Ruby City Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rubycitymods) wrote2012-01-13 01:45 pm
rubycitymods) wrote2012-01-13 01:45 pm
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APPLICATIONS
✗ Applications are processed weekly, every weekend. The cut-off time for the submission of applications is 11:59PST on Saturday.
✗ Before applying, please read the FAQ and Rules pages.
✗ Please submit your application with the journal you plan to use if you have one made already. If not, another journal is fine, but we prefer your intended journal so it makes for an easier time in granting access to the mod journal and the contacts page.
✗ For very long applications, we would ask you to please separate them into various comments so that they will not take up too much of the page.
✗ Please title your application as { [CANON/CANON OC/OC]CHARACTER NAME || Series Title || reserve/no reserve || X of X } in the subect header
✗ IMPORTANT: Our application form was edited on September 07, 2015. Please use the revised form.
✗ If you are looking for an example of what an application should be like, please refer to the application here for an example of a canon character application, and here for an original character application.
✗ Canon Application
✗ Canon OC Application
✗ OC Application
A note for CR AU applications
Ruby City does allow previous game history/CR to be brought over on a case by case basis. If you want to include this in your application please add additional sections for PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT and PREVIOUS GAME HISTORY beneath the Personality and Background/History sections.
In these additional sections we would like to see a brief outline of your character's previous game history and how it potentially impacted on and altered their canon personality.
[CANON] Johan Liebert || Monster || No reserve || 1 of 2?
Name: Raile
Age: 25
Personal Journal: Railerat
E-mail: literatehyaena [at] yahoo [dot] com
AIM/MSN/etc: Railerat on Plurk and AIM
CHARACTER
Name: Johan Liebert
Canon: Monster
Age: 20
Timeline: After the burning of the library, when he disappears
If playing another character from the same canon, how will you deal with this? NOPE
Personality: At first, Johan seems like a polite, amicable, and a charming young man--not overly social and somewhat reserved, but easy to get along with; he's honest, hard working, and very smart. A gentle, caring person. This is all relatively true.
But far from the actual truth.
'Johan Liebert' is primarily intangible, infamously difficult to pin down in any single aspect.
As far as personalities go and are defined, Johan is both one of the most overwhelming and one of the most innocuous.
Johan is manipulative, cunning, deceitful... and dangerous. His stated goal as a child was to be the last one standing at the end of the world; despite this, he repeatedly invites Dr. Tenma, a man who saved his life, to pull the trigger and kill him. Possessed of a driving WORD (compulsion? motivation? sense of?) for destruction, he has a vision--a specific vision--of the end of the world. A cold, bleak wasteland, devoid of life...
He is compelled by fear and by death, and yet indifferent to them; the concept of the human being as monster is central to his canon, and Johan serves as the catalyst for this development in others--directly or indirectly, the 'Monster' in Johan feeds, inspires, or reflects the 'Monsters' in others around him. It is often intentional. Terrifyingly intelligent, Johan easily involves himself in concepts and 'worlds' (most notable the financial world)--the kind that most people spend their entire lives trying to master, or at least participate in--and masters them easily. His 'play' in such spheres is sometimes subtle, but always cruel--not to mention tremendous in scope. "Like a child disturbing a line of ants," according to more than one person. He treats people much the same way, but in his hands they become much more like tools, conveniences or contrivances in his plans--the pieces of his 'game' rather than the game in and of themselves.
Humans... can become anything. But death is the great equaliser. All humans are equal in death. And so humans themselves are simultaneously 'special' and nothing at all.
He is not, by technicality, a serial killer, but a mass-murderer; a serial killer must have killed at least four people and have a modus operandi--while Johan has killed far more than four people and certainly appears to have an initial pattern in victims, the final facts do not support this: the murders of several middle-aged couple (former foster parents of Johan all) were only the tip of a very large iceberg. He has systematically and indiscriminately killed dozens and dozens of people, either directly or indirectly--many of them were killed by a third party, either loyal to him or hired to do so, while others were simply driven to suicide... or just helped along. Of course, all third party killers were summarily executed by Johan himself. As a brilliant, sometimes nigh-whimsical artist of corruption and destruction, Johan is capable of devising flawless plans on a near-moment's notice, occasionally improvising new steps or twists as he thinks of them.
However, Johan lacks a cogent sense of self. He is a non-person, but at the same time, his 'self' is split into two people, as the Monster in A Nameless Monster splits in half, one half to go East, the other West. In a sense, he and Nina are two independent selves of a unifying identity, but because Johan himself is consumed by another concept of 'self'--or rather, the Monster--his self is always being consumed and consuming, in a constant, active state of erasure. Nina herself is a threat to his existence, just as much as she is essential to it, and so must be consumed or absorbed into him, just as Johan from A Nameless Monster consumes his original 'other half', the Monster who went West.
His sense of self is so elusive that he can easily "become" other people--people who do not exist, people who do exist, idealised concepts of people who could exist... this is most noticeable in the subtle alterations of his apparent 'self', but happens most momentuously when he takes his twin sister's memories for his own--or rather, subsumes them and then mistakes them for his own. He physically takes on her identity for a period of time (following the burning of the library), seamlessly adopting and shifting between into her personality and physical appearance and his own. This is an excellent illustration of his ambiguous and enigmatic relationship with his twin. He often refers to his sister as his "other self," and repeats various permutations of "you are me, and I am you," both to his sister and, once, to his mother's portrait (right before burning the entire mansion it is in), but Johan also frequently speaks of the meaninglessness of names, their unnecessary nature, and is periodically explained to be 'a person who does not exist.' Indeed, for the first half/two-thirds of Monster, Inspector Lunge believes 'Johan' to be nothing but an alternate personality of Kenzou Tenma.
This is revealed to be untrue, and the reasoning for his murders varies wildly. Often they are related to his immediate goals or the desire to eradicate and/or remove all traces of his existence from the world, to become a non-person, to protect his secret 'self'--but sometimes it was simply convenient, easy, or too much trouble to handle otherwise.
And sometimes it simply suited him to do so.
It is has been questioned whether or not he has true emotions; he certainly has no capacity for guilt, and there is no doubt that he possesses a nuance of maliciousness, but it is key that Johan's cruelty is rooted not in insensitivity, but indifference--or desire. His motivations are complex, and the driving sense of despair he manifests is characterised from a sense of loss, of being unwanted. His expression and experience are so empty that it appears as though he possesses, at most, very small fluctuations within a single band of neutrality and thought. It would still be incorrect to say that he does not express emotion--that he does not cry, or smile, or laugh. He does all of these things freely... but as an act. They are superficial displays and affectations rather than true emotional reactions. His true state, as it seems, is 'emptiness.'
In the end, however, the difference may be meaningless to all but himself. After all, Johan possesses extraordinary charisma, manipulative ability, insight, and intellect; whatever he feels is going to be as apparent to others as he wants it to be.
Most of the time.
Re: [CANON] Johan Liebert || Monster || No reserve || 2 of 2
Abilities: Basically, Johan is the undisputed master of the mental game. He's brilliant, sensitive, charismatic, and a virtuoso of such diverse spheres as financial markets, law, communication, literature, and murder. He's also an expert at erasing his presence--nay, his very existence--and so practised at it that even with a body trail numbering in the hundreds, he is capable of walking away without a trace of his influence. More than anything, though, Johan is a master of manipulation--it is via manipulation that most of his schemes are controlled, and most of his murders are completed. It's much easier to convince people to kill themselves or provoke people into killing each other, after all. There is literally no way to overstate Johan's ability in this regard. He also canonically speaks five languages with complete fluency: French, German, Latin, English, and Czech--and mastered them in about four years.
First Person: [A fair-haired young man appears in the video, his brow slightly furrowed... at least until he realises it's actually recording him. Then his expression brightens a little, as though he's pleased to have figured it out. Interesting--a watch as computer. It was certainly creative. However...
His enthusiasm wanes again in favour of a more worried expression.]
Hello, I'm... ah, my name is Hans. I'm here at the train station, having just gotten off a train I don't recall boarding. I'm gathering this is... expected? Could someone explain this to me? It would be much appreciated.
[He manages to sound pretty upbeat and collected despite his obvious concern.
He had things he wanted to do. Things he needed to take care of.
This was not one of them.]
Third Person: Bear in mind this was done in 2009 and also my threadpartner dropped. :C
REVISION REQUESTED
You may submit your revision at any time in the next two weeks, and if you have any questions please feel free to contact one of the mods.
I got carried away with this I'm so sorry
And his thoughts were on Ruby City.
He could hardly claim to be thrilled with his relocation here, but he nor could he claim to find it boring. It was almost a dilemma. He was as curious as he was provoked, intrigued as much as inconvenienced. Ruby City... it was an interesting name. It reminded him, obliquely, of the Emerald City, fabled destination of The Wizard of Oz--a story he wasn't treated to until the Wall came down. It was a wonderful fantasy.
A pair of slippers featured in it. Ruby ones. Gorgeous items gifted to the precocious young heroine by a benevolent witch, they were taken from the corpse of the witch's evil sister, to whom they belonged. The witch had been killed by the heroine's falling house--lifted by a tornado into a fantastic land, through which she must then journey to return home. Upon the completion of the girl's journey, it is revealed by the same witch that the shoes had been the key to returning home all along. Or were they? A very neat ending--the power to go home was with her the entire time. Of course, this raised the question of why the benevolent witch didn't tell her this information to begin with.
Perhaps she was not so good after all.
He smiled faintly.
The Emerald City itself was a lie--it appeared to be a glorious, beautiful city of green, so brilliant as to be blinding to all who beheld it. Visitors were mandated to wear a pair of special glasses to protect them from the intensity of its splendour and beauty. A true wonder indeed. Once the glasses were taken off, however, the lie was revealed: it was revealed to be a perfectly ordinary city encircled by green walls, no more marvellous or splendid than any other.
So was this Ruby City, too, a lie?
He leaned back in his chair, opening his eyes and crossing one leg over the other as he began to watch the residents strolling by, talking in the warm afternoon sun. It was almost idyllic here. Very pretty.
But who was Dorothy? He wondered. Who was the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow? Who was the Wizard? The Good Witch?
Toto?
He wondered if it wouldn't be revealing to see the city burn itself to the ground. He would see the walls themselves come down, and the monsters of the outside pour in, driving the people inward even as they destroyed themselves from the inside. He would bear witness the waves of fear and paranoia radiating out from the centre obelisk, unfolding in each person like the petals of a flower--a cascading trail of terror and flame, death after death...
And then?
Perhaps he would walk to the edge of the world.
It was an idle thought, and not very practical. There would be more constructive ways to bring this city to its knees. Ways more conducive to his goals. There was no need to burn this city to the ground, or let itself do that. But as fun as this had been, his tea was done, and he really ought to get going.
There was a lot to today.
Perhaps he would meet the Wizard.
ACCEPTED
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