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interplanetary 

DISCORD: jordania#5628 

DEERINGTON APPLICATION

IN CHARACTER

Character Name: Mako
Canon: The Legend of Korra
Canon Point: He’s currently brainwashed by Guan during the canon comic Ruins of the Empire, post end-series.

In-Game Tattoo Placement: On his left bicep, just above where the lightning-scarring ends on his skin, looks like this
Current Health/Status: A little brainwashed and slightly bruised but otherwise, pretty good
Age: 22
Species: Human

Content Warnings: Mentions of death, poverty, and violence and the effect those things had on some very small children.

History: Avatar Wiki page about Mako

CRAU History and Impact: N/A
Personality:

> So, I understand you're dirt poor.

Mako’s personality has been shaped by his admittedly tough life. He was thrust into adulthood at the age of 8 after his parents were killed in front of him by firebenders. Bolin, his younger brother and for years his only known remaining family, was only 6 years old. Suddenly, Mako was responsible for everything: keeping them alive, keeping Bolin out of trouble, making sure they had a place to sleep and enough food to keep them going. In his mind, he was the only thing standing between Bolin and death. Keeping them safe and alive was Mako’s top priority, and for most of his life, that goal has stood above all other things.

He’s willing to do whatever is necessary in service of that goal, whether that’s joining a notorious criminal gang like the Triple-Threat Triads (for protection and some small sense of stability) or shoving someone into a wall with a fire-dagger aimed at their throat to get a friend back (it’s happened more than once). Mako has even killed someone who was actively trying to kill his friends, although after electrocuting Ming-Hua, he was very clearly in shock about having done that, how far it went, and the fact that she actually died.

Mako took on the responsibilities and weight of their lives by developing a thick, world-weary shell. Where Bolin is quick to trust and make friends, Mako, for the most part, keeps his distance. It was an early and hard-earned lesson that any sign of weakness could and would be exploited. He keeps the majority of his thoughts and feelings to himself, and places very little weight on emotion in general. Decisions are made out of practicality and necessity, both for himself and for other people.

This extends to people. While Mako has a deep well of love for Bolin, for most of his life, his approach to others has been transactional at best. When he was torn between Asami and Korra, he didn’t use his own feelings to make his choice: he thought it “made more sense” for him to go for Asami, at least in part because she could provide them with a lot more than Korra ostensibly could. It’s a mindset stemming from his childhood in poverty, and with a gang: everything, including fellow humans, is an asset to be used. The world boils down in his mind to “hustle or be hustled”. Mako lets Bolin be the emotional heart of their tiny family and shuts his own feelings away from himself. When he met Korra, he was surly and downright rude, focused on the pro-bending match he was about to fight, which had a lot more value to him than (at the time) some random fangirl his brother had brought in.

> Don't worry about it. I'll figure something out. I always do.

Mako is both a trained and a natural caretaker. He’s been the adult in the room for most of his life, and made sure that he and Bolin ate, often doing the cooking for the both of them, and that they got paid and paid their bills. His sense of duty and responsibility runs deep. He jumped into getting a job to pay their entrance fee into the pro-bending tournament without a second thought, and without even asking Bolin to contribute. In a world that placed extremely little value on two nobody street-rats, Mako’s usefulness and skills wove into his sense of self-worth. He makes himself indispensable so that no one can deny the value he brings to the table.

Mako has quite a bit of confidence in his own abilities. While that is both warranted (he’s a dedicated, talented bender and a solid detective) and served him well for a long time, it also means that Mako gets in his own way. His need for control, born from having so little over his life for so long, and his own ego lead him to step on toes trying to take situations into his own hands. He was so sure of his theory that Varrick was somehow behind the spate of attacks in season 2 that he launched his own, unsanctioned investigation despite being told to leave it. While the theory turned out to be correct, the way Mako handled it, with his temper flaring thanks to a crumbling personal life and a brewing civil war, didn’t do him any favors.

> You know, it seems like you're so afraid to disappoint anyone that you end up disappointing everyone.

One of Mako’s greatest weaknesses is the fact that his calm, carefully-controlled outer shell is just that: a shell, which can and has been cracked. Mako is great under physical fire, but because he’s put his strongly-felt emotions to the side for so long that he never learned to handle them in a healthy way, they often erupt spectacularly. He puts so much pressure on himself to be responsible and take care of everyone around him that he ends up not taking care of himself, and when the shell cracks, it cracks hard.

While his lack of emotional engagement kept them alive (no time to process grief when your little brother is starving and so are you) it’s much less helpful when trying to deal with complex relationships. He made an absolute mess of everything with Korra and Asami, and then had no idea how to handle it afterwards. Things got awkward, and Mako’s outward coolness broke entirely down. He didn’t want to hurt either Korra and Asami, especially since, for the first time since he was a kid, Mako actually had some emotional skin in the game. Korra’s impact on his life can’t be overstated. His relationship with her was the first one, besides Bolin, that wasn’t based on the value they mutually brought each other. Korra is compassionate just to be compassionate, caring for the sake of it, and willing to fight for those things. She gave Mako a new model, and something to aspire to.

After meeting her, Mako started trying a lot harder. He let down his walls, and while his self-serious nature is something that can’t really be changed, he started trying to let people in.

> Of course, Korra. Avatar. Avatar Korra.

For all his coolness on the surface, Mako has a lot more in common with his brother than he lets on. Sure, he rides a motorcycle and he’s a detective and he can direct lightning with his hands, but he’s also kind of a huge dork. His first few months as a beat cop, he wrote a list of cool one-liners that he’d run by Korra. When Asami hit him with her scooter, she shocked all the collectedness out of him (with her good hair and ridiculous face), turning him into a red-faced mess entirely too aware of his own hands. He’s an introvert, and his words often fail him spectacularly, especially when he’s uncomfortable (which is often. Mako may not be the most emotionally aware, but when he feels uncomfortable or unsure it radiates through his entire being). Mako takes himself quite seriously, and as such, is easily needled (see: being painfully awkward at Korra and Asami, and not at all knowing how to take the teasing he thus receives).

In the end, Mako is at his best when he’s playing a role that comes naturally to him: supporting the people he loves. Years of finally having a stable paycheck, solid friends, and finally finding the rest of his family in Ba Sing Se have softened Mako’s harder edges. Underneath the tough, brooding shell he put up to survive, Mako is a deeply caring person with an unmatched sense of loyalty. He wants to make sure his friends and family are taken care of, and while he still often thinks he’s the best person to do that, he’s also learned to take a step back. He recognizes, at the end of the series, how much keeping his thoughts and feelings to himself has made his life harder. With the help of the people who love him too, Mako is actively working to tear that wall down, bit by bit.

Abilities/Powers/Weaknesses & Warping:

🔴 Firebending Mako is an accomplished firebender, which means that he can create and control fire using his own body. Firebending is, essentially, magical martial arts: Mako uses a combination of boxing & Northern Shaolin kung fu to create and direct his flames. Firebenders can use their chi, their innr energy, to create flames (the only benders able to actually create the element they control) and to move or extinguish them. Firebending in general involves a lot of sharp, explosive movements, which Mako is quite good at, having competed professionally as a pro-bender. Firebending requires a lot of control, and the uses for it are really up to the creativity of the bender. They can do anything from kicking long spirals of fire out of their feet to warming up cold tea. In addition to being able to create and control fire itself, firebenders also have some amount of control over heat: they can warm up the air around them or their own bodies. They naturally run hot, in fact, and have a bit of a natural resistance against poison. Firebenders are made stronger by the sun and by bodies like comets entering the atmosphere (see: Sozin's comet making all firebenders very powerful for the duration of its pass over the planet). They are made much weaker by the cold, and their bending can be weakened to the point of disappearing by prolonged cold, damp conditions. Their connection to the sun means that their bending is stronger during the day, when the sun is up, and weaker at night.

Mako has quite a bit of raw power and is able to control and maintain streams of fire for a long time, long enough in some cases to be able to propel himself from the ground using the force and heat. His control is fine enough that he can make a tiny, focused dagger out of flames and strong enough that he can dispel the energy and fire from an explosion. 

🔴 Lightningbending Lightning Bolt Zolt, the boss of one arm of the Triple Threat Triads, taught Mako how to generate and conduct electricity, which is a skill unique to a subset of firebenders. He can act as a conduit for existing electricity, channeling it through his body (specifically, through his hands) like a lightning rod. With enough focus and power, he can generate bolts of electricity for short periods of time himself. This is the technique he used to escape from Amon, and to kill Ming-Hua. He can do this under an immense amount of pressure and pain, having acted as a conduit to blow up the spirit vines in Kuvira’s mech until he was physically knocked out. He can aim these bolts and hit moving targets, and control the amount of electricity used to some extent.

How will his powers warp? Mako will have significantly less fine control over his lightning and firebending, and they may spontaneously erupt, or come out much stronger or weaker or in different shapes than he intends. He’ll have to work much harder, especially at the beginning, to be able to do what he can in canon. Because fire is so connected to emotions, he will heat things up or make things burst into flames when he’s feeling strongly, and during other emotionally tough-times he may not be able to access his bending at all, or to a much lower degree (think Zuko when he lost his firebending due to losing his core of rage, if that rings any bells!) Open to warping his powers more, if necessary!

Other Abilities:

⭕ Hand-to-hand combat In addition to his bending, Mako is a very skilled hand-to-hand fighter. He’s very cool under pressure, and thinks on his feet. There is a solid amount of power behind his punches and kicks. He knows how to use his opponents against themselves, throwing them using their own weight and hitting them where it hurts most. Given that he learned these skills on the streets and from pro-bending, Mako’s not above fighting dirty when he has to.

⭕Observation Mako’s a detective, and a good one, at that. He’s always paying close attention to his surroundings, and often notices things other people don’t, making connections between things like the controlled blasts on the set of a mover and the remote detonation of the Southern Water Tribe Cultural Center. He’s also fairly good at reading people, having been able to determine that the guard suspected of letting the Red Lotus into Zaofu was being set up by Ai-Wei.

⭕Vehicles Mako’s good on a motorcycle, having driven one for a while as a beat cop. He was also able to figure out how to pilot an airship soon after encountering it, so he’s pretty good at piecing together how machines work and making them do what he wants.

⭕ Other stuff After living on the street so long, Mako’s an adaptable person. He’s good with maps, has a solid sense of spatial awareness, and can cook well, having provided for his brother for years. He’s also pretty good at hustling and scamming people out of their money, although those days are behind him.

⭕Weaknesses Emotions, in general.

Inventory: He’s a former street-rat, so he doesn’t have much, but:
🔴 his Republic City Police Uniform
🔴 Walkie-talkie that may or may not actually work anymore
🔴 the only other outfit he owns aka one change of normal clothes
🔴 a photo of Team Avatar (himself, Bolin, Korra, and Asami) from Varrick’s wedding, in black and white, with all of them smiling in their formalwear
🔴 pomade (for both his hair and his eyebrows. You think those shark brows are natural?)

Writing Samples:
Sample 1, being as soft as Mako gets after canon trauma with his brother

Sample 2, trying to get himself and an easily-distracted Wu out of a creepy situation

OUT OF CHARACTER

Player Name: Jordan
Player Age: 27
Player Contact: interplanetary

Other Characters In Game: None
In-Game Tag If Accepted: Mako: Jordan
Permissions for Character: Here
Are you comfortable with prominent elements of fourth-walling?: Absolutely, don’t mind them one bit, can’t wait to explore his reaction to that.

What themes of horror/psychological thrillers do you enjoy the most?: In games, I’m really interested in testing characters. I like to see how they react to horrible things, and the ways that they cope with those horrible things happening over and over again. Will they give up hope? Get jaded? Decide to hope even more? I think it’s interesting to push them in ways that they might not be pushed in their own canons, back them into corners, and see what happens.

Is there anything in particular you absolutely need specific content warnings for?: Overly-described gore, especially anything with impaling or people burning alive

Additional Information: None that I can think of!