(no subject)
User Name/Nick: Cathy
User LJ: a_respondent
AIM/IM: stoptheworld
E-mail: michaelheroin@gmail.com
Other Characters: Prefect, Profit, Valmont,
Character Name: Mr Wednesday (aka: Hooded One, Glad-of-War, Grimnir, Third, Grim Raider, One-eyed, Highest, True-Guesser, Gondlir Wand-bearer All Father, who has as many names as there are winds, as many titles are there are ways to die. Odin? Odin, Odin, ODINNNNNNNN)
Series: American Gods
Age: As old as his tongue, and a few months older than his teeth.
From When?: I’m gonna say from the end of the book, when his scheme is foxed and he doesn’t have enough death or belief left in America with which to rebuild himself.
Inmate/Warden: Inmaaaaate. There’s a brief meeting between the main character of the book, and the Odin of Norway, he is VERY VERY Different to Mr Wednesday, and he is pretty quick to claim that he never did the things that Wednesday did. The subtext being that while Wednesday WAS Odin, the stuff he did wasn’t intrinsic to his nature as a deity, THEREFORE, it was old school bad person making bad decisions.
Abilities/Powers: Mr Wednesday knows eighteen charms that he learned while hanging in the World Tree, AND HERE THEY ARE:
1) A charm that can cure harm and sickness and will lift the grief from the heart of the grieving.
2) A charm that will heal with a touch
3) A charm that will turn aside the weapons of an enemy
4) A charm to free himself of all bonds and locks
5) A charm to catch an arrow in flight and take now harm from it
6) Spells sent to hurt him will hurt only the sender
7) He can quench a fire merely by looking at it.
8) If a man hates him, he can win his friendship.
9) He can sing the wind to sleep and calm a storm long enough to bring a ship to shore
10) He can dispel witches, spin them around in the skies so that they can’t find their way home again.
11) If he sings while battle rages, he can take warriors through the tumult unscathed and bring them safely back to their hearth and home.
12) If he sees a hanged man, he can bring him down from the gallows and have him whisper what secrets he remembers.
13) If he sprinkles water on a child’s head, that child will not fall in battle.
14) He knows the names of the gods, every damned one of them.
15) If he has a dream of power, of glory and wisdom, he can make people believe that dream
16) If he needs love he can turn the mind and heart of any woman
17) No woman he ever wants will ever want another.
18) A TERRIBLE SECRET THAT NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW BUT HIM.
INITIALLY, I’m going to ask that he is allowed to keep all these charms other than “No woman he ever wants will ever want another”, (because lol that shit is crazy in an rp setting), on the basis that he CAN’T use them easily. One of the big themes in American Gods is that the gods are power starved, and that while they TECHNICALLY CAN still do these things, without worship or sacrifice, the energy which they expend on them is extremely hard to recoup, so they don’t do them a lot.
Wednesday takes his power from a number of sources, the main one being blood sacrifice. Deaths dedicated to him in battle are especially potent, but human or animal sacrifices are also good. He also takes power from prayers, worship, the telling of his stories and the casting of his runes, non-blood sacrifices, of meat or ale or crops, getting laid (especially if it’s with a virgin. omnomnom that’s a kind of sacrifice), and a few other things.
SO BASICALLY, while some of his powers are ingrained (knowing all the gods names, knowing his terrible secret, spells that are cast on him backfiring) most of them (escaping from bonds and locks, making people believe his dreams, dispelling witches, etc) take a shitload of power which he doesn’t really have, and so would basically only get used in dire emergencies, or for specific plot purposes if he’s in the process of running a scam or whatnot.
OTHER THINGS: Wednesday has a couple of other powers that aren’t on this list, but that he uses once or twice in the book. When he meets someone, he can see all the crimes they’ve ever committed, in Norse Mythology he traded his eye for full knowledge of the past, present and future, but because the Barge is basically a place where time and destiny is in flux, I figure it’s safe to say this power would have had it’s butt kicked. With player permission, he might get either strong feelings of what characters have done in the past, or with mod permission, he might get brief, unclear visions of the future, but that would be it.
ALSO, he can go ‘backstage’ as he puts it. Basically, he can travel from the material realm into it’s immaterial counterpart. Again, I’d kinda like him to keep this at first, since he wouldn’t be able to use it to escape the Barge, he could just... use it to temporarily go there to hang out. Time passes a lot faster there, and a few hours backstage can be a few weeks in the real world, so it seems like a HANDY DEVICE TO KEEP for hiatuses and whatnot.
All of these powers could theoretically be nerfed by a warden of course!
Personality:
On the surface of it, Mr Wednesday is slick, personable, and relaxed. He has an easy patter, and comes across as a good natured old con. With strangers, his mannerisms are flattering, familiar, and slightly roguish, as if he might have a couple of hustles going on in the background, but he isn’t really trying particularly hard to hide that fact. He’s good at reading the tone of a conversation, and can play his cards a little fast and loose when it comes to risking offending people, it seems that conversation is one of those many areas of life in which Wednesday is ruled by what he can get away with. He can at times, be extremely forward and pushy, even bawdy and coarse. If he is attracted to someone, then he can be downright lecherous about it, and will make no secret of his desires.
In pursuit of getting what he wants from people, he’s just as adept at exploiting the fact that strangers don’t know him, as he is to exploit his knowledge of old friends. He prefers to work as part of a pair, so it is not unheard of for him to send his partner in crime off to investigate people, to find out what makes them tick, so that by the time he steps in to make his pitch to them, he knows more or less exactly which buttons to push. At his heart? Wednesday is a con man, he’s an old fraud who delights in the artistry of a well performed con. He’s patient, focused, and ruthless, and while he might wax philosophical about how no one is really innocent and how deserving the targets of his scams are, but in reality, he’s guided by necessity, greed, and the thrill of it. He doesn’t really care if what he does is right or wrong anymore.
Wednesday makes strong friendships, often forged on the exchange of favours or bets, but while he can sincerely like someone, and be their good friend for years and years, he’ll still cheerily betray them when the hour calls for it. What makes this especially tragic is the fact that he does inspire such loyalty and belief in people, so if it often nothing but their faith in his integrity which guides the friends he betrays into their unfortunate ending. He even goes so far as to set up his son, Baldr to choose to die for him, as the sacrifice of a son is a potent thing indeed and gives him much power.
The truth of it is, at some point Wednesday decided that in the land that does not welcome gods, it’s every myth, deity, and culture hero for himself. He feels betrayed and abandoned, and he resents the people of America for bringing him to this barren land and then forgetting him. In a way, when he robs people and screws friends over, he’s doing it because he feels like he deserves their money or their lives, in the same way as he might feel entitled the sacrifice and worship that he hasn’t been paid to him in eaons. He can’t force people to give him the latter, but he can sure as fuck beg borrow and steal the former.
There is, almost contradictorily, a thread of self hatred running through Wednesday. He remembers what he was born to be, he knows that in another world and in another life, he was the true All-Father, and the belief people had in him was something to be treasured and rewarded rather than betrayed and exploited. He has lived for so long in America though, getting by on so little, that he’s adapted into something else, something corrupted and threatened and maligned to the edges of society, while new gods of media and communications have overtaken the land, steamrolling through people’s consciousness. Wednesday feels a great deal of envy and resentment for these new gods, but it also seems at times as though he recognizes his own arrogance in them, they do, essentially, still play by the same set of rules, at times Wednesday talks as if he pities them as much of anything else. This could be partially because he does, in a way, mourn his own godhood. Being dependent on the love and fealty of others is a hard path to walk when those others have almost forgotten you, unable to even truly die as long as a thread of faith still exists to call you (or something a lot like you) back.
And that is Wednesday’s bottom line. He is essentially a tragic figure. A forgotten God, far from home, who has seen great days of glory and reverence, and who is capable of incredible, and impossible things, but who has been betrayed by the same people who created him. He’s still bound by the cycle of his mythos, and by the framework of rules and stories which were written centuries ago for a different time and a different land, and in modern day America, he’s reduced to little more than a strange, exceptional drifter, meaningless to everyone but the others like himself. A God amongst Gods, and a nobody amongst nobodies.
Path to Redemption:
What Wednesday needs is to find something of value in a land which he feels betrayed by. He feels that his great days are behind him, and his evil deeds are orchestrated to reclaim them. If he could find something in the future which was as important to him, or as valuable to him as his former glory, then he might be all right in the end.
Also he could stand to actually get a little bit of loyalty back. WEDNESDAY >C
History:
Odin was brought to America in 813 AD, by a group of Vikings who sacrificed a Native to him, then were quickly slaughtered. He waited there for a hundred years before more Vikings came, rediscovering the land once more. They farmed, or they pillaged the land, or perhaps they didn’t bother with any of that nonsense, but for one reason or another they eventually died out or moved on, leaving their gods behind.
Time passed, and America, as an immigrant state, was populated with many gods, none of whom truly flourished, but as time passed, they managed to scrape their meagre existence together, and slowly began to dream of power.
Before American Gods, Odin and Loki, over the course of many years, forged a plot to reclaim their power together, in one glorious bang! Odin went from lady to lady trying to knock one up, then he finally succeeded!
and then... the book happened.
Sample Journal Entry:
Well, isn't this unexpected. There I was, dead and wept over and vigil had and held and been done with, and now I wake up with not a pearly gate in sight. I know a kid who's big in the Bible Belt who'd be tipping tables and crying bloody martyrdom if he heard about this place.
Not that I'm entirely unsurprised of course. There's no seat laid for a man like me at that table.
Mr. Wednesday, at your service, and despite the sorry cause of our communion, I find myself fascinated to now whose company I am now keeping.
Sample RP:
Wednesday sat in the chapel, staring despondently at the crucifix hanging on the wall. Of course Jesus had managed to worm his way here, into the land of the dead, with his unfeasible promises of resurrection and his death knell apostolic creed: We believe in the one God, the Father Almighty.
There was nothing in that place that called out to him. Nothing in the chapel that differentiated it from any other part of the barge. It wasn't a truly holy place, it was just a room that some well intentioned true believer had chosen to put his things in. Wednesday sat there, and glared at Jesus, and felt nothing. Slowly he stood up, and stretched out his back, feeling for the click of tension releasing in his spine.
The Barge was a funny kind of place. Not good for gods, but not bad either, not the minefield it could have been. Nothing here seemed to have roots, everything was inconstant. It made sense that you couldn't build a chapel here that might've meant something. He'd thought briefly that there was something in the garden that might have spoken, some hint of an earth spirit that might have once been, but he'd been mistaken. It was just a patch of ground with a handful of flowers and fertilizer in it, saying nothing, meaning nothing. Sweetness without calories, full bellies without nourishment. That was all the garden had to offer him.
Eventually he'd go to the CES, brave the land that wasn't land, and see if anything there spoke to him. He didn't want to find a holy place there though, he didn't want to find something real in a place that could be stretched so thin, and flickering away to nothing in an instant. He didn't want to think about what things might have grown in a place like that.
Special Notes:
User LJ: a_respondent
AIM/IM: stoptheworld
E-mail: michaelheroin@gmail.com
Other Characters: Prefect, Profit, Valmont,
Character Name: Mr Wednesday (aka: Hooded One, Glad-of-War, Grimnir, Third, Grim Raider, One-eyed, Highest, True-Guesser, Gondlir Wand-bearer All Father, who has as many names as there are winds, as many titles are there are ways to die. Odin? Odin, Odin, ODINNNNNNNN)
Series: American Gods
Age: As old as his tongue, and a few months older than his teeth.
From When?: I’m gonna say from the end of the book, when his scheme is foxed and he doesn’t have enough death or belief left in America with which to rebuild himself.
Inmate/Warden: Inmaaaaate. There’s a brief meeting between the main character of the book, and the Odin of Norway, he is VERY VERY Different to Mr Wednesday, and he is pretty quick to claim that he never did the things that Wednesday did. The subtext being that while Wednesday WAS Odin, the stuff he did wasn’t intrinsic to his nature as a deity, THEREFORE, it was old school bad person making bad decisions.
Abilities/Powers: Mr Wednesday knows eighteen charms that he learned while hanging in the World Tree, AND HERE THEY ARE:
1) A charm that can cure harm and sickness and will lift the grief from the heart of the grieving.
2) A charm that will heal with a touch
3) A charm that will turn aside the weapons of an enemy
4) A charm to free himself of all bonds and locks
5) A charm to catch an arrow in flight and take now harm from it
6) Spells sent to hurt him will hurt only the sender
7) He can quench a fire merely by looking at it.
8) If a man hates him, he can win his friendship.
9) He can sing the wind to sleep and calm a storm long enough to bring a ship to shore
10) He can dispel witches, spin them around in the skies so that they can’t find their way home again.
11) If he sings while battle rages, he can take warriors through the tumult unscathed and bring them safely back to their hearth and home.
12) If he sees a hanged man, he can bring him down from the gallows and have him whisper what secrets he remembers.
13) If he sprinkles water on a child’s head, that child will not fall in battle.
14) He knows the names of the gods, every damned one of them.
15) If he has a dream of power, of glory and wisdom, he can make people believe that dream
16) If he needs love he can turn the mind and heart of any woman
17) No woman he ever wants will ever want another.
18) A TERRIBLE SECRET THAT NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW BUT HIM.
INITIALLY, I’m going to ask that he is allowed to keep all these charms other than “No woman he ever wants will ever want another”, (because lol that shit is crazy in an rp setting), on the basis that he CAN’T use them easily. One of the big themes in American Gods is that the gods are power starved, and that while they TECHNICALLY CAN still do these things, without worship or sacrifice, the energy which they expend on them is extremely hard to recoup, so they don’t do them a lot.
Wednesday takes his power from a number of sources, the main one being blood sacrifice. Deaths dedicated to him in battle are especially potent, but human or animal sacrifices are also good. He also takes power from prayers, worship, the telling of his stories and the casting of his runes, non-blood sacrifices, of meat or ale or crops, getting laid (especially if it’s with a virgin. omnomnom that’s a kind of sacrifice), and a few other things.
SO BASICALLY, while some of his powers are ingrained (knowing all the gods names, knowing his terrible secret, spells that are cast on him backfiring) most of them (escaping from bonds and locks, making people believe his dreams, dispelling witches, etc) take a shitload of power which he doesn’t really have, and so would basically only get used in dire emergencies, or for specific plot purposes if he’s in the process of running a scam or whatnot.
OTHER THINGS: Wednesday has a couple of other powers that aren’t on this list, but that he uses once or twice in the book. When he meets someone, he can see all the crimes they’ve ever committed, in Norse Mythology he traded his eye for full knowledge of the past, present and future, but because the Barge is basically a place where time and destiny is in flux, I figure it’s safe to say this power would have had it’s butt kicked. With player permission, he might get either strong feelings of what characters have done in the past, or with mod permission, he might get brief, unclear visions of the future, but that would be it.
ALSO, he can go ‘backstage’ as he puts it. Basically, he can travel from the material realm into it’s immaterial counterpart. Again, I’d kinda like him to keep this at first, since he wouldn’t be able to use it to escape the Barge, he could just... use it to temporarily go there to hang out. Time passes a lot faster there, and a few hours backstage can be a few weeks in the real world, so it seems like a HANDY DEVICE TO KEEP for hiatuses and whatnot.
All of these powers could theoretically be nerfed by a warden of course!
Personality:
On the surface of it, Mr Wednesday is slick, personable, and relaxed. He has an easy patter, and comes across as a good natured old con. With strangers, his mannerisms are flattering, familiar, and slightly roguish, as if he might have a couple of hustles going on in the background, but he isn’t really trying particularly hard to hide that fact. He’s good at reading the tone of a conversation, and can play his cards a little fast and loose when it comes to risking offending people, it seems that conversation is one of those many areas of life in which Wednesday is ruled by what he can get away with. He can at times, be extremely forward and pushy, even bawdy and coarse. If he is attracted to someone, then he can be downright lecherous about it, and will make no secret of his desires.
In pursuit of getting what he wants from people, he’s just as adept at exploiting the fact that strangers don’t know him, as he is to exploit his knowledge of old friends. He prefers to work as part of a pair, so it is not unheard of for him to send his partner in crime off to investigate people, to find out what makes them tick, so that by the time he steps in to make his pitch to them, he knows more or less exactly which buttons to push. At his heart? Wednesday is a con man, he’s an old fraud who delights in the artistry of a well performed con. He’s patient, focused, and ruthless, and while he might wax philosophical about how no one is really innocent and how deserving the targets of his scams are, but in reality, he’s guided by necessity, greed, and the thrill of it. He doesn’t really care if what he does is right or wrong anymore.
Wednesday makes strong friendships, often forged on the exchange of favours or bets, but while he can sincerely like someone, and be their good friend for years and years, he’ll still cheerily betray them when the hour calls for it. What makes this especially tragic is the fact that he does inspire such loyalty and belief in people, so if it often nothing but their faith in his integrity which guides the friends he betrays into their unfortunate ending. He even goes so far as to set up his son, Baldr to choose to die for him, as the sacrifice of a son is a potent thing indeed and gives him much power.
The truth of it is, at some point Wednesday decided that in the land that does not welcome gods, it’s every myth, deity, and culture hero for himself. He feels betrayed and abandoned, and he resents the people of America for bringing him to this barren land and then forgetting him. In a way, when he robs people and screws friends over, he’s doing it because he feels like he deserves their money or their lives, in the same way as he might feel entitled the sacrifice and worship that he hasn’t been paid to him in eaons. He can’t force people to give him the latter, but he can sure as fuck beg borrow and steal the former.
There is, almost contradictorily, a thread of self hatred running through Wednesday. He remembers what he was born to be, he knows that in another world and in another life, he was the true All-Father, and the belief people had in him was something to be treasured and rewarded rather than betrayed and exploited. He has lived for so long in America though, getting by on so little, that he’s adapted into something else, something corrupted and threatened and maligned to the edges of society, while new gods of media and communications have overtaken the land, steamrolling through people’s consciousness. Wednesday feels a great deal of envy and resentment for these new gods, but it also seems at times as though he recognizes his own arrogance in them, they do, essentially, still play by the same set of rules, at times Wednesday talks as if he pities them as much of anything else. This could be partially because he does, in a way, mourn his own godhood. Being dependent on the love and fealty of others is a hard path to walk when those others have almost forgotten you, unable to even truly die as long as a thread of faith still exists to call you (or something a lot like you) back.
And that is Wednesday’s bottom line. He is essentially a tragic figure. A forgotten God, far from home, who has seen great days of glory and reverence, and who is capable of incredible, and impossible things, but who has been betrayed by the same people who created him. He’s still bound by the cycle of his mythos, and by the framework of rules and stories which were written centuries ago for a different time and a different land, and in modern day America, he’s reduced to little more than a strange, exceptional drifter, meaningless to everyone but the others like himself. A God amongst Gods, and a nobody amongst nobodies.
Path to Redemption:
What Wednesday needs is to find something of value in a land which he feels betrayed by. He feels that his great days are behind him, and his evil deeds are orchestrated to reclaim them. If he could find something in the future which was as important to him, or as valuable to him as his former glory, then he might be all right in the end.
Also he could stand to actually get a little bit of loyalty back. WEDNESDAY >C
History:
Odin was brought to America in 813 AD, by a group of Vikings who sacrificed a Native to him, then were quickly slaughtered. He waited there for a hundred years before more Vikings came, rediscovering the land once more. They farmed, or they pillaged the land, or perhaps they didn’t bother with any of that nonsense, but for one reason or another they eventually died out or moved on, leaving their gods behind.
Time passed, and America, as an immigrant state, was populated with many gods, none of whom truly flourished, but as time passed, they managed to scrape their meagre existence together, and slowly began to dream of power.
Before American Gods, Odin and Loki, over the course of many years, forged a plot to reclaim their power together, in one glorious bang! Odin went from lady to lady trying to knock one up, then he finally succeeded!
and then... the book happened.
Sample Journal Entry:
Well, isn't this unexpected. There I was, dead and wept over and vigil had and held and been done with, and now I wake up with not a pearly gate in sight. I know a kid who's big in the Bible Belt who'd be tipping tables and crying bloody martyrdom if he heard about this place.
Not that I'm entirely unsurprised of course. There's no seat laid for a man like me at that table.
Mr. Wednesday, at your service, and despite the sorry cause of our communion, I find myself fascinated to now whose company I am now keeping.
Sample RP:
Wednesday sat in the chapel, staring despondently at the crucifix hanging on the wall. Of course Jesus had managed to worm his way here, into the land of the dead, with his unfeasible promises of resurrection and his death knell apostolic creed: We believe in the one God, the Father Almighty.
There was nothing in that place that called out to him. Nothing in the chapel that differentiated it from any other part of the barge. It wasn't a truly holy place, it was just a room that some well intentioned true believer had chosen to put his things in. Wednesday sat there, and glared at Jesus, and felt nothing. Slowly he stood up, and stretched out his back, feeling for the click of tension releasing in his spine.
The Barge was a funny kind of place. Not good for gods, but not bad either, not the minefield it could have been. Nothing here seemed to have roots, everything was inconstant. It made sense that you couldn't build a chapel here that might've meant something. He'd thought briefly that there was something in the garden that might have spoken, some hint of an earth spirit that might have once been, but he'd been mistaken. It was just a patch of ground with a handful of flowers and fertilizer in it, saying nothing, meaning nothing. Sweetness without calories, full bellies without nourishment. That was all the garden had to offer him.
Eventually he'd go to the CES, brave the land that wasn't land, and see if anything there spoke to him. He didn't want to find a holy place there though, he didn't want to find something real in a place that could be stretched so thin, and flickering away to nothing in an instant. He didn't want to think about what things might have grown in a place like that.
Special Notes: