these_balls | Understand the secrets and have some fun

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

Player
Name: 
Personal Journal: <user name="">
E-mail:
AIM/Plurk/Etc.:
Timezone:
Current Characters in Route:

Character
Name:
Series:
Timeline:
Canon Resource Links: 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.

Personality: 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.
Strengths/Weaknesses: 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.

Pokémon Information
Affiliation: 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.)
Starter: 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.
Password: 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.

Samples
First Person Sample: 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.

Third Person Sample: 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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Strengths/Weaknesses:

STRENGTHS

✓ Loyal

Here's how it goes: You made friends with Dave! Dave will now die for you. I wish I could say this is an exaggeration, but Dave doesn't skimp when it comes to his crew: He's quietly gone to his death more than once to assist his friends and family and tends to trust without question the advice of people he thinks like him--right up until it's too late to salvage either himself or his opinion of them.

His dedication extends to ideas as well as people. Dave runs on intuition and an unexamined assumption that there's a right and wrong way for the world to go, the basis for which is largely rooted in the structure of Western narratives. To his thinking, heroes should always win, and good people either shouldn't suffer or should recoup more than was taken from them.

The flipside of this is that his loyalty and belief in a positive future can be pretty easily used against him. He can also trap himself into thinking things have to be a certain way because it feels right or adheres to his general outlook on life when it would be wiser to seek an alternate path.

✓ Clever

While he's no Rose or Jade, Dave can be surprisingly resourceful, particularly when it comes to exploiting loopholes for stupid gains. He's good at noting what's available in his environment and working around obstacles in unexpected ways rather than ramming through--see his breaking the legendary sword to get it out of the stone, or deploying the intellibeam laserstation to make a copy of his server disk for Jade.

Some of this stems from a vaguely scientific curiosity to test boundaries and see just how dumb things can possibly get. The rest comes from his quick, intuitive way of thinking; he's used to working on instinct and has a good head for when things do or don't feel right.

Flipside: Mostly he uses this intellect for inane reasons. Also, because he draws conclusions so fast, he can miss a lot, be easily distracted, or make too many surface assumptions.

✓ Takes things in stride, up to a point

Dave's got a fairly high-level ability to take what the world presents him and just, like, accept that that's what's going down. It's not exactly that he's chill; he's just resigned to never understanding anything, ever. He bears a sense of miserable obligation to everything being both a) stupid and b) awful, so that when bad things happen, he just goes on and concentrates on the things he CAN do. Sometimes those things are limited to drawing crappy cartoons while trying to forget all the badguys he'll eventually have to fight.

He's going to take to Pokéworld like a duck to water.

Flipside: What he's really doing is ignoring the problem until it either goes away or it's too big for him to "deal" with. This does not actually constitute dealing with anything at all, and will usually come back around later to bite him in the butt, especially when it comes to emotional issues.

This also means he doesn't often say no to people, even when he's uncomfortable.

✓ Brave

But when the chips are down, Dave lives up to his title as the Knight of Time. As insecure as he is, as scared as he can get, the boy is very, very brave, and he will give everything for what he thinks is right: his friends, through thick and thin.

Flipside: It frequently gets him killed.

WEAKNESSES

✗ Easily influenced

Dave has no leadership skills whatsoever and cannot take initiative. He barely makes his own decisions half the time, and spends most of his time in SBURB following others' orders, even if he drops some token snark about it. A troll that he knows indirectly killed his best friend (if in an alternate timeline) wins him over with relative ease by playing into his silly meme games, and he trusts her to the point that she gets an alternate version of him killed just to prove a point. And even after THAT, in this timeline, the two of them end up romantically involved to some capacity.

It's unbearably easy to get Dave to like, or at least accept, anyone who pays attention to him, and the dumb, distractable boy lets just about anyone boss him around for it.

✗ Emotions, what are those

On those occasions that events overwhelm Dave's ability to go with the flow--confronting his own mortality, for instance, or the death of a loved one--he doesn't seem to know how to work through his emotions. He often freezes up, and his thought process always gets a little erratic, his choices lean towards recklessness and self-destruction. It's under greatest duress that he most falls back on ideas of heroism and sacrifice to suss out what he's supposed to do, and that road leads to dead Daves.

He also doesn't really know how to deal with other people's feelings--not in this timeline, anyway. He often responds to distress with platitudes or wipes his hands of responsibility entirely, too unsure of his footing in the emotional field to risk messing up.

✗ Highly insecure

A lot of his problems come back to this, actually: He's terrified of messing up, and he won't commit to action without knowing that it's the right thing to do, as if there's a code or model on which he can base his life. All the posturing and deflection stems from his fear of not measuring up to an ideal he's drawn from movies and from his weirdo Bro. He doesn't want to disappoint people. He constantly seeks validation. That and his distraction are what make him so easy to manipulate. He just wants people to tell him he's cool because he's scared, not even that deep down, that he isn't.

✗ Inexperienced

Dave's skill set, while entertaining, is almost entirely inapplicable to a non-apocalpytic universe in which he does not have to take on a number of invincible endbosses with a magic sword, nor does he know how to survive in a world where he cannot "alchemize" food into existence with a few cards and a button. He is going to die. Someone please help him.

Pokémon Information
Affiliation: Trainer
Starter: Ralts

Because Dave is the Knight of Time, I thought it'd be thematically appropriate to choose the Pokémon that evolves into Gallade, one of the most knightly Pokémon out there. I'm specifically going with Ralts rather than, say, Shelmet/Karrablast or Honedge, because the canon point I picked for Dave is a negative one that cheats him out of a lot of healthy discussion about who he is and what he stands for; the Ralts line's empathetic nature will help heal the loneliness and the damage done, while Ralts' eventual evolution to Gallade will give Dave insight into his own growth--and where he still needs work.

Plus, Gallades are cool. Dave can stand to have one cool thing in his life.

Password: Pumpkin Seeds

Understand the secrets and have some fun

Dave Strider | Homestuck | Reserved (2/3)