SCORCHED APPLICATION

[sufferheir]

Out of Character Information

player name: Quix
player journal: quixocalypse
playing here: No one.
where did you find us? I can't even remember.
are you 16 years of age or older?: Yep

In Character Information

character name: Karkat Vantas
Fandom: Homestuck
Timeline: Just before receiving his copy of Sgrub.
character's age: Almost 14.

powers, skills, pets and equipment: Karkat, in canon and then in A_Facility, has no special powers that aren't typical of trolls in general. He's a bit tougher and harder to kill than humans (trolls are know to have their limbs blown off and survive without a hospital stay, and also to get stabbed in the gut and consider it not an extremely huge deal) but not in a manner significant enough to ward off critical damage. He's got claws and fangs as natural weapons, but they aren't ones he's especially skilled in using.

He does has some skill fighting with a sickle, something that he's polished a little in his time in the Facility. He also has some experience leading others, mostly due to a mixture of raw stubbornness and a compulsive need to organize things. In the end, it really comes down to him being willing to yell at people louder and longer than most.

However! In Scorched, I plan to bless him with the ability to sense and manipulate emotions. The reasoning for this is that in the Facility, there was an event which temporarily granted the character's innermost wishes. Karkat's was to be more useful and powerful (partially out of jealousy of Sollux's abilities) and so as a result he temporarily upgraded to his Godtier form - an aspect of the Sgrub game he would go on to play in Homestuck. It is basically a more powerful, super powered version of the player. In Karkat's case, this gave him emotion powers, as was my best extrapolation of his role as Knight of Blood in the game.

In Facility, I explained this with a sort of musical metaphor. He can sense emotions like the sounds of the vibrating strings in an instrument - different tones feel like different emotions. And once he has that sense, he can actively amplify or quell the existing feelings with his powers. Some emotions are much more complicated to fully replicate based on their complexity, much like the challenge of playing a very difficult musical piece.

In terms of equipment he has pretty much nothing except for a pair of sickles, the clothes on his back, and a charming stuffed animal of a crab monster made for him by Terezi.

canon history: This is summarized in the MSPA wiki, but since Karkat is taken from the very beginning of his canon the information only counts up until right before the trolls start playing Sgrub. The generalities of his life are summarized below:

Karkat is a troll, raised on the planet of Alternia. Despite some outward familiarities to humans, growing up a troll is a harsh, lethal experience, and despite the large number of grubs hatched every sweep, only a few will ever make it to adulthood.

At first the young troll and their lusus live together in the caves, but eventually they venture to the surface, where a construction drone awaits each young troll that emerges. They are free to choose a spot of land, and proceed to design their own home (or "hive" as they call them) which the drone then builds and leaves to assist another youth. This is the closest thing to care from an adult troll a child can expect to experience on Alternia. Besides those first moments, trolls are left to raise themselves with the help of their lusus. There are no adults on Alternia, and the culture is entirely maintained and driven by the young.

A troll can expect to spend the first seven or so sweeps of their life like this (a solar sweep amounting to roughly 2.2 human years), provided they survive. Trolls live fundamentally by the laws of survival of the fittest, and deaths and cullings are not uncommon or surprising. The hemospectrum (the blood colour-based caste system their culture runs on) and the common blood's predisposition to psionic abilities only make things more dangerous. Still, young trolls aren't left wanting as they grow, and seem to have their base needs accounted for when it comes things like tools, food, and technology.

Karkat grew up this way and, for the most part, lived his life as your average troll. There was one key difference, though. Unlike the rest of his peers, he was born a mutant - or a mutant blood colour, at least. The natural troll hemospectrum only extends as far down as a deep red maroon, whereas Karkat's blood was a bright candy red. Knowing he'd be culled for this trait if it was ever discovered, he hid behind the anonymity of grey text and a grey symbol. It worked - for the time being. But despite the tense inaction of his childhood years, he knew that one day he'd be forced to join the ranks of the Alternian army, and at that point nothing as flimsy as "blood anonymity" would protect him.

Which sucked, because Karkat was was ambitious. He wanted to lead, he wanted to be somebody. He wanted to become one of the elite and deadly troll threshecutioners. But despite his hopes, he inwardly realized these were things he would likely never have. Not with blood like his.

In the end, though, he would be saved by tragedy - the complete destruction of his home world kind of tragedy. The entire troll species died out, save Karkat and his eleven other friends as they entered a trans-dimensional, universe-creating game called Sgrub. Karkat would become there leader, and guide them through its challenges, and be the glue that kept them from falling apart. They would go on to win the game and create a universe, only to be stopped from claiming their final reward by a omnipotent demon named Jack Noir.

But unfortunately for Karkat, from his point in the timeline none of this has happened yet. From his entry point into A_Facility, he had no clue what Sgrub is, or anything but an inkling of the leader he would become. In fact, he had absolutely no clue about anything at all.

personality: I will start with standard canon Karkat - further personality developments are explained in his previous game history!

From the outside, Karkat is a foul-mouthed, blustering asshole with a short temper and dubious people skills. From the inside, he's still a foul-mouthed, blustering asshole, but he is a foul-mouthed blustering asshole who cares so very deeply and is filled with so many insecurities it's a wonder he can stand up straight. He's still a dick, of course, but rest assured there is no one that he hates more than he hates himself.

His aggressions towards other people functions like a defense mechanism, because once you get legitimately tangled up in his life it's hard for him to let go. He's passionate about everything he does, whether it's hating, pitying, being sad, or afraid. One thing he has trouble playing his cards on the table about, however, is his affection for other people - he's always reluctant to admit to positive feelings out of fear of eventual rejection. Because even if he allows himself to be fond of someone else, odds are he'll convince himself that there's no possible way it could be mutual, because really, who would want to be with him?

He burns with a special sort of overcompensating fervor in everything he does, whether that be socially bludgeoning his way into leadership positions or organizing his romcoms. There is nothing in the world that Karkat couldn't figure out how out a way to make an organizational chart about, and he has a hard time reacting to other people doing things he perceives as stupid without both loudly telling them about their faults and convincing himself he could figure out a better way. His overblown arrogance is completely at odds with his inner self doubt and disgust. It is not surprising that most of it has been built up to deal with both his own fears and the horrid society he grew up in.

He's naturally sensitive and inclined to kindness, but these aspects of himself are something he's aggressively tried to push down. To trolls, kindness is weakness, and weakness is an invitation to be murdered. Eventually, he even managed to convince himself.

Almost.

why do you feel this character would be appropriate to the setting? Despite Karkat technically being a child, troll children are left to more or less fend for themselves (besides the protection of an animal protector called a lusus) since the day they're hatched. So, while he does retain much of the youthful inexperience of a younger teen, he's been looking after himself for years already, including cooking, cleaning, and keeping himself from being killed by his neighbors - which is a considerably more likely thing to occur amongst trolls. In particular, Karkat has had to deal with a blood mutation that would have him killed on sight by most troll authority figures. The kid knows how to look out for himself, by necessity.

And in terms of genre appropriateness, while Homestuck does have a number of fairly comedic factors to it, it also has a lot of events and setting details that lend themselves to darker stories. This goes double for this previous game version of Karkat, as he's spent the last almost year in A_Facility's incredibly dark testing lab environment, that has often left the characters to deal with serious and traumatic events. He's faced a lot of terrible things, and they've been handled with appropriate levels of gravity, and will continue to be in Scorched. From both his canon and previous game based roots, Karkat is accustomed to dealing with just about the worst a game could dish out.

Previously Played Information

previous game: a_facility
length of time there: Just under a year.

important development and/or events in your previous game: There have been a fairly large number of important events that have occurred for Karkat at Facility, most of them not especially pleasant. But amongst them, there were a few very positive characters arcs that occurred, mostly due to the efforts of his friends.

Coming in from a very early canon point, one of the first most impacting things about his previous game was that all of his close friends were both from further down the timeline than him, as well as significantly older due to having been in the Facility for longer. With their own emotional scars and newfound maturity, this altered their interactions with him from the get go, many of his friends taking on a much more active caring and protective role in his life. He wasn't the first instance of himself to wind up in the Facility, and since his previous two incarnations had died, they were reluctant to allow it to happen again.

Karkat reacted to this with a mixture of confusion and bitterness at first, assuming that they would have preferred to have their old version of him back instead, and built up a pretty heavy inferiority complex in regards to his past selves. He also discovered that both Sollux and Terezi had been in romantic relationships with his previous self, which caused a lot of emotional turmoil (read: drama) between them and a lot of angst on Karkat's part.

Eventually, however, he began to realize and accept their feelings for what they actually were - genuine - and he gingerly began to commit to a relationship with Terezi. Unfortunately things with Sollux were still a lot more complicated due to the fact that he'd found someone else in Karkat's absence, but with a lot of stress and tears they eventually worked out a non-conventional romance between them (in troll romantic terms, anyway.) When a version of his friend (and future troll romantic partner, in his previous timeline) Gamzee appeared, he eventually found himself in a satisfying relationship with him, too. Despite his issues of self hatred and insecurity, Karkat eventually began to accept that he was actually loved, and thus, began to feel more comfortable letting himself express his love for others back.

Of course, for every few steps forward, there was a few steps back. Shortly after him and Terezi started getting back together, an event involving evil dopplegangers resulted in fake versions of Sollux and Terezi assaulting and humiliating him, something that left emotional wounds he hasn't managed to shake off even to this day. Months later, something similar happened again, with an evil version of himself (evil twins are pretty much a plague in Facility, you see) capturing and torturing him. Gamzee managed to save his life, but not before Karkat's feelings of personal security were irreparably damaged. At the point of entering Scorched, he's made progress to regaining some of his confidence, but he is still healing from the trauma he's been forced to endure.

However, his essence remains. He's still loud, and defensive, and hard to get close to. He's still completely obsessive about organizing things whether people like it or not, and is just as capable of being a belligerent asshole as ever before. The major differences are internal. The trials of his previous game have given him the chance to finally stop hating himself, and to accept the love of others. He's more willing to accept help and reach out to others than he was before, and he even went so far as to willingly reveal his blood color (a point of lifelong insecurity for him) to the public.

He's come out of it all both better and worse than he was before, and he's still not quite sure what to make of that.

Writing Samples

Network Post Sample:
A network sample from A_Facility, showcasing a major turning point in his characterization.

Third Person Sample:
Karkat attempts to pacify his friend Gamzee, who's just freshly come down from a murder spree.

Anything else? =D =D =D smiley faces!