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[ ARCHIVED ] [ application ]
IMPORTANT!Applications are on a monthly cycle. They run from the 1st thru the 4th of each month. The cycle opens at 12:00AM CST and close at 11:59PM CST. Notices will be sent out all at once at the end of the cycle, and no later than 24 hours after the end of the cycle.
Before applying, please be sure to read the following:
⌈ PLAYER SECTION ⌉
Player:
Contact: Journal/Plurk/AIM — anything to help identify since someone might share your name handle.
Age: You must be at least 13 years old to apply.
Current Characters: If a new player, just put "N/A"
⌈ CHARACTER SECTION ⌉
Character:
Age:
Canon:
Canon Point:
Background: We do not need a play by play of their life. You can of course provide one, but it's not necessary. A summary of their role in the canon and important events involving their character will suffice. Wiki links are allowed.
Personality: Tell us everything you can about how the character works. What are their quirks, reasons for thinking, habits, and flaws—basically we want to know not only how they act, but also why they act that way. You are free to use canon as examples, but be sure to explain why you are referencing the event.
Abilities: If there are any particular abilities the character has supernatural or otherwise, list them here. Referencing to a wiki list is acceptable. However, if there are any particular abilities that need to be weakened or removed, note them here.
Alignment: Please refer to the Alignment entry to choose which alignment your character would most likely fall under. Include a brief (a couple of sentences max) just to help explain why you think your choice is the best fit.
Other: Anything else you'd like to mention.
⌈ SAMPLE SECTION ⌉
Sample: We have two requirements for the sample:
The sample can be "written" in three different ways and you can choose which one will work best for you:
Format wise, you can use either [ brackets ] OR narrative prose. We do require that the writing at least be coherent, have proper sentence structure, and is mostly grammatically correct (we realize that writing styles can be loose/creative in [ bracket ] form so we're giving a bit more leeway). One last suggestion we have is try to have the character interacting with the environment and try thinking of the sample less of a narrative piece but more like a post or thread prompt you might make in the game. That will help the sample show not only how you will write the character, but also how you will play them in practice.
Questions: If you have any questions, ask them here.
Clean copy and paste form here:
Before applying, please be sure to read the following:
- Read the Rules and the Game Information.
- Double check the Reserves and Taken Characters lists to make sure the character you're applying for is not on the list. Also check the comments in case the entry has yet to be updated, as well as any pending applications.
- Feel free to use the most recent test drive both for practice as well as to use for samples. IMPORTANT! If you submit threads as samples, you must submit the application with that character journal. This is the only way we can ensure that the samples are from you and not someone else.
- Linked samples must have been made within the past year.
- You may apply for up to two characters per cycle.
- Application challenges are allowed. Reserves will have priority, but it's not definitive. We will choose the better application regardless.
- Do not plagiarize. If we find that the information provided was directly taken by either another player or source material such a wiki, the application will be rejected immediately. If we find this after processing the application, we will revoke the application and have you removed from the game with potential ban.
- Reusing your own applications from other games is allowed. We only ask any original written samples to conform to our game. That is, we don't want to read samples that are set specifically for another game's premise. Note: this does not apply to threads linked from other games used as samples.
- If you are rejected, you cannot reapply for the same character until the next cycle. However, you can apply for a different character in the same cycle.
- Those accepted must fill out all of the required entries within a week to be considered part of the game. Otherwise, we will consider it a revocation of the application.
- Fill out the form and comment to this entry! You can either paste the application directly to the entry or link it from your own journal/musebox.
Player:
Contact: Journal/Plurk/AIM — anything to help identify since someone might share your name handle.
Age: You must be at least 13 years old to apply.
Current Characters: If a new player, just put "N/A"
Character:
Age:
Canon:
Canon Point:
Background: We do not need a play by play of their life. You can of course provide one, but it's not necessary. A summary of their role in the canon and important events involving their character will suffice. Wiki links are allowed.
Personality: Tell us everything you can about how the character works. What are their quirks, reasons for thinking, habits, and flaws—basically we want to know not only how they act, but also why they act that way. You are free to use canon as examples, but be sure to explain why you are referencing the event.
Abilities: If there are any particular abilities the character has supernatural or otherwise, list them here. Referencing to a wiki list is acceptable. However, if there are any particular abilities that need to be weakened or removed, note them here.
Alignment: Please refer to the Alignment entry to choose which alignment your character would most likely fall under. Include a brief (a couple of sentences max) just to help explain why you think your choice is the best fit.
Other: Anything else you'd like to mention.
Sample: We have two requirements for the sample:
- Character Portrayal. We should see examples of the character's dialogue as well as some introspection or additional narrative to further show how you intend to write the character. This is the most important part of the sample and where most of the weight will be.
- Use of Emotions. This is our "game setting" requirement. Essentially we want to ensure that you have a basic grasp of the game's premise, especially with the use of emotions. It can be a small scene, even incidental to the main sample. For apathetic characters or those who do not exhibit emotions easily, an alternative is to describe what the character is doing instead and essentially show how they behave in such a manner. For example, if a character is set in a scenario that would normally provoke an emotional response, what do they do instead? What is their mindset and their reaction instead? This portion doesn't have to be lengthy and can even be a couple of sentences to a paragraph. Also keep in mind that subtle and passive effects count, so you do not have to try and create something exuberant or extreme. A calm wind will work just as well as a raging storm, so feel free to be as simple or creative as you want.
The sample can be "written" in three different ways and you can choose which one will work best for you:
- Test Drive. You can utilize our test drive to cover both requirements of the sample. So long as there is enough character portrayal and a scene with an emotional reaction, be it within the prompt or done during the thread, then it will satisfy both requirements.
- Link out + Written. You can link to threads/entries from other games, memes, or museboxes to show character portrayal, and then write an additional short scene for the emotion portion of the sample.
- Original Sample. You can write a complete sample that shows both character portrayal and a scene involving emotion use. This can be one sample or two separate samples. If you opt to write an original sample, you are welcome to use any prompts from any of our Test Drives, Intro Logs, Task Board, and even past events. You are also free to change things up and are not restricted to any of these prompts. They are just here to help offer ideas.
Format wise, you can use either [ brackets ] OR narrative prose. We do require that the writing at least be coherent, have proper sentence structure, and is mostly grammatically correct (we realize that writing styles can be loose/creative in [ bracket ] form so we're giving a bit more leeway). One last suggestion we have is try to have the character interacting with the environment and try thinking of the sample less of a narrative piece but more like a post or thread prompt you might make in the game. That will help the sample show not only how you will write the character, but also how you will play them in practice.
Questions: If you have any questions, ask them here.
River Tam | Firefly | not reserved
Player: Molly
Contact:
Age: 24
Current Characters: none atm!
Character: River Tam
Age: 18 (pooooosssibly 17 but I'm pretty sure she had a birthday offscreen, haha)
Canon: Firefly/Serenity
Canon Point: post-Leaves on the Wind
Background: Wiki page for the series (wiki 2: electric boogaloo, wiki 3: revenge of the wiki)
Personality: It’s hard to know where to start with River. When lucid, she’s sweet and playful. She plays tag with her friend Kaylee, draws and colors, and listens to gossip about boys. But in less favorable circumstances, she’s cryptic, blunt, and even violent. She throws packs of medical equipment around, explains how the crew would freeze to death in space before asphyxiating, and slashes a crewmate across the chest with a butcher knife.
These opposing traits exist in her mainly due to the medical and psychological experimentations she underwent as a teenager. Her brother, Simon, recalls how she acted before the experiments: hyperintelligent and hypertalented – to the point of being “more than gifted…she was a gift”; sometimes “a real brat” but still dearly loved by him and their parents. His descriptions – as well as several flashbacks that are scattered throughout the series – indicate that the friendly and sweet personality is the original.
Unfortunately, the experiments performed on her by the government – which included at least one partial lobotomy – left her scarred and unstable. It is unclear what the experimenters’ purposes were, but it seems that they were turning River Tam into an assassin. They conditioned her into responding to certain codes, both visual and aural; at least one exists to trigger her into “mindless killing” mode (as seen in the movie, when she incapacitates an entire bar’s worth of people), and one to “put her to sleep” (which stops her from hurting her captain in said bar). They took her natural intuitiveness and attempted to expand upon it – perhaps to the point of her becoming “psychic”. There are times when it does seem that she can read minds, knowing things that she couldn’t have known before; at other times she’s just hypersensitive, reading everything about a person from their voice, their body, their inflections. What is certain about her intuitiveness is that she can’t control it. The partial lobotomy – which removed her amygdala, the part of the brain that controls emotions – left her unable to filter or hold things back; as a result, “she feels everything. She can’t not”. Although it would be inaccurate to say that she always explains herself (she definitely doesn’t, and when she does it’s often cryptic and layered), she does have trouble knowing when to say things and when to keep quiet. (For example, at one point she and Simon are kidnapped by a town of old-fashioned folk, who come to believe that River is a “witch” and must be burnt. The pastor/village elder reacts kindly to her at first – perhaps this is just a misunderstanding, and she is simply a strange little girl. Unfortunately, River reads him and reveals that he gained his position of power by murdering his predecessor, “proving” that she’s a “witch” and causing him to proceed with the witch-burning.)
Her unstable moods sometime leave her morbid, such as when she decides to lay down on a (filled) coffin; childish, such as when she refuses to give Shepherd Book his Bible back; or generally inappropriate, such as when she calmly watches Kaylee and Simon consummating their relationship in the engine room.
Despite all of this, in her saner moments she reveals that she cares greatly for Simon and the rest of the crew. She is aware that her brother gave up everything he had to save her, and feels guilty for it (“You gave up everything you had to find me. You found me broken. It's hard for you.”). As aforementioned, she can be very nice and “pleasant enough” to be around; it all depends on her mood. After the events of the movie, she does seem to be more stable as commented on by her brother and Mal, but still continues to say odd things and jump around hitting people with knives.
Abilities: River's powers are somewhat difficult to describe; the short story is, she's a psychic assassin trained in being ridiculously fast and calculating. She appears to be able to read minds, sometimes in a more subtle way - seeing what people are feeling by observing them very closely, and having enough empathy to get some of that emotion in herself - and sometimes in a more mysterious way - knowing the pasts of the people around her, even when there is no conventional way for her to possess such knowledge. Her empathetic telepathy/psychometry probably has something to do with the missing parts of her brain. Her great power is tempered by the fact that she cannot control it.
Simon also mentions in his exposition for River that “Everything she did, music, math, theoretical physics -- even-even dance -- there was nothing that didn't come as naturally to her as breathing does to us.” Since her time at the Academy, River has developed her almost surreal grace for both dancing and more deadly combat situations. She is able to incapacitate an entire bar after being triggered by a secret code broadcasted by the government, and also seems fairly proficient with a variety of weapons, including guns and axes. She speaks English, Mandarin Chinese, Esperanto, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Latin, and Russian.
Alignment: Daimonia (grief-joy). As aforementioned, she "feels everything" and the gambit of happiness to sadness seems to encompass the most. There are a few iconic scenes of River being both joyous (dancing in the fair, playing chase with Kaylee) and grief-stricken ("You found me broken. It's hard for you. You gave up everything you had."; Sessions 22 of the R. Tam Sessions).
Other: River will be carrying a plastic toy dinosaur with her upon arrival.
Sample:
(In canon characters interject English with Chinese words and phrases. I will include the translation in hover-text when River does this.)
He would’ve liked it, she mused to herself as she toyed idly with the (his) plastic dinosaurs on the dashboard. Everything had been remade with love. She had watched Inara carefully paint Serenity’s face again, making her shine with new life. She had heard the new life in Zoe, and was excited to know that she would no longer be the youngest on board. (“I want her to call me dà jiě jie,” she’d said to Zoe, who’d been confused. She hadn’t even known about her own family, growing inside of her.) She had been pleased to know that Simon and Kaylee had finally found each other, pleased for him because her brother had finally figured out how girls work and pleased for her because she would be a real part of the family now.
She had wanted to keep his things on the dashboard. The rest of them agreed. They felt like it was a tribute to him. She decided it meant that he was still with them. People put themselves into their possessions. When his and Zoe’s baby was born, she would show the things to her. Then it would be like he was still here to be a father. He had always wanted to be one; she had heard him talk about it, time and time again, when the whole crew was together and when he thought he and Zoe were alone.
The ‘Verse had an ironic streak, to take him away just before he got his wish. She would’ve been upset at the unfairness of it all, but she’d already known how unfair life was.
Carefully, she placed the hula-dancer doll at the head of the dinosaurs, making sure it was secure. It was time for Mal to take the wheel.
(It wasn’t actually a wheel. That was an old anachronism, from the days of ships on water, on Earth-That-Was. They were steered via rudders, which were controlled via wheels. Which were controlled via humans, at the helm of the transport.)
It was time for Mal to take the controls. That was a more appropriate turn of phrase for Serenity. It was morning (another anachronism: in space, without the guidance of a star or a planetary orbit, traditional times of day had little meaning. It was the end of the crew’s sleep cycle) and that meant her shift was over. He wouldn’t want to be up, and he’d complain at her as he got ready, but a deal was a deal.
She found the hatch to his room unlocked and was climbing noisily down it when he cried out at her. He claimed not to be decent. She knew what men looked like. It didn’t seem like an issue, in her mind. But then her mind was never quite like the others’. So she climbed back up and waited at the top for him.
After a few moments he started.
“You know…little one…I’m not saying an early rise ain’t good for a man. But I’m thinking your impression of ‘early’ might be a little different than the rest of us. Pretty sure I just fell asleep a minute ago and now you’re sayin’ it’s time to get up…”
Above him, she smiled. He’d complain, but a deal was a deal.
Revision
While you have a good Sample for River, we would like you to expand more on River's Personality. In particular, we would like to know less about her behavioral quirks and more about her as a person. We would like you to expand on her self-awareness, her worldview, how she feels about others/people in general, and what her current motivations for her actions are, if there are any at all.
Please submit your revisions as its own comment in reply to this one. You have one week to submit the revisions, otherwise we will consider it a revocation of your application. If you have any questions or concerns, ask away!
no subject
While it is tempting to think that River has always been a lost, oblivious little girl, she has repeatedly stated – both before and after Miranda – that she understands that there is something wrong with her. It's clear that she doesn't always realize when/that her behavior is abnormal or inappropriate, and during the series she cannot articulate what made her this way (even in Leaves on the Wind she admits that she didn't know about Miranda before being triggered, and that there are more secrets “locked away” in her head), but she is aware of it. During the show it is something that frightens and upsets her, and that she feels guilty about concerning Simon's sacrifices for her; after Miranda, she seems to have more stability and a firmer grip on herself. She does firmly tell Simon that she's “never going to be normal”, but remains coherent and cognizant, and is able to calmly and easily relate to the girl they rescue from the Academy, comforting her with the knowledge that she will, eventually, heal. (An interesting thing to tell her, since, as aforementioned, River doesn't think of herself as normal – but she clearly feels more normal than she did before.)
Although the violence she has rained down on friends and strangers may seem to suggest otherwise, River actually cares often for others, and will put herself into harm's way for her crew mates and even for her former peers at the Academy. She is most clearly motivated to care for Simon - she attempts to turn himself in so that he (and the others) can live "normal" lives, and, in the movie, declares that it is "her turn" to take care of him and rushes headfirst into a mob of rabid space cannibal rapists to get him the medical supplies he needs - but she looks out for the other crew members as well. Most recently, she discovered that other young people were still trapped in the Academy, and made it her mission to try and rescue them (despite the fact that she did not seem to know any of them by name, and that it meant going physically into the Academy herself). She is also very affectionate sometimes, cuddling with Zoe in the comic and possibly with Inara during the show, and saying that she misses Jayne (and Book and Wash) when Zoe asks. Mentions of Simon's skills as a doctor indicate that she admires him for being able to help others.
Unlike her brother, she doesn't seem to have a hard time adjusting to the much less comfortable lifestyle of Serenity's crew, and though she has some sense of morality, she does not make much comment on the illegal activities of the crew (and of herself, sometimes).
She has a penchant for whimsy and fantasy and is perhaps more fascinated by the universe than her brother is. The depths of outer space, viewed from a suit while clinging to Serenity's hull, bring a big smile to her face (while Simon appears absolutely terrified), and she spends some time observing some cattle they are dropping off as a job, apparently musing about the state of their minds and souls. When the crew suddenly comes upon a huge amount of money, they each discuss how they would ideally use it; River envisions some sort of Alice-in-Wonderland world with clothed animals, dragons and fairies, and a huge poofy dress. This trait is shown to be a consistent part of her personality, rather than a result of the Alliance's partial lobotomy, in flashbacks where she makes up games to play with Simon (involving dinosaurs). On her good days, she still teases (Simon does recall that she has always been a bit bratty) and jokes.
Aside from caring for the crew, and perhaps helping the others stuck in the Academy, River may not have many other motivations. She likely believes that the Alliance should be punished for what they've done to her and others, but she does not seem fueled by revenge as one might assume she would be. Similarly, she hasn't shown any particular interest in money. Serenity, and her new-found family, are what's important to her.
Accepted!
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no subject