Important Stuff
OOC:
Name: Ethan. Gardock also works if necessary for whatever reason.
Are you over 16?: Yep.
Personal LJ: ideally_awesome
Email: draconictruth@gmail.com
Timezone: EST
Other contact: AIM: Captain Gardock
Characters already in the game: N/A
How did you find us?: A friend plays here but he didn't really try actively to recruit me, I just thought it sounded like the right place to app.
IC:
Character name: Laharl
Fandom: Nippon Ichi Software / Disgaea 1
Timeline: NIS has been making any timeline it had extremely confusing lately! I'll just say he's post-his-own-game and has met the Disgaea 3 cast before.
Age: 1313 in Disgaea 1, so several years over that. 1300-ish, essentially.
~*Magical*~ abilities and strengths:
Oh, boy... Disgaea is kinda one of those Unicorn Cube Y series where everyone who is even semi-competent as a fighter compared to the main characters can blow up Jupiter with a laser shot out of one hand, and Laharl's pretty high on that power curve as the first main protagonist and all. Not counting La Pucelle or Marl Kingdom or etc. Most of his more special powers are vaguely fire-related and he defaults to being equipped with a sword. All-in-all he has about ten different special attacks he can use to explode and/or cut things in different ways, but the gist of it is just superhuman strength and kaboom energy.
His dad had been trying to teach him to gain psychic powers and infinite wisdom by seeing through his Mind's Eye, but he's terrible at it and is far too lazy to ever get any practice in unprompted.
How would they use their abilities?:
Fortunately, he is only dangerous if you deserve it. Or if you make him really mad over something stupid, but in the latter case it has to be really mad. He's only destroyed a planet in a temper-tantrum in a completely non-canon ending, so there's that! No, but seriously, Laharl's bullheaded and unafraid of using violence to get his way, but 90% of his threats are empty, because out of a combination of laziness and heavily guarded decency, he'd rather be a brat by yelling at someone than by vaporizing them.
Appearance: Laharl is built like an anorexic ten-year-old, but that's largely artstyle. He is shorter than the other little demons and angels his age, but he's generally supposed to be physically (and mentally) 13. He has pointed ears, red eyes, uselessly tiny red wings on his back and something vaguely resembling fangs due to being a demon, and impossibly-shaped blue hair due to being from a Japanese video game-specifically, his hair goes up in two antennae like a roach. Clothing-wise he has a ridiculous oversized red scarf that behaves more like a billowing cape, a pair of shorts, and... that's it, besides shoes and some bracelets/some kind of neck ring thingamabob.
Background/Personality:
Laharl spent his early life as a kind, responsible little boy who loves his mother and father very much. This was somewhat unusual seeing as they were the royal family of a Netherworld, and Laharl and his father were demons-King Krichevskoy was somewhat “progressive” about demons not necessarily needing to be evil, and his human wife was fixated on love. Everything was pretty nice until Laharl fell desperately ill. No known cures worked, except for a spell Laharl's mother knew. It could bring anyone back from the brink of death, in exchange for the life of one who loved him.
Rather than grieve with his father and anyone else who knew her, Laharl reacted to his mother's sacrifice by closing up emotionally. Being a child in mourning, he came to the irrational and ironclad conclusion that if she died because she loved him, it was Love's fault she was dead. From that point on, he did everything in his power to grow up like a typical demon, taking pride in his evil and exploding at the very mention of love and kindness. His dad tried to get through to him, but they couldn't communicate. Laharl developed into being mostly the person he is now: angry, selfish, and immature.
At some point, Laharl took what was meant to be a short nap. Just ten days or so, because he was a little drowsy. However, resulting from unknown circumstances, it took him over two years to wake up. Krichevskoy's right-hand vassal, a girl around Laharl's age named Etna, finally managed to rouse him so he could be informed of his father's death by choking. Not informed by choking, Krichevskoy died choking on a pretzel. You know what I mean. Anyway, with the Overlord dead and his heir in some kind of weird coma, the citizens of the Netherworld did the right thing and collectively deliberately forgot that Laharl existed, starting a long and pointless war for the throne that was, luckily, not yet over by the time he woke up.
Jumping into the fray without wasting time on loser stuff like caring at all that his father was dead, Laharl randomly chose a competitor for the throne-the one currently in the lead, by pure chance-and knocked him out of the running. This demon, Vyers, upon whom Laharl forcibly bestowed the title of Mid-boss, bore a strange, subtle resemblance to the late King Krichev-wait, no, nobody noticed or remarked upon that at all. Clearly two unrelated people. Moving on!
In Celestia, Seraph Lamington sent a young angel trainee named Flonne on an extraordinarily unusual mission for both an angel and a trainee: assassinate the Overlord, King Krichevskoy. Apparently he simply did not know that Krichevskoy was dead and this was in no way part of any kind of grandiose plan. Predictably, Flonne immediately failed as an assassin and got chased out of the Overlord's Castle and into the Netherworld, until finally Laharl and Etna caught her.
Once she explained her mission, it was established that it was all one big misunderstanding. In the ensuing goofy conversation, Flonne revealed that she is kind of big on love, and Laharl, unhappily reminded of his mother, insisted that demons are incapable of feeling that stupid crap. Mission failed, she decided to stick around to investigate this claim. Laharl allowed this on the terms that she act as his vassal.
Several more Episodic Things happened as Flonne tried to convince Laharl that there was Love In His Heart, earning repetitive but increasingly angry denials for her trouble. She took vindication from the few incidents in which she squeezed a little bit of compassion out of him-sparing an enemy's life, helping her find a magical pendant that kept her fairly weak angel self from dying in the Netherworld's evil-heavy environment, and even forgiving Etna when it was revealed that she had been forced to play double agent and betray him by a manipulative vampire named Maderas. Eventually, Laharl's campaign to win the throne that was rightfully his in the first place ended in success. He was finally the Overlord!
He laughed maniacally for several days straight. Then episodic things continued to happen, several dumb and inconsequential battles with Mid-boss included. Flonne and Etna both grew on him, to his vigorous denial.
Things started looking up when he was challenged by a human hero-CAPTAIN GORDON, DEFENDER OF EARTH-and effortlessly beat him into submission and recruited him, his busty sidekick Jennifer, and their robot Thursday as his vassals. They, too, earned a semblance of grudging affection from the young Overlord in time. Flonne continued to slowly soften him up as the Netherworld fought off an invasion from the surprisingly corrupt Earth Defense Force. Curiously, there seemed to be a handful of elite angel warriors among earth's invading forces. Flonne resolved to investigate Seraph Lamington's motives, and Laharl decided everyone would be going with her back to Celestia. Not to protect her shut up he just wanted to see what his archenemy, the Seraph, was like.
What they learned in Celestia, which did not give them the warmest of welcomes, was that the Seraph's second-in-command, Archangel Vulcanus, had been behind earth's invasion of the Netherworld, and that the Seraph had been aware of this treachery from the start. Ultimately, Vulcanus was punished-but so was Flonne, for attacking her fellow angels despite being thoroughly justified. She was turned into a flower, presumably dead. Laharl lost his shit and overpowered Lamington, nearly killing him. He spared his life for Flonne's sake, which is when Mid-boss inexplicably showed up and started dropping exposition all over the place.
The flower-that-was-Flonne suddenly began glowing and burst, restoring Flonne mostly to normal... the difference, Vyers explained, was that she was now a Fallen Angel. This, essentially a banishment to stay in the Netherworld (with all her friends) was her “punishment;” Lamington had no intention of killing her. Laharl asked Vyers who the hell he really was, to which he responded with the vague implication that he was his father and disappeared, never to be seen again except in cameo battles in various other games and also in the novels.
Laharl, along with Etna and Flonne, also got around as Nippon Ichi continued to make games, appearing in most of them to try and hijack them out of desperation to be the main character again. Obviously he failed in most cases, though in Disgaea 2 he accepted a compromise in which he was allowed to be the main character for 90 seconds. He made the most of this short amount of time by spending it on a special anime-style cutscene. Unfortunately, the brief spotlight was spent on Etna and Flonne violently beating him for being rude to them earlier.
Laharl is not what you could call evil anymore. He's kind of a tsundere for morality-he may be selfish, stubborn, and grumpy with an ego the size of the moon, but he will not infrequently go out of his way to help someone who's in trouble. He'll just insist it was an accident or that he had ulterior motives or this is totally unlike him but you got lucky because he's sick today. He's smarter than his occasional scheme (like trying to trick someone his own age by claiming to be their father) would suggest, at least in certain ways. He's perceptive and level-headed enough to be the straightman as often as not. It's usually his arrogance, stubbornness or laziness that gets him outsmarted.
Like most demons in his setting, he takes pride in a lot of “evil” attributes that are harmless but annoying-things you would scold a child for. He's extremely lazy, he doesn't wash his hands, he eats junk food, he stays up ludicrously late (talking days here), and he spends too much time playing video games and watching TV.
He has weaknesses to women with sexy bodies and people shouting optimistic phrases loudly. As in, these phenomena cause him physical pain and hinder his ability to fight. There may be something Freudian going on there.
Have you read up on how the game works?: What was that guide thing again... FreezingWeasel? ThunderBadger? (FlamingFerret.) Also money is obtained via missions, freelancing, and/or mooching.
1st person sample:
This is an outrage! You call this a room? I wanna talk to someone who knows who the hell they're dealing with! I'm an Overlord, dammit! You should all be grateful that I'd consider settling for a first-class suite, let alone this dump! I'm used to an entire castle!
…
There are a lot of humans around, huh. I guess if you're mostly from the kind of backwater worlds that just get demolished without anybody noticing, I can excuse your ignorance. While I'm waiting on some proper service, allow me to introduce myself: King Laharl, the most powerful and famous demon in the universe! My Netherworld was destroyed in a freak accident I had nothing to do with. It was mostly Etna's fault.
I'm sure everyone's okay, I was aiming at the ground.
Anyway, what's taking that room change so long?
3rd person sample:
Laharl was out of money. It took him a while to notice, and longer to decide what to do about it. He certainly wasn't going to do some kind of job. The idea was an outrage. What he usually did when he ran low on funds at home was pinpoint a wealthy demon to rob, but even if he found someone who had been around a lot longer than him and had some cash stored up... well, it probably wouldn't be much. And there'd be too much commotion, and if he tried to crush everyone in his way he might damage the ship, and it'd be more profitable to wait until someone fixed their planet and then rob them at home. That was all. It wasn't like he sympathized with these people.
His stomach growled. He didn't budge, remaining cross-legged on the floor in his room-really, what he needed was some of his vassals. He wasn't doing missions, not himself. Not doing missions. Not doing missions. Not--
“Damn!” He shot up as he shouted. His roommates may or may not have gotten the impression that he was a crazy person, but that wasn't important right now. Roommates. If he had any common sense, he supposed, he'd just take their money, but he was clearly delusional with hunger.
He could check for a mission that might be fun if it didn't involve other people telling him what to do and try to tolerate it.
Questions?: None for the moment.
Did you put your characters name and fandom in the subject: Let's hope so!
Also, I use one concrit post on my personal journal and just link to it in all my character journal's profiles. If you're too lazy to click twice, it's right here.