(no subject)
[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: Kat
AGE: 19
JOURNAL: boudica
IM: paravels
E-MAIL: celtically@gmail.com
RETURNING: 3; Jim Kirk, Gwen Stacy & Carol Danvers
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Bruce Wayne
FANDOM: DC Animated Universe
CHRONOLOGY: Post- Divided We Fall
CLASS: Hero
SUPERHERO NAME: The Goddamned Batman
ALTER EGO: What is job.
BACKGROUND:
MY PARENTS ARE DEEEEEAAAAAAAAD!!!
Okay, no, I'll give you a real background section. Just let me put my summarizing pants on, because this dude's been in universe that spans eight TV series, four films, two web cartoons and various spin-off comic books. Thankfully, the canonicity of the last two is... somewhat dubious. And did I mention the franchise is as old as I am? Yep, Batman: The Animated Series started airing a little more than a month after I was born. So I've got a lot of ground to cover here!
So! The DCAU. It's, essentially, a slightly toned-down version of the main DC comics universe and it actually has continuity that you can follow, how awesome is that? Also, I say slightly because while the TV show didn't deal with the shadier side of comics explicitly, it's really kind of scary how much they got away with for a kid's show. Return of the Joker had a pretty intense torture scene, for an animated flick.
Anyways! Our story starts with tiny!Bruce Wayne. Stop me if you've heard this story before. Bruce was born to wealthy parents who he loved and who he loved him. For his eighth birthday they go out to see The Mask of Zorro and his parents get shot in an alley after the movie. Bruce, traumatized by his parents' deaths, swears vengeance on all evildoers and promises them he's going to do everything he can to make sure justice happens in the world and no other eight-year-old boy will have to go through what he goes through. Thus, the Batman is born.
DCAU actually has a twist in the story. In the movie The Mask of the Phantasm we learn Bruce almost never became Batman. Yep. He fell in love with a girl and was happy for the first time in forever, and he decided he was going to marry this girl and find some other way to bring justice to the world!! Except it turned out girl's dad had mob connections and they were after his money so she had to flee the country and Bruce was left without a fiancée. Broken hearted, he decided once again to become The Batman!!
So, much to his butler Alfred's chagrin, Bruce puts on a bat costume and goes out at night to fight crime. Eventually, some costumed bad guys start showing up and we get the rogue's gallery. Unfortunately, Riddler's riddles just aren't as good in the DCAU, but Mark Hamill is forever the best Joker, okay? Okay.
Anyways! Bruce fights crime on his own for a few months after his fiancée leaves him. But then he goes to the circus and sees ~The Flying Graysons~ who, just like the comics, plummet to their deaths, leaving behind a ten-year-old orphan, Dick, who Bruce then takes under his wing. Dick eventually becomes Robin! The Boy Wonder! And together they fight crime!! We don't actually see much of this, though, as BTAS starts off when Dick's nineteen. Go figure.
So there are hundreds of episodes, each about a half-hour long and most of them are their own adventure, so I can't... really give a summary about that, but I can say that throughout BTAS we see Dick and Bruce's partnership slowly deteriorate because Bruce is an asshole, even if he's not as bad as he is in the comics, we get to see Barbara Gordon, daughter of Gotham's police commissioner Jim Gordon, become Batgirl and we have lots of adventures and flashbacks wherein we see the rogues gallery form. He also meets Superman, the Last Son of Krypton somewhere in here.
Eventually, Dick gets fed up with Bruce's bullshit and goes off to be Nightwing! Barbara is still Batgirl and fights crime alongside Bruce for a while until Bruce, somewhat stupidly, gets injured in a fight and gets his butt saved by one Tim Drake. Who is not actually a rich, teenage stalker, but a street kid almost-stalker who's dad works for Two-Face and is, surprise surprise, dead! In a series of convoluted events, Babs and Bruce go off to fight Two-Face who is Villain of the Week at the time and end up in trouble. So, with a little encouragement from Alfred, Tim dons the Robin costume and helps save the day! Bruce, impressed by the little snot, takes him under his wing and lets him be the next Boy Wonder. They, along with Batgirl and Nightwing, you guessed it, fight crime!
So that's two shows done with! Phew. While Tim is Robin, but before all the nastiness that occurs in Return of the Joker, Bruce also does an epic team-up with a bunch of other superheroes, a Martian and an Amazonian princess to stop an alien invasion. Once they discover they fight well together, Bruce builds them a satellite HQ so they can... wait for it... fight crime!!
The adventures Bruce has with the Justice League are juuuust a little crazier than the ones he has in Gotham and tend to involve things like aliens and alternate universes where they're all evil (but sadly don't all have goatees) more than just beating up the bad guys. Though there is a lot of that!
Eventually, though, the Justice League encounters another alien invasion which it turns out one of their own, Hawkgirl, was a part of. Oh snap. After the invasion is dealt with and the Earth saved (yay!) Hawkgirl leaves the League and the team undergoes some changes. So instead of having six of them, there's like... sixty people in the Justice League. This is also when the show changed from Justice League to Justice League Unlimited!! This is also when the show changed from two-part episodes to self-contained adventures that all had a plot thread connecting them that took two whole seasons to play out. Yyyeah.
That plot thread had to do with this organization of dubious morality called Cadmus, Lex Luthor and Brainiac. It's really hard to explain since it's... two seasons long and pretty much reads like a conspiracy theory. But! It ends somewhat oddly with Luthor and Brainiac merging to share a body and the original seven battling him since Cadmus made it so the rest of the League was stuck on the Watchtower battling other people. But! Since this is a kids show, the Justice League saves the day! And there are talks of yet more changes, but I won't get into those since Bruce will be coming in right after the very strange fight with the Brainthor merged... thing. It was creepy, involved pseudo-science and nanotech. It's a lot easier if you just roll with it.
PERSONALITY:
Bruce’s life and most of his personality centers around masks and walls. When his parents died, it scarred him for life, and the giggling, happy boy he used to be was never found again. As he got older, he changed even more. He’s got lots and lots of walls surrounding various parts of himself and only let’s certain people see certain parts of himself. And there’s three main parts to the man now: the Bat, the Socialite and the Man.
The Socialite is his Bruce Wayne persona that he presents the rest of the world with. He’s a competent, if a little airheaded, CEO with a charming smile and occasionally the air that makes you think you could walk right over him. He dates women, he drives fast cars, he buys expensive things, and does all the things that a playboy billionaire should do. But he’s also got a family, two boys of his own, and has been known to support various charities and even start some of his own. Some might call him a little bit of a bleeding heart, and they wouldn’t exactly be wrong.
The Bat is, of course, Batman. It’s the persona he has while in the cape. He’s quiet, he’s hard, he’s almost vicious at times. He’s a creature of vengeance that exists to deal out punishment to those who do evil. Batman is strict and keeps to his own personal rules, if not the rules the rest of the world has, and he holds the people around him at arm’s length because he has a job to do, and in the cowl is when he’s going after the mission. However, there are times when he lets his real personality seep in. The Bat trusts no one completely, not even his own partners at times.
His real personality is the Man, who is somewhere unbetween the Bat and the Socialite. Bruce himself is a very strict man at times, very self-driven, and he has rules when it comes to pretty much every part of his life. He’s much, much more quiet and withdrawn than his socialite persona would lead people to believe. He vastly prefers solitude over large groups of people and is careful about what walls he lets down around certain people. That said, there are people he trusts, and it’s easy to tell who because he’ll smile around them and joke around them. Yes, joke. Bruce actually has a very dry, sarcastic sense of humor and when he’s not using it to try and either confuse or taunt villans, he uses it to almost poke fun at the people he cares about.
Speaking of people he cares about, Bruce is fiercely loyal to the people he lets himself care about. Hurt one of them and he will rain down fire upon your head and make you wish you would never been born. There’s not much that can set off his temper easily, but that’s one of the things. He’s a bit strange when it comes to relationships though, because he is very much a logical person and tries to view relationships through a logical lens whenever possible even though they’re anything but logical. That, combined with the fact that he never, ever, ever, ever lets anyone in fully, can make him a bit standoffish at times.
There’s a lot to Bruce, more than I think I could ever cover in a few paragraphs, but this is the basics. He’s a complicated man, but a fascinating one, too.
POWER:
Bruce has no canon powers, but in the City there's two I'd like to give him! They are as follows:
bat transformation → he would be able to turn into a bat! Except it would be a certain species of bat, commonly known as the bumblebee bat.
dramatic lightning → whenever the mood calls for it, there would be dramatic lightning and/or thunder storms surrounding Bruce for around half a city block. And, naturally, where he moved, the lightning/storm would move with him.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
[ the video feed turns on and the view is of… the inside of a coat pocket!! surprise, surprise. and in the background is someone singing christmas carols just a little off-key. a hand comes into view and pulls the communicator out and, oh look. it’s bruce’s surprised face. ]
Oh! It looks like this turned on while in my pocket. [ he gives the comm a small smile. ] Well, since it’s already on…
Don’t you just love this time of year? Everyone happy, the gift giving. It seems like perfect time to do something big, don’t you think? [ he pauses, then gives a small, not-obviously fake laugh. ] In case you haven’t already guessed, I’m planning something myself.
A little party of sorts. You’ll have to buy a ticket to get in, but there’s going to be music and maybe an auction of a few items, if I can pull enough of the right strings. Of course, all the proceeds are going to go towards children in need this winter. Isn’t that nice? I had a friend who lived in Central City back home who did a lot of work with kids around this time of the year. It just seemed like the thing to do.
I hope you’ll all find time in your schedules to come. Offical invitations will be going out once the details are finalized, so keep your eyes peeled, hmm?
[ the following is encrypted to a select few people. the smile is completely gone from bruce’s face, but he doesn’t look unhappy. ]
I’m expecting you all to be there. I’ll cover the entry fee if you don’t want to pay it yourself. We’re also going to need to talk security. Invites going out to the whole Network are a risky thing and we wouldn’t want someone spoiling the night.
[ haha, yes he kind of would. especially if it was one of not!his rogues they managed to get. but, anyways. he cuts the feed there, without any sort of goodbye or ‘talk to you later.’ just that. ]
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
It’s dark and the wind rustles his cape as he perches between two gargoyles, perfectly still, face schooled into a blank expression. He watches the traffic, hears the noise of the city around him, smells the smog, the pollution… the hot cocoa Tim left him in a thermos beside him before he went back to the manor to sleep since he had an early morning at school the next day. The smallest of smiles quirks at the corner of his lips as he reaches for the cocoa and takes a sip. Still warm, but not hot enough to scald his tongue. Perfect.
A scream from the alley to his left distracts him and he’s moving before he even thinks, jumping off the roof and down into the alley to land menacingly on a trash can in the shadows. The clatter of his boots on the metal startles the three men who were attempting to mug a woman and they stare for a moment before rushing him.
Idiots.
The one with the gun goes down first, the pistol gets kicked away from the other two as Batman moves as quickly and effeciently as he can. A strike here, a kick there, elbow to the nose… down the go. He takes a moment to cuff them before he picks up the woman’s purse and holds it out to her. “Here. You should think about carrying some pepper spray with you. You never know who you might run into, in this town.”
Before she can reply, he fires a grappling line and swings up and onto the roof he was on previously. The thermos is knocked over, cocoa spilled all onto the cement rooftop. He crouches down next to it and picks it up. With a small sigh, he screws the lid back on before wiping the grime off of it with a corner of his cape. There’s a chip on the bottom of it; Alfred won’t be pleased.
“Thank you, Batman!” he hears a slightly shaky yell from the street and carefully looks out to see the woman hurrying on her way. The small smile tugs at his lips again as he watches her go.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
HE IS VENGEANCE. HE IS THE NIGHT. HE. IS. BATMAN!!
By which I mean no.
NAME: Kat
AGE: 19
JOURNAL: boudica
IM: paravels
E-MAIL: celtically@gmail.com
RETURNING: 3; Jim Kirk, Gwen Stacy & Carol Danvers
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Bruce Wayne
FANDOM: DC Animated Universe
CHRONOLOGY: Post- Divided We Fall
CLASS: Hero
SUPERHERO NAME: The Goddamned Batman
ALTER EGO: What is job.
BACKGROUND:
MY PARENTS ARE DEEEEEAAAAAAAAD!!!
Okay, no, I'll give you a real background section. Just let me put my summarizing pants on, because this dude's been in universe that spans eight TV series, four films, two web cartoons and various spin-off comic books. Thankfully, the canonicity of the last two is... somewhat dubious. And did I mention the franchise is as old as I am? Yep, Batman: The Animated Series started airing a little more than a month after I was born. So I've got a lot of ground to cover here!
So! The DCAU. It's, essentially, a slightly toned-down version of the main DC comics universe and it actually has continuity that you can follow, how awesome is that? Also, I say slightly because while the TV show didn't deal with the shadier side of comics explicitly, it's really kind of scary how much they got away with for a kid's show. Return of the Joker had a pretty intense torture scene, for an animated flick.
Anyways! Our story starts with tiny!Bruce Wayne. Stop me if you've heard this story before. Bruce was born to wealthy parents who he loved and who he loved him. For his eighth birthday they go out to see The Mask of Zorro and his parents get shot in an alley after the movie. Bruce, traumatized by his parents' deaths, swears vengeance on all evildoers and promises them he's going to do everything he can to make sure justice happens in the world and no other eight-year-old boy will have to go through what he goes through. Thus, the Batman is born.
DCAU actually has a twist in the story. In the movie The Mask of the Phantasm we learn Bruce almost never became Batman. Yep. He fell in love with a girl and was happy for the first time in forever, and he decided he was going to marry this girl and find some other way to bring justice to the world!! Except it turned out girl's dad had mob connections and they were after his money so she had to flee the country and Bruce was left without a fiancée. Broken hearted, he decided once again to become The Batman!!
So, much to his butler Alfred's chagrin, Bruce puts on a bat costume and goes out at night to fight crime. Eventually, some costumed bad guys start showing up and we get the rogue's gallery. Unfortunately, Riddler's riddles just aren't as good in the DCAU, but Mark Hamill is forever the best Joker, okay? Okay.
Anyways! Bruce fights crime on his own for a few months after his fiancée leaves him. But then he goes to the circus and sees ~The Flying Graysons~ who, just like the comics, plummet to their deaths, leaving behind a ten-year-old orphan, Dick, who Bruce then takes under his wing. Dick eventually becomes Robin! The Boy Wonder! And together they fight crime!! We don't actually see much of this, though, as BTAS starts off when Dick's nineteen. Go figure.
So there are hundreds of episodes, each about a half-hour long and most of them are their own adventure, so I can't... really give a summary about that, but I can say that throughout BTAS we see Dick and Bruce's partnership slowly deteriorate because Bruce is an asshole, even if he's not as bad as he is in the comics, we get to see Barbara Gordon, daughter of Gotham's police commissioner Jim Gordon, become Batgirl and we have lots of adventures and flashbacks wherein we see the rogues gallery form. He also meets Superman, the Last Son of Krypton somewhere in here.
Eventually, Dick gets fed up with Bruce's bullshit and goes off to be Nightwing! Barbara is still Batgirl and fights crime alongside Bruce for a while until Bruce, somewhat stupidly, gets injured in a fight and gets his butt saved by one Tim Drake. Who is not actually a rich, teenage stalker, but a street kid almost-stalker who's dad works for Two-Face and is, surprise surprise, dead! In a series of convoluted events, Babs and Bruce go off to fight Two-Face who is Villain of the Week at the time and end up in trouble. So, with a little encouragement from Alfred, Tim dons the Robin costume and helps save the day! Bruce, impressed by the little snot, takes him under his wing and lets him be the next Boy Wonder. They, along with Batgirl and Nightwing, you guessed it, fight crime!
So that's two shows done with! Phew. While Tim is Robin, but before all the nastiness that occurs in Return of the Joker, Bruce also does an epic team-up with a bunch of other superheroes, a Martian and an Amazonian princess to stop an alien invasion. Once they discover they fight well together, Bruce builds them a satellite HQ so they can... wait for it... fight crime!!
The adventures Bruce has with the Justice League are juuuust a little crazier than the ones he has in Gotham and tend to involve things like aliens and alternate universes where they're all evil (but sadly don't all have goatees) more than just beating up the bad guys. Though there is a lot of that!
Eventually, though, the Justice League encounters another alien invasion which it turns out one of their own, Hawkgirl, was a part of. Oh snap. After the invasion is dealt with and the Earth saved (yay!) Hawkgirl leaves the League and the team undergoes some changes. So instead of having six of them, there's like... sixty people in the Justice League. This is also when the show changed from Justice League to Justice League Unlimited!! This is also when the show changed from two-part episodes to self-contained adventures that all had a plot thread connecting them that took two whole seasons to play out. Yyyeah.
That plot thread had to do with this organization of dubious morality called Cadmus, Lex Luthor and Brainiac. It's really hard to explain since it's... two seasons long and pretty much reads like a conspiracy theory. But! It ends somewhat oddly with Luthor and Brainiac merging to share a body and the original seven battling him since Cadmus made it so the rest of the League was stuck on the Watchtower battling other people. But! Since this is a kids show, the Justice League saves the day! And there are talks of yet more changes, but I won't get into those since Bruce will be coming in right after the very strange fight with the Brainthor merged... thing. It was creepy, involved pseudo-science and nanotech. It's a lot easier if you just roll with it.
PERSONALITY:
Bruce’s life and most of his personality centers around masks and walls. When his parents died, it scarred him for life, and the giggling, happy boy he used to be was never found again. As he got older, he changed even more. He’s got lots and lots of walls surrounding various parts of himself and only let’s certain people see certain parts of himself. And there’s three main parts to the man now: the Bat, the Socialite and the Man.
The Socialite is his Bruce Wayne persona that he presents the rest of the world with. He’s a competent, if a little airheaded, CEO with a charming smile and occasionally the air that makes you think you could walk right over him. He dates women, he drives fast cars, he buys expensive things, and does all the things that a playboy billionaire should do. But he’s also got a family, two boys of his own, and has been known to support various charities and even start some of his own. Some might call him a little bit of a bleeding heart, and they wouldn’t exactly be wrong.
The Bat is, of course, Batman. It’s the persona he has while in the cape. He’s quiet, he’s hard, he’s almost vicious at times. He’s a creature of vengeance that exists to deal out punishment to those who do evil. Batman is strict and keeps to his own personal rules, if not the rules the rest of the world has, and he holds the people around him at arm’s length because he has a job to do, and in the cowl is when he’s going after the mission. However, there are times when he lets his real personality seep in. The Bat trusts no one completely, not even his own partners at times.
His real personality is the Man, who is somewhere unbetween the Bat and the Socialite. Bruce himself is a very strict man at times, very self-driven, and he has rules when it comes to pretty much every part of his life. He’s much, much more quiet and withdrawn than his socialite persona would lead people to believe. He vastly prefers solitude over large groups of people and is careful about what walls he lets down around certain people. That said, there are people he trusts, and it’s easy to tell who because he’ll smile around them and joke around them. Yes, joke. Bruce actually has a very dry, sarcastic sense of humor and when he’s not using it to try and either confuse or taunt villans, he uses it to almost poke fun at the people he cares about.
Speaking of people he cares about, Bruce is fiercely loyal to the people he lets himself care about. Hurt one of them and he will rain down fire upon your head and make you wish you would never been born. There’s not much that can set off his temper easily, but that’s one of the things. He’s a bit strange when it comes to relationships though, because he is very much a logical person and tries to view relationships through a logical lens whenever possible even though they’re anything but logical. That, combined with the fact that he never, ever, ever, ever lets anyone in fully, can make him a bit standoffish at times.
There’s a lot to Bruce, more than I think I could ever cover in a few paragraphs, but this is the basics. He’s a complicated man, but a fascinating one, too.
POWER:
Bruce has no canon powers, but in the City there's two I'd like to give him! They are as follows:
bat transformation → he would be able to turn into a bat! Except it would be a certain species of bat, commonly known as the bumblebee bat.
dramatic lightning → whenever the mood calls for it, there would be dramatic lightning and/or thunder storms surrounding Bruce for around half a city block. And, naturally, where he moved, the lightning/storm would move with him.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
[ the video feed turns on and the view is of… the inside of a coat pocket!! surprise, surprise. and in the background is someone singing christmas carols just a little off-key. a hand comes into view and pulls the communicator out and, oh look. it’s bruce’s surprised face. ]
Oh! It looks like this turned on while in my pocket. [ he gives the comm a small smile. ] Well, since it’s already on…
Don’t you just love this time of year? Everyone happy, the gift giving. It seems like perfect time to do something big, don’t you think? [ he pauses, then gives a small, not-obviously fake laugh. ] In case you haven’t already guessed, I’m planning something myself.
A little party of sorts. You’ll have to buy a ticket to get in, but there’s going to be music and maybe an auction of a few items, if I can pull enough of the right strings. Of course, all the proceeds are going to go towards children in need this winter. Isn’t that nice? I had a friend who lived in Central City back home who did a lot of work with kids around this time of the year. It just seemed like the thing to do.
I hope you’ll all find time in your schedules to come. Offical invitations will be going out once the details are finalized, so keep your eyes peeled, hmm?
[ the following is encrypted to a select few people. the smile is completely gone from bruce’s face, but he doesn’t look unhappy. ]
I’m expecting you all to be there. I’ll cover the entry fee if you don’t want to pay it yourself. We’re also going to need to talk security. Invites going out to the whole Network are a risky thing and we wouldn’t want someone spoiling the night.
[ haha, yes he kind of would. especially if it was one of not!his rogues they managed to get. but, anyways. he cuts the feed there, without any sort of goodbye or ‘talk to you later.’ just that. ]
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
It’s dark and the wind rustles his cape as he perches between two gargoyles, perfectly still, face schooled into a blank expression. He watches the traffic, hears the noise of the city around him, smells the smog, the pollution… the hot cocoa Tim left him in a thermos beside him before he went back to the manor to sleep since he had an early morning at school the next day. The smallest of smiles quirks at the corner of his lips as he reaches for the cocoa and takes a sip. Still warm, but not hot enough to scald his tongue. Perfect.
A scream from the alley to his left distracts him and he’s moving before he even thinks, jumping off the roof and down into the alley to land menacingly on a trash can in the shadows. The clatter of his boots on the metal startles the three men who were attempting to mug a woman and they stare for a moment before rushing him.
Idiots.
The one with the gun goes down first, the pistol gets kicked away from the other two as Batman moves as quickly and effeciently as he can. A strike here, a kick there, elbow to the nose… down the go. He takes a moment to cuff them before he picks up the woman’s purse and holds it out to her. “Here. You should think about carrying some pepper spray with you. You never know who you might run into, in this town.”
Before she can reply, he fires a grappling line and swings up and onto the roof he was on previously. The thermos is knocked over, cocoa spilled all onto the cement rooftop. He crouches down next to it and picks it up. With a small sigh, he screws the lid back on before wiping the grime off of it with a corner of his cape. There’s a chip on the bottom of it; Alfred won’t be pleased.
“Thank you, Batman!” he hears a slightly shaky yell from the street and carefully looks out to see the woman hurrying on her way. The small smile tugs at his lips again as he watches her go.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
HE IS VENGEANCE. HE IS THE NIGHT. HE. IS. BATMAN!!
By which I mean no.