Profile!
NAME: Sokka (of the Water Tribe)
CANON SOURCE: Avatar: The Last Airbender
TIMELINE: Post-series
CANON ABILITIES: Sokka is the one member of Team Avatar with no bending abilities/supernatural powers. He is, however, highly skilled with a number of weapons, especially (but not limited to) boomerangs and swords. He is also extremely intelligent, especially in the areas of military strategy and mechanical engineering, and has a knack for invention. He can forge armor and weapons. He can pilot Water Tribe ships, Fire Nation zeppelins, and sky bisons. He's also a gifted poet!
PERSONALITY: Sokka is made up of contradictions: he's rash, but also a serious thinker; he's comic relief, but also a natural leader; he's cocky, but sometimes painfully insecure. Basically, he's a teenage boy.
In all seriousness, his personality is deceptively complex. Most of the time he comes across as goofy and frivolous, if not completely airheaded. He's constantly hungry and obsessed with food. He tells stupid jokes about everything, all the time, and is surprised when no one finds them as funny as he does. He's the self-titled "Meat and Sarcasm Guy" because his two favorite things are, indeed, meat and sarcasm. He takes great pleasure in catch phrases and stupid nicknames, proudly responsible for coining the name "Team Avatar." He loves shopping, wrestling, and fighting. And he is, indeed, rash, and tends to speak (and even launch complicated plans) without really thinking things through, which can land him in hot water.
But beneath Sokka's brash and kind of ridiculous exterior is the brain of a scientist and, as his sword master Piandao puts it, "a heart as strong as a lionturtle." He's quick to recognize his own mistakes and strive to correct them. For example, when he insults the warrior Suki, he soon after comes to her with such a heartfelt apology that she agrees to train him herself. While he doesn't think of himself as particularly great, even calling himself unworthy to Piandao, he constantly tries to live up to his father Hakoda, whom he hero-worships admires as a warrior and a leader. Ever since he was a boy, he's been trying to prove himself to Hakoda, not realizing how proud Hakoda already was of his courageous spirit.
Having been the only boy of age in the village for so long, Sokka is intensely protective of the Water Tribe, especially his own family. While at home, he singlehandedly builds a watchtower out of snow to keep a lookout for Fire Nation ships; and after he and his sister Katara leave with Aang he remains fiercely protective over her, even once attacking Aang himself for her sake. Later, he also develops overprotective feelings towards Suki, having been traumatized by his previous girlfriend Yue's departure to the spirit world.
Either because of all this, or as a complement to it, Sokka is slightly obsessed by weapons. He's familiar with a number of weapons and loves to learn about new ones, although he favors his beloved boomerang above all else. But it's not a frivolous obsession: over the course of his journey, Sokka becomes an excellent warrior. He's perhaps the only boy in the world other than Aang who can claim to have trained with members of all four nations, assuming traveling with the Avatar for a year counts as training with airbenders. He's the one who plans the invasion of the Fire Nation, and when Hakoda falls in battle, he's the one to take up his father's mantle and lead the small invasion force into the Fire Nation's capital.
If it wasn't clear, Sokka is surprisingly smart behind all the dumb jokes. Not only is he good with battle plans, but he's the team planner, being the only one who can manage their schedule and read the map. He's also a legitimate engineering prodigy, personally designing the hot air mechanism that becomes Team Avatar's war balloon, and later is stolen for the Fire Nation's zeppelins. He's also the one who discovers that the Fire Nation's weakness is the solar eclipse, and figures out how to calculate the date of the next one. He may be the comic relief, but he's also the de facto leader of Team Avatar.
But really, all Sokka wants from life is a nice girl who will laugh at his jokes, an endless supply of meat, and for his family to be safe and proud of him. The rest is all gravy. Delicious, delicious gravy.
HOW DIFFERENT DO YOU WANT THE MEMORIES TO BE FROM THEIR CANON? Obviously, since there is no bending in this world, much less a Water Tribe, Sokka's memories will be very different. I'd like for Sokka to still retain some memory of the abilities he develops over the series -- not necessarily swordfighting, but his blossoming gift for invention and puzzle-solving. And the boomerang, why not.
Otherwise: Sokka is now an Inuit from northern Alaska. Already poor through decades of American 'intervention', Sokka's tribe is crippled by the Depression. When Sokka is 13 his father, Hakoda, enlists in the military, leaving Sokka to care for the family. After two more years of struggle, however, Sokka's mother and grandmother agree to send the children east to find their fortunes -- or at least a decent salary. Sokka spends the next several months traveling across the country until he reaches New York. Smart but uneducated, Sokka takes a series of odd jobs, trying to find his true calling. Meanwhile, he begins to hear about the amateur detectives and other shadowy figures that hunt criminals in the night...
PLANS FOR YOUR CHARACTER: I'm really interested in playing Sokka in a world where, for once, he's not the odd man out, and fighting isn't the most important thing in the world. The reason I'm taking him post-series is that while he starts out as kind of a dumb jock, he grows into his intelligence over the course of the show, and I'd like to have a smart Sokka in an environment where his wits matter more than his boomerang skills. Ideally, what I'd like for him is to try to become involved in the superhero/detectiving fly-by-night world, possibly with the end goal of training himself to become a (good!) cop. Perhaps ironically, as far as getting back his memories goes... he's probably not going to notice anything any time soon.