Hi, newb with newb question.

[scribblingTiresias]

Hi! You can call me Scribbler. I've been trying to get into Glowfic lately (Eva is very persuasive, thanks friend) and I just have one question before I begin writing anything with anyone.

I understand how the template thing works (...I think, I'm only on "The Empire of the Stars" and the multiversal stuff starts slow). But the thing is...

My main writing/RP muse for group RP is an off-canon version of Edward Cullen. This is, presumably, why my friend got me into Glowfic in the first place.

He's from a continuity that is not completely divorced from Twilight canon, but is about as far away from it as Luminosity proper is. The gist: Edward is gay, Carlisle is evil, the Cullen family has some rather cult-y elements to how Carlisle runs it and every Cullen is some measure of fucked up because of it.

Edward is a complicated wreck of a man, but I'll try to sum him up succintly. Basically- in my head, the version of Twilight that should have existed is explicitly transhumanist. Bella wants to be more than human. Edward believes that being a vampire has made him less than human. He believes, just as in canon, that he's lost his soul, and that even if he hasn't, the despicable things he's done have made him irredeemable.

Because of this, he is low-key suicidal. He usually has enough of an instinct of self-preservation not to run into a dangerous situation, and being a twipire, most dangerous situations he might stumble into won't kill him anyway. But the thing that kept him from making a premeditated suicide attempt until New Moon was that he believes suicide is a sin.

Fairly par for the course, so far. The three biggest differences:

Edward is, as I mentioned, gay. The only physical attraction he has to Bella is because she's a singer. He managed to convince himself that that's the same thing as sexual attraction, but his marriage to her is not... very happy. At all. His!Bella may or may not actually be a Bell- she probably is- but if she is, he's going to be very relieved to find out that there is someone else out there who likes Bella much, much better than he ever could, who is probably not any flavour of supernatural. This only feeds into Edward's self-loathing and desperate need to disappear. Being a Christian (of a weird, unaffiliated, heavily-influenced-by-Carlisle variety, formerly Catholic), he feels like being a "sodomite" is a sin and a horrible temptation and thinking about romance in general makes him kind of sick.

The second big difference is that he's ... probably on the autism spectrum? He requires little to no social interaction. He is perfectly fine with only interacting with his siblings and spending all the rest of his time making music. His special interests are music, plagues and the eradication of them, and the Chicago Cubs; he stims with his super-speed as well as with music. He's not much of a fan of heat, large crowds (and boy, the telepathy doesn't help) and various textures, and he wears nothing but grey, white, and black because he can make them all match. I joke around that Edward is the most boring man alive, because if he wasn't a vampire, his life would be very, very boring; his idea of an exciting evening is going to a piano recital and then editing wikipedia articles on obscure Russian composers.

Last is the issue of backstory. This!Edward grew up poor, unlike canon!Edward, who's a lawyer's son. Because of this, he has a ... weird relationship with evil!Carlisle, that's half based on guilt and half on something like filial piety. He feels beholden to the man, because Carlisle technically saved his life; not only that, Carlisle is the only reason he was able to become a pianist and a composer and to drive around at a couple hundred miles an hour and do most of the things he loves. At the same time, though... Carlisle stole his soul, and he deeply, bitterly resents him for it. He usually keeps this buried under the surface.

There's a couple other differences with this 'verse- the notable ones include that vampire mating doesn't exist the way it does in Twicanon (or Luminosity canon!), and werewolf imprinting exists but it's Different.

With this in mind, could I still write this!Edward? Would he be the same as the Standard Edward Template, or would he be his own beast?

[Throne3d]

You could write him, I expect, just fine. He probably would not be a Standard Edward Template, at least in part because I think so far only Alicorn has written those, especially since he seems to have various other features about him that I don't think would fit with the standard template attractors, so he'd probably be "his own beast". It might be weird to have a different template that's sort of cousins or something (since they're related in the inspiration), but he'd be a different moiety in-story and I'd probably be inclined to explain as him not being the same template, at least in part because you're a different writer so he'd be different moiety.

I don't think Alicorn has sole claim over Twilight or anything like that, but you might want to clear it with her anyway? She might pop in here and respond later today.

[Moriwen]

I don't see a problem with it -- I agree with Throne, clear it with Alicorn, I strongly suspect she'll say it's fine, it won't be the first time there's been two similar templates belonging to different people, nor presumably the last. (For instance, both Teceler and Lintamande have their own takes on some of the canon Elves.)

Also: your username is super cool! Come join us in the IRC sometime!

[DanielH]

1. Welcome!
2. Spoiler-box does not work with quotation marks
3. Of course you can still write your version of Edward. I think Stephanie Meyer or Little, Brown and Company are the only ones who could stop you, and they probably won’t. Alicorn might not like you writing glowfic with him or something, but she would almost certainly say it’s fine. I imagine if you and Alicorn put him in a box with anybody from Aurum (have you read Luminosity and Radiance?) everybody would find each other pretty weird, though.
4. He would not be the same template as either Alicorn’s Edward or the canon one; you are not writing him in the same way as either of them. There would be a lot of similarities, but not enough to say they were in any way the same person. Similarly, Golden is not an alt of Twilight!Bella and the Loki!Bell is not an alt of MCU!Loki even though each set are in similar circumstances and have further curious similarities (Edward fell for both Golden and Twilight!Bella, and both Lokis are liked by the Tesseract and dress similarly, for example).
5. On a similar token, even if you tried to write your Edward’s Bella as a Bell, you would probably end up with some differences from typical Bells and would accordingly have a different template. You cannot separate template from author, at least not without a lot of effort. If you and Alicorn decided to write something together, then his Bella could be a Bell.

[scribblingTiresias]

Hey! I'd love to join you in the IRC; however I am an IRC virgin, so how do I do that?

Duly noted re: the spoiler box. I'm used to a slightly different version of BBcode, it seems.

...I've not strictly speaking *read* the Aurumverse, but I've gotten to the point in Effulgence where Star-Empress!Bella and Libby visit. I've got at least a decent idea of what it contains, and yes, Edward would find Aurum very, very, <i>very</i> weird. (Especially because his!Carlisle wants the same things as that!Bella, but is going about it all wrong.)

All right! He's his own template, then (I might call that template Nocturne, because of this [link]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5NWhCtIrmc[/link]; it's either that or Ned). And ah, good to know! I was wondering if Twicanon!Bella was a Bell or not; she doesn't seem like one to me.

And yes, that's very true. I'd love to write something with Alicorn someday, but Ned's Bella doesn't seem much like a Bell to me anyway.

[Alicorn]

As people predicted, I don't mind people spinning off their own glowfic characters from source that I happen to have used. I do want to maintain a clear distinction between "Bells" and other cases of "template inspired by the Stephenie Meyer Twilight protagonist"; I'm less neurotic about maintaining that separation between green Edwards and other Edwards (or Carlisles, or whatever) but the same approximate policy applies. One of the precursors to glowfic-qua-glowfic contained someone using Luminosity Bella, explicitly, as a character, and I've never objected to that; what you're talking about would be far less elbowing in on my territory. FYI, it is not out of scope of green Edwards to go by Ned (although due to Effulgence stallout, none of them have actually done this so far), but the template is Edwards so you can call yours Neds and we still have less collision than, like, that one vampire named Isabella who isn't mine at all.

[Throne3d]

Hey! I'd love to join you in the IRC; however I am an IRC virgin, so how do I do that?

There's a link in this thread – the IRC is on the PSIGenix IRC server, on the channel #glowfic. (Click the "#glowfic" link in that thread, or alternatively this link, and it'll load you into a web client for IRC – select a username and hit "Go".)

It's probably preferable to get a separate client if you plan on connecting frequently, in which case I'd recommend HexChat, then when it's installed, click "Add" to the right of the "Networks" list (on the "Network List" dialog, found under the 'HexChat' menu if it doesn't appear when you load it), then type "PSIGenix", click Edit, add new server, irc.psigenix.net/6667, then 'autojoin channels' and add '#glowfic', then close that window and click Connect.

Duly noted re: the spoiler box. I'm used to a slightly different version of BBcode, it seems.

I've got at least a decent idea of what it contains, and yes, Edward would find Aurum very, very, <i>very</i> weird.

All right! He's his own template, then (I might call that template Nocturne, because of this [link]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5NWhCtIrmc[/link]; it's either that or Ned).

You seem to have accidentally used HTML markup instead of BB-code for your italics. :P
Also links are done with the "url" BB-code.

Examples:
Hello, he says.

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[i]Hello[/i], he says.

http://google.com/

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[url]http://google.com/[/url]

Google

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[url=http://google.com/]Google[/url]

[DanielH]

I mess up many of the tags too; what I recommend if you’re at all not sure about the markup is to use the “preview” function available in the Full Editor.

[Eva]

that one vampire named Isabella who isn't mine at all.

(In my defense, the character was named before I had ever met a Bell. :P)

[AndaisQ]

...hey, my Edward from a Twilight fanfic I've barely written is also called Ned! What're the odds.

(Also less of a name collision than when we somehow managed to duplicate the name "Xan". How does that even happen.)