application
the original app for cnc.
,[PLAYER]
NAME/NICK: Ryuu
JOURNAL: tenshi_ryuu
IM: Book of Mirage
E-MAIL: ryuutenshi@gmail.com
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Johnny Truant
FANDOM: House of Leaves
CHRONOLOGY: After the end of the book (probably?)
BACKGROUND: The first thing you need to know is that this was very difficult to put together; Johnny routinely lies about his past, present, and future, and what I've put together here was gleaned from reading the damn book over and over again for my senior seminar. And I am still not sure if I'm right. Any cases where I go (AT LEAST, I THINK SO?!) is because Mark Danielewski is EXTREMELY AMBIGOUS at points, often deliberately. I'm really sorry about this, guys, I've done my best without re-reading the entire book and doing this point by point.
Anyway. Johnny Truant was born in 1971, presumably somewhere in California to Pelfina Lievre and Donnie... something. At the age of four, Pelfina accidentally dropped a wok full of cooking oil on him, scarring his arms for life. In 1978, when Johnny was 7, she tried to kill him by strangling him, maybe, except it's hard to tell because the novel is very bizarrely written. I THINK she did. Maybe. Regardless of whether she did or didn't she was shortly afterwards transferred to the Whalestone Institute, an insane asylum. Two years later, Johnny's father died in a truck crash.
Johnny of course was then shuffled between a number of foster homes, before finally being put into one with a crazy military motherfucker named Raymond. Raymond (apparently?) beat the shit out of Johnny several times; and during this time Johnny became very violent, beating people up at school.
Shortly afterwards, Raymond sends Johnny to Alaska to work in a canning plant; again, whether Johnny is actually lying here or not is subject to some debate. He tells several confusing sob stories about this time, notably one about a sinking ship, but again, lord knows what the fuck any of his ramblings actually mean.
Eventually, Johnny spends a year or so in Europe; again, this is difficult to actually date, as it's more implied than written out. He may or may not be the author of the Pelican Poems; who really knows.
Some other stuff happens to him. Probably. Now I'm getting to the important bit I PROMISE.
See, Johnny eventually gets a job as a tattoo artist, except he's no good at it and so ends up just making needles. He lives in an apartment somewhere in Los Angeles and hangs out with a druggie haircutter named Lude.
One day, Lude tells him that a man who lived downstairs, Zampano, is dead, and for some reason they go and look around the dead man's apartment before the police come to clean out the old guy's stuff (since Zampano had no relatives, no one can come to claim his things.) He finds, in the back room, a trunk full of paper.
This trunk ruins his life.
The trunk contains the manuscript of something called the Navidson Record, a literary analysis of a film which (probably) does not exist, about a family in a house that cannot exist. Johnny takes it upon himself to start editing this text, putting it together for publication.
And it slowly starts to drive him mad. At first it's small things, but then he starts hallucinating about a beast stalking him down dark corridors, starts to fear that his walls will expand and collapse around him.
Oh, and there's some stuff about him fucking a lot of women who were also involved with Zampano and about some stripper named Thumper who he thinks is really hot. And some girl named Kyrie whose boyfriend he pisses off. And leather pants.
So yeah.
Johnny eventually stops showering or even leaving his house, or seeing anyone, and then gets evicted because of this crazy book he's trying to edit. He wanders around for a while before presumably somehow publishing it and then forgetting that he did so, somehow, and then later meeting some people who had read it and talk to him about it. He apparently feels a bit better after this.
Maybe.
He could just be lying to us all.
PERSONALITY: Truant is crazy. Bonkers. Nutty. He suffers from what is probably undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia and probably not a giant monster stalking him. Probably. He's also a bit of a dick who enjoys messing with people's heads. He's got no respect at all for pretension, and while on the surface he'll take your shit on the inside he'll be merrily engaging in revenge fantasies which he never actually acts on.
Johnny is also a compulsive and chronic liar - at any given time half of what comes out of his mouth is complete bullshit. Even if he ISN'T lying, he tends to say the most inappropriate thing which comes into his head, apparently just to freak people out.
That said, he is capable of kindness, and even of genuine poetry. He's far from stupid, being versed in classical literature and even, apparently, Old English.
CLASS: Designated Protagonist.
SUPERHERO NAME: ... Thumper. No, probably the Minoutar is best.
ALTER EGO: Johnny will try very hard to get a job as a tattoo artist, which was his first job, but probably not do very well due to his powers (see below) being extraordinarily inconvenient for that profession. He will likely once again be reduced to needle making, cleaning, and ink mixing.
Or maybe he'll take up typing.
POWER: Courier Font: Everything Johnny writes or types automatically shows up in Courier font. Everything. Once upon a time this wasn't true (he DEFINETLY changes some of Zampano's writing to suit his own purposes by his own admission) but here he'll have no such luck. Furthermore, any time Johnny writes the word house it shows up in blue; the word minoutar in red, and things he tries to erase with nothing less than either a bit shredder or India ink, tar, and a lighter will show up as red struck text. Yes, that means that most people can just happily read his private thoughts unless he, you know, doesn't put them down.
I do understand that in the book, only what Zampano writes appears in red struck text since it's Johnny revealing what Zampano wanted to cut out; but I felt this would be an amusing thing to attach to Johnny's power.
No Fourth Wall: The fourth wall doesn't exist for him. Johnny is aware that Cape and Cowl is a Livejournal RP on some level; on the most basic level he can see icons and usernames. With permission, he can see struck text, title text, have awareness of events that happen in open RP posts and memes in goshdarnspam, and will confuse characters with each other based on who plays them (thus, to Johnny, Edgeworth is the same person as Godzilla). He may occasionally complain about being at the whim of a bored college student.
NOTE that this doesn't usually translate into the normal kind of fourth wall break! Johnny doesn't show very much knowledge of pop culture in canon - The Simpsons is mentioned, as is Calvin and Hobbes (looking at YOU, Calvin) but the book isn't very big on pop culture wallbreak.
... if you're from classical literature though, watch the fuck out. Also, really well known characters (batman, spiderman, Godzilla, etc)
AS A FINAL ASIDE CONCERNING FOURTH WALL BREAKAGE - Note that the book House of Leaves exists within Johnny's canon in two forms - one is a book that Will Navidson burns whilst trapped within the house; one is implied to be the first edition of the actual book, which Johnny himself reads and claims he didn't know he published (!). THEREFORE, even if House of Leaves didn't exist in the City before (likely, since Johnny is from Los Angeles and LA as we know it doesn't exist here), it does now, as the book it is in real life. Characters are free to pick it up and read it; Johnny may even talk about 'that book I edited'. Yes, this is the exact opposite of the normal rule. Enjoy your literature, CnC.
Detect Leather Pants: Johnny is instantly and immediately aware of who in the city is wearing leather pants, what kind of leather it is, and what sort of zipper the pants have.
COMMUNITY POST SAMPLE:
I never should have decided to clean up.
The book was published, it was out; it was over; I had escaped the labyrinth of my own self, I knew, now, that I was free, free to go, free to walk out of my door without fear and to live my own life, free to, I don't know. Free to something, even if I could never go back to the way I was I knew I was unbound from the threat of black hallways, from the glare of shadowed eyes from black corners. Lude was dead and with him my old life was dead but it didn't matter, I knew the house could no longer find me.
And I was also completely, utterly wrong.
I was taking off the last of the duct tape from my windows, peeling it back, feeling the sticky gum on my fingers when I smelled it - again, that familiar acrid scent, the knowledge that something ancient and terrible was behind me, fangs bared, teeth extended, ready to pounce, ready to rip my throat out and drink deeply of my blood, devour my flesh and undo me; only no, it wasn't a monster this time, it was the wall, and that was perhaps worse, the knowledge that this gaping void, this mouth of madness had opened up behind me, an endless black abyss of nothing into which I might fall forever, head over heels (that never made sense to me - isn't your head usually over your heels? When you stand, that's where your head is, so why should "head over heels" mean being disoriented, being lost, why should it be so commonly a metaphor for love when logically it should mean standing up straight and tall, knowing where you are, facing ahead, but I guess maybe the implication is that we're all mad, that it doesn't matter if we're standing up straight because we're all falling anyway, regardless of if our heals are over our heads) into nothingness, over and over again, never reaching the bottom, never feeling that blessed smack followed by an even deeper darkness, that undiscovered country from whose born no traveler returns or some other Shakespearian bullshit, I don't know, but what I do know is that the fourth wall was gone and I was lost.
Darkness.
And then.
Light.
Blinding, searingly bright, like operating table lights, and I thought to myself, "This is it, Johnny, you're finally done, cut off; at last it's over and you're standing at, I don't know, somewhere, elsewhere, you've been through the darkness and then-"
And then some average joe, or maybe it was a girl, I can't remember, regardless some pretty ordinary guy hands me a pair of tags and says "Welcome to the City, hero."
Hero? I have to laugh, because if there's anything I'm not, it's a hero. Villain, maybe; monster, definitely; freak, absolutely; hero? Please. Tights just don't show off my ass like they do for some people.
All I know is this - that somehow the house finally caught up with me. The last wall is gone.
THIRD PERSON: The shot opens up with a man standing on a platform. He is alone, isolated by the light shining from the ceiling; the platform around him looks almost cheesily fake, something out of a bad superhero movie, or a science fiction film.
Though the camera is clearly above and behind him, looking down at the back of his head, he turns around to face it.
"... that's different," he says.
He runs a hand across his head - once bald, now with a short fuzzy stubble, like scrub grass, growing across it. His arms are bare, revealing coiling, labyrinthine burn scars which run from the insides of his thumbs up to his elbows.
"Third person, I mean. It's not my thing. I'm a first-person sort of guy, I mean, life is in first person perspective. There isn't a little camera that floats along behind your head, recording everything you do - no matter what Will Navidson, no, he doesn't exist, no matter what Zampano seems to think - watching your every move, looking at you, constantly, consistently, ever-present."
He shrugs, then leans up against one of the railings around the platform, still looking intently into the lens of the camera. "Stop saying there's a camera there. There isn't one; I'm looking at the empty air, and I'm not Navidson with my Hi-8's that have unlimited batteries and you're not Zampano, no matter how much you want to try."
He smiles, a rueful, crooked smile, broken teeth flashing in the pale light.
"Anyway I guess it's not ever-present and I guess I'm used to mood-whiplash, to interruptions, shifts from dry third-person Classic prose straight into in-your-face first person stream of consciousness bullshit - bullshit which you, as a pretentious English major, immediately buy - unless you're not an English major, in which case, sorry, my mistake, but isn't that what most of you are, claiming that this is practice when really you're just trying, like me, to drown your sorrows in the unreal, the surreal, to cut yourself off and disconnect, tune out, plug in, only no, that was always Lude, I was trying to look for something real and concrete before I realized that well... it doesn't exist."
,[PLAYER]
NAME/NICK: Ryuu
JOURNAL: tenshi_ryuu
IM: Book of Mirage
E-MAIL: ryuutenshi@gmail.com
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Johnny Truant
FANDOM: House of Leaves
CHRONOLOGY: After the end of the book (probably?)
BACKGROUND: The first thing you need to know is that this was very difficult to put together; Johnny routinely lies about his past, present, and future, and what I've put together here was gleaned from reading the damn book over and over again for my senior seminar. And I am still not sure if I'm right. Any cases where I go (AT LEAST, I THINK SO?!) is because Mark Danielewski is EXTREMELY AMBIGOUS at points, often deliberately. I'm really sorry about this, guys, I've done my best without re-reading the entire book and doing this point by point.
Anyway. Johnny Truant was born in 1971, presumably somewhere in California to Pelfina Lievre and Donnie... something. At the age of four, Pelfina accidentally dropped a wok full of cooking oil on him, scarring his arms for life. In 1978, when Johnny was 7, she tried to kill him by strangling him, maybe, except it's hard to tell because the novel is very bizarrely written. I THINK she did. Maybe. Regardless of whether she did or didn't she was shortly afterwards transferred to the Whalestone Institute, an insane asylum. Two years later, Johnny's father died in a truck crash.
Johnny of course was then shuffled between a number of foster homes, before finally being put into one with a crazy military motherfucker named Raymond. Raymond (apparently?) beat the shit out of Johnny several times; and during this time Johnny became very violent, beating people up at school.
Shortly afterwards, Raymond sends Johnny to Alaska to work in a canning plant; again, whether Johnny is actually lying here or not is subject to some debate. He tells several confusing sob stories about this time, notably one about a sinking ship, but again, lord knows what the fuck any of his ramblings actually mean.
Eventually, Johnny spends a year or so in Europe; again, this is difficult to actually date, as it's more implied than written out. He may or may not be the author of the Pelican Poems; who really knows.
Some other stuff happens to him. Probably. Now I'm getting to the important bit I PROMISE.
See, Johnny eventually gets a job as a tattoo artist, except he's no good at it and so ends up just making needles. He lives in an apartment somewhere in Los Angeles and hangs out with a druggie haircutter named Lude.
One day, Lude tells him that a man who lived downstairs, Zampano, is dead, and for some reason they go and look around the dead man's apartment before the police come to clean out the old guy's stuff (since Zampano had no relatives, no one can come to claim his things.) He finds, in the back room, a trunk full of paper.
This trunk ruins his life.
The trunk contains the manuscript of something called the Navidson Record, a literary analysis of a film which (probably) does not exist, about a family in a house that cannot exist. Johnny takes it upon himself to start editing this text, putting it together for publication.
And it slowly starts to drive him mad. At first it's small things, but then he starts hallucinating about a beast stalking him down dark corridors, starts to fear that his walls will expand and collapse around him.
Oh, and there's some stuff about him fucking a lot of women who were also involved with Zampano and about some stripper named Thumper who he thinks is really hot. And some girl named Kyrie whose boyfriend he pisses off. And leather pants.
So yeah.
Johnny eventually stops showering or even leaving his house, or seeing anyone, and then gets evicted because of this crazy book he's trying to edit. He wanders around for a while before presumably somehow publishing it and then forgetting that he did so, somehow, and then later meeting some people who had read it and talk to him about it. He apparently feels a bit better after this.
Maybe.
He could just be lying to us all.
PERSONALITY: Truant is crazy. Bonkers. Nutty. He suffers from what is probably undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia and probably not a giant monster stalking him. Probably. He's also a bit of a dick who enjoys messing with people's heads. He's got no respect at all for pretension, and while on the surface he'll take your shit on the inside he'll be merrily engaging in revenge fantasies which he never actually acts on.
Johnny is also a compulsive and chronic liar - at any given time half of what comes out of his mouth is complete bullshit. Even if he ISN'T lying, he tends to say the most inappropriate thing which comes into his head, apparently just to freak people out.
That said, he is capable of kindness, and even of genuine poetry. He's far from stupid, being versed in classical literature and even, apparently, Old English.
CLASS: Designated Protagonist.
SUPERHERO NAME: ... Thumper. No, probably the Minoutar is best.
ALTER EGO: Johnny will try very hard to get a job as a tattoo artist, which was his first job, but probably not do very well due to his powers (see below) being extraordinarily inconvenient for that profession. He will likely once again be reduced to needle making, cleaning, and ink mixing.
Or maybe he'll take up typing.
POWER: Courier Font: Everything Johnny writes or types automatically shows up in Courier font. Everything. Once upon a time this wasn't true (he DEFINETLY changes some of Zampano's writing to suit his own purposes by his own admission) but here he'll have no such luck. Furthermore, any time Johnny writes the word house it shows up in blue; the word minoutar in red, and things he tries to erase with nothing less than either a bit shredder or India ink, tar, and a lighter will show up as red struck text. Yes, that means that most people can just happily read his private thoughts unless he, you know, doesn't put them down.
I do understand that in the book, only what Zampano writes appears in red struck text since it's Johnny revealing what Zampano wanted to cut out; but I felt this would be an amusing thing to attach to Johnny's power.
No Fourth Wall: The fourth wall doesn't exist for him. Johnny is aware that Cape and Cowl is a Livejournal RP on some level; on the most basic level he can see icons and usernames. With permission, he can see struck text, title text, have awareness of events that happen in open RP posts and memes in goshdarnspam, and will confuse characters with each other based on who plays them (thus, to Johnny, Edgeworth is the same person as Godzilla). He may occasionally complain about being at the whim of a bored college student.
NOTE that this doesn't usually translate into the normal kind of fourth wall break! Johnny doesn't show very much knowledge of pop culture in canon - The Simpsons is mentioned, as is Calvin and Hobbes (looking at YOU, Calvin) but the book isn't very big on pop culture wallbreak.
... if you're from classical literature though, watch the fuck out. Also, really well known characters (batman, spiderman, Godzilla, etc)
AS A FINAL ASIDE CONCERNING FOURTH WALL BREAKAGE - Note that the book House of Leaves exists within Johnny's canon in two forms - one is a book that Will Navidson burns whilst trapped within the house; one is implied to be the first edition of the actual book, which Johnny himself reads and claims he didn't know he published (!). THEREFORE, even if House of Leaves didn't exist in the City before (likely, since Johnny is from Los Angeles and LA as we know it doesn't exist here), it does now, as the book it is in real life. Characters are free to pick it up and read it; Johnny may even talk about 'that book I edited'. Yes, this is the exact opposite of the normal rule. Enjoy your literature, CnC.
Detect Leather Pants: Johnny is instantly and immediately aware of who in the city is wearing leather pants, what kind of leather it is, and what sort of zipper the pants have.
COMMUNITY POST SAMPLE:
I never should have decided to clean up.
The book was published, it was out; it was over; I had escaped the labyrinth of my own self, I knew, now, that I was free, free to go, free to walk out of my door without fear and to live my own life, free to, I don't know. Free to something, even if I could never go back to the way I was I knew I was unbound from the threat of black hallways, from the glare of shadowed eyes from black corners. Lude was dead and with him my old life was dead but it didn't matter, I knew the house could no longer find me.
And I was also completely, utterly wrong.
I was taking off the last of the duct tape from my windows, peeling it back, feeling the sticky gum on my fingers when I smelled it - again, that familiar acrid scent, the knowledge that something ancient and terrible was behind me, fangs bared, teeth extended, ready to pounce, ready to rip my throat out and drink deeply of my blood, devour my flesh and undo me; only no, it wasn't a monster this time, it was the wall, and that was perhaps worse, the knowledge that this gaping void, this mouth of madness had opened up behind me, an endless black abyss of nothing into which I might fall forever, head over heels (that never made sense to me - isn't your head usually over your heels? When you stand, that's where your head is, so why should "head over heels" mean being disoriented, being lost, why should it be so commonly a metaphor for love when logically it should mean standing up straight and tall, knowing where you are, facing ahead, but I guess maybe the implication is that we're all mad, that it doesn't matter if we're standing up straight because we're all falling anyway, regardless of if our heals are over our heads) into nothingness, over and over again, never reaching the bottom, never feeling that blessed smack followed by an even deeper darkness, that undiscovered country from whose born no traveler returns or some other Shakespearian bullshit, I don't know, but what I do know is that the fourth wall was gone and I was lost.
Darkness.
And then.
Light.
Blinding, searingly bright, like operating table lights, and I thought to myself, "This is it, Johnny, you're finally done, cut off; at last it's over and you're standing at, I don't know, somewhere, elsewhere, you've been through the darkness and then-"
And then some average joe, or maybe it was a girl, I can't remember, regardless some pretty ordinary guy hands me a pair of tags and says "Welcome to the City, hero."
Hero? I have to laugh, because if there's anything I'm not, it's a hero. Villain, maybe; monster, definitely; freak, absolutely; hero? Please. Tights just don't show off my ass like they do for some people.
All I know is this - that somehow the house finally caught up with me. The last wall is gone.
THIRD PERSON: The shot opens up with a man standing on a platform. He is alone, isolated by the light shining from the ceiling; the platform around him looks almost cheesily fake, something out of a bad superhero movie, or a science fiction film.
Though the camera is clearly above and behind him, looking down at the back of his head, he turns around to face it.
"... that's different," he says.
He runs a hand across his head - once bald, now with a short fuzzy stubble, like scrub grass, growing across it. His arms are bare, revealing coiling, labyrinthine burn scars which run from the insides of his thumbs up to his elbows.
"Third person, I mean. It's not my thing. I'm a first-person sort of guy, I mean, life is in first person perspective. There isn't a little camera that floats along behind your head, recording everything you do - no matter what Will Navidson, no, he doesn't exist, no matter what Zampano seems to think - watching your every move, looking at you, constantly, consistently, ever-present."
He shrugs, then leans up against one of the railings around the platform, still looking intently into the lens of the camera. "Stop saying there's a camera there. There isn't one; I'm looking at the empty air, and I'm not Navidson with my Hi-8's that have unlimited batteries and you're not Zampano, no matter how much you want to try."
He smiles, a rueful, crooked smile, broken teeth flashing in the pale light.
"Anyway I guess it's not ever-present and I guess I'm used to mood-whiplash, to interruptions, shifts from dry third-person Classic prose straight into in-your-face first person stream of consciousness bullshit - bullshit which you, as a pretentious English major, immediately buy - unless you're not an English major, in which case, sorry, my mistake, but isn't that what most of you are, claiming that this is practice when really you're just trying, like me, to drown your sorrows in the unreal, the surreal, to cut yourself off and disconnect, tune out, plug in, only no, that was always Lude, I was trying to look for something real and concrete before I realized that well... it doesn't exist."