Aha! Maybe you're where I picked up the "this food is not food" expression? I could've sworn it was something my mom used to say, but now I'm not sure xD I've been having to explain what I mean by "nothing is food except cereal" to like all my doctors
could be! i think all the northfield nakama have that expression, but i'm not sure which of us originated it. it's the only way i can think of to convey that feeling of, "yes, i could put this in my face and swallow it, but it would take an effort of will similar to eating pebbles or crayons."
i love reading pre-serum steve stories, but it's also a little harrowing, especially when they're well-written. i, too, am a chronically ill short guy with an overabundance of fight. i end up feeling a bit called out. the family joke when i was a kid was "jesse's a belligerent drunk." the joke being the drunk, not the belligerent. when i got my surly on, i was like that guy in the bar who starts bumping into people and making rude jokes hoping someone will throw a punch. it frankly took me until i was thirtyish to get a grip on anger management. i was a neighborhood menace because i'd go looking for bullies to fight. i found a surprising number of them, considering we lived well out in the suburbs. and i had absolutely no sense of scale. my friend stacy came home crying with a bloody bruise on her face and told us that mean girls threw a rock at her as she was riding past, i went charging down there on my bike and saw the mean girls were like fifteen? and we were nine? and there were three of them? i didn't care, i hit them with my bike. only one of them dodged fast enough, and that one ran away. picked up my little red dirtbike and just swung it over the fence like a lumber axe, i was an insane child. i can only imagine the kind of trouble i would've gotten up to if i lived in a more densely populated area. which, i mean, i did later, but by that time i was eighteen and had at least a modicum of self-control, i only nutted a skinhead once a month at the most. fortunately, both my parents were alive and well when i got a wild hair to join the navy, and they talked about taking orders and having your every moment regimented and sleeping in an airless bunkroom with three other gassy recruits until i came to my senses. :P
note to self: young casimir at the orcs' ranch, sniffling to himself. galley: what is it now, you baby. casimir: i'm sad because i ate squirrel. galley: come on, it's not THAT gross. casimir: squirrel was the name of my reindeer.
ALL OF THEM. ok just narcissus, muscari or whatever the ones tha tlook like grapes are called, lots of crocus, and a fuck ton of siberian squill. no daffodils or tulips, because i plan to put the bulbs in the yard after the thaw, and squirrels and deer eat daffodil and tulip bulbs every time around here. barb and i mixed up a big bucket of mud and spooned it into pots and it was fantastic. i love playing in dirt.
note to self: casimir's army nickname was 'daisy', short for 'daisy cutter', after his tendency to make huge swaths of the enemy's undead, summons, and constructs fall down like mown grass.
i'm imagining a scene where some courtier thinks they have hold of something juicy because they found out about 'daisy', and they're spreading it around, and making insinuations, and then galley hears them gossipping and grins a mean grin as he tells them what it's short for.
wheeee i've had 4 hours of sleep at most, then meenah kitty woke me up with great fervor and busy busy affections. i kept turning over and pulling my blanket over my head, and she kept walking on me and purring loudly and digging me out of the blankets with tiny relentless paws. turns out i have a back specialist appointment today tho and i'm actually hungry for breakfast so it's not entirely misfortunate.
i need to stop getting distracted by casimir's backstory and start coming up with conspirators. i have a hard time making my antagonists interesting because i get too focused on my viewpoint characters and the villains end up being kind of shallow. come on, jesse, not all the nobles are buffoons, and they do have some very reasonable gripes with casimir's rule. he's disrespecting the hell out of some very old and powerful families. it's not like these folks can just shrug it off. it's like copyright. defend it or lose it.
Conspirators/antagonists vs viewpoint characters/backstory the eternal struggle. (write down the list of gripes then decide which characters represent those gripes?)
Thought if you want it: What if not all of them are bad rulers persay? Maybe some dislike casimir because he is wrecking the established system and while he may be cleaning up some bad shit, he´s destabilizing good stuff in the process. They can be entirely well intentioned and even have good points and still wind up opposed to him.
Hmm, ok... so, what’s the name of one of these people with reasonable gripes? And what would they have named their goldfish when they were 8? Also, how long did they manage to keep the goldfish alive, and where the hell did they get a goldfish in the first place?
the problem with this is that due to divine-meddling-enforced-fairytale-fuckery, czinsistan is the Evil Kingdom, and its rulers and other significant people tend to be railroaded into badness by narrative forces. so while it's perfectly natural to resent a military coup that's disrespecting the established power structures, i can't rely on reasonable grudges and logical behavior. they have to be fairytale antagonists... as well as being real people who occasionally have a moment of lucidity and are like "why did i do that tho"
my clever good sheeps have the sense to come in out of the rain. i found them all sleeping under the awning or under trees, while the vanilla sheep stood around all night getting wet like dumbasses.
http://www.animaniamod.net/index.php/Main_Page for my own future reference. i think it is Very Sad that you cannot place a toad on your shoulder. also realistic, as they are darling idiots and would fall off. but then, you can't make armor out of diamonds in the real world either, yet here we are.