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luceti2011-12-29 07:59 pm
lucetimods) wrote in luceti2011-12-29 07:59 pm
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Applications
PLEASE USE THE NEW APPLICATION POST!
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If you want to canon-update your character, you must re-apply for said character with the relevant changes (history, personality, strengths and weaknesses, etc). For re-apps and canon updates, samples must be rewritten; we do not accept recycled samples.
The old application posts can be found on Livejournal, using the Applications tag.
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FANDOM CHARACTERS
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You may link to threads on the
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If a mod does not accept your app right away, please be patient. We all have our own personal and busy lives to attend to, and there might be a period of time when it might take us days to get to the applications. There is also the possibility that we do not know the canon you are applying for, and we need time to study it. So please be patient and we will work as fast as we can to get you an answer. If it has been a week with no word, please feel free to message Akai (guynophobic), Masamune (masamune3x), or Emily (spark memories) on AIM, or email them at their respective email addresses found in the
luceti profile page.Note: Applications are not always processed in the order they are received, due to the way they are divvied up between the moderators. If your application has been skipped, do not fret. Another mod will be getting to it soon enough. Additionally, you now have ONE WEEK to complete revision requests and Q&A's. You will be reminded of this deadline three days before it's up. After that week has passed, your application will no longer be considered for the current round. We apologize, but please be patient with us!
A note for applying here on Dreamwidth: Due to the character count limit being higher on DW, it might be tempting to toss the whole thing in one comment and leave it. However, we ask that you split the application up into at least two comments- the first containing your player information and (if you want) basic character info, the rest in another comment (or more, if you wish). This is to avoid having entire applications spanning the page and making it huge.
Splitting them up will make it easier for mods to process the applications. Thank you!
Spike | BtVS/Angel | Personality
Name: Spike (formerly known as William Pratt or “William the Bloody”)
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer / Angel
Gender: Male
Age: 154 (a vampire turned at the age of 30)
Time Period: Angel - a few hours into “After The Fall”
Wing Color: Black and Red
History: Wikia Link and Personal Timeline
Personality:
William Pratt is not a simple man. In many ways, Spike is a whole mess of contradictions that don’t quite add up. At face value, Spike is a tough guy. He dresses in black, takes care to make his hair appropriately gelled, and usually walks around with a scowl. He talks tough, is downright insulting, and will speak his mind to whoever he happens to be with. Brutally honest is what he is and he’s all too willing to remind a person of just how tough he is. Which is what makes it odd that under the right circumstances, he isn’t at all afraid to show his weaknesses. And not just the usual vampire variety. After being dumped by Drusilla, he was all too willing to admit to being ‘love’s bitch’. It’s a fact he wears it with a certain badge of pride. His ability to love is unique for a soulless vampire.
“You're not friends. You'll never be friends. You'll be in love 'til it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate each other 'til it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends. Real love isn't brains, children. It's blood. It's blood screaming inside you to work its will. I may be love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it.”
In general, Spike is downright unusual for a vampire. The average vampire mook is a pretty simple bloodsucker that bully the weak and flee from the strong. Even in his early days, Spike was more complex than that. As a moral, Spike was a pathetic upper class man who indulged in the pursuit of poetry and the love of a woman, while living with and taking care of his ailing mother. No one else took him seriously, save for his dear mother, and he faced harsh criticism. Being turned by Drusilla was ‘setting him free’. In her he found someone who recognized his hidden depths and potential. Even in his first day as a vampire, he was driven by love for his mother. With her failing health, he turned her so that she might live forever and join him and Drusilla as they roamed the land.
This is perhaps what makes Spike unique to other vampires. His mother held a small amount of contempt for him, which turned into cruel malice as a vampire. Spike held no such thoughts for his mother and loved her absolutely, though he was forced to kill her. Unlike Angelus, who immediately killed his own family, Spike wanted to save his. Interestingly, despite receiving harsh criticism for his poetry, we never seen any indication that Spike sought revenge on those who gave him trouble in life. As Spike later claims himself, it wasn’t Drusilla who turned him into a monster. That was Angelus. As an impressionable vampire, Spike modeled himself after Angelus, who pushed him into atrocities and fights. It turned out to be more than Angelus bargained for. Spike soon discovered he had a love of violence. Any fight he could get into. Normal humans weren’t quite enough for him.
This never quite changes. Spike loves a good brawl and a challenge. He craves it. When he learns about slayers, Spike has the opposite reaction of any sane vampire. He goes looking for one, instead of making sure to be nowhere near one. Not only that, but he succeeds in beating not one, but two slayers. As time goes by, Spike flings himself into trouble whenever he can. He forms a rivalry with Dracula, lives a life of danger, and eventually single Buffy out as the new target to add to his record. Ultimately he fails, largely due to impatience and the fact she has allies. But it doesn’t stop him from returning two years later to get revenge on Buffy. When he gets chipped by the government, it’s not human blood he misses the most. It’s the violence. Adam puts it best when he offers to ‘fix’ Spike:
“You feel smothered. Trapped like an animal. Pure in its ferocity, unable to actualize the feelings within. Clinging to one truth, like a flame, struggling to burn within an enclosed glass: that a beast this powerful cannot be contained. Inevitably, it will break free and savage the land again.”
Adam doesn’t quite do this. But when Spike learns that he can actually hurt vampires and other demons, he’s thrilled. It doesn’t matter that this puts him at odds with other demons he usually gets along with. The fact he can fight again is so liberating to him, that he tries to rally Buffy’s friends into fighting with him. Besides his developing love for Buffy, it’s one of the major turning point in his relationship with the Scoobies. He has a purpose in being able to fight. So when he is able to fight again, he is all too willing to have at it again. When he later is resurrected and loses his corporeal form, he takes the few opportunities to fight when he can. While possessing a necromancer, he exchanges a few blows with Angel ‘for the hell of it’. Partially because of his relationship with Angel, but partially because he just needed to let off steam. He is all too willing to spar with Illyria, despite her superior abilities, just because he savors the challenge. It doesn’t matter that she’s better. He’s quite proud of himself for adapting to her abilities.
“What's this? Sittin' around watching the telly while there's evil still afoot? It's not very industrious of you. I say we go out there and kick a little demon ass! What, can't go without your Buffy, is that it? Let's find her! She is the chosen one, after all. Come on! Vampires! Grrr! Nasty! Let's annihilate them, for justice, and for... the safety of puppies... and Christmas, right? Let's fight that evil! Let's kill something! Oh, come on!”
Like many vampires, Spike is rather attached to the world. It’s not an unusual aspect for vampires, though Spike is probably more indulgent about it than others. For most vampires, warm human blood is as good as it gets. But Spike likes more than that. He’ll add a little spice to his blood for flavor, or Weetabix for texture. He likes his pig’s blood with a little otter for the taste. And even though it gives him no sustenance, Spike has a large appetite for any other sort of food placed in front of him. He watches television and is quite annoyed if he misses ‘Passions’, a soap operate that he likes to watch during the day. Despite promoting himself as tough and scary, he can be downright domestic at times. Even before getting chipped, he befriended Joyce Summers simply because she would listen to his problems and treat him like a normal chap.
“Joyce was the only one of the lot of you that I could stand. . . . I liked the lady. . . . She was decent. Didn't put on airs. Always had a nice cuppa for me. And she never treated me like a freak.”
Spike developed this relationship with several people, though it’s worth noting that he primarily gets along best with women. Among Buffy’s friends, he never stopped being antagonistic with Angel, Giles and Xander. He befriends Dawn, Willow, and Tara. Among Angel’s group, it’s Fred he bonds with first. In general, he just gets on well with people who give him a chance. In particular, it’s Dawn and Fred who become important to him. Not because they are romantic interests. It’s because they know what he is, but it doesn’t bother them. With Dawn, he becomes her protector when Buffy isn’t around, even when the object of his affection dies. For Fred, he’s touched enough by her attempts to give him corporeal form again that he ultimately decides to keep working for Angel Investigations as he reasons it’s ‘what she would have wanted’.
What really drives Spike is people. There are a number of people that drive him forward and act as his primary motivation. As mentioned before, his mother was the one to drive him when he was still human. As a vampire, his focus was divided by two vampires. Drusilla and Angel. For the former, she was everything to him. She was the one who dragged him out of medicocrity and made him ‘great’. He recognized she was a bit bonkers, but he was madly in love with her. Not just attracted to her. What they shared was real and true love that is so distinctly unique among vampires, who typically are incapable of feelings of empathy or concern for anyone other than themselves. But for them it was real, especially on Spike’s part, twisted and strange as it was at times. When Drusilla eventually left Spike because of her visions of him and Buffy, he was utterly heartbroken and devastated, resorting at first to a love spell to get her back, before deciding to try and ‘torture’ her into loving him again.
“You never knew the real me. Too busy tryin' to see your own reflection, praying there was someone as disgusting as you in the world, so you could stand to live with yourself. Take a long look, hero. I'm nothing like you.”
And then there was Angelus. Spike claims himself that while Drusilla may have sired him, Angelus is the one that twisted him into a monster. In the flashbacks, it is shown that Angelus spent a lot of time pushing and prodding Spike to go beyond the usual vampire bloodlust. It wasn’t enough to simply eat to survive. Angelus instilled in him a love of violence and death. In some ways, he emotionally abused Spike as a vampire. After finding out that Spike truly considered Drusilla the love of his life, Angelus went behind his back to sleep with her and then taunt Spike over it. Ultimately he succeeded. After Angelus received a soul, Spike continued his ‘legacy’ by gaining a reputation as an incredibly violent vampire. His own accomplishments may not have been as sadistic as Angelus, but claiming two Slayers certainly made him just as respectable in the demon world.
Fast forward a hundred years and the two outright dislike each other. Even though Spike has a soul now, the two are competitive to the point of coming to blows at times. When it became apparent both of them qualified for a ‘vampire with a soul’ prophecy, Spike became intent on beating Angel. Not because he wanted the perks of the prophecy, but just to beat Angel. Though he doesn’t like to admit it and claims otherwise, Spike is constantly living in Angel’s shadow. And he hates it. Whereas Angel had the role of reluctant hero thrust upon him, Spike eagerly embraces it even before he receives his soul. Because Angel is working for the law firm, Wolfram & Hart, it became even easier to paint himself as ‘better’ than Angel, because he was still working solo on the streets to do good. But for the most part, his relationship with Angel is all about proving who is the better man: as a champion, as a demon, and to Buffy. Yet despite that, the two find a bit of solidarity with each other and make a decent team together. After all, their shared experiences and unique status as souled vampires make them unique. Both of them have to struggle with the guilty consciences of what they did before gaining their souls.
And then there’s Buffy. She plays the final role in his development. At first as a ‘big bad’, she was the one to foil his reputation as a fearsome and unstoppable vampire. He had to work with her more than once and although he didn’t realize it at first, he liked working with her. When he was finally chipped and had no choice, this started to become a pattern. At first he just worked with her for a bit of money. But over time, he started to realize it was more than just him tolerating her. For him it was a horrifying realization that he was in love with his sworn enemy. Because Spike knew himself too well. Being in love with someone wasn’t just something he could ‘get over’. It was at odds with his evil self. Over time he was willing to accept these feelings and went from antagonist to friend. Everything he did was to get in Buffy’s good graces. At first, anyway. Even after Buffy died, he stuck around to help her friends out of his love for her. When it became apparent that what made him evil wasn’t good enough for her, he fought hard to win a soul to be good enough for her.
“I am talking about something primal. Right? Savagery. Brutal animal instinct.”
For Spike, that’s what it’s all about. Though smart, he’s not an intellect. For him it’s all about the moment. He’s a passionate man in all things. As a man, he expressed it through poetry, but as a vampire he has found so many other ways to express himself. He’s not ashamed to expose this part of himself. He believes wholeheartedly that nothing is more powerful than blood, as it separates the living from the dead, and is at the heart of love and passion. Even in an argument with Angel, he backs ‘cavemen’ because they represent pure savagery and instinct, which is how Spike operates. For everything Spike does, whether its falling in love or being too impatient to act on a plan, it all comes down to that one thing. Spike is a caged beast. He fights the good fight for the ‘right’ side, but he doesn’t do it for the same reasons as others would. He’s a Champion, but just because he wants to be. Spike does what Spike wants to do.