Phantasmal Rift Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
phantasmods) wrote2018-01-17 08:32 am
phantasmods) wrote2018-01-17 08:32 am
APPLICATIONS
Applications are currently closed and will open at 12:01 AM PST on February 22nd.
Post your applications to this entry in the following format: First comment should contain the OOC information section only. Successive comments should be posted in reply to that comment, as many as you need. Moderator responses will be appended to the last comment of the application.
A reserve is not required to app! Please note that while the total cap for characters per player is four, you can apply a maximum of two characters per application cycle.
APPLICATION TEMPLATE:
Please note that apps are processed in batches at the end of the application period!
IMPORTANT: Be sure to post your app with the journal you intend to use for the game!
Post your applications to this entry in the following format: First comment should contain the OOC information section only. Successive comments should be posted in reply to that comment, as many as you need. Moderator responses will be appended to the last comment of the application.
A reserve is not required to app! Please note that while the total cap for characters per player is four, you can apply a maximum of two characters per application cycle.
APPLICATION TEMPLATE:
- OOC Information
Player name: [Your preferred name or handle here]
Player age and gender: [18+ folks only. Preferred pronouns go here, though please include one least one of he/she/they for the sanity of your mods and fellow players]
Player Contact: [Plurk, Discord, what have you]
Any other characters in game?
[THIS IS THE END OF YOUR FIRST COMMENT. EVERYTHING AFTER THIS GOES IN REPLIES TO THE FIRST COMMENT.]
IC Information
Character name: [Western order, please. Also if your character is a AU with a different name than the one they had in canon, please let us know!]
Character canon: [If your canon has multiple adaptations and you pull from one in specific, please note that. If your character is a CRAU, please note game they came from here!]
Canon point: [If your character is an AU, please include both their ORIGINAL CANONPOINT and their AU canonpoint. In the case of a CRAU, please note their canonpoint at their PREVIOUS GAME.]
Physical Description: [Image links are fine! Please also include your character's relative height and age!]
About the Character: [Tell us about your character! This is a freeform section for both history and personality, and we're looking for 500-2000 words. Please don't go too far under or overboard!]
Character abilities: [Include both supernatural abilities and more mundane ones, please! Details are good.]
Inventory: [What's on your character's person when they arrive, magically or otherwise?]
Samples: [Threads from the test drive are strongly preferred, but any thread of at least eight comments from your character will do.]
Please note that apps are processed in batches at the end of the application period!
IMPORTANT: Be sure to post your app with the journal you intend to use for the game!
no subject
Player name: Jeff
Player age and gender: 21, he/she
Player Contact:
Any other characters in game? Astolfo
no subject
Character name: Nikolai Gogol
Character canon: Bungou Stray Dogs (Lockdown CRAU)
Canon point: Canon: chapter 58.5 | Lockdown: R1 endgame
Physical Description: Somewhere in his twenties, just short of six foot. Honestly the wiki does a better job of describing his appearance than anything else and an image.
About the Character: SPOILERS + SUICIDE CW
Gogol is a member of a group called 'The Decay of Angels', who are a death cult masquerading as a terror organization in Japan- their aim to bring about the demise of the celestial world; a coded term for the world of justice. A plan is formed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky- leader of the 'Rats in the house of the dead', another underground organisation and fellow member of the Decay of Angels. The plan itself is pure evil, and Gogol recognizes that, but that's why he supports it - to be free of morality, of humanity, to break out of all that binds him to society. He finds kinship with Dostoyevsky, who he sees as the only one to understand this.
The Angels brutally murder four government officials within a week. Gogol, having disguised himself as a government secretary (enduring verbal and physical abuse from his boss) for six months, is the culprit. He sends a transmission to the Armed Detective Agency, displaying a number of government officials seated in a trap he'd come up with- body cutting chainsaws that will bisect them in a time limit -challenging the ADA to save them before then. After a clash with Atsushi Nakajima of the ADA, Gogol frees, his boss, the minister of justice, Mr.Tonan from the trap, granting him life as 'thanks' for the six months they worked together.
At the same time, he is working with a fellow member who is writing in a page of a book that alters reality, plotting the script that Gogol follows in accordance to Dostoyevsky’s plan. He activates the traps ahead of schedule, and with the power of the book the ADA are exposed as his accomplices in murder, whilst Gogol is placed into one of his own traps. As he is sawed in half, he declares that he is making a prison break from "morality", choosing the freedom of his soul over happiness. He says "listen to the scream of my free will", and begins to scream at Tonan that he doesn't wish to die, giving him the identities of the 'criminals', the ADA.
[end plot recap]
First and foremost: Gogol is a clown.
With a deceitful smile that never parts his lips, he’s constantly energetic and always having fun. He loves games, riddles, and quizzes, often getting so excited that he spoils the answer, forgets the question, or ignores the game’s rules entirely. Always laughing, he has a dark sense of humor, as it's often at others' misfortune. He takes a great joy in being theatrical, and that carries over into the violent acts he commits, gleefully torturing and killing others in unecessarily elaborate ways, earning him a reputation for being sadistic.
Gogol frequently contradicts himself with claims of lies. When confronted by Atsushi about his motives, he gives him one answer of “being a psychopath who just enjoys killing” (after having brutally stabbed his leg several times, laughing all the while) and then proceeds to give him another, that he experiences guilt and remorse just like anyone else, and seeks only ‘the freedom of birds’. Then he asks Atsushi what word of what he just said was a lie, undermining and calling into question any sincerity he might have displayed, leaving his true feelings a muddy enigma. He does not elaborate on his motives to Atsushi when he says he doesn't get them; he doesn’t believe anyone else would ever understand, so he doesn’t try let other people in.
The only man he found a connection with is another inhuman- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, referred to by others as a Demon, and a God by his followers. He claims he’s the only other who has ever - and will ever - understand him, becoming completely devoted to Dostoyevsky, and isolating himself from others at the same time. Gogol rejects his humanity because he both despises the structure of the human psyche (most prominently, the guilt it burdens him with), and because he has never been made to feel as if he is one, never being comfortable in the cage of his mind, body, and society.
Gogol’s entire thing is freedom. Dostoyevsky, and so, Gogol too, believes there is an inherent sin in humans, and that they should be freed from it; everyone is “sinfully stupid”, and can’t stop killing each other due to the inescapable evil in them. Gogol feels there is a punishment in human conscience, and he feels restricted and trapped by that part of his humanity & how it is bound to a concept of ‘society’ by nature. He wants to break free of the “warm, wet hell” of his own mind and body to truly be free as he believes birds are.
To escape, he has to commit great evil, as much as the guilt weighs on him. He explains that he sees Dostoyevsky’s plan as ‘right’ because it is so cruel. By committing that evil, he discards the shackles of the need to be “good” and “moral”, and inches ever closer to his freedom from morality. As he faces his death, he says, “over happiness, I choose the freedom of my soul!”. He knows his actions are barring him from having a normal, happy life, that it pushes everyone out of it, but that feeling of being trapped would be too pervasive to be cope with.
He confesses to Atsushi that he understands the evils of murder, that he is completely sane, and experiences guilt. The reason he gives a specific answer to his victims, of being an empty, monstrous person who loves violence, is because they find it easier to accept as they die. In this, he shows that he actually does have compassion for other people. Though he is hurting people, he’s doing it because he wants to save them from their own nature.
Gogol is a man of contradictions. He sees Dostoyevsky as both evil and good, both demon and god. He admires justice, and condemns it at once. He embraces opposites and their conflict with each other, and sees both sides as fundamentally the same, which is evident in the two halves of his personality; there is one that enjoys violence, evil, and cruelty, and another that experiences compassion, guilt, and sorrow for it.
Beneath it all, Gogol is simply a sad person. He claims that a bird that has only ever lived in a cage doesn’t know it’s trapped, and he laments his jealousy of this, longing for the blissful ignorance that humans in society have. He admires the glory of the ADA as avatars of justice, wishes he could be good, wishes he could be like other people. But, burdened with an outsider’s knowledge of how false it is, he knows he can’t.
In Gogol’s final moments, his claims of not wanting to die are partially because of the book’s narration, part of the plan, but also suggested to be true feelings as he symbolically lacks his mask and any of the tells for when he’s lying; implying that, deep inside, he might have wanted to live, content, happy - or at least have another shot at it.
LOCKDOWN CRAU
At Fayflower University, Gogol was revived, believing himself to be from a time before the Decay of Angels’ plan was put into motion. He was enlisted as part of a program of motivating others to kill, and executing the culprits. Though Gogol is a perpetrator of great violence, and made sure to paint himself as a sadistic, cruel, unstable creature, it took him a while to kill anyone, as he believed he was still needed by Dostoyevsky, and no matter how enticing the motive.
As the weeks passed, Gogol tried his best to mess with others, and keep people at a distance from him. It worked well for the most part, and the majority of the students came out disliking him, but he found a kinship in Ryota Mitarai, who Gogol saw aspects of himself in. With Mike’s trial, he had shown an invaluable understanding of Gogol’s beliefs, pointing out how everyone was content to follow their hypocritical brand of justice - executing Mike because he was ‘guilty’, but sparing Connor though he volunteered to die. In everyone else’s criticism of Mitarai’s point, he saw another bird, aware of the cage, and the hypocrisy and limitations of justice and morality. He reached out to Mitarai, and, finding him receptive to his suggestions of abandoning the cage of trying to be “good”, and was suddenly confronted with the possibility that there can be others like him, that Dostoyevsky was not the only one. With Mitarai’s trial, this reached a climax. He pointed out that the killers didn’t have a choice, and an inherent trait in humanity was being manipulated to make them do so, that people needed to be saved from themselves. This was the ideology that Gogol had been following in aiding Dostoyevsky’s plan, and the other apprentices’ negative reactions only cemented the idea that people like them did not fit in this world.
His closeness with Mitarai then opened up an avenue to become closer to Edgar Allan Poe. The two had started off antagonistic towards each other, but Poe was determined to understand Gogol. Though they started to warm to each other, it wasn’t until after discovering understanding with Mitarai that he’d considered this as possible, and he began to show Poe more of his true feelings and let the friendship fully bloom. Gogol was confronted with the possibility that he could be a “good friend” to someone, a positive influence, and that being himself wouldn’t drive him away.
Then, Gogol remembered dying. His freedom had been denied to him, and he was determined to get it back. There was a perfect way to get it, a perfect way to end this all - he would create a grand, grotesque show, killing Max and skewering her body, becoming the villain everyone knew he was, giving them the easiest culprit to execute and giving Gogol his freedom in death. It was a win/win scenario. Unfortunately, plans went awry, and he killed Tess instead of Max, and plans went further awry when, after dying, he woke up revived in a simulation. He did not break free of his sins, he had not yet shed the burden of his guilt, and had only piled on even more.
He was left, exposed, as the sad, pathetic, twisted and broken man that he really is. His ideals had died, everything had been for nothing, he hadn’t broken out of prison but only added more years onto his sentence. However, now at his lowest point, with a lot of time to himself, Gogol now has nowhere else to go but up. Though he previously saw himself as irredeemable without his ultimate freedom, after words with Rebecca Gales (someone he had never seen eye to eye with) and Mitarai, he’s begun to think that he might be able to find freedom in redemption, and that may shed the burden of his sin.
He has also started to consider that happiness doesn’t have to be sacrificed. This is largely in part to the joy he experiences with Mitarai, and his unfaltering support of him, but also to his feelings towards Poe. Even though he massively fucked things up at the end with committing murder, Poe had understood him in that crucial moment, and wanted him to be free, and Gogol had (rather late) realised the value of people who try to reach out even if they don’t immediately understand. He even made him feel like he could be human, and that might not be such a bad thing to be.
A thread in Gogol's understanding of things had come loose and, with a slight tug, has started to unravel the whole lot. He’s starting to doubt a lot of what he previously believed, and he’s got a lot to think about, and to reassess. Yet, this hasn't dampened his eccentricity and sheer ridiculousness.
Character abilities:
(To paraphrase Atsushi in chapter 58.5, "Gogol is OP".)
Inventory: Stored in cloakspace:
- The blast of an explosion
- A pile of dirt and sand
- Atsushi Nakajima's leg (disconnected between the thigh and the ankle)
- A revolver
- At least one switchblade
- "A whole lot of telephone poles"
On his person:Samples:
TDM thread 1
TDM thread 2
ACCEPTED
Additionally, if you use a secondary journal for icon space or other purposes, please respond to this comment with it so that we can get it included!
For your participation in the Test Drive, your character also receives the following items of loot;
Sexy IT Consultant Outfit: It's just a polo neck and some slacks, but the shirt has 'SEXY' on the front in huge bold lettering...