summerjuliet
New Member
Oh man, I'm sorry.
I know that can be rough! Wishing you a speedy recovery and good luck.
X-COM THINK TANK (Out of Character Discussion about X-COM and the Series)
- Thread starter ChristopherOdd
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I know that can be rough! Wishing you a speedy recovery and good luck.
Dahlexpert
Well-Known Member
Damn well that's unfortunate,but hope your surge goes successfully and that you have a healthy recovery.
Sharkdragon96
Active Member
Dragonivon
Active Member
Perhaps you might considering privately applying to RP Annette or one of the Furies (who I don't think ANYONE has applied to write for this season yet) who won't possibly become a character you can write about until well after your recovery has happened. Granted, it would take a special consideration from CommanderOdd to let that happen but perhaps it's a tangent to consider. Regardless, I hope you have a speedy recovery.
Dragonivon
Active Member
The way your application reads, especially in regards towards special gifts and involvement in secret society (EXALT seems likely), personally I'd consider this as a Furies or Annette application. While your wall of text has lots of details about what happened TO her there's not a whole lot of what she did herself. What her motivations might actually be in the world. From a RP perspective she's got a lot of potential for stories just because she is so incredibly compromised with brainwashing and unknown performance drugs and simple youth.
I commend the amount of detail you put into it, even the visual tricks of shifting fonts and colors within your application. It's eye-catching and you put a lot of work into it. From my point of view, it just needed more of the character's own narrative in it and not just a laundry list of what everyone else did to her.
Sharkdragon96
Active Member
I was wondering if someone could give a quick review of mine as well, if that's okay with anyone.
Dragonivon
Active Member
Your submission is... confusing. I don't have much problem with choosing a transsexual background; however, you immediately run into a number of paradoxes.
One... the military doesn't allow transsexuals to join any of the branches of the military currently.
Two... "Due to his identity crisis and his past experience with a girl named Persephone Brown that ended badly, Heisan came to the conclusion that he could never trust anyone, and proceeded to retract himself from interaction with other people." Being in the military is the very definition of having to trust others and interacting with other people, especially when you get any rank. It just makes no sense for someone so distrustful of people to join a situation where you are surrounded by people. Especially one during a time period when 'don't ask/don't tell' is still very much in effect adding to that anxiety. It would be a very special kind of hell to someone with acute social anxiety.
Three... so after a wound that would compromise his effectiveness on the battlefield (being shot in the knee tends to slow people down) and being on heroin for a year suddenly he is visited by a recruiter to XCOM. I can understand XCOM being desperate for personnel but that's even under the bottom of the barrel.
I never got a sense of anything exemplary from his record, no sense of his own motivations, no sense of how being a transsexual had any impact on his identity other than alienating his father. I know that the applications are supposed to be somewhat brief and to the point but your one paragraph summation (even slightly wall of text as it was) felt pretty scant on giving us your character's identity. I'll wish you luck with your application but to me I'd suggest trying to figure out way to flesh out your character a lot in game if you are accepted.
Discopanda
Member
DO MINE NEXT! (It's on page 2)
RP_OP(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
New Member
First, thanks for reviewing my character application, I appreciate it.
Second, my reasoning behind putting her application in a 3rd person perspective of itself and not going into details from HER perspective is because of the way I see how XCOM recruits their operatives. I don't think they have a neon-lit recruitment center with, "XCOM RECRUITMENT CENTER: JOIN THE FIGHT" plastered on it. I was trying to give it a sense of reality, to what a real top secret international military organization's application paper might look like.
If you recall a few details from the other XCOM game, "The Bureau-XCOM Declassified", Director Myron Faulke mentioned how everyone chosen for XCOM was previously put on a special draft list. This list documented people across the U.S. who were chosen for their talents, specialties, or importance which were deemed either worthy and/or essential to be part of the XCOM Project, often without their knowledge. It is the same idea here with this, although my OC had a choice due to her circumstances.
Third, I don't want to go into her thoughts yet because I want to keep my options open while writing out her journals. It is also an attempt to make CommanderOdd interested in the direct perspective of my character, since I left it up in smoke(yes, you can call it a dirty trick, I'm still using it). Basically the point was to leave her narrative in the air, to make her more interesting/mysterious, and be more flexible while in writing.
However, I do realize now that it might have been better to personalize the application to herself more somehow; like maybe instead of a psychological analysis, it would have been better to write details and parts from an interview.
Thanks again for the review, I do understand what your trying to say by putting more of "her" into the application, but I believe that you were misinterpreting the reasoning behind my style of writing. I hope this clarifies that. If I do get my OC accepted into the RP, I obviously won't be writing in the same fashion as the application, it just wouldn't make sense for a personal journal.
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RP_OP(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
New Member
I believe that your character's application is well written. It is informative, personal, and gives us an idea of his personality. However, I believe you could have added onto the personal touch of your application by including more distinctive data on him, like a special date(quoting the timeline) or a special quirk. To be blunt, he sounds like an uninteresting typical war veteran, who doubles as a hidden baddass, and is trying to get by the day-to-day life even though he is unable to fully rehabilitate to peaceful society. The use of "The Lost Lenore" TV Trope, just makes this even more stereotypical for a discharged soldier. There isn't really any defining traits(at least of that you mentioned), other than race and parenthood, that put him apart from the archetype. Unless you were saving those details for the journal entries if you get accepted, they would have been a nice build-up on the personal tone of your submission. Although, on a personal note, I believe that the application could have better balanced information with individual style.
However, I can say that your style of personal writing and details are well done, and I believe that your journals would be equally well written as well, even more so if you improve yourself. Take my words with a grain of salt, I'm just stating my analysis
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spencer pedersen
New Member
jees it sure is taking A while to get the video out.... I mean it's not exactly like I am destined by the gods to be choosen but I do believe this is taking a great deal of time.
spencer pedersen
New Member
ohhh good Idea.
Adrammalech
Well-Known Member
That sucks, I hope everything works out though and you have a swift recovery.
Dragonivon
Active Member
I'll just stop your mass justification there and say you asked for a review and first impression. I gave it but it is just my opinion, you don't have to convince me of anything. I just have my preferences when it comes to a literary rp journal, it is always the characters that matter. Good luck.
Dragonivon
Active Member
I liked it. Lots of hints at personality within a dossier format. I could go into more detail but will just hope your character does not die in the first mission. I want to see how he develops.
JuliaMaluca
Member
Wow. Thank you all for your kind words! I'm a bit flattened by that many replies.
Problem is, I can't even be sure to get WLan coverage at the hospital (and if, at what speed rate) so I might not be able to watch. That's why I prefer to back out completely, not to block a role without fulfilling it.
Maybe next season, I'll apply for the therapist - I do like that idea! Or a priest...
Problem is, I can't even be sure to get WLan coverage at the hospital (and if, at what speed rate) so I might not be able to watch. That's why I prefer to back out completely, not to block a role without fulfilling it.
Maybe next season, I'll apply for the therapist - I do like that idea! Or a priest...
Discopanda
Member
UltimaNamir
Member
Discopanda
Member
Thank you to the ONLY TWO OF YOU that critiqued my bio. I HOPE THE CHRYSSALIDS TAKE THE REST OF YOU. I love you all.
I tried to keep my app terse and mostly submitted only details that were either slightly interesting or slightly entertaining. I was going for a hand-written scouting report style, though I didn't explicitly mention that anywhere. Dennis IS a boring military veteran, as are most of the expendable X-Com grunts in a normal playthrough, but I wanted to give him hints of personality and emotional baggage in my app. I'm sure I could have made something much more engaging if I'd done more work, but I was really anxious to get my app submitted! To the rest of you who are looking for feedback and/or lacking confidence, keep seeking advice and keep improving. Someday you might be as cool as me.
(that's not actually me though, I am still not as cool as that guy)
I tried to keep my app terse and mostly submitted only details that were either slightly interesting or slightly entertaining. I was going for a hand-written scouting report style, though I didn't explicitly mention that anywhere. Dennis IS a boring military veteran, as are most of the expendable X-Com grunts in a normal playthrough, but I wanted to give him hints of personality and emotional baggage in my app. I'm sure I could have made something much more engaging if I'd done more work, but I was really anxious to get my app submitted! To the rest of you who are looking for feedback and/or lacking confidence, keep seeking advice and keep improving. Someday you might be as cool as me.
(that's not actually me though, I am still not as cool as that guy)
JuliaMaluca
Member
Reply withheld for diplomatical reasons.
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