APPLICATION | CURSED

[funhinged]

OOC

Player Name: Dani
Age: 30
Contact: comatoseroses
Other Characters: N/A

IC

Name: Stede Bonnet
Age: mid-40s (unspecified)
Canon: Our Flag Means Death
Canon Point: Episode 8
Background/World Information: The general canon wiki article is here, and a Stede-specific wiki is here!

Personality:

At his core, Stede is a fairly kind and gentle soul. Left to his own devices with no outside factors weighing on him, he'll act with good intentions almost every time. It's rare for him to hold a grudge, to the point of unquestioningly forgiving upwards of two plots to murder him. He's warm and personable, nerdy and well-read, and happy to share experiences, fineries, or quality time with others without hesitation. He operates with an high-energy, flamboyant cheeriness (and occasionally unhinged energy) that people either tend to find infectious or off-putting at first blush. He's highly expressive, animated, and easy to read, even when he himself may have trouble pinning down his own emotional state.

He attaches fairly quickly, usually by his own choice, and is protective of the well-being of his chosen people. He collects secret gossip from the servants of a ship full of partying rich people and puts them on blast-- to the point where the entire ship ends up on fire, in chaos-- pretty much solely because they hurt Ed's feelings. Or later, while he's willing to play polite host to someone he dislikes, he doesn't hesitate to banish him from the ship the moment he does something sincerely harmful. As one may be able to guess, Stede has a penchant for poor impulse control and a taste for Drama™. There's a non-traditional edge to his teeth that he's only just beginning to figure out.

Stede is a pirate captain, very proud of that, and generally poorly matched to the job/extremely inexperienced. He's poor under pressure to the point of often outright panicking, and doesn't cope well with that stress. He looks at piracy through a very idealistic lens that, scratching the surface a bit, marks his desire to start a life at sea as more of a desire to find freedom and general adventure than a fondness for traditional pirate culture.

On the other hand, he's not half-bad as a Team Dad figure with his gentler approach and sincere desire to care for his crew (and later, Ed). He provides physical and creative outlets, he sits out on deck to read them bedtime stories, encourages them to express themselves emotionally and to provide constructive feedback with their complaints. He sincerely coins a "we talk it through as a crew" motto. Which is to say, he has a naturally nurturing vibe a lot of the time. It's sort of like if a kindergarten teacher and a bumbling golden retriever fused into a muppet.

Yet despite his affinity for nurturing, Stede is simultaneously the most oblivious man on the planet, prone to a special brand of self-centered tunnel vision. He makes a point that the crew are welcome to borrow any books that they like, but (coming from a wealthy upbringing) doesn't consider until he's told that they might not be literate. He can be very unaware of his own privilege and isn't very used to needing to take other people's perspectives into account. He may get so pointedly set on one particular desire or outcome that he blindly walks himself and his crew into danger.

Some of this obliviousness stems from the fact that he's impulsive and prone to a lot of "head empty no thoughts" approaches. This is a man who won a duel by getting impaled so hard it broke his opponent's sword. He had secret passageways installed on his ship just for fun. He rolled up to a pirate hotspot in a fashionable all-white ensemble and called it a power play. He is his own chaos agent and sometimes outright reckless about it. His capacity for raw, stubborn enthusiasm and melodrama is truly remarkable. A lot of the time, he's just outright looking to prove himself.

Because right behind kindness as a core motivator for Stede is insecurity and guilt that he's constantly attempting to compensate for. His soft nature, his nurturing, his oddball energy, his sincere passions and interests, all the things that are genuinely him deep down, are things that have always been openly belittled. Even as a child, they put a target on his back among his peers. As kind and sunshiny and down to have a fun time as he is, Stede's self-esteem is low in a way that's wrapped around to being an accepted facet of reality. He doesn't know how to not be himself, so he's resigned to politely weathering that mockery.

He encourages his friends and crew to talk through their feelings, to express their vulnerabilities and difficulties, and tries to create a safe space in which they can explore that, but he never seems to do the same. If someone tells him outright that he's terrible, that he ruins things or a deserves terrible fate, he's not inclined to argue. Deep down, he's ultimately come to believe similarly. There must be something wrong with him, because everyone who's ever met him has all but said so. When he's told to his face late in the first season that he's a monster, a plague, that he "defiles beautiful things," he makes no argument against it. He completely agrees. He's grappling with the weight of his own unresolved and unprocessed issues, as well as his fresher very heavy guilt about the way that he abandoned his wife and children, and the way that he's never been able to conform or passably perform to a strict standard of masculinity in his life.

So basically, he's a kind, well-meaning person with a very cheery demeanor and emotional baggage, prone to making dumb choices and short-sighted mistakes, out there trying his best, coming to terms with the fact that running away from his problems somehow did not disappear them.

Curse:
Stede's curse is going to be a fluctuating effect on his surroundings/things that he directly interacts with. Sort of in a "hand of Midas" ballpark-- only instead of turning things to gold, they just end up ruined. (Because I feel like it would be an interesting way to get to play with his sort of learned belief that there's something wrong with him just by way of existing, the ease with which he agrees that he "defiles" beautiful things and brings them to ruin by proximity alone, etc.)

It's definitely not something I'd ever scale up to the point of like, crumbling architecture around him or opening chasms in the ground. The specific effect would vary depending on what he's interacting with and how strongly the curse is manifesting at the time, but all towards the end result of ruining/harming them. Like picking a flower only for it to shrivel in his hand or leaving a patch of dead grass behind around it; folding the laundry only to somehow leave it smeared with blood; small cracks manifesting in the pavement beneath him; walls yellowing around him; holding someone's arm, but anything from like, bruising to creeping mold spreads out from the place where he's touching them (with player permission), etc.


Sample:
TDM toplevel