Apping Meme
May. 20th, 2007 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kagekachouEnjolras/![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
patria_ou_mort [camper | December 2005 - 51.3% (20 IN) and January 2006 - 87.5% (49 IN)]
I started following CFUD in earnest during the fall of 2005, when I was having a relative non-busy semester (aside from orgo killing my soul) and was spending a lot of time in my room because I think I might have been sorta depressed oliolioooo. Anyhow, finals were just finishing, so I had even more time than usual, and I told myself that I shouldn't get involved... but I finally gave in.
EDIT: Also, asstudentbodiyaan said, "Anyway, the voting comm is ultimately what made me submit an app as I am a whore for challenges and having my efforts quantified. It isn't the only reason, natch". Same goes for me! I'd forgotten about that part. Like all of the second halves of sentences that I kept on forgetting in this thing. gg, me.
Les Misérables was my first fandom. I had about seven years' worth of familiarity with the canon, and I'd RPed several of the characters in the past. Granted, that RPing had taken place during the end of middle school/beginning of high school, but that just meant that I'd now had a lot of time to contemplate my sins.
I actually didn't usually play Enjolras -- Combeferre was my usual character of choice, both for RPing and writing, with Bossuet and Marius being my next most common. But given that the students (other than Enjolras and Grantaire) don't get much development outside of the original canon -- even the abridged versions of the book tend to chop out most of the students' material -- I decided that it would be to my strategic advantage to app the most memorable of the lot. More people would be likely to go "Oh, Enjolras, that revolutionary leader guy hahaha" than "Oh, Jean Prouvaire, that super-sensitive romantic poet revolutionary guy hahaha." While character familiarity isn't necessary, given that the canon was coming pretty out of left-field -- book characters are a minority and tend to be from relatively modern fantasy -- I thought that to be wisest.
His first app was started about an hour before the app window opened; it was completed and sent in approximately two hours into the apping window. Writing it was quite easy -- I had the book right next to me to check my facts and voice, and just the general jist of playing a French revolutionary student came back to me without difficulty. Revising the app was also pretty easy -- it mainly consisted of cutting out a lot of unnecessary material and breaking up paragraphs to make it appear to be a lot shorter than it actually was and, thus, easier to read.
His re-app earned both one "tl;dr" in the comments and an IN vote from Shinn. It was also the sole survivor of his batch. -_-;; I had created his journal when I apped the first time, because I had thought of the username and really liked it. Also, I was confident that if I didn't get in the first time, I would be able to get in with him eventually. And I know myself well enough to know that if I didn't get in the first time, I would continue re-apping until I did because... well. Persistence.
As it so happened, his re-app went up for vote while I was taking a short research trip to England for an independent project and was staying with a friend. And when he did get in, I couldn't post with him right away because not only was I staying with a friend whose computer I would have to steal, but we were heading into London that day. Still, I consider the trip to the gay club and the free beer I won there to be a sign that the universe approved and was helping me to celebrate.
I really cringe at reading a lot of Enjolras' old threads. He was my only character and CFUD is so huge -- not only did I not yet have a full understanding of him (like I said, I usually played the student who deals with Enjolras' retardation, not the retard himself), but I really pushed some things in order to participate more in camp life. These days, Enjolras is definitely a back-burner sort of character, but I'm comfortable when I play him. I think it's pretty safe to say that the day I drop him is the day I drop CFUD completely.
Maladict/bad_addict [camper | May 2006, 81.6% (36 IN)]
In a way the app was a whim -- I read Monstrous Regiment, thought that Maladict would be awesome to have in camp and wrote the app. However, due to life being busy, it turned out that I wouldn't send the app in until over a month later, at which point I read the app and decided that, yes, I still wanted to app Mal. He and his canon were funny and he was a good balance for Enjolras -- whereas Enjolras was a complete straight-man type of character (not to mention a completely normal human), Maladict was bad-ass and sexy and cool and a vampire. :D Batch-buddies with Reggie Shoe and Manfred, though neither character is here anymore. I did not learn that Manfred was also a Williams student until afterward, when Buffy told me. I created the journal after he was voted in.
I really like his journal name.
A lot.
Maladict's application was relatively easy to write -- nothing of great comment. However, for a long time, playing him wasn't easy at all. Mainly, it's because despite him being the main character's best friend, he gets no backstory and no interior life. Monstrous Regiment is told mainly through a limited third-person point of view, mostly Polly's. (Also, it isn't TP's best book, imho.) So I have very little canon to work with.
And what little canon there is, I don't have own or know as well as my others. It's a little embarrassing, how much time (and money) I've spent on my other two canons. In contrast, I have read Monstrous Regiment once. Also, other people knew his canon and liked it and liked him and he was supposed to be awesome, so there was some expectations anxiety at work. For a long time, he was my most difficult character and I hardly ever brought him out. (EDIT: Which, looking at his Memories, is really sort of a lie. But I felt as though I never brought him out, for some reason.) I never considered dropping him, though, because I felt that I could get the hang of him, that there just was something that wasn't clicking, and once I got that, I'd be good.
I can't pin down exactly when it happened, but I think that I began getting more comfortable with Maladict when he began getting more comfortable with people like Umeda, Sena and Pell. That would be around September 2006, about four months in. I just continued getting more comfortable with him, and now, I'm actually surprised by how easily he comes to me.
Though I have to say, that if I were to drop a character, it would be Mal. (NOT DROPPING ANYONE.) It has to do with the way he doesn't take things to heart in quite the way that the other two do, I think -- it would be the least messy drop for both him, the character, and me, the player.
This is all canceled out by the fact that he is a lot of fun. >D
Tatsumi/kagekachou [counselor | July 2006, 74.1% (43 IN)]
So Tatsumi is my favorite anime/manga character since forever (i.e. March 2005, when I watched Yami for the first time). By the time I got into camp, though, my interest in Yami no Matsuei had been faded to but a faintly glowing ember, scarcely seen through the ashes, for about a year. Yami no Matsuei people began arriving to CFUD about the time I got in, though (HI HISOKA), so it crept back onto my radar, so to speak. And when counselor apps were announced, I thought that clearly, I must do what had to be done.
I didn't app because of the cast, per se, being one of those "APP FOR YOURSELF" sort of people, but if the YnM cast here hadn't been so wonderful, I probably wouldn't have apped Tatsumi because YnM characters have such strong ties to their canonmates that trying to EDIT: oh hey I think I left out some words here, let me try to finish this sentence play Tatsumi with castmates who weren't so excellent would have required a lot of troublesome maneuvering by me, the player, in order to try to keep Tatsumi IC.
So I hit up the YnM cast members' journals as an anon, asking for permission to perhaps mention them in the app. And I received such enthusiastic responses --sadly, I do not have the relevant IRC log on this computer, I should upload that or something when I get home so that you can all imagine how SCARED OUT OF MY MIND I WAS as seen here -- that I was topped into being beta'd, something that I usually try to avoid. I did manage to stay anon the entire time, at least. (Though Xander guessed that it was me when the voting post went up -- we were talking on AIM, and she was, like, "...did you apply for a counselor this round? Because if I'm right, I think I know which one is yours, so I want to check." And she was right and I head-desked a lot, but apparently I wasn't too obvious to anyone else.)
And the voting. Ahahaha. Batch buddies were Ray K and Bailey. That was the really stressful counselors round, after which the mods did away with the counselor application weeding. I don't remember being extremely stressed, because it generally takes a lot to seriously disturb my zen, but I was... extremely determined, I suppose. I really wanted to play Tatsumi, and I knew that I would go all weird if somebody else were playing him, so I was prepared to DO MY BEST and FAITO TIL THE END.
...and when I got in I was all "hoshit I can actually make hundreds of icons now."
Playing Tatsumi has been a blast. Seriously, he's another character that I won't drop until I drop CFUD altogether. He can do normal, crack, emo, funny, scary. Despite being a "straight man" character, he's easy to spam with because he's all up in everyone's business. And he's easy for me to play -- Enjolras requires me to have my brain functioning at minimally 85%, Maladict at maybe 70%, but I can play Tatsumi until the point at which I am literally unable to read and write (which is something that was happening a lot this past semester and actually sort of signaled to me that I was in trouble). If his canonmates dropped, he would have major emo and I would have major emo -- but I would probably keep on playing him.
And so, in conclusion, I'm very happy with the three that I have right now. As I've mentioned in a serious poll, there have been other app attempts that I have been glad to have seen been thwarted, that retrospective gladness setting anywhere from a week or so after having been weeded to the minute I saw that there was a dup (I would say that the retrospective gladness for that one occurred mere hours after sending in my app, but that was retrospective PANIC, didn't have the gladness until I received an escape from the situation). With the combination of my characters' levels of activity in CFUD and my total level of activity, I've just been in a really happy place for the past couple of weeks. Barring anything completely life-changing happening, all three should be here for a while.
patria_ou_mort [camper | December 2005 - 51.3% (20 IN) and January 2006 - 87.5% (49 IN)]I started following CFUD in earnest during the fall of 2005, when I was having a relative non-busy semester (aside from orgo killing my soul) and was spending a lot of time in my room because I think I might have been sorta depressed oliolioooo. Anyhow, finals were just finishing, so I had even more time than usual, and I told myself that I shouldn't get involved... but I finally gave in.
EDIT: Also, as
studentbodiyaan said, "Anyway, the voting comm is ultimately what made me submit an app as I am a whore for challenges and having my efforts quantified. It isn't the only reason, natch". Same goes for me! I'd forgotten about that part. Like all of the second halves of sentences that I kept on forgetting in this thing. gg, me.Les Misérables was my first fandom. I had about seven years' worth of familiarity with the canon, and I'd RPed several of the characters in the past. Granted, that RPing had taken place during the end of middle school/beginning of high school, but that just meant that I'd now had a lot of time to contemplate my sins.
I actually didn't usually play Enjolras -- Combeferre was my usual character of choice, both for RPing and writing, with Bossuet and Marius being my next most common. But given that the students (other than Enjolras and Grantaire) don't get much development outside of the original canon -- even the abridged versions of the book tend to chop out most of the students' material -- I decided that it would be to my strategic advantage to app the most memorable of the lot. More people would be likely to go "Oh, Enjolras, that revolutionary leader guy hahaha" than "Oh, Jean Prouvaire, that super-sensitive romantic poet revolutionary guy hahaha." While character familiarity isn't necessary, given that the canon was coming pretty out of left-field -- book characters are a minority and tend to be from relatively modern fantasy -- I thought that to be wisest.
His first app was started about an hour before the app window opened; it was completed and sent in approximately two hours into the apping window. Writing it was quite easy -- I had the book right next to me to check my facts and voice, and just the general jist of playing a French revolutionary student came back to me without difficulty. Revising the app was also pretty easy -- it mainly consisted of cutting out a lot of unnecessary material and breaking up paragraphs to make it appear to be a lot shorter than it actually was and, thus, easier to read.
His re-app earned both one "tl;dr" in the comments and an IN vote from Shinn. It was also the sole survivor of his batch. -_-;; I had created his journal when I apped the first time, because I had thought of the username and really liked it. Also, I was confident that if I didn't get in the first time, I would be able to get in with him eventually. And I know myself well enough to know that if I didn't get in the first time, I would continue re-apping until I did because... well. Persistence.
As it so happened, his re-app went up for vote while I was taking a short research trip to England for an independent project and was staying with a friend. And when he did get in, I couldn't post with him right away because not only was I staying with a friend whose computer I would have to steal, but we were heading into London that day. Still, I consider the trip to the gay club and the free beer I won there to be a sign that the universe approved and was helping me to celebrate.
I really cringe at reading a lot of Enjolras' old threads. He was my only character and CFUD is so huge -- not only did I not yet have a full understanding of him (like I said, I usually played the student who deals with Enjolras' retardation, not the retard himself), but I really pushed some things in order to participate more in camp life. These days, Enjolras is definitely a back-burner sort of character, but I'm comfortable when I play him. I think it's pretty safe to say that the day I drop him is the day I drop CFUD completely.
Maladict/
bad_addict [camper | May 2006, 81.6% (36 IN)]In a way the app was a whim -- I read Monstrous Regiment, thought that Maladict would be awesome to have in camp and wrote the app. However, due to life being busy, it turned out that I wouldn't send the app in until over a month later, at which point I read the app and decided that, yes, I still wanted to app Mal. He and his canon were funny and he was a good balance for Enjolras -- whereas Enjolras was a complete straight-man type of character (not to mention a completely normal human), Maladict was bad-ass and sexy and cool and a vampire. :D Batch-buddies with Reggie Shoe and Manfred, though neither character is here anymore. I did not learn that Manfred was also a Williams student until afterward, when Buffy told me. I created the journal after he was voted in.
I really like his journal name.
A lot.
Maladict's application was relatively easy to write -- nothing of great comment. However, for a long time, playing him wasn't easy at all. Mainly, it's because despite him being the main character's best friend, he gets no backstory and no interior life. Monstrous Regiment is told mainly through a limited third-person point of view, mostly Polly's. (Also, it isn't TP's best book, imho.) So I have very little canon to work with.
And what little canon there is, I don't have own or know as well as my others. It's a little embarrassing, how much time (and money) I've spent on my other two canons. In contrast, I have read Monstrous Regiment once. Also, other people knew his canon and liked it and liked him and he was supposed to be awesome, so there was some expectations anxiety at work. For a long time, he was my most difficult character and I hardly ever brought him out. (EDIT: Which, looking at his Memories, is really sort of a lie. But I felt as though I never brought him out, for some reason.) I never considered dropping him, though, because I felt that I could get the hang of him, that there just was something that wasn't clicking, and once I got that, I'd be good.
I can't pin down exactly when it happened, but I think that I began getting more comfortable with Maladict when he began getting more comfortable with people like Umeda, Sena and Pell. That would be around September 2006, about four months in. I just continued getting more comfortable with him, and now, I'm actually surprised by how easily he comes to me.
Though I have to say, that if I were to drop a character, it would be Mal. (NOT DROPPING ANYONE.) It has to do with the way he doesn't take things to heart in quite the way that the other two do, I think -- it would be the least messy drop for both him, the character, and me, the player.
This is all canceled out by the fact that he is a lot of fun. >D
Tatsumi/
kagekachou [counselor | July 2006, 74.1% (43 IN)]So Tatsumi is my favorite anime/manga character since forever (i.e. March 2005, when I watched Yami for the first time). By the time I got into camp, though, my interest in Yami no Matsuei had been faded to but a faintly glowing ember, scarcely seen through the ashes, for about a year. Yami no Matsuei people began arriving to CFUD about the time I got in, though (HI HISOKA), so it crept back onto my radar, so to speak. And when counselor apps were announced, I thought that clearly, I must do what had to be done.
I didn't app because of the cast, per se, being one of those "APP FOR YOURSELF" sort of people, but if the YnM cast here hadn't been so wonderful, I probably wouldn't have apped Tatsumi because YnM characters have such strong ties to their canonmates that trying to EDIT: oh hey I think I left out some words here, let me try to finish this sentence play Tatsumi with castmates who weren't so excellent would have required a lot of troublesome maneuvering by me, the player, in order to try to keep Tatsumi IC.
So I hit up the YnM cast members' journals as an anon, asking for permission to perhaps mention them in the app. And I received such enthusiastic responses --
And the voting. Ahahaha. Batch buddies were Ray K and Bailey. That was the really stressful counselors round, after which the mods did away with the counselor application weeding. I don't remember being extremely stressed, because it generally takes a lot to seriously disturb my zen, but I was... extremely determined, I suppose. I really wanted to play Tatsumi, and I knew that I would go all weird if somebody else were playing him, so I was prepared to DO MY BEST and FAITO TIL THE END.
...and when I got in I was all "hoshit I can actually make hundreds of icons now."
Playing Tatsumi has been a blast. Seriously, he's another character that I won't drop until I drop CFUD altogether. He can do normal, crack, emo, funny, scary. Despite being a "straight man" character, he's easy to spam with because he's all up in everyone's business. And he's easy for me to play -- Enjolras requires me to have my brain functioning at minimally 85%, Maladict at maybe 70%, but I can play Tatsumi until the point at which I am literally unable to read and write (which is something that was happening a lot this past semester and actually sort of signaled to me that I was in trouble). If his canonmates dropped, he would have major emo and I would have major emo -- but I would probably keep on playing him.
And so, in conclusion, I'm very happy with the three that I have right now. As I've mentioned in a serious poll, there have been other app attempts that I have been glad to have seen been thwarted, that retrospective gladness setting anywhere from a week or so after having been weeded to the minute I saw that there was a dup (I would say that the retrospective gladness for that one occurred mere hours after sending in my app, but that was retrospective PANIC, didn't have the gladness until I received an escape from the situation). With the combination of my characters' levels of activity in CFUD and my total level of activity, I've just been in a really happy place for the past couple of weeks. Barring anything completely life-changing happening, all three should be here for a while.
