DARREN RADNER: FUTURE KNIGHT (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
angrytadpole) wrote2013-01-28 03:16 pm
angrytadpole) wrote2013-01-28 03:16 pm
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heroesparadise
Player Information
Name: Gingey
Age: 19
Current Characters: The crazy señorita with the katana Maria Barcelito
Contact:why would I give you smelly people a way to track me down gingerveer on aim, ![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
Gingeyweasel
Character Information
Name: Darren Radner
Age: 16
Fandom: Warrior U
Appearance: a tall, bow-legged boy with brown hair and green eyes. Also, see this.
History:
Darren comes from a noble family in the small, fictional kingdom of Cailburry. His parents' marriage has been a mess as long as he can remember, because to put it simply his father--a knight of the kingdom--could never seem to stay faithful to his mother. His many affairs even extended to the evil witch that terrorized the town(and he may actually be the father of her illegitimate son), leaving Darren's mother incredibly bitter but unable to do all that much about it--divorce wasn't really an option in Medieval Europe.
Darren's life changed dramatically when he was around six years old. Having pissed off an old flame--the aforementioned evil witch Leenan--Darren's father was transformed into a frog. While this forced his father to stop sleeping around(unless he was willing to woo some frog ladies...which he was not), it didn't do anything to help Darren's parents' rocky relationship. Darren grew up incredibly close to both of his parents and spent much of his time trying to keep his parents from fighting. With his father stuck living as a frog, Darren took to forcing him to ride around on his head so no one could step on him. Darren was eventually made his father's squire despite his father's predicament, making the two even more inseparable.
But constantly trying to hold his parents' marriage together wasn't Darren's only problem. Leenan the witch and her son Finn often crashed parties at the palace, and because Leenan used her magic to bully everyone into respecting them they tended to waltz about like they owned the place. Finn, an agoraphobic, rarely left his house and thus this was pretty much his only opportunity to socialize with children near his age...or anyone that wasn't his mother, really. But as the son of the witch that had made all of Darren's family problems worse, Darren really didn't want anything to do with him and took to picking on him immediately. This was a pretty bad outlet for his anger in the end, because it really only made Leenan angrier at Darren's family. Still, Darren blamed Leenan and Finn for all of his problems instead of acknowledging that his parents' relationship would still be in shambles without Leenan's interference, so he continued to aggrivate the situation and started to plot ways to get revenge on them.
Darren's first real plot against them came after a confrontation at one of the palace parties. Finn had finally overcome his anxiety enough to leave the house more often and even go to school, having enrolled at the peasants' "warrior school" so he could major in saga studies and become a bard. Of course, as schools often do, they required Finn to take core classes completely unrelated to his major...leaving the physically pathetic boy stuck trying to survive Warrioring 101. Darren of course, found this hilarious, and was content to make fun of Finn with his best friend and fellow squire Shiel until Finn decided to come and talk to them. Darren and Finn immediately started insulting each other--Darren pointing out how laughable Finn's performance at school must be and Finn targeting Darren's father. Eventually Darren couldn't take it anymore and almost punched Finn in the face, however with the threat of Finn's mother looming over him he backed off...but he'd had more than enough of Finn and Leenan at this point.
Convinced that Finn was Leenan's only weakness, Darren persuaded the Princess to hold a junior tournament and challenge Finn's class at Warrior University so he could have an excuse to kill Finn. As far as he was concerned, he was making an effort to free his kingdom of the witch's horrible reign, so he didn't really feel bad about it at all...yet.
Come the day of the tournament, Darren grew more and more confident in his plan. Realizing that Finn's mother hadn't shown up to watch he was sure he'd be able to get away with killing Finn when the time came...and lucky for him, during the last even of the tourament(the melee), Finn slipped into a tent to avoid having to fight. That was when Darren decided to strike, sneaking into it and revealing the sword he'd smuggled in(everyone was supposed to be using wooden ones for safety's sake). Darren expected Finn to resist, of course, but wasn't mentally prepared to handle the other boy's reaction to his plan to kill him. Finn insistence that he shouldn't be punished for his mother's actions didn't sway Darren at all, but killing a defenseless person that was begging for his life and crying? The idea of that made Darren feel kind of...bad. He was supposed to be a knight on a noble mission to protect the kingdom, not a jerk about to murder a helpless kid.
But that brief moment of hesitation wasn't enough for Darren to let Finn go, oh no. He knew how he'd fix this--by handing Finn a sword of his own! Darren knew full well that Finn would be hopeless at actually using it, but hey! He was giving a fair chance to defend himself, wasn't he? This wasn't cold-blooded murder anymore, now it was a duel!
Still, that hesitation cost Darren his chance to strike--Finn refused to fight back, and instead used that opportunity to scream for his best friend Harv at the top of his lungs. Harv abandoned his fight and ran over to the tent immediately, and true to his cowardly nature Finn jumped behind him to use him as a meatshield the moment he saw him. Darren hid his sword and tried to pretend nothing fishy was going on, but it did very little to help him as Finn called a time-out and called a meeting with his classmates to tell them about what happened.
When the fight started back up, Darren was approached by Harv(with Finn riding on his back), who was pretty eager to challenge him now that he knew what Darren was up to. After exchanging some insults with the two of them and warning Harv not to make himself his enemy, Finn jumped off of Harv and fled as Darren and Harv started fighting. While Harv was a good fighter, Darren was better, and it didn't take him too long to defeat him. Knocking Harv down and stomping on his back in a show of superiority, Darren noticed Harv shifting his attention elsewhere--Finn was back, and he was desperately trying to warn Finn to run. But surprisingly enough, Finn stood his ground as Darren turned his attention to him. When Darren said he didn't care if he got disqualified from the tournament for killing Finn, Finn merely grinned and said "then maybe you'll care about this..." as he pulled his trump card from out of a sack: he'd gotten his hands on Darren's father. Threatening to step on him if Darren got any closer left everyone in the area horrified--what Darren was doing was wrong, but Finn threatening his father in retaliation wasn't okay either.
At the end that didn't matter, though, because as Harv tried to talk Harv into letting Darren's dad go? Finn's mother finally appeared, apologizing for being late because some of the area's other witches had poisoned her. She wasted no time springing into action, lunging towards Darren and asking Finn if he'd like her to use her magic to fry him. Exchanging a look with Harv, Finn sighed and told her to spare him, gave Darren his father back, and decided to take his mother back home to take care of her(because again, she was poisoned). Finn leaving early got his team disqualified in the tournament, but that did little to comfort Darren as he sulked over his plan failing.
After an unspecified amount of time, yet another party was held at the castle. Finn and his mother crashed as usual, leaving Darren and Finn both apprehensive about it. As Darren lamented his inability to do anything about Finn and his mother, his friend Shiel offered to help him with his next plan. Suddenly feeling confident again, Darren cooked up another plan--not a murder, this time, but a kidnapping. Shiel and Darren snatched Finn from the party, and Shiel carried him up to Darren's room while Darren went to attempt to bargain with his mother. Planning on asking for her to hand over all of her magic books in exchange for her son so she wouldn't be able to terrorize the town anymore, he ended up settling for another deal offered to him by the witch--if he gave her son back, she'd turn his father back into a human being. She just had to run home and find the spell she needed.
Running back up to his room to share the good news with Shiel, Darren found Shiel had given Finn free range of his room. Apparently, Finn had convinced Shiel that he was too delicate to be tied up. While this annoyed Darren, he continued to focus on how excited he was for the witch to arrive...until Finn chimed in with some disappointing news: his mother's study was incredibly cluttered and they could easily be waiting all night.
Upon realizing that, however, Finn got excited. Because if he was there all night, clearly that meant the three of them were actually having a slumber party. And Finn had always wanted to have a slumber party...but never could due to not having any friends. Taking this opportunity and hoping to get the most out of it, Finn tried to force his kidnappers into partaking in typical slumber party activities with him. Darren outright refused at first, and while he briefly humored Finn with a game of truth or dare, it quickly ended because Darren refused to do any of the dares he was given or answer any of the questions.
Lucky for Darren, he was not forced to endure the slumper party for much longer, as Finn's mother came back early. However, she didn't bring the spell with her because she couldn't find it, and instead sent an illusion under Darren's door to freak him and Shiel out. After the two were thorougly scared, she disappeared again, leaving the three boys alone in each other's company yet again. Finn decided to try and salvage the slumber party by playing some music, which only served to piss Darren off more as he knocked the harp out of Finn's hands and broke it. As Finn went off to mourn his precious instrument, Darren looked on, feeling guilty...he hadn't intended to break it...
Of course, any sympathy he had for Finn dissolved pretty quickly, as Finn wrapped a string from his broken harp around his hands and cursed Darren with misfortune. As soon as he finished performing the curse, Darren was knocked unconscious and Shiel fainted, leaving Finn to escape. Darren eventually woke back up again to lament yet another failure.
Canon Point: Post The Slumber Party.
Personality:
Darren takes being a noble very seriously. While he without a doubt looks down on the peasants of Cailburry, he also feels a sense of duty towards them. They're beneath him and his family, but they're his people. It's his job to be the best knight he can and serve his kingdom properly. Just don't try to touch him or pull the moral high ground on him, peasants.
As one would expect of a noble, Darren comes off as proud and confident. And really, he is quite proud. He's a member of a noble family training to be an honorable knight of his kingdom--what's not to be proud of? The confidence, however, varies. He's very hard on himself, having periodic moments of "I can't do anything right" and "why do I bother?" He tries pretty hard to bury this under arrogance, even if it doesn't hold up around those he's closest to. His father, his mother, Shiel...he'll let them see his doubt, but few others. He has an image to maintain, after all.
Darren is a very angry person and has quite the temper. He sees himself and his family as having been very wronged by fate, and spends a lot of his time lamenting his frustration at his family's situation, which has made him very bitter and impatient. While he tries to keep his composure, it...usually does very little. He'll snap pretty quickly and act rash, doing things like attempting to punch out Finn in the middle of a party or breaking his harp without thinking about it. Unfortunately letting his anger get the better of him has made him something of a poor planner--which lead to the entire tournament fiasco, and, as his dad pointed out, it would've been more of a mess had he succeeded. A dead Finn would do nothing but piss Leenan off more.
Darren likes to think that he's always morally in the right, although this is pretty clearly wrong. They say every villain is the hero of his own story, and this is especially true for Darren. He wants to do the right thing, so he tries to justify his actions to himself, but coming up with excuses to preserve his peace of mind doesn't make his actions any more right. While Finn is a huge jerk to him and gives Darren plenty of reasons to dislike him, Darren's attempts to murder and kidnap him are still him going way too far. Darren even recognizes this himself, at the end of the day, because somewhere along the line it dawns on him and he starts to feel guilty. He's too proud and stubborn to outrignt admit it's wrong, and instead he'll just look for more ways he can justify it as okay, but it's not like he has no sense of right and wrong or anything. He just tries to lie to himself so he can distort it a bit.
Darren is very hardworking and dedicated. He's loyal to and cares about his family and kingdom, which is the main motivation for a good chunk of his actions. His schemes are all for their benefit, and he dreams of the day when he can free his kingdom from the evil witch that terrorizes it and get his dad back. While some might accept the trouble with his parents' marriage easier, Darren continues to struggle to play mediator between them no matter what happens. He has to keep himself in a constant state of denial so he can continue to believe that everything is going to pay off, but he always finds a way to justify his hope and keep working towards his goals.
As stuffy and strict as Darren often seems, as grumpy and angry as he can be, there are a few people he'll let loose around. While he may chastise the princess for her behavior frequently, he's also something of a big brother to her, and willing to let his guard down to play with her. One of the few genuinely happy smiles we've seen him wear came from the two of them playing together. He's also a lot less stiff around his best friend Shiel--while he'll often roll his eyes at Shiel's behavior, Shiel's also the best person to cheer him up when he's down. Darren can let himself relax and even joke around in his presence.
Game Specific
Suitability: Darren is a squire, thus trained in combat--and he's good at it. Our big strong hero that can beat the crap out of just about any other character in the series? This is how a fight with Darren ends for him. Darren's arguably the best fighter out of anyone in this comic, adults that rarely do anything aside.
As for mentally, well...Darren's hardly innocent. He's come up with complicated schemes for kidnapping and murder and made honest attempts at going through with them. Once his justifications for his actions fall apart so do his plans because he doesn't have it in him to be cruel enough to, for example, murder someone that's begging for their life in cold blood...but the fights the UAA holds? Those are duels, and that makes it fair game. He'll probably be fine with it unless he's fighting Jacuzzi Splot or something.
Weapon: While Darren would be most comfortable with a sword, he's going to be pushed out of his comfort zone a bit and get an extremely high-tech laser cannon that only responds to his vocal commands. It talks to him in a robotic voice, such as repeating his commands for confirmation and notifying him of its status. Each shot requires a 30 second recharge period afterwards, and having to announce what he's doing will surely serve as a disadvantage to him.
Something like this, of course, will horrify Darren at first--he'll label it witchcraft--but having to talk to it and boss it around might come to be cathartic for the angry kid.
Samples
Log/Third Person Sample:
Santa Destroy was the kind of place Darren could barely comprehend. It was so different from what he was used to, so many of the things he encoutered there were beyond his wildest dreams. While Darren knew full well that there was a huge world out there and he had only seen a small percentage of it, the technology he ran into struck him as things that surely couldn't exist anywhere.
And in a way Darren was right, the world he'd been thrown into was full of things that didn't exist anywhere...during his time period. But being a time traveler wasn't a notion Darren was willing to entertain at first, despite the fact that it could easily be blamed on magic. Darren felt obligated to seek out some sort of alternate explanation.
Darren remained frustrated and confusing until he began to examine the device he'd been given for communication. Something like this surely couldn't be the product of good, honest men. No, rather than some ordinary invention...
This device was clearly an unholy object born from the sinful practice of witchcraft.
And his theories grew from there. Observing the world around him once more, he finally felt confident about an explanation for all of it. He didn't know how he didn't see it before, because now it felt so obvious. All of this just had to be an illusion created by the witch. It wasn't like she hadn't done it before...she was kind of known for her illusions.
But why had she trapped him here this time? How was he going to escape? Were the other people here fake, or were they real and just as trapped as he was? In the latter case he'd be obligated to save them as the honorable squire that he was, so he'd have to figure it all out...somehow.
He didn't know what he was going to do about this or how he was going to do it, but he did know one thing: this time was going to be different. He'd find a way to break the illusion and this time...he'd end her reign of terror and finally get what he'd always wanted.
Journal Entry/First Person Sample:
You know, in my time here I've noticed quite a large number of unsavory people around. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I am still a bit disappointed to be around so many that clearly lack any sense of honor.
[Darren lets out an overdramatic sigh, just to drive home how much better he apparently is than most of the people he's talking to. He has a sense of honor, he does what's right...being such a chivalrous person trapped amongst all of this rabble is simply awful for him.
He's obviously pretty blind to all of his own faults.]
Anyway, this leads to the questions I'm going to pose to you lot today. What kind of moral standard do you personally hold yourself to? Where do you think you stand morally, and are you content with that? Surely you must have some opinion on the matter.
Name: Gingey
Age: 19
Current Characters:
Contact:
Character Information
Name: Darren Radner
Age: 16
Fandom: Warrior U
Appearance: a tall, bow-legged boy with brown hair and green eyes. Also, see this.
History:
Darren comes from a noble family in the small, fictional kingdom of Cailburry. His parents' marriage has been a mess as long as he can remember, because to put it simply his father--a knight of the kingdom--could never seem to stay faithful to his mother. His many affairs even extended to the evil witch that terrorized the town(and he may actually be the father of her illegitimate son), leaving Darren's mother incredibly bitter but unable to do all that much about it--divorce wasn't really an option in Medieval Europe.
Darren's life changed dramatically when he was around six years old. Having pissed off an old flame--the aforementioned evil witch Leenan--Darren's father was transformed into a frog. While this forced his father to stop sleeping around(unless he was willing to woo some frog ladies...which he was not), it didn't do anything to help Darren's parents' rocky relationship. Darren grew up incredibly close to both of his parents and spent much of his time trying to keep his parents from fighting. With his father stuck living as a frog, Darren took to forcing him to ride around on his head so no one could step on him. Darren was eventually made his father's squire despite his father's predicament, making the two even more inseparable.
But constantly trying to hold his parents' marriage together wasn't Darren's only problem. Leenan the witch and her son Finn often crashed parties at the palace, and because Leenan used her magic to bully everyone into respecting them they tended to waltz about like they owned the place. Finn, an agoraphobic, rarely left his house and thus this was pretty much his only opportunity to socialize with children near his age...or anyone that wasn't his mother, really. But as the son of the witch that had made all of Darren's family problems worse, Darren really didn't want anything to do with him and took to picking on him immediately. This was a pretty bad outlet for his anger in the end, because it really only made Leenan angrier at Darren's family. Still, Darren blamed Leenan and Finn for all of his problems instead of acknowledging that his parents' relationship would still be in shambles without Leenan's interference, so he continued to aggrivate the situation and started to plot ways to get revenge on them.
Darren's first real plot against them came after a confrontation at one of the palace parties. Finn had finally overcome his anxiety enough to leave the house more often and even go to school, having enrolled at the peasants' "warrior school" so he could major in saga studies and become a bard. Of course, as schools often do, they required Finn to take core classes completely unrelated to his major...leaving the physically pathetic boy stuck trying to survive Warrioring 101. Darren of course, found this hilarious, and was content to make fun of Finn with his best friend and fellow squire Shiel until Finn decided to come and talk to them. Darren and Finn immediately started insulting each other--Darren pointing out how laughable Finn's performance at school must be and Finn targeting Darren's father. Eventually Darren couldn't take it anymore and almost punched Finn in the face, however with the threat of Finn's mother looming over him he backed off...but he'd had more than enough of Finn and Leenan at this point.
Convinced that Finn was Leenan's only weakness, Darren persuaded the Princess to hold a junior tournament and challenge Finn's class at Warrior University so he could have an excuse to kill Finn. As far as he was concerned, he was making an effort to free his kingdom of the witch's horrible reign, so he didn't really feel bad about it at all...yet.
Come the day of the tournament, Darren grew more and more confident in his plan. Realizing that Finn's mother hadn't shown up to watch he was sure he'd be able to get away with killing Finn when the time came...and lucky for him, during the last even of the tourament(the melee), Finn slipped into a tent to avoid having to fight. That was when Darren decided to strike, sneaking into it and revealing the sword he'd smuggled in(everyone was supposed to be using wooden ones for safety's sake). Darren expected Finn to resist, of course, but wasn't mentally prepared to handle the other boy's reaction to his plan to kill him. Finn insistence that he shouldn't be punished for his mother's actions didn't sway Darren at all, but killing a defenseless person that was begging for his life and crying? The idea of that made Darren feel kind of...bad. He was supposed to be a knight on a noble mission to protect the kingdom, not a jerk about to murder a helpless kid.
But that brief moment of hesitation wasn't enough for Darren to let Finn go, oh no. He knew how he'd fix this--by handing Finn a sword of his own! Darren knew full well that Finn would be hopeless at actually using it, but hey! He was giving a fair chance to defend himself, wasn't he? This wasn't cold-blooded murder anymore, now it was a duel!
Still, that hesitation cost Darren his chance to strike--Finn refused to fight back, and instead used that opportunity to scream for his best friend Harv at the top of his lungs. Harv abandoned his fight and ran over to the tent immediately, and true to his cowardly nature Finn jumped behind him to use him as a meatshield the moment he saw him. Darren hid his sword and tried to pretend nothing fishy was going on, but it did very little to help him as Finn called a time-out and called a meeting with his classmates to tell them about what happened.
When the fight started back up, Darren was approached by Harv(with Finn riding on his back), who was pretty eager to challenge him now that he knew what Darren was up to. After exchanging some insults with the two of them and warning Harv not to make himself his enemy, Finn jumped off of Harv and fled as Darren and Harv started fighting. While Harv was a good fighter, Darren was better, and it didn't take him too long to defeat him. Knocking Harv down and stomping on his back in a show of superiority, Darren noticed Harv shifting his attention elsewhere--Finn was back, and he was desperately trying to warn Finn to run. But surprisingly enough, Finn stood his ground as Darren turned his attention to him. When Darren said he didn't care if he got disqualified from the tournament for killing Finn, Finn merely grinned and said "then maybe you'll care about this..." as he pulled his trump card from out of a sack: he'd gotten his hands on Darren's father. Threatening to step on him if Darren got any closer left everyone in the area horrified--what Darren was doing was wrong, but Finn threatening his father in retaliation wasn't okay either.
At the end that didn't matter, though, because as Harv tried to talk Harv into letting Darren's dad go? Finn's mother finally appeared, apologizing for being late because some of the area's other witches had poisoned her. She wasted no time springing into action, lunging towards Darren and asking Finn if he'd like her to use her magic to fry him. Exchanging a look with Harv, Finn sighed and told her to spare him, gave Darren his father back, and decided to take his mother back home to take care of her(because again, she was poisoned). Finn leaving early got his team disqualified in the tournament, but that did little to comfort Darren as he sulked over his plan failing.
After an unspecified amount of time, yet another party was held at the castle. Finn and his mother crashed as usual, leaving Darren and Finn both apprehensive about it. As Darren lamented his inability to do anything about Finn and his mother, his friend Shiel offered to help him with his next plan. Suddenly feeling confident again, Darren cooked up another plan--not a murder, this time, but a kidnapping. Shiel and Darren snatched Finn from the party, and Shiel carried him up to Darren's room while Darren went to attempt to bargain with his mother. Planning on asking for her to hand over all of her magic books in exchange for her son so she wouldn't be able to terrorize the town anymore, he ended up settling for another deal offered to him by the witch--if he gave her son back, she'd turn his father back into a human being. She just had to run home and find the spell she needed.
Running back up to his room to share the good news with Shiel, Darren found Shiel had given Finn free range of his room. Apparently, Finn had convinced Shiel that he was too delicate to be tied up. While this annoyed Darren, he continued to focus on how excited he was for the witch to arrive...until Finn chimed in with some disappointing news: his mother's study was incredibly cluttered and they could easily be waiting all night.
Upon realizing that, however, Finn got excited. Because if he was there all night, clearly that meant the three of them were actually having a slumber party. And Finn had always wanted to have a slumber party...but never could due to not having any friends. Taking this opportunity and hoping to get the most out of it, Finn tried to force his kidnappers into partaking in typical slumber party activities with him. Darren outright refused at first, and while he briefly humored Finn with a game of truth or dare, it quickly ended because Darren refused to do any of the dares he was given or answer any of the questions.
Lucky for Darren, he was not forced to endure the slumper party for much longer, as Finn's mother came back early. However, she didn't bring the spell with her because she couldn't find it, and instead sent an illusion under Darren's door to freak him and Shiel out. After the two were thorougly scared, she disappeared again, leaving the three boys alone in each other's company yet again. Finn decided to try and salvage the slumber party by playing some music, which only served to piss Darren off more as he knocked the harp out of Finn's hands and broke it. As Finn went off to mourn his precious instrument, Darren looked on, feeling guilty...he hadn't intended to break it...
Of course, any sympathy he had for Finn dissolved pretty quickly, as Finn wrapped a string from his broken harp around his hands and cursed Darren with misfortune. As soon as he finished performing the curse, Darren was knocked unconscious and Shiel fainted, leaving Finn to escape. Darren eventually woke back up again to lament yet another failure.
Canon Point: Post The Slumber Party.
Personality:
Darren takes being a noble very seriously. While he without a doubt looks down on the peasants of Cailburry, he also feels a sense of duty towards them. They're beneath him and his family, but they're his people. It's his job to be the best knight he can and serve his kingdom properly. Just don't try to touch him or pull the moral high ground on him, peasants.
As one would expect of a noble, Darren comes off as proud and confident. And really, he is quite proud. He's a member of a noble family training to be an honorable knight of his kingdom--what's not to be proud of? The confidence, however, varies. He's very hard on himself, having periodic moments of "I can't do anything right" and "why do I bother?" He tries pretty hard to bury this under arrogance, even if it doesn't hold up around those he's closest to. His father, his mother, Shiel...he'll let them see his doubt, but few others. He has an image to maintain, after all.
Darren is a very angry person and has quite the temper. He sees himself and his family as having been very wronged by fate, and spends a lot of his time lamenting his frustration at his family's situation, which has made him very bitter and impatient. While he tries to keep his composure, it...usually does very little. He'll snap pretty quickly and act rash, doing things like attempting to punch out Finn in the middle of a party or breaking his harp without thinking about it. Unfortunately letting his anger get the better of him has made him something of a poor planner--which lead to the entire tournament fiasco, and, as his dad pointed out, it would've been more of a mess had he succeeded. A dead Finn would do nothing but piss Leenan off more.
Darren likes to think that he's always morally in the right, although this is pretty clearly wrong. They say every villain is the hero of his own story, and this is especially true for Darren. He wants to do the right thing, so he tries to justify his actions to himself, but coming up with excuses to preserve his peace of mind doesn't make his actions any more right. While Finn is a huge jerk to him and gives Darren plenty of reasons to dislike him, Darren's attempts to murder and kidnap him are still him going way too far. Darren even recognizes this himself, at the end of the day, because somewhere along the line it dawns on him and he starts to feel guilty. He's too proud and stubborn to outrignt admit it's wrong, and instead he'll just look for more ways he can justify it as okay, but it's not like he has no sense of right and wrong or anything. He just tries to lie to himself so he can distort it a bit.
Darren is very hardworking and dedicated. He's loyal to and cares about his family and kingdom, which is the main motivation for a good chunk of his actions. His schemes are all for their benefit, and he dreams of the day when he can free his kingdom from the evil witch that terrorizes it and get his dad back. While some might accept the trouble with his parents' marriage easier, Darren continues to struggle to play mediator between them no matter what happens. He has to keep himself in a constant state of denial so he can continue to believe that everything is going to pay off, but he always finds a way to justify his hope and keep working towards his goals.
As stuffy and strict as Darren often seems, as grumpy and angry as he can be, there are a few people he'll let loose around. While he may chastise the princess for her behavior frequently, he's also something of a big brother to her, and willing to let his guard down to play with her. One of the few genuinely happy smiles we've seen him wear came from the two of them playing together. He's also a lot less stiff around his best friend Shiel--while he'll often roll his eyes at Shiel's behavior, Shiel's also the best person to cheer him up when he's down. Darren can let himself relax and even joke around in his presence.
Game Specific
Suitability: Darren is a squire, thus trained in combat--and he's good at it. Our big strong hero that can beat the crap out of just about any other character in the series? This is how a fight with Darren ends for him. Darren's arguably the best fighter out of anyone in this comic, adults that rarely do anything aside.
As for mentally, well...Darren's hardly innocent. He's come up with complicated schemes for kidnapping and murder and made honest attempts at going through with them. Once his justifications for his actions fall apart so do his plans because he doesn't have it in him to be cruel enough to, for example, murder someone that's begging for their life in cold blood...but the fights the UAA holds? Those are duels, and that makes it fair game. He'll probably be fine with it unless he's fighting Jacuzzi Splot or something.
Weapon: While Darren would be most comfortable with a sword, he's going to be pushed out of his comfort zone a bit and get an extremely high-tech laser cannon that only responds to his vocal commands. It talks to him in a robotic voice, such as repeating his commands for confirmation and notifying him of its status. Each shot requires a 30 second recharge period afterwards, and having to announce what he's doing will surely serve as a disadvantage to him.
Something like this, of course, will horrify Darren at first--he'll label it witchcraft--but having to talk to it and boss it around might come to be cathartic for the angry kid.
Samples
Log/Third Person Sample:
Santa Destroy was the kind of place Darren could barely comprehend. It was so different from what he was used to, so many of the things he encoutered there were beyond his wildest dreams. While Darren knew full well that there was a huge world out there and he had only seen a small percentage of it, the technology he ran into struck him as things that surely couldn't exist anywhere.
And in a way Darren was right, the world he'd been thrown into was full of things that didn't exist anywhere...during his time period. But being a time traveler wasn't a notion Darren was willing to entertain at first, despite the fact that it could easily be blamed on magic. Darren felt obligated to seek out some sort of alternate explanation.
Darren remained frustrated and confusing until he began to examine the device he'd been given for communication. Something like this surely couldn't be the product of good, honest men. No, rather than some ordinary invention...
This device was clearly an unholy object born from the sinful practice of witchcraft.
And his theories grew from there. Observing the world around him once more, he finally felt confident about an explanation for all of it. He didn't know how he didn't see it before, because now it felt so obvious. All of this just had to be an illusion created by the witch. It wasn't like she hadn't done it before...she was kind of known for her illusions.
But why had she trapped him here this time? How was he going to escape? Were the other people here fake, or were they real and just as trapped as he was? In the latter case he'd be obligated to save them as the honorable squire that he was, so he'd have to figure it all out...somehow.
He didn't know what he was going to do about this or how he was going to do it, but he did know one thing: this time was going to be different. He'd find a way to break the illusion and this time...he'd end her reign of terror and finally get what he'd always wanted.
Journal Entry/First Person Sample:
You know, in my time here I've noticed quite a large number of unsavory people around. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I am still a bit disappointed to be around so many that clearly lack any sense of honor.
[Darren lets out an overdramatic sigh, just to drive home how much better he apparently is than most of the people he's talking to. He has a sense of honor, he does what's right...being such a chivalrous person trapped amongst all of this rabble is simply awful for him.
He's obviously pretty blind to all of his own faults.]
Anyway, this leads to the questions I'm going to pose to you lot today. What kind of moral standard do you personally hold yourself to? Where do you think you stand morally, and are you content with that? Surely you must have some opinion on the matter.