Subnautica | Application

[potentite]

IC INFORMATION
NAME: Jake English
AGE: 16
CANON: Homestuck
CANON POINT: Post Final Battle
CANON INFORMATION: This should do!

PERSONALITY:

In many ways, Jake is exactly the kind of sixteen-year-old boy you'd expect him to be. Raised on Hollywood action flicks and romcoms, he dreams of Lara Croft and imagines great adventures around every turn with a romantic subplot or two in tow. He has a healthy appreciate for beautiful women and muscular action men shooting pistols everywhere. In fact, he loves it all so much that he models himself after them and his crazy, gunslinging, biologist, archeologist grandma. He loves practicing with his guns and exploring the ruins on the island. His entire intro discusses how much, in fact, he devotes his time to it. It's his favourite pastime.

Almost.

His real favourite is movies and here's where the issue starts. Jake is a dreamer. Adventure, beautiful people, confidence, bravery, friendship, all that's good and fun in the world exists on the silver screen and Jake lives through it. He states flat-out that he doesn't like the monsters on the island and would rather stay in his room watching things on his computer. In fact, he usually is watching things. Those people are people he believes in more than he believes in himself and so he imagines what it'd be like to be them. Fake it until you make it, right? It's what he tells Caliborn almost word for word. If you believe hard enough, then even fake things become real. And he thinks he's made it from how he acts, flippantly 'solving' problems like some action hero and often treating his friends like supporting actors to the drama of his life rather than real people starring in their own adventures. As the leading man, he even states he doesn't believe thinking is his responsibility in the slightest. That's for the plot to figure out, he says, not him.

The problem is that Jake is smart; in fact he's incredibly smart. He knows he's not brave or a good friend. He knows Jane loves him, he knows how he and Dirk feel about each other and he's aware of Roxy's struggles. His own mind (in the form of Brain Ghost Dirk) tells as exactly that: that he knows all of this and more and just refuses to acknowledge it. A few times, too, Jake states he thinks he always knew something, for example that he isn't brave. He knows everything about them and himself, in fact, with almost perfect clarity.

He knows, therefore, how downright terrified he is of relationships with other people and letting them see his heart. A conversation with Brain Ghost Dirk forces Jake to reveal he would rather not deal with any difficult emotions or situations involving them. Having found and burned the body of the only family he knew at a young age, it's no wonder he'd be deeply reluctant to let anyone in after. He represses and pushes down all his sharp insights to instead be the thickheaded, lovable idiot. Someone people have to care about instead of the person he really is. A mask of confidence and charm serves him well but he knows its fake at the end of the day, even if he hides it from himself. Jake states he forgot the important part of believing is meaning it.

As stated by the perfectly in character version of Dirk he made in his head, he's never believed in anything or anyone, his friends or himself. A hopeless Page of Hope, he sees hope as the ability to truly believe in others. But he never trusted them, couldn't trust them, when he can't see what they would even see in him in the first place, something he openly wonders. When he can't imagine a reason for them to like him, why should he believe a thing they feel or think? Despite his fake it until it's real policy, nothing has become truly real to him.

His self-loathing doesn't surface fully until after his fight with Jane and the subsequent break-up with Dirk but it's always been there. Jake tends to put himself down with 'cute' remarks constantly compared to his friends, acting like he doesn't know anything about machines compared to Dirk despite Dirk's reasonable argument otherwise. And of course, much of his outward personality demonstrates his deeply repressed knowledge of his fears and insecurities. But by the same token, he desperately craves validation and love. If he lacks enough hope to make something real, he also has a painful, agonizingly small hope that he'll be loved and accepted as the useless person he sees himself as. Jake describing the plot of Avatar sounds an awful lot like himself, someone who is finally accepted for who they are.

To Jake, what's truly hard is focusing on something outside of himself. He talks endlessly about himself, trying to justify his actions and thoughts, waiting for someone to catch him and care. There are two incredibly painful conversations with Jane where he admitted later or even before the conversation happened that he knew the truth but continued to talk about himself and his problems, blathering on insensitively. Hearing Jane say she wanted to listen to him, even if she didn't mean it, is enough for him. It's a backwards way of doing it and it doesn't work but he doesn't know how to proper ask for help when he can't even consciously admit any of this.

That said Jake isn't all confidence issues and self-hatred. One thing that becomes more evident through his breakdown is just how much his friends mean to him. Although Jake wonders if he's even capable of emotions like love, it's very clear that he is. What caused his breakdown in the first place is realising his methods of coping finally hurt his friends enough to lose them. Yes, it's selfish as far as realisations go, staying in line with his constant issue with himself, but that realisation allows him to step back from his problems. He starts to care openly about the others in ways that won't force them to even deal with him, like trying to have Roxy tell them his apologies. He cries at the thought of Jane dying and at seeing Terezi, a stranger, being hurt even if he admits it's possible she deserved it. Dirk being hurt triggers his hope powers. It just goes to show how deeply he's always cared about everyone around him and how hard it would have made it on him to accept them when he wasn't ready to.

Despite lacking hope, he can be a bit gullible. It's not that he doesn't know the truth but that he's practicing believing in others and takes it a little far. This is especially apparent with Calibron and Tavrosprite, both of whom flatter him in ways that promote his beliefs about himself. Likewise, though, when Vriska puts him down, he immediately agrees with her. While he wants to believe there's something special and good about him, something that makes him worthwhile, he has trouble actually keeping that thought for very long and it's easily crushed. Believing he was somehow different in a positive way is what led him to ruining his friendships and he's aware enough of that to take a more humble approach now.

On top of being gullible, the real root of the issues comes down to his wishy-washy nature. Since he has always cared about his friends and their feelings, even if he hasn't acted well positively for it, he's also not good at asserting his feelings. It's why he can easily accept what's said about him on a shallow level while also having trouble turning down Jane, even though he says directly to Roxy that Jane's feelings are unrequited. It's also the massive issue between him and Dirk, since Jake could never assert the boundaries he needed. Both Jane and Erisolsprite call him fickle, and he is, but much of it comes from trying to meet the demands of others without disappointing them. When it's about him, his fickle nature asserts itself as talking about his problems rather than getting to the heart of the matter. He talks around everything, good and bad, drifting between the lines but never touching what matters.

The biggest problem that makes it hard for Jake to get better is his outright refusal to think about himself. He states he made a list of traits he decided to have and simply never thought beyond them, at least not consciously. No matter how active his subconscious might be, it couldn't make up for the shallow sense of self he'd developed through this too simple means. Without a strong self, he couldn't assert a self, couldn't have deeper desires and couldn't feel his emotions strongly. He says to Brain Ghost Dirk (in other words, his own mind taking the form of Dirk) that he doesn't want to think any deeper than that. He knows what's there and he's subconsciously and sometimes consciously protecting himself from it. The moment it's acknowledged, that shallow self he's built will crumble.

That all said, he's very brave in traditional ways. He puts himself in front of Jane to take a fatal hit for her and attacks Meenah, under the false impression that she's the Batterwitch. In the former he knew he would die - again we covered that he just really is that smart - and in the latter, he would have lost in a heartbeat if she'd actually been that person. But he still would have tried and often does try to do what's right. Part of it comes from his adventurer spirit but also from a strong sense of what's right and wrong, beliefs he picked up from Hollywood and his Grandma's legacy, something he cherishes more than anything.

He is actually a sensitive boy, too. When he's trying to apologise to Dirk and Jane through Roxy, the moment he hears she's not doing well, he shifts gears to try talking to her about it instead of worrying about his problems. When it comes to others, although he's so shy that he can't talk to anyone else much, he does chat in a friendly way once he has the chance. The shyness just makes it impossible for him to reach out to anyone he doesn't know well. And then there's crying openly multiple times when upset or worried. Now that his thin barriers are down, there's not much to stop him from expressing his less 'manly' or self-centered emotions.

One additional thing to consider is despite all his problems, he honestly is a good person. He believes what his friends tell him no matter how outlandish about their upcoming game and about Dirk and Roxy's lives. It isn't the sort of shallow belief that he hates himself for but something honest for once. Jake wants, very desperately, to believe in his friends and when it comes to themselves, he can. He promises to take Jane's dream warning to heart if she promises him the same. He's even able to express, shy as it might be, that he cares about her as a friend. A few times, too, he tells Dirk what a good friend he is. None of it is lip service but rather his actual feelings shining through.

In the end he really is someone who likes adventure, just as he says himself, adventures he can win. Emotions aren't a winning situation. They're messy and hard and with the kind of intelligence he has about the people around him, he knows exactly how difficult things would be. He chooses not to know but he can't make that choice anymore. Jake is actively trying to get better and ready himself for the greatest adventures he could have: the ones with his friends.


ABILITIES:
- Combat Skills: Jake is an incredible gunslinger, able to fight monsters many times his size with relative ease. His aim is good enough for dead center headshots and his reflexes allow him to hear and sense things around him (when he's not being completely oblivious). He tends to do things with a lot of style like some movie action hero. Somehow these moves actually work for him. Though he's already very good, it's stated he would be even better if he didn't dual wield guns and just shot one instead. His hand-to-hand skills have gotten much better through fighting Brobot, although he's never been able to beat him on the highest difficulty setting.

- Miscellaneous Skills: Considering he raised himself in a monster infested jungle from a young age, he has a decent amount of survival skills relevant to his environment. These include trapping, tracking, fishing, swimming, fire building, weather watching, knowledge of plants and herbs and some animals. He's also a polymath, having an approximate knowledge of a variety of subjects but without much real interest in them outside of adventuring applications. He has skill with mechanics and can build what he needs usually if he has the tools and attention span.

- God Tier Bullshit Abilities: As the Page of Hope, he has the potential for greatness, if it's only been achieved in canon under very specific circumstances. His class is a slow burning class focused on the ability to use hope in battle. In canon we see this as he uses it to create a fake-real Dirk from his mind with all the powers and abilities of the real God Tier Dirk to defend himself. He also uses these hope explosions to summon angels, beat back Jade who was wielding the power of the Green Sun, and even deliver a defeat Caliborn, the big bad. For my sanity and yours, his ability is nerfed down to small hope explosions which do none of the above and that merely use the power to deliver blasts. This will probably still only be when he's feeling emotionally volatile since he has no real control over it at this point.

Like all God Tiers, he has conditional immortality (so long as his death can't be considered heroic or just) and the ability to fly.

INVENTORY:
- (5) Computers
- (1) Phone
- (1) Blanket of sentimental value
- (4) Sets of guns
- (too many) movie posters
- (a few) sets of clothes he thought were snazzy

MEMORY ALTERATION: Honestly Jake just thinks this is what was on the other side of the door. It's not like anyone can prove it's not. So sure why not. Better than death, man.

SAMPLE: Here's a few for the knucklehead