Sapphire Birch (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pathofstrength) wrote2015-01-19 05:23 pm
pathofstrength) wrote2015-01-19 05:23 pm
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ryslig
OOC INFORMATION
Name: Holo
Contact:holographica | ![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
hologramblue
Other Characters: Walter | Shin Megami Tensei IV |beliar
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Sapphire Birch
Age: 11
Canon: Pokemon Special
Canon Point: Post-Emerald arc
Character Information: Sapphire at Bulbapedia
Personality: Once upon a time, a boy and a girl, both six years old, were left to play together while their parents met for an important event. The boy was a Pokemon trainer, frighteningly skilled for his age. The girl was sweet and shy, and admired the boy's skills and sense of adventure. While the two were playing, they were attacked by a wild dragon Pokemon; the boy fought the dragon off and was badly wounded for his efforts, and the girl cried to see her friend behave so ruthlessly. That girl was Sapphire, and though it's been five years (and some) since then and she's grown significantly within only the last one-and-a-half, that incident marked a moment in her life when she made a deliberate choice about what kind of person she was going to be, and that choice (if not the incident itself) is the foundation of her character.
I should note right off the bat - even before going into that choice of hers further - that Sapphire is in many ways a product of her environment, especially considering her age, because the Pokemon world inspires certain values in its people to begin with and on top of that it tends to expect a lot out of its preteens. This could in part be a meta thing, since Pokemon is aimed at preteens to begin with, but the Ruby/Sapphire arc of Pokemon Special contains a few dialogues that set the age of...not majority, but personal agency, much lower than it would be in reality. Eleven-year-olds are widely considered ready to make their own choices about their futures, sixteen-year-olds can be sent on important government missions, and the human race as a whole is a lot more durable. (Also, animals are more or less people too.) Sapphire knows she is a child, and she willingly takes a subordinate role to people older than her, but she doesn't see herself as a child in the same capacity that she would be in reality.
That helps to explain why the adults in Sapphire's life readily describe her as "skilled and trustworthy"; she's known to be both morally reliable and capable of carrying out what she sets out to do. She's kind, friendly, enthusiastic, curious, but she is above all helpful - Sapphire's most basic priority, at all times and in all situations, is to do whatever is in her power to help and protect people, and when there is no one who needs immediate help or protection her next priority is to become more powerful so that she is better-equipped to be of more help. Pokemon battling is the universal sport of her world, a fun way to put Pokemon's practical skills to use in competition, but Sapphire is one of the subset who practice it for its own sake. Pursuing power through Pokemon battling was what motivated her to leave her home, and in the years after her campaign to win all the region's badges turned into an all-out battle to save Hoenn, she seems to be consistently in training or helping to investigate hints of evildoer activity. Most trainers raise Pokemon in the course of a primary profession and do battle on the side, but Sapphire appears to have no hobby or career plan outside of Pokemon training, suggesting that she intends to be a full-time trainer and thus general defender of the land.
This habit of Sapphire's isn't just an incidental quirk. It ties back into that choice I mentioned, made when she was six years old and rather traumatized; she consciously decided that the correct use of power is to prevent other people from getting hurt, and that she would personally pursue strength so that people would not have to be hurt for her sake - or by her emotional weakness. While she doesn't begrudge others for not going to the lengths she does, she does believe that doing nothing to help when you have the ability to do so is nearly as bad as hurting people to begin with, and she holds herself to that standard relentlessly. Sapphire has trained herself for the past five (and some) years of her life, and has remarkable strength of will. She's never shown backing down from anything because it is difficult, unpleasant, or dangerous, suggesting that her self-discipline is top-notch. In fact, she's only shown fear for her own life once in canon, when faced directly with the continent-destroying Groudon and Kyogre for the first time, and in all other cases - being rendered sightless in a life-threatening battle, diving to the bottom of the ocean, even subsequent encounters with Groudon and Kyogre - she seems to be able to discard fear for her personal safety. Her greatest fear is always reserved for the welfare of others, in part because she dreads seeing people hurt - or pushed away and lost to her - by her inaction again.
Sapphire's choice affected other, more universally relevant aspects of her life, too. She's as caring as she ever was, but following the incident and throughout the R/S arc, her shyness vanished - as she resolved to stop being fearful, she became seriously outgoing instead. In many scenes she's the first character to speak, introduce themselves, or ask a question that needs asking. In others, she interrupts people or speaks in a very confident manner. She's curious and generally takes the initiative in pursuing whatever catches her interest.
Most of Sapphire's interactions in canon, both personal and casual, are with characters older than she is. She seems to take this in stride; the older they are, the more polite she is, but she never hesitates to speak with them or loses her characteristic excitable chattiness. Her demeanor becomes more intense when she interacts with someone who shares her interests - Pokemon battling, usually - and her opinions of people become more exaggerated, from a competitive or supportive outlook to deep respect for those older or more experienced than she. Sapphire's respect doesn't hush or cow her, and she's very vocal about her positive opinions of people, wanting and expecting to become closer to those she likes. In the same vein, she says what she thinks of people in negative respects too, to their face and wherever else her opinion is called on. If Sapphire dislikes someone, it's probably because they violate her opinions on power or helping people in some way; people who hurt others either intentionally or out of carelessness, people who shirk responsibility, and people who don't appreciate what others do for them are sure to fall out of her good graces. And, of course, people who personally insult her, because who doesn't dislike those kinds of people?
Pokemon being Pokemon, I can't get away without covering how Sapphire behaves in battle, because Pokemon Special does the sports anime kind of thing where battle style is a microcosm of the trainer's character. All of the Pokedex owners have a "title" that describes what their personal skill or specialty is - "Hatcher", "Evolver", etc. The Hoenn trio gets a little more abstract - Ruby's is something along the lines of "Charmer", someone whose specialty is enchanting and misdirecting the opponent - and Sapphire's is a delightfully difficult to translate phrase that Bulbapedia renders as "Conqueror" and that means something along the line of "one who masters" or "one who pursues to the end". It's a good summary of how Sapphire behaves as a trainer, both in her long-term ambitions and in individual battles (and in life.) She doesn't half-ass things. Sapphire doesn't often wear out, and tends to fight with all guns blazing until she just plain can't. She uses every aspect of the battle at her disposal, from the limits of her own body and senses to the powers of her Pokemon to the behavior of her opponent and the environment the battle takes place in.
It's worth talking about Sapphire's perceptiveness in battle in its own paragraph, because she defies her archetype somewhat in that she's a young, excitable hero type who's terrible at sit-down academics but she's actually very intelligent in an analytical way. Sapphire was raised by a professor of ecology, and learned about the connections between living beings and their environment as she grew up - in keeping with her theme of "doing things all the way through", Sapphire notices things as part of an overall system, and doesn't take isolated oddities for granted. She's won several battles by taking note of her opponent's behavior before the battle started and connecting it to information learned during the battle, remaining aware of the context of actions at all times. She's helped in this by the odd cartoon logic that growing up in the jungle trained her senses to superhuman levels somehow, so she's constantly passively picking up cues via sound, scent, vision, and touch.
There are, of course, a couple of downsides to Sapphire's way of doing things, both on the battlefield and off. The first is that while Sapphire is very perceptive, once she's already formed her course of action, she can be easy to misdirect - and because she puts so much focus onto the opponent she already sees, she can be overwhelmed. Opponents have taken advantage of this several times: once by setting her up in a low-visibility area with reflective fields that bounced her own attacks back at her, forcing her to stay too occupied with dodging, continuous attacking, and overthinking her "opponent's" position to pause and realize it was a decoy; once by letting her execute several powerful moves only to reveal that they'd been used as cover to subtly recover the damage taken.
The second overall weakness is that Sapphire is a terrible "book learner", and in a battle context, doesn't perform quite as well in manufactured stadium environments. She's a very physical person who needs to latch onto a practical problem or living example of a concept to really understand it, and without proper context, theory really isn't her thing. Her analysis is done all on the fly, and when presented with a long-term problem, Sapphire's first instinct is to find things to do Right Away and keep doing them until something clicks, not to sit down and pour over what she already knows. This is a mixed curse and blessing because it can be an advantage sometimes, but the price of her ability to work out problems in fast, demanding situations is a tendency to miss solutions that someone more methodical might catch.
The third, a combination of her age and her moral stance, is that she is very morally predictable and could easily be considered naive outside of her own world. Situations where she has to risk her own safety to protect people are easy for her to will her way through, but she's never been confronted with a situation where saving everyone isn't possible and she might have to hurt one person to help another, and those situations (especially in Ryslig) will no doubt challenge her fundamental values and cause her no shortage of distress. Her protect-everyone mentality, in a world less forgiving of the power of friendship than her own, could easily turn self-sacrificing and self-destructive.
The fourth is fairly petty and straightforward. Sapphire has known to be confrontational and aggressive when she's wound up, and the problem with her honesty and excitability is that, while she knows how to be polite and has no reservations about expressing remorse when she feels it, she has very little practice in defusing delicate situations or holding herself back when she is genuinely upset or irritated.
5-10 Key Character Traits:
- Strong willpower
- Competitive
- Perceptive
- Energetic/physically active
- quick-witted/intuitive thinker
- Capable/self-reliant
- Caring
- Impulsive
- Forceful
Would you prefer a monster that FITS your character’s personality, CONFLICTS with it, or EITHER? Fits
Opt-Outs: Faerie, Nymph, Wendigo, Goblin, Kelpie (also Merperson, from character already in the game)
Roleplay Sample: TDM threads
Name: Holo
Contact:
holographica | Other Characters: Walter | Shin Megami Tensei IV |
beliarCHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Sapphire Birch
Age: 11
Canon: Pokemon Special
Canon Point: Post-Emerald arc
Character Information: Sapphire at Bulbapedia
Personality: Once upon a time, a boy and a girl, both six years old, were left to play together while their parents met for an important event. The boy was a Pokemon trainer, frighteningly skilled for his age. The girl was sweet and shy, and admired the boy's skills and sense of adventure. While the two were playing, they were attacked by a wild dragon Pokemon; the boy fought the dragon off and was badly wounded for his efforts, and the girl cried to see her friend behave so ruthlessly. That girl was Sapphire, and though it's been five years (and some) since then and she's grown significantly within only the last one-and-a-half, that incident marked a moment in her life when she made a deliberate choice about what kind of person she was going to be, and that choice (if not the incident itself) is the foundation of her character.
I should note right off the bat - even before going into that choice of hers further - that Sapphire is in many ways a product of her environment, especially considering her age, because the Pokemon world inspires certain values in its people to begin with and on top of that it tends to expect a lot out of its preteens. This could in part be a meta thing, since Pokemon is aimed at preteens to begin with, but the Ruby/Sapphire arc of Pokemon Special contains a few dialogues that set the age of...not majority, but personal agency, much lower than it would be in reality. Eleven-year-olds are widely considered ready to make their own choices about their futures, sixteen-year-olds can be sent on important government missions, and the human race as a whole is a lot more durable. (Also, animals are more or less people too.) Sapphire knows she is a child, and she willingly takes a subordinate role to people older than her, but she doesn't see herself as a child in the same capacity that she would be in reality.
That helps to explain why the adults in Sapphire's life readily describe her as "skilled and trustworthy"; she's known to be both morally reliable and capable of carrying out what she sets out to do. She's kind, friendly, enthusiastic, curious, but she is above all helpful - Sapphire's most basic priority, at all times and in all situations, is to do whatever is in her power to help and protect people, and when there is no one who needs immediate help or protection her next priority is to become more powerful so that she is better-equipped to be of more help. Pokemon battling is the universal sport of her world, a fun way to put Pokemon's practical skills to use in competition, but Sapphire is one of the subset who practice it for its own sake. Pursuing power through Pokemon battling was what motivated her to leave her home, and in the years after her campaign to win all the region's badges turned into an all-out battle to save Hoenn, she seems to be consistently in training or helping to investigate hints of evildoer activity. Most trainers raise Pokemon in the course of a primary profession and do battle on the side, but Sapphire appears to have no hobby or career plan outside of Pokemon training, suggesting that she intends to be a full-time trainer and thus general defender of the land.
This habit of Sapphire's isn't just an incidental quirk. It ties back into that choice I mentioned, made when she was six years old and rather traumatized; she consciously decided that the correct use of power is to prevent other people from getting hurt, and that she would personally pursue strength so that people would not have to be hurt for her sake - or by her emotional weakness. While she doesn't begrudge others for not going to the lengths she does, she does believe that doing nothing to help when you have the ability to do so is nearly as bad as hurting people to begin with, and she holds herself to that standard relentlessly. Sapphire has trained herself for the past five (and some) years of her life, and has remarkable strength of will. She's never shown backing down from anything because it is difficult, unpleasant, or dangerous, suggesting that her self-discipline is top-notch. In fact, she's only shown fear for her own life once in canon, when faced directly with the continent-destroying Groudon and Kyogre for the first time, and in all other cases - being rendered sightless in a life-threatening battle, diving to the bottom of the ocean, even subsequent encounters with Groudon and Kyogre - she seems to be able to discard fear for her personal safety. Her greatest fear is always reserved for the welfare of others, in part because she dreads seeing people hurt - or pushed away and lost to her - by her inaction again.
Sapphire's choice affected other, more universally relevant aspects of her life, too. She's as caring as she ever was, but following the incident and throughout the R/S arc, her shyness vanished - as she resolved to stop being fearful, she became seriously outgoing instead. In many scenes she's the first character to speak, introduce themselves, or ask a question that needs asking. In others, she interrupts people or speaks in a very confident manner. She's curious and generally takes the initiative in pursuing whatever catches her interest.
Most of Sapphire's interactions in canon, both personal and casual, are with characters older than she is. She seems to take this in stride; the older they are, the more polite she is, but she never hesitates to speak with them or loses her characteristic excitable chattiness. Her demeanor becomes more intense when she interacts with someone who shares her interests - Pokemon battling, usually - and her opinions of people become more exaggerated, from a competitive or supportive outlook to deep respect for those older or more experienced than she. Sapphire's respect doesn't hush or cow her, and she's very vocal about her positive opinions of people, wanting and expecting to become closer to those she likes. In the same vein, she says what she thinks of people in negative respects too, to their face and wherever else her opinion is called on. If Sapphire dislikes someone, it's probably because they violate her opinions on power or helping people in some way; people who hurt others either intentionally or out of carelessness, people who shirk responsibility, and people who don't appreciate what others do for them are sure to fall out of her good graces. And, of course, people who personally insult her, because who doesn't dislike those kinds of people?
Pokemon being Pokemon, I can't get away without covering how Sapphire behaves in battle, because Pokemon Special does the sports anime kind of thing where battle style is a microcosm of the trainer's character. All of the Pokedex owners have a "title" that describes what their personal skill or specialty is - "Hatcher", "Evolver", etc. The Hoenn trio gets a little more abstract - Ruby's is something along the lines of "Charmer", someone whose specialty is enchanting and misdirecting the opponent - and Sapphire's is a delightfully difficult to translate phrase that Bulbapedia renders as "Conqueror" and that means something along the line of "one who masters" or "one who pursues to the end". It's a good summary of how Sapphire behaves as a trainer, both in her long-term ambitions and in individual battles (and in life.) She doesn't half-ass things. Sapphire doesn't often wear out, and tends to fight with all guns blazing until she just plain can't. She uses every aspect of the battle at her disposal, from the limits of her own body and senses to the powers of her Pokemon to the behavior of her opponent and the environment the battle takes place in.
It's worth talking about Sapphire's perceptiveness in battle in its own paragraph, because she defies her archetype somewhat in that she's a young, excitable hero type who's terrible at sit-down academics but she's actually very intelligent in an analytical way. Sapphire was raised by a professor of ecology, and learned about the connections between living beings and their environment as she grew up - in keeping with her theme of "doing things all the way through", Sapphire notices things as part of an overall system, and doesn't take isolated oddities for granted. She's won several battles by taking note of her opponent's behavior before the battle started and connecting it to information learned during the battle, remaining aware of the context of actions at all times. She's helped in this by the odd cartoon logic that growing up in the jungle trained her senses to superhuman levels somehow, so she's constantly passively picking up cues via sound, scent, vision, and touch.
There are, of course, a couple of downsides to Sapphire's way of doing things, both on the battlefield and off. The first is that while Sapphire is very perceptive, once she's already formed her course of action, she can be easy to misdirect - and because she puts so much focus onto the opponent she already sees, she can be overwhelmed. Opponents have taken advantage of this several times: once by setting her up in a low-visibility area with reflective fields that bounced her own attacks back at her, forcing her to stay too occupied with dodging, continuous attacking, and overthinking her "opponent's" position to pause and realize it was a decoy; once by letting her execute several powerful moves only to reveal that they'd been used as cover to subtly recover the damage taken.
The second overall weakness is that Sapphire is a terrible "book learner", and in a battle context, doesn't perform quite as well in manufactured stadium environments. She's a very physical person who needs to latch onto a practical problem or living example of a concept to really understand it, and without proper context, theory really isn't her thing. Her analysis is done all on the fly, and when presented with a long-term problem, Sapphire's first instinct is to find things to do Right Away and keep doing them until something clicks, not to sit down and pour over what she already knows. This is a mixed curse and blessing because it can be an advantage sometimes, but the price of her ability to work out problems in fast, demanding situations is a tendency to miss solutions that someone more methodical might catch.
The third, a combination of her age and her moral stance, is that she is very morally predictable and could easily be considered naive outside of her own world. Situations where she has to risk her own safety to protect people are easy for her to will her way through, but she's never been confronted with a situation where saving everyone isn't possible and she might have to hurt one person to help another, and those situations (especially in Ryslig) will no doubt challenge her fundamental values and cause her no shortage of distress. Her protect-everyone mentality, in a world less forgiving of the power of friendship than her own, could easily turn self-sacrificing and self-destructive.
The fourth is fairly petty and straightforward. Sapphire has known to be confrontational and aggressive when she's wound up, and the problem with her honesty and excitability is that, while she knows how to be polite and has no reservations about expressing remorse when she feels it, she has very little practice in defusing delicate situations or holding herself back when she is genuinely upset or irritated.
5-10 Key Character Traits:
- Strong willpower
- Competitive
- Perceptive
- Energetic/physically active
- quick-witted/intuitive thinker
- Capable/self-reliant
- Caring
- Impulsive
- Forceful
Would you prefer a monster that FITS your character’s personality, CONFLICTS with it, or EITHER? Fits
Opt-Outs: Faerie, Nymph, Wendigo, Goblin, Kelpie (also Merperson, from character already in the game)
Roleplay Sample: TDM threads