Understand the secrets and have some fun

[these_balls]

APPLICATIONS!
Currently: Closed!
Route 29 has closed as of May 30th. For the continuation of the game, please visit victory_road!

Applications will be normally checked during the weekend following the first and third Sunday of each month unless otherwise stated, and we will allow one application per person during one application cycle. Remember, the most characters one player can have at a time is currently set at five.

Applications received after 11:59 PM EST on Saturday of the first and third weekend of each month will be checked the following app weekend unless otherwise stated.

We now ask that potential applicants post their application in comments rather than linking. If their application contains explicit references to 'hard' spoilers (character death, unforeseen plot twists, big reveals, he was evil all along etc), players should put the application in their own journal or their character's journal and link it, making sure to mention the presence of spoilers within. For further clarification on our spoilers policy and whether or not your application needs to be linked, please check this page. Thank you for your cooperation!

The comment character limit on dreamwidth is 16,000 characters so apps no longer need to be split into multiple comments; however this is at players' discretion.

Please use the form below and post your application in comments rather than linking if you can. If you have any questions, feel free to ask either of the mods. You can reach us through emails, IMs, or PMs.

A reminder for those waiting to hear back, please don't be worried if we skip yours while going through them. It only means we needed a little more time to research!

Helpful links!
Taken: 1|2|3 / Reserves
Please do not app a character from either of these unless you reserved them!
Starter Pokémon!
A compiled list of the starter pokémon to choose from offered in Route 29!
Word Count Tool!
Word count! It has other pointless stats too.
Navigation


<u><b>Player</u></b> <b>Name:</b> <b>Personal Journal:</b> <user name=""> <b>E-mail:</b> <b>AIM/Plurk/Etc.:</b> <b>Timezone:</b> <b>Current Characters in Route:</b> <b><u>Character</u></b> <b>Name:</b> <b>Series:</b> <b>Timeline:</b> <b>Canon Resource Links:</b> Here we would have the links to wikis and other information sites. If none of those seem to provide enough information, feel free to add more about the character here. However, please do not use this section as a full history section unless your canon is ridiculously obscure. General rule of thumb: if there are a good amount of descriptive resources, please just link them and use this section to add in what may have been left out, as opposed to writing an entire history section. <b>Personality:</b> Give us at minimum 2-3 full paragraphs of how you understand your character's personality. Talk about basic characteristics, any major developments over the course of their canon, their motives, their social behavior, and anything else you can think of that shows off your knowledge of this character. <b>Strengths/Weaknesses:</b> Try to cover the good points of what they can do, their life skills (not necessarily powers, but things they're just good at). Go into their biggest fears and what they just can’t do. <b><u>Pokémon Information</u></b> <b>Affiliation:</b> What career path will your character be taking? Breeder, Trainer? Or maybe even down the dark path of becoming a member of Team Rocket? Note: All Rocket members start as grunts. (For right now, only those three positions are available, whether your character chooses to follow their assigned path or not.) <b>Starter:</b> What starter pokémon do you want your character to have? Please use the list linked above to choose from. Certain pokémon have an orange star next to their names; if you choose one of these starters (Deino, Zorua, Litwick, Pikachu, Scyther, Dratini, Bagon, Gible, Axew, Ralts, Riolu, Beldum, Larvitar, Eevee, or Beldum) you must provide reasoning. You do not need to explain your reasoning for pokémon other than those listed above. <b>Password:</b> This is where you'll put the passwords from the Rules and the F.A.Q. There are two words, to assure you've read both. <b><u>Samples</u></b> <b>First Person Sample:</b> The sample must take place in Route_29's setting. Eight sentences is the minimum. This is a PokéConnect post--one that will be on the character's journal, broadcast to the network. Although it is short, it needs to show how your character would communicate with others, as well as be descriptive enough to express the character's voice without sounding too generic. <b>Third Person Sample:</b> The sample must take place in Route_29's setting. The minimum is 300 words. Please note that what we are looking for is an inner working into the character’s thoughts and actions, and how the character responds to the setting, not something that could be taken as an excerpt fanfic. You may use other characters to bounce your characters actions off of, but everything should still be mostly from their point of view.

Comments

[aufsassig]

Personality:

In Kaori Yuki's Count Cain/Godchild manga, the various characters are often heavily associated with a representative card of the Major Arcana that tends to illustrate their role, their history, or their personal arc throughout the plot; in chapter one of volume five, sidebar information from the author indicates that Meridiana's representative tarot card is the Wheel of Fortune, and so it is through this lens that her personality is best examined.

Superficially speaking, the Wheel of Fortune seems like the natural card of choice for Meridiana; the narrative introduces her as a stoic, picturesque fortune-teller who has recently become the sensation of Victorian London's society affairs. She is often invited to parties because of her ability to tell fortunes and make predictions for the social elite who find themselves entranced by such occult mysteries, even while decrying such things as nonsense and fairy tales. And indeed, for a large portion of Meridiana's early appearances, she is presented as lifeless and cold, aloof and untouchable; she comes off as more of a doll than a living person, pretty and poised to do as she is directed without any independent will of her own.

However, the message of the Wheel of Fortune is also that "everything changes", and Meridiana is certainly no exception. Indeed, the stoic princess she appears to be when she is first introduced is a far cry from the girl she was in life: a lively, spunky girl from a middle-class family who was renowned for her beauty and really rather vain because of it. Over the course of her appearances in the manga, Meridiana's journey details the personal struggles that simultaneously reveal how she ultimately fell from the heights of her life to the quiet doll we met in the beginning, and chronicles her rise once again to regaining the life and personality she'd once had.

A major theme of Meridiana's story is that she is a girl who is frequently moved by the whims of circumstances beyond her control. As the first confirmed appearance of one of DELILAH's deadly dolls, she was forcibly resurrected from the dead to be a pawn for the organization's schemes; it's implied that she served as a test subject for certain aspects of the process, and that she mostly exists to be observed as a means of gaining data for future deadly dolls projects (of which there are several). Once resurrected from the dead, Meridiana becomes unable to survive on her own — she depends on the doctor who raised her, Jezebel, for weekly treatments that sustain her physical body, and in a more grotesque sense she depends on the blood and organs of the girls being murdered to act as donors for her. In a metaphorical sense, once Jezebel learns that the protagonist of the series has fallen in love with her, he uses Meridiana as a tool and a means by which to inflict more trauma upon him. Even actions that she thinks she has taken independently — escaping from the house where Jezebel has his base of operations, most notably — are later revealed to be actions she was manipulated into. As she exclaims in horror, "I...I'd wanted to cut all your strings...all this time, have I just been your marionette?!"

However, Meridiana's unfortunate role as someone else's marionette is not unique to Jezebel; the narrative also reveals that her first death occurred as the result of a failed "lovers' suicide". Meridiana, a girl from a middle-class family, had fallen in love with the eldest son of a marquis — a titled young man well above her station. When it became clear that his family would never let him marry a girl from such a vastly different social class, Meridiana took the rebuff hard and, as Jezebel taunts her, "chose to die rather than face reality." It's implied that the "lovers' suicide" she tries to complete was the son's idea; wanting to be rid of her, the son convinced Meridiana to climb a tower and leap off together with him, and then let her fall to her death while he utilized a means of saving himself to avoid the same fate. Consequently, an overarching theme in Meridiana's life is her tendency to be taken advantage of by others, and to let her flaws be used against her to manipulative effect.

And indeed, she has her flaws: while described as being "more beautiful than any living person, with a smile that bestows eternal bliss unto those who lay eyes upon her", Meridiana is also very vain about her looks and has a lot of her self-worth invested in being the quintessential example of a Victorian lady — despite the fact that she's from a middle-class family and suffers the social consequences of it from the upper echelon of society as a result. Jezebel, in lecturing her, calls her a "self-serving narcissist"; she clearly doesn't take slights and criticism well, and can often make choices rooted in strong emotion that later act to her detriment — and sometimes even death. Naturally, this investment in her beauty proves to be an ironic echo once she is resurrected from the dead and becomes "a monster escaped from her grave" who has "eaten the entrails of total strangers"; while physically speaking she still has all of the beauty she did in life, that physical aesthetic is hollow and sustained only by virtue of the monstrous actions she is forced to take (and indeed, forced into) in order to stay that way. This leads her to a great deal of understandable self-loathing, and none moreso than when one of the girls killed to sustain her proves to be none other than the protagonist's fiancee (and her rival in love) — a fact Jezebel makes certain to tell her about, once he's already completed the operation to transplant the fiancee's organs into Meridiana's body.

Suffice to say, Meridiana is a lovely, once-average Victorian girl who (like any character in a Kaori Yuki manga) is now struggling with a veritable motherlode of issues. She has now died twice, and both times for the sake of a man she loved; she has been resurrected from the dead specifically to be someone else's pawn, used and manipulated by her own emotions; she has suffered through a weekly string of bullshit Victorian occult experimentation including but not limited to blood transfusions, organ transplants, and whatever the shit is going on here for the sake of being kept alive long beyond a point when she should've been dead; and perhaps most egregiously, just minutes before her death, she discovered that the person acting as "Jack the Ripper", who had been working with Jezebel to murder the girls that eventually became Meridiana's blood and organ donors, was none other than her own mother.

However, even in the midst of all this adversity, Meridiana displays some notable moments of character that truly demonstrate that fire and determination she'd had in life. Several times over the narrative (despite being unknowing manipulated into at least one of them), Meridiana asserts herself with notable bravery and self-confidence. At one point, while Jezebel is attempting to keep her tied down literally by her hair (which is very long, and at the time braided, acting as a symbol of her vanity), Meridiana gives herself a Dramatic Haircut and hacks her braid off at the shoulders, yelling that "[s]taying here is just as bad as being dead! ...And I won't let even one more person die because of me! Yes, all the things [Jezebel had] said were true! But I'm never going to pity myself and run away again — I'm going to fight back! That's what it truly means to be alive!" Later, when she knows Cain is still in love with her despite mourning his fiancee, she tries to drive him away from her for his own sake by acting confident and nonchalant, claiming that she "hate[s] obstinate men" and doesn't want him to chase after her when she leaves — which, naturally, he does. Later still, when the protagonist's beloved sister is missing and the protagonist comes to Meridiana to insist that she tell him where Jezebel's base of operations can be found, Meridiana demands to come with him and so adamantly refuses to be left behind that the protagonist eventually relents, arming her with a cane sword and taking her along on what he knows may be a perilous, and even deadly, venture. Finally, just before she dies, she repeats her earlier convictions to Jezebel and Cain both, stating that "this time...[she] control[s her] life itself" and that she'd rather die than allow the protagonist to be hurt on her account, insisting, "I'm...not a doll...anymore".

Hence, the Wheel of Fortune speaks volumes about Meridiana Everett, the apparent first of DELILAH's deadly dolls. She is a girl upon whom external factors have always acted; she is a girl who, when faced with adversity, has at times forgotten that things always have the potential to get better. She is a girl who once rode high on the wings of youth and beauty, only to be brought low by scorn, rejection, and manipulation. And, over the course of her narrative, she is a girl who remembers the lesson that the Wheel is intended to teach: that the possibility still exists to adapt and overcome, and that the Wheel is always turning, even for someone who has hit rock bottom.

At the point when she'll be coming into Route, she's hit about as rock bottom as it gets. It only seems fair, therefore, to give her a shot at climbing her way back up to the top once again.