John Egbert (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wakingsavior) wrote2012-02-25 03:44 pm
wakingsavior) wrote2012-02-25 03:44 pm
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theposthumans app
Player Name: Mat
Personal DW:thatrainbow (clearly underutilized these days...)
E-mail: thatlovingrainbow [at] gmail.com
AIM: wakingsavior
Other characters currently in-game: none
Who referred you to the game?: It was a joint effort by Poptart, Kim, Paul, and Glass.
Character Name:John Cristina Joan Egbert (but he'll still introduce himself as John.)
I'm going to note here that in the personality and history secions, there might be some "less-than-PC" wording about how trans*ness presents - this should mostly be chalked up to how John thinks of himself. I know this is sort of a minefield to RP, but most of John's take on things or reactions or emotions are based on how I myself have handled or thought of things in the past - obviously every trans* person's journey and experience is unique, and I am not intending to insult anyone's experiences with John - I'm writing him as true to life as I can, which mostly means drawing on my own and close friends' experiences being trans*. So, uh... yes. I just wanted to get that out of the way.
Canon source: Homestuck
PB: n/a
Personality: John is a generally upbeat and friendly guy - always glass half full, ready to be friends with anyone he meets - online at least. He’s a real dork, and he has a ridiculous, eyeroll-worthy sense of humor and considers himself a great prankster, even though he’s… really not. His pranks are never intentionally malicious, though, and if anyone were actually hurt (physically or emotionally) by them, he would trip over himself in an effort to apologize and make it up to them. He loves Con Air, Armageddon, Little Monsters, and basically anything with Matthew McConaughey - basically, he doesn’t have the best taste in movies, but when he loves something he LOVES it. He's a little naive and a generally nice kid.
While he's not always the most confident in himself, John tends to have pretty good self-esteem - he's a cool guy, even if he's not as cool as Dave. Or, well, that's how he comes across online. In reality, John has a lot of self-image issues. He hates the well-meaning compliments he gets on what a pretty young lady "she" is, he feels like he's broken somehow, even after doing some research on transgendered people and realising that that's what he is. He feels like he's somehow a horrible person for not having told Dave and Jade and Rose that he was born a girl. And he's already dreading the inevitable breast growth that could start any day now, really, given his age. On the whole, it makes him a lot more self-conscious and withdrawn in his offline life. He's always sort of wanted to fall into another dimension where no one knows he's a girl, because then he can just lie and say he's a boy - though he has given no thought to how he'd keep the fact that he's biologically female secret once puberty hits in force. He doesn't let people as close to him as he'd like, just as an attempt to either keep them from finding out he's not "actually" a boy, or to minimize how often he gets called a girl and "she" and "Joan".
Despite not letting friends as close to himself as he tries to let them believe, John is a very loyal friend. When he has a friend, he wants to keep them, and stand up for them, and protect them however he can. He treasures his friends all the more because he has relatively few of them, and while he feels guilty for "lying" to Jade, Dave, and Rose, he treasures the fact that they see him as he wants to be seen - as a guy. He believes the best of his friends, and has confidence that they can do whatever they dream of, or whatever they need to. His loyalty and belief in people has, in Sburb, led him to sort of stumbling on leadership, not that he feels like he's a good leader or that he wants to be a leader at all. He really just wants to be people's friends, and feels more comfortable in a follower's spot. That said, if he finds himself in a position of leadership, he'll do his best to lead and do right by everyone he's leading.
History: Cristina Joan Egbert was not born. She was created in an ectobiology lab by her 13-year-old self and sent back in time on a meteor, which crashed into a joke shop and left her the only survivor, found by her ectomom's son in the wreckage when he went to see if his mom was alive (hint: she wasn't). He adopted the baby girl left behind and raised her as his own, which says a lot about what sort of a man he was.
Joan (as her dad called her unless she was in trouble) was a happy child, for the most part. She had friends anyway, and she wasn't unhappy, though she could've done with fewer clowns and baked goods in her house. When she was little and playing with friends, she always was the dad when they played house, or the handsome prince when they played princesses. Pretending to be a boy was so much more fun! Sometimes she'd pretend it just because she could. When she was 4, 5, even 6 it was a cute little quirk that everyone laughed off, but as she got older she got a bit of a reputation among her peers (and their parents) that she was "weird". When she was 8, she got in a fight with a girl who lived down the street when the other girl told her she couldn't be a boy because she was a girl, and Joan hit her in the face. After that, her dad took her aside and told her that while there was nothing wrong with playing pretend games, she couldn't hit people because they disagreed with how she played, and that maybe she shouldn't play that pretend when the girl who'd been hit was around.
Little 8-year-old Joan's mind interpreted that as "you shouldn't play this pretend in front of anyone", and outwardly stopped pretending to be a boy at all. She played it silently, being a boy whenever she could but never saying anything about it to anyone - she especially hated when people would tell her how pretty she was - it pulled her right out of the pretend and made it hard to forget that she was a girl and not actually a boy. She was a huge tomboy, though - begging her dad to let her shop in the boy's department because the clothes were more fun and comfortable, keeping her hair cut short in a mostly androgynous hairstyle, romping and yelling and playing pranks and generally being as boy-like as she could without saying she was pretending to be a boy.
Unfortunately, she was still pretty "weird" to most of the kids at school, and while she did have a few people she'd eat lunch with or play with during recess, she didn't have anyone she considered a good friend.
And then when she turned 12, her dad gave her an old computer as a birthday present. It had internet access (though she was warned to stay away from certain kinds of sites and told to be careful about personal information and told that if she abused the privilege it would be taken away) and came with a chat client - Pesterchum - installed on it. Joan eagerly set it up and logged in, and the first person she met was a girl who introduced herself as Jade.
And when Joan went to introduce herself, she hesitated, and then introduced herself as "John". It was the name she pretended she had when she was pretending to be a boy, because it was only one letter off from Joan, and if she wasn't listening to close she could pretend anyone calling her name was calling for John.
And thus John Egbert was born. Over the next year, he became friends with a few more kids, all his age, and he did a lot of reading on various websites. Most of them were comedy sites, sites dedicated to the ridiculous actors or crappy action flicks he was so fond of, or pranking, but there were a few sites he read voraciously for one reason:
They were about people like him.
Transgendered people, he learned, were people like him, who were born in one body, but inside were the opposite. Or, well, the terminology got complicated and a little out of his league at some point, but the point was that just because he had been born a girl named Joan didn't mean that he couldn't be a boy named John. While part of him still felt like he was "really" a girl just pretending to be a boy, it was an ecstatic realisation for him. Not that he told anyone, he didn't want to freak his dad out or... well, really, it was mostly his dad. And he didn't want to get picked on at school more than he did by just being a sort of weird tomboy. So he kept this revelation secret, asked his friends to send his birthday presents to 'J. Egbert' because "that's how our mailman likes it written, i don't know, he's kinda weird" and didn't tell him his birth certificate said Joan, and played the tomboy for everyone else, including his dad.
And then, on his 13th birthday, he got into the Sburb beta, which was something he'd been waiting for forever (ie a few weeks), and he and his three best friends started to play.
http://mspaintadventures.wikia.com/wiki/John_Egbert
The events of canon happened... well, pretty much like canon. Thus the link instead of a play-by-play John isn't UBERMASCULINE, but he just turned 13 and wear's boy's clothes and has a messy boy's haircut, and hasn't started to fill out in certain feminine areas yet. He did get a fit of nerves when he first met Grimdark!Rose face to face (explaining a bit of his odd reactions to her in that first conversation), but she was distracted enough to not notice anything (at the time, anyway), and then she was dead and John didn't see her again.
John's canon point is going to be from just after the Scratch, right around exactly the time that Jade sent them hurtling through the 4th Wall.
How does your AU differ from canon? The thing about John in this AU is that he presents himself, over the internet anyway, as the person you see in canon. He's a bit more reserved in person, but not much. His dad is a good guy, and let him grow up being as much of a tomboy as he wanted - by the time he was 7 or 8, Dad had stopped buying John "girly" things without being asked by John himself because he never showed any interest in them. But he did grow up feeling like he didn't fit in his own skin - he's always lived a bit more in a fantasy world where he "really is" a boy than the real world, but he's not precisely disconnected.
He's friendly and outgoing, though slightly less outgoing than people would probably expect, in face-to-face meetings. But he doesn't let people get too close to him. He keeps everybody at arms' length, even his best friends Jade, Dave, and Rose. If he lets them too close, they'll find out his secret, and he doesn't want that, because despite the fact that none of them are exactly "normal", he feels like he's significantly more in the realm of "freakish" than they are, even if it's not a bad sort of freakish. He's never told anyone about himself and his trans-ness, not even anonymously on trans blogs or message boards, so the thought of telling anyone terrifies him, because even if all rational and logical thought says they won't judge him for it, the rest of him says they'll hate him for lying to them, they'll think he's a freak and won't want to be friends with him anymore. Or, even if they don't hate him or stop being friends with him, that they'll think of him as a girl who happens to go by a guy's name. All these things loom over him every time he considers coming clean, so he has decided he just never will.
Of course, puberty's going to put a wrench in the gears of that plan within a few months, but he hasn't thought that far ahead yet.
Strengths:
Weaknesses:
Personal DW:
thatrainbow (clearly underutilized these days...)E-mail: thatlovingrainbow [at] gmail.com
AIM: wakingsavior
Other characters currently in-game: none
Who referred you to the game?: It was a joint effort by Poptart, Kim, Paul, and Glass.
Character Name:
I'm going to note here that in the personality and history secions, there might be some "less-than-PC" wording about how trans*ness presents - this should mostly be chalked up to how John thinks of himself. I know this is sort of a minefield to RP, but most of John's take on things or reactions or emotions are based on how I myself have handled or thought of things in the past - obviously every trans* person's journey and experience is unique, and I am not intending to insult anyone's experiences with John - I'm writing him as true to life as I can, which mostly means drawing on my own and close friends' experiences being trans*. So, uh... yes. I just wanted to get that out of the way.
Canon source: Homestuck
PB: n/a
Personality: John is a generally upbeat and friendly guy - always glass half full, ready to be friends with anyone he meets - online at least. He’s a real dork, and he has a ridiculous, eyeroll-worthy sense of humor and considers himself a great prankster, even though he’s… really not. His pranks are never intentionally malicious, though, and if anyone were actually hurt (physically or emotionally) by them, he would trip over himself in an effort to apologize and make it up to them. He loves Con Air, Armageddon, Little Monsters, and basically anything with Matthew McConaughey - basically, he doesn’t have the best taste in movies, but when he loves something he LOVES it. He's a little naive and a generally nice kid.
While he's not always the most confident in himself, John tends to have pretty good self-esteem - he's a cool guy, even if he's not as cool as Dave. Or, well, that's how he comes across online. In reality, John has a lot of self-image issues. He hates the well-meaning compliments he gets on what a pretty young lady "she" is, he feels like he's broken somehow, even after doing some research on transgendered people and realising that that's what he is. He feels like he's somehow a horrible person for not having told Dave and Jade and Rose that he was born a girl. And he's already dreading the inevitable breast growth that could start any day now, really, given his age. On the whole, it makes him a lot more self-conscious and withdrawn in his offline life. He's always sort of wanted to fall into another dimension where no one knows he's a girl, because then he can just lie and say he's a boy - though he has given no thought to how he'd keep the fact that he's biologically female secret once puberty hits in force. He doesn't let people as close to him as he'd like, just as an attempt to either keep them from finding out he's not "actually" a boy, or to minimize how often he gets called a girl and "she" and "Joan".
Despite not letting friends as close to himself as he tries to let them believe, John is a very loyal friend. When he has a friend, he wants to keep them, and stand up for them, and protect them however he can. He treasures his friends all the more because he has relatively few of them, and while he feels guilty for "lying" to Jade, Dave, and Rose, he treasures the fact that they see him as he wants to be seen - as a guy. He believes the best of his friends, and has confidence that they can do whatever they dream of, or whatever they need to. His loyalty and belief in people has, in Sburb, led him to sort of stumbling on leadership, not that he feels like he's a good leader or that he wants to be a leader at all. He really just wants to be people's friends, and feels more comfortable in a follower's spot. That said, if he finds himself in a position of leadership, he'll do his best to lead and do right by everyone he's leading.
History: Cristina Joan Egbert was not born. She was created in an ectobiology lab by her 13-year-old self and sent back in time on a meteor, which crashed into a joke shop and left her the only survivor, found by her ectomom's son in the wreckage when he went to see if his mom was alive (hint: she wasn't). He adopted the baby girl left behind and raised her as his own, which says a lot about what sort of a man he was.
Joan (as her dad called her unless she was in trouble) was a happy child, for the most part. She had friends anyway, and she wasn't unhappy, though she could've done with fewer clowns and baked goods in her house. When she was little and playing with friends, she always was the dad when they played house, or the handsome prince when they played princesses. Pretending to be a boy was so much more fun! Sometimes she'd pretend it just because she could. When she was 4, 5, even 6 it was a cute little quirk that everyone laughed off, but as she got older she got a bit of a reputation among her peers (and their parents) that she was "weird". When she was 8, she got in a fight with a girl who lived down the street when the other girl told her she couldn't be a boy because she was a girl, and Joan hit her in the face. After that, her dad took her aside and told her that while there was nothing wrong with playing pretend games, she couldn't hit people because they disagreed with how she played, and that maybe she shouldn't play that pretend when the girl who'd been hit was around.
Little 8-year-old Joan's mind interpreted that as "you shouldn't play this pretend in front of anyone", and outwardly stopped pretending to be a boy at all. She played it silently, being a boy whenever she could but never saying anything about it to anyone - she especially hated when people would tell her how pretty she was - it pulled her right out of the pretend and made it hard to forget that she was a girl and not actually a boy. She was a huge tomboy, though - begging her dad to let her shop in the boy's department because the clothes were more fun and comfortable, keeping her hair cut short in a mostly androgynous hairstyle, romping and yelling and playing pranks and generally being as boy-like as she could without saying she was pretending to be a boy.
Unfortunately, she was still pretty "weird" to most of the kids at school, and while she did have a few people she'd eat lunch with or play with during recess, she didn't have anyone she considered a good friend.
And then when she turned 12, her dad gave her an old computer as a birthday present. It had internet access (though she was warned to stay away from certain kinds of sites and told to be careful about personal information and told that if she abused the privilege it would be taken away) and came with a chat client - Pesterchum - installed on it. Joan eagerly set it up and logged in, and the first person she met was a girl who introduced herself as Jade.
And when Joan went to introduce herself, she hesitated, and then introduced herself as "John". It was the name she pretended she had when she was pretending to be a boy, because it was only one letter off from Joan, and if she wasn't listening to close she could pretend anyone calling her name was calling for John.
And thus John Egbert was born. Over the next year, he became friends with a few more kids, all his age, and he did a lot of reading on various websites. Most of them were comedy sites, sites dedicated to the ridiculous actors or crappy action flicks he was so fond of, or pranking, but there were a few sites he read voraciously for one reason:
They were about people like him.
Transgendered people, he learned, were people like him, who were born in one body, but inside were the opposite. Or, well, the terminology got complicated and a little out of his league at some point, but the point was that just because he had been born a girl named Joan didn't mean that he couldn't be a boy named John. While part of him still felt like he was "really" a girl just pretending to be a boy, it was an ecstatic realisation for him. Not that he told anyone, he didn't want to freak his dad out or... well, really, it was mostly his dad. And he didn't want to get picked on at school more than he did by just being a sort of weird tomboy. So he kept this revelation secret, asked his friends to send his birthday presents to 'J. Egbert' because "that's how our mailman likes it written, i don't know, he's kinda weird" and didn't tell him his birth certificate said Joan, and played the tomboy for everyone else, including his dad.
And then, on his 13th birthday, he got into the Sburb beta, which was something he'd been waiting for forever (ie a few weeks), and he and his three best friends started to play.
http://mspaintadventures.wikia.com/wiki/John_Egbert
The events of canon happened... well, pretty much like canon. Thus the link instead of a play-by-play John isn't UBERMASCULINE, but he just turned 13 and wear's boy's clothes and has a messy boy's haircut, and hasn't started to fill out in certain feminine areas yet. He did get a fit of nerves when he first met Grimdark!Rose face to face (explaining a bit of his odd reactions to her in that first conversation), but she was distracted enough to not notice anything (at the time, anyway), and then she was dead and John didn't see her again.
John's canon point is going to be from just after the Scratch, right around exactly the time that Jade sent them hurtling through the 4th Wall.
How does your AU differ from canon? The thing about John in this AU is that he presents himself, over the internet anyway, as the person you see in canon. He's a bit more reserved in person, but not much. His dad is a good guy, and let him grow up being as much of a tomboy as he wanted - by the time he was 7 or 8, Dad had stopped buying John "girly" things without being asked by John himself because he never showed any interest in them. But he did grow up feeling like he didn't fit in his own skin - he's always lived a bit more in a fantasy world where he "really is" a boy than the real world, but he's not precisely disconnected.
He's friendly and outgoing, though slightly less outgoing than people would probably expect, in face-to-face meetings. But he doesn't let people get too close to him. He keeps everybody at arms' length, even his best friends Jade, Dave, and Rose. If he lets them too close, they'll find out his secret, and he doesn't want that, because despite the fact that none of them are exactly "normal", he feels like he's significantly more in the realm of "freakish" than they are, even if it's not a bad sort of freakish. He's never told anyone about himself and his trans-ness, not even anonymously on trans blogs or message boards, so the thought of telling anyone terrifies him, because even if all rational and logical thought says they won't judge him for it, the rest of him says they'll hate him for lying to them, they'll think he's a freak and won't want to be friends with him anymore. Or, even if they don't hate him or stop being friends with him, that they'll think of him as a girl who happens to go by a guy's name. All these things loom over him every time he considers coming clean, so he has decided he just never will.
Of course, puberty's going to put a wrench in the gears of that plan within a few months, but he hasn't thought that far ahead yet.
Strengths:
- Do The Windy Thing - John has wind powers. He can fly (though it is unclear whether this actually has anything to do with his windy powers - it's likely this is actually unrelated and is a God Tier ability), he can control the wind - to make other things fly (like a car), to drill into the surface of a planet (no, seriously), to blow so hard that it PUTS OUT an oil fire. This can obviously be toned down if necessary.
- Even Gods Do - GOD TEIR. Along with his windy powers, God Tier gives him conditional immortality. As long as his death isn't Just or Heroic (and no, there are no guidelines on that, it's up to the universe, apparently), he will not stay dead. WOO! Additionally, as I mentioned before, I'm pretty sure that the flying abilities are tied into God Tier and not his windy powers, though he could probably use his windy powers to do that as well.
- Friendleading - John doesn't look to be a leader, but because he is a likeable guy, he tends to find himself in leader-esque roles. He does his best, and he can definitely be inspiring and encouraging and loyal enough to inspire the same in others.
- Palhoncho - related to Friendleading, John is a very loyal friend, and will do whatever is in his power to help his friends. And really, he just likes helping people. While he won't stick his neck out to the same extent for people he doesn't know he will gladly help anyone he can, as long as they're not a dick.
- Pure Imagination - John is a very... imaginative kid. He'll often pretend to be characters from his favourite movies (most notably Nic Cage's character in Con Air). He'll come up with the most ridiculous potential outcomes to situations, but it also allows him to be creative, if he would choose to use his imagination in that way.
- You're the Piano Man - John is a very good pianist. Possibly even a bit better than canon!John, because piano has been one of his escapes from the Real World for a long time. He tends to prefer Jazz and Ragtime over classical.
Weaknesses:
- 98lb Weakling - John is pretty tiny - only about 5' tall - and not exactly physically powerful. He's kind of scrawny, honestly. He can run and climb and goof off about as well as any kid, but he's not especially fast or strong or athletic.
- Do You Trust Me? - Because of his secret, John keeps people at arm's length, and doesn't let them really get close to him. He does his best to make it seem otherwise, but it leaves him a bit isolated, and makes it hard to really be completely honest when he needs to be, even to himself. While he'll bend over backwards to help his friends deal with their emotional crises, he's shit at dealing with his own, partially because he doesn't like to admit they exist.
- Act Your Age - Yes, he's loyal and caring and everything, but he's also a 13-year-old kid. He can be immature, petty, sulky, and any other range of negative things. He's 13! He sometimes likes to rebel against rules just because he can. He will have relationship drama. It's just how the world works.
- With Great Power - While he may find himself kind of a de facto leader from time to time... he's not really any good at it. He is not really good at long-term thinking and planning, he isn't really able to deal positively (or at least neutrally) with people he doesn't get along with, and he just... generally isn't much of an actual good leader. Nor does he really want to be a leader if he can help it.
Preferred drop-in point: Can I just say "modly discretion?" I mean, if I have to pick one, Seattle, but modly discretion is more fun.
What are some of your plans for this character in their new environment? Well, uh... I'll know more when I get there? XD Other than lying about his biological sex from the get-go and then having to deal with puberty really kicking into gear in a few months, I don't have any set plans other than "interact with people, have fun, see where it goes". ^^;;
First Person Journal Sample: (taking this as a private journal entry rather than a public one, hope that's ok?)
oh shit. oh shit oh fuck oh shit oh fuck.
just breathe, john. it's cool.
they don't know. you don't have to tell them.
yeah.
that's the ticket - not telling them. i mean, it's not like i have a sign above my head or anything.
nope, it'll be totally fine as long as i don't tell them.
and as long as no unicorns looking for fair maidens with laps they can rest their heads in show up.
jegus, they might.
the world is just that crazy.
i should create a unicorn contingency...
Third Person Sample:
In the locker room when the girls were changing for gym class, John noticed that of all his classmates, he was one of only a couple who weren't wearing bras yet. Training bras, in most cases, he noted, as he tried to look casually at everyone before they got their shirts pulled on, but still bras, concealing the start of those feminine curves that every single girl seemed to be so obsessed with.
He was a late bloomer, he knew that much from what his health teacher and Dad had said, and he didn't mind in the least. But he couldn't help be reminded by moments like this that he was not going to escape it forever.
It stuck with him the rest of the day, and after he got home from school he pounded up the stairs and into the bathroom, locking the door behind him before taking his shirt off and scrutinizing himself in the mirror, looking for any sign of softness or growth. After a few minutes, he let out a deep sigh of relief - still as flat as ever.
"Joan?" His father's voice filtered up, sounding a bit concerned. "Are you all right, sweetheart?"
"Yeah, Dad!" he called, taking one last look at his reflection before making a face and pulling his shirt back on. One more day of safely avoiding feminine curves. One more day of being able to keep up the make-believe in his head that he was actually a boy. He left the bathroom and flopped down in front of his computer, logging into Pesterchum and getting a message almost immediately.
TG: egbert dude where have you been
TG: the girls are driving me up the fucking wall
The tension in John's chest loosened a bit, and he smiled as he put his fingers to the keyboard.