For betenoire_rp: Application
1. Player Information
Name (or internet handle): Lisa
Current characters in Bete Noire: Rachel Conway, the Rani, and Adam Monroe.
2. Character Information
Name: Sam Tyler
Livejournal Username: makeitabottle
Fandom: Life on Mars
Image: http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/96784453/24617883
3. Character Information II
Age/Appearance: Sam is thirty-seven years old. He stands five feet, ten inches tall, and he has brown eyes and neat, slightly receding brown hair. He wears leather boots, flare-leg jeans, a wide-collared button-up shirt, a small medallion on a gold chain around his neck, and a black leather jacket. He very frequently has a beleaguered look about him-weary, waiting for the other shoe to drop, maybe even as if he doesn't really believe what's going on around him. He's a policeman, so he carries himself with authority, but there are times when that's undercut by hesitation or uncertainty.
History: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Tyler
Personality: Outwardly, Sam's a very no-nonsense, by-the-book cop. Rules and procedures are in place for a reason, and by God, he'll abide by them to the best of his ability. He's professional, honest, loyal, and compassionate; he tends to be sorely lacking in patience for people who are not any of those things. As an investigator he's methodical and tenacious. He has very good instincts but he doesn't let them override either the evidence he has or the boundaries within which he must do his job. He's a damn good cop, confident in his abilities, unafraid to exercise his authority.
Sam tends to see the world in black-and-white terms; this is great for police work but he also tries to apply this to the rest of his life and that doesn't work out so well for him. He's tightly wound. He's a man who feels very deeply but works hard not to show it, a man who holds people at arm's length rather than open up to them and risk them hurting him. He can be hard on people, none more than himself. He holds himself to high standards and does not do well with defeat or frustration.
Waking up in 1973 after being hit by a car in 2006 turned Sam's world upside down. He's convinced he was in a coma in 2006, but deep down inside, he's terrified he's either dead or gone insane and is hallucinating everything he sees and experiences. I'm taking him from the end of the series, just before the final scenes; he's expecting to once more wake up in 1973 so finding himself in Bete Noire instead is really going to screw with his perceptions and make those fears rise closer to the surface.
Sexual Preferences/Orientation: Sam is heterosexual. Sex, to him, isn't something to be entered into lightly. He has a pretty romanticized, old-fashioned view of it. It's only something that's done between two people who know each other well, as part of an established or burgeoning relationship. Sam doesn't do one-night stands or friends-with-benefits. He's the type of guy who will actually court a lady and take her out on a few dates before he tries to put the moves on her.
Sex in and of itself isn't wrong, in his eyes. But trying sex without that courtship and connection would be, because he'd find that disrespectful to the lady in question. He treats women-old or young, street hookers or aristocrats-as ladies, worthy of respect and care, but he's not so old-fashioned that he can't see them as his equals, especially in the workplace. It takes him a while to grow attached to a woman but once he does he'd be loyal and monogamous out of that respect and esteem in which he holds women.
Sam is a tender and patient if occasionally insecure lover, and very vanilla in his tastes.
Powers: None whatsoever.
Reason for playing: Once again we hit head-on my fiction kink for ordinary people who have extraordinary circumstances thrust upon them. With Adam and Rachel, and with the Heroes universe, the extraordinary circumstances are internal-quirks of evolution that create unbelievable abilities within a person. Their challenge is to figure out how to reconcile the internal with the external world, to balance what they have inside them against the world in which they live.
Sam has that same challenge of reconciling the internal and external experiences, but his circumstances are the opposite of what Rachel and Adam face. With Sam, it's everything around him that's changed while he's remained the same. He has to balance living in the wrong world with what he has inside him-his fears, his uncertainties, his lack of comprehension, the tension of yearning for both a return to his proper time and for fitting in where he wound up. Sam's no superhero; he's got no comic-book powers to give him an edge over everyone else. His whole world's gone to hell but he's trying his best to make something of it, to carry on being just that ordinary cop in the most inexplicable of situations.
I want to play with that idea of clinging to what you know and who you are when the world shifts around you without warning. I also want to play with the uncertainty that brings--the fear that you've gone mad or you no longer exist outside your own head. Even with those fears, all Sam wants to do Is the right thing, as much as he can. He's a complex and sympathetic character that I've always wanted to try my hand at writing.
5. Samples
First-Person: http://makeitabottle.livejournal.com/321.html
Third-Person: http://makeitabottle.livejournal.com/564.html
Third-Person #2: http://makeitabottle.livejournal.com/854.html