application - exsilium.

[notatherapist]

» PLAYER INFORMATION
Player NAME: Jansen.
Current AGE: Twenty-three.
Player TIME ZONE: EST.
Personal JOURNAL: touchstoned.
IM & SERVICE: AIM: ga11imaufru.
Player PLURK: midcirclenine
Current CHARACTERS: Tony Stark.

» CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character NAME: Larry Paul.
Canon & MEDIUM: Ally McBeal. Shut up.
Canon PULL-POINT: 4x10, "The Ex-Files".
Character AGE: ….36?
Character ABILITIES: He's really good at singing, making people feel good about themselves, and talking at precisely the wrong moments. Also he's a lawyer. Not a therapist.


Character HISTORY:

Okay so Larry Paul's first episode consists of him playing hilariously good pseudo-therapist to a completely neurotic Ally McBeal because she can't read English, apparently. In reality, he's a lawyer, just moved to Boston from Detroit, because who wouldn't want to move to Boston from Detroit. Apparently Boston is just chock full of lawyers, and my mom actually confirmed this (somehow??) when I made her watch the show with me it's a good show I swear.

Anyway, it's eventually kenned that Larry Paul – somewhat expectedly – has had a number of relationships with people, to the point of having a seven year old son in Detroit with his mother, and an ex-wife who also lives in Boston. He's a private defense lawyer, and is pretty damn good at it, and has a hilariously small amount of backstory beyond all that. What he does in canon is predominately immediately become a new love interest for Ally, and then spend the rest of his season totally not being a therapist to everyone around him. Let's take a closer look.

Episode one sees him help Ally both into realizing she wants to, and then actually going through with a break-up. He surprises her in the unisex bathroom (don't ask) at her workplace at the end of the episode and is probably more surprised to hear that she thought he was a therapist as she is to find out he isn't one at all.

He's not in episodes two and three in a tragic misuse of a beautiful guest-star.

In episode four, he gets Ally out of a lawsuit by making her apologize, starts dating her co-worker, then "declares Nelle void" and starts going out with Ally. Five involves them both definitely not kissing.

Six shows us that he hates Christmas, mostly because he feels ashamed to not be a bigger part of his son's life. Also that he can sing really well. Also that he's a good dad regardless, and also also who doesn't dislike Christmas at least a little bit? It's great, but damn.

Not a whole lot really happens in seven, but that's okay, because we learn in episode eight that his son's mom is Famke Janssen and that they did some theatre together in college. Also apparently that he's pretty good at sex, but who didn't already think that?

Eight is similarly uneventful aside from the aforementioned as far as I remember, and then nine is hilarious because Famke shows up again immediately and wants to take their son to Canada. Canada. It's so much further than whatever city he's normally in that Larry's also normally not in, and he gets mad, and then kisses her, and then gets mad, and then tells Ally because that was a great idea, and they fight and then everybody gets mad, and then he writes Ally a song and everything's okay again. Also his kid doesn't go to Canada. I think.

The fifteen some-odd episodes after that don't matter because that's the episode I'm pulling him from and eventually they make me sad anyway because Downey went to jail for a little while and ruined his own character but w/e w/e bro you do what you want.

Character PERSONALITY:

Okay, so. First things. Genuinely, at a deep and basic level, Larry Paul is a good person. He's the kind of person that most people don't really believe meeting, for relatively good reason. He's nice, intelligent, pretty, skilled, and successful. He's also completely afraid of commitment, vaguely selfish, and does not stop talking even when you can tell that even he knows he already should have. You can see it on his face when he knows that he needs to shut up, and yet he can rarely resist providing whatever clever turn of phrase or retort he's thought of regardless, even though habitually his intent is – in his own terms and obviously, transparently untrue – "not to be clever". He thoroughly enjoys one-ups-manship, be it verbally or however else, although most often verbally. Larry is intelligent and while it's not necessarily something that he flaunts in and of itself, it's simultaneously not something he takes any great pains to conceal or not take advantage of, to his own means.

But he's still a good person!! He likes to help people, and even if this habit is potentially mired in some sort of self-aggrandizing, personally motivated means, it is somehow at the same time entirely selflessly spurred. Larry truly feels better when the people around him similarly feel better, and he is a master at seeing what those people need to hear or simply be told in order to fix most whatever issues they happen to be working with and through to get to that happier place. He's hilariously good at noticing when someone needs a subtle – or perhaps not so subtle – spurring on, likes to motivate them, makes them feel better to make himself feel better about all the times he's failed at other things.

See the fun thing about intelligence is that it's normally paired off with a good memory, with the ability to justify things – and alternately demonize them. Effectively, whatever you put your mind to can be done, whether that's exacerbating your own failures or bluffing out your own accomplishments. Larry is, despite all his apparent optimism and happiness, naturally someone who at this point tends towards the negative without a positive counterbalance in his life. He dwells on his own failures, rather than noting his successes, but without actually letting those failures prevent himself from achieving more. All things considered, he's a remarkably healthy person, mentally and emotionally, aside from the whole thing about where he's completely afraid to let himself enjoy and deserve good things once they become serious and gain the potential to stay that way.

Beyond all of that, he's playful, and probably is happy despite whatever pessimism his ability to understand people has wrought him. Understanding people, empathizing with them, to the level at which he does, typically doesn't actually work out that well for the person able to do it – at least, not as well as it works out for those around them. Larry is also sarcastic, enjoys a good joke and entertains a good bit of ridiculousness now and again – he apparently knows how to unicycle well enough to do so in a trenchcoat with his son on his shoulders, and has no qualms doing an abrupt one-eighty from disparaging legitimately everything to do with Christmas to over-decorating the shit out of his office in honor of the holiday instead. He's capable of at least encouraging the ideas and ideals of other people, even if he's typically fairly skeptical of actually accepting them without some sort of proof involved as to either their validity or efficacy. He's willing to entertain Ally's worship of Christmas because he already trusts her to some degree, but moreover because she offers something to abate his own pessimism towards the holiday. He helps Elaine with her own adequacy issues by reminding her that she is not her accomplishments, but that they are themselves rather just something that she's done. He has little need for people as superficial as Richard Fish – indeed, has few qualms with all but telling them so to their face. In fact, he's fairly okay most of the time with just stating his opinion on most things, albeit in a more or less socially acceptable manner. Even he admits at some point early in his appearances that he talks too much, even though he does so with literally zero remorse as to the fact.

So, basically – guy who says what's on his mind tactfully but truthfully who is sarcastic but honest and makes himself feel better by making the people around him feel better instead. Generous and knowledgeable as to the true benefit involved in a compromise and reconcilliation, he's not above debate all but for the sake of arguing if it feels necessary, in a manner that makes him fascinating and altogether tragically human at the end of the day.

» EXSILIUM INFORMATION
Chosen WEAPON: Larry will have, for the moment, the ability to generate forcefields. This will eventually develop – along with his ability to trust people and allow them within throwing distance of himself to any legitimate level – to envelop other people nearby, and then gradally with differing auras of sorts, be they healing, protective, reactive, or whathaveyou.

Character INVENTORY: He will simply be bringing in the clothes on his back – a reasonably decent suit – a legal pad with notes on several cases, a cell phone, his wallet, and assorted odd things in his pockets. Very few of them, but still.

» SAMPLES
First PERSON:

[ It's video, because video. Why wouldn't he use video? He doesn't have an issue looking at faces, actually tends to enjoy it, and text is just time-consuming unless it's necessary. Time will tell if that's actually the case. ]

Well, this is peppy. All this Christmas cheer and flamboyance – you guys really know how to make a guy feel welcome. [ Seriously. Look at all this beautiful décor and – oh screw it, it looks terrible here. ] I actually just did all of this, all this Christmas stuff, back home. Wasn't really looking for a repeat on all the joy and noels and carols, much that I do enjoy a good round robin here and there.

Speaking of Christmas cheer – guess I need a job now. Don't suppose you guys are in any particular need of lawyers up here?

Third PERSON:

Not so much that he didn't enjoy the attempt at providing a vacation. And the moon! Honestly, what little boy didn't want to be an astronaut at some point and go jumping around on the moon? He certainly wasn't an exception there.

Kind of loses the fairy tale magic when there's artificial gravity equivalent mostly to one Earth atmosphere also involved, but that hadn't actually stopped him regardless. The whole "mostly" part also made it a little weird, but no more than the plain staring he got for it. That was just given a shrug – seriously. Once in a lifetime thing happening here. Well, hopefully. This whole "vacation" was starting to feel a little hideously permanent, a point of fact which was very slowly sinking down and settling in and seeping throughout the marrow of his bones. It's making him feel itchy, itchier than he normally does with too long in any one place anyway, and this time his typical solution has been ripped out from underneath him in a ridiculously concrete manner. Hard to cut and run from what's bothering you when the reason you're stuck in the first place is because someone's already made you do it without asking nicely first. Out of the matchbox, into the fire.

It's not all bad though. There's the whole whimsy with regards to the moon thing again, although that's more or less worn off after the first, oh, forty seconds at a generous estimate. There's certainly a lot of... interesting people up here, and he'd thought the most colorful people were all still somehow coalescing slowly in Boston without sending out the memos beforehand. The history is fascinating, and while he's mildly grateful there's some sort of big kerfluffle that just happened that requires apparently all manner of debate and lawyering, he can't help but wish it was within some sort of system that actually allowed such needs to be met. As it stands, there's not really a whole lot of legality to actually legitimately stand on, which in his mind rather negates the point. Beggars and choosers, sure, but if there's one inalienable right that sentient life maintains throughout the galaxy apparently, it's the right to complain loudly and incessantly about whatever happens to be offending its senses at that precise moment. Even, and particularly, if no one else actually cares about it.

There's also apparently some guy who looks like him, but so far, they have yet to actually meet each other, in an annoying turn of events. He's still not actually sure how he feels about it, but hey, he doesn't mind admitting it's not a bad face. He can see why the universe would copy it. Sort of.

» ADDITIONAL NOTES
Yo, bro.