#the hope-faith-cruelty tightrope | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

diveronarpg · 5 years ago

Photo

Congratulations, CLAUDIA! You’ve been accepted for the role of OTHELLO with a FC change to Chadwick Boseman. Admin Minnie: Claudia. Wow, Claudia. This application won me over. I got extremely excited in a matter of seconds just from your first paragraph alone — just ask the other admins, I can even send you a screenshot of my message: “ok i've read one paragraph and im in luv”. From your clean and precise analysis of his core (”learning that love and terror were not the antithesis of each other but an echo of the hunger that comes with being alive” YOU DID THAT) to the incredibly story you weaved in your para sample... you completely won me over. And so did your Othello. I cannot wait to see your plot points come to life, because I’m positive that you’re going to bring a storm to Verona. Please read over the checklist and send in your blog within 24 hours.

WELCOME TO THE MOB.

OUT OF CHARACTER

Alias | Claudia

Age | 23

Preferred Pronouns | She / Her

Activity Level | 7

Timezone | GMT+11

How did you find the rp? | I’ve known about DiVerona for a while now but it’s been some time since I was active on the rpc scene. Stumbling upon it again after all this time and seeing Othello open feels a little like serendipity.

Current/Past RP Accounts | Here and here.

IN CHARACTER

Character | Othello. And if I could please request a faceclaim change to Chadwick Boseman.

What drew you to this character? |

Othello is a study in dichotomies – a man torn between polar extremes. Between savagery and nobility, brutality and kindness, love and war.

His very existence was borne of a war waged between his mother’s warmth and his father’s cruelty. He grew up in a house that felt more like battlefield than home, learning that love and terror were not the antithesis of each other but an echo of the hunger that comes with being alive. He feels everything: deeply, intensely, like an open wound half-healed; it’s his greatest strength and it will be his ultimate downfall. Odin is a man capable of a vast and terrible rage. There’s brutality sunken deep in his marrow, something black and rotten in his birthright, an ancient violence. He feels it in his blood like a beast that’s slept dormant all these years, lying in wait, watchful, preying on his worst instincts. He hears it singing in his veins, can taste it climbing into his throat, when he sees a guilty man’s blood spilled on fresh dirt. He thinks he sees glimpses of his father in the mirror, sometimes, when his mind is adrift and steeped in shadow. His eyes, soulless and quiet, his knuckles blooming with bruises.

Suffice to say, I love this broken, conflicted, contradiction of a man. There’s nothing more compelling than a tragic hero and the thing about Othello is that he has every inkling in him of someone who could so easily be tipped over the edge into monster. I love that discrepancy, I live for that sliver of doubt, the seduction of l’appel du vide and the terrifying realisation that he has everything in him to slip beyond that edge.

What is a future plot idea you have in mind for the character? |

ONE MORE SUCH VICTORY WOULD UTTERLY UNDO ME | Odin has survived the maelstrom of scandal and ruin that would have meant a fall from grace and high standing, the destruction of all that he has built for himself. And in doing so, he’s lost the only thing he has every truly loved in this life: Delilah. All of the love and devotion and pleas for understanding could not deny the rage and ruthlessness that came with her infidelity. With the heartbreak of knowing the one person he’d let into the deepest parts of his soul, who’d seen him bare and unstripped of all artifice, had betrayed him. He’s burned all their bridges, performed triage to save his reputation and his pride, but what of the love that still sickens him when he thinks of her and how she’s suffering? He has set fire to all traces of her inside his heart but it isn’t so easy to burn her out of his mind or his dreams. These are the places where man has no dominion. And what of the peace he knows he will never find again without her by his side? What of the treacherous slivers of doubt beginning to eat away at him that till now, he has tried to kill and smother with green-eyed reason? He couldn’t possibly be wrong, could he? He couldn’t have abandoned his happiness and his honour with the one woman who has loved him for all his flaws and vices at the turn of a whispered deception?

AM I MY BROTHER’S KEEPER? | Ivan is the closest thing Odin has to family. To blood. Ivan has stood at his side through everything, his left-tenant, his confidante, his greatest source of comfort and familiarity. Call it a blind spot, a weakness, but Ivan has earned his faith and unquestioning trust. It was Ivan who came to him when he first heard of Delilah’s betrayal, and it was Ivan who gave him the strength to do what had to be done. But now he has lost his greatest love, and his brother seems more and more a stranger to him by the day. Ivan has always been smarter, sharper, hungrier, hiscunning forged out of necessity and survival. It is the flicker of doubt, the silhouette of something far more treacherous and unforgivable that stains his dreams like nightshade. He is not a man of halfway, or half-done. Odin absolutely cannot abide the grey area of hesitation. If there is more than speculation to the idea that Ivan has somehow exaggerated, or misconstrued Delilah’s transgression… There’s nothing more dangerous than a man who has nothing left to lose.

WHY ARE YOU FULL OF RAGE? BECAUSE YOU ARE FULL OF GRIEF | Despite his well-crafted attempts at appearing to the contrary, Odin walks a finely wired tightrope between chaos and control. His ego is bruised and battered, and his heart is worn thin with humiliation. He was once a man that wore the hearts of Verona’s people on his sleep. Now, a whisper follows him everywhere he goes. A whisper that becomes a murmur, rising and spilling into a crescendo of rumour and disgrace that hounds him day and night. Odin is quicker to anger, more belligerent and unruly, a humming drum beat of shame and dishonour ringing in his ears every time he turns away and pretends not to hear the outrageous lies they spin. And with his beloved gone, cast out of his heart and soul, there is so little left to keep his worst instincts at bay. All it would take is one bad day. One simple push is all it would take to plunge him down the path into darkness. A push, or a drip of well-timed poison in his ear.

PROMETHEUS’ GAMBIT | Before Odin swore himself to the Capulets, he was a man of the people. A hero. A saviour. Someone who fought to protect those who could not protect themselves, who strove to uphold the law and to push for reform when, at times, it failed to protect Verona’s people. Why, then, would such a noble, virtuous man like Odin Bello, choose to fall in with the mob? Odin is idealistic, but pragmatic. War and injustice have taught him that the law is not enough. Verona runs on blood and money, and if that is what it takes to wield the power and influence in this city necessary to do genuine good, then so be it. Becoming a Captain of the Capulets was an act of necessity, and political savvy. He is a man of his word, and therefore loyal to their cause. But if there ever comes a day when he must choose between the Capulets and the life of an innocent, Odin’s sense of justice may cause him to waver.

Are you comfortable with killing off your character? | Absolutely. Preferably in some manner of tragedy and disaster befitting the very embodiment of tragic irony.

IN DEPTH

In-Character Para Sample:

It is always the same dream.

The same endless plunge into nothingness, a black chasm void of any light or air or sound. It could be sinking, or rising, and Odin wouldn’t know the difference between the sky and the ground. Suffocating. Drowning. Either way, it is a slow, and terrible way to go.

The vice around his neck, coiling tight around his throat, tighter with every breath, crushing any frenzied hope of salvation. He scrabbles wildly at the noose (not a rope but smooth, sleek to the touch, and cold), knuckles paling with desperation as his lungs scream. He fights. But the end is always the same. The hand (when did the noose become so clearly defined? Are those fingers?) clenches around his throat, grinding down against his windpipe with unrelenting pressure. It metastasizes – liquefying with the metallic consistency of blood, or perhaps smoke, as it fills his mouth and his lungs and his chest, pouring into his ribcage and filling every fissure and crevice inside of him.

It tastes like death. It tastes like inevitability.

He drowns like this, suspended in time between shadow and purgatory, for what feels like an eternity. And then either his mind snaps, or the dream does, and he’s released, hurtling into reality with the speed of a sniper bullet.

—

He wakes like a dying man drawing his last, shuddering breath.

In his dream state, his sweat-streaked brow tightens with the anticipation of a brush of warm, soft lips. Ah. But she’s gone now, isn’t she? She is gone and he has carved her out of his chest like a pound of flesh he still holds clutched in his bloodied fist. The proof of her betrayal beating in his palm, visceral and raw as a slaughter.

Odin wakes from sleep every morning like he has survived a death. He moves as if his body is exhausted to find itself alive and begrudges him the audacity of enabling the very breath in his lungs. But years of military regimen has been beaten into him like sandstone worn smooth by a millennia of moon and tide. He drags himself out of bed, dresses, makes his bed squared with perfect angles, shaves, slips his gun out from beneath his pillow and into his holster. The barely risen sun casts everything in a dull tinge of faded indigo like day old bruising. He pads through the house, the hollow echo of his footsteps winding down and down the stairs.

A rap of knuckles upon his door splinters his reverie, his attention snaps to the entryway. Sharp. Alert.

It’s Katarina. She swirls through the door, out of uniform but armed to the teeth, gaze chilled as black ice.

“It’s the rat,” she hisses, eyes flashing like chips of steel in the dark.

The word has an affect akin to an electric shock: he’s awake.

“What did he do now?”

Katarina’s gaze narrows in disdain. “What rats are wont to do: lie and squirm and betray.”

“And what’s the word from Sloane? Rafaella?”

“Dispose and send in the cleaner.” Casual murder, discussed just like that. It’s not even seven in the morning yet, a time when normal, human citizens of Verona could be having their first cup of coffee.

“No use disposing of a rat if we can’t get something out of it first,” Odin deliberates. “Catch him for interrogation.”

Katarina snorts indelicately. “Shouldn’t be too hard, the way he’s been hitting The Dark Lady every night like the world is ending.”

The barest smirk toys at the corner of Odin’s mouth. “Maybe he’s not as stupid as we thought then.”

Those that lie to the Capulet Mob are usually exactly as slow-witted as they appear on the surface. Lying and betraying the Capulets is akin to signing one’s own death sentence in blood.

“Oh, I highly doubt that,” Katarina drawls, the syllables velveteen on her tongue.

“Tonight. Nine o’clock in The Orchid Room. You can handle getting him there on a work night?”

“Can I get a Veronesi police officer to slack and indulge their vices at a glorified whorehouse? Please.”

“Alright, then.” Odin gives a small nod, a subtle seal of approval.

“Well, I have to go see a gentleman about an exterminator.”

There is something to be admired in how efficiently a malvivente can get away with murder. The science and precision it takes to orchestrate a killing floor, a crime scene, a clean-up. In many ways, Cosimo Capulet is a virtuoso of his craft, if homicide could be considered an art.

“Have I mentioned how much I hate disappearing bodies from the precinct? Remind me to recommend that we accept external transfers only from now on.”

Katarina flicks him a smile sharp enough to cut through bone. “Here’s hoping third time’s a charm.”

––

The city is restless with fevered boredom. A sinister hush before a summer storm. Odin is alone on patrol this morning; Bellamy has begged off their shift with some falsified story about an elderly neighbour in crisis. In other words, a convincingly tedious tale to spin to cover the tracks of covert Montague business.

Odin doesn’t pry; there will be a time to play his cards and reveal his hand but today is not the day.

A crackling comes on over the radio, a standard 10-62 from dispatch. When he arrives on scene on the very outskirts of south Verona, it’s to an unsettling quiet. He steps out of the car, hand slipping cool over the grip of his gun. He heads round the back of the building, passing soundlessly down the winding cobblestone path that leads to the back entrance. His second cause for concern comes with his discovery that the door has been left unlocked. A push of the frame sends it swinging open. Odin’s hand flexes instinctively, curling tighter around his gun as he moves, barrel-first, into the house. With a slight exhale through his teeth, he raises his fist and hammers it into the peeling wood.

“Polizia,” he cries out. “Is anyone there?”

No answer.

No signs, even, of a breaking and entering.

He releases his fist, and heads cautiously on into the house. He clears one room after the other, swiftly and methodically, finding no signs of forced entry or illicit trespassing. The only remaining room left to scour is on the upper floor facing northward. Odin steps forward and reaches to open the door.

Of all the things Odin could have anticipated finding here, the rat they’ve have been hunting for over a week wouldn’t have made the list. But here, in the center of the room, sprawled on the floorboards like a tableau vivant, is Luca Salvatore. His nose and upper lip are smeared with quicksilver, and there’s powered gold, faintly gleaming, dusted around his collar. Ambrosia and il sangue di Faerie. An ironic harmony of Montague and Capulet – perhaps the only time the two sides have ever known true balance. How bittersweet, Odin muses as he lowers into a crouch to expect the body, he betrayed the Capulets and yet it is Montague poison that helped to seal his death. The foam gathered at the corner of Salvatore’s blue-tinged lips glimmers in the light, specks of chrome and liquid gold catching the sun seeping in from the window. Someone made damn sure they shoved enough fae blood and ambrosia down this man’s throat that he’d never live to draw another breath.

Odin sighs, a muscle tightening in his jaw as he pulls out his phone to send a message: Our rat’s been poisoned.

“Dispatch, 10-45D. I’ve got a body.”

Whatever secrets this man was harbouring, whatever danger or temptation drove him to fuck the Capulets, dying of borderline madness was a mercy.

Fool them once, they’ll kill you twice.

––

The night spirals on an endless loop at the The Dark Lady, time and space wrapped around a mobius strip of warped deception and illegality. The walls always look like freshly painted blood from the shadows of the lowlit stage. Unlike many of his fellow Capulets and officers – men are all the same, honourable or not, noble or not – Odin has never been seduced by the promise of The Dark Lady and her Sparrows. So long as his wife held his heart, he was hers in mind and body and endless soul.

Now, he is unchained. Adrift. But the thought of another woman, in her place, whispering the words she once whispered in his ear, physically sickens him. And perhaps it’s pathetic that the very idea of being unfaithful to his cheating ex-wife is anathema to him. Foolish, ignorant, blindly loyal Odin. That’s him. Besides, his purpose here tonight lies with business, not pleasure. If anyone knows who would have the most probable cause to poison their little rat, it’ll be the illustrious queen of the Sparrows. Of course, she’s kept him waiting. Her word and will is law within the dark walls of this establishment.

From his vantage point at the bar, he sees everything clearly through the haze of lust and debauchery. Men reduced to their base, animal selves, led by beautiful Sparrows with their fingers wrapped around their wallet. Gambling, prostitution, solicitation – technically, being here at all goes against the premise of his very existence as an officer of the law. The Dark Lady is one of the most profitable businesses on Capulet territory for good reason, however. Even if it weren’t for Odin’s interference, Mona has her hands in the pockets of every high-ranking officer within the police force. Or around their throats, with the numbers of untold secrets she has in her gilded arsenal.

He’s close to calling it a night and returning in the morning to reschedule when the piercing shatter of glass cuts through the music and hushed conversation.

“Jesus fuck, now look what you’ve done.”

A Sparrow, one of Mona’s girls, her long scarlet hair spilling loose down her shoulders, gives a soft yelp as she’s yanked from her position in a patron’s lap. Like the bird of her namesake with a broken wing, she’s tugged by the force of the man gripping at her wrist. Hard enough to bruise by the judgement of the man’s sheer height and build.

“Stupid little bitch,” the man hisses venomously, brushing furiously at his pants and the patch of wetness growing from spilled liquor staining the left leg. His grip on her tightens, the effect immediately visible from the lance of pain that flickers across her face, pointed and urgent.

The world goes very quiet, and very still. Odin tenses, every muscle in his body going rigid.

The walls here are red, the little Sparrow’s hair is red – vermillion, the colour of a sunset on fire, Bordeaux wine – and his vision bleeds red.

Odin moves without conscious thought: one moment he is at the bar, and the next his arm is slamming into the man’s gut, crushing the air from his lungs and forcing him to release the Sparrow out of shock. His hand, formed in a knuckled fist, fingers wrapped around thumb and the ring on his fourth finger that he keeps fucking forgetting to take off (or burn, or throw into the river, or melt down into scrap metal), swings forward in a brutal uppercut. It makes contact with a resounding snap of bone and cartilage, blood spraying forth in vivid, violent streaks of red.

“You crazy fucking bastard,” the man howls, staggering on his feet as his hands fly up to clutch at his face. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“There is one and only one rule in this club.” Odin widens his eyes a fraction. “Are you an idiot, or just in the mood to be skinned alive fully conscious?”

The man’s face twists into a snarling contempt. Naturally, he ignores the question entirely. “I know you,” he says, voice low and lascivious, swaying precariously on his feet. “You’re Odin Bello.”

Odin’s mouth flat lines, unimpressed by the drunken display before him.

“The man whose wife has fucked half the city.”

After, the reports will say that the man was found near dead: 6 broken ribs, dozens of broken, fractured bones, internal bleeding, contusions on his chest, arms and face, comatose.

After, they’ll say that Odin Bello lost his mind.

(Have you seen him? He doesn’t look like someone stable.

His wife was cheating on him for months with every member of his precinct, the poor fool. Who could blame him?

Bello’s insane. He’s completely lost it.

Did you hear the man he attacked is in a coma? Who knows, maybe he deserves it. Maybe he was asking for it.

I feel bad for the wife. Good thing she got out while she still could.)

––

After, Mona finds him in the alleyway with a cigarette dangling from his fingers, his hands and arms soaked in blood to the elbow. He smells like the inside of a slaughterhouse, and ash. She stalks over on stiletto heels sharpened to a knife point and slaps a black dossier against his chest. The Dark Lady’s insignia is debossed, an imprint, a shadow of an elegant swirling sigil.

“This isn’t a favour, Bello. I expect repayment in full, and then some.”

Her hand shoots out to grip him by the chin, manicured fingernails digging into his jawline as she drags his face down towards her eye line.

“You pull that shit in my club again and I’m blacklisting you for life.”

Odin shakes her hand free like her touch is nothing but air and straightens, presses the cigarette back to his lips and lets the smoke coil and spiral from his fingertips. Even the smoke tastes of something raw. Like fresh blood, metallic and veined with rust. There are flecks of it clinging to his cheekbones, splattered across his shirt like an abstract impressionist rendering of violence. The afterimage of it seared into the black and white negative of his silhouette. He looks like an old god, covered in the grime and filth of modernity. A bloodied relic of an ancient religion built on the altar of human sacrifice. He inhales, black smoke swirling in his lungs, the faint glow of eyes like ritual fire as he turns to face her.

“Do you think she knows?”

Bewilderment, then disgust as understanding dawns on Mona’s face. “How the fuck would I know, Bello?”

Odin watches her, unblinking, utterly motionless, his gaze deadened and hollowed like the heart of a black hole. A yawning abyss of unending nothingness with no horizon.

Am I only a monster if she knows what I’ve done?

Extras:

ORIGIN: Standing at 6’5” since he was 18 years old, Odin cuts a striking figure. His presence commands gravitas without him ever having to speak a word: a simple nod, a tilt of the chin. Soldiers fall silent when he speaks, higher-ranking officers defer to his cool judgement and lateral insight. He is a man born for leadership, marked for authority and the steady ascent to power. They say that those who deserve power do not want it, and in Odin’s case, at least to begin with, this is true. He enlisted at 18 to find an escape, a lifeline. A pathway to an existence free of his father and the brutal legacy he’d built for him — the only thing his father had ever given him other than his name. It was of little surprise that being primed and honed for war came easily to him. Odin rose swiftly through the ranks, impressing his superiors with his discipline, resolve and relentless potential. If anything, he was a little too disciplined, a little too resolute. Too intense and dead-eyed even when his fellow recruits were pushed to the brink of physical and mental collapse. Odin never seemed to tire, never seemed to even approach a tangible breaking point. He was utterly in his element: consistently ranking first in all his classes and dominating thr basic training activities with his physical advantages. But he was also charismatic, distinctly likeable, and always willing to help and shoulder someone else’s burden if he saw them struggling. As much as the other recruits would have preferred it, he was impossible to hate. At 24, he was promoted early to Lieutenant and led a squad of nine men who were willing to fight and die at his word. Out there, in the desert, they would have walked open-eyed into a minefield if he had given the order. Five years later, he was honourably discharged with the end of his tour. At least, that’s what his official military transcript says. What the transcript doesn’t say is that Odin Bello was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic insomnia and major depressive disorder following his return. This will do you good, the Lieutenant Colonel had said. You’ve fought this war for long enough but now it’s time for you to go home, to find a little peace for yourself. He returned to the country, battle still burning in his blood and his head full of quiet demons, and immediately left in search of a place that did not feel like a graveyard. So he found, Verona, wartorn, streets red with blood, a monster lurking behind the face of every man, and felt for the first time in a very long time, at home.

HEART: Odin has a great love for animals and small children. When he was young, he would feed what little food he had to the local dogs and strays. They followed him around the streets like a loyal pack of guard dogs and one time even chased off a gang of older children harassing him for non-existent money. Odin was a single child but he often played with the other children in his town and helped to look after the youngest ones when needed. His heart is most visibly softest when he’s around children. To this day, he ensures that a significant portion of his pay – as a law enforcer and Capulet – goes to the local orphanage of Verona. He spends at least one day a week in his time off-duty feeding the stray creatures of Verona – be they beggars, street ruffians or stray dogs.

SOUL: It’s a hypocrisy of the highest order to be an officer of the law, and yet a Capulet. The Capulets are the source of half the rife and warfare in the city, the beating heart of the black market that funnels contraband and weaponry through the illicit networks of the underground. The Capulets liken their legacy to that of Robin Hood, a legendary tale of David defeating Goliath. Now, however, the Capulets are fat and glutted on their gold and wealth. Just as filthy rich and corrupted as the aristocrats they overthrew in the name of liberty and equality. Joining the Capulets was a means to an end for Odin, an opportunity to oversee the inner workings of the Capulet crime family, and to use it for his own quiet purposes. A thief that slipped away with the life savings of a dozen families he swindled could be dealt with in shadow and silence. A rapist plaguing the city with no proof to his accusations but the blood and tears of his victims could be found dead in the morning, his throat slit in retribution. A murderer could be caught, and punishment dealt in a manner befitting his crime, not by the corrupt, unjust systems of the court. It does not sit entirely well with the balance of Odin Bello’s soul, that he works for the Capulets and paints his hands in blood for them. But as long as the good he can do outweighs the evil, then he is willing to stretch his soul a little thinner in the name of what must be done.

HAMARTIA: Odin does not do anything in halves. It’s all or nothing with him. He loved his mother with all his heart, and he hates his father with the very same heart. He has never known a middle ground. The love he knows is a double-edged sword – all-consuming, and therefore, destructive. For Odin, there is no other way to love than to give everything of himself until here is nothing left. Even if it means his ruin. He gave everything to Delilah when he swore himself to her – his heart, his name, his soul, his life. He would have ridden into hell for her and beyond, if she had asked. He would have plucked the moon from the sky and given her the stars to light her smile, if she had asked. At the time of her betrayal, he had believe his rage equal to his love. Burning like wildfire from inside of him until it consumed all the good and warmth he had associated with loving her. Grief, he has since realised, outlasts rage. He placed Delilah on a pedestal and made her his god. Casting her out of Eden meant leaving behind a hollowness nothing else could fill. So he clings to the only other person who has ever worn the shape of love in his life – his comrade-in-arms, his brother, Ivan. Ivan, who has never abandoned him or given him cause for pain or doubt. Ivan, who has always understood his rage and darkness, and stands by him in the light nevertheless.

#accepted #accepted: othello #WHEW WELCOME CLAUDIA YOU DESTROYED ME!!!

8 notes · View notes