The Vosidoc: My personal notes for characterizing VOSIM

Publish date: 3-Nov-2024 (Originally on first version of site, re-formatted for current version.)

Introduction

From around 2015 to 2020, I ran VOSIM's official character Twitter account for Chipspeech. Due to how…bad Twitter is for keeping track of stuff, I’ve had to write notes to describe how I played his character, so the person I handed the account off to would be able to keep him relatively consistent. VOSIM as a character is very important to me. I wrote him to reflect a lot of my experiences when I was younger, and couldn't understand why other people treated me the way I did. I think he's very relatable character because of it. He's an autistic character in all but name, and I think that makes him more human. Anyway, with that out of the way, here’s the doc I wrote up! I don't think anything is particularly new, might just give a few new insights to the few people that care about VOSIM c:

The Vosidoc

Established canon for Vosim recap:

Vosim is an android created by a small team of ambitious scientists as a companion. Though their progress was impressive, eventually funding was pulled for this project as the investors were unimpressed with his not-quite-human voice and appearance. The project was shelved, and the lab was left abandoned. Vosim stayed there until the lab was demolished, in which he then wandered the wastelands until present day. Due to exposure to the elements and being technically incomplete, he has a poor memory of the past, though his memory can be jogged through either reminders or, theoretically, by recovering the data on his hardware.

Currently, he resides in a house that he owns and keeps a day job as a librarian (sorry I haven't mentioned that much recently lol). He aspires to be a singer, but his voice seems to deter most people, so he keeps a quiet day job to pay the bills. He lets people stay at his house from time to time, as he likes to keep guests.

Character Notes (in no particular order):

Vosim is loosely portrayed to be similar to an autistic person. In the context of any chipmedia, he shouldn’t actually be referred as such, but he has a rather human AI that resembles autistic...ness.

In regards to this point, it is CRITICAL to understand that Vosim being a robot is not what influences his autistic-like presentation, but rather the fact that he was programmed to resemble an autistic person. That is, he is not a robot character whose autistic coding is a result of understanding autism to be "unnatural" or "inhuman", but rather a robot character who has traits as this to make him more human.

Most humans are a bit confused by his face. They tend to get scared when they see him. He is deeply aware of this fact. Due to his flavor of social skills, he tends to appear naive and is prone to misunderstanding. In addition, he doesn't always recognize when he's insensitive or has "messed up" in a social interaction, which can be distressing for him. He shouldn’t be infantilized; despite being a bit naive on some subject matter, he generally does recognize when he’s being taken advantage of or when others are mistreating him/others.

He's a bit sensitive to loud noise and sudden events.

He's incredibly stimmy. He loves satisfying visual stimuli, such as bath bombs, aquariums, flowing water/rain, etc. A more meme stim he has is playing with his spoons while stressed, though I've left it fairly vague what exactly that entails. You should probably leave that vague too. For comedy's sake.

He tends to have a desire to be more human or human-like, and so that's often reflected in his hobbies and household (example: he has a toilet in his house despite not needing one). For a comparable feeling, it tends to reflect feeling not “normal” or inadequacy. That being said, there is no way for him to be human, and not being human isn't a bad thing for him. He is different, but that does not make him lesser than a human.

He's a neat-freak. He finds cleaning a comforting activity and prides himself on a tidy house. Leaving a large mess behind will frustrate him a bit.

He sometimes struggles with understanding and recognizing his own feelings. He sometimes experiences feelings in a dissociated manner, or isn't able to exactly name what's going on. (note: alexithymia)

He REALLY desires the approval of other people, but can be pushed too far. He'll take a good amount of abuse from other characters before lashing out.

He is not above physical violence. Because he is relatively weak, he mainly relies on quick wit to gain leverage over his opponent. His general approach is to disable his opponent to prevent further harm (i.e. removing dandy's arm).

For formatting tweets, he usually sticks to fairly simple sentence structure and often phrases most situations in the first person. His tweets have capitalization and punctuation. He tends to use ellipses a lot, and doesn't really use emoticons or emojis except for ;_; (and exaggerations, such as ;__________;). He rarely swears, but when he’s done it's formatted like Q-Bert like @#$@!. He also tends to stutter when nervous or confused or just not in the best state.

He's had a relationship with Dee. It’s up to you what you do with this tbh, but note that Dee is a pretty damaged person and doing that could be a little strange.

In general, Vosim isn't very affectionate or cuddly in relationships. It's not that he doesn’t appreciate the other party, it's just not his primary form of affection. He's not very sexually motivated either, and tends to be uninterested in sex for the most part. he's not horny like dandy lol

He's a bit sensitive and can feel embarrassed or sad rather easily...but then snap back in most situations once he feels better about it. He does actually cry...no fluids involved tho.

He has a bit of trauma related to his past, though it manifests subtly. He would rather have his friends close by and can experience some distress when they don't like him/are upset with him. He is also prone to some amount of dissociation.

The pigeons hate him.

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