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 ] Kariya Matou || Fate/zero || reserved || 2 of 4 sorry i lied
In short, he is nothing like what you would expect a man from a long line of mages to be.
Kariya’s decision to live the way he does wasn’t just a case of his own personality naturally dictating things; it’s also a conscious rejection of everything about the world of magecraft. Bluntly put, at best Kariya does not even see the point in it; at worst, he’s actively repulsed and disgusted by everything to do with it. From his perspective, being normal and living peacefully is a welcome escape. As with most opinions this strong, there is a good reason behind Kariya’s revulsion for magic, and that would be his family. Although the Matou have been magi for centuries, Kariya is actually the first in many generations to be born naturally capable of magic; unfortunately for him, his family’s particular brand of magecraft is nothing short of horrific torture for those subjected to training under it, and the family head a sadistic, twisted old magus whose only concern is in achieving true immortality. All that considered, and inferring the sort of atmosphere Kariya would have been surrounded by growing up, it is no surprise that sometime in his teens, he chose to reject becoming the inheritor of the Matou family magic and instead cut all ties with the family he hated, hoping that any chance of reviving the line of magic would die with him. Not only did Kariya run out of fear, wanting to be free of the world that disgusted him so much, he also had no desire to put any potential wife or children through the hell of living in the Matou family.
His desire for his loved ones to remain safe and happy is a large part of what drives him, and hearing about that happiness being threatened is also one of the few things that can ignite his temper. Kariya is naturally a little hot-blooded and ruled more by his heart than his head, but he usually tries to keep a lid on things due to his desire to avoid rocking the proverbial boat. Generally speaking, his temper has two main triggers; the first being anything that even remotely threatens those he truly cares for, and the second being anything whatsoever to do with his family. This contrasts in an almost jarring way with his seemingly easy-going attitude to issues others may find horrifying – it’s not that he doesn’t care, exactly, so much that almost nothing else seems quite as horrifying to him as it should after growing up in a house with a basement full of parasitic Crest Worms. Kariya may offer his sympathy and even his help, but for him to truly care about a cause, it has to be personal for him in some way; only then will he throw himself into it without any hesitation. In canon, this comes in the form of Sakura, the young daughter of his childhood friend Aoi Tohsaka, being handed over to the Matou family; the idea of the innocent girl he cares for so much being abandoned to a terrible fate, at the hands of his family no less, is horrifying enough for him to immediately begin to try winning Sakura’s freedom.
As you may have guessed, Kariya can be self-centered. He often has trouble seeing other people’s perspectives on things, especially when they directly clash with his; for example, he can’t understand how anyone would see the lifestyle of a mage as a good thing, and Tokiomi Tohsaka’s logic for giving his daughter away to the Matou – that a child with magical potential as strong as hers needs the protection and tutoring a strong, well-established magus family can provide – goes completely over Kariya’s head. From Kariya’s perspective, Tokiomi is either knowingly and cruelly causing suffering to his wife and daughters, or else he is holding the world’s biggest Idiot Ball; it doesn’t occur to him that Tokiomi just might not possess all the information Kariya does about the situation. Despite his tendency to only care about things in his immediate circle, however, one could hardly say that Kariya is selfish. He’s someone with a great deal of love to offer the people he comes to care for, and has a soft spot for children that’s evident in the way he dotes on Rin and Sakura. He can also be very protective of these people, and he’s a man who would be willing to sacrifice literally everything he has for the sake of a chance for their happiness; his health, his sanity, even his life.
Needless to say, this makes Kariya someone who possesses more courage than one would expect from someone with such a carefully maintained appearance of normality. A person would have to have some degree of bravery within them not only to leave a family like the Matou, but to then willingly return to them ten years later and knowingly put themselves through a year of torment that would inevitably end in death, all for the sake of a little girl. The problem is that when Kariya acts on his bravery, it often crosses the line straight into recklessness or foolhardiness, something that happens with increasing frequency as he loses his grip on his mind during the events of canon.
Someone that requires special mention for how much she influences Kariya as a person is his childhood friend, Aoi Tohsaka. Three years his senior, Aoi is someone who has looked out for Kariya since they were both small, and they were once very close; as his oldest and possibly one of his only friends, Kariya cares for her deeply. However, this is complicated by the fact that Kariya’s feelings for her run deeper than friendship, even after her marriage. Kariya genuinely loves Aoi and wishes for her happiness; it’s for that reason that he peacefully gave up pursuing her when she accepted Tokiomi’s proposal. Of course, that doesn’t help with his lingering feelings for her, and he’s aware of that; he consciously tries to keep a respectful distance between them because by his own reckoning, he knows it isn’t his place. Indeed, in the anime Aoi, despite being his childhood friend, is the only person we see the otherwise very informal Kariya address with the “-san” honourific, indicating this distance. Even so, Aoi – or at least, the idea of Aoi – has been a sort of emotional crutch for Kariya over the years, and he has subconsciously placed her on a bit of a pedestal. And despite his very best and genuine attempts to let her live her own life, Kariya is still only human; deep down he harbours tiny feelings of resentment and jealousy towards Tokiomi, though he’s not even aware himself that he holds these feelings inside him. Indeed, it might not have ever been an issue had Tokiomi not misguidedly given Sakura to the Matou family and indirectly set the events in motion that lead to Kariya’s physical and mental decline.
[ CANON ] Kariya Matou || Fate/zero || reserved || 3 of 4
It goes without saying, then, that after a year of enduring such pain, it’s not just Kariya’s body that changes for the worse. Though still fundamentally a decent person, he is outwardly more reserved and taciturn than before and tends to avoid people, if only for the problems his now somewhat terrifying appearance would cause. Thanks to the constant pain he is in and also Crest Worms having literally eaten parts of his brain, Kariya is also now more prone to emotional outbursts when triggered and is on a much shorter fuse, having much less of a hold on his temper. Since he knows all too well that he’s existing on borrowed time, he also becomes a lot more reckless when it comes to trying to get what he set out to do done, caring little for any sort of strategy.
His determination to accomplish this becomes frighteningly single-minded, to the point where saving Sakura from her fate and killing Tokiomi become the only real purposes he has for what’s left of his life – to the extent of ignoring the threat of a large monster created by one of the other Servants in favour of sending his own Servant to fight Tokiomi’s while confronting Tokiomi himself at the same time. Whether it was his original intention or not, by the time of the Grail War, getting revenge on Tokiomi by killing him becomes just as important to Kariya as his goal of rescuing Sakura. It’s easier to survive putting yourself through terrible pain if you have someone to blame and get angry at, and other than Zouken, Tokiomi, who gave away his own daughter to the Matou, is the obvious choice. What started as small seeds of resentment becomes fully-fledged hatred, and the Kariya of the Grail War now takes a vicious and unstable kind of pleasure in causing any kind of humiliation or throwing any kind of spanner in the works for the Tohsaka magus. Kariya also develops a certain amount of loathing towards himself; he blames himself just as harshly for Sakura’s situation as he does Zouken and Tokiomi, reasoning that if he had just accepted his fate eleven years beforehand instead of running away, Sakura could have carried on living happily with her mother and sister.
Ultimately as the Grail War wears on, Kariya progressively loses more and more of his grip on his own sanity to the point where he begins losing sight of himself and everything that he once held dear, with only his twin goals of Save Sakura And Kill Tokiomi Before I Die to cling to. His fragile mental and emotional state combined with his single-minded desire to see these two goals through makes him an easy target for manipulation by others since he no longer has the ability to really perceive when he’s being duped, something that Kirei Kotomine is able to mercilessly exploit to increase Kariya’s suffering and unhinge his mind even further. Once Kariya’s mind starts breaking down completely, he even becomes capable of hurting those closest to him when triggered the wrong way; all it takes during a moment of Kotomine-engineered misunderstanding is for Aoi to say something that is so out of place with Kariya’s remaining perception of her that his mind briefly snaps – for long enough to lead to some truly tragic consequences.
The real tragedy of Kariya Matou is that his slow descent into insanity reveals as much about him as it destroys; although it could never be denied that his self-sacrificial efforts were genuine and whole-heartedly meant, there are more selfish layers to his actions that Kariya himself neglects, practicing some pretty thorough self-deception as a protective measure. It’s only during his final moments when his body and mind finally give out completely that his deepest, suppressed wish for himself – to be a family with Aoi, Sakura and Rin – is embraced in the form of a final, delusional vision.
Perhaps it’s kinder that way.
[ CANON ] Kariya Matou || Fate/zero || reserved || 4 of 4
Third Person: Shinto was just as busy as he remembered it. Well. “Remembered it,” was hardly the right phrase, considering Kariya had just been here not even two hours ago. The crowds bustling about the place on their comings and goings even as the sun was going down gave the whole place the feel of an overactive beehive.
It was a perfect match for his own agitated restlessness.
The area down by the suspension bridge was a little quieter, just as it always was, but it didn’t help. He’d come down here to think, to try and clear his head, but his thoughts weren’t so much ticking as they were racing.
He couldn’t get the tears he’d seen in Aoi’s eyes out of his mind. Nor Rin’s miserable attempts to mask her sadness by playing her troubles away. Trying their hardest to accept something unacceptable, because that was what was expected of them.
And Sakura…
Kariya didn’t want to imagine what Sakura could be going through even at that very instant; trying to made his stomach turn. He knew better than almost anyone else what Zouken was capable of – the thought of Sakura’s shy smile and soft voice bearing the full brunt of that vampire’s malice was too much to bear.
It can’t even have been that long, Kariya thought bitterly, his hands balling into fists. If he’d come back even a few days earlier, he could have put a stop to this. He was sure of it. He would have planted himself in front of the Tohsaka house and refused to let them hand Sakura over—
No. Maybe he could still put a stop to this.
There wasn’t any other option, not for him. He needed to. Aoi and Rin’s hands were tied through no fault of their own, but Kariya – he was the one with the Matou blood flowing through his veins. He couldn’t stand idly by and let the Matou family drag an innocent child into their disgusting affairs. Especially when she was just being forced into the hole he’d forced his own way out of. (Aoi hadn’t said so in so many words, but he knew she was right all the same.) If he walked away from this, how could he say he was any better than the rest of his whole rotten bloodline?
Kariya took a deep breath. Pushing himself off the riverside railing, he turned towards the suspension bridge.
For the first time in ten years, he began to cross it.
ACCEPTED
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