Could I ask you about Sov!Kankri’s relationship to his religion? As he was excommunicated, is he doing anything to get back in or unlearn any of what he was taught? Are there any unique beliefs from his sect?
Certainly.
He’s mostly trying to separate himself from it and unlearn the teachings of the church. The shock of getting thrown out of his comfortable childhood suburban home by his own parents for experiencing the most traumatic and difficult 6 years of his life definitely wasn’t going to be putting him in a permanent state of craving what used to be. It was more difficult the first few months, wracked with grief and guilt, suddenly forced out of his whole life, identity, and community. That kind of pain makes you desperate to crawl back, even if you were kicked down a flight of stairs when you thought you were at your lowest point.
Porrim - who took him in when everything happened, and is the only reason he wasn’t outright homeless - held him back by the scruff from trying to wallow before the council and plead his case. He wasn’t going to be let back in, anyway, no point in trying.
His congregation was a more conservative one. He was always something of an outsider, being the only troll in his ward. Very much so a more densely human populated area than most. The isolation runs pretty deep, but it was all that he had. He never even truly realized it until that flimsy but dominating sense of community slipped right through his fingers. He was left with nothing in its wake. The Seer of Blood had gotten completely uprooted - his entire cardiovascular system ripped straight from his body for the crime of trying to survive.
They wouldn’t be very tolerant of his orientation, and they wouldn’t be very tolerant of who he calls his friends, or who his family is now. He isn’t wholly antithetical to their teachings… But he’s just aberrant enough that it would be aggravating and uncomfortable to reconcile.
As someone who was raised in the Mormon church for a unfortunate more than half my life, I'm really interested in sovstuck Kankri. I'd love to hear pretty much anything about him and his upbringing. It's nice to see literally anyone who might've had a similar experience to mine, real or not
(also I gotta agree with everyone who says they like how you format your posts. They're so much easier to read)
Hey there, anon!! I’m really glad to hear you escaped- it can be pretty hard to leave the church, especially with religions like Mormonism. I do hope you’re recovering from it well.
Rest assured, sov!Kankri’s status as Ex-Mormon isn’t something that’s brushed under the rug. It’s not comparable to the Strilondes status of being Jewish- it actually significantly impacts his life, character, and how he relates to and interacts with others, especially considering he only left the church recently… Not by choice, but by excommunication. It very much so uprooted his entire life. He’s had to restart his entire journey as a Seer of Blood because of it.
I can only hope his arc brings you, or anyone else in his shoes, some level of catharsis, or at least proves itself to be comfortingly relatable. Sov!Kankri’s arc is one of the arcs I’m honestly most proud of, at least conceptually- all I can do is pray that I’m able to execute it in a way that does it justice.
NEKRO!!! important (read: stupid) question. Do Annomi, Tomiei, and Kankri have rantsonas? Do they get into pointless Earth C discourse? Like debating whether or not Dersite Carapacians should be allowed to choose Space as part of their classpect, since the Genesis Frog associated with Space? I wanna know your thoughts
This is incredibly funny. Reading this ask felt like getting shot. Help.
Most likely character here to have a genuine rantsona is Annomi. He’s inspired by CinemaSins, as well as a couple other bullshit media critics, so he’s pretty likely to have a YouTube. It is a scholarly-looking anthropomorphic turtle partially inspired by his own Lusus. It looks absolutely nothing like him. He projects himself as being cooler and smarter than he actually is. You know, usual Prince of Heart shenanigans. He’s pretty likely to try and deconstruct discourse he doesn’t know jack shit about, all while pretending he knows what he’s saying. His attempts at a rational approach are very flawed because his understanding of the topics are flawed and so is his worldview.
Kankri isn’t the rantsona type. He’d have his own avatar, sure, but I doubt he’d take the time and money to commission sprites from someone. Doesn’t seem very within his nature. His online presence doesn’t predominantly consist of video essays, either, unlike Annomi- though he does like to hear himself talk, filming and editing are quite time consuming and he’s found that it’s not very viable to only contain his thoughts on video format. Regularly engages in the most pointless discourse you’ve ever seen, whether it’s in agreement or disagreement. He’s a surprisingly angry person, and is quite known for his hypocrisy. He tends to function under the rules of “it’s okay if I like it and problematic if I don’t,” and also refuses to admit to the fact that he has definitely sent people anon hate before.
The closest Tomiei gets to a rantsona is engaging in serious discourse in anime clowngirl cosplays. She does not take discourse seriously. At all. She tends to hit serious talks about serious subjects with total nonsense and completely derail the direction of the conversation. Sometimes the discourse is bullshit. Sometimes it isn’t. She doesn’t really care what the gravity of the topic is either way, as long as chaos is ensued. She strives to be the living, troll equivalent to getting Rickrolled, but, like, worse. Doesn’t actually have many strong opinions of her own, except for ones that don’t particularly matter, and this is on purpose. She thinks people should be able to do what they want, especially her, and what she wants to do is fuck with people.
BONUS DISCOURSE ROUND: Meulin posts fandom discourse on main at random and can get surprisingly heated about it, Ajax uses his scalesona as a rantsona ironically on Twitter Dot Com, Horuss only uses Facebook and is deaf to the sins of this world, and Tintin thinks people should “FUCKING GO OUTSIDE. NOW.”
Which character arc in sovereignstuck you worked on/wrote are you most proud of? Which of the other writers arcs are you most excited for ??
Oh, god. This is such a hard question. Some of this shit gets positively thespian. Going to try to avoid overt spoilers as best as I can.
Content Warning: Long.
As far as myself goes… Kankri’s growth has given many issues. He’s not that difficult to write, per se, and it’s not like writing him isn’t fun. He’s just hard to get a good angle with. Character arcs have an angle. There’s no improvement without there being some kind of focus to that arc of improvement. If something is to be fixed, you need to know what there is to fix, and how. What’s the root of the issue, and how do you address it without unintentionally making it worse?
It took fucking ages to find a good angle with Kankri, and when we did find it, it was through an offhand joke. Emotional attachment skyrocketed with it, though, and I personally find it to be a highly satisfying arc. I’m definitely proud of my other work with character arcs, but Kankri’s is the first one to come to mind, and it’s absolutely the most dramatic change I’ve written. As I said earlier, though, it’s genuinely hard to pick a favorite.
As far as arcs from the other writers go…
Emeric’s character arc is genuinely fascinating to me. I’m so fucking excited to see it written out fully. Emeric is such a fascinating character, and it’s really, really satisfying seeing a Bard not get defaulted to a villain role. She’s incredibly complex, and incredibly fun to watch. She’s one of those characters where you think she’d get shafted as pure comic relief, but she’s so much more than that, and I love her. Her battle with herself is one of those that those who have felt neglect can really relate to. Her struggle is a brutal one. Every moment she’s alive, she’s fighting for something, and her efforts are felt. (@unexiled)
Tejuri’s arc is dramatic in ways we never thought it’d be. She starts as an awkward, nerdy, southern troll-Catholic girl with very little self confidence, and the way SVURB makes her confront and challenge herself really makes her blossom into a complete badass, weaponizing other people’s belief in her and her friends in an absolutely catastrophic way. She deserves every victory she gets, and I feel like her humble, clumsy beginnings as a character really help you feel like she’s someone you would have been best friends with in high school. She’s a character where you don’t realize how much you believe in her until you’re actively cheering for her, it’s amazing. She’s a true Rogue of Hope. (@scalematez)
Meenah’s growth as a character and as a person within Sovereignstuck is one that I hope invigorates others just as much as it does me. She’s someone who’s slowly come to realize just how much hurt she’s caused, but she’s so deep in her routines that being a good person is something she has to fight tooth and nail for. She fucks up constantly, but she really is trying, and it honestly hurts to see her fail. She’s battling with the fact that just because she’s trying to be better doesn’t mean people will forgive her for the past. She’s built to hurt people, and she knows she is, she truly believes so, but the blood on her hands is starting to sting. She’s done so much damage in the past, and yet seeing her hurt isn’t even satisfying. Improvement really is Sisyphean sometimes. (@octopeixes)
Kausat’s arc is quiet. At least at first. Most of those who are Voidbound don’t tend to have a very loud, dramatic arc. But you don’t need to be flashy to be interesting, do you? Their story is one of growing into who they are- watching how his arc ties into his status as both a Seer of Life and a Seer of Void is really interesting. Change is an inevitable force of nature. It’s what makes things a tangible concept. Sometimes change is unexpected- mysterious, unexplainable, intangible. Sometimes it’s slow, like the growth of a tree, the decomposition of a body, and sometimes it’s dramatic- lightning striking the tallest construct it can find, an explosion in a lake, so on and so forth. Life, and living, is about change, and acceptance of that change, even if you don’t understand it. It’s the only way to survive. It’s quite an intimate topic, honestly, but rather fun to pick apart. (@santostrife)
obligatory what are your thoughts on kankri's religious expression question
I had actually already written up an entire, quite long post on the matter in response to an anon prior to receiving this! I still want to answer this one, though, because I’m very passionate about the topic, and I like answering asks, lol. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ll be using this to talk about specifically Sov!Kankri’s relationship with religion, because that’s an entirely different beast.
Considering we’re working with reincarnations, and those reincarnations are being put in an entirely new setting with entirely new politics, we aren’t too keen on the idea of completely rehashing backstories. We very much so do consider the effects certain upbringings will have on characters, and we adjust accordingly. After all, reincarnation is a trope we’re using less to copy and paste characters we like into our story to arbitrarily beef up our cast list, and more one we’re using to more deeply explore these characters on our own terms. Sometimes that comes with a substantial amount of divergence. Sometimes that divergence leads to a character landing in just about the same spot they were in in canon, filling out the same shoes as their past counterparts, just with different emphases on different aspects of the issues they have. They have different baggage, but ended up on the same flight.
Having the context of what Sov!Kankri’s background, in my opinion, makes a lot of his character suddenly make complete sense. It’s one of those situations where you wonder to yourself, “Why the hell is he like this,” but upon getting the information on how he was raised… Yeah, nevermind, that makes sense, carry on.
Kankri was the only child in a human nuclear family. I specifically mention his status of being an only child because that is an important part of this equation. It lead to more focus and attention on him, and contributes to his inability to handle conflict.
His parents were quite overprotective of him- he was very visibly “other” from his peers, considering he was raised in a mostly human-populated area, and they knew quite little about trolls. They especially knew little about raising trolls. This overprotectiveness eventually descended into helicopter parenting.
He was raised in the suburbs. I mention this specifically, though it sounds silly, because the suburbs are… Rather isolating. Nothing is within walking distance, so you usually end up defaulting to just staying inside and going on the internet, especially when you’re younger. The suburban isolation driving up how often he spends online is a big reason why his politics are like that.
He was raised Mormon. Not Christian, not Catholic, Mormon. He was raised in the Mormon church. You know, the cult?
This is important to mention: Kankri went apostate during his session, prior to the events of Sovereignstuck. Getting forcibly separated from the religion, the church community, his family, and getting those routines uprooted truly made it sink in just how unhappy he was in the religion. He’s still struggling with it- he’s a very lost person.
The Sovereignstuck Player session happens one year after the Patron Session’s conclusion- a lot of the wounds on the Patrons are still fresh. Some of them are coping with some major baggage, and Kankri is one of those people. He still has a lot to unpack. He’ll figure stuff out in due time, but he really does struggle.
If you don't mind me asking, what are the pins on kankri's jacket?
I don’t mind at all! Never be afraid to ask questions. Might not get to them immediately, but I will get to them.
The pins can vary, but I most commonly and consistently draw him with three specific ones:
Aromantic flag
Asexual flag
Straight Edge
Straight Edge is half of a joke inclusion in the sense that I 100% think he would identify as straight edge, especially in Sovereignstuck, but also I think the concept of him identifying as such is kind of hilarious. Either way, those are the main three you’ll see, especially in the start, and those will remain constant.
(We aren’t treating Sov!Kankri’s status as AroAce as a phase, because we are all quite frankly tired of the label being treated as such. Hence the specific remark on its constancy. No worries to the AroAce crowd, we’re respecting identities in this household.)
