my life is crazy right now so i don't have much time to post for the next couple days. but until then, i'm just gonna leave this food for thought concerning artemis: it feels like she's being pushed towards identifying her motivation. which is a good thing! she needs a real direction to go in and i need to get off my ass and decide on something. but like. it's not in character for her? so i have a conundrum. keep in mind that i am currently a little wine'd up and have what i assume is the world's worst alcohol tolerance level. so. y'know. coherent thoughts are fun.

artemis has pretty much spent her entire life being aimless. no one really saw her as all that reliable when she was living in a palace, and she wasn't supposed to sit on the throne anyway, so she grew up with no real pressure to accomplish anything. i mean, she was given lots of opportunity to be good at things, and was [i]expected[/i] to be good at them, sure. but none of that potential and skill was ever really given a goal to aim for. she was kinda a rascal, avoided responsibility, therefor wasn't given responsibility, therefor internalized that she [i]shouldn't[/i] be given responsibility because she was a rascal and on and on and on culminating in a record low sense of self-worth (not-so-expertly-hidden by masks and flippancy) and an aggressive avoidance of being relied on by others in any meaningful way because she thought she'd just abuse the power or disappoint them or bring down ruin or whatever the hell wine is potent and i can feel it.

ahem.

where was i going with this? grew up with high-turned-to-low expectations put on her. internalization of self-worth based on perception of others. avoidance. right.

she's really great at avoiding things. mainly responsibility and reality. most obvious piece of evidence is when she ollie'd out when her brother was dying and she was next in line for the throne. she loved her brother more than anything. she likely would've made a decent ruler. she's clever and intuitive enough, and probably has a good heart underneath all the self-interest? but nope nope nope the person she loved the most in the world was on his death bed, telling her how much he believed in her and giving her the biggest responsibility imaginable and gosh that sounds like a massive opportunity to be a failure and disappoint him. because in artemis' mind, that was the only possible outcome. 

(i feel like i should put a little note in here that i have no idea about the nuances of bloodline-based systems of government like monarchies and nobilities and what have you but also. like. i don't care? so shit's gonna make no sense and yeah i know. just like. go with it. we'll have a good time and ignore what doesn't make sense. it's all just backstory anyway.)

anyway she avoids responsibility and reality. responsibility like when baby bro told her she'd make a good ruler or when the witch told her to keep the lantern safe so the dragon wouldn't awaken, and she wasted no time in dropping that shit like it was hot and running the hell away. reality like how she pretended to be someone else for 3 years while her home was thrown into (completely avoidable) chaos and her heart was breaking or how she's stopping herself from looking for a way off the island because she's afraid there [i]isn't[/i] one and it'll just make the fact that she's lost all hope of returning home one day achingly real.

and for the past few years, those have been her… idk if you can really call them motivations, but there you go. she's just. aggressively not dealing with shit. numbing the pain of her own shortcomings and mistakes however she can and calling it a vagabond's dream. this doesn't translate super well to having a tangible thing to work towards in the rp and i also get how artemis' current path of being thrown (sometimes literally) at different plot things and reacting with little in the way of actual agency is gonna do much. the one real call she made on her own was dropping the red lantern. which i get is kinda significant itself. but. like. right? this isn't gonna be super fulfilling in the long run.

so the issue here. because we're finally getting to the issue after [i]seven paragraphs[/i] of rambling. the issue is that artemis is in need of motivation, but her current characterization prevents that. unless there's an option i haven't seen in which case, please, i'm super interested in hearing. so the logical conclusion to this issue, barring that, is that something needs to shift in her characterization for a tangible goal to be found. and i can feel her plot line working itself up to that. but not quite yet. she hasn't really [i]earned[/i] the character development necessary. idk what, but something significant needs to happen to finally get us to that tipping point and then we can see which way she falls. not necessarily something significant to the plot, just to her. we got pretty darn close with the witch telling her she couldn't go home and her going near catatonic. but that was still too early to really have an effect, and she snapped right back into her old self because hey, crazy new world, [i]something[/i] needs to be familiar. it laid some good groundwork tho. or who knows, the event in question doesn't even need to be related to that. 

what an excessive amount of words i've written. no one really needs this lol. but that's basically where i'm at with arty. i can't figure out motivation for her without some character development, but she hasn't quite earned enough growth yet to make it happen. i worry about the coherency of... all of that shit above. she's kinda already a mess of a character without adding my scatter-brained inebriation into the mix. but yeah, this is just what's been on my mind, and part of the reason why i haven't posted yet. the rest of the reason being my life.

[s]lol i probably could've used my time to write an actual post instead of this rambling wall of text.[/s]

[u][b]tl;dr[/b][/u]
i'm a baby who's putting off figuring out a solid character goal for the rp. also alcohol.