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Jan. 28th, 2013 12:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawthemudPLAYER
Name: Peter
Personal Journal:pikabot
E-mail: peter [at] spatula [dot] ca
Messenger: AIM: pikabot
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pikabot
Previous Characters: N/A
CHARACTER
Name: Dio Brando
Canon: Jojo's Bizarre Adventure
Age: 13
Specialty: Pyrokinesis
Position: Camper
Personality: It's tempting to dismiss Dio as simply being one-dimensionally evil; canon makes absolutely no bones about the fact that this kid is bad news. He has infinite ambition and no scruples, and little empathy. He'll step on anybody to get what he wants. And all of this is true, but there is more to it than that.
Dio Brando is, fundamentally, a product of his upbringing. His father taught him greed, violence, and not a single moral principle. Dio hates his old man, and is determined to be better than him, but he defines 'better' as 'richer and more successful': he's already internalized his father's worldview. And like so many other victims of abuse, he finds himself replicating the behavior of his abuser (see how, later in life, he finds himself falling into his father's drinking habits). Much of his other behaviors (his bad reaction to any perceived humiliation, his need to be top dog in any situation) can be ascribed to his formative years at the bottom of the economic food chain.
(Not that this excuses any of his...Dio-ness. He had ample opportunity to self-reflect and improve himself, and he decided instead to double down on the villainy. He chose to be a monster. This just explains why he did)
So, what is Dio like? He will likely appear, on casual contact, as a polite and helpful young man. Friendly, even. He's shown a real affinity for worming his way into a dominant social position, and making a wide range of friends. He will lay it on particularly thick if he has a use for you, or thinks he might later.
But his outward behavior is simply a facade. Beneath his pleasant exterior lies a calculating and remorseless mind, one focused like a laser on one task: to become rich - indeed, the richest man in the world. More specifically, he plans to oust Johnathan Joestar as heir to the Joestar estate and claim it for himself. This is important because nearly everything he does is for this purpose. Although at the point I have taken him from, he has put those plans on hold in favor of a long-term strategy, he certainly hasn't forgotten about it.
The other major motivation for what he does? Pride. He is intensely prideful, and will not stand for any insult - which, to him, includes anybody who gets the better of him in any way. He feels every defeat - no matter how petty - as a barb of humiliation, and cannot feel satisfied until he's revenged himself on the one responsible. Said revenge may be just as petty as the original offense, or may be wildly out of proportion, depending on the circumstances. He burned his adoptive brother's dog alive as payback for said brother beating him in a fistfight, for crying out loud. He may not get back at you immediately, but he never forgets a slight.
This pride is also reflected in a greatly exaggerated sense of self-importance. Dio genuinely believes himself to be above other people, more important than them, destined for and deserving of great things. In mental monologue, he consistently refers to himself in an extremely haughty manner - something which, like all his other worst tendencies, he is careful to keep out of his behavior towards others (until he becomes a vampire and then he feels free to let it all hang out).
What makes Dio dangerous, though, isn't his pride or his ambition. It is his lack of remorse and conscience. At no point during the series does he ever express remorse for anything he does. In his adult life, in response to someone demanding to know just how many people he'd eaten to heal his wounds, he memorably responded "Do you remember how many loaves of bread you've eaten in your life?" While that's after he's gone all Vampire and completely severed his connection to humanity, it illustrates how little he cares for the people around him. The only true limiting factor on his behavior is a desire not to be caught, since that would reveal him for the less-than-savory guy he is and foul up all his plans for the future.
On the other hand, while he's capable of incredible cruelty, even murder, he does not do it without reason. Everything he does is for a purpose, even if that purpose may not make sense to people other than himself. You could spend years with him and not realize how twisted he is - and indeed, many people did.
AU History: Dio Brando was born in London, son of Dario Brando, who was himself a descendent of Italian immigrants in the first half of the twentieth century. Dario was a cruel, abusive, good-for-nothing alcoholic, a man who would rather cheat and steal his way through life than work.
On a dark and stormy night, Dario Brando was out with one of his mistresses when a car veered off the road before them and crashed at high speeds. With nobody else around, Dario rushed forward - not to help, but to pick valuables off of the dead before any witnesses arrived. The car belonged to Lord Joestar, a very rich and important man, and he was travelling with his family - His wife and their infant son Jonathan. The driver was killed instantly, impaled on the steering column, and his wife died shielding their son from the impact. But baby Jonathan was miraculously unhurt, and much to Dario's surprise, just as he was pulling Lord Joestar's wedding ring off of his finger, the older man awoke. He was badly hurt, but still alive. In his injured state, he mistook Dario's thievery for a rescue effort, and swore to him that if ever he needed help, the Joestar estate was in his debt.
Twelve years or so passed. Dio, who was only an infant himself at the time all of this happened, grew up with only his father to learn from. His mother died when he was young, something Dio always blamed his father for. His father sank deeper and deeper into alcoholism the whole time, and their living conditions grew worse and worse. In order to survive, Dio turned to his own life of crime, beginning with shoplifting and eventually associating with local gangs. In his eleventh year, Dio decided he had had enough of living under his father's thumb. He obtained a poison which mimicked the symptoms of a chronic disease, and over the next year he slowly poisoned his father to death.
On his deathbed, Dario handed Dio a letter addressed to Lord Joestar. He told him the story of how he had 'saved' Joestar, and that the Lord owed him a debt; the letter asked for him to adopt Dio as his own after Dario's passing. Dario Brando died, urging Dio to use this chance to become a rich man. Dio buried him, spit on the grave, and then left to move on with his new life as the son of one of the wealthiest men in the nation.
From the very beginning, his plan was simple: to alienate Jonathan, the proper heir to the estate, and thus supplant him as the inheritor. Fromt he moment he stepped onto the Joestar grounds, he set about isolating Jonathan, beating him physically at sports and taking control of his social circle, ostracizing him from his peers. Even at home, he acted the perfect son, and Jonathan was chastised for not meeting the standard of behavior and performance he set. Things came to a head when Dio realized that Jonathan had gotten himself a little twelve-year-old love affair. That wouldn't fly with his plan to keep Jonathan isolated, so he set about chasing her away. He harassed her and even stole her first kiss, until she began avoiding Jonathan. What's more, Dio arranged to be sure that it would get back to Jonathan exactly what he had done. Predictably, Jonathan took it badly and charged in for a fight. This was exactly what Dio wanted: he already knew he could easily take Jonathan in a fight. He figured that beating him now, like this, would break his spirit.
What he didn't expect was for Jonathan to beat the snot out of him; he was so full of righteous anger than Dio found himself completely overwhelmed. Angered by his own failure and his humiliation at Jonathan's hand, in a moment of furious impulse he began to pull a knife...only to be interrupted by Lord Joestar, who had apparently seen the whole fight. He broke it up.
Dio was furious about the beating he had taken, but knew that his plan needed changing. Not only had he just had the tar whipped out of him, he had nearly been caught with the knife in his hand. He needed to play the longer game. Take things slower. And part one of his plan was to get for himself a top-notch education, to situate himself as a potential heir.
But first, he needed to make Jonathan pay for the beating he'd endured. And so he trapped Jonathan's loyal dog Danny in the grounds' trash incinerator, which the groundskeeper did not discover until it was too late.
Reasoning that a well-rounded education that included training of his latent psychic abilities would be a big asset for him in the future, Dio enrolled last year at Whispering Rock. This is his second summer with the camp.
Brain World: The inside of his mind is a dark, twisting set of London streets, which seem to go on without end. It is perpetually a moonless night, and every door seems to lead to a bar or a liquor store. The streets are full of men in raggedy clothes, huddled together in the streets. Knives glint from underneath the cloaks they wrap around themselves. The streets are lit by weak gas lanterns, but mostly by the glow coming froman enormous palace on a hill, visible from everywhere in the city. The gates are guarded by soldiers in ceremonial uniform, and inside a lavish feast is set out, with upper-class, well-dressed men and women cavorting freely and indulging themselves in various displays of extravagance. The noise from the massive party is such that it can be heard at least faintly everywhere in the city.
Badges: Basic Braining, Pyrokinesis, Marksmanship, Psi Shield.
SAMPLES
Sample 1:
I believe this test drive thread should do nicely.
Sample 2:
Not every prospective Psychonaut is good at everything. They all have specialties for a reason, after all. But Dio was not used to having trouble. His mind had always been his greatest weapon, and he always felt sure of his ability to bend it to his will, whether it was in a game of chess or a its overt application as psychic power.
So why couldn't he stay on the damn ball?
Levitation, it seemed, was his achilles' heel. He could form the ball beneath him, that was no problem, but maintaining his balance on it? Impossible. He wavered, flailed, and then fell on his face for the fifth time this day alone.
Titters of laughter arose from around him as the other campers caught sight of his pratfall. All around him, the sound of people laughing. People laughing at him.
Shut up, you meaningless chittering monkeys. Don't you realize who you're laughing at? I, Dio, am equal to all of you at once! You will show me proper respect!
The words were on the tip of his tongue, dying to be spoken, but he restrained himself. Restraint, restraint, restraint, always the most important part of any plan, of any interaction. He grit his teeth with rage at their mockery, while his face was in the mud, but by the time he rose to his feet he was smiling in an embarrassed manner, brushing the fall off as a comical misstep.
And yet, his eyes scanned the group, memorizing the faces of everyone who had dared to laugh at him. One way or the other, they would all pay. Not today, not tomorrow, but eventually, Dio would get back at them somehow.
Name: Peter
Personal Journal:
pikabotE-mail: peter [at] spatula [dot] ca
Messenger: AIM: pikabot
Plurk:
Previous Characters: N/A
CHARACTER
Name: Dio Brando
Canon: Jojo's Bizarre Adventure
Age: 13
Specialty: Pyrokinesis
Position: Camper
Personality: It's tempting to dismiss Dio as simply being one-dimensionally evil; canon makes absolutely no bones about the fact that this kid is bad news. He has infinite ambition and no scruples, and little empathy. He'll step on anybody to get what he wants. And all of this is true, but there is more to it than that.
Dio Brando is, fundamentally, a product of his upbringing. His father taught him greed, violence, and not a single moral principle. Dio hates his old man, and is determined to be better than him, but he defines 'better' as 'richer and more successful': he's already internalized his father's worldview. And like so many other victims of abuse, he finds himself replicating the behavior of his abuser (see how, later in life, he finds himself falling into his father's drinking habits). Much of his other behaviors (his bad reaction to any perceived humiliation, his need to be top dog in any situation) can be ascribed to his formative years at the bottom of the economic food chain.
(Not that this excuses any of his...Dio-ness. He had ample opportunity to self-reflect and improve himself, and he decided instead to double down on the villainy. He chose to be a monster. This just explains why he did)
So, what is Dio like? He will likely appear, on casual contact, as a polite and helpful young man. Friendly, even. He's shown a real affinity for worming his way into a dominant social position, and making a wide range of friends. He will lay it on particularly thick if he has a use for you, or thinks he might later.
But his outward behavior is simply a facade. Beneath his pleasant exterior lies a calculating and remorseless mind, one focused like a laser on one task: to become rich - indeed, the richest man in the world. More specifically, he plans to oust Johnathan Joestar as heir to the Joestar estate and claim it for himself. This is important because nearly everything he does is for this purpose. Although at the point I have taken him from, he has put those plans on hold in favor of a long-term strategy, he certainly hasn't forgotten about it.
The other major motivation for what he does? Pride. He is intensely prideful, and will not stand for any insult - which, to him, includes anybody who gets the better of him in any way. He feels every defeat - no matter how petty - as a barb of humiliation, and cannot feel satisfied until he's revenged himself on the one responsible. Said revenge may be just as petty as the original offense, or may be wildly out of proportion, depending on the circumstances. He burned his adoptive brother's dog alive as payback for said brother beating him in a fistfight, for crying out loud. He may not get back at you immediately, but he never forgets a slight.
This pride is also reflected in a greatly exaggerated sense of self-importance. Dio genuinely believes himself to be above other people, more important than them, destined for and deserving of great things. In mental monologue, he consistently refers to himself in an extremely haughty manner - something which, like all his other worst tendencies, he is careful to keep out of his behavior towards others (until he becomes a vampire and then he feels free to let it all hang out).
What makes Dio dangerous, though, isn't his pride or his ambition. It is his lack of remorse and conscience. At no point during the series does he ever express remorse for anything he does. In his adult life, in response to someone demanding to know just how many people he'd eaten to heal his wounds, he memorably responded "Do you remember how many loaves of bread you've eaten in your life?" While that's after he's gone all Vampire and completely severed his connection to humanity, it illustrates how little he cares for the people around him. The only true limiting factor on his behavior is a desire not to be caught, since that would reveal him for the less-than-savory guy he is and foul up all his plans for the future.
On the other hand, while he's capable of incredible cruelty, even murder, he does not do it without reason. Everything he does is for a purpose, even if that purpose may not make sense to people other than himself. You could spend years with him and not realize how twisted he is - and indeed, many people did.
AU History: Dio Brando was born in London, son of Dario Brando, who was himself a descendent of Italian immigrants in the first half of the twentieth century. Dario was a cruel, abusive, good-for-nothing alcoholic, a man who would rather cheat and steal his way through life than work.
On a dark and stormy night, Dario Brando was out with one of his mistresses when a car veered off the road before them and crashed at high speeds. With nobody else around, Dario rushed forward - not to help, but to pick valuables off of the dead before any witnesses arrived. The car belonged to Lord Joestar, a very rich and important man, and he was travelling with his family - His wife and their infant son Jonathan. The driver was killed instantly, impaled on the steering column, and his wife died shielding their son from the impact. But baby Jonathan was miraculously unhurt, and much to Dario's surprise, just as he was pulling Lord Joestar's wedding ring off of his finger, the older man awoke. He was badly hurt, but still alive. In his injured state, he mistook Dario's thievery for a rescue effort, and swore to him that if ever he needed help, the Joestar estate was in his debt.
Twelve years or so passed. Dio, who was only an infant himself at the time all of this happened, grew up with only his father to learn from. His mother died when he was young, something Dio always blamed his father for. His father sank deeper and deeper into alcoholism the whole time, and their living conditions grew worse and worse. In order to survive, Dio turned to his own life of crime, beginning with shoplifting and eventually associating with local gangs. In his eleventh year, Dio decided he had had enough of living under his father's thumb. He obtained a poison which mimicked the symptoms of a chronic disease, and over the next year he slowly poisoned his father to death.
On his deathbed, Dario handed Dio a letter addressed to Lord Joestar. He told him the story of how he had 'saved' Joestar, and that the Lord owed him a debt; the letter asked for him to adopt Dio as his own after Dario's passing. Dario Brando died, urging Dio to use this chance to become a rich man. Dio buried him, spit on the grave, and then left to move on with his new life as the son of one of the wealthiest men in the nation.
From the very beginning, his plan was simple: to alienate Jonathan, the proper heir to the estate, and thus supplant him as the inheritor. Fromt he moment he stepped onto the Joestar grounds, he set about isolating Jonathan, beating him physically at sports and taking control of his social circle, ostracizing him from his peers. Even at home, he acted the perfect son, and Jonathan was chastised for not meeting the standard of behavior and performance he set. Things came to a head when Dio realized that Jonathan had gotten himself a little twelve-year-old love affair. That wouldn't fly with his plan to keep Jonathan isolated, so he set about chasing her away. He harassed her and even stole her first kiss, until she began avoiding Jonathan. What's more, Dio arranged to be sure that it would get back to Jonathan exactly what he had done. Predictably, Jonathan took it badly and charged in for a fight. This was exactly what Dio wanted: he already knew he could easily take Jonathan in a fight. He figured that beating him now, like this, would break his spirit.
What he didn't expect was for Jonathan to beat the snot out of him; he was so full of righteous anger than Dio found himself completely overwhelmed. Angered by his own failure and his humiliation at Jonathan's hand, in a moment of furious impulse he began to pull a knife...only to be interrupted by Lord Joestar, who had apparently seen the whole fight. He broke it up.
Dio was furious about the beating he had taken, but knew that his plan needed changing. Not only had he just had the tar whipped out of him, he had nearly been caught with the knife in his hand. He needed to play the longer game. Take things slower. And part one of his plan was to get for himself a top-notch education, to situate himself as a potential heir.
But first, he needed to make Jonathan pay for the beating he'd endured. And so he trapped Jonathan's loyal dog Danny in the grounds' trash incinerator, which the groundskeeper did not discover until it was too late.
Reasoning that a well-rounded education that included training of his latent psychic abilities would be a big asset for him in the future, Dio enrolled last year at Whispering Rock. This is his second summer with the camp.
Brain World: The inside of his mind is a dark, twisting set of London streets, which seem to go on without end. It is perpetually a moonless night, and every door seems to lead to a bar or a liquor store. The streets are full of men in raggedy clothes, huddled together in the streets. Knives glint from underneath the cloaks they wrap around themselves. The streets are lit by weak gas lanterns, but mostly by the glow coming froman enormous palace on a hill, visible from everywhere in the city. The gates are guarded by soldiers in ceremonial uniform, and inside a lavish feast is set out, with upper-class, well-dressed men and women cavorting freely and indulging themselves in various displays of extravagance. The noise from the massive party is such that it can be heard at least faintly everywhere in the city.
Badges: Basic Braining, Pyrokinesis, Marksmanship, Psi Shield.
SAMPLES
Sample 1:
I believe this test drive thread should do nicely.
Sample 2:
Not every prospective Psychonaut is good at everything. They all have specialties for a reason, after all. But Dio was not used to having trouble. His mind had always been his greatest weapon, and he always felt sure of his ability to bend it to his will, whether it was in a game of chess or a its overt application as psychic power.
So why couldn't he stay on the damn ball?
Levitation, it seemed, was his achilles' heel. He could form the ball beneath him, that was no problem, but maintaining his balance on it? Impossible. He wavered, flailed, and then fell on his face for the fifth time this day alone.
Titters of laughter arose from around him as the other campers caught sight of his pratfall. All around him, the sound of people laughing. People laughing at him.
Shut up, you meaningless chittering monkeys. Don't you realize who you're laughing at? I, Dio, am equal to all of you at once! You will show me proper respect!
The words were on the tip of his tongue, dying to be spoken, but he restrained himself. Restraint, restraint, restraint, always the most important part of any plan, of any interaction. He grit his teeth with rage at their mockery, while his face was in the mud, but by the time he rose to his feet he was smiling in an embarrassed manner, brushing the fall off as a comical misstep.
And yet, his eyes scanned the group, memorizing the faces of everyone who had dared to laugh at him. One way or the other, they would all pay. Not today, not tomorrow, but eventually, Dio would get back at them somehow.
