These kind of people are also the people that come yell at your mom when you've just walloped some playground bully who wouldn't stop throwing rocks at you or trying to make you eat sand, should they happen to have a human child.
Well, plus side: they'd be useful. Not-quite plus side: ... they wouldn't be any more disruptive than the ship's cultural average? >.> I need to just draw the entire clusterfuck of them in a box all "PROBLEM TROLLS: FREE TO A GOOD INDIFFERENT HOME"
Re: Lord Alphasshat: Is it still embarrassment squick when you are mostly embarrassed that the character exists and is talking? Because I feel embarrassed for the existence of Lord Alphasshat, even if Erskin and Bel are having fun pranking him.
i'm trying to aim for like, a spoiled, complacent guy with a self-righteous victim complex, who's managed to blame all his rejections on direct enemy action. can't get a job? well the hiring people hated and feared him because he's too intelligent and challenging and makes them afraid so they lash out. can't get dates? well women are awful and shallow and only want hot rich guys. etcetera. that kind of guy. so smelling wolves around is DEFINITELY cause for him to ramp up into a besieged, hysterical aggression. because OF COURSE this means war. of course anything frightening or bad in his life is a direct attack on him. it's still hard thinking of like, what he'd say, how he'd command people that actually were under his 'command'. i'm going with 'pissy, condescending dick trying to LARP'. but suggestions or advice are also appreciated. i'm really bad at writing jerks. :T
Okay, so... Boat Trolls. The Archetype AU. Spoiler: Quick reminder Archetype AU The boat trolls are basic archetypes. Every culture knows them. Throughout human history, as far back as there are stories, every culture knows the story of The Enslaved Person Who Made A Thing Go And Then Rebelled And Crashed It. Every culture knows about the Noble Soldier Who Loved The Enslaved Pilot. Maybe it’s a pilot, or a navigator, or a horseman. But everyone knows the story. And so on. They’re just there. Always have been. In the 20th century, someone studying Campbell’s work notices that there’s something strange about these archetypes. The names of the characters are more similar in every culture they can find than is typical of any other names. The Hero’s Journey is abstract, but something about the Enslaved Pilot seems a little more concrete. He studies it, he accumulates evidence, he writes a book. No one cares. It just seems completely normal to them. Any attempt to point out the abnormalities runs into an impenetrable wall of certainty that of course things would be like that. Why wouldn’t the Soldier and the Noble hate each other but have lots of sex? I mean, what, you don’t expect them to be friends, do you? They wouldn’t get along. ...The Incredibly Ill-Advised Disney Adaptation. Who gets made the baddie, Bel (ala Ares in Xena) or Erskin (ala Loki in Avengers)? Maybe *both*, and they are in the way of Disney Princess Elusca's incredibly heteronormative romance with Sanitized For The Kids Galley?
in the disney adaptation, erskin is made female. bel is galley's big brother who has a terrible crush on wicked duchess erskin, and half-unwittingly does her bidding; in the end he sacrifices himself in an attempt to keep erskin and lu from killing each other; grief-stricken, since she did love him back in her weird way, erskina botches her attempt to dispatch lu and capture galley (for his valuable powers of course, he's probably a dragon in disguise or something) and lu has to kill her -- albeit indirectly, disney-style, via a fall from a high place or a long-distance firework shot or something. pancho, bel and galley's sensible sister, doesn't get as much screen time as she should and is the fan favorite. she probably gets to knock erskina's thugs out with a cast iron skillet at some point.
