BN App - Take Two
1. Player Information
Name (or internet handle): Ronen
Current characters in Bete Noire: The Doctor (Eleventh)
2. Character Information
Name: Sam Lowry
Livejournal Username: not_even_dreams
Fandom: Brazil
Image: http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/94756544/22565721
Reserve: http://magistrated.livejournal.com/10038.html?thread=1791798#t1791798
3. Character Information II
Age/Appearance: Late thirties, tall (6’2”) and reedy with brown eyes and thinning dark hair, although there is a certain boyishness to his features that will never go away entirely. He tends to go around with his shoulders hunched, although these days he stands a little straighter and with a little more strength than he used to.
History: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_%28film%29
ADDITIONAL GAME HISTORY: Sam has been in Bete Noire before. Near the beginning of his canon, just as he was trying to find Jill’s identity, he wandered into the City of Sin. He spent about seven months as the Secretary of Justice, doing his part in the Magistrate’s (at the time) plan to stabilize the city. These experiences didn’t change him very much at all, and will exist only as vague, dream-like memories for Sam: enough to make Bete Noire and the people he’s met before seem familiar, but he won’t remember many specifics even after he returns.
Then near the end of his canon, a moment before his mind would have snapped, Sam was pulled into a different world: Rowan. Rowan was a place entirely different than either Bete Noire or the world Sam had known: in addition to humans, it was populated by elves, demons, and all sorts of other fantastical creatures. There was magic there too, and unspoiled land, and civilizations far behind the technology of the twentieth century.
In Rowan, Sam had an opportunity to heal and rebuild himself. He found a way to mourn for Jill properly and made a promise that he would dedicate himself to helping people, just as she would have done. He learned a little bit about surviving in the wilderness and a little bit more about how to fight: he even killed an enemy fighter in the battle for the city of Jhelbor. He developed his shamanistic abilities and was starting to adjust to them and learn just what they could do.
This wasn’t all done on his own. In Rowan, Sam suddenly found himself with something he’d never had in his old life: real friends, people who believed in and supported him as himself and not for the sake of some vision they were projecting onto him. The most significant of these was a man even more traumatized than Sam, who never spoke and who went by the name of Guy. During Sam’s months in Rowan, his relationship with Guy became more than friendship, and they stayed together until the day Guy got his voice (and his old name - David) back and left the city, saying that he needed time and space to work things out on his own. As he traveled, he got caught up in the strange time fluctuations in the eastern part of Rowan, and returned to Jhelbor only weeks later as an elderly corpse, in the hands of an ambassador.
At the same time, Sam had another version of Guy still living with him in David’s old place: an illusion, one only Sam could see, visited on Sam by a god of Rowan that appeared to have styled itself his patron, that he knew only as ‘The Deceiver.’ Although shocking and upsetting, the unusual and sudden circumstances of David’s death were a little easier to endure because of this false Guy. Sam was quickly coming to accept him as, if not wholly real, then real enough.
Personality: Sam was never suited to the world he was born into. He was intelligent but unambitious in a place that valued status, an imaginative daydreamer in a place that had smothered any last vestiges of fancy in a pile of paperwork and red tape. As a child and a teenager, he was one of those kids that kept to himself and had few friends - although he did have a few, since he was trained enough in social protocol to fake it - and got good marks without trying very hard.
On a normal day, Sam moves through the world as one partially disconnected with it. Always half-distracted, a little bitter (more than a little these days), a little apathetic, with a characteristically English brand of dry wit. For most of his life, the real world held very little appeal or importance. He knew he could get by well enough only being half in it, and he had no interest in doing anything more, despite how certain people in his life - his mother, or Jack - would talk about his “potential.” He just didn’t want what they were selling.
It was on the day he met Jill Layton that he discovered he really could be passionate about something tangible. It was the first time in his life that the real world lined up with - so he thought - the world in his head. Suddenly, he had something to fight for. He had always wanted to be a hero to someone, a hero in the classically chivalrous, valorous, romantic sense, and he grabbed the opportunity with both hands. The reality of the situation turned out to be very different, but it revealed a truth about Sam: that when he finds a cause he can believe in, he goes after it with everything he has. His enthusiasm might cause him to rush in too fast and stumble over his own efforts, but he doesn’t do anything by half measures: not if it matters to him.
Even now, Sam has trouble believing in his own strength. Much of that disbelief comes from the influence of his original world, where strength was defined as either brute force or cunning ambition, and Sam doesn’t have an abundance of either. His strength is largely one of endurance and perseverance, like a very old tree that someone’s trying to cut down. The axe may keep on biting, nicking little pieces of him away, and it hurts - but he’s still standing, and there’s still much more to go before he finally falls.
More on this AU'ed version of him: The jumping-off point for the alternate (or, I suppose, extended) universe was giving Sam the chance to not get completely broken, to see what would happen if he were given the opportunity to move on and get a fresh start. As a result, he’s gone partway through a process I like to call getting “Wesley Windham-Pryce”d. Started out nebbishy and very easily flustered, went through a series of trials, and as a result he’s been hardened, hammered into something tougher than he was before. Partway. He’s a long, long way from being any kind of badass, but he’s rougher around the edges now, a little bit wiser, a little bit darker.
Having some time to look back on the events of his canon lent Sam a healthy amount of self-awareness. He’s realized how ridiculous and stupid and potentially crazy some of the things he did were. Still, he hasn’t gained enough confidence to be equal to the amount of this new self-awareness, so for the most part that knowledge is feeding his insecurity. He screws things up, he makes things worse, he never really knows what he’s doing: these are thoughts that assert themselves with alarming frequency in Sam’s mind.
Also, merely being aware of a certain behavior doesn’t mean a person can change it right away, or even within a matter of months. This is why, when he gets caught up in something, he’ll still dive into it head-first - only now, if whatever it was doesn’t work out, he’ll just be kicking himself all the more.
He’s also had time to reflect on all the years that led up to the events of his canon. It’s not that he thinks he had many other options in life, but all the resentment and bitterness he’d been quietly harboring for years is now out in the open. He now has an obvious disdain for and a feeling of repulsion at the idea of excessive bureaucracy and getting involved in government business. This also puts him back at Square One, at “not knowing what he wants.” For most of his life Sam had people telling him what he wanted or what was good for him, instead of asking him. Now, left to himself, Sam finds himself lost. He’ll do what occurs to him, enough for him to get on and survive, because that’s what he does... but without some sort of guidance or cause he can believe in, he is likely to shut down and keep running on autopilot until the restlessness gets to be too much.
Sam crossed a lot of lines in Rowan and had a lot of lines crossed for him. He had to deal with being transported to another reality, and come to terms with the existence of things like demons and magic. He fell for someone he never would have expected to. He fought in a battle. His personal line of what qualifies as “weird” has been shoved way back; his personal boundaries have been pushed. Relative to the way he used to be, not a whole lot phases him anymore. All the same, just because the line has been moved doesn’t mean it’s disappeared. When something happens that’s outside of his comfort zone, when he finds himself under pressure, he’s still very much Sam Lowry - flustered, panicked, more likely to act suddenly and make bad decisions.
He’s more outwardly honest than he used to be. He doesn’t hold up as much to social niceties. That “as much” is important, by the way: thirty-plus years of operating in polite society are damned difficult to erase. But in many situations he’ll be more likely to speak plainly and honestly.
As for the powers. For a long time before Rowan, Sam was plagued with recurring fantastical dreams that started to manifest as waking hallucinations near the end, when things got intense. With the way things played out, and with time and perspective, Sam’s worked out that he must have been at least a little bit off his head in those days. For that reason, the first time he experienced his shaman’s sight, it terrified him; he thought he was losing his mind again. But once it was explained to him, he realized that it was something based in reality - a fantastical reality, but all the same something that could be proven and substantiated because the exact same thing was experienced by every other shaman in Rowan. It was trustworthy, as were the visions from the gods. Not trustworthy because they were always clear or helpful, but trustworthy because he could be 100% certain they came from a source outside his own head. Because of this, he’s now much more grounded. He still sees and experiences strange things, but now he knows it means something instead of only hoping it does, and some of those meanings he’s actually starting to understand (primarily in the aura-reading aspect of his powers). Having the powers also means he can do something useful and he knows it, which has given a small boost to his general confidence.
Sexual Preferences/Orientation: The culture he grew up in had a strong prejudice against homosexual behavior and thought, so it took an extreme circumstance for him to really consider sex with another man. Still, strictly speaking, Sam is bisexual. He can fall in love with a person of either sex - and in Sam’s mind, love and sex were always very much intertwined. Or at least he always thought they ought to have been. In his younger years, he had one or two sexual encounters where he didn’t have any real feelings the girl, and found they left him feeling unfulfilled - he found himself getting infatuated with them in the aftermath to compensate. By contrast, the best sex of his life happened with Jill and with Guy, both of whom he was already head-over-heels for.
His feelings on this will start to shift soon after being brought to Bete Noire. Sam will always be a romantic, but now he’s an embittered romantic: he believes love just isn’t something he’ll ever get to hang onto for long before it’s ripped (rather violently and bizarrely) from his hands. Even if he craves human contact, even if he may start indulging in casual sex for the sake of another warm body, he’s going to be building up a shell around himself to make certain he can’t fall in love again - and if he does find himself falling hard for someone, he’s going to try to avoid them like the plague. It’s just not worth what seems to inevitably happen afterward.
Powers: Before being brought to Rowan, Sam was a normal human. Since Rowan, he has become a what is called a ‘shaman’ in that world. He has been able to see auras and detect magical influence, perform astral projection, receive visions from the gods, and placate/control mundane animals. He is still not very practiced, but the potential is there for all of that.
I do figure that being brought to Bete Noire will change the nature of his powers a little. For one, the gods of Rowan aren’t present in Bete Noire, so that ought to affect the nature of his visions/communication with the ‘gods,’ if he even has those anymore. I’d be okay with the visions and voices going away completely if that’s what the mods want, since he’s always going to have messed-up dreams anyway. Auras will likely appear different, too - perhaps he could (with player permission) be able to discern some of a person’s character traits or abilities by reading their aura, or read the amount of corruption the city has visited upon them, or whether they are one of the Chosen. I’d still like him to be able to see magic with his shaman’s sight, and while I don’t know how much he’ll be using the power over animals, I don’t see any reason to drop it either.
Reason for playing: Sam is among my favorite muses, and definitely the one that hits me hardest on an emotional level. Should have figured I’d want to pick him up again eventually. I have a certain guilty-pleasure-style fondness for angstbunnying and hurt/comfort, and Sam is a goldmine for both... although I do want him to keep developing as a character and not always wallowing in angst. Mostly I just want to start playing him again to see where he goes, and he’s only ever going to work in a panfandom game that’s accepting of obscure muses, and Bete Noire happens to be such a place.
On a more specific note, he may wind up getting involved with the growing revolutionary factions in the city, but that depends partially on who he meets and how much the city feeds the part of him that wants to buck the system.
Name (or internet handle): Ronen
Current characters in Bete Noire: The Doctor (Eleventh)
2. Character Information
Name: Sam Lowry
Livejournal Username: not_even_dreams
Fandom: Brazil
Image: http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/94756544/22565721
Reserve: http://magistrated.livejournal.com/10038.html?thread=1791798#t1791798
3. Character Information II
Age/Appearance: Late thirties, tall (6’2”) and reedy with brown eyes and thinning dark hair, although there is a certain boyishness to his features that will never go away entirely. He tends to go around with his shoulders hunched, although these days he stands a little straighter and with a little more strength than he used to.
History: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_%28film%29
ADDITIONAL GAME HISTORY: Sam has been in Bete Noire before. Near the beginning of his canon, just as he was trying to find Jill’s identity, he wandered into the City of Sin. He spent about seven months as the Secretary of Justice, doing his part in the Magistrate’s (at the time) plan to stabilize the city. These experiences didn’t change him very much at all, and will exist only as vague, dream-like memories for Sam: enough to make Bete Noire and the people he’s met before seem familiar, but he won’t remember many specifics even after he returns.
Then near the end of his canon, a moment before his mind would have snapped, Sam was pulled into a different world: Rowan. Rowan was a place entirely different than either Bete Noire or the world Sam had known: in addition to humans, it was populated by elves, demons, and all sorts of other fantastical creatures. There was magic there too, and unspoiled land, and civilizations far behind the technology of the twentieth century.
In Rowan, Sam had an opportunity to heal and rebuild himself. He found a way to mourn for Jill properly and made a promise that he would dedicate himself to helping people, just as she would have done. He learned a little bit about surviving in the wilderness and a little bit more about how to fight: he even killed an enemy fighter in the battle for the city of Jhelbor. He developed his shamanistic abilities and was starting to adjust to them and learn just what they could do.
This wasn’t all done on his own. In Rowan, Sam suddenly found himself with something he’d never had in his old life: real friends, people who believed in and supported him as himself and not for the sake of some vision they were projecting onto him. The most significant of these was a man even more traumatized than Sam, who never spoke and who went by the name of Guy. During Sam’s months in Rowan, his relationship with Guy became more than friendship, and they stayed together until the day Guy got his voice (and his old name - David) back and left the city, saying that he needed time and space to work things out on his own. As he traveled, he got caught up in the strange time fluctuations in the eastern part of Rowan, and returned to Jhelbor only weeks later as an elderly corpse, in the hands of an ambassador.
At the same time, Sam had another version of Guy still living with him in David’s old place: an illusion, one only Sam could see, visited on Sam by a god of Rowan that appeared to have styled itself his patron, that he knew only as ‘The Deceiver.’ Although shocking and upsetting, the unusual and sudden circumstances of David’s death were a little easier to endure because of this false Guy. Sam was quickly coming to accept him as, if not wholly real, then real enough.
Personality: Sam was never suited to the world he was born into. He was intelligent but unambitious in a place that valued status, an imaginative daydreamer in a place that had smothered any last vestiges of fancy in a pile of paperwork and red tape. As a child and a teenager, he was one of those kids that kept to himself and had few friends - although he did have a few, since he was trained enough in social protocol to fake it - and got good marks without trying very hard.
On a normal day, Sam moves through the world as one partially disconnected with it. Always half-distracted, a little bitter (more than a little these days), a little apathetic, with a characteristically English brand of dry wit. For most of his life, the real world held very little appeal or importance. He knew he could get by well enough only being half in it, and he had no interest in doing anything more, despite how certain people in his life - his mother, or Jack - would talk about his “potential.” He just didn’t want what they were selling.
It was on the day he met Jill Layton that he discovered he really could be passionate about something tangible. It was the first time in his life that the real world lined up with - so he thought - the world in his head. Suddenly, he had something to fight for. He had always wanted to be a hero to someone, a hero in the classically chivalrous, valorous, romantic sense, and he grabbed the opportunity with both hands. The reality of the situation turned out to be very different, but it revealed a truth about Sam: that when he finds a cause he can believe in, he goes after it with everything he has. His enthusiasm might cause him to rush in too fast and stumble over his own efforts, but he doesn’t do anything by half measures: not if it matters to him.
Even now, Sam has trouble believing in his own strength. Much of that disbelief comes from the influence of his original world, where strength was defined as either brute force or cunning ambition, and Sam doesn’t have an abundance of either. His strength is largely one of endurance and perseverance, like a very old tree that someone’s trying to cut down. The axe may keep on biting, nicking little pieces of him away, and it hurts - but he’s still standing, and there’s still much more to go before he finally falls.
More on this AU'ed version of him: The jumping-off point for the alternate (or, I suppose, extended) universe was giving Sam the chance to not get completely broken, to see what would happen if he were given the opportunity to move on and get a fresh start. As a result, he’s gone partway through a process I like to call getting “Wesley Windham-Pryce”d. Started out nebbishy and very easily flustered, went through a series of trials, and as a result he’s been hardened, hammered into something tougher than he was before. Partway. He’s a long, long way from being any kind of badass, but he’s rougher around the edges now, a little bit wiser, a little bit darker.
Having some time to look back on the events of his canon lent Sam a healthy amount of self-awareness. He’s realized how ridiculous and stupid and potentially crazy some of the things he did were. Still, he hasn’t gained enough confidence to be equal to the amount of this new self-awareness, so for the most part that knowledge is feeding his insecurity. He screws things up, he makes things worse, he never really knows what he’s doing: these are thoughts that assert themselves with alarming frequency in Sam’s mind.
Also, merely being aware of a certain behavior doesn’t mean a person can change it right away, or even within a matter of months. This is why, when he gets caught up in something, he’ll still dive into it head-first - only now, if whatever it was doesn’t work out, he’ll just be kicking himself all the more.
He’s also had time to reflect on all the years that led up to the events of his canon. It’s not that he thinks he had many other options in life, but all the resentment and bitterness he’d been quietly harboring for years is now out in the open. He now has an obvious disdain for and a feeling of repulsion at the idea of excessive bureaucracy and getting involved in government business. This also puts him back at Square One, at “not knowing what he wants.” For most of his life Sam had people telling him what he wanted or what was good for him, instead of asking him. Now, left to himself, Sam finds himself lost. He’ll do what occurs to him, enough for him to get on and survive, because that’s what he does... but without some sort of guidance or cause he can believe in, he is likely to shut down and keep running on autopilot until the restlessness gets to be too much.
Sam crossed a lot of lines in Rowan and had a lot of lines crossed for him. He had to deal with being transported to another reality, and come to terms with the existence of things like demons and magic. He fell for someone he never would have expected to. He fought in a battle. His personal line of what qualifies as “weird” has been shoved way back; his personal boundaries have been pushed. Relative to the way he used to be, not a whole lot phases him anymore. All the same, just because the line has been moved doesn’t mean it’s disappeared. When something happens that’s outside of his comfort zone, when he finds himself under pressure, he’s still very much Sam Lowry - flustered, panicked, more likely to act suddenly and make bad decisions.
He’s more outwardly honest than he used to be. He doesn’t hold up as much to social niceties. That “as much” is important, by the way: thirty-plus years of operating in polite society are damned difficult to erase. But in many situations he’ll be more likely to speak plainly and honestly.
As for the powers. For a long time before Rowan, Sam was plagued with recurring fantastical dreams that started to manifest as waking hallucinations near the end, when things got intense. With the way things played out, and with time and perspective, Sam’s worked out that he must have been at least a little bit off his head in those days. For that reason, the first time he experienced his shaman’s sight, it terrified him; he thought he was losing his mind again. But once it was explained to him, he realized that it was something based in reality - a fantastical reality, but all the same something that could be proven and substantiated because the exact same thing was experienced by every other shaman in Rowan. It was trustworthy, as were the visions from the gods. Not trustworthy because they were always clear or helpful, but trustworthy because he could be 100% certain they came from a source outside his own head. Because of this, he’s now much more grounded. He still sees and experiences strange things, but now he knows it means something instead of only hoping it does, and some of those meanings he’s actually starting to understand (primarily in the aura-reading aspect of his powers). Having the powers also means he can do something useful and he knows it, which has given a small boost to his general confidence.
Sexual Preferences/Orientation: The culture he grew up in had a strong prejudice against homosexual behavior and thought, so it took an extreme circumstance for him to really consider sex with another man. Still, strictly speaking, Sam is bisexual. He can fall in love with a person of either sex - and in Sam’s mind, love and sex were always very much intertwined. Or at least he always thought they ought to have been. In his younger years, he had one or two sexual encounters where he didn’t have any real feelings the girl, and found they left him feeling unfulfilled - he found himself getting infatuated with them in the aftermath to compensate. By contrast, the best sex of his life happened with Jill and with Guy, both of whom he was already head-over-heels for.
His feelings on this will start to shift soon after being brought to Bete Noire. Sam will always be a romantic, but now he’s an embittered romantic: he believes love just isn’t something he’ll ever get to hang onto for long before it’s ripped (rather violently and bizarrely) from his hands. Even if he craves human contact, even if he may start indulging in casual sex for the sake of another warm body, he’s going to be building up a shell around himself to make certain he can’t fall in love again - and if he does find himself falling hard for someone, he’s going to try to avoid them like the plague. It’s just not worth what seems to inevitably happen afterward.
Powers: Before being brought to Rowan, Sam was a normal human. Since Rowan, he has become a what is called a ‘shaman’ in that world. He has been able to see auras and detect magical influence, perform astral projection, receive visions from the gods, and placate/control mundane animals. He is still not very practiced, but the potential is there for all of that.
I do figure that being brought to Bete Noire will change the nature of his powers a little. For one, the gods of Rowan aren’t present in Bete Noire, so that ought to affect the nature of his visions/communication with the ‘gods,’ if he even has those anymore. I’d be okay with the visions and voices going away completely if that’s what the mods want, since he’s always going to have messed-up dreams anyway. Auras will likely appear different, too - perhaps he could (with player permission) be able to discern some of a person’s character traits or abilities by reading their aura, or read the amount of corruption the city has visited upon them, or whether they are one of the Chosen. I’d still like him to be able to see magic with his shaman’s sight, and while I don’t know how much he’ll be using the power over animals, I don’t see any reason to drop it either.
Reason for playing: Sam is among my favorite muses, and definitely the one that hits me hardest on an emotional level. Should have figured I’d want to pick him up again eventually. I have a certain guilty-pleasure-style fondness for angstbunnying and hurt/comfort, and Sam is a goldmine for both... although I do want him to keep developing as a character and not always wallowing in angst. Mostly I just want to start playing him again to see where he goes, and he’s only ever going to work in a panfandom game that’s accepting of obscure muses, and Bete Noire happens to be such a place.
On a more specific note, he may wind up getting involved with the growing revolutionary factions in the city, but that depends partially on who he meets and how much the city feeds the part of him that wants to buck the system.