![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jkatkinaI keep trying to figure out what the hell kind of character Kaitan is. She’s been slippery since her inception, since so many of the core pieces of KTFE I used to build her are really unmoored without the context of being real old and real sad. Anyways, she’s so far mutated from that base that it’s hard to say, aside from aesthetics and a certain inclination towards mischief, she’s not the same character at all.
She’s too much full of contradictions that I can’t seem to resolve. She’s deeply rooted to ideas of family and heritage, but she’s not even really a part of her very own family and she knows it. She’s a free radical who is deeply tied to the importance of her duties. She’s not a happy person, but she’s aggressively effective and in truth she’s not unhappy either. I guess she doesn’t really see happiness as a goal? She's much more interested in chasing duty, and freedom, and championing the people and things that she loves. Like a romanticized version of a knight. She wants satisfaction, success, and relevance.
And then there’s the whole Fara thing (and secondarily the Laedo thing, and maybe the Rat City thing?) She plays with the trappings of romance but I’m starting to get this inkling that, if I stay really true to her character, she’s either aromantic or aggressively polyamorous, and I'm leaning towards the former. She develops these fixations on people, but I can’t see her ever becoming really reliant on anyone who isn’t Tuanada. (I think she likes having people rely on her, but hates to rely on anyone who might not always be there.) Everything she’d want to get from a romance, she gets from him; sex and wider social connection, she’s happy to get elsewhere. I’m happy the last few years have given me new language to reckon with ideas of sexuality and gender and romantic preferences and that whole mire, because it inches me a little closer, I think, to figuring Kaitan out.
I do worry, too, that I’m working with tropes about trauma that I’m not really all that aware of. Kaitan has gone through a lot, and will go through a lot, and I think some of the slipperiness is coping mechanisms piled upon coping mechanisms. I wish I had easy access to a psychologist I could run her by and see what they think.
I find her very compelling and very frustrating all at once. I find the way she constructs relationships incredibly interesting. She's not afraid to get totally fascinated with a person, but the idea of putting her into an actual romance just slides right off — and that leaves the door open for all of these myriad other kinds of deeply entangled relationships.
Maybe I should lean into that. Get all Homestuck up on this fucker and explore those different paradigms.
You ever get the feeling your own characters are taunting you?
She’s too much full of contradictions that I can’t seem to resolve. She’s deeply rooted to ideas of family and heritage, but she’s not even really a part of her very own family and she knows it. She’s a free radical who is deeply tied to the importance of her duties. She’s not a happy person, but she’s aggressively effective and in truth she’s not unhappy either. I guess she doesn’t really see happiness as a goal? She's much more interested in chasing duty, and freedom, and championing the people and things that she loves. Like a romanticized version of a knight. She wants satisfaction, success, and relevance.
And then there’s the whole Fara thing (and secondarily the Laedo thing, and maybe the Rat City thing?) She plays with the trappings of romance but I’m starting to get this inkling that, if I stay really true to her character, she’s either aromantic or aggressively polyamorous, and I'm leaning towards the former. She develops these fixations on people, but I can’t see her ever becoming really reliant on anyone who isn’t Tuanada. (I think she likes having people rely on her, but hates to rely on anyone who might not always be there.) Everything she’d want to get from a romance, she gets from him; sex and wider social connection, she’s happy to get elsewhere. I’m happy the last few years have given me new language to reckon with ideas of sexuality and gender and romantic preferences and that whole mire, because it inches me a little closer, I think, to figuring Kaitan out.
I do worry, too, that I’m working with tropes about trauma that I’m not really all that aware of. Kaitan has gone through a lot, and will go through a lot, and I think some of the slipperiness is coping mechanisms piled upon coping mechanisms. I wish I had easy access to a psychologist I could run her by and see what they think.
I find her very compelling and very frustrating all at once. I find the way she constructs relationships incredibly interesting. She's not afraid to get totally fascinated with a person, but the idea of putting her into an actual romance just slides right off — and that leaves the door open for all of these myriad other kinds of deeply entangled relationships.
Maybe I should lean into that. Get all Homestuck up on this fucker and explore those different paradigms.
You ever get the feeling your own characters are taunting you?
no subject
Date: 2019-01-26 03:24 pm (UTC)I wonder what would have happened if the Caetrans hadn't attacked. Like, what happens if Kaitan and Fara get to dabble and then Fara has to go on with her life, and then she winds up left with this "oh no, I know what I'm missing now" feeling once she gets married? That feels like it could be its own AU that might still work out nicely for drama, albeit with less of an epic arc.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-01 11:01 pm (UTC)I am very interested to hear what you think Fara's storyline would end up like with those changes. Who would she be? How would she resolve that? What does she actually want?
Actually, I think there are some similarities between her and Kaitan that we haven't capitalized on -- they both want to be effective people, whatever that means for them, but it seems like from the start of the novel they don't even try to connect on that level. I wonder if we could use that? They're both seeing a flattened version of each other at first, assuming a lot based on the personas they're both putting out -- but if they dropped those they might actually connect better?
no subject
Date: 2019-02-01 11:47 pm (UTC)(Can we do it as a Rainbowfic set?? X3)
no subject
Date: 2019-02-04 10:31 pm (UTC)