hii hi hi 2, 5, 28 and/or 30 for Edith?? smiles so wide
Hiii!! Thank you for the ask, Coco!! Smiles so, so wide :]
From this OC ask game. Most of these are under the cut.
Q2: Biggest Pet Peeve
Edith can't stand people not performing basic etiquette, especially in public places. She would hate to work in hospitality because she'd have to deal with untucked chairs. It's such an easy thing to do.
Q5: Do They Smoke?
Nope! She has no interest in it. All her life, she has been surrounded by cigarettes. Now, she associates them with carelessness.
Q28: Do They Believe in Aliens?
No. She has not seen any proof, so she does not believe. Edith seeks facts. In her persuit of knowledge and truth, she disregards anything without solid evidence.
This is why she is athiest. She hasn't had her prayers recieved, hasn't seen any proof of Jesus, or anything else. It doesn't make sense to her. She can get rather judgy about it.
This contrasts with Brandon, who believes in aliens because of a lack of proof against it. The two can debate about this for a long time. He takes it very seriously, but she sees it as a casual, intellectual debate. No matter what, they end in stalemates.
Q30: Have They Been in Love?
I was hoping someone would ask this for Edith.
Anyway, nope, and she never will. She's aromantic-asexual and has no interest in dating as an aro-ace person. Of course, living in the 1950s, she does not have these labels. She assumes she will fall in love someday, but resents the idea.
She's also on the aplatonic spectrum. Her friendships are very shallow. Because it's the bare minimum in her society to have friends, she does feel that something is wrong with her.
It's a small spoiler to say this, but I don't mind. Before moving, she had one friend she considered close/a best friend. Days before moving, she went to this girl's house to retrieve some photos/memorabillia. The girl was distant. A group of her friends were hanging out at her house. Only then did Edith realise her friend never behaved as casual and happy around her as she did with this group.
I don't know if Edith ever got those photos. What I do know is she left feeling rather strange. It wasn't that she wasn't upset. She was greatly upset that she never knew this girl did not care for her much. However, that's all it really was. It occurred to her that she didn't miss her friendship, but that she was angry at herself. She was angry for not seeing the signs. She was angry for not feeling how others felt.
Over the story, Edith will never have a grand moment of, for lack of a better word, unlocking friendship. I want it to be clear that her aplatonicism is not something to be fixed. Her struggles come from living in a society that places having close friends as the bare minimum.
She is not completely aplatonic, though. Her friendship to Brandon is very important to her character and the story overall.
TL;DR: Edith is greyplatonic and aro-ace. If people ship her with anyone, I will lose my shit (/negative).
Do they believe some individuals are inherently more important than others? (Cassidy)
Which do they fear more, the deep ocean or the reaches of space? (Brandon)
How would they react if they learned that some of their memories were not as they remembered them? (Jeffery)
When do they consider someone no longer a person? If someone remembers nothing, are they still themselves? (Edith)
Feel free to do however many of these seem interesting to answer! I love learning more about your little guys!
Hello, HP! Thank you for these questions! I'm so happy you're interested in my OCs :] I hope you're doing well!
Identity is a fascinating concept. I love my time and memory losers. Get existential crises, idiots (/affectionate).
A read more was put at the end of Cassidy's section to prevent this from getting too long.
Questions from the Cosmic Horror Ask Meme.
Cassidy: Do they believe some individuals are inherently more important than others?
Oh, definitely. Cassidy is the golden girl of the school. She's the cheer captain, the to-be prom queen, the sought after tutor, and widely considered one of the nicest students around. Her long-standing relationship with Benny (the so-called King of Prebrook Falls) gives her a reputation as one half of a perfect pair. Although she tries to do right by most people, she absolutely has a hidden superiority complex.
Her father runs the tin can factory on the outskirts of town. He gets a lot of money for it. She lives in a big house on a tidy street with her parents. Her neighbours all present as well-to-do, all American people. Of course, everyone in town has their struggles, but the outward appearance is picturesque.
She's very ignorant to class struggles. She knows that some of her classmates can't afford the school lunches or don't have enough food to bring their own. She knows some of her classmates wear the same few outfits because they don't have any other clothes. She knows it all in a factual sense. She doesn't think people from lower classes are dirty, disgusting vermin. It's just that none of it sinks in for her.
Cassidy's idea of inherent worth is very tied to social classes. At the core of it, she ties worth to how much someone can influence the world at large. Money, assets, and especially relations all contribute to higher social power. When you're stuck at the bottom of the class ladder, it's harder to have this power on a large scale as an individual.
I could keep rambling about her, but I think it would be better to make a separate post for the rest.
TL;DR: she attributes worth to social power. She is absolutely a nepo baby who is not ill-intentioned but extremely ignorant to the obstacles blocking lower classes from gaining this power. This has given her a superiority complex.
Brandon: Do they fear the deep ocean or deep space more?
Brandon will tell anyone he's not afraid of either. The answer is the ocean terrifies him.
Any time someone expresses fear regarding deep space, he'll go on a spiel about how that's a stupid fear to have. He'll list all the facts he knows about deep space. He'll put heavy emphasis on the fact that so much is unknown but that doesn't matter because it barely affects humans. He thinks fearing something so vast and constant is irrational and weird.
The problem with the ocean is that it does affect humans. Water makes up 71% of Earth's surface. It's inescapable. The fact that scientists don't even know all of what's at the bottom is eerie. He can study space like it's an endless playground of wonder. Sure, humans' knowledge of it only goes so far, but that makes sense for something practically infinite!
Meanwhile, the ocean is finite. There is a bottom and there's a top. It's contained. Even so, there are so many things that lurk in the depths. The idea of aliens scares him, but he's a sceptic. It's unfortunate that the creatures of the deep trenches act and look a whole lot like the extraterrestrials he fears.
So, yeah, he's totally not afraid of either, and you'd be stupid to assume he is.
Jeffrey: How would they react if they learned that some of their memories were not as they remembered them?
>:]
Memories warp with time. I read once that the human brain never remembers something exactly as it happened because the paths taken to form a memory versus to recall a memory are different. I don't know the accuracy of this, but it was in a science book, so I'll trust it enough.
Jeffrey wouldn't believe this. He loves to force ignorance onto scientific facts. He loves to force ignorance onto everything. A more cartoon version of him would cover his ears, close his eyes, and say it doesn't exist if he can't see it.
Ironically, he'd argue that the tree still fell in the forest even if nobody bore witness to it.
Anyway, he'd be deeply disturbed if it could be proven to him that he remembered things wrong. Little things, sure, he could handle better, but big events would be deeply troubling to him.
For example, if he were to misremember and entire birthday of his from years before, he'd be thoroughly distressed. He'd start questioning his other memories. Is anything he knew real? Can he trust other people's memories? He doesn't have to face up to that fact he ignored. I mean, it's not even real! Right?
Edith: When do they consider someone no longer a person? If someone remembers nothing, are they still themselves?
EXCELLENT question, HP! :D
Throughout The Butterfly Effect, Edith is tormented by her sense of self. She's forced to face a future version of herself she has not experienced and now never will. Did she experience these things? It was her who wrote it down, who went to that place, who said that thing, but was it her?
The Butterfly Effect focuses heavily on memories. When Edith finds the copy of her journal from her future, she is immediately thrown off course. The simple act of finding the journal will irreversibly prevent her from ever experiencing that future exactly as it happened. You could say it's similar to the different paths taken when forming a memory versus recalling a memory.
As for before the time journal (as I call it) is found, she would say it's a grey area. Nobody remembers being born when they're an adult, but they were still that baby once. Key words being 'were' and 'once'. She wouldn't consider herself the newborn she once was. That was a state of her that only exists in the past.
She thinks identity is transient through time. She can't comprehend a single, identifiable state of being thanks to the infinite scale of time. If she was this person at this exact second, what about all the microseconds within it? It freaks her out when she thinks about it too much.
If faced with a hypothetical person who truly remembers nothing and cannot form memories, she's actually consider that the most constant state of self someone can have. To have no memories is to be a blank slate. A blank canvas is always a blank canvas. When you paint on it, you're changing it. Even if you finish the painting, it will flake and fall apart with time too.
Despite this, she would be the most terrified if she were to have all her memories wiped. Well, she'd be terrified beforehand. Being a husk might be the (for lack of a better word) purest state of self, but it's one that cannot experience life unless you remove the purity from it.
hi! i saw edith through arts's blog and i thought. wow! they seem really cool and maybe have similar vibes to my own project! i should check it out! and i was right this is cool <3 (though different than i expected!)
anyway! how does edith come to the conclusion that she's found her own future self's notebook? does she draw this conclusion from the book alone, it's contents, some other outside clue, or a mix?
Ahhh, hello! I'm so happy you decided to check my OCs out! Thank you! :D
I checked out your blog when I got this ask and also thought, "Woah! Cool OCs!" I will be sending an ask for them :]
Okay, I originally typed a bunch of paragraphs, but I've tried to condense it. (Edit: I failed, haha.)
After some trauma and stress-induced psychosis, Edith has to track every detail of her life in a journal. If not, or if she records symptoms of the psychosis returning, she'll be straight in hospital. Not a good fate when it's 1958!
One day, she picks up her journal from a box under her bed. She doesn't remember this box, but assumes her mother organised her room. The journal looks the same, albeit with a few more scuff marks on the cover.
At first, the contents are normal. However, the entries soon start going beyond the present date. Somehow, she's started cataloguing events that haven't happened yet.
She understandably freaks out and thinks the psychosis is back or she's in a dream. The dream idea breaks when she never wakes up. The psychosis idea gets more complicated when she finds the normal journal she was writing in outside of the box. Now, she has two!
To confirm she's not detaching from reality, she starts carrying the future-time-fuckery journal around the house when it's closed. Her family openly acknowledge its existence, thinking it's the normal book. Then, she hides the future journal somewhere secret while her parents read the normal one. She realises they are two distinct but very real books.
The future journal also contains info she shouldn't know. Rumours, people's secrets, and bubbling tension between people. Some of these people she hasn't really spoken to, or, at least, not in a positive, open way.
She ends up confronting someone on some personal info she knows about them. They call her out on how in the world she knows this, but don't deny it. Using the info she read in the journal, she lies about the signs having been obvious.
There's also stuff like her handwriting and tone matching. This future version of her has included details of her own past that only her family knows. They aren't interested in forging her entries at all. I think the only person who might have a chance of being good at forging it would be Martha (her mother). She'd still fail in the tone aspect.
I should mention that all these things about the messed up journal never make it into the regular one. She leaves details out and makes excuses. Surely, this won't come back to bite her (ha).
Thank you again for taking interest in her! I appreciate it lots :]
These are my OCs from my story The Butterfly Effect (TBE for short). Edith is the protagonist of the story. Also shown are her younger brother, Tomas, and parents, Martha and Dennis.
I'm trying to get more comfortable with sharing details about my OCs without worrying about spoiling everything. It's hard when the story still isn't fully formed, though. I'm getting there!
Don't repost (reblogs are allowed); don't use for any programs/models/et cetera; don't use for any gain or profit.
Click to view better.
Tomas looks more like how I always imagined him now. He's got that Caesar-style haircut. I'm practicing face shapes and how they change over different ages.
Martha has a victory roll hairdo! From what I know, they're more of a 1940s thing, which I think is perfect for her. She's always behind on the times (and everything, really).
Dennis looks a little bit older than I wanted him to (he's in his late thirties/early forties). That said, he'd get wrinkles due to stress. Still, I like drawing wrinkles, so I don't mind too much. I just don't want to give the impression that him and Martha have a big age gap. She's only a few years younger than him.
I tried to make Edith look much more like her father than her mother, and for Tomas to look like a bit more of an even mix between them.
Site watermark in the full image is Yesterland.com. I haven't visited it myself so it might not even exist anymore, but figured I'd drop that here as well. Felt weird not to include.
Edith never expected to experience psychosis. Of course, she never expected to lose her home in a terrible house fire, or to be forced to move from California to Washington state as a result. Within her first day, she made an enemy of her next-door neighbour. It all seemed as if the world was out to get her.
Ironically, her so-called miraculous recovery came as quickly as the psychosis appeared. The town feared, judged, and pitied her. Against her doctor's wishes, she was spared hospitalisation. Instead, she was required to track her every symptom in a journal.
Only when Edith discovers an exact copy of her journal does she begin to truly question her stability. It contains her memories of the house fire, her psychosis, and things she has never experienced. She realises she has found a relic of her own future. Armed with this knowledge, she becomes determined to change the course of fate and figure out how she crossed time.
Hi! I'm @dollycosmic, creator/owner of The Butterfly Effect (TBE for short) and the mod behind this blog. I have a handful of stories, but this is one I am really excited about. Here is where I dump all things related to TBE, from art to rambling to OC ask games to random posts I associate with it. You're welcome to take a wander through it!
The Butterfly Effect is a psychological horror with heavy existential themes. It features potentially triggering topics including domestic abuse, bigotry, drug use (mostly just cigarettes) and alcoholism, and death. Mental health is the big one. They can't be mentally well when having existential crises!
I plan for TBE to be a series of about four novels, give or take. Currently, everything is still in the planning phase. Character and setting info, names, and inclusion in the plot are subject to change! I'm trying to keep only the stuff I really want to include on this blog. That's why it took so long to get even a blurb up here, haha <:']
You're encouraged to ask me questions about the characters, story, and so on as long as they are SFW. Please note that some things might have to be kept under wraps for spoilers or because I'm still figuring it out. Even so, I appreciate when people appreciate my OCs :]
All tags have the prefix 'tbe'. E.g., '#tbe edith'. Current tags include (as one hodgepodge to prevent this from being one billion lines long):
Edith is insatiably curious. She wants to know everything. Like any child, she always asked 'why?' However, she just never stopped. She's learnt to suppress it around other people for fear of rejection, but her mind is constantly buzzing.
She's also very fearful of what will happen when she gives up. After finding the mystery journal, she knows she'll immediately be labelled crazy and institutionalised (in 1958, mind you) if anyone finds out. The journal is a real mystery. It's unlike any questions she had about why the sky is blue or how soap is made. Unfortunately, it's not something she can solve alone.
There also enters the existential dread as she uncovers more and more. The journal alone is enough to give anyone a crisis, but it just gets worse. Eventually, other people get involved, but they are just as puzzled.
All in all, she never takes 'because it is' or 'because I said so' for an answer. In her mind, she has to know what's going on, or it'll kill her. She'd even trade getting killed in the process for dying without answers.
Q2: What are your OC's three most valued things (physical or metaphysical)? Take them away. How would they change?
Truth
Tomas (her younger brother)
Reasoning
After the Terrible, Tragic Family Event™, Edith already greatly loses her sense of reasoning for a period. For a short time, she experiences psychosis, so reality becomes a warped stranger to her. Thankfully, the episode ends. Even so, she's scarred and terrified. After hallucinating, she's far more distrustful of everything she encounters. She's become extremely guarded and more irritable. When being in a whole new town, this is even less helpful.
If she lost Tomas, her world would feel over. For a long, long time, Tomas has been her best friend. At times, he's been her only friend. She loves him more than anyone (and is also co-dependent on him). The grief would be immeasurable. She'd be more likely to reenter psychosis. I actually think that, especially if it happened at the start of the story, she'd not end well at all.
Truth is everything to her. Without it, she loses all sense of self or direction. Truth is what she strives for. It gives her purpose. Ironically, it also drags her down. She loves to dig her own grave!
