InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Favours for sailors! "

MarinaNova Mods (marinanova_mod) wrote in marinanova_ooc,
@ 2012-11-30 18:42:00

Entry tags:

mod: hmd, mod: plotting

Game-wide HMD/Plotting!
Welcome to the MarinaNova HMD! This is optional, but encouraged.

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Be constructive and considerate.

• Since there is no plotting meme during months with an HMD, please feel free to do that here too.

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1/2 OTL.... some minor, old DGM spoilers contained herein!

_incurable
2012-12-02 12:10 am UTC (link)

Thanks for the compliments on Garcia! I adore playing her.

With regards to Cross... I'm afraid that's kind of on purpose. ^^: Maybe if I explain a bit of his role in canon it will make more sense? Hopefully at least it will let you know why I choose to play him the way I do, without much of his thought process played out.

In canon... Cross is a huge mystery. No one ever knows his true motivations, everything about his internal workings is pretty much assumption or conjecture. I have *no idea* of his age, for example, or where he is from. And all his canon appearances have this subtle, underlying strangeness to them, because neither the reader NOR the characters he's interacting with know what he's really thinking.

His canon is also ongoing, and though he is presumed dead at the current time (has been forever), the circumstances of his "death" were just as mysterious, and I can't even presume he's actually not still kicking and orchestrating things from behind the scenes. However, the author occasionally tosses in flashbacks and references to Cross, again insinuating things he did "off-camera" or covertly.

It makes him a challenge to RP, needless to say! I don't know most of why he does what he does, and to some degree making up headcanon is limited because one never knows when the author will bust out with more information and contradict what I've done in my RPing.

What I do to combat this is that, with rare exceptions, I leave Cross' motivations in RP veiled in mystery, just as his canon self is presented. Sure, some things I throw in there because I feel pretty confident about them, but those would be things like his hatred of cheap things and ugly people -- little details, in the scheme of things. Sometimes I have no choice but to pick a thought process and go with it, but a lot of playing Cross is... well, gut feeling? If that seems bizarre, I assure you that it sounds that way to me, too! I try hard to base him in canon as much as possible but there are sometimes he's thrown into situations and I just have to let the muse speak for himself. (Funnily, it's not uncommon that long after the thread in question is over an epiphany comes to me and it's like "OH THAT'S WHY HE DID THAT." It's the strangest thing. XD)

The other thing is, that with a character so shrouded in mystery, other characters most of the time are not going to have the first clue what he's thinking, since neither his body language, tone, nor certainly his words give much away. This is pretty much canon, as I read Cross. He comes off as... well, RUDE like Elena has seen, but his actual motivations in being rude are, I believe, much deeper than that and there are reasons to it beyond just being a jackass. However, the character with him he's interacting should read him like a plain old jackass rather than someone who is acting like a jackass for carefully concealed reasons. I worry a little that adding brackets that basically say (paraphrasing) [Although he's acting this way, his jackassery has reasons, which are...] that the player and/or character I'm threading with will be impacted by the brackets and begin to see Cross differently than he should come off, which is as a totally unapologetic jackass. Or, alternatively, make the player THINK that I want them to see Cross as something other than an unapologetic jackass, which would be flirting with OOCness in my part since people should, unless they know Cross extremely well, see him as just that. If that makes sense? ^^;

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