I love this icon a lot
SOME FRAGMENTARY ESSAY-THOUGHTS, because I like to put this kind of stuff into words and I've been playing this bastard for two years and seven months. That's a lot of time for things to change in.
CANON/S STUFF
Okay so. When I apped Wolfwood, it was from the anime. A few months in, I switched him to the manga because it was just better and it was still continuing. At the time I kept both the anime and manga side about equal in his head since... I'd been playing him for what, half a year already? And all of the friendships he'd made (and more importantly the secrets he'd divulged) were based on the ANIME's plot. So I didn't want to just toss all that to the side and pretend it never happened. I pretty much couldn't. These days he pretty much doesn't remember the anime half of things; I play him completely from the manga. But I haven't entirely retconned the anime out of him since it has, very rarely, come up. IN FACT MAYBE I HOLD ON TO IT IN CASE SOMEDAY, SOMEWHERE, AN ANIME!MILLY APPER COMES ALONG. :'( But at this stage it's 99.5% manga.
There was another thing the anime affected though which BOTHERS me but I can't quite bring myself to change: his voice. I apped from the dub! I admit this freely. And in the dub Wolfwood has no accent, whereas he has the Osaka accent in original Japanese. According to Nightow this is just meant to indicate an accent of SOME KIND, since No Man's Land is an English-speaking planet. Anyway I started off with this voice and it informs most of how Wolfwood speaks. This is not really a huge issue but the manga translates Wolfwood's voice as being a bit more... slangish? Dropping g's and things like that. It's not to a HUGE extent but it's still there (well, mostly... mysteriously they stopped translating him like that from volume 8 onwards). My problem with this is that I can't stand writing that way all the time. In fact I barely ever do it. So occasionally I feel bad about this and think I should maybe fix it, but I know I don't want to. Because I hate writing like that. So boo.
GWENDAL
...this relationship is like a seesaw sometimes. Obviously it went DOWN when they broke up and that lasted five months, but now they're "starting from the beginning". So it's going back up. But it's not going up in the same way as before, because, on Wolfwood's end, this past half year has forced him to go through a lot of emotional stress and he's had to grow up. Which is a weird way to put it, but that's how it feels to him. He was very happy with Gwendal the first time, possibly too happy, because when they broke up it was pretty devastating for him. He invested a lot in Gwendal, both as someone he loved and as a focus point. Wolfwood needs focus in his life and camp doesn't really give him one, which is why Gwendal was important to him. Having that focus point taken away really threw him off (I'll come back to this later) and so he needed to face the fact that... maybe he shouldn't have invested so much in Gwendal. Not that he shouldn't have loved him, but that he shouldn't have been so singleminded about it. So this time, in this relationship, I think he's going to approach it differently.
He's still kind of wary about it. When he told Gwendal that he hadn't wanted to break up that time, he wasn't actually expecting it to start up again. HE DOESN'T AHEAD OF ANYTHING. Once he'd SAID what he needed to he didn't exactly have a clue what would happen as a result. Wolfwood's still not entirely ready to put his faith in a relationship again; he can't pretend the last five months didn't happen. So he's willing to give it a shot but if it failed again, it wouldn't hit him nearly as badly as the first time. Because he's not as naive about it anymore.
HOME
One thing he also had to face up to after the split with Gwendal was that, yes, he misses No Man's Land. More specifically, he misses the orphanage, the place he considers home. This is something he didn't want to accept! Because Wolfwood thinks it's utterly pointless to miss a place he can't go back to. What a waste of time and energy that is, etc. He spent a lot of time in early camp telling people how much NML sucked and how he wasn't bothered about never going back. That's what he wanted to think so it was pretty much the truth for a while. After Vash and Livio arrived, he was less certain of that but he still puts down NML as a hole. And he does think that. But it's also his home, and he really can't ignore that. One thing about it was that he felt like he knew what he was doing back there, whereas in camp he DOESN'T know what he's doing anymore. Focus points again; the orphanage was Wolfwood's driving focus for ALL of canon. Everything he did was with the intention of keeping that place safe, whether he was going about it the wrong way or not.
I think it was easier for Wolfwood when he refused to accept that he wanted to go home. He probably started accepting it after talking about it with Vash (IT'S ALWAYS VASH >/) and he suggested sending a letter home. Wolfwood wrote this letter, then promptly DIDN'T TRY TO SEND IT until a few weeks ago when Zidane unearthed MogNet. Partly he didn't send it because I was waiting for an IC way to do it, but on Wolfwood's side he didn't try to send it because he doesn't think the orphanage needs to hear from him. Apart from the I AM WRITING FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE issue, he... doesn't think they should hear from him. Why? Because he's a moron. He loves them and he always will but he spent a huge part of his life killing people and doing horrible things thinking this was for their protection, and not once did he try to come home. Eventually he had to because a trap was set there from him and he knew it, but even then he didn't want them to see him. He doesn't really address what HE wants, a lot of the time. Because if he did, he would have already known that he wanted to go home. And he came really close, but he died and so it's out of reach forever.
STILL. He most likely will never admit it to anyone in camp. There are people who can probably tell, like Livio and Vash, but he won't outright say it. That's one step too far.
CAMP
Wolfwood likes camp. He's liked it since the beginning, because hey, he's getting extra life right now. But at some point in the last half year, he started getting frustrated at the fact that he's still here. Wolfwood doesn't stay in one place in canon; he's always pushing through after a few days. And so here he is, coming up on three years in a tiny camp surrounded by a barrier. THIS DIDN'T ANNOY HIM IN THE FIRST TWO YEARS which is a pretty good feat for him. But it's starting to get to him because he is just like ... "Okay, this is great, but I want to move on." He still likes camp and all the people he knows but he's starting to wonder if it'll ever end. A lot of the people he's been really close to in camp have already left; in canon this wouldn't be a concern because the number of people he was close to was ONE, and they were together most of the time anyway. So it's not something he generally had to pay attention to in canon.
He's still okay! It's not like he's so frustrated and anxious to go that he's unplayable. It's more like it sits there at the back of his mind and gnaws on him every now and then. For instance, he's actually been out to the barrier a couple of times now. He never did that in the first couple of years. Another factor making him a bit tense is the aging freeze camp has on him. Which isn't BAD, since otherwise people would have to start noticing how fast he ages, but it's kind of unnerving for him NOT to be aging. And all this came up in that conversation with Vash I already mentioned, when Wolfwood said something about spending 100 years in camp and Vash asked if that would be so bad. Wolfwood responded that it wouldn't be great. He doesn't want to be here for the rest of his "life", or so long that everyone he knows is gone. So, he does want to leave eventually, even though he knows leaving might mean death for him. If it came to that, I think he'd be zen with it. After all, how many other people got extra time after dying? Not many.
Blah blah blah etc.
CANON/S STUFF
Okay so. When I apped Wolfwood, it was from the anime. A few months in, I switched him to the manga because it was just better and it was still continuing. At the time I kept both the anime and manga side about equal in his head since... I'd been playing him for what, half a year already? And all of the friendships he'd made (and more importantly the secrets he'd divulged) were based on the ANIME's plot. So I didn't want to just toss all that to the side and pretend it never happened. I pretty much couldn't. These days he pretty much doesn't remember the anime half of things; I play him completely from the manga. But I haven't entirely retconned the anime out of him since it has, very rarely, come up. IN FACT MAYBE I HOLD ON TO IT IN CASE SOMEDAY, SOMEWHERE, AN ANIME!MILLY APPER COMES ALONG. :'( But at this stage it's 99.5% manga.
There was another thing the anime affected though which BOTHERS me but I can't quite bring myself to change: his voice. I apped from the dub! I admit this freely. And in the dub Wolfwood has no accent, whereas he has the Osaka accent in original Japanese. According to Nightow this is just meant to indicate an accent of SOME KIND, since No Man's Land is an English-speaking planet. Anyway I started off with this voice and it informs most of how Wolfwood speaks. This is not really a huge issue but the manga translates Wolfwood's voice as being a bit more... slangish? Dropping g's and things like that. It's not to a HUGE extent but it's still there (well, mostly... mysteriously they stopped translating him like that from volume 8 onwards). My problem with this is that I can't stand writing that way all the time. In fact I barely ever do it. So occasionally I feel bad about this and think I should maybe fix it, but I know I don't want to. Because I hate writing like that. So boo.
GWENDAL
...this relationship is like a seesaw sometimes. Obviously it went DOWN when they broke up and that lasted five months, but now they're "starting from the beginning". So it's going back up. But it's not going up in the same way as before, because, on Wolfwood's end, this past half year has forced him to go through a lot of emotional stress and he's had to grow up. Which is a weird way to put it, but that's how it feels to him. He was very happy with Gwendal the first time, possibly too happy, because when they broke up it was pretty devastating for him. He invested a lot in Gwendal, both as someone he loved and as a focus point. Wolfwood needs focus in his life and camp doesn't really give him one, which is why Gwendal was important to him. Having that focus point taken away really threw him off (I'll come back to this later) and so he needed to face the fact that... maybe he shouldn't have invested so much in Gwendal. Not that he shouldn't have loved him, but that he shouldn't have been so singleminded about it. So this time, in this relationship, I think he's going to approach it differently.
He's still kind of wary about it. When he told Gwendal that he hadn't wanted to break up that time, he wasn't actually expecting it to start up again. HE DOESN'T AHEAD OF ANYTHING. Once he'd SAID what he needed to he didn't exactly have a clue what would happen as a result. Wolfwood's still not entirely ready to put his faith in a relationship again; he can't pretend the last five months didn't happen. So he's willing to give it a shot but if it failed again, it wouldn't hit him nearly as badly as the first time. Because he's not as naive about it anymore.
HOME
One thing he also had to face up to after the split with Gwendal was that, yes, he misses No Man's Land. More specifically, he misses the orphanage, the place he considers home. This is something he didn't want to accept! Because Wolfwood thinks it's utterly pointless to miss a place he can't go back to. What a waste of time and energy that is, etc. He spent a lot of time in early camp telling people how much NML sucked and how he wasn't bothered about never going back. That's what he wanted to think so it was pretty much the truth for a while. After Vash and Livio arrived, he was less certain of that but he still puts down NML as a hole. And he does think that. But it's also his home, and he really can't ignore that. One thing about it was that he felt like he knew what he was doing back there, whereas in camp he DOESN'T know what he's doing anymore. Focus points again; the orphanage was Wolfwood's driving focus for ALL of canon. Everything he did was with the intention of keeping that place safe, whether he was going about it the wrong way or not.
I think it was easier for Wolfwood when he refused to accept that he wanted to go home. He probably started accepting it after talking about it with Vash (IT'S ALWAYS VASH >/) and he suggested sending a letter home. Wolfwood wrote this letter, then promptly DIDN'T TRY TO SEND IT until a few weeks ago when Zidane unearthed MogNet. Partly he didn't send it because I was waiting for an IC way to do it, but on Wolfwood's side he didn't try to send it because he doesn't think the orphanage needs to hear from him. Apart from the I AM WRITING FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE issue, he... doesn't think they should hear from him. Why? Because he's a moron. He loves them and he always will but he spent a huge part of his life killing people and doing horrible things thinking this was for their protection, and not once did he try to come home. Eventually he had to because a trap was set there from him and he knew it, but even then he didn't want them to see him. He doesn't really address what HE wants, a lot of the time. Because if he did, he would have already known that he wanted to go home. And he came really close, but he died and so it's out of reach forever.
STILL. He most likely will never admit it to anyone in camp. There are people who can probably tell, like Livio and Vash, but he won't outright say it. That's one step too far.
CAMP
Wolfwood likes camp. He's liked it since the beginning, because hey, he's getting extra life right now. But at some point in the last half year, he started getting frustrated at the fact that he's still here. Wolfwood doesn't stay in one place in canon; he's always pushing through after a few days. And so here he is, coming up on three years in a tiny camp surrounded by a barrier. THIS DIDN'T ANNOY HIM IN THE FIRST TWO YEARS which is a pretty good feat for him. But it's starting to get to him because he is just like ... "Okay, this is great, but I want to move on." He still likes camp and all the people he knows but he's starting to wonder if it'll ever end. A lot of the people he's been really close to in camp have already left; in canon this wouldn't be a concern because the number of people he was close to was ONE, and they were together most of the time anyway. So it's not something he generally had to pay attention to in canon.
He's still okay! It's not like he's so frustrated and anxious to go that he's unplayable. It's more like it sits there at the back of his mind and gnaws on him every now and then. For instance, he's actually been out to the barrier a couple of times now. He never did that in the first couple of years. Another factor making him a bit tense is the aging freeze camp has on him. Which isn't BAD, since otherwise people would have to start noticing how fast he ages, but it's kind of unnerving for him NOT to be aging. And all this came up in that conversation with Vash I already mentioned, when Wolfwood said something about spending 100 years in camp and Vash asked if that would be so bad. Wolfwood responded that it wouldn't be great. He doesn't want to be here for the rest of his "life", or so long that everyone he knows is gone. So, he does want to leave eventually, even though he knows leaving might mean death for him. If it came to that, I think he'd be zen with it. After all, how many other people got extra time after dying? Not many.
Blah blah blah etc.