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app for we're still here
Jan. 10th, 2021 08:17 pmPLAYER INFO.
NAME: Rinne
PREFERRED PRONOUNS: she/her
ARE YOU OVER 18? yes!
CONTACT:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
spoilers
CURRENT CHARACTERS: none!
CHARACTER INFO.
NAME: Lauren Oya Olamina
CANON: Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler
CANON POINT: November 3, 2025 (end of chapter 9)
AGE: 16
GENDER: female
HISTORY:
Parable of the Sower starts off in the far off future of... 2024 (these books were written in the 90s) in a version of the US where society has started to crumble in the face of catastrophic climate change, a devastating economic downturn, and violence resulting from escalating inequality (again, written in the 90s, but there's a reason this book hit the NYT Bestseller's list last year). Lauren grew up in a walled-off cul-de-sac outside of Los Angeles as the daughter of a Baptist preacher. By the time she became a teenager, people in her community only leaves their walls in large armed groups for shooting practice or, once, a group baptism; the skeleton of public infrastructure like the police, fire department, and local school system technically exist, but no one in the community has the resources to pay for their services or a safe way to get through the indiscriminate violence and poverty outside the walls for something so trivial. Lauren helps her stepmother teach an unofficial school for the neighborhood children in the living room where her father holds services on Sundays. The community is largely self-sustaining, with only a few adults holding paid jobs outside to get the funds for water, electricity, and the occasional foodstuffs to supplement what the community can grow for themselves. The adults around her are operating as though they simply have to hold out long enough for the country to put itself back together again, which Lauren has long since realized is a slow path to the destruction of the community as the situation worsens.
From the age of 12 onward, Lauren has been assembling the tenets of a religion she comes to call Earthseed, with two core principles: first, that change is the most powerful and unavoidable force in the universe to the extent that if anything is god, it is change; second, that the destiny of humanity is to spread to other planets, with the ruined Earth as their training wheels. Earthseed doesn't worship change, but rather recognizes the inevitability of it and focuses on preparing to cope with it. This primarily takes the form of collective cooperation, gathering as much knowledge as possible, and finding strength in diversity. At her current canonpoint, Lauren hasn't shared her beliefs with anyone besides the need to learn self-sufficiency and not take their current living situation for granted; by the time she's an elderly woman, Earthseed will have become a major world religion and will send its first group of adherents out to the stars. In order to get there, she'll first have to walk from the ruins of her town all the way to Northern California, slowly collecting followers on her walk up the highways with hundreds of other climate refugees, but that all happens a bit after this canonpoint. For now, she's essentially a paranoid prepper with several journals' worth of spiritual poetry living in a ticking time bomb of a sheltered community in a dystopia.
APPEARANCE:
Lauren is a dark-skinned, tall, broad-shouldered black teenager with natural hair. She's tall enough and androgynous enough to pass herself off as a man for protection once she gets a little older. She's known in the community for being very stoic and not showing her emotions on her face to the point where others are put off by her intensity. I'm using Ashleigh Murray as a PB but here is an image of Lauren from the graphic novel adaptation!
ABILITIES:
Lauren is what she calls a "sharer," or someone with a disorder called hyperempathy, which causes her to experience the same pain (or pleasure) that she sees other people (and animals) experience. This is explicitly psychosomatic-- her younger brother once tricked her into bleeding by making her think he was injured by putting red ink on his hand. haring is very heavily based off of Lauren's perception of what the other person is experiencing; if she can't see the injury and someone keeps their face completely calm and unaffected, she doesn't feel anything. She no longer bleeds when she sees other people bleeding at this age, but she does experience sympathy aches when she sees injuries that can temporarily cripple her to the point where she's completely defenseless. If she watches someone die, she experiences a shadow death herself that essentially makes her pass out for a few seconds until it passes, leaving her extremely vulnerable if she's in the middle of a larger violent situation. Lauren's father keeps her hyperempathy a strict secret within the family and as a result of having to constantly power through it, Lauren is very good at hiding when she experiences pain. At one point, Lauren is injured around several other sharers; they all believe the injury is minor based on her reaction up until she has to undress to treat the wound, where they suddenly experience much stronger pain when they see its extent. As far as pleasure goes, it only seems to come up during sex, where Lauren feels both her own physical pleasure and also her partner's. I'm assuming her hyperempathy syndrome is treated as any other supernatural ability for the purposes of regains even though it is explicitly all in her head!
On a non-weird-scifi-BS front, Lauren speaks Spanish and English fluently, is knowledgeable about survival skills and native plants in the Americas with a particular focus on California, knows how to shoot a gun (and specifically shoot to kill so she doesn't suffer any more than she has to), has some basic martial arts training, and is a natural at collecting followers like the pseudo cult leader she grows up to be.
SUITABILITY:
Lauren's everyday reality includes living without electricity or much water and constant sieges against her home and community where break-ins, the threat of sexual violence, and spontaneous gunfights are a fact of life. She is hyperfixated on threats against her way of life and devotes the majority of her energy to planning for her survival. She is the sort of character who may resent the unpleasant situation she finds herself in, but she's incredibly resilient (as tends to happen when you make a religion about how God is change). By her current canonpoint, she's already dealt with enough death, mutilated corpses, and desperate fear that finding a rotting half-eaten elderly woman's corpse is described as "we found another body today during target practice." In particular, she has a large capacity for uniting people and inspiring them to push back against terrible situations-- not through wide-eyed idealism and optimism, but a grim, determined, blunt "do or die" approach.
PERSONALITY.
WRITING SAMPLES.
SAMPLES:
NOTES.
QUESTIONS OR CONCERNS:
NAME: Rinne
PREFERRED PRONOUNS: she/her
ARE YOU OVER 18? yes!
CONTACT:
CURRENT CHARACTERS: none!
CHARACTER INFO.
NAME: Lauren Oya Olamina
CANON: Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler
CANON POINT: November 3, 2025 (end of chapter 9)
AGE: 16
GENDER: female
HISTORY:
Parable of the Sower starts off in the far off future of... 2024 (these books were written in the 90s) in a version of the US where society has started to crumble in the face of catastrophic climate change, a devastating economic downturn, and violence resulting from escalating inequality (again, written in the 90s, but there's a reason this book hit the NYT Bestseller's list last year). Lauren grew up in a walled-off cul-de-sac outside of Los Angeles as the daughter of a Baptist preacher. By the time she became a teenager, people in her community only leaves their walls in large armed groups for shooting practice or, once, a group baptism; the skeleton of public infrastructure like the police, fire department, and local school system technically exist, but no one in the community has the resources to pay for their services or a safe way to get through the indiscriminate violence and poverty outside the walls for something so trivial. Lauren helps her stepmother teach an unofficial school for the neighborhood children in the living room where her father holds services on Sundays. The community is largely self-sustaining, with only a few adults holding paid jobs outside to get the funds for water, electricity, and the occasional foodstuffs to supplement what the community can grow for themselves. The adults around her are operating as though they simply have to hold out long enough for the country to put itself back together again, which Lauren has long since realized is a slow path to the destruction of the community as the situation worsens.
From the age of 12 onward, Lauren has been assembling the tenets of a religion she comes to call Earthseed, with two core principles: first, that change is the most powerful and unavoidable force in the universe to the extent that if anything is god, it is change; second, that the destiny of humanity is to spread to other planets, with the ruined Earth as their training wheels. Earthseed doesn't worship change, but rather recognizes the inevitability of it and focuses on preparing to cope with it. This primarily takes the form of collective cooperation, gathering as much knowledge as possible, and finding strength in diversity. At her current canonpoint, Lauren hasn't shared her beliefs with anyone besides the need to learn self-sufficiency and not take their current living situation for granted; by the time she's an elderly woman, Earthseed will have become a major world religion and will send its first group of adherents out to the stars. In order to get there, she'll first have to walk from the ruins of her town all the way to Northern California, slowly collecting followers on her walk up the highways with hundreds of other climate refugees, but that all happens a bit after this canonpoint. For now, she's essentially a paranoid prepper with several journals' worth of spiritual poetry living in a ticking time bomb of a sheltered community in a dystopia.
APPEARANCE:
Lauren is a dark-skinned, tall, broad-shouldered black teenager with natural hair. She's tall enough and androgynous enough to pass herself off as a man for protection once she gets a little older. She's known in the community for being very stoic and not showing her emotions on her face to the point where others are put off by her intensity. I'm using Ashleigh Murray as a PB but here is an image of Lauren from the graphic novel adaptation!
ABILITIES:
Lauren is what she calls a "sharer," or someone with a disorder called hyperempathy, which causes her to experience the same pain (or pleasure) that she sees other people (and animals) experience. This is explicitly psychosomatic-- her younger brother once tricked her into bleeding by making her think he was injured by putting red ink on his hand. haring is very heavily based off of Lauren's perception of what the other person is experiencing; if she can't see the injury and someone keeps their face completely calm and unaffected, she doesn't feel anything. She no longer bleeds when she sees other people bleeding at this age, but she does experience sympathy aches when she sees injuries that can temporarily cripple her to the point where she's completely defenseless. If she watches someone die, she experiences a shadow death herself that essentially makes her pass out for a few seconds until it passes, leaving her extremely vulnerable if she's in the middle of a larger violent situation. Lauren's father keeps her hyperempathy a strict secret within the family and as a result of having to constantly power through it, Lauren is very good at hiding when she experiences pain. At one point, Lauren is injured around several other sharers; they all believe the injury is minor based on her reaction up until she has to undress to treat the wound, where they suddenly experience much stronger pain when they see its extent. As far as pleasure goes, it only seems to come up during sex, where Lauren feels both her own physical pleasure and also her partner's. I'm assuming her hyperempathy syndrome is treated as any other supernatural ability for the purposes of regains even though it is explicitly all in her head!
On a non-weird-scifi-BS front, Lauren speaks Spanish and English fluently, is knowledgeable about survival skills and native plants in the Americas with a particular focus on California, knows how to shoot a gun (and specifically shoot to kill so she doesn't suffer any more than she has to), has some basic martial arts training, and is a natural at collecting followers like the pseudo cult leader she grows up to be.
SUITABILITY:
Lauren's everyday reality includes living without electricity or much water and constant sieges against her home and community where break-ins, the threat of sexual violence, and spontaneous gunfights are a fact of life. She is hyperfixated on threats against her way of life and devotes the majority of her energy to planning for her survival. She is the sort of character who may resent the unpleasant situation she finds herself in, but she's incredibly resilient (as tends to happen when you make a religion about how God is change). By her current canonpoint, she's already dealt with enough death, mutilated corpses, and desperate fear that finding a rotting half-eaten elderly woman's corpse is described as "we found another body today during target practice." In particular, she has a large capacity for uniting people and inspiring them to push back against terrible situations-- not through wide-eyed idealism and optimism, but a grim, determined, blunt "do or die" approach.
PERSONALITY.
● Your character has a chance to undo a terrible mistake, but in doing so, there could be unintended consequences for everyone they know. Is it worth the risk? Or should the dead stay dead?
In general, yes, the dead should stay dead-- death is just another change, and it is pretty antithetical to Lauren's philosophy to lament change to the point of 'undoing' it. As far as she's concerned, lingering on the past is one of the greatest threats to survival in the present, since people who are fixated on how things used to be are spending too much resources on trying to go back to a past point instead of addressing the reality that is actually happening around them. If she were a little younger, she might want to walk back telling her friend about their need to prepare to survive outside of their cul-de-sac-- this was something that lost her that friendship and got her into an enormous amount of trouble-- but she also realizes that it was an important lesson to her about how to present her message (for example, this event is followed by the Earthseed verse "drowning people / sometimes die / fighting their own rescuers") and also how she should #trustnobitch, and she wouldn't want to give that up even if there weren't additional consequences. She would still be tempted to consider reversing the death of a four year old in her community, though-- it's easy for her to say that people who are older and made more decisions were tragedies but part of life, but it's a lot harder to walk away from being able to undo the death of a small child.
● If your character had the option to permanently lose the ability to feel certain negative emotions like fear or grief, or permanently forget certain memories, would they take it? What if they will never know that something has been taken from them? Does loss only matter if it's known what's missing?
She would not! Even her hyperempathy, which 98% of the time only ever comes up in a negative context, isn't something that Lauren would willingly give up-- she takes it as a sign of
● Could your character ever forgive themselves for something morally wrong that they've done? No matter how much time has passed? No matter how much penitence has been done? Is being sorry enough to be a good person?
Yes she can. Lauren has a tremendous capacity for hardness when it comes down to it, and she's very good at justifying her own actions to herself.
● Your character has a secret they have been sworn to, but revealing this secret could save the lives of countless others. Is it worth breaking the promise to save others, or is betrayal never justifiable?
Lauren is, in general, very good at keeping secrets, and feels fiercely defensive about her own.
● Has your character ever gotten joy out of hurting others, physically or mentally? If they have, does it scare them?
She hasn't gotten joy out of hurting other people, but she has gotten satisfaction. That doesn't scare her-- she is aware of exactly how much pain she's doling out, so if she's going to physically hurt someone she's doing so with the full knowledge that she will experience the same pain and thus it has to be worth it, and she insures that it's worth it. If someone's pushed her to the point where she's willing to physically hurt herself to get back at them, she's going to feel some satisfaction about putting them in their place. Lauren is a character who likes being in charge of other people, and takes pleasure when this power is proven or when she's proven right. People are often intimidated by her, afraid of her, or in awe of her, and she likes that. It's not something she'll ever fully acknowledge in her lifetime, but she really does get a thrill from being in control of things, and sometimes she needs to punish people to prove it.
WRITING SAMPLES.
SAMPLES:
NOTES.
QUESTIONS OR CONCERNS:
