Boat Trolls planning thread! (full of spoilers, non-players enter at your own risk)

i think trolls must have troll... autism? for karkat to use that line? and anyway why not have autistic aliens, that's cool.

i think a component of their miscommunication is i write erskin as genuinely bad at stringing words together, especially when stressed or emotional. he really just plain does do a shitty job of communicating why he feels how he feels, and guessing what anyone else is up to, and self-pitying paranoia fills in the rest of the gaps.

i think another component of their miscommunication is you and i will have different ideas about how a scene should go, and different perspectives on how previous scenes went! do you want to back up a bit in the RP, or hash out what you'd like to happen?

 

yeah, the way bel's hung up on the fact that erskin believes something that is demonstrably not true makes me both sympathetic and frustrated. poor kid needs to like... circle around it, or talk to his moirail about it or something, or accept that people will stubbornly and stupidly keep having feelings about their own subjective interpretation of events and you can't always 'correct' them. erskin isn't hearing 'look, buddy, she was a really, really bad person who was literally killing you', he's hearing 'hey so i killed the love of your life, but it's okay because my friends and i all hated her'.

also trolls being... well, trolls, someone having a body count doesn't really make them a bad person automatically? it doesn't seem reasonable to me that a troll kid would hear 'your girlfriend is a murderer' and not go 'okay, so?'.

and yeah erskin's still twisted up, like bel said. cloris has been punching his brain full of holes for a few months. that's not gonna resolve itself in a big 'AHA!' realization moment like, three days after she blows up in front of him. even if she wasn't fucking with his brain, i think killing someone's girlfriend and then being like 'well, she was evil, and i actually rescued you right now, so stop being sad' is not exactly the kind of thing that goes down well.

 

yeah i think they can work erskin around in stages. like at first he thought bel just fetched him back like a stolen toy. then he was assured bel still wanted him, and he's approaching the idea that bel went and got him because bel genuinely believes, like everyone else, that cloris was killing him, and bel wanted to save him, and that's actually very flattering even though erskin wishes they could all have just gotten along. and erskin is really shocked and confused that cloris attacked jethro, but shit went down so fast and horribly that it's all mixed up with this sense of failure. it's a lot to process!


and yeah i don't blame bel for being really hurt and insulted and confused that erskin's still so fixated on cloris, even when they're making out. that's gotta suck.

 

also i don't know how to resolve 'erskin's terrible

I AGREE THEY SHOULD MAKE OUT i was like 'oh dang it's time for feelings dang' but it's probably good they worked some of the feelings out with each other? i don't think you're white-knighting bel at all, i think bel's a nineteen year old soldier-boy and enjoyably and realistically flawed, and also has an extremely exasperating seventeen-ish hateboyfriend. everyone's got their own areas of butthurt. their own... butts to hurt.

i keep trying to resolve erskin's communication problems and social detachment with his sense of humor? but maybe it's that he likes to deflect being serious as much as possible, and put a cheerful spin on everything, or ignore bad stuff in favor of clowning around. i think by nature he's just a bouncy, confident, good-natured kid, and the paranoia and distrust and trauma factors of his personality are externally imposed by virtue of the poor fuck had to grow up on goddamn alternia.

 

ok i'm snoozing! see you around

o/

 

I REALLY LIKE THIS, YES.

 

If it makes you feel better, I hadn't noticed the parallel either. I was operating off of a more traditional vampire trope? Like where the swooney maiden starts overtly dying and everyone's like 'ok you look really sick' and she's like 'la! i feel wonderful! and the handsome gentleman who visits me at night is totally honorable and we're gonna get married and live happily ever after!'. But yeah, dang, the ray-and-rhett stuff is... super similar, haha.

For my part, unreliable and even delusional narrators aren't nightmarish to me, they're a really fun and interesting point of view? I mean, y'know, look at my writing, I'm always writing zealots or sick kids or paranoid kids or whatever, I like the doubled-up narrative that results from a protagonist who's clearly not in tune with what the readers get to figure out is actually going on. So that's basically why I was delighted to fry Erskin's brain and get him operating on a very different version of events. I can tone it down or have him recover faster, though, if it keeps being horrifying for you!

 

Gotcha! I'll aim for that. I think it would help, actually, if he sorted through those issues with Jethro instead of Bel? He can clearly see that Jethro and Reggie got fucked up, and he's way more inclined to pay attention to Jethro and to listen to him and to be persuaded of unpleasant truths with him. He's been genuinely trying to modify his behavior around his moirail, even if haltingly and not well.

In contrast, he's got the habit of suspiciously, or dismissively, ignoring the shit out of whatever Bel tells him about anything or anyone. And there's the whole issue of 'Bel killed my girlfriend, while my girlfriend horrifyingly tried to kill Jethro, what the fuck' that I don't think he can make headway on just by going over the same tired 'she's evil / you just didn't like her' ground with Bel. Also the whole issue of— it's got to be really hard to admit to weakness and infirmity in front of a pitch partner! Or to take them pointing out your weakness without taking it as a challenge or a rejection. Jethro would be able to say 'bro, you're really sick,' and have it be a more natural and ok part of the relationship to hear.

 

wow i like this a lot

(is there going to be a photo of erskin in there too? or does she only take pics of the corpses)

 

that sounds great! sorry about the break in the action, but it feels implausible for erskin to have a delirious fever and then sleep all of it off in one go. i think he should be easily tired out for a while yet.