Multifandom! She/her. I'm a writer and artist on a couple different platforms. I'll post links to my works on AO3 when I update along with illustrations and front covers 'cause I'm trying to get back into that
I’VE BEEN SUMMONED! (Dw about the @, you’re all good!) You’re also not far off the mark for the theory!
Diz very much doesn't like himself or what he's become. But it's specifically a matter of who and what he is, and it doesn't extend to his capabilities — in that regard, he's rigidly and aggressively proud of himself.
The thing is, this guy is smart. Like, scary smart. It's pretty out of focus in Riddle V.I.Z.ion because all three aliens are stuck on the backfoot running scared the whole story, but Diz is legitimately very good at the things he does (as much as I will dunk on him for the things he sucks at.) During his time in the Academy, he was consistently top of his classes across all the boards, and these days he's in possession of a solid sixty percent of the skills which keep them alive. Yes, he is Burnt The Fuck Out, but that's highly recoverable for them (their bodies react very differently to long term high stress and high pressure to ours, so bouncing back would be much easier. Not to say he isn't affected, but he hasn't crashed nearly so hard as a human would in the same circumstances.) He's been held to extremely high standards all his life under literally life or death pressure to make sure he meets expectations. And he always has; he's very proud of that.
The problem comes from the fact that he knows that's all he has to offer as a person.
Diz is self-aware enough to know he's difficult to tolerate, let alone feel affection for. At his best, he's emotionally distant and easily triggered; at his worst and most reactive, he's a vicious omnicidal loose cannon willing to destroy habituated planets and drag out your personal baggage to stab you in the heart with. He can be absolutely brutal with his crewmates (see: him turning on Quiz when he knows full well Quiz has dont nothing wrong and is just as scared as the rest of them. Sure, he's doing it to spare him from dying with them, but it doesn't change the fact that it was a cruel thing to do), and he's the only member of V.I.Z.ion absolutely guaranteed to go for a fatality outcome when fighting. He's violent, he's half-mad at best, and he poses a legitimate threat to everyone he comes into contact with, whether he means to or not. He’s very different to the man he used to be and he knows it.
With a pessimistic self-evaluation like that, among other factors, it's kind of inevitable you stop seeing value in yourself as a person.
Being wanted is something completely off the table in his opinion. He's not something which can be liked, but he is needed. He's essential to the operation and they would literally be dead in the water without him; that is something he clings to. It's his substitution for feeling like he has value as a person or real security in his relationships.
(I feel so pretentious citing my own work, but I feel like I summed it up pretty good with this line!)
('Together, they were consumed with an exhausted, angry disbelief in the idea that either of them would want to stick around him if they gave up their cause.' Ch. 16.)
Without his skills and smarts, what is there to want about him? What is there to like? Viz and Quiz would have their own answers, of course, but then you face the issue of making any of these repressed losers Talk About Feelings, and that's it's own Life Or Death difficulty. Suffice to say, the other two don't really recognise that this is an issue, and Diz isn't in a hurry to tell them.
(Just to cover the other two things you mentioned, I’ll go through them — briefly, I swear!)
His dislike of his hands specifically comes largely from the fact that they’re visibly damaged, and he’s forced to confront it on a daily basis. Most of the body can be avoided. You don't have to look at your reflection if you don't want to; there are ways around having to see your face, or your torso, or most of your skin, but you're pretty much stuck with your hands. It's combined with the fact that he has, well, only two hands. Gloves can’t fix that, but he’ll take what he can get.
Diz has, let's say, a history with critical levels of physical damage (this is obviously a deepcut into my history for them, but basically the soldier who trained him as a fighter pilot was on Darth Vader levels of life support for the whole time he knew her, the result of an accident which prematurely ended her career. She eventually died from the condition. The whole experience affected him more deeply than even he knows.) For the most part he is indifferent to how he looks, but anything that reminds him of how fragile a body is, or drives home the point that he’s less physically capable than he used to be freaks him out on a visceral level. It’s weakness, it’s less than perfect, and it’s not something he’s prepared to accept in himself.
As for neurodivergency, I tend not to write any specific thing for my characters, partly because I wouldn’t want to force it and end up being a bad representation, but also because I find characters develop best for me if I just kind of… leave them to do things organically. So I tend to know the specifics of what their particular psychologies are but couldn't tell you broadly what that cumulates to, if that makes sense? Any of my characters could be dead on for any number of things and I Would Not Know unless, like PTSD, it's something they develop over the course of the story and I researched accordingly. That being said, I myself am Undiagnosed Something, and Diz has ended up being a character I relate to a lot, and he was nonverbal for a while as a young child (could speak perfectly, but just… wouldn’t), so make of that what you will!
Special design choices you wanted, perhaps, elaborate on or anything?
(I don't know if you know this, but! If you look at RS4 Diz's eyes, they have big ol' pupils! I find it a really cute thing for him :D)
I did not know! But as for the question, I guess eyes is a good place to start!
My aliens have eyes which appear completely black all over, with all the actual mechanics of the eye (sclera, iris, pupil) hidden behind a hard cornea which is a bit like a shell. It’s completely dark and functions like a two way mirror, meaning they can see out but nothing can see in to where the working parts of the eye are. This was deliberate on the part of the genetic engineers who made the clones (have I mentioned they’re part of a clone race? I feel like that was in Riddle Vizion at some point, but at this point who knows what I’ve actually said and what I internally take as fact.) Having blacked out eyes made it pretty much impossible to tell precisely where the soldiers were looking, giving them a bit of an edge. The eyelid section is mostly the same as it is for a human, though without eyelashes; the hard cornea is impervious to most irritants and, if they are somewhere which requires more eye protection, they have a vertical, translucent secondary eyelid which they can shut to keep out dust or debris. Overall, their eyes are very hard to damage, and yet one of the easier things to clone and replace (Rip Viz.)
A lot of my headcanons for how the aliens present physically has a basis in the anatomy I’ve designed for their species overall, which may be too much and too specific to dive into here. I will say they have much longer lifespans than humans and are pretty much impervious to radiation, and a lot of the unintentional harm they cause can be boiled down their underestimation/disregard of those two things. Diz’s rib cage is slightly… uneven due to the rib and muscle grafts in his sides, and he never removed the secondary scapula in his back so those are still there. Viz has a very faint X shaped scar just behind his left temple, just over the maintenance panel in his skull for the implant, because that’s the line they cut along when they need to do work on it; it’s not a particularly traumatic wound like his other scars are, but repeatedly opening up the same cut meant it stuck where other small injuries didn’t. Quiz’s injuries takes longest to heal because the tissue repair nanobots the other two have were only standard issue for soldiers on active fronts; Quiz never received them. What he has are copies modded off of Viz and Diz’s, and as such they don’t work quite as well.
Because of his missing eye, Viz doesn't hold his head straight; he tilts it slightly to centre his (working) right eye to compensate for the blindness on his left. Being who he is, it tends to come across as aloofness, like you're not worth facing head on, but really it's to optimise his peripheral vision; if anything, you should be offended if he's looking at you straight on, that's when he's not paying attention. This isn't a trait he loses with the glasses, either, though it's way less noticeable when he's got them on; the digital feed can expand his field of vision, but it doesn't do shit to his muscle memory. He has to keep correcting himself to hold his head normally, and nobody really notices but he finds it so annoying.
(When he's with the other two, he prefers to have Quiz on the right where Viz can keep an eye on him, and Diz standing on the left, in his blindspot, where he can defend his captain from things he can’t see. This is a lot of trust to extend to someone as homicidal as Diz, and both of them are very aware of that. For what it's worth, Diz has never broken that particular offer of faith and does recognise it as something of a privilege.)
Diz doesn't like looking at his hands. They look a little like dead spiders, with long, thin fingers, strange joints, and very visible phalange tendons across the backs. The skin is rough and calloused, and covered in scars. The damage they've taken over the years is very obvious and, while it doesn't actually impair him in any particularly noteworthy way day to day, he can't stand seeing his own perceived shortcomings. Most of the time on the ship, he wears various gloves and lies that it's for maintenance, for flying, for dealing with chemicals — whatever lets him avoid saying he can't stand the sight of himself.
(A slightly nicer one for Diz is that, as their clothes are all fabricated copies, they're very basic and without embellishments; he's the one who takes the time to embroider their rank insignias onto the chest and shoulders. He rarely actually has the time or energy for this, but damnit he has standards for how they're supposed to look. It's calming work, even if he has to use pliers to force the needle through the wire mesh in the coats. He’s also absolutely ass at cooking — like, cursed levels of bad. Like ‘that one banana bread attempt that liquified hideously’ levels of bad, except it’s everything he does.)
For reasons no one can understand, Quiz is the best at poker. Like, he's good. Weirdly good. He very rarely loses when the three play together.
The truth is, it’s a combination of mad luck and the fact that Quiz is only paying attention enough to know when its his turn. There is no way to tell if he's bluffing — motherfucker doesn't even know what cards he's got. He's coasting off of vibes the entire time and somehow it's a winning strategy. Diz grew up with him and knows this; he doesn't really mind losing as a result. Viz, however, cannot for the life of him work out how he keeps losing to a guy who he had to tell just last week not to stand by the cables while they're adding tension.
(Viz demonstrated why you shouldn't stand near tension cables with a bounty hunter they'd taken prisoner: Quiz did not appreciate the scarring image of a person whip-cracked in half; Diz did not appreciate the viscera plastered to the forty foot tall ceiling of the docking bay. Both of them are warped enough to agree that losing inexplicably at poker forever is suitable punishment.)
(This is like my third try answering this because I keep diving off into the unfathomable depths of my own nonsense and lose all perspective lol. I could talk about these idiots forever. If you have something more specific, feel free at ask)
I'd love to listen to you talk about these guys, and I know someone else who would, lol. Anyways, you mentioned Diz being bad at cooking. Who was the better/best cook in the trio? And did they have like chores/roles aboard the ship—if so, what did each member do?
(Sorry if my question sounds stupid or my grammar is bad. I'm running on... 1 braincell and no sleep T°T)
So, I singled Diz out because he’s a ~ Spectacular Failure ~ rather than just the regular kind, but I wouldn’t say any of them are great at cooking. Cooking is, just in general, Not A Thing they had to deal with before defecting because meals were all pre-made things you, at most, shoved in a microwave because you had more important things to be getting on with like The Terrible Horrible War. Actual Food Preparation is something they have very limited experience in outside of basic How Not To Die If You Get Stranded training. Bear with me, but I’ll actually answer your other question first!
Their jobs on the ship remain pretty consistent between Who Does What, but they all fill in for a lot of roles because… there’s only three of them. To run a fuck-off-big ship. It’s a lot of work!
Viz: he is the captain, but he’s also their weapons expert and tactician, quartermaster and, for the most part, their medic.
Most of the jobs which require actively organising them or their living space fall to Viz by default because, well, there isn’t another authority to defer to. Where are they going? Viz decides. What mercenary work will they be doing when they get there? It’s Viz’s job to source something. How are work hours organised this week, because at least one of them needs to be awake at all times? You guessed it, it’s him again. He needs to keep track of supplies, bounties, where they can and can’t go back to, what allies they have, what enemies they’ve made, etc. The medic role falls to him partly out of seniority and field experience (when he was a real captain of a proper crew, he saw a lot of his men eat shit in fights) and partially because the other two... can't do it reliably: Quiz panics at the sight of blood unless the situation is severe enough, at which point he disassociates and sometimes behaves helpfully in a terrified fugue state; and Diz is fine... unless he thinks the person he’s working on is going to die. Then he freezes entirely. You can imagine the sort of shitshow that inevitably ensues whenever it's Viz who needs help XD. Tactician is a pretty obvious fit; it’s part of what he did back In The Old Days, though he wasn’t calling the shots for the whole armada. His say was still considered, and he was part of those conversations for almost twenty years. Most of his expertise in weapons lies in explosives, but he's also increasingly proficient in chemical weaponry the longer they're beyond their own army's control. Towards the latter years of their time in Andromeda (and for all of their time around Earth) he shares the weapons workshop with Diz, who graduates from just rewiring stolen cannons into their ship to designing his own (Viz very much approves. Hell, he's almost proud.)
Diz: pilot, engineer, main communications officer, and Viz’s lieutenant/enforcer, which basically entails picking up whatever Viz can’t do.
Pilot is the obvious one; it’s his main duty, it’s the thing he’s most qualified in, and it’s something that’s really hard to replace him for because they’re working with whatever junk ships they can steal from salvage — there’s no way to get a reliable autopilot and, even if there was, they get into too many dogfights for an AI to be worth the hassle of its wiring. Engineer is also a fair shout considering that their options are limited to the three of them and he aced all the training for the engineering modules in the Academy. Diz is capable of making and maintaining a spaceship… But I really do have to say, the Vizion ship for the most part of their history is a nightmare creation welded together from whatever shipwrecks he found even remotely salvageable. I think my favourite description of it I’ve written so far is ‘A two hundred thousand tonne bomb which moves only as an incidental function and which has to be regularly cajoled out of exploding over small matters like needing new lightbulbs.’ Honestly, it's impressive that he's managed it at all, and he does improve significantly the longer he's left in the Saw trap of his own creation, but really. Down the line they pick up a character called M.A.L.O.E (pronounced mallow), who is an original character I’ve not spoken about before, and she helps with running the machines. Which is a massive help, because it was not sustainable to have the foundries, processing workshops, assembly lines, and various reactors/engines and computer systems all relying on One Guy who was ultimately Not Qualified For This. Unfortunately, this gives Diz free time to focus on weapon building with Viz, and we all know how that story goes. He shares communications duty with Quiz, but he's the primary because Viz doesn't really trust Quiz to not give something away when liaising with whatever communication towers/other ships he's talking to. As lieutenant, Diz basically acts as a second set of eyes for all the admin stuff I mentioned in Viz’s section (supplies, crimes, plans, etc.)
Quiz: Navigator. Tertiary communications officer. Cooking and cleaning.
(Yes I said tertiary not secondary, even though Viz almost never works communications; Quiz gave their position away One Time and Viz never forgave him.)
Here’s the thing about Quiz; he’s cripplingly over-specialised. When he was in the Academy, Quiz decided he wanted to be a navigator at pretty much any cost; it was a prestigious position to take, it got him into Enquiry, and it kept him out of the firing line of being in the actual army. He wasn't the smartest candidate, he couldn't keep up with the rest if he divided his focus the way they were supposed to, so he stopped revising his other subjects to focus exclusively on his navigation course. He put all his eggs in one basket. And it paid off! Within the mapped part of Andromeda, he's invaluable to the other two in working out where they are and how to get away... But then they get chased out of the mapped territories... and Quiz doesn't really remember how to make maps (because that was information relevant to a scouting position and he didn't want that)... and he doesn't have a solid basis in anything else like the other two do (engineering, munitions, that pesky mapping course that Diz did take)... And Viz and Diz were both over-achievers who fought their way to the tops of all their respective programmes, and I do mean all of them...
Yeah, Quiz very quickly becomes the least skilled member of the crew. He could absolutely learn new skills if anyone had the time to let him, but they very pertinently don't have that time (or the patience to teach him because, honestly, look at the fucking list of shit they have to do.) So Quiz gets whatever menial work can't be handled by automatic systems. Sometimes it's things he sort of enjoys — anything that lets him feel like he's actively contributing to the cause; helping in the labs is a favourite — but mostly it's the unglamorous essential stuff like cooking and cleaning and secretarial work like counting bullets, which he does find demeaning but... it's also not like he's got anything better to do. And then when Nitwit gets brought aboard by accident he loses a lot of those responsibilities too. You bet your ass that, when they get to Earth, he clings to that Zone 5.1 project like a fucking tick; it's the first 'important' thing he's had a hand in in actual years.
So, to return and answer your original question after a roundabout fashion, the best at cooking is Quiz — not because he is actually any good, but because he is the one who has done it most frequently and trial and error is a great mentor. I'd say his skill level is 'solidly competent, at worst bland.' Viz's cooking is best described as ‘safe’; unlikely to be enjoyed in any measure, but also unlikely to poison anyone.
Diz once tried to make soup, and they marooned him on a nearby moon to Think About What He Did for a week.
Special design choices you wanted, perhaps, elaborate on or anything?
(I don't know if you know this, but! If you look at RS4 Diz's eyes, they have big ol' pupils! I find it a really cute thing for him :D)
I did not know! But as for the question, I guess eyes is a good place to start!
My aliens have eyes which appear completely black all over, with all the actual mechanics of the eye (sclera, iris, pupil) hidden behind a hard cornea which is a bit like a shell. It’s completely dark and functions like a two way mirror, meaning they can see out but nothing can see in to where the working parts of the eye are. This was deliberate on the part of the genetic engineers who made the clones (have I mentioned they’re part of a clone race? I feel like that was in Riddle Vizion at some point, but at this point who knows what I’ve actually said and what I internally take as fact.) Having blacked out eyes made it pretty much impossible to tell precisely where the soldiers were looking, giving them a bit of an edge. The eyelid section is mostly the same as it is for a human, though without eyelashes; the hard cornea is impervious to most irritants and, if they are somewhere which requires more eye protection, they have a vertical, translucent secondary eyelid which they can shut to keep out dust or debris. Overall, their eyes are very hard to damage, and yet one of the easier things to clone and replace (Rip Viz.)
A lot of my headcanons for how the aliens present physically has a basis in the anatomy I’ve designed for their species overall, which may be too much and too specific to dive into here. I will say they have much longer lifespans than humans and are pretty much impervious to radiation, and a lot of the unintentional harm they cause can be boiled down their underestimation/disregard of those two things. Diz’s rib cage is slightly… uneven due to the rib and muscle grafts in his sides, and he never removed the secondary scapula in his back so those are still there. Viz has a very faint X shaped scar just behind his left temple, just over the maintenance panel in his skull for the implant, because that’s the line they cut along when they need to do work on it; it’s not a particularly traumatic wound like his other scars are, but repeatedly opening up the same cut meant it stuck where other small injuries didn’t. Quiz’s injuries takes longest to heal because the tissue repair nanobots the other two have were only standard issue for soldiers on active fronts; Quiz never received them. What he has are copies modded off of Viz and Diz’s, and as such they don’t work quite as well.
Because of his missing eye, Viz doesn't hold his head straight; he tilts it slightly to centre his (working) right eye to compensate for the blindness on his left. Being who he is, it tends to come across as aloofness, like you're not worth facing head on, but really it's to optimise his peripheral vision; if anything, you should be offended if he's looking at you straight on, that's when he's not paying attention. This isn't a trait he loses with the glasses, either, though it's way less noticeable when he's got them on; the digital feed can expand his field of vision, but it doesn't do shit to his muscle memory. He has to keep correcting himself to hold his head normally, and nobody really notices but he finds it so annoying.
(When he's with the other two, he prefers to have Quiz on the right where Viz can keep an eye on him, and Diz standing on the left, in his blindspot, where he can defend his captain from things he can’t see. This is a lot of trust to extend to someone as homicidal as Diz, and both of them are very aware of that. For what it's worth, Diz has never broken that particular offer of faith and does recognise it as something of a privilege.)
Diz doesn't like looking at his hands. They look a little like dead spiders, with long, thin fingers, strange joints, and very visible phalange tendons across the backs. The skin is rough and calloused, and covered in scars. The damage they've taken over the years is very obvious and, while it doesn't actually impair him in any particularly noteworthy way day to day, he can't stand seeing his own perceived shortcomings. Most of the time on the ship, he wears various gloves and lies that it's for maintenance, for flying, for dealing with chemicals — whatever lets him avoid saying he can't stand the sight of himself.
(A slightly nicer one for Diz is that, as their clothes are all fabricated copies, they're very basic and without embellishments; he's the one who takes the time to embroider their rank insignias onto the chest and shoulders. He rarely actually has the time or energy for this, but damnit he has standards for how they're supposed to look. It's calming work, even if he has to use pliers to force the needle through the wire mesh in the coats. He’s also absolutely ass at cooking — like, cursed levels of bad. Like ‘that one banana bread attempt that liquified hideously’ levels of bad, except it’s everything he does.)
For reasons no one can understand, Quiz is the best at poker. Like, he's good. Weirdly good. He very rarely loses when the three play together.
The truth is, it’s a combination of mad luck and the fact that Quiz is only paying attention enough to know when its his turn. There is no way to tell if he's bluffing — motherfucker doesn't even know what cards he's got. He's coasting off of vibes the entire time and somehow it's a winning strategy. Diz grew up with him and knows this; he doesn't really mind losing as a result. Viz, however, cannot for the life of him work out how he keeps losing to a guy who he had to tell just last week not to stand by the cables while they're adding tension.
(Viz demonstrated why you shouldn't stand near tension cables with a bounty hunter they'd taken prisoner: Quiz did not appreciate the scarring image of a person whip-cracked in half; Diz did not appreciate the viscera plastered to the forty foot tall ceiling of the docking bay. Both of them are warped enough to agree that losing inexplicably at poker forever is suitable punishment.)
(This is like my third try answering this because I keep diving off into the unfathomable depths of my own nonsense and lose all perspective lol. I could talk about these idiots forever. If you have something more specific, feel free at ask)
What if the aliens did get therapy? I know it was mentioned in your book once, and they didn't know what it was, and it's all I can imagine sometimes!
Have they considered... staying on Earth? After the whole mess, obviously, since I think their homeplanet was destroyed? I understand why they didn't, but did it ever cross them? If it did, how would they deal with that?
Ok, so I never know whether I’ve effectively answered a question, but I can definitely say that This Particular Answer is all over the shop lmao
I think the issue for them with potential therapy would be twofold:
The First is that some of their issues are genuinely, like, a result of what they are — which isn’t really touched on in Riddle V.I.Z.ion, but since we’re out in the bleachers behind the playing fields I don’t mind elaborating. They were designed to be part of a war, one way or another — the whole damn species was perfected for use in conflict. The way they interact with stress is fundamentally different, and there are limits to how much they could ever be changed from the species baseline.
It’s like… you can desensitise a horse to reacting to certain parts of its nature, but you can’t… make it not be a horse, you know? They're always going to be more confrontational than you'd probably want something as dangerous as them to be; they're always going to have a slight superiority complex to other living things, the same way most humans don't consider worms or goldfish social equals; they're never going to completely get rid of their segmented, highly hierarchal ways of thinking. Any therapy with them would have to be done with the understanding that they’ll never end up in a state a human would regard as Well-Adjusted or Socially Normal, and there are coping mechanisms that work pretty universally on humans that would do Absolutely Nothing for them. Ideally, they would have a therapist from their species/culture, but that's… really not an option (they were more in favour of, you know, Blowing Difficult People To Smithereens.)
(A good example of this disconnect in their priorities is how they emphasise that they were lied to by The Enquiry instead of, you know, the part where they were made a sacrifice of: It was not unthinkable that they should be murdered, but it was untenable that they should be lied to. It's a very different psychology which would probably be hard to navigate.)
And The Second, and perhaps larger, obstacle is that, in my understanding, therapy does have some requirements for a person to engage with before it’s really effective. Like a stable home environment and a therapy style which works with you. It also seems to be the sort of thing which goes a lot better if you acknowledge your problems and cooperate, which takes a certain amount of trust in the therapist in question — not to mention confidence in one’s own ability to reach out and be received by an accepting society. Trust that someone is there to help and at least some belief that you yourself are a thing which can be helped. It takes a willingness to be vulnerable, not only with other people but with yourself, and internal compassion, and an ability to permit yourself the time and space to heal and meaningfully change…
…
Yeah, look, I’m not saying the intensely paranoid, unimaginably repressed, vainglorious active criminals who are still on the run for the other shit they did outside Enquiry records and who were conditioned to absolute fortitude under a regime of nightmarish discipline couldn’t manage it ever, but I am saying they would make it hell. Any potential therapist would probably rather set themselves on fire than perform the psychological equivalent of pulling teeth with mile long chopsticks. They are really, really not optimal patients for anything that formal. Not in this state, at least.
(I do play with the idea a little in the post canon parts of my sequel/prequel project (which is very much still a thing; everything is just taking me forever rn and it’s a much bigger project than I thought it would be). They obtain a Space Therapist through Legal And Irreproachable Methods (they break into his house) and, after several sessions over a few months (listening to them argue with each other about nothing for an hour precisely each time, never getting to the point, his head in his hands) the guy is like: ‘you’ve spent ten years stuck together. Maybe take some time apart, tf????’ because theres codependency and then there’s whatever the fuck this nonsense is, and maybe that’s a good place to start?
And they give it a go! Because they are trying. The three of them spend three months separated… and it goes okay for a short while! It’s nice to establish some independence outside each other. It… does not last. Trouble is, they’re a very social species which forms very strong attachments with each other, but their instinctive reactions to other life forms range from ‘dismissive’ to ‘hostile’ with little variation. Diz spirals quickly without something else there to ground him and give him direction; Viz gets himself in over his head because he forgets that he doesn’t have the other two to rely on (and then disregards the idea that he relies on them at all); and Quiz’s Enquirer mindset makes a grand comeback because, as mentioned, they don’t bond outside their species very easily and his reaction to it being difficult is to just Not Do It. Upon noticing all this, they cut the experiment short and reunite.
Of course, they then break into the therapist’s house again to berate him for being wrong and, having spent three whole months thinking he’s escaped them, the dude promptly quits his job and takes up pottery.)
Anyway, tangent over. I know I'm the one who essentially proposed the idea but, in isolation, I don't know how much actual impact it would make on their behaviours; I don’t think their situation is stable enough for that sort of thing to stick, and I’m not sure the infrastructure would be able to accommodate them regardless
I think community would help them more, as cliche and sentimental as it sounds, and, in astronomically different circumstances, Earth and the people they met might have offered that. They’ve got criminal records a half mile long in most of the rest of populated space, so Earth is the first place they’ve been in a good while which doesn’t have a preconceived bias against them (they earn it again allllll on their own XD). It takes them off the defensive a little and let’s them relax — which they don’t do very well or very much but it’s something. And they were genuinely fond of the Riddle group by the end, in their aloof, inscrutable way… Had it worked out for a long term (had they not threatened to blow up the world again) that relationship could have been good for them, in large part because the kids’ resounding opinion wasn’t 'you're terrifying, unfixable monsters' but 'you're kind of a dick and a loser lmao.' They’re unserious and informal and irreverent, and all three of these idiots could stand to be taken down a few pegs. It’s nice to have people who don’t need to be scared of you
I doubt they would have been close exactly, but they certainly wouldn’t have been too intimidated by the aliens to call them out; and the aliens would never have viewed the ex-kidnapped-ex-children as a threat, and therefore they could be listened to without too much suspicion. Just in general, a more varied support system to balance out the echo chamber of each other would do them a lot of good. But also, having something to value in a manner which isn’t as immediate and vital as life or death (as it so often is in their violently turbulent lives) would go a long way towards fixing their myopic lack of consideration for literally anyone who isn’t Them.
Of course none of the Riddle kids deserve to have to deal with Imperial Alien Bullshit after the sort of traumatic experiences said aliens have ALREADY put them through. The aliens burned those bridges before they realised there was water to cross and they’re astute enough to know that by the end of the day. Sadly, they would also all be too proud and stubborn to think of reaching out again unless they were really desperate (accrue another debt to the humans who want nothing to do with them after barely paying off five life debts with a planet? Risk being rejected by some of the only points of contact you have? Nah. Somebody would have to be dying. Again.)
Did the aliens ever consider staying? No. As much as they could have and in some ways did form connections there, all three of them very much viewed their time on Earth as an exile. And what would life look like if they did stay? Certainly none of them have the ambassadorial skills necessary to be First Contact (‘Do you come in peace?’ “For now. But you should know that we are a superior species and are capable of obliterating your little planet outright.” *has no intention of doing this but threat displays are a common self defence tactic in their usual parts of space and they’ve seen the sort of sci-fi films humans enjoy. Like hell are they going to be taken advantage of* *every country unites to declare them hostile within the hour*) And that’s not even counting the fact that, if they did want to integrate to Earth society, they would likely face some sort of consequence for all the illegal and disturbing things they’ve during their unlicensed tenancy (murder, kidnapping, and experimental surgery come immediately to mind, but there’s more.) It’s either that or enact a takeover and I don’t think they’d know what to do with a whole planet to be honest; something about dogs chasing cars…
I imagine they would hole up undeclared in Zone 5.1, feeling rather lost and wary of discovery. Perhaps they would explore a little more, but they’ve been on Earth for years already; there’s little left to discover in their opinion, and a lot more that they’ve lost and don’t know how to deal with. They don’t have a reason to be there anymore. Ultimately they would start to feel isolated, stuck on the other side of the galaxy from anything familiar. There's another element to it, which is part maladaption to trauma and partly a result of how they were designed, but the lack of conflict would start to wear on them just as much as purposelessness. It would be too peaceful — too quiet
To be honest, after having thought about it for a while now, I think they probably would try to go back home — the planet hasn’t been destroyed, and even if it had there’s still a few hundred million of their species kicking around in that corner of Andromeda. In their usual fashion, they have rather fucked everyone else over in their bid to escape their Terrible Fate and, with two of them lacking a reason to exist, I can very easily see them wanting to go back and help (try to help. The poor useless things try.) They wouldn’t be met with open arms, and they’re likely heading back into some sort of conflict which won’t be good for them… but that’s probably the place with the best chance of them finding an equal understanding with other people about what they’re like and what they went through. Particularly now that The Enquiry has been destroyed — there’s going to be a lot of people who are in similar situations to how they were ten years ago. It would give them something to do and people to lean on and, while that’s only part of what they need, it is a big part, and it’s something they’d be hard pressed to find anywhere else.
(Because these characters are My Beloveds and I drag them around with me like dolls, I do sometimes keep them on Earth with the lads, just for fun. No plot, no continuity, just vibes (plot and continuity Do Not Permit these vibes.) In those scenes, it rather pans out like this:
(Phred and Zach go urban exploring and stop being surprised when they find one or more of the aliens following along like a stray cat. The kids force them to stay for Halloween, watch Smile, and spend the whole time pointing at the monster and going ‘Diz, it’s you.’ Anyone who sees the aliens in public assumes it’s just the best cosplay they’ve ever seen and wants to know what it’s from, so Phil has to help them work out what game works as a cover; they hate this (except for Quiz, who thinks the whole thing is hysterical and let’s people take pictures.) Silly stuff like that… things that Would Have Been Nice.)
I know this might sound a little silly but... How would the aliens react if they got to meet their younger selves?
Badly.
I'm assuming we're going with a Before They Run Away definition of younger version, just cause that's the most significant inflection point for the characters.
Quiz: he would be so unnerved and uncomfortable the whole time. Just skin-crawlingly upset by the whole interaction. Imagine meeting the cringiest memory of yourself as a teenager, and add in the fact that they’re a facist responsible for murder; it would feel something like that.
But, if you literally forced them to interact past that immediate rejection, he would actually enjoy having someone who shares his perspective on the insane shit the crew get up to: someone who immediately agrees that Viz and Diz are insanely paranoid and it's so inconvenient; someone else who has no idea what’s going on when they talk tactics, and strategy, and weapons; someone less than him, because Young Quiz would be even more useless at ship life than Older Quiz is, and he would love the novelty of having the upper hand in a power dynamic like that.
And the fact that they still have things in common, regardless of how much he's managed to change otherwise?
… That would be unbearable.
Diz: positively lethal amounts of resentment. Envy. Shame. Like, ‘hello deeply unstable man! Would you like a living reminder of the fact that there was a time in your life where you had a purpose and felt a facsimile of joy?’ A normal person would perhaps just feel extremely miserable...
Paradoxes be damned, Diz would hunt his younger self for sport because how dare you exist? How dare you remind me of the things I'm not anymore. Respected and secure and admired; all gone. It doesn't really matter to him that there are objective improvements to his life in the here and now (ugly, fundamental things like 'being fully and constantly aware of The Horrors.') The physical manifestation of the fact that he's changed as a person and it wasn't for the better (a reminder that there was a version of himself that he liked more who existed before everything got fucked up) would not do good things to his psyche.
('Cause even in this version of himself where he was ostensibly at his best—his most successful, his most meaningful—he's now cripplingly aware he was being exploited to death. And even if he somehow changed it, if he managed to defy time and reality and save this version of himself, let him go and live free somewhere else and make a better life for himself... it still doesn't save him, now does it? Nobody ever saved him. There's not much left to save anymore. Better to kill off the reminder and be done with it.)
Viz: this man is his own disappointed father. He would have the least dramatic reaction purely because it's just an icy sense of disappointment and outright dismissal. This is the useless child who lost his ship and crew, who was puppeted about his whole career, who only just managed to get one other person out of hell with him when he left. Older Viz knows that everything his younger self is proud of is as good as a sham; he's just a stupid piece on a chessboard in a game played by someone else. PTSD flashbacks aside, he divorces himself from what he considers an inferior version of himself as much as possible—a younger self who failed his responsibilities and agreed to plans that got his soldiers killed.
The god complex is not found in the rearview mirror. He's better than that now. He doesn't need this idiot thing with its provincial vanity (doesn't need to see his own dawning horror in his younger self's eyes when he callously tells him what's going to happen to the people he's trying to protect. Doesn’t need the reminder of how it felt. It's easier to other himself, to believe that he was too stupid and inexperienced to prevent things turning out the way they did back then. Easier to believe that than face the fact that, given his time again, he would still fail.)
(Long response under cut because I’m incapable of being concise.)
Oh they’d 100% try to warn their younger selves; if we’re imagining it as some sort of time travel scenario, they’d definitely agree that it would be worth the chance. Unfortunately, there’s no universe where that goes well:
Enquirer Quiz would just… brush the whole thing off as mad ravings. I mean, not only does this crazy doppelgänger think there’s some conspiracy to lie to their troops, but he also thinks he’s from the future! He’s very good at just Not Hearing things that are inconvenient or unpalatable at this point in his career. (Him taking the three escapees into his house to hide them was, like, the eighth cataclysmically worldview shattering thing to happen to him that week, so he was, very critically, already softened up to just accept the next bullshit thing that happened so he didn’t have to do any more mental gymnastics.)
Young Viz and Diz would both make the mistake of somehow trying to go against orders or save the whole crew. Noble intentions, sure, but Viz is only in charge so long as he acts according to Enquiry rules; the second he breaks that (say, for an insane sounding reason like ‘this recon mission is a set up to kill us all’) there would be a unanimous mutiny and he would be removed from his position to be sent away and examined for defects. Which is to say he would be taken into Enquiry custody, interrogated, and destroyed and the plan would just go ahead with his lieutenant in command.
Much the same would happen to Diz if he, say, tried to play along until the last minute before disobeying orders and diverting their course out of danger: he would be seen as defective by the crew, removed from control of the ship, then they would all be taken into custody, the crew culled to keep the No Survivors plan intact, and the ship quietly sent for scrap with the other ten Dreadnoughts which were withdrawn a few months later. The only material difference Diz’s efforts would make would be the Diversion Scheme being deemed only 90% effective instead of 100%, courtesy of the ship Invincible contributing nothing and needing to be retrieved.
I can’t emphasise enough how sincerely crazy they would all sound in the face of a lifetime’s worth of brainwashing, and the precariousness of the dominos which say they survived at all. Their story is a tragedy; the timeline they’re in is the best they’re going to get.
If we’re imagining a looser, more abstract meeting completely free of the time space continuum where the three younger versions just appear on the ship one day sitcom style, it would go a little something like this:
Young Diz: hates his counterpart just as much as Older Diz hates him and thinks it’s probably best to kill him and put him out of his misery. After all, his life expectancy has never been that high (pilots don’t live long, frontliners less so) and he’s got no eagerness to turn into that. He is genuinely unsettled by Older Viz and has no idea how to respond to him; is this still his captain? How can he stand the disgrace of it all? There’s a lot of feeling enormously let down by someone he loved, barely restrained by indoctrinated respect for hierarchies. He reacts warmly and with sympathy to Older Quiz at first, who he accurately regards as being disgraced, but loses it quickly when Older Quiz openly rejects him — that one stings too much to get past, and he’s gotten over a surprising amount over the course of their friendship. Younger Quiz is, of course, still a dear friend.
Older Diz: trying to kill his counterpart earned him the enmity of Young Viz immediately. Which is psychological hell, because looking at a younger version of Viz is a destabilising experience enough on its own — sort of like seeing a photo of a much older sibling from when they were your age, the weird empathy of a familiar face and your own intimate knowledge of your internal life coming together to realise ‘oh. You were young too.’ ‘Cause Viz was always older than him, always his superior, and now he’s looking at this version of a guy he always looked up to, the one he idolised as better, and he’s… just a man. There’s some forgiveness in that somewhere, but hell if Diz knows what to do with it. Young Quiz is also a struggle to deal with emotionally, for the fairly understandable reason of ‘this is that age where you were actively in charge of killing the people I worked alongside, but you look just like I remember and, no matter how sick it makes me feel, my memory of loving you is still there, right where it’s been my whole life.’ He doesn’t really get to unpack any of that because he’s having to protect Young Quiz from Older Viz.
Young Viz: Does Not Like Any Of These Weird Traitors Or This Horrible Ship. His older self is a failure and a disgrace, and it’s making some vital part of him shrivel up with shame that feels enough like rage to be getting on with. Older Diz is some strange, warped nightmare who Young Viz would feel a lot of curiosity over if said nightmare hadn’t immediately started trying to axe Young Viz’s bestie. So they’re On Sight. Older Quiz invokes a frankly bewildering combination of instinctive, absolute loyalty and crushing disdain because ‘you’re some sort of defective Enquirer, how does that even happen?’ There are supposed to be failsafes for that sort of thing. Clearly he belongs under a microscope in a genetic engineering lab to make sure the faults in his makeup don’t happen again. Conversely, Young Viz is practically subservient in his deference to Young Quiz, who is a Real Enquirer and hasn’t shown any signs of Going Strange. It’s another good reason to fight his older self, who doesn’t just disrespect this Perfectly Good Government Official but tries to throw him out an airlock.
Older Viz: well, his younger self has picked a fight with Older Diz, and that can’t be allowed to stand, so he and his counterpart are fighting now too. Two against two. Older Selves vs Younger. If he thinks about the ironies and psychological implications of this, he doesn’t have to think about Young Diz; if he thinks about Young Diz for too long he might do something stupid like break down and beg for forgiveness, and we most certainly can’t have that. He doesn’t even know which version he would ask (it’s the older one. It’s always gonna be him.) Viz — either of them — is the only one who never met Young Quiz until they were at the Running Away stage, which is to say they have next to no history. No personal connection. And there’s no lingering shellshock to dampen him this time around. So Older Viz’s response to seeing Young Quiz, a soft, idly vicious Enquirer perfectly happy with his life, on his ship is, quite expectedly, to try and kill him…
… Which put him in conflict with Older Diz. What a shitshow.
Young Quiz: he’s just having A Time. Just… what is happening here? Older Viz is trying to Get Him and that is fucking horrifying because this version of Quiz hasn’t had anything to do with active combat situations since before he graduated and nobody’s supposed to touch him, much less try to hurt him, he’s an Enquirer! He reacts to Older Diz with an inept but genuine sort of sympathy because, though he never spotted the cracks in Young Diz during their time together in the academy, they’re more Cavernous Holes here and he’s clever enough to recognise them at least a little. Unfortunately he’s a lot less clever in dealing with his Older Self, who he finds… quite frankly comical. He can’t even feel insecure about how far he’s fallen because… look at him! He’s barely even a parody! So anxious about The Horrors — which Simply Can’t Be Happening, he would know, because he knows Everything — and so dismally provincial on this Ugly Little Ship with its Undignified Crew Of Abominations. Yeah, no, he’s not taking this seriously at all.
Older Quiz: well, nothing in the world could have prepared him for feeling hopelessly protective over the younger versions of his crew mates. Even if they are both hellions. That sense of protectiveness is not nearly enough to overcome how much seeing Young Diz feels like looking at a ghost, and worse, he keeps following him; Older Quiz refuses Young Diz’s efforts at closeness, and he knows it breaks something, and it’s worse knowing that he wouldn’t have noticed that when they were the same age. Young Viz is easier to handle, if full of vitriol; it’s like petting a feral cat who wants to bite him, all he has to do is wear proverbial gloves. He just wishes Young Viz were less fawningly receptive to Young Quiz; it’s far too Through The Looking Glass to see any version of Viz so eager to obey any version of him, and he really doesn’t like the demonstration of how much trust everyone had in him back then and how careless he was with it. When Older Viz starts trying to murder Young Quiz, all Older Quiz can really think is: “oh good, I don’t have to look at it any more.”
In my head, it just kinda goes on Like That until the Older Versions kill the Younger Versions — and that is how it would go. Yeah, sure, Young Viz and Diz are both trained soldiers, but so are their Older Counterparts, and those bitches have spent a decade running various mercenary ops whenever they get the chance to keep their heads above water. They have a vastly more varied experience of fighting. Viz trying to kill Younger Quiz would cause a fight between him and Diz, which would end with Quiz offing his Younger Self to shut them both up — and he would be furious with them both for ‘making him get involved.’
(And then they wake up from the terrible dream and spend the rest of the day feeling sick and strange, sticking abnormally close to one another. They Don’t Talk About It.)
I know this might sound a little silly but... How would the aliens react if they got to meet their younger selves?
Badly.
I'm assuming we're going with a Before They Run Away definition of younger version, just cause that's the most significant inflection point for the characters.
Quiz: he would be so unnerved and uncomfortable the whole time. Just skin-crawlingly upset by the whole interaction. Imagine meeting the cringiest memory of yourself as a teenager, and add in the fact that they’re a facist responsible for murder; it would feel something like that.
But, if you literally forced them to interact past that immediate rejection, he would actually enjoy having someone who shares his perspective on the insane shit the crew get up to: someone who immediately agrees that Viz and Diz are insanely paranoid and it's so inconvenient; someone else who has no idea what’s going on when they talk tactics, and strategy, and weapons; someone less than him, because Young Quiz would be even more useless at ship life than Older Quiz is, and he would love the novelty of having the upper hand in a power dynamic like that.
And the fact that they still have things in common, regardless of how much he's managed to change otherwise?
… That would be unbearable.
Diz: positively lethal amounts of resentment. Envy. Shame. Like, ‘hello deeply unstable man! Would you like a living reminder of the fact that there was a time in your life where you had a purpose and felt a facsimile of joy?’ A normal person would perhaps just feel extremely miserable...
Paradoxes be damned, Diz would hunt his younger self for sport because how dare you exist? How dare you remind me of the things I'm not anymore. Respected and secure and admired; all gone. It doesn't really matter to him that there are objective improvements to his life in the here and now (ugly, fundamental things like 'being fully and constantly aware of The Horrors.') The physical manifestation of the fact that he's changed as a person and it wasn't for the better (a reminder that there was a version of himself that he liked more who existed before everything got fucked up) would not do good things to his psyche.
('Cause even in this version of himself where he was ostensibly at his best—his most successful, his most meaningful—he's now cripplingly aware he was being exploited to death. And even if he somehow changed it, if he managed to defy time and reality and save this version of himself, let him go and live free somewhere else and make a better life for himself... it still doesn't save him, now does it? Nobody ever saved him. There's not much left to save anymore. Better to kill off the reminder and be done with it.)
Viz: this man is his own disappointed father. He would have the least dramatic reaction purely because it's just an icy sense of disappointment and outright dismissal. This is the useless child who lost his ship and crew, who was puppeted about his whole career, who only just managed to get one other person out of hell with him when he left. Older Viz knows that everything his younger self is proud of is as good as a sham; he's just a stupid piece on a chessboard in a game played by someone else. PTSD flashbacks aside, he divorces himself from what he considers an inferior version of himself as much as possible—a younger self who failed his responsibilities and agreed to plans that got his soldiers killed.
The god complex is not found in the rearview mirror. He's better than that now. He doesn't need this idiot thing with its provincial vanity (doesn't need to see his own dawning horror in his younger self's eyes when he callously tells him what's going to happen to the people he's trying to protect. Doesn’t need the reminder of how it felt. It's easier to other himself, to believe that he was too stupid and inexperienced to prevent things turning out the way they did back then. Easier to believe that than face the fact that, given his time again, he would still fail.)
The Worst People You Know (Are Also The Only Ones Left)
Traditional painting: gouache on paper.
Is this before the events of Riddle V.I.Z.ion? After? Don’t know! Probably after, but I only say that ‘cause they’re having a decent evening for once. Perspective is a little off and space gave me hell but overall I’m super happy with this piece!
Viz is telling a story everyone has heard a million times before and will hear again. Diz is either making a bomb or fixing the chronometer—I doubt even he knows at this point. Quiz has been confined to a salt circle. (If Quiz gets too close to the command console Everything Goes Horribly Wrong. If Viz and Diz had a choice between Quiz being helpful and an actual EMP, they would pick the bomb every time. Thus, the salt circle.)
(Nobody ever ask me how long this took, I shan’t answer, I shall simply turn smoke)
Thank you <3 sadly it will taste only of glue and aggrieved swearing!
(Thanks for your ask as well, btw; I’m doing some pen sketches rn to avoid having to wash my palettes, so if one with Viz in it turns out any good, I’ll put that up too.)
The Worst People You Know (Are Also The Only Ones Left)
Traditional painting: gouache on paper.
Is this before the events of Riddle V.I.Z.ion? After? Don’t know! Probably after, but I only say that ‘cause they’re having a decent evening for once. Perspective is a little off and space gave me hell but overall I’m super happy with this piece!
Viz is telling a story everyone has heard a million times before and will hear again. Diz is either making a bomb or fixing the chronometer—I doubt even he knows at this point. Quiz has been confined to a salt circle. (If Quiz gets too close to the command console Everything Goes Horribly Wrong. If Viz and Diz had a choice between Quiz being helpful and an actual EMP, they would pick the bomb every time. Thus, the salt circle.)
(Nobody ever ask me how long this took, I shan’t answer, I shall simply turn smoke)
Wanted to ask if you do art requests. If yes, could you draw/paint that one scene from Riddle V.I.Z.ion where Diz and Quiz are washing dishes together? If no, I really love your work!
An important question to ask before handing a knife to your most homicidal friend (who you mildly tortured recently and who hasn’t been taking it as well as you’d hoped.)
(This was very fun, thanks for the request! I would have done it faster, but my desk has been taken up with another project for about a month, and by the time I cleared it I’d overthought it so hard I lost the ability to conceptualise kitchens; I’m not perfectly happy with how the perspective turned out in a few places, but I did at least remember what a sink looked like!)
Anyone wishing to know where I’ve been is invited to imagine that scene from Pirates of the Caribbean where Beckett, consumed with a rapture of despair and awe, walks down the steps of a burning ship to meet his violent demise.
That is me. but the staircase is endless and I am wearing a somehow even sillier hat
I asked this about the aliens but now, do you have a favorite Riddle school child to write for or just their personality in general? (I have to admit for me Zack is way too funny sometimes)
Another excellent question I can’t answer concisely!
I have very strong and defined opinions about all of the aliens but aside from Phil, I think I know the kids a little less well. Riddle V.I.Z.ion only interacts with Not-Phil Humans comparatively briefly, so while I have distinct characters in mind for them, I didn’t engage with them to the same degree. Which is a shame in hindsight.
When I started my rewrite I did pencil out more stuff with the group initially—just inconsequential hanging-out-at-the-house style shenanigans—but it got cut pretty early on ‘cause it felt like I was stalling the plot and the damn thing was already long as fuck, it didn’t need me fooling around any more than I was already. (‘kill your darlings’ is my actual least favourite piece of writing advice, but at some point I know if I don’t seize myself by the scruff of my neck and drag myself away from a project, it will never end … Why am I writing more if the story was supposed to end? My grip slipped.)
So! I liked writing for Phil most because I knew him best out of all of them. But in terms of personality, I think Phred would be a strong contender for favourite; he wants so badly to live a quiet life but he's surrounded by cosmic level shenanigans all the damn time. He's not like Phil, who actively invites this shit. He's playing the straight man to the universe itself. Comes home from his job at the supermarket and his todo list reads Check Intergalactic Criminals Haven’t Killed Anyone and Feed Cat, in that order. He’s on his fifth ‘damn that’s crazy’ and the person at the McDonald’s drive through is still telling their life story, except the person is me and the story is their lives going wrong.
Phil and Zach I liked to use for jokes (Phil cause he’s Phil, and Zach cause he’s the liveliest character to me) but Phred and Smiley were both more grounded people in my mind; then the difference between them was that Smiley gets the serious side of the storyline and Phred gets to stand there like that guy who just wanted a waffle. One of them was always taking it seriously and the other said he’d do it on the night (and he did, go Phred.) The slowly draining sense of surrealism he experiences as things get worse is fun to imagine.
(I did actually draw up a very basic outline for the ways the kids interacted with the storyline when the other three had bigger roles; only shades of it showed through in the end, but I think it gives an impression of how I thought of them all:
Smiley: taking the situation seriously; wants to be anywhere else.
Phred: not taking the situation seriously; wants to be anywhere else.
Zach: not taking the situation seriously; wants to be involved.
Phil: taking the situation seriously; wants to be involved.)
For games, I like that Zach can be used as an item, I think that's neat. Sometimes you just have to put the homies in the inventory.
I wanted to ask you, do you have any writing tips? I love the way you write descriptions. Do you write them however it feels right or do you take inspiration?
Omg!!! Describing is my favourite <3 I can’t promise to be helpful because, for all I love writing, I’ve never really worked out a formal structure for how to do it; I just have at it and have fun! … Actually, that’s the only tip I can offer with full confidence; have fun, don’t be nervous to experiment with styles, prioritise enjoyment over perfection. I’ll say some other stuff as well because I’m incapable of shutting up, but that’s the takeaway I’d like anyone to have.
I'm very good at visualising things, so I like to just mentally sit in an environment or run through a scene as many times as it takes to get familiar with what I 'see', and then go from there. Sometimes I write a setting or scene multiple times. Then, I either choose the version I like the best or edit the good bits together into a final copy. If I do the latter, it does mean I have to be careful to avoid repeating things, cutting important things out, the scene feeling completely incoherent and disjointed, etc, but that’s just a matter of proofreading. Both methods take away the imagined pressure of having to get it ‘right’ first try, which is something I struggle with.
Unless I'm looking to be absolutely accurate for some reason, I tend not to worry too much about precisely what a place would actually be like—beyond broad strokes I'm more interested in conveying something thematic or atmospheric. Big fan of metaphors! And juxtapositions! And similes! And anything that lets me skirt around the difficult bits of language. One thing I really enjoy doing is using two unrelated concepts to describe a very specific idea; those either come to me in the moment and are perfect or I spend forever trying to decide what’s most apt, no in between, I’ve either got it or I ain’t. “Diz drove the way a man having a seizure paints—badly.” That’s one I distinctly remember being fond of.
Sometimes, if I’m stuck on how to convey a vibe in a section, I read a few passages from a book which has the tone I’m looking to embody. Some of my more ornate descriptions are inspired by Edgar Allen Poe, for example. The works of Frances Hardinge are a big reason for my love of weird metaphors. Hell, some of the more colloquial bits of prose are literally just how I speak when I’m doing a bit. I wanted the section to be mildly amusing and just… did it as a bit. Did it work, you maybe ask? Well, I amused myself, so it counts for something!
I think, technique-wise, I might advise writing dialogue separately (I tend to do it first) and then work on other things; otherwise I feel like I lose my flow. I do dialogue and tone markers, positioning and action, then description around it where it's needed and where it fits. But I don't know if that's a universally good method or if it's just what works for me; I know some people who can write it all out at once in one go—never got it down myself.
The best writing advice I’ve been given is to avoid deleting things! Maybe something didn't fit in the project you initially wrote it for; it might be absolutely perfect for something else later. Or it might not; keep it anyway, and you get to see how far you’ve come. I have whole documents like that. And notebooks full of concepts and half-sentences—unironically, those are the best for flicking through if I’m feeling uninspired. No commitment to any one concept! No pressure to be meaningful! Just vague musings about pigeons! Miscellaneous pigeons always turn out more useful than initially expected.
Hello again! A question I've been meaning to ask you, between the Vizion aliens, do you have a favorite? Someone who you like writing for, their personality or just as a character.
Oh. Now that is a good question… I can’t possibly be normal about this one.
The short answer is that they all make me bite things for different reasons, and because of that I think I’d struggle to pick a clear favourite. They mean different things to me: one is blurring the line between monster and god when you really shouldn’t be either; one is inescapably doomed by the narrative; one is just a little guy. They’re all fuck ups in their own special ways and they all belong in the shredder <3
The long answer involves me rambling for forever about the characters themselves, and there is no way for me to escape from that looking sane because this is the sort of shit I’m using my literature degree for these days. We will go for the medium answer!
For writing specifically, there are different things to explore that make them interesting to me. The contradictions! The drive! I love that, despite everything, Viz is still something of an optimist who wants to do good, but his idea of ‘good’ is so deeply wrong it’s impossible for it to help anyone. I love that Diz had the potential to be legitimately brilliant but reduced himself to a snarling mess of an attack dog and wouldn’t know how to stop if he tried. I love that Quiz is a selfish coward who, when it comes right down to the wire, will stand against horrific odds for the mere hope that it will help. They all have positive traits that are ultimately so warped they loop back around into being their worst qualities.
(I think I’d say I like the ways the characters intersect the best rather than picking any one of them. Idk, man, it’s the triangle of it all: Quiz as the one the other two defend and manage, one of the few things they still team up for with no question; Diz as the lynchpin Quiz and Viz both knew separately before they ever met each other and who they both no longer understand; Viz as the leader they trust implicitly even when he’s horrifically wrong because there isn’t anyone else. And then they all have their own individual intricacies and concerns within this mutual framework.
Currently I’m switching between how they reacted to each other in the past and how they do now in the present, and Viz and Quiz are fascinating me. There’s a scene early on in their V.I.Z.ion era where Viz teaches Quiz to shoot properly. They get into an argument (because Diz is basically catatonic and tensions are high) and Quiz recognises for the first time that this isn’t a piece he’s moving around on a battleground anymore—it’s a guy. It’s the first time he breaks out of the Enquirer mindset he’s been trained in to and recognises Viz as a person. And for Viz, teaching Quiz to defend himself is an acknowledgment of him being part of his new, three-person crew, something he really didn’t want to have to accept for a lot of difficult reasons. The whole thing is just… not sweet, exactly, because look at who and what we’re talking about, but… it’s close. Especially after the outright dystopian shit I’ve written about their homeworld at this point. Anyway, unrelated ramble over.)
For drawing? My favourite is Diz. He only has two arms to deal with and therefore I only have to draw two hands! The silhouettes for the other two are also harder to work with. Sorry about your trauma buddy, but I can’t deny the convenience!
Hello! I have put together the Riddle School- Good Ending AU a bit more and decided to share some things since you were interested! I wanted to have a bit of a different take on the aliens and for fun decided to make them the 'good guys'. I kept the military idea the fandom adopted since I loved it and went a step further to make them the best of their respective branches therefore prime targets in the war. Diz was a fighter pilot, Viz was a captain and Quiz a lead cartographer. They were chased out of their solar system by the enemy their planet was at war with (Viz lost an eye, Diz his lower arms) and now have to help build this 'Cryobeam' that could land a good enough hit on the enemy to bring an advantage to their losing side. All whilst they are also constantly pressed by time and their superiors.
The three took refugee on Earth where Phil happened to spot them stealing from a local store. They took him and later on his friends when they tried to find him, since the Vizion crew knew it would be dangerous if their enemy was around and found out these kids knew of them. Diz is not a traitor in this story, Quiz does not run off to play principal and Viz does not die. Some game events play out differently.
Kids living on a spaceship, shenanigans ensue later on. From games of hide and seek with Phil getting stuck in a vent, truth or dare near a lava pit, Viz saves Smiley from a bunch of boys bulling her and trying to steal her wig, Zack challenging Viz and Diz to a match of football, Smiley and the boys cooking dinner with Diz, Zack and Phred having Quiz play a horror game, Smiley and Quiz playing wingmen for Diz and Viz (it started as a crackship, I don't know how it got here), etc. Also another change to the canon. I didn't make Smiley magically grow hair instead that is a wig and she has alopecia areata.
Basically, three military dudes who have forgotten what it was like to live life adopt four rambunctious children that shake up their entire operation. If you want to know anything more about it please let me know! I'd love to share!
Omg! This is so very cool!! Sorry I’m so late; I must have clicked on the notification at some point and meant to reply later, then forgot all about actually doing it because I had thought about it and there was now no notification. Regardless, it was amazing when I read it the first time and it still hits now! Thanks for messaging me about it!
I must know who wins the football game. Don’t know why that line in particular is standing out to me so much (I don’t even like football) but I must know. Truth or dare near the lava pit also intrigues me; what dares involve the lava pit? (Don’t know about you, but I had at least one friend who would probably dare you to throw your shoes or some shit in there XD)
The whole concept of the AU is brilliant! It’s kinda giving gravity falls with the whole ‘inexplicable and possibly violent happenings occurring while school children hang out with cryptids’ (I fell back into that bottomless pit recently so maybe that’s just me conflating things, but it’s a good vibe! Anything that makes me think of gravity falls is a win.)
I love love love your ideas for a softer portrayal with the aliens; it’s kinda hilarious to me that they might have just yoinked the children with barely half a plan and now they’re stuck babysitting for the good of the mission. The villain decay from Ambiguous Threat to Bonus Uncles is immaculate. Headquarters is phoning in to find out how weapon testing is going only to find all three of their best soldiers losing at smash bros, rip
(Oh god, don't get me started on Viz and Diz as a crack ship. Every. single. time I write them they get more divorced and I... do not know how they're doing it. I am staring at them in incomprehension. 'You’re not a couple? You’ve literally never been a couple?? I wrote your species to have no concept of marriage, how the fuck did you get divorced???' They have yet to answer me; they’re too busy missing each other while stood in the same room.)
Questions! What do the aliens do about the kids parents in this? (Super curious about this one cause it was something I never considered until I started writing the Kidnapping Phil scene and fell into the plot hole face first.) Are the enemy forces on Earth as well? Do the kids get tangled up in the Everything, or do they successfully avoid that fate in exchange for low-risk shenanigans? I remember you had a few OCs you talked about last time; are they still part of it? Do you think you’ll write it out as prose or did you have something else in mind? What are the aliens like in your story and (because I found this one fun to answer!) who’s your favourite?
With special thanks to tumblr for reducing my image quality to Potato—looks way less pixelated in my photo library. One day I will use technology successfully…
Whipped this together in a night to get used to painting again and, while I’m a bit rusty and it’s not my biggest or most complicated work, I’m still really pleased with it! It’s also got the honour of being my first fanart since I was 14, so that’s giving it bonus points in my book (Riddle School stays winning in my brain ig.) Although, technically, it counts as an illustration for Riddle V.I.Z.ion more than fanart, seeing as I’ve fucked off somewhere far into the distance as far as actual RS canon is concerned XD
Anyway, two of my boys <3 this was fun, will be doing it again
yousharknotpass
romaincrisis
2087
germansingergirl