I have deliberated over this since I saw you post this interest check originally, because I'm someone who's Very Passionate™, but also Deeply Ashamed™ (just in general). But you were exceptionally brave and fought through your anxiety to post this, so heck it. I'm gonna be a little brave and respond to it.
So if you know me at all, or have caught wind of my wretched stink on the RP breeze, you probably know that I don't shut up about Mindcrime and I drag around this stupid little anarchist twink boy, Nikki, around every site I RP on like a disease. Mindcrime has just under an hour of content to it
we're not talking about you, Mindcrime II, go back to your room, so there's not enough canon to write its characters
as 'canons' on most panfandoms, but it's also niche enough (as in, I think I have met one person in the community so far who'd heard of it before my Mindcrime Awareness Crusade™ - that level of niche) that most people wouldn't have any idea that I'm passing off what is technically a canon character who's 75% headcanon as an OC, assuming I knew how to shut up about my
special-est special interest. The character(s) I want played most are to match with this technically-canon, and are themselves technically-canon characters with enough headcanon to basically make them OCs. I feel like that's important to preface this with, since I can easily see that being a deal-breaker and would not blame you in the slightest if it was. No, listening to the 1988 heavy metal album Operation: Mindcrime is not necessary to fill my
hopes and dreams want ad. The plot can be summarized in three paragraphs on Wikipedia, and I can tell you aaaaaaaaaaaall about it, in great length, if you don't want to listen to the original, which might not be up your alley music-wise.
The second probably deal-breaker is that I like pretty toxic dynamics – romantic or otherwise – and this
definitely qualifies, so if you don't want to write some toxic mutual pining, that is also very understandable and you need not read any further. If you do intend to read further, gonna throw a warning out there for mentions of drug abuse, sexual abuse, and some good ol' fashioned manipulation.
So Nikki's got two people that are critical to his backstory, and while neither is necessary for me to play him on a site, they definitely make it a lot more fun. The very quick rundown is that Nikki was recruited by Character of Interest A, a demagogue going by the name Doctor X, as a hitman in his underground revolutionary group; through this work, Nikki came to know Character of Interest B, Sister Mary, a nun that Nikki gets the doki-doki's for and helps him realize that him murdering people for a living is... very bad, actually! For him, if no one else. Nikki tries to bail on X's group, Mary ends up dead because of Nikki's actions, and everything goes so catastrophically wrong that Nikki ends up in a psyche ward for the next two decades. Depending on the site, I either play Nikki: a) before Mary's death (which would be necessary*, should there be an interest in playing Mary) while he's still loyal to X and the revolution; b) in a slight AU where Nikki goes on the run from the law after Mary's death/bailing the revolution, rather than ending up in the ward; or c) three years into the ward stay, under the assumption that something goes wrong at said ward and Nikki is somehow able to escape.
CHARACTER OF INTEREST A, DOCTOR X is admittedly the one I'm far more interested in, partly because I'm down bad I think the dynamic between the two is more fun, but mostly because I've never successfully been able to RP these two without writing them both myself. I've had some wonderful friends write some wonderful apps for this stinky man, but it never got any further than that, and I'd very much like to see what the RP is like!
About the character, there's definitely some wiggle room, but I find as time goes on that sometimes I give too much wiggle room for plots (not wanting to stifle the other person's ideas), to the point where what originally made me excited for the plot is no longer present, so I'm just gonna. Gonna dump what I've got that I think is core. X is a dubiously British man about 15 years Nikki's senior who runs a revolution that kills political enemies to 'fix America' ('dubiously British' because they never explain why he has that accent, but he does! Have that accent!); when X sees that Mary's influence is making Nikki question the nature of their work, X orders that Nikki have her killed, and then openly mocks Nikki for thinking he can just walk away from the revolution when the latter tries to bail; this is canon, and personality/motivation beyond that is speculation. But speculate I shall! I envision X as a very intelligent, charming, and sympathetic man, who at one time probably wanted genuine change through honest means – but by the time that Nikki would have known him, these laudable traits have made him into a master manipulator capable of wrapping anyone and everyone around his finger. Ideally, X would be played as someone incredibly vengeful, running a bloody campaign against injustice not because he actually has any faith that it can make change, but to do as much damage to a system that's failed him and many others before he and everyone else inevitably gets crushed in its maw. “I am incapable of stopping or escaping you,” he thinks, “but I will go out with teeth, and you will forever bear my scars.” In this goal to burn everything down with him, X has acknowledged that innocents will also be drawn into the line of fire, and for a long time, he has convinced himself that he is beyond caring about whatever bystander victims he might make; necessary sacrifices for his necessary evils. Unfortunately, he's angry, not heartless! In the process of recruiting a bunch of people who have been wronged by the world, even though he tells himself they're little more than pawns, he regrettably actually starts caring about them. (This is the no-win scenario, you see. All that ties him to the people he's begrudgingly learned to love is a revolution doomed to die, ruining everyone it touches. To do right by them is to let them go – but by the time they come to him, and by the time they've made it into his heart, 'letting go' isn't possible.)
Plots with this character, hoo boy. C: So how I typically like to envision these two is a little something like this: X hires Nikki as his hitman, and Nikki is the first revolutionist to worm his way into X's heart, as mentioned above. X manipulates Nikki in a variety of ways, but the main two are: a) physically, by controlling Nikki's access to the drug he's addicted to; and b) emotionally, largely through love-bombing (as a neglected child, if you tell Nikki you believe in him, he will die for you, and X goes WAY beyond that). As a result of these and the sentence before, we have two characters who are very different that grow very attached to one another. X starts to view Nikki in a very familial, 'this is my son, only I get to hurt him' sort of way, and Nikki falls for anyone who's nice to him, so he's over here daydreaming of frolicking together through the blood of their enemies will hand-holding and kissing or whatever. X does not want to feel familial toward Nikki; does not want to feel anything for Nikki; but again, it's a matter of 'by the time I've realized, I'm in too deep'. Meanwhile, Nikki is so busy putting X on a pedestal that, like, well, yeah, that's gonna fall apart eventually. X starts trying to back off a bit to put some healthy distance between the two, and during this time, Nikki gets to know/starts to fall for Mary, who takes one look at the way X is treating Nikki and goes, “Uuuuuuuh, honey, you realize he's only telling you nice things because it's literally keeping the blood off his hands and on yours,” and after many months of this, Nikki realizes, “HECK. YOU USED ME. FOR LAND DEVELOPMENT.” Cue the overly dramatic fallout where Nikki feels X has betrayed him in the ultimate way (turning him into a murderer, taking away his independence, killing the only person in Nikki's life who loved him in a genuine/no-strings-attached way, I could go on) and X feels Nikki has betrayed him in the ultimate way ('we were supposed to go down with this sinking ship TOGETHER, you literally swore your LIFE to me, you're the closest thing I have to a family left and you threw that away')... and then Nikki gets arrested, or at least has to go into hiding for the rest of his life to avoid it. This is the preamble. My gosh.
So in the present day, AKA when the RP would actually take place, the idea is that it would either be a first meeting several years after their final confrontation, or not very long after their first meeting/in the beginning stages of coming to terms that the other guy's back in town and now they have to deal with this. Nikki's spent the last however many years blaming every bad thing that ever happened in his life, right down to being born on X, and he's convinced himself that he wants Mr. Electric to send X to the principal's office and have him hecking killed... but when it comes down to actually doing the dirty deed (done dirt cheap...), Nikki is unable to confront the fact that there's still a very large part of him who views X as this untouchable paragon, a part who even now cannot help but love X hopelessly, so the closest he gets to his revenge is putting a gun under X's chin and then breaking down and bawling about 'why couldn't you have just loved me right'. Meanwhile, X is having his own conflict of interests between 'part of me still wants to see you grow up happy and well' and 'you abandoned me when you promised you wouldn't, and for that, you deserve to suffer (and who better to make you suffer than the person who knows your weaknesses best? ouo Three guesses as to who -)'. Depending on what tickles your fancy, there are a couple avenues (that are not mutually exclusive) this could go down. My guilty pleasure idea, which is incredibly cursed, is that X realizes he can guarantee Nikki won't kill him by taking advantage of Nikki's lingering romantic feelings, and they enter into the worst hateship of all time, where Nikki hates himself for enjoying it and X is incredibly squicked by his own choice in partner (but better squicked than dead!). If the revolution angle still sounds interesting, the revolution need not have ended in the time they've been apart! X has ways of roping Nikki back in to do his killing/bidding, rhetoric like 'if you don't see this through, all those people LITERALLY died for nothing, sunk cost fallacy, idiot!!!' and literally mind control among them. Maybe these years apart have made X realize that maybe... the rest of his life isn't some over-dramatic 'going out in a blaze of glory' trope, that the best way to spite the US government is to live well despite it, and he's actually back in town to try to do right by the guy whose life he undeniably ruined. Okay, admittedly that last one is a little too vanilla sounding for me, but it would be a fun AU! Or it could be fun to have that be the original stated intent, but then, while they try to rebuild a normal relationship outside of Literally Killing People, they fall back into old habits and everything is ruined once again? My favorite thing about these two is brainstorming anything from the sweetest, tooth-rotting ideas to the worst 'ripping into you, tearing your identity apart' ideas, so while I'm most interested in these two destroying each other in site canon, doing AUs of all kinds is also something I'd be very, very down for. Get yourself a duo who can do it all.
Impossibly, I have more I could say (I have a whole backstory for X, complete with *gasps* a real name, and an explanation of why everyone uses that corny title for him in the revolution), but I will refrain unless further interest is shown. Gotta. Gotta stop somewhere, right? Right? Haha...
Okay, onto the next.
CHARACTER OF INTEREST B, SISTER MARY is the one I'm less excited for between the two, not because I don't love her to bits, but because I've already gotten to explore she and Nikki's dynamic a couple times before, so it's just... not an itch that needs scratched. As badly. But I do always have an interest in her being around, if it is possible within the time frame of the RP (or through shenanigans), and what I dare only dream about is getting to RP with her... and X. At the same time. Nikki & X are my 'I will go down with these two' duo, but I think the potential relationship between Mary and X is really interesting, and the idea of... my gosh... doing the most unbalanced poly between these three makes my neurons ACTIVATE. So basically, she's here as a 'I'd absolutely take a Mary over nothing, but really I'd like her as icing on the X cake'.
About the character, she comes with some trigger warnings of her own (really the whole thing kinda does, reminder to self to go back up and mention those). Canon is that she ran away from home at sixteen, became a prostitute, lived on the streets doing that for an indeterminate amount of time before a priest, Father William, 'saved her from the streets' by taking her to his church and then... doing to her what every other man before him did; when Father William starts working with the revolution, Mary gets wrapped up in it, and is 'offered' to Nikki, who does a little pro-gamer move called Becoming Besties instead of sleeping with her as intended; Mary, who's been manipulated and abused all her life recognizes what Nikki's going through and starts influencing him for the better, and for this, X orders that she be killed (hoping to nip her 'bad influence' in the bud before it's too late, when it is definitely already too late); Nikki goes to kill her, but does a little pro-gamer move called Confessing His Undying Love instead, convinces Mary to run away with him, goes to tell X they're donion rings, and comes back to find her dead in such a way that it is unclear if Nikki did it himself (remember the mind control thing?); this is the canon! A lot more to her than X out the box, but that's mostly because she's not intentionally designed to be a shadow-y enigma. I like to imagine Mary as someone who's not naturally a very soft, kind, or nurturing person (there's a one-off line that describes her eyes as being 'cold as ice'), but she views herself as so inherently 'bad' and 'unlovable' that forcing herself to do as many acts of kindness, all while gritting her teeth through it is the only way to attain personal 'atonement'. She's the sort of person who sees someone doing something stupid and is like, “Who gave you the right to be born???” but then takes a moment to school herself and goes up to help correct the stupid behavior as gently as possible. She gravitates toward Nikki during the revolution – well, first of all, because he's the first person in a long while who doesn't treat her like a slab of meet, but after that, it's a toss-up of “you're so stupid it's exasperating and I want to make sure you don't get yourself killed/have that on my conscious” and “we are both being abused by the people who were supposed to take care of us, and while I am beyond saving, I want to be able to at least see you make it out to the other side alright”. Conversely, Nikki looks at Mary like she's Mother hecking Theresa, the softest bean in the whole universe, doer of no wrong. 'Fell for the facade', type beat, though I don't think of Mary as a 'dishonest' person so much as someone fighting against their nature to be seen as 'good'. I want to imagine that if they'd had more time, Nikki would've gotten wise to her colder nature, but been able to fall in love with that as well as the 'facade'; Mary, I think, did not love Nikki romantically, but loved him very much platonically, and would have tried to make herself love him romantically if they were able to run away together (and would have been forced to fake loving him romantically every day after because the idea of making herself miserable for his happiness is just... it's a given to her at this point). Self-sacrificing up the wazoo. This girl has NO concept of self-worth. It was robbed from her when she was still very young. There is also the fact that Nikki is really stupid and was like, “People who love each other are physical with each other, yes?” and did not compute that maybe expressing his affection for Mary in that particular way was probably a bad idea, given her history, so. Even though these two had a good relationship leading up to her death, it's just as likely that Nikki unknowingly one-two-punched any trust she had in him into smithereens, as the very last thing he did around/to/for her before she died.
Plots with this character, a little trickier because she's... well, depending on when in the timeline the RP takes place, she's. She's dead. When I play Nikki during the revolution, it's usually during a time where he still very much idolizes/fantasizes about X, but has started to develop a baby crush on Mary, and they have already established themselves as besties. I'm not super interested in playing out the slowburn 'strangers-to-friends' that takes place before this, admittedly because most of that time was spent with Nikki shooting up while Mary awkwardly sits in his bedroom wondering why she couldn't have been a nun at a NORMAL church, with a few cute exceptions involving cereal and hijinks in the middle. Playing out a little further into their friendship, where Mary is a little more emboldened to be honest about her scathing opinion of the revolution and especially its leader could be fun. I like to imagine that these two got into some pretty nasty fights about this before Nikki started opening his eyes to the reality of his situation. Otherwise, anything else would have to be relegated to AU threads – what if Nikki hadn't gone back to tell X they were out, and the two just... ran right then and there? Would they have successfully made it away from the revolution without retaliation? What was their life like after? – or shenanigans on a panfandom, assuming the rules are lenient enough to allow for them to be played. Nikki's been mourning Mary for years and years, and then suddenly she pops up one day on Panfandom Island type beat. This is, admittedly, where most of my Nikki/Mary RP experience has been, though, so my main interest for this piggybacks off of already having an X to write with – Mary coming into the picture late while Nikki and X are neck-deep in... whatever hecked up mutual coping mechanism they're subjecting each other to. Mary's like, “I come back, and you've somehow made your life WORSE. Can't a woman die in peace? Get therapy.”
To harken back to the Extremely Loud Incorrect Buzzer poly I mentioned before, I make myself crack up laughing at least once a week imagining “this is Mary's boyfriend, Nikki (they're in love), and that's Nikki's boyfriend, X (there's no word in the English language we'd make stoop to the level of whatever they've got going on), and that's X's mortal enemy, cannot-be-in-the-same-room-without-threat-of-fire foe, Mary”, but I acknowledge this is a fever dream that will probably only be relegated to some crack fic I write while having a breakdown at five AM on a Wednesday morning. (But hey, in the crackfic, X and Mary can realize they have more in common than they want to admit, and as soon as X makes it clear he's not treating Nikki like a dumpster fire anymore/stops projecting onto Mary so hard, and Mary... actually, Mary's done nothing wrong in her life, BUT AS SOON AS THAT'S DONE, they can realize that they actually have some chemistry of their own, who'da thunk?)
YIKES, OKAY, SO, UH. Places to RP. I'm currently on Epitaph, which has a similar design philosophy to Panfandoms when it comes to characters originating from different times/places (that is to say, SOMEONE being dead in canon actually makes them an EASIER character to write on Epitaph), and even have some site-specific ideas of how to handle things with at least Nikki and X (as well as another character on site who's involved in the plot and would almost definitely be interested in threading with X). The main issue is that the staff team are either busy or outright away, so I cannot guarantee an app acceptance in a timely manner – though the staff and community are both great, if you have the patience for it. Otherwise, I'm willing to join any site that playing one or both of these plots is possible on, whether it be original (I'm more than happy to RP Pokemon/modern fantasy) or panfandom (I see Arknights in that list, you'd better BELIEVE we'd be RPing Arknights together as well). Heck, I'll make the site, if that's what it takes. Make my RP dream a reality and I'll crank a whole forum out for you to make it happen.
EDIT FROM THE FUTURE, because I just thought of it, but... I wrote all of this under the assumption that I would be writing Nikki. (I do already have him apped on Epitaph, so if that's where you'd like to write, I would prefer to keep my currently accepted character there.) But honestly, I'd be perfectly happy to write as X or Mary if you somehow came away from reading all this and went, "Actually, I'm not here for the love interests, I want that twink (obliterated)." I
do have a preference for writing Nikki - I wouldn't RP him on nearly every site I'm on if I didn't - but I've RPed as X before, and have
apped but gotten no further with Mary as well, so I'm definitely not unwilling. Just. Just throwing that out there. ;u;b
