Midwestern Dirt

So, as it turns out, remembering about your other blog is both awesome in that hey! You have another blog! and obnoxious in that oh. Fuck. Another blog. Where you to have to, like, write stuff. A conundrum, obviously.

So to fulfill my promise of providing an insider’s guide to my currently college-addled brain, I’ll give you the low-down on Life of Brinn, as told by Fandom, verbatim. Since my current and arguably most passionate love affair is with the Naruto ‘verse right now, let’s begin there. As it turns out, a really amazing way to get into the heads of your characters is to literally try to write from inside their headspace – if that headspace happens to involve classic rock and copious amounts of alcohol, well, I am just a vessel to totally awesome muses. Now it’s probably misleading to wax poetic about my love for Naruto, since – as I’m sure many people have discovered with their favorite fandoms – it’s not exactly the manga or the show I enjoy so much as it is the world itself and the characters the dwell therein. And yet again, it’s not so much the characters as they are written, but rather the characters as you choose to interpret them – since in a way, you only ever love the backstories you create in your own head without even noticing and you only ever love the characters as you see them. There’s nothing wrong with that. In my opinion, the beauty of fandom – any fandom – is the way in which it belongs to the fans first.

There’s no better example of this than RPGs. Role-playing presents a unique opportunity for fans to literally become the characters they love so much, for whatever reason, and you’d be amazed at how that forces you as a writer to think about the motivations behind your character’s actions. This delicacy of “why the hell would they do that?” is what makes IC such a bitch and so super ultra mega deluxe important. It allows you to, as one of my profs once said, show and not tell. Let your fingers do the walkin’, baby. (Okay, okay, a poorly connected pop culture reference, fucking sue me.)

Anyways, what I have been building up to is that through a series of serendipitous events including ff.net’s Tea Leaf, one of my many, many, and therefore contradictory OTPs is Kakashi/Rin. (For those of you who just went scrabbling for the Wiki entry, let me save you the trouble.) It’s true that this is a rather obscure pairing, as Rin is a rather obscure character, but once I actually began thinking about how these two characters would interact, the more my blatant and admitted crack habit came back to growling, shrieking life, demanding tribute and first borns and the local virgins. It’s interesting for me to think of Kakashi with somebody soft, as most of his more popular pairings involves characters that are strong, loud, and opinionated (read: Iruka, Sakura, Genma, in that order). Half the entertainment of those pairings is watching how their righteous fury rolls off Kakashi like water off a particularly infuriating duck’s back. How would that dynamic change with someone who didn’t pick fights to begin with? Who would feel inclined to defer to Kakashi naturally? Or, more importantly, how would Kakashi behave with someone who actually knows him? We all know that we’re suckers for the impenetrable, sleepy-eyed gaze with nothing but a long trail of fog and blood to give away their motivation – really, we wouldn’t want to see what’s along the path of that particular trail. Kakashi likes it that way, and he keeps it that way. So how would he interact, then, with someone who couldn’t help but know all his dirty secrets, all his childhood heartbreak, and all his awkward teenage growth spurts?

I totally wanted to answer all those questions, but instead I started writing this. Oh well. Read the rest of this entry »