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Saturday, March 24, 2012

Twilight with an expanded nonhuman population, some notes

So I think it all started with a post by Patrick Knipe, which included this:
I'm sort of picturing it now as this hilariously un-self aware place where -everyone- is secretly a vampire or a werewolf or a lizard-person or something, all trying to hide their non-human status from each other. 
And that got me thinking of an idea I had for a setting with superpowers, which I may or may not talk about in more depth at another time, but with regard to Twilight I initially just said this:
The basic reasoning being that if it's possible to hide something from the rest of the world so that no one who isn't let in on it knows about it, why not two things? So in Twilight the world at large doesn't know vampires are real, but if that's possible then shouldn't it also be possibly to hide the lizard people from the vampires? 
And for a while that was all of it, but for some reason at some point I decided that Jessica should be the lizard person in town.  I was also thinking that there should be a weresloth, and I imagined a tragic story for a mermaid who couldn't swim (she was paralyzed from the waist down you see) and thus was thus her family was living as humans.  But I didn't put too much more thought into it than that.

Then the concept of werebears came up.  (It's worth reading that thread for the mention of werebear carebears alone, and the earlier unrelated more plausible legend for sparklepires is something I also highly recommend.)  In response to, "Dammit, now I want the werebear version of Twilight!" I wrote:
Well, if we go with the theory that the entire town of Forks is populated by non-humans trying to blend in, perhaps there are already some. I was thinking that Jessica was a lizard person, and beyond that I hadn't really thought of anything beyond wanting there to be weresloths involved, maybe Eric was a weresloth, and Lauren has fish eyes so she should be something sea related but probably not a mermaid since the eyes are among the least fish-like aspects of a mermaid. 
That leaves a lot of options still open. Maybe Angela could be a werebear.
And then Ana Mardoll made some suggestions, supporting Angela as a werebear on account of being quiet and cuddly, and suggesting that Lauren be from her favorite Lovecraft story and Jessica be Yuan-Ti.

I responded to the suggestion about Jessica thus:
I note the "usually evil" and I'm not sure if I should place my focus on the "evil" or the fact that "usually" means "not always". 
I see Jessica as being a genuinely nice. Some of that is probably due to trying to compensate for her nature by going out of her way to seem warm and... you know, mammalian. But a lot of that is just the way she is, she likes people and wants to be part of a group and wants the group to be happy. 
As a result she is constantly struggling with the fact that her circle of friends doesn't actually like each other, and she wants the new girl to be happy but the the new girl never seems to be, and that cute boy doesn't even notice her most of the time, and she's always worried that she's moving in an overly reptilian fashion but when she tries to stop doing that her movements all look forced, and she'll get herself bent out of shape over that only to realize that absolutely no one pays attention to her anyway so it doesn't really matter, and that makes her sad. 
And a random thought that occurs to me, under this way of looking at things maybe the reason that everyone is so interested in Bella is that she's different from everyone else in the school in a very special way: she's the only one who is actually human. So in the eyes of everyone else she has this strange almost indefinable quality that they're entirely unfamiliar with, which comes from actually being what she pretends to be. 
Everyone else is constantly working to maintain the masquerade, and even if they do it perfectly some sense of their inhuman nature probably bleeds through on some level of perception, even though it's probably not conscious, but Bella... Bella just is. She's the only one in the school who is being herself. 
[added]  And half an hour later it hits me that I'm talking about a setting in which Bella, the lying liar who lies, is one of the most honest characters. (Through no fault of her own.)

And I think that's about all of it, though I should note that manuscript e from Snarky Twilight, mentioned in the Bible Quote passage, assumes that this is how the Twilight-verse works (where the main text of Snarky Twilight does not.)

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