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Kusajishi Yachiru (death_backpack): 10,940 (37.9%); 12/3/05 - 7/25/07
Oh, Yachiru.
Back in 2005, I'd had CFUD bookmarked for months and months. I stumbled on it and watched it eagerly not too long after it started--the apps fascinated me, and I was a little in love with the Naruto and DN Angel cast. But! My attention span is short like a short thing and I eventually stopped looking at it for awhile. Then around June/July I randomly clicked it again and got in trouble for a few days because I couldn't stop reading crack threads long enough to do my homework.
I toyed with the idea of apping for a bit, and kept waffling because NO, NO, MY GRADES WOULD SUFFER. (I had willpower back in the day, you see!) Then one day Gwendal's player left a message in my journal along the lines of '...are we in the same Japanese class?'
CRITICAL HIT TO RESOLVE IT'S MAXIMUM EFFECTIVE.
Now. Sometime before then I'd gone to AE 2005, seen the fifty million Bleach cosplayers that year, went '...wut,' bought volume 1, and got hooked on the series. I remember I looked through the logs for the old Bleach!cast's threads, too, because they'd mostly all dropped by then but omg awesome. I did a lot of Bleach RPing--prose-style, with a couple of friends. They lost interest in it faster than I did, but not before I'd goten to toss Yachiru around a couple of times. I made a lot of ':<' faces, then checked CFUD, saw there was an app round opening in a day or so, and decided what the hell, why not, I like her and I feel like playing her more and if I get in then AWESOME and if I don't then it's still cool. Nervous but zen!
...I promptly forgot all about it and didn't actually get to starting an app until the window had already been open for about six hours. Lalalalalala. I was hesitant as hell about sending it in, and promptly had panic attacks for the next week since it was in the last batch. OOPS. By that time I had given up all hope and thought it was weeded. AND THEN IT WENT UP AND GOT IN with a really high percentage w-wtf. ♥ So I had a fit of the '8D' and went right ahead, thought up a journal name and started playing. Eventually I fumbled my way through newbie jitters, and Gwendal prodded me into coming onto IRC, and lo, it was good!
I never EXPECTED to keep Yachiru so long, much less see such awesome canonmates make it in or form relationships with the characters that she did. Eventually, though, Bleach canon lost its appeal for me (...I can't follow series for 250+ chapters), and Yachiru herself was put on the backburner for weeks at a time before I realized it. She wasn't making new friends, I dropped her threads all the damn time, and. We got a new Kenpachi and I relaized that even for Kenpachi I could no longer play Yachiru. IT WAS TIME FOR HER TO GO. She did, however, exit in style. ♥
Fukiya Yuma (wonderlandstyle): 6,950 (24.1%); 4/26/06 - present
Yuma now, um. After a few months of playing Yachiru I realized I needed someone more mature to balance her out--there are events in camp a child-character really shouldn't be involved in--and started thinking about apping again. I tried and failed once miserably. Cue ':X' and a general app-athy for a bit (har har.)
Meantime, we got Hisoka and Tsuzuki in CFUD. I loved them to pieces even though I'd stopped reading YnM years back (meaning: when the scanlation site went down in the middle of volume 5), and they eventually pimped both the manga and the anime. Went right through it, bothered them both with Yachiru, and thought about apping, especially since YnM theatre in the chan was fun and wacky antics.
I thought about apping Minase Hijiri at first, but ... though he does have a personality, it didn't stand out to me much. I could never have played him--I like characters with sharp voices. Then I went and flipped back to the two Saya and Yuma arcs, and. I really liked them and their voices were THERE and they were cute. But I didn't have the nerve to app one without the other! What to do?
suzuran_lily, Saya's player, had mentioned starting and giving up on a SayandYuma app once before, and we tended to nick to one or the other when theatre time came up. Hisoka mentioned this and said I should probably ask her. So there was lots of thumbtwiddling and HAY SUZU PM? and. I asked her to doubleapp, she asked which of the two I would be apping, I said I'd started an app for Yuma, and it turned out the app she had started was for Saya. SCORE. Our apps went up on her birthday.
Looking back on it now, Yuma's app was really scattershot and abusive of font tags/canon reliance. Saya's been much better about handling her character voice right from the start, but! I like to think I've made Yuma's voice really distinct by itself, while remaining IC. Her app was also the most fun one to write ever because it was so happy. More than a year later, I don't feel the drive to play her that I did, and have once or twice considered dropping her, but...I love her too much. She's okay as a backburner character, though, since she's pretty sidestory in canon too.
Kami-sama (yegodlesschild): 962 (3.3%); 05/23/06 - 7/12/06
Saiyuki is one of my older fandoms--I picked up the first volume RIGHT AROUND when manga first started to appear in the Philippines, and found more of it later on when I moved to Canada. There is still a post in the annals of my old GJ that is keyboardmashing over Sanzo getting in as a counselor. It's one of those series I never really lose interest in, which is. Rare for me! So when we got a full ikkou and then some of the other characters, it was happy days to threadstalk.
Kami-sama and Nii had always been two of my favorite villains in the series. I have a thing for characters who aren't right in the head. So I jumped in glee every time we got a Kami-sama app--there were three of them, I think--but they all got voted out. SADFACE. And I thought it was a shame, since...well. Eventually my thought process came down to '...I can do this,' I ended up snagging the last three volumes, working through them a couple of dozen times, and finishing a draft. It came out SHOCKINGLY EASY, and after running it past a few betas, tweaking some of the flow and the jokes (I. Didn't even TRY for gags in this one, they just went right along with the creepy little boy-god voice), I sent it in.
NANANANANA SURPRISE DUP BATCH. I woke up and saw that and my app was at 67.6% and then I had to leave the house o-oh fun times. I think Gwendal distracted me with dragalongs to Science World and by the time we went home, it was done and I was in.
Playing Kami-sama was fun! It really, really was. At the same time, I ended up finding out I couldn't handle him. It wasn't the actual RPing, though really, threading with him felt like walking a tightrope down the middle of my heart, he was just that messed up. MY BROKEN KILLER PUPPY. His dependency on the ikkou was a little nervewracking--I wasn't used to playing a character that had that and I was always sort of 'um am I being a pest Gojyo am I?' every time he intervened in one of his threads. ILU Suelo.
What finally broke it for me was that I hated having a character that physically hurt others on a whim. I couldn't get rid of that without veering off into OOCland, and even with permission it was still pretty scary to PM people and say '...so can Kami-sama fire a bead into your shoulder and hurt you very hard because he feels like it?' My first two characters hadn't prepared me for that kind of thing, and it made it hard for Kami-sama to build relationships, so in the end I decided it was too much stress and let him go.
I keep hoping someone will reapp him, and occasionally consider picking him up again now that I've gotten over that OOC queasiness, but. I don't think I'd be able to do him justice anymore.
Cielo (beatdownblue): 2,097 (7.3%); 07/30/06 - 4/20/07
I heard of Digital Devil Saga from a friend in October 2005. I was not able to acquire and fully play through both games until ... early 2006. This is because they are really damned hard to get hold of. S-so many eBay bidwars. I apped from DDS four times: once as Jenna Angel, once as Gale, and twice as Cielo. It's my most-apped canon, Cielo is the only character I have ever made an effort to reapp, and yet he had the rockiest start and became the most difficult for me to play at any given time. G-go figure.
The first app I wrote for him was just before I left for a trip to Europe -- it got called on accent and canon reliance, and got somewhere between 50-60%. As people might guess, I wanted desperately to play someone from the DDS canon, Cielo was one of my favorites, and so I stuck with him, making rough notes on the plane. I wrote the reapp in London and got Hisoka's player to send it in for me, since my computer time there was extremely limited. It pulled through!
Then the first thing I had to post with my shiny new character was an OOC note explaining that I couldn't play him at all for the next two weeks or so. WOE. Things picked up after that, but i got scared of throwing him into posts, partly because of the accent and partly because the cannibal issues always came up. AS MENTIONED, playing Kami-sama was a really good way to learn to deal with that, so I was able to keep him as a backburner character and bring him out more when harukami apped Heat!
Eventually, though, I couldn't handle him, realized how hard it was to play him, and off he went. :(
Thomas (lastle_cord): 2,740 (9.5%); 11/6/06 - 9/8/07
Suikoden is, gamewise, my oldest fandom, and Suikoden III was the first PS2 game I ever picked up or went all the way through. I loved it, and drifted in and out of the fandom for years, but it didn't really catch my attention again until a) the manga series came out, and b) we got Caesar Silverberg in camp, the pebble that triggered a CANON AVALANCHE OF AWESOME.
Thomas was never my first choice for apping, and I've mentioned that at AE, when Hugo asked me if I would, I remarked '...nah, he's too boring.' I have half-written apps for Luc and Sasarai sitting in my hard drive still, gathering dust. However, I was (still am) a COMPLETE AND UTTER WHORE for Aki Shimizu's rendition of the series, by which I mean the pretty pretty Suikoden III: Succesor of Fate manga.
Truthfully, I found Thomas's chapters in the game utterly boring and tedious to play through -- he also waffled a lot more there, whiiiiich irritated me. The manga presented him much more favorably, tied stuff together better, and gosh he's cute in it. I didn't fall in LOVE, but as I kept rereading my mindset sort of went '... ... . . . :D' and I finally pulled an app together about three hours before the window had closed.
Partial blame can also be attributed to Hugo's ho!AU.
Thomas would never be one of my primaries, but he was normal and social and flaily and good-natured and after awhile HIS STRAIGHT CAME TO CAMP \o/. He was...a new experience, surprisingly fun for me, and, well. I kept him for nearly a year.
I never did him justice, though. One of the best parts of playing a character for me is relationship building! Thomas canonly does a lot of relationship building--he's the Tenkai. I. Couldn't do that with Thomas in camp! He just never clicked with many people, and after awhile it wasn't fun anymore, so he dropped too. :( THREE DROPS IN A ROW.
Albert Silverberg (noarmyatmyback): 4,356 (15.1%); 12/30/06 - present
--what the hell Albert is my spamwhore now! Anyway.
I'd wanted so very badly to app a counselor. I'd already tried twice and been weeded both times, but this was the round the mods said would go through light weeding and so I was more hopeful about getting in! I mean, the rounds pop up once in a blue moon, suddenly you're free of the age limit! The thing was, I didn't know who the hell I wanted to play over the 21-year-old line. Or rather, I had a few ideas, but I didn't know if I could maintain any of them.
I don't ... remember what prompted my interest in apping Albert. Probably it was a combination of throwing characters at Caesar so often, a bit of a stale period I was having with Thomas at the time, and my horrible tendency towards apping characters that make other characters go 'sdksldfj.'
Albert was a total straight man (haha) voice-wise. That was probably the longest and hardest I have ever worked on any app, and I still wasn't sure it would get in when I submitted it. BUT IT DID. And. God I love playing with him, afraid as I am of fucking up sometimes as I go and wing it. He is like the rock of sanity in the puddle of whack that makes up the rest of my play, and. The one character I am not afraid of dropping into MAJOR DRAMA.
Also, weirdly, he's the only character I can form really complex relationships with--he comes with a few of them from canon, he's built up several more in camp. I like it!
Also, maybe a quarter of that comment count is porn. MOVING ON.
Seth Nightlord (papillondejade): 841 (2.9%); 03/24/07 - present
...SO hydr0phobia IS A WHORE.
By which I mean two of our characters mack on each other a lot and so there was OOC talkin' (HEY AM I TOPPING YOU NOW AM I AM I AM I) and somewhere or other she mentioned she wanted a Seth because Seth is Abel's IC enabler. Eventually I got around to reading/watching Trinity Blood, which I'd tried once and lost interest in a year or so back. I did the watching first, checked out Seth's episodes, and was all, "...this is KIND OF COOL."
And then I read the manga. And Seth is sexy in the manga. And I think it was 3 AM my time, which is...the hour everything seems like a good idea, and on impulse I think I sent over am e-mail that contained something like "SO. IF SOMEONE WERE TO HYPOTHETICALLY APP YOUR SISTER. WOULD YOU BETA FOR THEM? YOU KNOW. HYPOTHETICALLY."
And thus my doom was sealed! ...only not really, Seth is fun and kinda crazy to play and is the character I don't mind not making deep and meaningful relationships, because...she shouldn't, really. She's also unique among my female characters in that she is not RAPIST TO THE CORE, but has her facets! I think the best thing about apping TB is that pretty much every one of the characters is pretty damn complex when you have a look at them--Seth gets just a handful of chapters so far, but I owe her maybe a dozen essays or so.
Tachibana Shito (mistalonely): (%); 03/24/07 - present
YET ANOTHER CASE OF hydr0phobia BEING A WHORE.
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