Tag Archives: character study

September 23, 2018

Character Study: Carol Danvers

By Rebecca M. Horner

Okay, for the record, this is my version of Carol for my X-Men RP. We obviously don’t know what direction the movies are going to go in, so I can’t make commentary on that yet. But since I play her on the RP and have for several years, with the drop of the new trailer, I thought it a good idea to talk about what I love about the character, and what some of the pitfalls are.

My first introduction into Carol Danvers was actually the animated X-Men cartoon from the 90’s, where she was in a coma and a spectra in Rogue’s head that first hinted at Rogue’s backstory. And that was a really baaaad intro to her, because that version of Carol, for sake of plot, was angry, vengeful, and not very understanding. It was all of her bad traits, and none of her good ones. Many of my early fanfic readings concurred with this interpretation of the character, so I obviously wasn’t her biggest fan.

But then we were figuring out how to do Carol’s plot for our X-Men RP, and since the original plan was to kill Carol, I decided I had better play her in order to avoid upsetting someone. This required me to figure out a lot more about this character and what her overall personality was like. Some of the other cartoons I saw didn’t help much, they fell right in line with what I already knew, but then I started to finally hit a groove that helped me understand the character better. (Reading the Mockingverse fanfiction for the MCU has helped confirm that, the writer does an excellent job with Carol.)

What I found was a very confident and yet self-aware person. She had to be, in order to thumb her nose at the idea that she wasn’t going to have her parents’ help to go to college because she was a girl, which got her into the Air Force and finding her love of flying. It was really easy for me to weave in a fear of being found out about being a mutant into that background (we have a firm no-alien policy in the RP, so her powers became a mutation rather than alien shenanigans). Her confidence and leadership abilities are a completely unapologetic part of her personality–she will take control of a situation if someone else doesn’t beat her to it, and even if they do, if they are going to be a dumb ass about it, she’s going to stage a coup.

So bossy and vengeful is how an outsider would view this character if they didn’t like her, right? Except that still wasn’t the complete picture of Carol, and boiling her down to just that isn’t fair. It’s part of why she comes across as either a great character or a pretentious bitch, the latter happens when writers stop at the worst of her personality traits and her leadership capabilities. Because while she is all these things, there is also a layer of humor and playfulness that while we only see flashes of it or too much of it in other heroes in Marvel, Carol has it in this perfect balance with the rest of her personality that knows when to be serious and when she can relax with her friends.

Mind, Carol’s humor also usually lines up with mine. It’s sass and sarcasm, teasing and ruffling feathers in ways that won’t offend someone to having a fit, which requires a very good perception of personalities. I’ve also made her an absolutely outrageous flirt if she’s interested in someone, something that she’s currently been keeping toned-down for her interest’s sensibilities, but since he’s being a doofus, she’s going to have to take the lid off and push him a bit.

Alright, now to some specifics here to the RP. What part of Carol’s power set stayed? I wanted to avoid overpowering here, since we are working with the idea that mutants come in classes, with Class 5 like Phoenix, Rogue, and Remy being very rare, and that’s normally where Carol’s powers would lump her. Of all the classes we had (err, I had, I world-built like a nut), we really didn’t have someone with a Class 2 mutation–something completely totally passive, with Class 1 being a purely physical mutation such as Hank’s blue fur or Kurt’s appearance. So I kept her super strength, flight, and six-sense of immediate danger/threats for her mutation, sending the rest to the trash bin, and made them all passive mutations. What that means is Carol doesn’t know when her physical, muscular strength turns into her mutation’s super strength, and that if she goes to jump, she might also fly.

(Yeah, I cut all her energy absorption/bolts/redirection. It was way too similar to other X-Men powers that we already had, and like I said, Carol can very easily lean towards overpowered, so some nerfing was required.)

I mentioned a love interest up above, but I highly recommend not looking too much into it. Carol Danvers doesn’t have much going for her as far as romance is concerned, which you know, I’m actually okay with? She’s had a lot of bad luck, but I think it’s great that she has all of this story going on for her without romance being a key part of it. But I’ll be honest, romance is what saved her from death in the RP. For some bizarre reason that I can’t remember, I decided to give her an unrequited crush on Hank McCoy, a.k.a. Beast. And now this has blossomed into a whole THING, and while I am about crying in amusement over what happens to get them from Point A to Point B, it is also the crackiest of all crackships, and I’m okay with that.

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October 20, 2017

Character Study: Evangeline

By Rebecca M. Horner

Name: Evangeline (I know, repetitive)

Evangeline Headshot

Artwork courtesy Kynim

Nickname: ???
Age: 16
Home Region: Kanto/Johto
Family: Aya (Great-Aunt)
Father
Mother
Starter Pokemon: ???
Hair Color: Purple
Eye Color: Teal-blue
Build: Slightly short, slim and athletic, graceful
Personality: Quietly stubborn, likes reading outside
Favorite Colors: Aqua blue and pale pink

Not native to the Kalos region, Evangeline begged to travel last year, and was given permission by her parents…with some stipulations. It took some time for her to pick where she was going, finally picking the place as far from her home region as possible, and helping with the arrangements. She left home with her great-aunt, Aya, for a chance at a trainer-journey away from watchful eyes and expectations that she didn’t know if she could live up to.

She has learned French, though her skills leave her a little rusty and preferring not to speak at all unless she absolutely has to. She also has an Antidote kit that she is capable of using, not a normal skill for most trainers to have. Similarly, she has the ability to understand what Pokemon are saying, though at least that’s something that one in five trainers are capable of, so it stands out less. Perhaps to balance it out, she has a phobia of Bug-Types.

 

I feel like if I update this profile much more, I’ll give everything away, and I want at least some things to be a surprise. Figuring out what I was going to do for the main character of the game was tricky. I knew I didn’t want to just do the character X provides you with, since the backstory and legacy of her history that they provided doesn’t fit with anything else in the game (or if there is Rhyhorn racing, I haven’t gotten to it yet! Just riding the one around to get to the caves). Hopefully as more is revealed, you all will like her. It’s hard to take the hero-protagonist that is a silent lead in any game and make them real and relatable…

I’m going to come up with some sort of display thing showing her Pokemon within the text of the story, not sure what. I’ll update this with her starter once it gets started, but the rest of the team will be found in the actual story. Other info that is kept blank will probably be kept that way on purpose to avoid spoilers for anyone who reads the characters first and then the story.

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July 7, 2017

Character Study: Bevan

By Rebecca M. Horner

Ahhh, the first Dungeons and Dragons character. Always fills you with nostalgia. Especially with how broken she ended up being, it was really funny, since I didn’t build her that way, it sorted of just happened.

Like most beginning players, I was an idiot and gave the DM too much to play with. I have a stated preferences of elven characters, and Bevan was no different as a half-elf…whose human side ended up being nobility as we found out later. Further, we crack shipped her with the Lawful Good character in the party, who had issues with non-human races, and she was Chaotic Good, so you can imagine how they got along. In addition, he thought she was a he, because Bevan started as very androgynous in appearance (we eventually time skipped and she grew up a little more so that ended). So I got bored and made a giant genetics chart like you learn in biology class, and yeah… See, I’ve learned!

Bevan was a lot of fun though partly because of how much info I gave my DM to hang me with. She had lots of family problems, serving as an indirect bridge between a hidden village of elves and the nearest human local. While some of her village didn’t view her any differently, some saw her as nothing but a half-human. Similarly, her human family just saw her as an elf getting in their way. Add in the fact her mother was killed on purpose when she was a child, rather than it being an accident, and you’ve got a whole mess of a character arc to deal with. And as awkward as it was to RP a relationship later on with her and my friend’s character, we had some fun too. (Okay, I remain firm that it was hysterical that when he had to “kill” her, he took forever, and in a similar situation, she was like, “NOPE, not my real husband, BYE!”)

A lot of the fun with this character was how broken she ended up being. Some of that came from us modifying a prestige class from version 2.0 into 3.5, because deep wood sniper was the class that made the most sense for how Bevan was set up, but oh lord did it do broken things to this character. Add to that a couple of items we found–a sentient ring designed to protect those of elven descent and turned her invisible at will and a quiver of everful so she never ran out of ammo–and the stockpile of poisons we ended up with and she was the sniper from Hell that no one wanted to be up against. Due to feats and class skills, she had insane range, could fire a lot of arrows per round, and you wouldn’t even see her while she was doing it. I had all the giggles.

If all of that wasn’t enough, we had a wild mage in the party. Wild mages do…interesting things…to the characters who are around them. I’ve had to come to terms with it, despite my hatred of people screwing with my characters. (My control issues are legendary.) Bevan had one of these funny examples. At one point, she got hit with a surge (pre timeskip, I remember that much). And she got a random racial template assigned to her. The problem is, the half-elf race is set up assuming that you are half-human. That part didn’t change. When the dice landed on half-Raptorian on the table, DM ruling was that I got the wings and would be able to be targeted by Raptorian-centric stuff. I wouldn’t lose my human or elf statistics either. The only way that’s possible in DnD is if you are half of each race. So Bevan became, effectively, half human, half elf, half Raptorian.

…All I can say is, “A wizard did it.”

So now the sniper can fly, doesn’t that just fill your hearts with glee? Not really, I know, but it was a lot of fun to play her. And you know, Bevan’s story was so complete, I actually don’t have any drive to write it as something else. We really covered a lot of ground with her, and she had an ending she deserved. Okay, plus I’m not sure if I’m capable of writing her story as a book. So many of the wild craziness was dependent on other people for humor and was so off the cuff, I couldn’t remember it all if I tried. Add in the fact that she was, for the first few sessions, a quiet member of the party, and she isn’t set up to be a major protagonists.

Bevan was my first character, and honestly if she hadn’t been as much fun as she was, I probably wouldn’t have kept playing. But she was, and she will always be special to me as a result. Probably why I’m so fond of the name still!

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June 9, 2017

Character Study: Birdie

By Rebecca M. Horner

God, I love this character. I built her as a Fast Hero, which for those who aren’t aware of d20 Future’s interesting class choices, means that she was primarily Dex(terity) based in terms of skills, saves, etc. She was supposed to be fast and speedy. Except I decided to have fun with it, and made her best skill Int(elligence) instead (Dex was a very close second so I didn’t exactly suffer for this decision). Picking my allegiances, aaaand…

What I ended up with was a child prodigy in mech design and computer programming who had good reflexes and an instinct for piloting…who was also a pacifist. Due to circumstances, she had to hide who she was for quite some time, that being the child of two other highly intelligent people who are now both deceased. Except I left some deliberate holes with her family, and the DM had a whole lot of fun with them. I got to be the hero in a Gundam story, and it was a blast.

I think what was fun was how she was this snarky pacifist in a war situation, and how the upper ranks just tolerated it? I mean, she ends up being this ridiculously powerful psychic who could do all sorts of stupid things, and after two or three times of being right…they pretty much believed her no matter what she said. And despite the fact that she was no hero in her own mind, everyone was looking to her, relying on her. The pressure was so heavy on her. And then it was fun to have her rely on other characters…and then the DM kills them because war is like that and it’s heartbreaking.

Birdie’s biggest characteristic, aside from being the strongest psychic of her generation, was her do-no-harm mindset. If she could avoid conflict, she’d do it. If she could resolve an issue with words, she’d do it. And if things had to go to the physical, she would do everything she could to make sure all parties made it out alive. Every death was personal to her, not only because she felt them die if she was close enough for her psychic ness to pick it up, but because she hates violence and war that much. This is  what really drew others to her, making her a bit of a rallying figure for the resistance she got dragged to. Of course, this is also what made her enemies really hate her, whether its the ones who enjoy the fighting or the ones who suffered when she had no choice but to kill someone for her own survival.

Okay, her other big character trait ended up being her hair, because the doll I made for her gave her knee-length pink hair… And I basically got to play with it. She started as my pink psychic princess, and she ended as my pink psychic princess. But in between it turned navy blue and super short, except the crew is struggling to remember this as I play the second half of the campaign as a different character. I’m just endlessly amused by this.

But shortly after we started, I had a thought and realized it would have been sooo awesome if I had thought to make her a clone of her “mother.” Imagining her reaction to finding out her father is actually her uncle, and the confusion that results from it. Questioning how she’d be treated, if she would even be acknowledged as a person or if as a clone she wouldn’t. And then we meet this space royal family, and the fact my character has NO idea who her grandparents are also started twigging in my brain. So through a large portion of the campaign, I’ve been musing about a storyline where those two lines are true. It’d be radically different than the RP, but at the same time, it promises so much amusement.

You all know me. Scifi is not my jam. But I love Gundam Seed (not so much the sequels, but I like the original), and really Birdie was my attempt to honor it. I’d love to keep playing with her character concept, and making it work for a book. I have a loose idea for it, but I’m not sure how much of the war I’d want to take from the RP and how much I’d want to change for the sake of making it original and my own versus my DM’s. There’s the added issue that I am ignorant as heck about space since it has been years since my one college course in the subject, and I am the first to admit I know nothing about machinery.

I might write this in snipets and just kinda see what comes out of it. We’ll see.

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October 9, 2016

Character Study: Yun/Psyche/Mageris

By Rebecca M. Horner

…This character went by a lot of names, okay? This was the warmage character…that eventually got turned into a favored soul/warmage gestalt and had a lot going on, both in front of and behind the scenes.

Short story on why her classes changed: we had one campaign going with her as the warmage, and the DM realized the story was going in a direction he felt was in his comfort zone and he wanted to stretch himself. We all agreed to a restart, most of the players changed their characters entirely…but I am the sort of person who wants some conclusion for characters, so I just modified her (only I didn’t, we’ll get there). The campaign, through no one in the current group’s fault, ended up dragging and then getting wrapped up quickly, but the conclusion was definitely there and so I am quite content with this character.

First off, I got to play with the amnesia trope, which is one of my favorites. This character was raised as Graceella (childhood name, elves are weird) and took on Mageris as her adult name. She was a lower born noble, but was lifebonded with the heir to the empire. But considering how being lifebonded can make life complicated, the adults in the situation decided to separate them in hopes of weakening it a little. Unfortunately, one adult (who Mageris thought was her mother, actually her aunt and this was a lot of fun later) took it too far and wiped all of her memories. All that there was for this poor girl to figure out who she was was her scrawl of her signature at an inn, which she thought said “Yun.”

Now, while I was pretty careful about fleshing out the mother’s side of the family…I hadn’t paid attention to the father’s side. So the DM got to have some leeway with them, and boy did he take it. It also led to us having to keep two different histories straight. Yep, we had parallel world hopping going on, and while most of the party was from the same world, I was from the original RP’s world, which was two different situations. At several points, we ended up killing that world’s version of Psyche, as several different possible outcomes to her situation played out. This is also how I ended up with the sword I used, which was pretty epic and I loved. The DM really worked hard to make sure everyone in the party stayed balanced, which is great when you contrast people who understand how the classes are in strength compared to others…and then people like me, who just create a character and find the appropriate class and run with it, regardless of how strong of a class it is.

And what’s really fun is the change that happened to this character without her memories. She had been raised the gentle, retiring lady who happened to have warmage capabilities, someone who was frequently overwhelmed by the lifebond who was used to getting his way as they got older. But without those memories, away from friends and family, she had to learn to stand on her and found her own voice and authority. When her memories returned, she had to try and mesh those two different personalities together. Thus, when she started going by Psyche. This was also when she started having real trust issues with the adults in her life, because she was very upset over how they had treated her, and God can elves hold grudges. And it was fun when she met her paternal uncles, and she was full of stubborn authority instead of being demure. (One really didn’t like it, it was funny.)

The favored soul aspect was fun too, because Psyche was Neutral Good, the Good is Not Nice trope at times, definitely not the gentle maiden anymore. But she was chosen by a draconic deity who was true Neutral, and his focus was on maintaining balance and stability…even if that stability couldn’t be considered “good” by an objective eye. There were a couple of instances where Psyche had to convince her deity to do something that was going to destabilize the world they were in at that time, where the “good” argument wasn’t going to work. Usually she managed to pull it off by arguing that they were about to throw the balance off anyway…it didn’t always work.

Something fun I did with her (just because I could) was do an elemental thing with her spell choices. While warmage’s known spells are set, with lots of fire and lightning, I got to pick her favored soul list. I ended up going with ice and holy light offensive spells aside from the request healer spells, creating what I consider this interesting contrast in the two sides to her nature, and what ended up being the two conflicting personalities in her head: headstrong and authoritative Yun and the more retiring and quiet Mageris. Funnily enough, it was the favored soul stuff (which matches Mageris better) that flared up with the loss of memory.

As for the lifebond, there was a lot of shenanigans, but things ended up working out there well…sorta. We didn’t get to RP much with him, or rather the real him (which is probably for the better for everyone’s comfort level), but I imagine the epilogue was pretty entertaining. Both end up being chosen favored souls of draconic deities, but he doesn’t get as much of a chance to interact with her after she has her memories back and both of them are aware of it until it has ended and they are now being the clean-up crew. I have mental stories and musings about how he would handle the change in personality in his lifebond, and the different path their lives have taken. Though really, he is probably happy about the difference–he has magic now, when previously he didn’t, so yay equalizer.

I honestly think I might return to Psyche at some point, though not as a DnD character. Rather, I’d like to play with her as an original fiction character. I think it could be a lot of fun, and let me explore some things with her that I couldn’t in a DnD setting, since there’s either no mechanic for it, no point to it without possibly taking up time that isn’t fair to the other players, or just be something I’m more comfortable writing rather than RPing in a tabletop setting.

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June 19, 2016

Character Study: Bobbi Morse

By Rebecca M. Horner

Partnering with Clint here, my rendition of Bobbi Morse.

What was fun about Bobbi was while I knew who the character was, I am, as has been established, not a comic book reader. When I went wiki-diving for background information, I had very little to go on. She was really under-represented in wikis (or under written in comics, both are options). However, I watched her in the few mediums she was present in, read her quote entries, and came up with my interpretation of her character that I can only hope is close.

Bubbly and high energy, at least on the surface, Bobbi uses her energy to hide her serious demeanor and her smarts, on top of being a smart ass. She started off as being bound and determined to prove herself as worthy of being of the Avengers, despite dealing with psychological and potentially physically issues from her past. She has slowly relaxed over the panic attacks that losing a loved one used to cause her due to Clint carefully addressing them once he was aware of her issues. Around Clint, she acts the flirt, but others who have worked for her know that under her snark, she is the most serious agent on missions and won’t tolerate goofing around.

I made all of this history up, so be aware that it is completely wrong. Her father was from an old Southern family who moved west to California to be an artist, her mother an orphan who rose to be a ballet star in New York before she retired to have a family. Her mother was diagnosed with a mutant-variant of MS, highly aggressive and eventually fatal. During that time, Bobbi basically raised herself. She was then sent to live with her grandmother while her father lost himself in his grief. Going to college early, she got her doctorate in biochemistry and was recruited into SHIELD. During those early days, her grandmother and father both died, leaving her with no family. As a result, all of Bobbi’s emotional ties are with SHIELD. It is her home, Fury is her paternal figure and boss combined, Phil was her favorite uncle (that was a hard loss for her), Natasha is that annoying older sister…and Clint is her whole world.

Her biggest character trait is her mind, and her way of thinking. She is constantly planning, constantly absorbing new information and using it to problem solve. The problem with this is that she can get too caught up in worrying about the future (especially since she inherits her mother’s strain of MS and has to come up with the treatment for it), and the past just adds fuel to the fire. She also really struggled with putting a name to the feelings between her and Clint, much less their relationship, out of fear of repeating her parents’ history.

Bobbi is social for work, since I went more of the spy-espionage route with her, and is good at acting the right way in situations. But really, she’s happiest spending quiet time with people she cares about, maybe going out for something casual. A beach bum, if she can have a person she loves with her while hanging around the beach all day, that’s the perfect vacation for her. There is a miscarriage for her and Clint that will lead her to being very protective of her other two children, particularly Ash, who is her baby. But as long as nothing is even remotely threatening them, she is a very loving mother who encourages her children to do what makes them happy.

Bobbi is so much fun to write…and also suffers from having the most AU timelines because she’s so easy to do so with. I think my favorite is the one I call the Romanoff Sisters AU, because Bobbi ends up at the Red Room Academy with Natasha as girls. She is rescued by Natasha and Clint just before her graduation procedure, and discovers that her father has remarried since her mother died, giving her a half-sister (who Natasha also adopts, because Bobbi’s sister is her sister) Rhonda who goes by Rhonni, and then more digging produces another sister, Titania. Her personality doesn’t really change, and she gets to annoy Clint while being jail bait with a crush for a while. The sister and family dynamics in that one is just a lot of fun.

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May 22, 2016

Character Study: Clint Barton

By Rebecca M. Horner

Trying something new here for the RPG section, and doing some studies on characters that I either play or play with as we interpret them in my various Forum RPs. There’s a few OCs in here, but a lot of them are actually canon characters that we combine different mediums for and sometimes ignore canon for the sake of sanity. Maybe I’ll even eventually do some of my d20 characters. So welcome to my personal chaos.

I’m starting with Clint, who I don’t really play myself, but I do write him in prompts, so I guess I half own him? Joys of one-on-one threads (sort of, a third guest writes as Natasha). This is an AU of the MCU RP, started just after the first Avengers movie, and since then it will keep with the main plot of MCU movies, but I reserve the right to throw monkey wrenches at things that don’t work for our story, rather than the other way around. Or entire shows, since Agents of SHIELD is totally not canon for us aside from occasional pulls.

Our Clint is a surly sort. He didn’t snark much, not after what Loki did to his head, but once he started to get his feet under him, he got better. Particularly renewing his friendship with Bobbi Morse…which has since developed into something more, despite some of his reservations and Bobbi being Bobbi. His seriousness probably comes out more because Bobbi is such a smart ass, while with Natasha he is allowed to be more of the class clown. Regardless, he always has a snarky comment at the ready.

His past history is a bit of a combination of comics and MCU-canon. Abusive father, ran away and joined the circus with his brother, who then left him for the army. Clint followed along eventually but never found Barney, and got recruited into SHIELD as a fixer. He met Natasha while she was being mind-controlled by a villain-of-the-week, and despite orders used the antidote on her to bring her over to his side. She was with him on the mission that has his hearing questionable out of one ear (which one depends on who is writing him). They are close, but while Natasha flirted with the idea of them being a couple, he didn’t consider it as anything serious (until this got him in trouble later).

Possibly that is his biggest character trait outside of the snark and the bow and arrows. Clint is very much in the present. He may see better from far away, but he tries not to let the past drag him down, and he sometimes struggles to see past current circumstances to the future. He also is big on making assumptions on his relationships with other people–whether it’s friendships and work partnerships to where he and Bobbi currently stand in their relationship. While this means he has incredible focus on missions and isn’t easily swayed from his objectives, it can lead to problems when he is wrong about where he currently stands with people.

More than Bobbi, Clint is a social creature in the sincere sense. When he cares about you, he means it, and he wants to spend time with you. He also prefers doing active things…as much as work lets him. He’ll also lie in bed and cuddle…as much as Bobbi lets him (curse morning people). With his kids (yes, plural, we’re odd), he is the doting father. There are moments where he worries over Bobbi babying the youngest, Ash, but that’s just him wanting his son to be able to follow in his and Bobbi’s footsteps if that’s what he desires. (Bobbi’s dog drives him nuts, though. His own fault for getting her a puppy for Christmas.)

I think what I love most of RPing with Clint, on both sides of the coin, is the aftermath of a conflict. He’s able to put aside what just happened–whether it’s a verbal or physical fight–and enjoy the moment of calm after, capable of sweetness and poorly timed jokes to ease the tension and give some levity. Or, if needed, give someone a talking-to about how they just screwed up, and tell them how to make it better.

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