So I just got back from Easter vacation in Turkey, at Trabzon and Lake Uzungöl. It was pretty awesome–I’ll definitely be blogging about it in the next couple of days! First, though, I wanted to share something interesting that happened on the way back.
While I was hanging out in Batumi with some other TLG volunteers eating Adjarian khatchapuri (an experience in itself), we got to talking about what we’re going to do with our lives after we get back to the States. Most of them didn’t really want to think about it, which surprised me, so I asked why.
They told me they didn’t want to have to figure out the rest of their lives–that coming out to Georgia to teach English was a way of putting off those major life decisions. Fair enough. They then asked me if I’ve figured it out. I said yes: that I want to be a full-time writer, and that I’m out here to see the world and get some cultural experience as I try to make that dream a reality.
One of the girls then asked what my backup was if that didn’t work out. To be honest, I had no idea what to say. My plan at this point is to just keep teaching and traveling until the dream becomes a reality. Am I confident that it will? Eventually, yeah–as long as I keep writing, which I certainly will.
I thought about it a bit on the way back, and realized that my mindset has shifted tremendously in the past few years. When I was back in college, and to some extent for the first year after I graduated, I used to worry a lot about my “backup plan.” It was a way of addressing the fear of failure, of creating an illusion of safety by having a “fallback.”
I’m sure there are careers where that’s a good idea. Generally, those are careers with definite paths, where if you don’t pass a certain number of checkpoints, you’re basically screwed. With writing, though, there is no set path that everybody follows–especially now with ebooks and epublishing. Because of this, it’s impossible to really fail–either you keep on trying until you make it, or for one reason or another you give up.
Ever since I graduated in 2010, I’ve been structuring my life in such a way that I can continue to pursue my writing. Every job I’ve taken has just been a stepping stone, a bridge to allow me to keep pursuing this dream. Have I made it yet? No, but I haven’t given up yet either, so I haven’t had to fall back on my backup–whatever that would mean at this point.
From the outside, it probably looks like I’m being hopelessly responsible–that, or willfully oblivious to a hundred things I should be worried sick about. However, I’m actually quite confident that I’m on the right path and things will work out–and that surprises me. It’s like that moment when you realize you’re actually swimming, not just kicking and thrashing about the pool.
Worst case scenario, I fall head over heels in love with an awesome, wonderful girl, and after a few heady months filled with blissful romance, I wake up one morning and realize that I’m married. If that happens, I might have to put my writing on hold for a while until I get things sorted out so that I can support both myself and my wife–but then again, with her help, I might be able to do twice as much, or even more. Perhaps that will help my writing career even more than trying to go it alone.
So really, there is no back up plan or worst case scenario–just the future. And as Georgians are so fond of saying, “no one can know what will happen in future.”
მოტაცება (pronounced mot’atseba) is the Georgian word for bride kidnapping, as opposed to regular kidnapping, which takes a different word. It’s an ancient practice in the Caucasus region that doesn’t happen as much as it used to, but still happens, especially in the rural areas. Today, most Georgians condemn it, but there’s still a whole slew of lingering cultural subtexts that can be very difficult for a Westerner (like me) to understand and navigate.
The video clip at the top is from a Georgian comedy program (named, aptly enough, “Comedy შაუ”), and does a pretty good job illustrating how mot’atseba works. Of course, the genders have been reversed–50% of Georgian humor is cross-dressing, and the other 50% is cross-dressing with slapstick–but everything else is pretty accurate. Like I said in a previous post, it’s like a weird game of capture-the-flag involving sex and arranged marriage, where the flag is the girl.
This is how it works: boy meets girl. Boy decides to marry girl. Boy gets his friends together and kidnaps the girl (with or without her consent), holding her captive overnight. The next morning, boy contacts girl’s parents to ask for girl’s hand in marriage.
Since the girl has been held overnight, the implication is that she’s been raped (which may or may not be true). Therefore, to avoid a scandal which could tarnish the family’s reputation, the parents will usually marry their daughter off as quickly as possible. However, if the girl can escape, or the girl’s brothers can rescue her before nightfall, the crisis can be averted.
I first heard about mot’atseba from this post on Georgia On My Mind, back when I was looking into TLG about a year ago. It disturbed me a little, but not enough to dissuade me from coming to Georgia. A couple of weeks ago, however, I learned that that was how my host parents got married.
Here’s the thing, though: they both seem to remember it kind of fondly. In fact, when my host mom saw the clip from Comedy შაუ, she couldn’t stop laughing. Her mom lives with them now, and from time to time they go out to visit his family in the village, so it looks like everyone’s on pretty good terms.
So what the heck happened?
Here’s the story, as best as I can piece it together. They were introduced by his sister, who was her coworker at the hospital. After a month, he got together with some friends and took her without violence to his family’s house out in the village. She was surprised and upset at first, of course, but her parents gave their consent, and so they were married the next day by a magistrate. Now, they’ve got four kids–a huge family, by Georgian standards–and seem to be pretty happy together.
As a Westerner, it blows my mind that a strong, healthy family can come out of something as violent as an act of kidnapping. Indeed, I have yet to be convinced that that’s a normal outcome. However, after asking around and doing some research, I’ve come to realize that mot’atseba isn’t a black and white issue: there are all sorts of cultural subtexts that make the issue much more complicated.
The key to understanding how all this works is the following proverb, which underscores the entire Georgian concept of gender roles and the differences between men and women:
If a woman says no, she means maybe. If she says maybe, she means yes. If she says yes, she is not a woman.
From this, two things follow:
1: Women are fickle, therefore men should be assertive.
As a man, I see this all the time. All three of my co-teachers are women, and all of them constantly defer to me, even though they have far more professional experience than I do. When I had some pretty serious differences over teaching methodologies with one of them, she suggested that I take over the next lesson and teach it without her interference, so that she could get a better idea that way. This isn’t the case with the female volunteers–many of them complain about how hard it is to get anyone to take their suggestions seriously.
2: A woman can never say no.
If “no” is constantly interpreted as “maybe,” then it follows that no one (or at least, no man) is going to believe that a woman is even capable of saying “no.” This turns the whole concept of rape into a nebulous gray area, unlike the United States, where women have a lot more power at least in terms of the law.
This is not to say that in Georgian culture, women are doormats or property (even though that’s what some TLGers claim). Women have a number of support networks, such as family, friends, and other women, and can use these networks to ward off unwanted attention. When I asked my host sister if she’s worried that a mot’atseba would ever happen to her, she said no, because if it did, her three brothers would kick some serious ass.
On top of all this, Georgians have no real concept of casual dating. If a girl and a guy are seeing each other, they’re either married or about to be married. This shows up in the way they use Facebook and other social networks: instead of listing themselves as “in a relationship,” the girl will give her password to the guy she’s dating. And they don’t just do it because the guy demands it–when my host sister was seeing someone, he asked her if she wanted to give her password to him, as if that was the natural next-step in their relationship. From the way she told me, she seemed to be worried that she’d made a mistake by telling him no. Of course, I told her she’d made the right decision!
Combine all of these together, and you should start to get a clearer picture of some of the subtext surrounding mot’atseba.
When I asked my first co-teacher about it, she said it was only an ancient practice and absolutely didn’t happen anymore. When I brought up rape and asked if that was also a part of it, she was horrified and didn’t want to talk about it. However, when I asked if it’s possible for a happy marriage to come of it, she kind of smiled a little and said that if the woman likes it, then why not?
My second co-teacher was much more straight with me. Yes, it happens occasionally, though it was a lot more “fashionable” about twenty or thirty years ago. No, it’s not romantic. Yes, a lot of the marriages aren’t very happy, which is why so many of them end in divorce. She told me that one of her friends from college was married through mot’atseba, and that she knows of at least one case in our school where an 8th grader was kidnapped and married. However, under President Sakashvili, mot’atseba is now a serious crime, so it’s not as common as it used to be.
My third co-teacher’s answer was a lot sketchier. The first time I asked about it was in passing, as she walked in on the conversation I was having with my first co-teacher. When I asked her about rape, she laughed and said “well yes, of course it happens!” as if that wasn’t a big deal. Later, however, she sat me down and said quite seriously that mot’atseba is a horrible thing, that it’s a criminal act, that it doesn’t happen anymore, etc etc.
However–and this was perhaps the most illuminating thing–she said that sometimes, when a guy and a girl are in love, but she’s being wishy-washy and non-committal, he’ll sweep her off her feet and carry her off. In fact, that was what happened with her: her boyfriend wanted to marry her, but she kept putting it off, so one day he tricked her into getting in the car and told her “all right, enough is enough–we’re getting married this weekend.” And they did.
When I asked her if that was mot’atseba, she said no, but I think the subtext was similar. A real man knows how to assert himself and take what he wants. Since a real woman will never say yes, sometimes you just have to man up and tell her how it’s going to be. And don’t worry if she says no at first–she only says that because she doesn’t really know what she wants yet. She’ll come around eventually.
It sounds pretty horrible, but that seems to be how it works. And really, there are gradations of it. Most Georgians will agree that it’s wrong for a guy to kidnap a girl he doesn’t know so that he can rape her and force her to marry him. But if the guy and the girl know each other, and are already pretty serious (ie seeing each other at all), and he wants to speed things up–or, alternately, if she knows her parents would never say yes otherwise–that’s when everyone speaks of it with a wink and a nod.
And really, can we say that our culture’s problems are any less abhorrent? What about teenage pregnancy? Secret abortions? Date rape? At least with mot’atseba, the guy is trying to marry the girl, not just sleep with her and walk away. If it’s just sex that the guy is after, there are a lot more easier ways to get it than risking a prison sentence.
So is it “wrong”? I don’t know if it’s possible to say yes or no, except on a case by case basis. My host sister knows a girl who was kidnapped at age 12 and had a baby the year after. I’m pretty sure that’s wrong. But when I told her what would happen to that guy in the states–that he would go on the registered sex offender list and spend the rest of his life ostracized and unable to find work–she thought that that was wrong too. And as for my host parents, well, it seemed to work out well for them.
I don’t know. But either way, it’s definitely an interesting anthropological experience.
Actually, this last quarter wasn’t quite so bad as the title might make it seem. For the first part, I was on roll, writing almost 25k new words a week. But then I finished that project, started a new career, moved to the other side of the world…yeah, my writing took a hit. Or at least, that’s how it feels.
In January, I was working on Stars of Blood and Glory, and was really on a roll. The application process for TLG was still pending, but I pretty much knew I was getting in, and since I was staying with my parents until it went through, I didn’t have to worry much about money issues. With lots of writing time, I finished SBG in about 6 weeks and published Journey to Jordan. Life was good.
After Stars of Blood and Glory, I went back to Star Wanderers, finishing up Part II and starting Part III. However, something felt wrong, and I didn’t really know what it was. With my TLG departure date imminent, it was really hard to focus, and I wasn’t in much of a position to move on to anything else. That’s when the angst began.
I flew out to Georgia on February 15th, did a week of training in Tbilisi, and then was whisked about 220 kilometers away to Kutaisi. As a consequence, I didn’t get any real writing done for almost a month. However, I didn’t have any major challenges navigating the new culture, and was soon settled pretty comfortably.
The trouble was, nothing was working. Star Wanderers was broken, and I was too close to the project to fix it. But after putting it on the back burner, I didn’t know what to do. For most of March, I switched from one project to another. Nothing seemed to stick, though, and by the end, I was getting pretty antsy.
What if I’d made a mistake to come to Georgia? What if that was the reason nothing was working? It sounds silly now, but that was what was going through my mind. I still worry about it a little, but I think it has to do more with my creative process than anything here in Georgia.
I have a very non-linear way of writing first drafts. After starting the revision for Heart of the Nebula and making some good progress on that, I got an idea for Star Wanderers and moved back to that. At this point, I think the only way to get productive again is to finish that project, even if it sucks. I’ve got a lot of great ideas for other stories, but until I can close the book on this one, I don’t think I’ll be able to make much progress.
So that’s where things stand right now. All in all, it wasn’t a bad quarter, but I’ll be happy when I’ve actually finished something for a change. Hopefully, that’ll only be a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I’ll keep writing.
The best description of this book that I think I could give is the disclaimer at the front:
The following is not fiction. The characters and events described are closely based on real life, and any resemblance to real persons, organizations and events is purely intentional, and should be construed in the most negative light the text will support. Some names have been changed to protect the author from violent reprisals from the real people thus depicted, in the unlikely event that any of them have learned to read.
Thus begins a darkly cynical account of one soldier’s experience (or lack thereof) in Al-Anbar Province during the Iraq War. At times hilarious, at times surprisingly moving, this book made me laugh out loud and kept me engrossed all the way to the end.
Full disclosure: the author is a friend of mine from the Leading Edge slushpile, and I was one of the beta readers for this book. That said, I really enjoyed this novel, both the earlier draft that I read and the finished version that I bought as soon as it came out. It’s a lot like Catch 22, except I actually liked this one (whereas I could hardly get through the first chapter of Catch 22). The writing is witty and sarcastic, and the story, while far from honeycoated, ends on a note that makes the read worthwhile.
If you’re happily employed by the military, this book will probably make you livid with rage…or it’ll send you roaring on the floor laughing your ass off. I can see my military friends taking it either way. But one thing is for sure: you won’t find it boring.
One Confirmed Kill is an indie published ebook, and you can currently pick it up in all formats for $.99 on Smashwords. Disclosure: as a Smashwords affiliate, I get about $.10 from the sale. However, even if I didn’t get anything for it, I’d still recommend it, because it’s a great read.
This is actually a more common trope than you might think. It’s the underlying premise for Beauty and the Beast, though Disney rewrote that part out of it. It’s a major plot element in Watership Down, as well as The Courtship of Princess Leia. More recently, Twilight featured a few variations on this trope, though considering the source, that probably isn’t surprising.
In the West, this trope tends to be a lot less prominent than it used to be. However, if you look at the trappings of our marriage customs, you start to notice some disturbing trends that point to a time when abduction-as-romance was much more common. For example, what was the original function of the best man at a wedding? Quite possibly, it was to keep the bride from escaping (or being rescued). And why does the groom whisk the bride away to a remote, isolated place to consummate the marriage? To evade the bride’s angry family, of course.
Here in Georgia, this trope is alive and well, not just in fiction but in real life–seriously. It’s called motatseba, and is often discussed with a wink and a nod. In the family that’s hosting me, the mother married her husband after he abducted her, then bore him four children. Now, they both seem to remember it rather fondly.
This is such a bizarre tradition that I’m going to dedicate an entire post to it…after I figure out just what the hell is going on. Seriously, I can barely make sense of the practice–it’s like a twisted game of tag involving sex and arranged marriage. How it can possibly lead to love…that’s what I’m trying to figure out.
However, I’m sure it involves some interesting variation of this trope.
So I’ve decided to stay here in Georgia for another semester. Things are working out really well, I enjoy teaching English, and for the full experience I think it will be better to stay for a full year.
I’m not sure if I’ll stay in Kutaisi yet, though. It’s a convenient place to live, but I have upwards of 30 kids in my classes, which can be a real challenge. I’d kind of like to spend the next semester in a village or small town, where I can know all the kids by name. Then again, I really like it here in Kutaisi, and I’m doing so much where I am that I’d kind of like to stay, just to see how things turn out.
Currently, I’m teaching grades 1-6, 9-10, and 12. It sounds like a lot, but I’ve got great co-teachers who help out a ton. I teach 18 class periods per week, which is enough to keep me busy but not so much that I feel overwhelmed. My favorite grade to teach is probably 4th or 5th, where the kids know enough to surprise you but don’t have all the issues that come with teenagers. There are different things I enjoy about each grade, though, so it’s good to have a mix.
The second semester doesn’t start until September, so that’ll give me a few months off to do whatever I like. My current plan is to come home and work on getting print editions of my books out. TLG will pay for my flight out and back, and my parents will let me stay at their place over the summer, so I think things will work out quite well.
As for what to do in December once this tour is finished–that’s an entirely different question. I could probably leverage my experience here in Georgia to get a much higher paying job in Asia or the Persian Gulf, but all I’m really looking for is a job situation to tide me over until my writing career takes off. That, and an awesome cultural experience.
What I’d REALLY like to do is find some remote desert village in the Middle East, where the locals will pay for room and board, my book royalties will pay the rest, the cultural experience will give me a chance to practice my Arabic, and my teaching skills will make a real difference in the local community.
Towards that end, I found this site called Workaway. A friend of mine used it to get a short-term job in a Bedouin camp in Wadi Rum, and there are TONS of other opportunities listed just like it. I freaked out a little when I saw it, because it looks AWESOME. When I was in Jordan, I used to fantasize about spending some time in the desert with the Bedouin, so getting the chance to actually do that would be amazing!
TLG will pay for my flight home at the end of the second semester, but I can opt to go anywhere else, so long as the ticket price isn’t any more than Tbilisi to JFK. Since this is the year my sister’s get together with their in-laws for Christmas, it might be better to go straight from Georgia to my next job at the end of December.
I was thinking about it as I walked around my neighborhood earlier today, and it made me wonder: why did I wait so long? There are so many awesome opportunities overseas–if you don’t have any debt or anyone you need to support, you could spend years hopping from one random adventure to the next. I could spend years doing that. And with epublishing, all I really need is my netbook and periodic internet access to put up new books as I write them–everything else more or less takes care of itself. It’s fantastic.
In any case, that’s the plan for now. I’m taking the night train to Tbilisi tonight, so I’d better go get ready for that. See you around!
From what I hear from my friends, it’s been a pretty mild winter back in the States. Here in Georgia, though, it’s been a much different story.
I think we’ve had only three sunny days since I arrived here in Kutaisi almost four weeks ago. The natives tell me that this is highly unusual. The temperature hovers right around 0 degrees Celsius, which means the snow is wet and melts extremely fast. It’s pretty for a day or two, then it turns to rain again, and that means mud…lots and lots of mud.
During a break in the snow, I ventured outside to take a few pictures of my neighborhood. In a couple of weeks, the weather will hopefully be warmer and things will look a lot different, but still, I thought it would be good to give you guys an idea of what this place looks like.
My host family's apartment. We live on the second floor, which is good since there isn't an elevator.
I live in the Avtokarkhana settlement, near the old Soviet auto factory. The apartments are about 50 years old, and haven’t been renovated much since then. It’s a poor neighborhood, but it’s comfortable enough, with all of the basic amenities like water and heating.
An abandoned bus along the road to my school. My host father has some choice words to describe his Russian-made vehicle.In Soviet Russia, puddle splash YOU!
The roads are pretty nasty; they haven’t been repaved in decades, and the potholes are so deep you practically need a raft to get across the street. Most of the locals wear rubber boots during the rainy season, but I recently treated my boots with beeswax and that seems to be doing fairly well. Besides, after a while, you figure out where the stepping stones are, and then it’s not so bad.
One of the local free-range chickens. There's a cow, too, but she was staying out of the snow.Where the chickens go to keep warm. My host family laughed when I showed them this picture.
Even though Kutaisi is a fairly large city, I get the feeling that there’s still a few lingering elements of the village mentality. How else would you explain all the free-range chickens that people still keep? The school is within walking distance, as are the stores where we buy our bread, and even though the pharmacy is a short drive away, I could probably walk there in fifteen or twenty minutes.
The local church. It seems pretty small, but Georgians don't really have weekly worship meetings like we do in the States.
Because of the snow, I haven’t gotten out much in the past few weeks. I haven’t been stranded, though; there are about a dozen other TLG volunteers in the city, and we’ve had a few parties and get-togethers. Kutaisi is a small city, as far as cities go, but there are plenty of interesting places if you know where to look, and even in the dead of winter, it’s still quite pretty.
The road I walk back from school every day.
So yeah, that’s what my neighborhood is like. When the weather gets better, I’ll bring my camera to school and take some pictures of my school. I should also take some pictures of my host family’s apartment, come to think of it. What else do you guys want to see?
If I had to sum up my thoughts with one word, that would be it–though of course, by itself that word is hopelessly inadequate. Let’s just say that, for me at least, this was a truly astounding book, a literary journey that left me wide-eyed with my mouth hanging open, blinking wearily as I looked up from the last page and returned, reluctantly, to the world of physical reality.
I don’t plan to spend this blog post talking about how awesome this book is, however; I’ll save that for a review. Rather, I want to spend some time talking about how this book has influenced the way I think about science fiction and my own writing, and to share a few of my thoughts having just finished it less than an hour ago.
If anything, this book has shown me that science fiction–real science fiction–is about staring into the unblinking void of the cosmos with a deep and abiding need to find answers, or perhaps more accurately, to ask questions. This inevitably produces a sense of wonder, but that’s merely incidental; the genre is really about fulfilling an almost religious need to connect with something greater than oneself.
I enjoy reading science fiction and experiencing that connection, but I don’t need it–not in the way that I sense some of the grand masters of the genre truly did. Instead, I hunger for the sense of wonder and adventure that is more characteristic of fantasy. In my own writing, it’s not so much the grand sweep of the cosmos that interests me as much as the intimacies of human nature–which isn’t to say that the two are incompatible, but that my preferences lean more to the one than the other.
What I’m saying is that it’s not science fiction that I write, so much as science fantasy. I still feel drawn to space adventures and the trappings of science fiction–I’m not at all interested in writing about elves or dragons–but at their heart, the books I write are more fantasy than true science fiction.
Which might be a purely esoteric distinction to the average reader, but if it helps me to understand my own writing, it’s a distinction worth making. If science fantasy is the sub-genre that really speaks to me, then that’s the kind of literature that I should explore. Of course, it’s important to be well-read in multiple genres, but if there’s a particular one in which you want to write, it stands to reason that that’s the one on which you need to be an expert.
So that’s my new goal: to explore fantasy, science fantasy in particular, and the ways in which other sub-genres like space opera and space adventure lean more toward the fantasy side of things than pure science fiction. And to keep reading really awesome books.
Ishmael Wang never thought he would sign up with the crew of a solar clipper, traveling the stars as part of a merchant collective. But when his mother unexpectedly dies, leaving him with barely enough money to pay next month’s rent, he finds himself without any other choice. Fortunately, the starfaring life suits him quite well–surprisingly well.
I picked up this novel because it appeared in the “customer’s also bought” section of my own novel, Genesis Earth. It was a fun read, though to be honest I put it down for almost seven or eight months before finishing it. The reasons for that should be clear by the end of this post.
Don’t get me wrong; there are things that I liked a lot about this book. The beginning set up is excellent–I really felt drawn into the story, and felt for the challenges that Ishmael was facing. As he started to make friends and explore his new world, the wish fulfillment factor became a major draw. I mean, who wouldn’t want to sign up with the crew of a solar clipper and travel across the stars?
But somewhere in the middle, the book started to lose steam. Ishmael’s internal conflicts with the death of his Mom faded into the background until they completely disappeared. Everything that he set out to accomplish, he did so successfully after the first or second try. The story took on a sort of video game quality, where the main focus was leveling up: from quarter-share to half-share, from this test to that test, etc. Even some of the aspects of the world-building became mundane, with mushroom-growing asteroids and space station flea markets becoming just another way to make a profit.
While there were aspects of the trading game that I liked, the lack of any real conflict made me lost interest in the story. The beginning is very strong, and the middle, though weaker, is still okay, but the ending just sort of fizzled without a real climax. If you’re only reading for wish-fulfillment, that probably isn’t a problem, but if you want something else, you’re probably better off looking elsewhere.
Look, I ain't in this for your revolution, and I'm not in it for you, Princess. I expect to be well paid--I'm in it for the money.
If you’ve ever read a space adventure with smugglers and pirates, or a sword & sorcery with rogue thieves and master-less swordsmen, or a western with gritty outlaws and mountain men, you know this character alignment. If you’re a fan of any of these genres, chances are you love him, too.
A chaotic neutral character follows his whims. He is an individualist first and last. He values his own liberty but doesn’t strive to protect others’ freedom. He avoids authority, resents restrictions, and challenges traditions.
A lot of characters start out as this but tend to shift as the story progresses. Han Solo, for example, shifts from Chaotic Neutral to Chaotic Good as he becomes more and more involved with the Rebellion. The Jägers from Girl Genius are Chaotic Neutral until they have a Heterodyne to lead them. But in other stories, such as Pirates of the Caribbean and Schlock Mercenary, the Chaotic Neutral serves as an anchor.
My favorite Chaotic Neutral is probably Waylander from David Gemmell’s Drenai series. The Jerusalem Man is another good one–in fact, just about every one of his books has a Chaotic Neutral that I love. Haruhi Suzumiya is an excellent example of a female Chaotic Neutral–in fact, she’s probably the queen of this particular character alignment.
In my own work, the best example of a Chaotic Neutral would probably be Tamu from Bringing Stella Home / Sholpan. Even though she’s technically a slave, she doesn’t really mind it because she has everything she wants and doesn’t have to be beholden to anybody (not even Qasar, really, since she’s his favorite). Amina from Desert Stars is also Chaotic Neutral, in contrast with Surayya, who is more of a Lawful Neutral, though sometimes it’s hard to tell. And in Genesis Earth, Terra is definitely a Chaotic Neutral at the beginning, though she shifts a little somewhere around the middle.
I’m hesitant to admit this, but when I took the character alignment test for myself, I tested out as a Chaotic Neutral. As to what that means, exactly…I’m not going to say. o.0
