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PLAYER
NAME: Cass
CONTACT: pm to this account or sifface @ plurk
ARE YOU 18 OR OLDER: y
CHARACTER
NAME: Kate Bishop
CANON: Marvel Comics (616)
AGE: 23
CANON POINT: Civil War II - Choosing Sides #3, just before her friends find her
HISTORY: a wiki
PERSONALITY:
Like Clint Barton, her fellow Hawkeye, Kate Bishop is a "self-made hero." Unlike her teammates and most other superheroes, Kate has no powers and no personal ties to the superhero community. She becomes a superhero on her own initiative: she saw her opportunity when she ran into the Young Avengers and she took it, inviting herself to join and making the most of it. This isn't to say she was without help along the way, from Cassie, from Clint, from sheer luck, but the choice to become and to remain a hero was always her own, without the pressure of legacy or the great responsibility of powers to motivate it.
Her training started off as a way to deal with trauma, to try to rebuild a sense of control for herself after she was attacked. Therapy helped but so did finding that outlet and a way to shape the experience and use it. Maybe she'd never really feel safe again, but maybe she could prevent others having to go through what she did. She doesn't show it often, but Kate has at times struggled with self-worth, with finding meaning in a life of inherited privilege and personal pain, and so she remains determined to make sure that her life and her actions mean something and are worth something. At first it was helping with her mother's charitable efforts, but being a superhero lets her use more of her skills and take even more direct action, and gives her concrete things to look at-- crimes stopped, criminals jailed, lives saved-- and know she's making a difference in people's lives in a way that just throwing money around couldn't.
While her motivations are largely altruistic, it doesn't hurt that being a superhero is generally pretty great. The Young Avengers and Clint Barton aren't just Kate's teammates/partners/mentors, they're her best friends, and working together, having adventures, the exhilaration of taking down bad guys: she loves it. Doing good by doing something she's great at is pretty awesome.
But it's not all fun and games, obviously. Kate and her teammates have been through some rough times, and to say that being a superhero is amazing isn't to say that she's oblivious to or completely ignoring the dangers of it. She was deeply affected by the deaths of Cassie Lang and the Vision, enough that she for a time quit being Hawkeye and let the Young Avengers disband. Cassie was her best friend and Kate felt more than a little guilt for not being able to stop her death. That guilt and fear for the safety of her other teammates led her to give up superheroing for a time, until the opportunities to do good again outweighed her doubts.
When it comes down to it, Kate takes being a superhero very seriously. She has to be serious about it to have gotten where she is, because as someone without powers, keeping her skills up to a level where she can hold her own at all with friends and foes requires an immense amount of effort and dedication. And even with those skills, there have been plenty of obstacles along the way. As a young woman with no powers in a world dominated by adult men with them, she's gotten at least as much discouragement as support, especially early on.
It never slows her down for long. When Captain America orders the YA to disband, Kate makes sure they continue by finding a new HQ and new uniforms and convincing the others to join her in keeping up their efforts. When Hawkeye takes his bow from her, she sneaks into Avengers Mansion to steal it back. She's never afraid to tell Clint exactly what she thinks of his behavior, and she is ultimately unwilling to let him drag her along on what she sees as a downward spiral. She looks up to Clint and his fellow Avengers and appreciates their training and guidance when it's offered but she doesn't let that prevent her from contradicting them when she believes they're wrong.
Since being a superhero makes her essentially a vigilante in many ways, obviously her respect for authority is sometimes shaky and subordinate to doing what's right. Her view of the world isn't strictly black and white, but she does believe in a heroes vs. villains/good vs. evil dichotomy for the most part, viewing herself as a hero firmly on the side of right and justice and having no qualms about violently taking down those viewed as bad guys (she does balk at killing them, but seems perfectly fine with some serious [and rather grim] maiming). But she's also willing to forgive and give second chances to people like Noh-Varr and Loki who have been antagonists in the past. She's not going to completely ignore past offenses (she never quite trusts Loki, whereas Noh-Varr having been mind-controlled when they fought grants him easier integration into the team), but she's sympathetic to people trying to turn their lives around if she believes they're genuine about the effort. In the end, whatever a person's history, she will always make her own assessments and decisions based on what she sees, rather than relying on reputation.
Her world-view can sound naive, but Kate's not, really. She knows that the world is complicated, that even "good" organizations can be dangerous (see, her conflict with Clint and SHIELD about how to handle Project Communion), that bad shit can lurk close to home (see, her father's involvement with Madame Masque), and that good intentions can have disastrous consequences (see, literally anything Billy Kaplan has ever done). At her canon point, Clint has just been arrested and put on trial for assassinating Bruce Banner in cold blood because of his potential to become the Hulk again in the future. She trusts Clint, knows he's a good guy, believes he must've had a good reason, but at the same time...what he did seems terrible, and Kate is struggling with what it means: for him, for her, for their future as teammates. As his protege and partner she's under a lot of public scrutiny and media attention, and everyone seems to've already decided on the role she should play in this unfolding drama. She may hate that more than any other aspect of the situation--very few things are more important to her than being in control of her own destiny.
This sort of independence and reliance on her own judgment also makes her bold. Throughout her canon appearances, she's shown striking out on her own, making brave and decisive choices - to join the Young Avengers, to work with Clint Barton, to move to California, to take off with her friends across galaxies and universes. She adapts well and quickly to new situations and environments, and despite her young age has already seen more of the world(s) than most people ever will. It makes it easier to roll with the punches thrown at her and figure out how to make her way.
She's pretty good at that, too. She's clear-headed and possessed of common sense, even in the face of danger. She's good at keeping her head in battle even when things go wrong and with foes that have troubled the adult Avengers, as seen when she assists in taking on Kang the Conqueror only hours after first inviting herself to join the Young Avengers, saves Clint from thieving circus goons, or fends off an alien attack minutes after waking up in a one night stand's spaceship bedroom. In a tight spot Kate can be relied on to keep her cool and her sense of humor, often improvising successfully and keeping up the banter while she does it.
Her teammates call her "the sensible one" and "the adult one" and from the day she joined the Young Avengers she took on an unofficial leadership role. She's pretty good at it, juggling expectations and plans and the personalities of her teammates. She's good at being a supportive ear, capable of commiserating and encouraging and gently advising, but she's equally capable of sarcasm and snark (and terrible dad joke puns). Sometimes her brand of straight-shooting tough love is what a person needs, but tact hasn't always been her strongest suit and she carries on the Hawkeye tradition of occasionally shoving her foot firmly into her mouth.
She usually is fairly sensible and realistic, but can occasionally underestimate the difficulty of situations and get caught up in the excitement. And she's never as concerned about herself as she is about others, showing a serious reckless streak when left to her own devices, and a tendency to try to compensate for being out of her depth with creativity and bravado. She's capable of making plans, but more often than not ends up winging it, even against terrible odds. As good as she is at helping people, she's not keen on having to ask for help herself even when she knows she should. It's part pride, part lingering control issues, part trying to live up to the career she's chosen and the Avengers legacy she's linked herself to. Her eagerness to prove herself, both to herself and to others, makes her sometimes take unnecessary risks with her own life.
And overall things have more or less worked out for her, which can only exacerbate that habit. She is, as Clint says, "about nine years old and spoiled rotten." He's joking, but for all her good sense, skill, and leadership ability Kate is still young and has grown up in immense privilege. She can be extremely stubborn, determined to get her own way, to prove she can stand on her own. Her insistence on becoming a hero despite the risks, which are even greater for baseline-human her than for most of her companions, is brave and selfless but also the sort of risk-taking that's supported by the arrogance of youth. "I have no powers and not nearly enough training," she says at one point, "but I'm doing this anyway. Being a super hero is amazing." It's not that she doesn't believe in her own mortality, it's just that it doesn't ever really feel like an immediate concern.
Because whether it's fun or harrowing at any given moment, at the end of the day Kate became a hero to keep other people safe, and that goal is of paramount importance to her. More than rules, more than relationships, more than her own life. Despite all manner of setbacks and dangers, all the opportunities to walk away, it's that goal that keeps her returning to being Hawkeye again and again, and probably will until the day she dies.
POWERS: Kate possesses no superhuman powers or abilities. She is a baseline human, limited to the peak athletic capacity of a young woman her size (not very big). But she's also a baseline human from Marvel Comics, which means she possesses skills that we here in the real world would still call unlikely or even impossible.
Marksmanship: She has exceptional hand-eye coordination, reflexes, and aim, which makes her the most gifted marksman that Clint Barton has ever seen - and he's seen them all. Her combination of raw talent and lifelong training mean she can perform feats that seem ridiculous, like firing five arrows at once and hitting five different targets, or shooting from a moving vehicle, or upside-down, or at an absurd distance. She is best and most comfortable with a bow of some sort, but her skills translate to other ranged weapons.
Arrowsmith: She's also skilled with trick arrows that deliver payloads like acid or putty or boomerangs, just to mix things up. She's been taught how to fashion her own, given the right materials.
Close quarters combat: She's a highly skilled fencer and martial artist, able to hold her own against multiple larger opponents. She's studied several types of martial arts, including jiu-jitsu and boxing.
Reflexes/Coordination: Kate has extraordinary coordination, allowing her to pick things up more quickly than normal. So quickly, in fact, that it's been suggested in canon that she possesses a Taskmaster-like ability to replicate any physical feat she sees performed ("photographic reflexes"). That's really just an analogy; unlike Taskmaster she can't really just see a thing once and instantly repeat it perfectly. It's just a shorthand way of saying that while there's still practice and hard work that goes into it, she learns very, very fast compared to other people, even in her own world.
Agility: She has sufficient gymnastic and climbing ability to scale buildings and leap around rooftops, and could totally teach a yoga class.
Vehicles: Kate is canonically a great driver and experienced with vehicles ranging from classic muscle cars to Vespas. She's even flown a spaceship a few times.
Random Rich Girl Skills: She has several years of equestrian training, speaks conversational French and Mandarin, plays a mean cello, has excellent fashion sense, has traveled, knows which fork is which, can dance a little bit and schmooze her way through a fancy party, and is good at the classic socialite skill of swanning into a place like she owns it, projecting an air of entitlement, and refusing to take no for an answer.
Academics: Up through high school she received the best education money can buy, and totally rocked her AP exams. But she also dropped out of college after a semester to focus on super-heroing, and isn't any sort of super-genius or techie inventor-type or anything. She is, however, a huge nerd about the history of New York City.
SAMPLES
1ST PERSON: a network thread
3rd PERSON: a (familiar) log thread
MISC
PLANS: I love history, I love time travel, I love characters having to go undercover in different time periods, so this is basically like my dream game premise. I also love war-time games--I love the crucible-like conditions they can create and the unlikely bonds characters can develop in them, I love the stress and the strain they put characters under, and I love the moral dilemmas they force characters into. I think superhero ethics bumping up against the realities of war will be a lot of fun to play with, seeing how Kate's refusal to kill and insistence that there are always alternatives will stand up under these conditions, and what happens if (when) that's brought to a breaking point. And also adventures and heroics!!
CHARACTER @ID SUGGESTIONS: @hawkeye
HOW DID YOUR CHARACTER JOIN COST? I'd like to say that Kate was approached openly and the situation was explained and they answered her questions about how time travel is a terrible idea and eventually she was convinced and agreed, if it's cool to assume they have at least one agent with the patience to put up with her wary skepticism and relentless probing. I think the moment she's coming from is one in which she's particularly susceptible to COST's argument about how terrible the Regency and the bloodline traitor stuff is (it doesn't need to be her own great great great grandchildren even, just the concept in general sucks), and in which she's eager to get away from everything and everyone that knows her so she can just do her own thing and make her own way. So she'll still be wary and on the lookout for signs that she's being scammed and used, but I think I can reasonably handwave that she signed up willingly.
NAME: Cass
CONTACT: pm to this account or sifface @ plurk
ARE YOU 18 OR OLDER: y
CHARACTER
NAME: Kate Bishop
CANON: Marvel Comics (616)
AGE: 23
CANON POINT: Civil War II - Choosing Sides #3, just before her friends find her
HISTORY: a wiki
PERSONALITY:
Like Clint Barton, her fellow Hawkeye, Kate Bishop is a "self-made hero." Unlike her teammates and most other superheroes, Kate has no powers and no personal ties to the superhero community. She becomes a superhero on her own initiative: she saw her opportunity when she ran into the Young Avengers and she took it, inviting herself to join and making the most of it. This isn't to say she was without help along the way, from Cassie, from Clint, from sheer luck, but the choice to become and to remain a hero was always her own, without the pressure of legacy or the great responsibility of powers to motivate it.
Her training started off as a way to deal with trauma, to try to rebuild a sense of control for herself after she was attacked. Therapy helped but so did finding that outlet and a way to shape the experience and use it. Maybe she'd never really feel safe again, but maybe she could prevent others having to go through what she did. She doesn't show it often, but Kate has at times struggled with self-worth, with finding meaning in a life of inherited privilege and personal pain, and so she remains determined to make sure that her life and her actions mean something and are worth something. At first it was helping with her mother's charitable efforts, but being a superhero lets her use more of her skills and take even more direct action, and gives her concrete things to look at-- crimes stopped, criminals jailed, lives saved-- and know she's making a difference in people's lives in a way that just throwing money around couldn't.
While her motivations are largely altruistic, it doesn't hurt that being a superhero is generally pretty great. The Young Avengers and Clint Barton aren't just Kate's teammates/partners/mentors, they're her best friends, and working together, having adventures, the exhilaration of taking down bad guys: she loves it. Doing good by doing something she's great at is pretty awesome.
But it's not all fun and games, obviously. Kate and her teammates have been through some rough times, and to say that being a superhero is amazing isn't to say that she's oblivious to or completely ignoring the dangers of it. She was deeply affected by the deaths of Cassie Lang and the Vision, enough that she for a time quit being Hawkeye and let the Young Avengers disband. Cassie was her best friend and Kate felt more than a little guilt for not being able to stop her death. That guilt and fear for the safety of her other teammates led her to give up superheroing for a time, until the opportunities to do good again outweighed her doubts.
When it comes down to it, Kate takes being a superhero very seriously. She has to be serious about it to have gotten where she is, because as someone without powers, keeping her skills up to a level where she can hold her own at all with friends and foes requires an immense amount of effort and dedication. And even with those skills, there have been plenty of obstacles along the way. As a young woman with no powers in a world dominated by adult men with them, she's gotten at least as much discouragement as support, especially early on.
It never slows her down for long. When Captain America orders the YA to disband, Kate makes sure they continue by finding a new HQ and new uniforms and convincing the others to join her in keeping up their efforts. When Hawkeye takes his bow from her, she sneaks into Avengers Mansion to steal it back. She's never afraid to tell Clint exactly what she thinks of his behavior, and she is ultimately unwilling to let him drag her along on what she sees as a downward spiral. She looks up to Clint and his fellow Avengers and appreciates their training and guidance when it's offered but she doesn't let that prevent her from contradicting them when she believes they're wrong.
Since being a superhero makes her essentially a vigilante in many ways, obviously her respect for authority is sometimes shaky and subordinate to doing what's right. Her view of the world isn't strictly black and white, but she does believe in a heroes vs. villains/good vs. evil dichotomy for the most part, viewing herself as a hero firmly on the side of right and justice and having no qualms about violently taking down those viewed as bad guys (she does balk at killing them, but seems perfectly fine with some serious [and rather grim] maiming). But she's also willing to forgive and give second chances to people like Noh-Varr and Loki who have been antagonists in the past. She's not going to completely ignore past offenses (she never quite trusts Loki, whereas Noh-Varr having been mind-controlled when they fought grants him easier integration into the team), but she's sympathetic to people trying to turn their lives around if she believes they're genuine about the effort. In the end, whatever a person's history, she will always make her own assessments and decisions based on what she sees, rather than relying on reputation.
Her world-view can sound naive, but Kate's not, really. She knows that the world is complicated, that even "good" organizations can be dangerous (see, her conflict with Clint and SHIELD about how to handle Project Communion), that bad shit can lurk close to home (see, her father's involvement with Madame Masque), and that good intentions can have disastrous consequences (see, literally anything Billy Kaplan has ever done). At her canon point, Clint has just been arrested and put on trial for assassinating Bruce Banner in cold blood because of his potential to become the Hulk again in the future. She trusts Clint, knows he's a good guy, believes he must've had a good reason, but at the same time...what he did seems terrible, and Kate is struggling with what it means: for him, for her, for their future as teammates. As his protege and partner she's under a lot of public scrutiny and media attention, and everyone seems to've already decided on the role she should play in this unfolding drama. She may hate that more than any other aspect of the situation--very few things are more important to her than being in control of her own destiny.
This sort of independence and reliance on her own judgment also makes her bold. Throughout her canon appearances, she's shown striking out on her own, making brave and decisive choices - to join the Young Avengers, to work with Clint Barton, to move to California, to take off with her friends across galaxies and universes. She adapts well and quickly to new situations and environments, and despite her young age has already seen more of the world(s) than most people ever will. It makes it easier to roll with the punches thrown at her and figure out how to make her way.
She's pretty good at that, too. She's clear-headed and possessed of common sense, even in the face of danger. She's good at keeping her head in battle even when things go wrong and with foes that have troubled the adult Avengers, as seen when she assists in taking on Kang the Conqueror only hours after first inviting herself to join the Young Avengers, saves Clint from thieving circus goons, or fends off an alien attack minutes after waking up in a one night stand's spaceship bedroom. In a tight spot Kate can be relied on to keep her cool and her sense of humor, often improvising successfully and keeping up the banter while she does it.
Her teammates call her "the sensible one" and "the adult one" and from the day she joined the Young Avengers she took on an unofficial leadership role. She's pretty good at it, juggling expectations and plans and the personalities of her teammates. She's good at being a supportive ear, capable of commiserating and encouraging and gently advising, but she's equally capable of sarcasm and snark (and terrible dad joke puns). Sometimes her brand of straight-shooting tough love is what a person needs, but tact hasn't always been her strongest suit and she carries on the Hawkeye tradition of occasionally shoving her foot firmly into her mouth.
She usually is fairly sensible and realistic, but can occasionally underestimate the difficulty of situations and get caught up in the excitement. And she's never as concerned about herself as she is about others, showing a serious reckless streak when left to her own devices, and a tendency to try to compensate for being out of her depth with creativity and bravado. She's capable of making plans, but more often than not ends up winging it, even against terrible odds. As good as she is at helping people, she's not keen on having to ask for help herself even when she knows she should. It's part pride, part lingering control issues, part trying to live up to the career she's chosen and the Avengers legacy she's linked herself to. Her eagerness to prove herself, both to herself and to others, makes her sometimes take unnecessary risks with her own life.
And overall things have more or less worked out for her, which can only exacerbate that habit. She is, as Clint says, "about nine years old and spoiled rotten." He's joking, but for all her good sense, skill, and leadership ability Kate is still young and has grown up in immense privilege. She can be extremely stubborn, determined to get her own way, to prove she can stand on her own. Her insistence on becoming a hero despite the risks, which are even greater for baseline-human her than for most of her companions, is brave and selfless but also the sort of risk-taking that's supported by the arrogance of youth. "I have no powers and not nearly enough training," she says at one point, "but I'm doing this anyway. Being a super hero is amazing." It's not that she doesn't believe in her own mortality, it's just that it doesn't ever really feel like an immediate concern.
Because whether it's fun or harrowing at any given moment, at the end of the day Kate became a hero to keep other people safe, and that goal is of paramount importance to her. More than rules, more than relationships, more than her own life. Despite all manner of setbacks and dangers, all the opportunities to walk away, it's that goal that keeps her returning to being Hawkeye again and again, and probably will until the day she dies.
POWERS: Kate possesses no superhuman powers or abilities. She is a baseline human, limited to the peak athletic capacity of a young woman her size (not very big). But she's also a baseline human from Marvel Comics, which means she possesses skills that we here in the real world would still call unlikely or even impossible.
SAMPLES
1ST PERSON: a network thread
3rd PERSON: a (familiar) log thread
MISC
PLANS: I love history, I love time travel, I love characters having to go undercover in different time periods, so this is basically like my dream game premise. I also love war-time games--I love the crucible-like conditions they can create and the unlikely bonds characters can develop in them, I love the stress and the strain they put characters under, and I love the moral dilemmas they force characters into. I think superhero ethics bumping up against the realities of war will be a lot of fun to play with, seeing how Kate's refusal to kill and insistence that there are always alternatives will stand up under these conditions, and what happens if (when) that's brought to a breaking point. And also adventures and heroics!!
CHARACTER @ID SUGGESTIONS: @hawkeye
HOW DID YOUR CHARACTER JOIN COST? I'd like to say that Kate was approached openly and the situation was explained and they answered her questions about how time travel is a terrible idea and eventually she was convinced and agreed, if it's cool to assume they have at least one agent with the patience to put up with her wary skepticism and relentless probing. I think the moment she's coming from is one in which she's particularly susceptible to COST's argument about how terrible the Regency and the bloodline traitor stuff is (it doesn't need to be her own great great great grandchildren even, just the concept in general sucks), and in which she's eager to get away from everything and everyone that knows her so she can just do her own thing and make her own way. So she'll still be wary and on the lookout for signs that she's being scammed and used, but I think I can reasonably handwave that she signed up willingly.