CAPE&COWL: application

[overcompenslaying]

[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Garcia Fucking Hotspur. The Fucking is capitalized in subtitles, so it may actually be his middle name. I would be WHOLLY unsurprised.
SERIES: Shadows of the Damned.
CHRONOLOGY: The game epilogue.
CLASS: Herooooo.

BACKGROUND:

Okay, SO. Garcia (possibly Fucking) Hotspur is a demon hunter. We don't know how, we don't know for how long. We know only the why: because he loves killing fucking demons. Garcia spends his time re-murdering the souls of the dead with a talking ex-demon skull that turns into a gun that shoots bones. It's called

the

Boner.

I'm going to need you to not know a lot of things during this app, guys. Most of all, I'm going to need you to not know that penis jokes are for grade schoolers.

Anyway, there's your setup. We don't at any point learn any actual backstory, we're just asked to accept that here's this thirty-something (maybe?) Mexican demon hunter with a talking flaming skull buddy slash gun slash motorcycle slash dick pun, Johnson.

Now, if media's taught me anything, demon hunting is pretty pedestrian as far as jobs go. What makes Garcia's life special, then, is the fact that he's completely, utterly, disgustingly in love with a woman he pulled out of a dumpster in the back lot of a Wal-Mart knockoff. For all Garcia is concerned from then on, even if she's a little weird, Paula is the most perfect angel to have ever walked upon the Earth. Despite little hiccups like trying to knife him to death.

At some point during their idyllic lover's paradise of Paula threatening to stab his shit when he makes jokes about having been previously married, Garcia comes home to Paula having apparently committed suicide, hung herself on the fan. This wouldn't be SO weird if a demon didn't explode out of her. Things get a little hectic, and a bunch of demon corpses later, it turns out that he's gotten a visit from the Prince of Evil himself, who is not actually the devil but a demon named Fleming. He snatches Paula (who is now alive again???) and flies out the window into a portal to Hell, which Garcia flings himself into in a desperate bid to grab Paula back.

SO, after a motorcycle ride to the gates of Hell itself, Garcia starts his very own road trip to the heart of the underworld, Fleming's castle, Gulkak-Zu-Barza-Lech-Tora-Ray (known colloquially as the Castle of Hassle).

Yes, that's right. Shadows of the Damned is just a Mario game with more penis jokes.

Now that we've put that on the table, you can probably guess how ALL of the rest of the game goes. Garcia and Johnson fight their way through Hell, defeating quirky minibosses and seeing the sights. Fake mindgame Paulas also keep showing up and then exploding into demons, or drowning, or having her head cut off, et cetera et cetera. It is all very EMOTIONALLY TAXING for Garcia.

Hell is... uh... well, it's definitely not quite what Dante envisioned. Hell is oversaturated as fuck, full of random meat and blood and shit (probably actual shit!) in otherwise normal-looking residential areas. Normal for the 1800's, anyway, judging by the cobblestone streets and penny farthings.

Johnson, as an ex-demon, helpfully narrates their road trip through Hell, which is a good goddamn thing because it is baffling. Did you know that the Circles of Hell are actually just a library? Neither did I. Neither did Garcia. Johnson did, though. And how about the fact that goats are a source of light? Welp.

At one point, to get to a new level, they jump through the butthole of a billboard for a stripclub. This is not a game for my demographic. How did I get here? I am not good with straight male.

There's plenty of storybooks around explaining the life stories of some of the more important residents of Hell, like "Stinky Crow", who in life was a sad young man with BO who wanted nothing more than to fly, so then he flew off of the school roof and turned into giblets all over his classmates; or the Sisters Grim, who were beautiful in life and then all slipped and fell down a well and then their dog got hit with lightning and Fleming turned them into the Grim Reaper collectively. Garcia murders all of them, of course.

Another story -- and Johnson's favorite -- is that of the Unbreakable Huntress, the first woman demon slayer, if we're not counting Buffy, I guess. She challenged Fleming and he tore her to bits, but she refused to die. Because that impressed him, he made her his Queen.

Having plowed through the entirety of Hell and murdered everything in his path relentlessly, Garcia finally arrives at Fleming's doorstep and clambers up the Castle of Hassle to meet him gunpoint first.

Fleming and Garcia have their showdown, and Garcia kills him, if you're a decent enough player, anyway. Granted, since he's a demon it's not going to stick ANYWAY, but... whatever. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

He and Paula hug it out like adults, except for the part where she eats him and he gets teleported to a world made entirely of meat and rage???? Shit's like Amnesia all up in. Paula is pissed off that Garcia let her die time and time again. So all of those "illusory" Paulas were... totally real. WHOOPS. She's kitted out like a proper dark angel, wings and all, and they final battle that shit out. When Garcia defeats her, the two embrace and let the darkness close in to kill them both.

CUT TO DOMESTIC BLISS. NOTHING IS EXPLAINED. The pair wake up together like it's just another day, happy to be in each other's arms at last. Uuuunfortunately, though, Garcia gets an ominous phonecall from Fleming and a bunch of demons bust into their house again. Figures.

While it's never explicitly said, if you've been paying attention to the blatant clues -- like Paula not being able to keep her limbs on her fucking body for more than five seconds onscreen -- she is revealed as the Unbreakable Huntress and the Queen of Hell, though not to Garcia. By the end of the game, though, he seems to have cottoned on and realized what he's done. Luckily, he's willing to pay the price: having to keep Fleming's hands off of her for the rest of, uh, ever.

He's chill with that though. He loves Paula that much, guys. Awwwww.

PERSONALITY:

Garcia ain't a clever man. He thinks with his, er, well, his Johnson, as it were: he isn't the brains of the operation, and leaves most of the cerebral lifting to Johnson. "I fucking hate puzzles," he complains.

Garcia also thinks with his heart and his gut and basically every body part that isn't his brain: everything he does is just his first instinct, what he FEELS like he has to do. Garcia is a serial leap-before-looker. He falls for the same damn trick over and over, rushing facefirst at a blatantly fake Paula (well, before the big reveal) only to be let down every time. He acknowledges that they're probably mind games... and yet he keeps doing it. Throughout the game. Even after the Paulas start bumrushing him with murder in their eyes, in-between running from her, he... runs to her. "She's always been crazy," he says, "that is why I love her!"

His one redeeming quality, really, besides being able to aim a gun, is that he is devoted. To the extreme. To extremes perhaps no man should ever be devoted to something. He needs Paula like most people need to support their chronic addictions to breathing. Most people would be worried by their girlfriend's penchant to flip out and try to murder them. Not so with Garcia. A tattoo on his neck says (en Espanol, naturally), I would kill the world before it did you harm.

Despite the utter machismo Garcia exudes, then, his weakpoint that you can hit for massive damage is Paula. He's very gentle with her, and she's the only enemy in the game that he runs from rather than fighting head-on (in the segments where she chases him down in her lingerie, anyway). With Paula, rather than being the BADASS DEMON HUNTER, Garcia's just a vulnerable guy who is utterly, often dopily in love, to the point where he refuses to see any of her flaws. Even if those flaws are her trying to rip him to bits. ("She's not mental! She is momentarily confused!")

Garcia is very roll-with-the-punches, and deals with the weird bullshit he has to go through pretty well, for all that he bitches about it. He is just too damn focused to really stop for long to think about why shooting light at a goat makes the evil darkness go away, dammit. Sure, okay, a door with a baby's face wants to eat a strawberry before he can go through? Here's a strawberry. Also, fuck you, baby face. He's suddenly in a papercraft 2-D sidescroller? Alright, fine, so long as he still gets to shoot demons.

At one point, Johnson says that Garcia reminds him of a comic-book character, which is very apropos, and why I'm apping him here, shocker. He's loud, no-holds-barred violent as a way of solving his problems, and has a hell of a potty mouth. He spouts one-liners and headbutts demons into bloody messes. He runs into situations pun-first and camel clutches demons so hard their heads fly off. Garcia is very balls to the wall, emphasis on, of course, the balls.

He has little sympathy for people who aren't willing to go as far or as fast as he does: at one point, another demon hunter is turned into mincemeat by Stinky Crow, and rather than paying respects to the dead, he says that only the weak would allow themselves to be killed like that. Garcia respects standing your ground and doing anything to accomplish your goals: hearing the story of the Unbreakable Huntress, he has nothing but praise for her, calling her a hell of a woman. (Which, I guess, is why they're in love.)

POWER:

FIRE-O-MANIAC: Now that he's been... emasculated... of Johnson by dint of me not wanting to play another damn character, Garcia will have standard-issue, light-myself-on-fire-at-will comic-book style pyrokinesis! Not so standard-issue is the fact that -- in keeping with his demon-hunting and the burst-of-demon-harming-light his Boner used to be capable of -- his fire will be anathema to all paranormal creatures. Paranormal here meaning demons, ghosts, vampires, et cetera, you know, things a demon hunter would... hunt. Not like... trolls. You're fine, trolls. Carry on.

ANYWAY IT'LL HURT SPOOKIES.

A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR THE PAIN: Rather than destroying his liver slowly, booze will heal Garcia. How much it helps him depends on the alcohol content: 100-proof meaning he'll be fresh as a daisy again, on down. He has to drink the whole thing for full effect, and the booze still tastes the same as normal. Unfortunately, this also means he cannot get drunk. This is absolutely canon.


[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:

[there's the sounds of someone fumbling with the comm, the sound cutting in and out as he gets used to it.]

Celular de mierda.

I go through all of Hell, and for what? For some robotic puta to take me away from my Angel, again?! If she had an ass... I would be kicking it. I've been through too much shit to listen to some damn machine.

"Hero", she says, right? Like... the comic book kind? I am a slayer of demons. I don't need a mask or a cape to do that. But I do need my fucking gun, who seems to have taken a walk without me. I never thought I would miss the constant yapping. Or the headache.

What am I even supposed to do here? Unless they're all already busy running from me, I don't see any hellmonkeys.

-- Ahhh. Wait, I think I understand. Maybe she just wanted to see me in those little shorts superheroes wear, eh?

Well. If this bitch thinks she can hold Garcia Fucking Hotspur here, then she had better think again. My job may be hunting demons, but that just means that this isn't business... it's for pleasure.

LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:



FINAL NOTES: