project gemini } { application

[somanyadjectives]

Player Name: Emily
Player Journal: iluvroadrunner6
Player Age: 23

Character Name: Stefan Salvatore
Canon: The Vampire Diaries
Medium: TV

Character Age: 163
Canon Point: 309: Homecoming; after he leaves Katherine, but before he actually steals Klaus’s family.

Why did you choose this character?:

Stefan Salvatore is something a little different for me. I’ve never actually written a vampire long term before, and playing one comes with a different set of rules—there’s the idea of immortality to explore, as well as the fact that they live, in a sense, by a different set of morals. Their idea of society is different, and while a lot of vampires still play by human rules, there are a lot of things that are “excused” in a sense, and I think it would be something interesting to explore.

Also, Stefan is a character that I’ve really come to adore. I have always preferred my vampires to have a chewy moral center, and Stefan has that in spades, but he also struggles with a dark side that isn’t dependent on a soul or some kind of outside influence. That’s one of the things that have always appealed to me about The Vampire Diaries vampires—they’re people, despite the fact that they’re supernatural, and that makes them very interesting to play. The villains are real, with real motives and they become much more interesting to watch, and makes the reactions from the protagonists all the more real.

As for the canon point, Stefan is getting his feelings back for the first time in a few months, and considering all his feelings are amplified as a vampire to begin with, learning to balance the fine line of his guilt and anger without giving in to the temptation to turn them off again and starting a killing spree in not-Minneapolis is going to be an interesting thing for him to learn. That’s really where I want to take him—to a place where he can be okay with what he is, and learn that drinking human blood isn’t really the bad thing—it’s more learning not to go overboard.

(As I said, I’m playing all the alcoholics this app round.)

Give a brief idea of how your character will react to the setting:

Given what Stefan had just been entrusted by Katherine to do, he will not be pleased. In fact, he’ll be pretty pissed. He’s also going to be just coming off his sociopathic phase and getting his emotions back, that anger is going to be times a billion, so first he would try to get the hell out of town, and when he finds out he can’t do that, he may … cause violence and property damage.

However, once that is out of his system, he’ll do his best to acclimate. He’ll track down the nearest blood bank/hospital/whatever the case may be for his food needs, find a place to live, and start trying to figure out what he needs to do until he does figure a way out. Odds are, he will probably do his best to try and pass for a normal guy—he doesn’t want to cause trouble, he just wants to go home and finish what he was about to start. But if people happen to get into trouble along the way, he’ll do his best to help—he is a good guy, deep down.

History: Here, have a wiki page.

Personality:

Stefan Salvatore is a vampire.

It’s not a part of his life that he likes to emphasize, nor does he like to spread around. In fact, when he’s not binging on blood, he tries his best to be a normal guy. Despite the fact that he’s one hundred sixty-three, he goes to high school, or college to be among people, to make friends, start a life. When you die at seventeen, a life isn’t really something you get to have, and Stefan’s been chasing it ever since. When Stefan is on the wagon, so to speak, he only drinks animal blood, which leaves him substantially weaker than other vampires, but it also keeps him from killing people. When he’s on the wagon, the Stefan Salvatore that people meet is sweet, affectionate, and friendly—in fact, he’s probably about as close to human as a vampire can get. He is well read, eloquent, and polite, and has very few enemies based on who he is as a person.

Unfortunately for Stefan, however, he’s not very good at staying on the wagon, and technically, he shouldn’t be. Drinking human blood is in a vampire’s nature, and the fact that Stefan spends so much time fighting that part of his nature instead of learning how to balance it, he falls into these binge cycles, starting with when he was first turned into a vampire and repeating several times over the course of his life. It hasn’t really been shown what events in his life have triggered these binges, but it seems clear that it’s most likely due to some kind of overwhelming negative emotion. According to TVD lore, when a person becomes a vampire, their emotions are heightened—happiness becomes ecstasy, sadness becomes despair. Younger vampires have the ability to turn these emotions off, and often times it’s because they can’t handle the onslaught of emotions on such an intense level. In theory, his first experience with the darker side of his personality came shortly after he was turned. It wasn’t until he met a vampire named Lexi, who taught him control and how not to overindulge himself on blood that he learned how to manage his emotions and gain some sense of normalcy. It’s possible that when this normalcy is threatened, and he tips towards the side of despair, that’s when he turns his feelings off and succumbs to his desire for blood, but it’s also possible that it could be something as simple as needing to drink human blood to heal himself after a fight, and never stopped, slowly succumbing to the darker side of his personality.

Stefan at his worst is the kind of vampire who drowns himself in blood to the point where he blacks out and doesn’t remember what he’s done. He is amoral, without any kind of regard for humanity as a whole—in fact, you could even say that he despises it. He’s the kind of killer who likes the hunt. He plays games with his victims, compelling them into doing things they wouldn’t normally do. He feeds on them with reckless abandon, sometimes so violently that he tears their bodies apart, and he keeps a list of the victims that he feeds on in order to relive the kills at a later date—and that list can get to be a long one, depending on how long he goes on these binges. These situations usually ended with Lexi, Stefan’s best friend and also a vampire, locking him down and detoxing him from human blood until she forces him to feel again. It’s something that Stefan is forever grateful for—even if he curses her for it during the process.

Stefan as he’s landing in Minneapolis is somewhere in between these two extremes, however, unlike the earlier binges where he chose to succumb to his nature, this one Klaus forced him into. He drank the blood in the first place to save Damon’s life in order to get the cure for a werewolf bite (werewolf bites are fatal to vampires), and then Klaus compelled him to turn off his emotions, forcing him into his sociopathic “ripper” persona, destroying his relationships with everyone he cares about in the process. However, in return for saving Klaus’s life, he released Stefan from his compulsion and allowed him to have his freedom again. It’s not long after that that Stefan will be waking up in Minneapolis, so he will have to learn to find the balance of those emotions again, but this time on his own, without his best friend. At the same time, however, he isn’t going to want to return to the animal blood diet. He’s stronger on human blood, and given that he is in a strange place, he’s going to be on the defensive. He will want to have every advantage possible. Therefore, he’ll have to learn the thing he never learned, how to balance what he is with his lifestyle, and not let it overtake him. It’s going to be a rough road, but it has a lot of potential for growth.

First Person Sample: Dear Mun entry

Third Person Sample:

When a vampire turns off his emotions, they never go away completely.

They sit on the edges of his mind, just waiting for the moment when he’ll let them in again. They bubble up when you first wake up, thinking that maybe this will be the time when he’ll acknowledge the fact that his humanity is there and that he has it. That it’s part of him. Normally, it will just get shoved back down again, blocked out, but as the day wears on and starts to weigh on him a little more, they bubble up again, reminding him how tired he is. Emotions are the only reason why he sleeps a lot of the time, because he gets tired of holding things back doesn’t want to feel, and sleep is the only way to keep them out again.

When an Original compels a vampire to turn off his emotions, however, it’s another story.

There’s no bubbling. No reminder of the person he used to be or the things he used to do. All that’s left is the cold expanse of nothing-ness that comes with feeling nothing, and caring about nothing. He looks at the people around him and feels nothing that he used to feel. He looks at Elena, and all he could see is the pulse of her juglar, pressing up against her skin with the steady thump-thump, thump-thump of her heart. To a vampire who can’t feel anything, all that’s left is blood.

And when Klaus lets him go, it all comes rushing back.

All the guilt, the pain, the anger, it floods back like an tsunami and it takes everything he has not to let it cripple him. But he holds himself together long enough to let Katherine to get him in the car, and for her to stop driving. He’s already started pushing it down again, wanting to just keep not feeling for a little while longer, because the fact of the matter is this—there’s no Lexi to bring him back this time around. There’s no one to lock him down and wait for him to burn himself out. He would have to do this on his own, and he didn’t know if he’s strong enough for that. He never has been before.

Then Katherine tells him that he needs to get mad. That she has something she needs him to do, and he can’t if he’s not angry enough. He slowly lets that bit of himself in, just a taste of the anger he has bubbling under the surface, and by the time Katherine drops him off on the side of the road to do what he needs to do, he knows this won’t be a problem.

Anger is easy. Anger he can do.