info post | onepassingnight

[intuitivelyapt]

Your name: Ruthi
Your journal: saria
Contact: pandabuckets @ AIM, ruthnor @ plurk
Other characters played at Passing: n/a

Character name: Sylar
Character fandom: Heroes
Version: V2
Importing development from old game? Yes, AUing from bravenewworldrp
Background: here.

Changes from canon, if AU: BNW is basically a crossover between the worlds of Heroes and Supernatural, but because of it's setting in sixwordstories for most of its duration, other characters came in too and it became more or less a panfandom game.

Sylar's (brief-ish) BNW history:
Sylar's life follows canon until around the end of S4. At the end of Pass/Fail, he feels an immense amount of sadness when Claire begins her lesbian love affair with Gretchen. And then:

+ He begged for Elle to take him back. She was hooked up with Dean Winchester (different Dean than the Dean for the rest of this summary), and told him to fuck off and die.
+ He got trapped in his head by Matt Parkman. It was a sad time. He somehow had coffee with Claire (autophoenix) in his head. She decided she didn't hate him entirely. Much. They slowly become friends.
+ The Wall happens pretty much according to canon.
+ He gets his flirt on with Faith Lehane for awhile. They bond over trying to be ~redemptive~
+ Brave New World (the episode) happens. Claire (autophoenix) jumps off a ferris wheel and exposes mutants to the world.
+ Sylar and Peter move in together because Sylar has to be Anne Frank now. They end up awkwardly admitting their feelings to each other.
+ My Bloody Valentine (SPN) happens. Dean angsts about not having any ~needs~ when the horseman Famine comes into town and makes people go batshit for things they need. Claire (autophoenix) is bffs with Dean and basically strong arms him into using his empathy power to look into Dean and see if he has a soul. They talk about Dean's experiences in hell, and they bond over being cold and dead inside.
+ Claire (autophoenix) is in a relationship with Sam Winchester and had sex with him. She told Sylar because he's her gay dad. He ended up spilling it to Peter because they're ~that couple~. Peter got really pissed and dragged Sylar to South Dakota so he could beat the shit out of Sam.
+ Claire (autophoenix) was not happy with this turn of events and outed Sylar and Peter to everyone. They had been trying to keep it on the low-low and call each other ~*roommates*~.
+ Nathan found out and lectured Peter about it. It was a sad time. It ruined Sylar and Peter's getaway vacation to Tahiti.
+ Peter got instated as the head of the new Company. Sylar got pissed off because he knew Angela was using him as a figurehead. Peter offered him a job as an agent for the Company. He shut up about it because Peter doesn't like hearing backtalk about his family.
+ There were a bunch of Greek pantheon people partying in Nebraska. Sylar goes over to see if Dean and Sam needed help, and got stabbed in the face by Cupid. Hence, he fell madly in love with Castiel and locked him in a Wendy's to make him confess his love. It didn't work out.
+ Sylar's dead mom showed up. He freaked out.
+ Claire (autophoenix) went on some freaky nightmare trip and decided she hated Sylar because she had a bad dream about him. He's not happy about this either.
+ Dean visited his bitch in North Carolina and got stranded without his car. Claire (regeneracy) and Sylar show up with a rental car to take him back to South Dakota. It's St. Patrick's Day. They stop in a bar and Claire does a poor job of hiding her awkward crush on Dean. Sylar locks her in the trunk to avoid this situation.
+ When they get to SD, Sylar tries to confront Claire (autophoenix) about her avoiding him and figures out what's going on in her head by touching her. Claire does not approve of this emotional violation. But they make up in the end.
+ He flies back to New York with Elle and they talk about unicorns. It might not have happened at this time, but this is where I'm putting it. Deal.
+ Claire (autophoenix) is a crazy bitch and basically manipulates Sylar into cutting her head open again to see if he can fix her inability to feel pain. He can't. He's also broken forever and downward spirals into being a crazy serial killer again.
+ Peter finds out and gets really pissed off. They move to the Upper East Side eventually anyway.
+ He has a really shitty April Fool's Day. Dean puts Nair in his shampoo.
+ Dark Side of the Moon (SPN) happens. Dean and Sam talk about their experiences in heaven. Sylar has an existential crisis about death and wonders if he'll ever actually get to see heaven.
+ Spencer Reid shows up and says that because of all the mutant discrimination and riots happening that I didn't talk about anywhere else in this history, the FBI is reopening the Sylar case. Sylar flips his shit and finds a way to get drunk. Peter takes him to Ireland.
+ When he comes back, Dean's disappeared to go find Michael and ~say yes~. Everyone's looking for him, Sylar included. Ruby uses her Harry Potter bullshit to find his location, but he throws the map piece away because he has more loyalty to Dean than that.
+ Sylar and Peter get a kitten. It's awesome.
+ He's been jealous and feeling like he's been losing Peter's attention for a long time. Angela plays into this by paying girls to flirt with Peter just to drive Sylar crazy. She's a bitch. It works and Sylar kills three of the girls.
+ A bunch of people visit Sylar while he's washing off all the blood in the shower. Peter comes in and they have a domestic violence fight. Dean finds him and says he'll still be his bro, but only if he owns the fuck up to what he did.
+ So Sylar willingly allows himself to be locked up in the Company facility.
+ But Ruby goes Shawshank on his ass and busts him out. He's actually really pissed off about this. But not pissed off enough to … go back.
+ He lives with her awhile, but eventually gets tired of her demon bitch bullshit and leaves.
+ Sylar and Dean beat the shit out of each other to work out all their anger and aggression. And then they go to Applebee's.
+ Since the apocalypse is nigh, he decides to give it one more shot and locks Peter in a hotel so he can somehow ~force Peter to love him again~. It doesn't work out. Sylar is sad and empty is inside.
+ The SPN finale happens. Sylar goes to help Dean beat up Lucifer-Sam. He gets killed by Lucifer-Sam. But he comes back to life later.
+ He talks to Mohinder about the curse to … mutantism he's developing, and decides to split town before anyone can tranq him with it. He also makes out with a future version of Peter on his way out because he still has a lot of confusing feelings. But he angsts about it later.
+ He also runs into Dean on his way out to the other side of the country. Dean is a bitch and doesn't want to talk to any of their friends so he can have a ~normal life~. Sylar cries himself to sleep about it.
+ He runs into Claire (autophoenix) in Colorado. She dyed her hair brown and is crazy as shit now. They have fucked up angsty sex. And then go their separate ways like two ships in the night.
+ Around Easter he hires Veronica Mars to track down Dean and pays him a visit. Dean isn't happy to see him. So he kills Dean's neighbor and uses shapeshifting to impersonate him for several months. Stalking Dean is really important to him.
+ Around September, Sam shows up after "dying" in the SPN finale. Cid the neighbor gets killed, only he doesn't because he's … Sylar. Sylar has some explaining to do to Dean.
+ He talks to Peter again at some point. Peter's going on some suicide mission with Adam and won't take him along. Shit gets awkward.
+ After moping around for awhile he goes back to New York. Everyone is flipping out about Sam being weird and creepy. So he uses his soul molesting power to see what's up with him. Only Sam doesn't have a soul anymore. ~*the plot thickens*~

Personality:
Sylar is, in so many words, a giant brat. He's self-entitled, self-absorbed, and unable to see past the end of his own nose as far as other people's problems go. He's an unstable, crazy fuck. A lot of it is the result of his upbringing, and to a degree his ability. He can go from being eerily calm to cheerfully mocking his enemies to throwing a full-blown temper tantrum in the course of five minutes. His temper often gets the best of him-- he'll drop whatever scheme he's plotting to throw a giant hissy fit if he feels he's being thwarted or if his plans aren't going exactly how he wants them. This sort of impairs his ability to be a good actor. He can sustain a role, but the second there's a snag, he drops it. No matter what he does, he seems to face things around him with a dry, sarcastic sense of humor-- unless it happens to be one of the days he's angsting and waxing philosophical.

Sylar has a lot of tendencies that clearly spell out textbook psychopath and narcissist. It's easy to pin-point and explain a lot of his traits this way. He manages to charm people who don't know him at all-- Sandra, for example, at a superficial level, because he knows how to play nice, even if he doesn't always exercise the ability. He's a pathological liar, and will say whatever he thinks will get him what he wants.

A huge part of the way he acts is due to how he was treated in his childhood. His biological father sold him to his uncle, and killed his mother in front of him. He was very young-- no exact age is given, but he was probably four or five-- and even though he repressed the memory, there's some deep mental scarring, shown by the way he kills his victims. It's the same way his father killed his mother, and presumably the rest of the people he killed.

If that wasn't enough, the family he was adopted into wasn't exactly better. His father left presumably not long after he was "adopted", leaving him without a male rolemodel for most of his life. This also explains how he tends to cling to most older male figures who come into his adult life-- eg, Chandra Suresh.

When his father abandoned them, he was left to be raised by Virginia Gray. A blanket statement of a word for how Virginia seems to treat him would be "overbearing". She isn't satisfied with his accomplishments, and would rather he be doing something more lucrative than timepiece repair, like accounting. She smothers him, to a degree of emotional abuse. A lot of his eager-to-please personality is a result of Virginia's attitude towards him. One of the driving forces in Sylar's life is a need to be accepted, and that's something he never got from Virginia.

He also happens to have a very skewed sense of self-worth. As in, not only does he think he's the most "special" person to ever walk the planet, he thinks he's entitled to the abilities of other evolved humans. They simply don't deserve their powers, and since he's stronger than most of them, he takes a very drastic survival of the fittest kind of approach and decides they … don't deserve to live, either.

In addition to his entitlement issues, he has difficulty accepting responsibility for any of his actions. Instead of accepting responsibility for his actions, he makes himself out to be the victim in any given situation. Even if part of his situation is because of outside forces, some of it is still because of him in some way. But he refuses to accept that any of his misery and misfortune is his own fault. It's always the other person or outside circumstances, and if the anyone disagrees, he demonizes them.

The funny thing about this, and his ability, is that it seems to have some base in empathy. He can connect emotionally with other people to take their abilities, and does in a few rare instances. He feels remorse over what he did-- after his first kill, he feels guilt to the point of trying to commit suicide. In It's Coming, he admits to Elle that he "never wanted to kill any of them." It's hard to say if his actions and motives are a result of personality flaws, or a side effect of his ability. In season three he explains his ability as a "hunger", an insatiable desire for not only abilities, but for pure knowledge. He can see how things work, so he wants to see how everything works. It seems like the groundwork for his downward spiral was always there, but when his ability manifests, it warps and distorts his personality like any addiction would. The fix is the most important to him. He doesn't care who he has to kill or the lengths he has to go through to get it.

Even if he is capable of real, sincere emotions, he tends to act very juvenile and even a little socially stunted. When he does show remorse, the periods are brief and shallow-- if he doesn't get the instant gratification of the other person's love and acceptance, he ditches the attempt and goes back to his old ways. The series finale is the exception to this, but that's only after all Nathan Petrelli's have been jumbled in with his, and it's completely possible that he could backslide out of his "emo apologist" phase after the finale. He doesn't really understand other people until seasons three and four, when he gets clairsentience and empathy as an ability and is more or less forced to by their involuntary nature. The only time he feels that something is wrong or evil is when it's action being taken directly against him. Even when intuitive aptitude gives him the ability to "see how things work", it either doesn't extend people, only mechanical and biological processes, or Sylar just doesn't care enough to push it that farther for long amounts of time.

As far as BNW goes, he's kind of fallen off the redemption wagon and become more bitter and batshit crazy.

Abilities:
Intuitive Aptitude
Sylar's base ability is intuitive aptitude-- the ability to automatically understand any biological and mechanical processes. He replicates the powers that others have by looking into their brains, then altering his own DNA patterns to match the ones of other specials. But he can also access the powers of other specials through empathy, not unlike Peter Petrelli. Since not many other people do, I'm going to take my great big meta post as an opportunity to look at that from a scientific standpoint. Neuroscience teaches us that all mental functions, even emotions, are activity in the brain. When you feel a certain way, neurons in your brain are fired in certain ways. If they (being Peter and Sylar) replicate the neural activity, they can replicate the power along with it as a result of their abilities.
However, Sylar's empathy isn't as developed as Peter's, and any abilities he acquires that way he actually has to learn to use-- such as Elle's electricity or James Martin's shapeshifting-- unlike the ease that comes from cutting open their brains and drinking straight from the tap, so to speak. But as a consequence of that, he doesn't keep those abilities he acquired without empathy after the Shanti virus wipes them all out. This is only vaguely referred to in The Second Coming by Sylar, and confirmed by the writers in Behind the Eclipse. Which doesn't really make sense, but... Heroes is Heroes. I like to think of it in terms of having a website in your recent history versus having a website bookmarked. I'd also accept the idea that maybe he does still have them, recessively, he just doesn't know how to access those abilities without the empathic bonds. Kind of like Peter before Claude came and kicked his ass.
I don't think his intuitive aptitude allows him to understand people themselves. He has flashes of insight that help him manipulate people, but he doesn't care enough to understand or try to understand them nine times out of ten. Because he's a self-centered, narcissistic bitch. If he weren't, we might as well have another Peter on our hands.
I've been comparing Sylar's ability a lot to Peter's so far, but the thing that really sets them apart is ~the Hunger~. In season three, it's revealed that the hunger is why he'd been killing all those people. He claims to Elle in It's Coming that he didn't want to kill any of them, that it'd been the hunger taking him over all along. I know a lot of people think the hunger is dumb and contrived and like to pretend it never happened at all but... those people are stupid because it is a MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR part of who Sylar is. It takes him from being a cold blooded killer to basically an addict. An addict who happens to kill, but those are the breaks. His ability is something bigger than himself, he drowns in it, he can't even think properly (he describes his head as being filled with “cotton and ice” to Elle in regards to having it) because he is so consumed with getting his fix. He tries to break himself of it in season three, and relapses, which is really typical addict behavior. In the I Am Become Death future he seems to manage it for the sake of his son, even though it's still hard and he has to take it one day at a time. And for all his relapsing at the end of Villains, he seems to have better control of it to some degree for the remaining seasons. In Fugitives, he only kills when he has to. When he goes for abilities, he only goes for the big prey (ie James Martin), instead of wasting time piddling around with useless abilities for the sake of having them like he did in Genesis. In Redemption, he's willing to reform himself completely, and renounce having any abilities at all if it gives him a shot at making human connections. Thanks to Nathan Petrelli's memories and a eight year long time out from Matt Parkman, he ends season four seeming to genuinely believe that he's reformed and won't kill again. Since I'm an optimist at heart and also think eight years is a really long time to go cold turkey, I fall in the party that believes he could be fully redeemed. But because of the nature of his ability and addiction in general, I wouldn't be surprised if he did relapse at some point, either.
I'm going to go through and list the abilities he's acquired through intuitive aptitude and still possesses at the time I'm writing this, and only stop to make comments if I have them.

Telekinesis

Rapid cellular regeneration
He can only die if something is shoved in his brain stem, or through decapitation. He claims to have moved the kill switch through his shapeshifting ability, but I think it's still in the general area of his brain, probably only moved a few centimeters or so. The spot is microscopic, according to Sylar, so a minor move is still enough to make a huge difference. It's a bundle of nerves, it's not going to end up in his stomach or on his dick or somewhere.
Part of having rapidly regenerating cells is presumably having an insanely high metabolism, which is why he can eat like Candice Wilmer and still be stick thin. In fact, it would probably make him want to eat more often than a normal person, so there's that. It's also a much better explanation for why regens can't get drunk than Claire's “regenerating liver tissue” theory. There's a reason why she was getting a C- in Biology, okay. Regenerating liver tissue would not make a regen immune to alcohol. Their metabolisms just process it so fast that they can put drink after drink down without any of the usual side effects. As shown when Claire got tranquilized by Danko's men, they are susceptible to being drugged, although their bodies would process anything much faster than a normal human's.

Alchemy

Clairsentience
Although not addressed in the series, I think that being clairsentient could have had a part in the changes in Sylar that led him to become the man he became in season four. Imagine how you would feel if everything you touched came with the memories before it-- particularly things that could involve memories of being happy, belonging, things like that, if you hadn't really experienced them before. It would be a constant reminder of things you didn't have. Because RPing with this ability might be kind of tiresome otherwise, Sylar doesn't flash on everything he touches, or if he does it might just be a surface deep memory going back as far as a few minutes ago. Unless it's a really strong memory, he has to actually be focusing and making a conscious effort to flash on something.
Sound manipulation
Electric manipulation
Lie detection
The series doesn't go into the exact mechanics of how the lie detection ability works, other than to say it “tingles” when the possessor is being lied to. I assume that it works like an actual lie detector, and he has to be face to face with someone for it to actually work. He can't detect lies over the internet, written on paper, on television, or over phones. It's not an exact science-- it doesn't detect half-truths or lies of omission, and he won't tingle if the person honestly believes what they're saying, even if it's not the absolute truth of the world.

Imprinting

Shapeshifting

Disintegration

Flight

Empathy
Allows him to tap in on the emotions of others through physical touch. I imagine this being really similar to clairsentience, except where touching an object might give him a memory of something that happened in the past-- for example, when he flashed on Nathan killing his girlfriend by touching his baseball hat, I imagine it played out for him like a movie in his head. With empathy, if he touched Nathan and tried to search for that memory, he would live it out in his eyes and feel exactly what he felt. He claims to be able to already do this with clairsentience when he apologizes to Claire in Angels and Monsters and says he “felt her pain”, but I think the empathy ability works on a much deeper level. And, for the sake of my RP, it works similar to the way I described clairsentience as working. He's only going to get surface stuff unless he's touching you and actually digging around for something.