Snowblind Moderators (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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 | |||
Gregory House | House MD | Reserved
Name: Terri
Age: 21+
Contact Info:
Other Characters: N/A
Character Information
Name: Gregory House
Canon: House MD
Age: 46
Gender: Male
Canon Point: Season 1 after Episode 21 (Three Stories)
Background Link: House Wiki
Inventory:
- 1 bottle of Vicodin: 32 pills (1-week supply if he's not careful; 2 to 3-week supply if he is)
- 1 cane (walking aid)
- 1 set of reading glasses
- 1 pen flashlight
- 1 wallet with driver's license and hospital ID along with credit cards and a dollar in cash
- 1 pair of running shoes
- 1 pair of jeans
- 1 blue T-shirt with a Rolling Stones logo
- 1 blue collared, button down shirt
- 1 dark gray suit jacket
Personality:
To put it politely, Gregory House is a jerk. To put it less politely, he's an absolute asshole. Dr. House is a manipulative, lazy drug addict who would rather spend time watching soap operas or playing video games than dealing with people. He is childish to the extreme, often whining and fussing when he doesn't get his way, irreverent, smarmy, stubborn, sarcastic, and dismissive of any sort of activism or faith. He's also an incredibly gifted physician who is fascinated by difficult questions and cases. He has a passion not so much for helping patients, but for solving puzzles. That patients are often helped as an end result of his efforts is nice for them but not as important to him. He does show some honest regard for a few people, but this is, more often than not, masked behind his veneer of sarcastic commentary and acerbic wit.
"Everybody lies."
House is a liar, he believes everyone else is lying about something, and more often than not, he's right. Whether he's right about what they're lying about varies from spot on to dead wrong, often falling somewhere in between. It might be easy to put his maxim for life down to his parents, but his father - the man who raised him, anyway - was the very antithesis of this. John House, a Marine, demanded absolute honesty and had, by House's reckoning 'an insane moral compass,' that alienated him from his son. While his father might be the one exception to House's rule, he is a major part of what's led House to be the man he is today.
Where his father was timely, House has always been late. Where his father was impeccably well-dressed and clean-cut, House has always been a slob in his personal appearance. Rebelling against authority, any authority, but especially his father's, defined his early years in life. The clashes with his father and subsequent punishments (e.g., ice baths, being forced to sleep outside in the yard without shelter, and not being fed) have led House to despise the cold and most survival-oriented hobbies. Additional punishments meant to isolate House emotionally (e.g., his father not speaking to him for an entire summer, and generally being distant) have also contributed to his dysfunction. Said dysfunction tends to manifest as a complete disregard for social conventions, cruel sarcasm, and self-destructive tendencies.
"This is Vicodin. It's mine. You can't have any. And no, I do not have a pain management problem, I have a pain problem. But who knows? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm too stoned to tell."
One such self-destructive tendency is his penchant for addiction. Drugs, puzzles, gambling, random activities. If he's left to his own devices, House will at times descend into a near obsession with something to keep himself occupied and stave off boredom. He grew up being dragged around from one military base to another in his youth and has become something of a self-sufficient loner because of it, not wanting to form close connections as they would have been gone in six months, maybe a year or two if he was lucky, when he was a kid. It means he won't have as hard a time as some might in a setting like Snowblind where isolation is a part of life. He doesn't do well without physical interaction for long stretches of time, as much as he dislikes people, but he can manage without it provided he can talk to people over the network.
Broadly speaking, this obsessive behavior has worked out in his life as House developing a surprising array of interests and skills ranging from music to physics to medicine to monster trucks. He's also taken drugs recreationally, takes Vicodin much less recreationally, and uses his own medical practice as a chance to experiment on himself and patients with new ideas and treatment options. Some would say he's both a sadist and a masochist. There may be some truth to the former; though, he seems not so much to derive pleasure from hurting other people as use it as a tool to keep them emotionally distant or to get a reaction he's looking for. People are often more honest in a moment of anger than they are when they're calm and collected, after all.
"That's the difference between him and me; he thinks you do your job, and what will be will be. I think that what I do, and what you do matters. He sleeps better at night; he shouldn't."
For all of this, House can display a remarkable amount of pragmatism. He is a doctor who is used to making life-or-death decisions about patient treatment in minutes. He has bluntly told others that sometimes his patients die because of those decisions and that other doctors will make decisions and mistakes that will result in patient death. He considers it important to own up to that and simply understand that it's a part of the profession. This trait extends to his non-medical life, as well. While he hates his father, he has shown the ability to set that to one side and be civil to maintain the peace, at least for a short while. Given that he has none of the resources he usually does at home, House is very likely, in-game, to draw upon his pragmatism for making a number of decisions once her realizes he's not going home soon. There is no one to fall back on like his team, and no long-term friends in positions of power and respect like Wilson or Cuddy to go to bat for him.
"See, that's another example of Ed's brilliance. Whenever one of his drugs is about to lose its patent he has his boys and girls alter it just a tiny bit and patent it all over again. Making not just a pointless new pill, but millions and millions of dollars. Which is good for everybody, right? Except for the patients."
But his pragmatism can go flying out the window on occasion, especially when someone is trying to control him. We see this in his encounters with authority figures throughout the first season, particularly with his 'nemesis,' Vogler. House is pragmatic enough to go along with some of Volger's increasingly frustrating and domineering commands, but when it comes to the point of House being told to shill for one of the drugs that Vogler's pharmaceutical company manufactures, House pretends to go along, and then uses his speech as a platform to roast the drug and its manufacturer, laying into big pharmaceuticals for their patenting practices. While it expresses an honest assessment of the drug, it's aimed at taking Vogler down a peg, rebelling against the hold that the man has tried to put on House. He doesn't like being told what to do and people who try to pressure him will typically find themselves subverted in some manner.
"No. I was there. You are not just some regular guy who's getting older. You've changed! You're miserable! And you're afraid to face yourself-"
"Of course I've changed!"
For all his boasting, apparent narcissism, and sarcastically cheerful behavior, House also happens to be miserable, which he hates himself for... which makes him more miserable. He knows he's a disappointment to his mother whose only wish is for him to be happy. She is the one woman House shows genuine and consistent respect for. House is deferential and polite to his mother, claiming that he can't lie to her, in contrast to most every other person he interacts with. He's similarly quiet and reserved around his father, though this is mainly for his mother's sake. The interactions with his parents are particularly notable given House's otherwise irreverent behavior. They highlight the fact that he can observe social norms and niceties when he has the incentive to do so. Typically, those incentives are extremely personal in nature.
"People don't bug me until they get teeth."
This occasionally shines through with patients, though, specifically ones he takes a liking to for one reason or another. He's honestly charmed by and playful with an elderly woman he diagnoses with syphilis who starts flirting with him, helps a woman get the most out of her health care services when she's about to be fired, and takes the fall for one patient with her son. More often than not, his motives for being 'kind' can be explained by the fact that someone has interested him, either by saying or doing something unexpected or being a difficult puzzle for him to pick apart.
"I have no kids, my marriage sucks... I only got two things that work for me: this job and this stupid screwed up friendship, and neither mattered enough for you to give one lousy speech."
"They matter... If I could do it all again—"
"—you'd do the exact same thing."
One of the other relationships that highlights House's more human side is his friendship with Dr. James Wilson. House has a vitriolic best buddies relationship with Wilson and while he often manipulates the man (like most other people), he is shown to care about and rely on him. Wilson is someone House readily invites to join him in activities he enjoys and someone House respects enough to take case referrals from and think better of and trust when he shouldn't. He's also one of the few people House will be honest with (sparingly), actually admitting to Wilson that he knows he has a Vicodin addiction, and that he views narcotics as the only way that he can be functional enough to do his job. Contrary to any sort of logic, he also tells Wilson that he doesn't think this is a problem.
Which leads into the fact that House is a hypocrite. He'll berate patients, subordinates, peers, and superiors for making decisions for what he calls stupid reasons, and will turn around and make decisions based on his stubbornness, gut feelings, or a moment of emotion. He's generally a guarded man who uses sarcasm, flippancy, and childish behavior as a screen for what he's really feeling, but there are rare moments when that breaks down and genuine vulnerability shines through. In those moments, House can show true outrage, frustration, fear, self-doubt, and regret. He's been called a coward by more than one person with regard to this behavior by people who view his self-defense mechanisms as a way to push people away so that he can't be hurt by them.
Several women have seen that in his life, and considered it attractive enough to try to overcome his barriers. Most notable, perhaps, is Stacy Warner, House's ex-girlfriend. With Stacy, House was as much of an ass as he ever is, but prior to the infarction that caused him to go lame, he is shown to be caring, even playful with her... even if he was still an ass. She can see through him and the walls he puts up, and it makes him respect her. Particularly when she's able to give as good as she gets. House likes people who will stand up to him, rather than just agree with everything he says. If you're a pushover or Yes Man, you're going to be on his radar for manipulation, as much for the entertainment value as anything else. In the game, finding people to manipulate will be especially important to him as he knows he's at a disadvantage in terms of survival skills apart from field medicine.
"So let's get to the point. You don't like me. I'm pretty sure I'm not gonna like you. It's nothing personal, I don't like anybody."
House is a man of contradictions: a purposefully socially inept genius, a seeming narcissist who considers himself a failure because he couldn't live up to what his mother wanted, and a misanthrope who finds himself needing and connecting with people. He's a cynic and nihilist who believes that everyone has to have an angle and no one is truly altruistic. He's also a problem-solver who doesn't care about most of the people affected by those problems... until he starts to respect them. He's vain, manipulative, an addict, and can come off as anything ranging from eccentric to perverted to moderately insane depending on the day and the circumstances. He abhors convention, has a passion for seemingly random and incongruous things, and has a sense of humor that tends toward the sarcastic and sometimes cruel.
In short, he isn't the doctor you send Christmas cards to, but he is the doctor who will try to do everything in his power to save your life if he thinks it might be interesting for him to do so. Or if you're dying in front of him and there's no one else around. House is human, and has significant difficulty, whatever he might say, in walking away from someone in medical distress if he knows he's the only person there to do something. In a situation like Snowblind, those circumstances are likely to present themselves more often than not, leaving House in a position of wanting to and trying to help without the appropriate equipment to do so.
Flavor Abilities: N/A
Suitability: House is the ultimate Agent Scully. He doesn't believe in the supernatural/ghosts/aliens/etc. I'd like to play with that, confronting him with people and circumstances that automatically go against what he knows to be true and having him figure out how that slots into his understanding of the world. I'd also like to play House dealing with his disability and Vicodin addiction in a world of snow and limited resources. I'd like him to have to detox at some point, possibly dying because of it. He assumes people will deal with his attitude because he's a brilliant doctor, but in a world where he doesn't have what he needs to practice... that kind of falls to the wayside. He would be focused on trying to figure out the mystery of what's keeping them here and why they were brought, how revival works, how to get home, and so forth, to satisfy his need for puzzles in the absence of medical cases. It's been shown more than once that he has the capacity to dive into other fields and excel when he doesn't have medicine to keep him busy.
I would also like to continue the deadly game of cat-and-mouse House began with Ramsay Bolton should that character make it into the game. This will drive him toward meeting up with and working with others to have them for protection. That should effectively help with House's isolationist tendencies. He doesn't like people, and he would probably be fine just going around on his own, otherwise.
RP Samples:
Settled-ish Test Drive Sample
Network Samples: 1, 2, and 3
ACCEPTED
This house is full of holes. Every room is full of snow and mold and completely unsuitable for an overnight stay--except for the attic. All of the boxes and trunks have been pushed to the edges of the room and octagons and hexagons have been drawn all over the floor with black paint. "T. HAMADA, DAY 25, EAST" has been carved into the doorframe above the door.
Please reply to this comment with the journal you will be using for the game. After that, join
Thank you for your interest in our game!
Re: ACCEPTED