Jasper (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
stompadour) wrote2017-01-23 08:17 pm
stompadour) wrote2017-01-23 08:17 pm
(no subject)
OOC
Name: Harry
Preferred pronouns: she/her
Over 16?: i am so old
Contact: ormery on plurk
Time zone: EST
IC
Type: OU
Name: Jasper
Canon: Steven Universe
Canon point: after ‘Earthlings’
Age: 5,000+
Appearance: big
Personality: On her people’s Homeworld, gems are made for specific functions and never given the opportunity to divert from their Diamonds’ plans for them. Jasper was created for a very specific purpose — she was a soldier, and it was her job to win the war for Earth for her Diamond or die trying.
Unfortunately for Jasper, neither of these things happened. Despite being the perfect warrior quartz, she wasn’t able to prevent her leader, Pink Diamond’s destruction, and she survived the end of the war with a lingering bitterness in her gem. Some other gem soldiers, like the Ruby Steven dubs ‘Eyeball’, clearly respect and admire her a great deal — Eyeball calls her ‘the Kindergarten Quartz That Could’ and recounts starry-eyed that it’s rumoured she came out of the rock with her helmet on and crushed thousands of rebels single-handedly — but Jasper doesn’t seem particularly proud of herself. And why would she? It’s hard to imagine her being pleased to be called the ‘Quartz That Could’ when in her view, what she ‘Could’ do was pretty much nothing worthwhile.
When she first appears in the show, she’s been assigned a tedious escort mission that’s ostensibly far below her skillset, and judging by the way she says it “Looks like another waste of my time” when she steps off the ship, it’s not the first one she’s been given lately. She’s clearly capable of more than acting as bodyguard to a single technician, and she knows it. But Jasper’s staunch loyalty to Homeworld’s values means she firmly believes that everyone gets what they deserve in life. She failed her Diamond; she might not like it, but this is what she’s earned, and only her above-average physical capability earned her a place in Yellow Diamond’s court when the rest of Pink Diamond’s surviving Earth quartzes were considered too useless to be worth keeping for anything beyond sentimental value. Jasper has spent five thousand years being grateful that she didn’t end up with her sisters, convinced that she escaped that fate because she’s better them but also that she doesn’t deserve any better because she couldn’t protect her Diamond. Similarly, her corruption seems, to her, like a fair punishment for the fact that even when given a second chance to defeat Rose Quartz, she was incapable of succeeding. In her view, life has winners and losers, and those who succeed are succeeding because they’re doing what they’re made for and they’re doing it well; failures get what’s coming to them, and despite everything earlier on in her life that suggested otherwise, Jasper knows by now that she is a failure.
It’s unsurprising, then, that she rejects Steven’s offer to help her with the healing abilities he’s inherited from his mother. Accepting help from an enemy would be a terrible blow to Jasper’s pride, and she’s convinced that Rose Quartz (to her, Steven is the same person; she’s unable to comprehend that he has her gem and her powers otherwise), rather than inspiring gems to seize control of their own destinies, takes advantage of them at their lowest points to put them in her debt. She believes this is what happened to those of her fellow soldiers who defected on Earth – it’s easier to believe this, because giving in to that kind of manipulation means they were weak, and weak gems deserve to be destroyed, and because then she doesn’t have to think about the possibility of there being any merit to Rose Quartz’s way of thinking. She would rather die than follow in their footsteps, not least because it would mean having to acknowledge that she has spent five thousand miserable years being wrong.
Ultimately Jasper is a very angry and lonely person struggling to justify her lot in life through a lot of thoroughly nasty aggression. She has never had anybody tell her she’s worthwhile without strength and power and success, so she measures herself by these things exclusively; she’s supposed to be the best, so if she’s not the best, she’s nothing. She’s a classic bully, taking out her anger on those she considers below her to remind herself that she is at least better than them; power makes her feel good, and so she craves it, whether she’s pushing around smaller gems like the defective quartz Amethyst, or begging Lapis Lazuli to fuse with her again so she can feel the rush of being Malachite — at any cost. Lapis admits to having taken her own anger out on Jasper while they were fused, but Jasper doesn’t care; she’s willing to endure anything to feel strong again, and she doesn’t care what Lapis wants.
When she’s not in the midst of having a breakdown about her failures, Jasper likes rules and order and things being The Way They’re Supposed To Be; she likes knowing what she has to do and being given orders. Despite being generally fairly practical and uninclined to get into fights that aren’t ‘worth’ her time, she likes to make an impression — she arrives on Earth wearing a flashy cloak and winged eyeliner, the latter of which is seen again only when she thinks she’s going to be facing Rose Quartz. Most of all, though, she likes feeling strong… but it seems, when she’s knocked out of her fusion with the corrupted gem monster and laments that no one she fuses with wants to stay with her, that she’s beginning to realise she’s missing something deeper.
From what we’ve seen of other Homeworld soldiers (the Ruby squad, or Centipeetle’s crew – and the other surviving Earth quartzes, although their circumstances are kind of unusual) it’s typical for them to operate in groups, and to have some kind of cameraderie from being one of many. Jasper has never had this. She was supposed to have been better than every other Quartz produced on Earth, so none of the others were ever on her level — especially not her sisters produced in the Beta Kindergarten, who were all failures from the moment they stepped out of their holes. From the get-go, Jasper’s worth was predicated on being better than them; there was never any room for cameraderie for her there. Soldiers from other Kindergartens, judging by the way Eyeball and Holly Blue Agate talk, would have initially thought poorly of her due to where she came from, forcing her to prove herself around them. And she saw soldiers she fought alongside defect to that of their mutual enemy, further diminishing her willingness to put her trust in other gems.
What Jasper really needs is for someone to care about her and for her to be able to accept it — but between what an asshole she is to other people and what an asshole she is to herself, that’s not looking all that likely.
Background/AU details: http://steven-universe.wikia.com/wiki/Jasper
Strengths & weaknesses:
+ very big
+ has huge muscles even if they aren’t made out of space magic
+ millennia of combat experience
+ great at taking orders ??
+ uh
- has to duck to go through many doors sized for regular human shaped people; very large hands make it difficult to press small buttons or hold pens
- millennia of combat experience predicated on superhuman strength, durability, magic helmet, ability to regenerate physical form, lack of need to breathe, etc
- not used to having to eat, sleep, wash, groom herself
- debilitating emotional problems & PTSD
- doesn’t believe in the power of friendship or pronouns other than ‘she’
- gem placement will translate to having a rock nose in the middle of her meat face as opposed to an actual nose with nostrils, which will mean two fewer available holes to breathe through than the average mammal
Depowering/humanization: Jasper, like the majority of quartz Gems, has the following superhuman abilities:
- Shapeshifting. Most gems can shapeshift, but it’s an effort for them to hold a form other than their base one.
- Regeneration. If her physical form is destroyed, she can regenerate a new one as long as her gem remains intact. (If the gem is shattered she is functionally dead.)
- Summoned weapon. Jasper can summon a helmet from her gem at will. It’s shiny and orange and has a big column on the front that she uses to headbutt stuff.
- Lack of need for food or sleep. Gems can eat and sleep if they want to, but Jasper pretty definitely does not want to.
- Superhuman strength and endurance.
- Sonic the Hedgehog style spin dash attack, I guess, where she sort of launches herself into this glowing orange wheel of concussive force?
All of these powers are reliant on her having a body made out of pure light energy produced by her gem, so when she arrives here in a basically human meat body she will not have any of them. She will still have her gem, as mentioned above, but it won’t have any special properties, it will just be a rock embedded in the middle of her face. She will still be orange, eight feet tall, and very beefy. She will now have to put effort into maintaining her physique instead of just innately being totally shredded, so her body mass will probably fluctuate a bit as she tries to figure it out, but her status as THE PERFECT QUARTZ will at least translate to an easier time than average when it comes to building and maintaining muscle once she gets a grip on how it actually works.
Placement preference: EITHER... she’s got experience being part of an invading military force on a technologically-less-advanced resisting planet but that means either one would be potentially interesting imo. Cetaganda would probably be a Better Fit
Character goals: I feel like whichever side she’s placed on the situation will force Jasper to think about her business on Earth in a way which will result in Character Development of some sort (positive? negative? either is good honestly). I’m excited about the prospect of putting her in a setting where loyalty is a focus and there are orders to be followed, because Jasper flourishes with orders to follow and pretty definitely won’t be able to help developing loyalty to competent leaders (or resentment for incompetent ones, yk, either way). Also she is going to hate being human and I love suffering
Sample: here
Name: Harry
Preferred pronouns: she/her
Over 16?: i am so old
Contact: ormery on plurk
Time zone: EST
IC
Type: OU
Name: Jasper
Canon: Steven Universe
Canon point: after ‘Earthlings’
Age: 5,000+
Appearance: big
Personality: On her people’s Homeworld, gems are made for specific functions and never given the opportunity to divert from their Diamonds’ plans for them. Jasper was created for a very specific purpose — she was a soldier, and it was her job to win the war for Earth for her Diamond or die trying.
Unfortunately for Jasper, neither of these things happened. Despite being the perfect warrior quartz, she wasn’t able to prevent her leader, Pink Diamond’s destruction, and she survived the end of the war with a lingering bitterness in her gem. Some other gem soldiers, like the Ruby Steven dubs ‘Eyeball’, clearly respect and admire her a great deal — Eyeball calls her ‘the Kindergarten Quartz That Could’ and recounts starry-eyed that it’s rumoured she came out of the rock with her helmet on and crushed thousands of rebels single-handedly — but Jasper doesn’t seem particularly proud of herself. And why would she? It’s hard to imagine her being pleased to be called the ‘Quartz That Could’ when in her view, what she ‘Could’ do was pretty much nothing worthwhile.
When she first appears in the show, she’s been assigned a tedious escort mission that’s ostensibly far below her skillset, and judging by the way she says it “Looks like another waste of my time” when she steps off the ship, it’s not the first one she’s been given lately. She’s clearly capable of more than acting as bodyguard to a single technician, and she knows it. But Jasper’s staunch loyalty to Homeworld’s values means she firmly believes that everyone gets what they deserve in life. She failed her Diamond; she might not like it, but this is what she’s earned, and only her above-average physical capability earned her a place in Yellow Diamond’s court when the rest of Pink Diamond’s surviving Earth quartzes were considered too useless to be worth keeping for anything beyond sentimental value. Jasper has spent five thousand years being grateful that she didn’t end up with her sisters, convinced that she escaped that fate because she’s better them but also that she doesn’t deserve any better because she couldn’t protect her Diamond. Similarly, her corruption seems, to her, like a fair punishment for the fact that even when given a second chance to defeat Rose Quartz, she was incapable of succeeding. In her view, life has winners and losers, and those who succeed are succeeding because they’re doing what they’re made for and they’re doing it well; failures get what’s coming to them, and despite everything earlier on in her life that suggested otherwise, Jasper knows by now that she is a failure.
It’s unsurprising, then, that she rejects Steven’s offer to help her with the healing abilities he’s inherited from his mother. Accepting help from an enemy would be a terrible blow to Jasper’s pride, and she’s convinced that Rose Quartz (to her, Steven is the same person; she’s unable to comprehend that he has her gem and her powers otherwise), rather than inspiring gems to seize control of their own destinies, takes advantage of them at their lowest points to put them in her debt. She believes this is what happened to those of her fellow soldiers who defected on Earth – it’s easier to believe this, because giving in to that kind of manipulation means they were weak, and weak gems deserve to be destroyed, and because then she doesn’t have to think about the possibility of there being any merit to Rose Quartz’s way of thinking. She would rather die than follow in their footsteps, not least because it would mean having to acknowledge that she has spent five thousand miserable years being wrong.
Ultimately Jasper is a very angry and lonely person struggling to justify her lot in life through a lot of thoroughly nasty aggression. She has never had anybody tell her she’s worthwhile without strength and power and success, so she measures herself by these things exclusively; she’s supposed to be the best, so if she’s not the best, she’s nothing. She’s a classic bully, taking out her anger on those she considers below her to remind herself that she is at least better than them; power makes her feel good, and so she craves it, whether she’s pushing around smaller gems like the defective quartz Amethyst, or begging Lapis Lazuli to fuse with her again so she can feel the rush of being Malachite — at any cost. Lapis admits to having taken her own anger out on Jasper while they were fused, but Jasper doesn’t care; she’s willing to endure anything to feel strong again, and she doesn’t care what Lapis wants.
When she’s not in the midst of having a breakdown about her failures, Jasper likes rules and order and things being The Way They’re Supposed To Be; she likes knowing what she has to do and being given orders. Despite being generally fairly practical and uninclined to get into fights that aren’t ‘worth’ her time, she likes to make an impression — she arrives on Earth wearing a flashy cloak and winged eyeliner, the latter of which is seen again only when she thinks she’s going to be facing Rose Quartz. Most of all, though, she likes feeling strong… but it seems, when she’s knocked out of her fusion with the corrupted gem monster and laments that no one she fuses with wants to stay with her, that she’s beginning to realise she’s missing something deeper.
From what we’ve seen of other Homeworld soldiers (the Ruby squad, or Centipeetle’s crew – and the other surviving Earth quartzes, although their circumstances are kind of unusual) it’s typical for them to operate in groups, and to have some kind of cameraderie from being one of many. Jasper has never had this. She was supposed to have been better than every other Quartz produced on Earth, so none of the others were ever on her level — especially not her sisters produced in the Beta Kindergarten, who were all failures from the moment they stepped out of their holes. From the get-go, Jasper’s worth was predicated on being better than them; there was never any room for cameraderie for her there. Soldiers from other Kindergartens, judging by the way Eyeball and Holly Blue Agate talk, would have initially thought poorly of her due to where she came from, forcing her to prove herself around them. And she saw soldiers she fought alongside defect to that of their mutual enemy, further diminishing her willingness to put her trust in other gems.
What Jasper really needs is for someone to care about her and for her to be able to accept it — but between what an asshole she is to other people and what an asshole she is to herself, that’s not looking all that likely.
Background/AU details: http://steven-universe.wikia.com/wiki/Jasper
Strengths & weaknesses:
+ very big
+ has huge muscles even if they aren’t made out of space magic
+ millennia of combat experience
+ great at taking orders ??
+ uh
- has to duck to go through many doors sized for regular human shaped people; very large hands make it difficult to press small buttons or hold pens
- millennia of combat experience predicated on superhuman strength, durability, magic helmet, ability to regenerate physical form, lack of need to breathe, etc
- not used to having to eat, sleep, wash, groom herself
- debilitating emotional problems & PTSD
- doesn’t believe in the power of friendship or pronouns other than ‘she’
- gem placement will translate to having a rock nose in the middle of her meat face as opposed to an actual nose with nostrils, which will mean two fewer available holes to breathe through than the average mammal
Depowering/humanization: Jasper, like the majority of quartz Gems, has the following superhuman abilities:
- Shapeshifting. Most gems can shapeshift, but it’s an effort for them to hold a form other than their base one.
- Regeneration. If her physical form is destroyed, she can regenerate a new one as long as her gem remains intact. (If the gem is shattered she is functionally dead.)
- Summoned weapon. Jasper can summon a helmet from her gem at will. It’s shiny and orange and has a big column on the front that she uses to headbutt stuff.
- Lack of need for food or sleep. Gems can eat and sleep if they want to, but Jasper pretty definitely does not want to.
- Superhuman strength and endurance.
- Sonic the Hedgehog style spin dash attack, I guess, where she sort of launches herself into this glowing orange wheel of concussive force?
All of these powers are reliant on her having a body made out of pure light energy produced by her gem, so when she arrives here in a basically human meat body she will not have any of them. She will still have her gem, as mentioned above, but it won’t have any special properties, it will just be a rock embedded in the middle of her face. She will still be orange, eight feet tall, and very beefy. She will now have to put effort into maintaining her physique instead of just innately being totally shredded, so her body mass will probably fluctuate a bit as she tries to figure it out, but her status as THE PERFECT QUARTZ will at least translate to an easier time than average when it comes to building and maintaining muscle once she gets a grip on how it actually works.
Placement preference: EITHER... she’s got experience being part of an invading military force on a technologically-less-advanced resisting planet but that means either one would be potentially interesting imo. Cetaganda would probably be a Better Fit
Character goals: I feel like whichever side she’s placed on the situation will force Jasper to think about her business on Earth in a way which will result in Character Development of some sort (positive? negative? either is good honestly). I’m excited about the prospect of putting her in a setting where loyalty is a focus and there are orders to be followed, because Jasper flourishes with orders to follow and pretty definitely won’t be able to help developing loyalty to competent leaders (or resentment for incompetent ones, yk, either way). Also she is going to hate being human and I love suffering
Sample: here