State of the RP: May 2013

[accidentalrebellion]

I should probably do this... more than once every three months or so. THAT IS MY MID-YEAR RESOLUTION. Anyway, onward!

GENERAL

So I'm actually really happy where I am right now c: Exsilium lost some of its crazy, frantic pace, and I've gotten a little bit faster myself than I was a couple of months ago, so all in all, I think this is a good combination that results in me better keeping up with RP and having more fun. The second character experiment at this game did fail kind of miserably recently, so I'm back to just Katniss, and I'm definitely okay with that. I'm not sure whether it's the game being so large or whether I just really suck at playing multiple characters in a single game, but I think I'll just be sticking with her and not apping anyone else.

And Exsilium won't be getting rid of me anytime soon. I really, really continue to love it here. The game creates a great niche that jives with me as a writer (since dystopia is my true love), as well as creates the kind of setting that my character can actually be engaged in, which I've struggled with finding in the past. In addition, this game has a group of really lovely players, and you guys really do make it feel like home. Thank you ♥

I do have a couple of other games I'm considering as side things right now, but Exs is definitely my main and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, for sure.


CHARACTER

May has been a really busy month. I mean... really busy, and with things that are great for me OOC but complicated-to-bad for Katniss IC. As I rambled about in the little blurb on the CR meme a couple of nights ago, this can really be broken down into two categories: canonmate stuff and event stuff. Katniss, true to Katniss form, has a lot of very complex and muddled feelings about all of these things, so I'm hoping that writing them all out in this format will help me be able to better navigate the mess.

Chronological order is probably the best way to approach this, so let's start with the beginning of the month when Peeta showed up. Of all the things that could make Katniss have a heroic BSOD, that's definitely up there. There are a lot of complicated feelings where Peeta is concerned, but perhaps the strongest one that emerges at the present time is guilt. As it was her self-prescribed mission to keep him alive and ensure he was the one to make it out of the Quell, she feels personally responsible for him being captured by the Capitol. She feels like she failed. Failed to protect him. And now that he's in Exsilium for the second time in her game duration, once again brought in as a deliberate (in her view) pawn in whatever game the Initiative is playing, it feels like a slap in the face, and that sense of failure has just been magnified at least tenfold.

On the flipside, there's a part of her, one she can't really control, as much as she'd like to, that's relieved, maybe even some degree of happy, that he's here. She has an ally; she doesn't have to face all of this alone. He's someone she can lean on, a kind of emotional crutch, and they can be a team and come out stronger together as they always have. This, though, and the fact that she has found herself, for instance, seeking him out in the middle of the night after a nightmare... all of that only adds to her guilt. Because it's terrible that he's even here in the first place, and here she is, being as selfish as she's ever been, relying on him for her own reassurance and peace of mind.

Guilt, however, is not as strong as anger.

For a while, she was just mad at the whole fucking world. Mad, mad, mad. Taking her anger out on other people (even if she's not really consciously aware of doing this, because WHAT IS SELF-AWARENESS), generally being a rude little shit, that kind of thing. Her emotions were also quite a bit more volatile than usual, as evidenced by what you can probably call an overreaction to Oz's response (paraphrased to something along the lines of "I wasn't going to die") after she stopped him from running into the explosion when the spaceship crashed into the housing building.

But then... Rue disappeared. In the end, this had kind of a mellowing effect on her, at least as far as her intense anger is concerned. She was sad, of course. Deeply, deeply sad, because she'd gotten to see her grow up a little, do things she would never have been able to do, and there's only one fate that awaits her in Panem. She was able to make peace with this, however, because she knows what's for the best, and it's for the best that Rue is allowed to rest in peace and never again be a piece in anyone's game. That she's allowed to stay 'Good and safe.'

So now I'm brought to part two, which is all that concerns the recent event of this past week. There are distinct reasons that this event is an important character/character development milestone, which is part of why I've been taking my sweet time with it and putting a lot of thought into how I'm handling it. Most notably, this event has challenged two core beliefs that Katniss has held: one, her refusal to cooperate with the objectives of the Initiative, and two, her fundamental notion of life and death.

Up until now, Katniss has had a very negative reaction to the Initiative, and understandably so; they're taking people by force simply for the sake of their own purposes. Pulling people into a revolution without their consent, making them pawns on their chess board. It's all very reminiscent of, well, a lot of things, and at some point you just pull a Peter Finch in Network and you're mad as hell and you're not going to take it anymore. The whole time she's been here, she's made a point of not doing what they've asked her to, but the UE attack on Elmer's world is starting to change that notion a little.

What she saw there was what she saw in District 12: total, 100% devastation. The UE has the same power that the Capitol does, actually to an exponentially larger extent, and also the same intent. They have no problem with destruction and causing the deaths of innocents to prove a point. Only they're a more formidable enemy, because they can hop between worlds to prove this point, and suddenly, there's potentially much more of a threat to her loved ones that she thought she'd safely left behind. So what we're experiencing right now is a parallel moment to when Katniss decides in District 13 that she'll be the Mockingjay for the rebels. She doesn't trust the Initiative, (just as much as she doesn't trust Coin and co. in 13), but there are real stakes here, real reasons to be propelled into action, real reasons to fight, so she's willing to accept what she feels is her role in order to do what's right/keep people safe.

Of course, she doesn't have to like it. And she never will.

On a more philosophical level, there was something that happened during the event that has shaken her to her core. This, of course, is hard evidence that her notion of death has been challenged. You can say that death has been a defining feature of Katniss's life. Her father died when she was only eleven years old. She's been in the arena twice, and has both been a witness to some pretty horrific deaths and killed people herself. Most of the population of her home district is now dead. There's no going back from any of that; no matter what happens, that is the one constant.

But then people here died and were brought back to life, just like that. It didn't happen to her personally, but she saw it happen to other people, and she can't really refute what she saw. An inability to refute, though, doesn't mean an understanding; understanding has been shattered. The impossible just became possible. What does it mean to be able to reverse death? She's never been particularly open-minded, both as functions of her base personality AND the world she comes from, so this isn't just something that she can accept with a snap of her fingers.

Beyond that? She doesn't know how she feels about it, and, honestly, I don't know how she feels about it either. I'm guessing that this is something I'll just have to keep writing about, and I'll figure it out over time. It admittedly makes me a little nervous, going into such an unknown like this, BUT HEY... that's part of what keeps stuff interesting, right?