Application for Animus

[buttsinattheend]

Player Information

Name: Ethan
Personal Journal: gardock
Age: 22
Contact Info: Plurk: Gardock
Other Characters Played: N/A, but I have an app in for Laharl.

Character Information

Character Name: Willard H. Wright
Character Series: Umineko no Naku Koro ni
Character Age: Apparent age is, like, 20sish maybe? Will isn't human and is almost certainly much older than he looks; he's a retiree, after all.
Character Gender: Male

Original Canon/
Canon Point: After being saved from the end of EP7, but before EP8.
Background Link: http://umineko.wikia.com/wiki/Willard_H._Wright

Personality:

Like most denizens of Heaven that we see in Umineko, Will comes across at a glance as bizarrely stoic. He doesn't border on seeming emotionless like some others, but he's less expressive than the average person, and things that you'd think would excite or bother someone often don't faze him. You might get the impression that he's very reserved, but that's not the case. If anything, the cause is more like “seen it all” syndrome. For a very long time he headed a division of, for all intents and purposes, the Mystery Cops; he's met all types, and for most of said types he's acted as judge, jury and executioner at least once. Now that he's a civilian, you could say his priorities are weird; he's spent probably most of his life getting used to big, crazy, life-or-death situations, so he keeps a completely cool head about those, but god if he doesn't get worried about getting home to feed his cat on time.

Of course the assumption that leads to is that he must be pretty jaded, but really, it's the opposite. If anything, he was born jaded; he quit the SSVD because he learned not to be. “Wizard-hunting” Wright was famous for his ruthlessness for a long time; he disregarded feelings and tore through mysteries without passion or mercy. Over time, though, he repeatedly saw himself causing more suffering than the heretics he was hunting; his methods had frequently trampled the innocent for information to weed out the guilty, blowing everyone's deepest secrets wide open and conducting brutal, torturous interrogations. He abided by the spirit of Van Dine's twenty rules, many of which essentially dictate that a mystery is to be a well-oiled machine in which feelings, aside from maybe rage against the culprit, are out of place—they outlaw romance, complex characterization, and any out-of-the-ordinary elements besides the crime itself. Willard once used these commandments as weapons so liberally they came to be known as his twenty blades.

Eventually, though, he got fed up with turning mysteries into tragedies and retired. Will's new purpose in life, cat ownership notwithstanding, is to denounce everything he used to be. He's extremely sentimental, and solving a mystery means nothing to him if he doesn't understand the heart of it. He's an advocate for the “whydunnit,” puzzling out the culprit's motive; this is widely discredited as unimportant in the mystery world, but Will has learned that there are a lot of stories you can never truly understand if you ignore the heart. He's reluctant, though not unwilling, to use Van Dine's rules anymore. He only disagrees with the content of a few of them, but on the whole they remind him of his days as Chief Inquisitor. Doing his best to solve mysteries without relying on them and bringing justice in a fair way is his penance.

In placing so much importance on understanding people as individuals, he's gotten into the habit of seeing the best in them, where possible. Some people really are huge assholes *bernkastelcoughbernkastel*. Within reason, though, he's the forgiving type, and a relatively good samaritan; in researching Beatrice's past, he hears some of the darkest secrets of the Ushiromiya family (most of whom specialize in dark secrets) and, rather than very reasonably expressing disgust, does what he can to alleviate the crushing guilt of the people keeping them. He's got a knack for pep talks; he won't hesitate to criticize someone (at all) but he can usually see what they're doing right, too, and he's good at reassuring them about that.

But seriously, the dude still loves him some mysteries. He really enjoys a good, clean battle of the wits, and bristling with so many opinions about how they should be constructed and solved means he likes a good debate about the genre too. Most of his friends share this interest, and also the confusing metafictional ability to represent arguments as physical combat (see Abilities), so he's not opposed to “sparring” every once in a while.

Probably as an out-of-universe nod to Sherlock Holmes, Will is a brilliant and insightful detective who suddenly becomes much less intelligent when it comes to social interactions. He has great empathy and can understand people, sure, but that's not the same as getting along casually; there's a reason his best friend is his cat. His style of speech is short and blunt, and his cool, seemingly detached attitude makes it come across even worse. He'll frequently skip pleasantries and very transparently derail small-talk to get to the meat of a conversation faster, and he doesn't go out of his way to treat anybody in particular with extra respect. He comes across as so rude by accident that Lion takes to stealthily pinching him from behind as a painful signal for “manners please.” That isn't to say “by accident” is the only way he's ever rude. He has a sarcastic streak that mostly shows up with both those he considers good friends and those he considers enemies.

Abilities: Well. This is a bit complicated. Will has a conceptual sword. Conceptual weapons are hard to pin down in terms of how they work, but generally speaking they're only seen in canon being used against other fantasy characters—in the “real” world, they're probably useless. Their primary (but not only) use is more or less a visual metaphor for debates; one argument accompanies one attack, the opponent parries by countering your claims.

Of course they can also be used to just cut people up, as long as they're in a magic-friendly environment—Will conjures his sword out of nowhere, and magic in Umineko is dependent upon everyone present believing in magic, so he likely can't use it if someone who doesn't believe in the supernatural is around.

As an ex-member of the Inquisition of Heresy, Will also has limited, specialized use of the Red Truth, which means he can state something as incontrovertible fact. The limitation is that there are only twenty things he can guarantee: S.S. Van Dine's twenty rules for mysteries. The specialization is that by making those rules absolute, he has the power to limit what actually happens in a mystery; it's prescriptive red truth, not descriptive. If a mystery breaks one of Van Dine's rules, Will is capable of forbidding it to be so. Of course, this only works in situations where someone is deliberately crafting a mystery for someone to try and solve—in other words, only against witches from his own canon. In fewer words: he can rewrite reality in an extremely specific way under extremely specific conditions.

Sample Entry: Another one from the meme.