Application
Series: Futurama
Series' Medium: Cartoon TV series
Character: Turanga Leela ("Leela")
Age: 20something (claimed)/30 (actual) (Leela's exact birth date is never given, but Bender mocks her in the second season for saying "I don't want to die at the age of twenty-five," so I'm putting her at 26 at the start of the series.)
Sex/Gender: Female
Canon Role: Leela is the main female character and the love interest of the protagonist, Fry. As captain of the Planet Express ship, she's the boss of several other characters. She often acts as the voice of reason.
"Real" Name: Lisa Townsend
Please give us a personal history of your character's life and explain to us in detail how they grow and develop over the course of their canon:
Leela was born to Turanga Morris and Munda in about 2975, in the sewers of New New York City, which in her time house a self-contained society of mutants who have been ostracized from the above-ground world. The only sign of Leela's mutant origins was her single eye. Hoping that by giving her up, they could let her have a normal life, her parents left her in a basket on the doorstep of the Cookieville Minimum Security Orphanarium, with a note pinned to her blanket in an alien-looking language that had actually been invented by Munda, an expert in extraterrestrial linguistics. For most of her life, Leela believed herself to be the only survivor from a distant planet, as she was the only one-eyed "alien" on Earth.
The other kids at the Orphanarium made fun of Leela's eye, and she was an outcast growing up, but she was resilient, and grew from a goofy, dorky kid with braces and a monocle to a strong, confident young woman. At some point, she had a relationship with a man named Sean. It seems to have been her only serious involvement, and ended in a breakup whose mutuality Leela emphasizes, repeatedly, every time the topic comes up.
By her mid-twenties, she worked at Applied Cryogenics as a Fate Assignment Officer, giving newly-defrozen people a test to determine the job they were most suited for, and implanting career-assignment chips in their hands. The law compelled people to take the job they were given. This was where Leela met Philip Fry, a defrostee who'd inadvertently frozen himself in "the Stupid Ages" (1999). Fry refused to accept his assigned career as a lowly delivery boy, and Leela had to chase him down. While trying to elude her, Fry met Bender, a robot who had planned to use a suicide booth, and the two became friends. Once she tracked them down, Leela realized she didn't like her job either, and quit. This made all three of them career deserters, but Fry had a living relative, his great-nephew several times over, Hubert Farnsworth, a doddering crackpot scientist, who ended up hiring them as the crew for his spaceship, doing... deliveries.
On a mission to rescue animals from a planet about to implode, Leela met Zapp Brannigan. Zapp was the most decorated captain in the Democratic Order of Planets (DOOP), but was also a pompous, clueless blowhard who arrested Leela, Fry, and Bender for trying to intervene on the planet, even though it was DOOP's mining of dark matter that had caused the planet to be hollowed out in the first place. He had a moment of vulnerability that coincided with Leela having a moment of pity, and they slept together. From that moment on, Zapp was unshakably convinced that Leela was his woman, a sentiment Leela emphatically did not share.
On the doomed planet, Leela discovered a creature not on the list of species to be rescued, and took him in, naming him Nibbler. Nibbler had a bad habit of swallowing other animals whole, but he also excreted dark matter, used to fuel spaceships. Leela's primary motivation in adopting him, though, was that he was cute.
She ran into Zapp again when the Planet Express crew went on the maiden voyage of the luxury spaceliner Titanic with him as captain. To try to elude his advances, Leela pretended she and Fry were involved, which of course led to wacky shenanigans when Amy Wong, Planet Express's intern, came up with the same ploy to keep her parents from trying to fix her up with other passengers. Fry and Leela almost shared a romantic moment, but the mood was thoroughly ruined by Zapp's incompetence as a captain. He steered the ship into an asteroid field, and everyone had to evacuate.
Finding out where she came from, and connecting with an alien like herself, were important enough to Leela that she was easy prey for a con artist, Alcazar, pretending to be another cyclops. He and Leela met online, and he invited her to his planet. This was one of the few times Leela let her emotions override her sense of responsibility; she dumped a shipment rather than delivering it, so she could go meet up with Alcazar. He spun a story about the supposed destruction of their race that won Leela over. Even when he turned out to be a sexist slob, Leela was willing to marry him to continue their race. But then he revealed his true colors as a quintuple-timing shape-shifter. Even after this, Leela continued to hope that she would one day learn the truth about her origins.
Leela's relationship with Fry advanced when he caught worms from a truck-stop-bathroom sandwich. Everyone but Leela flew micro-droids of themselves into Fry's body in a tiny model of the Planet Express ship, and found the worms repairing systems throughout Fry to make him smarter and stronger. Leela distracted him while they were on this mission. She found his new eloquence and charm very attractive, and went in and stopped the others from expelling the worms. At her apartment that evening, she declared her love for what Fry had become. But Fry was intelligent enough to recognize the difference between that and who he really was, and got rid of the worms himself. Leela couldn't be attracted to him once he went back to his usual immature, clueless self.
Leela revisited the Orphanarium, and some of her childhood insecurities, at a reunion. The crush she'd had on another orphan, Adlai Atkins, was rekindled. He'd become a doctor, and he gave Leela an operation to give her a second, purely cosmetic, eye. She and Adlai began dating, and became serious enough to consider adopting a child themselves. Leela wanted to choose a little mutant girl with an ear on her forehead. She was offended that Adlai wanted to give the child an operation to make her "acceptable," realized she preferred her own former appearance, and made him change her back.
She briefly became a pitcher in professional blernsball (the 31st-century, crazily complicated version of baseball), the first woman to do so. She was hired as a publicity stunt to draw crowds to Mets games, because she beaned every batter. Her inglorious career, and even more inglorious product-endorsement attempts, were short-lived.
Leela was generally well-adjusted, but she sometimes became depressed about knowing nothing about her family. Winning the Orphan of the Year award at the Orphanarium (in such august company as a man who successfully switched from heroin to methadone addiction) brought her loneliness to the forefront. At the same time, Bender was running a crooked waste-disposal business, dumping hazardous wastes into the sewers, and he, Fry, and Leela were snatched by mutants seeking revenge. They were saved by a mysterious cloaked couple. Instead of leaving the sewers with the others, Leela became determined to find out why. Pursuing them, she dove into the mutagenic lake and discovered that it had no effect on her. She tracked down the couple, who had what appeared to be a weird shrine to her in their house. One of them was wearing a bracelet identical to Leela's own, and she assumed they had killed her parents. She was about to kill them in revenge, which they would have allowed, when Fry, who had been investigating the note that had been pinned to Leela when she was left at the Orphanarium, burst in and revealed that they were her parents. Overcome with emotion, Leela embraced them, overjoyed to finally be able to know her family.
Fry continued his attempts to woo Leela, while Bender had a dating adventure of his own with the artificial intelligence of the Planet Express ship. The ship went a little nuts when Bender dumped her. She shut off the oxygen and gravity and headed for a quasar, intent on compressing herself and Bender into a single entity. Fry and Leela had to shut down the ship's brain, and Fry hooked Leela's failing oxygen tank up to his own, even though that left him with no air at all. After Leela revived him, she seemed to be starting to see him in a different light.
Fry and Leela briefly gained superpowers from a "miracle cream," and formed a crime-fighting trio with Bender. This was a handy way for Leela to combine her violent tendencies with doing good. She was forced to reveal her superhero identity to her parents when foiling a criminal made her miss meeting up with them on the one day they had special passes to be on the surface. They thought this was a sign that Leela was ashamed of them. Her father couldn't keep the secret, and the criminal kidnapped him and Munda as a way to get to Leela. After rescuing them (and running out of the cream), Leela, Fry, and Bender retired from being superheroes.
Leela got a chance to experience being a teenager living with her parents when the Planet Express crew was doused with age-reversing tar at a spa. She insisted on getting the authentic teenage experience, with rules and curfews (so she could rebel). Her parents tried, but weren't too clear on the concept. (One of her father's rules: "No beer until you finish your tequila!") But Leela reverted back to her normal age after the Professor made the de-aging worse for the rest of the crew. They had to go looking for the Fountain of Aging, and Leela was the only one still old enough to rescue the others when they got stuck in a whirlpool in it. She gained a newfound appreciation for her life as an adult and the experiences that had made her who she was.
On a mission to collect honey from space bees (which turned out to have been the job that killed at least one former Planet Express crew), Leela decided to adopt a baby queen bee so they could get their own space honey without having to cheat death. The baby bee stung her on the way back to Earth, and Leela laughed off the injury until she saw that Fry, who threw himself between the bee and Leela to protect her, had been impaled and killed. Leela was so overcome by grief and guilt that she began to dream about Fry speaking to her, and then to hallucinate while awake. Throughout it all, Fry kept telling her to wake up. And she finally did, to find she had been in a coma, having gotten the full dose of the bee's venom while Fry was only injured. Fry had sat by her hospital bed talking to her for weeks.
One way Fry had impressed Leela when he had parasites was by playing the holophoner, a difficult, futuristic, oboe-like instrument that generated images from the player's mind. He continued to try to learn it even after his worm-induced talent was taken away, and he made a deal with the robot devil that ended up with the two of them trading hands. With the robotic hands, Fry became an internationally renowned holophoner player, and he composed an opera in Leela's honor. The robot devil schemed to get his own hands back, and in the middle of the opera's premiere, revealed that he would marry Leela himself if Fry didn't undo the trade. Fry had no choice but to give in. The opening-night crowd fled when they heard him play with his own, untalented fingers, but Leela stayed to hear the end. This is the end of the series, and the point from which Leela's pulled.
Please give us a detailed description of your character's personality:
Leela almost entirely lacks impulsiveness. She and the bureaucrat Hermes Conrad are the only responsible people at Planet Express, and Leela seems to have a good sense for just how much bossing around Fry and Bender need to counteract their laziness. She's the one who makes sure they complete their missions, and she's the one who gets the others out of the trouble they inevitably blunder into. She's genuinely hurt when Zapp, temporarily disgraced, comes to work for Planet Express and convinces Fry and Bender to mutiny and depose her as captain, but she's still willing to save Fry and Bender when Zapp's plan to restore his own good name is going to get them killed.
Despite her unimpulsive nature, Leela also has a violent streak, and will kick people in the face at the drop of a hat. I think this is because kung fu was one of her only outlets for expressing herself as an awkward teen, so violence comes more naturally to her than diplomacy.
She freely meddles in the lives of her more feckless friends, particularly Fry, which is understandable, because they generally need all the help they can get. Leela doesn't hesitate to tell people when they're being morons, and usually knows they're being dumb before they do. She's down-to-earth and practical, but does seem to interfere primarily for her friends' own good, to make sure they make the right decisions, as she does when she gets Bender and Fry back together as roommates.
Leela can be sarcastic and cynical, but her cynicism masks a sensitive side. She has a soft spot for animals, and cares deeply about the environment, on several occasions joining up with animal-rights or green activist groups. And even though she's quick to call things corny or roll her eyes at public displays of affection, she's also easily swayed by compliments and romance directed at her. I think this apparent contradiction is because Leela uses cynicism as a pre-emptive defense mechanism; it's the hard shell over the gooey center, as it were.
Having only one eye has obviously influenced Leela's self-image, and she's more self-conscious about her appearance than she generally lets on, as is clear from how much she enjoys looking normal at first after the operation Adlai gives her. She's sometimes irritated with Amy, who brags about having had cuteness reduction surgery and occasionally dings Leela about her lack of femininity. Leela tends to repress any feelings of sadness or inadequacy, so that, as she says "they can fester quietly as a mental illness." Being and seeming strong are important to her, and she's very self-reliant and usually projects a confident front.
Her family is also very important to her. Leela never knew her parents at all until she was in her late twenties, and she's eager to make up for the lost time. Knowing them has filled a void that she had dealt with all her life.
She's romantically unlucky, partly because she's picky, but still manages to have terrible taste in men. She optimistically keeps looking for true love over the course of the series. Even though Fry's infatuated with her, it takes Leela a long time to see him as more than a friend, and it's indicative of her pickiness that she resists these feelings even after they develop. It doesn't help that when they first become involved, Fry's under the influence of parasitic worms that make him smarter; nor does experiencing their wedding, but skipping over the grand gesture that led to it, thanks to chronitons (particles that affect the flow of time) run amok. Leela does seem to gradually move from completely dismissing Fry as a potential partner to being able to appreciate his genuine affection for her.
Please give us a physical description of your character: At Landel's, Leela has two eyes instead of the one she has in canon. We never see her eye color in the show, but, given her mutant origins, I think it's purple. I'm guessing at her height, too, but she appears relatively tall compared to other characters, so I'll say she's five-foot-eight in her big clunky boots, and five-six without. She has long purple hair that she wears in a high ponytail. She's quite athletic and moderately curvy, with sturdy hips and muscular arms and legs. Her nose is small, and she has a large mouth, usually lipsticked pink.
What kinds of otherworldly abilities does your character have, if any?: Leela's a mutant, which in the Futurama universe makes her immune to mutagens and more resistant to viruses and communicable diseases than normal humans.
If present, how do you plan to tweak these powers to make your character appropriately hindered in the setting of Landel's?: She'll be completely human, with a normal immune system and normal susceptibility to any radioactive waste Landel's might have lying around.
Does your character have any non-otherworldly abilities/training that surpass the norm?: Leela became a black belt in Arcturan kung-fu (pretty identical to the regular kind) as a teenager, and often uses kicks to attack people. She's in excellent physical shape, better than the average DOOP recruit, and has great stamina. There's some debate over whether her being a mutant affects her physical prowess, but except for the episode where she has superpowers, she doesn't exhibit any abilities beyond the norm for an in-shape human with comparable training.
It won't matter in Landel's, but she's an accomplished spaceship pilot. She's also the worst major-league blernsball player ever.
A note about canon-puncturing: Star Trek exists in the Futurama universe, and the Planet Express crew have met the cast. (As a hot "alien" chick, Leela of course ended up making out with Shatner.) Her knowledge about the show itself is limited to what she learned in that episode and the fact that the series was banned on Earth in the 23rd century, after its fandom became a worldwide religion. I'll be sure to secure mun permission before she mentions any Star Trek people being fictional. Star Wars also exists in the Futurama universe. Movies are apparently still being made, but the die-hard fans emigrated from Earth at some point. The Star Wars characters in Damned at the moment are not any Leela would recognize as being from the series. If any were to show up that she'd know about, I'd certainly check with the mun(s) before puncturing.
Series' Medium: Cartoon TV series
Character: Turanga Leela ("Leela")
Age: 20something (claimed)/30 (actual) (Leela's exact birth date is never given, but Bender mocks her in the second season for saying "I don't want to die at the age of twenty-five," so I'm putting her at 26 at the start of the series.)
Sex/Gender: Female
Canon Role: Leela is the main female character and the love interest of the protagonist, Fry. As captain of the Planet Express ship, she's the boss of several other characters. She often acts as the voice of reason.
"Real" Name: Lisa Townsend
Please give us a personal history of your character's life and explain to us in detail how they grow and develop over the course of their canon:
Leela was born to Turanga Morris and Munda in about 2975, in the sewers of New New York City, which in her time house a self-contained society of mutants who have been ostracized from the above-ground world. The only sign of Leela's mutant origins was her single eye. Hoping that by giving her up, they could let her have a normal life, her parents left her in a basket on the doorstep of the Cookieville Minimum Security Orphanarium, with a note pinned to her blanket in an alien-looking language that had actually been invented by Munda, an expert in extraterrestrial linguistics. For most of her life, Leela believed herself to be the only survivor from a distant planet, as she was the only one-eyed "alien" on Earth.
The other kids at the Orphanarium made fun of Leela's eye, and she was an outcast growing up, but she was resilient, and grew from a goofy, dorky kid with braces and a monocle to a strong, confident young woman. At some point, she had a relationship with a man named Sean. It seems to have been her only serious involvement, and ended in a breakup whose mutuality Leela emphasizes, repeatedly, every time the topic comes up.
By her mid-twenties, she worked at Applied Cryogenics as a Fate Assignment Officer, giving newly-defrozen people a test to determine the job they were most suited for, and implanting career-assignment chips in their hands. The law compelled people to take the job they were given. This was where Leela met Philip Fry, a defrostee who'd inadvertently frozen himself in "the Stupid Ages" (1999). Fry refused to accept his assigned career as a lowly delivery boy, and Leela had to chase him down. While trying to elude her, Fry met Bender, a robot who had planned to use a suicide booth, and the two became friends. Once she tracked them down, Leela realized she didn't like her job either, and quit. This made all three of them career deserters, but Fry had a living relative, his great-nephew several times over, Hubert Farnsworth, a doddering crackpot scientist, who ended up hiring them as the crew for his spaceship, doing... deliveries.
On a mission to rescue animals from a planet about to implode, Leela met Zapp Brannigan. Zapp was the most decorated captain in the Democratic Order of Planets (DOOP), but was also a pompous, clueless blowhard who arrested Leela, Fry, and Bender for trying to intervene on the planet, even though it was DOOP's mining of dark matter that had caused the planet to be hollowed out in the first place. He had a moment of vulnerability that coincided with Leela having a moment of pity, and they slept together. From that moment on, Zapp was unshakably convinced that Leela was his woman, a sentiment Leela emphatically did not share.
On the doomed planet, Leela discovered a creature not on the list of species to be rescued, and took him in, naming him Nibbler. Nibbler had a bad habit of swallowing other animals whole, but he also excreted dark matter, used to fuel spaceships. Leela's primary motivation in adopting him, though, was that he was cute.
She ran into Zapp again when the Planet Express crew went on the maiden voyage of the luxury spaceliner Titanic with him as captain. To try to elude his advances, Leela pretended she and Fry were involved, which of course led to wacky shenanigans when Amy Wong, Planet Express's intern, came up with the same ploy to keep her parents from trying to fix her up with other passengers. Fry and Leela almost shared a romantic moment, but the mood was thoroughly ruined by Zapp's incompetence as a captain. He steered the ship into an asteroid field, and everyone had to evacuate.
Finding out where she came from, and connecting with an alien like herself, were important enough to Leela that she was easy prey for a con artist, Alcazar, pretending to be another cyclops. He and Leela met online, and he invited her to his planet. This was one of the few times Leela let her emotions override her sense of responsibility; she dumped a shipment rather than delivering it, so she could go meet up with Alcazar. He spun a story about the supposed destruction of their race that won Leela over. Even when he turned out to be a sexist slob, Leela was willing to marry him to continue their race. But then he revealed his true colors as a quintuple-timing shape-shifter. Even after this, Leela continued to hope that she would one day learn the truth about her origins.
Leela's relationship with Fry advanced when he caught worms from a truck-stop-bathroom sandwich. Everyone but Leela flew micro-droids of themselves into Fry's body in a tiny model of the Planet Express ship, and found the worms repairing systems throughout Fry to make him smarter and stronger. Leela distracted him while they were on this mission. She found his new eloquence and charm very attractive, and went in and stopped the others from expelling the worms. At her apartment that evening, she declared her love for what Fry had become. But Fry was intelligent enough to recognize the difference between that and who he really was, and got rid of the worms himself. Leela couldn't be attracted to him once he went back to his usual immature, clueless self.
Leela revisited the Orphanarium, and some of her childhood insecurities, at a reunion. The crush she'd had on another orphan, Adlai Atkins, was rekindled. He'd become a doctor, and he gave Leela an operation to give her a second, purely cosmetic, eye. She and Adlai began dating, and became serious enough to consider adopting a child themselves. Leela wanted to choose a little mutant girl with an ear on her forehead. She was offended that Adlai wanted to give the child an operation to make her "acceptable," realized she preferred her own former appearance, and made him change her back.
She briefly became a pitcher in professional blernsball (the 31st-century, crazily complicated version of baseball), the first woman to do so. She was hired as a publicity stunt to draw crowds to Mets games, because she beaned every batter. Her inglorious career, and even more inglorious product-endorsement attempts, were short-lived.
Leela was generally well-adjusted, but she sometimes became depressed about knowing nothing about her family. Winning the Orphan of the Year award at the Orphanarium (in such august company as a man who successfully switched from heroin to methadone addiction) brought her loneliness to the forefront. At the same time, Bender was running a crooked waste-disposal business, dumping hazardous wastes into the sewers, and he, Fry, and Leela were snatched by mutants seeking revenge. They were saved by a mysterious cloaked couple. Instead of leaving the sewers with the others, Leela became determined to find out why. Pursuing them, she dove into the mutagenic lake and discovered that it had no effect on her. She tracked down the couple, who had what appeared to be a weird shrine to her in their house. One of them was wearing a bracelet identical to Leela's own, and she assumed they had killed her parents. She was about to kill them in revenge, which they would have allowed, when Fry, who had been investigating the note that had been pinned to Leela when she was left at the Orphanarium, burst in and revealed that they were her parents. Overcome with emotion, Leela embraced them, overjoyed to finally be able to know her family.
Fry continued his attempts to woo Leela, while Bender had a dating adventure of his own with the artificial intelligence of the Planet Express ship. The ship went a little nuts when Bender dumped her. She shut off the oxygen and gravity and headed for a quasar, intent on compressing herself and Bender into a single entity. Fry and Leela had to shut down the ship's brain, and Fry hooked Leela's failing oxygen tank up to his own, even though that left him with no air at all. After Leela revived him, she seemed to be starting to see him in a different light.
Fry and Leela briefly gained superpowers from a "miracle cream," and formed a crime-fighting trio with Bender. This was a handy way for Leela to combine her violent tendencies with doing good. She was forced to reveal her superhero identity to her parents when foiling a criminal made her miss meeting up with them on the one day they had special passes to be on the surface. They thought this was a sign that Leela was ashamed of them. Her father couldn't keep the secret, and the criminal kidnapped him and Munda as a way to get to Leela. After rescuing them (and running out of the cream), Leela, Fry, and Bender retired from being superheroes.
Leela got a chance to experience being a teenager living with her parents when the Planet Express crew was doused with age-reversing tar at a spa. She insisted on getting the authentic teenage experience, with rules and curfews (so she could rebel). Her parents tried, but weren't too clear on the concept. (One of her father's rules: "No beer until you finish your tequila!") But Leela reverted back to her normal age after the Professor made the de-aging worse for the rest of the crew. They had to go looking for the Fountain of Aging, and Leela was the only one still old enough to rescue the others when they got stuck in a whirlpool in it. She gained a newfound appreciation for her life as an adult and the experiences that had made her who she was.
On a mission to collect honey from space bees (which turned out to have been the job that killed at least one former Planet Express crew), Leela decided to adopt a baby queen bee so they could get their own space honey without having to cheat death. The baby bee stung her on the way back to Earth, and Leela laughed off the injury until she saw that Fry, who threw himself between the bee and Leela to protect her, had been impaled and killed. Leela was so overcome by grief and guilt that she began to dream about Fry speaking to her, and then to hallucinate while awake. Throughout it all, Fry kept telling her to wake up. And she finally did, to find she had been in a coma, having gotten the full dose of the bee's venom while Fry was only injured. Fry had sat by her hospital bed talking to her for weeks.
One way Fry had impressed Leela when he had parasites was by playing the holophoner, a difficult, futuristic, oboe-like instrument that generated images from the player's mind. He continued to try to learn it even after his worm-induced talent was taken away, and he made a deal with the robot devil that ended up with the two of them trading hands. With the robotic hands, Fry became an internationally renowned holophoner player, and he composed an opera in Leela's honor. The robot devil schemed to get his own hands back, and in the middle of the opera's premiere, revealed that he would marry Leela himself if Fry didn't undo the trade. Fry had no choice but to give in. The opening-night crowd fled when they heard him play with his own, untalented fingers, but Leela stayed to hear the end. This is the end of the series, and the point from which Leela's pulled.
Please give us a detailed description of your character's personality:
Leela almost entirely lacks impulsiveness. She and the bureaucrat Hermes Conrad are the only responsible people at Planet Express, and Leela seems to have a good sense for just how much bossing around Fry and Bender need to counteract their laziness. She's the one who makes sure they complete their missions, and she's the one who gets the others out of the trouble they inevitably blunder into. She's genuinely hurt when Zapp, temporarily disgraced, comes to work for Planet Express and convinces Fry and Bender to mutiny and depose her as captain, but she's still willing to save Fry and Bender when Zapp's plan to restore his own good name is going to get them killed.
Despite her unimpulsive nature, Leela also has a violent streak, and will kick people in the face at the drop of a hat. I think this is because kung fu was one of her only outlets for expressing herself as an awkward teen, so violence comes more naturally to her than diplomacy.
She freely meddles in the lives of her more feckless friends, particularly Fry, which is understandable, because they generally need all the help they can get. Leela doesn't hesitate to tell people when they're being morons, and usually knows they're being dumb before they do. She's down-to-earth and practical, but does seem to interfere primarily for her friends' own good, to make sure they make the right decisions, as she does when she gets Bender and Fry back together as roommates.
Leela can be sarcastic and cynical, but her cynicism masks a sensitive side. She has a soft spot for animals, and cares deeply about the environment, on several occasions joining up with animal-rights or green activist groups. And even though she's quick to call things corny or roll her eyes at public displays of affection, she's also easily swayed by compliments and romance directed at her. I think this apparent contradiction is because Leela uses cynicism as a pre-emptive defense mechanism; it's the hard shell over the gooey center, as it were.
Having only one eye has obviously influenced Leela's self-image, and she's more self-conscious about her appearance than she generally lets on, as is clear from how much she enjoys looking normal at first after the operation Adlai gives her. She's sometimes irritated with Amy, who brags about having had cuteness reduction surgery and occasionally dings Leela about her lack of femininity. Leela tends to repress any feelings of sadness or inadequacy, so that, as she says "they can fester quietly as a mental illness." Being and seeming strong are important to her, and she's very self-reliant and usually projects a confident front.
Her family is also very important to her. Leela never knew her parents at all until she was in her late twenties, and she's eager to make up for the lost time. Knowing them has filled a void that she had dealt with all her life.
She's romantically unlucky, partly because she's picky, but still manages to have terrible taste in men. She optimistically keeps looking for true love over the course of the series. Even though Fry's infatuated with her, it takes Leela a long time to see him as more than a friend, and it's indicative of her pickiness that she resists these feelings even after they develop. It doesn't help that when they first become involved, Fry's under the influence of parasitic worms that make him smarter; nor does experiencing their wedding, but skipping over the grand gesture that led to it, thanks to chronitons (particles that affect the flow of time) run amok. Leela does seem to gradually move from completely dismissing Fry as a potential partner to being able to appreciate his genuine affection for her.
Please give us a physical description of your character: At Landel's, Leela has two eyes instead of the one she has in canon. We never see her eye color in the show, but, given her mutant origins, I think it's purple. I'm guessing at her height, too, but she appears relatively tall compared to other characters, so I'll say she's five-foot-eight in her big clunky boots, and five-six without. She has long purple hair that she wears in a high ponytail. She's quite athletic and moderately curvy, with sturdy hips and muscular arms and legs. Her nose is small, and she has a large mouth, usually lipsticked pink.
What kinds of otherworldly abilities does your character have, if any?: Leela's a mutant, which in the Futurama universe makes her immune to mutagens and more resistant to viruses and communicable diseases than normal humans.
If present, how do you plan to tweak these powers to make your character appropriately hindered in the setting of Landel's?: She'll be completely human, with a normal immune system and normal susceptibility to any radioactive waste Landel's might have lying around.
Does your character have any non-otherworldly abilities/training that surpass the norm?: Leela became a black belt in Arcturan kung-fu (pretty identical to the regular kind) as a teenager, and often uses kicks to attack people. She's in excellent physical shape, better than the average DOOP recruit, and has great stamina. There's some debate over whether her being a mutant affects her physical prowess, but except for the episode where she has superpowers, she doesn't exhibit any abilities beyond the norm for an in-shape human with comparable training.
It won't matter in Landel's, but she's an accomplished spaceship pilot. She's also the worst major-league blernsball player ever.
A note about canon-puncturing: Star Trek exists in the Futurama universe, and the Planet Express crew have met the cast. (As a hot "alien" chick, Leela of course ended up making out with Shatner.) Her knowledge about the show itself is limited to what she learned in that episode and the fact that the series was banned on Earth in the 23rd century, after its fandom became a worldwide religion. I'll be sure to secure mun permission before she mentions any Star Trek people being fictional. Star Wars also exists in the Futurama universe. Movies are apparently still being made, but the die-hard fans emigrated from Earth at some point. The Star Wars characters in Damned at the moment are not any Leela would recognize as being from the series. If any were to show up that she'd know about, I'd certainly check with the mun(s) before puncturing.