Application for Tu Shanshu

[wilsooon]

Player Information:
Name: Jae
Age: 26
Contact: PM via character journal
Game Cast: Steve Rogers, Raylan Givens

Character Information:
Name: Oliver Queen
Canon: Arrow
Canon Point: Midway through episode 12
Age: 27
Reference:

Arrow Wikia
Wikipedia entry

Setting:
Oliver lives in some variation of the DC universe. There’s been no clear indication of where in the spectrum of realism it falls – nobody has shown up flying or using telekinesis, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility. Certain cues indicate that vigilantism is fairly common – at one point someone calls Oliver “the local vigilante”, and Digg jokingly refers to Oliver’s hideout as “the Arrow Cave”, seeming to suggest that Batman is a well-known if not infamous presence. When Oliver is arrested as a suspect in the hunt for the Starling City vigilante, the elder Merlyn says that the arrest may even make national news, another indicator that arrests and trials like those are, if not common, at least not unheard of. Bludhaven has been mentioned as an existing location, and several Batman villains, including the Royal Flush Gang, Count Vertigo, and Firefly, have all made appearances, though their origins and motives are extremely different than their comic-book counterparts. Helena Bertinelli has a brief fling with Oliver before taking his teaching and his weapons on the road, and the show has made reference to other DC characters, including a wink at the possible appearance of Black Canary.
 
For the purposes of RP, I’m going to say that superhuman powers are not widespread but do have a presence in Oliver’s world, and that while the majority of the members of the Justice League may exist and be operating in their respective cities, none are at this point the world-saving heroes they may become.

Oliver Queen was born in Starling City, on the west coast of the United States. While the universe presented seems to be much like our own, including references made to shows and celebrities that exist in our world, their technology is more advanced and masked vigilantes seem to be commonplace, as noted above. Oliver is part of Starling City's wealthy elite, acquainted with most of them and close friends with Tommy Merlyn, the son of Malcolm Merlyn, who owns a corporation at least as large as Queen Consolidated (which is owned by Oliver's family).

Starling City itself is heavily divided by class, the wealthy owning most of the properties worth having and slum lords owning most of the rest. The Glades are the sprawling neighborhoods in which the poor are forced to live, victims of gangs, violent crime, and exploitation by property owners. Homelessness, joblessness, and the machinations of shady men and women have turned out ranks of criminals of every conceivable type, from madames to loan sharks.

In 2007 Oliver was shipwrecked on an island in the North China Sea called Lian Yu, the sole survivor of the storm that sank his father's ship. What happened to him there and in the interim five years is coming out in pieces as the show progresses, but somehow he ended up a heavily scarred, heavily experienced mercenary, with connections to the Russian mob and a reputation in the underground.

In 2012, after his rescue, he lives on his family's estate with his sister, mother, their staff, and his body guard and friend John Diggle. His best friend is Tommy Merlyn, whose father - unbeknownst to any of the above but Oliver's mother - is part of a cabal aimed at reshaping Starling City and its surrounding region through criminal enterprise and blackmail. Ollie's mother is also part of this conspiracy, though her participation is increasingly unwilling and hinges around Malcolm Merlyn's kidnapping of her husband, Oliver's stepfather, Walter Steele.

Starling City is a warren of petty and major criminal conspiracies. The cops are perpetually overwhelmed and understaffed, most prosecutors won't try the criminal bigwigs, and there are probably a handful of judges who aren't as corrupt as the people who walk in and out of their courtrooms every day. Robert Queen, before his death, told Oliver that he'd failed Starling City - told him about the conspiracy, and provided him with a list of names of its foot soldiers. Admonishing Oliver to right the wrongs Robert himself had committed, he shot himself in the head and left his son alone and adrift in the ocean with no guarantee that Oliver would survive, let alone get back to Starling City to perform the man's last request.

The villains Oliver faces on a regular basis have not to date exhibited any superhuman abilities: he's taken down a family of bank robbers who shot and nearly killed a cop, helped put a man nicknamed "the Count" behind bars for selling a drug called Vertigo and experimenting on the homeless to perfect its high, stopped a former fireman who was killing his squad-mates, and has blackmailed, robbed, and strong-armed a growing list of rich dirtbags into turning themselves in or repaying money and goods stolen from the people of Starling City. He's a one man wrecking crew and it's starting to show in the numbers - violent crime has decreased and some wealthy criminals have started turning themselves in when the vigilante's shadow falls across them.

While characters who share the names of DC heroes have appeared - Dinah Laurel Lance, Oliver's former girlfriend and a Starling City attorney being one of them - there has been no indication as yet that they are or will become part of this universe's stable of heroes. Others of significance include Laurel's father, a cop who despises Oliver and pursues the vigilante with fanatic dedication; Oliver's friend McKenna Hall, who works Vice; and Oliver's sister Thea, nicknamed Speedy, over whom he is extremely protective. His circle of true friends is small, and none of them but John Diggle, his body guard, know the truth about how he spends his nights.

Personality:
To say Oliver doesn’t have many illusions about himself would be an absolute lie. He looks in the mirror and sees pretty much nothing but illusions. The ones he presents to his friends and family, yes, but also the ones he creates for himself. The person he sees, at least immediately after being pulled off the island, is a stranger, neither the boy he remembers before Lian-Yu or the self he constructed to protect him mentally and physically on the island itself. When he gets to Starling City from the island he sees a person who is essentially worthless outside of the vendetta assigned by his father; he’s a tool that exists to serve a purpose. What he doesn’t factor in to this belief is the influence of those around him and the affect that their opinion of him has on his own mental state.
 
There’s a feral edge to almost everything he does. Unless he’s inhabiting the persona of Oliver Queen, unfettered playboy, he walks stiffly, watches his environment like an animal outside of its den, doesn’t quite seem to fit his clothes or his surroundings. When thrust into a social situation for which he doesn’t have previous context to draw from, his easy grin and irreverence evaporate into silence and a long stare, sometimes with an added dose of clear confusion if it’s not a situation in which he feels threatened.
 
It’s one of the most important aspects of his character that Ollie is not, at first, a vigilante or a hero, in his own mind or in his actions. He’s a killer, pure and simple. He has no aspirations to be anything more, and hasn’t even considered his own survival as a factor in his objectives. He’s been the recipient of nothing but violence during human contact for over five years; his framework for the analysis and acceptance of human kindness has been completely destroyed. Injuring and killing others seems to affect Oliver about as much as killing a chicken would affect a farmer. Sentimentality and remorse weren’t factored into the requirements for survival. He knows how to wound, physically and emotionally, how to create distance, how to lie without blinking, and how to hide insecurity until he’s not sure how to show it any more. And he’s incredibly, desperately lonely.
 
Casual physical intimacy is no longer an option. Even if he weren’t conditioned to react violently against the closeness of anyone he doesn’t know, there are only about four people, excluding the doctor, who know how badly he’s scarred. Between the clear damage his body has been through and the Russian mob tattoo on his chest, Oliver makes sure to keep himself entirely covered whenever he’s not alone. It’s a question of logistics, certainly – he doesn’t want people asking questions he can’t or won’t answer – but it’s also self-consciousness, a form of self-protection, because those questions would also force him to relive the torture that earned him many of the scars, and he does that enough on his own. He’s uncomfortable with what they are and what they mean to the people that see them. There are those like Digg who understand, but for the civilized world the scars are a mark of trauma, potential weakness, and personal suffering. He doesn’t want to be anyone’s pity case, and he is aware enough of how broken he is that he doesn’t want the reminder, even from people who care.

Ollie’s sanity – or at least his stability – is anchored by ritual. When he was on the island there was nothing to distract him, no external influences, no energy for existential questions. He had two priorities: survive, and return to Starling City to pursue the individuals listed in his father’s book. Now, back in the crowded pound and grind of the world he left behind, with his immediate needs cared for and responsibilities and relationships pulling him in a dozen directions, it would be extremely easy to fall apart; instead he seems to make simple tasks into ceremonies, pouring a disproportionate amount of focus into things like getting dressed, cleaning, eating, maintaining his weaponry, and crossing names out of his father’s book when their debts have been paid. He uses specific exchanges when addressing criminals, and seems to have a slang vocabulary that’s going on twenty years out of date – phraseology likely adopted from his father after the man’s death. Every little action to which he applies his focus is a touchstone, a reminder of where and when and who he is. He still loses track on occasion – as evidenced by the way he attacked his mother when she approached him one night as he slept. He spends long stretches without sleep, and when he does sleep is plagued by nightmares of his father’s death and what resulted.
 
He’s disturbingly malleable and incredibly naïve, still a rich brat under all of his trauma. Oliver says on several occasions that he can’t waste his time fighting petty criminals and bank robbers, that he has an objective and can’t be distracted from it. He doesn’t care about the small-scale victims of regular crimes. It takes Diggle force-feeding him low-class crime fighting for Ollie to realize that he can and should do more than play Robin Hood. He can be a hero, not just a weapon. He tries to pass on this lesson in his own inexperienced way to Helena Bertinelli when they cross paths, but it doesn’t stick – and while he’s in her orbit, he ends up in a series of conflicts that force him to kill, until he confronts her directly to save the man she’s been targeting all along. Adaptation was the key to him living this long. Acceptance of what he couldn’t change about his surroundings and what his surroundings would require him to do. He’s comfortable shifting gears depending on who he’s keeping company with, but there are a few lines that he won't cross no matter the circumstances. Killing innocents or those who haven't been given a chance to atone for their crimes is one of those lines.
 
He has an incredibly vicious streak when it comes to protecting the people he cares about. An inmate who assaults his ex nearly gets beaten to death when Ollie pulls the man off of her; the shooter who tags Diggle gets an arrow through the eye; Ollie breaks the neck of a man indirectly responsible for his mother being injured, and only stops Helena Bertinelli (the actual shooter) with a minimum of violence because she found him out and he fell for her. The drug dealer responsible for developing Vertigo, which gets his sister arrested after she crashes her car while high, gets a massive injection of his own drug that leaves the man screaming for days.
 
Oliver's nanny tells him on his return from the island that he has a good heart – his heart is in the right place, certainly, but he has a long way to go before he’s firmly in the spectrum of “good”. He doesn’t want to be seen as a monster in the eyes of those he loves; it’s the primary tether that keeps him from killing without restraint, from taking the shortest possible route to an efficient reduction in crime. He’s incredibly hypocritical regarding his standards for what is justice and how much force is required in a given situation; it depends on his own feelings, and whether or not Digg is there to hold him back.
 
John Diggle is probably the single most positive influence in Oliver’s life. He’s the only one who didn’t demand anything of Oliver immediately, who told him it was all right to take his time dealing with what he’d been through, and who didn’t tell him that he needed to open up or stop lying. It’s not surprising that Oliver talked to Diggle first about some of what happened to him and what he planned to do, taking the man on as a partner in vigilante crime. It’s Diggle who’s kept Oliver on the straight and narrow, who demanded a drop in the casualty count, and who’s shown Oliver the value of helping people beyond the scope of his mission. He’s the one who influenced the shift in the media’s response to Ollie’s actions, because once he started going after dangerous criminals of all shades, that’s when he started being called a hero – and it’s when that recognition came that Oliver really started to feel like what he did mattered, That is when he started to like being the good guy, not just a boogeyman. Doing good and being called a hero for it is probably the first form of positive reinforcement he’s gotten, between his spoiled upbringing, paparazzi attention, and his various Ivy-league drop outs and the petty crimes of his teen and young adult years. Failure was met either with a surge of attention or, later, violence – which gives him a powerful subconscious incentive to keep being the good guy. It feels nice to be counted on, and that responsibility has gradually made him more responsible in other areas of his life as well, as he’s learned to balance the vigilante and his home life.
 
All that said, if you’ve earned his loyalty and affection, Oliver is an extremely gentle individual, handling his relationships almost gingerly. It leads to a lot of social awkwardness and verbal missteps. He doesn’t always know when it’s inappropriate to joke, occasionally makes observations he should really keep to himself, and has trouble reading people when they aren’t being aggressive. He was a clown before the island and his humor stuck around, even if it didn’t stay entirely intact and has turned slightly morbid at times. He takes jokes well and doesn’t hold petty grudges, brushing off eighty percent of the rude or cruel things people say when heated as exactly what they are: attempts to wound spoken in the moment.  He has (when he exercises it) a great capacity for mercy and forgiveness, in part because he sees himself as someone irredeemable, without any place to judge others. It’s only when you go after a loved one or turn down the opportunity to atone for past actions that clemency gets taken off the table. And once it gets taken away, it isn’t offered again.
 
Given how easily influenced he is, how extremely his paradigm for violence has shifted, and how forceful his friends and family had to be in order to begin re-socializing him, arrival in Tu Shanshu is going to severely upend his progress. With his reasons to live and fight carefully removed, he’ll spiral into recklessness; with no one to remind him of the moral implications of murder, he’ll slide into the comfortable “survival” mentality of kill or be killed. Depending on the connections he makes with people in Keeliai, this could get better or worse. He’s a poorly-trained stray – without someone to tug on the leash, he’ll run wild in his own way.

Appearance: 6'1'', blonde haired and blue eyed and ripped. Also heavily scarred with a few scattered tattoos.


Abilities:
He speaks fluent Mandarin, Russian, and probably other East-Asian or East-European languages. He's a dead shot with low-tech projectile weapons and incredibly fast and skilled in combat. He's done pretty much nothing in the last five years but fight, and has the speed, instincts, and skills to show for it.

Inventory:
Red sweater, jeans, work boots, underclothes, leather jacket. His father's book of names, and a double-barreled syringe full of a drug called Vertigo.

Suite:
Wood, three floors. He's used to a certain affluence from the majority of his life, but the Wood sector and its housing would be similar to the island where he ended up after the sinking of the Queen's Gambit.

In-Character Samples:
Third Person:
His name is Oliver Queen.

It's a mantra that repeats in his head in the dark.

His name is Oliver Queen, he was born May sixteenth, 1985, he's the son of Moira and Robert Queen, is Thea Queen's brother, and he's alive.

The content changes from recital to recital.

His name is Oliver Queen, and when he was nineteen he crashed his father's car through the gates of the estate on his way home from a party. His name is Oliver Queen, and the first thing he killed was a dog, by mistake, in another car at another time, and he cried when he was alone with his mother and there was no reason to pretend he didn't want to. His name is Oliver Queen, and he's alive.

In the quiet at night while he listens for strangers, he repeats it to himself, over and over again. Promises to the dead and the living, lists of things he misses or he doesn't or he wishes he did. Every so often he pauses to be sure a passing rustle is an animal or the wind, but he always comes back to it, and it always ends the same way.

My name is Oliver Queen, and I'm alive.

On days like this, when the wind is light and he can see the iron sky between the clouds, he goes to visit the place where he buried his father. There are other small memorials there. One for Sarah. One for the crew of the Queen's Gambit, whose names he never bothered knowing.

His name is Oliver Queen. Sometimes he says it aloud to remind himself what voices sound like, so he won't be startled when he has company again. Company. It's such a civilized word for human beings.

He says it when he's drilling.

My name is Oliver Queen.

When he's hunting.

My name is Oliver Queen, and I am Robert Queen's son.

When he's cooking, when he's cleaning, when he's stitching up his clothes with fishbone needles and plant fibers.

My name is Oliver Queen, and I am going back to Starling City.

My name is Oliver Queen, and I am going to kill you all.

It's a promise and a prayer, and while the days wear into months, it's what holds him together in solitude.

His name is Oliver Queen, and he's alive.


Network:
[He doesn't have to do much to put on his playboy mask for this - he looks as haggard as he feels, eyes sunken and skin that particular kind of sallow that indicates a person is either going to pass out or throw up. The cocky grin he flashes the screen comes naturally, even if his mind is running five different directions. Mckenna, Diggle, the Count, the Bratva, the possibility of Thea's trial. A pause as he gathers himself, and he makes a show of that for the benefit of the act.] I have never actually partied myself into another universe before. First time for everything I guess.

[He throws a two-fingered salute and has to pause as the world follows his fingers into a tailspin.] Oliver Queen. I'm sure there are all kinds of questions I should be asking, but right now I have only one: where can I find some advil and a nice, greasy breakfast.