Application - The Far Shore
May. 13th, 2017 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fortunesmilesPlayer Information
Player Information
Name: Callie
Contact: callistodementia@gmail.com/![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
lymmea/Lymmea#6855 @ Discord
Age: 33
Other Characters: Ken Joshima | Katekyo Hitman Reborn!
Character Information
Name: Nagito Komaeda
Canon: Dangan Ronpa
Canon Point: After his 'death' in the Neo World Program in SDR2 Chapter 5, which means that as far as Komaeda knows he actually is dead, or as close to it as makes no difference.
Age: 21 (The SDR2 characters all thought they were 17, but lost 4 years' worth of their memories and were actually 21 during the events of the game. Komaeda, by the time of his death, has learned of the memory loss and knows his true age. YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW LONG IT TOOK ME TO FIGURE OUT THE TIMELINE.)
History: Wiki article
Personality: Komaeda is a man of extremes, in every sense of the word. The nature of luck and probability is completely out of whack with him; whereas most people would have minor rises and dips in fortune, Komaeda's luck boomerangs between the worst and best possible outcomes of any event, with horrific things almost seeming to have to happen in order to permit amazing things to occur to him. (Or, alternately, one could view it as, for every fantastic thing that happens to him, something horrifically tragic immediately follows.) For instance, one of his earliest memories is of the plane he and his wealthy parents were aboard being hijacked. A meteor promptly hit the plane and killed the hijacker...along with Komaeda's parents. However, with Komaeda's parents dead, he inherited their entire fortune. Needless to say, a lifetime full of horrifically traumatic events with beautiful silver linings, of constantly being ping-ponged between delight and despair, has wreaked absolute havoc on Komaeda's psyche. In many cases, the good luck he experiences doesn't seem proportionate to the tragedy that precedes/follows it; for instance, at one point in his life he was kidnapped and held for ransom by a serial killer, and the good luck he got out of it was finding a winning lottery ticket in the garbage bag the kidnapper kept him in. Considering he was already rich at the time, one wonders how useful the good luck really was to him, or if he even cared about it. What Komaeda's luck defines as good, and what Komaeda himself might consider good luck, don't necessarily seem to have any direct connection - although, later in life, Komaeda learns how to inflict suffering and bad luck on himself in ways which skew his luck in his favor when he undertakes specific actions in which he wants to be lucky.
Regardless, Komaeda's luck - meaning in both its good and bad senses - has shaped his personality inescapably. Most of it is tied into how he views hope and despair; Komaeda truly believes that the two are inextricably linked, and that it's impossible to have one without the other. This is technically true, in the same way one couldn't perceive light without darkness as contrast, but Komaeda takes his beliefs to disturbing extremes. Komaeda's own fatalism and having become so accustomed to horrible things happening to him (and those horrible things being quickly followed by strokes of good fortune) means that, no matter how terrible the event, Komaeda faces it with a carefree, seemingly unconcerned attitude and an alarming sense of optimism for the hope that will balance out the despair. Even deaths of beloved friends are shrugged off, or greeted with excitement for the tremendous hope that has to result from something so awful. Naturally, people find this to be a deranged way of thinking and are often offended and enraged by it, precisely because Komaeda's mindset is so far warped beyond what most people would consider normal. Komaeda's experienced so much grief in his life that the only real coping mechanism he could possibly turn to was to fixate on the happiness or good fortune that would inevitably follow; it's doubtful he would have been able to function at all in life if he hadn't resorted to his unsettling brand of optimism. Of course, part of his easy acceptance of tragedies isn't just his optimism; one assumes that with so many terrible things happening to him, he's simply grown so used to the idea that no terrible event is truly unexpected for him, and that his ability to feel grief and sorrow is either deadened or overwhelmed to some degree.
Interestingly, Komaeda has the exact opposite reaction to good things happening to him. Whether it's a stroke of good luck or simply enjoying himself casually with friends, Komaeda finds it impossible to forget or stop thinking about the misfortune that will follow to balance out any happiness he experiences. In fact, when he's happiest, he's been known to 'joke' about how he wouldn't be surprised if one or two of his friends had died as a direct result, if not an active consequence. This may factor into Komaeda's utter lack of self-esteem, as he considers himself responsible for the bad things that happen around him - he may even believe it's caused by his feeling happiness or having good things happen to him. As a result, he often assesses possible risk whenever it comes to spending time with someone he cares about or recreational activities in general, and discouraging various activities that could go lethally wrong. (Swimming, for example.) Other times, however, he almost seems to take a perverse pleasure in daring his bad luck to do it worst, such as willingly blindfolding himself and trying to split a watermelon with a wooden sword after shivering with anticipation over what his bad luck might do in such a situation. It's likely that this is because Komaeda knows his bad luck is, to a degree, inevitable, and his nerves can only take so much running from it before he gives up and meets it head-on just to get it over with.
Despite all this, which would be quite enough to warp anyone's outlook, it's not just circumstances that have shaped Komaeda's behavior or his fetishistic obsession with hope. Part of his misfortune in life has led to his contracting terminal lymphoma and frontotemporal dementia; he was diagnosed when he was between 16 and 17, and was predicted to have no more than a year to live. (His luck has been keeping him alive ever since.) As canon never shows us a Komaeda prior to his illness, it's honestly hard to know how much of his behavior is due to the life he's led, and how much of it is due to his being mentally unstable due to disease; undoubtedly it's both, but the ratio between the two is impossible to determine. Komaeda hates himself and his life to the point of being passively suicidal, as he himself states in canon that he was drifting through life waiting to die at one point...so his luck extending his life could be viewed as good or bad luck, depending on one's perspective.
As mentioned previously, Komaeda loathes himself, most likely due to his awareness that the terrible things that happen around him are (indirectly) his fault, and also because his biggest defining feature - his luck - is something that happens to him without effort, and so he doesn't view it as a talent or a skill he can take any credit for. He considers himself utterly worthless, regularly deriding himself as lowly trash, and his greatest aspiration in life is to help people of greater worth and talent around him. (Which, by his standards, is basically everyone.) As such, he tremendously admires people of strong will or talent - especially the students of Hope's Peak Academy, who embody not just the greatest talents of their respective fields, but what Komaeda considers to be humanity's greatest hope. Komaeda himself wishes to create and embody hope, but doesn't believe he's truly capable of it, despite occasionally attempting to do so - one of the many blatant contradictions of Komaeda's confused mind. He considers himself worthless, but more than anything he wants to create worth for himself, to create hope and be important in ways he doesn't view himself as capable of even if only in legacy. Most of his ideas for how he can do those things involve his death; either he thinks only his death could be a great enough expression of his dedication to inspire hope or create any worth for himself, or his own self-hatred and suicidal ideation refuse to let him comprehend of doing so by any other route. (Or, perhaps due to his illnesses, he views his own impending death as imminent and inescapable - as no good luck of his lasts forever - and so he wants to choose the manner of that death in a way that gives it purpose and meaning.)
Ironically, Komaeda's love of hope and his belief that hope is superior to and will always conquer despair interacts dangerously with his belief that despair has to exist to create hope. Komaeda will create tragedy and horror himself, if he believes that it will result in an even more amazing hope rising to defeat it; Komaeda doesn't actually think anything done in the name of hope can be immoral or wrong. In essence, Komaeda might deplore terrible things happening, considering them sad and unfortunate, but he still applauds them because he considers the ends - creating hope - to justify the means in the existence of the despair that necessitates the existence of hope. So while he might be sad to lose a friend to murder, he'd happily credit their murderer with creating the hope that would result from solving the murder mystery. (Along with the people who solved it, of course. But Komaeda's argument would be that without the murderer, they would have had nothing to solve and the hope of solving the mystery would then be unable to exist.) Komaeda has himself almost murdered one of his friends because he believed that solving the murder - and sentencing him to death as the killer - would permit his surviving friends to achieve a greater level of hope. As a result of all this, Komaeda - hope's most fervent zealot - will quite happily and willingly create despair, because he truly believes this creates room for more hope to come into existence. (And, most likely, because Komaeda's life has been so full of inescapable despair that to him, he views the original source of misfortune to be interchangeable and irrelevant. He'd likely assume that not committing a murder himself would simply result in the same level of despair taking another, perhaps more unpredictable form. The idea that there would be no misfortune if he avoided causing it personally isn't one that makes sense to him, because he's lived a life where it will come for him no matter what he does.) It was all of this confused, twisted logic that led Komaeda to become part of the terrorist group known as Ultimate Despair - he assumed that if they created Ultimate Despair, they would naturally create and be defeated by the Ultimate Hope, and Komaeda wants to see the form Ultimate Hope would take more than anything else.
So Komaeda is pretty thoroughly insane, through no real fault of his own. Despite this, Komaeda is actually a kind person with good intentions...it's just that he has remarkably flexible ideas about things like acceptable losses, and he doesn't realize - or at least doesn't modify his behavior to reflect - how differently the rest of the world views fortune and misfortune. Komaeda considers the two so connected that he views his inviting (or outright causing) misfortune to be one and the same as bringing about something good, because he's so accustomed to the cycle and basically has no comprehension left of the idea of truly random chance. Other people with normal luck, where good things don't necessarily follow bad ones, view events of good luck and bad luck as separate events, and so the idea of being grateful or happy to see bad luck is completely foreign to them because they have no guarantee that good fortune will inevitably follow. (Of course, even if one fully accepts Komaeda's worldview and benefits from his luck cycle, that's no reason for anyone to thank him for inviting or causing misfortune. Komaeda, in a show of low self-awareness, will invite or inflict misfortune at his own choosing, without allowing the people being affected to decide if they're willing to trade that suffering for any potential future gains. Since not being able to choose the manner of the good luck and bad luck that comes to him has caused most of the problems in Komaeda's own life, one might expect him to realize that his making the decision for others isn't necessarily welcome.)
On a side note, Komaeda is very strongly hinted at as being gay in canon, to the point where it's more or less acknowledged as canon even if it's never explicitly stated as such. (There's an entire list of evidence on his wiki page.) It bears mentioning here, since it's so heavily implied as being canon that his orientation is more a canon fact than player interpretation.
Abilities: Komaeda, having been terminally ill for years now, has physical abilities that are probably below what one would expect for someone his age. (Presumably his health can't get worse now that he's both dead and a god, but I assume his body would remain more or less in the state it was when he died, aka overall sickly.) Mentally, however, Komaeda is exceedingly intelligent and observant, and can put together inferences and complex scenarios easily. In his canon, he tends to figure things out well before any of his classmates do, and guides them toward the correct line of questioning or reasoning without explicitly spelling out what he knows. (This roundabout assistance may be due to wanting to see their talents coming to light and letting them create hope in solving the mystery themselves, or it may be due to not feeling worthy to provide the solution directly. Possibly both.) And, of course, Komaeda's luck borders on the supernatural, though it swings back and forth between favoring and punishing him. He has learned how to control this to some degree, however; by intentionally causing himself injury or misfortune, he can influence his good luck to kick in when he needs it for something he's trying to accomplish. Usually, however, the luckiest and unluckiest events of his life are outside his ability to predict or influence at all, and that trend would likely continue for him even as a god. (The rule seems to be that Komaeda only has any kind of predictability in regards to his luck, and only ever consciously manipulates it, when he's acting with intent - never when he's just going about his daily life. We only see him manage it in canon when he goes out of his way to take action in schemes of his own devising, schemes that actually rely on his luck to work.)
Strengths: Good luck, intelligence, optimism, wants to help others, practically fearless
Weaknesses: Bad luck, literally insane, creeps out most people, self-loathing, sickly
God/Shinki: God
Why?: Honestly, Komaeda is a character so shaped by his experiences that not remembering the experiences that shaped him would be a very bewildering way to play him. Also, I feel like his luck is a borderline overpowered ability to the point where it'd make more sense to base him being a god around it, rather than it being an incidental shinki ability.
Top 3 Choices: Averruncus(luck), Caerus(luck), Elpis(hope)
God Type: Komaeda will hold true to his life philosophy, in that bad luck/despair must be balanced out by good luck/hope. And, considering his own life, he knows full well how important it is for them to be balanced in moderation rather than to tremendous extremes. So if he becomes a deity of luck, he'd actually keep things fairly balanced...so long as he stays focused on the fact that it's luck, not hope and despair, that he's influencing. (Komaeda's own casual indifference to whether the bad luck he's bringing is bearable, or a fair trade for any good luck that might follow, would in fact keep luck under his domain comfortably randomized. Even if he attempted to perfectly balance things, he'd fail due to his own limitations of perception in regards to what people want.) If he becomes a deity of hope...he'll be more than a little inclined to swing to the extremes, to see the great hope brought about by great despair. He'd probably need at least one shinki with some emotional stability to keep him grounded to some degree.
Regardless of what type of god he becomes, however, Komaeda will feel unworthy - though he'll respond to those feelings by seeking to do as good a job as 'trash' like him possibly can. (Note: that will be his intention; he may not do a good job at all, depending.) And, likewise regardless as to what type of god he becomes, he'll take prayers where he feels his intervention will inspire hope or defeat despair.
Power: Probability Manipulation - Komaeda has the power to alter the probability of something happening, effectively giving him the power to influence good or bad fortune as a god of luck. He can, for example, increase the odds of someone winning the lottery, or of someone being hit by a car when crossing the street. Of course, the more inherently long the odds are, the more power it takes for him to guarantee it will happen. Making a limb drop off a zombie in the TDM prompt, for example, wouldn't take a lot of power; they're already rotting. Making a meteor hit one would take a much more significant expenditure of his energy, and would probably be next to impossible before he'd gained strength/followers as a god. (And, of course, for anything that was so near statistically impossible, I'd be checking not just with the other player, but the mods for permission to do it.)
Also, Komaeda's own experiences with impossibly good and bad luck, and how it's inherently negatively influenced his whole life, will provide IC incentive not to go overboard with dramatic displays. In canon, Komaeda's shown to fantasize about being a normal person with normal luck; as a god, he'll have incentive to keep displays of his powers to giving people the normal luck he wishes he could have. (His powers will have no active influence over his own natural luck; like in canon, if he wants to directly influence his luck at all, he'd have to hurt himself to give himself good luck, and bad luck will find him no matter what he does. So for most things that directly affect him, his powers won't be able to help him anyway.) Even if he does muster the power for shooting something with low probability to being 100% probable, he isn't likely to do so unless it's in answer to a prayer or the need is dire.
(And, of course, he'll ideally have a level-headed shinki who will urge even further prudence, which never hurts with someone as mentally unstable as Komaeda.)
Writing Sample
Sample: Komaeda on the TDM, 10+ comments total
Other
Anything Else?: For purposes of keeping Komaeda manageable and not letting him get too disruptive, since he's by all definitions insane(especially with a potential Junko in the mix, holy mental instability Batman), I'd really like him paired with a shinki as soon as possible - ideally one that's emotionally stable enough to at least encourage that in their god. That said, I don't have a specific preference for who that is!
Also, I included two luck deities and one hope deity because I as a player think luck would be a more suitable god role for Komaeda, but the character would love to be a god of hope. I personally think luck would both suit him better and would prefer that, as it'd be hard for me to ICly justify his not being highly disruptive as a god of hope, but obviously all of this is purely personal preference; I'll work within whatever the mod team decides! (And I couldn't find other fortune deities quite as fitting as Averruncus and Caerus, both of which come with negative/sinister connotations on top of being associated with good fortune.)
Player Information
Name: Callie
Contact: callistodementia@gmail.com/
Age: 33
Other Characters: Ken Joshima | Katekyo Hitman Reborn!
Character Information
Name: Nagito Komaeda
Canon: Dangan Ronpa
Canon Point: After his 'death' in the Neo World Program in SDR2 Chapter 5, which means that as far as Komaeda knows he actually is dead, or as close to it as makes no difference.
Age: 21 (The SDR2 characters all thought they were 17, but lost 4 years' worth of their memories and were actually 21 during the events of the game. Komaeda, by the time of his death, has learned of the memory loss and knows his true age. YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW LONG IT TOOK ME TO FIGURE OUT THE TIMELINE.)
History: Wiki article
Personality: Komaeda is a man of extremes, in every sense of the word. The nature of luck and probability is completely out of whack with him; whereas most people would have minor rises and dips in fortune, Komaeda's luck boomerangs between the worst and best possible outcomes of any event, with horrific things almost seeming to have to happen in order to permit amazing things to occur to him. (Or, alternately, one could view it as, for every fantastic thing that happens to him, something horrifically tragic immediately follows.) For instance, one of his earliest memories is of the plane he and his wealthy parents were aboard being hijacked. A meteor promptly hit the plane and killed the hijacker...along with Komaeda's parents. However, with Komaeda's parents dead, he inherited their entire fortune. Needless to say, a lifetime full of horrifically traumatic events with beautiful silver linings, of constantly being ping-ponged between delight and despair, has wreaked absolute havoc on Komaeda's psyche. In many cases, the good luck he experiences doesn't seem proportionate to the tragedy that precedes/follows it; for instance, at one point in his life he was kidnapped and held for ransom by a serial killer, and the good luck he got out of it was finding a winning lottery ticket in the garbage bag the kidnapper kept him in. Considering he was already rich at the time, one wonders how useful the good luck really was to him, or if he even cared about it. What Komaeda's luck defines as good, and what Komaeda himself might consider good luck, don't necessarily seem to have any direct connection - although, later in life, Komaeda learns how to inflict suffering and bad luck on himself in ways which skew his luck in his favor when he undertakes specific actions in which he wants to be lucky.
Regardless, Komaeda's luck - meaning in both its good and bad senses - has shaped his personality inescapably. Most of it is tied into how he views hope and despair; Komaeda truly believes that the two are inextricably linked, and that it's impossible to have one without the other. This is technically true, in the same way one couldn't perceive light without darkness as contrast, but Komaeda takes his beliefs to disturbing extremes. Komaeda's own fatalism and having become so accustomed to horrible things happening to him (and those horrible things being quickly followed by strokes of good fortune) means that, no matter how terrible the event, Komaeda faces it with a carefree, seemingly unconcerned attitude and an alarming sense of optimism for the hope that will balance out the despair. Even deaths of beloved friends are shrugged off, or greeted with excitement for the tremendous hope that has to result from something so awful. Naturally, people find this to be a deranged way of thinking and are often offended and enraged by it, precisely because Komaeda's mindset is so far warped beyond what most people would consider normal. Komaeda's experienced so much grief in his life that the only real coping mechanism he could possibly turn to was to fixate on the happiness or good fortune that would inevitably follow; it's doubtful he would have been able to function at all in life if he hadn't resorted to his unsettling brand of optimism. Of course, part of his easy acceptance of tragedies isn't just his optimism; one assumes that with so many terrible things happening to him, he's simply grown so used to the idea that no terrible event is truly unexpected for him, and that his ability to feel grief and sorrow is either deadened or overwhelmed to some degree.
Interestingly, Komaeda has the exact opposite reaction to good things happening to him. Whether it's a stroke of good luck or simply enjoying himself casually with friends, Komaeda finds it impossible to forget or stop thinking about the misfortune that will follow to balance out any happiness he experiences. In fact, when he's happiest, he's been known to 'joke' about how he wouldn't be surprised if one or two of his friends had died as a direct result, if not an active consequence. This may factor into Komaeda's utter lack of self-esteem, as he considers himself responsible for the bad things that happen around him - he may even believe it's caused by his feeling happiness or having good things happen to him. As a result, he often assesses possible risk whenever it comes to spending time with someone he cares about or recreational activities in general, and discouraging various activities that could go lethally wrong. (Swimming, for example.) Other times, however, he almost seems to take a perverse pleasure in daring his bad luck to do it worst, such as willingly blindfolding himself and trying to split a watermelon with a wooden sword after shivering with anticipation over what his bad luck might do in such a situation. It's likely that this is because Komaeda knows his bad luck is, to a degree, inevitable, and his nerves can only take so much running from it before he gives up and meets it head-on just to get it over with.
Despite all this, which would be quite enough to warp anyone's outlook, it's not just circumstances that have shaped Komaeda's behavior or his fetishistic obsession with hope. Part of his misfortune in life has led to his contracting terminal lymphoma and frontotemporal dementia; he was diagnosed when he was between 16 and 17, and was predicted to have no more than a year to live. (His luck has been keeping him alive ever since.) As canon never shows us a Komaeda prior to his illness, it's honestly hard to know how much of his behavior is due to the life he's led, and how much of it is due to his being mentally unstable due to disease; undoubtedly it's both, but the ratio between the two is impossible to determine. Komaeda hates himself and his life to the point of being passively suicidal, as he himself states in canon that he was drifting through life waiting to die at one point...so his luck extending his life could be viewed as good or bad luck, depending on one's perspective.
As mentioned previously, Komaeda loathes himself, most likely due to his awareness that the terrible things that happen around him are (indirectly) his fault, and also because his biggest defining feature - his luck - is something that happens to him without effort, and so he doesn't view it as a talent or a skill he can take any credit for. He considers himself utterly worthless, regularly deriding himself as lowly trash, and his greatest aspiration in life is to help people of greater worth and talent around him. (Which, by his standards, is basically everyone.) As such, he tremendously admires people of strong will or talent - especially the students of Hope's Peak Academy, who embody not just the greatest talents of their respective fields, but what Komaeda considers to be humanity's greatest hope. Komaeda himself wishes to create and embody hope, but doesn't believe he's truly capable of it, despite occasionally attempting to do so - one of the many blatant contradictions of Komaeda's confused mind. He considers himself worthless, but more than anything he wants to create worth for himself, to create hope and be important in ways he doesn't view himself as capable of even if only in legacy. Most of his ideas for how he can do those things involve his death; either he thinks only his death could be a great enough expression of his dedication to inspire hope or create any worth for himself, or his own self-hatred and suicidal ideation refuse to let him comprehend of doing so by any other route. (Or, perhaps due to his illnesses, he views his own impending death as imminent and inescapable - as no good luck of his lasts forever - and so he wants to choose the manner of that death in a way that gives it purpose and meaning.)
Ironically, Komaeda's love of hope and his belief that hope is superior to and will always conquer despair interacts dangerously with his belief that despair has to exist to create hope. Komaeda will create tragedy and horror himself, if he believes that it will result in an even more amazing hope rising to defeat it; Komaeda doesn't actually think anything done in the name of hope can be immoral or wrong. In essence, Komaeda might deplore terrible things happening, considering them sad and unfortunate, but he still applauds them because he considers the ends - creating hope - to justify the means in the existence of the despair that necessitates the existence of hope. So while he might be sad to lose a friend to murder, he'd happily credit their murderer with creating the hope that would result from solving the murder mystery. (Along with the people who solved it, of course. But Komaeda's argument would be that without the murderer, they would have had nothing to solve and the hope of solving the mystery would then be unable to exist.) Komaeda has himself almost murdered one of his friends because he believed that solving the murder - and sentencing him to death as the killer - would permit his surviving friends to achieve a greater level of hope. As a result of all this, Komaeda - hope's most fervent zealot - will quite happily and willingly create despair, because he truly believes this creates room for more hope to come into existence. (And, most likely, because Komaeda's life has been so full of inescapable despair that to him, he views the original source of misfortune to be interchangeable and irrelevant. He'd likely assume that not committing a murder himself would simply result in the same level of despair taking another, perhaps more unpredictable form. The idea that there would be no misfortune if he avoided causing it personally isn't one that makes sense to him, because he's lived a life where it will come for him no matter what he does.) It was all of this confused, twisted logic that led Komaeda to become part of the terrorist group known as Ultimate Despair - he assumed that if they created Ultimate Despair, they would naturally create and be defeated by the Ultimate Hope, and Komaeda wants to see the form Ultimate Hope would take more than anything else.
So Komaeda is pretty thoroughly insane, through no real fault of his own. Despite this, Komaeda is actually a kind person with good intentions...it's just that he has remarkably flexible ideas about things like acceptable losses, and he doesn't realize - or at least doesn't modify his behavior to reflect - how differently the rest of the world views fortune and misfortune. Komaeda considers the two so connected that he views his inviting (or outright causing) misfortune to be one and the same as bringing about something good, because he's so accustomed to the cycle and basically has no comprehension left of the idea of truly random chance. Other people with normal luck, where good things don't necessarily follow bad ones, view events of good luck and bad luck as separate events, and so the idea of being grateful or happy to see bad luck is completely foreign to them because they have no guarantee that good fortune will inevitably follow. (Of course, even if one fully accepts Komaeda's worldview and benefits from his luck cycle, that's no reason for anyone to thank him for inviting or causing misfortune. Komaeda, in a show of low self-awareness, will invite or inflict misfortune at his own choosing, without allowing the people being affected to decide if they're willing to trade that suffering for any potential future gains. Since not being able to choose the manner of the good luck and bad luck that comes to him has caused most of the problems in Komaeda's own life, one might expect him to realize that his making the decision for others isn't necessarily welcome.)
On a side note, Komaeda is very strongly hinted at as being gay in canon, to the point where it's more or less acknowledged as canon even if it's never explicitly stated as such. (There's an entire list of evidence on his wiki page.) It bears mentioning here, since it's so heavily implied as being canon that his orientation is more a canon fact than player interpretation.
Abilities: Komaeda, having been terminally ill for years now, has physical abilities that are probably below what one would expect for someone his age. (Presumably his health can't get worse now that he's both dead and a god, but I assume his body would remain more or less in the state it was when he died, aka overall sickly.) Mentally, however, Komaeda is exceedingly intelligent and observant, and can put together inferences and complex scenarios easily. In his canon, he tends to figure things out well before any of his classmates do, and guides them toward the correct line of questioning or reasoning without explicitly spelling out what he knows. (This roundabout assistance may be due to wanting to see their talents coming to light and letting them create hope in solving the mystery themselves, or it may be due to not feeling worthy to provide the solution directly. Possibly both.) And, of course, Komaeda's luck borders on the supernatural, though it swings back and forth between favoring and punishing him. He has learned how to control this to some degree, however; by intentionally causing himself injury or misfortune, he can influence his good luck to kick in when he needs it for something he's trying to accomplish. Usually, however, the luckiest and unluckiest events of his life are outside his ability to predict or influence at all, and that trend would likely continue for him even as a god. (The rule seems to be that Komaeda only has any kind of predictability in regards to his luck, and only ever consciously manipulates it, when he's acting with intent - never when he's just going about his daily life. We only see him manage it in canon when he goes out of his way to take action in schemes of his own devising, schemes that actually rely on his luck to work.)
Strengths: Good luck, intelligence, optimism, wants to help others, practically fearless
Weaknesses: Bad luck, literally insane, creeps out most people, self-loathing, sickly
God/Shinki: God
Why?: Honestly, Komaeda is a character so shaped by his experiences that not remembering the experiences that shaped him would be a very bewildering way to play him. Also, I feel like his luck is a borderline overpowered ability to the point where it'd make more sense to base him being a god around it, rather than it being an incidental shinki ability.
Top 3 Choices: Averruncus(luck), Caerus(luck), Elpis(hope)
God Type: Komaeda will hold true to his life philosophy, in that bad luck/despair must be balanced out by good luck/hope. And, considering his own life, he knows full well how important it is for them to be balanced in moderation rather than to tremendous extremes. So if he becomes a deity of luck, he'd actually keep things fairly balanced...so long as he stays focused on the fact that it's luck, not hope and despair, that he's influencing. (Komaeda's own casual indifference to whether the bad luck he's bringing is bearable, or a fair trade for any good luck that might follow, would in fact keep luck under his domain comfortably randomized. Even if he attempted to perfectly balance things, he'd fail due to his own limitations of perception in regards to what people want.) If he becomes a deity of hope...he'll be more than a little inclined to swing to the extremes, to see the great hope brought about by great despair. He'd probably need at least one shinki with some emotional stability to keep him grounded to some degree.
Regardless of what type of god he becomes, however, Komaeda will feel unworthy - though he'll respond to those feelings by seeking to do as good a job as 'trash' like him possibly can. (Note: that will be his intention; he may not do a good job at all, depending.) And, likewise regardless as to what type of god he becomes, he'll take prayers where he feels his intervention will inspire hope or defeat despair.
Power: Probability Manipulation - Komaeda has the power to alter the probability of something happening, effectively giving him the power to influence good or bad fortune as a god of luck. He can, for example, increase the odds of someone winning the lottery, or of someone being hit by a car when crossing the street. Of course, the more inherently long the odds are, the more power it takes for him to guarantee it will happen. Making a limb drop off a zombie in the TDM prompt, for example, wouldn't take a lot of power; they're already rotting. Making a meteor hit one would take a much more significant expenditure of his energy, and would probably be next to impossible before he'd gained strength/followers as a god. (And, of course, for anything that was so near statistically impossible, I'd be checking not just with the other player, but the mods for permission to do it.)
Also, Komaeda's own experiences with impossibly good and bad luck, and how it's inherently negatively influenced his whole life, will provide IC incentive not to go overboard with dramatic displays. In canon, Komaeda's shown to fantasize about being a normal person with normal luck; as a god, he'll have incentive to keep displays of his powers to giving people the normal luck he wishes he could have. (His powers will have no active influence over his own natural luck; like in canon, if he wants to directly influence his luck at all, he'd have to hurt himself to give himself good luck, and bad luck will find him no matter what he does. So for most things that directly affect him, his powers won't be able to help him anyway.) Even if he does muster the power for shooting something with low probability to being 100% probable, he isn't likely to do so unless it's in answer to a prayer or the need is dire.
(And, of course, he'll ideally have a level-headed shinki who will urge even further prudence, which never hurts with someone as mentally unstable as Komaeda.)
Writing Sample
Sample: Komaeda on the TDM, 10+ comments total
Other
Anything Else?: For purposes of keeping Komaeda manageable and not letting him get too disruptive, since he's by all definitions insane(especially with a potential Junko in the mix, holy mental instability Batman), I'd really like him paired with a shinki as soon as possible - ideally one that's emotionally stable enough to at least encourage that in their god. That said, I don't have a specific preference for who that is!
Also, I included two luck deities and one hope deity because I as a player think luck would be a more suitable god role for Komaeda, but the character would love to be a god of hope. I personally think luck would both suit him better and would prefer that, as it'd be hard for me to ICly justify his not being highly disruptive as a god of hope, but obviously all of this is purely personal preference; I'll work within whatever the mod team decides! (And I couldn't find other fortune deities quite as fitting as Averruncus and Caerus, both of which come with negative/sinister connotations on top of being associated with good fortune.)
