extemely beth and incredibly greene (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
littlemissfutility) wrote2022-09-27 07:21 am
littlemissfutility) wrote2022-09-27 07:21 am
(no subject)
The elevator pitch:
What if a teenage girl had to survive the apocalypse? I tend to play Beth from when she's ~18 (I'm all about that season 5 aftermath), but I'm happy to AU her past her age at death out into later canon or AUs. So the range of options is closer to 18-28, depending on how far out into the series we want to go. If there's a specific time period you're more interested in, give me a heads-up.
How I write her:
I feel like approaches to Beth can really vary, so here's the Cliff's Notes version of my interpretation of the character:
❝All I wanted to do today was lay down and cry, but we don't get to do that.❞
Beth's no longer actively suicidal, but she's also experienced a shitload of trauma and has had approximately 0 therapy for it. She still has varying levels of depression that haven't - and probably won't ever - go away. At this point, her approach to handling it involves a fair amount of white-knuckling and personal boundaries (careful with the alcohol! no hurting yourself! you're allowed to stare into the void, but not to jump!) to keep herself from doing something she'll regret.
❝No one's coming, Dawn. No one's coming.❞
Just a little nihilistic! And not just when she's trapped someplace unsafe, surrounded by people manipulating her. The thing is, no one is coming, except the people she knows and trusts. There's no higher authority that's going to save them, whether that's God* or the tattered remains of the government - but that's freeing, in a way. It puts the onus on her and what she can do for others, which gives her purpose, which helps the fact that she's a little depressed.
*Does she still believe in God? It's Complicated. Please feel free to put her on the spot.
❝Yeah, I'm happy. I'm just not blind.❞
None of this is to say that she's off the deep end 24/7 or anything. She can still take joy from the world - and honestly, finding out that Judith survived the razing of the prison probably counts for a LOT. If her time at Grady Memorial Hospital fucked her up (and it did), being able to exist outside of it could slowly help her heal.
In general, my favourite thing about Beth is that before the turn, she would have been horrified by the way her life's gone - but at and after season 5? It's kind of okay. She loves babies, ladybugs, berries picked from the bush, her family, and every song Tom Waits ever sang. She's just also willing to risk her own life to kill a woman in cold blood, because she knows other people will get hurt if she doesn't.
Crossovers and AUs:
First of all, I love crossovers and AUing characters! With Beth, everything's kind of an AU anyway, since I'm most interested in her post-hospital.
Some Beth-specific AUs I really enjoy:
♫ The bullet misses, or it grazes her, or it gets her in the shoulder or someplace else survivable.
♫ She dies, but for weird eldritch reasons, she comes back (and possibly comes back a little wrong).
♫ She dies, and now she's a ghost and we're doing some Ghost and Mrs. Muir "is your character crazy or is she really there" shit.
♫ She dies, and now she's a ghost in the parallel universe of your character's canon.
♫ She's supposed to die, but for whatever reason, it doesn't take + she ends up slipping through the cracks of the multiverse into your character's canon.
♫ If both our characters are from similar settings, smashing the two together - TWD and Fallout, for instance - into a big mush.
♫ A full AU where she's always been part of your character's canon - though it really depends on whether shit like "and then she was an indentured servant in a shady medical setting" translates over easily.
I'm happy to use various Beth's-still-around premises for plot generation purposes or just as background noise to justify her presence in a thread! My main goal is really to find a way to write about her from after season 5 despite the inconvenient matter of her death.
I'm generally not interested in mundane modern settings or completely setting-divergent AUs - if your character's from a modern-day setting with minimal speculative elements, I'd rather AU your character in TWD than vice versa.
Ships:
I'm interested in both m/f and f/f with Beth - crosscanon f/f has been some of my best CR, tbh.
yes: daryl*, noah
probably yes: crosscanon
no: carl, rick, noncon situations
*NB: I feel like sometimes Beth fans are super fuckin weird about Bethyl, so this is just a note that if you're not interested, I'm not going to be weird about it. Gen shit is A++ as well.
What if a teenage girl had to survive the apocalypse? I tend to play Beth from when she's ~18 (I'm all about that season 5 aftermath), but I'm happy to AU her past her age at death out into later canon or AUs. So the range of options is closer to 18-28, depending on how far out into the series we want to go. If there's a specific time period you're more interested in, give me a heads-up.
How I write her:
I feel like approaches to Beth can really vary, so here's the Cliff's Notes version of my interpretation of the character:
❝All I wanted to do today was lay down and cry, but we don't get to do that.❞
Beth's no longer actively suicidal, but she's also experienced a shitload of trauma and has had approximately 0 therapy for it. She still has varying levels of depression that haven't - and probably won't ever - go away. At this point, her approach to handling it involves a fair amount of white-knuckling and personal boundaries (careful with the alcohol! no hurting yourself! you're allowed to stare into the void, but not to jump!) to keep herself from doing something she'll regret.
❝No one's coming, Dawn. No one's coming.❞
Just a little nihilistic! And not just when she's trapped someplace unsafe, surrounded by people manipulating her. The thing is, no one is coming, except the people she knows and trusts. There's no higher authority that's going to save them, whether that's God* or the tattered remains of the government - but that's freeing, in a way. It puts the onus on her and what she can do for others, which gives her purpose, which helps the fact that she's a little depressed.
*Does she still believe in God? It's Complicated. Please feel free to put her on the spot.
❝Yeah, I'm happy. I'm just not blind.❞
None of this is to say that she's off the deep end 24/7 or anything. She can still take joy from the world - and honestly, finding out that Judith survived the razing of the prison probably counts for a LOT. If her time at Grady Memorial Hospital fucked her up (and it did), being able to exist outside of it could slowly help her heal.
In general, my favourite thing about Beth is that before the turn, she would have been horrified by the way her life's gone - but at and after season 5? It's kind of okay. She loves babies, ladybugs, berries picked from the bush, her family, and every song Tom Waits ever sang. She's just also willing to risk her own life to kill a woman in cold blood, because she knows other people will get hurt if she doesn't.
Crossovers and AUs:
First of all, I love crossovers and AUing characters! With Beth, everything's kind of an AU anyway, since I'm most interested in her post-hospital.
Some Beth-specific AUs I really enjoy:
♫ The bullet misses, or it grazes her, or it gets her in the shoulder or someplace else survivable.
♫ She dies, but for weird eldritch reasons, she comes back (and possibly comes back a little wrong).
♫ She dies, and now she's a ghost and we're doing some Ghost and Mrs. Muir "is your character crazy or is she really there" shit.
♫ She dies, and now she's a ghost in the parallel universe of your character's canon.
♫ She's supposed to die, but for whatever reason, it doesn't take + she ends up slipping through the cracks of the multiverse into your character's canon.
♫ If both our characters are from similar settings, smashing the two together - TWD and Fallout, for instance - into a big mush.
♫ A full AU where she's always been part of your character's canon - though it really depends on whether shit like "and then she was an indentured servant in a shady medical setting" translates over easily.
I'm happy to use various Beth's-still-around premises for plot generation purposes or just as background noise to justify her presence in a thread! My main goal is really to find a way to write about her from after season 5 despite the inconvenient matter of her death.
I'm generally not interested in mundane modern settings or completely setting-divergent AUs - if your character's from a modern-day setting with minimal speculative elements, I'd rather AU your character in TWD than vice versa.
Ships:
I'm interested in both m/f and f/f with Beth - crosscanon f/f has been some of my best CR, tbh.
yes: daryl*, noah
probably yes: crosscanon
no: carl, rick, noncon situations
*NB: I feel like sometimes Beth fans are super fuckin weird about Bethyl, so this is just a note that if you're not interested, I'm not going to be weird about it. Gen shit is A++ as well.