sora (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
arsarcanum) wrote2019-12-31 12:14 am
arsarcanum) wrote2019-12-31 12:14 am
Entry tags:
HMD
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if you just want to leave me some general feedback, here's a cute little form to fill out!
AM I FUN TO PLAY WITH?: ■■■■□□□□□□ (what it says on the tin - are my tags easy to respond to? are my attempts at humor legitimate? is my handle on sora/skyler conducive to your overall experience?)
AM I IN CHARACTER?: ■■■■■■■□□□ (has sora/skyler done or said anything that seems inappropriate for where he's at? do our characters have appropriate chemistry? is my grasp on the canon strong, or do i need to brush up?)
HAVE I BEEN EXCELLENT TO YOU ON AN OOC BASIS?: ■■□□□□□□□□ (are there any arguments or disagreements that i've left unresolved between us? does it seem like i bleed too much of myself into my ic play? are there any triggers that you'd like me to avoid while playing with you?)
ANYTHING ELSE?: anything that doesn't fit into the above!
anon is on
comment screening is on
if you just want to leave me some general feedback, here's a cute little form to fill out!
AM I FUN TO PLAY WITH?: ■■■■□□□□□□ (what it says on the tin - are my tags easy to respond to? are my attempts at humor legitimate? is my handle on sora/skyler conducive to your overall experience?)
AM I IN CHARACTER?: ■■■■■■■□□□ (has sora/skyler done or said anything that seems inappropriate for where he's at? do our characters have appropriate chemistry? is my grasp on the canon strong, or do i need to brush up?)
HAVE I BEEN EXCELLENT TO YOU ON AN OOC BASIS?: ■■□□□□□□□□ (are there any arguments or disagreements that i've left unresolved between us? does it seem like i bleed too much of myself into my ic play? are there any triggers that you'd like me to avoid while playing with you?)
ANYTHING ELSE?: anything that doesn't fit into the above!
no subject
your tags seem to vary widly based on who you tag. sometimes sora sounds very much like the canon version vocally and his meta comes across very ou, but in others the meta text talks about things that one might expect any character interacting with him face to face might notice? for example, i think i saw in one thread that he has keyholes in his eyes? but i haven't seen it come up very often so i'm not sure if its a constant thing or not? ah, i hope this makes sense!
sometimes verbally he comes across as a very contemporary/modern day character, and i think from what i read, you're playing him as a crau with a double identity?
so the verbal expression differences make sense in that light. but i'm not sure how that translates in the meta text because things that (should be?) consistent (maybe his eyes, as an example?) but it doesn't really make sense in aren't, and then i'm not sure if maybe i'm just missing cues or if there's an actual ic switch that gets flipped between the way he acts.
i hope these questions make sense! i'm sure that i might be missing things as an outside observer but i was just trying to get a feel for what it might be like to play together. thanks!!♥
no subject
no subject
i'm not really worried either way, so whatever makes you feel most comfortable is fine with me :) i was mostly just asking so i would have some idea about whether i would app her canon version or a crau as well!
no subject
Again, thanks for your question! I have a very long and a very short explanation for how I play him, but I'd like to give you some quick context, then hit on your points, then add some clarifying info for anything that might be unclear at the end. Hopefully this won't be too too long! (I'll add a TLDR at the end.)
This Sora is a CRAU from a game called Save the Earth! It has a few spiritual successors and dupes (
People born in Locke City are reincarnations of the people from the worlds that were destroyed. The application process involves the creation of a version of the character in question who grew up in the setting - basically, an AU. This character is the character we play in the game to start with, not the original universe's character! Over the course of the game, the reincarnation receives the original character's heart/soul/essence/body, physically and mentally and even in a metaphysical sense (we had plenty of people echoing back war trauma, relationships, personality traits, etc). The goal was, on a meta level, to create a character that not only had to deal with the apocalypse, but also the fact that the universe was effectively trying to change them into a different person.
Okay, that's exposition. Your questions!
1. The character that people in ITN see looks a bit like Sora, but he's actually Sora in the body of his reincarnation - a half-Filipino kid called Skyler who grew up in Locke City. Over the course of his three years in Save The Earth, Skyler grew about four inches, had sort of a jock background that graduated into a part-time police intern/part-time resistance fighter deal, and made a choice to be turned into a cyborg (which, I kid you not, involved the modification of his eyes into cyborg eyes - the keyhole shape was a part of STE's game mechanics and was a complete coincidence.)
There is no body swapping or physical transformations involved in Sora's presence in Beacon! (Not at the moment, anyway.) I'm slowly changing the icons on this account to reflect that this Sora is older, shorter haired, and has weird eyes. This Sora straight up looks different, maybe like if Sora had an older brother, and at first glance, it would be a perfectly acceptable conclusion to make that this Sora may just be someone who looks eerily like the original. I also don't want to tell other muns that my Sora has to feel like the original - it hovers too closely to godmoding and I want other players to make their own conclusions on the matter so they can play whatever makes sense to them.
I guess if I were playing against this Sora with another KH character, I would make the decision to make the encounter feel a bit like encountering Sion Barzhad from the Bouncer - someone who looks like an older Sora, but there's a perfectly good chance that he isn't. I'd like you to be free to choose your own adventure on that front as well. Again, there are no physical swaps happening, and I don't have any plans to do so!
2. As for the character inconsistencies, here's how I play him!
Sora has both his own memories and Skyler's memories, but while he has all of Skyler's memories until around age 18, he only has about 60-70% of his memories as Sora (this is something I had to work out with the mod team at ITN - as a CRAU character, he had to be at least 50% from his original universe.) Additionally, I play him as though Skyler is asleep in his heart in the same way Ventus was. I do not play him as Skyler in this game; I play him as Sora with incomplete memories, using Skyler's heart/memories/soul/etc to fill in gaps he's missing.
Here's how this plays out in an ingame scenario!
This is an interaction he recently had with Overwatch's Hana Song. In his first reply, he's pretty much acting like the OU version of Sora - trying to be helpful, wanting to get this girl to safety - but he pauses while introducing himself. While in STE, Skyler had enough of an impact that people wouldn't have wanted to call him Sora even if he wanted them to call him that, so in a lot of cases, he really did introduce himself as Skyler, even after Skyler fell asleep. However, at the start of his time in Beacon, he effectively considers himself Sora! This is why he asks Hana to wait until he's made up his mind on the matter in the next tag. He doesn't know if he wants to be called Skyler if he's in a place where no one knows him (or so he thinks) and has a chance to be called who he thinks he is - Sora, or at least what's left of him.
In his next reply, he thinks about Hana in terms of some of the girls he's met at home. In this particular case, the "girls at home" lacks specificity because having an info dump in a tag does not a fun or speedy reply make, but if you were to ask him who he was thinking about, he'd say he was thinking about some of the girls he met in Locke City - Harper, Helene, Winter, Holly, Octavia, and so on. Sora has a lot of his memories, but he's really lacking in memories of Aqua, Xion, Tifa, and so on, so he can't use them to make the comparison - he doesn't even know they exist. So where an OU Sora would refer to a memory of Aqua on her quest or Xion protecting Roxas to make a comparison, this Sora uses Harper punching him into a wall and Winter telling him that she wants to protect everyone instead.
In the tag after that (and only now do i realize that i borked the formatting on that real bad HAHA), he goes back to the power of friendship because that is both a memory about his own powers and a personality trait that he gained back as a part of the regain process! He 100% believes this as someone who is mostly Sora. Skyler would personally take issue with this - even though he was Sora's reincarnation, their lives ended up very different - but since Skyler's asleep, Sora's the one who gets to call the shots, and this is quality he chooses to embody. He likes to think he's Sora, and until he met Riku in Beacon, he never really thought of himself as anything other than Sora!
There's some nuance to this but I don't think it's needed for this part of the explanation! I'd love to elaborate but I want to keep this as painless as possible lol. If you want more, I'd be happy to talk your ear off about it. If you have a specific interaction that confuses you, or a specific worry that we can work together on, please let me know so we can talk about it!
TLDR: This is Sora haunting his reincarnation's body like Roxas does to Sora sometimes to make him cry and stuff, except some stuff happened and now Sora's in charge instead of the guy to whom the body belongs. That guy happened to be Sora but with different life circumstances! Also, this Sora doesn't remember a lot of things, so he'll make connections to Earth things if he doesn't have a KH equivalent to work with.
no subject
i think i was mostly asking though because i was trying to figure out hmmm how do i ask
your threads with hana for example, don't really touch a lot on the physical things that would make him stand out? so if i didn't look into it very much, i wouldn't necessarily know that your sora was as different as he is. whereas your thread with riku talks a whole lot about what the differences are. so i guess i was trying to figure out if that inconsistency was on purpose? though maybe i'm missing something. again all the stuff you told me is really helpful for me to help make sense of, i think i'm just a little confused because his tags can be really different depending on who he's tagging with. does that make any sense?
no subject
To answer the question of how much he has upstairs, I say it’s 60-70% because I do dice rolls to see what he remembers! I have some links here and here with specific dice rolls, some math, and a list of what he remembers that I update whenever I can (sorry, the sections are a little messy because I haven’t had the time to properly format them, but the info should all be there.) The rationale behind why I do this is here in his app for ITN under the CRAU and Ability sections, but if you just want me to summarize the info, let me know!
I know that isn’t your main concern, but I wanted to bring that up! Although there are several moments where I, while playing Sora, don’t know what he remembers, I can and do find out during play. There are a few more mechanics going on here, but they involve explaining how STE works and that's a little outside of the scope of your concern.
If there is a specific memory or ability or character trait or anything you want me to roll for, please don’t hesitate to ask! I’ll tell you if he has it or do a roll to see if he has it. Otherwise, I think it’s fair for characters to be sad, confused, frustrated, upset, amused, disgusted, and so on about the things he can’t remember! It comes with the territory of finding a familiar face only for them to not remember things the way you do. It's something I accepted could happen coming in and so far it has indeed panned out that way. And that's okay! I also know that the unpredictability of this mechanic can turn people off, so that's why I want to be really open to conversation about this. If you need me to do something for you to make their CR more planned or certain, please let me know! I will be happy to throw down some foundations with you.
As for the differences between the two threads, that’s actually a personal play choice! For characters like Hana, Bucky, and Jason, I chose to lean back on describing his differences because, for all they as characters would know, Sora looks completely normal back in his world. I especially don't want to go on and on about it for a character like Hana who works with robots and cyborgs on a regular basis back in her world - what's the point of pointing out slight cybernetic differences when she's surrounded by Omnics?
When I do have Sora encounter a character who isn't a part of the KH crew but had CR with Sora, just like Daylight and Maes, I do my best to emphasize the difference in the tags following with the information that would be available to the characters so the mun is up to speed and can tag accordingly. This has backfired on me before! I didn’t warn Aziraphale’s mun in time and really had to backpedal to make sure they were caught up (I am very very much not proud of how I handled this tag and will not be phrasing it like this again.)
However, even if I do have my reasons for withholding that information, I think that this lack of transparency is a sensible thing to point out? I was trying not to be too obnoxious about Sora’s physical differences because 1. this is a game where we all have to read quite a bit and I didn’t want to tag into a bunch of new threads pointing out that Sora has weird keyhole eyes if that wasn’t the focus of the prompt, and 2. I personally think that his eyes have less to do with who he is as a person than other things we could be focusing on in the conversation. If they don’t end up coming up at all, I don’t consider it a great loss. HOWEVER, I hear you, and having you point out the inconsistency is really valuable to me! After all, I had no idea that it wasn't enough engagement for an outsider to follow what he looks like - I have no idea how much I've been confusing my fellow players, especially since Sora's a very identifiable character and people tend to have a picture of him in their heads, even if they've never played the games before. I’ll definitely make more of an effort to link his visual profile when encountering new CR from now on.
When it comes to my fellow KH players, though, my approach is a little different. I feel like when I tag my castmates, I do have to make more of a concerted effort to point out the differences between what they expect of Sora and the Sora I play. I try to get a handle on the energy in their tags and reflect it back in what I give them. Riku’s tags were more focused on how much Sora’s reappearance as someone who doesn’t look like Sora affected him as someone going through an intense grieving process, so I aimed to reflect that wariness and discomfort back in my own tags - Sora could tell Riku saw him as a stranger, and his feelings about how strange and out of place he felt followed suit. Vanitas’ tags are more wary and careful about this stranger with Sora’s face who knows who he is but wants to avoid him, so I aimed to reflect that wariness back while pointing out things Vanitas would definitely have caught.
These are dynamics that I worked out with both muns beforehand. Riku's mun especially wanted to warn me that Riku would probably want nothing to do with my Sora and would probably end up thinking of him as a different person, and for me, that’s fine! I’m very adaptable and have no personal qualms about playing a dynamic in one direction or another. There were IC consequences, but I’m taking them as they come because I find the unpredictability and tension fun. I do love playing fluff and dynamics where people love each other and have fun in each others' company, but I like negative CR as well! I find it equally as interesting as the nice stuff.
If you’d like to talk out a specific dynamic that you’d want to try (or avoid) with Sora, I’d be happy to talk here or your preferred plotting medium. (I have Discord and Plurk available - just ask!) I ended up talking to both Riku’s and Vanitas’ mun before I apped in so we could get this all straight, and being on the same page definitely made me feel better about the dynamics we were getting into, especially since they knew what to expect of me and Sora in the future. I know my Sora is an extremely weird case and I want to make sure we’re on the same page before anything goes down. I want you to feel like you know what you're getting into if you do end up apping in!
TLDR: I do dice rolls like DND to randomize what Sora has to work with, which is how I got the 60-70% number - probability! The inconsistencies when I describe his appearance have to do with which character I'm tagging him with and their established dynamics - when I don't describe him, he should still look like Sora with weird eyes. However, you've pointed out that's confusing, so I'll make an additional effort in the future to make his current appearance obvious!
Again, thank you for your questions! I'll keep answering them for as long as you have them. d(ouo )