Talk To Glowfic Characters

[alicornucopia]

So we've started answering comments in "How To Read Effulgence" in character, and that's not really the ideal platform for those conversations. This is! You may address characters here and we may opt to answer in character. You will get a kind of loosely "backstage" out-of-continuity version of the character (in continuity proper, you cannot talk to them, since you aren't there) and if you want them at a specific (past relative to where we're writing) point in time, feel free to specify (e.g. "Addy in 1932", "Shell in her box", "the Joker while committed", "Minus right after he woke up from turning", "the alethiometer on the subject of 1207").

Any glowfic author may use this thread to receive questions.

You may also be interested in Make My Characters Talk To Each Other.

Comments

Re: Questions for Relatively Major Purples

[aeskhyne]

(first question)

What's your angle here? What do you get out of it if I answer this question?

Re: Questions for Relatively Major Purples

[daniel_h]

This was part of my question backlog; I can’t guarantee I accurately reproduced the reasoning and I may be misremembering some in-story details in this reconstruction.

I have two main reasons for asking. I thought about the part about making it an intense neutral signal because it seemed to give you both what you wanted out of a hypothetical button, and I asked you because I still often have trouble understanding Joker psychology. I expect Bella would push that button relatively quickly; I am quite unsure about whether you would or not.

I asked the second part, about assuming that the state of the world was most in favor of pushing the button, partially because I think the conversation could have gone better if the unspoken assumptions had been spoken. You later discuss with her what some of those unspoken assumptions on each side were; I know that if Bella accepted your assumptions that there are enough intense masochists to outweigh the majority disliking pain it would probably be better to not push the button, but I don’t know what you would do if the world were to unarguably be closer to her unstated assumptions.

Basically, you and Bella have one of the all-time worst Bell-Joker relationships, probably including when Stella put the Joker on an asteroid. I attribute a lot of that to this conversation, although it might be more a symptom than a cause. I’m curious about different ways the conversation could have gone, and wondering how you would react in a situation which obviously was closer to her unstated assumptions than yours is part of that curiosity.

Re: Questions for Relatively Major Purples

[daniel_h]

Re-reading the conversation I can tell that some of the reasoning above was not right, because some stuff that I thought happened weeks later was part of the same conversation. I think a lot of my reasoning still holds, though. If in this hypothetical scenario the numbers were crunched and we got to the “Bella was more right than she thought” outcome, I am curious what you would think in that situation.

Re: Questions for Relatively Major Purples

[pythbox]

(Trouble got fed up with this line of inquiry. It might be possible to coax a response out of him by engaging with him on a more personal level regarding why you're curious about these specific things in these specific ways and where you think the flaws are in your understanding of Joker psychology and why you're going to him for help with that, but that may be more effort/depth than you want to go into in order to get a fictional character to explain himself.)