as most people know, i am drawn to a.... pretty standard character archetype. which tends to be incredibly strong women with some sort of family trauma who makes decisions that alienate them from other people and makes them kind of hate themselves

(juliet is mostly the exception that proves the rule)

and when i picked up chloe i was coming off of 5+ years of playing kate beckett who was a character i strongly related to, and i actually didn't want to play chloe initially because i felt like she was too much like beckett. until i started reading her from a player point of view and realizing they are not similar at all

but there was still a lot of bleed over, and kate was incredibly stubborn and angry all of the time, even when she wasn't. and writing a character for so many years whose knee jerk reaction to being wrong was being an asshole about it put me in a strange playing space because, honestly

that also me. my reaction to being wrong is being an asshole about it.

one of the things i love about lucifer is that one of the major themes is assumptions. people make a lot of assumptions about each other, to the point that it can actually be damaging to their relationships because they just... really suck at hearing each other.

and chloe is in that position a lot because until season 4, she was the character in the thick of it who had no idea what was happening 90% of the time and fully riding on assumptions

when i apped her to eway, i joked about how her application was a mess because i had to write about a lot of things that were canonically unknown to her, but i couldn't leave them out because so much of it affected her directly

but the thing is when you play a character who is surrounded by people she cares about but does not have the context to understand what they are going through... you only have so much leeway when it comes to not making the players around you miserable

you can be wrong or you can be an asshole. you can't really be both

and luckily this works with chloe because they do a great job in writing her being ok with not knowing what is going on all of the time, even if that means she's compartmentalizing, or being willfully ignorant, or just not taking every single thing said to her personally

but that also means, for me, allowing my character to be wrong. about a lot of things. and making that a lesson for her.

but i think in a weird way it's also been kind of a lesson for me in being wrong. because i was a beckett for a long time in a lot of ways and i didn't particularly like who i was when i related to her.

i like relating to chloe.

anyway that spun off into a different place but. i guess my point mostly is that playing chloe has forced me to come at things from a different point of view than i'm used to and i feel like that's been really fulfilling for me in a lot of ways.

anyway, thank you for coming to my ted talk i guess?

good job good personal growth via characters

I think I had some of that with Sherlock I don't have his voice really anymore but I also don't feel like I need that escapism anymore?

like I was in a shitty place emotionally and I felt like an idiot because of how grad school was going and I think I used him as a lot of escapism. like not to the degree I went headmates or freakiness but it gave me a sense of control and something to look forward to?

and like...I miss playing him but I don't feel the need to anymore so I guess I got past whatever issue he was helping me with

i feel like i was totally going through a similar thing with beckett. absolutely.

i've definitely learned that in my case, i do tend to end up being drawn to characters that i relate to depending on where i am in my headspace. and because of that, deconstructing their characterization makes me really think about why they make the decisions they do and can definitely kind of help me figure out what's going on in my own head too

and definitely not in that soulbondy way but... i think writing makes you take a step back, and you have to internally defend what you're putting into a tag in a lot of ways as you write it. and i think, sometimes, when you're in a position where you are doing through something you relate to your character about

it forces you into a safe distance to look at it objectively

which i think can just be an interesting by product of writing anything in general

I definitely agree with all of this. Especially with characters helping with where you’re at in the moment. There’s tons of characters I simply can’t write anymore despite playing them for years

definitely. like, i've come to terms with the fact that i don't think i'd ever go back to playing beckett again, because i'm not in that same place anymore. and playing her would feel like a step backwards, or it would just be really hard to write her well because i don't grasp her psychology the same way as i did before

Exactly. This is why I could never go back to Jackson. His psychology is just something I'm not in the headspace for anymore

it kind of sucks because you dump so much heart and soul into these characters to just move on but, in a way it's good, too. i can almost trace my life story through the characters i've chosen to play over the years lol

It's like clothes. Even as an adult, eventually they just don't fit right or they're too worn out to be viable anymore.

that's exactly it

+1