defencive | App for neosapien

PLAYER INFORMATION

PLAYER: Nerdo
ARE YOU AT LEAST 16 YEARS OLD?: Yes
IF UNDER 18 YEARS OLD, PLEASE STATE YOUR AGE: N/A
CONTACT: Nerdorama
CHARACTERS PLAYED: N/A

CHARACTER INFORMATION

NAME: Weiss Schnee
CANON: RWBY
CANON REFERENCE: The fandom Wiki, Weiss's character page, and her original character trailer.
AGE: 21 (up from 19ish at current point in the show).
GENDER: Female
CHARACTER TYPE: Meta-human
APPEARANCE: Image. Weiss is very a petite woman, 5'3" in 4-inch heels, with an accompanying slight build. When she's made up - and she usually is - her pale skin and light blue eyes give the impression of a porcelain doll, although she's far too animated and expressive in conversation to be confused for one for long. She wears her white hair very long, usually in a large braid or side ponytail, and favors fashionable clothes, typically in shades of blue. Her only real appearance change from canon is occasionally considering wearing her hair down and having more than one outfit per year.

PERSONALITY:

To understand who Weiss Schnee is now, we have to discuss who she used to be. Once upon a time, Weiss was a bit of a brat. A bad home life and sheltered upbringing led to a very lonely girl who developed a habit of keeping others at arms length by aggressively asserting her personality, putting others down, and letting overwhelming pride get in the way of forming meaningful relationships. In her younger days in the world of Neo Sapien and the early volumes of RWBY, Weiss was prone to being downright cold to others, a fact best exemplified by her relationships in the first volume of the show, where she was downright aggressive to people she had even the slightest reason to dislike, and asserted her name, knowledge, and capability at every opportunity. In her maturity, she's modified this personality a lot, but it's important to remember where she came from. Weiss Schnee was the loneliest girl in the world when she was younger, provided with everything money could buy and absolutely nothing it couldn't, and her tendency to keep others at arms length out of fear and insecurity colored her life in the past as much as growing out of that tendency colors her life today.

After thawing a bit - to the point where she'd actually probably make that pun out loud now - Weiss is a significantly more friendly and helpful person. Getting to know other people as peers and actual friends, and recognize that the stark coldness and emotional abuse of her upbringing was both abnormal and not her fault, means she turns her assertive personality in much more assertive directions. Weiss in her "current" state is someone who believes in and supports her friends unquestioningly, best exemplified in canon with her support of Yang through a couple of different personal trials, including being framed for a crime and dealing with her abandonment issues, and with her blooming respect for Ruby as a leader and friend, bearing in mind this is a girl she literally blew up out of sheer indignance the day they met. She even, on occasion, takes this perhaps too far, fighting for her friends without even being asked, which has escalated a conversation to violence at least once in canon. In point of fact, Weiss never really gave up her tendency to assert her dominance in conversation discussed in the previous paragraph - she just does so to help and support her friends now, instead of putting others down. She can still be aggressive and mean (again, her incidents of escalation), but only to people she regards as being harmful to people or concepts she cares about.

What all this amounts to is that Weiss is someone who is aggressively passionate: about her friends, about her hobbies and interests, and about her ideals. Despite being born in a position of privilege (and then losing it), Weiss is a natural rebel - even described by Blake as the personification of "defiance" in canon - always pushing for her ideal of what's right. All that's really changed over the course of her life is what her ideal of what's right is, and how far she's able to go to get it - both arguably for the better. She is a very dedicated person, whether to the pursuit of skill, of knowledge, or of justice, and intense in her actions and interactions. She throws the same passion into organizing a school dance or even note-taking that she does into defending humanity (or meta-humanity) from destruction, and holds to that level of general dedication as a point of pride. Whatever cool facade she tries to put up usually melts quickly when she finds an emotional connection to something, and she usually does, whether it's friends, family, what she's doing, or what she's striving for. If nothing else, you can look at her reactions to small, cute dogs and see that Weiss has, in fact, never been cool, even when she was trying to be cold.

Weiss is not without her weaknesses (and the fact that she can acknowledge them now is another way she's changed from her younger days). Like many people who grew up in a, frankly, abusive household, raised voices make Weiss nerveous and are something of a fear trigger for her, making her look for support or ways to de-escalate the situation, and if she can't find either, she'll escalate into rash decision-making or withdraw. And while she's gone from judging entire species for the indirect pain some criminals have inflicted on her, she still bears something of a grudge toward particular organizations that gives her blind spots - more so in Neo Sapien, with regards to Yakashbah, as she hasn't yet had an opportunity to come to terms with the human side of that organization the way she did with Blake and the White Fang in canon. And in general, she's got a habit of charging forward and putting her all into things even when that's not necessarily the best idea. Not that that ever stopped her from chiding Ruby for doing the same.

POWERS & ABILITIES: Cryokinesis. Weiss has the ability to "create" ice, with very fine control, and to some extent control the resulting ice constructs. In a technical sense, what she does is crystallize water molecules in the air through telekinesis, which she can then continue to direct. Generally, she can't generate much force with this, but in relatively moist air she can create quite a lot of ice in very precise shapes. For example, while she can't just shoot a beam of frost at someone and expect it to knock them off their feet, she could easily wrap their feet in blocks of ice, form a sheet of ice under them, or create a chunk of ice high in the air and let it drop. Alternatively, with concentration, she can create precisely sculpted ice figures - works of art, statues of animales or people, even complex decorative filigrees. She can then move her ice constructs a bit, but the amount of mass she can actually move is currently fairly low. With training, she could hypothetically make, say, an ice statue that fights like a remote-controlled combat robot, but she'll need a lot of practice for something like that. Right now it's more "create a beautiful to-scale ice rose and have it bob around like it's dancing" or similar party tricks. Weiss generally has to be able to see where she's creating or moving the ice and have a clear path through the air to get there - she can't currently manipulate the ice inside an airtight container, or on the other side of a wall. The upper range on her ability is something like 20-30 yards, depending on how much effort she puts into it, although this is something that could be increased a good deal by training.

Weiss is also a competitive sport fencer from a very young age, one of several demanding hobbies she pursued as a corporate heiress. She's fully aware that sport fencing and any combat skills useful for self-defense are two different things, but it did give her excellent balance and reflexes, and she's looking to parlay that ability into proper combat training. There's a lot of interesting things you can do with a sword, after all. Other, less combat-relevant skills include singing and dancing (more corporate heiress tricks), figure-skating (that one she figured out to use with her meta-human abilities), and accounting. So much accounting.

AU HISTORY: In the complex feudal edifice that is the zaibatsu economy, there are numerous corporate clans jockeying for resources and positions. Among them is a family that owns a nice vertically-integrated pillar of the international energy sector: the Schnee Energy Company. Weiss was born into a position of extreme wealth and privilege, but one with a family secret: for the last three generations at least, her mother's side of the family have been Meta-Humans, a fact kept strenuously quiet in order to avoid scandal and the covetous eye of other, more senior businesspeople like Douman Zaibatsu. This led to Weiss's upbringing being even more cold and isolated than typical for her social stratum, as she was kept under constant stressful watch by her father, treated as both a tool and a potential liability.

More than that, the Schnee company was frequently the target of violence from a variety of groups around the world. Most particularly, however, its board and the Schnee family itself were targeted by Yakashbah, with the company's staunch anti-Meta stance often cited as a reason for attacks against energy infrastructure, and even directly against the upper echelons of Schnee Energy Company. Weiss was fortunate never to be directly attacked, but she grew a strong resentment for Yakashbah's methods as paranoia and fear grew throughout her household. While her opinion on the idea of Meta rights would soften as she grew to understand her family history and later herself, she still blames this organization in particular for making her already bad childhood worse.

Weiss was miserable, but played her part as a proper corporate heiress well, making public appearances mandated by her father and engaging in all the proper hobbies of a young lady of wealth: ballet, figure skating, even a brief period of public vocal performance, although she never gained as much fame as a proper (or virtual) pop idol. Amidst all of this, Weiss was learning and adapting with the expectation of one day gaining power within the company, and maybe some day using that power to improve the state of society, rather than merely collecting money from the world's constantly-growing need for electricity.

Unfortunately, that dream was not to come to pass - at least not as Weiss expected it to. As genetics had warned them, Weiss manifested metahuman abilities in late puberty. Not only that, she did so in a blatant and public way, getting into an argument with her father at a party and freezing an enormous block of ice in the middle of the ballroom. In the ensuing scandal, she found herself confined to her family's estate indefinitely, as well as disinherited from the Schnee company's line of ownership. It was at this point Weiss developed an understanding of several things: that her family had no interest in her as a person, only a pawn; that she could do more good and follow her own path by leaving the Schnee company, if not the name, behind her; and how to destroy electronic locks by freezing them until they malfunction. With all of that knowledge under her belt, and confident that her father would not pursue her beyond the boundaries of their estate if he didn't consider her a threat, she broke out of her imprisonment and made her way to New Gate City and, more specifically, the Neo-Sapien Organization, throwing herself on the ample generosity of Dr. Annan, as she had nowhere else to go.

Weiss has been working at the NSO for some time. She's passionate about helping others, even if her upper-class upbringing sometimes leads to clashes with other Meta-Humans, but she nonetheless throws herself into the NSO's work in both promotion, organization, and under-the-table work. Weiss understands from her own experience that rights are not typically given freely and need to be fought for, and she is enthusiastic about doing so, although she still needs a fair bit of training in anything that isn't fighting people by freezing the environment. She also still remembers the damage caused by Yakashbah in her youth, both in terms of her terrible home life and the casualties inflicted on her father's employees, and is of the opinion that there needs to be some sort of middle ground between doing nothing and violent fanaticism. The NSO's unofficial vigilante work fits her standards nicely, and so she's doing her best to throw herself in with that cause.

SAMPLES

TDM thread with Lapis
TDM thread with Tracer
TDM thread with SQUIP
TDM thread with Yang