havenmods | Applications

Entry tags:

applications

Applications

APPLICATIONS ARE OPEN!
The next processing date is Friday 11th October

IMPORTANT: PLEASE POST YOUR APPLICATIONS HERE ON THE NEW APPLICATION PAGE

We're so glad you're thinking of joining us in Haven, where we are all safe.

In order to apply for a canon character, please fill out the information below and post it in a comment in this entry. For an OC, please apply using the OC information. Please do not link to applications, all applications must be posted here. Please do not delete your applications; if you do not want it to be seen, you can request for it to be screened after a decision is made.

You may apply for two characters every two weeks, to a total of six characters. Only two of these may be from the same canon, and they cannot be too familiar with one another. Please make sure to mark the header of your comment(s) with RESERVED or NOT RESERVED, as well as the character name and canon. App challenges are not allowed currently.

Try to remember spelling and grammar are important, and in app length quality and not quantity is what matters. If you wish to request a specific apartment, please do so in the relevant part of the application. All parts of the application must be your own work, plagiarism will not be tolerated, though you are welcome to reuse your own old applications.

If you are asked for revisions, please don't panic! It doesn't mean the mods don't like you, only that we probably need more information before making a decision. If you are asked for revisions, you will have one week to supply them.

Every attempt will be made to place a character in their chosen apartments, though this may not always be possible depending on the slots available.

Applications are open constantly, but are only processed every other Friday at 7PM EST. The Saturday following acceptance, an IC mingle log will be posted for characters to be introduced to the game.

We now have a test drive community at haventest which is continuously open. Posts there may be used in lieu of a sample in the application. You may also link posts, logs, or threads from other games and memes in lieu of samples, though we ask that they be no more than one year old.

To see what we are looking for:
Canon Characters:
Sample Application (Faith Lehane)
Sample Application (Iroh)

Original Characters:
Sample Application (Mors)
Sample Application (Vera de Barr)

Previous Game History:
Sample Application (Abel Nightroad/Mayfield RPG)
Sample Application (Bolin/Discedo)

Applications will be processed on the following dates:
11th October
25th October
8th November
22nd November
6th December
20th December

To apply for a canon character, please fill out this form:
Name: Your name or nickname Contact Info: Email, plurk, IM... as long as there's a way to contact you, it's fine! Other Characters Played: Any other characters you play at Haven. Preferred Apartment: If you have no preferred apartment, just put None. Character Name: Names and nicknames, in Western order (first name, surname) Canon: Canon Point: Where in the series are you taking them from? Background/History: A link to a source about the canon is fine for this. Previous Game History: At least two paragraphs on important events for the character and how they have been shaped by the previous game. If this is not applicable, please delete this section. Personality: This is the most important section! There is no specific word count, but anything less than three paragraphs likely isn't detailed enough. Abilities/Powers: Please assume canon-blindness and explain in as much detail as possible. Items/Weapons: Which three items and/or weapons will your character arrive with? Sample Entry: At least ten sentences in first person, please. A link to a previous post or thread with the character is also acceptable. Sample Entry Two: A third person sample of at least two paragraphs.

To apply for an original character, please fill out this form:
Name: Your name or nickname Contact Info: Email, plurk, IM... as long as there's a way to contact you, it's fine! Other Characters Played: Any other characters you play at Haven. Preferred Apartment: If you have no preferred apartment, just put None. Character Name: Names and nicknames, in Western order (first name, surname) Background/History: At least three paragraphs, please. Try to focus on events in the world history that have had an impact on the character. Previous Game History: At least two paragraphs on important events for the character and how they have been shaped by the previous game. If this is not applicable, please delete this section. Personality: This is the most important section! There is no specific word count, but anything less than three paragraphs likely isn't detailed enough. Abilities/Powers: Please explain in as much detail as possible. Items/Weapons: Which three items and/or weapons will your character arrive with? Sample Entry: At least ten sentences in first person, please. A link to a previous post or thread under a year old with the character is also acceptable. Sample Entry Two: A third person sample of at least two paragraphs.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Name: Shamera
Contact Info:

shamera, AIM: kl0tho
Other Characters Played: ...Will be apping another soon?
Preferred Apartment: ...idek, with Cousland plz?

Character Name: Hope Estheim
Canon: Final Fantasy XIII
Background/History: The world's full of lies. There's no way of knowing what's right.

Personality:

If anything, Hope is more than a bit awkward around people. He’s a teenage boy who grew up in the background and never really had a direction for himself even though everyone else seemed to know who and what they wanted to be when they grew up. He was a child content with what he had and without the ambition to be better in any way, despite the fact that he had so much potential. He's a good child— doesn’t cuss, doesn’t cause trouble, doesn’t go out of his way to make a fuss, doesn’t hang out with the bad crowd, and does his work quietly and efficiently. Hope’s world as a kid revolved around his mother, whom he doted on and clung to with the fervor of a child who had a hard time making friends and had a hard time fitting in. He had two friends in elementary school, both of whom moved away and lost contact with him during middle school. He was an extremely sheltered child; an only child with a government worker as a father and a full time mom. What has to be understood is that Cocoon is an extremely sheltered world, and Hope was sheltered even in Cocoon standards. He's never so much as stepped in mud before he was eight years old (and that was only because of a school field trip that took the kids out of their comfort zones. The kids thought dirt and plants smelled funny because they had never encountered so much of it before, coming from the city). He was the type who preferred playing inside rather than outside; preferred staying with his mother and washing vegetables for her despite not understanding why she was so fascinated with grown food when the food created by the fal’Cie provided the sufficient nutrition. He was the child who once adored his father, but then grew up biting down on venomous comments regarding how his dad was never there so that he wouldn’t upset his mother, and then worked hard to distract her from her loneliness. (It didn't always work, since his sullen silence around his father worried her a lot as well.)

Hope is a bit shy and extremely polite (better illustrated in the Japanese version as he speaks keigo (the formal and polite manner) to everyone with the exception of one character) with a very blunt manner of speaking: he uses simple words and is able to twist them enough to get his point across in a rather eloquent manner when he’s serious, contrasted with stammers and general ducked head and slouching when he’s uncertain (which is a lot). Hope tends to take promises very seriously because of certain events in his childhood, and be very childish in his physical mannerisms: he reaches out and grabs onto someone’s hand or shirt if he wants their attention, and swings his arms rocking on his feet when he’s waiting for something to happen. He wrings his hands when he's nervous and covers his face when he laughs or cries. Most of those are generally physical quirks that would be seen in children much younger than he is, but then, Hope’s lack of friends and other teenage influences in his life, along with his dependence on his mother, would explain the lack of development there.

This gives a better understanding on just how lost he became after his mom's death— after being suddenly rounded up at gunpoint by soldiers while they were on vacation and herded on a train that would take them to “Hell”. That day was the first day Hope had ever been in any real danger, and spun his life around from being the same content child who was just waiting for his problems to pass without any insight to his future, to watching a massacre conducted by the very government that was supposed to protect him; and being stripped of his mother, home, past, future, freedom, and humanity when he was turned into a l’Cie: a monster straight from nightmares and horror stories. He lost everything that he had relied on in one day, and wasn't ready for that loss, not like the other characters of the game who had all known what they were getting into.

The events of the game is a giant ride of character development for Hope. He had to learn, and learn quick, in order to survive. The thing is, though: Hope is resourceful. He is quick-witted and sharp and so very brilliant that sometimes his deductions seem rather disconnected from the game because he manages to make connections from A to Z while skipping the rest of the alphabet. He’s logical and eventually becomes the team strategist, revealing the very beginning of what is an exceptional mind (which is taken much, much further in the second game) of a teenager who could potentially become... anything he wanted to be. He’s good with machines, good with deducing situations as well as people, charismatic when he’s self confident enough, and powerful. He’s got fantastic aim and learns very, very quickly.

But along with all of that... Hope isn’t self-confident. He may have all that potential and all that power, but he’s hesitant and uncertain in his own thoughts, never sure if he’s good enough to do something. Despite all his potential, Hope is still limited by his age and his inexperience as well as his mental and emotional trauma from the events of the game that needs time to heal. Hope’s the type who clings to people because despite his maturity and his understandings, he still has a child’s mentality and instinct to trust and depend. He tends to duck his head when he talks (a habit he never grows out of), and turn statements into questions if he’s in the slightest bit unsure of things. His mood is usually dependent on the mood of people around him as he’s very easily influenced— he draws his confidence from those around him and their approval.

Hope isn't your typical video game hero who has something tragic happen to them and suddenly they're willing to fight for what's right... he behaves much more like a normal, albeit broken, kid: he whines, he sulks, he grieves, he throws tantrums, and he struggles to learn and grow up. He can be a real brat. He can hold terrible grudges and feel like wanting to kill someone. He's very much a pushover, even. But at the core of it all, Hope is a very kind teen who doesn't like causing trouble or even drawing attention to himself. He oscillates between wanting to stay a child and not believing that he's good enough at... anything, really, since he compares himself to his (exceptional and experienced) teammates, and wanting so hard to be seen as grown up and believe that he really can take a stand and make a difference even when it looked like all was lost. He misses the security he once had, but is determined that he’s an adult now because he refuses to be left behind in the way children are left behind when people go off to fight.

For Hope, the duration of the game was a real eye-opener. Within the week (canon says the events of the game took a week. I propose closer to a month with the amount of things that happened), he's had his entire life re-written. He's not just some helpless child without a sense of direction anymore. All of a sudden, he's got real power and the realization that those in charge can be wrong. They can be the bad guys. He's had it revealed that the core of everything he had been told as a child (and that the rest of his world had been told) was a complete lie, and that the dangerous and feared monsters the government protected them from... was actually just what the government turned ordinary people into. He's been shot at, clawed, fallen from dangerous heights, poisoned, and so much more in that week. He's learned how to kill to survive.

But what makes him special, and a hero, is how he retained his heart and his belief in people. Hope honestly believes that people are good despite being chased out of his own home city by a mob who had probably watched him grow up, and the government announcing that they wanted to publicly execute him, and everything that happened to him. Despite the tragedies he's had to face (or perhaps because of), he's starting to learn to trust in himself, and starting to understand that people can be manipulated easily. That it's easy to believe in lies because people generally want the easier path. That he's not going to do that anymore, because he wants to judge things for himself rather than be told what to believe in. He may be naive and believe in others too much, but he has exceptionally clear insight in that no matter what he does, no matter what seems to blindsight him, he does understand his own motivations and what he needs to do in order to continue. Hope can lie to himself, but he'll always know that it's a lie.

In the beginning of the game, he actively scrambled away from things he was scared of— he clung to Vanille and hid behind Sazh when soldiers came. Along the way, though, he slowly learned and actually managed to convinced Lightning to teach him how to survive. By chapter seven, he was brave enough to confront Snow about his mother’s death. By chapter eleven, he choked back his own fears and asked his team to leave him behind if he slowed them down. By the end, he stood to defend Vanille despite barely being able to stand at all. Hope grew up in that aspect. He’s not the type to run from danger, not anymore, not when there’s a chance that he can protect someone else. He's not scared of monsters anymore, because he's had to face all the monsters his world (and the world he thought was Hell) could throw at him and because he knows that he has a worse monster inside himself. What he's scared of now is being left alone, but more than that is the fear that eventually he would be the demise of everyone he cares about.

And while he may be very mature mentally, he's still missing real life experiences. Some things need practice, after all, and Hope's only had a week of his new-found mentality.

Abilites/Powers:

As glossed over in the personality section, Hope is brilliant. He’s a child strategist and an exceptionally quick learner. He’s inventive, thinks outside the box, and skips steps to come up with an answer. He’s good with machines in that he managed to hack a military weapon by accident (the first time it was funny, the second time you start to realize that yeah he’s really good at this), and I’m putting likeable in his abilities section because that’s honestly a part of how he survived. He’s persistent and determined, and has great intuition in that he usually manages to feel that something’s wrong before something bad happens. (Happened twice in canon: once could be explained as him being a child and having a higher hearing range, and the other... how in the world did he know that?)

He's not exactly the most sportsy person and doesn't play any musical instruments, but he has a knack for sciences and maths and can cook in the sense that he's watched his mother and helped her with it a thousand times (doesn't mean he can actually do it here until he learns the differences in appliances and technology, though), and isn't messy. Despite being more of an introvert, Hope is very good with people because he likes to put himself in their shoes (What would they do? How would they feel?) and tends to go along with what other people say.

In-game, Hope wields a boomerang that with a single toss can hit up to 8 targets (not sure if more because 8 was the max amount of enemies in one confrontation without further summoning), and he never misses— not even before he became a l’Cie when his senses weren’t sharpened by an supernatural force. That says a little about not only his aim, but the quick mental calculations before each throw.

He’s not strong, and he doesn’t have high endurance. In fact, Hope has the lowest health points in-game and the lowest strength stats as well. That means he can’t take a lot of hits, and can barely deal physical damage at all... but for what he lacks in strength and endurance, he makes for in spades with magic (and smarts. If there's a roundabout way to defeat enemies...). He has three starting roles with the ability to develop into all other roles as well, but let's just describe the three he gets when you first get to play his character after being turned into a l'Cie:

Hope is the only one on his team to have only one offensive class: ravager is the magic attack role, which uses elemental spells which increase in power each tier. Lower tiers include Fire (Fira), Blizzard (Blizzara), Water (Watera), Thunder (Thundarra), and Aero (Aerora). First spells are basic, second with the -ra is much more powerful. In the higher tiers, they become area-of-effect spells (Firaga, Blizzaga, Thunderga, Waterga, Aeroga). This means at the low levels, he'd be tossing a magical fireball at an enemy, and at the high level, it'd be a small firestorm. Singular to Hope was an ability called Last Resort, which was a purely magical and non elemental based large scale AoE attack that could cut through all defenses to deal high damage.

The synergist class is based on buffing characters: it’s a support class. The spells include Protect and Shell (shields against physical and magical damage respectively), and Bravery and Faith (spells to increase physical and magical damage done to enemies), along with Haste to speed up attacks or casting. The rest of the spells in this class are ones to create resistance to elemental attacks (Barfire, Barfrost, Barthunder, Barwater) and ones to give an additional elemental damage to an ally’s weapon (Enfire, Enthunder, Enfrost, Enwater). The last spell in that class is Veil, which is protection against enemy debuffs.

His last and most important class is medic. As the title would suggest, that’s the healing role, which Hope quite excels at. Those spells include the basic Cure and then Cura (which is area of effect) as well as Esuna (which negates poisons and debuffs). Curasa and Curaja are the more powerful versions of the cure spell, able to heal more the more injured a character is. Last and most powerful of them all is Raise, which is able to resurrect a recently dead character and heal a portion of their wounds as well. This, I gather, is a little like non-magical resurrection in that there is a very limited time for it to work. The fun thing with magic in this canon is that it seems to work on everything-- you can as easily Raise a machine or a person, it really doesn't matter.

What is perhaps the most powerful ability he has is to summon his Eidolon, Alexander, who in contrast to Hope uses physical attacks and acts as sentinel while in the battlefield to ensure that he draws the fire away from Hope. Alexander may have the highest stats of all the Eidolons, but he also moves very slowly and is the only character in the entire game with access to Holy spells. Eidolons are quite protective of their summoners (such as Alexander using sentinel abilities purely to draw fire and keep Hope safe), and make sure to leave the battlefield with their summoners (plus the rest of the team) in full health, no matter how bad it had been before they were summoned. Alexander is also the only Eidolon who can not just carry his summoner away to safety; instead, he transforms into a fortress to defend against enemies so can also potentially be a blockade to protect a group of persons or area.

On the same vein as the ability to summon Eidolons is his one earth-based spell: Quake. It creates a small, localized earthquake that doesn't so much damage enemies as it does stagger them, and is a spell he can't use very often unlike his other spells (it's connected on the same bar that needs to refill when summoning).

Last but not least, though, is Hope’s actual inability to control his magic fully. He is the only character in-game who loses control of his magic because of his emotions— not once, but twice, so this may be quite a problem. Once, his magic reacted almost as a shockwave when he was upset, blasting everything away from him violently enough that Snow (6’7 mass of muscle) was shoved hard enough he actually broke through the metal railing behind him. The second time was detrimental only to Hope, when his despair reacted with his magic and he ended up in a near coma for a day.

Thing is, Hope has the highest magic in both his world and the world below. Maxed out, his magic stats pass 4000 while others linger around 1000. In fact, even in the sequel game, maxing out magic stats for magic oriented characters would have them hit about 1000. (The closest to his is Vanille, who hits above 3000 when she's maxed out.) Magic is... really something that he wields well (especially considering he's four times more powerful than what might be considered some of the most powerful magic users, hands down) and an integral part of him right now.

Sample Entry: Another game, although this the game developments have changed his voice sliiiiightly.
Sample Entry Two: Old game log about hospitals and being left behind. Or, you know, Darkness events?

Congratulations on being accepted, Hope Estheim. You will be living in apartment #2.003, and your tag is character: hope estheim. Please only use this tag when you are the poster of the entry or log, thank you.

Please make sure to complete the following:

-> Join havenrpg, havenooc and havenlogs.
-> Optionally join havenmemes, the Haven Meme community.
-> Fill out this form.
-> Fill out your details on the taken characters page.
-> Check out who you'll be sharing an apartment with on the apartment listings.
-> Introduce yourself in the OOC community.

THE GAME WILL OPEN ON FRIDAY 28TH SEPTEMBER
Please feel free to introduce yourself in the OOC community before then.

Due to a poll about tag use, your character tag is now to be used both when posting and commenting to entries.

Thank you.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Applications

Hope Estheim | Final Fantasy XIII | Reserved

continued

continued

-> ACCEPTED

-> NOTE