#dosopod

[boratoki]

Holiday card for dos~

[slipstreamborne]

i don't think i've really seen you talk about them, but just out of curiosity, what are your feelings on john? and perhaps jade if you feel like it :0

I like Jade!  She is an awesome, awesome, utterly badass lady, even if I don't have particularly intense Feelings about her the way I do other characters (though I do want to grow up to be Grandma English, someday 8D).

John... Oh, John.  There are some characters that I dislike as individuals but find compelling as characters/narrative voices, but John doesn't even manage that.  For me, he is the absolute least interesting of the entire cast, with a really shallow backstory and minimalistic motivations compared to everyone else around him. John's story is one that's been told over and over and over AND OVER again, and one I'm pretty sick of.  I've been presented with characters like him and expected to experience this new world/lifestyle/adventure through his perspective and automatically empathize with his obviously normative/default identity in pretty much every sub-genre of YA-ish media I've ever encountered, and I have run out of empathetic fucks to give for the problems his kind of character encounters. 

John is very much the 13 year old boy raised within a society that caters specifically to him, that considers his demographic the "norm" and "ideal" against which all others are to be measured, and as such he's gone through life without having a lot of his views challenged or subject to substantial growth.   In some ways Sburb is good for him because it forces him to navigate situations with all sorts of people drastically different from himself, but then again he also stumbles into godhood and has a lot of his worst/most problematic behaviors rewarded.  He takes a lot of shit for granted, and for the moment his prankster attitude lets him gloss over anything that would otherwise challenge his very comfortable position within the narrative. 

I also find his relationships with his friends very unbalanced.  He does care about them deeply, and is capable of really personal and heartfelt acts of friendship, but he can also lash out and wound them with casual ease and effectiveness, his callousness excused away with a mentality of ;it's just a joke/but it was funny'.  Not that being a Bit of a Jerk or even Kind of a Major Douche, Actually is anything novel in Homestuck, and a lot of my favorite characters are assholes in their own rights, but John doesn't have any vulnerabilities of his own to balance out that behavior.  As is he'd be a terrible black partner because he hurts without BEING hurt, and often doesn't bother to think through the long-term impact of his actions.

One good thing for John though is those are all things that he could theoretically grow out of.  Like I said, he's a teenage boy, and a lot of his worst behaviors are how teenaged boys are conditioned within a lot of cultures to act.  In the right circumstances he could mature into a person that I'd be interested in reading about, but as for the actual maturation process I'm not interested at all unless it takes the form of characters very pointedly calling John out on his shit and him actually having to deal with some serious consequences without being rescued by his charms or built in socioeconomic cushion.

Which is to say, it's vindictive as hell, but I only like John when he's stomping on rakes and getting smacked in the face. 

Writing him in an exclusively limited POV has proven interesting because he says/thinks/does a lot of things that in my mind range from side-eye worthy to downright terrible but which make perfect sense in his own headspace.  Those things can't really be extracted from the narrative because John's perception of events is as much part of the story as the events themselves, so instead I have to take care in how I frame his words and actions and how other characters react to him in order to establish that Dude, That Was So Not Okay.  And because John is so happily clueless so long as nothing is bothering him too terribly, it's fun to set things up so that reader knows what's going on long before he does. 

As much as I dislike him I'm not out to write a bashing fic, but I'm also not out to hold his hand and patiently walk him step by step through all of his fuck-ups.  Training wheels came off this metaphorical bicycle a long time ago, dude.  Time to take your skinned knees and learn to balance that motherfucker like everybody else. 

[slipstreamborne]

Dammit dos, all these delicious Nurse Nitram ideas and I can't make them fit in with the John-centric POV I've got plotted.

Guess that means there'll have to be a Tavros-POV remix with porn wait what who said that when all's said and done.

[slipstreamborne]

slip, what if. what if...what if, aradia is nurse nitram's tattoo artist/piercer/gossip and advice buddy. what if.

Yes.  YEEESSSSSSS. 

Rubber glove morails pleases me greatly. 

When he has major problems he takes them to Aradia and she pins him down and makes him spill his guts while she pokes him with sharp things.  It's a really cathartic experience (endorphins really, REALLY help out, too), plus he walks out of the parlor with physical proof that he's more than the things that worry him, and that becomes wrapped up in each mod's meaning and history and YES YES GOOD DOS I LOVE YOUR BRAAAAAAAAAIN. 

(Tavros feeds into Aradia's morbid side with tales of all the gruesome and bizarre cases that walk into the ER and helps her get good deals on all the sterilizing equipment she needs for her shop.)

[slipstreamborne]

It's love at first sight.

(for dosopod, who has the best Nurse Nitram headcanons)

[partyshoggoth-blog]

dosopod replied to your post: please raise ur hand if youve ever tried to...

yeah and she didn’t listen to a thing i said which is probably good b/c it didn’t make any sense

i explained homestuck to one of my best friends when we were suuuper high and she was SO INTERESTED like she was INTO that shit and then the next day she was like "all that shit u said was totally fucked up i had nightmares"

[nicosdisangelic]

You like DaveTavros? THEN DOSOPOD.

He's the bestest.