Okay I am writing a long ass spiel about them and the au they're from, but it's going to take. a while. and i'm bad at talking about my oc's. so here are these scribbles i did of them, none of them will fucking look at the camera, you idiots, i will kill you to death.
This is an introduction post for some of the most plot relevant members of the Children of Dionysus.
Admittedly, I've been hesitant to share many details about the Troupe, because they are characters that are only meant to be seen in retrospect. By the time the story starts, they are dead, and they linger on only through the eyes of others. But I also might need to get over myself. So here's a brief introduction to each of them!
This is Francis Donner. He is terrible and awful and i hate him so much. Imagine, if you will, a plague upon the earth in human form. That's Francis. We made him this way! Francis is something that is truly wrong in every way, he came out of the womb with apologies already on his lips, he is neither a man nor a butterfly, but a worm dreaming that he might be either. You take in a kitten from the street and it's grubby and starving and it's leg is bent all wrong. It hisses and spits at your hands no matter how gently you handle it, growling and puffing up when you set down food, and drawing blood with its claws while you wash the mud from it's fur. It's all instinct, animal, survival, it hasn't learnt how to trust yet, you see your face in it's eyes. Francis is also the one who introduces Bernard to the Children of Dionysus.
You would be forgiven for thinking that Shelby Reyes was a child. She certainly acts like one, she's often assumed to be 13-15, though she's actually almost 18. Shelby is the type to play little sister to everyone, the feeling of being childish and immature is a security to her. She's like a bird in a cage with no bars and a door. Her exit is all around her, yet she fixates on that door, fighting to escape through her one track route. She knows that door isn't her way out, she knows she can leave through any other means, but it's habit. The world outside the cage is something of lovecraftian scale, Shelby cannot comprehend it, but her whole life has been defined by her fight to escape.
Kierstan Walker is not a fighter, and she's not a child, and yet there's a certain naivete to her. She has a crick in her neck from staring at the sky, following the stars and watching the sun. K wants to be a part of something larger than herself, and yet she fears infinity; she's both captivated by and terrified of possibility. She's an incredibly gentle thing, soft and kind in a way that betrays everything she's surrounded by. She lives in a waking dream of destiny, clinging to fate and blindly walking where those fraying threads lead her, she needs to be something worthy, something that can't be lost in the scale of it all. Shelby has never seen the world outside her cage, but K has, and she ignores it with a childish determination, it's not that she cannot be there, it's that she will not.
Charlotte Marin is a drifter, she's always looking for a place to belong. Charlie is the only one of the troupe who is new to Gotham, and that's ultimately what lead her to the Children of Dionysus. Truthfully, Charlie isn't devoted to the ideology of the cult, she's driven by her desire for community and the ever-blind groping search for something to hold on to. Charlie is very anxious, but she thrives on social connections and relationships, and so will do anything to create a space where she feels wanted, she'll hollow out a hole in any unyielding surface to make a home. I tend to picture Charlie as a helium balloon drifting along the treetops of a forest, secretly hoping that her string will get tangled in the branches and she'll have an excuse to stay even for a moment.
Percival Hyde is weird. They're strange, a social aberration. Percy understands norms, but they don't care about them, they like being a freak who stares at people for too long and makes weird observations and generally behaves in ways that make people feel just a little unnerved. This isn't out of any distaste for those social norms, Percy is truly fascinated by the human psyche, by culture and tradition and the implicit laws of society, but they still refuse to conform. Percy is especially fascinated by the cult because of the observations they can draw from within it, they've been a member almost since its inception. They have a deep reverence for humanity, whether that be the good or bad of it.
Richard Crawford is incredibly friendly and personable. He and Percy are very close, in part because of how intrinsically different they are. Where Percy is emotionally invested in the social nature of humans, Richie's approach to people is very clinical, to him people are first and fore mostly an organism, and that's what gets his attention. Richie is very charismatic, but much of how he interacts with others is to disguise how he struggles to understand himself and his own emotions. He understands people best through a medical standpoint, which clashes with Percy's almost idealistic idea of humanity as something transcendental. Richie and Percy are so ideologically opposed, and yet that's what their friendship is built on because they recognise each other as something important and intrinsic to their own world views.
The last member of the Troupe is of course, Bernard, but we've met him already. More on the Troupe later!
These characters were made together with my good friend tumblr user @nyquilfishtank
