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wilderlands App
Jul. 28th, 2018 04:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moscowpotatoblossomAPPLICATION
Player Name: Ruth Wilder
Plurk Handle:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
hotpinkcoffee
Player Status: Current Player
Other characters: Jason Dixon
Character Name: Ruth Wilder / “Zoya the Destroya”
Fandom: GLOW
Character Journal:moscowpotatoblossom
OU, AU, or OC? OU
PB: Alison Brie
Setting Background: The time is 1985. The place? Los Angeles. The entertainment? Back to the Future just came out. The people? Struggling actors and weirdos in a gymnasium purchased by their now-broke trust fund baby producer. It’s full 80’s throwback with the big hair, scrunchies, mom jeans, Pat Benatar, industrial misogyny and training montages.
This is another one of my normcore canons.
History: Ruth is a struggling actress from a small town in the Midwest; she’s spent the last decade trying to adjust to being a small fish in a huge ocean when she was marginally successful back home. Prior to auditioning for “G.L.O.W.”, she was at the point of considering doing pornography and was getting a reputation for being difficult from her agent. Auditioning for a low-budget women’s wrestling show was a moment of last resort, and she was quickly told to get out.
Never one to be dissuaded by rejection (she once waited for an hour outside a casting director’s bathroom stall to ask for feedback), Ruth wormed her way back into the cast through her creativity, persistence, and most importantly her willingness to completely debase herself if it means people will like her. Being eventually hired as a “heel”, or a wrestling character meant to be hated, pit her against her longtime former best-friend Debbie. Prior to auditioning, Ruth had deeply betrayed Debbie by sleeping with Debbie’s husband and lying about it. Twice. Because she was feeling needy.
Ruth dedicated herself to making it work on Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, workshopping characters to try and find a persona for herself and absorbing all manners of emotional and verbal abuse from Debbie, which Ruth felt obligated to accepted as penance. Meanwhile, Ruth began to bond with her collection of oddball castmates and director, Sam. She realized she was pregnant with Debbie’s husband’s baby, and had an abortion, with only Sam looped in. Soon, she stumbled upon wrestling persona gold when she attended a bris with her concierge’s family of Russian Jews.
Reinventing herself as “Zoya the Destroya”, Ruth became one of the most valuable players in the G.L.O.W. cast, serving as the “heel” counterpart to Debbie’s “face” hero, “Liberty Belle”. Ruth also ended up stepping up in other ways to support the show, organizing trips with the other girls to boost morale, coming up with storylines and eventually directing the entire pilot episode of G.L.O.W. when Sam went temporarily missing. Her continued autonomy rubbed against both Sam and Debbie the wrong way, and despite her increased bond with the other girls her creative contributions were undermined.
When the show was in dire financial straits, a major funder invited Ruth to his room, where under the guise of helping her career her sexually assaulted her. Before the situation could escalate even further, Ruth escaped his room when he stepped outside. The funder pulled his support from the show, leaving G.L.O.W. likely to be canceled. Ruth confided about the incident to Sam and Debbie, but while her confession about the incident helped to repair her relationship with Sam, it further soured things with Debbie, who felt that Ruth should have put up with the abuse to save the show. The next night, Liberty Belle and Zoya the Destroya were going head to head in the ring in front of a live audience, and while high on cocaine and furious with Ruth, Debbie snapped Ruth’s ankle.
Ruth’s pull-point is from the split-second before her ankle breaks.
Personality: On the upside, Ruth is creative, persistent, resourceful, team-oriented, proactive, sweet and compassionate. On the downside, Ruth is also desperate to please, shameless, disloyal, needy and unwilling to stand up for herself.
Ruth spills over with ideas, and is constantly coming up with new angles to take for stories and ways to get out of tight situations. Her brain is constantly working in overdrive, and she adapts well to new obstacle. Throughout her time on G.L.O.W., she and the rest of the girls were constantly dealing with the challenges of being a low-budget production, and Ruth was a powerhouse in terms of raising morale, taking control and helping them out of financial scrapes, as well as developing storylines that kept the plot running.
When Ruth cares about something, she cares wholeheartedly. She’ll devote herself totally to passion projects. She’ll stay up nights, she’ll break bones, she’ll look like an idiot – she doesn’t care so long as the job gets done as well as it can be done. It makes her feel like part of something and when things go well, she feels a sense of control and belonging that ease her innate restlessness and doubt.
Ruth’s real priorities lie with feeling as if she belongs. She made a major mistake in taking the opportunity to sleep with Debbie’s husband, which she did not because she was attracted to him but because he appealed to her insecurities. He told her she was worth something, and desperate to believe it, she betrayed her best friend. While she deeply regrets the decision and has learned from it, she’s still prone to act in the interests of her insecurities rather than considering the impact it will have on others, and sometimes hurtles like a meteor into other people’s lives by being inconsiderate.
As part of her need for validation, Ruth’s proven to be a strong team player. She intuits ways to bring up morale and makes each person feel seen and valued. She brings a can-do attitude and relentless optimism. She isn’t, however, excellent at reading a room, and fairly frequently makes a fool of herself through being essentially an obnoxious theater kid. She tends to assume everyone has the same enthusiasm as she does, and is constantly disappointed when they don’t.
She also is a desperate people-pleaser who isn’t too proud to beg, cry, cheat, lie or cut corners to feel as if everything’s good between her and others. She internalizes criticism and has low self-esteem, feeling mousy, underappreciated and like she has to work harder than everyone else to get just as far.
As Zoya the Destroya, Ruth’s the personification of over-the-top communist Russia stereotypes. Her wrestling moves include “the Bread Line” and “Vodka for Breakfast”, and Ruth hams up her accent to comical proportions while delivering lines like “in Soviet Union, we eat stars and stripes for breakfast!” and “we will neuter all your pet dogs and fill your swimming pools with borscht”. Zoya’s hyperbolically evil, at one point kidnapping Liberty Belle’s daughter Savannah Rose as a hostage and renaming her “Moscow Potatoblossom” out of spite.
Canon Powers: None
Freebie Powers: None
Power Selection: Magic
Game Powers: Necromancer – Ruth will realize she has necromancy powers soon upon arriving. Over time, using dark powers will increase her impulsivity, especially regarding doing things that will either inadvertently or intentionally hurt others. She will also crave raw meat and blood, have nightmares, and cause animals to avoid her (such as flocks of birds flying out of trees when she approaches). Additionally, people who get too close to her will feel chilled, as if she were a block of ice.
Three Starting Spells:
Siberian Tundra: Basic curse that causes opponents to feel painfully cold, with teeth-chattering, violent shaking and numbness. Can only be used on one person at a time and doesn’t actually stop them or leave lasting damage.
Redistribution of Unwell’th: Sends a bolt of dark energy towards an opponent. Opponents will feel a small life drain, resulting in nausea, dizziness, despondency and apathy. Effects will not be debilitating but will last several hours, potentially days if Ruth focuses and strikes hard enough. This would be an equivalent exchange power – whatever effect Ruth inflicts on someone else, she will feel herself.
Homewrecker: An aura Ruth can project that will sow discord and distrust among enemies (or friends) around her. At the first stage it will be limited to 20 feet and won’t be guaranteed to cause fighting, just difficulty cooperating. At higher levels this spell could lead to brother-fighting-brother-style mental distortions.
For shits and giggles, I’d love to have some BS magic excuse for her to need to be pretending to be Zoya for this to work.
Non-Powered Abilities: Ruth is a professional wrestler, which means that while she doesn’t really have combat skills, she is in incredible shape, is very agile, knows how to fall or take a hit and has a lot of physical intelligence.
Setting/Suitability: If there’s any normie from a normcore canon who will adapt to the challenges of the Wilderlands quest, it’s Ruth. She’s a team player, she’s willing to adapt, and when you pare everything else down she’s got an iron will. She’ll be initially disoriented but will soon get her groove.
SAMPLES
Prose Sample:
Ruth woke up in a bush, dressed in Spandex, leaves in her hair, roused by the cry of a mob screaming to burn a witch. Torn between being vaguely offended that in the year 1985 people are still calling women witches, and feeling confused by the nature of how she got here and why spear-wielding people in burlap and leather are shouting at her to help them in tormenting this woman, she hoists herself to her feet and brushes the dirt off her hip.
“A witch? Where’s the…?” But as soon as she raises her voice to ask the question things click into place.
Oh. She’s the witch. A rush of fear seizes her in the chest, as if it’s drawing her bones tight around her organs. She feels her throat go tight and her breath go shallow.
When backed into a corner, Ruth has a defense mechanism not unlike a puffer fish. She walks out of the bushes, shaking imperceptibly but head held high, and digs deep for the same boldness she felt when she was seven and performing as Peppermint Patty for the first time.
“Friends!” Ruth’s expression is manic and wide as she draws on one of the number one rules of live theater: don’t let them see you sweat. Commit to the bit. Don’t let your fear about the real situation eclipse your belief in the fantasy. She also affects a British accent, because that’s more high-falutin’. “I am indeed a witch, but I am a good witch! I’m more a fairy godmother! Spare my life and I’ll fill your hearths with warmth and your rucksacks with gold! I have the power to…cure your scurvy!”
What’s she going to do with that check her ass can’t catch? Who knows! She’ll come up with it when she gets there!”
Network Sample:
Okay, don’t laugh. [Ruth looks through the mirror at a messy-haired little girl with huge eyes and a smear of pink lipstick across her mouth and cheek. The girl’s in a white, puffy dress with more brightly-colored makeup all over the chest and sleeves. She’s surrounded by stuffed animals, each of them posed into a tableau of a scene from The Wizard of Oz. She’s made a hate out of black paper to put on her stuffed alligator, which is playing the role of the Wicked Witch, stooped over a metal pot that’s serving as a miniature cauldron. “Toto”, a stuffed dog, is the centerpiece of the scene, propped up on the table.
Ruth, by contrast, has her hair piled atop her head in huge, airsprayed curls, is wearing heavy stage makeup and glitter, and is wearing a red leotard with a hammer and sickle on it.]
I am Zoya! [The accent is thick as mud and fake as astroturf. Ruth lifts her chin to give the little girl a disdainful look, but doesn’t lose the smirk entirely.] Hailing from the glorious country of Mother Russia! Filthy American, your cheeseburgers and ham sandwiches disgust me! Instead, your little dog will make delicious stroganoff, da?
[In the mirror, the little girl scowls, and then bursts into tears, grabbing her stuffed dog from the table and clutching it to her chest and howling.]
It’s okay! You don’t know what communism is yet! [Ruth cringes a moment.] But trust me. It’s a good bit.
Additional info: Ruth’s going to show up in a spandex leotard, books, and with massive hair and stage makeup. She’s going to lean into it. You know, because.
(I’d love it if she could have her ushanka too.)
Player Name: Ruth Wilder
Plurk Handle:
Player Status: Current Player
Other characters: Jason Dixon
Character Name: Ruth Wilder / “Zoya the Destroya”
Fandom: GLOW
Character Journal:
moscowpotatoblossomOU, AU, or OC? OU
PB: Alison Brie
Setting Background: The time is 1985. The place? Los Angeles. The entertainment? Back to the Future just came out. The people? Struggling actors and weirdos in a gymnasium purchased by their now-broke trust fund baby producer. It’s full 80’s throwback with the big hair, scrunchies, mom jeans, Pat Benatar, industrial misogyny and training montages.
This is another one of my normcore canons.
History: Ruth is a struggling actress from a small town in the Midwest; she’s spent the last decade trying to adjust to being a small fish in a huge ocean when she was marginally successful back home. Prior to auditioning for “G.L.O.W.”, she was at the point of considering doing pornography and was getting a reputation for being difficult from her agent. Auditioning for a low-budget women’s wrestling show was a moment of last resort, and she was quickly told to get out.
Never one to be dissuaded by rejection (she once waited for an hour outside a casting director’s bathroom stall to ask for feedback), Ruth wormed her way back into the cast through her creativity, persistence, and most importantly her willingness to completely debase herself if it means people will like her. Being eventually hired as a “heel”, or a wrestling character meant to be hated, pit her against her longtime former best-friend Debbie. Prior to auditioning, Ruth had deeply betrayed Debbie by sleeping with Debbie’s husband and lying about it. Twice. Because she was feeling needy.
Ruth dedicated herself to making it work on Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, workshopping characters to try and find a persona for herself and absorbing all manners of emotional and verbal abuse from Debbie, which Ruth felt obligated to accepted as penance. Meanwhile, Ruth began to bond with her collection of oddball castmates and director, Sam. She realized she was pregnant with Debbie’s husband’s baby, and had an abortion, with only Sam looped in. Soon, she stumbled upon wrestling persona gold when she attended a bris with her concierge’s family of Russian Jews.
Reinventing herself as “Zoya the Destroya”, Ruth became one of the most valuable players in the G.L.O.W. cast, serving as the “heel” counterpart to Debbie’s “face” hero, “Liberty Belle”. Ruth also ended up stepping up in other ways to support the show, organizing trips with the other girls to boost morale, coming up with storylines and eventually directing the entire pilot episode of G.L.O.W. when Sam went temporarily missing. Her continued autonomy rubbed against both Sam and Debbie the wrong way, and despite her increased bond with the other girls her creative contributions were undermined.
When the show was in dire financial straits, a major funder invited Ruth to his room, where under the guise of helping her career her sexually assaulted her. Before the situation could escalate even further, Ruth escaped his room when he stepped outside. The funder pulled his support from the show, leaving G.L.O.W. likely to be canceled. Ruth confided about the incident to Sam and Debbie, but while her confession about the incident helped to repair her relationship with Sam, it further soured things with Debbie, who felt that Ruth should have put up with the abuse to save the show. The next night, Liberty Belle and Zoya the Destroya were going head to head in the ring in front of a live audience, and while high on cocaine and furious with Ruth, Debbie snapped Ruth’s ankle.
Ruth’s pull-point is from the split-second before her ankle breaks.
Personality: On the upside, Ruth is creative, persistent, resourceful, team-oriented, proactive, sweet and compassionate. On the downside, Ruth is also desperate to please, shameless, disloyal, needy and unwilling to stand up for herself.
Ruth spills over with ideas, and is constantly coming up with new angles to take for stories and ways to get out of tight situations. Her brain is constantly working in overdrive, and she adapts well to new obstacle. Throughout her time on G.L.O.W., she and the rest of the girls were constantly dealing with the challenges of being a low-budget production, and Ruth was a powerhouse in terms of raising morale, taking control and helping them out of financial scrapes, as well as developing storylines that kept the plot running.
When Ruth cares about something, she cares wholeheartedly. She’ll devote herself totally to passion projects. She’ll stay up nights, she’ll break bones, she’ll look like an idiot – she doesn’t care so long as the job gets done as well as it can be done. It makes her feel like part of something and when things go well, she feels a sense of control and belonging that ease her innate restlessness and doubt.
Ruth’s real priorities lie with feeling as if she belongs. She made a major mistake in taking the opportunity to sleep with Debbie’s husband, which she did not because she was attracted to him but because he appealed to her insecurities. He told her she was worth something, and desperate to believe it, she betrayed her best friend. While she deeply regrets the decision and has learned from it, she’s still prone to act in the interests of her insecurities rather than considering the impact it will have on others, and sometimes hurtles like a meteor into other people’s lives by being inconsiderate.
As part of her need for validation, Ruth’s proven to be a strong team player. She intuits ways to bring up morale and makes each person feel seen and valued. She brings a can-do attitude and relentless optimism. She isn’t, however, excellent at reading a room, and fairly frequently makes a fool of herself through being essentially an obnoxious theater kid. She tends to assume everyone has the same enthusiasm as she does, and is constantly disappointed when they don’t.
She also is a desperate people-pleaser who isn’t too proud to beg, cry, cheat, lie or cut corners to feel as if everything’s good between her and others. She internalizes criticism and has low self-esteem, feeling mousy, underappreciated and like she has to work harder than everyone else to get just as far.
As Zoya the Destroya, Ruth’s the personification of over-the-top communist Russia stereotypes. Her wrestling moves include “the Bread Line” and “Vodka for Breakfast”, and Ruth hams up her accent to comical proportions while delivering lines like “in Soviet Union, we eat stars and stripes for breakfast!” and “we will neuter all your pet dogs and fill your swimming pools with borscht”. Zoya’s hyperbolically evil, at one point kidnapping Liberty Belle’s daughter Savannah Rose as a hostage and renaming her “Moscow Potatoblossom” out of spite.
Canon Powers: None
Freebie Powers: None
Power Selection: Magic
Game Powers: Necromancer – Ruth will realize she has necromancy powers soon upon arriving. Over time, using dark powers will increase her impulsivity, especially regarding doing things that will either inadvertently or intentionally hurt others. She will also crave raw meat and blood, have nightmares, and cause animals to avoid her (such as flocks of birds flying out of trees when she approaches). Additionally, people who get too close to her will feel chilled, as if she were a block of ice.
Three Starting Spells:
Siberian Tundra: Basic curse that causes opponents to feel painfully cold, with teeth-chattering, violent shaking and numbness. Can only be used on one person at a time and doesn’t actually stop them or leave lasting damage.
Redistribution of Unwell’th: Sends a bolt of dark energy towards an opponent. Opponents will feel a small life drain, resulting in nausea, dizziness, despondency and apathy. Effects will not be debilitating but will last several hours, potentially days if Ruth focuses and strikes hard enough. This would be an equivalent exchange power – whatever effect Ruth inflicts on someone else, she will feel herself.
Homewrecker: An aura Ruth can project that will sow discord and distrust among enemies (or friends) around her. At the first stage it will be limited to 20 feet and won’t be guaranteed to cause fighting, just difficulty cooperating. At higher levels this spell could lead to brother-fighting-brother-style mental distortions.
For shits and giggles, I’d love to have some BS magic excuse for her to need to be pretending to be Zoya for this to work.
Non-Powered Abilities: Ruth is a professional wrestler, which means that while she doesn’t really have combat skills, she is in incredible shape, is very agile, knows how to fall or take a hit and has a lot of physical intelligence.
Setting/Suitability: If there’s any normie from a normcore canon who will adapt to the challenges of the Wilderlands quest, it’s Ruth. She’s a team player, she’s willing to adapt, and when you pare everything else down she’s got an iron will. She’ll be initially disoriented but will soon get her groove.
SAMPLES
Prose Sample:
Ruth woke up in a bush, dressed in Spandex, leaves in her hair, roused by the cry of a mob screaming to burn a witch. Torn between being vaguely offended that in the year 1985 people are still calling women witches, and feeling confused by the nature of how she got here and why spear-wielding people in burlap and leather are shouting at her to help them in tormenting this woman, she hoists herself to her feet and brushes the dirt off her hip.
“A witch? Where’s the…?” But as soon as she raises her voice to ask the question things click into place.
Oh. She’s the witch. A rush of fear seizes her in the chest, as if it’s drawing her bones tight around her organs. She feels her throat go tight and her breath go shallow.
When backed into a corner, Ruth has a defense mechanism not unlike a puffer fish. She walks out of the bushes, shaking imperceptibly but head held high, and digs deep for the same boldness she felt when she was seven and performing as Peppermint Patty for the first time.
“Friends!” Ruth’s expression is manic and wide as she draws on one of the number one rules of live theater: don’t let them see you sweat. Commit to the bit. Don’t let your fear about the real situation eclipse your belief in the fantasy. She also affects a British accent, because that’s more high-falutin’. “I am indeed a witch, but I am a good witch! I’m more a fairy godmother! Spare my life and I’ll fill your hearths with warmth and your rucksacks with gold! I have the power to…cure your scurvy!”
What’s she going to do with that check her ass can’t catch? Who knows! She’ll come up with it when she gets there!”
Network Sample:
Okay, don’t laugh. [Ruth looks through the mirror at a messy-haired little girl with huge eyes and a smear of pink lipstick across her mouth and cheek. The girl’s in a white, puffy dress with more brightly-colored makeup all over the chest and sleeves. She’s surrounded by stuffed animals, each of them posed into a tableau of a scene from The Wizard of Oz. She’s made a hate out of black paper to put on her stuffed alligator, which is playing the role of the Wicked Witch, stooped over a metal pot that’s serving as a miniature cauldron. “Toto”, a stuffed dog, is the centerpiece of the scene, propped up on the table.
Ruth, by contrast, has her hair piled atop her head in huge, airsprayed curls, is wearing heavy stage makeup and glitter, and is wearing a red leotard with a hammer and sickle on it.]
I am Zoya! [The accent is thick as mud and fake as astroturf. Ruth lifts her chin to give the little girl a disdainful look, but doesn’t lose the smirk entirely.] Hailing from the glorious country of Mother Russia! Filthy American, your cheeseburgers and ham sandwiches disgust me! Instead, your little dog will make delicious stroganoff, da?
[In the mirror, the little girl scowls, and then bursts into tears, grabbing her stuffed dog from the table and clutching it to her chest and howling.]
It’s okay! You don’t know what communism is yet! [Ruth cringes a moment.] But trust me. It’s a good bit.
Additional info: Ruth’s going to show up in a spandex leotard, books, and with massive hair and stage makeup. She’s going to lean into it. You know, because.
(I’d love it if she could have her ushanka too.)
