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it's just a lot, it's just a lot, it's just a lot
〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Ari
AGE: 30
JOURNAL: nah
IM / EMAIL: redrobin133@gmail.com
PLURK:![[plurk.com profile]](https://www.plurk.com/favicon.ico)
with_discipline
RETURNING: New!
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Number 7/Vanya Hargreeves
CHARACTER AGE: 29
SERIES: The Umbrella Academy (Netflix)
CHRONOLOGY: End of s1
CLASS: Hero? Maybe? Villain? Honestly who tf knows, get a good talker on her and we'll see which way the wind blows. Tentatively saying Hero since she's not really out to destroy the world.
HOUSING: Randomize please! She could use the built in CR.
BACKGROUND: Vanya's world isn't too dissimilar from MoM's world, to be honest. Well, in one big way they differ: where Vanya comes from, there have only been six super heroes, and one of them has been dead for years and most of them have bowed out of that life. Super powers are real, in specific instances, and probably aliens, too, but who's left to confirm that? There's still mad science and all that crap, but mostly life is normal and everyday. It looks like a modern 2019 in almost all ways, except for the Umbrella Academy and all those pesky villains they grew up fighting.
For ease of reference and expanded detail, there's a decent wiki of her background.
PERSONALITY:
Not a lot of families are like the Hargreeves. They're the only superheroes in the world, and they're hopefully the only kids bought and paid for by a weird old billionaire to raise as a world-saving, crime-fighting team rather than a family. Even with that, and even with Vanya being consistently on the outside looking in, the book she wrote five years ago is pretty cold by anyone's standards. It was a tell-all, soul-baring, deeply passive aggressive move that she still only sort of regrets, even after seeing how hurt by it most of her family was. It speaks a lot about who she is as a person, that all that hard work, all those late nights, all the pain she caused her four remaining siblings, was just so she could send a copy to her father in the blind hope that maybe he would read it and feel some semblance of guilt about what he did to the family - or, more importantly, to her.
It was selfish, incredibly so, and Vanya wrote it anyway, relishing in her all too brief moment in the spotlight. When that faded and her books sold for nothing, when the royalties stopped showing up, Vanya disappeared back into her life of anonymity where she existed in an unknowingly over-medicated fog, drifting through one day and into the next.
All of this points to her petty side, small, often buried by fear of saying the wrong thing (sometimes rightly), but very much present. There's more nuance to it, but even boiled down, it takes a certain kind of pettiness to kill your boyfriend for lying to you; to almost kill your family for trying to keep you from accidentally ending the world; to tear your childhood home down to its foundation because you have bad memories of the place. There is a distinctly childish part of her that combines particularly dangerously with her power. Trapped in a silent cell, panicking and claustrophobic, Vanya hallucinates a conversation with her younger self, and when she follows that particular childhood advice and embraces the roiling anger she'd been shrinking from, she gives into her id entirely; the childish desire to satisfy every passing whim takes over, regardless of consequences. Why shouldn't she go and play her solo? This is her night. What, just because she murdered the person she always thought of as her one friend? Her new consciousness had no place for logic like that.
None of the Hargreeves children were lavished with love or attention. They were trained by an eccentric, probably alien old man who didn't care for their emotional happiness at all. They all have their different chips on their shoulders, all grew into emotionally stunted adults with no real hope for a normal life. Vanya, who was left out of just about everything in their childhood, is just the same even with never having spent her early years fighting or training to fight crime; she's almost stealthier for it, having lived the closest thing to an average life of all her siblings. She's not the actress, though: while V might seem like she's got her shit wired, anyone giving her more than a cursory glance can see that's not true. Vanya has spent most of her life wandering through life in an overmedicated fog, pushing her way through life with her head down, the constant sense of anxiety kept at bay only by the bottle of pills in her pocket. It - not to mention everything else about her life - has left her deeply isolated, unable even to give her all to the things she loves.
When she was in her pre or early teens, she told her caretaker that she would learn to play her father's violin, to be extraordinary in the only way she could think to be. For a brief time, she was a virtuoso: but while her brothers and sister traveled around the world thwarting one villainous plan after another, Vanya learned what it was to peak early. Her playing improved quickly and then plateaued, and though she was good enough to spend a few years in the city orchestra, she never advanced beyond third chair. Third chair is not extraordinary. Only once she was off her meds was she able to reach her full potential - to put everything she was into her music. Everything including her powers, so it's probably not fair to stand her against a prodigy who's otherwise perfectly human, but it still stands: she fell in love with music because it was the only retreat left to her. It was the one thing that she was, despite everything else in her life, good at.
Vanya would give just about anything to always feel as calm and confident as she did while auditioning for her solo. It was the first time people appeared to actually see her, and being acknowledged is huge for her - if somewhat poisoned by Leonard's part in her life. She was so starved for attention that she was willing to ignore warning signs, to isolate herself, because is it really isolation if you're with someone who cares about you?
(Yes. The answer is yes.)
And thanks to Leonard, her self-doubt and anxiety, particularly in regards to other people paying attention to her, is likely to be worse than usual. The first person to really pay attention to her in, well, pretty much her entire life was a psycho murderer out to turn her into a weapon to kill her family. What the fuck, right? How is she supposed to ever trust anyone? It's proof, in her mind, that she is either too unremarkable to be worthy of attention, or too powerful to ever be treated fairly. No one will ever see her for who she is, and why should they? Vanya doesn't even know who she is.
There's the girl who used to cry when her brothers stepped on ants; that is a part of her, the soft-hearted child she was, and there's the woman who gave into her most basic id, treating those brothers like ants themselves because consequences couldn't reach her. Both are true, and neither are solely true.
It's going to be more difficult, too, to face the world without her medication. That alone is going to be a struggle of anxiety and self-doubt: Vanya has never been given much reason to believe in herself. Grace was supportive, always, but Vanya was out of the Academy for longer than she was in it: Leonard was the only one in recent memory to encourage her to trust herself, and that was all a lie. V never wants to see a bottle of her pills again in her life, but the prospect of losing herself isn't exactly comforting, either. One way or the other, she loses, and it's going to be pretty hard to keep from completely retreating again. In game, she won't have even the orchestra or individual lessons to fall back on, making withdrawing even more potentially dangerous for her.
It's always hardest to admit the worst, weakest things about ourselves. Vanya is going to be desperately running from her memories of roughly the last episode of the season, lapsing into a sort of willful amnesia because facing what she did is going to be monumentally difficult. She's not a bad person, but she did things so terrible she would much rather forget they happened than face the cause within her. She can be fragile, and weak-willed, and easily manipulated; she is a monster, and a murderer, and probably a little unrepentant on both those fronts. She's petty and mean. She doesn't like any of these traits in herself, and can easily be swayed by someone who makes even the smallest of gestures with her. She wants to be seen, to be loved, to have her time in the spotlight both alone and as part of something, and all of these traits, the bad and the desperate, make her terribly easy to manipulate. That is probably the worst characteristic of all, because it means she will have an even harder time trusting good intentions, or her own instincts. She knows now that she's weak.
And she is, but everyone has their strengths. Despite herself, Vanya does have them.
Even after thinking she'd killed her sister, even though Leonard had painted himself to her as the only person she could trust or rely on, Vanya knew that she had to get back to her family. She needed them, even after what she'd done: they would understand, after all, she'd explain that it was an accident, that she would never mean to hurt Allison. They're a family.
It's a loyalty that can't be easily broken, though it is considerably strained, now. She walked back into the Academy after killing Leonard for using her, because the only people she had left in the world - the only people she ever had, really - were her family. She's manipulable, sure - but even given who her family is, even given how they were raised and how isolated she was, Vanya knows the meaning of family. You protect your family.
There were a lot of things leading up to Vanya's apocalypse - seriously, a lot. The final straws, though, were silence and betrayal. Silence is a bad thing for Vanya, now - and not the kind of silence that sitting home alone brings, she's used to that silence. She lives and breathes that kind of quiet. But real silence, Are You Afraid of the Dark kind of silence, throws her right back to being four and stuck in a cell, staring at the same gray walls day after day. And betrayal, well - it's one thing when the world outside snubs you. It hurts, yeah, especially when you try and still get turned out in the cold. But it's nothing compared to the people you trust turning on you. Vanya has had to deal with a lot of that lately, and she is not even remotely equipped to deal with it (see: Apocalypse). Leonard using her, Luther throwing her in the cell, her family trying - from her perspective - to kill her, is a whole lot of shit that Vanya doesn't know how to even begin dealing with. She's not equipped, and all her sour traits noted above just make her more prone to deal with it poorly.
Forgiveness is an amazing, beautiful thing, and it's not something V really knows how to do, despite the years she spent in therapy.
POWER: The White Violin - Everything under this umbrella counts as various kinds of sound manipulation. In absorbing sound, Vanya can convert it into energy. This has potentially infinite applications, and tends to be extremely destructive when used thanks to her deeply limited control. She's been shown to use this to perform telekinesis, create violent sound waves, affect the air and weather around her, and (if accidentally) create what was effectively an extremely powerful laser that was capable of destroying Earth's moon. This also covers a sense of enhanced hearing: Vanya is capable of picking out sounds that wouldn't normally be possible for normal people, like picking out a stream in a noisy forest or a wind chime many miles away. She focuses on the sound, and uses it to power her abilities.
This is a canon power, and I'd like to eventually circle back to a potential second, most likely of the absurd variety because what Vanya can do in canon is pretty over powered to begin with.
Vanya's powers are expansive, there's no doubt about that, and her biggest flaw is her lack of control. In game, she'll discover some limits (that she'll assume are normal, since she hasn't exactly learned much about her power). These limits will include a half-mile radius for explosive events: this will allow for potential plot at a later date, but won't decimate as much as canon shows her to be capable of.
In addition to the radial limit, V will feel extreme exhaustion (mental, emotional, physical) with any large-scale use of her abilities, potentially leading to unconsciousness. Essentially she will be able to practice her abilities to learn control, and she'll be able to defend herself if necessary, but out-of-control moments will limit destruction to the half-mile radius noted above.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE: [Vanya is so woefully anti-social media it's laughable. She has no idea how Instagram or Twitter works, and she deleted her Facebook years ago, after a failed attempt to reconnect with people she went to school with. It's okay; no one really noticed. She doesn't have that many friends, and trying to interact with them in person is hard enough. Why put all the uncertainties of not being able to tell whether or not someone hates you in between?
So when it comes to the network, she's struggling. The last thing in the world she wants to do is post to it, or even use it at all, really. Talking into the ether and praying someone talks back was pretty much the name of her childhood, and it's not something she's ever been eager to relive.
But this place is a fucking lot to take in, especially when you find out your whole family is around, and you were too, even if you don't remember it, and oh hey, try not to think about trying to kill your siblings or apparently ending the world. Vanya doesn't know how to deal with this, and she's seen enough OD notices from Klaus over the years to know that alcoholism is not a road she wants to wander down. So that really only leaves her with one option, doesn't it?]
Hi.
[Oh God, this is already awful. She tries to smile into the camera; it doesn't quite reach her eyes, and drops entirely pretty fast.]
I'm new here-- [Should she explain? What if the other her made friends? If she did, Vanya's about to be jealous of herself.] And I could, um, use some help?
[She hates every second of this, especially when she hears herself ask a question when it should be a statement. She fiddles off screen, picking at the hems of her sleeves.]
I had this...prescription, back home. [She can taste bile, and pauses a moment. No turning back now, no walking this back, don't think about how disgusted eleven-year-old Vanya would be with her right now.] It's really specific, and um, I'm not sure if I'm...looking for a doctor, or a pharmacist. How does that work, here?
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: Test Drive link!
FINAL NOTES:
NAME: Ari
AGE: 30
JOURNAL: nah
IM / EMAIL: redrobin133@gmail.com
PLURK:
RETURNING: New!
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Number 7/Vanya Hargreeves
CHARACTER AGE: 29
SERIES: The Umbrella Academy (Netflix)
CHRONOLOGY: End of s1
CLASS: Hero? Maybe? Villain? Honestly who tf knows, get a good talker on her and we'll see which way the wind blows. Tentatively saying Hero since she's not really out to destroy the world.
HOUSING: Randomize please! She could use the built in CR.
BACKGROUND: Vanya's world isn't too dissimilar from MoM's world, to be honest. Well, in one big way they differ: where Vanya comes from, there have only been six super heroes, and one of them has been dead for years and most of them have bowed out of that life. Super powers are real, in specific instances, and probably aliens, too, but who's left to confirm that? There's still mad science and all that crap, but mostly life is normal and everyday. It looks like a modern 2019 in almost all ways, except for the Umbrella Academy and all those pesky villains they grew up fighting.
For ease of reference and expanded detail, there's a decent wiki of her background.
PERSONALITY:
"If you're raised to believe that nothing about you is special, if the bench mark is extraordinary, what do you do if...you're not?"
Not a lot of families are like the Hargreeves. They're the only superheroes in the world, and they're hopefully the only kids bought and paid for by a weird old billionaire to raise as a world-saving, crime-fighting team rather than a family. Even with that, and even with Vanya being consistently on the outside looking in, the book she wrote five years ago is pretty cold by anyone's standards. It was a tell-all, soul-baring, deeply passive aggressive move that she still only sort of regrets, even after seeing how hurt by it most of her family was. It speaks a lot about who she is as a person, that all that hard work, all those late nights, all the pain she caused her four remaining siblings, was just so she could send a copy to her father in the blind hope that maybe he would read it and feel some semblance of guilt about what he did to the family - or, more importantly, to her.
It was selfish, incredibly so, and Vanya wrote it anyway, relishing in her all too brief moment in the spotlight. When that faded and her books sold for nothing, when the royalties stopped showing up, Vanya disappeared back into her life of anonymity where she existed in an unknowingly over-medicated fog, drifting through one day and into the next.
All of this points to her petty side, small, often buried by fear of saying the wrong thing (sometimes rightly), but very much present. There's more nuance to it, but even boiled down, it takes a certain kind of pettiness to kill your boyfriend for lying to you; to almost kill your family for trying to keep you from accidentally ending the world; to tear your childhood home down to its foundation because you have bad memories of the place. There is a distinctly childish part of her that combines particularly dangerously with her power. Trapped in a silent cell, panicking and claustrophobic, Vanya hallucinates a conversation with her younger self, and when she follows that particular childhood advice and embraces the roiling anger she'd been shrinking from, she gives into her id entirely; the childish desire to satisfy every passing whim takes over, regardless of consequences. Why shouldn't she go and play her solo? This is her night. What, just because she murdered the person she always thought of as her one friend? Her new consciousness had no place for logic like that.
None of the Hargreeves children were lavished with love or attention. They were trained by an eccentric, probably alien old man who didn't care for their emotional happiness at all. They all have their different chips on their shoulders, all grew into emotionally stunted adults with no real hope for a normal life. Vanya, who was left out of just about everything in their childhood, is just the same even with never having spent her early years fighting or training to fight crime; she's almost stealthier for it, having lived the closest thing to an average life of all her siblings. She's not the actress, though: while V might seem like she's got her shit wired, anyone giving her more than a cursory glance can see that's not true. Vanya has spent most of her life wandering through life in an overmedicated fog, pushing her way through life with her head down, the constant sense of anxiety kept at bay only by the bottle of pills in her pocket. It - not to mention everything else about her life - has left her deeply isolated, unable even to give her all to the things she loves.
When she was in her pre or early teens, she told her caretaker that she would learn to play her father's violin, to be extraordinary in the only way she could think to be. For a brief time, she was a virtuoso: but while her brothers and sister traveled around the world thwarting one villainous plan after another, Vanya learned what it was to peak early. Her playing improved quickly and then plateaued, and though she was good enough to spend a few years in the city orchestra, she never advanced beyond third chair. Third chair is not extraordinary. Only once she was off her meds was she able to reach her full potential - to put everything she was into her music. Everything including her powers, so it's probably not fair to stand her against a prodigy who's otherwise perfectly human, but it still stands: she fell in love with music because it was the only retreat left to her. It was the one thing that she was, despite everything else in her life, good at.
Vanya would give just about anything to always feel as calm and confident as she did while auditioning for her solo. It was the first time people appeared to actually see her, and being acknowledged is huge for her - if somewhat poisoned by Leonard's part in her life. She was so starved for attention that she was willing to ignore warning signs, to isolate herself, because is it really isolation if you're with someone who cares about you?
(Yes. The answer is yes.)
And thanks to Leonard, her self-doubt and anxiety, particularly in regards to other people paying attention to her, is likely to be worse than usual. The first person to really pay attention to her in, well, pretty much her entire life was a psycho murderer out to turn her into a weapon to kill her family. What the fuck, right? How is she supposed to ever trust anyone? It's proof, in her mind, that she is either too unremarkable to be worthy of attention, or too powerful to ever be treated fairly. No one will ever see her for who she is, and why should they? Vanya doesn't even know who she is.
There's the girl who used to cry when her brothers stepped on ants; that is a part of her, the soft-hearted child she was, and there's the woman who gave into her most basic id, treating those brothers like ants themselves because consequences couldn't reach her. Both are true, and neither are solely true.
It's going to be more difficult, too, to face the world without her medication. That alone is going to be a struggle of anxiety and self-doubt: Vanya has never been given much reason to believe in herself. Grace was supportive, always, but Vanya was out of the Academy for longer than she was in it: Leonard was the only one in recent memory to encourage her to trust herself, and that was all a lie. V never wants to see a bottle of her pills again in her life, but the prospect of losing herself isn't exactly comforting, either. One way or the other, she loses, and it's going to be pretty hard to keep from completely retreating again. In game, she won't have even the orchestra or individual lessons to fall back on, making withdrawing even more potentially dangerous for her.
It's always hardest to admit the worst, weakest things about ourselves. Vanya is going to be desperately running from her memories of roughly the last episode of the season, lapsing into a sort of willful amnesia because facing what she did is going to be monumentally difficult. She's not a bad person, but she did things so terrible she would much rather forget they happened than face the cause within her. She can be fragile, and weak-willed, and easily manipulated; she is a monster, and a murderer, and probably a little unrepentant on both those fronts. She's petty and mean. She doesn't like any of these traits in herself, and can easily be swayed by someone who makes even the smallest of gestures with her. She wants to be seen, to be loved, to have her time in the spotlight both alone and as part of something, and all of these traits, the bad and the desperate, make her terribly easy to manipulate. That is probably the worst characteristic of all, because it means she will have an even harder time trusting good intentions, or her own instincts. She knows now that she's weak.
And she is, but everyone has their strengths. Despite herself, Vanya does have them.
Even after thinking she'd killed her sister, even though Leonard had painted himself to her as the only person she could trust or rely on, Vanya knew that she had to get back to her family. She needed them, even after what she'd done: they would understand, after all, she'd explain that it was an accident, that she would never mean to hurt Allison. They're a family.
It's a loyalty that can't be easily broken, though it is considerably strained, now. She walked back into the Academy after killing Leonard for using her, because the only people she had left in the world - the only people she ever had, really - were her family. She's manipulable, sure - but even given who her family is, even given how they were raised and how isolated she was, Vanya knows the meaning of family. You protect your family.
There were a lot of things leading up to Vanya's apocalypse - seriously, a lot. The final straws, though, were silence and betrayal. Silence is a bad thing for Vanya, now - and not the kind of silence that sitting home alone brings, she's used to that silence. She lives and breathes that kind of quiet. But real silence, Are You Afraid of the Dark kind of silence, throws her right back to being four and stuck in a cell, staring at the same gray walls day after day. And betrayal, well - it's one thing when the world outside snubs you. It hurts, yeah, especially when you try and still get turned out in the cold. But it's nothing compared to the people you trust turning on you. Vanya has had to deal with a lot of that lately, and she is not even remotely equipped to deal with it (see: Apocalypse). Leonard using her, Luther throwing her in the cell, her family trying - from her perspective - to kill her, is a whole lot of shit that Vanya doesn't know how to even begin dealing with. She's not equipped, and all her sour traits noted above just make her more prone to deal with it poorly.
Forgiveness is an amazing, beautiful thing, and it's not something V really knows how to do, despite the years she spent in therapy.
POWER: The White Violin - Everything under this umbrella counts as various kinds of sound manipulation. In absorbing sound, Vanya can convert it into energy. This has potentially infinite applications, and tends to be extremely destructive when used thanks to her deeply limited control. She's been shown to use this to perform telekinesis, create violent sound waves, affect the air and weather around her, and (if accidentally) create what was effectively an extremely powerful laser that was capable of destroying Earth's moon. This also covers a sense of enhanced hearing: Vanya is capable of picking out sounds that wouldn't normally be possible for normal people, like picking out a stream in a noisy forest or a wind chime many miles away. She focuses on the sound, and uses it to power her abilities.
This is a canon power, and I'd like to eventually circle back to a potential second, most likely of the absurd variety because what Vanya can do in canon is pretty over powered to begin with.
Vanya's powers are expansive, there's no doubt about that, and her biggest flaw is her lack of control. In game, she'll discover some limits (that she'll assume are normal, since she hasn't exactly learned much about her power). These limits will include a half-mile radius for explosive events: this will allow for potential plot at a later date, but won't decimate as much as canon shows her to be capable of.
In addition to the radial limit, V will feel extreme exhaustion (mental, emotional, physical) with any large-scale use of her abilities, potentially leading to unconsciousness. Essentially she will be able to practice her abilities to learn control, and she'll be able to defend herself if necessary, but out-of-control moments will limit destruction to the half-mile radius noted above.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE: [Vanya is so woefully anti-social media it's laughable. She has no idea how Instagram or Twitter works, and she deleted her Facebook years ago, after a failed attempt to reconnect with people she went to school with. It's okay; no one really noticed. She doesn't have that many friends, and trying to interact with them in person is hard enough. Why put all the uncertainties of not being able to tell whether or not someone hates you in between?
So when it comes to the network, she's struggling. The last thing in the world she wants to do is post to it, or even use it at all, really. Talking into the ether and praying someone talks back was pretty much the name of her childhood, and it's not something she's ever been eager to relive.
But this place is a fucking lot to take in, especially when you find out your whole family is around, and you were too, even if you don't remember it, and oh hey, try not to think about trying to kill your siblings or apparently ending the world. Vanya doesn't know how to deal with this, and she's seen enough OD notices from Klaus over the years to know that alcoholism is not a road she wants to wander down. So that really only leaves her with one option, doesn't it?]
Hi.
[Oh God, this is already awful. She tries to smile into the camera; it doesn't quite reach her eyes, and drops entirely pretty fast.]
I'm new here-- [Should she explain? What if the other her made friends? If she did, Vanya's about to be jealous of herself.] And I could, um, use some help?
[She hates every second of this, especially when she hears herself ask a question when it should be a statement. She fiddles off screen, picking at the hems of her sleeves.]
I had this...prescription, back home. [She can taste bile, and pauses a moment. No turning back now, no walking this back, don't think about how disgusted eleven-year-old Vanya would be with her right now.] It's really specific, and um, I'm not sure if I'm...looking for a doctor, or a pharmacist. How does that work, here?
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: Test Drive link!
FINAL NOTES: