Random notes I came up with for writing Octava in the comic:
- She’s an escaped slave, but not someone who had to do hard manual labor - that’s what robots are for (Summer will have words with people about that…)
- Instead, her species was enslaved for their general pleasantness and artistic skill by the Blot, who love beauty but can’t make it
- She’ll come off as a sweet, shy, and innocent girl because she was literally raised to be a Good Girl by bad people
- She rhymes when she talks both out of habit, and to get accustomed to English by forcing herself to construct sentences
- At bottom, though, this is a consequence of the abuse her people were put through, and isn’t a good thing (something Jason doesn’t know, and compliments her on anyway, and will feel guilty about if he finds out later…)
- Getting her to a place where she doesn’t feel threatened to perform any more - where she could talk “naturally”, express unpleasantness or dissatisfaction, or (heavens to Betsy) swear - would be a major accomplishment
Basically, she’s a (very distant) take on an artistic child raised by a dour fundamentalist family, so write her as such.