Application

[nevermorethroppish]

ABOUT YOU

Name: Danii
Are you 18 or over?: Yes
Other characters played: None

CHARACTER

Name: Liir Thropp-Tigelaar Ko
Canon: The Wicked Years by Gregory Maguire (book series)
Age: mid to late 30s
History: As this only covers the first two books, here's the rest: After Son of a Witch, he reunites with Candle and the two of them decide that the safest place for his daughter would be with the Lady Glinda, as she was to some degree above suspicion. With the help of a Snake magician, they make the girl look a normal color (ie, not GREEN) and give her to Glinda. Liir and Candle spend their lives mostly running around and/or hiding to escape detection. During Out of Oz, he awkwardly reunites with his daughter, gets captured by Mombey's Free Munchkinland troops, then gets turned into a Black Elephant in an attempt to get him to use the Grimmerie for her. It also turns out that his lover, Trism, has been with Mombey all this time helping her to in her revolt. The two part roughly, as even Trism can't convince him to help her.

He refuses and is drugged to the gills and left in an Elephant's body, which will kill him in time. His restoration is offered in exchange for serious peace talks between Oz and Free Munchkinland, as the Emperor Apostle is his uncle and all. Thinking she was trying to restore him to again insist he use the Grimmerie, he resists so greatly that Mombey has to bend her entire power to try and turn him back. The power explodes, restoring EVERYTHING in the room to it's proper form, including returning the greeness to his daughter and Tip returns to HER true form as Ozma. As Ozma has returned, both the Emperor and Mombey kind of have to bow out of things because hello, rightful ruler of Oz.

After he is restored, Candle leaves him in disgust for his unwillingness to take up power to act against the tyrants who've fought over Oz over the years. Eventually, he and Rain settle in a little cabin in Nether How; Rain goes off to find the sea and Liir sets down to write a treatise on power and politics and thus ends the last book.

Point in canon: The ending of Out of Oz, shortly after Rain has left the cottage; he's been writing his treatise on politics at Nether How since then.
Window Location: within the copse of trees around Nether How, over the buried Grimmerie
Universe: Gregory Maguire's version of the Land of Oz, which is Oz only Deeply Deeply Dystopian. A proper map can be found here.
Abilities:
Liir, like his mother, is a bit of a reality warper with his magical abilities. Unlike his mother, who eventually trained and directed her magic using the Grimmerie, Liir's never had any formal training and hardly acknowledges that he has any magic whatsoever except to try and avoid using it. That means that occasionally, he can will things accidentally (kind of like Harry Potter pre-Hogwarts) though mostly this takes the most subtle form imaginable. What he's managed to work out on his own usually involves dealing with memory and the past of objects, places, and things.

Canon proven magical acts include: flying the broom, willing the branches of the broom back to life, picking up memories from people, places, and objects, leaving his body to travel back in time and through space, resisting the spell of a powerful witch, hearing the voices of the dead, and using the power of memory to revert someone from a false form to their true form.

He's a little stronger and much more resilient than he has any right to be: despite falling from flying/skyscraper height AFTER being savaged by dragons, he manages a full recovery with what amounts to bandages and happy thoughts. This isn't so much a one off as he was used to children throwing rocks at him as a child and they apparently 'bounced'.

He's also got SOME connection with dragons, stated during one section then supported by the fact that the dragons attacked him when they weren't supposed to (according to their trainer) but did not kill him like every other target.

More mundanely, he's an EXCELLENT organizer, very good with numbers and processes (less so with people) and a good sportsman.
Possessions: His mother's cloak, the book he's writing, and his goosefeather quill
Personality: I've written a few things on him before, but that was more in dealing with him at a much younger age (and section of canon), so I'll take a second to address him at the point in canon where I'm taking him from.

Liir is a prickly, awkward man who's spent most of his life adrift for one reason or another. He's uneducated, but exceptionally smart as well as a quick learner in every other category outside of 'how people work' and unfortunately, that includes himself. He's a prime example of someone who had talent and even ambition but never at the right time or the right place to do him or anyone else any good. That's made him EXTREMELY self-depreciating, self-conscious, and there is a lot that he hates himself for without any real excuses made. It's part of why he won't take power easily; he doesn't trust himself with it as he's seen what it did to his mother (namely, drove her insane). He is, however, a much better person than he thinks he is and some of his biggest mistakes have been in not believing that.

Emotionally, he's very childish. He loves deeply and desperately, willing to do almost anything for the person he cares for; he worked tirelessly for Cherrystone as his father figure, tried to fulfill Elphaba's last obligations, blew up dragons with Trism as much for Trism's sanity as for anything else. Physical touch and affection are kind of like a drug for him, since he wasn't given any while growing up. At the same time, hurting him, while hard, can have a very nasty backlash and sometimes the whys and hows of it are both difficult to figure out and not even someone's fault; a friend he made in the barracks was eventually drummed out of the service due to a spiteful measure on Liir's part and the man very well might have hung himself. Hence the prickly. Regardless, he's never ever closed his heart. It's caused him pain and suffering and the deepest sadness, but that's one thing he's never done. He put it best himself: "It’s the only condition I know. Bitter love, loneliness, contempt for corruption, blind hope. It’s where I live. A permanent state of bereavement. "

Sarcasm and pessimism are his bread and butter, though the fact that he tends to look at the world from a slightly different angle than anyone else can sometimes have him using the most negative feelings towards the most hopeful of goals; turn left enough times and you do end up in the same place you'd have been had you turned right. Very very pragmatic, he'll poke the holes in a plan until it looks like swiss-cheese, but only because he doesn't want the failure to cost more than doing nothing at all for those involved. While he enjoys niceness, he doesn't know what to do with it and tough love is really the only kind he knows how to give; he didn't want to give up his daughter but he knew her best chance was with Glinda so he didn't even pause in doing it.

In a lot of ways, he's a list of contradictions: he's a coward who'll do what's necessary when it's necessary... mostly because he doesn't think he's worth protecting. He's a snappish, cranky bastard who loves people but can't stand the thought of them wasting time and energy in loving someone like him. He's an intelligent man who's seen most of his own world who still thinks of himself as a bumpkin but has the pessimism earned by experience. He's deeply insightful, but mostly because he's looking at things from a different direction than others.

His more passive nature makes some think that he's wishy washy, but really, he's anything but. He's not the seaweed, swayed by the smallest wave; he's the rock, and plenty of ideas and insults and what have you have crashed up against him but, battered or not, he's still alive and in the end, it's his stubborn insistence on his principles that ends up setting things right.

In short, he takes after his mother and his father both though he'd never think that was true.

As a father, Liir is awkward, guilty, inexperienced, and tolerant. He never wanted to be apart from his daughter, even if he knew it was the best for her. His own upbringing was largely loveless (at least in the most obvious ways) and he doesn't know what to do with Rain but he's done the one thing his mother never did which was make her aware that she is loved. It's for that reason that he takes her jibes and insults and snapping and jabs; he feels he deserves it, but he also thinks that maybe after a while she'll accept that no matter what she does, he's still her father and he still loves her.

Which is also how he feels about the two loves of his life. Liir is canonically bisexual, though I'd think that he's more closely attracted to men than women (much as his mother had a more meaningful connection with Glinda in some ways than Fiyero). Candle left him out of disgust for his pacifism and unwillingness to try and fix the world with the Grimmerie himself. Trism left and joined Mombey and stood there and let them nearly kill him, but Liir says quite firmly at the end of the last book that 'the front door is open for one, the back door is open for the other' and that they'll wander back when and if they want to with his affections for them none the worse for wear.

Thread Sample: http://mixed-muses.livejournal.com/1081908.html
Prose Sample: http://archiveofourown.org/works/476258 (some post canon fanfic I wrote)
Plans: I'd love for him to actually learn to deal with his magic, gain a few friends (and some confidence) and find a place for himself. That was the one thing he never really managed: to find a place where he was good at it, happy, and no one turned on him and screwed him over.
Notes: ...I'm sorry for the very very long explanations of some of the technical things. Maguire is many things but 'exact' is not one of them so extrapolating distinct things for an application can be a little difficult ^_^;

DÆMON

Name:Lyric
Sex: female
Form: dragon
Additional notes: The dragon is small, the size of a large dog, with mostly green coloring and accents of plumy purple. Claws in the back, hand-like claws in the front with reasonable dexterity, and large wings.
Why this form: My reasons are twofold: Thematically, Liir's odd relationship with the dragons in canon, combined with the fact that in Maguire's Oz, Time itself is a great dragon and Liir's relationship with the past makes it work really interestingly in my head. There's also a relationship implied between his mother, Elphaba, and dragons so Liir's soul actually being a dragon (given both their 'fixations' on the idea that they lack a soul and the initial disbelief in dragons from Oz on the whole ) strikes me as being incredible poetic justice. Further, given that Liir 'tried to be a Bird' but couldn't quite do it, according to one of the other characters, is somewhat interesting given that the only other creature that we ever see in the skies ARE the dragons.

Personalitywise, it makes just as much sense to me. The creature had to be cold-blooded, as Liir's own decisions are treated that way. He claims at one point that he did not make the 'human' choice, though he thought he made the best one in refusing to pick up the Grimmerie and use it's power. Liir is a creature apart, a person set adrift right from the beginning; Elphaba might have been Different with a capital DIFF, but she still had parents and she went to school and she had a religion of sorts for a time.

And of all the creatures in Oz, dragons are really the only ones that don't have a Place. Every other creature is, to some degree, given some sort of intimation of a purpose or autonomy; the dragons are there to be used, and Liir is one of the only people who give them any kind of benefit of a doubt. Given the Animals and the animals and even some of the more fantastic beasties like the pfenix, the dragons are the only ones that stand apart. No one really understands them or how they function or even what they want; they're 'vicious' creatures, but the way to handling them involves soft words and gentle whispers and treating them sweetly. Given Liir's own usual prickly nature and seemingly paradoxical affection for cuddling and sweetness, it seems vastly appropriate. It's also hilarious, given the man he loved was the one who trained the dragons (with said gentle whispers).

...it's also going to make him spaz.

Comments

Expansion on the Daemon Section

[nevermorethroppish]

Happily! Sorry; I start babbling and then figure I should stop well before I get to the meat and potatoes. Thank you for a chance to explain.

Despite dealing with animals and Animals all during the books (and even having a Goose familiar), the only kinship of any kind that Liir admits is to the dragons. They are capable of terrible things, just as Liir is capable of terrible things (Bengda bridge is a good example, though a better one is probably his bitter actions against a supposed 'friend' over nothing so harmful as affection for his own mother) but they are more than that. Their dexterous claws and graceful forearms are remarked upon more than once, perfect for exacting work, much as Liir prefers to do such as when he acted as Cherrystone's secretary or even just keeping order in the bunks, and even later in life when he decides to write a treatise on the complicated nature of power. Even the horrible things the dragons do are done with precision, and Liir is all about precision (he takes to the army well, does everything with care and exactness) when he can. They can recognize their own, but much like Liir, they didn't know what to do with it any more than Liir does; family is not a natural concept to either the dragons or to Liir though both are shown to try and act in the best interest of the group. They are intelligent, which Liir definitely is, though not terribly good in a crisis; when they knew they'd been poisoned, they cried out but the didn't do much more than that. Liir is similarly terrible in a crisis, freezing (as he did at Bengda) or losing his head (as he did when Dorothy came to the keep).

Dragons, in and out of Oz, are solitary creatures (even in the dragons in the Citadel need their own pens to live in); Liir is similar, not really making friends or looking for romance (though it's found him a time or two) and generally defaulting to being alone for the most part. Connection is not something that happens easily for him. That said, they do respond extremely well to sweetness and kindness and despite the fact that Liir doesn't get terribly much of that in his life, that's what he responds to as well. Trism, the dragonmaster, would quite literally 'whisper sweet nothings' into their ears to send them on assignment and Liir similarly responds well to praise (Cherrystone) and to affection (Trism).

The fact that they take to the sky is DEEPLY important, as flying is a deeply important part of him and any creature that couldn't fly wouldn't really be suitable; his first actualization is made by his first flight and it's one of the very few things that give him any joy in life. Similarly to the dragons, he doesn't particularly like 'sharing' the sky; it's kind of a personal place for him, somewhere to be free of everything else.

Further, the concept of dragons are intimately tied to the Time Dragon in Oz as well and all of Oz is part of the Dragon's dream; Liir's own greatest revelations and understandings come in trances and dreams and half visions. The Time Dragon's actual creation of time, and of Oz, is likened to an accident, happenstance, action taken with great consequences that were never foreseen or intended and that's pretty much Liir's life in a nutshell.