a peon, add?  Bleach, however, did not do that for all its characters, nor could it have given the vastness of the cast.  So, the urge to “what if” is so itchy that I have to scratch it, and that itch, for me specifically, is Rukia’s backstory.  Part of me wants so badly to know everything, but the other part of me is happy not to know so I can “what if” until the cows come home.  Stay out in the field, cows!

This is all a very long way to say that much of my ByaHisa fixation is truly a way to solve for “X,” with “X” being Rukia’s backstory.  How can you write a prequel and foreshadow the events to come?  What kind of similarities to Rukia might have her sister had?  What about Rukia might remind her brother-in-law of his beloved late wife, and what parts of Rukia felt like a cold bucket of water being dropped over his head to witness due to how different the sisters are?  Is there more to Rukia’s history?  If so, does Byakuya know and is tiptoeing around the truth even now, or was Byakuya lied to as well?  Were they all lied to? 

And trying to think of various creative ways to solve for “X” does, in fact, bring me comfort!  Endless possibilities are oddly comforting and exciting all at once.  Which, sadly, feels like a non-answer, but there it is. 

Thanks so much for tagging me, B3!!!

five comfort characters, five tags

Thank you for the tag, @fractoluminescence! I made a new post because this got long, but the original meme is at this link, and @fractoluminescence's cool responses are at this one, if you'd like to read everyone's (I recommend!).

I had a difficult time developing an answer because I got too in the weeds about what the definition of “comfort character” was, rip. It turns out there are a lot of definitions, ranging from characters you find cozy, to characters you find relatable, to characters you look up to, to more elaborate definitions that attempt to articulate those distinctions between a character you love and a character that you would sink to the bottom of the Marianas Trench with.

I’ll define “comfort character” as that thing that begins by delineating, say, a show you love so so much (Haikyuu!!—my soul for a volleyball) vs. a show you want to be fannish about (Bleach. BleachBleachBleach, even. BLEACHBLEACHBLEACH, even), and then refines further into characters you love (my eternal Soi Fon era) vs. the characters you’re in the Trench about. Because while I probably think an above average amount about Soi Fon, and love seeing her on my dash, and do want to write for her once I alight upon some idea that sufficiently connects my headcanons about her to 1) actual canon and 2) a Story, she is not who I:

think about every single ding dong day;

regularly revel in in daydreams;

both consciously and unconsciously filter my lived experiences or relationships through, such that they become doubled; they find translation, in an act of both processing (growing distance from, or increasing intimacy with) the experience and in tugging at the character themselves, growing them into something that proceeds from their canon or offers an opportunity to entertain new and additional dimensions.

I think the key elements here are:

the alwaysness of this—the readiness to be in the soup at all times;

how personal the engagements are, which I think is sometimes to do with the relatability of a character (proximity to oneself) and is sometimes personal to… the character? Like, the intimacy of wanting to both crystallize one’s understanding of a beloved character by stress-testing their concept, and to spin them out, break them from what is canonically known just to see how much depth they have beyond that and in how many ways they might be known.

…Which, now that I’ve written that, is... just my definition of “blorbo” and not “comfort character,” but maybe the terms are synonymous??? who knows—AS THOUGH BLORBO HAS A DEFINITION AND ISN’T WHOLLY MEME-DERIVED TO BEGIN WITH. AS THOUGH ANY OF THESE THINGS HAVE PRESCRIPTIVE DEFINITIONS.

Anyway, all of that is the appeal of writing fanfic, to me, so it technically extends to anyone I’ve had occasion to write. But that’s within the specific action of writing a story, or preparing to write a story, or thinking about writing a story.

If we’re talking “always” and unconsciously, readily, blorbo-ily, whether there’s a story or not, then #1-3 are and have been for the last four years:

Hitsugaya

Hinamori

Matsumoto

They are who I am most inclined to give things to, or translate things through, and am most interested in defining/destroying. <333

There are probably use-cases/concrete examples that should go here, in addition to the somewhat woowoo definition above, but part of me is shy, and another part is like, those are what the stories are, and another part is “those two parts are the same part...” and yet another is “those two parts are the exact opposite of each other..."

So instead I'll no-pressure tag @confluencechimera, @recurring-polynya, @afinepiece, @bendingwind, and @unohanadaydreams!

Below the cut because it's not Bleach-related enough: I promise I’m not trying to be evasive/coquettish on purpose, but I don’t think I can get myself to put my thoughts about my lifetime character for this on Tumblr, because according to me, organizationally, that’s not where they go. So I’ll skip him. I’m also one of those people where my idea of comfort is to lean into the negative and feel comforted by the experience of being joined in misery by others, rather than go the cozy route. In that usage my comfort “character” is Law and Order: SVU because it’s like 800 episodes of people having the worst day of their lives and/or people on absolutely depraved sprees, depending on which side of the story you focus on. But also that show is deeply unserious, pleasingly formulaic, and has infinite rewatchability. So let's say those are responses #4 and #5!!

I remember dropping Bleach years ago somewhere in the beginning of the Hueco Mundo arc, when it was still airing and I had zero patience to wait for the episodes to air. This year it got me back with that irresistible appeal of names and ranks and zanpakutou releases, which I somehow always crazily adored. And then Shinji's TBTP design somehow got me back to digital painting. He is like a Tooth Fairy gone wrong, with Rapunzel hair and awful posture, making horrendous faces. What's not to love?

so tired

I guess we. have garage doors. in Soul Society now.

The thing is, I suppose, when you are 1000 years old, you see this and you're like 'wow that's so futuristic and cool I bet we could make a really sweet entrance with one of those babies."

This probably requires a much longer, sprawling post (the number of tentacles increased exponentially every 2 seconds as I was thinking about this) but despite Gotei captains making good money and having fairly high social standing, I feel like land prices must be set artificially, astronomically high so that no one but the already-landed nobility [or a governmental entity, lie the Gotei] could possibly ever own anything. That 'officer's neighborhood' or whatever it is is cushy, but it's also technically just a reserve the nobility has consented to so that there's no reason for these people to live anywhere else (unless they already have property by virtue of being noble). Not sure how this works for commercial leases--are they subsidized by the 46? or does running a business require you to have some kind of arrangement with a noble family. DOES SILVER DRAGONFLY LEASE FROM THE KUCHIKI.

I'm not sure how this would work for Rukongai (except that surely it's very controversial to be buying/selling parcels in Rukongai to begin with, many considering it a foolish audacity to assume such a place can be owned) but I imagine that at the very least the property taxes (or whatever payments/responsibilities inhere in "ownership" in Rukongai, re: assuming responsibility for whatever shit happens out there/keeping it Hollow-controlled, etc.) present a functional barrier to ownership for most individuals.

The generational wealth gap (mostly in terms of having family vs. having no family, but also I guess in terms of shinigami who are really old vs. those who are not) must be bananas, too. But NO, NO, STOPPING, this post was supposed to be 2 sentences about Seireitei land prices and it's already about seventy other things. It's 9AM stopping STOPPING

without fail, i am taken entirely by surprise when the most popular character in the fandom turns out to be the protagonist