@scorched

[thinkin_arbys]

Out of Character Information

player name: Nini
player journal: buccellati
playing here: Giovanni Auditore, Olivier Mira Armstrong
where did you find us? ...........kittens
are you 16 years of age or older?: LOLOLOLOLOL

In Character Information

character name: Hot Pants
Fandom: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure/Steel Ball Run
Timeline: shortly after allying with Diego Brando
character's age: 23

powers, skills, pets and equipment: Her main weapon is a "magical" ability called a Stand. Hers is called Cream Starter, and takes the form of a small aerosol-like sprayer that she keeps in a holster at her hip. Stands are sort of a manifestation of the user's soul; they are either innate, or granted--in this case, Hot Pants had hers given to her by the Devil's Palm, and the power of Jesus. I am not making this up. These abilities are not generally able to be seen by the general populace, so others would see the canister, but not the actual contents it releases.

Cream Starter is a spray that HP can use to disable or otherwise totally confuse her opponents... by spraying them with flesh. It can also gather flesh to then spray onto something else. Yeah. Gross. Specifically, it can be used to create a foamy fleshlike substance that can mold to whatever it touches (and can be used for, among other things, bandaging wounds), can transfer limbs that are captured by it to other places, can create disguises (especially on faces), and can be concentrated into a stream that is capable of cutting even human limbs. It abilities can be seen as a reflection of her innate qualities: willingness and need to disguise and be disguised being at the fore of this. As a note, Cream Starter is one of very, very, very few Stands that can be used by others, and also when the user is unconscious or deceased. There is a solid breakdown of all its canon appearances here (which I will integrate into any permissions post).

I will not be adding any additional abilities at this time. She can, however, handle horses, cook over a campfire, hunt and slaughter animals, and generally rough it in the wilderness.

She will arrive with her outfit, including a belt, hat, and tunic, with long undergarments. She has a holster, which holds her Stand.

canon history: An Objective Source that's pretty useless. How does she fit into the world? Frankly, she's a plot device. She's shaped by her experiences, including her childhood trauma and the way she sought religion and salvation afterward.

There's a split in fandom on her nationality and background; I've elected to play her, in this case, as an American from California (let's roll with Nevada City). Raised in a small Gold Rush town, she was afforded exposure to many cultures, making her adaptable and open-minded. However, with the tragic death of her brother, she chose to become a nun instead of live a normal life.

HEADCANON TIME! After being in the convent for several years, she grew restless. Her restlessness was funneled into a project the Vatican needed agents for. Masquerading as a man, she signed up for the Steel Ball Run. And thus her story picks up in the manga.

For more information, please reference this dramatis personae as it pertains to major players in the series.

personality:
Fierce, determined, but broken, Hot Pants is a unique character in the JoJo's universe. Whereas one might expect characters with little gray area—white knights, terrible sympathetic villains—she is directly in the middle, the true intersection of black and white. In the simplest terms, she's an alignment nightmare, lawful in her own mind but chaotic to others, and certainly neutral in the sense that she doesn't care about anyone but herself... sort of. As a plot device, her characterization varies about as widely as is possible in a story of this length. She is molded to fit the story she functions in, and as such is a volatile, intriguing bundle of neuroses. If her characterization had a Facebook status, it would be It's Complicated.

When we first meet Hot Pants, she's masquerading as a man. Rather than stating anywhere that she is a man, she simply declines to list gender or origin on her paperwork and records. In this way, especially, she never lies. Her lies and untruths are all by omission or misdirection. Whenever she comes to a situation where lying would be beneficial, she has unique ways of handling it. She could have repeatedly lied about her identity and successfully thrown people off, but instead she chooses to say nothing. She facilitates this by deliberately being enigmatic, not volunteering information until she is deep, deep in the schemes of the movers of the story.

Her aversion to lying lay in her true identity: a nun. When she was a child, her younger brother was killed by a bear (she pushed him toward it to save herself), and while refusing to say what actually happened, she felt guilty. This guilt led her to join a convent at a young age, seeking forgiveness. The essence of her experience there was a mixture of stewing in guilt and learning the higher morals she thought would ensure her forgiveness from God. Despite leaving the convent on this holy crusade, she still holds to the ideals of a nun. She selflessly helps others even while striving toward her goal, such as when she delays her journey to reattach Gyro Zeppeli's limbs, and when she sacrifices her hidden identity to protect a young girl she manipulated into a dangerous situation.

And, in the same spirit, she does find herself willing to help others, especially when it advances her goal. She's driven, goal-oriented, and she's smart enough to know when stopping to help others and gain loose allies is more beneficial than racing against them. In fact, she eventually drops out of the race to simply pursue the corpse, following the hero characters and later creating an alliance with a terrible enemy to serve her purposes.

Her identity as a nun also lends insight to why she would go to such lengths. As a holy woman, she desperately wants to see the Church brought to glory, and for believers like herself to be assured a place in Heaven, to be given stronger faith. By obtaining the corpse, she believes she will not only be entirely forgiven—something she thinks unattainable otherwise—but that she will restore faith for all of God's children. By lending the Church legitimacy at a difficult time, she will secure its footing and bring God's mercy to her immediately. The parts of the body move her to tears, and she never stores them anywhere but inside her own body, if she can help it. Her devotion to God stays true, despite the sins she commits in His name.

So, from this, one might think her peaceable. You'd be wrong. A vicious fighter, she excuses her murders and violent deeds as for the greater good, like a historical Knight of the Crusades. A Templar in her own right, Hot Pants finds a way to justify deaths by making sure they're just. If someone breaks the law, they should be punished accordingly; if someone attacks her, they may be attacked. Her methods vary, from using someone else to do the killing, by having her own defense system (part of her Stand) do a passive kill, or even by direct threats. Each situation for her is different, based on her own swift judgments and strong, self-defined sense of justice.

In all of this, she is also a manipulator and blackmailer. Though this point seems minor, it's significant in that she causes death in both cases of the act. When she goes to the final sprint to the corpse of Christ, she blackmails Diego Brando with information about his estranged father; her manipulation of Lucy Steel nearly gets the girl killed and causes a 14-year-old girl to witness two gruesome deaths. She is not apologetic, but rather assigns these things mentally as casualties of war. In repentance, she does help them, offering a reasonable reward for their cooperation, but the situations she asks them to undertake are disproportionately dangerous. She is stubborn and single-minded about her goal, so she tries especially hard to detach from these terrible occurrences for the benefit of her quest.

Intensely emotional, we see two distinct sides of Hot Pants' heart. In front of the corpse and when faced with her own mortality and sins, she is broken, desperate, crying from the depths of her heart and soul. When she is rendered helpless, she feels easily defeated; in both the cases where she is nearly killed, and in the final battle that kills her, she seems helpless and crushed, able only to wail and mourn her defeat in terror. This is a huge contrast to the bold, serious, cold woman who seeks the corpse parts, the other racer persona she shows everyone else. This side of her is almost sassy, full of clever and simple solutions to big problems, able to think quickly and clearly with some brief analysis, and it is this side of her that causes her to be so successful for such a long time. This side of her gains the trust of Johnny Joestar and Lucy Steel, and is likely what gained the trust of the Vatican to begin with. Her logical side allows her to mentally create the loopholes that keep her from tearing herself apart over her sins in the race. Still, in the end, she is emotional and vulnerable, a jarring contrast indeed.

Her Stand reflects her inner self, having two sides as well. It can kill and maim, cut and infiltrate just as easily as it can mend and recreate. This duality is essential to her role in the story, the one whose arc represents the ebb and flow of the story, its ups and downs, the futility and selfishness of each character's quest, and the extremes of humanity's mental and ethical limits.

why do you feel this character would be appropriate to the setting? She's a badass, she's adventurous, she's tortured, and she's appealing to even the least likely of folks. In other words, YOU CAN'T HANDLE THIS ONE, ANATOLE. Nothing you can throw at her is worse than Funny Valentine. Nothing.

Writing Samples

Network Post Sample:
A dear_mun post!

Third Person Sample:

It was quiet; too quiet, honestly, for her tastes. The room was still, the only sound the mesmerizing turning of the wheels. Even now, she tuned that out.

A quiet moan broke the silence, weary and labored, familiar, the echo of a mournful wail she'd heard only a short few weeks prior. The girl. She'd meant to save her, but what had her "good" deed wrought?

"Are you alright? We should get out of here; I'll carry you." She spoke quietly, with urgency, a dread rising at the sight of the girl's broken body. Everything had fallen apart. She'd signed her soul over to a man as akin to a demon as anyone could be, signed her allegiance over to the one person who could help her to her goal or stab her in the back.

Sickening, thick, the sound of sliding and rustling reached her ears. Nothing so unnatural had ever passed into her hearing, nothing so disgusting or unsettling, and even before she turned, she knew the source.

Valentine.

In a moment that seemed like an eternity, her sins all came rushing back. What was she? Who had she become? Once a girl, then a Sister, now a killer, now faced with her own mortality and a power she didn't even know. It weighed on her soul more than anything ever had, draining her will to fight and triggering the need to run.

If she could have moved from that rustling shadow of his, she would have.

Smothering, the sense of another dimension, another time, another place seeping into her flesh and her bones, the sensation of encroaching death of the foulest sort gave her a chill that could only be likened to the grave. And it kept coming, kept moving forward, enveloping her arms, her legs, ripping at her flesh and rending her bones. Even as she frantically tried to chase the darkness away with her Stand, the end approached. She clawed uselessly at her skin, screaming, praying for protection, and none came.

And then she started awake, staring wide-eyed at the red lines she'd marked on her own flesh, unbidden tears threatening to spill. She was alive... or so she thought.


Anything else? HI GUYS. Major portions of this app were taken/adapted from applications under the account thinkin_arbys, who is also played by me. It is an alternate version of the character, so much of the information otherwise contained there is irrelevant; disregard anything not specifically linked!