Memething.

[balsamandash]

That meme where you give me a character and I tell you three random pieces of personal canon about them: let's do that.

Original characters up for grabs as well as fandom, asking for a character someone else has gone for is welcome. Give me something to brainstorm at work please?

Comments

[rootsofthestories]

Charlene
Bobby (The City angel)
The Death with a daughter
Shell

Vodka
Vermouth

Peter
Cliff
Meg
Dave

The magic in Sentient Magic

Meg

[balsamandash]

Jumping around and doing these as they come to me, so to start with.

1. She is originally from a much, much lower class part of England than her accent would lead you to believe. She traveled around and worked in a couple of places in the UK before moving to America, and her original plan had always been show business of some kind (behind the scenes, whether on film or theater), so she let herself/taught herself to pick up an accent closer to what Americans would expect from her.

The boys and Anya probably eventually found this out because her accent slips when drunk or extremely tired.


2. She actually came from a pretty decently well-off family, though, and she did a lot of classes and activities as a kid and a teenager. Singing, dance, gymnastics, running, cooking, self-defense -- she spent a lot of her childhood wanting to learn everything basically. She's better now at remembering some of it than others (she's still got a really nice singing voice, and she can run like you wouldn't believe) but she learned an awful lot.


3. She never actually finished university, although she started it. She means to get a degree someday, maybe do online classes, but she hasn't done it yet and isn't sure she's ever going to get around to it.

Re: Meg

[rootsofthestories]

fajioe :D Oh darling. chews on her This makes me happy in ways I can't entirely explain but it does.

Cliff

[balsamandash]

1. Relationships of all kind are hard. Friendships are hard, family is hard, romance is hard, it's all kind of a ball of failure most of the time, so when he finds something that's not hard, he holds on with two hands and stubbornly refuses to let go. The twins aren't hard, because they're easy to make happy and quick to show if they're happy; Dave is kind of easy, because he's friendly but doesn't expect more than an employer-employee level of friendship and he can handle that.

Bailey is super-easy and the little sister he never knew he needed and there are days he'd like to just live in her closet and forget the rest of the world exists. (Phil is complicated because he can't entirely understand why he got taken under his wing; Bailey, at least, was tiny enough that when she attached to him she didn't ping against his self-esteem issues, which are loud and rampant and tend to be a large part of why relationships are hard, because why would people like you when you're very aware that you're unlikable.)


2. Growing up he had one of those totally idealized images of growing up to be a musician, and he was gonna travel around and play to sold-out audiences and people were going to love him and he was going to be famous and it was gonna be awesome. The fact that he never had a drop of interest in writing his own songs, or that he still can only kind of play an instrument, didn't matter all that much. (He did teach himself to read music, though. And sing, though not quite at professional levels.)


3. He's always been a pretty good artist on a technical level, actually, and working at the bakery has only enhanced that. What he doesn't have is ideas. Tell him what to do, and he could paint a masterpiece for you; give him paper and tell him to go for it, and he's going to doodle lopsided flowers and dogs at best.

Re: Cliff

[rootsofthestories]

Oh honey. chews on him This is adorable an da little depressing all at once, which is appropriate for the verse really.

Re: Cliff

[balsamandash]

Yeaaaaaah. I love them all, but they all have issues.

Except Bailey. Bailey doesn't have issues. I think. Bailey gets a cookie. :D

Re: Cliff

[rootsofthestories]

Bailey doe snot have issues, no. :D And she takes your cookie with glee.

Peter

[balsamandash]

1. Anya knows more about his time in jail than anyone else does, including Wendy. He doesn't like to upset his sister, so he doesn't really talk about the time they were separated; but there are times, and kinds of bad days, when talking it through can help, and Anya is really the only one he's comfortable talking about it with.

(Their childhood, on the other hand, I think he's actually said very little about, and what he has said has just kind of... little things that come out as if it was normal and he didn't realize it shouldn't be? No matter how not-actually-normal it is? Some of it he's aware is Definitely Not Normal and he Does Not Tell People because then they look at the two of them more closely. But there are little things that come out around the edges.)


2. The night he decided they needed to run, it -- well, it was the end of a long string of kind of understanding why they needed to and not knowing how to do it. But it finally happened because he'd been getting told off about trying to protect his sister and getting in the way and making a problem of himself, and it wasn't for the first time, but it was really the first time something said made him actually believe their father would start keeping them apart more. And he wasn't going to let that happen.


3. Oh my god there needs to be something happy in this set um. With their (probably spliced in and stolen, probably after checking like ten times with Anya and Cliff and Dave and Teddy that seriously, everyone does it, nobody cares and it's not like they're stealing good cable or anything and they will show him how to do it and it will be fine) basic cable, he has a small addiction to PBS. All of it, but especially the live musicals/operas (he doesn't understand most of it, but he enjoys it), the murder mystery theater when Wendy's not around to hear/see anything violent, and a couple of the more soothing kids shows.

Dave, cause let's just finish Cupcake

[balsamandash]

1. There are a couple of different diagnoses that he's just sort of... neglected to tell anyone about, including Teddy and, in a couple of cases, his mother. Primarily: He has seasonal affective disorder, which is a thing he was too embarrassed to tell anyone about at first and then... continued to just not talk about and hey he totally had a handle on it as it was.

1.5 (Other things that definitely exist, that everyone knows about: dyslexia, asthma.

Other things that definitely exist, which Teddy knows about [the symptoms if not remembering the actual diagnoses], Anya knows about half of, and everyone else is only... kind of aware that stuff sucks: Auditory processing disorder, developmental coordination disorder, some very mild sensory processing disorder issues, arrhythmia, arthritis, and he has a primary immunodeficiency issue. I am not entirely sure that's all of it. His doctor is, honestly, not entirely sure that what they have him diagnosed with is all of it, but he pretends that fact does not exist, cause nope, his list of illnesses is long enough already, thank you, no more are allowed to be added, you missed the boat, the checkpoint closed when he was 18.)


2. When they were younger and Teddy just started filming things, he had a lot of shyness about being in front of the camera. It resurfaced when Teddy decided to actually start putting things he filmed on the internet, even if he never expected to be in much of what ended up there.


3. School was weird in that while he knew it was a good idea and he wanted to do something good for the world, he... had no idea what he wanted to do. Or what he'd be good at. Or what he should learn. So he kind of bummed around for two years and maybe considered putting up the course catalog on a dartboard and letting fate pick his major because what even, how do you decide on a career path.

... He ended up majoring in education. It seemed to at least hit the 'doing something that would help people' note, even if he didn't think he actually wanted to be a teacher or anything.