Lately I've been redeveloping the first Vampire: the Masquerade character I ever had, a Malkavian named Holly. Originally, she was based on an extremely thin premise: the premise that I am about to expire in just under two minutes! Get it, moosebrain?
No, not quite. But close. She was very loosely based on the character of Holly, the computer, from
Red Dwarf, specifically a line in the book version after he/she has had his/her intelligence compressed (I use both because it's female in the show, but still male in the book), along the lines of "you don't understand. I know everything, and I want to share it with you. You could ask me, is there a God, and what is His address?" I thought that the idea of a Malk who thought she knew everything would be interesting, and ran with it.
Holly has always been my favourite character (as first characters are wont to be), but let's just say I was a little... naive... and silly about her personal background. (I mean come on, ditching the mortal connection by basically being a runaway, and having a random Embrace at a nightclub by someone named "Caramel, the sweetest on the street"?) More importantly, I really had no clue what was "Malkavian" about her. This was a point in time where Malks hadn't been developed much beyond "kooky vampires" in the books, and so you had huge rashes of people wearing bunny ears and thinking that meant something. I was determined not to be that sort of Malk, but I still wasn't very detailed or very good about it.
That was partly the way our games were, though. This was a large-group LARP, which mainly consisted of "mill around and interact in character, with no specific plot; storyteller will introduce plot threads if we get bored". One didn't need a lot of detail just to mill around. We also got stupid amounts of experience and by the time we stopped playing, Holly had gone from a base character to having like 16 dots of Disciplines, including ridiculous stuff like Serpentis and Vicissitude. Did I forget to mention that this character, while being 11th gen and later Diablerizing to 10th was simultaneously a primogen and an anarch? Yeah. Our game was like that. Maybe it was the fact that the average player age was 17 or so. But I digress.
The point is, I'm redoing the character, keeping a number of basic, original-inspiration elements -- such as her having been an un-awakened changeling (sidhe) before her Embrace, thus being haunted by this sense of a missing birthright and having some various "faerie left-overs" merits and flaws, and the whole "I know everything, please listen to me while I tell you" bit -- but making her much more of a
character, if I possibly can. I seem to have added into the mix, rather than the Holly "what is God's address" bit, the Hitchhiker's Guide "Total Perspective Vortex" effect. (Needs more stuff in the Embrace story about how it was to have a faerie soul destroyed, even if she didn't know that's what was going on, and more leading up to that about her not-quite-Chrysalis-ing, and more out-of-character stuff about how the few changelings that were sensing her impending Chrysalis went "what the fuck?" when she disappeared off their radar.) Anyway, I'm not really sure why I'm bothering to get so into this, as the likelihood that I will ever actually play the character is about zilch, but hey. It's fun.
( Read more... )PS. Here is the drawing I mentioned in
this entry:
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richpizor, I'd be willing to pay give you something for it this time :P
