firewalled | Application for folkmore

★ Character Information ★

Character Name: Rich Goranski
Character Age: 17
Character Species: Human (with a cybernetic implant, so he often jokes about being a cyborg)
Current Health: Injured. Rich has bright red burn scars on the left side on his body, along his arm, chest, leg, and around his eye. The burns on his face seem to stem from an area on his neck. He's no longer in a full-body cast, but he's heavily bandaged and is still getting used to moving around.
Outfit: A medical gown and a pair of grey sweatpants.

Character Canon: Be More Chill
Link to History: Very bare bones summary here.

Rich is a high school student from a broken family, lost and desperate enough with his untreated mental health problems to become the test subject for a Japanese supercomputer called a SQUIP. Ingested as a pill, it implants in a host’s brain to help them with their life goals. Rich’s immediately helps him skyrocket to popularity, though in the process, he becomes a bully and harasses Jeremy until he too acquires a SQUIP. The two form a digital bond when their SQUIPs sync, and Rich becomes a completely different person in order to meet the requirements of being Jeremy’s friend.

A few weeks later, Rich attends a friend’s Halloween party, and appears to be his usual hyperactive self for a while, but things quickly get out of hand. Rich’s SQUIP has become more demanding with its requests to Rich to sell SQUIPs to other students. The SQUIP wants to have everyone connected to a “social network” in order to eliminate human unpredictability and sync all desires together, leading to a hivemind in which “everyone can be happy.” Rich’s SQUIP new plan involves coaxing Rich to stockpile hundreds of SQUIPs, trying to force Rich into dosing everyone at the Halloween party.

Rich, thankfully, realizes this is a bad idea. He fights with his SQUIP throughout the night, his SQUIP puppeting his body to make him look like a happy, wild partygoer. Rich occasionally breaks through, but his desperate pleas for the one thing that will deactivate a SQUIP (Mountain Dew Red, the old soft drink discontinued in 1989) come off as unhinged ramblings from someone extremely drunk or high. Eventually, Rich realizes that he cannot save himself, but he attempts to save everyone else by going to the garage, dousing his surroundings in gasoline, and lighting a match.

Rich is rushed to the hospital. The student body’s rumour mill runs wild with gossip regarding the house fire and the physical and mental state of Rich himself. The tragedy backfires somewhat by leaving the student populace lost, worried, and scared... in other words, the perfect targets for an upgrade. Jeremy's SQUIP directs Jeremy into finishing what Rich started by spiking a prop drink for the school play with dozens of SQUIPs.

Thankfully, Jeremy and the SQUIP fail, once Michael gets Mountain Dew Red into one of the SQUIPped students, and they all deactivate due to being synced. When Jeremy is taken to hospital after what is labelled by adults as a bad drug trip, Jeremy meets Rich there. Rich is in a full body cast, but he’s free of the “shiny, happy hivemind.” He vows that from now on, everyone will get to meet the real him, including himself, as he realizes he is bisexual.

The play ends rather ambiguously, but it seems hopeful that Rich and Jeremy will become genuine friends with their peers, able to listen to their own voices instead of the voices in their head that aim to bring them down.

Canon Point: A month into Rich'a hospital stay (the play kind of glosses over this with a time skip, but with the amount of burns Rich has, he'd be hospitalized for at least a few months).
Canon Iteration: Original Canon
Canon Iteration Explanation: N/A

★ Folkmore Roles & Attributes ★

Skills: Rich, being a high school student, doesn’t have many skills aside from occasional hobbies, but he does have a talent for the guitar. He does have extra knowledge in regards to mental health, if only because therapy was required after his suicide attempt. His own SQUIP would say he had developed better communication and socialization thanks to its influence, but Rich tends to ignore most of its advice now, so only the basics tend to remain.
Canon Abilities: Rich is mainly an average human, though his strength has been amplified somewhat due to his SQUIP’s training regimen for him. Once Rich heals up, he will be very physically fit, able to take and deliver quite a few punches. Unfortunately, he doesn't have any formal training in any fighting style.
Other than that, he has no special abilities. Any perks he might have had from his SQUIP (quantum predictions, Google in one's brain, etc.) are lost now that the SQUIP is deactivated.
Role: Myth
Role Qualities/Attributes: A pair of bull-like horns, a scaled tail, and fangs. His speed will also increase. Self-preservation, though? Never heard of her.
Role Reasoning: Rich is a person who not only has some negative qualities, but is one who is completely held back by them. He took the SQUIP due to selfish motivations, in his opinion, and during that time, he was rude, brash, and quick to anger. Those pieces of him are not gone at the moment... and with Rich's struggle to figure out who he is outside of the SQUIP's influence, he finds that selfishness a bit of a roadblock. He's concerned about making friends with the people he actively hurt and about how to connect with him when he was so easily lying to them about everything he was.
Rich has many good qualities as well, but his selfishness and cruelty act as a sort of stopper, and those qualities don't get to shine through if Rich decides to push people away or lash out.
That said, Rich's martyr attempt was a purely selfless action, and proves that he could (very slowly) push himself to change into a good person. As a writer, I'm curious to see if he'll be able to push himself up from the bottom when the worst parts of him are physically on display.

★ Personality ★

Option 2. Choose FOUR-FIVE of the following questions to answer and expand upon.

What is a headcanon (or two) you feel strongly about and that you prefer playing your character with? How is this supported in canon and why do you think it benefits the character's story?

Rich Goranski is a trans man. This is a deeply important headcanon for the fanbase, and one that both the playwright and original actor have encouraged. The journey of having a SQUIP and struggling with feeling like a stranger in your own body is one that has been directly compared to the trans experience by main actor Will Roland here.

It may seem unlikely, but Rich's actions, particularly his methods of bullying and his obsession with masculinity, make a great deal of sense when viewed through the lens of a young boy struggling to come to terms with his gender. Rich is fixated on looking as manly as possible, attributing gender to nonsensical ideas ("Stalls are for girls. Are you a girl, Jeremy?"). Much like he's putting on the airs of confidence and self-importance, Rich overcompensates in nearly every scene he's in to attempt to look as tough as possible, even doing push-ups in the background if he feels people are doubting his masculinity.

Rich also has changed so much due to the SQUIP's influence that he's entirely unrecognizable to his own peers. Jeremy is completely disbelieving when Rich insists that he attended the same school in freshman year, with Rich insisting that nobody even noticed him back then. With Rich having changed so drastically, there is an implication that Rich might have transitioned between freshman and sophomore year, or at least been able to more deeply alter his appearance thanks to the SQUIP manipulating his muscle mass and body's chemistry.

Above all, Rich is a character that embodies the struggles teens face in regards to being true to themselves and to being seen. Rich's struggles with society's expectations and his fears of being invisible to others mirror queer teens' struggles with gender acceptance.

What does your character feel like they struggle with still? Where could they improve? This could be physically, mentally, emotionally, or otherwise.

Being a young teenager who had two of the most developmental years of his life stolen away by a supercomputer, Rich has... a lot of struggles. He was forbidden from being himself at a crucial time of self-discovery, so now, he's left as a scared kid trying to fight back and become who he wants to be. Due to this, parts of his personality that he isn't used to showing are still heavily suppressed, even without Rich intending to do so. He hides behind joking confidence and bravado, which does the job of hiding his deeper flaws from casual acquaintances. He could do with a better look at his past and how it screwed him up, especially considering how without that perspective, he blames himself and takes on too much responsibility for the mistakes he's made with the SQUIP.

One thing Rich keeps especially close to his chest is just how scared he is of figuring himself out. Though he's openly bisexual, his struggles with figuring his identity out further and unpacking the toxic masculinity he was brought up in are near impossible for him to voice, and he usually falls back on that crass sexist rhetoric to explain how he feels he should be. He speaks about his mental health, but he's terrified of understanding what diagnoses he may have, and is ignorant of flaws he blames himself for that may be symptoms of his mental illness. He wants to know who he is, but only the parts that he can deem simply 'good.' Anything more morally grey or complex has to go... otherwise, he'll hate himself entirely. This struggle with autonomy, purpose, and character is something he suppresses so badly that he honestly is unaware how much he's covering up.

What would your character sacrifice to get what they want or to reach their potential? What have they sacrificed already?

Rich has had to sacrifice a great deal, under the influence of his SQUIP, and as such, there isn't much left for him to give up. Rich thought he would give absolutely anything in order to become stronger, to defend himself from his father and to have a presence that would demand attention from his peers. To accomplish this, Rich's SQUIP distanced him from his brother (the one member of his family who still deeply cared for him). He quickly ended up on a meal plan and an exercise routine, meaning he gave up on foods he enjoyed and the free time he had.

To become friends with those popular kids Rich envied so badly, he gave up his ability to speak to them normally. The SQUIP gave him instruction on everything he ever said, and even forcefully trained his lisp out of him through violence. Rich even gave up control of his body and voice when the SQUIP felt he was too hopeless to follow direction.

Thankfully, the one thing Rich wouldn't sacrifice was his real dreams and desires. Despite how much the SQUIP had twisted his ideals, Rich was genuinely a lonely, desperate kid who needed someone to care for him as he was. He wanted to have connections with people... but genuine ones, as his own self. When he realized how manufactured his relationships had become, and understood that with the SQUIP's grand plan of SQUIPping everyone in the world, everyone would end up as trapped in a mockery of success, Rich nearly gave up his chance at living to ensure that wouldn't happen.

At this point, it's unlikely Rich would want to give up anything for some foolish idea of 'his true potential' anymore. He's seen first hand what can happen if you let go of too much of yourself, and needs to keep a grip on what he has left at any cost.

Which Taylor Swift era is your character going through right now and why?

Rich is 100 percent going through a 'Reputation' era. After disappearing from the play through the catastrophic house fire, Rich leaves the spotlight, and his reputation as a popular kid can't save him from the flurry of social media rumours and wild speculation. (Honestly, he even has people theorizing he's gay... somewhere out there, there's an alternate universe where an unhinged Tumblr blogger is posting zoomed in photos of his and Jake's hands touching during the Halloween party.)
Rich post-play is remarkably different from the Rich seen pre-fire, and on top of that, he's completely unapologetic for who he truly is.

...Really, the only reason I answered this question is because "the old Rich can't come to the phone right now." Rich is entering a new, violent, messy, but truthful era of himself, shedding his old ways and stepping back into the spotlight, his new self an aggressive middle finger to everything his SQUIPped self stood for.

★ Player Information ★

Player Name: Venus
Pronouns: She/they
Are you over 18?: Yes
Contact(s):

needsmountaindewred, thegreatpapyrus#3208 on Discord, or PM
Who Invited You?: Neth!
Current Characters: N/A
Permissions: Here
Writing Samples: One and Two.