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Mun

Name: Anna
Livejournal/Dreamwidth Username: apocryphal
E-mail: wire.bird.cage@gmail.com
AIM/MSN: godtiertits
Current Characters at Luceti: Not Applicable!


Character

Name: Zoosmell Pooplord John Egbert
Fandom: Homestuck
Gender: Male
Age: Thirteen
Time Period: End of Act One.
Wing Color: Cyan
History: Here on Wikia!
Personality: So John in Act One is actually kind of a jerk. This is a feature that stays all throughout the canon, but is most easily noticeable in Act One when basically the entirety of what you have to go by is his pester logs with his friends. He's snippy and a little bit impatient, and doesn't really put up with (namely, Dave's) bullshit. He'll call you on your crap, and if you ramble about stuff that is unimportant (to him or just in general) he'll basically ignore you and move on, if not completely talk over you. Usually he won't do this to a complete stranger, since it's kind of rude, but once he feels comfortable around you, don't expect otherwise (one can assume that he waits until he knows a person to behave this way in order to discern whether or not they will be able to take this as mostly joking). His house is full of harlequins, and he thinks they are creepy as all get-out, but he doesn't really say anything because his dad seems to like them an awful lot (it is later discovered that his father collects them on John's behalf). In this way one can assume that John is relatively polite when he's not choosing to be a snotty little brat of a kid and when he's not revving up what he calls his Prankster's Gambit.

More noticeable than he is a jerk (he's actually rather subtle in that regard), however, John is kind of a huge goofball. He likes pranks, has shitty taste in movies, and Nicolas Cage is basically his favorite thing ever. Don't ever try to convince him otherwise, because he's also stubborn as a rodeo bull on the fact that Nic Cage is the best actor ever. His role model is Cameron Poe, the character Cage played in the 1997 film Con Air. Don't ever get in a debate with him about Con Air, you will not win. Other things amongst John's likes are movies like Ghostbusters (the 1982 film, not the remake!), and Little Monsters (Howie Mandell is so awesome at pranking, the apple juice pee thing is about John's favorite thing to lord over Dave, who loves apple juice, with). He's relatively sweet, otherwise, and is sort of inherently very good at gift-giving.

He absolutely abhors all things relating to Betty Crocker, as his father bakes more than is healthy or sane. He doesn't outrightly and completely hate cake, he just abjures the hell out of it in Act One because it's his birthday and his father has baked him like three cakes already so he is just sick to death of cake. He has a rather comical reaction when he realizes that one of his favorite snacks, Gushers, are a Betty Crocker product, and has a habit of referring to the woman as batterwitch. In this way, you can see that John doesn't take much of anything terribly seriously, and is very overdramatic in his actions and speech patterns. He's very showy, which could easily be due in part to the fact that he likes old, shitty action movies that are full of either bad acting or very over-done acting.

All of these things aside, John seems to have a small collection of very well-hidden self-esteem issues. He has written on his walls in his sleep, and has since blocked the memory out so completely that he does not even see the markings on his walls (he writes things like "lame kid" and "fool", along with drawings of angry little harlequins all over his walls, hence his father's collecting, under the impression that his son likes them). It is much, much later discovered that part of the reason behind these writings all over his walls were due to Gamzee, a troll in a parallel session of the game featured in the comic, tormenting him in his dreams.

Strengths: John rolls with the punches. He's relatively easygoing, if a little overdramatic, but apart from maybe an overblown initial reaction that is meant purely to be obnoxious and may not actually have any bearing on his thoughts on what happened... John is pretty mellow about crazy shit. When Rose first starts moving things around in his house during their session of SBURB, he kind of freaks out about it right at first for a minute or two (in part because she put a chest full of awesome pranking stuff of his on his roof where he couldn't get to it), and then just goes with it because how else do you react to that (except, of course, when she put his bathtub in the middle of his hallway and when she dropped his piano into an endless abyss. That kind of bothered him).

He's also physically pretty strong, considering he's seen hefting about hammers that are nearly half his size and wailing on huge ogres and imps that seem pretty tenacious and hard to beat the snot out of. His father is also sort of a badass, so one can assume that magrit runs in the family. Whereas the other kids fight with ranged, magical or melee weapons, John is also the only kid to fight with a weapon that would actually take physical strength into account (cases in point; Dave uses a Japanese sword and relies primarily on agility, Rose uses knitting needles and uses magic, and Jade wields a terrifying variety of guns).

Not necessarily a strength in the traditional sense, since it wouldn't be useful in a fight, but John is also a very skilled pianist. He is shown early in the comic playing a musical number called Showtime, that he assumably wrote himself, as there is no sheet music for him to consult. At the age of thirteen, this is a pretty impressive feat, since it's not an easy piece of music. (Here is a link to the comic page in question.)

Weaknesses: Well for starters, John is only thirteen. So he's probably pretty easy to vault across a room without much effort. He may be strong for his age, but he's still pretty little. None of the characters are given canon heights or weights or even body types (the comic's creator actually specifically stated he was not going to give weights, heights, body types or ethnicities, simply to leave it up to the reader), but John is the youngest of the group by nearly five months and thus it's likely not difficult to assume that he is probably also the smallest.

John also has a borderline-comical detestment of all things made by Betty Crocker. He doesn't actually hate cake like most people seem to think, he was just "sick to death" of it through the first act of the comic, as it took place on his birthday and his father had baked him no less than three entire cakes. He does, however, nearly instantaneously harbor a great dislike for anything with the Betty Crocker label on it (though sometimes it takes him a while to notice these things-- as was this case with his favorite fruit snack, Gushers*).

He's also... pretty gullible, and far too trusting for his own good. Terezi, one of the trolls who are notoriously unfriendly early on in the story, easily tricks John into going to face the denizen of his planet far before he was prepared to do so, leading to his death and a doomed timeline. This also speaks highly of the pride he doesn't often show, and that he is extremely stubborn and impossible to talk out of things once he has decided on them. Dave comments on this during the entire debacle with Terezi, that John is impossible to reason with and only stubborn when a person is trying to convince him of what is best for him*.

John is also deathly allergic to peanuts! This is made note of in Act One, when he enters his father's study and notes a canister of peanuts on the desk, and a mention is made of a previous experience with aforementioned deadly allergy. So peanuts = death. Whoops.

* These are canon examples that do not actually occur until Act 2, but are the most notable canon references to these aspects of John's character.

Samples

so all right. let's pretend for a couple of minutes here that i'm not really confused.
it makes total sense to me, right now, that i'm in the middle of a forest.
okay, i live in washington! forests everywhere. sure, i can handle that part.
last i checked, though, people didn't have wings?
i am not nicolas cage in city of angels.
unless i am, in which case wow, whoever did this set design wasn't paying attention to the original movie.
his wings were not blue or tiny and useless.
would someone else like to try to fly with wings this size?
also he was a *fallen* angel.
at least by the time he was actually on earth.
i guess maybe i should see if people can see me, that's a good way to figure it out...
i just have to make sure to not run into meg ryan.
oh and maybe this book is--
oh that explains a lot.
the script is blank!!
am i writing my own city of angels, wherein nicolas cage has tiny useless blue wings??
this movie is going to suck.
just sayin'.

(transcription; no blue. I intend to do this for any and all journal posts of John's, along with a permissions post should people want to opt out of any blue font. If this is not okay just let me know and I'll just cut the blue altogether.)

so all right. let's pretend for a couple of minutes here that i'm not really confused.
it makes total sense to me, right now, that i'm in the middle of a forest.
okay, i live in washington! forests everywhere. sure, i can handle that part.
last i checked, though, people didn't have wings?
i am not nicolas cage in city of angels.
unless i am, in which case wow, whoever did this set design wasn't paying attention to the original movie.
his wings were not blue or tiny and useless.
would someone else like to try to fly with wings this size?
also he was a *fallen* angel.
at least by the time he was actually on earth.
i guess maybe i should see if people can see me, that's a good way to figure it out...
i just have to make sure to not run into meg ryan.
oh and maybe this book is--
oh that explains a lot.
the script is blank!!
am i writing my own city of angels, wherein nicolas cage has tiny useless blue wings??
this movie is going to suck.
just sayin'.

Third Person:

John Egbert had been in a large collection of strange situations lately. His birthday was just a veritable bag of fucking tricks, really. Cakes, giant harlequin dolls, crazy stupid video games, bathtubs in his hallways, toilets in his back yard. Oh, and had he mentioned he had bitten into some kind of weird radioactive-blue apple in hopes of transporting himself and his house out of the path of an impending meteor, only to wake up half-naked in a forest with dinky little blue wings on his back?

Yeah, that was a thing.

He'd have figured the wings to be part of the game, except that he couldn't quite figure out what purpose they would serve (not that he could figure out the purpose of anything else the game had thrown at him thusfar). Nevermind that everything he was wearing prior to biting into that apple was gone, replaced by a simple pair of (surprisingly comfy, he had to admit) white pants. And nothing else. The shirtlessness he could understand, given the wings. They hurt enough without fabric all up in their grill. It was mostly the lack of shoes he was irritated over. I mean, really. Walking around on sticks and shit with bare feet kind of hurt. Rude.

And then there was this weird little book. The pen that came along with it was conveniently blue, which he appreciated, but his handwriting was incorrigible and he'd never remembered to write in a diary all his life. He'd tried a few times-- though he supposed Livejournal didn't really count. Of course the fact that the book kind of talked freaked him out, and he'd pretty much immediately closed it and decided he would probably shove it somewhere and only pull it out on days he was really goddamn bored. Because that actually sounded like a pretty funny thing to break out on a rainy day.

For right now, though? He was still dealing with sticks and bare feet. And it was still basically really uncool.