( scorched app ; gamzee makara ; homestuck )
Out of Character Information
player name: Amber.
player livejournal: bentley
playing here: Arthur & Theon
where did you find us? hiding in the dark, waiting to come out
are you 16 years of age or older?: y
In Character Information
character name: Gamzee Makara
Fandom: MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck
Timeline: page 6230
character's age: Six "sweeps", which is the equivalent of thirteen Earth years.
powers, skills, pets and equipment:
Gamzee is a troll, an alien race with a different biology, upbringing and culture to humans.
The main one is probably that they are nocturnal. Trolls sleep within recuperacoons filled with sopor slime. The slime helps ease the terrible visions of blood and carnage that plague the dark subconscious of their species. Gamzee eats the Sopor Slime to stave off his hereditary insanity.
So I suppose here is where I should talk about the typing quirks. A typing quirk is essentially "how the character types" in canon. Most text in the comic is delivered over an instant messaging service, as opposed to in-person - rather like us players! So much of it is rendered in the format of chatlogs. Each character types differently, as you might expect. These quirks often reflect personality, for example: capitalising proper nouns and using correct punctuation as opposed to typing everything in lower case and not caring about punctuation! OR substituting the letters "A, I, E" with "4, 1, 3" because those numbers have special significance to you.
But more importantly, they reflect character voice. Karkat TYPES IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE HE IS LOUD and angry and yelling a lot. Kanaya Capitalises The Beginning Of Each Word Because She Enunciates Very Properly. Vriska elongates her voooooooowels sometimes because she's overdramaaaaaaaatic! Etc, etc. You get the picture! Gamzee's multiple personalities mean that when he is under the influence of a soporific hE TyPeS In sTiCkY CaPs and when he is not, his ANGRY PERSONALITY TYPES IN ALL CAPS and his malicious personality types in all lowercase, these in alternating lines. Offline, this becomes him switching between shouting and whispering.CG: I REALLY CAN'T STAND YOU AND I HATE HOW YOU TYPE, IT JUST BOTHERS ME SO MUCH, HAVE I MENTIONED THAT?
TC: YoU SaY iT pReTtY mUcH eVeRy TiMe We TaLk YeAh.
TC: but uh, i don't have to...
TC: uhhh see?
TC: but i mean man this feels so motherfuckin unnatural and shit.
TC: YoU jUsT gOt To Be GoInG wItH wHaT fEeLs RiGhT aT wHeRe YoUr HeArT's Up In, YoU kNoW?
Finally, the colour of a troll's text is also significantly important. Trolls have a rigid social class structure, dictated by the colour of one's blood. Red is basically peasantry, going all the way up through the rainbow to orange, yellow, green, blue and purple-- which is royalty! Many trolls type with their blood colour to show they are proud of who they are and not ashamed (Gamzee included). The higher a troll's blood the colour, the more likely for their ancestral tendencies towards psychopathy and violence kick in. It's noteworthy that Karkat types in gray to hide his blood colour (which is a mutant variation not found in troll society) because he is ashamed/scared of it. So yes! Colours are important. Sort of.CT: D --> Honestly I'm confused by the social order
TC: mAn, Me ToO. i DoN't KnOw WhAt Of FuCkIn WhAt CoLoR iS wHaT, sO i DoN't BoThEr WiTh ThInKiN oN tHaT mOtHeRfUcKeR.
For the sake of my sanity, I am only going to use the typing quirk if Gamzee is legitimately typing (in the same way that there are other characters in scorched who use lowercase or odd punctuation when using the text function.) He might choose not to do it if characters hassle him enough about it. I'm not going to use the colours at all, as they mostly exist in the story to differentiate between characters in chatlogs, and Gamzee could care less about his prestigious purple blood. Also, the Forge doesn't have colour text.
In addition to all this being-a-troll weirdness, Gamzee also exists in the Homestuck universe whereby items are "captchalogued" in a card system existing both in a physical capacity (i.e. each item has a real card that people may keep in a wallet) and in a metaphysical capacity (i.e. the items stack in the corner of the screen and can only be accessed by complex procedures mimicking the various ins and outs of computer coding, called a Fetch Modus.) Unlike characters with sensible Fetch Modi based on actual data structures (Stack, Umbrella, Array) Gamzee's is called the "Miracle" modus, and the only way he can accurately call to hand the item he wants is through a miracle. So rather than use it in the traditional way, he is the only character to disregard this way of storing and retrieving items (John, the human main character, is pretty confused by the idea of simply "picking something up"). Gamzee retrieves cards with items from his modus by reaching up into the corner of his screen and physically taking a card.
Because Homestuck includes a lot of game parody, each character has a weapons class, called a "strife specibus". Someone with "hammerkind" can only fight, for example, with hammers, be they your average nail-thunking dealies or large Greek weapons of lightning and godliness. Gamzee starts out with "clubkind" and tends to use juggling pins, in fitting with his clown schtick, but later his specibus is upgraded "jokerkind" - the Joker is of course the wild card of any deck, and jokerkind in turn allows Gamzee to use pretty much any -kind you can think of. During the story he uses a broken bow (as a garotte), a hammer, a whip, a spear, a sickle...
Within the game SBurb/SGrub (sort of like if the Sims was a LARP and a dungeon crawler) Gamzee's title is the "Bard of Rage" and he deals the most damage to the endgame boss in one almighty blow.
Finally, the symbol on his shirt (the astrological sign for Capricorn) determines certain aspects of his character (his internet handle is terminallyCapricious, he was raised by a being that took the shape of a "sea goat", his horns are goatlike, his last name Makara is the Sanskrit equivalent of Capricorn) but it also has significance within the comic.
Ancestors are a concept in Troll society. They are historical figures who lived centuries before the set of twelve trolls who are followed in Homestuck. Each ancestor is said to be a close genetic match to a particular troll, and young trolls believe that they are supposed to find clues about their ancestors. The ancestors are also intended to serve as role models for adolescent trolls. Each of the twelve trolls in Homestuck shares the same zodiac symbol and blood color as his or her respective ancestor.
Gamzee's marks him as one of the Lord High Subjugglators. This is basically a class of "laughssassins" that the Troll Empress created to subjugate the masses by use of the inherent predilection to violence that comes with being so high up the hemospectrum. More about this later.
In terms of skills, Gamzee is the "stoner troll" and most of the time can't get much done, though he enjoys rapping (which he is bad at) and giving advice (which he is even worse at).
He's coming in with his item sylladex and "jokerkind" strife (neither of which will be visible to anybody except him). He'll have on him: a few ordinary weapons and the Warhammer of Zillyhoo, which is a god-tier powerful weapon; some miscellaneous body parts he took off his friends (captchalogued into the cards); some empty pie pans and empty bottles of Faygo; his laptop, which won't work; and a "horn pile" - about 100 bicycle horns in a pile for him to sleep on.
canon history:
MS Paint Adventures at Wikipedia
Homestuck at TVTropes (This timeline is especially fantastic.)
Quick Homestuck synopsis at the MSPA wiki.
Gamzee Makara's biography on the MSPA wiki.
Solely for the sake of elucidation: Homestuck at Know Your Meme, an explanation of of some of the major memes/hype surrounding Homestuck, its fans and its creators.
My quick Homestuck summary would be: it's the story of a demon. He can only appear when a universe dies if a certain set of requirements has been met, but is omniscient so when he appears, he goes back through the entire history of that universe and sets those requirements in motion. So essentially, paradoxically, he creates himself. This is a reoccurring theme in Homestuck, as the sBurb/sGrub game is brought into existence to make these requirements happen, and the outcome of the game is to bring about the end of the universe it is played in but also create a new universe, one where its occupants are even more likely to succeed when playing sBurb/sGrub.
A bunch of alien trolls play the game and fail. They use the game's restart mechanism, the scratch, to reset the entire universe to one in which succeeding is more likely. This makes them "swap roles" with their Ancestors - they are now the Ancestors and their Ancestors are now the young trolls playing the game. This is the Session that takes up most of Act Five of Homestuck and which Gamzee and his friends played. They succeed and create a new universe, the one in which the human kids live. This is where Act One of Homestuck begins, with the kids playing the game. They fail, and are forced to reset the game. This reset allows their "Ancestors" (mother, grandmother, grandfather, and brother) to be the main characters of the story (Act Six) while the kids become those same parental equivalents.
Gamzee's personal history is fairly normal - for a troll.
Trolls breed like bees: Imperial Drones collect "genetic material" from paired adult trolls in buckets (giving buckets an erotic significance in troll culture) and all the collected fluid is used to impregnate the Mother Grub, sort of a queen bee, who pops out loads of "wrigglers". These are then adopted by a "lusus", one of the great sentient beasts that roam Alternia, and are cared for and raised until they are old enough to repay the lusus through some sort of symbiotic service (feeding it, for example.)
Gamzee's lusus was a sea creature even though he is not one of the aquatic trolls with gills. It spent a lot of time away from their respiteblock (house) and mostly left Gamzee to his own devices. Because of this, he took to baking the sopor slime from the recupuracoons into pies and eating it. He also drank a lot of Faygo, which the other trolls seem to regard as the equivalent of being an alcoholic. He had an obsession with a troll religion which seems to closely resemble Earth's "juggalo" culture (perpetuated by the band Insane Clown Posse). He genuinely believes in miracles and incorporates aspects of clowning and juggalo culture into his life, and collects bicycle horns and enjoys saying "honk" a lot.
When the trolls started playing sGrub, Gamzee was recruited by his friends. It was only later, after they had all lost the game, hiding out on an asteroid, that Gamzee's story becomes important. The trolls are interacting, via the IM program Trollian, with the humans that live in the universe they have created who are also playing the human equivalent of the game, sBurb.
Dave Strider, who is a bit of a dick, is amused by Gamzee's discussion of things that he considers to do with a stupid band subculture, and links him the youtube music video of ICP's song "Miracles". Gamzee sees this as "blasphemy" and begins to question his religion. Combined with the fact that he has run out of his soporifics, he snaps, and taps into his hereditary violence and insanity as a descendant of the High Subjugglators.
Gamzee develops a split personality, decides that the both of him is the messiah of his religion, and that he must kill everyone else. He puts some events into play that are the root cause for all the terrible things happening in both universes, and goes on a small and terrifying killing spree. He starts a collection of the heads of his dead friends, and also takes their bloodied personal possessions as trophies, and writes messages on the wall in their blood.
Despite his terror, his best friend and the leader of their group, Karkat, is able to placate him through "papping" (gentle tapping and slapping) and "shooshing" (a constant shhh noise). Because troll romance includes not just love, but also a conciliatory/balancing friendship, Karkat ad Gamzee become "moirails" and he is pacified through to this point in the story.
personality:
While "under the influence", Gamzee is generally a friendly, chill guy. He has been lonely most of his life, and hasn't been very well socialized, and is considered a little "weird" or "annoying" by the other trolls, but he really likes people and being friends with people.
In fact, Gamzee is the sort of person who would do anything for his friends - at one point Equius suggests he give up the slime and Faygo and Gamzee says he's quite happy to, since he respects his friends and their opinions, and if they think something is a good idea, then they are probably better-informed than he is. He laughs along with jokes made at his expense and supports his friends in any endeavor they want to undertake.
It is very rare that Gamzee disagrees with someone or wants to chastise them, and when he does he still maintains a vaguely submissive, easy-going attitude about it: "I don't really think you should do this thing, but I guess you can if you want?" This is completely at odds with the expected behavior of someone so high up in the caste system as Gamzee. But though he isn't ashamed of his purple blood, Gamzee doesn't really care about caste, and not only is he friends with people far lower than him, he also harbours romantic feelings for Tavros, who is essentially right at the other end of the hemospectrum and disabled to boot.
Due to his imbibing, Gamzee comes off as a bit of a stoner. He spaces out for long periods of time (at some point referencing that he occasionally drops items because he forgets he's holding them) and he enjoys contemplating philosophical questions. Sometimes he just stares at the colours of things. His thought processes move slowly and he likes it that way, although he's always a bit guilty and apologetic whenever this inconveniences anybody else.
Sopor slimed Gamzee also dislikes violence. In theory he understands the concepts of subjugglation and laughssassination, but rather than fight the monsters in his session of sGrub he bonds with them and they chill out with some pie and Faygo. Where possible, Gamzee avoid conflict.
Sober Gamzee is a different kettle of fish entirely. When he snaps, he is insane and furious. However his behaviour soon calms to a sort of creepy psychopathy. Where before he was sort of vacant, now he is a calculating, smiling bastard, who enjoys playing psychological games with others.
He is now all about violence: not only does he kill Equius in the most ironic way possible, he curses him out as a filthy lowblood to boot. And though it's implied he may have tried to revive Tavros when he came upon his body, he also cut off the head of his already dead friend and added it to a growing collection. Sober, Gamzee enjoys commanding others, blood, writing terrifying death threats on the wall in blood, painting pictures in blood, shedding his own blood, and killing.
He also has a sort of split personality: one loud and angry, and one cold and calculating.
Once Karkat calms him he maintains his split personality typing quirk, but also seems to have returned to his submissive, casually suggesting ways, and comforts a crying Karkat at the death of his good friend Sollux.GAMZEE: naw brother, i was just about to all say for you to try and get your settle down on, maybe.
GAMZEE: :o(
why do you feel this character would be appropriate to the setting?
First, let's talk about age. As you may have gathered by this point in the app, troll culture is very different to human culture. While 6 sweeps / thirteen years is a coming-of-age point, by then troll children will be expected to have participated in war games amongst themselves, be developing the romantic attachments that will last them the rest of their lives, seeking out the ancestor who shares their symbol and thus whose footsteps they should follow in, and so on.
The trolls in Homestuck have this process interrupted by the SBurb game, which has ramifications both on their real lives (the death of their "lusus", the guardian monsters who raised them) and on their personalities (the formation of a team, the need to take responsibility for their actions, the 'level up' system being strongly tied to emotional growth as well as stat boosts.) In addition, all the thirteen year old humans in the comic read as older/wiser than their years (I'd put them at sixteen if ages weren't canon, and current developments indicate there may in fact be a three-year timeskip.)
Gamzee has murdered two people in cold blood, and seen the death of his guardian, several of his other friends, and then his entire species, and then his entire universe. It's worth assuming he isn't going to be too drastically affected by the darker elements of scorched's setting.
Secondly, let's talk about the canon itself. Homestuck is long and convoluted and at times, yes, cracky (especially the early parts of the comic while it was getting set up: the first act has a lot of "random" humour and memetic jokes, although the seeds for the longer plot are also planted). It is a canon with a lot of balls in the air or cards on the table or some other metaphor, but the plot holes mostly only exist as questions that haven't been answered yet rather than questions that have been overlooked. And being that it invents an alien universe and three alien races, and a lot of the "systems" in place for the aliens and for the humans are satirizing computer coding and data structures, RPG stat systems and levels (particularly the old Squeenix stuff), and geek and internet culture, it can be complex and contain a lot of made-up, in-joke or just plain difficult to understand terminology.
I'm more than aware that a lot of people resent Homestuck for being a popular canon with a lot of terms and memes that are incomprehensible to those who hven't read/watched/played it. I'm going to attempt to avoid cultivating this resentment as much as possible. I don't want to blind people with blocks of purple courier, I don't want to make constant references to things nobody else understands without explaining myself, and I don't want to godmode simply because "that's the way my canon is". I'm absolutely willing to compromise, translate and explain wherever possible, but in the end I don't think playing off a Homestuck troll is any different to playing off a Homunculus from FMA or a Claymore or a Bleach Shinigami - each canon has species, abilities, terminology and references that an "outsider" would not intuitively grasp and yet they still manage to integrate just fine within a panfandom setting.
Finally, I think it'd be fun to see Gamzee making the major adjustments to human culture, since he's both the troll who is likely to be chillest with the differences but also the one who probably most needs to learn he can escape his cultural destiny. Freaking people out with his murderclown business, rapping badly (I'm thinking he might remind some people of John and his awful barding) and staying out of all the patrol/fighty/monsters business. I have considered having him start a babysitting business or something because that is hilarious and awful.
Writing Samples
Network Post Sample:
[ There is an inhuman eye taking up the whole screen of the forge. The pupil is solid black, the eyeball is an eerie yellow, and the surrounding skin is pale grey, smeared haphazardly in places with white greasepaint. ]
Woah...
[ And the owner of the eye pulls back, revealing an odd-looking young man - or troll, as is actually the case - humanoid but alien, messy dark hair, pale clown makeup smeared over his grey face and three jagged cuts sliced from his left brow, across his eyes, and down to his right cheek. The crusted blood, long-dried, is purple. His eyes are heavy-lidded, complacent, a hint of a smirk playing around his fang-filled mouth. ]
There is some wicked shit all up in this motherfucking place, bro. I thought I'd seen all the things there all are for me to see and then some, but now I've up and realized I haven't ever seen any motherfucking thing. Look at this shit, man. Just look at it.
[ Seemingly savvy as to how the Forge works, he pans the camera around the room: it's one of the standard Outislander Community Block apartments. There is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about it. When Gamzee turns the camera back onto the oddest thing in the room, himself, his eyes are glassy with wonder. ]
No wonder, no fucking wonder the mirthful messiahs talked all that shit about getting all up in the space of the paradise planet. Do you think that's where we are now, motherfucking best friend? Did some supreme honking miracle just up and take us all right off to the new motherfucking universe with all the sweet human loot we could desire?
Yeah, I feel in my special stardust, that's gotta be it.
[ He pokes the screen, fiddles about with the device for a little longer, until it switches to text. ]
BEST FRIEND?
you didn't go all and get left behind with all our other best bros, now did you?
BECAUSE I HAVE TO TELL YOU, IT'S GETTING A LITTLE MOTHERFUCKING DIFFICULT TO STAY POSITIVE ABOUT THIS MOTHERFUCKING MIRACLE
i don't want to be here by myself.
AND YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS FOR ME TO CONTROL MY MOTHERFUCKING TEMPER THESE DAYS...
Third Person Sample:
It's pretty motherfucking great, this strange new world Gamzee's managed to find himself in.
Okay, so there's no sopor slime, but he'd run out on the asteroid a while back. And even if that hadn't really been all to the good what with the murder and the shouting and all that bad stuff, it had turned out pretty motherfucking okay in the end, hadn't it? Hadn't it?
But there's something else, something that has him giving quiet little honks of happiness. And sometimes actual honks, with his horns instead of his voice, just to motherfucking remind himself that he'd remembered to pack them and there was a soothingly uncomfortable horn pile all up and waiting for him when he made his way all chill back to his new hive in the respiteblock. This substitute sort of burns like the slime and fizzes like Faygo, a miraculous mix of his two favourite things, and when he drinks it the little bit of him that's always angry gets even more angry, but the rest of him, the rest of him gets happy and sleepy and he folds his arms up on the bar counter and just floats there for a while until he feels, maybe a little bit bad around about his middle region, a little bit nauseous, but still pretty motherfucking good.
Except he's not allowed sleep here, the man who mixes up all these miraculous cocktails of rainbows and fluffy warm goodness, he gets his stern on when Gamzee tries to nap on his counter. Maybe it's a human thing? But otherwise he's pretty chill, and sort of badass for a human, and he never makes fun of the way Gamzee talks like some other people kinda can, even though he's been trying to get it all up and evened out now, since whether there's one or two of him there's not really any need to get all impolite. "Indoor voice", wasn't that what the nice female human had told him? Gamzee is down with his indoor voice.
Human stuff Gamzee is also down with: electricity, necklaces, the Forge, the public ablution traps where he just sort of chills out in all that hot water with bros all around him - yeah, so most of the humans were still strangers, but a stranger's really just a buddy you haven't all motherfucking met yet, right? Right?
"Hey, kid. You can't sleep here."
Aww, he'd all gone and spaced out again. It's kinda hard to not do that, even harder than it was back home, because Gamzee isn't really used to being awake during the whole day, even if his lusus hadn't exactly been around to get all strict about Gamzee getting into his recuparacoon come dawn.
"Sorry, bro. Maybe I should all be getting myself home," Gamzee yawns, slides off the stool to his feet. He's a little unsteady - it's the miracle drink, still racing through his system and making it all sluggish and shit. But there's plenty of other warm places a brother can curl up and get his nap on, even when there's all this ice and fucking snow going on. "Thanks for the motherfucking drink," Gamzee shouts as he leaves, because he's all about politeness these days. And he honks quietly again, as the door clicks shut behind him.
Anything else? :o)