ionic | (no subject)

but what do you mean, you don't just vomit words out onto a page and hope it turns out for the best? i do not understand!

(from what you've sent me thus far, it seems very much like him. i am super excited for it! yay!)

yes! I think she would allow it a little since they probably both make good points, it's just when it goes on too long/wanders anywhere off-topic that it becomes a problem. I kind of feel like Charles might be quiet the times when he gets the last word in? but then the other times he still tries to go on to say something.

have we come up with a concrete history for Charles and Moira? because I think we need to if we are going to have them knowing each other prior to the story? there are just a lot of times when I see Moira portrayed as the ex in a way that just doesn't work for me, and while I don't think you'd do most of the things other people do, I do think we need to figure out how they are around each other? (since I was considering having them interact in the first Charles story, but, uh, it sounds like that wouldn't work with what you're plotting?)

haha, yes, the constant wandering off topic would be a problem. but i also just think that she's uninterested in allowing them to dominate a discussion that way. i also kind of love the idea of erik really not talking all that much in class—unless charles gets him started. it's not even the last word, i think, so much as being able to finish his thoughts. i don't see him as particularly intellectually combative in that way. he doesn't care if he gets to talk last; he cares if he gets to express (to the best of his ability) everything he's trying to say.

and oh no, i didn't mean to step on your toes! i have to run out the door, but i'm happy to send you my thoughts in about half an hour, and we can hash out a backstory? and plot the friendship going forward. because i think you're absolutely right: we do need one.

this is a good point, too. you'll probably have to periodically remind me that this is a normal size school and not one where it's like, four people in a class.

no, it's okay! i just think we have completely different ideas about what level of friendship they're starting out at? and we should decide when they dated? (because like i mentioned before i'm more inclined to have them already be where they're kind of fine with each other, because i'm really particular about Moira? sorry! but yes, thoughts would be good.)

sometimes yes, sometimes no? :D? :D?

(i'm glad you do! because i have really strong opinions about him as you may have noticed...)

me again!

before moira, can we discuss erik's roommate again? so i know we discussed having him have this really quiet roommate, and i like that, but maybe that was his roommate for his masters? and then his roommate for all of college was this really loud, really fratty guy who wasn't in the room a lot, but when he was, he tried to teach erik perfect english and get him to join him, etc. but because he was gone a lot, erik never asked for a transfer. still very different from charles in many respects, but sort of a friend of his. mostly because i think of his americanisms as being a result of rooming with him. something like:

"Your funeral," Erik says. It's something he picked up from his roommate in college, along with a near-native ability to curse, a working knowledge of American slang, and a talent for shotgunning beer.

this way we can also use the awesome description of his roommate that you wrote. two roommates. hey presto?

Err, can we also discuss Moira? I'm pretty certain I don't have a clear grasp on what you want to do, based on the snippet you sent today? I can reply to both things when I'm not on phone.

Works for me!

For Moira, I was working off the following backstory, which I've copied and pasted from our email exchanges:

What if they were set up by mutual friends, and he went on dates with Moira and got to know her as they dated, and so Raven points out that he's done this before? And Charles is like, no, no, we were already dating first. ... Moira was a few years older than Charles and doing a study abroad at Oxford or getting a masters there, perhaps during his second year at Oxford, and when she went back to the states, they couldn't make it work but stayed friends. ... [They] dated for a little while, but then maybe they broke up mutually and they were out of contact for a little while, but each got over it healthily and so now they have no problem being good friends with no kind of lingering history (but Erik still is a little jealous irrationally, because he's Erik?).

There are no lingering feelings, and they're both fine with the breakup, and they've communicated (probably a lot, once it became clear Charles was going to join her there), but only via email, never in person. The weirdness that I see between them is simply the fact that they haven't seen each other in person since they broke up. So it's going to be a little weird, but when Erik returns, they're talking about some bar in the area that she recommended to him, and he's asks her if it's the one that some guy took her on their first date, so it's clear that most of it was just that they hadn't gotten together in person? And I'm happy to make it explicit it via Charles' conversation with Erik after she leaves, how he says that he's so glad the first meeting awkwardness was out of the way, because they're such good friends, and it's delightful to see her here, etc.

I just think that there's always going to be some weirdness when you first start spending time as friends with someone you once dated, no matter how platonic the relationship now is. Possibly based on my own experiences, but I really can't imagine it going any other way. And it'll wear off quickly, but I wanted a recognition of that.

Do you have problems with the entirety of the backstory we created for them?

I kind of have mixed feelings about that. Is there a reason why loud fratty guy wouldn't be living with his frat? (I will state Erik in a frat does not work at all for me.) How long would they have been roommates? Is there a reason why he would try to teach perfect English to Erik? If he did, would Erik want to go along with that? (idk, maybe it's the phrasing of teaching him perfect English, but it sounds kind of condescending to me and I can't really see Erik being a willing student.)

Picking up slang and cursing feels like more of a teenager thing to me (which yeah, I know he'd still be a teenager starting, but I guess on the more juvenile teenager end, like being fourteen and all, haha, let's learn swear words) and possibly the sort-of thing that could have happened while he was at Gymnasium. IDK, just a thought.

erik in a frat definitely doesn't work for me, either. i used fratty to mean the type of guy who stereotypically would be in a frat, not necessarily someone who is in a frat. so big drinker/partier, a little crazy, etc. (not that i think erik is like this either.)

the perfect english thing is my phrasing, not theirs. just that he'd correct erik if he made a mistake or fix his idioms, etc. i think at the end of the day that erik would think that knowledge is knowledge, particularly since it wouldn't be his roommate sitting down and actually teaching him these things in any sort of formal way. and that erik is smart and cares about his fluency and would make a mental note of these things and not do it again.

i suppose it could happen in gymnasium, but i see erik as still fluctuating between being withdrawn and aggressive in Gymnasium, mostly as the result of shaw, whom i see him viewing as a surrogate older brother. as a result, he didn't have close friends then, certainly no one from whom he'd pick up slang. i also think that the ability to curse properly is one of the biggest distinctions between native and non-native speakers, and erik would take care to learn it.

i picture erik's roommate as some big, blond all-american type who drinks and parties and is a womanizer and likes a good time. he's not in the room that often, and he doesn't throw parties there, and he doesn't bring girls back, and he probably couch surfs a lot with friends after a night of heavy drinking. but when he does come back to the room, he kind of likes his quiet, somewhat geeky roommate and likes to shoot the shit with him. erik doesn't think about him a lot, because while they were roommates for two years, he wasn't around all that often, but he picked up a lot from him.

i think the reason they lived together for that long is for the reason that lots of guys that i know had the same roommates from freshman year on: for a lot of them, as soon as you find someone that you can live with, it's just not worth it to find someone else. so they lived together freshman and sophomore year, and then ask soon as erik was able to find a single, he moved into a single, and his roommate moved into a huge party suite with some of his friends.

is any of this working better for you? :D

although obviously if it's really not working for you, we won't use it.

:D? :D? :D?

I will admit that I kind of forgot about that and now I'm not sure I'm still on board with it, since it poses some problems. (I also feel like I said something different while we were watching Penelope [wanting them to have dated briefly but be close/fine with each other at the time of our AU beginning].) So, kind... of? or well, upon thinking about it there are ways it's problematic for me with some of the other character adjustments we've done?

Anyway, the first thing that comes to mind is, if Moira's older than Charles by that degree, is there a reason why she's just starting to get her Ph.D. at the same time now? I see her as being really focused and driven, so I'd want there to be a valid reason for her being a first year doctoral student at the same time as Charles. (and if she's not a first year, then when does the keg race take place/would she be graduated at that time/near graduating etc).

It also seems extremely bizarre to me that Moira would confront Erik at the second mixer, but she and Charles don't actually interact face-to-face until the birthday party. Would they be aware that they'd be going to the same school? If so, and if they are fine with each other, why wouldn't they just get the first meeting out of the way sooner than that, especially if they're going to be working in the same department?

And I agree that awkwardness can be there (putting aside personal experience, because for me it's been the opposite, unless the break up was horrible), but if it's just "I haven't seen you in person in a while" awkwardness, I'd want it addressed why they put it off (because I could see Charles putting it off, I guess, but I feel like Moira would want to be direct about it, knowing that they were going to be working together).

I also don't really like that part of the exchange between Charles and Raven the more I think about it, so I'm probably going to rework that majorly once I get to it. :/

I'M SORRY. I know I'm being difficult about this, I'm just not totally in love with the idea and can't entirely decide if Moira would actually want to date Oxford!Charles/I like the idea of Charles being arrogant at Oxford more than I do the ex angle, and I have trouble reconciling these two things.

From my recollection, you were really concerned about them being awkward, but I didn't know you had problems with the backstory itself. Which is neither here nor there, because if you're having problems with it now, that's what matters :)

Moira is at least a year older than Charles in my mind. So during the Keg Race, she would be near graduating, which is part of the reason that she's run it for forever. My mental backstory from her, which I believe was from an early conversation that we had, but which I now can't find, was that she did a one-year masters or study abroad at Oxford and then returned to start her PhD the year before Charles.

I don't think they put it off so much as I think that Moira didn't arrive as early as they did. She's probably living in the same apartment as last year, and she's already moved into her office, doesn't need an introductory meeting with her advisor, doesn't need to go to these oreintation-type meetings, etc. (Additionally in my mental canon for her, and feel free to disagree with me, since it's just my head!canon, she's the only child of a single mother, and she likes to spend as much time at home with her mother as possible.) So in my head, she only just arrived around the time of the second mixer.

Look, if it's really not working for you, we'll scrap it entirely, no hard feelings at all! So don't think that I'm annoyed. :)

But frankly, if we're going to have Charles be really arrogant at Oxford, I can't even see her being friends with him then. Because the sense that I got from her in the movie is that she only barely tolerated him until he toned it down and started proving his worth. I can see Charles liking her as a friend, because Charles is easy, and he likes smart people, but I can't see it the other way around, unless she had a relationship with him like Raven did in the movie, whether she barely tolerated him when he was out doing his thing in bars but then was friends with him the rest of the time.

Haha, as you can see, I'm really nitpicky, but I just wanted to clarify to make sure there isn't like, misunderstanding? :D?

and I'm okay with it being that way. it just didn't entirely sound like it was that way in the first mention? I can see Erik being okay with that; I couldn't really see him being okay if his roommate was just like, you speak English weird, let me teach you the right way?

properly howso? I'm just curious since my roommate was taught how/what context to swear in Germany by her German speaking friend before she could actually converse in normal conversation. then again, I swear a lot and so do most of my friends, so that could be it, too. (really, I clean up my internet conversation a lot, haha.)

I'm good with all of that, I think. I think the other thing that slightly confused me was the original phrasing about how his roommate would try to get Erik to join him a lot or something and it confused me why Erik would be friends with that guy but be annoyed at Charles being around all the time etc.

it's all :D no charles raised eyebrows of doom here!

sometimes i forget that other people don't live in my brain and automatically know what i'm thinking when i say things. words are a very imperfect medium; i'm going to have to develop telepathy. :)

oh, i don't mean properly like when it's appropriate. i mean properly like saying things like "what the fuck?" which isn't something you'd pick up in school. or "what the hell is wrong with you" or things like that. how to use curses in normal sentences, rather than just as expletives.

in terms of his roommate trying to get erik to join him, i just meant that he'd probably be like, "hey, man, come out for a beer with us tonight," and erik would make a face, and say "no, thank you," and then his roommate would mimic him and say, "no, thank you," with exactly the same intonation, and so erik would throw something at him and say, "fuck off," and the roommate would cheer and hold a hand out for a fist bump and say, "that's more like it!" and erik would roll his eyes and go back to ignoring him, and the roommate would leave.

Yeah, and I may not have expressed myself as well with that. I think I thought you really wanted it to be part of their backstory so I was trying to accommodate? Which was why I was really emphasizing it can be there, but not awkward. Then I kept thinking of ways it didn't work for me. Sorry!

I'm okay with that for Moira. (I just don't want her to be too, too much older? Since then I have trouble seeing her with Sean.)

I'm good with that mental canon for her mother. and that makes more sense, but like I said, I was then kind of confused by her presence at the second mixer.

If you don't mind I think I'd prefer that? Because I feel like it would be easier than me trying to resolve backstory for them to work in my mental canon? :D?

Yeah, exactly that, too, which I was kind of thinking about. Maybe it can kind of be that they know each other from Oxford and then they become like actual, good friends while at our fictitious university? I kind of feel like it might be more IC that way? Because yeah, I totally see Moira as having zero patience for Charles doing his bar thing, and I think in my head I definitely see him acting that way, especially since he's just like, young, with an ego, and very smart? but he's really good when put into a mentor-y position, which I think he would be in more at grad school than undergrad (or at least more significantly), and that helps ground him, so he and Moira become better friends from there? (maybe like in the movie the first time they meet he drunkenly hits on her and she just shuts him down? but then they start to become closer friends more during grad school and such?) IDK, I think that fits in more with my characterization of both of them?

hooray! :D I'm glad you aren't put off by how demanding I am. because sometimes I feel like I'm pretty stubborn about things, but it's just because I want our story to be the best it can be.

that could help, I suppose. :)

oh, haha, okay. that makes more sense. :D

that also makes more sense, too, w/r/t why Erik's growing frustrated with Charles during our story.

one day i will have a reply for you beyond "yes, i agree with you." but it's not right now. because right now, i am FILLED WITH LOVE for our story.

seriously. i'm just rereading and having so much fun :)

it's so awesome. how terrible am i? :D

YAY. :D :D I am too! like I said, I don't want it to seem like me being intractable means I don't like the way our story is going, because it means the opposite? :D?

GOOD. That's the important part. :D :D

as terrible as I am? because I am just like IT KEEPS GETTING BETTER? :D?

it does! i mean, i'm with you, if you mean, it's awesome now and keeps getting better? because that's basically where i am. i'm so excited for charles' feelings during move in! and erik's feelings during charles' birthday! and halloween! and thanksgiving! AND FEELINGS OKAY SO MANY MANY MANY FEELINGS.

yes! exactly! that's what i mean. :D :D I AM SO EXCITED TOO. <3 <3 FEELINGS EVERYWHERE. (and you're really fine with me like, wanting to undo the backstory? It won't be a problem for the birthday story or the bowls or??)

seriously, i'm totally okay with it. i will rewrite as necessary or ignore or come up with new ideas! because i know you have/will do the same for me, so it's totally fine!

okay, so now i have feelings about the proposal? because sean asks charles to go ring shopping with him, okay, because his best friend from his job says he knows nothing about moira's taste, and alex absolutely, 100% refused to set foot in a jewelry store, because he tends to break things everywhere he goes, and he can't afford to break things in a jewelry shop, and also hell no. so charles goes with him.

and so obviously charles is just there for moral support and to steer sean away from the rings he obviously can't afford and the ones moira would hate and to say things like, "um, it's moira. i don't think she wants you to propose to her. frankly, i think she wants to sit down and have a conversation about marriage and then go from there," and sean is like, "but i can't do that without a ring! she'll think i don't mean it!" so charles says fine.

only, when he gets to the store, there's this ring that would be perfect for erik, okay? totally, totally perfect. and he's been thinking about marriage a lot, because he adores erik, and he knows they're going to spend the rest of their lives together, but he also wants to get married. and the ring is right there. and it's perfect. so he kind of has to buy it, right? it's fate!

woooo! i mean maybe Moira teases Charles at some point at how he hit on her and Charles is just like, yes, well, I admit, it was one of my less shining moments, and maybe Erik wonders then if Moira is Charles' type, perhaps not realizing how Charles kind of used to hit on a lot of people during his time at Oxford? or something? :D?

I DON'T THINK YOU TOLD ME ABOUT THE PROPOSAL?

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