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snowblindmods) wrote2015-04-06 10:43 pm
snowblindmods) wrote2015-04-06 10:43 pm
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. Application challenges are allowed, but someone who did not place a reserve challenge cannot challenge a reserved application. Once reservations expire, an application challenge can only be placed before we process the character application of the applicant you would like to challenge. 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. Original Character Application | |||
Neku Sakuraba | The World Ends With You
Name: Kaed
Age: 29
Contact Info:
Other Characters: N/A
Character Information
Name: Neku Sakuraba
Canon: The World Ends With You
Age: 15
Gender: Male
Canon Point: Post-canon
Background Link: Link!
Inventory: The clothes/accessories on his back: a dark purpleblue-and-black tank top with high collar, white shorts,
giant clownshoes, wristband, belt. Also a pair of house keys, headphones, MP3 player, cell phone, and a few hundred yen.Neku Sakuraba | The World Ends With You
At least, that's how Neku is before he's quite literally caught in the crossfire and thrown into the Reaper's Game.
At the beginning of the game, Neku is still this way. He had gone out of his way to keep his social attachments to a minimum, and as a result, he isn't canonly known to have many friends, if any at all. Other people only drag you down and friends only end up hurting you, so why even bother? People only seem to be there to push their values on him, but he was perfectly content with his own world. He didn't need outside influence. The world beyond his headphones and his music could just stay where it is.
After being thrust into the Reaper's Game, Neku was forced to partner up with someone or be erased. He didn't like it, but in order to survive, he was forced to bear with it. It was necessary. Due to circumstances beyond his control, he ended up playing for a solid three weeks in a row instead of just one week - each week bringing a different partner, a different set of players. And, with each other person that he encountered, Neku felt himself begin to open up. After all, he needed to trust his partner in order to succeed, right? And the more Neku began to place his trust in other people... the more he realized that other people weren't so bad. They weren't just annoying sources of noise. He began to care about them, about their wellbeing. He was changing, and it showed.
When Shiki alone was returned to life and subsequently made to be Neku's entry fee - the most important thing to a player - the very next week, he fought tooth and nail to make sure he didn't lose. That same week, he had suspected Joshua of killing him and even accused him of such, only to learn that Minamimoto had been his killer. But before Neku even had a chance to apologize, Joshua took a blast that would otherwise have killed Neku, sacrificing himself. During the next week, he felt an extreme amount of remorse for not being able to tell Joshua he was sorry. The third week, Beat defected from the Reapers just to save Neku from being erased due to the lack of a partner. With Beat at the risk of being erased within five days, Neku gladly went with him to find the Composer and put a stop to all of this.
And, at the end of the third week, when Joshua revealed himself to be the mastermind behind it all, it nearly destroyed Neku. Joshua had been the one person like himself, the one person he really could consider a true friend, and he'd been completely betrayed. Joshua gave Neku a choice, though - shoot Joshua, become Composer and do what he wished with Shibuya, or leave Shibuya to erasure at Joshua's hands. But, in the end, he couldn't do it. At the beginning of it all, he'd been prepared to sacrifice Shiki's life in order to escape the game. But when it came down to shooting someone he had considered a friend versus letting the city be completely erased... he couldn't fire the gun. Luckily, this change in Neku, who had once been so shut-off from the rest of the world, prompted a change of heart in Joshua, who stayed his hand in the end and returned them all back to life. If someone like Neku could change that much, surely the entire city could change as well.
At the end of it all, Neku came away from the Game with a completely different perspective on the people and world around him. No longer did he think of other people as annoying and in his face - having someone to reach out to, to spend time with and get to know... it made him happy. Happier than he'd ever been by himself. And expanding his horizons, extending his world out beyond himself... wasn't so bad. And having friends definitely wasn't so bad.
Flavor Abilities: None! Neku is a normal, everyday teenager post-game.
Suitability: Considering the changes that Neku went through during the game, I feel like it would be interesting to play with him being shoved into yet another survival-type situation, but this one forcing him into isolation and distant communication than coming to rely on others physically with him. After three weeks in the Reaper's Game, he had it drilled into him to trust his partner - and other people by extension - though it's still a work in progress, and I'd like to see him deal with that in an environment where he's thrown right back into going it alone most of the time. ... also, I played him at a_facility for a long while, and I just can't resist throwing him into a psychological horror situation. The muse is used to that sort of thing, sob.
RP Samples:
[ network ]
[Losing track of time is surprisingly easy, Neku has found. For all that he's tried, obsessively looking at the tablet and trying to figure out how long it would take to get back to shelter before cutoff, he's lost time in looking for something to eat. But he hasn't eaten all day. He's starving and cold, and like hell he's going to let both get the better of him.
But it's too late. He didn't find anything usable, and now, he's trapped outside. None of the buildings have any entrances he can get into, not even a hole in the wall or a basement stairwell to huddle in. Shibuya never has winters this bad, and even with the coat on, it isn't doing much to keep out the cold. If he can't find some way of finding heat, he isn't going to make it through the night.
... relying on other people... is still something kind of new. But if he's going to survive this, he has to try. He doesn't want to die from exposure. Not after all he's been through.]
... h-hey. So, uh. Is... is anyone else stuck out here?
[A shiver wracks his body, and he curls in more on himself, closing his eyes for a moment.]
Anyone else n-not from a place that's used to this kind of weather?
[ action ]
Finding a place to stay is Neku's biggest goal at this point in time. Rather, finding a decent place to stay, one that has a chance at warmth and not starving and maybe even some running water if he's really lucky. Because hey, it's been too long since he could actually shower. He could probably use one, even if it is a cold one. Actually finding a place like that, though, seems to be a slim chance, if not flat out nonexistent.
Or, it was. But this place he's standing in now seems to be just what he's looking for. A nice fireplace, some wood...! Maybe this place is abandoned. Maybe someone meant to use it and then just... didn't. He's pretty sure no one is here. But how long has this firewood been sitting out? ... maybe it would be safer to check, just in case.
Keeping his bag on him, Neku moves through the house, first focusing on the kitchen before other areas. If whoever lived here last left some food in the cabinets, he's going to take it. He can take jabs all day long about how skinny he is, because back at home he just didn't care, but here he really, really could use something on his bones. Cold isn't too kind on him.
REVISION REQUEST
Your personality section reads very much like a history section; we see things that happened to Neku, but you don't delve very much into his thoughts and driving motivations. We would like to see more of that in your application. Additionally, we would like a sample that contains more of Neku's dialog. You can either write this yourself or use a thread from an old RP.
Please reply to this comment with your revisions within three days or your slot will be forfeit.
Revisions! Hopefully a bit better?
At least, that's how Neku is before he's quite literally caught in the crossfire and thrown into the Reaper's Game.
At the beginning of the game, Neku is still this way. He had gone out of his way to keep his social attachments to a minimum, and as a result, he isn't canonly known to have many friends, if any at all. Other people only drag you down and friends only end up hurting you, so why even bother? People only seem to be there to push their values on him, but he was perfectly content with his own world. He didn't need outside influence. The world beyond his headphones and his music could just stay where it is.
His first week - his week with Shiki - proves to have the most drastic changes in his personality. At the beginning of the week, he is much as we see him in the intro: the cold, aloof, antisocial youth with no interest in spending time with other people. He calls Shiki a stalker, and tries his hardest to avoid interacting much at all with her except what's necessary to win, and only seems to talk to her when she prattles on long enough to annoy him. In fact, early on in the week he's given the chance to kill her in exchange for escaping the Game - a trick, considering the way of escaping was being erased due to not having a partner - and he takes it in a heartbeat, but thankfully gets stopped by Hanekoma before he can actually go through with it. But Shiki is forever stubborn, and through her constant picking and pushing and attempts to understand Neku, she manages to break through to him and actually make him care for someone else. When she is taken as his entry fee for the subsequent week, he feels horribly guilty for someone else's existence being on the line because of him, and works even harder than before to ensure he succeeds. The change between who he was at the beginning of the week and who he is at the end of the week is like night and day, and through connecting with others through the rest of the weeks, he changes even more, to the person we see him as post-game.
Overall, Neku develops into being a strong hero. The Game forces him to develop compassion, empathy, and courage to do what's right and stand up for other people, whether he knows them well or not. He's still a bit sarcastic, but it's much more lighthearted and joking because he actually cares. The Game turns him into, basically, an egg. A hard shell on the outside, but a goopy mess on the inside. And the shell isn't very hard to crack. Especially seen in the ending scene of the game, he's internally monologuing to Joshua about how the city isn't so bad after all, and the lilt in his voice when he mentions having friends just shows how much he really cares and has changed. At the beginning of the game, there's no way he would have shown feelings that way. He even goes so far as to invite Joshua, the one that had tricked and manipulated him, to hang out with them. Despite Joshua hurting him, he still felt a connection with Joshua during their week together, and still considers him a friend. "I can't forgive you, but I trust you."
During the game, Neku is shown to be incredibly sharp and intelligent. This, of course, never changes, even though his personality does a complete 180 in the span of 21 days. He's able to rattle off square roots and the periodic symbol for gold, and (with your help and probably some strong google-fu) can answer Joshua's inane trivia questions perfectly. He also has a strong creative side. At the beginning of the game, Shiki points out how odd it is that he can use pins that she can't - and in reality, Neku is the only one that can use nearly all of the pins in the game, save for each partner's character-specific pin. This is due to having a high amount of Imagination, or creative potential, and is what targeted him as Joshua's pawn. He has a strong eye for art, and idolizes CAT, a local artist with a penchant for graffiti.
A large part of his defensiveness and isolation at the beginning is to avoid getting hurt by others. Different people have different headcanons, whether it be in part of a close friend dying or something happening with his parents or various other theories, but no one puts up walls the way he did without going through something incredibly emotionally painful. It's why he was so reluctant to trust others and only wanted to trust himself. But his new friends broke those walls down, and while they could still go up if hurt again, there's not a strong chance of it. Especially with the people he's come to call friends.
Except maybe you, Joshua.At the end of it all, Neku came away from the Game with a completely different perspective on the people and world around him. No longer does he think of other people as annoying and in his face - having someone to reach out to, to spend time with and get to know... it makes him happy. Happier than he'd ever been by himself. And expanding his horizons, extending his world out beyond himself... wasn't so bad. And having friends definitely wasn't so bad.
RP Sample: Network thread from A Facility!
ACCEPTED
A standard two-story house with a basement. The first floor has a kitchen, living room, and dining room, while the second floor has two bedrooms and a bathroom. The backyard to this house is pretty large, including a plastic child's slide and a buried sandbox.
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Thank you for your interest in our game!
Re: ACCEPTED