(( chisame essay oh wow ))
Oooookay. It's time to explain what's going on with Chisame, ahaha. Since it's been going on for a couple of months at least and wow I wasn't sure how I was going to resolve it, and then luckily for me things began to be resolved in their natural way (so NICE when RP imitates life) and she's Getting Over It. Slowly, but we're on our way.
So, uh. What the hell WAS "It"? Well. Chisame's been here a year now. This issue . . . spans pretty much the entire time. There's a little OOC talk in the beginning here, but most of this has been an IC progression of events and her state of mind ever since she first began to adjust to camp--which horrified her.
I.
Negima's an ongoing canon, and a LONG one, and one that moves quickly. And I tend to update my characters as they're updated in canon. When Chisame came to CFUD last May, she was, uh, circa chapter 14. And now she's from around chapter 138. XD Luckily, this has worked out for me so far. Surprisingly well. But 14!Chisame is a very different Chisame from 138!Chisame. And we've learned a lot in the meantime. BACK TO THE BEGINNING HERE.
So, May. Chisame shows up in camp from around chapter 14. She's a twitchy, angry, anti-social, repressed girl who despises everything happening around her and doesn't want to associate with anyone. She's miserable and self-destructive and lonely as fuck. This is, by the way, impossible to play. :D;
So I begin aging her up through the manga, to avoid dropping her. I forget how many chapters were out at this time, but really by the time you get to volume 5 (circa ch. 40) there's evidence that she's loosening up and learning to accept her ordinary life. The extraordinary is still beyond her and pisses her the fuck off, but she's learning, slowly, how to relate to other human beings. This is a GOOD THING.
And it's still hard to play, and in the meantime I get Makie, and anyone who knows me in this RP likely knows me as Tomo and realizes that my default RP character mode is "social, happy and sort of stupid." XD; And Makie's those things and Chisame's not and AGAIN I'm thiiiiis close to dropping her, and then she meets Mello and Ban and Near and Chizuru, and finally begins to have real relationships. Slow ones, awkward ones, but real ones. And it's Makie who ends up going instead, ahahah. ANYWAY.
Chisame continues to learn to deal with people, sex, romantic feelings, and the dreaded abnormal, and other characters come and go, people she knows that I played XD; and some I didn't, of course. And I continue to work her up through the manga, where she grows, THANKFULLY along the same path I'm taking her in camp: ultimately reactive and disinterested, but loosening up, growing to accept what's happening in her world, realizing that she's accepting it and being a little horrified but realizing there's no other way to live, and beginning to care for people close to her who make her feel like she's not such an overshadowed loser after all. FTW. I was IC all along zomg. TAKE THAT SOCIETY!
What we learn about her in the manga post-121 was really comforting to me. Chisame's learned to joke around. She can socialize. She's surprisingly quick to accept the bizarrities she's learning about, but continues to deny her own involvement in them. She's still snarky, generally irritated, disinterested in teamwork and involvement, defiant of authority, and does what she feels like doing. She's also still shy, lacks confidence like WHOA, is easily embarrassed by praise, and is possessive and quick to develop feelings for people who manage to break through walls.
This is where she is in camp right now, characterization-wise. She grew to this point over 100 chapters, both in the manga and here in camp, and I'd like to think the paths were similar and believable, because that makes me feel good. Heh.
NOW. How this translates in Chisame's mind ICly.
II.
Chisame knows she's changed. This is canon; she remarks on her own development several times, boggles at herself when she does or says something she hadn't thought she was capable of. She's the same way in camp. Chisame is keenly aware that she's not the same as she was when she showed up, and she's not always sure how to interpret this. She's the kind of character who mutters to herself under her breath constantly. "I can't believe I said that. This guy is insane. Why is this pissing me off?" She examines herself intently, her motives and her development and her surroundings. She's not a Tomo--"If it feels good, I do it without asking why." Chisame's an "I'll do it, but I will second-guess myself every fucking step of the way and regret everything and wonder what the Hell I am doing even as I do it." And this is why we love her. T^Tb
So yes. Chisame knows things are different now. She's developed serious, serious complexes about this as time has gone on in camp--this began as early as Lu Xun's first death and reset. Before the Moogles, Chisame's greatest fear in camp was dying and coming back without her memories. Because even if she's not always sure all her development has been a good thing, she knows how MISERABLE she was for her first month at camp, and she honestly doesn't think she could survive it again. She's convinced she would lose all of her friends--that a Chapter 14 Chisame would have no ability at this point to make lasting ties and everyone would give up on her within days and she'd be left alone and friendless, like she was for 14 years back home. Worse yet, she knows she probably wouldn't care, and would alienate everyone she used to love, and wouldn't even realize how much she was hurting everyone.
Chisame had recurring nightmares about this for months. The Moogles and Boyan's memory returning finally got rid of them.
And Chisame knows she's been here A FUCKING LONG TIME. And that most people have come and gone by now. There are only a few people still here from when she showed up. And guess what! Most of them have been important to her in some way. Ari, Shinn, Boyan, etc. Others went on their way ages ago and haven't come back. Other, healthier people, who didn't change or grow much while they were here. Oh my.
When Chisame first began to change--it was after she met Mello, and they had a few conversations, they both lost, and they began to work through their socialization issues together. He was--like her. They were best friends. She worked her way through stages. She was alone, and then distantly tied to a few, and then completely dependent upon Mello and Near and losing herself, and then she worked through that too and became her own person again and was able to step back and judge them for what they were even though she loved them and always would. And then Mello wasn't around so much anymore and she missed her BFF a bit but it was okay. She had a life and they still talked and stayed together and she wasn't crippled with emotion or shyness around him. She was edging her way towards normalcy.
And then Mello was gone forever, and Chisame's 1-year anniversary happened to be very very quickly approaching.
In that year, with Mello as a major influence, Chisame'd gone from being totally alone and anti-social to working her way through awkward relationship-building stages, codependency, crushes, love, and then onto something approaching healthy. Mello leaving was a symbol that all of that was over. She'd gone through one of the most fucked-up and wonderful (I LOVE YOU SO MUCH HARU T^Tb) friendships ever and now she had some idea of how to DO it. How to be social in a way that was kinda a little bit okay. Right around the all-important 1-year mark, too. So what's Chisame do?
She waits for camp to end, of course.
III.
Chisame isn't completely conscious of her belief that the entire purpose of her year at CFUD was to torment her into learning how to deal with people socially. But she's beginning to figure that out, that she's been operating on this assumption. Until she started to change and work through her issues, Chisame thought camp was just random hellish stupidity. Shit happens, that kind of thing. But as she began to grow, this belief began to form in the back of her head that everything was happening for a reason. Too many of her fears and social issues were confronted and torn down. There was just too much to deal with, and somehow she did, and she continued to emerge stronger. She wasn't distant enough from this to step back and think about the "Camp is designed to make me healthy" concept, but she was able to step back and look at herself and go "Wow, I'm changing, things are happening to me and I'm learning how to be happy and functional," because she's the kind of character with a slight split personality who DOES that, as I mentioned.
By the time Mello left, this belief had pretty much ingrained itself into her subconscious. Mello wasn't the only development she had gone through, either. Her relationship with Chizuru was in a good place, after a LOT of strife and treefuckery. 8D She had friends she'd met under unsavory circumstances and grown close to anyway. She'd been through a hell of a lot of camp effects and mischief and managed to work through the fallout. There hadn't been any sort of big "CAMP IS TORMENTING US ALL!" occurence in AGES, not since the plagues. Things were in stasis. Chisame was feeling pretty healthy. And then her major agent of change leaves camp. And to Chisame, in the back of her mind, this is a sign: this is the end. I'm on my way out. One day I'm going to wake up and just--not be here, or I'll know how to escape. And that'll be the end of this. Camp's done what it needed to for me, I've done what I needed, and it's over.
This was accompanied by Chisame feeling for the first time in about 8 months that she was actually ready to go home, that she wouldn't be miserable if she did. And it was also accompanied by Chao showing up in camp. And Chao was a HUGE HONKING REMINDER of the situation back home. Of how long she'd been gone, and everything that could go wrong in her world, and Negi, and her past and his future. This was also a sign, of course!
Chisame started to withdraw from people a bit, and hang out quietly, and surf the internet for information about the situation in her homeworld, and . . . mostly wait. She didn't know how to act around anyone. After all, she knew she'd be going home soon, and she didn't know who she'd be able to take, if anyone. She didn't want to make things harder than they had to be, or form any new attachments, or weaken her resolve to leave. It was only a matter of time.
GUESS WHAT. AND THEN IT DIDN'T HAPPEN. AND IT NEVER WILL, AHAHAHAH! >DDDDD BECAUSE I WILL NEVER DROP CHISAME, AND SHE HAS TO DEAL WITH THAT. WHOOPS.
IV.
So, uh, yeah. She didn't DO a good job of dealing with that. Her anniversary came and went, Mello had been gone over a month, Chao had left, and everything was the same. And Chisame felt half-here. Mentally, she'd left camp. She'd prepared herself for it. But her grand escape was just not fucking happening. And she had no idea what to do, how to integrate herself back into a camp society she'd turned her back on. For the first time, she had wanted to leave camp, and it hadn't happened. And it hit her for the first time that she was really and truly trapped here.
It wasn't a neat storybook plot meant to develop her to a point and then let her triumph over adversity. It was, exactly as she'd suspected when she arrived, a bunch of stupid shit that a bunch of stupid people got caught up in and it was fucking with everyone and stuff wasn't happening to make her a better person. It was happening because bad shit happens to good people, and there is no meaning.
How do you DEAL with that?
She was depressed for awhile. And then she began talking to her friends a little, when she felt up to it. And then--then she went and agreed to prank the hospital with Ari and Russel. Knowing it was idiotic and asking for trouble. It was a stupid kid thing to do, and Chisame needed to do a stupid kid thing, and she needed to feel like she was among her friends again.
And then Simon blew up and threw a tantrum, and Chisame felt so tired, and Simon's actually a whole HELL of a lot like her and Chisame felt like she was talking to herself through that entire conversation and she kinda was. And she got angry at another person, and it felt really good. It felt like being in society again, like being a person who'd done a stupid thing and then been confronted with something even stupider and had to work through it in a way that any normal teenager does in life. It wasn't a life lesson or something meant to make her a better person, it was shit happening, and that was okay. It was life again.
So she went to the shooting range afterwards, finally fired the Glock pistol Mello had left her when he escaped camp, and decided to move forward.
V.
And then, what the fuck. Everything old is new again. People are showing up that Chisame hasn't thought about in months. A lot of them? Happen to be people she had confused feelings for at the time, heh. They'd been filtering in for awhile--Stellar, Light, Allen. And then all at once, Auel, Ichigo--a couple of guys she'd kinda had crushes on back in the day--a new Sakura sans memories, more. It's summer again. Her anniversary has passed and camp is transforming, it's turning into something a lot more like what it was when she arrived. New cast of characters, but the old guard is showing up and it's weird and it's sort of comforting too.
. . . Camp is starting over. In Chisame's mind, this is basically how she's looking at it now. It's been a season and now things are resetting slightly, not completely but slightly, and she's grown to a point where she can't grow any more (because that'd be taking her pretty far OOC, ahahah), and she's in a relationship which is currently happy and she has friends and experience now. And so it's time to face another year at CFUD, or however long it takes, only this time she's equipped to get through it! She's a voice of experience, and she's still awkward socially and confused by the insanity around her and generally snippy and uncomfortable, but she's also gone through a lot and she knows what it's done to her. This next year won't be a repeat of last year. It'll be something different entirely, a chance to build up relationships in different ways with people who had left and have now returned, a chance to face another season with the perspective and sanity she sure as hell didn't have the first time around. And she's ready for that. Because shit happens and now she knows she can deal with it.
FOR THE WIN.
T-that was all inspiring. T^Tb
Chisame's still a retard though and still kinda assumes that camp is for her benefit, only now her job is to finish out another year in a healthier way than she did the first one, and then CFUD really will end for everyone because she will have Accomplished Her Mission. 8D
. . . good christ that was long BUT I FINALLY HAVE IT OVER WITH. So yes. That's Chisame's deal. You know you all needed to hear that.
So, uh. What the hell WAS "It"? Well. Chisame's been here a year now. This issue . . . spans pretty much the entire time. There's a little OOC talk in the beginning here, but most of this has been an IC progression of events and her state of mind ever since she first began to adjust to camp--which horrified her.
I.
Negima's an ongoing canon, and a LONG one, and one that moves quickly. And I tend to update my characters as they're updated in canon. When Chisame came to CFUD last May, she was, uh, circa chapter 14. And now she's from around chapter 138. XD Luckily, this has worked out for me so far. Surprisingly well. But 14!Chisame is a very different Chisame from 138!Chisame. And we've learned a lot in the meantime. BACK TO THE BEGINNING HERE.
So, May. Chisame shows up in camp from around chapter 14. She's a twitchy, angry, anti-social, repressed girl who despises everything happening around her and doesn't want to associate with anyone. She's miserable and self-destructive and lonely as fuck. This is, by the way, impossible to play. :D;
So I begin aging her up through the manga, to avoid dropping her. I forget how many chapters were out at this time, but really by the time you get to volume 5 (circa ch. 40) there's evidence that she's loosening up and learning to accept her ordinary life. The extraordinary is still beyond her and pisses her the fuck off, but she's learning, slowly, how to relate to other human beings. This is a GOOD THING.
And it's still hard to play, and in the meantime I get Makie, and anyone who knows me in this RP likely knows me as Tomo and realizes that my default RP character mode is "social, happy and sort of stupid." XD; And Makie's those things and Chisame's not and AGAIN I'm thiiiiis close to dropping her, and then she meets Mello and Ban and Near and Chizuru, and finally begins to have real relationships. Slow ones, awkward ones, but real ones. And it's Makie who ends up going instead, ahahah. ANYWAY.
Chisame continues to learn to deal with people, sex, romantic feelings, and the dreaded abnormal, and other characters come and go, people she knows that I played XD; and some I didn't, of course. And I continue to work her up through the manga, where she grows, THANKFULLY along the same path I'm taking her in camp: ultimately reactive and disinterested, but loosening up, growing to accept what's happening in her world, realizing that she's accepting it and being a little horrified but realizing there's no other way to live, and beginning to care for people close to her who make her feel like she's not such an overshadowed loser after all. FTW. I was IC all along zomg. TAKE THAT SOCIETY!
What we learn about her in the manga post-121 was really comforting to me. Chisame's learned to joke around. She can socialize. She's surprisingly quick to accept the bizarrities she's learning about, but continues to deny her own involvement in them. She's still snarky, generally irritated, disinterested in teamwork and involvement, defiant of authority, and does what she feels like doing. She's also still shy, lacks confidence like WHOA, is easily embarrassed by praise, and is possessive and quick to develop feelings for people who manage to break through walls.
This is where she is in camp right now, characterization-wise. She grew to this point over 100 chapters, both in the manga and here in camp, and I'd like to think the paths were similar and believable, because that makes me feel good. Heh.
NOW. How this translates in Chisame's mind ICly.
II.
Chisame knows she's changed. This is canon; she remarks on her own development several times, boggles at herself when she does or says something she hadn't thought she was capable of. She's the same way in camp. Chisame is keenly aware that she's not the same as she was when she showed up, and she's not always sure how to interpret this. She's the kind of character who mutters to herself under her breath constantly. "I can't believe I said that. This guy is insane. Why is this pissing me off?" She examines herself intently, her motives and her development and her surroundings. She's not a Tomo--"If it feels good, I do it without asking why." Chisame's an "I'll do it, but I will second-guess myself every fucking step of the way and regret everything and wonder what the Hell I am doing even as I do it." And this is why we love her. T^Tb
So yes. Chisame knows things are different now. She's developed serious, serious complexes about this as time has gone on in camp--this began as early as Lu Xun's first death and reset. Before the Moogles, Chisame's greatest fear in camp was dying and coming back without her memories. Because even if she's not always sure all her development has been a good thing, she knows how MISERABLE she was for her first month at camp, and she honestly doesn't think she could survive it again. She's convinced she would lose all of her friends--that a Chapter 14 Chisame would have no ability at this point to make lasting ties and everyone would give up on her within days and she'd be left alone and friendless, like she was for 14 years back home. Worse yet, she knows she probably wouldn't care, and would alienate everyone she used to love, and wouldn't even realize how much she was hurting everyone.
Chisame had recurring nightmares about this for months. The Moogles and Boyan's memory returning finally got rid of them.
And Chisame knows she's been here A FUCKING LONG TIME. And that most people have come and gone by now. There are only a few people still here from when she showed up. And guess what! Most of them have been important to her in some way. Ari, Shinn, Boyan, etc. Others went on their way ages ago and haven't come back. Other, healthier people, who didn't change or grow much while they were here. Oh my.
When Chisame first began to change--it was after she met Mello, and they had a few conversations, they both lost, and they began to work through their socialization issues together. He was--like her. They were best friends. She worked her way through stages. She was alone, and then distantly tied to a few, and then completely dependent upon Mello and Near and losing herself, and then she worked through that too and became her own person again and was able to step back and judge them for what they were even though she loved them and always would. And then Mello wasn't around so much anymore and she missed her BFF a bit but it was okay. She had a life and they still talked and stayed together and she wasn't crippled with emotion or shyness around him. She was edging her way towards normalcy.
And then Mello was gone forever, and Chisame's 1-year anniversary happened to be very very quickly approaching.
In that year, with Mello as a major influence, Chisame'd gone from being totally alone and anti-social to working her way through awkward relationship-building stages, codependency, crushes, love, and then onto something approaching healthy. Mello leaving was a symbol that all of that was over. She'd gone through one of the most fucked-up and wonderful (I LOVE YOU SO MUCH HARU T^Tb) friendships ever and now she had some idea of how to DO it. How to be social in a way that was kinda a little bit okay. Right around the all-important 1-year mark, too. So what's Chisame do?
She waits for camp to end, of course.
III.
Chisame isn't completely conscious of her belief that the entire purpose of her year at CFUD was to torment her into learning how to deal with people socially. But she's beginning to figure that out, that she's been operating on this assumption. Until she started to change and work through her issues, Chisame thought camp was just random hellish stupidity. Shit happens, that kind of thing. But as she began to grow, this belief began to form in the back of her head that everything was happening for a reason. Too many of her fears and social issues were confronted and torn down. There was just too much to deal with, and somehow she did, and she continued to emerge stronger. She wasn't distant enough from this to step back and think about the "Camp is designed to make me healthy" concept, but she was able to step back and look at herself and go "Wow, I'm changing, things are happening to me and I'm learning how to be happy and functional," because she's the kind of character with a slight split personality who DOES that, as I mentioned.
By the time Mello left, this belief had pretty much ingrained itself into her subconscious. Mello wasn't the only development she had gone through, either. Her relationship with Chizuru was in a good place, after a LOT of strife and treefuckery. 8D She had friends she'd met under unsavory circumstances and grown close to anyway. She'd been through a hell of a lot of camp effects and mischief and managed to work through the fallout. There hadn't been any sort of big "CAMP IS TORMENTING US ALL!" occurence in AGES, not since the plagues. Things were in stasis. Chisame was feeling pretty healthy. And then her major agent of change leaves camp. And to Chisame, in the back of her mind, this is a sign: this is the end. I'm on my way out. One day I'm going to wake up and just--not be here, or I'll know how to escape. And that'll be the end of this. Camp's done what it needed to for me, I've done what I needed, and it's over.
This was accompanied by Chisame feeling for the first time in about 8 months that she was actually ready to go home, that she wouldn't be miserable if she did. And it was also accompanied by Chao showing up in camp. And Chao was a HUGE HONKING REMINDER of the situation back home. Of how long she'd been gone, and everything that could go wrong in her world, and Negi, and her past and his future. This was also a sign, of course!
Chisame started to withdraw from people a bit, and hang out quietly, and surf the internet for information about the situation in her homeworld, and . . . mostly wait. She didn't know how to act around anyone. After all, she knew she'd be going home soon, and she didn't know who she'd be able to take, if anyone. She didn't want to make things harder than they had to be, or form any new attachments, or weaken her resolve to leave. It was only a matter of time.
GUESS WHAT. AND THEN IT DIDN'T HAPPEN. AND IT NEVER WILL, AHAHAHAH! >DDDDD BECAUSE I WILL NEVER DROP CHISAME, AND SHE HAS TO DEAL WITH THAT. WHOOPS.
IV.
So, uh, yeah. She didn't DO a good job of dealing with that. Her anniversary came and went, Mello had been gone over a month, Chao had left, and everything was the same. And Chisame felt half-here. Mentally, she'd left camp. She'd prepared herself for it. But her grand escape was just not fucking happening. And she had no idea what to do, how to integrate herself back into a camp society she'd turned her back on. For the first time, she had wanted to leave camp, and it hadn't happened. And it hit her for the first time that she was really and truly trapped here.
It wasn't a neat storybook plot meant to develop her to a point and then let her triumph over adversity. It was, exactly as she'd suspected when she arrived, a bunch of stupid shit that a bunch of stupid people got caught up in and it was fucking with everyone and stuff wasn't happening to make her a better person. It was happening because bad shit happens to good people, and there is no meaning.
How do you DEAL with that?
She was depressed for awhile. And then she began talking to her friends a little, when she felt up to it. And then--then she went and agreed to prank the hospital with Ari and Russel. Knowing it was idiotic and asking for trouble. It was a stupid kid thing to do, and Chisame needed to do a stupid kid thing, and she needed to feel like she was among her friends again.
And then Simon blew up and threw a tantrum, and Chisame felt so tired, and Simon's actually a whole HELL of a lot like her and Chisame felt like she was talking to herself through that entire conversation and she kinda was. And she got angry at another person, and it felt really good. It felt like being in society again, like being a person who'd done a stupid thing and then been confronted with something even stupider and had to work through it in a way that any normal teenager does in life. It wasn't a life lesson or something meant to make her a better person, it was shit happening, and that was okay. It was life again.
So she went to the shooting range afterwards, finally fired the Glock pistol Mello had left her when he escaped camp, and decided to move forward.
V.
And then, what the fuck. Everything old is new again. People are showing up that Chisame hasn't thought about in months. A lot of them? Happen to be people she had confused feelings for at the time, heh. They'd been filtering in for awhile--Stellar, Light, Allen. And then all at once, Auel, Ichigo--a couple of guys she'd kinda had crushes on back in the day--a new Sakura sans memories, more. It's summer again. Her anniversary has passed and camp is transforming, it's turning into something a lot more like what it was when she arrived. New cast of characters, but the old guard is showing up and it's weird and it's sort of comforting too.
. . . Camp is starting over. In Chisame's mind, this is basically how she's looking at it now. It's been a season and now things are resetting slightly, not completely but slightly, and she's grown to a point where she can't grow any more (because that'd be taking her pretty far OOC, ahahah), and she's in a relationship which is currently happy and she has friends and experience now. And so it's time to face another year at CFUD, or however long it takes, only this time she's equipped to get through it! She's a voice of experience, and she's still awkward socially and confused by the insanity around her and generally snippy and uncomfortable, but she's also gone through a lot and she knows what it's done to her. This next year won't be a repeat of last year. It'll be something different entirely, a chance to build up relationships in different ways with people who had left and have now returned, a chance to face another season with the perspective and sanity she sure as hell didn't have the first time around. And she's ready for that. Because shit happens and now she knows she can deal with it.
FOR THE WIN.
T-that was all inspiring. T^Tb
Chisame's still a retard though and still kinda assumes that camp is for her benefit, only now her job is to finish out another year in a healthier way than she did the first one, and then CFUD really will end for everyone because she will have Accomplished Her Mission. 8D
. . . good christ that was long BUT I FINALLY HAVE IT OVER WITH. So yes. That's Chisame's deal. You know you all needed to hear that.