![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
[ 62 application ]
PLAYER INFORMATION
Name: SqueeCHARACTER INFORMATION
Reserve: Yes
Contact:claptrap or chinhands (aim)
Have you participated in a short-term game before? Yessur
I have read the rules and understand the activity requirements: Yep!
Name: RhysMEMORY BANK
Canon: Borderlands
Age: 28
(Brief) Canon Description:• Borderlands (Series)
• Tales From The Borderlands (Wiki)
• Tales From The Borderlands (Wikia)
• Rhys (Wikia #1)
• Rhys (Wikia #2)
• Handsome Jack -- Important for Rhys because through the course of the game, Handsome Jack is Rhys' hero and Rhys' brain gets implanted with Handsome Jack's AI. Not a good time.
Personality/Background:Rhys is what you get when you take a guy that has never once understood his privilege or bothered to question it and throw him right to the wolves. If you strip him of everything he holds dear and makes him confront the fact that he doesn't really know how to do anything because he's lived such a pampered lifestyle, that's Rhys. At the start of the game, Rhys has it all -- a good job, an excellent promotion coming his way, friends, money, looks, all of it! -- and then it swiftly and without mercy, is all taken away when his promotion is torn from hi and he's thrown from his cushy office into the wild Pandoran desert with no way to survive and no ability to. That's how the game starts.
See, he works for the Hyperion corporation and in the Borderlands universe, Hyperion is the biggest shark in the ocean. Hyperion is greedy and powerful and most of all, ruthless. Most of the time, promotions are given through bloodshed and the idea of killing your fellow employee is encouraged within those walls. While the company has always kind of been this way, the one who increased this sort of mindset is Rhys' hero -- Hyperion's previous CEO, Handsome Jack. Rhys wants to be Handsome Jack, he wants everything about the guy to be his. He considers him his hero and the only one who understands Rhys' goals. He wants to be at the top and he'll do anything to get there! Just like Handsome Jack!
This all means, Rhys' morals are pretty corrupt. Any shred of goodness he used to have has definitely been twisted in some way by Hyperion, making him sort of... forget how to be good in the process. Rhys isn't a malicious guy, at his core he doesn't want to hurt people but he's a product of his environment and his environment encourages backstabbing, arrogance, murder, and a variety of other sins. So, he accepts it and does his best to bend with it so he can get the greater payoff in the end. That's what Rhys wants, the biggest reward.
Rhys is a guy who wants to be comfortable. He wants money and status and not have to worry about anything at all. He's not so much ambitious as he is greedy, feeling like the power and wealth is something owed to him and when he isn't able to get it -- he doesn't know how to deal with it. He has a quick temper and can hold a grudge, making him incredibly capricious in disposition. He also lacks the ability to be self-aware enough to understand these problems, instead becoming incredibly defensive at anything he finds a personal slight or criticism towards him. He's not the nicest guy to get along with.
On the other hand though, Rhys isn't all bad. When he's with his friends or with people he likes, he chills out immensely, becoming incredibly loyal and while still prickly, showing an underlining warmth to him. Rhys' loyalty runs deep and while his affections aren't overt, they're present underneath anything else. Rhys is a pretty lonely guy deep down and craves kindness over anything else but he doesn't quite... understand or have the ability to ask for it or generate it. When someone does push past the prickliness and the feigned arrogance, is kind to him instead of dismissive, Rhys is the guy who grows incredibly attached and will follow that friend to the ends of the earth -- most likely while bitching all the while.
Really, the problem with Rhys is that he doesn't understand how to be decent anymore. When he was younger, it was easier to grasp onto those feelings of wanting to like people and reach out to them because Rhys does have his moments of being able to be charismatic and friendly, of being able to give others the benefit of the doubt, but after years of steeping himself in the Hyperion mindset -- it's all a bit messed up now. Now, Rhys reaches for the paranoia and the snideness before any other reaction, already on the defensive before he even knew there was a fight.
Other events in the game shape who Rhys comes to be, going from haughty and bull-headed to... still haughty and bull-headed but with a hesitance to him that wasn't there before. In the course of the game, he trusts people, attaches himself to them, and then loses them again. He gives his heart and soul to an AI copy of his hero, Handsome Jack, and when Jack inevitably betrays him, he's forced to kill many, many people to escape. He's left abandoned, without any of his friends, and even when he reunites with them -- there's still something under all of it that indicates yeah, Rhys went through some shit.
Rhys is a guy who could use a few years of therapy and some good friends who won't abandon him to feel better. That would probably help wake him up a little to realize just how far the Hyperion rabbit hole he's gone and just how twisted his personality has become because of it. Unfortunately, that's not something Rhys really gets in the game or the type of universe the game's set in, so instead he remains how he is -- prickly, arrogant, and desperate to have a friend.
Moral Alignment:Rhys is pretty hard to pin down in terms of alignment but he's probably somewhere between Lawful Evil and Neutral Evil. He comes off as a fairly nice guy but in the end, his morals are pretty corrupt and leaning towards what's most self-serving for him. This summary at the bottom of the Lawful Evil page describing the conflict between those two alignments sums up Rhys' character arc within the game fairly well, actually.
Item:- One (x1) robot buddy named Dumpy
Role: Yeah, sure. What's the worst that could happen?
1) How to use his cybernetics.
2) All memories of Jack that are personal -- Jack's daughter, Jack's girlfriend, their bonding moments, etc. He just remembers the idolized vision of Jack and that an AI version of Jack tried to kill him when he uploaded it back into Helios. He'll remember being hurt by the events but not the specifics -- so like, he'll feel betrayed by his hero trying to kill him but the extent, the whole of the end of the game, it's just patchy for him. Details will be fuzzy for Rhys, so he'll probably justify the betrayal as it being a corrupt AI from Nakayama's drive.
3) Everything after being knocked out by the Stranger. His canon point will be after Fiona and him open the Vault but he won't remember anything after running into the Stranger and being hit in the face after the radiation suit comment.
4) Vaughn. Everything about Vaughn.
5) How Handsome Jack saved Elpis -- he knows Jack saved something aside from Pandora but he only knows Pandora. He doesn't remember the story of Elpis.