application
PLAYER
NAME: Nai
AGE: 22
JOURNAL: nai_is_not
IM: Nai is Not
E-MAIL: nai.is.not AT gmail DOT com
RETURNING: Returning, currently playing Brother Cavil (bestmachine) and the Narrator (improvesmorale)
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Katurian K. Katurian
FANDOM: The Pillowman, by Martin McDonagh
CHRONOLOGY: From the end of the play, after his execution.
BACKGROUND:
Once upon a time, in an unnamed, totalitarian state…
There was a writer, Katurian, who was literally born to be a writer. From an early age, his parents provided him with all the best writing supplies and encouraged him with their every breath to the best author he could be. Spoiled rotten, Katurian flourished under his parents. He wrote wonderful, whimsical tales and desired nothing more than to tell stories for the rest of his life. Starting the night of his seventh birthday, however, strange, unsettling noises began to emerge from the room next to his bedroom, the one his parents had bolted shut and forbidden him to enter. Screaming. Crying. The sounds of power tools whirling for hours on end. When he asked his parents about these horrifying sounds, they attributed them to his wonderful imagination, claiming that only “extraordinarily talented” little boys could hear it. With time, his stories grew darker and more morbid, the nightly sounds of torture shaping each and every one of his creative thoughts.
On the night of his fourteenth birthday, however, he noticed a note written in blood that had been slipped out from under the door to the locked room.
They have loved you and tortured me for seven straight years for no reason other than as an artistic experiment, an artistic experiment which has worked. You don’t write about little green pigs any more, do you? It was signed ‘Your brother.’
Bewildered, Katurian took an axe to the door and found that the note was true, that there was a boy in there who was most likely the brother he never knew he had, and that his parents had been treating both of them as experiments their entire life. After rescuing his brother, he snuck into his parents’ bedroom and smothered both of them to death with a pillow.
Flash forward to years later, with both Katurian and his older brother, Michal, as adults. The years of torture had left Michal traumatized and brain-damaged beyond repair, and so Katurian looked after him, taking a job at a local slaughterhouse to make ends meet while he spent the rest of his time writing. His stories were always morbid and often featured children being maimed, tortured, or killed. The play opens with Katurian being brought in for questioning because someone had been killing children in the same manner as his stories.
That someone, to Katurian’s horror, was Michal. Michal confessed to Katurian once they were placed in the same cell, claiming that Katurian told him to do it, that if he wrote happier stories and they had better parents, maybe none of this would had happened. Pitying his brother and knowing that they were both certain to be executed, he waited until his brother was asleep before smothering him to death with a pillow, sobbing the entire time. In his confession to the police, he wrote that he killed his brother to “save him from the torture and execution at the hands of his captors” and then took the blame for all of the murders, as well as a third, yet undiscovered victim his brother had told him he buried by their parents. His confession was under the conditions that, though he would be executed, his stories would be saved.
As it turned out, however, his brother hadn’t killed the third victim - he instead acted out another story with her, an innocent, cheerful story with a happy ending about a green colored pig that Katurian had written before the torture began all those years ago. It became obvious, then, that Katurian’s confession was false, and that he was in fact entirely innocent save for the murder of his parents and his brother. Those murders still warranted an execution, however, and that he had faked his confession meant his stories could no longer be saved. In the end, he was killed, convinced that all of his life’s work had been for nothing.
--Except one of the police officers related to him, took pity on him, and never burned his stories after all.
PERSONALITY:
Katurian sees the negatives in life more than the positives - he relishes being unable to find the answers to life’s questions, craves morbid irony, and expects unhappy endings. He doesn’t see this as sorrowful so much as how the world works, and enjoys being cruel to his characters in the way he believes life is cruel to absolutely everyone. That he claims not to mind cleaning up carcasses in the slaughterhouse suggests a desensitization to morbidity. The torture his parents conducted next door to him for seven years of life have almost acclimated him to it. This mindset makes it difficult for him to connect with other people, as they often judge him as weird or messed up. For that reason, his only companion is his brother, whom he bonds with by reading his stories aloud, in a way, using his writing as a crutch for regular human interaction.
Katurian is also a deeply patient individual. He tends to hold up his anger until it surfaces in yelling, cursing bursts, but he otherwise rolls with the punches. He’s aware that he’s weak, and as Tupolski, one of the interrogating officers puts it, he’s kind of “lily-livered and subservient on the one hand, yet vaguely sarcastic and provocative on the other,” hiding behind subtle jabs that can easily be taken back should it anger the other person too much.
His writing is everything to him. Though every time he tells a story he can feel the influence of his parents, he writes because he’s convinced his life is insignificant and that stories are the only way to leave his mark on the world. When he’s ordered to be executed, it’s not his life he’s afraid for (though he’s very much a coward, he’s resigned to his fate by the time the gun touches his head), but his stories and the fact that no one would ever read them. Life is transient. He knows this. The only way to live on, he believes, is through fiction.
CLASS: Anti-Hero.
SUPERHERO NAME: The Pillowman
ALTER EGO: Katurian Katurian
POWER: > Noncanon: Restricted time travel, the ability to sense the overall quality of someone’s life.
Further explanation here.
COMMUNITY POST SAMPLE:
[ Here
THIRD PERSON:
[ Here
NAME: Nai
AGE: 22
JOURNAL: nai_is_not
IM: Nai is Not
E-MAIL: nai.is.not AT gmail DOT com
RETURNING: Returning, currently playing Brother Cavil (bestmachine) and the Narrator (improvesmorale)
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Katurian K. Katurian
FANDOM: The Pillowman, by Martin McDonagh
CHRONOLOGY: From the end of the play, after his execution.
BACKGROUND:
Once upon a time, in an unnamed, totalitarian state…
There was a writer, Katurian, who was literally born to be a writer. From an early age, his parents provided him with all the best writing supplies and encouraged him with their every breath to the best author he could be. Spoiled rotten, Katurian flourished under his parents. He wrote wonderful, whimsical tales and desired nothing more than to tell stories for the rest of his life. Starting the night of his seventh birthday, however, strange, unsettling noises began to emerge from the room next to his bedroom, the one his parents had bolted shut and forbidden him to enter. Screaming. Crying. The sounds of power tools whirling for hours on end. When he asked his parents about these horrifying sounds, they attributed them to his wonderful imagination, claiming that only “extraordinarily talented” little boys could hear it. With time, his stories grew darker and more morbid, the nightly sounds of torture shaping each and every one of his creative thoughts.
On the night of his fourteenth birthday, however, he noticed a note written in blood that had been slipped out from under the door to the locked room.
They have loved you and tortured me for seven straight years for no reason other than as an artistic experiment, an artistic experiment which has worked. You don’t write about little green pigs any more, do you? It was signed ‘Your brother.’
Bewildered, Katurian took an axe to the door and found that the note was true, that there was a boy in there who was most likely the brother he never knew he had, and that his parents had been treating both of them as experiments their entire life. After rescuing his brother, he snuck into his parents’ bedroom and smothered both of them to death with a pillow.
Flash forward to years later, with both Katurian and his older brother, Michal, as adults. The years of torture had left Michal traumatized and brain-damaged beyond repair, and so Katurian looked after him, taking a job at a local slaughterhouse to make ends meet while he spent the rest of his time writing. His stories were always morbid and often featured children being maimed, tortured, or killed. The play opens with Katurian being brought in for questioning because someone had been killing children in the same manner as his stories.
That someone, to Katurian’s horror, was Michal. Michal confessed to Katurian once they were placed in the same cell, claiming that Katurian told him to do it, that if he wrote happier stories and they had better parents, maybe none of this would had happened. Pitying his brother and knowing that they were both certain to be executed, he waited until his brother was asleep before smothering him to death with a pillow, sobbing the entire time. In his confession to the police, he wrote that he killed his brother to “save him from the torture and execution at the hands of his captors” and then took the blame for all of the murders, as well as a third, yet undiscovered victim his brother had told him he buried by their parents. His confession was under the conditions that, though he would be executed, his stories would be saved.
As it turned out, however, his brother hadn’t killed the third victim - he instead acted out another story with her, an innocent, cheerful story with a happy ending about a green colored pig that Katurian had written before the torture began all those years ago. It became obvious, then, that Katurian’s confession was false, and that he was in fact entirely innocent save for the murder of his parents and his brother. Those murders still warranted an execution, however, and that he had faked his confession meant his stories could no longer be saved. In the end, he was killed, convinced that all of his life’s work had been for nothing.
--Except one of the police officers related to him, took pity on him, and never burned his stories after all.
PERSONALITY:
Katurian sees the negatives in life more than the positives - he relishes being unable to find the answers to life’s questions, craves morbid irony, and expects unhappy endings. He doesn’t see this as sorrowful so much as how the world works, and enjoys being cruel to his characters in the way he believes life is cruel to absolutely everyone. That he claims not to mind cleaning up carcasses in the slaughterhouse suggests a desensitization to morbidity. The torture his parents conducted next door to him for seven years of life have almost acclimated him to it. This mindset makes it difficult for him to connect with other people, as they often judge him as weird or messed up. For that reason, his only companion is his brother, whom he bonds with by reading his stories aloud, in a way, using his writing as a crutch for regular human interaction.
Katurian is also a deeply patient individual. He tends to hold up his anger until it surfaces in yelling, cursing bursts, but he otherwise rolls with the punches. He’s aware that he’s weak, and as Tupolski, one of the interrogating officers puts it, he’s kind of “lily-livered and subservient on the one hand, yet vaguely sarcastic and provocative on the other,” hiding behind subtle jabs that can easily be taken back should it anger the other person too much.
His writing is everything to him. Though every time he tells a story he can feel the influence of his parents, he writes because he’s convinced his life is insignificant and that stories are the only way to leave his mark on the world. When he’s ordered to be executed, it’s not his life he’s afraid for (though he’s very much a coward, he’s resigned to his fate by the time the gun touches his head), but his stories and the fact that no one would ever read them. Life is transient. He knows this. The only way to live on, he believes, is through fiction.
CLASS: Anti-Hero.
SUPERHERO NAME: The Pillowman
ALTER EGO: Katurian Katurian
POWER: > Noncanon: Restricted time travel, the ability to sense the overall quality of someone’s life.
Further explanation here.
COMMUNITY POST SAMPLE:
[ Here
THIRD PERSON:
[ Here