Jules, I srsly <3 you.
A note on kelvic bonding.
Wtf. Katie! You’ve been playing this game for over a year, you’re an ST, you have a kelvic alt. What do you mean you don’t understand kelvic bonding?
The above is pretty much how I’m feeling. I do understand kelvic bonding. I’ve read all the lore, I’ve read all the threads of older kelvic players, I’ve even read Jen’s rants on kelvics seeing as how, you know, she created them. If my understanding was propped up against half the game’s, I bet the odds would ever be in my favor. (Thank you, Susanne Collins.)
The problem is that I have created a problem for myself. I’m really excellent at that. It’s like plotting up conflict in fiction isn’t enough for me, I have to insert conflict in my IRL plot. I’m such a fucking fail sometimes. Anyway, back to the point.
I can’t figure out how to make my kelvic bond to someone.
She’s a peregrin falcon, an animal that is not particularly social, and due to her history highly suspicious and untrusting. On the opposite end of this feathery bit of nasty is the fact that she is of course kelvic and thus utterly and completely driven by the need to seek and seek and serve and please and seek some more for that unnamable, faceless bondmate to spend the rest of life serving and pleasing and..
Yeah, you get the drift.
To take it a step farther, she is four years old and never bonded. Not even once. The bonding attempt she made with her caretaker (one master of awesome Duvalyon Hellebore) was rejected. The circumstances surrounding her upbringing, the bond rejection and her ultimate departure (read as: fiery escape of doom) from Kalinor cause her to even be a little afraid of bonding. Why? Because she wants it. She wants it bad. The only two things she has ever wanted so bad in her life have initially been denied her and ultimately slathered in negative connotations.
In summation, she doesn’t always trust her emotions or judgement.
For what she is, she is intelligent. That is to say that for a bird, she’s pretty sharp. Duvalyon was an educator, experience taught her its always better to know things than not to, and she’s insanely curious.
And perpetually miserable. Omg. I can’t deal with it. It’s like she molting ALL THE TIME.
Now to throw in the OOC aspect of things to bake this up into a poop pie. (Thank you, Kathryn Stockett). It is next to impossible to obtain a solid bondmate PC without a little OOC action. Conversations, begging, borrowing, thread boxing, you name it. I don’t care what anyone says. It is out right impossible. Why?
Because like anyone else, my ideal bondmate for Dor has a player who is active, writes well, knows the rules, easy to get along with and unlikely to disappear on me. These are normal hopes and expectations. It would also be awesome if the player in question had the sense of humor to put up with me and did not expect me to post fast. This is still not out of the ordinary, I feel.
But it gets better.
The fastest way for me to get tired of a character and lose all interest in playing them is to force them into an irreversible situation that is against what they would have chosen was I not godding at them. I have retired major PCs due to this mistake in other games. I have trashed entire manuscripts over this and gone back to the beginning to rewrite up to five hundred plus pages. The end result is that I absolutely, across the board refuse to force one of my PCs to do something they would not. I have no problem forcing situations and scenarios and whatnot upon them that may lead to a choice or force a choice, but I won’t take away that choice. It is their’s in the end. Does that make sense?
What this means is that I can totally scout out the most awesome player with the most kick ass perfect PC EVER and beg them and beg them until they agree to do something with me and in the end, if Dor isn’t down, then the bonding won’t happen.
You see the problem this poses.
If I had the time to pay her more attention and give her twenty million threads with a crap ton of different PCs, this might be different. I don’t, however, between my other PCs, my mod responsibilities and, you know, real life. Aspen kindly agreed to do a modded thread for her well over a week ago and I still haven’t even been able to start it. You see? Denval, development and Caelum get the lion’s share of my attention. Dor and the rest fall after. Poor birdie.
In conclusion, I have no solution. Surprise!
- katie (who has a lot of lady writers on her brain) |