The Velvet Key Mod Team (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
velvetyhelpers) wrote2012-01-04 04:22 pm
velvetyhelpers) wrote2012-01-04 04:22 pm
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APPLICATIONS;
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✦Please read the rules, the Application FAQ, and the Game FAQ before you apply. Application Explanations PLAYER Nickname: What you, the player, wants to go by in the game. Age: You don’t need to tell us specifics, but we’d like to know if you are under 18. Do not lie about your age, doing so will result in an automatic ban. Personal LJ/DW: Link us to your personal journal, if you have one. If you do not have one, that's fine! Method of Contact: IM, Plurk, Email, PMs, etc. Tell us how we can get a hold of you. Characters Played: How many characters do you play in Velvet Keys and who are they? If you are new, ignore this. CHARACTER Name: The characters name, in western order of first, last. Age: Your character’s age, to your best guess. Canon: The title of the canon or canons your character is from. If you are applying for an original character, state that here. Pull Point: From what point is the character being brought into Velvet Key? Be as specific as possible. BACKGROUND History:The history of the canon setting and the specific history of your character. Either a link or condensed written history will suffice. Personality: We require at least two paragraphs for this section. Here is where you show us how well you know your character. Tell us their good and bad traits, their fears, hopes, dreams, and quirks. How did their relationships and experiences shape them? We don’t just want an overview; give us all the little details that make up this character. GAME SPECIFIC Arcana: Which arcana do you think fits this character? Justification: Why does this arcana fit this character? Give us at least a few sentences of explanation. SAMPLES First Person Sample:This is a main comm post that should be written in the first person. This is the opportunity to show off your character’s voice. We would like this to be at least three to four sentences. Third Person Sample: This sample should be written in the third person, just like an entry for the log comm. This should showcase your character’s personality and how they think, act, and move. We would like this to be at least a paragraph in length. | |
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Lucia Nanami ☂ Pichi Pichi Pitch
Nickname: Jisu
Age: 23
Personal LJ/DW:
Method of Contact: jisusushi @ Plurk, ColorKidLalaPink on AIM
Characters Played: Kaoru Kiryuu
Character Info:
Name: Lucia Nanami
Age: 16 (The manga started after her 13th birthday and ran in real-time, and the characters do occasionally refer to aging and moving up grades in school; she would be 16 by this point unless summer comes more than once a year.)
Canon: Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch
Pull Point: After the three bonus chapters at the end of the manga.
Background Info:
History: Wiki sucks, I'm doing this myself.
Lucia is a mermaid. There are a number of complications herein like turning into a human on land, having her soul be physically represented in a pearl she carries on her person at all times (kinda like Madoka, when you think about it), and the world's most isolationist foreign policy, but that doesn't matter right now. What you need to know now is that she's a mermaid who grew up very sheltered compared to other mermaids; she was told that humans didn't exist until she was six years old, she didn't know she was going to have a coming-of-age ceremony until a good deal after it was supposed to happen, and she didn't know who was ruling her own country of the North Pacific Ocean.
Well, that last one was because the person ruling it was her surrogate sister, Nanami Nicola (why the two of them have Italian first names and Japanese surnames, the world will never know), regent in Lucia's own place. In an attempt to shield Lucia after hearing a prophecy that her life would really suck, everybody unanimously decided to keep her ignorant about just about everything, including the fact that she was the princess.
As you may know, prophecies of this sort have a tendency to come true anyway. When Lucia was six, she snuck up to the surface and discovered that humans were real! But a freak storm happened, she was nearly killed, and she ended up having to save the life of some kid by giving him her pearl (every mermaid has one and carries it around on her person, and it contains her life energy). She would have died herself eventually, being deprived of her pearl, but the sea goddess-queen Aqua Regina showed up and gave her seven years' worth of life until she could get it back. Or something. It's a little confusing. Anyway, flash forward seven years, and Lucia has gone to live in the human world with Nicola (who now owns a bathhouse) and her talking penguin, Hippo. They insist that she needs to find her lost pearl, and coincidentally, she ends up transferring into the class of and sitting right next to Doumoto Kaito, the guy who has it. (Yes, he is named after a couple of popular Japanese musicians.) She gets it back from him after saving him from a water demon, transforms into a sparkly magical idol singer, and learns that she's a princess and that she needs to gather the six other Mermaid Princesses to summon Aqua Regina.
This is gonna be hard. Some guy named Gackt (carrying along the J-rock artist naming theme) and his harem of water demons are trying to take over the ocean by attacking mermaid kingdoms. He's kidnapped two princesses already and the rest are nowhere to be found, so Lucia needs to gather the other princesses, organize a jailbreak for the captives, and lay the musical smackdown on Gackt and the battle harem. She meets two, learns more about the mermaid world, and angsts about various things always coming back to getting Kaito to love her. Which he does, but he's torn between Nanami Lucia the human and that pink Mermaid Princess who is also Lucia, and Lucia also doesn't want to die and thinks she will if she tells him they're the same person. This goes on for two years.
After a giant clusterflip with a fourth princess who insists on doing everything herself because having friends is stupid (and also being Kaito's moral support when he finds out he was adopted... and that he has weird powers involving a glowy cross appearing on his head, too), Lucia and friends decide to storm Gackt's castle... again and again until they can actually pull off their jailbreak. Surprise! The last princess unaccounted for is Gackt's right-hand woman, Sara, who became corrupted due to the forces of Contrived Misunderstandings and Emo. Also, Gackt is the prince of the Panthalassa, a race that was sealed away ages and ages ago by Aqua Regina with a spell that stole one of each pair of twins born to them and dumped the baby in the human world for fear that the power of twins united would break the seal. Also, Kaito is Gackt's twin and thus also the prince. And he's kidnapped him to steal his power. Despite all this, with the power of love speeches and the ability to bleed half their blood and survive, the princesses turn Sara good, free Kaito, and seal the repentant bad guys under the sea again. Although Sara feels bad about causing this whole thing, so she gives Lucia her pearl and goes under the seal too. :(
Happy ending! Kaito's a prince and knows who Lucia is and they're all happy ever after and back to rebuilding the destroyed mermaid kingdoms. Not so fast, Lucia. You still have more foretold suckage ahead. Soon, Kaito disappears while on vacation, and Lucia is accosted by Michel, a creepy androgynous angel in a toga, who wants her to help him carry out some anti-human genocide plan. When Lucia rejects him, Kaito is returned without any memory of Lucia or mermaids and has been taken in by an ill girl named Michal who lets him believe that she is the one who saved him from drowning as a child. Michel has absorbed his memories and is using them to taunt Lucia into joining him, and when she still refuses, he interrupts when she's using Sara's pearl to create a new princess to replace her (which Sara herself had willed to happen). Now Kaito's memories and the unborn princess Seira are at stake, absorbed by Michel. Lucia is in the worst despair she can be in right now, and only thanks to her friends has she not completely lost it and turned out like Sara.
But things get better. Lucia gets close to Kaito and restores his memories of her, and every battle with Michel and his followers gets them back a piece of Seira's heart so she can be born. But when Kaito breaks Michal's heart by going back to Lucia, Michel merges with Michal, who turns out to have been engineered as a host body for him (despite being female...), and eats the rest of his followers alive for the power he needs to destroy the humans. Lucia and friends are not down with this. What follows is a storm of reveal after reveal of "No, I'M the real villain!" that eventually ends up in Lucia and friends singing at the final boss enough to change all their enemies' hearts. Seira is born, Michal is reborn as a healthy child who can live a normal life, and Lucia is happy.
Except for the part where she catches the flu and nearly dies because she used up all her energy (and this didn't happen to anybody else? ...I don't get it either. Neither did the Nakayoshi editors, because the mangaka fought tooth and nail to get this ending). However, instead of dying, she inherits Aqua Regina's power and becomes the new goddess-queen, known to fandom as Lucia Regina, Aqua Lucia, or Lucia Regina Aquae. Yay! Although now they'll probably need a new pink princess. Sequel hook, I guess. I don't know.
..."I don't know" sums up a lot of this manga, really. I haven't even gotten into what a mess mermaid society is.
Personality: Lucia is the main character of a shoujo manga. This should explain a lot of what you need to know about her. She's moderately ditzy (although she's not so much stupid as she is ignorant, mostly due to having been sheltered as a child), she has lofty ideals of romance, and she has a terribly complicated love life that she can and will vent about for hours to any listening ear. In this sense, Lucia is a regular teenage girl like one you can find anywhere. She's a little shy about approaching people -- the only friends she makes in class in the very beginning are those who go up to her, she's completely in awe about it, and when she decides to make friends with the new girl soon after that, she treats it like a major life decision that needs an extra shot of courage to get through. She also has a shoujo heroine's terrible tendency to assume the worst of situations, not look beyond what she sees, and put on an act that she's okay while she depresses herself into a terrible mess.
On the other hand, there are admirable qualities about her, and qualities that set her apart from other leads in the same demographic. Lucia might want to escape and live a frivolous life sometimes, but in the end, she could never do it. She's got a strong sense of responsibility, and despite her ignorance making people question whether she's fit to be a princess, she's very dedicated to her role. She sees being a princess as being a protector of the people and even the animals who live in her country, people she hasn't even met and has no idea how to rule. Lucia wants to do what's best for everyone and keep everyone safe; her subjects, her friends, the human world, even her enemies. Michel's emotional torture of Lucia worked -- and would have completely broken her psyche if not for her friends -- because she loves Kaito so much that she could never bear to lose him, yet she still had to refuse the offer to join Michel because she couldn't go along with anti-human genocide.
As mentioned before, Lucia has one trait that the previous Aqua Regina lacked: compassion for her enemies. This starts to grow when Caren refuses to join her cause because of her grudge against Rina and when Hippo falls in love with Yuuri and discovers that she's working for Gackt, but comes to a head when she meets Sara and has to reconcile the Orange Pearl Princess, an ally they absolutely need, with the person she knows is an enemy. Lucia will listen to other people's pain with an ultimate goal of healing them and getting them to stop hurting others, and she will not give up on this no matter what's been done to her. This attitude is brushed off as naive by many of the people around her, but her determination eventually infects them. Aqua Regina herself seems to be influenced by seeing Lucia and her friends, and goes from a person who would seal an entire race away forever for the crimes of its king to a person who acknowledges a repentant criminal's sympathetic backstory but condemns her crimes as unforgivable to a person who stands by accepting an all-forgiving judgment and helps to repair the lives of the affected. In the end, Aqua Regina gives up her life and her mantle to Lucia so she can carry on her job; that says a lot.
Ultimately, though, Lucia needs other people. This is even reflected in her powers, which get stronger with the number of people singing along (to take an example from the badly-drawn, filler-laden anime, six people singing the weakest song in the repertoire is about equal in power to, if not slightly stronger than, three singing the first-season eleventh-hour superpower number). She hides what's bothering her inside herself and needs other people to find out what's wrong with her and help her out; otherwise, she'll crack, and then we get Black Lucia like what happened to Sara, and then we're all screwed. Furthermore, love is the most important thing to her, and brushing off or insulting love either as a concept or as executed will send her into a flailing, ranting rage. She fangirls, she works hard to get and keep friends, she decides that people will be her friends right off and keeps working until she wears them down -- interpersonal connections are very important to her, and all of that implacable determination wears away when she's convinced that she's completely alone.
...Oh, and because of some bizarre quirk of mermaid biology, she gets drunk off carbonated beverages. Very drunk. Half a liter of cola and she's nearly incoherent and draping all over everybody.
Game Specific:
Arcana: Lovers
Justification: Because Lucia hits all the major "Shoujo Heroine" points, she also hits all the major points covered by the Lovers: aside from her obsession with love and her own romantic drama, she focuses a lot on feelings and on understanding other people. Getting and keeping everyone together was her quest in the beginning, and it was that goal that led her to not give up on Rina when she tried to do things on her own, on Caren when she called them useless puppets of a selfish queen, on Coco when she willingly gave up her freedom again and set them back because she didn't want them hurt, or on Sara when she turned out to be an enemy. She wants peace through mutual decision, not locking people away to breed hate for another thousand years. This sets her apart from the original Aqua Regina and also represents her choice to do things her way, a choice that Aqua Regina comes around to accept.
Lucia also represents all of the aspects of the reversed Lovers, sometimes even more so than the positive ones. Duality is obvious, as not only is she a magical girl, she also has to deal with being a mermaid while projecting herself as a human, as well as having gone through two years of not being able to tell Kaito that Nanami Lucia and Princess Lucia were the same and wondering if he loved both of her selves or just one. Postponing choices is also common -- she wanted to stay on the surface a little more before going to her country knowing she was a princess for the first time (which ended up being a good idea, with Michel showing up and all) and she encouraged her friends to go after the people they loved knowing that these guys were human and they couldn't stay together forever. As for internal conflict and troubles in a union, have you seen her love life.
Samples:
First Person Sample: Testrun
Third Person Sample: The girl with the hair ribbons was back in the school library. She didn't come there often, but once a month, a shipment would come in from the mainland with all of the school's magazine subscriptions. That meant that, as soon as the library volunteers were done sorting out the educational stuff, the sports stuff, and some religious fundamentalist magazine nobody was really sure why they kept buying, the girl would go straight to the latest copies of five extra-girly teen magazines. Seated right at the couch by the magazine rack, with her freshly-picked stack beside her, she picked one from the top and opened it. Anyone walking in would see her poring over the fluffiest of literature, with the covers claiming everything from grad dress shopping tips to advice on starting your own business to "healthy diet" tips to horror stories about why you shouldn't go on diets at all (both on the same cover).
It was almost as if she hadn't been crying last night over the phone network about wanting to go home.
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