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Snowblind Moderators ([personal profile] snowblindmods) wrote2015-04-06 10:43 pm
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Application

Application

Applications are closed permanently. Thank you to everyone who has applied over the years!

Before applying for a character, make sure you've read the rules and FAQ. You should also refer to the application guide to see what we're looking for in our applications. You may apply for one character per application cycle and three characters total. Please put your character's name and canon in the subject line of your application comment. Applications must be posted directly to this post and cannot be links. We will screen your application if you request it of us after we review it.

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In the event of us nearing our application cap and having more applications than slots, we will attempt to choose the most well-written applications. First-time applicants will be processed first, then applications for second characters, and finally applications for third characters. We may allow more applications to be submitted than we have slots for in the name of greater selection. We will clarify in our response if an application is not being allowed into the game because of the cap or because of issues with the application not meeting the standards of the game.

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gitanes: (♘ the danger is)

lila zacharov | curse workers

[personal profile] gitanes 2017-01-01 05:13 am (UTC)(link)
Personality:
The first, most formative thing to know about Lila is that she was born to lead. As heir to one of the leading crime families in the United States, she has known from her very first conscious moment that she's set to inherit his legacy, and that knowledge has shaped her actions and experiences for her entire life. Furthermore, it has shaped the way other people react to her, changing the way she reacts to them - her existence a cycle of expectations, assumptions, and displays of power.

"Ambition" is the word voted most likely to have Lila's face next to it in the dictionary. While, yes, she can conceive of other routes her life could take besides being head of the Zacharov family, none of them have the same sense of pride and family, and therefore none of them could ever be as worthy of her pursuit as rising in the ranks of the family. Not only does she intend to get to the top and lead the men her father leads, on some level she also clearly intends to surpass him. To build on his legacy, but also to make her name more memorable and more infamous.

Part of this is out of necessity. Another thing Lila has always known is that she would be a woman doing what is traditionally a man's job, leading men, needing to inspire men. Besides which, her father, while repeatedly showing that he has faith in her ability to lead, seems to also be instinctively protective of her, trying to shelter from the messier nature of mob life in the way that he may have sheltered her mother. Certainly he treats her as younger and more vulnerable than she is, which only fuels Lila's ambition to be bigger, stronger, more than her father ever was. She resents him, too, for treating her like she can't be exactly like him, even though on some level she logically understands his reasoning.

Her drive to go above and beyond often translates into ruthlessness. She's learned cruelty and hard-heartedness from her father, and she takes advantage of every opportunity to practice them. Like anyone who is successful in a crime family, Lila is used to violence and death; she doesn't flinch at death or pain and is accustomed to torture and assassination. When she learns that she or her father is a target, she doesn't blink, she reacts, compartmentalizing her emotional reaction in favor of making a plan. In this way, she is an exceptional leader, refusing to allow enemies to rattle her in most situations.

Most. She's not always logical. Lila operates on the principle of an eye for an eye. In fact, when she's personally wronged and especially when she feels trapped, she is capable of moving past ruthlessness and into pure murderousness. After her imprisonment at the hands of the Sharpes, she's ready and willing to walk Cassel off a roof and rip the rest of the family apart with her bare hands if she has to. She repeatedly expresses her frustration that she can't do this, especially towards Barron and Philip, and is still incredibly (justifiably) bitter towards Cassel despite the fact that he has no memories of the incident.

Bloodthirstiness aside, Lila could easily be termed a sadist. It should be noted that, torture and horrific murder and assassination aside, she seems to be a consensual sadist - she takes pleasure in other people's pain, but only if they are also taking pleasure in it. She also derives pleasure from being deferred to; this runs the gamut from people paying her due deference as Zacharov's daughter to people who will jump when she says jump, stop breathing when she says stop breathing, jump off a roof when she says jump off a roof. The clearest example of this tendency is Lila's relationship with Cassel, which is admittedly complicated by the fact that he ruined her life and then his mother worked her to love him. Even when they were very young, though, a significant portion of the basis of their relationship came from his blind obedience to her and her ability to inflict pain on him without feeling a twinge of conscience.

Not that Lila is a sociopath. She very much is not. It's more like she's got all the same morals as an ordinary person shoved slightly sideways. What she has been taught from a very young age is that in order to survive, she and her family must be superior, they must rule; the government is the enemy, as are ordinary non-worker citizens, when they're not people to be fleeced and taken advantage of. Even other workers are almost always subordinates. In truth, the Zacharovs are worker royalty, and Lila has always been a princess.

So, yes, Lila is spoiled. In her early years, before she underwent the worst, cattiest puberty ever and got serious about her calling as a mafia queen, she utilized her wealth and privilege much more as a weapon against her peers than as a tool for success. Nowadays, she is still used to the finer things in life and she's still entitled to some extent, but she also uses her access to said finer things as a means of comporting herself as she and her family ought to be represented. She dresses well, drives expensive cars, and goes to an exclusive school, but if she did any less she wouldn't be a Zacharov. It's half about ambition, once again, and half about boosting confidence.

Which Lila does not have nearly as much of as she'd like you to think. Here's the problem: when the brothers of the boy you have a crush on try to get him to assassinate you, then he turns you into a cat, and you're kept in a tiny cage that's rarely cleaned for three years, only let out once in a while to work people - you go a little crazy. Or, to be more specific: you lose all sense of self for a while there. Lila specifically states that she tried to tell herself stories, fairy tales, to keep herself stable and grounded, but eventually they ran out. She had nothing more to remind herself that she was human; she lost time; she became something not quite herself, until she finally found a way to get Cassel to set her free again.

Anybody who is that powerless for that length of time is going to have serious post-traumatic reactions, but for Lila, whose entire self-image was built on her own power, it shattered her. When she came back to herself, she was still, in essence, a thirteen-year-old in a seventeen-year-old's body, and as immature as that implies. She had to - is having to - grow up incredibly quickly, and to compensate for her lost time she has become more ruthless, more sadistic, and more willing to sublimate her own emotional stability for the sake of success. More than that, she's furious. Her life was taken away from her and she was only able to get partial revenge. Her solution to this unresolvable emotional dilemma is: climb higher, climb faster, climb harder, take down everyone in my way.

It's as impossible to omit the Sharpes from this section as it would be to omit the Zacharovs. The Sharpes have shaped the Zacharovs' fates for decades, ever since Cassel's grandfather first started working for Lila's father. They have specifically had a huge, almost entirely negative influence on Lila. In quick sum: older brothers Barron and Philip made an alliance with her cousin Anton to kill Lila and put Anton next in line to take over the family; Cassel, who was obsessively crushing on her as a young teenager, turned her into a cat and then had his memory wiped so he couldn't change her back; Barron kept her in a cage for three years without taking any measure of care of her; after Cassel changed her back and Lila was just starting to get her life back to normal, Cassel's mother Shandra emotion-worked her to love him; Cassel dicked around with her emotions as a result and ultimately almost raped her while she was under the influence of the emotion work. The conclusion here being that Lila blames the Sharpes for everything bad that has ever happened her, while also having Cassel as a very specific complicating factor. He's responsible for a lot of awful things, true, but she also always liked him - that and now she has to like him. Even though the emotion work has mostly worn off, her feelings are and will continue to be all tangled up in that curse until and unless someone can take if off her. So she loves him, but hates him, and hates him for being someone she loves. Just as Cassel will never fully get over her, she will never fully get over Cassel. Even though she wants to kill everyone genetically related to him. That's another thing she'll never get over.
Flavor Abilities: Lila's canonical abilities are definitely too powerful to quality here, so she won't have any!

Suitability:
Essentially what I would like to explore with Lila in Snowblind is how the pressure-cooker nature of the environment, as well as its psychological effects, work on Lila's already-skewed psychology and mindset. I could see her reacting extremely poorly to the aspects of Snowblind that remind her of her own history of powerlessness, the bits about being trapped and powerless in particular. On the other hand, it's possible that the nature of the place and the fact that everyone is so reliant on everyone else for their well-being will bring out and strengthen Lila's latent leadership abilities and actually make her a more competent decision-maker after a few false starts. Regardless of which way it falls (or if some of each ends up happening), I think it would be interesting to explore Lila's skewed sense of morality within the confines of a close-cr and limited-run game, for many reasons but most especially because, while extremism in crisis is reasonable to an extent, it'd also be totally reasonable for other characters to call her on it and hold her accountable.

RP Samples: two separate threads on the test drive! also, here is a network sample based on the latest test drive meme.
There's something. Watching.

[Lila's moving. Not in a normal way, though. Well, what is normal anyway, is what she'd shoot back if someone called her out on it--what's normal in a place like this, or anywhere but especially here, and fuck you for pointing it out. Her lips curls back a little more than they ought to when she pauses, when she isn't speaking, an instinctive way to catch a scent that her palate isn't strong enough to catch anymore. Her eyes don't quite meet the viewer's, like she's more sensitive to light than it makes sense for her to be.]

[Lots of things don't make sense. Her gaze flicks up, left of center, then back down to her twitching fingers.]

Behind my eyes and out there, too. I know one of you has to have seen it.

So come on. There's a hero out there, right? Somewhere? Isn't there?

[She pronounces hero like sucker, and passes the back of her hand over her nose.]

There are a lot of heroes in this stupid place. So go check it out. Find a way. Otherwise what good are you? Come back with something useful. Or I guess we'll see what good heroism is after all.
snowblindmods: (Default)

ACCEPTED

[personal profile] snowblindmods 2017-01-09 07:13 am (UTC)(link)
Congratulations, you’ve been accepted into [community profile] snowblindrpg! Your character’s tag will be lila zacharov (the curse workers). Your character will wake up at six AM on day 197 in a building on square K3. The description for this building is as follows:

A frozen and cracked water pipe has rendered this house a bit soggy in places. The bathroom is very dangerous to attempt to cross, with its floor long-rotted by an apparently constant flow of cold water, and bits of the surrounding hallway are in the same dire shape. The kitchen is another story entirely. There's a giant hole in the floor that reveals a basement-sized sinkhole beneath the house, but there's nothing down there besides a damaged table. Some of the floorboards by the kitchen have been pulled up to reveal dirt underneath them. The rest of the house seems surprisingly free of water damage. There are two bedrooms, one decorated for a single woman and the other for a teenage boy; the room is covered in faded posters of unknown bands. There used to be a guitar here, but it's gone now. The house also has a dining room and living room. "ALPHONSE ELRIC, STEPHANIE BROWN, GREED, EDWARD ELRIC, DAY FORTY FOUR, TRAVELLING EAST." has been carved into one of the walls.

Please reply to this comment with the journal you will be using for the game. After that, join [community profile] snowblindrpg, [community profile] snowblindooc, and optionally [community profile] snowblindmemes with your character journal. After that, reply to the taken character list and player contact list and make a top level thread for your character on the character movements page. If you have not replied to these lists within three days you will be removed from the game and will have to apply again.

Thank you for your interest in our game!
gitanes: (♘ i'm gonna lure you into the dark)

Re: ACCEPTED

[personal profile] gitanes 2017-01-09 07:18 am (UTC)(link)
Thank you so much! This is the journal I'll be using!
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