Also tell me about your favorite angry bisexual woman elf with problems!
I actually had to think about this one for a minute because while many of my favorite characters embody one or more of these traits (angry, bisexual, woman, elf, problems), there's fewer characters I can think of who possess all of them!
If we're going with canon bisexual... I'm going to say Merrill Dragon Age! I think her anger is, sadly, often ofterlooked, but it's definitely there, and you see it come out when she talks to Marethari, or talks about her issues with her clan. That frustration at not being taken seriously, being talked down to, talked about, lowkey lied about, treated as both stupid and dangerous... whatever one thinks about her goals, it's is clear she feels very disrespected in many aspects of her life, feels that people do not see her for who she is and what's she's capable of, and I think that anger simmering under the surface about, coming through most of the time only in the occasional cutting remark, is very compelling.
It seemed a quirky and suitable descriptor nearly a decade ago, though nowadays the incoherency is entirely expected. I keep wanting to change it but I dunno what to.
16) What's a piece of advice you would give to yourself five years ago?
Dump their ass. lmao. Join those hobbies you'd been dreaming of doing for years, you'll get into them eventually anyway.
20) What do you wish someone would ask you?
Anything that gives me an excuse to yap about the WIPs I keep putting off for other projects. Ask me how nice it is to finally have treatment for adhd. its so so good.
5, 7, and 35: which character (if any) has changed the most as you wrote them, in terms of your interpretation or understanding of their character and choices?
(Fanfic/author ask game)
5. What's something you learnt while researching a fic?
I had to mull over this question for quite a while! Given my tendency to mostly write canon-compliant character studies in fantasy universes, most of my 'research' process is double-checking for lore compliance and the like and it was a struggle to identify anything particularly interesting or revelatory which would be worth sharing from those deep dives (unless people want to hear me bang on about the symbolism of Meredith and Orsino both losing loved ones in cupboard fires again).
So, I had a flick though the last few pages of my posted AO3 works, and came up with the research I had to do into the neighbourhoods of New York City for my Crazy Ex-Girlfriend fic Crossroads, featuring Rebecca Bunch crashing at her ex-frenemy Audra Bunch's house when stranded in NYC, as well as my Ace Attorney smut fic escargot*, which uh, features the eating of escargot. (I have eaten escargot before, but wanted to refresh my memory of the process because it was basically a food kink fic lol.)
*Heads up that this is a (aged-up) Trucy/Miles fic for anyone who's canon familiar and might be squicked by the pairing.
7. Coffee or tea while you write?
I don't really tend to drink either while writing these days! They're both very work-coded to me now. (Coffee for when I need to focus, tea for when I need to calm down.)
The real question is water or alcohol, to which the ratio is about 9:1 😉. (But no joke, I have found that staying adequately hydrated helps my writing process a LOT. glug glug)
35 (wild card): which character (if any) has changed the most as you wrote them, in terms of your interpretation or understanding of their character and choices?
I know I mentioned the other day that I've started finding Meredith easier to write due to recent life events, and I think there's at least a handful of people who follow me here who would understand the full context of why that's the case, and probably a dozen more that could make a pretty educated guess based on what I've mentioned publicly!
Because the explanation deals with pretty heavy mental health shit (psychosis, suicide) and is quite lengthy, I'm putting the rest of this answer under a cut.
Long story short, I think it's incredibly difficult to truly appreciate just how fucking weird brains can be when pushed to their absolute limits (especially where trauma is involved). And nothing quite encapsulates that for me more than the circumstances which lead to my involuntary hospitalisation on the other side of the planet last year!
Basically, due to a cumulation of insanely stressful life factors between January and June last year, I ended up having a psychotic break featuring hallucinations, persecutory delusions, and delusions of grandeur. Unfortunately, I was still acting just normal enough before my pre-planned trip to the US last year that nobody quite picked up on it until after I left Australia (although in hindsight I was definitely having hallucinations before the trip).
Anyway, I quickly grew more deranged after that due to a combination of factors, such as being socially isolated from my support network, missing my connecting flight to NYC at LAX (and absolutely lacking the executive function to rebook one), as well as being separated from my luggage. I also misplaced my wallet and glasses (but somehow managed to hold onto my passport, thank god).
Thankfully, I did have my credit card details stored on my phone, so I managed to book a room in a Holiday Inn for several days, which I only left to eat at the McDonald's across the road in a state of constant hypervigilance. I became convinced that I was a secret CIA sleeper agent and that the CIA had killed my cousin (who had suicided some nine years prior).
Eventually, I decided that I desperately needed to return to Australia and tried to make my way back to the Australian embassy, missing its closing time by 15 minutes. Lost and confused, I spent a lot of time wandering about in circles hoping that whoever was tailing me would lose my scent. I sent my lawyer an email from an Apple store stating that I had "shaken the fabric of reality and discovered my moral values" and that I wanted to go home now.
I got hungry and hunkered down in a McDonald's again. I sat there for a while having occasional moments of clarity where I would be like 'holy shit I think I am losing my fucking mind'. During one of these moments, I asked to borrow the restaurant's phone and called 911 on myself. I then had a very vivid and soothing hallucination of my Honours thesis supervisor who I had not seen in a decade putting on a bad Australian accent (he's American) telling me that everything would be okay and I would get through this.
Then the police turned up and I screamed at this LAPD officer about how I was a proud Australian citizen, that I was going to become PM one day, and that when I was Prime Minister (of Australia) I would ... *check notes* fix Los Angeles International Airport? And then I got sectioned. lol
As for how all this relates to Meredith Stannard, I think it's very cool and sexy for me to have already been a massive fan of a character who more or less experiences canonical delusions (and implied hallucinations) so I can continue processing this absolutely bizarre batshit experience that happened to me the way I know best (terrorising fictional characters). It definitely gave me more insight into how somebody in that frame of mind (and not sleeping for days!!) might end up putting dots together that aren't there because their frames of reference are wrong, or they believe God is sending them signs, or what have you.
tl;dr I was always fascinated by how Meredith's sanity slippage has a very slow build up (she carried that red lyrium sword around for YEARS!) for her to just finally snap the way she does, and although I have written snippets set in that time frame before, I think I'll be able to do it in an even better and more meaningful way now.
abelia ⇢ do you have a particular piece of jewelry you always wear or can’t part with?
probably my flower-shaped earrings and engagement ring! I used to have sword earrings which fit this but those got lost in the Great Pandemic Move of 2020
jasmine ⇢ do you have a movie or book you loved but will never watch/read again?
oh this is hard! I have a high tolerance for Bad Things happening in fiction so that if I never watch/read something it's more often due to not having the chance to. maybe Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (dir. Park Chan-wook), which contains every content warning under the sun, though it still belongs to the former camp. and Farewell My Concubine/霸王别姬 (dir. Chen Kaige), not because it's horrifying but because it has a very sad ending.
taro ⇢ if someone called you right now to catch up, what’re the things you’d tell them about?
rental market woes, visa bureaucracy, thesis writing, job-hunting, my quest to hopefully get to foster kittens, figuring out why Brits dont ever wear sunscreen outdoors. this makes me sound like a huge normie 😅
(lmao haven't thought of that Vault in ages, excellent username)
Gaarrry!?
Finally someone gets that it's a fallout reference(might happen more often if I actually posted fallout lol), I like that it doubles as a reference to the cloning vault and hypothetically the number of clones 😁
Was fun to see it actively noticed lol, I imagine my lone wanderer thinks about it often
The game in it's entirety? ^^; Just, We Know The Devil is kind of a love letter to this relationship, both as a whole and as the constituent pairs.
I was very willing to be sold by the first scene with them running to the campfire.
I was so very, very sold by the true ending.
2. What are your favorite things about the ship?
To avoid this become a complete wall o' text, I am going to pick one thing.
One of my favourite things about this ship is how they're all different flavours of 'bad kid' and how that affects the way they bounce off each other. Neptune is the kid who knows the game is rigged, and sure, you can make her play, but you can't make her put her heart into it. Venus would be good if she could "just man up" and stop hiding in a cupboard. Jupiter is so so close to being good, but she isn't perfect, so it doesn't count. (And one of the things I love is-- look, these are definitely ways straight and cis kids can be? But also they do speak to being a queer teenager and I just love that, in the same way Heaven Will Be Mine's endings are metaphorically answering the question "how do you live in a queerphobic society?"
3. Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?
Going through the true ending solves a lot of their problems. They will heal.
They will just not heal and have completely solved problems immediately.
“Where does it stop?” Meredith asks Hawke one morning, their limbs so thoroughly tangled with one another’s they can scarcely tell where one of them begins and the other one ends. “When does it stop?”
Hawke sighs, her fingers spreading against the curve of Meredith’s hip. “I don’t know,” she answers, “but we’ll know it when we see it.”
When the Chantry explodes, streaking the sky with ash and burying the city in rubble, Hawke can’t tell whether Meredith is staring out at the same inevitable conclusion, or if all the knight-commander can see these days is red, red, red.
