#u know during the trial one of them makes a reference to some stupid thing they talked about that night and they all laugh at it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

littleprincesa-isabel · 4 years

Photo

Writing Task: BDRP Questionnaire

Trigger Warnings: None

Extra Note: This got very long haha

Your Name: Kiara :DD

Characters:

Sally Finkelstein, Minnie Muysken, Georgette Midler, Isabel Flores

Pick one of your characters and talk about their growth (we recommend choosing an older character, but it’s up to you!) What about their story has surprised you? What are you proud of? How have they changed from their original inception to now?

Georgette

First off, let me preface by saying that when Georgette’s muse originally formed in my head and I went for her, I absolutely did not envision her dying, coming back to life undead, and becoming a magick like at all. In fact, when I picked her up I loved the fact that she was a mundus and all my intentions were to keep her as such. Yeah... she’s not so much now but... surprise!

Georgette has done a total 360 change from what I originally had formed for her in my head, but it like also really helped out too that she did lol. (Thanks MK!!) I knew from the start that the MAIN goal I wanted for Georgette was to create a new form of stability for her. I wanted her to grow out of her old glamorous and ritzy life and into a life where fame and fortune really aren’t the most important aspects.

I wanted her to end up gaining a more humble perspective of life, almost just completely rewire her and I got to end up doing this twice for her lmao.

Just from Georgette needing to learn how to puzzle/rewire herself into this new life when she was forced to move to Swynlake. Learning how to live smaller and with a publically trashed and slandered reputation, learning to cook (she still sucks at it), live on her own, process through living with her rape trauma and just getting help with her alcoholism. I was able to meet that goal simply through all of that because Georgette grew and learned so much. She got into therapy, accepted help, gained real friends, learned how to process through her trauma, gained an appreciation for the simpler things in life and all through that journey of simply trying to tape up all that had shattered in her life.

Then she died... and came back to life.

So it was now going through this journey with her again where Georgette had to learn how to rewire herself and pick up the pieces to now make them fit into this new life of hers. It was going through all the emotional baggage of processing this new reset button for her, learning her new powers, coping through having died under a tree, surviving her rape trial, accepting that she no longer had such needs as hunger or sleep like normal humans, etc.

I’m proud of where she ended up going and how strong she has become. She hasn’t given up and keeps working through each hurdle. She has really changed from the shallow, spoiled brat she was in the beginning like I’m a proud mom lol.

Pick another character and talk a little about where you WANT them to go. What are your plans for them going into the new year?

Isabel

I want Isa to like completely spread open her wings for this new coming year!!! She is officially EIGHTEEN, and I want her to gain independence outside of her family. I want her to have independence outside of the royal appearance and duties of a princess, and outside of the daily knife over her head that is a crazy sorceress out to kill her.

Isa just wants to live life in where she doesn’t feel caged in.

I want her to be reckless lmao. Go to a party and get straight up trashed, travel more outside of Swynlake, move out, have sex, go to the club, go go-karting, sing karaoke with friends drunk or sober, set up an instagram account, survive an all-nighter, tipi a house, watch a Broadway play, get a tattoo because why the fuck not?!?

Feel life! I want Isa to feel life. Almost all of Isa’s life has been under the microscope of bodyguards or her family that I want her to learn how to be out on her own. I want her to make stupid mistakes, she’ll learn to go through them and get to grow because of them. Isa loves to learn, this will be great for her!!

And yes, she has already done a lot, but under the supervision of someone else, like Isa doesn’t know how it feels to be completely free and she wants a taste of it. I want a taste of it for her.

Pick a thread or a plot that you’re proud of and talk about why you loved it.

Minnie

I actually really liked my plot in where I got Minnie attacked at night by a patient that has already hurt her before. It makes me sound awful, but I liked it because it allowed Minnie to pull herself away from the hospital. Minnie wraps so much of her identity around the hospital. Her father used to work there as a surgeon, she used to spend so much time with her father there when she was little, she would volunteer at the hospital and it has been where she was working since she graduated from Pride U.

I honestly wanted to see if Minnie could see herself outside of the hospital. It was a journey of Minnie processing through the trauma, being able to simply feel safe again, and realizing that for her mental health she will have to step back some from a job and a place she loves dearly.

Minnie is still healing and will still ask for company whenever she needs to go out at night because she hasn’t been able to feel entirely safe as of yet. She is still working at the hospital but no longer coded/full time and now she has actually become the school nurse for Swynlake General. She loves the job and if it hadn’t been for the attack she honestly would’ve never been opened to even trying for that opportunity.

In terms of your own writing, identify 1-3 strengths and talk about why you think it’s one of your strengths.

Voice: Not to so much conversational voice as that’s actually something I want to improve in, but the mental voice. It is so easy for me to get into the thought processes involved with my characters. I always speak of their emotions and how they are thinking through their current situation. I love doing that because, for me, it explains the reasoning for all that my characters do what they do or end up doing. I just end up forgetting about everything else that should also be involved beyond thought and emotion lol.

Starters: This is a weird strength lol but I absolutely have no problems writing starters. It’s easy for me to create a situation where I need two people to end up engaging with one another. It’s fun for me to think of different ways, especially since Swynlake is a magical town so ideas really are limitless!! I just suck at creating titles that is definitely not my forte!

In terms of your own writing, identify 1-3 areas of improvement.

Conversation: I’m trying to be very cautious about this and I’m hoping that I have been improving but just not answering everything that is being spoken in a thread. I want to improve in knowing which things should be answered and what shouldn’t because it messes with the continuity of the thread. Hopefully, I have gotten better but it’s one of the main things I have been trying to pay hard attention to when writing my replies.

Body Placement/Situational Awareness: I’m also hoping to improve in being constantly aware of where my characters are and what they are doing. I lack describing simple actions with my characters like continuing to drink a tea they have in hand, remembering if they were holding something so as to know they need to put that something down if they want their hand, remembering if my girls hair is up or down because then she can’t tuck hair behind her ear if it’s up, etc. It gets hard for me sometimes because it’s a lot I have to keep track of.

Actions: I think I stink at writing actions where my characters are concerned. I forget that they are supposed to do more than think and talk. I suck at properly engaging them at times and I have to constantly remind myself like oh this is a date: hold hands, kiss, hug, lean in, stuff like that. They are in a hospital remember to engage with the machines, the diagnosis, doctors, and nurses etc.

Pick one of your plots, or even just a character, and come up with a list of 3-5 “mentor texts” where you can look for inspiration or research, then write a short (2-4 sentences) why you picked those texts.

Sally

Edgar Allen Poe’s Ligeia and Morella: I use these two short stories from Edgar Allen Poe a lot when it comes to inspirations for Sally. For Morella, I took the aspects of Sally looking so identical to her mother as she grew older and her father being obsessed with her because of that straight out of that text. Morella dying during the birth of her child, I stole that too for Sally’s back story involving her own mother. WIth Ligeia I love Edgar’s description of the main woman in the story, Ligeia and I often find myself going back to read it because I want Sally to resemble that description since that’s how I view her in my head.

Weather Websites: Lmao. I don’t know if this counts as a text per say, but legit I am constantly looking up websites that give me different types of weather and their descriptions. I use them because Sally empathic magic transcribes itself through a type of weather. Whenever she feels an emotion from someone it comes to her like the feeling of weather: snow, hale, warmth, fog, rain etc. depending on what emotion it is whether anger, sadness, confusion, happiness etc.

Edith Hamilton’s Mythology/Charmed: I know charmed is not a text lol but it needs to be mentioned because I used that show (particularly Phoebe) as an inspiration for Sally’s vision magic. Sally’s visions are constantly evolving and changing mainly due to the long time it has taken Sally to control it so it took a form of its own when it had the upper hand. That form I stole from Phoebe in how touch was needed for a vision to form and the aspect of Sally feeling all the emotions involved with it. Then, Mythology was a book I had to read as a requirement in my Freshmen year of high school. I use that text for references to the seers and oracles in Greek Mythology which is where I get my inspiration for how Sally’s visions are appearing now.

And now, a wishlist! Jot down a few themes or stories or genres etc that you want to maybe pursue in the upcoming year!

A forbidden romance, a bi-wakening!!!, any magic based plots because I love being able to dive into the magic of my magick babiess, family drama, paranormal thingss and medical plots because I can’t help myself it is who I amm haha.

Sally: Continue to evolve her magic because there is a specific point I want her aside from ya know that having complete control point, so if anyone needs anything seen you know who to hit upp. Open up the store she wants tor tailoring!!! I need to stop being a lazy fuck with that :/. Get her into a relationship. I have had Sally for likeee 3/4 years now and she has just been a lonely spirit. I don’t want her to be a lonely spirit all her liffeee.

Minnie: Hmmm not sure tbh aside from like medical plots!!! I love those gimmie gimmie, Minnie is an awesome nurse :DD

Georgette: Get her through a second trial where hopefully her rapist lands in jail. More socialite things because like she is a famously known socialite and I be forgetting that often. Magic stuff because she is now a magick herselff.

Isabel: She is going to be living up her eighteenth year of life. I am hoping it will be Princess Gone Wild this 2020 lmao. Get Isa to simply live it uppp.

#bdrptask #this really did get so longg #that like I didn't do the optional question bc of that xD

1 note · View note

aureus-ignis · 6 years

Text

When I was young, I fell in love with the Pokemon series. I loved the RBY and GSC games, I watched the anime on TV every weekend, bought the movies, played the TCG, and collected the PokeSpe manga zealously. But as the years went by, the newer Pokemon games failed to hold my interest, and I soon stopped following Pokemon entirely. Last year, the generation of Alola was announced, and after watching a few trailers, I found myself drawn to the music. The adorable Rowlet also caught my eye, and on top of that, it seemed like the story was going to be interesting. A conservation society full of nice people dressed in white that looked strangely sinister at times? Hell yesssss. So I decided to buy the game... and then I fell deeply in love. Once again I was in Pokemon heaven (or hell).

So when Mei asked me if there was any series we could cos together that'd be fun and simple to do, I suggested Gladion and Lillie, since their costumes are fairly simple (c o u g h). She agreed, and that was the beginning of it all.

I started working on stuff around mid-June this year. People who know me know that accuracy is pretty high on my list of priorities, and I was determined to get the not-very-logical hair of Lillie and Gladion as good as I possibly could. Lillie's problem, of course, was the thickness. She has two insanely fat braids that had to be made up of almost all the hair on a normal human head, yet somehow still has a thick wide mane of loose hair behind her. So I had to spend time wefting as many extra rows of fibre into the wig, and then crafting removable bases for the braids from batting and more wefts.

Testing!

Batting base WIP HAHAHA

And the final result was worth it <3 <3

Next was Gladion. When it comes to the subject of pulled back hair, I've gotten to the point where I can ONLY accept lacefront. Anything else is too fake for me. For me, cosplay has always been about portraying the characters as if they were real, no matter how zany and strange their designs may be. I wanted the hair to look almost as though it grew on me. I ripped out almost the whole front to get rid of the fringe, and sewed in longer wefts, adjusting the direction of the hair to the left so that they would comb back naturally. Then ventilating hell began

Darkness, my old friend, we meet again. ;___; My hooking skills have improved since I first started ventilating, but it's still a long, tedious process. School started before I could finish, and I had to work on everything else too...

The realization that his uncut wig looks like Mercy from Overwatch HAHAHA

But as with Lillie, the final result was worth it <3 <3 <3

With regards to his costume, I'd actually had the hoodie and pants tailored because I ran out of time. I'd wanted just the base made so I can do the rest of the details myself, but the tailor forgot and did everything for me... and ended up messing up the accuracy. It was a disappointment, so much so that after STGCC was over, and we planned to have a shoot at the end of the year... I decided to remake everything from scratch. I'm terrible at patterning, really, and Gladion's biggest problem was THE STUPID GRAVITY DEFYING HOOD. Ultimately I couldn't get it to look exactly like the original (because I didn't want extra seams and all, but it was close enough. And the second time round, all of the holes were in the correct areas HAHAHA.

I'd made his first waistpouch myself, but for some reason, despite my careful measurements, the size turned out far too large the first time. So I had to remake the whole thing a second time. The hardest part is sewing the damn thing together, because I'd had to put two layers of hard inferfacing for each piece and sometimes the needle just wouldn't. Go. Through. OTL In version 2, I had more time, so I paid more attention to getting the shape accurate. The stupid thing tapers towards the bottom and has a curved side. Even more stupid, the strap goes from FAT TO THIN TO FAT for some reason. But I succeeded!

New VS Old

Next was the Z-ring. Gladion's official art doesn't have one, but he obviously wears one in-game. I felt that it was important, because Nanu gave it to him. So I had to dig out references from the game screenshots 8D;;

This is how a lot of my prop drafts look like. ALGEBRA IS MY FRIEND.

Also crafted the Z-crystal thanks to Pythagoras' theorem 8D; I used liquid quartz to glue the clear acrylic sheet together without leaving traces.

Final result! I'm pretty happy with it =>

Before STGCC, there was one more segment that I worked really hard on. After we'd decided to do SuMo together, I thought of making a Nebby plushie for Mei to carry. Yes, Pokemon Center had already released their Nebby plush by then, but... For one, it's smaller than life-size. For another, the shape looks more like a sunflower than a starry cloud. I didn't want it to look like Lillie was just carrying a toy; I wanted to give the impression that Mei had an adorable, soft, beautiful real-life Cosmog. But how on earth would someone with very terrible patterning skills make a 3D cloud plushie that could be dyed for Nebby's distinctive gradient colouring, and still be nice and soft to hug?

The answer is, I struggled.

Set up a spraying booth to airbrush the gradient on. Due to a problem with shipping, I couldn't get my compressor in time, so I ended up having to splurge on compressed air cans, which were horrendously expensive oTL.

BUT LOOK AT THE FINAL RESULT. LOOK AT HIM. <3 <3 <3

Let it also be known that I tested to make sure he could fit inside Mei's bag the moment I finished the base HAHAHAHAHAHAHA-----

So that was part 1 of Project Alola! We went to STGCC together and met lots of Pokemon fans (quite a lot of people were very happy to see Nebby, in particular XD), and Laki offered to come shoot with us as Moon since she already had the costume. We then planned to have our shoot at the end of the year during my holidays.

As mentioned, I'd already planned to remake my entire costume and waistpouch, but aside from that... I had the mad idea that I wanted to make a Silvally prop. It's something I'd considered for STGCC too, but I was really short on time then, and Mei told me to FINISH EVERYTHING ELSE FIRST THEN DO IT IF YOU HAVE TIME.

The problem is... Silvally's official size in the Pokedex is 2.4m. That's 80cm taller than myself. )o) Sure, I could scale him down, make a tiny lap plushie like all the other cosplayers, but what would be the point? Although I'd never cosplayed from the Pokemon series before, I'd always thought that if I were to do so, I'd want to make life-size Pokemon so that it'd look like I actually have a Pokemon partner, and not just a Pokemon toy. But I'd thought then that my projects would be starters like Pikachu or Charmander or Cyndaquil, or maybe one of the Eeveelutions. Not a giant horse-dog like Silvally ^^;;;

I had to consider the fact that my house isn't very big and I'd have barely any space to keep him. I had to consider how I'd be able to transport him, and how to construct him so that I could take him apart. I also had to consider the amount of money I'd be spending on him, because honestly, cosplay is not a cheap hobby. Materials in Singapore are especially expensive. As an unemployed student, I'd be splurging a lot if I decided to go ahead with this crazy project. When I told this to Mei during one of our dinners out, she suggested just making his head and taking halfbody shots so no one can tell that he has nobody. Like a hobby horse, except it's a hobby Silvally.

Good idea.

So when school finished, I started drafting him out, and the basic paper draft itself took like three giant sheets of patterning paper taped together HAHAHA.

The base

Honestly, even though I had an idea of how I'd make him, I wasn't completely sure if it would work. As I've said repeatedly I really, really suck at patterning. I can never seem to envision where to cut darts in a piece of EVA foam to get the shape I want, so half the time I was just taping drafting paper on and folding and taping excess parts off, then that that up for a trial-and-error pattern.

With paper mache and paper draft pattern for the mouth.

That's how large the whole thing is 8D'

Apart from the making of Silvally, I'd also spent time searching for reference pictures and sketching storyboard ideas for our shoot. I went to check out the our shoot location (Sentosa Island) a few weekends back, so that we could decide where exactly we wanted to shoot. In hindsight, there were a lot more shots I could have planned to bring out the personality of our characters more, but oh well ;w;

The shoot itself went pretty well, for the sun was quite kind to us, and hid under clouds for most of the day. Sei's working style is quite different from mine, but she was very gracious and did everything I asked of her. Sakami and Greg were wonderful helpers, and some of my best memories from the day include our hilarious videos, and the shenanigans with the Pokemon.

I've already thanked my wonderful team mates, helpers and photographer in another post, so I won't go into details here. But everyone was very kind and obliging, and listened to all my ambitious plans, allowing me to be a bossy director. I'm very, very grateful to all of them.

So now, a bit of reflection on Silvally, and the whole project.

The patterns for Silvally weren't perfect, and I messed up a lot. The final result was definitely far from what I had hoped for. Most noticeably, the top of the head is bumpy holey because I ran out of gesso to fill and sand. But the proportions also came out a bit off, and the neck piece patterning failed on the right side. But when I finished painting... I felt very, very happy. I'd gotten some small bouts of joy when I finished each stage of the crafting process, when I looked at what I'd done, but looking at the final product was just.... incredible. It wasn't as beautiful as it could have been, and I still regret all the imperfections that are so obvious to my eyes, but....I was so excited. I couldn't wait for the shoot.

Perhaps it was partly because I hadn't really been sure if I'd be able to make things work, so the success tastes that much sweeter. Some of my friends had told me I was crazy. I kept asking myself if I were crazy. All that money and time and pain sunk into a project that I'm not even getting paid for, with a success rate that seemed really low. My mom telling me straight out that I was 'too ambitious'. Was it worth it? Would it have been better to make a smaller, much more perfect prop, than an actual sized, flawed one, with half the effort and money? Cosplay is already an indulgence, but had I crossed the line into foolish waste zone?

When I looked at my completed Silvally, the answer didn't hit me like Mjolnir. I still don't know if it was the right thing to do, or if I was an irresponsible child wasting the money that could have gone into feeding me better food.

But it made me happy. So happy. I nearly cried as I stood there for a few minutes staring at him. He was truly a labour of love. I spent hours spraying gesso and paint because I love Silvally. I spent days sanding until my arms want to fall off and my eyes are dying from dust because I love Gladion. I spent hours cortorted in weird positions with a paintbrush trying desperately to stay within the pencil lines, sweat dripping into my eyes, because I love this art. Sure, the process itself was often painful; I suffered multiple burns from hot glue and a hot iron and cut my fingers open way too many times. I still hate hand-sanding with a burning passion because it's tiring as hell and I get blisters on my oversensitive skin. But the thought that all of the suffering helps to build the final piece of art that I envision makes me grit my teeth and soldier on.

Cosplay is my art, something that I would put 500% of me into. Whether the crafting of insanely large props, or the preparations for the shoot, or the styling of my entire team's wigs, or the endless sewing adventures on plushies.

Because I love it.

#pokemon #my journals

0 notes