Route 29: ｍｏｄｓ (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
these_balls) wrote2010-04-27 11:40 pm
these_balls) wrote2010-04-27 11:40 pm
Entry tags:
Understand the secrets and have some fun
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Billy/Dr. Horrible | Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog | No reserve
Player
Name: Ri
Personal Journal:
E-mail: cheetah1090@yahoo.com
AIM/Plurk/Etc.: AIM: JoyBringer5002; or
Timezone: EST
Current Characters in Route: Shaun Mars
Character
Name: Billy
Series: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
Timeline: Post-Act 3
Canon Resource Links: Dr. Horrible at the Dr. Horrible Wiki. One thing that the wiki doesn't cover is the supplemental comics, namely what is given about Billy's "start of darkness." There will be a more in-depth discussion of this in the personality section, but for now the brief summary is that when he was 8 years old, Billy (who was severely bullied as a child) witnessed his then-idol the hero Joe Justice exhibiting behavior exactly like that of the same bullies who tormented Billy on a daily basis. He realized as a result that he would never be respected for his intelligence, so his "start of darkness" was the resolution to show the world that brains was mightier than brawn.
Personality:
As a child, Billy was quiet and withdrawn because of the severe bullying that he faced. He was kind of the darling of his teachers, to the point where he was bumped ahead at least four grades (8 years old in 6th grade), but being at a different place, developmentally, from his classmates alienated him further and made him a subject of bullying that has impacted him even as an adult. His one solace was in his belief in superheroes, especially his favorite, Joe Justice. And then one day when he was 8 years old, he witnessed Joe Justice maligning the supervillain Mister Maniacal using the same language that the bullies had used on him that same day, and he realized that superheroes don't protect people like him.
"Dr. Horrible" is a persona that Billy projects in order to protect himself, but "off-camera" Billy demonstrates in multiple different situations that that's all it is. Before "A Man's Gotta Do," both before and after he meets Penny, he acts indistinguishably from the Dr. Horrible seen on the blog. He shows shades of the same adorkable charisma when he actually gets to know Penny, as well. Similarly, when he's alone with Moist but in the Dr. Horrible costume, he still "drops character" somewhat and shows indecision and even helplessness, when he's ordered to kill. But Billy uses the name Dr. Horrible as somebody stronger than him that he can hide behind, a supervillain persona designed to destroy the status quo and break the society that tried to break him when he was a child. When he's "in character," he's adorkably charismatic and confident almost to a fault. He barely stammers, and he carries himself with a much more open posture, "on-camera" (in aforementioned scene where he's alone with Moist, he reverts more to his usual closed-off gestures, although he doesn't use the full submissive posturing that he uses in the laundromat; conversely, when he has an audience to perform to in "Slipping," his posture is almost entirely very open and confident and exuding a sense of "come at me" throughout the entire boastful song).
When he's not in character, Billy still protects himself in public by exuding as submissive a demeanor as he can, from his hunched shoulders and averted gaze to his closed-off way of shoving his hands into his hoodie pockets. This behavior makes sense when it's put into the context of a man who has been relentlessly bullied by a society that reviles intelligence his entire life. He's very quiet and withdrawn because he doesn't want to be noticed, and this cripples him when it comes to the girl he loves, admiring her from afar because he's effectively kneecapped by the anxiety of actually working up the nerve to talk to her.
He isn't in love with Penny, however, as much as he's in love with the idea of Penny. While he does get along with her, and becomes friends with her, he sees her not as a person but more as a prize to be won. He disregards her feelings because he believes that he knows what's best for her ("Brand New Day") and as a result he loses his chance to win her over because he's so fixated on the idea of rescuing her ("So They Say"). Since he won't have a Penny in Route, this is mostly a moot point, but it's mentioned in case he finds a replacement goldfish for her.
However, the last song of the musical, besides being loaded with enough double meaning to make an English major weak in the knees, also shows an important degeneration of Billy's character. [SPOILERS FOR THE END OF ACT 3] Penny is dead and Captain Hammer is defeated, and in one fell swoop that wasn't even a direct action on his part suddenly Billy finds himself with everything he's been wanting through the entire musical just handed to him. Rather than realize that his prize wasn't worth what it cost him, Billy becomes completely numb. The world forgets about Penny almost instantly, her only legacy being "Hero's Girlfriend," and Billy takes his offered place in the Evil League of Evil. His expression robbing the bank is not one of a villain who has won, but of one who has nothing left to lose. One important thing about his costume change in "Everything You Ever," aside from his new blood-red Howie coat and black gloves, is that now his goggles are pulled down over his eyes, obscuring them from view. The palette change reflects Dr. Horrible's change to the darker, but because his goggles hide so much of his face they imply something different - they represent Billy closing himself off even more to anything resembling redemption or humanity.
The final shot of the musical shows Billy in his hoodie in front of the camera, eyes red-rimmed and his expression distant, and his voice changes timbre on the last two words from the gruff and guttural new Doctor to a small, helpless "a thing," showing that however much he's closing himself off he's still vulnerable and more than that he's still grieving the loss of Penny.[END SPOILERS]
In Route, he'll be dropped into an unfamiliar organization, suddenly a lowly grunt instead of part of the elite upper ranks of the Evil League of Evil. Having an organization to be part of will be a guiding force that will no doubt help him get his bearings and give him something to strive for. Being outside of not!LA will help him in a lot of ways as well - being around people who don't know about Penny, and who may even admire his intelligence (or at least not...turn him into the police at the slightest demonstration of it) will give him a chance to become known for something that's not killing the hero's girlfriend. Unconsciously, he'll be almost glad for the no-death rule, because the Boss will never expect of him what Bad Horse drove him to do in canon, and having a whole new world of mechanics and substances to command will spark his curiosity and help him move on.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
+ Intelligent: Even just saying that he's intelligent is an understatement. Billy is incredibly intelligent, particularly where maths and science are concerned. In the supplementary comics, it shows that when he was eight years old, he was in sixth grade, which is about four years ahead of his peers. His entire "Dr. Horrible" persona is built on his intelligence, using his uniquely gifted mind to devise plans and hatch schemes that are impressive on paper (using a trans-matter ray to steal gold), even if they don't quite work according to plan in practice (same trans-matter ray "shifting molecules" into a liquid).
+ Tech-savvy: Deserves its own point because not only is he tech-savvy in the sense that he can build all of these remarkable scientific gadgets, but he's also incredibly savvy at working with existing technology, as is shown in canon when he's actually able to make an iPhone app to operate his remote control device in order to steal the courier van carrying the Wonderfluonium. In Route, this will definitely translate into having an easier time learning his way around the Pokegear and various other Rocket gadgets, but will also probably result in his programming his own Pokegear apps, after a while. Because he chose to focus his interests elsewhere, programming is not a major strong suit of his, but he can make simple and functional applications that work with his existing technology.
+ Resourceful: The fact of the matter is that, before he secured funding from the Evil League of Evil, Billy had to keep his projects fairly low-budget. His laboratory, while advanced, also looks fairly cobbled together, and however put-together it is, it's hidden behind a secret wall in his shitty apartment. Aside from his limited funds, of course, his resourcefulness comes out in his ability to think on his feet (sometimes). When one of his plans to defeat Captain Hammer fails, he is able to beat a hasty retreat by falling back on a previous mischief that he'd sowed as a diversion (coin-sized explosives in every parking meter in not!LA). This will serve him well both as an early Rocket (low funds) and if he's ever sent out on any undercover/field missions (covering his ass).
+ Resilient: He can take a lot more damage than it looks like he can. He takes a car to the head and walks away with a couple bruises.
+/- Devoted: When Billy has a cause to throw himself at, he throws himself at it single-mindedly. His stated goal on his blog is to destroy the status quo (because the status is not quo), and to that end most of his evil schemes are anarchical annoyances at worst, and bureaucratic inconveniences at best. He will apply his mind to any problem that crosses his path, up to and including… working up the nerve to talk to a girl (which was what the original purpose of the Freeze Ray was - to give him time to come up with something to say to Penny). This isn't always a positive trait, however, because whenever he single-mindedly devotes himself to a cause, he tends to blind himself to other (possibly easier or better) options, like when he becomes so fixated on killing Captain Hammer to "rescue" Penny that he misses his weekly meeting with Penny at the laundromat and therefore misses an opportunity to see her.
+/- Creative: Along with intelligent, Billy is wildly creative. For one, he decides that the best solution to "I am too much of a weenie to talk to this cute girl" is "invent a weapon that will stop time long enough for me to work up the nerve to say she has pretty hair." On the other hand, this works against him when he overthinks things to the point that "invent a weapon that will stop time long enough to work up the nerve to say she has pretty hair" sounds like a reasonable solution. (Also giving her Australia to compensate for his own evil coming-out being the gratuitous murder of her boyfriend. That's also a completely reasonable solution.)
+/- Idealistic/Ambitious: Given that his stated goal is to topple the existing power structures of the world and put that power into his own hands, of course he's ambitious. Like his devotion, however, his ambition comes at a price. He has to constantly prioritize his goals, and although he wants to put his personal goal of getting the girl first, in action he constantly prioritizes other things over her ("A Man's Gotta Do," "So They Say"), which ultimately results in him losing her entirely, first to Captain Hammer in Act 1 and then to his own hubris in the finale.
- Nervous: Billy's "main" personality (that is to say, Billy himself, not the Dr. Horrible persona, although there are shades of this in that facade as well) is practically brimming with nerves. Stemming from a childhood of being constantly bullied for being four grades above his age level, Billy flinches from the outside world like it's going to attack him at any moment. Aside from the slight stammer that this afflicts him with, it comes through in his constantly-tensed shoulders, closed-off body language (hands in pockets, head ducked), and the nervous tic that he has of blinking particularly hard or frequently when he feels threatened or cornered in a situation.
- Awkward: HAHAHAHA BOY HOWDY to say that Billy is awkward is like saying the water is slightly moist. All of the above nervous traits, along with a lifetime of societal conditioning to blend in and hide from all attention, makes Billy himself pretty damn painful to deal with. Thrust into a new situation, these nervous traits will come back in full force for a while, as he adjusts to being transplanted from his own world. The only upside is that it's possible, if he deems you worthy of being actually friendly toward (and if you establish an actual...audible connection), his tics tend to fade somewhat - he's more open in his body language when he's being friendly with Penny, and even his unconscious nervous tics like the stammer and the blinking fade.
- Obsessive: Aside from what's been covered in the Ambitious and Devoted sections, one of Billy's greatest flaws is that he falls in love with ideas and not reality. A great example of this is his relationship with Penny. He admires her from afar for an unspecified amount of time before canon even starts, to the point where he invents a machine that can freeze time just for the opportunity to psych himself up enough to talk to her. He has her laundry schedule memorized just from observing her, and he even has a photograph of her that seems as though it's been taken through the cover of leaves. But it becomes clear by the end of act 2 that, even though Billy is friendly with Penny, he's still very much in love with this perfect image of her in his mind than he is actually in love with her - Captain Hammer's objectifying remarks secure Billy's idea of Penny as a thing that needs to be rescued from his nemesis' clutches, rather than a thinking human being who he could talk to. He fantasizes about rescuing Penny, and in obsessively following this fantasy he robs himself of a chance to actually talk to her and maybe convince her to dump Hammer's dumb ass.
- Oversharing: One of Billy's more minor flaws is that he has the unfortunate tendency to speak with little to no filter. When he's not in the Dr. Horrible persona, this manifests as nervous word vomit ("Tuesdays and Saturdays except twice last month you skipped the weekend - I mean, if that was you…") but it comes out when he's hiding behind his Dr. Horrible persona as well, as something that is actually acknowledged that he needs to work on. He details the location and intent of one of his plans on his blog, and then decides he might have said too much when he's thwarted the next day.
- Prideful: Like most tragedies, Billy's fatal flaw is his hubris (unlike some tragedies, it doesn't turn out to be fatal for him, but that's neither here nor there), in that because he takes personal responsibility and thinks himself the key to changing the world, he is blind to what he can change and his lofty ideals turn out to be not what the doctor ordered at all. He takes a great amount of pride in his intelligence and his inventions, at first considering murder neither elegant nor creative enough for his standards. In the end of act 2, when his much, much more personal pride in the form of his affection for Penny is lit like a Nice Guy powderkeg, suddenly his previous disinclinations toward murder go out the window and he's not only ready but willing to kill Captain Hammer in order to rescue Penny from him.
2/2 I...I broke the character limit...
Affiliation: Rocket (Technician/Science Dept. Grunt, specifically)
Starter: Rotom (lvl 15) + Vulpix (lvl 5)
Password: Swedish Fish
Samples
First Person Sample:
Since Billy essentially has a very distinct persona that he projects, I'm including two samples - one that's more just regular Billy, and the other being Dr. Horrible, since that's generally the persona he likes to broadcast. I know that they're definitely not separate personalities, but he behaves so much more confidently when he's "in character" as Dr. Horrible that I wanted to cover my bases and demonstrate that I can do both, especially because his "broadcasting voice" will probably end up semi-limited to his Rocket duties and general villainy.
.
Billy
[When the feed connects, the man on the other end blinks hard a couple of times and glances to either side before turning his attention to the 'Gear.]
So, I- I have a question about how people name these, uh… Pokemon...things. Wasn't there some kind of video game with something called Pokemon? I never played many video games.
Anyway! Uh, so I was wondering if anyone ever names them after… people? Like, people they knew back-- back home. [He blinks hard again, nervously.] And I guess, if you do, why? Not why would you do that but like [He glances at something offscreen, this time more pensively and less out of the nervous twitching that he started with.] ...why did you pick that name?
Dr. Horrible
[Someone has apparently decided that the Rocket uniform is gauche, opting instead for a blood red Howie coat, welder's goggles pulled down so that the thick shaded lenses and immense metal frames obscure his face from immediate identification.
Because that's subtle.]
You know, in most places if you said that you got rich because your cat could literally throw money people would think you were insane. And a counterfeiter. But not only is Pay Day a socially acceptable move, but all these people literally making money doesn't seem to impact the economy negatively at all. It's almost like this place was made up by somebody with no grasp on the concept of inflation or economics.
So progress on my Spore Ray is going great. I'm getting ready for the final round of testing, and then after that it should be ready for use. You know, for...self-defense. And stuff.
Anyway! I'm no closer to figuring out what exactly the meat is made of, because every time I try to analyze it I just keep getting error messages, so… My advice there is, uh. Become a vegetarian.
No fanmail this week - remember, guys, P.O. Box 24, Goldenrod City. Or I guess you could hang around after the broadcast, if you don't want your letter read over the air.
That about does it for this week. Until next week, the doctor is out.
[He reaches out and the camera fades to static.]
Third Person Sample:
Billy had his goggles down for more than aesthetic reasons, wielding a small welding torch and carefully affixing together various parts of the casing for his newest invention. He'd been at work on this for about three days straight, rarely leaving the lab for more than bathroom breaks (and not even really for food, either). Tesla had gotten bored and probably hidden himself in Billy's pokegear, which for the time being he wasn't worried about (this may change depending on how much damage control he had to do later, but he had bigger things to be concerned with at the moment).
A small brown head bumped into the hand holding the torch, sending the flame wide before he clicked it off and looked at the Vulpix in surprise.
"Penny?" he asked, lifting his goggles up to look at her for a minute.
"Vuuul!" the little fox trilled in response, huffing impatiently and giving him an unimpressed look with her doe-brown eyes. He sighed and lowered his goggles again.
"Not right now, Penny, I'm busy," he said dismissively, clicking on the flame again and going back to work. The Vulpix didn't let him get too far before she nudged his hand again, more intently this time. He was glad for the heavy black gloves, because the leather felt suddenly very warm on his other hand before he clicked the torch off again and pushed his goggles up even more frustrated than before. "What has gotten into you?" he asked her. He fished out her pokeball somewhat awkwardly with his unwieldy black gloves, tossing it at her. She batted it back with her six tails and an angry "Pix!"
"Penny, stop." Toss.
"Vul!" Bat.
"Fine!" He put the ball back in his pocket. "Just...give me five minutes, okay?" Without waiting for an answer (after all, who waits for permission from a fox?) he put his goggles back down and started carefully welding again. He was aware that she was watching him, but given her fire-type he wasn't too worried about her getting in the way. What he wasn't aware of was the time, and after a while she became easy to ignore.
And then a few shining purple embers settled on his glove and his sleeve. He let out an inelegant squawk and batted them out, the flame on the torch going out as it fell to the floor with a clatter. When he looked at the Vulpix, she looked inordinately pleased with herself, and he sighed.
"...I take it it's been five minutes." She nodded with a cheerful "Pix!" He pushed his goggles up and set the torch back on the table, taking his gloves off and setting them next to his work. Penny jumped down from the table and pranced around his boots for a minute, and then made a beeline for the door, looking back at him over her shoulder. He glanced at his ray briefly before heading to his locker to get his bag and following her out the door. She pointed him straight toward the mess hall, and he was about to protest until his stomach rumbled.
"You were just looking out for me, weren't you?" Penny yipped and pranced a couple steps ahead. "I guess it is about time for a break."
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The doctor is in