Gray War application - TLV players, sorry for the momentary interruption. Carry on. :3
Player Information
Name: Amanda
Contact: farrago606 (AIM)
Characters: N/A
Character Information
Name: Amanda Young
Journal Name: creatingalegacy
Fandom / Series: Saw
From When: 1-2 weeks before the events of Saw III
Function: Is there a "torturer" role? "Intelligence," maybe?
Preferred Side: Civilian. Amanda might follow John with a fierce loyalty but has zero faith in other higher authorities. Her method is supposedly for the benefit of ordinary people, and is one based on supposedly higher ideals than the law.
Abilities / Powers: She has no superhuman abilities. That being said, she's very calculating, able to anticipate human behavior well, and has a talent for designing/constructing large-scale working devices using only found objects.
Personality:
Amanda Young is a very unstable individual. She often uses cutting, burning and other forms of self-injury in order to cope with her anger and stress. Although she admits that she's a murderer, her cold-blooded moments alternate with feelings of intense guilt and remorse; however, she's grown to suppress these as often as possible. She harbors a deep sense of inferiority; the fears that she's "nothing," unimportant, or could never live up to her mentor's legacy, ate and continue to eat at her.
In her effort to give all of herself for John's cause, which she believed would give her some greater purpose and make her important, she consequently lost hold on her sense of self. She is stuck between existing as John's right-hand apprentice, which she knows she's failed at, and being herself, which she views as worthless. This cultivates a sense of desperation in her, and she'll do anything to forge a sense of identity with her mentor.
Needless to say, she suffers from Stockholm Syndrome. She nearly worships the man who rigged a game that could have easily killed her, and is disturbingly grateful that he "saved her life." She claims to have been "reborn," but this is just her neurotic desire to be someone other than herself manifesting coherently. Her three-way dilemma of trying to create her own new identity, trying to emulate John, and trying to abandon her old identity entirely without disappointing him leads directly to her intense emotional and mental instability. She greatly fears being abandoned or replaced.
Amanda has long stretches of calm, seemingly normal control, during which she is able to execute the plans of herself and others properly. Punctuating these stretches are marked declines followed by emotional breakdowns. While in a breakdown, she becomes even more dangerous because she abandons her own (already faulty) sense of rationality and quasi-idealism, bursting into fits of rage, depression or mania. She is also dangerous to herself during these periods, as she'll ignore all warnings as to her own safety and is unable to focus on "the bigger picture" or the future, or even to think several steps ahead, setting her sights only on the here-and-now and an immediate sense of satisfaction. She's prone to act out of spite, and tends to kill or commit other acts of violence to satisfy her desire to see others suffer.
Deep down, she believes that people can't change, and that many of the people who don't cherish their lives could never do anything to deserve them anyway.
As a result of her abusive childhood, plus the PTSD from her test and her attachment to John, Amanda has developed Borderline Personality Disorder. She displays every symptom to a high degree:
- 1.) Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.
- 2.) A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
- 3.) Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
- 4.) Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging.
- 5.) Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats or self-injuring behavior such as cutting, interfering with the healing of scars (excoriation) or picking at oneself.
- 6.) Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days).
- 7.) Chronic feelings of emptiness.
- 8.) Inappropriate anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).
- 9.) Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation, delusions or severe dissociative symptoms.
History:
Amanda Young endured a terrible childhood. Her father, an alcoholic, used to lock her under the stairs and in closets for hours or days at a time, despite being aware of her acute fear of the dark. At other times, he physically assaulted her, leaving her badly injured. Her mother, also an alcoholic (and possible drug addict) who was also abused by Amanda's father, neglected her most of the time, and didn't always come home after hitting the bars at night. She veered constantly between being sort-of mothering, neglectful, and actively blaming Amanda for her life being terrible. Eventually she ran out and left Amanda's completely at her father's mercy. Because of the neglect and abuse, she became filled with rage and never learned how to deal with her anger, stress and emotional pain.
Upon graduating high school and leaving home, things didn't look up for her. She lived in slums, or places not much better, for much of her independent life.
When Amanda grew into adulthood, she'd already begun using self-injury as a way to cope. She was a young woman when she was accused of heroin possession, of which she was not guilty; however, the detective working the investigation, Eric Matthews, planted false evidence which resulted in her conviction. She spent time in prison, and ironically, actually began using heroin to cope. She traded sexual favors for the drug, and suffered prison rape as a result. She was released from prison a full-blown addict, and much more traumatized than she had been before her lockup.
Once out of prison, Amanda's life continued to spiral ever-downwards. She lived in a shitty apartment that didn't always have hot water or power because she spent everything she had on heroin; when the money was out and she still needed a fix, she sold her body. She began running with thieves and drug-dealers, and once managed to convince a man named Cecil, one of her lovers and a fellow addict, to rob a drug-abuse rehab clinic for her. On the way out of the building, Ceil accidentally slammed a door into stomach of the woman running the center, the then-seven months pregnant Jill Tuck, causing her to miscarry. The father of the unborn child was John Kramer, and the loss of his child would eventually play a role in his becoming the "Jigsaw Killer."
Some time later, Amanda was hospitalized for an overdose, and placed in the bed next to John Kramer, then a terminal cancer patient. John still did not know she was involved in the death of his child; instead, he started watching her after she was released from the hospital. She continued to use heroin, leading John to decide she hadn't learned anything from her brush with death, and he decided to test her.
A short while after he first targeted her, Amanda woke up in an empty warehouse room with a heavy metal device strapped to her head, locking her jaws in place. A video began to play on a nearby TV, telling her that the device was a "reverse bear trap" that would permanently rip her mouth wide open in one minute. The only way to remove the device, she was instructed, was with the key in the stomach of the man laying on the floor in front of her. That man, Donnie Greco, was her drug dealer. Provided with a scalpel, Amanda cut the sedated man open, dug through his guts to reach his stomach, retrieved the key and unlocked and removed the device mere seconds before it would have torn her face apart. John, via a remote-controlled puppet, congratulated her on her escape and told her she would not longer be ungrateful for her life. Indeed, the experience caused her to stop using heroin, and she reported to the police that John "helped her."
After giving her a little time to recover from her ordeal, John approached her and proposed that she become his apprentice; his brain tumor was inoperable, and he needed for someone to carry on his work after he died. Seeing John as a father figure who saved her life, she was thrilled to be able to assist him...in theory. Once she actually began carrying out tasks for him, however, she had a hard time dealing with the emotional turmoil that resulted. She mercy-killed a "test subject" she was supposed to have left alone, after the thought of his otherwise slow death caused her to suffer nightmares, and broke down in tears while on assignment. She also went back to harming herself, cutting her wrists and inner thighs when unable to cope in any other way. John later showed Amanda off to Jill, saying she was proof that his method of rehab was the ONLY kind that worked. Jill eventually became an accomplice because of this, and Amanda also came to view her as a surrogate mother. Jill supported her emotionally, and Amanda did her best to fill the void left by Gideon's death by being a good "daughter."
Amanda, although John's closest and most favored apprentice, was neither his first nor his last. His first apprentice, Detective Mark Hoffman, had been blackmailed into assisting after having been caught staging a copycat trap murder. Although John took a keen interest in Hoffman's training before Amanda came along, he cast him aside to focus on Amanda, declaring her his successor; from then on, Hoffman was utilized mostly for heavy lifting and kidnapping. He and Amanda loathed each other--Hoffman, because he'd been rejected as successor in favor of a former junkie, and Amanda because she saw the less-intelligent Hoffman as an obsolete inferior who got in the way of her relationship with John. Another apprentice, Dr. Lawrence Gordon, was recruited after surviving his own game; as John's former oncologist, he was used for his medical expertise. He assisted Amanda several times (although his apprenticeship was kept a total secret from Hoffman), and as Amanda grew more unstable later, John continued to favor Amanda personally but confided more secrets in Gordon.
Her biggest assignment was as a plant inside one of John's largest "games." She posed as just another test subject trapped in a house filled with a slow-acting nerve gas, in order to make sure one of the other subjects, a cop's son, made it out alive. She completed this task, helping John to lure the officer--Eric Matthews, the one who'd framed her for drug possession--into his grasp. She successfully captured him and declared him to be her first personal test subject.
Eric managed to escape in the same night she'd locked him away, but didn't get far; he and Amanda ran into each other in a hallway by his "cell," and although she did need to defend herself from him, she continued to beat him savagely after gaining the upper hand when he called her "nothing" and told her she wasn't Jigsaw. She eventually left him for dead, believing there was no way he'd live through what she'd done to him, and that encounter was exactly what caused her to turn from John's intentions towards outright murder. She was getting revenge for his framing of her, and it awakened her spite. She began to enjoy killing for its own sake and as an alternative to self-mutilation, thinking of Eric as proof that the survivors of John's games never really learned their lessons.
John's condition continued to decline, and Amanda began to set up her own games to test those who were living their lives poorly. However, all of her games were ultimately unwinnable; even when her subjects followed all the directions she left for them, there was no way for any of them to survive. John took notice of this, and realized that despite coming to truly care for Amanda, enough to essentially love her as a daughter in his own way, she may have been too unstable to carry on his legacy. Near death, he decided to test her once more; Amanda, overwhelmed by grief, had no idea that the tests she was helping him to set up would ultimately decide her own fate. Before that could happen, however, she was yanked into the world of the Gray War.
Sample Journal Entry: http://creatingalegacy.livejournal.com/3007.html
Sample RP: http://lastvoyageslogs.livejournal.com/635684.html
Name: Amanda
Contact: farrago606 (AIM)
Characters: N/A
Character Information
Name: Amanda Young
Journal Name: creatingalegacy
Fandom / Series: Saw
From When: 1-2 weeks before the events of Saw III
Function: Is there a "torturer" role? "Intelligence," maybe?
Preferred Side: Civilian. Amanda might follow John with a fierce loyalty but has zero faith in other higher authorities. Her method is supposedly for the benefit of ordinary people, and is one based on supposedly higher ideals than the law.
Abilities / Powers: She has no superhuman abilities. That being said, she's very calculating, able to anticipate human behavior well, and has a talent for designing/constructing large-scale working devices using only found objects.
Personality:
Amanda Young is a very unstable individual. She often uses cutting, burning and other forms of self-injury in order to cope with her anger and stress. Although she admits that she's a murderer, her cold-blooded moments alternate with feelings of intense guilt and remorse; however, she's grown to suppress these as often as possible. She harbors a deep sense of inferiority; the fears that she's "nothing," unimportant, or could never live up to her mentor's legacy, ate and continue to eat at her.
In her effort to give all of herself for John's cause, which she believed would give her some greater purpose and make her important, she consequently lost hold on her sense of self. She is stuck between existing as John's right-hand apprentice, which she knows she's failed at, and being herself, which she views as worthless. This cultivates a sense of desperation in her, and she'll do anything to forge a sense of identity with her mentor.
Needless to say, she suffers from Stockholm Syndrome. She nearly worships the man who rigged a game that could have easily killed her, and is disturbingly grateful that he "saved her life." She claims to have been "reborn," but this is just her neurotic desire to be someone other than herself manifesting coherently. Her three-way dilemma of trying to create her own new identity, trying to emulate John, and trying to abandon her old identity entirely without disappointing him leads directly to her intense emotional and mental instability. She greatly fears being abandoned or replaced.
Amanda has long stretches of calm, seemingly normal control, during which she is able to execute the plans of herself and others properly. Punctuating these stretches are marked declines followed by emotional breakdowns. While in a breakdown, she becomes even more dangerous because she abandons her own (already faulty) sense of rationality and quasi-idealism, bursting into fits of rage, depression or mania. She is also dangerous to herself during these periods, as she'll ignore all warnings as to her own safety and is unable to focus on "the bigger picture" or the future, or even to think several steps ahead, setting her sights only on the here-and-now and an immediate sense of satisfaction. She's prone to act out of spite, and tends to kill or commit other acts of violence to satisfy her desire to see others suffer.
Deep down, she believes that people can't change, and that many of the people who don't cherish their lives could never do anything to deserve them anyway.
As a result of her abusive childhood, plus the PTSD from her test and her attachment to John, Amanda has developed Borderline Personality Disorder. She displays every symptom to a high degree:
- 1.) Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.
- 2.) A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
- 3.) Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
- 4.) Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging.
- 5.) Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats or self-injuring behavior such as cutting, interfering with the healing of scars (excoriation) or picking at oneself.
- 6.) Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days).
- 7.) Chronic feelings of emptiness.
- 8.) Inappropriate anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).
- 9.) Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation, delusions or severe dissociative symptoms.
History:
Amanda Young endured a terrible childhood. Her father, an alcoholic, used to lock her under the stairs and in closets for hours or days at a time, despite being aware of her acute fear of the dark. At other times, he physically assaulted her, leaving her badly injured. Her mother, also an alcoholic (and possible drug addict) who was also abused by Amanda's father, neglected her most of the time, and didn't always come home after hitting the bars at night. She veered constantly between being sort-of mothering, neglectful, and actively blaming Amanda for her life being terrible. Eventually she ran out and left Amanda's completely at her father's mercy. Because of the neglect and abuse, she became filled with rage and never learned how to deal with her anger, stress and emotional pain.
Upon graduating high school and leaving home, things didn't look up for her. She lived in slums, or places not much better, for much of her independent life.
When Amanda grew into adulthood, she'd already begun using self-injury as a way to cope. She was a young woman when she was accused of heroin possession, of which she was not guilty; however, the detective working the investigation, Eric Matthews, planted false evidence which resulted in her conviction. She spent time in prison, and ironically, actually began using heroin to cope. She traded sexual favors for the drug, and suffered prison rape as a result. She was released from prison a full-blown addict, and much more traumatized than she had been before her lockup.
Once out of prison, Amanda's life continued to spiral ever-downwards. She lived in a shitty apartment that didn't always have hot water or power because she spent everything she had on heroin; when the money was out and she still needed a fix, she sold her body. She began running with thieves and drug-dealers, and once managed to convince a man named Cecil, one of her lovers and a fellow addict, to rob a drug-abuse rehab clinic for her. On the way out of the building, Ceil accidentally slammed a door into stomach of the woman running the center, the then-seven months pregnant Jill Tuck, causing her to miscarry. The father of the unborn child was John Kramer, and the loss of his child would eventually play a role in his becoming the "Jigsaw Killer."
Some time later, Amanda was hospitalized for an overdose, and placed in the bed next to John Kramer, then a terminal cancer patient. John still did not know she was involved in the death of his child; instead, he started watching her after she was released from the hospital. She continued to use heroin, leading John to decide she hadn't learned anything from her brush with death, and he decided to test her.
A short while after he first targeted her, Amanda woke up in an empty warehouse room with a heavy metal device strapped to her head, locking her jaws in place. A video began to play on a nearby TV, telling her that the device was a "reverse bear trap" that would permanently rip her mouth wide open in one minute. The only way to remove the device, she was instructed, was with the key in the stomach of the man laying on the floor in front of her. That man, Donnie Greco, was her drug dealer. Provided with a scalpel, Amanda cut the sedated man open, dug through his guts to reach his stomach, retrieved the key and unlocked and removed the device mere seconds before it would have torn her face apart. John, via a remote-controlled puppet, congratulated her on her escape and told her she would not longer be ungrateful for her life. Indeed, the experience caused her to stop using heroin, and she reported to the police that John "helped her."
After giving her a little time to recover from her ordeal, John approached her and proposed that she become his apprentice; his brain tumor was inoperable, and he needed for someone to carry on his work after he died. Seeing John as a father figure who saved her life, she was thrilled to be able to assist him...in theory. Once she actually began carrying out tasks for him, however, she had a hard time dealing with the emotional turmoil that resulted. She mercy-killed a "test subject" she was supposed to have left alone, after the thought of his otherwise slow death caused her to suffer nightmares, and broke down in tears while on assignment. She also went back to harming herself, cutting her wrists and inner thighs when unable to cope in any other way. John later showed Amanda off to Jill, saying she was proof that his method of rehab was the ONLY kind that worked. Jill eventually became an accomplice because of this, and Amanda also came to view her as a surrogate mother. Jill supported her emotionally, and Amanda did her best to fill the void left by Gideon's death by being a good "daughter."
Amanda, although John's closest and most favored apprentice, was neither his first nor his last. His first apprentice, Detective Mark Hoffman, had been blackmailed into assisting after having been caught staging a copycat trap murder. Although John took a keen interest in Hoffman's training before Amanda came along, he cast him aside to focus on Amanda, declaring her his successor; from then on, Hoffman was utilized mostly for heavy lifting and kidnapping. He and Amanda loathed each other--Hoffman, because he'd been rejected as successor in favor of a former junkie, and Amanda because she saw the less-intelligent Hoffman as an obsolete inferior who got in the way of her relationship with John. Another apprentice, Dr. Lawrence Gordon, was recruited after surviving his own game; as John's former oncologist, he was used for his medical expertise. He assisted Amanda several times (although his apprenticeship was kept a total secret from Hoffman), and as Amanda grew more unstable later, John continued to favor Amanda personally but confided more secrets in Gordon.
Her biggest assignment was as a plant inside one of John's largest "games." She posed as just another test subject trapped in a house filled with a slow-acting nerve gas, in order to make sure one of the other subjects, a cop's son, made it out alive. She completed this task, helping John to lure the officer--Eric Matthews, the one who'd framed her for drug possession--into his grasp. She successfully captured him and declared him to be her first personal test subject.
Eric managed to escape in the same night she'd locked him away, but didn't get far; he and Amanda ran into each other in a hallway by his "cell," and although she did need to defend herself from him, she continued to beat him savagely after gaining the upper hand when he called her "nothing" and told her she wasn't Jigsaw. She eventually left him for dead, believing there was no way he'd live through what she'd done to him, and that encounter was exactly what caused her to turn from John's intentions towards outright murder. She was getting revenge for his framing of her, and it awakened her spite. She began to enjoy killing for its own sake and as an alternative to self-mutilation, thinking of Eric as proof that the survivors of John's games never really learned their lessons.
John's condition continued to decline, and Amanda began to set up her own games to test those who were living their lives poorly. However, all of her games were ultimately unwinnable; even when her subjects followed all the directions she left for them, there was no way for any of them to survive. John took notice of this, and realized that despite coming to truly care for Amanda, enough to essentially love her as a daughter in his own way, she may have been too unstable to carry on his legacy. Near death, he decided to test her once more; Amanda, overwhelmed by grief, had no idea that the tests she was helping him to set up would ultimately decide her own fate. Before that could happen, however, she was yanked into the world of the Gray War.
Sample Journal Entry: http://creatingalegacy.livejournal.com/3007.html
Sample RP: http://lastvoyageslogs.livejournal.com/635684.html