the box application

[watchmaker]

Player Information
Player name: Ruthi
Contact: to be ruthless @ aim, ruthnor @ plurk
Are you over 18: y
Characters in The Box Already: none

Character Information
Character Name: Sylar
Canon: Heroes
Canon Point: End of 3x25
Is your character Dead, Undead or Alive: alive.
History: history link

Personality:
Evil takes human form in Sylar. Don't be fooled because he may seem like your typical narcissistic, socially-stunted psychopath, but in reality, he's so much more than that. He's self-entitled, self-absorbed, and unable to see past the end of his own nose as far as other people's problems go. He's an unstable, crazy fuck. A lot of it is the result of his upbringing, and to a degree his ability. Noah Bennet proposed the theory that changing his DNA to the extent that he did (and continues to do so) is corrupting his mind. While it's mostly likely he was just saying that to provoke Sylar, you can't deny that it sounds pretty legit.

And why? Well, he has ridiculously extreme mood swings. He can go from being eerily calm to cheerfully mocking his enemies to throwing a full-blown temper tantrum in the course of five minutes. His temper often gets the best of him-- he'll drop whatever scheme he's plotting to throw a giant hissy fit if he feels he's being thwarted or if his plans aren't going exactly how he wants them. This sort of impairs his ability to be a good actor. He can sustain a role, but the second there's a snag, he drops it. No matter what he does, he seems to face things around him with a dry, sarcastic sense of humor-- unless it happens to be one of the days he's angsting and waxing philosophical.

Sylar has a lot of tendencies that clearly spell out textbook psychopath and narcissist. It's easy to pin-point and explain a lot of his traits this way. He manages to charm people who don't know him at all-- Sandra, for example, at a superficial level, because he knows how to play nice, even if he doesn't always exercise the ability. He's a pathological liar, and will say whatever he thinks will get him what he wants.

A huge part of the way he acts is due to how he was treated in his childhood. His biological father sold him to his uncle, and killed his mother in front of him. He was very young-- no exact age is given, but he was probably four or five-- and even though he repressed the memory, there's some deep mental scarring, shown by the way he kills his victims. It's the same way his father killed his mother, and presumably the rest of the people he killed.

If that wasn't enough, the family he was adopted into wasn't exactly better. His father left presumably not long after he was "adopted", leaving him without a male role model for most of his life. This also explains how he tends to cling to most older male figures who come into his adult life-- e.g., Chandra Suresh.

When his father abandoned them, he was left to be raised by Virginia Gray. A blanket statement of a word for how Virginia seems to treat him would be "overbearing". She isn't satisfied with his accomplishments, and would rather he be doing something more lucrative than "timepiece repair", like accounting. She smothers him, to a degree of emotional abuse. A lot of his eager-to-please personality is a result of Virginia's attitude towards him. One of the driving forces in Sylar's life is a need to be accepted, and that's something he never got from Virginia.

He also has a very skewed sense of self-worth. As in, not only does he think he's the most "special" person to ever walk the planet, he thinks he's entitled to the abilities of other evolved humans. They simply don't deserve their powers, and since he's stronger than most of them, he takes a very drastic survival of the fittest kind of approach and decides they don't deserve to live, either.

In addition to his entitlement issues, he has difficulty accepting responsibility for any of his actions. Instead of accepting responsibility, he makes himself out to be the victim in any given situation. He refuses to accept that any of his misery and misfortune is his own fault. It's always the other person or outside circumstances, and if the anyone disagrees, he demonizes them.

The funny thing about this, and his ability, is that it seems to have some base in empathy. He can connect emotionally with other people to take their abilities, and does in a few rare instances. He feels remorse over what he did-- after his first kill, he feels guilt to the point of trying to commit suicide. In It's Coming, he admits to Elle that he "never wanted to kill any of them." It's hard to say if his actions and motives are a result of personality flaws, or a side effect of his ability. In season three he explains his ability as a "hunger", an insatiable desire for not only abilities, but for pure knowledge. He can see how things work, so he wants to see how everything works. It seems like the groundwork for his downward spiral was always there, but when his ability manifests, it warps and distorts his personality like any addiction would. The fix is the most important to him. He doesn't care who he has to kill or the lengths he has to go through to get it.

Even if he is capable of real, sincere emotions, he tends to act very juvenile and even a little socially stunted. When he does show remorse, the periods are brief and shallow-- if he doesn't get the instant gratification of the other person's love and acceptance, he ditches the attempt and goes back to his old ways. The series finale is the exception to this, but that's only after all Nathan Petrelli's have been jumbled in with his, and it's completely possible that he could backslide out of his "emo apologist" phase after the finale. He doesn't really understand other people until seasons three and four, when he gets clairsentience and empathy as an ability and is more or less forced to by their involuntary nature. The only time he feels that something is wrong or evil is when it's action being taken directly against him. Even when intuitive aptitude gives him the ability to "see how things work", it either doesn't extend people, only mechanical and biological processes, or Sylar just doesn't care enough to push it that far for long amounts of time.


Abilities, Strengths and Weaknesses:
abilities:
Sylar's base ability is intuitive aptitude-- the ability to automatically understand any biological and mechanical processes. He replicates the powers that others have by looking into their brains, then altering his own DNA patterns to match the ones of other specials. This is usually does by … well, de-braining them. However, he can also access the powers of other specials through empathy. (This is a lot harder for him than the other way, probably because he's so selfish and emotionally stunted.) At this point in time, he's acquired telekinesis, rapid cellular regeneration, alchemy, clairsentience, sound manipulation, electric manipulation, lie detection, imprinting, shape shifting, disintegration, and flight.

strengths:
Besides … basically being a giant hoarder, he has a lot of skill in deception and manipulation. he can figure out exactly what to say to get under someone's skin or slowly destroy someone's life, and then he'll say just that.

weaknesses:
What he has in raw power he makes up for in emotional trauma, basically. He's extremely gullible and attention-hungry, making him very easy to manipulate when using the right words. He's insecure, although he tends to hide it by lashing out. his tendency to latch onto things he wants without thinking of the consequences is a pretty big weakness, too.

Samples
Network/Action Spam Sample:
a network post


Prose Log Sample:

Again. It was happening again. Another face greeting him in the mirror, one that wasn't his own. He had everything now. He could be whoever he wanted, could manipulate any situation into his favor. This was supposed to be what victory tasted like. But things were never as they seemed — you'd think he'd know that by now. Especially by now.

Waking up in a body that wasn't his own wasn't what he had signed up for by any stretch of the imagination.

He knew it was a malfunction. He was glitching, like some kind of overworked computer system. It was enough to make him hesitate when it came to his whole power-seeking quest. Maybe he just needed some time to be himself for awhile — or to figure out who that was even supposed to be. He couldn't be the real Sylar anymore, not after signing himself away to Danko. He was supposed to be dead — and he knew Danko wished he actually was, allegiances be damned. He'd always looked at him like something subpar. An animal. A monster. It shouldn't have bothered him, but … well, at his core, he was still mostly human after all.

He shifted back into himself, leaving the appearance of boring nobody Agent Taub behind. Sylar stared into the mirror, feeling at his face to make sure  everything was in place, right where it should be ... but something was off. One of his eyes was still blue. Not a very glaring error, but it mattered to Sylar. When having identity issues (or, really, a meltdown), minute details were everything. No matter how much he tried and focused, it wouldn't  shift back. It was stuck.

In frustration, he slammed his fist against the mirror, not caring about the shards of glass that snaked out out and dug into his palm after the deed was done. His  skin forced the glass out and mended. No traces of any damage, except a few thin smears of blood. He wiped his hand off on his jeans. Breaking the mirror  didn't fix anything, but at least it felt pretty damn cathartic.