kendall — the boy prince with a crown of thorns, imprisoned at the top. he overlooks the city, painfully distant from it all. a reflection in broken glass haunts him; his father, the waiter, himself. shattered and bloodied and dripping onto him still. so high and so blue, a puzzle barely together. his gaze tells you he knows how pathetic he is.
connor — the relatable uber-rich. the eldest son, forgotten, overtaken by the background. his political ambitions are yet another hobby to fill a void; his ranch, his wine, his presidency. he is pastel, faded, swathed in republican red that even then is all vanity. sees himself in screens. he is blowing away in the wind.
roman — doing the dirty work in the dirty room. he's ready to sling over offers and quick wit but there is a childishness about him, like he's scrawled in crayon. something's off, something's wrong with him and you can't figure out what exactly. he lives within it, then: slimy and blood-hot and close. his eyes dart around. the trained dog that might just bite when he's nervous.
shiv — all that effort to go nowhere. a girl with a pearl earring: wealthy, intriguing, unknowable. can't be bothered to face you fully, but baring her back in the process. bathed in the lines of light that her father gives her in inches. she is doomed to be pushed, and to be helped back up, which might be worse than the falling. exuding something sharp, startling, hot pink: forever pinky.
I’ll never get over Ilya being like no no, I must set record straight. I want to fuck your son since the literal moment I first saw him at seventeen. It was freckles. And then I fuck him. Repeatedly. For entire decade. He gave up that ass like absolute freak. He is my good little boy. Yes, that is right. Since the markets crash and millennial dream is dead. I hear on radio, then I fuck your son. We grow old together. Lovers.
we need to invent a way to explain how deep running and pervasive and subliminal racism and antiblackness is without immediately sounding like an insane conspiracy theorist
female characters are always lighter than male characters. strong characters are almost always dark. aggressive characters are almost always dark. peaceful and intelligent characters are almost always light. even amongst darker characters the lightest one is usually either the leader or the girls. dark is evil and light is good.
briefly pursuing a career in animation radicalized me on this. So many stories from the industry about how you have to start with your character design as dark as possible, because INEVITABLY you'll get "notes" from higher-ups asking you to make them lighter.
In a class about making a pitch bible my teacher once role-played as a shitty executive with a classmate, pressing them in intentionally abrasive ways about why they made their characters diverse. He emphasized that we had to learn to defend these things, because the racism in the industry is extremely deliberate.
ellievsbear
yousharknotpass
annaxmalina
blakekathryn
stormborns
