12. What's a headcanon you have for this character? (cynthia)
i think cynthia having genuine full blown pseudo medieval times ADHD is not a headcanon because she is doing that all the time in the game. but i like to think she has pretty substantial dyslexia as well. like "kjelle gave up trying to teach me my letters" level of dysfunction. that's something that doesn't matter at all when you can spend your life as part of the world's most enthusiastic but least skilled three person theatre troop, but i do factor it in if i'm thinking about any other setting. why didn't cynthia get a summer job with inigo and owain in mall au? she had to take remedial special ed classes. that kind of thing. plus i think it's more fun to imagine the awakening cast in any other setting underachieving and having pretty mundane lives
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? (cynthia)
every time i try to write cynigowain i default to inigo's limited third-person pov and i loved this question because it made me think about why. in a really broad, general sense i enjoy writing really unreliable narrators a lot more than people who are honest about what's going on, because loading up a puzzle feeder with all the things that are being left unsaid is one of my favourite things about writing or reading a story. ymmv ofc im not fishing for compliments here, just peeling back the curtain (which btw is yellow bc its my favourite colour). so i like writing claude's impression of events a lot because it feels authentic to do things like having him be extremely aware of minute shifts in other people's emotions (even if he's not necessarily cognizant of this or consciously analysing it) while being completely oblivious to his own emotional state beyond like, "i'm probably happy about this". while i wouldn't put inigo at that level i do think there's a level of cognitive dissonance between what inigo thinks is happening and what is actually going on that's fun to play with, plus he's the most capable of three of sitting down and observing. i'm not a very cinematic writer. i want to be in one of the character's heads and having everything filtered through their perspective because i'm more interested in what they think about what's going on than the way the dolly camera is currently moving over the scene.
for that reason i don't think i could write from owain's POV in a way that felt true to my understanding of his character (suicidal, big pause to take a breath, chuuni) while being recognisable as what the people around him see (massive chuuinibyou who is only incidentally suicidal sometimes). even if he was in a really extreme situation like tfp2 where he does not have to hide the extent to which he thinks the most useful thing he can do is die i don't think it would be fun to be in his head during that, you know?
i have tried writing cynthia and it was... oof. i would say i hit upon "preoccupied" as a way of describing it. i'll post a chunk
like it's not bad bad, but i don't think it's very good, and crucially it is exhausting to write and possibly even less fun to go back and read. where cynthia has insight she isn't going to keep it to herself; she's going to say it because she has just fucking say some shit brain disorder (<- im officially diagnosed i can call it that #OwnVoices). but she's so high energy. the scene kind of peters out around her because i couldn't keep coming up with ways for inigo and owain to match it, let alone escalate. i also ran out of ways to make this scene funny. honestly writing cynthia from severa or nah's perspective would be hysterically funny. they would not hold back
in terms of reading fic about her i think people make her too stupid. she's not an idiot she's just not thinking about what she's saying because when the thought occurred to her fifteen seconds ago it made perfect sense and her brain has been doing unrelated loop-de-loops since. and i get that. also she is , aha ha ha , inattentive in addition to being impulsive and hyperactive, and im not convinced i know enough to structure a story around whatever plot points she happened to notice. still love her though always and forever
25. What was your first impression of this character? How about now? (sumia)
i don't really remember unfortunately, I don't think she made much of an impression on me in my first playthrough until i got cynthia and started unlock sumia's supports with her and lucina. miriel was my original awakening number one! i do remember encountering the 2012-2013 rounds of sumia hate and they made me into one of her strongest soldiers. i think it was my second playthrough or the first time i played hard i started trying to build sumia as an actually good unit rather than just letting things happen and godddd she was so good. i never looked back
my impression of her now is that a week ago i was strongly considering making a reddit account to argue about a r/fe tier list because everyone was wrong. what are you talking about "backpack / useless flier only". this is a lunatic tier list not lunatic+ you are never going to encounter hawkeye so avotanking is still insanely broken and sumia's avotanking is so fucking good it will carry her through to the endgame. so fred is incredible because he can take 5 points of damage per hit but sumia taking 0 is yet another of her failings??? are you stupid??????? sumia is a great unit in no grind lunatic because she's a great unit in lunatic and if the only way you know how to play awakening is to feed 90% of your early EXP to frederick i genuinely don't think you understand the game. avotanking is not cheating. sumia using chrom's triple effective dual strikes while taking NO DAMAGE ON ENEMY PHASE is not cheating. she is incredible. i like her personality too i think 'person who is just genuinely very nice and tries very hard and likes animals' is completely unobjectionable. you are all just misogynists
4. If you could put this character in any other media, be it a book, a movie, anything, what would you put them in?
like cynthia i am the child of a lifelong horse girl so my more serious answer is any of the horse girl books from the seventies my mum grew up reading and then passed down to me
sumia would absolutely thrive in something like the world's end series and i think she would really enjoy herself! i can see her as a cool through boundless kindness aunt in animal themed children's fiction, like she has no authority over the children and can't legally take on the role of the parent but she provides that consistent loving and nurturing presence. maybe she's the vet who goes out of her to help the children accumulate pets. idk. there's options. i would not put her in black beauty but i think she would love a setting in which she could read it.
also i watched a documentary once made by a horse trainer who lived by herself on an irish island for several weeks gradually befriending the feral ponies there with the end goal of training them for a roman riding show and i can see sumia doing that. maybe not so much the roman riding but definitely having a journey of self discovery that just heavily features befriending semi-wild horses
