(no subject)
Your character's personality:
The entire nature of Wesley’s life has been in pursuit of approval from one source or another. As a boy, it was his father whose love he continually tried to earn and no doubt he transferred this desire to be accepted towards his professors at both university and at the Watcher’s Council. Even when he was shunned to being an outcast with no friends and family, he embraced Cordelia and Angel and began striving for their approval in both a social and a professional context. His need to please has fostered an overachiever and Wes would never truly be content with himself until he had the approval of everyone else, which is something impossible, but still is something that Wes wants to achieve.
As a result of always failing to win his superiors’ and peers’ approval (his father, Watcher’s Council, Buffy and Faith, Giles, Angel, etc.), he has developed a low self-esteem. His father used punishment in order to teach Wes lessons, which planted the seedlings of Wes’ inability to believe in himself. Almost contrary to his lack of self-esteem though, Wes projects an air of cockiness and superiority, overcompensating for his lack of belief in himself. When given a comfortable environment with people who are slowly learning to trust him, however, Wes is slowly overcoming his self-esteem problems, only being set back when placed in situations with people who push him back down, such as his father.
Wes has it in him to blindly follow anyone set in a patriarchal leader position, simply because of the way he was raised. He takes orders without question and doesn’t wonder about the means, but rather just the end. He also has a tendency to hero-worship those that both lead and are true champions. In this case, he has blindly followed Angel and affords him worship that he has earned in a heroic archetypal role.
Wes has occasional battles with his masculinity, trying to prove that he is, indeed, just as manly as the next bloke. When all the material possessions are stripped away, however, Wes’ top skill is his intellect and database of demonic knowledge. He sometimes retreats to it, abandoning all social skills in favour of getting the information and the problem solved.
To Wes, he is constantly searching for a family that will have him. His father didn’t want to be that man, and the Watcher’s Council couldn’t be that. Now that he has a home with Angel, Cordelia, and Gunn, he can finally begin to further discover who he truly is in a city of lost souls.
Why do you want to play this character?:
Of all the shows that I have ever watched, Angel: The Series is still by far and away my favourite with my favourite cast of characters and plots and therefore, I want to play Wes because I have a thorough canonical knowledge of him from watching all five years of the show and want to explore him as a character in an RP, taking my love for him one step further.
One of the most exciting prospects of having Wes on the island is the ability to RP him with Doyle, who normally is only dead for him. Doyle is the shoes that Wes had to step into and by RP’ing the two together, a variety of strange friendships might form, especially with Cordelia and Angel in the mix. There is also Giles on the island, and Wesley can continue in his quest for approval. It will also be very intriguing and plot-heavy/fun to be able to thread Wesley with the number of former-vampires on the island, leading him into another place of murky grey moral areas that he’s only encountered with Angel, so far.
With Wes’ affinity for books, having him near the bookshelf will prove very interesting to play out, as well as playing out his encounters on the island to see who will and who won’t earn his loyalty and worship.
Mostly, I want to play this character because I have such a passionate love for him and with so many possibilities of plot and furthering his character on the island, I know he’d be an interesting piece to add to the massive, unsolveable puzzle of TR. He would devote much of his time into simple research and would peruse the old journals, even trying to put together a template and logic for why everyone was trapped and with his experience in the supernatural, would work together with other supernatural-esque pups to try and find a way out.
Tell us about your character's background: Wesley leaves Angel canon in the middle of the episode “Redefinition” where he, Cordelia, and Gunn are drinking away their woes of being fired within Caritas.
Wesley comes from an upper-middle class family in England and his whole life was predestined since he was a young boy. There was never a question about what he would do. He was to grow up and learn about demons and slayers and become a Watcher. His father chose this path for Wesley and Wesley in his quest to earn his father’s approval, was all too happy to go down it. Of course, it was not an easy path to follow. When he earned his father’s disapproval, he was subject to scathing verbal abuse and even punishment, being locked under the stairs to learn his lessons.
As he grew up, he was Head Boy and eager to earn the very best of achievements throughout school and the Watcher’s Council. He managed (with his father’s influence, no doubt) to become The Watcher to The Slayer when the time came, which is saying something given that there are a variety of watchers about the world, but there can only be one slayer. Unfortunately, though, since it was mostly influence and not experience that got Wesley the job, he was grossly unprepared for dealing with Buffy and Faith. He treated them like textbooks, implying that he was unable to apply his theoretical lessons to the practical, setting himself up for failure.
He wound up intervening in Angel’s tough-love lesson to Faith, setting her free before she could truly learn her lesson. This came back to haunt him in LA when Faith (already down a dark road) kidnapped him and tied him up to torture him. She only managed to get through one of her basic five torture groups before he was rescued. When Graduation Day went down at the school, Wesley was fired from the Watcher’s Council, but still made a stand (though he was knocked down very quickly).
He arrived in LA months later as a Rogue Demon Hunter, raring to go and fight the good fight. Angel hesitantly took him onto the team and he quickly became the resident demon expert, lending his skills to an institution that finally had a use for his textbook knowledge and in this comfortable environment, his other skills (accuracy from darts, crossbow, guns, translating demonic languages, hand-to-hand combat) and bravery were able to grow and thrive. He performed exorcisms, fought vampires, and was even blown up in the midst of translating the Shanshu scrolls.
Since Gunn has joined the team, Wes has overcome his social awkwardness and become true, genuine friends with both him and Cordelia to the point that they continue to be champions and do the bidding of The Powers That Be, even after Angel fired them. Cordelia is still receiving visions and Wes took the initiative in saying that they could do it without Angel, displaying leadership that he has cultivated in the time since his failures as a Watcher.
Your character's initial personal inventory:
(1) Black t-shirt
(1) Pair of thinly-rimmed glasses
(1) Beige vest with several stains from drinks on it
(1) Shotglass filled with the lovely, yet evil drink known as tequila
(1) Yellow long-sleeve shirt, undone atop his sweatervest combo; the material is suede
(1) Pair of ironed jeans; black
(1) Pair of black boxer-briefs
(1) Pair of woolen socks
(1) Pair of steel-toed shoes
(1) Black watch with a leather band and a gold-plated face, which was purchased with his first Angel Investigations paycheque
(1) Wallet containing several Angel Investigations business cards (one of them with a woman’s phone number on the back), several pounds from England kept for nostalgia’s sake, $12 in American dollars, a list of phone numbers of contacts of the seedy demonic underworld (Merl resides at the top) , one condom, a picture of Virginia, a picture of Cordelia, a picture of himself, Gunn, and Cordelia, and one of himself, Angel, taken as a candid by Cordelia, a credit card, a debit card, several membership cards
(1) Stake, tucked away into his back pants-pocket
Your character's entrance post:
There was, somewhere, a washroom.
It had to be around there somewhere! Wesley was quite sure he had seen it and truly, his eyesight hardly failed him to such a degree that he couldn’t see a little man on a door. Of course, within Caritas, the little man had horns, six legs, and other appendages that Wesley truly hoped were horns and not…
He hiccupped lightly, a shot of tequila in his hands. Bloody good tequila, too. Even if it was giving him the hiccups and possibly making him leer at Cordelia’s cleavage.
He closed his eyes and stopped at the bar, balancing the tequila glass in his palm, flanked by a vampire in a ridiculously awful eighties’ ensemble and a skin-demon to the right of him better known for haunting the alleys of Argentina and eating rats as a delicacy. Honestly, he just needed to get to the washroom and avoid making it on stage again. One drunken rendition of We Are The Champions was more than enough for him in a night. Angel never said that the karaoke could be quite so horrid - though, really and truly, from all the torturous times they had been forced to watch him attempt Mandy, he should have known. He bolstered himself on the bar and managed a drunken smile at Lorne. “Washrooms?” he verified.
“Over there, pumpkin,” Lorne said, with deep sympathy and dear Lord, but was he…wobbling? Wesley truly would have to have a word with him about that. “Careful not to throw up on that little peach number you’re working.”
“I believe it’s beige,” Wesley argued.
“Peach, beige, it’s all kittens to me, cupcake,” Lorne laughed and took the microphone in his hand. Wesley just stared at him. That had to be misheard, drunkenly so. It simply made no sense. And the real indicator that he was pissed was the fact that he’d almost understood that sentence.
He pushed himself off the bar with the shot still in hand, catching the sight of Gunn and Cordelia in the corner of his eye, bickering over something. Was Cordelia pointing to her shoes? Were they…fighting about her taste in clothes? Or perhaps Gunn was discussing alternate methods to staking vampires?
Pushing into the door, he stumbled into the fluorescently lit washroom of Caritas and winced, closing his eyes. “Too bright,” he groaned, closing his eyes tightly so he could adjust. “Oh, far too bright,” he murmured to himself, sighing with relief when it seemed to improve. He opened his eyes to push into a stall and found himself pushing against a perfectly hard wall.
Now, Wesley had studied a great many deal of mood-affecting drugs. Nowhere on the list did it say that tequila did this.
Oh, it was truly evil.
He pushed his way out of a strange room and found a hallway and what appeared to be a room with a bookshelf and a jukebox and tables. And then there was a kitchen and a clinic? Wesley truly had no manner of knowing what to do, so staring down the hall towards a door, he sighed ruefully. “Bottoms up,” he toasted himself and knocked back the shot of tequila. He scowled at the burn down his throat and smiled as it warmed his stomach.
Odd. He was still in the strange hallway. And yet, it still seemed preferable to arguing about Cordelia’s shoes. Somehow, that made everything just the tiniest bit better, at least, for the moment.