THE GAMES APP
Apr. 19th, 2013 03:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sleeplessinalterniaOUT of CHARACTER
Name: Bii
Other characters: nop
IN CHARACTER
Name: Karkat Vantas
Fandom: Homestuck
Canon point/AU: Immediately after Bec Noir hijacks the troll's victory in their game. He gets grabbed by the Capitol instead of Aradiabot.
Journal:sleeplessinalternia
PB: Various canon arts and fanarts
History: Here on the Homestuck wiki (the articles about the troll species and troll relationship quadrants are probably also useful.)
Presentation: Karkat is a kid with a lot to prove. And for one very good reason: he's a mutant. And yeah, mutation isn't completely unknown and it's not even an automatic death sentence for a troll, but Karkat's mutation is special. Alternia has a strict caste system based on the hemospectrum—which is their name for the various blood colors a troll can have; in short, it follows the visible light spectrum and and basically the further you are from red and the closer you are to purple the better off you are—and Karkat's blood is a red much brighter than any other shade in the hemospectrum. It's the kind of thing that is liable to get him killed-on-sight and this is made worse because the only other troll known to have this blood color was the ancient prophet and rebel known as the Signless Sufferer, whose name and sym69l have largely been wiped from history, but whose followers have secretly kept the faith in his ideals of pacifism and equality for thousands of solar sweeps.
(Those followers are pretty much the only reason Karkat wasn't culled immediately after hatching—they're also responsible for the fact that he's got a personal sign and a lusus like a normal troll. The Sufferists basically believed that he was the second coming of the Signless. Karkat himself is aware of absolutely none of this at the point I'll be grabbing him from.)
Since Karkat is outside the caste system, he's worked as hard as he can to present himself as a model troll: an aggressive, arrogant boy warrior. He's spent years training with the sickles in the vague hopes that when he hits the age of mandatory conscription that he'll be able to wow the Threshecutioner Corps enough that they'll hold off from culling him in order to take advantage of his martial madskills for the greater glory of the empire. Despite the fact that his government would quite like see him dead if they ever knew he existed, he takes pride in being a troll and a member of the fearsome Alternian Empire. It's a shitty world, but it's his world.
Karkat protects his hemo-anonymity in two ways: first of all, instead of typing in his blood color and wearing a version of his sign that's colored to match, he types in grey and wears a similarly colorless sign. He claims it's because he'd rather be judged for himself rather than his caste. (This leads most people to assume he's an embarrassed lowblood, but since even those people expect that he has a place on the hemospectrum, this counts as a win to Karkat.) The second way he does this is by avoiding seeing people in person—most of his friendships were conducted on a largely internet basis prior to playing Sgrub—to avoid any occurrences where the color might be revealed through bloodshed or other means. (Since a lot of troll bodily fluids, including tears, are tinted the same color as a troll's blood, this is rather tricky.) This also has given Karkat motivation to get very good at combat in order to avoid his own blood getting shed. (Canon doesn't state whethere or not he's had to kill strangers to protect his secret, but I suspect it's fairly likely.)
(At the canon point I'm drawing him from, Karkat's friends have all recently figured out about the whole mutant thing he was hiding and have accepted him anyway—even the most caste-ist of them—but he is very well aware that he got lucky and that the twelve of them being the only trolls left of their race probably also helped.)
Karkat considers himself to be a hatched leader, something he's very willing to inform everyone of. He was very good at motivating his ragtag team of adolescent trolls into getting things done, leading them into battle against the Black King. Despite his rather cantankerous nature, people listen to him and more often than not take his advice. Possibly it was only so that he would shut up and stop yelling at everyone, but that still counts as a win. He's very organized, with a fondness for charts and a good head for strategy.
I can kind of see him being a kind of polarizing tribute among the Capitol viewers, mostly due to his bossy, know-it-all attitude. Physically, I headcanon him as being short but solidly built—at six sweeps (thirteen years) he'd probably be only about five foot, since he's still got some moults ahead of him before reaching adulthood. Since the Signless is already playing in this game, it's very possible that the media might pick up on their connection for the juicy gossip it basically is. They might also try to play up the Tough Boy Who Is Secretly Soft Inside angle, which I will explain in the next section.
Motivations: Karkat's symbol is virtually identical to the human Cancer astrological symbol, which is appropriate. Crabs are known for having a hard shell that protects a soft inside. So does Karkat. Despite his swaggering, hard-ass front, deep inside he's a softie. He cares about people—he just doesn't want them to know he cares, because that would be un-troll-like. However, he can get really sentimental about his friends, however much he insults and bitches at them to their faces. Also, he's a not-so-secret romantic: he loves romantic comedies, romance novels thicker than your fist, and explaining the finer points of troll romance to anyone who's willing to listen to him about it.
Karkat's drive to be a model troll stems from his secret conviction that he's actually a really terrible one. It's not just that he's a mutant with no place in Alternian society, although that really doesn't help. It's also because he's perfectly aware of how useless his sentimentality and caring nature is in troll society. Pity for anyone but your moirail and matesprit is a weakness in a kill or be killed world like Alternia. (He's also having to cope with the growing suspicion that he's romantically deviant: he wants more than one person in some of his quadrants, as well as a single person in more than one quadrant.)
Karkat takes failure hard. He's already accumulated a lot of guilt due to accidentally setting off a chain of events that killed off his lusus and all of his friends' lusi—as well as being partially responsible for the deaths of nearly every member of his race, except for him and his friends. He also has some guilt for how he and his teammates double-crossed Jack Noir—a Sgrub NPC who Karkat befriended early on in their game session—in order for them to win the game. He'll also have some guilt for not being able to stop Bec Noir's attack that kept the trolls from gaining their Ultimate Reward—and perhaps more when he realizes that Bec Noir was the alternate universe counterpart of Jack.
Mostly, Karkat wants to live. Fate and genetics have dealt him a virtual death sentence. Thanks to Sgrub, he was given a chance to create a new world where he could live without fear of being culled. Losing out on that and finding himself in Panem will be hard on him, but he should be able to pull through. Trolls, even sentimental secret softies like Karkat, are tough.
SAMPLES
Thread: Thread with Signless from this Dear Mun post
Prose:
“This is so much beastshit,” Karkat mutters under his breath.
Holy fuck, but he's exhausted. He might have temporarily blacked out between when that winged demon barkbeast.... thing had cut down the door and when he woke up here, wherever here was, he still wasn't completely straight on that—he's never even heard of a planet called Panem or of these vaguely trolloid aliens that are eying him like he's a fucking gladiatortainer—but anyway, although he'd been unconscious, it hadn't been for long enough, certainly not enough to get any energy back.
His thinkpan is throbbing. He feels like he might burst a lobe.
He's able to listen to enough of the explanation, though, that he knows what's supposed to happen. He's supposed to show off some of his martial prowess for these alien assholes, because it'll supposedly benefit him later on. How, he's not sure. He's not sure about a lot of things, including how the fuck these so-called Gamemakers got him here and where the hell his sylladex went, but that doesn't matter.
What matters is showing these douchebuckets exactly what kind of elite killing machine they have in front of them.
Karkat sorts through the weapons until he finds a pair of sickles. They're not nearly as cool-looking as the Homes Smell You Later, but they'll do. He takes them into his hands, turns to face the Gamemakers, and bows, sickles crossed in front of him. “Karkat Vantas,” he says. “Six sweeps old.”
What follows is something of an abbreviated dance, as Karkat runs himself through the various sickle forms before attacking the training dummy. He has it on the floor with its arm severed in a matter of seconds.
What is your character scored: Probably around 7 or 8? A lot of this has to do with when in his canon I'm grabbing him. Being a troll he's got a naturally tough body plus nightvision and he's spent a lot of time training to be a threshecutioner when he grows up. Also, at the canon point I'll be plucking him from he's just spent a an extended time leveling and grinding inside of a reality affecting computer game so he's been doing a lot of fighting and killing lately, even though it's mostly been against nonsentient game constructs that don't even leave proper corpses. He and his friends just took down the Game's Boss down together and while there were twelve of them, the Sburb boss difficulty has a tendency to scale with the number of players in the game. And as far as we know, this was all with his natural combat skills, as Karkat doesn't seem to have any powers—and whatever Knight of Blood means as a Sburb/Sgrub Game Title, it doesn't seem to carry over any extra combat advantages that we know of.
On the other hand, he absolutely sucks when it comes to taking down anyone he sees as a friend. One of the best examples of this happens later in the day from when I'll be taking Karkat. It involves one of Karkat's best friends, Gamzee—who is going through a crisis of faith and what basically amounts to drug withdrawal—snapping and threatening to kill everyone else in their friends group. Karkat knows that Gamzee is unstable enough to likely do it—and physically capable of going through with it—and Gamzee pretty much dares Karkat to confront him and stop him. Instead, Karkat freaks out and tries to get another one of their teammates (Equius) to take Gamzee down for him, because he can't stomach the idea himself. When that doesn't work—and gets Equius killed, along with their friend Nepeta—Karkat does end up confronting Gamzee, but instead of trying to kill Gamzee before anyone else dies, he tries to nonviolently calm Gamzee's ass down. And it works!
Basically, Karkat will have a better time in the arena while he's still new as a tribute. But the longer he's in the Games and in Panem, the harder it's going to be for him because he'll have started to care about his fellow players. Killing to stay alive is way easier with strangers than it is with people you know.
Name: Bii
Other characters: nop
IN CHARACTER
Name: Karkat Vantas
Fandom: Homestuck
Canon point/AU: Immediately after Bec Noir hijacks the troll's victory in their game. He gets grabbed by the Capitol instead of Aradiabot.
Journal:
sleeplessinalterniaPB: Various canon arts and fanarts
History: Here on the Homestuck wiki (the articles about the troll species and troll relationship quadrants are probably also useful.)
Presentation: Karkat is a kid with a lot to prove. And for one very good reason: he's a mutant. And yeah, mutation isn't completely unknown and it's not even an automatic death sentence for a troll, but Karkat's mutation is special. Alternia has a strict caste system based on the hemospectrum—which is their name for the various blood colors a troll can have; in short, it follows the visible light spectrum and and basically the further you are from red and the closer you are to purple the better off you are—and Karkat's blood is a red much brighter than any other shade in the hemospectrum. It's the kind of thing that is liable to get him killed-on-sight and this is made worse because the only other troll known to have this blood color was the ancient prophet and rebel known as the Signless Sufferer, whose name and sym69l have largely been wiped from history, but whose followers have secretly kept the faith in his ideals of pacifism and equality for thousands of solar sweeps.
(Those followers are pretty much the only reason Karkat wasn't culled immediately after hatching—they're also responsible for the fact that he's got a personal sign and a lusus like a normal troll. The Sufferists basically believed that he was the second coming of the Signless. Karkat himself is aware of absolutely none of this at the point I'll be grabbing him from.)
Since Karkat is outside the caste system, he's worked as hard as he can to present himself as a model troll: an aggressive, arrogant boy warrior. He's spent years training with the sickles in the vague hopes that when he hits the age of mandatory conscription that he'll be able to wow the Threshecutioner Corps enough that they'll hold off from culling him in order to take advantage of his martial madskills for the greater glory of the empire. Despite the fact that his government would quite like see him dead if they ever knew he existed, he takes pride in being a troll and a member of the fearsome Alternian Empire. It's a shitty world, but it's his world.
Karkat protects his hemo-anonymity in two ways: first of all, instead of typing in his blood color and wearing a version of his sign that's colored to match, he types in grey and wears a similarly colorless sign. He claims it's because he'd rather be judged for himself rather than his caste. (This leads most people to assume he's an embarrassed lowblood, but since even those people expect that he has a place on the hemospectrum, this counts as a win to Karkat.) The second way he does this is by avoiding seeing people in person—most of his friendships were conducted on a largely internet basis prior to playing Sgrub—to avoid any occurrences where the color might be revealed through bloodshed or other means. (Since a lot of troll bodily fluids, including tears, are tinted the same color as a troll's blood, this is rather tricky.) This also has given Karkat motivation to get very good at combat in order to avoid his own blood getting shed. (Canon doesn't state whethere or not he's had to kill strangers to protect his secret, but I suspect it's fairly likely.)
(At the canon point I'm drawing him from, Karkat's friends have all recently figured out about the whole mutant thing he was hiding and have accepted him anyway—even the most caste-ist of them—but he is very well aware that he got lucky and that the twelve of them being the only trolls left of their race probably also helped.)
Karkat considers himself to be a hatched leader, something he's very willing to inform everyone of. He was very good at motivating his ragtag team of adolescent trolls into getting things done, leading them into battle against the Black King. Despite his rather cantankerous nature, people listen to him and more often than not take his advice. Possibly it was only so that he would shut up and stop yelling at everyone, but that still counts as a win. He's very organized, with a fondness for charts and a good head for strategy.
I can kind of see him being a kind of polarizing tribute among the Capitol viewers, mostly due to his bossy, know-it-all attitude. Physically, I headcanon him as being short but solidly built—at six sweeps (thirteen years) he'd probably be only about five foot, since he's still got some moults ahead of him before reaching adulthood. Since the Signless is already playing in this game, it's very possible that the media might pick up on their connection for the juicy gossip it basically is. They might also try to play up the Tough Boy Who Is Secretly Soft Inside angle, which I will explain in the next section.
Motivations: Karkat's symbol is virtually identical to the human Cancer astrological symbol, which is appropriate. Crabs are known for having a hard shell that protects a soft inside. So does Karkat. Despite his swaggering, hard-ass front, deep inside he's a softie. He cares about people—he just doesn't want them to know he cares, because that would be un-troll-like. However, he can get really sentimental about his friends, however much he insults and bitches at them to their faces. Also, he's a not-so-secret romantic: he loves romantic comedies, romance novels thicker than your fist, and explaining the finer points of troll romance to anyone who's willing to listen to him about it.
Karkat's drive to be a model troll stems from his secret conviction that he's actually a really terrible one. It's not just that he's a mutant with no place in Alternian society, although that really doesn't help. It's also because he's perfectly aware of how useless his sentimentality and caring nature is in troll society. Pity for anyone but your moirail and matesprit is a weakness in a kill or be killed world like Alternia. (He's also having to cope with the growing suspicion that he's romantically deviant: he wants more than one person in some of his quadrants, as well as a single person in more than one quadrant.)
Karkat takes failure hard. He's already accumulated a lot of guilt due to accidentally setting off a chain of events that killed off his lusus and all of his friends' lusi—as well as being partially responsible for the deaths of nearly every member of his race, except for him and his friends. He also has some guilt for how he and his teammates double-crossed Jack Noir—a Sgrub NPC who Karkat befriended early on in their game session—in order for them to win the game. He'll also have some guilt for not being able to stop Bec Noir's attack that kept the trolls from gaining their Ultimate Reward—and perhaps more when he realizes that Bec Noir was the alternate universe counterpart of Jack.
Mostly, Karkat wants to live. Fate and genetics have dealt him a virtual death sentence. Thanks to Sgrub, he was given a chance to create a new world where he could live without fear of being culled. Losing out on that and finding himself in Panem will be hard on him, but he should be able to pull through. Trolls, even sentimental secret softies like Karkat, are tough.
SAMPLES
Thread: Thread with Signless from this Dear Mun post
Prose:
“This is so much beastshit,” Karkat mutters under his breath.
Holy fuck, but he's exhausted. He might have temporarily blacked out between when that winged demon barkbeast.... thing had cut down the door and when he woke up here, wherever here was, he still wasn't completely straight on that—he's never even heard of a planet called Panem or of these vaguely trolloid aliens that are eying him like he's a fucking gladiatortainer—but anyway, although he'd been unconscious, it hadn't been for long enough, certainly not enough to get any energy back.
His thinkpan is throbbing. He feels like he might burst a lobe.
He's able to listen to enough of the explanation, though, that he knows what's supposed to happen. He's supposed to show off some of his martial prowess for these alien assholes, because it'll supposedly benefit him later on. How, he's not sure. He's not sure about a lot of things, including how the fuck these so-called Gamemakers got him here and where the hell his sylladex went, but that doesn't matter.
What matters is showing these douchebuckets exactly what kind of elite killing machine they have in front of them.
Karkat sorts through the weapons until he finds a pair of sickles. They're not nearly as cool-looking as the Homes Smell You Later, but they'll do. He takes them into his hands, turns to face the Gamemakers, and bows, sickles crossed in front of him. “Karkat Vantas,” he says. “Six sweeps old.”
What follows is something of an abbreviated dance, as Karkat runs himself through the various sickle forms before attacking the training dummy. He has it on the floor with its arm severed in a matter of seconds.
What is your character scored: Probably around 7 or 8? A lot of this has to do with when in his canon I'm grabbing him. Being a troll he's got a naturally tough body plus nightvision and he's spent a lot of time training to be a threshecutioner when he grows up. Also, at the canon point I'll be plucking him from he's just spent a an extended time leveling and grinding inside of a reality affecting computer game so he's been doing a lot of fighting and killing lately, even though it's mostly been against nonsentient game constructs that don't even leave proper corpses. He and his friends just took down the Game's Boss down together and while there were twelve of them, the Sburb boss difficulty has a tendency to scale with the number of players in the game. And as far as we know, this was all with his natural combat skills, as Karkat doesn't seem to have any powers—and whatever Knight of Blood means as a Sburb/Sgrub Game Title, it doesn't seem to carry over any extra combat advantages that we know of.
On the other hand, he absolutely sucks when it comes to taking down anyone he sees as a friend. One of the best examples of this happens later in the day from when I'll be taking Karkat. It involves one of Karkat's best friends, Gamzee—who is going through a crisis of faith and what basically amounts to drug withdrawal—snapping and threatening to kill everyone else in their friends group. Karkat knows that Gamzee is unstable enough to likely do it—and physically capable of going through with it—and Gamzee pretty much dares Karkat to confront him and stop him. Instead, Karkat freaks out and tries to get another one of their teammates (Equius) to take Gamzee down for him, because he can't stomach the idea himself. When that doesn't work—and gets Equius killed, along with their friend Nepeta—Karkat does end up confronting Gamzee, but instead of trying to kill Gamzee before anyone else dies, he tries to nonviolently calm Gamzee's ass down. And it works!
Basically, Karkat will have a better time in the arena while he's still new as a tribute. But the longer he's in the Games and in Panem, the harder it's going to be for him because he'll have started to care about his fellow players. Killing to stay alive is way easier with strangers than it is with people you know.
