(no subject)

[mari4212]

Okay, so it's been another long week(ish) since I've updated. Things have improved muchly, mostly because I had the chance to go home for Easter break. Going home meant:

1. Being on my territory in a way that school really never is, knowing intuitively where everything is and how everything functions.

2. Getting enough sleep and not stressing about missing any classes, because there were none.

3. Seeing my family again, getting to hug my sisters, talk with my father, and do things with my mother. (Including cleaning things, because for Mom and I, that's a very important way we interact together. Yes, we're weird. But someone has to notice that the legs of the table have gunk on them and need to be scrubbed. nightshadow242, stop laughing.)

4. Seeing my doctor, who has known me since I was knee-high to a grasshopper and can normally diagnose me at a glance because he's seen every aspect of my health before. This also means that he laughed himself sick at the BS the ER department told me, laughed even more at the prescription they gave me, which was apparently more useful for sending me into a drugged sleep than anything else, and then promptly gave a diagnosis that makes much more sense in terms of my symptoms and my history, plus the medication for my blood pressure that I took the last time I was having dizzy spells.

5. Church! And all the loveliness of being back with my home church community and that supportive religious context that I miss so much when I'm here. I really wish I could find a Christian context to belong with here at school, because even though I love Judaism, and am interested in every other religion I've come across, I'm a Christian at heart and I really miss that sense of belonging that I get with my own faith and the faith community I grew up with.

And being back here hasn't been that bad, because my teachers are being very reasonable about me making up the lost work, which helps. Plus, I'd forgotten that there was no genetics lab today, since there's two lab sections and one of them meets on Monday, when we were still on Easter Break.

Now, to go off on another completely different tangent, I was linked to this meta: http://cluegirl.insanejournal.com/847497.html?format=light while I was checking out my flist. And it set me to thinking a bit about characterizations, and finally to this challenge for you guys to give to me. Ask me to either write or tell how I'd write various different characters as evil, without breaking their characterization. Available fandoms: NCIS, Firefly, Doctor Who, Harry Potter. Because it would be a stretch, and possibly distract me from the fact that my health problems forced me to default from the femmefic challenge. I have a feeling I'm going to try to write at least one of the prompts I was given later, as a belated gift to the person I was supposed to be writing for, but that's going to take a while.

Comments

[ljmckay.livejournal.com]

Yay going home for Easter! I went home for Easter, too, and I'm glad I did. Though I got really behind on stuff. But it's a good thing you got to see your doctor! That would have made the rest of the semester pretty miserable if you didn't get that all sorted out. Not to mention potentially dangerous...

Oooh, challenge...I'm thinking the Doctor would almost be too easy, cuz he kind of teeters on that edge anyway, as does Snape...hmmm...oooh, how about Wash? :D

[heylittleriver.livejournal.com]

Oh, four is FTW! That's fantastic. And lots of aww for the rest of it.



Kaylee! And Abby. And Inara. And/or, anyway. (Give you the ones I'd have trouble with. *g*)


(And... Huh. Now I'm wondering just what it says about me that my favourite characters are the ones that I could quite conceivably imagine crossing the line.)

[mari4212.livejournal.com]

She's not bad. Not really, not if you think about it.

She just wants her friends to all be happy. And to stay with her for forever, because they're her family and she loves them. And if that means taking some extra steps to eliminate things which she knows hurts them, well, that's something she's always been willing to do for a true friend of hers.

So when she finds out that Tony's father really was much worse than he'd ever let on in his jokes, of course she had to do something about it. A few days off of work on a trip up to New England, and she'd easily been able to talk the lawyer into helping her make a few small changes to Mr. Dinozzo's will. No problem. And of course, it had been an inside joke with all of NCIS for years that she'd be able to kill someone with no forensic evidence. How were they supposed to know that the only reason she said that so much was because she'd already done it a few times before? It was so easy to switch his ulcer medication in for one which would damage his heart, and most biotoxins weren't detectable at all until you specifically looked for the precise one.

Three weeks later, when the news came in that Tony's dad had had a heart attack, and that he'd included Tony in his will and apologized for the whole disowning thing, Abby was home in DC to comfort and comiserate with Tony.

She always did like helping a friend.

(Kaylee I can see as a lot like Abby, that she'd re-define everything in her head until she was only doing it to help, and if they'd just see that she was trying to fix everything and make it all shiny and work, they'd understand, right? And she'd be so sweet and earnest about it all that you'd almost agree with her, right up until you saw all the dead bodies around and the other lives ruined to keep her people happy.)

(Inara? Inara's always good at manipulating people. She's been trained to do it, and to do it in a way that will genuinely help the person. Now, if you then twist that a bit, and say that she's either been badly hurt by something and starts taking it out on others, or that for some reason she sees it as her duty to do it, she could easily begin to warp someone until they broke themselves, like an emotionally abusive person can do in a relationship. A really interesting story to do would be one where Inara is an Alliance operative, trained to identify potential leaders for another uprising, and mentally destroy them. Then you take Mal and Inara's somewhat dysfunctional relationship as is, and say that instead of just taking potshots that hit too deeply by accident, that she is actually trying to systematically weaken Mal and make him question his beliefs and his decision-making abilities. That she then twists the times when they make up and turns those into making him believe that she was right all along, and that he needs her to save him somehow. Twist that correctly, and she can then lead him into following the orders of someone he thinks is actually against the Alliance, but in actuality, he ends up doing the Alliance's dirty work for them. And all the time she's there, pushing him one step more into the brink, until one day, he shatters completely and all that's left is someone that obeys her orders.)

And I think I just scared myself silly.

[heylittleriver.livejournal.com]

And I think I just scared myself silly.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Because you just did the exact same thing to me. The Abby thing was... yeah. Kaylee? Yeah.

(There's more I want to say on this, about Abby/Kaylee as evil would actually be much much more creepier than say, Mal or Zoe or Jack or Gibbs, in some ways, because I think they would be deluding themselves just a bit more to keep them still so... innocent on the surface.

Or it could just be that they're not canonically as close to the line.)

Although, And she'd be so sweet and earnest about it all that you'd almost agree with her, right up until you saw all the dead bodies around and the other lives ruined to keep her people happy. makes me giggle, just for how you put it.

Then you take Mal and Inara's somewhat dysfunctional relationship as is, and say that instead of just taking potshots that hit too deeply by accident, that she is actually trying to systematically weaken Mal and make him question his beliefs and his decision-making abilities.

Your brain = awesome. YES. I WANT TO SEE THIS FIC.

(I have this caveat, though, where Zoe is either dead or indisposed here. Because hell no, would she let that happen.)

[mari4212.livejournal.com]

Oh, you too? Good, I'm glad I'm not the only one I scared with coming up with that.

I do agree that Kaylee and Abby are more scary when they go evil. Because they come across as so good initially, and if they can go so wrong, what about you or I? Whereas Gibbs or Mal, yeah, they're good now, but they've got their ruthlessness so much closer to the surface that it makes sense on some level for them to turn darkside.

YES. I WANT TO SEE THIS FIC.

(I have this caveat, though, where Zoe is either dead or indisposed here. Because hell no, would she let that happen.)

Oh yeah, Zoe when herself and present would never let it get that far. I kind of want to see this fic too, but I don't think I'd be able to stay in a dark enough headspace long enough to write all of it out, and it would have to be long to do it at all right.

[heylittleriver.livejournal.com]

I didn't quite have nightmares, but I got those butterflies!

Zoe when herself and present

I like that. 'when herself'.

but I don't think I'd be able to stay in a dark enough headspace long enough to write all of it out, and it would have to be long to do it at all right.

*nods* A girl can dream though. *g*