havenmods | Applications Two

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applications

Applications Two

APPLICATIONS ARE CLOSED!
The next application opening date is Friday 16th January, 7pm EST.
The next application processing date is Friday 23rd January, 7pm EST.

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 application round, 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. 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.

Applications are open on a monthly cycle, where they will be opened on the second Friday of every month for a week, and then processed on the third Friday of the month, before being closed again.

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. As of November 22nd 2014, samples cannot be "where am I" intro posts. The reason for this is that we often find it hard to gauge characterization from those, as most people when immediately in a new surrounding are confused or frightened.

While we encourage players who have dropped to re-join us, we do not encourage the continual rapid dropping and re-apping of the same character in a short time period. You are welcome to request specific housing, and all attempts will be made to accommodate that request, but it may not always be possible.

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)
Sample Application (Malkus Iverwelling)

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

The old application post can be found here if you would like to look through past accepted applications.

Applications will be open on the following dates (from 7pm EST):
12th-19th December
16th-23rd January

Applications will be processed on the following dates (at 7pm EST):
19th December
23rd January

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. Requested apartment: Please put N/A if you have no preference. 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/action bracket format, please. A link to a previous post or thread with the character is also acceptable. All links must be one year old or less. Samples submitted may not be in the form of a "where am I" intro, as these are hard to judge characterization from. All other scenarios are welcome. Sample Entry Two: At least two paragraphs in third person/prose format, please. A link to a previous log or thread with the character is also acceptable. All links must be one year old or less. Samples submitted may not be in the form of a "where am I" intro, as these are hard to judge characterization from. All other scenarios are welcome.

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. Requested apartment: Please put N/A if you have no preference. 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/action bracket format, please. A link to a previous post or thread under a year old with the character is also acceptable. All links must be one year old or less. Samples submitted may not be in the form of a "where am I" intro, as these are hard to judge characterization from. All other scenarios are welcome. Sample Entry Two: At least two paragraphs in third person/prose format, please. A link to a previous log or thread with the character is also acceptable. All links must be one year old or less. Samples submitted may not be in the form of a "where am I" intro, as these are hard to judge characterization from. All other scenarios are welcome.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

APPLICATIONS ARE NOW OPEN.
ALL APPLICATIONS WILL BE PROCESSED ON JUNE 20TH AT 7PM EST.
RESERVES EXPIRE ON SUNDAY 15TH JUNE AT 7PM EST.

Let's start this off with a content warning for cannibalism: though he doesn't particularly enjoy it, Tony is frequently made to eat human flesh (both fresh and remains), and all of that is addressed throughout his series and will be brought up in this app. Bon appetit.

Name: Danni
Contact Info:

reenact, purewhiteglastonbury@gmail.com, khajixda @ AIM
Other Characters Played: Also apping in Travis Touchdown.
Preferred Apartment: none!

Character Name: Tony Chu
Canon: Chew
Canon Point: Chew #40
Background/History: Comic Vine | Wikipedia | Setting from a previous app

Edited (threading it so the app page is easier to read) 2014-06-13 23:03 (UTC)

Personality: (headcanon is marked in red!)

First and foremost, Tony Chu’s most obvious trait is that he is a good cop. Not just a good cop-- THE good cop. Straight-laced, a stickler to the rules, and intolerant of crime to the point of inconvenience, he's almost too textbook good to be convenient or flexible. Only when another person pushes him out of his comfort zone as a law-abiding, rule-following officer-- or in times of extreme distress-- does he allow himself to move outside of the select boundaries. (Watch Tony with John Colby, and the full effect of the good cop-bad cop duo shows clearly.) This isn't to say that he's a poor cop, however. He's simply an idealistic man with a deep dedication to the system—to the way that things “should” work—despite all its failings. As an officer of the law, he doesn't tend to act for his own interests: he's legitimately a guy working to do good for the sake of justice itself. However, as Tony’s unhappily discovered, it takes a lot more than willpower to make the law work for one’s own benefit, and even then, it doesn’t always prevail. Under-appreciated, often disrespected, and just a little bit bitter about how his job doesn’t always make any progress worth mentioning at all, Tony’s typically an unhappy person. Or at least vaguely dissatisfied. Working with the rules as he's obligated himself to do, he doesn't always tend to see justice done in a timely fashion, if at all-- his lawful good idealism is rarely satisfied pushing papers and sifting through old cases.

Which means that, predictably, Tony is one hell of a workhorse. His job is often thankless, he’s pushed around and belittled by a boss that hates him, frequently gets beat up and/or forced to eat terrible things, doesn’t always succeed or get the lead he wants… but despite it all, Tony keeps going. It’s for the sake of finding the truth and exposing/catching criminals as much as it is for never giving up a lead or leaving something he’s started unfinished. He’s persistent to a fault, and he makes it a rule to see all things through to an end, even when the process itself isn't something that makes him all that happy.

This isn’t a good thing all the way around, though. Tony’s a far better cop than he is a parent, a friend, or a sibling. Turns out, throwing yourself fully into work makes it very difficult to socialize or maintain personal relationships! Which is exactly what he wants. The majority of his family either dislikes him or doesn’t care enough to have an opinion on him, and the closest thing Tony has to a friend in canon is Colby, who was assigned to hang around him for the better part of a decade and some change anyway. He’s always been a rather prickly person, but after the death of his wife Min, which is described as the “greatest loss of his life” Tony found fully opening up emotionally to others difficult, and to this day he still hasn’t completely gotten over the death of his first love. (He keeps her toe in the freezer for Reasons. Don’t worry, she gave it to him, and they’re actual and slightly less creepy reasons.) The “things [he had] to work through” after Min’s death are never truly resolved; he distances himself from his family; he lets his older sister Rosemary raise his daughter Olive instead of stepping forward himself. In the end, it’s a hell of a lot easier to bust criminals than to deal with your emotions. Sticking to work over his personal life allows him to avoid having to resolve his problems in the most productive way possible. On the opposite end, though, turning this distant nature into a habit has created the least useful result ever: Tony now takes his loved ones for granted, with the exception of Amelia (as he’s still pretty head-over-heels for her) and a partial-exception for Colby (who keeps getting seriously injured/put in mortal peril for Tony’s sake). He cares about his folks and partner, of course, but he’s gotten more-or-less complacent. Of course nothing will happen to his family again. He’s already lost once, and it seems like they’ve been there and okay forever, so of course they will be there forever—right? (Then his sister dies and everything goes to hell, but that’s later.)

Continuing on his personal life, a whole lot of the bitterness that Tony feels in general stems from his childhood. He's by far the unfavorite amongst his family, having been bullied and teased for most of his childhood (and, well, adulthood) by his older brother Chow. The only people who actively seem to like him are his mother and twin sister Toni. As a particularly geeky preteen and teen with noticeably weird dietary habits (beets, beets, and more beets, thanks to his power), he was also teased at school in his youth, leading him to become a rather verbally defensive person. Until he figured out how to defend himself properly with a weedier frame, it was really all he could put forward to protect himself. Tony never forgets an injustice, and as such, holds grudges easily. (The only exception to this seems to be his partner Colby: over ten years is a long time to spend with someone you can't at least learn to tolerate.) He's quick to take offense or to get annoyed, and he's equally quick to sharpness or sarcasm.

On the other end of the spectrum, Tony is also quick to attach himself to people who treat him well or with some measure of respect. This is how he fell for Min, his high school sweetheart, and for his current girlfriend Amelia, as well as why he trusts his partner John so much: people who treat Tony as anything more than a freak of nature due to his powers are few and far between. (Even if they’re like John, where “treating him normally” means including him in the “indiscriminately be a dick to everyone” umbrella while only sometimes complaining about his weird food powers.) In spite of his bad attitude, if he feels comfortable-- himself-- around someone, it won’t take long for him to deem them a friend. And once this happens, he offers them a rare loyalty and dedication: not quite as much as work, of course, but still.

Abilities/Powers: Tony Chu was part of the Philadelphia Police Department for over ten years and has been an agent of the F.D.A. special crimes division for several months; as such, he can use a gun, is clever enough to help solve frequent criminal cases, and is physically fit enough to hold his own in a fight. But Tony really shines in his innate ability:cibopathy.

Like the scan says, Tony Chu is a powerful cibopath, and receives psychic readings of the history of anything he ingests. This includes where plants were harvested, how meat was slaughtered, and, should he be made to eat part of a person's body, flashes of their memories and experiences. More recent memories are favored, and more that he eats, the more that he learns. For example, a bit of an unconscious John Colby's blood on his tongue showed Tony who knocked Colby out and how. The blood of a serial killer spilled into his soup showed Tony the names and fates of the man's two recent victims and jumbled knowledge of eleven others; then several bites off his face gave Tony the names, fates, and locations of all thirteen of his victims. If the flesh eaten is not in good condition, the reading will be affected--cremated human ashes gave Tony only a couple strong impressions, with an overwhelming memory of fire. The only food exempt from Tony's cibopathy is beets, for an inexplicable reason.

Cibopaths are also capable of absorbing the abilities of people whose flesh they eat. Thus far, he's used this ability to absorb not only basic human abilities (learning how to pitch, becoming double-jointed) but also cibo-abilities (sculpting sharp weapons out of tortillas, etc). I assume that this will apply to cross-canon abilities, though I will use it with discretion and set up a permissions post for it (as well as um JUST GENERALLY FOR EATING PEOPLE YKNOW).

Items/Weapons: His prosthetic ear, his FDA-issue gun (with a fair amount of ammo), and his FDA badge.

Sample Entry: STOP THIEF
Sample Entry Two:

Another day at work in the F.D.A., another bland lunch of beet salad.

He'd been eating the stuff for years-- since he'd discovered their amazing not-delivering-horrible-visions properties, he'd eaten almost nothing else-- so eating them was about as much routine as brushing his teeth or putting his shoes on in the morning. But it was hard to admit on most days that he really liked them, or even did more than vaguely tolerate them. He was human, wasn't he? And what kind of person didn't like the taste of a good steak (sans flashes of cow slaughter, bloodletting, fire and pain and death)?

Tony prodded at one of the ugly sickly purple discs with his fork. It was funny, really. If he were more poetic of a person, he'd think up some complex metaphor for the beets and his life. But that wasn't his thing. Writing was more Amelia's place, really, so he wouldn't even bother.

Across his desk, however, lay a small box containing something that was even less appetizing. Some poor sucker across town killed by a-- what was it? An exploding hamburger, or something. Applebee, generous soul that he was, had managed to acquire some, er, evidence from the scene, and he was to report back with the results as soon as he'd 'worked up the stones to choke down that damn corpse's thumb, Chu, so help me God, or I will fire you'.

Reluctantly, he set down his fork, and reached for the box. If he was going to be miserable, he may as well be functionally miserable, right?

Across the way, Applebee, sitting at his desk, grinned, angelic.

God, he hated this job.

this is a reapp, and i'm keeping my old cr!! c:

Name: Danni
Contact Info:

reenact, purewhiteglastonbury@gmail.com, khajixda @ AIM (in order of priority)
Other Characters Played: Also apping in Tony Chu!
Requested apartment: 1.1

Character Name: Travis Touchdown
Canon: No More Heroes
Canon Point: post-NMH2, pre-epilogue + previous Haven CR
Background/History: whatever happened to the heroes?

Name: linda
Contact Info: whyhotmailwhy@gmail.com | Pb2Ag (AIM)
Other Characters Played: n/a
Requested apartment: n/a

Character Name: Joseph "Jojo" Joestar
Canon: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency
Canon Point: end of Chapter 112, volume 12: The Phenomenal Power of the Red Stone
Background/History: Wikipedia and the JoJo Wikia

Personality:

Out of all the Joestar line, Joseph is literally the most ridiculous. While the situations he faces and the people he meets are pretty damn strange (and usually named after classic rock references), throughout the whole bizarre adventure, Joseph is probably one of the most bizarre characters encountered by the reader. He's a man of paradoxical extremes-- incredibly self-oriented, but all his strategies are based on understanding others better than they understand themselves; endlessly rash and impulsive (everything's DO OR DIE), but always thinking ahead five, six, seven steps; the ultimate trickster, but genuine with his feelings. And he's loud, too. Since this is a personality section of an application, I'm going to break down each of these points ad nauseam or at least until you start hating me for all the tl;dr. pls dont hate me weeps gently onto haven

Alright, let's start with the paradox between his self-orientation and his understanding of others. Prior to the start of the story, Joseph has, like, no friends whatsoever. Not because he's some kinda shut in or anti social whatever. It's because he's straight up a punk. He's rude, he's sassy, and he always has to comment on the situation at hand, even if it starts fights or gets him arrested... a lot. He picks fights and starts fights and finishes 'em in the same breath, all while using his inherited Ripple power for everything it was never intended for. If he knows someone's hunting him down, he still goes about his business, even if it means getting attacked by an immortal vampire while in a busy diner with a friend (where the potential for causalities is high). This isn't because he wants other people to get hurt. It's because the idea that others might get caught up in the fight never crosses his mind. It seems like the only people he's ever cared for in his life previous to the story's start are his grandmother Erina and his "uncle" Speedwagon. If anything upsets them or hurts them (emotionally or otherwise), he does a backwards pirouette flip right off the handle before landing a perfect ten with his fist in the threat's face and wins the Beijing Olympics. The Beijing Olympics then begins an investigation into steroid use because he's just too damn good at it. As a kid, even when terrorists attempted to kidnap and ransom Speedwagon, Joseph didn't give a fuck until one of them ruined his shirt that Erina gave him. His response was to immediately crash the plane and steal the only parachutes for himself, Speedwagon, and the Speedwagon Foundation pilot. When a member of one of New York's gang leaders told Erina and Joseph of Speedwagon's supposed death in Mexico, Joseph beat the shit out of him for upsetting Erina. This was right before Joseph took off on his motorcycle to Mexico to see what the hell happened to Speedwagon. Later, during his first fight against Wham, Joseph willingly used himself as a distraction so that Caesar could get Speedwagon to safety. He has a very small set of people that he cares a lot for, and everyone else is free game to sass and harass-- however, even those in that small circle of friends and family aren't safe from his bullshit. Time and time again, he unknowingly stomps all over people's emotions, and while he genuinely regrets doing so, at the time it happens, he has no clue. Pretty much anything he ever says to Lisa Lisa when he's not insanely impressed with her and her strength is atrocious. Especially when we consider the fact that she's his mom (which hes not aware of at the time sob). At one point, Joseph gets in an argument with Caesar over fulfilling their family legacies-- Joseph doesn't give a crap about old dead guys and what they might have wanted out of life, but Caesar's Zeppeli legacy is his driving force. After listening to Joseph shit all over family lineages, Caesar charges off to fight Cars alone and dies when he encounters Wham. Whoops. It was only after Lisa Lisa explained Caesar's backstory that Joseph realized he done hecked up-- it wasn't because when Joseph first started running his mouth, and Caesar got angry. It was because someone had to sit down and say "Joseph, that hurt his feelings and this is why."

So we've gone over what an emotional fuckwit Joseph can be, but remember: he's also a one man absurdist reality. Almost every situation he's in, almost every conversation he has, he's endlessly predicting what the other will do or say next, and he's doing it with some crazy accuracy. One of his favorite things to do is outright say, "THE NEXT THING YOU'LL SAY IS... [whatever the person is going to say next]" just to fuck with people. It works in two ways-- 1) it shows that he understands the other person and their mentality, and 2) it's a damn fine way to throw off his opponents (and he knows it). He's observant of other people and their actions to an almost obsessive degree, kinda like Sherlock Holmes if Sherlock were a loudmouthed asshole and didn't care about solving crimes. He can tell where you've been, what you were doing, and that you've mistakenly misplaced your brass knuckles in the wrong pocket just by the stains on your jacket. He can also set up a clever trap, know you'll outsmart that trap, and have another, massive overarching trap ready to snatch you up the moment you outsmart his first one. The perfect example of this is during his fight against AC/DC-- Joseph subtly unwound the fabric of his wool hat to create a net, but tied it in such an elaborate way, so that while AC/DC realized that Joseph was setting up a Ripple barrier using the thread, when AC/DC cut the thread, the barrier still stood. Joseph predicted that AC/DC was sharp enough to notice his subtle administrations and rapidly diminishing hat, and he played off that. Other examples include his final fight with Wham-- while Wham was sucking in air to create a wind knife (shut up it happens omg), Joseph threw a vial of oil with a burning wick. He knew Wham would destroy it, which he did, so right after, Joseph threw Caesar's burning headband. Yet again, he knew Wham would tear it up, but because he inhaled and vaporized the oil from the original bomb and inhaled the burning pieces of Caesar's headband, Wham was toast... if toast exploded and became a disembodied head in the toaster. All of these situations are examples of how Joseph waits for people to let their guard down-- he observes, understands them, their actions, and their mentalities, and then takes advantages of any mistakes they make or any point where they underestimate him.

While Joseph might not be the most academically oriented of characters, he knows the Art of War by heart and lives that shit every goddamn day. Sun Tzu is his forever boy, and because of that, Joseph won't start a fight or accept a challenge unless he already knows he can win or he's forced into it. He'll use anything and everything to gain the upperhand in fighting and in life, even if it's something considered unfair or not honorable. When Speedwagon is presumed dead while investigating the Stone Masks, Joseph knows whoever did it will come after him next and prepares accordingly-- by hiding a ridiculous sum of grenades and a tommy gun on his person. In the end, what eventually saves him in his fight against Straits were shot glasses he picked up in the bar where the fight began. Conversely, if he doesn't really know what's up with a situation, he'll wait before acting-- either stalling for time or just fucking around. When he meets the first Pillar Man (Santana) in Mexico, his first response isn't to fight, despite the dozen or so dead Nazis on the ground around Santana. Joseph's first reaction is to try and chat Santana up, claiming that he doesn't know if Santana's an enemy or not. In actuality, that's total bull. He knows that he's going to have to fight his way out of the Nazi military compound to save Speedwagon, but his little song and friendship attempts with Santana are entirely to buy time to 1) get more of a reading on Santana, and 2) come up with a plan of attack with the priority of getting Speedwagon the fuck outta there. In fact, Joseph doesn't really care much about fighting Santana until Stroheim (the only surviving Nazi) tells Joseph that Santana's a huuuuuuugeass threat to the surrounding population and Santana attacks Speedwagon. In the end, it's not his strength or Ripple power that saves him-- it's remembering where the sun is at noon near the equator and how a well with the sun directly overhead will reflect sunlight. It's taking advantage of his surroundings and his opponent's mistakes.

First paradox down, slam bam thank u ma'am. Let's get on the floor, and let's move on the to next: his rash attitude towards life and his endless calculation.

Joseph is a rash guy. He's the type of guy who says what's on his mind whenever it's on his mind, fuck mental filters. He's always running his mouth, no matter how serious the situation, and he's always loud about it. He's gonna hit on a girl if he sees her (even if he just nearly died while fighting AC/DC), he's gonna peep on his magical kung fu master when she's in the bath, and he's going to massively regret peeping on his magical kung fu master when she's in the bath after he finds out that she's his mom. He marries a girl he only knew for a month and sticks with her his whole life. His temper is ridiculous, especially against insults to his intelligence, and often causes him to just do dumb shit. For example, you're in a room with 200 vampires and one of them calls you dumb. Your options are a) get the fuck outta there bro, b) ignore it and focus on the two nearly naked Aztec vampire gods threatening your life, c) cry more crying will help, d) call that one vampire out and tell 199 of his best vampire Nazi buddies to keep out of it. Spoiler warning: Joseph chose d.

In fights, too, he'll come up with rash, last minute plans. Once Caesar gets to know him and they're BFFS 4LYFE, Caesar explains that when confronted with a trying situation, Joseph's probably going to come up with some ridiculous DO OR DIE solution. In this case, he used a long string of falling icicles to create a rope and not die when falling off a cliff. Caesar, unlike pretty much any sane person ever, effectively predicted that Joseph would do something so brilliantly dumb and ended up saving Joseph's ass because of it. If success means crashing a plane he hijacked from the Nazis into a volcano to kill PETA's biggest fan (who also happens to also be the ultimate being) (im talkin about Cars here), then sure why not what a great plan. Later launch yourself and PETA's biggest fan into space using the volcano? Yeah, cool. Did you plan any of this? Kinda maybe sorta not really. If anyone asks? Totally all according to plan. Even as an old man in his 80s during part four, he still forms his plans in much the same way. Slitting your wrists to taint clear water to find an invisible baby? Brilliant, A+, very nice.

Joseph is also the world's luckiest man (move the fuck over, DIO). Because his plans are so ridiculous and because he's the quintessential example of 'putting all your eggs in one basket,' it's a lot of luck and good fortune that carries him through. Without Caesar to predict that Joseph would use the icicles, Joseph would be dead. Without Wham blinding himself, he wouldn't have been able to use Caesar's headband to carry fire into his body. It was lucky that he picked up the Red Stone of Aja during his fight against Cars, and it was lucky that Stroheim hid away on the Nazi plane Joseph hijacked. In the end, it was lucky that Suzie Q was the one who found him after the volcano eruption. Luck carries a lot of his plans through to the end, but there are plenty of them that are just so blatantly dumb, and it's so obvious Joseph thinks they're smart-- it's embarrassing (dressing up as a ridiculously buff woman delivering tequila to Nazis in Mexico, for example). But hey, he says that luck's nothing but applied talent, you know. He's either being impressively brilliant or absolutely fucking dumb, nothing in between.

The important thing to note is that in life, he doesn't focus so much on the consequences as he does on the winning. At the end of the fight, he doesn't calculate whether or not he'll be alive or what loses there might be-- instead, he just focuses on the end goal of winning. Which can get him in a lot of trouble, as you can imagine.

Conversely, though, he calculates. Remember all that Sun Tzu shit from above and his observations of others? That's still a thing, even when he's not thinking about his own morality during a fight, you can sure as hell bet he's thinking of his opponent's and how to best exploit it. He'd be damn good at chess if he ever had the patience for it, and his endless calculations are probably why, after the events of Battle Tendency (part two), he goes to New York and becomes a ridiculously successful real estate agent. He's good at it, and he knows it, so when his calculations are wrong or he fucks up, it throws him way off. The important thing to note, though, is that his calculations and observations are based outward, not inward. He rarely self critiques, rarely reflects on his own thoughts and actions-- basically the exact opposite of what I'm doing here. The few times he does, he simply says "worrying won't do me any good now," and promptly focuses on everything else and not himself. All his calculations are based on his outward surroundings, and he always uses his observations and calculations in his rash, DO OR DIE plans.

ok we're almost done i will hold your hand for this last part my dear friends

As you might have guessed above, Joseph is the reigning king, queen, and several heirs of Bullshit. He is the bullshit master when it comes to solutions or fighting, but he's also the bullshit master in life in general. Like a street magician, everything he does relies on trickery and lying through his teeth. He's rash, he's clever, and he knows it-- so he's flashy too. Which is also why he absolutely refuses to take anything seriously. Even after crying and screaming over Caesar's death, he's still able to make smartass comments about the vampires he encounters soon after. Even after losing a hand and launching himself and Cars into space, he still finds time to tell Cars that he planned it all, from start to finish, even if that's the biggest lie that was ever told by anyone ever. When Straits grabs a hostage and threatens to kill her if Joseph doesn't keep running away, Joseph's first response is "why the hell should I care? I don't know her!"

But here's where it's interesting... because he does care and he's genuine about it. See, there's a pesky thing that all JoJos have that was inherited from Jonathan-- they are selfless. Remember all the stuff about how Joseph is self-oriented, but not internally perceptive? It doesn't mean he's selfish. It means he's careless, sure. But when given the opportunity, he does and will care about others and their safety. Because right after Straits threatens the woman and then calls Joseph on his "i dont give a fux" bluff, Joseph gets his ass up there to kick Straits straight out of immortality. It's why he can't kill Suzie Q who's possessed by AC/DC or why he gets upset when he watches Wham kill a friendly Nazi solider (never thought I'd ever use that description ever).

Embracing this Joestar legacy is Joseph's own personal character arc throughout Battle Tendency. He kinda picks up on it after watching Straits, Stroheim, and AC/DC die, but it's really through the argument with Caesar and his friend's subsequent death that Joseph really understands the importance of legacy and the difficulty of carrying the duties of, not only, one's own family, but also of friends who are lost along the way. Joseph has empathy, but Caesar's loss also teaches him you can't just whisper "fuck off" to your past and backflip away, even if that past involves people doing shit from before you were born. Before this point, Joseph was just training to fight Wham and AC/DC to save his own life. After this point, Joseph was fighting for the whole world-- he knew that if he lost, everything that Jonathan and the entire Zeppeli family had done would be for nothing, because wow, immortal unstoppable mostly-naked Aztec vampires running amok is bad news bears. Not just for himself, but for the world as a whole. At last, he understands that. Ironically enough, this understanding of legacy and pride in that legacy is what forges the twenty second friendship between Wham and Joseph as Wham dies. Joseph has respect for Wham's legacy, even if it was a honorable shitty Aztec vampire one.

So basically, tl;dr: Joseph's a man of extremes and paradoxes wrapped in a thick layer of dick.

Abilities/Powers:

Joseph is built like a goddamn tank. He's six foot four and weighs over two hundred pounds of pure muscle. He's strong-- strong enough to carry ridiculously huge hammers that are his height to beat the shit out of people with them. But his size isn't the most dangerous thing about him-- it's his smarts. He fights dirty, and he'll use any and every advantage available (hell, he'll use disadvantages too) to win. His bullshit abilities are on par with the best of college procrastinators and would put any senior's senioritis to shame. Usually, these types of things don't really count as "powers" or "abilities" and more as "personality traits," but Joseph's bullshitting is so outside the realm of reasonable bullshit, it should be noted at the very least.

On top of being a literal macho god, Joseph knows kung fu magic shit. In canon, it's called the Ripple, and it's the manifestation of the sun's energy channeled through well-trained breathing techniques. The Ripple itself travels like actual ripples- in that it can easily pass through objects to hit an intended target (like a wall or a frog) and it can be amplified in certain mediums (like water or oil). Objects, living or inanimate, can also be charged with Ripple energy and used as weapons. Things like swords, pigeons, clackers, people, hair, and spaghetti are free game as Ripple weapons. It was a style of fighting originally created to combat vampires, because hey, you don't need to wait for the sun to rise when you can put the sun in your hand and punch the crap out of some undead punks while posing with your ass in the air. If the Ripple is powerful enough, it can liquefy human flesh, but it's mostly effective against the undead and idk i guess people who are allergic to the sun too.

Using the Ripple takes years of training, and because Joseph has only had about a month of some hardcore serious training, even with his latent Ripple abilities, he's no where near the strongest Ripple user in the series (his mom is whoops). Joseph lacks the finesse and control that most Ripple users have, and even by the end of the series, his techniques are lacking. He relies less on the Ripple than he does on his bullshit capabilities, but even when he does use the Ripple, it's usually for secondary assistance to his attacks, rather than the primary attack itself. For example, one of the biggest blows Wham takes isn't directly from the Ripple-- it's from an iron ball from a crossbow coated in the Ripple.

Powerful attacks infused with Ripple energies are typically called "Overdrives," and when combined with other elements (like water or steel), these attacks are given super anime names relating to the element. In canon, Joseph usually either conducts the Ripple through steel or through his own body, which means all his special Overdrive attacks have super boring names, like "Ripple Overdrive" and "Rebuff Overdrive" when he knees a guy in the face. Yet again, he usually uses these big Overdrive attacks as kinda a double-tap method-- like when you shoot a zombie in the head twice to make sure it's dead.

People who are trained in the Ripple will heal faster than those who aren't (as well as age much slower) and have the capabilities to heal others' wounds too. Joseph fucking sucks at the Ripple, so while he'll heal faster, he can't do shit for anyone else.

A huge weakness of the Ripple is that you have to be breathing to use it. Not just alive, but breathing. Deep, steady breaths. Since it's entirely based on well-trained breathing techniques, the weaker or more erratic your breathing, the weaker your Ripple powers are. For example, if I could use the Ripple and ran a mile, and hypothetically I didn't die from that egregious physical activity, my Ripple powers would still be shit because I would be gasping for breath like a victim on the first five minutes of a Criminal Minds episode. Early on in the series, this is a huge problem for Joseph. Because he goes all out all the time, he wears himself out quick. By the time he starts his final fight with Cars, Joseph's wounded and worn out-- the Ripples he produces are as weak as my new year resolution to stop eating so many Oreos was.

Honestly, though, if there's no undead threat in Haven (or if Joseph doesn't think there's one), he'll probably lay off the Ripple training and slowly become worse and worse at it.

It shouldn't be an issue in Haven, but it should also be noted that planes are allergic to Joseph Joestar. By the end of Stardust Crusaders (part 3), his plane crash count is four, his shipwreck count is one and a halfish, his submarine crash count is one, and his car crash count is incomprehensible to the human mind.

Finally, his ultimate power... his absolutely most secret and cherished technique... The greatest Joestar skill that Joseph invents and later passes down the family line. His legacy: running away. No one can ever hope to beat Joseph in running away. He is, indisputably, the champion of this art. If it means playing dead and scooting away to a mine cart when his enemy's back is turned, he'll do it. If it means hijacking a Nazi plane and flying from Switzerland to Italy, he'll fuckin' do it.

Items/Weapons: Nothing-- by his canon point, he's used up everything he had with him.

Personality:
To be perfectly blunt, Travis Touchdown is an asshole; a jerk, a douchebag. That one guy--you know, the shifty guy who hangs around the hentai aisle in the video store, wearing the gross cheap cologne and ogling the tentacle porn. He’s an irreconcilable pervert and the most embarrassing sort of geek there can ever be: i.e., utterly shameless. His motivations are largely based on what’s the most fun for him and what he wants. (This also includes propositioning anything with a pair of boobs.) Travis is selfish, rude, violent, and vulgar--he also takes a lot of enjoyment out of acting out and being a general nuisance. Half of this is because he’s really just that socially ignorant, but the other is because he enjoys any attention he can get, even if it is negative.

However, as obnoxious as he is, he isn’t a completely awful person. Travis once had an extremely childish view of the world, going on what was basically a fruitless killing spree based on some far-flung revenge plot, a death wish, and the desire to screw a hot Ukrainian/Japanese/French chick. But he's matured a great deal over the course of his games. He tends to think of himself first, true, but he does sympathize with others and understand their feelings and emotions. He can recognize pain; he’s capable of mercy and shies away from hurting the innocent. This has an especially big effect on the way that he fights. Though he is an assassin, when Travis fights, he fights fairly, no matter who he’s up against. Additionally, he’s seen to get more and more disgusted with the depravity of the UAA as time goes on, even showing some degree of remorse for his actions. By the second game he's completely acknowledged that the gladiatorial nature of the UAA's game is a horrible, horrible thing. He says it to Sylvia himself in the second to last battle of NMH2:

"We humans are alive, even if we are assassins! It doesn't matter if its a videogame, movie, drama, anime, manga! We're alive! People shed blood and die. This isn't a game! You can't just selfishly use death as your tool!"

Though he is an assassin, he only kills when it is completely necessary: he views all fights as a test of strength: something truly honorable. He detests murder without a cause and respects his opponents, especially if they're a good match for him. Thus, by the end of his tenure with the UAA he's gone from vengeance and joy killings to a genuine desire to topple an organization that's treated so many lives like so much cheap entertainment. Particularly when these were the lives of people he respected--fellow assassins who fought hard, only to be caught in a never-ending cycle of violence. In short, Travis really does see value in the lives of others, and if he doesn't have a good reason to kill a person, he won't.

The pain of the deaths of his loved ones (his parents' murder many years ago by his sister Jeane, his battle to the death with that sister three years ago, and his best friend Bishop's recent murder) has still shaken him and made him occasionally awkward or naive in social situations. This also applies to romantic relationships: he talks a big game, but most of his experience comes from porn tapes and hentai. He's been betrayed before and can be hesitant to trust others as a result, so it takes a lot of work to get past his angry otaku exterior. When he does open up and befriend someone, though, he is very loyal and will do his utmost to protect them. He was also once unable to kill women--something he's now overcome--but he still maintains his own strange form of chivalry. Though he flirts like nobody’s business, he won't make a move unless prompted, and even then, if it feels wrong (e.g. the girl is crazy or too young), he won't go with it. Basically, he tries to refrain from hurting women he isn't assigned to fight, and doesn't mack on the underage. He also refuses to kill children (except for the one that was actually a ghost, but that was different) and has previously spared assassins who he believed were too young.

At times, he seems to be gullible or naive, initially falling for the traps that every opponent sets for him--and really, it takes a very special kind of person to pick up scorpions with a set of tongs, put them in an OPEN container on your back, and then bend over to pick up more scorpions. He leaps into bad situations without a thought for consequences, and is easily manipulated by a nice rack and a pretty face (thanks a lot, Sylvia). But on other occasions, he displays a clever streak, especially when he's fighting: he'll study an opponent's style and learn their weak points quickly enough to take them down. He even waxes poetic from time to time, usually when he's made to question his own philosophies. And, in the end, he’s at least persistent; it’ll take a lot to dissuade Travis from a goal he’s set for himself, for better or for worse.

Though Travis eventually faces his dark past, he can't completely put it behind him--there's still a picture of Jeane (his first love, half-sister, and the murderer of his parents) in his house, though the face is scribbled out. He is a man filled with a lot of pain and a lot of regrets behind a seemingly shallow front. He won't admit it to anyone, not even himself, but the guilt is always there and constantly gnawing at him. He's caught in a vicious cycle of his own making: by refusing to completely reconcile with his past and move on with his life, he tries to find distraction and solace in assassination, and when things go wrong and he isn't sure what else to do, he continues to kill and find different ways to shift blame for his problems away from himself. The assassination business was a way out, and a self-destructive one at that.

In the end, true to the game’s title, Travis Touchdown is anything but a hero. However...what matters now is that he is at least somewhat aware of these personal flaws. He's had time to think about things. Even if he doesn't stop killing, he's still taking it more seriously. He knows all too well how badly it hurts to lose someone, and he'll do anything for the few loved ones he's got left. But most importantly, he wants to actually start doing things right and turning things around for himself. He wants to be a hero. He even says it himself.

"I want to be a hero, by my own standards."

Long story short, Travis has grown from a near villain protagonist to a jerk with a heart of gold. He's still got a slightly...unique view of right and wrong, however, and he's still not an entirely emotionally mature individual. Though he's still got a very long way to go before he can truly become a good guy--if he can ever become a "good guy" at all--he's on his way there.

Sample Entry:

[ Video post. Enjoy the image of a man's ear. It's pretty gross, i'm so sorry. ]

Hello, hello! Can you hear me? Come on, speak up!

[ Joseph shouts into the phone like an old man who has several hearing aids and uses none of them. At least he pauses for a few moments waiting for an answer before continuing his vocal onslaught. ]

HELLO? Did I actually break it? Incredible-- oh? Huh?

[ Another pause while a roommate explains the concept of 'posts' to him. ]

Yeah, yeah, whatever. So I have to wait for responses. Boring. I'll just continue to soothe you all with the melodic baritone of my sexy, manly voice until I hear back from you then. Ooooooooooooooooh-- so sexy, sexy! Hehehe!

But seriously, though, I've got a legitimate question-- give me a second, hold on. [ He starts fumbling with the phone; the camera angles created would put the movie Gravity to shame. Joseph gives a little wink to the camera (which is upside down) before aiming it at his stump of a left hand. ]

Think I can find a replacement for this? Hell, anyone got any ideas? I'm not that picky at this point. I'll whatever you've got! Unles---

[ whoops accidentally switches off the phone ]

Sample Entry Two:

The first thing Joseph discovered about Haven was that the "phones" were indestructible. They weren't really phones, not like what Joseph was used to, but hey, he's no Luddite-- technology changing is a thing that happens, and he can roll with it, even if the technological gap he's experiencing is a leap of half a century or so. No big deal. It's pretty neat, actually; the light-up screen makes it a small, but powerful flashlight. Something useful for a horror setting, you know. But there's no way to input numbers, and his roommates have insisted that there's no way to contact his grandma, even if he shouts the numbers in alphabetical order while attempting to punt it across the room. He decided to try it anyways. Unsurprisingly, it didn't work. Nor did dropping it off every building Joseph could find, trying to feed it to several monsters, or setting it on fire.

Useless phone, but an indestructible flashlight. Cool.

So, there's no one to call, no one he really cares to speak to, and none of the pictures of the girls he can contact are particularly cute. Which means Joseph does the only thing he really can do: he ties the phone to his fucking hand and creates a brand new unbreakable pair of brass knuckles. It's a bit annoying with its glow, but Jojo's pretty sure he can work it to his advantage somehow. Maybe a sudden blinder before a punch to the face? No, no, they'll see that coming. Too obvious. Better yet, how about a blinding movie where they expect a punch to the face to follow, but end up with a knee to the gut instead? It's a little basic, and it would really depend on the opponent, but hey, Joseph's an adaptive man. It's good to have standard moves ready to roll and ready to change as opposed to having to come up with that shit on the spot. Besides, as brass knuckles, it's way more useful than it could ever be as a phone.

Name: Heather
Contact Info: heather.roleplays [@] gmail.com &

heatherberry
Other Characters Played: N/A
Requested apartment: N/A

Character Name: William "Bill" Oswalt
Canon: Fargo (TV)
Canon Point: Episode 9, "A Fox, A Rabbit, and A Cabbage"
Background/History:

(SPOILER WARNING) Here, but since that's a Wikipedia entry about the whole show, I'd like to focus it a bit more: Bill is from the small and normal Midwestern town of Bemidji, Minnesota, where things were, for the most part, quiet — up until January of 2006, when people started getting killed and the town almost went to Hell in a handbasket courtesy of a mysterious out-of-towner and a local man who decided he'd had enough of being treated like dirt. Aside from the fact that said out-of-towner may literally be the Devil, there is nothing supernatural about Bill's world save for some instances of strange coincidence.

Personality:

Not too long ago, Bemidji's former (now late) Chief of Police said of Bill Oswalt, "Bill cleans his gun with bubble bath." Though the truth of this statement is never revealed, it's... likely. Maybe.

Bill's a Good Guy. Senior police deputy turned Chief, Bill loves his job and the town he serves (which he's lived in almost all his life) and has a very Midwestern attitude about things: He believes in community, in faith, in government, and in Right and Wrong. He wants nothing but the best for the citizens of Bemidji and as their Chief tries hard to keep things in order, to keep things calm, and to keep everyone happy. He's thoughtful and sensitive, a little bit goofy, and those traits show in how he interacts with and cares for his colleagues — limited though those interactions may be, since Bill doesn't have all that much screen time.

He's also a family man. Bill has a wife, Sally, whom we don't see, but we do meet his and Sally's foster son, Tahir, who is from Sudan. There's no implication that he and Sally have other children, and when Bill relays the story of how he literally found Tahir in a supermarket after there had been some kind of mix-up with what sounds like the adoption agency.

But his emotions can get the better of him in that they sometimes blind him. When his childhood friend, Lester Nygaard, becomes a suspect in his wife's murder as well as the murder of the former Chief of Police, Bill almost flat-out rejects the notion. This is what clouds his judgment throughout the rest of the series, as he continually actively denies that Lester could have had any involvement because, as he said, "Lester wouldn't hurt a fly." However, later on, Lester is brought into questioning when his young nephew was taken into custody for bringing a gun to school (which Lester had actually planted in his backpack, thinking the backpack belonged to his brother — not his brother's son), and Bill is visibly upset and shaken by the events that have transpired since the first episode. He says:
"I don't even know where to start. It's like, when you see on the news, a boat sinks in India and three hundred people drown and you ask yourself, 'Do I know three hundred people?' or — one of those African massacres with twelve-year-olds with machetes and they kill — you can't even count that high. We lost sixteen people in 1920 to the flu; I looked it up. In '78, six people died in a pharmacy fire. But nothin' like this. Ever. Three people murdered in two days, including the Chief of Police. Lenny Potts missing, and a cop shot. And now a kid brings a gun to school."
In that same scene, Bill expresses a feeling of betrayal to Lester, noting that Lester could have come to him as a friend with the marital issues that (Bill believes) led to Lester's wife's death. He's also somewhat exasperated, having discovered that Lester was fudging the truth a bit during the initial investigation, which plants a seed of doubt in Bill's mind regarding Deputy Solverson's claims. This only makes him reject them more vehemently, though.

Bill only became Chief due to his seniority; he's not really fit for the job. Though his heart is in the right place and he tries hard to do his job as well as he's able, he doesn't possess many of the leadership qualities needed for such a position. There is something of an air of authority about him, but it almost seems forced. When he's in his office with his feet kicked up on his desk, relaxing like everything is fine and he owns the place, his secretary/assistant is usually standing nearby handling business for him.

He does things his own way and is usually convinced that's the Right Way and also the Only Way. The way he continually dismissed the evidence gathered by Deputy Solverson is good evidence of that — because it went against what Bill and the others believed to be true about the case they (and the townsfolk) desperately wanted closed, Bill couldn't accept it as possible truth. Bill wanted to keep the case closed because it gave him and the town peace of mind, so it's clear that he didn't even consider what Molly said for more than just long enough to have heard her out and then shut her down. It isn't until two FBI agents come to town a year after that case was marked closed that Bill saw he was, unfortunately, wrong: The agents praised Deputy Solverson for her work and said they were impressed, which left Bill standing slack-jawed and clearly unnerved — because him being wrong meant he let a killer go and put the town — the people he's supposed to protect — in danger. Bill doesn't seem to have much of an ability to look past the surface of things, to see beyond what's obvious. Now that his eyes have been opened much wider, though, that could change.

Also, although he doesn't seem to lack bravery, he does have quite a weak stomach and is prone to nausea when near crime scenes where blood is present.

And he enjoys fishing.

Abilities/Powers:

Bill has firearms training and likely knows how to physically apprehend someone, though canon does not show him doing so at any point. He's otherwise a pretty average guy with a bad haircut.

Items/Weapons: His gun, police standard issue; handcuffs; handie-talkie (portable police radio).

Sample Entry:

[video]

[Sitting opposite the camera is a man in a beige police uniform, gray-haired and gray-mustachioed, looking awfully worried and tired all at once. He keeps shifting back and forth in his seat like he can't get comfortable, alternating between looking to his side and then back at the camera.

Finally, he speaks. With a thick Minnesotan accent:] Hiya. Wasn't quite sure how to work this thing, but — here I am. The name's Bill Oswalt —

[A pause, brief and barely there.]

Uh, Chief Bill Oswalt. Bill'll do just fine, though, seein' as I don't have jurisdiction in these parts. [Wherever "these parts" are, he thinks.] I'm from Minnesota, in case that wasn't obvious.

[He chuckles, albeit halfheartedly. C'mon, it was a joke. Some humor to lighten things up. Yeah.]

So... anyway, uh, I was wonderin' about the current state of law enforcement here, since it looks like I might need to keep myself busy for a while, and helpin' enforce the law is what I'm best at. So just — just lemme know. Thanks.

Sample Entry Two:

Bill's had nightmares like this before. He'd wake up in the middle of the night, turn over to wrap his arms around his wife, and mumble the details to her: "It was the darndest thing, Sal..."

But the town he'd dreamed of never looked quite this bad. He'd dream of Bemidji, just empty and a little old-looking. It was more upsetting than anything, something that made him sad — not scared. His blood never ran cold the way it is now, and his heart certainly never tried clawing its way into his throat. Those dreams were so benign he'd even hesitate to label them true nightmares, but Sally had insisted that that's what they were.

He wonders what Sally would think about this.

For a few moments, he just stands there, stiff. He knows his training taught him otherwise: you should anticipate. Be alert. Be vigilant. Move. What he does instead is survey his surroundings as much as his eyes will allow while he tries to remember how to use his limbs, and that's when he sees the billboard there on the periphery of his vision. He finally moves then, turning to read the text, and it leaves him grabbing in a panic for his gun while simultaneously trying to radio one of his colleagues.

But his radio is dead, and he can't still his hands long enough to actually get the weapon out of its holster.

Something tells him that what he just read is a load of baloney. Gas masks don't really inspire a sense of safety — if anything, he'd almost guess that the people who lived here once upon a time might not have believed what that billboard said, either. Maybe they didn't get the masks in time.

Or maybe the board went up after —

After whatever happened here happened.

"Jeez," he whispers to himself. "Jeez."

Name: RJ
Contact Info:

paranoidpatriot PM's are fine too!
Other Characters Played: N/A
Requested apartment: N/A

Character Name: Dr. John Watson
Canon: Sherlock (BBC)
Canon Point: The end of the Hound of Baskerville/ Pre:Reichenbach
Background/History: Here and, more in depth, here!

Personality: At a first glance, John is as ordinary as they come. He keeps to himself, doesn't take sugar with his coffee, wears bland woolen jumpers, likes a night out with a pint and some mates, flirts with the occasional female who smiles his way--
He is also an adrenaline junky who kills a man to save someone he has known for less than a week; more impressively, however, he manages to surprise a self-proclaimed sociopath who thought he knew all there was to know about the man.

Captain/Dr. John Watson is a paradox, as an army doctor he likes peace but he feels the most alive in battle; he can break a man's arm, and then prescribe some pain medication to go with it; his leg flares up with pain, but the real wound is in his shoulder; he has night terrors about Afghanistan, but he misses the war more than he is haunted by it. All these things and more are what intrigued Sherlock to take a second look at the man, but who the good doctor actually turned out to be was what made the detective value his friendship.

"Please don’t feel obliged to tell me that was remarkable or amazing. John’s expressed the same thought in every possible variant available to the English language."- Sherlock

John is uniquely qualified to be Sherlock's companion for several reasons; for one, his adoration placates the detective's ego. Unlike the police force of London whom Sherlock routinely delights in outdoing, John, rather than being annoyed at Sherlock's ability, instead finds it fascinating. Perhaps one of the reasons Sherlock's deductions impress rather than offend, is because John came back from Afghanistan feeling like he was nothing. Hearing Sherlock rattle off so much about his life from one simple look likely gave him hope there was still something left in him, after all.

"No, I know you’re for real."-John
"A hundred percent?"-Sherlock
"Well, nobody could fake being such an annoying dick all the time."-John

Of course, Sherlock couldn't depend on someone who just behaved like a doormat, which is why the second part of John Watson, his stubborn, sarcastic streak, is just as important. John Watson is not afraid to speak his mind. Over the course of several seasons, even when practically abducted by strangers, he can't resist throwing out a smart comment. John also isn't afraid to stand up to Sherlock, yelling at the man when he steals his laptop or getting in his face about not taking proper care of himself. When the two gradually become more famous, he becomes a helpful 'translator' to Sherlock; going as far as to instruct him on when to say 'thank you'. John also rarely takes any of Sherlock's insults personally, which means he isn't afraid to wound the detective's a bit in return. In A Scandal in Belgravia he tells Sherlock no one cares about his blog cataloging '240 types of tobacco ash.'

"You’re very loyal, very quickly."-Mycroft
"No, I’m not. I’m just not interested."-John

As a soldier, John has strong morals and knows where he stands with them. He is shown to feel relatively no guilt for shooting the cabbie in order to protect Sherlock; after all, the man was a serial killer, John knew in that precise moment he had to act or another body would be in the morgue. John was quick to tell Mycroft, he isn't actually that quick to trust people, and despite all he does for Sherlock, we learn this is true. By the second episode, John is shown having grown disenchanted with Sherlock; telling himself his initial fascination was a passing fluke and nothing more. He was quicker to say 'colleague' than 'friend' and felt unsure of how to conduct himself around Sebastian who referred to Sherlock as something of a freak of nature.
By the end of season 1, Sherlock does eventually earn John's trust properly; by then their bond has grown so strong, John is more than willing to die with Moriarty if it means Sherlock might escape and live.

"You don’t seem very afraid."-Mycroft
"You don’t seem very frightening."-John

To say John is comfortable around violence is putting it mildly, John doesn't just tolerate danger, he needs it. As best stated in a conversation with Mycroft: "You have an intermittent tremor in your left hand... You’re under stress right now and your hand is perfectly steady. You’re not haunted by the war, Doctor Watson ... you miss it." And therein lies the final puzzle to John's character. John was alive and useful on the battlefield, he had never intended to get sent home early. While John does not show it as vocally, or as quickly, as his flatmate, the former soldier regresses back to his depressive state when he has nothing useful to do. John goes with Sherlock willingly and it is clear despite the many near death scrapes John finds himself in, he would gladly do it all again if it meant the same successful result. As Sherlock perfectly summarized: "I said 'dangerous', and here you are."

When John panics he does so internally, with quiet control. As shown in the season finale the Great Game, when John is wired up to explode by Moriarty, he is clearly shaken but rational enough to think the whole way though; even when the returning psychosomatic pain causes his knees to buckle, he manages to wait until the threat has abated to safely collapse. The only time we see John truly lose his composure from fright, rather than anger and annoyance, is when he is dosed up with a drug designed to enhance fear when presented with a stimulus.

In addition to being 'difficult to ruffle', John has strong sense of humor. It isn't that death and violence brings him joy, he isn't sadistic, but he knows how to make the best of a bad situation and remain calm with a lighthearted comment. In Season 3, after being apart from John for so long, we see Sherlock tries (very poorly) to also attempt to use humor in tense situations, despite never having done it as much before; the possibility that this was due to John's influence is hard to overlook.

While John Watson may be a soldier, he is also a doctor; which leads John to bizarrely disassociate from the brutality of a crime while still being able to sympathize with the victims. He has a strong inclination to care for people; regardless of how well he knows them, and is usually the only member of his party to treat a witness delicately. Although it may have to do with John's need to feel useful, we can assume John at least partly cares for the well being of others, as he becomes rather offended when Sherlock claims to care more about the challenge of solving the case than helping the hostages in the Great Game.

"For the record – if anyone out there still cares, I’m not actually gay."-John

Contradictory to the running joke that John is Sherlock's lover, John is shown to be very attracted to woman. Though the relationships seldom last due to Sherlock's constant neediness, he nevertheless tries and does succeed quite often to get a couple dates in before being dumped. While we don't see the actual flirting, the fact he manages to keep his job after falling asleep his first day and get a date out of it speaks for itself. Of course, there is plenty of
evidence to give people the assumption he is romantically involved with his flatmate. In addition to living with Sherlock and following the man at nearly any hour, John frequently gives up his plans with other people to appease the Detective. During a Scandal in Belgravia, Mycroft tells him to cancel his date on Christmas because it might turn out to be one of Sherlock's 'danger nights' (in which he will be tempted to do something reckless). Even Mrs. Hudson never quite seems to believe his orientation, telling him not to worry because there are 'all sorts around here.'

"You were the best man, and the most human... human being that I’ve ever known.
I was so alone, and I owe you so much."-John

As much as Sherlock would not be the same without John Watson, there is much to be said about the reverse. For all that John complains, he needs Sherlock in his life just as much as the detective requires his presence.

With Sherlock, John became so engrossed with keeping up that he forgot about his psychosomatic limp, which now allows him to walk regularly without his cane. Sherlock also provides an outlet for all of John's pent up frustration. Although he may only have a mild case of PTSD (Post traumatic Stress Disorder), we can see the 'ordinary' life John had before meeting Sherlock Holmes gave him no way of releasing his stress and bottled up emotions. He yelled at chip-and-pin machines and was prone to outbursts, such as when he loudly cursed his leg when Mrs. Hudson pitied him. Sherlock, on the other hand, Sherlock gives him reasons to be angry. No longer does John have to feel guilty for becoming disgruntled, because it is perfectly acceptable to not want a severed head in the fridge, thank you; he knows he won't blow up from a bad day at work, after scolding the detective all day for much worse. On the days where Sherlock is more content to ignore him, the stimulus of a new case is enough to keep him active.

Sherlock isn't just a person for John, he is a lifestyle. He is John's life. A life John will go at any lengths to protect, for better or for worse.

"That’s not the John Watson I kno--"
"-I’m not the John Watson you know."

Of course, John is much more than a summation of usefulness to one other person. With or without Sherlock, he is his own individual, even if the war made him temporarily forget that about himself.

When Mike, an old friend from Uni, meets up with John after his return from Afghanistan, he finds himself conversely saying: " You couldn't bear to be anywhere else! That’s not the John Watson I know." From this we can infer John used to be more social, unable to stand being anywhere but the hustle and bustle of London; certainly not the quiet reclusive man we start the series with. After John begins his stay at 221B we gradually see more of this side of him. No longer do the folks at Scotland Yard know him as 'that guy Sherlock brings along', no, he becomes John; Even Mycroft stops treating him less like a pawn and more like a partner in their plans to aid Sherlock.

You might say part of what makes John unique is the fact that he lacks all uniqueness in the first place. He doesn't really stick out in a crowd, isn't particularly attractive, and while the army doctor can hold his own fairly well, he has also been kidnapped more times than he can count. Yes, John by himself is most certainly a simple man, but he is a simple man that we as an audience can relate to. Through John's eyes, we see how brilliant, aggravating, and kind-hearted Sherlock can be. Without John, Sherlock may never have realized that even ordinary people could still inspire; now, 3 seasons later, the detective seems a lot keener to give all the other goldfish in his life a second look and we have a certain blogger to thank.

Abilities/Powers: Although John has no real powers, given that BBC Sherlock is set in an entirely realistic modern day London, his dual professions more than make up for it.

Crackshot: John's time in the army has left him a very proficient with his weapon. We see in his first episode that not only does John decide in a split second he needs to shoot the cab driver to save Sherlock's life, he also manages to do it with one shot, through the window of an adjacent building and manages to fatally wound the target. Sherlock describes the mystery gunman as: "Not just a marksman; a fighter. His hands couldn’t have shaken at all, so clearly he’s acclimatised to violence. You’re looking for a man probably with a history of military service... and nerves of steel" And if we know anything, Sherlock's analysis are rarely wrong. Later, in the hound of Baskerville, we again witness John demonstrate his skill by being able to shoot what Lestrade could not.

Medical detail- As John himself would say, he is very good at what he does. On cases, Sherlock brings John along to examine the corpses just in the case the man can reiterate any ideas he has already thought up. He works locum at the local surgery (which is basically a small clinic in non U.K terms) where even they claim he is impressively overqualified. Although GP's (General Practitioners) are generally known for lesser chores such as prescribing cold medicine, John is more than decent at stitching up a wound to stop bleeding. In season 3, Sherlock recalls a time where John manages save a man who had been fatally stabbed.

Military- John's peculiar lack of reaction when faced with a crisis is likely due to his military training to dissociate; but that is not all he has learned. In the Hounds of Baskerville, John's thought to translate the blinks of a distant light into an acronym message (although the light ended up having no actual significance) inspires Sherlock to find the final clue and crack the case. In the Great Game, the season prior, we also see John attempt to blink out an SOS signal to Sherlock when he is wired up with Semtex and not allowed to speak.

Items/Weapons: In addition to clothing on his back: His black Haversack coat, his sig sauer gun (limited bullets), and a pocket torch.

Sample Entry: I have a finished meme thread but I can always write more if need be.
Sample Entry Two: Since previous threads are allowed, I hope you don't mind me making up my own setting for a sample?
(Set in a hypothetical scenario where bodies are taking longer to vanish after death in North Haven.)

“There now, chin up, we've gone through much worse, haven't we? Yao corp must be losing their touch.” The army doctor murmured reassuringly to the silent form beside him, before taking their pulse and gently easing the eyelids of the now deceased resident shut. This, John thought grimly, was something he did not miss.

Mycroft only had it half right. It wasn't the war John had longed for, it was his sense of duty. The dead bodies, the bullets flying overhead, the misery of his aching limbs, he could do without all of that. What he really wanted was to be where he was needed and the adrenaline rush to accomplish what was asked of him. Afghanistan had been that for him once and John had barely survived being ripped from it prematurely, how Haven expected him to cope through it a second time, he hadn't the faintest.

Unlike then, however, this time John knew where he belonged, he belonged at the side of one Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock, who was as brilliant as he was an idiot. Sherlock, who only weeks ago called John his friend as if it was the most sincere thing he had ever confessed; as if that simple of a label really meant something. John couldn't abandon the arrogant sod now, not when the genius was just as likely to be attacked by terrorists as he was to blow up their flat out of boredom.

John made his way to the next fallen form. Fortune had allowed him to bring one pocket notebook; the one which stupidly had the letters UMQRA wasting the entire first page. He should be using it to draft out his blog to continue his therapy, in a place like this, he's bound to need it; never mind that it would all be erased the moment it left North Haven. Yes, that is obviously what he should use it for... Instead John found himself writing useless facts, cataloging every insignificant detail that caught his eye for barely a moment. Data for Sherlock when he arrived. If he should arrive. Which he won't... John shouldn't want him to. He wouldn't be able to investigate murders for one thing.

The odd occurrence of leftover corpses today aside, things were different here, John knew, he had seen. Haven never left behind the bodies of their dead for long. Apparently if a death is swift enough, if enough of the body is destroyed, a person could be revived with all of our limbs still intact, but there seemed to be no exact science to it, no specifics. If someone lost their arm and then died, what if they still woke up without it? It was a chance John refused to take. Grateful to be stitching the arm of a cadaver, if only because of how woefully short his supply of anesthetics were, John paused mid-suture to marvel morbidly at how much precision he had been able to coax out of the hand that should be racked with intermittent tremors.

'Well done Haven, can't argue there', he thought with bitterly, one thing was for certain, he was never bored.

Abilities/Powers:
Travis is skilled at swordplay as well as physical combat. His experiences in both are varied; he's learned new techniques everywhere, from training in the infamous Dungeon in Calgary and under a former professional wrestler to correspondence courses and video tapes. His style's rough at times, yes, but his strength is not something to be taken lightly. He's at his most clever in the middle of a fight--he's got a decent sense of strategy, even if he's sometimes too hot-headed to remember it. (For example, during his fight with Bad Girl, the wrestling moves he did were all focused on weakening her batting arm.) Travis is also quick to learn new techniques and is reasonably intelligent.

In-game, he has a set of "Dark Side" abilities. Travis enters a trance-like state for a few moments and displays superhuman abilities, most notably super-speed, time manipulation, firing energy blasts from his sword, and shapeshifting (into an adult tiger). There is very little canon explanation for his powers, but they operate in two ways. The first is through an "ecstasy" gauge: the more riled up Travis gets from fighting, the more likely one of the Dark Side abilities is to activate. Finally, the ability can just occur randomly while he's fighting--in-game, when you kill an enemy a slot machine icon appears, and getting three icons in a row determines what ability you get. Because there is no canon explanation for how and when these abilities work, (or whether or not they're just in Travis' head SUDA51 GAMES ARE WEIRD OKAY), these special abilities will not be applying to Travis in Haven.

As for weaknesses? Travis is an ordinary human and, now that he’s without cutscene immortality and unlimited continues, he can be killed fairly easily. Furthermore, his fighting style is quite rough and unrefined, and he is also mostly accustomed to a beam weapon, which is much lighter than the average sword. It’s likely that he’ll be slowed down a lot without his trusty beam katanas. He also has the tendency to be a bit of an idiot and easily finds himself in trouble. Especially when there are ladies involved. Or people who aggravate him on purpose. Or both.

FINALLY, Travis is completely fourth wall aware, but I will be putting up permissions for this should I be accepted!

Items/Weapons:His beam katana Peony, his clothes (this outfit!), and his cellphone.

Sample Entry: post to the haven network

Sample Entry Two:

Until arriving in Haven however-many months ago, Travis hadn't really ever been bored. Not truly, anyway. Back in Santa Destroy there was internet, television, video games... hell, there was at least jerking off if he was desperate enough. But here, there was very little to fill the space. All of those things-- distractions from reality, the white noise and static and bright colors and glowing screens-- were things he realized he had taken for granted now that he was in a world without reliable electricity or entertainment. On top of being horrifyingly dangerous, Haven was also horrifyingly dull. There were only so many places he could get to and only so long that he could gather supplies, and even then what was to be found was scant. As usual.

(...As for the jerking off, the walls were too thin and the apartments too occupied to do it in peace. The Worst.)

All in all there was an absence, especially at night; an empty space of time in which he knew he should be asleep, but just couldn't do it proper. Some remnant of a golden time with high-speed 'net access, maybe. Now, this was real boredom: staring up at the white stucco ceiling of an apartment full of strangers or near-strangers, the only sound their quiet breathing and occasional snoring.

And that was the real killer of Haven, now, wasn't it, having to sit around and wait for Yao to fuck you over?

Travis, lying on his back in his bunk, glared up at the mockingly average ceiling-- some psychological screw-with-your-mind bullshit, it had to be. This was not Yao deciding to give them a break, or not having anything to do with them at all, he'd theorized (a product of all these boring nights with nothing else to do but think, and overthink). It must be part of it: part of whatever they were trying to do with them.

It was all too reminiscent of a lab rat shoved in a cage between experiments for him to pass off. Just waiting, and being watched all the while.

And suddenly, the silence broke.

Scraping. Metallic, and familiar.

Another thing he hated about Haven: being actually obligated to choose his battles. That Pyramid thing was patrolling the housing spiral again, no doubt, and by now he had it beaten into him more than once that some of the monsters here just weren't to be taken on. He had to wait for it to pass. Like always, even as his fingers itched for the hilt of his beam katana.

A cage that was impossible to escape; a prison guard impossible to take on. He had to hand it to Yao, they were pretty efficient about making him feel absolutely goddamn useless. Travis rolled over, scowling, and planted a pillow over his head-- at least until he couldn't hear Pyramid Head anymore.

This was more than boredom. It was remembering that he was trapped.

Edited 2014-06-14 00:08 (UTC)

Name: LA
Contact Info: possiblyevil @ dw, angrybears @ plurk
Other Characters Played: N/A.
Requested apartment: N/A

Character Name: Renzou Shima
Canon: Ao no Exorcist
Canon Point: End of Chapter 55
Background/History: Canon Background / Character Wiki

The wiki only covers up to a certain arc, though, so I will summarize the important parts pertaining to Shima.

In the Impure King revival arc, the exwires go along to Kyoto to help with the defense of a dangerous demon’s eye (the first one had been stolen already from another location; if both are brought back together, the demon, the Impure King, revives). As it so happens, Kyoto is Shima’s hometown and the exorcists they’re going to help are the Myouda sect, which his family are all a part of. Turns out he has a very large family, including one dead brother. During this arc, he’s one of the first to get over Rin being Satan’s son (it’s too troublesome to ignore him, he claims). When the Impure King is inevitably revived, though, Shima shows a less carefree part of himself and nearly abandoned his life-long friend, Konekomaru, to die fighting alone. A flashback confirms that Shima doesn’t care about fighting demons, his family’s oath to defend Myouda, or even about how his oldest brother died saving him way back during the Blue Night. He thinks none of it is worth dying for, but, in the end, he decides just ignoring all of that is also too troublesome and he goes back to save Konekomaru.

In the Seven Mysteries arc, the gang is off to solve seven mysteries of the academy, which is pretty much just defeating a bunch of possessed stuff and ghosts. Shima is basically useless throughout all of this and is inevitably told by Konekomaru that he would be better off training to be a Knight (an exorcist that is combat-oriented) over an Aria (an exorcist that relies on chants/spells). Since he’s outright admitted he before that he hasn’t memorized anything from their classes, it seems accurate.

In the Festival arc, the academy is throwing their big school festival. Shima fails miserably to get a date to the big dance, so he’s stuck on guard duty. When it comes to light that Izumo is in trouble, the exorcist in charge of them at that time sends them all out to try and locate her. Shima finds her first and engages her assailant, their classmate Nemu Takara, in combat. Much to everyone’s surprise, Shima suddenly summons an extremely high level demon and uses chants to cast different attacks using black hellfire. When Izumo questions it, he says he’s been able to summon the demon Yamantaka since he was a kid, but doesn’t do it much because it’s draining to do so. Doubly surprising is when he turns around and uses the black hellfire to knock Izumo out. This arc reveals that Renzou Shima is a spy for the Illuminati, an organization that serves the first son of Satan, Lucifer, and he was placed in the cram school specifically to keep tabs on Izumo. Nemu had only attacked Izumo to draw him out. At the end of this arc, Lucifer and company arrive to pick up Shima and Izumo. War is officially declared on the Order.

In the latest story arc, Shima has turned Izumo over to the Illuminati and they’ve both been taken to their research base in Inari, Izumo’s hometown. He tries talking to her, but she’s understandably upset by him and it only ends with him being slapped. When she makes an escape attempt in chapter 55, it’s Shima who stops her, killing her fox spirit summons while doing so. He promptly passes out (again) after that.

Personality:

What is there to know about Renzou Shima? Well, a good start are his hobbies, which are smiling, lying, faking politeness, and buying dirty books even if a girl is working the cash register. He’s terribly lazy and doesn’t like troublesome things in his life, instead wishing to simply go with the flow until everything works out. So he might as well be the average rude teenage boy if it weren’t for one final detail. He hates everything. Well, nearly everything. Women are fine. They can stay. Everything else? Not so much. At least, that’s the story he’s sticking to.

Not that it’s a view he readily shows on the outside, of course. The personality he displays to the public at large sets him up as the most carefree member of the Exwires at the True Cross Academy, that he would rather drift through life without too much work or trouble. His demeanor is easy-going and playful, quick to laugh when he finds anything humorous and to make a joke, even when things are looking bad, really bad, seriously bad, up until said bad thing happens (such as openly laughing at demon kings; fyi, don’t laugh at those, kids, it’s a bad idea). He’s lazy and conflict avoidant, leaving all the combat up to heavier hitters than himself whenever possible and never showing any remorse for doing so quite openly. There is some truth in that persona, of course, as he truly is out to avoid anything that might be too much of a bother (he honestly gives up on avoiding or being scared of Rin after discovering he’s Satan’s son because it was just way too troublesome to keep up), but it’s also a defense. No one takes him very seriously, no one looks twice at what he’s up to; he comes and goes as freely as can be, no one expects too much of him.

His other side, well, not much changes aside from how any of his loyalty at all seems to be one big lie, one he’s carried on for years and years with no one the wiser. He claims to hate his circumstances, his childhood friends, his family, their sect. He hates being an exorcist, having to deal with demons. He hates a whole lot of things and thinks it'd be better if they all just disappeared. Shima has always come off as fairly self-centered, but it had never been to the extent that he was willing to sacrifice others before a certain point. Once it’s no longer in his own interests to keep others on his good side, however, all bets seem to be off, the prime example being his abduction of Izumo right in front of all his friends. He even thanked them cheerfully for trusting him up until that point. So, even when coming off as a cheerful dumbass, he’s really only ever really looking out for himself (and possibly anyone who’s survival makes his own easier). As for his so-called hate, it comes off as incredibly passive. It's more as if he just doesn't care about anything then any active anger.

All that said, he isn't as cowardly or as useless as his personality comes off as. He can hold his own in a fight when pushed to it, it's only that he chooses not to. A lot of his panic to get out of the front lines doesn't really hold up against other actions he's taken, like when he chooses to stand between an angry ghoul-class demon and Bon to hold it off or when he intervenes to take on Takara and his collection of demon-possessed toys, which he does without much worry at all. So he has some talent, even if it might only apply to a talent for picking his fights. Similarly, he's not entirely without some measure of kindness, although it mostly sticks to small gestures like giving friendly advice or returning simple little stuffed dolls. There isn't much to lose with those.

There are also two outliers to how Shima is that don’t really seem to have much to do with his exorcist problems as they are just part of who he is. First is, as mentioned before, how his hate doesn’t even remotely apply to women, not even the ones who do happen to add trouble to his life. Shima is an absolutely shameless flirt, called the perv of the family by his brothers. He loves women, often complimenting them on how cute they are, swooning over nurses, passing out his phone number, and using up most of his free time going out on dates. He doesn’t appear to have any special sort of attachment to any particular girl (aside from Izumo, but that turned out to have ulterior motives), but there’s a higher chance he’ll step in to help a woman simply because, well, they’re a woman. The second is his severe case of entomophobia, the fear of insects (including spiders and any creepy crawler that technically isn’t a bug; he’s onto them, he knows better!!!). He has gone into full-out panics just from being surrounded by even fairly harmless insects, such as moths. He outright refuses to help with anything that involves him getting near bugs, as they render him totally useless.

And that’s Renzou Shima, summed up as a guy mostly looking out for himself, a fantastic enough liar to keep anyone from realizing it, and generally trying to enjoy his role as a useless perverted brat the whole way through.

Abilities/Powers:

Shima is trained for close combat, primarily with staff weapons, and is surprisingly not bad at it. His family specializes in fighting with khakkhara (metal Buddhist staffs) and he has been training since early childhood, so he has all the strength and agility for it. Dude can fight, he just would rather not.

Previously, he was an Exwire of the True Cross Order, training to become an Aria, which is an exorcist who uses chants and verses to fight. He knows a few basic prayers for protection, but is otherwise completely useless at being an Aria.

He has access to a high level demon familiar called Yamantaka. He summons him with a chant and is able to borrow Yamantaka’s black hellfire to attack with, which he also uses chants for (such as turning his staff into a black hellfire spear and sending flames across the floor to burn specific targets). Black hellfire is nasty in how it does not harm the physical, but the spiritual. It kills demons and spirits outright, destroy something possessing a person without harming the person’s body, and can burn souls in general. The length of time that Shima can use the hellfire and keep Yamantaka summoned is limited and he has a tendency to pass out right after dismissing the demon.

Yamantaka himself seems to have a violent personality and likes to fight. He can also use black hellfire, since he is the source. He has enough physical presence when summoned to interact with people or objects to some extent (shown when he stops Shima and Izumo from getting knocked off a roof).

On a more minor note, he's gone through a Mashou, which is a close encounter with a demon that allows whoever experiences it to see demons for the rest of their life. This is something all Exorcists must receive. Basically means he can see demons and other weird stuff from his own world.

Items/Weapons: His khakkhara (the metal ringed Buddhist staff he fights with; it can break down into three pieces for concealment) and his Illuminati uniform. He doesn’t have anything else on him at the time of his pull point.

Sample Entry: previous meme thread.

Sample Entry Two:

"Guess I won't be going that way, huh?"

Shima said this to no one in particular. Unless he had meant to direct it to the appallingly large cloud of coal tar demons that clustered around the entrance to the subway, but the likelihood of that was slim. They would undoubtably ignore him even if he could chat them up, assuming they wouldn't try to smother him to death first. At a distance, though, he felt no real danger. They were incredibly benign as far as demonic entities went, so long as he left them be. He sure intended to, although that brought him back to his current dilemma.

He couldn't leave that way, obviously. Something nasty had to be down that way to attract the little floating demons, although he would have to question their presence later. If this place wasn't home, why were they even here? Did they just happen to exist everywhere? Could everyone stuck here even see them?

Or maybe he was just unlucky.

Maybe they were only there to discourage him this one time. Well, discouraging him from something wasn't exactly hard to do! With that thought, he heaved a sigh, greatly exaggerated even without anyone really there to witness it, and slung his staff back up and across his shoulders. He hooked his arms around both sides, letting them hang off it lazily.

"Troublesome," he grumbled as he turned to meander on back the way he'd come from. "Maybe they won't be there next time I check, but I seriously don't want to be here long enough for there to be a bunch of next times..."

Edited 2014-06-13 23:53 (UTC)

Name: Heather
Contact Info:

rythulian
Other Characters Played: N/A
Requested apartment: N/A

Character Name: Derek Hale
Canon: Teen Wolf
Canon Point: 3x24 – The Divine Move (Otherwise known as the final episode of season 3b.)
Background/History: Over here

Previous Game History: While life in Exitvoid, specifically in the city of Zelien, wasn’t as bad as it could have been for Derek, it wasn’t particularly great by any standard either. Aside from a fair amount of weight loss, the result of several weeks on the bare minimum amount of food followed by a week and a bit with nothing at all, the werewolf’s appearance hasn’t suffered from the less than pleasant challenges present by COMPASS. The physical damage healed, from the skin-crawling bugs to a fatal gunshot wound, it’s the mental damage that’s managed to linger.

Within a week of arriving in the city the cultists turned up for their first attempt at human sacrifices. That in itself wasn’t the problem for Derek, the thing that really got to him was the method of sacrifice that they had chosen, being burnt alive. Given the fact that the majority of his family was burnt to death in his childhood home, the idea of people suffering the same fate didn’t sit well with him to say the least. Throw in mind control to force people into burning themselves alive and it’s a bit of a worst case scenario for the guy. While he was left unaffected, the fact that Scott and Isaac were made the situation so much worse for him. Strangers burning he could have dealt with just fine, but not people he’s familiar with. While dealing with Scott was more or less fine, a little unsettling but overall an easy encounter, it was staying the night with a half-crazy Isaac that really shook him up. Trying to keep his then beta locked in a room with him while attempting to talk the teenager out of setting himself on fire was a bit of a challenge. Derek’s not the best at comforting talks on a good day; throw in one his nightmare scenarios and it’s an uphill struggle to avoid saying the wrong thing. While he did manage to push the event to the back of his mind eventually, things were awkward between him and Isaac from that point on. Awkward to the point where they barely crossed paths with one another, let alone spoke.

What’s worse than people setting themselves on fire? Facing a SAW-esque ‘game’ with a couple of strangers and believing that only one person can escape. At the time Derek and his companions had been under the impression that one of them could leave the room and simply bring back help for the remaining prisoners. The reality of the situation? Shrapnel bombs the moment Derek left the room. Needless to say, Derek feels guilty about being the one to escape the blast, regardless of the fact that the choice to send him out had been a group decision. As far as he’s concerned he’d been stuck in the room with a pair of humans, his guilt is justified. He would have healed from the damage done by the blast, he could have prevented on of his fellow prisoners from gaining a life-altering injury. In his mind, as illogical as it might sound, he feels responsible for two archers being rendered half blind. If he’d been the one to stay at least one of the others could have been spared. Hindsight is 20/20 though. While one of the women left the city shortly after the event, he couldn’t look the other in the face again.

While not necessarily a bad thing, Derek didn’t exactly appreciate the fact that he lost his werewolf powers for a week. Being human didn’t sit well with him, it made him feel vulnerable and surprisingly fragile. That said, given the fact that his powers were transferred to someone else, it did give him the motivation to actively offer assistance for once. Over the course of the full moon night he bonded to a certain extent with a werewolf from another world, one who had retained her powers, and strengthened his tentative friendship with her. One of the few friendships he actually had during his stay in the city. On the less pleasant side of things he also clashed heads with Scott, something that would go on to be a running theme between the pair of them, over ideas on how to keep the newly ‘formed’ werewolves from murdering everything that moved. Derek kept pushing the idea of pain as a way to keep the werewolves from shifting, Scott kept refusing the idea.

Several weeks later, upon finding out that the mystery books inside the campus library had decoded themselves, Derek pushed aside his more violent, head first line of thinking and decided to hit the books instead. From this point onward he notably started to stray away from his ‘fight first, ask questions later’ method of operation and instead went for a more logical route. Any quiet moment he could utilise between COMPASS’ experiments, he spent either in the library or in a generally quiet area of the campus reading over the lore of the city, attempting to theorise out the cultists’ plan along with Stiles. Not as odd a choice for company as it might initially appear.

The next key moment for Derek wasn’t for a fair number of weeks after the book decoding event. The campus grounds were transported to the ruined city of London. While it didn’t offer much in terms of character development for Derek, or mental scarring as the case may be, the main point here is that Derek had his ‘major’ death here. Upon hearing voices from the ‘Great Old ones’ Derek agreed to lead Stiles to them, just on the off chance that the teenager might have be capable of hearing the voices too. It went as well as expected. Just when they thought they were safe, Derek was bitten by one of the infected ‘residents’ of the ruined land. The infection was passed onto him and he quickly began to succumb to the virus. While he was quickly put down by Stiles, who managed to shoot him in the head before the transformation process could finish, the werewolf does regret the fact there had to be a shooting in the first place. He doesn’t mention it, knows all too well that the topic will cause an argument if brought up, but he does feel a little guilty over how things played out. He let his guard down, he was bitten, he forced a teenager to kill another living being.

Throughout the collapse of COMPASS Derek reverted to more of a self-preserving line of thinking. While he had no objections to helping those he met along the way, he didn’t go out of his way to find people in danger. He stuck close to Stiles, the first person he’d run into after the buildings come alive, until they were transported to COMPASS’ headquarters. Whilst there Derek wasted no time in pushing forward, passing through the tests one by one as quickly as possible without needlessly sacrificing someone else’s life. He waited long enough to meet up with the other Beacon Hills residents before heading home. Well, before heading to what he thought was home at any rate.

With the major events out the way I’ll touch upon the topic of relationship changes. For the most part Derek kept his connections within the city relatively small, a few of the people from Beacon Hills and a couple of select individuals outside of them. He wasn’t social by any means and if anything after the first couple of weeks he managed to become worse at interacting with other people. That didn’t stop him from talking to people who happened to start conversations with him but it did place a strain on his home-based connections.

The two relationships that underwent the most noticeable changes during his time in the city were his ones with Scott and Stiles. He and Scott suffered from numerous clashes on opinion, more so after the library started to decode itself. Scott had wanted to take action, to try and protect everyone; Derek had wanted to lay low for a little longer, to spend more time gathering specific details. It was a bit of a role reversal to say the least. The final straw was reached following an impromptu blood shower, Scott put his foot down on playing the hero and Derek essentially called him an idiot for rushing into the unknown. After that their contact was minimal at best, although they did come together to save a mutual acquaintance, even then it’s using the term ‘together’ extremely loosely though. They did not mend their ‘friendship’ before leaving the city.

In comparison to the downhill slope with Scott, his standing with Stiles had the opposite sort of development. Initially they fought, a lot and on most if not all of their interactions. It wasn’t until after their exploration of the recently discovered Egyptian cavern that they started to form a tentative allegiance. The more weeks that passed by, the closer they became. Derek assisted Stiles with research and attempted to teach him how to fight, Stiles provided food supplies right up until the city ran out of food and generally provided Derek with a little bit of company. Company which he was sorely lacking by the end of his stay in the city, seeing as the majority of his ‘friends’ had left the city limits earlier on.

All in all, Zelien didn’t change Derek to a huge extent; he wasn’t really there long enough for it to have completely broken him. Less than 23 weeks by the end of it all. It has however tweaked a couple of his canon interactions and it has added a little more weight to his already guilt-ridden shoulders. On the plus side it has taught him to be a little more patient, to use his time wisely and plan things out ahead of time, but in comparison it’s also dented his ability to really ‘bond’ with other people. On initial meetings at least. Seeing your friends leave shortly after finding them tends to put someone off the idea altogether after a while.

Personality: If there’s one thing that can be said about Derek, it’s that he’s come a long way from his initial appearance back in S1. He’s still not a very sociable person by any means but there has been a marked improvement over the course of the seasons. Despite what the fandom may have you believe, he’s perfectly capable of talking in full sentences and even extended ones from time to time, it’s just that he tends to have a little more emphasis on body language and facial expressions. He’s a quiet guy, not overly talkative but not silent either, and he does appear to prefer his own company as opposed to a large crowd. That doesn’t mean he’s socially inept though, in fact he’s actually quite adaptable when it comes to interacting with people. To give a couple of examples, he can turn on the charm and flirt with the best of them at a moment’s notice, a skill that seems to primarily be used for the sake of manipulating people, or he can pull the blank faced straight man for the sake of playing the ‘tough guy’ role, which admittedly tends to be his default expression. Following a toning down of his violent tendencies, and his general ‘kill everything’ line of thinking, he’s also perfectly capable of holding a civil conversation, even if the topic in question revolves around a point of view that he may disagree with. Overall he’s just more tolerant of people in general. It could be said that Derek’s come out of his shell in a way, while he still isn’t the sort to openly swap background stories and he’s certainly not the type of guy to talk about his feelings, he can at least uphold a general, everyday talk. Which is more than could be said for his social skills way back at the start of the show.

The interesting thing about Derek’s recent role change within the Beacon Hill’s supernatural group is that he’s settled into a mentor-like role despite his less than impressive teaching history. In the past he’s been very hit or miss at supplying useful information, literally to the point where he’s withheld useful titbits and made situations more difficult than they needed to be. Not to mention the fact that he likely put the entire population at risk due to his silent act. These days the werewolf is thankfully a little more open with sharing his knowledge amongst his acquaintances and allies. He still holds back on what he knows until someone actually asks or needs to know but he doesn’t hold out for half as long as he would have done in the past. If someone were to ask him a question, he would actually answer it instead of giving a vague holdover statement. It doesn’t make him a perfect mentor but it allows him to get the job done and, given his previously terrible attempt at being an Alpha, it’s a role that simply fits him by comparison. It’s also been a position that he’s been trying to fill since season 1, now he actually has a chance to teach Scott, to teach Stiles and everyone else involved. It’s another chance for him to actually be useful instead of relying solely on his ability to be a meat shield. Needless to say a lot of his information revolves around supernatural stories and his own experiences, the latter of which comes into play with both Scott and the former alpha twins who were temporarily under his wing. With Scott he notably teaches him about smelling lingering emotions, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, with the twins he goes into a speech about not giving up and pushing through the difficult times. For Derek it’s a matter of teaching from experience and turning potentially negative memories into something that will be helpful to others. Now, make no mistake, he’s not about to win any awards for this new role within the resident supernatural community, insulting your ‘students’ isn’t the best way to go, but he’s got a lot of information under his belt and he’s willing to try and give more detailed advice this time around. He’s willing to be more of a team player instead of the lonely guy standing off to the side. Again.

Trust is a complicated topic when it comes to Derek, and that’s putting it nicely, given his close history with matters of betrayal one would likely assume that he’d be through with trusting other people. That isn’t necessarily the case. You see, Derek has somewhat of a history of saying that he doesn’t trust certain people and then he usually ends up following their advice a few scenes later. Now, on the one hand this could be seen as straight up naivety, especially when his uncle is involved, or it could be seen as him simply being a guy of second chances in certain cases, such as with the former alpha twins.

In his uncle’s case, there’s a fair amount of history that logically should have put Derek off the idea of trusting him, his sister’s death, a point-blank warning to avoid trusting him and a few personal experiences with Peter’s manipulative personality. And yet Derek frequently takes his advice within the recent seasons, he doesn’t question his uncle’s motives and at one point actually allowed the man to stab him in the back of the neck with his mother’s claws. Now, to be fair to the character it’s clear that Derek doesn’t fully trust his uncle but for all his deeds in the past, he seems to give Peter a larger ‘benefit of the doubt’ than he really should be given. It could be argued that this is down to their familial connection, there are only a couple of Hales wandering about and Derek feels a sense of guilt over the death of his family. In his instance Derek generally seems to come across as naïve simply because of his seeming desire to keep a family member around.

The case of the twins is a little less surprising in comparison. While the twins did assist in forcing Derek to kill one of his betas, Boyd, they actually had a heel-turn character moment at the end of 3a. One of the twins even went so far as to give a warning to Derek, telling him that he had to leave town if he wanted to live. Whether that change of heart played a role in Derek’s decision to try and help the twins integrate into Scott’s pack or whether he simply saw some sort of comparison between himself and them is unclear. All we know is that during 3b, Derek offered up several pieces of advice to try and get on the resident alpha’s good side. In this instance he seems to be giving a clear-cut second chase to the pair, he places their pasts to one side and even states near the end that he’ll make sure to tell Lydia about the one of the twins dying as ‘the good guy’.

With all that in mind let’s make one thing clear, his trust primarily extends to current happenings and life or death situations; it does not extend to stories from his background. To date the only time he’s mentioned an event from his past was to Scott back in S1 and he brought up the Hale house fire to prove a point. He’s very guarded when it comes to both his emotions and his history unless it is somehow relevant to larger problems occurring within Beacon Hills. Perhaps more so guarded in the romance department since his last girlfriend turned out to be yet another psychotic killer. And whether he fully trusts other people to have his back is another matter entirely.

You see, Derek doesn’t have a great sense of self-worth; in fact he’s practically perfected the art of putting himself down. Given the amount of guilt on his shoulders it kind of makes sense that he isn’t a huge fan of himself, he has a long standing history of terrible decisions coming back to bite him in the worst ways imaginable after all. He gave into his uncle’s manipulation, first girlfriend died. He gave into a pretty face, majority of his family died. He let his sister return to Beacon hills alone, sister died. The list goes on. A lot of terrible events either occur around him or can be linked back to him at a later point and, more often than not, the events in question happen to the people closest to him. With that in mind, is it a huge surprise that he feels responsible for everything? As far as he’s concerned he gets people into these situations so he’s either got to get them out of their predicament or take the blame should the worst case scenario occur.

Naturally when you’ve got an amount of guilt like that on your shoulders, you start to think a little pessimistically. In Derek’s case his thoughts seem to translate directly into his actions. Over the course of the show Derek has been a bit of a punching bag character, normally this trait is shown in relation to the current villains although recently he has allowed a couple of the teenagers to verbally vent their anger at him. He’s there to beaten up and cut down and he just lets it happen. The majority of these scenes involve him effectively sacrificing his own life for the sake of protecting someone else, which sounds like a ‘heroic’ thing in theory but, given certain lines of his dialogue, it would appear that that is what Derek thinks he’s useful for. He notably never thinks twice about throwing his life on the line, he just sees a situation that could potentially be solved if a physical sacrifice is made and goes for it, as far as he seems to be concerned his primary use within the group is the role of either a distraction or a temporary meat shield. The notable example of this would be the Sheriff’s station scene from 3b where he and Chris Argent, a man who he hasn’t seen eye to eye with in the past, are handcuffed to a bench. When Derek hears a bomb timer ticking down in the nearby office he doesn’t break out of the cuffs to save himself, despite mentioning earlier on that he could do it if he wanted, instead he literally turns to shield Chris with his own body. He does it instinctively and he does it regardless of his earlier comment about how he wouldn’t help the other man out. Call it a combination of his clear protective streak compared with a complete disregard for his own safety.

Given said lack of regard for his own well-being and combined with a few questionable decisions on his part, there is an overhanging question on just how healthy Derek is on a mental level. After all he’s suffered a large number of losses within a short span of time, been tortured on several occasions and he’s faced several acts of betrayal on top of all of that. Allowing your traitorous, murderous uncle into your home after all of that doesn’t seem like the sanest decision to make, family or no. It’s a popular theory that Derek suffers from PTSD whether that’s true or not remains to be seen but he has recently had a somewhat questionable episode involving a dream sequence. During the finale of 3b Derek is shot by a certain returning character, upon seeing this specific shooter Derek essentially retreats into his own head for a bit. There’s a short dream sequence where he explains what just happened within the waking world to an imaginary version of Stiles and then proceeds to state that he isn’t certain whether he’s dreaming or not. While the scene ends with him coming back to reality the more interesting thing to note id that this is the first time that an event has effectively proved to be too much for Derek to take in. Whether he has a particular diagnosable problem or not he’s clearly reached a point where he can no longer push aside traumatic events and carry on as though they didn’t happen, he’s reached his limit in terms of stress.

Abilities/Powers: Derek currently possesses the basic strengths and weakness of a beta werewolf. The basis of which are essentially enhanced human abilities. Their senses are notably heightened which gives them a few perks. Sight, smell, hearing, presumably touch too although this sense has yet to really be delved into. So far on the show the senses of smell and hearing have been shown off in standard betas, the sight aspect had more to do with an alpha at the time although it does come with a red-tint for everyone during a ‘shift’. Hearing was the first to come into play way back in season one, it was shown that a werewolf can detect lies by listening to a person’s heartbeat. It does appear to be a focused ability though, preferably one utilised in a quiet room. The smell sense was shown off a little more recently; within 3b it was shown that a werewolf has the ability to smell lingering emotions. The example given was emotional distress. The catch will this ability seems to be that the amount they can smell depends on how strong the emotions were in the first place. As expected, along with the senses werewolves have increased physical capabilities. Speed, agility, strength. All of which have simply been shown in passing. Some examples would include Derek outrunning a police car, leaping for heights, and generally being able lift heavy objects. It’s a little self-explanatory on that point.

On top of those base abilities werewolves do have a little something up their sleeves. One of their more obvious abilities is their advanced healing capabilities. In most instances a werewolf can heal within seconds of the injury occurring. They’re even shown to mend broken bones with a couple of minutes. There are a couple of things that they cannot heal from though. Wolfsbane is the more obvious answer, it’s a poisonous plant plain and simple, it slows a werewolf down considerably until it eventually kills them upon reaching the heart. Another common example would be a wound from an Alpha, an injury from one of them naturally takes longer to heal. On the slightly happier side of pain though, sort of, werewolves additionally have the ability to take pain from others. A simple touch is all it takes. There is, of course, a downside to the pain pull, while taking a little bit of pain is fine, if a werewolf takes too much in one going it could potentially kill the ‘drainer’.

Last but not least, let’s talk about the shift. A beta’s shift is pretty much just a hairier version of their normal appearance. Most tend to grow out sideburn during the transformation along with a slightly altered hairline, Derek is one of the few who actually manages to lose hair in the process despite the sideburn part, where his eyebrows go will forever be a mystery. Along with the hair, werewolves will also grow claws in place of their human fingernails. An interesting but pointless bit of information is that Derek’s claws have recently changed colour, and he’s now one of the few ‘wolves with black claws instead of the clear sort. Finally there’s the eye colour, the basics are pretty simple, Red means an Alpha, Yelllow means an innocent Beta, Blue means that the beta has taken an innocent life. It should also be mentioned that a werewolf that is in control of their abilities should be able to achieve a partial shift. The partial shift can vary between ‘flashing’ their eye colour at something or lengthening their claws, these can be done independently without the rest of the transformation following afterwards.

Items/Weapons: Just the clothes on his back.
Sample Entry: I think this counts.
Sample Entry Two: And another previous in-game thing.

Name: Mel
Contact Info: AIM: turntechism Plurk: loverbayou
Other Characters Played: n/a
Requested apartment: 24.1

Character Name: Ellie
Canon: The Last Of Us
Canon Point: End game.
Background/History: here
Personality: Ellie is the product of a broken world. Born somewhere around 2018, Ellie came into the world 6 years after the spread of an extreme infection that stole the entire world and left it in shambles. Her parents died at an early age for her, leaving her the child of every camp and quarantine zone run by a corrupt post-apocalyptic government. She was always a problem child, being transferred from military school to military school after beating up other students, stealing, escaping, and just acting out in general. She's defensive, feisty, and not afraid to pick a fight where she sees fit. But there's also a soft side to her-- Ellie is just a teenager, having barely experienced puberty and growing up.

She made friends with another student around her age, if only a bit older, named Riley, who had generally the same temperament as her. It's because of Riley that she's able to find fun in the darkness of their world. Ellie loves to joke around, her interest in terrible puns and dreams of playing actual video games making her the normal kid that she really is deep down. Her sarcasm and sense of humor are still the likes of a budding teenager, given how much of a smart-ass and rebel that she can be at least 99% of the time. Even throughout her adventure across the country with Joel, she still has a fire about her that never goes out. She's the only person holding the key to the cure, which is a heavy weight to carry on her shoulders. And although all seems lost throughout her adventures, her life and her integrity remain the only part that means something to her. She's a fighter, first and foremost, and a child later. Even in her young age, she's smart and quick-witted, fully educated on how to defend herself and those around her. But that doesn't mean she necessarily holds trust. Ellie has had trust issues her whole life, casting out those she doesn't see fit or rightful in her personal space.

Anyone and everyone, to her unfortunate opinion, is an enemy first. It's how she was raised, but that doesn't mean she won't give them a chance. Ellie wants so much to have friends and family, but the closest she's gotten to that at all have either lied to her, died, or turned into infected. The only ones who have honestly tried for her are a part of a government rebellion group, or those who have gotten in the way of her own views of justice-- Namely, Joel. And although she believes her own sense of justice and righteousness has been stepped on and destroyed, that surprisingly hasn't taken the kid out of Ellie. She's a fun-loving, humorous, and curious individual. When her walls are down, all she wants is to try and find her own smile among the disarray and destruction that is the world she has grown up in. So don't be afraid to try and get close to her, she might just let you in.

Abilities/Powers: Ellie is a normal human being, but is significantly talented in self-defense, archery, guns, and first-aid for her age.
Items/Weapons: Her switchblade, pistol, and letter from her mother.

Sample Entry: [ She hadn't expected to fall asleep, not when they were on their way to safety. How could she sleep after everything that had happened? ]

[ But here she is, eyes wide and mouth gasping as she jolts forward. What greets her vision holds hardly any familiarity. A room... A room that somehow resides in a hospital or something, but cleaner than the hospitals she's seen. Her eyebrows furrow, and she calls out into the emptiness of the room. ]

Joel?

[ Nothing. The silence is deafening, making Ellie's heart race when she realizes she's alone. She gets on her knees on the bed, peeking through a window to witness a world that doesn't look any different from her own, and she considers it nothing but. Ellie grits her teeth, turning around and getting off the bed quickly. ]

Joel?!

[ Still no response, even after Ellie looks under her bed and behind cabinets, within them and on top of them. Nothing. She's alone. Again. Immediately, Ellie panics, her heart beating out her ears as she starts turning up the entire room. She searches for her backpack, a person, something. ]

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

[ All she can think is "Not again". Not after what happened the last time she was alone. She can't do that, not again. In a fit of anxiety and frustration, she kicks over the side table, the contents of it clattering to the floor. ]

[ She stops, hands on her head as she tries to think of a rational way to deal with this. ]

Okay. Okay. It's gonna be fine, Ellie. You just need to... I don't know, calm down and figure something out. You're not a newbie to this.

Just... Find a weapon and maim any asshole that threatens you. Yeah.

[ She sighs, hands lowering as she tries to look for a rational answer. But when she turns, she sees what she's knocked on the floor. What she finds is a surprise: her switchblade, a note, her pistol, and a strange phone. Quickly, she takes the blade, flipping it out and folding it back in before shoving it in her pocket. Ellie checks the chamber of the pistol, checks the safety and switches it on before shoving it through her waistband. The note, upon unfolding, appears to be the note her mother left her before she died. As for the phone? That's the mystery... Whoever brought her here obviously stole her backpack, but left her with something to use. ]

Oh god, this is weird.

Second Sample Entry: Post in test community

Edited 2014-06-15 18:19 (UTC)

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Applications Two

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Tony Chu | Chew | not reserved

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Travis Touchdown | No More Heroes | reserved

Joseph Joestar | Jojo's Bizarre Adventure | reserved

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Bill Oswalt | Fargo (TV) | not reserved

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John Watson | Sherlock (BBC) | Reserved

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Renzou Shima | Ao no Exorcist | Reserved

Derek Hale | Teen Wolf | Reserved

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Ellie >> The Last Of Us >> Reserved

Ellie >> The Last Of Us >> Reserved