If you're still interested in taking asks for the games you reblogged how about 4, 21, 22 and 🔥 for Percy?
4. If you could put this character in any other media, be it a book, a movie, anything, what would you put them in?
Book. Book. Give me a book. I want to know Percy's internal monologue if possible, or at least how he was with his family prior to the Briarwoods, and I think a book would be a great way of showing the fun nuances of that given we won't get anything like that on stream.
21. If you're a fic writer and have written for this character, what's your favorite thing to do when you're writing for this character? What's something you don't like?
I mean I think the obvious choice is that I love to poke at his trauma but also like...
I like to provide a small change and try to figure out how it'd affect him? Partly because small points of divergence are fun for me, but also partly because Percy is an overthinker and also someone who comes to conclusions and then rationalises them to himself, not always realising the inconsistency between his emotional conclusion and the actual facts. Percy loves to portray himself as rational and reasonable and he almost never is! He has reasons for what he does and what he thinks is best, but he's also a lot more emotional than he wants to think he is, and I think that's interesting. Percy's brain is a big old thorny mess and I like to really get into the weeds with that, to pick apart how he thinks and why he thinks it, where his logical errors are and where he remains consistent.
I don't think there's anything in particularly I dislike? I mean, I don't tend to write crack, but that's more because crack isn't where my skills lie, it's not to do with Percy. When it's to do with Percy... I mean my goal is to write a good story and sometimes that means geode method-ing it - to find out what a character is made of, first you must break them. Which I think leads on to the next question-
22. If you're a fic reader, what's something you like in fics when it comes to this character? Something you don't like?
Because something I don't like is stories which deny Percy's capacity for awful. I dislike the fandom propensity for woobiefication and how many fics just have him simp for Vex and ignore the ways he can be kind of awful, and neglectful of his sister and just generally kind of a mess. I also hate just...
Okay this is layered but, there's this habit in fandom, largely by people who I think are either inexperienced writers or just inexperienced with trauma to... flatten it. To make the ability to relay a narrative easy, to make triggers simple and obvious and the reactions similarly clear cut.
But the thing is... it isn't? It's way more fucked up and messy? We see Percy in canon try to relay events and it's choppy and erratic and disordered - trauma messes with your memory! And yet I see fics which have Percy just blandly exposit his trauma to Vex, no ums or ahs, no pauses, no hesitation, no chewing over his words or trailing off to silence as the memories overtake the present. There's ones where they have Percy perform anxiety and trauma when encountering people a part of things, and yet it's nothing like what we see in canon - his seething anger with Stonefell, his razor's edge calm at Ripley (that's barely concealing screaming terror within). There's none of his capacity for total irrationality (again, Ripley) and it's...
I don't think it's intentional on the part of these authors. I don't think they realise just how much of a shit job they're doing. But at least to me, with my own trauma - it doesn't feel remotely reflective of 1. My own experiences with trauma and that kind of shit and 2. With what we see in canon.
Instead it feels like someone playacting something they don't remotely understand - like a child. And that's fine for the people learning about it, but for people who've got their own experiences and who like to read about similar experiences for the catharsis of seeing a character overcome it or the relatability factor or anything else - it can feel weirdly mocking? Dismissive? Like the author doesn't care enough to actually think about how those kinds of events affect someone. It's like they think our stories make good stories - but they don't care enough to portray it accurately.
And, again, I don't think most authors do this with malice, I think it's pure ignorance, but that doesn't stop me hating it.
On the flipside, I really love stories which actually tackle Percy's trauma and bullshit well.
I also... and this is much more petty, but I dislike the portions of fandom that like to make Percy some kind of sex god, or even overtly horny. Percy is very restrained and very internal that we see, and he's easily flustered. When Scanlan makes a joke about him having syphilis when he has his cough early in the Briarwood Arc Percy's flustered response is along the lines of once! Vex makes a point that Percy has improved because he's good at learning and knows when to listen. He was a nerd who explicitly had nothing to do with court - he's not the kind of person who was likely to go fucking around before the Briarwoods and after the Briarwoods he had awful, personal, visceral trauma and violation from being tortured, as well as dissociating to shit! I highly doubt he fucked around after! It seems likely to me that he has very limited sexual experience and also was someone who was deeply flustered by a lot of sexuality for some time - he notably relaxes once he's getting some on a regular basis which very much suggests to me that if he had more experience, he'd be less flustered!
There's also that Percy is very much someone who overthinks. Who hates himself for his own terrible thoughts and ideas. I'm sorry, but I can't see him easily fantasising about someone he knows - Percy strikes me as the kind of person who'd think even a wet dream about someone to be terribly rude and an imposition. He hates his reflexive awful bad ideas, the Ripley of his brain, he was raised posh and noble with rigid etiquette expectations - I think Percy's sense of propriety probably extends even that far. Repression is a hell of a thing.
Send me a “ 🔥 “ for an unpopular opinion.
Percy's a dick, no not a dick like that, no, not a misunderstood woobie, Percy's kind of an arrogant rich wanker and that's half the fun of his character. As I say above, there's a lot of people in fandom who just want Percy to be cool and kind of ignore his capacity for awfulness or petty bullshit, and also who ignore his capacity to be a dork or a fucked up uni kid! He's a traumatised man in his early 20s, he's basically a fucked up uni student! Percy wants people to think he's cool, but this man is a nerd! He invented guns! Don't make him cool! Make him a dork!
A huge swath of fandom is wrong about Percy and I remain narky about it.
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