Aug. 9th, 2013

Application

Aug. 9th, 2013 04:58 pm
mancesmechros: (I am SUCH a BA)
OOC Information
NAME; Lyndon
AGE; 20
OTHER CHARACTERS PLAYED; n/a


IC Information
CHARACTER NAME; Gaige
AGE; 18
CANON; Borderlands 2
CANON POINT; Post-game
FAMILY TYPES;
Dragon’s Roar: “[H]ardheaded, tempered, and rash” sounds very Gaige, more than any of the other categories. She’s definitely liable to go Big Damn Hero. (also of note: goggles. Just saying.)
Metal Empire: She’s an engineer, robots are kind of her thing. Having a robot digimon would at least be LIKE having D-T around. Also if they tend to be colder and more logical than here it would be cool to bounce off of them.
Nature Spirits: Being not entirely good or evil (but mostly good) is a core Vault Hunter ideology, it seems like, so this would speak to that. Also I’m not gonna lie this is me just picking a third category because none of the other descriptions really feel like Gaige.


APPEARANCE; Gaige is young, with very little noticeably nonhuman about her except for the one robotic arm, dressed eclectically with her bright red hair done up in pigtails. The robotic arm is hardly sophisticated or subtle, given that she made it herself while bleeding out after cutting the human arm off, but it can hardly be described as shoddy. Her clothes are many-colored and odd-looking, significantly worn after her long adventure on Pandora. She also, if her alternate heads are any indication, really likes wearing hats.


PERSONALITY; NEW: Gaige’s personality, like that of many teenagers, is marked most notably by a volatile temper, a strong rebellious streak, and thoroughly enjoying being the center of attention. Add a brilliant and resourceful mind, immutable self-confidence, and the kind of healthy appreciation for murdering criminals who get in her way that only an extended stay on Pandora can provide, and she emerges as a shockingly complex character for having only thirty minutes or so of unique audio total in a game where the point of the player-controlled characters is to be relatively flat in their first game.

The first and most notable of Gaige’s qualities is her volatility. As seen repeatedly in her ECHOcasts, she oscillates often between extreme happiness, burning anger, and nigh-incoherent technobabble quite often, all emphasized in just how she enjoys talking. Which she very much does, given that she has the future equivalent of a podcast with all of ten listeners yet still presses on with her wordy updates on her life. Bottling up emotions, especially around people she’s close to, seems downright foreign to Gaige. She attacks everything (literally, once on Pandora) with zeal and enthusiasm, whether positively from happiness or violently from anger. She is a character marked by extremes, bolstered by a remarkable sense of self-confidence. She knows she’s brilliant – she made a near-sentient death robot for a science fair project and made the robot arm to house him after cutting her own arm off! This confidence in her own ability and rightness has shown as something of a personality flaw, though – at the science fair D-T murdered one of her classmates and because Gaige didn’t like her the reason she ended up distraught and fleeing for a lawless planet was the prospect of being both expelled AND arrested. Can you imagine? Her morals are clearly more than a little confused, but she’s shown to have a strong interest in the greater good and doing what she thinks to be right. Even if what’s right is sometimes just what’s best for her.

As far as political views go, Gaige combines a “we must advance science!” ideology with the punk movement of the 20th century, even if she hasn’t quite thought ahead further than “smash[ing] the system!!!!!!” She’s a bit shortsighted overall, really, as expressed when she made a death robot to win the school science fair and when, instead of being arrested, she fled to an incredibly dangerous lawless planet that regularly sees daily unnatural deaths go into the triple digits in just the areas visited in-game and has driven most of its population insane merely with its day-night cycle. What is a consequence? Gaige doesn’t know. Or at least she doesn’t give them much thought (if any). And any authority figure who wants to remind her of the consequences is first on the list of systems who need to be smashed. Preferably with that robot arm that, as she is pleased to remind people, is strong enough to smash concrete. As canon shows pretty regularly, being a very action-oriented first-person shooter, Gaige does not shy away from violence. After all, it’s where her robot does all his cool stuff! Cool murder stuff. Which in the end is really the coolest kind of stuff a death robot can do.

As far as relationships with others go, she at least starts off friendly most of the time. She’ll certainly talk to (or at) you if you’re willing to listen and won’t mock her or anything. Not being “a part of the system” helps too, certainly – you’re probably going to have to prove yourself to her if you’re noticeably wealthy or whatever (Gaige of course continues to miss that she comes from a family wealthy enough to live on a planet with the wealthy people and support her with a large stockpile of complicated mechanical parts and tools), but she’s become more discerning with how terrible a person one has to be in addition to being rich to earn her ire since her time on Pandora. It’s pretty easy to get into her good graces, but not much harder to get into her bad – and if she really hates you, she’s become accustomed to, well, living in an fps as far as murder goes. Pandora’s a nasty place, yo. She does also, though, also as a result of canon, harbor strong loyalty for those who fight alongside her, so staying in her good graces is a lot less difficult than it used to be. She’s not THAT difficult to get along with, right?

Which brings me to how canon has shaped her, because there are some things that it can be assumed killing an alien superweapon made out of lava and bringing down a giant robot army will do to a person like Gaige. She definitely will have more of an ego until someone who’s accomplished more comes along to knock her down to size, but she’ll also be slightly more trusting of people who’ve made notable accomplishments (and more willing to admit that they’ve made accomplishments in the first place). Basically, a lawless planet where she had to shoot people taught her how to social skills and trust. Also her new least favorite trait is narcissism, given that the villain of Borderlands 2 is so defined by his, and she values teamwork a lot. Also fighting for justice! Preferably with guns. Lots of guns. She also will be rather distraught at the loss of D-T, given how heavily she relies on him in canon. Losing her best friend is going to weigh pretty heavily on her for a while until she inevitably turns that attention fully to her digimon.



OLD: Gaige is excitable, energetic, manic, and slightly volatile, like any girl forced into murdering her way through the bandit population of an alien planet after accidentally causing the death of a rival in the school science fair would be. She’s loud, boisterious, speaks her mind near-continuously, and has an intense fascination for how things work/were built, given her fixation on building and designing mechanical things. She is first and foremost an engineer, after all. Her dialogue shifts effortlessly from highly technical future technology jargon to chatspeak abbreviations to enthused denouncing of centralized government within one message. She’s intensely smart and capable, if short-sighted: she sliced her own arm off to make a robotic replacement for a science fair project before even starting work on said robotic arm. And no, she doesn’t think it was a bad idea at all. This arm smashes concrete! How much cooler than her old arm is that?

Gaige tries to be very “punk rock.” Much of her time is spent encouraging herself and others to “SMASH THE SYSTEM!!!!!!!1” even if I’m not quite sure she realized what that entails. Despite all these gone through, her biggest regret seems to be only winning third place in the science fair with her giant death robot that, y’know, murdered one of her classmates. But hey, she totally had it coming. Not Gaige’s fault.
By the very nature of how little Borderlands characters are involved with the plot, there’s little indication how Gaige interacts with people other than her family and/or friends. From what we get, though, she seems to enter friendships with just as much energy as anything else, dramatic though her bounces in mood can be. I imagine she’s probably very protective of friends when she gets them, but on the whole is friendly to everyone. Takes too much effort to be unfriendly to people without cause, y’know? That said, if someone threatens her, she has a backpack full of space guns and she’s made a career of shooting people and giant monsters with them. Her bad side is not a good place to be. And at the end of the day, it’s not super-difficult to get on the bad side of an anti-authority 18-year-old fresh off destroying a legendary space monster, which has certainly given her ego a boost.

Her strongest emotional connection is definitely to her robot, D34TH-TR4P, who she can digistruct (ie summon) from her robotic arm at any time. Given that I assume he will cease to be summonable on arrival, Gaige is going to be pissed. She likes her future tech, man! That’s basically her life! A Digimon is a poor replacement for what she had going with her pet robot best friend.

It is worth noting that there is no other state her personality ever enters, because the Borderlands series does not give playable characters anything resembling actual emotional arcs or character development. So there’s something about a strong resistance to opposing worldviews to be said for her too, given that she’s now destroyed a legendary alien superweapon and helped explode the CEO of a weapons’ company.


HISTORY; A brief summary and many quotes from her live here http://borderlands.wikia.com/wiki/Gaige , but as a DLC character the whole of her actual background information is contained in her four Echo Logs, collected here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIUUQrZSI8s . The plot and dialogue of Borderlands 2 is exactly the same no matter the character picked, and is summed up briefly here: http://borderlands.wikia.com/wiki/Borderlands_2 .


SAMPLES
FIRST PERSON; Hellooooooo, Tokyo! Gaige here, bringing you recording number… five? Yeah, five, directly from my apartment! Now, as you know, I build robots and machines and stuff for a living because I’m cool like that, and why would I give that up even stuck in the past without like ninety percent of the tools I own? Answer: I wouldn’t, even if the results are kind of shit! Not anybody’s fault, though, just how this sort of thing goes.

Anyway, robots are still forthcoming, I just have to figure out how to simulate a Turing Chip without robbing a bank or getting my hands on a bunch of chemicals they don’t let the public have because they’re “extremely unstable” or whatever. No big deal, though, I have every confidence I’ll be able to make that happen eventually. So this is where you can all sign up for pre-orders! I won’t make you pay in advance or anything, but I’m gonna make this happen. Leave your name, contact info, and what you want your ‘bot to do, and we’ll negotiate price once I figure out what making a robot here entails.

[Something behind her sparks and explodes, given that her room is mostly lab/workshop]

Son of a- hang on, I’ll get back to you! Robots, though! Super-cool! Buy one from me!


THIRD PERSON; Gaige groaned in frustration and laid back on her bed. This wasn’t working, NOTHING was working! This digital world thing was incredibly not what she was looking for in life after saving Pandora and being generally awesome – having to go help protect a whole different world without D-T or her astonishing number of fire-and-lightning-shooting guns. Now she had a working arm but no way to call D-T and had to live with things like laws and outdated technology and an overwhelming sense of boredom. Civilization didn’t seem to quite suit her after all her time on Pandora, neither did working for other people. There were plenty of cool people here, sure, and pretty much everything about it was deeply fascinating, but Gaige reserved the right to be petty about this and exercised it. Stupid sexy miracle of digital engineering.

She raised her robotic hand towards the ceiling and focused. Maybe she just had to try harder to summon D-T! Quite frankly, pretty much everything about this situation, digimon companion or no, would be a lot easier with him around. She hated the idea of her best bot being gone for good. Well, at least being anywhere she wasn’t. Now all that was left was a girl with a mechanical arm strong enough to break concrete and nobody she knew in a city way more citylike than she was comfortable with. Truly, a tragic tale. It almost brought a tear to her eye, but she was way too badass to cry over something like this. It was time to become the kind of badass feared everywhere on Pandora: the kind of badass that had social skills. It was time to make friends and not shoot people at the same time, and it was gonna be awesome.

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Gaige

August 2013

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