Application for ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
carvaka
▸PLAYER
Name: GG
Means of Contact: email: theggning @ gmail / PM character journal
Time Zone: Mountain (GMT-7)
▸CHARACTER
Name: Joseph Oda
Journal:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
axecop
Canon: The Evil Within
Age: 33
Canon Point: Post chapter 13
NOTE/ETA: My original application was written before the DLCs were released, meaning some of the original information was out of date. I have revised the following information to be canon-compliant.
Background Information:
CONTENT WARNING: The canon information below contains mentions of dark themes such as graphic violence, child death, mental illness, alcoholism, and suicide.
Joseph Oda's career as a police detective in the Krimson City Police Department began close to ten years ago when he was given his badge and partnered up with wildcard Detective Sebastian Castellanos. It was not expected that the buttoned-up, by-the-book Joseph would last long with notorious loose-cannon Sebastian, but against all expectations, the two proved to make an excellent team. Joseph and Sebastian were famous within the department for cracking even the most difficult homicide cases, and their partnership led them to form a close, trusting friendship as well.
In February of 2012, Sebastian's daughter Lily was killed in a house fire, and in the aftermath his marriage to fellow detective Myra began to fall apart. Sebastian developed a drinking problem, though he was very careful to keep it from impacting his police work. Joseph was aware of it all the same and he watched, helpless and worried, as his best friend's life began to spiral out of control. In late August, Myra Castellanos disappeared under suspicious circumstances, and Sebastian was left even more distraught than before. As the only lifeline he had left, Joseph did his best to help his partner, but he was unable to pull Sebastian out of his personal darkness no matter what he tried.
At one point, desperate to save Sebastian from himself but unable to reach him in any other way, Joseph filed an Internal Affairs report on Sebastian's alcoholism. The investigation ended up clearing Sebastian of any wrongdoing, and he was allowed to go back to work without incident. It was not the wakeup call Joseph was hoping it would be. Instead, the report struck a tremendous rift in their friendship, and it remains a sore spot between them, though they are able to keep their personal feelings separate from their work and have continued on as professional partners despite it.
All this time, Sebastian was in the middle of investigating his wife's disappearance and his daughter's death in relation to a mysterious group called Mobius. Joseph is shown to be at least superficially aware of Sebastian's investigation and his conspiracy theories, though the extent of his knowledge is unclear. He is shown to still be worried about Sebastian’s mental stability and the impact his side investigation is having on the pair’s police work, and whatever Joseph knew before, it is apparent Sebastian is now keeping him out of the loop on the bulk of his findings.
One day, while responding to an incident at Beacon Mental Hospital with their junior partner, Juli Kidman, Joseph and Sebastian hear an ear-splitting high-pitched noise. Unknown to them, from this point on, they have been remotely drawn into STEM--a machine constructed at the hospital by Mobius. By connecting people’s consciousnesses together, it creates a false reality that can be molded and shaped by those within it. For much of the game, the protagonists don’t realize that the world they are seeing is nothing more than a cobbled-together Inception-like “dream...” that just happens to take place within the mind of a psychotic, sadistic serial killer.
The detectives arrive to find a massacre inside the hospital, and they are quickly attacked by a mysterious, burn-scarred figure in a tattered hood-- Ruben Victoriano, AKA "Ruvik," the betrayed creator of the STEM system and aforementioned serial killer. The world within STEM is cobbled together from the memories of the people plugged into it, but the host, Ruvik, is the only person who consciously influences the environment. STEM!world is basically Ruvik's playground, and he can change it, twist it, and shape it however he likes. Those trapped within STEM are helpless but to struggle against Ruvik's influence as he turns the world into a nightmarish hellscape, and tortures those within it by preying on their greatest fears. If he manages to break their minds they become the Haunted: deformed zombie-like creatures that Ruvik can further mold and shape into even more horrible monsters as he pleases.
Initially, Sebastian is alone as he struggles through Ruvik's twisted world, but he finds Joseph unconscious a few chapters in. As Joseph awakens he complains of feeling ill and suffers from a splitting headache. A few minutes later, Joseph begins to transform into a Haunted, and he loses control and tries to strangle Sebastian. Sebastian fights him off, and Joseph is able to recover himself with some effort. Later, he turns again and attacks Kidman; she is able to defeat him, and he wakes up again a short while later, uninjured, with nothing but an uneasy feeling that he may have lost control again. He and Sebastian both fear that Joseph may turn permanently at any moment, but soldier on together regardless, because that’s what partners do. It is implied that Ruvik is specifically targeting Joseph as a way to torment Sebastian (and Kidman as well, in the DLCs.)
In addition to the swarms of monsters that are out to kill them, Joseph is continually tormented by intrusive thoughts and the urge to succumb to the evil influence. Struggling against it gives him nosebleeds and causes him to cough blood. Eventually, he is so frightened of turning that he steals Sebastian's gun and tries to commit suicide. Sebastian is quick to disarm him and tells him off, but it is apparent that Joseph's condition is getting worse by the moment. Ruvik soon appears in person, and tries directly forcing Joseph to change-- Sebastian stops this by injecting a syringe (healing item) into Joseph's spine, and he passes out, overwhelmed by the shock.
When Joseph wakes up again, he is alone, but much more mentally stable-- protected from Ruvik's influence, it seems, by Sebastian's intervention. He fights his way forward through the STEM nightmare until he and Sebastian are reunited. The pair later discover that Kidman is actually working for Mobius, and they try to stop her from killing Leslie, an innocent mental patient with an unusually strong connection to Ruvik. Joseph leaps in between Leslie and Kidman as Leslie begins to warp reality around them, and in the confusion Kidman accidentally shoots Joseph in the chest. He falls to the ground wounded just as Sebastian plummets through another crack in reality.
It is later confirmed that Joseph is still alive after being “shot”, his body removed from the STEM machine by agents of Mobius just a few moments before Sebastian himself awakens.
Personality:
Joseph is a police detective with the Krimson City Police Department and a consummate professional. A man of words and intellect, Joseph is well-spoken, polite, and gentle, with a dry wit that he allows to slip out occasionally. He does his best to remain calm, composed and professional, even when dealing with unreasonable people and even when it’s not expected for him to do so. It is practically unheard of for him to be rude or inconsiderate, and it takes a truly inhuman amount of frustration before his patience will ever wear thin. Most everything he does he does with calculated precision, carefully planning his actions before he takes them.
As a severe perfectionist, Joseph is very careful and by-the-book, following rules to the letter in the course of his job and insisting that others do the same. It’s fair to say he’s more than a little uptight, though he isn’t completely inflexible-- he has had a fruitful partnership with notorious loose-cannon Sebastian for nearly a decade, though he frequently finds himself needing to wrangle his brash partner back into line. At the same time, Sebastian keeps Joseph from getting too clinical, too fussy, or too uptight about the rules to get the job done. Between Sebastian's more action-oriented style and Joseph's more intellectual approach, the two of them balance one another and are among the most effective detectives in the KCPD.
Joseph is without question a skilled investigator, meticulous and organized. He is very observant, frequently taking notice of details that others may miss and taking useful notes in his notebook. In canon, he can be heard noting tiny details about the scene outside the hospital to predict what's happening inside. Later on, in STEM he copies down architectural details, runes, and otherworldly scripture and later recalls them to help solve deadly puzzles. Even more so than his fellow detectives, Joseph is able to piece together seemingly disjointed clues and evidence to reach sound conclusions even in a canon where "reality" is constantly shifting and frequently nonsensical. He is the one who pinpoints the mental hospital as central “hub” of the STEM world, and his theory that returning there will lead out also proves to be correct.
He may be the bookish type, but that's certainly not to say that Joseph is passive, weak or incapable of taking care of himself; he is still a police officer, after all. He's an excellent shot, skilled with a variety of firearms, and in one memorable sequence runs around brutally splattering enemies' heads with a fire axe. Violence is a tool in his arsenal, but one that he only wields as a last resort. And god help you if you drive him to his last resort.
He takes his vow to serve and protect very seriously and he has little tolerance for people who flout the law, who willfully misbehave, or who harm others with their own selfishness. He also will not hesitate to stand up for a person in need. He takes a bullet for Leslie without having ever met him before, simply because he knows he is an innocent. Joseph believes that a police officer's badge is a privilege and comes with an obligation to be an example to others.
This ties back into Joseph's extreme perfectionist tendencies. He holds himself to a higher standard of behavior than he does everyone else. As forgiving and patient as he is with other people, he is doubly hard on himself. Joseph takes his own flaws and failings to heart and gets easily discouraged, taking the blame for things that he would never blame on another person. He has a hard time forgiving himself for even honest mistakes and gets unfairly upset with himself for being a burden to others, even when the situation is completely out of his control.
He values his competence and effectiveness over all of his other personal traits, as though he is only worthwhile when he is useful. It is intolerable to him that someone else should have to put themselves out to pick up his slack--at the same time, he takes it upon himself to solve problems that are entirely too big for him to tackle, such as his partner's alcoholism. A major worrier, Joseph cannot sit idly by and watch when he believes there's something he can do to help. Once he has chosen to focus he is persistent to a fault; he absolutely refuses to give up if he feels strongly about something. This endless determination is often likely to get Joseph in trouble, as he cannot or will not move on from something without exhausting every possibility he can to take care of it. It is at times like this when Joseph's patience slips and he can become uncharacteristically reckless, desperate to prove that he can handle everything he takes on and desperate not to let anyone down.
During his tenure in the STEM system, Joseph is tormented by the game's antagonist, Ruvik, whose M.O. is to break people's minds by torturing them with their fears and neuroses. We don't get to see what Joseph sees and experiences in STEM while away from Sebastian, but he clearly suffers the worst symptoms of Ruvik's influence out of the three protagonists. STEM reveals dark feelings of Joseph's that he carefully represses-- frustration, anxiety, helplessness, despair, and a perceived lack of control over his life. His perfectionism causes him no shortage of emotional distress, and it is confirmed that he's been suicidal. Ruvik roots out these weaknesses and uses them to mentally torture Joseph, trying to break him and turn him into one of the Haunted. Joseph describes the urge to give in as feeling like "instinct" that he cannot reason away. He slips and turns on at least two occasions, briefly attacking Sebastian the first time, and losing it and all-out trying to murder Kidman the second.
Joseph is terrified of being forced to harm his partners, and discouraged at his perceived liability to them. At one point, he is so frightened of slipping and hurting Sebastian that he puts a gun to his head (and the DLCs reveal this was only one of at least four suicide attempts he made just within the STEM system- all unsuccessful, obviously.) Though Joseph is able to fight off these urges as the game progresses, they are clearly traumatic for him, and he is likely still deeply psychologically impacted by them as well as the other nightmares he experienced inside STEM.
Appearance:
5'9" and 149 pounds of mystery-solving, sharp-shooting, zombie-beheading, bomb-disarming sharp-dressed cop with a 1950s haircut in a meticulous Japanese package.
Abilities:
Joseph has no superhuman abilities. He is, however, a police detective of some esteem. He is highly intelligent with sharp deductive skills, and well-known for his meticulous, organized approach to cracking cases. He is physically fit and skilled in the use of firearms, and also swings a pretty mean fireman’s axe. Joseph is also shown to be skilled in picking locks and dismantling incredibly complex explosive devices. (Headcanon: he has past experience in the police department’s bomb squad.)
Name: GG
Means of Contact: email: theggning @ gmail / PM character journal
Time Zone: Mountain (GMT-7)
▸CHARACTER
Name: Joseph Oda
Journal:
axecopCanon: The Evil Within
Age: 33
Canon Point: Post chapter 13
NOTE/ETA: My original application was written before the DLCs were released, meaning some of the original information was out of date. I have revised the following information to be canon-compliant.
Background Information:
CONTENT WARNING: The canon information below contains mentions of dark themes such as graphic violence, child death, mental illness, alcoholism, and suicide.
Joseph Oda's career as a police detective in the Krimson City Police Department began close to ten years ago when he was given his badge and partnered up with wildcard Detective Sebastian Castellanos. It was not expected that the buttoned-up, by-the-book Joseph would last long with notorious loose-cannon Sebastian, but against all expectations, the two proved to make an excellent team. Joseph and Sebastian were famous within the department for cracking even the most difficult homicide cases, and their partnership led them to form a close, trusting friendship as well.
In February of 2012, Sebastian's daughter Lily was killed in a house fire, and in the aftermath his marriage to fellow detective Myra began to fall apart. Sebastian developed a drinking problem, though he was very careful to keep it from impacting his police work. Joseph was aware of it all the same and he watched, helpless and worried, as his best friend's life began to spiral out of control. In late August, Myra Castellanos disappeared under suspicious circumstances, and Sebastian was left even more distraught than before. As the only lifeline he had left, Joseph did his best to help his partner, but he was unable to pull Sebastian out of his personal darkness no matter what he tried.
At one point, desperate to save Sebastian from himself but unable to reach him in any other way, Joseph filed an Internal Affairs report on Sebastian's alcoholism. The investigation ended up clearing Sebastian of any wrongdoing, and he was allowed to go back to work without incident. It was not the wakeup call Joseph was hoping it would be. Instead, the report struck a tremendous rift in their friendship, and it remains a sore spot between them, though they are able to keep their personal feelings separate from their work and have continued on as professional partners despite it.
All this time, Sebastian was in the middle of investigating his wife's disappearance and his daughter's death in relation to a mysterious group called Mobius. Joseph is shown to be at least superficially aware of Sebastian's investigation and his conspiracy theories, though the extent of his knowledge is unclear. He is shown to still be worried about Sebastian’s mental stability and the impact his side investigation is having on the pair’s police work, and whatever Joseph knew before, it is apparent Sebastian is now keeping him out of the loop on the bulk of his findings.
One day, while responding to an incident at Beacon Mental Hospital with their junior partner, Juli Kidman, Joseph and Sebastian hear an ear-splitting high-pitched noise. Unknown to them, from this point on, they have been remotely drawn into STEM--a machine constructed at the hospital by Mobius. By connecting people’s consciousnesses together, it creates a false reality that can be molded and shaped by those within it. For much of the game, the protagonists don’t realize that the world they are seeing is nothing more than a cobbled-together Inception-like “dream...” that just happens to take place within the mind of a psychotic, sadistic serial killer.
The detectives arrive to find a massacre inside the hospital, and they are quickly attacked by a mysterious, burn-scarred figure in a tattered hood-- Ruben Victoriano, AKA "Ruvik," the betrayed creator of the STEM system and aforementioned serial killer. The world within STEM is cobbled together from the memories of the people plugged into it, but the host, Ruvik, is the only person who consciously influences the environment. STEM!world is basically Ruvik's playground, and he can change it, twist it, and shape it however he likes. Those trapped within STEM are helpless but to struggle against Ruvik's influence as he turns the world into a nightmarish hellscape, and tortures those within it by preying on their greatest fears. If he manages to break their minds they become the Haunted: deformed zombie-like creatures that Ruvik can further mold and shape into even more horrible monsters as he pleases.
Initially, Sebastian is alone as he struggles through Ruvik's twisted world, but he finds Joseph unconscious a few chapters in. As Joseph awakens he complains of feeling ill and suffers from a splitting headache. A few minutes later, Joseph begins to transform into a Haunted, and he loses control and tries to strangle Sebastian. Sebastian fights him off, and Joseph is able to recover himself with some effort. Later, he turns again and attacks Kidman; she is able to defeat him, and he wakes up again a short while later, uninjured, with nothing but an uneasy feeling that he may have lost control again. He and Sebastian both fear that Joseph may turn permanently at any moment, but soldier on together regardless, because that’s what partners do. It is implied that Ruvik is specifically targeting Joseph as a way to torment Sebastian (and Kidman as well, in the DLCs.)
In addition to the swarms of monsters that are out to kill them, Joseph is continually tormented by intrusive thoughts and the urge to succumb to the evil influence. Struggling against it gives him nosebleeds and causes him to cough blood. Eventually, he is so frightened of turning that he steals Sebastian's gun and tries to commit suicide. Sebastian is quick to disarm him and tells him off, but it is apparent that Joseph's condition is getting worse by the moment. Ruvik soon appears in person, and tries directly forcing Joseph to change-- Sebastian stops this by injecting a syringe (healing item) into Joseph's spine, and he passes out, overwhelmed by the shock.
When Joseph wakes up again, he is alone, but much more mentally stable-- protected from Ruvik's influence, it seems, by Sebastian's intervention. He fights his way forward through the STEM nightmare until he and Sebastian are reunited. The pair later discover that Kidman is actually working for Mobius, and they try to stop her from killing Leslie, an innocent mental patient with an unusually strong connection to Ruvik. Joseph leaps in between Leslie and Kidman as Leslie begins to warp reality around them, and in the confusion Kidman accidentally shoots Joseph in the chest. He falls to the ground wounded just as Sebastian plummets through another crack in reality.
It is later confirmed that Joseph is still alive after being “shot”, his body removed from the STEM machine by agents of Mobius just a few moments before Sebastian himself awakens.
Personality:
Joseph is a police detective with the Krimson City Police Department and a consummate professional. A man of words and intellect, Joseph is well-spoken, polite, and gentle, with a dry wit that he allows to slip out occasionally. He does his best to remain calm, composed and professional, even when dealing with unreasonable people and even when it’s not expected for him to do so. It is practically unheard of for him to be rude or inconsiderate, and it takes a truly inhuman amount of frustration before his patience will ever wear thin. Most everything he does he does with calculated precision, carefully planning his actions before he takes them.
As a severe perfectionist, Joseph is very careful and by-the-book, following rules to the letter in the course of his job and insisting that others do the same. It’s fair to say he’s more than a little uptight, though he isn’t completely inflexible-- he has had a fruitful partnership with notorious loose-cannon Sebastian for nearly a decade, though he frequently finds himself needing to wrangle his brash partner back into line. At the same time, Sebastian keeps Joseph from getting too clinical, too fussy, or too uptight about the rules to get the job done. Between Sebastian's more action-oriented style and Joseph's more intellectual approach, the two of them balance one another and are among the most effective detectives in the KCPD.
Joseph is without question a skilled investigator, meticulous and organized. He is very observant, frequently taking notice of details that others may miss and taking useful notes in his notebook. In canon, he can be heard noting tiny details about the scene outside the hospital to predict what's happening inside. Later on, in STEM he copies down architectural details, runes, and otherworldly scripture and later recalls them to help solve deadly puzzles. Even more so than his fellow detectives, Joseph is able to piece together seemingly disjointed clues and evidence to reach sound conclusions even in a canon where "reality" is constantly shifting and frequently nonsensical. He is the one who pinpoints the mental hospital as central “hub” of the STEM world, and his theory that returning there will lead out also proves to be correct.
He may be the bookish type, but that's certainly not to say that Joseph is passive, weak or incapable of taking care of himself; he is still a police officer, after all. He's an excellent shot, skilled with a variety of firearms, and in one memorable sequence runs around brutally splattering enemies' heads with a fire axe. Violence is a tool in his arsenal, but one that he only wields as a last resort. And god help you if you drive him to his last resort.
He takes his vow to serve and protect very seriously and he has little tolerance for people who flout the law, who willfully misbehave, or who harm others with their own selfishness. He also will not hesitate to stand up for a person in need. He takes a bullet for Leslie without having ever met him before, simply because he knows he is an innocent. Joseph believes that a police officer's badge is a privilege and comes with an obligation to be an example to others.
This ties back into Joseph's extreme perfectionist tendencies. He holds himself to a higher standard of behavior than he does everyone else. As forgiving and patient as he is with other people, he is doubly hard on himself. Joseph takes his own flaws and failings to heart and gets easily discouraged, taking the blame for things that he would never blame on another person. He has a hard time forgiving himself for even honest mistakes and gets unfairly upset with himself for being a burden to others, even when the situation is completely out of his control.
He values his competence and effectiveness over all of his other personal traits, as though he is only worthwhile when he is useful. It is intolerable to him that someone else should have to put themselves out to pick up his slack--at the same time, he takes it upon himself to solve problems that are entirely too big for him to tackle, such as his partner's alcoholism. A major worrier, Joseph cannot sit idly by and watch when he believes there's something he can do to help. Once he has chosen to focus he is persistent to a fault; he absolutely refuses to give up if he feels strongly about something. This endless determination is often likely to get Joseph in trouble, as he cannot or will not move on from something without exhausting every possibility he can to take care of it. It is at times like this when Joseph's patience slips and he can become uncharacteristically reckless, desperate to prove that he can handle everything he takes on and desperate not to let anyone down.
During his tenure in the STEM system, Joseph is tormented by the game's antagonist, Ruvik, whose M.O. is to break people's minds by torturing them with their fears and neuroses. We don't get to see what Joseph sees and experiences in STEM while away from Sebastian, but he clearly suffers the worst symptoms of Ruvik's influence out of the three protagonists. STEM reveals dark feelings of Joseph's that he carefully represses-- frustration, anxiety, helplessness, despair, and a perceived lack of control over his life. His perfectionism causes him no shortage of emotional distress, and it is confirmed that he's been suicidal. Ruvik roots out these weaknesses and uses them to mentally torture Joseph, trying to break him and turn him into one of the Haunted. Joseph describes the urge to give in as feeling like "instinct" that he cannot reason away. He slips and turns on at least two occasions, briefly attacking Sebastian the first time, and losing it and all-out trying to murder Kidman the second.
Joseph is terrified of being forced to harm his partners, and discouraged at his perceived liability to them. At one point, he is so frightened of slipping and hurting Sebastian that he puts a gun to his head (and the DLCs reveal this was only one of at least four suicide attempts he made just within the STEM system- all unsuccessful, obviously.) Though Joseph is able to fight off these urges as the game progresses, they are clearly traumatic for him, and he is likely still deeply psychologically impacted by them as well as the other nightmares he experienced inside STEM.
Appearance:
5'9" and 149 pounds of mystery-solving, sharp-shooting, zombie-beheading, bomb-disarming sharp-dressed cop with a 1950s haircut in a meticulous Japanese package.
Abilities:
Joseph has no superhuman abilities. He is, however, a police detective of some esteem. He is highly intelligent with sharp deductive skills, and well-known for his meticulous, organized approach to cracking cases. He is physically fit and skilled in the use of firearms, and also swings a pretty mean fireman’s axe. Joseph is also shown to be skilled in picking locks and dismantling incredibly complex explosive devices. (Headcanon: he has past experience in the police department’s bomb squad.)