#identity meme

ANYWAY sometimes I forget y'all aren't In My Head and don't Just Know Stuff about my OCs so here's the identity thingy for Erik!

General rule of thumb is to avoid most gendered things unless you're family ^.^

As with everything, the specifics of Erik's identity are as fluid as his identity itself -- if it hasn't been explicitly mentioned IN A BOOK, it's just a headcanon and not fixed canon a la the Neil Gaiman mindset, so don't be afraid to Project On Him. This is mostly just a guide for what terminology he prefers not to be called (his distaste for being called a man, for example, is explicitly written in the books).

As of right now the only things that have been/will be mentioned in canon are:

-Erik is nonbinary -Erik does not like being referred to as a man or by 'Mr' and doesn't feel 'boyfriend' describes him accurately in a relationship -Erik is attracted to all or most genders and sexes -'Girly-boy' is an affectionate nickname adopted by his family in his childhood to describe his gender expression -Erik is fine with he/him pronouns/doesn't feel strongly either way

20. would you rather be in Middle Earth, Narnia, Hogwarts, or somewhere else?

I like this universe, and I’m not an outdoors sort of person, so Hogwarts.

15. five most influential books over your lifetime.

Harry Potter by JK Rowling - without a doubt this fandom’s had the biggest impact on my life. It’s the first book series that I got seriously obsessed with, I got my Internet handle from it, I wrote Wizard Rock because of it - playing at Terminus in Chicago is one of the highlights of my entire life and I doubt I’ll ever top it - I made so many friends and met SO MANY ridiculously amazing people because of it… Wow, yes, HP definitely.

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett - For starters it’s my favourite book of all time. It’s the first Watch book I read, the first Discworld book I truly fell in love with. I based one of my GCSE music projects on it. I feel more strongly about the 25th of May than I do about Easter.

Artemis Fowl and the Eternity Code by Eoin Colfer - This book is a part of my soul. The entire series is great, but it’s this book in particular that holds the most meaning. Maybe it’s not as directly influential as HP or Night Watch, but I think of it like an old blanket. It’s very, very dear to me.

Dresden Files - I have not been able to go a day without thinking about this series for the past 3 years. It has brought me so much joy, especially through quite a rough patch back in 2015 (and all of 2016, lbr that year was categorically The Worst). It’s also the reason “Hell’s bells” is now my default reaction to most things IRL… #damn it harry

I really don’t know what to put for the fifth xD. Maybe Dracula? Although not so much Dracula itself as the reason for and result of reading Dracula. I read it for a Yr 9 English project in which we had to speak in front of the class, and it turned out I hadn’t actually understood the project brief and so the presentation I’d prepared was all wrong. The teacher forced me to perform it first, despite my protestations, and it resulted in the class watching me sit on a chair for about 1 minute in utter silence while my entire brain exploded in fear and anger. I’m pretty sure that project is 75% of the reason I now have social anxiety issues. FWIW Dracula is a very good book, and I recommend it.

29. three songs that you connect with right now.

2. have you ever found a writer who thinks just like you? if so, who?

Wow, what a question. I guess this one’s weird to me because everyone is different, and everyone has different thought processes. The closest I think I can come to an answer on this is the fact that I identified so strongly with the book Charlotte Sometimes as a child, and the way it explores issues of identity and what it means to be true to yourself. And it didn’t end with a pat happy ending, which I’ve never liked that much when a story that explores that kind of thing does that. So I guess I’d have to say Penelope Farmer.

5. do you think of yourself as a human being or a human doing? do you identify yourself by the things you do?

Considering the fact that i made a very deliberate decision to leave the cult I was in, based on the evidence I had been researching and learning about, I feel very much that I have shifted from being someone who had let life happen to her into someone who is a lot more deliberate in making decisions and acting on them to change the course of my life. Until then, I went along with what my husband wanted me to do most of the time, and I was super miserable.

Identity V meme templates

identity ask meme!

1. if someone wanted to really understand you, what would they read, watch, and listen to?

Ummm. Let’s see. How would I keep this list SHORT? Also, I’m going to add a “play” list for video games because that’s important, too!

Read: Fullmetal Achemist manga; the Bible; academic papers on phonetics and sociolinguistics; How to Train Your Dragon series; Fahrenheit 451; Plato’s Republic

Watch: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood; Voltron: Legendary Defender; How to Train Your Dragon 1 & 2; The Prince of Egypt; Gravity Falls

Listen: “Elegy for Solo Viola” by Stravinsky; “Maximize” and “Danger Zone” by Amaranthine; “When You Believe” from TPOE; Dvorak’s “Symphony No. 8”; Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 7”; “Mars” by Sleeping at Last; almost anything by Relient K or Falling Up; my music compositions I guess????; Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Prelude on viola

Play: Mass Effect series; Undertale

Aaaaand I’ll try to keep it at that list!

10. do you have a creed?

Yes!!!! It started as a New Year’s Resolution in 2013. Since then, it’s become a life philosophy for how I want to act and encourage others to try to act. 

“Treat everyone with the maximal amount of kindness you can.”  

Maximal kindness is important to me. We need to recognize we won’t always have the physical/psychological energy to help everyone every step of the way, and sometimes we’re not in the right life position to be *THE* crutch a random person leans on. However, I think it’s our important duty and human decency to treat everyone we come across with the maximum amount of kindness we can for the context the interactions happen. Treat people with the benefit of the doubt and the understanding that they act the way they do for underlying reason - and oftentimes, underlying hurt or struggles. Treat people with the idea that they’re a precious, precious human soul who deserves respect, love, and attention. I love the idea of going into every interaction thinking, “What’s the best way for me to interact with this person?”

If the other person is being rude, that doesn’t excuse me being rude. It doesn’t excuse me acting poorly and failing on the morality of being a decent human soul. My actions are my actions and I’m responsible for them. I’m responsible for being kind and considerate. I’ve had many experiences wherein I would have gotten upset, but choked down that anger and responded favorably… and in turn got a favorable response from the person in turn. It’s created bonds where there might have been battles. And yeah, sure, there will be some people who will be rude no matter what, but it’s so much more emotionally… helpful… to myself and the people around me, to act with kindness and consideration toward all human souls. It doesn’t mean excusing away shit and letting people be shits; but it does mean making no shit yourself, and not exacerbating any of the shit around you.

identity ask meme!

22. list the top five things you spend the most time doing, in order.

Alrighty let’s see! This somehow actually involves a bit of thinking???

Sleeping, trying to sleep, or failing to sleep. I’ve always had sleep issues. Yay! I’m a chronic insomniac. I’m actually getting full rests lately though, so that’s awesome, and I’m down to my average time for falling asleep (2 hours - a few months ago it’d take me about 4-6 hours to fall asleep). But sleep-related things still take up a hoard of my day. (Side note to friends: No sleep-related advice please. <3 I know everything inside-and-out because it’s affected me always. Thanks!)

Work. No surprises that I have to put work on the top of this list? XD Haha. Work’s going to take its hours. I’ve got three part-time jobs right now, so I’ve got the perfect steady stream of materials to work on. I’m a freelance remote linguist, if anyone cares. I work with companies who contract linguist teams for short-term projects that range from a month to over a year’s length in time. They’ll have hoards of language data (like sentences) they want me to work on, I’ll annotate some linguistic information on top of those sentences, and they’ll use my annotations to help machines process and understand those sentences better! Woot! Yay machine learning!

Screwing around online. I hate that I’m putting this as #3, but I must face reality. I’m on Facebook, tumblr, and discord a lot. Since I work from home and lots of my friends live 40 minutes or more away from me, online socialization is the only way I get my daily dose of human interaction. I’m very thankful for the human beings I’ve met through the interwebs. :3

Creative projects. Writing, drawing, conlanging, cosplaying, music composition, etc! I don’t know how to live without 200 creative projects going on at the same time.