![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Applications
APPLICATIONS
Since the game is in the closing process, applications are permanently CLOSED.
Reserves are currently CLOSED.
Please be sure to review our FAQ, rules, and taken page!
Player Cap: 38/60
Please note that reserves only hold the character for you to apply with. Should all player slots be filled before the end of the scheduled application round, applications will close at that time. Due to the limited number of player slots, revision requests will be given a 24 hour window for re-submission.
To submit your application during an open round, copy and paste it directly in a comment here. If your application exceeds the character length, please only use one top-level and reply to it with as many comments as needed.
Please title your comments in the following format:
CHARACTER NAME | CANON | RESERVED/NOT RESERVED
Player
Name:
Age:
Contact:
Preferred Pronouns:
Other Characters: If this is your second character, please list your first here.
Character
Name: Please include any known aliases as well.
Age:
Memory Option: (1, 2, 3 -- see HERE for more information).
Established Status: Y/N. If yes, please state for how long (up to five years, more information can be found here) and detail briefly what they've been doing since they've come to Overjoyed. Please note that no memory regains will be possible prior to game-start: this option is only available to allow you to better establish your character and their potential organizations/business/etc.
Canon:
Canon Point:
Citizenship: Please review the settings guide and job guide, as not all characters will have citizenship. This will be very important for plot events and will not be easily changed once accepted, so consider your options carefully.
Job: See our jobs, FAQ, and culture pages for more information. Who they work for--whether it's The Company, The RAC, or another option, will have a significant impact on their daily lives. The most important thing to bear in mind is that the job should make sense for the character--we probably wouldn't have Gundam Wing's Heero become a pastry chef (though that would be its own level of awesome), and likewise, Ash Ketchum probably isn't suited for biomedical engineering.
* Level: For characters who are applying as members of the RAC, please state the level you believe is the most logical starting point for them. Keep in mind that no one begins higher than a level 4.
Abilities: For an overview of how your character's canon powers can translate to Overjoyed, please review the FAQ, powers guide and/or hit up the brainstorming meme where a mod will be happy to work with you. In short, we will only be nerfing those abilities deemed game-breaking, but will require that magical abilities translate into more scifi iterations of themselves. Additionally, you will need to classify your abilities between minor and major and explain why you chose that classification. Minor abilities will be available from day one, but major abilities can only be regained through AC purchases.
This section should also include any standard physical or mental abilities that are noteworthy about your character.
Personality: We expect this section to be thorough and as comprehensive as possible. While we understand that the nature of an AU-bending game will skew a canon personality, we ask that you refrain from heavy use of headcanon and, in the instances where you do use it, provide your logic and reference canon to back it up. Things to consider in this section: How do they react to conflict? What are their strongest traits and their weakest points? In their worst moments, what are they like? How about when they're at their best? We want to see well-rounded characters--no one is perfect and no one is completely flawed.
CRAU: Yes or no. If yes, please provide a brief summary of the world setting they're coming from, the developments and/or formative experiences that occurred during the time they were there, and a link to the game's main navigation page.
AU History: This is the section where you will blend the world setting with your character's original history. Because we realize that this isn't the easiest task, we want to make it as painless--and as fun--as possible. If you're struggling for ideas, please don't hesitate to hit up the brainstorming meme. Your history does not need to mirror canon precisely--some things just won't translate well at all, but try to stay as true to the original path as you can. The people tasked with rewriting your character's memory would try to align it as closely to true experiences as they could.
Original History:
If canon: A wiki link is sufficient as long as it covers the pertinent details and pertains to the specific universe in which you're pulling your character from (anime, manga, game, etc).
If OC: Please provide a detailed account of their life and general world setting of their original universe. If possible, try to limit this section to no more than 1000 words, but know that this is more of a general guideline for your moderators' sanity than unbending rule (so if you feel that you need to write more to convey important details, we understand).
Inventory: Items that your character had on their person at the time of leaving their universe will be permitted, though some may change form when entering Overjoyed to suit the environment (i.e., if you had a magical pocketwatch, it would probably look slightly different now.) For application purposes, please list any items within their possession at the canon point you'll be taking them from, and describe any changes the items will undergo.
Samples: Please provide either (A) a sample written within the game verse or (B) two threads, only one of which may be network, wherein at least one is set within game verse (i.e., tdm).
Miscellaneous Notes: Is there anything you would like the mods to consider that didn't quite fit into the above sections? For original characters, please note your PB here. Otherwise, feel free to add anything pertinent that didn't quite fall into the above categories.
Hanbei Takenaka | Samurai Warriors | reserved
Player
Name: Sam
Age: 32
Contact: estamir @ plurk
Preferred Pronouns: She/her
Other Characters: n/a
Character
Name: Hanbei Takenaka. Hanbei is actually a nickname he received in conjunction with a character not present in game, his real given name being Shigeharu, so for AU purposes, I'm thinking he won't have the Hanbei nickname here - it'll just be something else to confuse him in memory regains.
Age: 34
Memory Option: 1
Established Status: Yes, five years. Which he has spent playing political advisor and generally annoying the f. out of everyone who has to listen to him.
Canon: Samurai Warriors
Canon Point: Directly before his death.
Citizenship: Leith
Job: Political advisor to the Nine.
Abilities
► Hanbei is best known for his intelligence and insight, to the point where his name has become a Japanese idiom for ridiculously keen insight. He's well-read and booksmart, but where he truly shines is in getting a read on people; most of his best military maneuvers are rooting in his knack for predicting his opposition's intentions and reactions.
► The fighting style in his canon generally involves using unexplained energies (musou, the spirit gauge) to do limit-break type moves, enter states of temporarily invulnerability, and generally bend the laws of physics gently over the table. I'm not sure how to reasonably translate these, but realistically, given his health at his canon point, I don't think it'll be particularly necessary, as he won't be in much shape to pull it off, so I'd like to just nerf it for now.
► Hanbei's weapon is a compass with attached rotating blades; his fighting style is a mishmash of hitting enemies with the blunt side, slicing with the blades and twirling them, and throwing his weapon to use as a ranged weapon (and reeling it back in via an attached wire). He's also able to spin the blades at high speed to use it like a one-man steampunk helicopter to fly a short distance above the ground and move around the battlefield very quickly. I think it'd be easy enough to assume some updated tech is worked into the frame to make the physically illogical parts of that more feasible.
Personality:
The image Hanbei presents in a first meeting is not, generally, one of a wise and well-seasoned strategist who shapes the flow of entire battlefields. He is small, quite young-looking for his age, and perhaps in response to this, tends to play up that image at times with deceptively cutesy body language. He has a mischievous streak a mile wide, claims he wishes he was a cat, and tells Masanori ridiculous stories about how his intelligence actually came from a magic helmet. However, Hanbei knows perfectly well what he's doing; as he himself points out, deception is the true art of war, and nobody who bothers to look past that seemingly harmless facade would make the mistake of underestimating Hanbei twice.
He is smart - and while traditional book learning is certainly a part of that, a great deal of Hanbei's intelligence seems to be attributable to an uncanny ability to read people and get a good idea of how they think. Some of Hanbei's best battlefield ploys come from knowing who to put the pressure on and knowing how his opponents are likely to react to what he puts in front of them - or what reactions they're hoping to elicit with the formations they put in front of him. He's good at making character judgments; while everyone else is still talking about Nobunaga bringing peace to the land, Hanbei is the first to point out that while Nobunaga is an excellent choice to quell the chaos, he has no talent for leading men at times of peace and proper unification is beyond his talents - but not beyond Hideyoshi's. Hanbei predicts that the road to peace will take several leaders, long before events prove him right. In SWC, he seems to suspect Mitsuhide's eventual betrayal before Mitsuhide himself has even thought of it. He's good at taking people's measure, and at realizing things about their motivations that may not be obvious to the people in question.
And as someone who sees those truths, he's not afraid to say them - and to be quite pointed about them, at times. Hanbei can be very blunt in his observations; when he feels something needs to be said, he doesn't worry about politeness or protocol. He doesn't make excuses or try to soften the blow of what's in front of them; he's the guy who will tell you up front, yeah, I'll serve you but you're gonna have to be ready to dispose of your lord someday for the sake of Japan, because he's gonna be pretty shitty at building peace out of the chaos. He's the guy who will tell you that if you want to bring peace, you're going to have to be ready to carry the weight of thousands of lives and thousands of grudges. He may be cute, but he does not sugarcoat what needs to be said.
He takes the weight of human life very seriously; he confesses at one point that for every battle he plans, he runs through it in his head thousands of times, trying to figure out the best way to reduce the casualties, and that he looks "lazy" because he's compensating for overtaxing his brain (although the fact that he is terminally ill probably also has something to do with that). Although he's usually very composed, the one time he's ever shown losing his temper in canon is when he confronts Nobunaga about treating the lives of all of his men as completely expendable. Hanbei's job puts him in a position where he has to send a lot of people to their deaths, but he takes it deathly seriously and does everything in his power to keep as many people alive as possible, and he's very conscious of the weight of those lives, to the point where he lets it wear on him a bit too much sometimes.
He is ill and died from it; specifics aren't given in his canon but the usual historical assumption is that he has tuberculosis. He is pretty clearly aware of his own mortality and is generally calm about it when it comes up; he doesn't really engage in self-pity about his condition. He tends to downplay it when asked (he brushes off concerns from other characters, and in the battle before he dies in SW3, he simply says that he's "a bit under the weather"), but it's presumably been bad enough that the writing has been on the wall for a long time - he has some pretty bad convulsions in one of his scenes that takes place some four years before his death, and Nobunaga, at least, has noticed by this point that he's very close to dying, so it's something he's been living with for years. But he ignores it when his own lord suggests he should get off the battlefield and rest up, insisting that he's fine - and saying that he would prefer to die on the battlefield anyway. (In a couple of the alternate story paths in SW3, where the player can kill him rather than him dying from his illness, he actually thanks whoever strikes him down for giving him an honorable battlefield death.) So while he is calm about his fate, he has some well-buried issues with it, and although he can be somewhat critical of bushido and the way it leads some other characters to throw away their lives (this comes up in particular when he deals with Nagamasa), he ultimately wants that honorable samurai death for himself, rather than a pointless one in a sickbed.
Overall, while Hanbei comes across as rather composed and perhaps a bit detached, his own impending mortality and the demands of his position as a strategist have left him intensely aware of the value of life and death, and that guides his thoughts and actions to a far greater extent than he makes obvious. He looks for other ways around things, he aims to avoid wholesale slaughter, and he prefers to negotiate, build alliances, force defections, and use whatever other methods he can to settle a battle without it coming to throwing soldiers at each other and seeing who runs out first. He is highly intelligent and very driven, despite his eccentricities, and he's not above taking advantage of his rather deceptive appearance to deflect attention and keep people from paying attention to his issues (which he would prefer to remain his issues and not the business of everyone who passes by). With as cheerful and breezy an attitude as he shows to most people, it's easy to overlook just how serious he can be underneath that smartass exterior - which is fine, because that's just the way he seems to like it.
As a more AU-specific note, while Hanbei's position working with the Nine does imply that his cold side will be a bit more prominent here than in canon, the nature of it isn't really changing much - he suppresses his empathy where necessary to make the appropriate sacrifices to maintain stability, rather than bring out peace. He's not without a human sense of decency, even here, but he's in a position where he does bad things for what he sees as better ends, and he has a bit less of an appreciation for the ideal of a peaceful future where everybody can be happy because this universe is a little too fucked for him to hope for that much.
AU History:
Shigeharu Takenaka, like so many, was born to minor nobility that saw better prospects on Leith than on Qresh proper, and so had resettled there and accepted an existence off the main path of power and politics.
From a young age, Shigeharu was highly observant, and early on he impressed those around him with the conclusions he drew about the people around him, but observant as he was, he noted other things: the importance people placed on first impressions, the lack of threat people tended to assign to certain personality types, even when they ought to know better. And so it was only slightly less early on that he started cultivating an attitude to take advantage of that, a combination of flippant commentary, feigned ignorance, and childish mannerisms that did their job perfectly well - disarming the suspicions of those he dealt with, leaving him frequently underestimated and frequently taking very good advantage of that fact.
As a result, he acquired something of a dual reputation. Some noticed and praised his talent, others chalked it up to luck and maintained that he wasn't worth the headache of dealing with. When he was sixteen, his father died, and although he was unable to officially hold control of the family assets until two years later, he had little trouble keeping his legal guardian wrapped around his finger until he came of age. Once in full control, he managed his lands and interests deftly and with aplomb, which eventually drew the attention of some among the Nine.
One man in particular took notice and was completely unfazed by the rumors of Shigeharu's extremely unpleasant personality, and issued a politely worded request that was clearly not really a request, to meet with him and discuss the political situation - and since that meeting, Shigeharu's earned himself a solid place alongside the hierarchy - alongside it because he's unconventional enough that nobody's willing to try very hard to properly integrate him inside it. His status as an advisor to the Nine has granted him a travel permit to Qresh, and he's a frequent sight (and perhaps more frequent source of headaches) there. But he's known to be odd, as the polite ones tend to put it, and those who rely on his advice have just gotten used to him running meetings in his bathrobe or making them endure twenty minutes of small talk about cats before getting down to business - as well as the fact that his advice tends to be extremely blunt, sometimes unpleasant, and he's not one to sugarcoat his observations about public opinion.
It's worth it, they say. Others on Qresh aren't so sure.
Several years ago, Shigeharu contracted a retroviral infection while on business travel. He's fortunate; his status gives him access to nanotech treatments to combat it. He's less fortunate in that the treatment is barely adequate - doctors have been able to keep him alive, but his health has gone down the shitter as the nanotech tries to keep his DNA from mutating beyond recognition.
Not so ill he can't work, though. Even death would have trouble keeping him from that.
CRAU: No.
Original History: here.
Inventory:
► His compass...blade-spinny...weaponthing. There's probably some better tech worked into it to make the whole "using it to fly" part less ridiculous. It's probably also sitting in his home like some kind of weird piece of modernist sculpture because he's going to need some memories for what it even is to make sense.
► His adorable hat? idk, he doesn't take much with him.
no subject
The doctor is competent enough, he's already concluded. Not much bedside manner, and never sounds quite sure enough of herself when she speaks; there's something in her tone that sounds like she's apologizing for every word that comes out of her mouth, as if the diagnosis is her fault and not just her judgment - but her science seems sound enough, and he's the last person who'd take someone's delivery as proof of the mind behind the words.
So Shigeharu doesn't have any reason to disbelieve her, when she stops shuffling by the foot of his bed and staring at her notes and finally gets down to business.
"There's good news and bad news," she says. "The treatment was as successful as we'd hoped."
The implied but is obvious enough. She's too specific; there's nothing said about recovery or improvement, nothing that defining that success as anything more than it did what we thought it would do - and while he'd normally have taken note of what that was to begin with, he'd been a little busy coughing his lungs out and trying not to vomit when they'd hastily tried to explain things before the sedatives kicked in.
"And by that -" He breaks off in a cough for a few seconds. Not, he notes, as awful of one as he'd been sporting when he came through that door, but it's certainly not a good sound, nonetheless. "By that, you mean that you weren't really hoping to accomplish much of anything at all."
She winces, and he can already imagine exactly the hyper-apologetic inflection of her voice before she's even opened her mouth to answer. "You're not going to die. The nanotech is holding it off. But..."
"But that's about all I can expect it to do," he helpfully supplies, his own tone light and perfectly calculated not to sound bitter. "Hey, has there ever been a successful hack-job that replaced someone's lungs? Maybe I'm looking at the wrong branch of medicine."
The doctor pales a bit. "Surely - surely you can't be serious."
"Of course I'm not serious. I'm dying, not delusional." He twiddles his thumbs and settles back against his pillow. "And I'm sure anywhere illegal enough to get that sort of thing done, I'd be shot before I made it to the waiting room anyway."
She's shifting her weight from foot to foot, looking more uncomfortable by the second, and that, he thinks, is far more satisfying than all the pity in the world. So go on. Give him the immediate prognosis, the well-meaning instructions that he may or may not actually take to heart -
- and then get on out and give him some privacy for this next part, because he's got a lot of thinking to do.
Miscellaneous Notes:
ACCEPTED
Congratulations! You've been accepted into Overjoyed.
We’re so excited to have you join our community. Before we can get started, please do the following:
- Request to join the following communities: Logs · Network · OOC · Memes
- Friend the mod account, thenine, and respond to the player contact page.
- Reply to the taken page.
- Fill out the job registry.
- (Optional) Follow the mod plurk here to stay up to date about upcoming plots, community discussions, and more!
- (Optional) Put your application, IC contact/inbox, and permissions post in your journal, then introduce yourself to the OOC community!
- Third Round Applicants: Chapter 3 will launch on February 11th! In the meantime, feel free to create pregame CR or play with the current timeline/setting of Chapter 2 (found here) until the next plot installment!
All characters will start with a balance of 100 bonus HP. This balance can be used towards AC bank purchases, but may not be used for satisfying monthly AC requirements.If you have any further questions or comments, please don't hesitate to reach out to us by PM or on the contact page.
Once again, we’re so happy to have you, and thanks for joining us!
Yours,
Overjoyed Mods