paradisamods | GAME IMPORTED CHARACTER APPLICATIONS

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GAME IMPORTED CHARACTER APPLICATIONS

GAME IMPORTED CHARACTER APPLICATIONS

General Applications | Returning Character Applications | Game Imported Character Applications

If you wish to apply for a character you have previously played in another game, then please copy and paste the form in the box below into a new comment to this post. Do not link it from another journal.

If your application does not fit into one comment, split your application into as many comments are needed. You can mark them as part 1, part 2, etc if you feel the need. A mod or helper will reply to it in a timely fashion.

Applications take on average 3-7 days, depending on how accessible canon is. If a revision is requested for your application, you have 72 hours to make the noted revisions. If after 72 hours revisions are not made, the application will be declined and must be resubmitted.

If you are applying for a character you reserved recently, please put 'Reserved Character - ( Character Name )' on the subject line.

Please space your paragraphs properly; improper spacing may be grounds for a decline over writing quality.

<big><big>PERSONAL</big></big>
NAME: 
PERSONAL JOURNAL:
EMAIL: [ Required. ]
AIM: [ Optional, but recommended ]
CURRENT CHARACTERS: [ If applicable. ]

<big><big>CHARACTER</big></big>
CHARACTER NAME: 
SERIES:
CANON POINT: [ After which point in their canon storyline does the character enter Paradisa? ]
LOSS: [ Paradisa takes something precious from residents when they arrive, as a "price" for a ticket to paradise. This can be an object, an ability, a memory –– anything precious to the character. What is your character's loss, and why is it precious to them? How would losing this effect them? ]

ABOUT THE CHARACTER: [ 500 WORDS MINIMUM. Please describe who the character is, including any relevant details from their history. This will be a measure of your characterization and understanding of the character; who they are, what drives them, how their experiences have shaped them. For a rough idea of what you should consider when writing this, please see <a href="http://paradisamods.dreamwidth.org/14746.html">What We're Looking For.</a>]

ABILITIES: [ If applicable, provide a summary of your character's supernatural, magical or technological abilities, or anything that might make them otherwise exceptional compared to your average human being. Links are welcome if the character has too many abilities to expand on here.]

PREVIOUS GAME HISTORY: [ Provide a summary of the character's previous game history, including any major events or relationships that have really affected the character, and how their previous experiences have changed them (if at all). Please also include a brief summary of the setting of your previous game(s). THIS MUST BE 500 WORDS or longer. ]

THIRD-PERSON WRITING SAMPLE: [ 250 WORDS MINIMUM. In a third-person perspective, write a couple of paragraphs featuring your character. It will used as a measure of your characterization and writing ability, so we advise to choose a premise that will best demonstrate those things. ]

FIRST-PERSON JOURNAL SAMPLE: [ 100 WORDS MINIMUM. In the first-person voice, write as if the character were making an entry in their journal, ideally using little to no action descriptors. It should be long enough to show that you have a grasp of the character's voice.

OPTIONAL: If you prefer, you may link to sample threads in place of writing a 100 word sample. The replies from your character should equal or exceed 100 words. ]

INTENT: [ What draws you to play this particular character with imported memories? Ideally, what would you like to do with the character in Paradisa? It's alright if you don't know yet; we're just curious. ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

PERSONAL
NAME: Anne
PERSONAL JOURNAL:

trustme_imthe
EMAIL: tavrosno[at]gmail[dot]com
AIM: No AIM, but

trustmeimthe works well!
CURRENT CHARACTERS: N/A

CHARACTER
CHARACTER NAME: Cassel Sharpe
SERIES: Curse Workers
CANON POINT: Post-canon - that is, about six months post-Black Heart; he's running away with Lila when some Brennans track him down and shoot him for reneging on the deal he broke, like, a book and a half ago.
LOSS: The suit that Kon made for him to remove the blowback side effects of his work, and the faces of all non-family members he has ever loved, both at home and on the Barge. Voices stay, memories stay, but faces are gone.

ABOUT THE CHARACTER:

Cassel Sharpe is a big ol' bundle of issues. He has mommy issues, daddy issues, brother issues, girl issues, but most of all he has trust issues. Cassel's trust issues are so serious that he can't even tell himself the whole truth most of the time and only manages half-truths half of the time. No matter how he paints himself, Cassel is just as much of a pathological liar as his brother, Barron, which makes a lot of sense, given how similar their lives have been.

The environment Cassel grew up in was toxic to say the least. The entire family was and is steeped in violence and organized crime. While Cassel doesn't talk much about his father, it's implied that he was one stone cold mofo and was as much a part of pushing his kids into a life of crime as Shandra was. Of course, Shandra was not only emotionally abusive but literally emotionally manipulative; she had the ability to stick her fingers in her sons' emotions and twist them around, and she used that ability almost constantly. She set out to create three little sociopaths, and three little sociopaths she did create, with unhealthy violent-switching-with-codependent relationships to each other, piles and piles of resentment, and the bone-deep understanding that their survival went hand in hand with the survival of the family, which went hand in hand with being able to be a good criminal, to run a good con. Besides which, when Shandra did emotion work her own emotions shifted violently with the blowback, leading her to physically and verbally abuse her sons on a regular basis. Cassel pays a lot of lip service to being aware of the dysfunctionality and abnormality of his upbringing, especially in White Cat, but while he might logically understand this he doesn't believe it on an emotional level. He can only ever see his family having been the way it was and can't conceptualize a childhood not tainted by curse work and cruelty.

In other words, Cassel was both explicitly trained by his family to be a sociopathic criminal and implicitly encouraged to do so in order to keep himself out of trouble, at least in the insular family context. Being a worker criminal in a worker family was considered the "good, normal" thing to do, and Cassel wanted more than anything to be a powerful, valuable worker. Instead, it seemed like he was a powerless kid, so he had to strive to be a good criminal, at the very least. Even so, he was always on the outside, not only of his family but of the Zacharov family, because he wasn't as useful as his brothers.

This was where his rival relationship with Barron came into play. It was really only a semi-rivalry, because Barron seemed to want to look out for him and care for him as much as Barron could care for anybody. It was Barron who watched scary movies with him on the stairs over Philip and Anton's shoulders even though it was against the rules; it was Barron who learned how to pick locks with him; it was Barron who helped him out of scrapes. It was also Barron who protected him from the fact that he was an assassin - which was a shitty thing to do, but was at least partially motivated by a desire to keep Cassel safe, even from himself. Cassel, though, considers Barron to be his chief rival and even pathologizes him as one of the major forces in the way of him achieving happiness, while on some level wanting desperately to have a normal, brotherly relationship with him. Hence Cassel writing in Barron's fake journals that they had pizza day once a week: he really wants that. He wants to have a normal brother and a normal family. He wants to be normal.

The problem with that is that he's also convinced himself that he can't be normal, not ever. While society has told him since he was small that it's wrong to be a criminal, it's wrong to lie, and it's extra wrong to be a worker, his family has always said the opposite: that you can't survive unless you're a criminal, that you can't survive if you don't lie, and that you're the best to your family if you're a powerful worker. Until he was seventeen years old, Cassel believed he was an outsider in his family because he wasn't a worker and tried to fit into society by acting as normal as he could. Once he finally found out for good that he was a worker, he sank into it with, frankly, a lot of gratitude and resigned himself to being an outsider in society but a valuable member of his own family. However, he was so used to be an outsider in his family and was so betrayed by the way Shandra, Barron, and Philip had kept the truth from him that he couldn't ally himself with his family either, so that in the end he forced himself into paranoid isolation, trusting no one, not even his friends or the girl he said he loved.

His self-perceived dual status as an outsider, in his family and in society, led him to romanticize himself as the anti-hero of his own personal narrative. It's said repeatedly of Philip that "it's not just a weakness but a continued romantic need to believe himself manipulated against his will instead of admitting he wants power and privilege." Add the word belonging to that list and you've got Cassel in a nutshell. The trouble is that, as much as he wants to belong, as much as he wants to trust people, he can't bring himself to. He's pushed himself so tightly into a life of isolation, paranoia, posturing self-sufficiency, and above all lying that every time he takes a step forward, he slides two steps back. He can't bring himself to make himself vulnerable by telling the truth more than a few times in the entire series, even to those people he's closest to. Furthermore, he's so attuned to lies that he can read other people's tells like a book. He comes from the automatic assumption that people are lying to him, so when he catches a tell it just confirms what he already suspected, and he is always attuned to others' tells and vulnerabilities. He assumes that everyone functions on the same dishonest wavelength that he and his family do, so he gets caught off guard when people do manage to convince him they're being truthful. Even when someone does convince him of their honesty, though, Cassel truly doesn't believe there's a single person in the world with his best interests at heart. He also has trouble understanding empathy because he has trouble accessing his own, so it's almost impossible for him to put himself in another person's shoes and feel the pain they're feeling.

Cassel is pathologically attached to his own behavior patterns, and especially doesn't want to relinquish the thrill of the con. For example, he dismisses aloud Mina's desire to go after "the big con" while subconsciously agreeing with her 100%. Lying and fooling people, hoisting them on their own petard, is as much a thrill to Cassel as it is to Shandra and Barron; he's just less honest about that fact. He talks a big game about wanting to be normal, and he does want to be perceived as normal, but if normality comes at the price of running cons, he's going to find a sly way to sabotage himself. To him, the con is a way to do his family proud, prove his intelligence, and prove his value, and he's unable or unwilling to come up with a creative substitute for that that would allow him to live a civilian life.

Not that it would have worked anyway; is attempt to be normal at Wallingford was a colossal failure because Cassel is not as smooth an operator as he thinks he is. People are constantly remarking on how dangerous Cassel has always seemed, how they were afraid to set him off; his roommate Sam compared him to a tiger pretending to be a housecat at one point, something dangerous trying to wrap itself in an unconvincingly innocent skin. His family can read him even more easily, because he's never seemed normal to them and never tried to seem normal around them. He clings to a world where "worker kids have to play cops or robbers" underneath his attempt at normalcy, and that's what ultimately undermines it. People can tell he doesn't 100% buy into his act, so they don't either.

Cassel's also a coward, which is a true Sharpe family trait. Because they're workers, they as a family have never had to own up to anything or face up to any consequences, Shandra and Barron being the best example of this. Cassel talks to talk about guilt and owning up to his mistakes, but when push comes to shove he runs from the consequences every time, most notably at the end of Black Heart, when he literally runs away from all of his problems and into Lila's arms. Instead of facing up to his mistakes and his flaws, he oversimplifies the world into a false paradigm of good and bad. When he does bad things, he dismisses it and says that he's an irredeemable "bad guy" instead of facing up to the fact that he's basically a dick and working on his own malfunctions.

Cassel's biggest hang-up is on Lila Zacharov. He claims to have been in love with her since they were thirteen, but let's think about this logically for a second. Cassel knew Lila for a few months when they were thirteen. He probably did have a crush on her, maybe something more, but she was always an unattainable ideal to him, the spoiled, haughty princess of the mob family that Cassel's family worked for. She would never be his, not really, and that seems to have been part of the appeal. Then he thought he murdered her and pined after her for three years, even fantasizing about her when he thought she was dead. By the time Lila - the real Lila, not the idealized Lila or the dead Lila or the Lila as Cassel had preserved her - came back, she was an entirely different person than she was at 13, but Cassel was still in love with Lila-the-13-year-old. This Lila was vengeful, even crueller than before, and frankly a little insane from being locked in a cage as a cat for three years. Hell, she had tried to kill him. But Cassel never allows himself to acknowledge that she's not the girl he used to love. Instead he chooses to interpret her actions in a way that will allow him to romanticize her and preserve that idealized tragic love affair that he's so intent on. Her feelings hardly come into play for the majority of their interactions. Even when she's been worked by Shandra, the tragedy is his tragedy and not hers; he's been robbed of his true love, he's the one in danger of doing something bad rather than her being in danger of him doing something bad to her, and when he's had enough of "resisting" her he labels her as an irresistable femme fatale and very nearly rapes her under the influence of his mother's emotion work. But it doesn't matter, because she's dangerous, seductive Lila and therefore he doesn't have to take responsibility for his own actions.

The bottom line is that Cassel is a danger to Lila just as much as she's a danger to him. He goes so far as labeling her his "death instinct;" he wants her because she's exhilarating and at least used to be a door to the criminal underworld he wanted to be a part of. He built her up to superhuman perfection in his head and convinced himself (probably accurately) that he could never have her. Instead he possesses her in other ways, by rewriting her in his head to be the femme fatale for his narrative anti-hero. And by stalking her. Can't forget that one.

Beyond all this, though, Cassel is in a lot of ways a typical teenager: broody, mopey, moody, and overly dramatic. He's blatantly cruel, sardonic, and vindictive, especially when frightened or threatened as a means of self-defense. He uses taunts and sarcasm as coping mechanisms for negative feelings, especially fear, and also as a means of relating to his peers. Finally, Cassel is angry, every minute of every day. His feelings of persecution, justified as they may have been in the beginning, are off-the-charts paranoid by now. He thinks everyone is out to wrong him, and he is royally pissed about it 25/8.

ABILITIES: Cassel's a worker, which means he has a more-or-less-magical skill that he can use if he has hand-to-skin contact with another person - hence the gloves. Not only is he a worker, but he's a transformation worker, the rarest of them all and maybe the most dangerous. He can turn anything into anything else, with no care for where all that extra matter goes. (Don't question it, it's magic.) By extension, he can also kill anyone with a touch, simply by turning them into something inanimate. The catch to all of this is the bigger his work, the worse the blowback is, and he gets blowback of some kind every time he works. What you need to know about blowback is: he turns into a walking, talking, flopping, writhing bodyhorror for a couple of minutes. Then he's okay and has the normal number of eyes again.

Note: In the game I am taking him from, Cassel had a suit that he made, a replication of his warden's, that mitigated the effects of blowback. As mentioned in the LOSS section, that is going to be part of his loss; he will experience the full effects of blowback if he chooses to use his work.

PREVIOUS GAME HISTORY: Canon history.

First, a brief note on the set-up of The Last Voyages. Essentially, it is a place where quote-unquote damned souls are taken after death to redeem themselves, guided in their journey by the allegedly pure. Or at least purer. Or at least a little less fucked up. It is a large ship floating through space and occasionally crashing into really terrible places because the faceless Admiral appears to be unable to drive.

This is where Cassel found himself after death. Naturally, he was unimpressed by this premise to start with and began to make alliances with people he felt a natural kinship with, while scheming to get back home as soon as possible. His most prominent relationships were with Barron Sharpe, his brother; Chris D'Amico, his best friend and later boyfriend; Zane, an assassin and later his adoptive brother; and of course Kon-El, his Admiral-assigned warden and guide to being a less shitty person.

His initial approach to the Barge was to take nothing seriously, cause as much trouble as possible, and be unaffected by anything. This proved difficult in close proximity to Barron, whom Cassel had always pitted himself against. It also became more and more difficult to keep himself emotionally distanced from the other passengers of the Barge, especially after being stabbed to death by a tiny serial killer he'd been trying to con. His first real step towards emotional connection came when he confessed several of his impulsive lies to Chris and told him about Lila.

Shortly after this, several major exciting crises occurred on board, culminating in a ship-wide takeover by one of the wardens and Barron jumping overboard with his warden in the hopes of making his way back home, somehow, using mysterious logic. Cassel flipped out and attacked several people, but later used to aftermath of this experience to open up to a few people, warily but more or less without lying. After that, they found Barron and his warden on a medieval world riding a dragon. It was actually kind of cool.

After bucking Kon's authority repeatedly and getting banned from the bar for drinking without supervision and being smacked in the face with the revelation that he is actually worth more than just his work and doesn't need to put himself through excruciating pain in order to be a "useful" person (thank you Chris), Cassel decided to get into other trouble other ways. He approached Zane, the isolated new arrival, and decided to channel his own latent masochism and Zane's frustration and aggression into giving him permission to beat him bloody. Which he did. Then Cassel broke a bunch of rules by giving him metal to use his powers with, then Zane freaked out because Cassel was getting close to him, then they both had too many emotions to deal with.

All of which pushed Cassel to coax an alcoholic character off the wagon for no reason other than that he could, and nobody can make him be a good person for anything, so there. After this, he was locked up for a week and had a number of breakthroughs about the fact that apparently even that can't push people away for good, so maybe they weren't lying this whole time after all. It was only after this point that he truly began to uncover his old traumatic memories that had been subsumed by Barron, with the help of a telepath, and started to heal.

Another series of clever life choices began with Cassel antagonizing Harvey Dent, then getting beaten to pieces so that Harvey could get back at Chris. However, this was actually a pretty significant moment of growth for Cassel, because he was able to hold his own without antagonizing Harvey further at the time and was able to stay away from him in the future without seeking revenge. It was shortly after this that he graduated and decided to stay on board the Barge as a warden. I will be taking him from the end of this past October, after he was transported to a mirror version of the Barge and shown the worst possible version of himself, an assassin and sadistic torturer.

So in sum, Cassel has changed hugely in his more-than-a-year on the Barge. He is more open with his emotions and makes a concerted effort to be overhonest rather than catching himself up in a web of compulsive lies. He has some, although admittedly not comprehensive, understanding of his own trauma, and has come to an understanding that many of his previous relationships before the Barge were based on lies and self-delusion. His greatest personal change in that respect is that he now has the understanding that his obsessive love for Lila was just that: obsessive, unhealthy, based on an old vision of who she was when she was thirteen, and with no real focus on her needs and her wants. He has made new relationships, some of them healthy, some of them just as obsessive, but he is at least trying to start from a solid place - most of the time. Unless he feels like backsliding a little bit back day.

Which is also sort of the point. He's better, but he'll never be "good"; he's a stronger person, but he'll never leave his trauma behind; he knows himself better, but he's still a seventeen-year-old boy with a dark past and an unknown future. And he's still scared of a whole lot of shit. Where he goes from here is up in the air.

THIRD-PERSON WRITING SAMPLE:

It feels like there's a hole in his head.

This time it's so much clumsier than when Barron did it. When his brother did it, Cassel never even knew.

He takes a few moments to let the sick satisfaction of his brother's superiority sink into his stomach, then brushes that away. Thinking about Barron won't help now. Thinking about how Barron would probably laugh at him won't, and thinking about how he'd inevitably come up with a plan for what to do now won't help at all.

All Cassel wants to do is think about pizza night, and all the stupid talks they had on the Barge, dancing around each other like either of them really knew how to be a good brother at all.

He vigorously scrubs at the corners of his eyes. He is not gonna fucking cry. This isn't the time or the place. He's got - he has shit to do. Like find out where it ends, and when the ship is coming back. Call Chris. Can he call Chris?

I want to go home, he thinks pathetically, and his heart sinks when he realizes that home means the Barge. It sinks a little bit every time. His mom would be so disappointed.

Sighing, he runs his hands through his hair, pushing it into some semblance of order. His gloves have little spots of product on them; he smooths his hair out some more and then wipes his hands on the bedspread, a petty little gesture of dismissal. This place isn't his. He won't own it.

Instead, he stands straight and tall, cracking his back before slouching. A smirk grows on his face like it was planted there.

Ready or not, he thinks: here I come.

FIRST-PERSON JOURNAL SAMPLE: try (cw: self-injury) these & this | NB: these are from a couple of months before his graduation, the day of his graduation, and a couple of months after. I chose the ones I did because I feel like they represent the erratic nature of his emotional state and presentation, but if you would like a further sample I'm happy to provide it!

INTENT: Cassel's experiences on the Barge have led him to try to take his life in a new direction. Rather than being a deluded, vicious, self-destructive asshole with serious codependency issues and a massive amount of self-loathing, he's only mildly deluded, normally not vicious, rarely self-destructive, and standard teenaged levels of codependent and self-loathing! In other words: he's made a start, but he's not Young Adult of the Year or anything, and he would not be voted Most Likely To Succeed in any graduating class, like, anywhere.

So he's trying. What I want to do with him in the context of Paradisa is push him to try outside of the counterintuitively stable environment of the Barge, where he is a known and relatively safe quantity. I really want to push him outside of his comfort zone and see how well he adapts, and I think this would be a great place to do that.

Your application has been approved. Go ahead and create your character journal, then comment on this entry and join

paradisa,

paradisalogs,

paradisaooc, and

paradisabeyond. Thank you!

If you'd like, you may also join

paradisamemes, our meme community.

Thank you! ♥

PERSONAL
NAME: Crystal
PERSONAL JOURNAL:

nerdangel
EMAIL: octoberrain08 @ gmail
AIM: kyotoshowgirl
CURRENT CHARACTERS: n/a

CHARACTER
CHARACTER NAME: Elena Gilbert
SERIES: The Vampire Diaries (TV series)
CANON POINT: 4x19 Pictures of You
LOSS: Elena cannot recall any specific memories or the faces of Damon or Stefan Salvatore. Their names will sound vaguely familiar to her, but she won't be able to connect how/why she knows them or what relevance they have in her life. The Salvatores have obviously impacted Elena's life for better or for worse, so disconnecting her from that will be interesting and potentially complicated should a Stefan or Damon ever turn up.

ABOUT THE CHARACTER:

Before the death of her parents, Elena was your garden variety girl next door type. She was fairly popular at school, but preferred the company of a very close circle of friends that she had grown up with since Mystic Falls is that kind of ass-end of nowhere small town. She also did well at just about anything and everything she attempted or put her mind to. Elena has always been reliable as a friend and was always the person that could be turned to during a crisis. There really wasn't a whole lot missing from Elena's life that would be the picture of happiness. But Elena is still a teenager and that means trying to figure out who you are and what you want. Even before her parents' deaths, Elena struggled to find herself. For example, she started to date her best friend Matt but wasn't entirely happy with that. Their relationship was solid and comfortable and in a sense, Elena felt obligated to want it - or at least something similar to it. But on the other side of the coin, it felt too spelled out and finalized for her. Even back then when things were easier and simpler for her, Elena has been the sort of small town girl who didn't want to miss out on the world and has never been all that comfortable with settling with good enough.

The death of Elena's parents amplified these feelings tenfold, but also was a shock to her system. Elena, quite understandably, was depressed for a long time afterward. She broke up with Matt and stopped spending as much time with her friends. She seemed to spend more time writing in her diary than actually leaving the house. On top of grieving for her parents, Elena also had to deal with survivor's guilt because not only was she the only one to survive the accident, she was the reason why they were out driving in the first place. Elena began struggling with not just the typical teenage worries of figuring out her place in life, but also now trying to justify even wanting anything for herself in the first place. By the end of the summer though, she makes a conscious effort to move on from the death of her parents though in many ways, this is Elena putting on a brave face for the sake of everyone else.

Then there were vampires and that screwed everything up so much more. Though, to be fair, they didn't screw everything up right away over night.

At first, it was actually relatively nice all things considered. Elena managed to fall head over heels in love with Stefan Salvatore ~~and it was epic~~. Their relationship had its dramatic ups and downs, but the important part was that being with Stefan always made Elena feel safe without the feeling of being stifled like she felt in her relationship with Matt. With - not to be confused with "because of" - Stefan, Elena was able to experience new things and evaluate them for herself. She gained more confidence to say yes or no for herself in terms of what she wanted for her life though it came at some pretty steep prices and with some bad mistakes.

Elena has lost a lot of family in the process and her friends have lost a lot in the crossfire as well. (Matt lost his sister, Bonnie lost her grandmother, Caroline became a vampire, Jeremy and her both lost their aunt, she lost her biological parents, etc.) The loss is, however, a part of growing up and to a certain extent, it becomes almost normal and expected for Elena that she's going to lose something along the way. As long she doesn't lose everything, Elena manages to weather most of the losses she faces fairly well. And even when she feels like she's falling apart at the seams, she manages to keep it together to be there for her friends. Because at the end of the day, it's what she has left that matters most of all to her. Best example of this, of course, is Elena's willingness to offer herself up to Klaus for sacrifice in order to keep everyone else safe even though she can't even begin to realistically convince herself that somehow she's going to survive because nobody else is convinced. In fact, most people try to talk Elena out of going through with everything, but she has a enough resolve to make the choice for herself because at the end of the day, Elena is both stubborn and independent.

Lastly, there is also the important relationship Elena has with Damon which in a lot of ways is the polar opposite of her relationship to Stefan. Where Stefan offers a lot more safety and stability, Damon is generally unpredictable and volatile. At first, Elena outright hates and distrusts Damon. (And not a soul blamed her.) But as time goes on, Elena's views of things being black and white start to change and as a result, so does her opinion of Damon. While she is certainly able to sympathize with him on some level and she's able to offer him forgiveness in a lot of situations most wouldn't, she still holds him accountable for the bad things he says and does. It's a complicated relationship that Elena is generally unsure of how to approach or even how to define it because on the one hand, she is attracted by him and on the other, she knows better.

In some ways, Elena still is that girl next door even if her life is not so cookie cutter. She's been there to help and support the people she cares about through the various losses they've experienced. Her compassion for others has only intensified since the loss of her parents; before she was just a shoulder to cry and now she's willing to lay down her life to protect what she holds dear. At the same time though, Elena has become aware of how tricky the world/life can be to navigate and absolutes just don't work so much anymore. She doesn't have all of life's questions answered (and more importantly, she's come to realize she probably never will because things are way too complicated for that), she knows far more of what she wants than ever before. And the more she knows of what she wants, the firmer Elena is willing to stand and fight for that very thing regardless of whether or not the path ahead is straightforward.

Then she gets turned into a vampire.

Deciding to become a vampire wasn't an easy decision for Elena. She never wanted to become one in the first place, but she definitely didn't want to die either. Most of this conflict about being a vampire arises when she kills one of the Five and is cursed to hallucinate various people that are basically trying to convince her to off herself. Ultimately she survives it and comes to find that just because she's a vampire now doesn't mean she's any less Elena Gilbert than she was before. While all of this is going on, Elena is moving from Stefan to Damon, but her feelings for Damon are heavily called into question because she was under the influence of a sire bond. For her, this meant that whatever Damon said, she immediately agreed to and wanted to please him. Although this has yet to be resolved in canon, Elena is convinced that her feelings for Damon are real and not due to the sire bond. She believes that at this point she's tired of safety and stability. Basically dangerous is sexy now.

So that just leaves the question of Elena turning her emotions off and what the hell that's done to her. For starters, Elena was pretty close to the edge to begin with even without Damon invoking the sire bond and telling her to turn it all off. As a vampire, her emotions and personality are heightened which meant the loss of her brother was even worse than what it would have been if she was still human. She was ready to burn down her family home and throw away everything of her old life in an attempt to escape and did after her emotions were turned off because ooh symbolism ooh. With her emotions off, Elena's thought process has changed from being considerate and mindful of others to seeing others more as liabilities and obstacles from what she wants. She's indifferent to how her actions are going to impact others and she very adamantly does not want to go back to feeling. In fact, the Elena who would have sacrificed her life for the sake of her friends is nowhere to be seen and she's made several attempts on the life of those very same friends for her own purposes. And most importantly, Elena's stubborn independence is now a big problem because she has zero intention of ever going back and turning her emotions back on.

ABILITIES: This stuff here.

PREVIOUS GAME HISTORY:

So the important thing to know about The Last Voyages is that characters either arrive as inmates or wardens. Inmates are taken from points of near death (or actual death) and it is the job of the wardens to rehabilitate/graduate the inmates. The Admiral (there's some debate as to what the Admiral is if he's a man, a god, or what) is a very terrible driver and often lands in ports or hits something that results in floods/breaches. In other words, this allows for characters to take on new traits, new identities, or new histories for the course of the events before reverting back to normal and dealing with the consequences. Elena entered the game as an inmate with her humanity turned off and it was a long, arduous process that eventually brought her to graduation and where she is today.

Elena was at first paired up with Margaret "Racetrack" Edmonson. Racetrack believed that Elena was going through a transition in her life and that she needed to be allowed to make mistakes and figure life out for herself. She emphasized to Elena that she wasn't interested in the girl she used to be, but who she was now and what she wanted to be in the future. This proved a somewhat potentially dangerous approach because Racetrack granted back Elena all of her abilities. Elena did continue to mind herself after Racetrack left and was eventually paired with Arkin O'Brien who took a similar approach as Racetrack. Elena was left to her own devices so long as she remained honest and didn't hurt anyone. Elena, at that point in time, had begun a long-term relationship with Abigail Hobbs. Elena identified with Abigail, seeing the girl who had her life and everything she ever knew stripped away from her by the men in her life. She wanted Abigail to be stronger and to do as she pleased, so she encouraged Abigail to make her own decisions and take matters into her own hands.

And what better than to lead by example? Elena eventually compelled Cassel Sharpe into using his transformation work to turn James Bond into a rat. After some digging around, Elena was identified as the culprit and tossed in Zero which is, more or less, solitary and her compulsion was stripped from her. Her motivation for going after Cassel had been derived from her intense anger directed at the Salvatore brothers, particularly Damon Salvatore. Cassel was shaken, but didn't hold it against Elena and the two eventually ended up becoming somewhat friends in the end.

Another close relationship that Elena managed to forge before I discuss her final progression towards graduation was the one she had with Dean Winchester. Dean didn't really tolerate Elena's shenanigans, but he could understand her grief over losing Jeremy due to his previous loss of Sam. There was a flood wherein everyone was able to enter different memories of another person and the two shared the memories of Dean losing Sam and Elena losing her biological father and Jenna in the wake of Klaus. Although Elena vehemently denied the connection while her humanity was away, she looked to Dean for some guidance and she trusted him in the end.

Now, as far as Elena's progression to graduation is concerned, after exacting pseudo-revenge on Cassel, Elena laid low for a while. It wasn't until Abigail started to try and exact revenge of her own that Elena began to realize that this wasn't the person she wanted to be. She realized that underneath it all, she had started to actually care about people again. What was missing is that she did not care about herself as much. Elena turned her humanity back on with the support of everyone. She was finally able to show her appreciation to Arkin, Bond, and Dean and also finally bury the hatchet fully between herself and Cassel. However, on the other hand, it somewhat cooled her relationship with Abigail. The two eventually figured themselves out and where they stood with regards to one another. Likewise, Elena gradually learned to accept herself more over the course of her recovery and gave some sound advice to Scott McCall about accepting who he is now and moving forward.

Elena started the game in a very low place. She didn't have much regard for herself or others with her humanity off. She just wanted to enjoy life however she saw fit without having to deal with any of the potential negative consequences. She was angry and she was hurt. But over time, she learned to care about herself again and found it within herself to fight for herself. She's much more the girl she used to be. She cares and she's compassionate. But she doesn't compromise herself so easily now. She recognizes the way her life has shaped her, but she's not letting it defeat her. She's not entirely sure of where she's going, but she knows who she is now. And she's okay with that. She's okay with surviving.

Edited 2014-02-23 06:32 (UTC)

THIRD-PERSON WRITING SAMPLE:

The first thing Elena does is take in a deep breath and tell herself that it's okay. The Admiral was supposed to take her home, but clearly they've hit a port or something before he could do it. It's not the first time he's had horrible steering or she's found herself in an unfamiliar place with no one nearby that she recognizes. She just needs to call Abigail or Dean. Or Arkin. Maybe Mal. Someone. Then she can try to meet up with them and figure out how to get back to the Barge from there. It's not the most flourished of plans, but it's a decent start.

Elena pats herself down looking for her communicator to make that call and comes up empty-handed. It's not in any of her pockets and looking around, she doesn't see it lying anywhere. Did she fall off and lose it in the process? Or did the Admiral just drop her off somewhere that wasn't home. Elena's mind starts to race with the possibilities, but she forces herself to remain calm. Wandering through the hallways, she tries to think things through. If this was a flood or breach, that meant she was still on the Barge. If this was a port, then they crashed or she fell. But if she had fallen, why didn't she integrate with the world like the others have in the past? Did she just need to wait this out and find herself back to normal on the Barge?

Elena sighs. She's getting ahead of herself. Right now, she just needs to focus on finding a familiar face. Worry about how to get back to the Barge - or back home - later.

FIRST-PERSON JOURNAL SAMPLE: A post right before her graduation.

INTENT: I'm interested in playing this imported version of Elena because while she's still recognizably Elena, she's done a lot of growing. She's still defining herself in a sense, but she's more confident and trusting in herself. In other words, she hasn't figured all there is to life yet, but she's not afraid of moving forward with it. She's finished her arc in TLV as I wasn't interested in playing her as a warden, but I think it would be interesting to see how this Elena will be in another setting. Especially when she was under the impression she was on her way back home to Mystic Falls and instead winding up in Para. It will be interesting to see how this impacts her personal growth and see her establish new friendships.