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PLAYER INFORMATION

Player Name: Qi
Are you 18+?: Yes
Preferred Contact: PM this account
Current Characters: N/A

CHARACTER INFORMATION

Character Name: Horatio Hornblower
Canon: C.S. Forester's Hornblower (books)
Canonpoint: Peace of Amiens in Lieutenant Hornblower
Character Age: 25

Appearance: A gangling human person already.

Background/History: There's a wiki page here, although I would caveat that the Hornblower Wikia as a whole only sometimes distinguishes between book canon and movie canon. I have a book-specific timeline cobbled for my own purposes, and would be happy to write a more detailed history, but the overarching gist is that Horatio has been an officer in the Royal Navy since the age of 17 (which is Too Old to start but screw the rules), has seen a good deal of action for the time period (including two incidents which led to him being held as a prisoner of war), and most recently was denied a promotion because the war with France has temporarily come to an end--which means he's now playing whist for money while the Navy continues to barely pay him.

Strengths:
= Brave - Most people who have known Horatio in any sort of unsteady situation will point first to the fact that he's incredibly brave. Although uncomfortable social situations often make his skin crawl, genuine danger brings out Horatio's deep-seated courage. He balks slightly at having to carve a bird in front of the upper crust, but he also swallows his fear of heights when capturing a prize ship (and keeping the cutting out party alive) depends on it. Horatio is the first to volunteer himself for danger (including, of course, for his own stupidly dangerous plans), and quick to toe the line of his duty to the Admiralty in order to keep those below him safe.

The core of his bravery is bound up with both his sense of duty and his problem-solving inclination, as well as his underlying insecurities. Generally, Horatio rates his own life somewhere below most of the people around him, so when duty demands he act and his best chances involve risking his own life and limb, he simply follows through on the thought. His courage, more or less, is an inability to think of his own safety when the safety of others is on the line.

= Dutiful - Since the age of seventeen, Horatio has been wrapped up in putting duty ahead of self. While this has had some less than pleasant side effects on his personal life (or genuine lack thereof), having a sense of duty hammered into him has made him a person of more general integrity. When something is set to him as a mission or purpose, a piece of what he ought to do for the things he's loyal to, the rest of the world fades away slightly and leaves him with only that goal on the horizon. In his life thus far, his predominant duty has been to the Admiralty, and he has sacrificed his body and mind to its mercurial goals. More recently (i.e. since becoming a lieutenant), that sense of duty has begun to extend toward his men as well.

(As a caveat, although this is generally a strength, his sense of duty does evolve, in the context of the Navy, into quite a double-edged sword. By and large, his sense of duty keeps him on-mission and barreling through obstacles in the right direction. When pushed by the forces he feels duty-bound to, however, Horatio tends to find himself overriding his personal feelings on things in order to keep, well... order. This is largely an evolution later than his current canon point, but it's the direction he naturally trends in the more his spirit is broken.)

= Industrious - Horatio has met very few problems he can't solve, and that's put him very much into the mode of always putting his head down and plowing through the hard work needed to achieve things. Sometimes this solution-orientation expresses as complex plans involving entire crews of ships planned well in advance, and sometimes it expresses as catching hold of the few details he can in a split second and throwing them into the best possible configuration for his goals.

This is very much a combination of nature and nurture in Horatio. He comes by his analytical brain honestly, and approaches most of the difficulties he encounters in life with the same mindset as the thing that comes most naturally to him: mathematics. This natural inclination was intensified when he joins the Navy and finds himself surrounded by a far more moneyed class of people, men who had been better educated at a younger age and never worried a day in their life about putting food on the table. Surviving among them means trying harder--and, ultimately, trying harder is something reassuringly doable.

Weaknesses:
= Insecure - The worst critic of Horatio Hornblower is Horatio Hornblower. Every flaw is mentally magnified, and every fault is fixated on. Even in the face of genuine success, he diminishes his own accomplishments by zeroing in on the imperfections of the victory. His takeaway is constantly his own mistakes, which certainly helps him grow as an officer but at the cost of nearly every shred of his self-esteem.

This is in part because he's constantly privy to his own thoughts; what the rest of the world labels 'brave,' he often labels 'panicked' or 'lucky.' This is also in part because he's acutely aware of the class and experience differences between himself and most of his fellow officers; he started about five years 'late' in the Navy and without a particularly noteworthy patron. It is, however, in larger part a holdover from his childhood. Horatio was a fairly sensitive boy who grew up into a shaky and awkward young man. His first 'real world' experience in the Navy was on a ship with a physically violent older midshipman who systemically demolished him emotionally over the course of a few weeks. A piece of Horatio remains stuck in the way he felt on the Justinian, and no objective success since then has been able to disprove what his youthful tormentors said about him.

= Impulsive - When he has time to plan, Horatio can be incredibly methodical. When he doesn't have time to plan, he follows his impulses with a fairly noncritical eye. Although this sometimes serves him well, it's very much a bad habit that can backfire spectacularly when it doesn't work.

The real problem with his impulsiveness is that it grows out of his general strengths. As a teenager, certain things made instinctive sense--things like complex mathematics that puzzled others his own age. As he began sailing, that same mathematical brain made certain things come naturally as well, the physics of wind and water playing out the way written problems always had in his mind. This translates, in moments of high stress and quick action, into a willingness to throw himself into the first thought that comes to mind--if his first thought for tacking usually worked, why shouldn't his first thought for leaping into battle?

Often it does. Sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't, Horatio usually comes to from the haze to realize the simple steps he should have taken to succeed had been just a second or third thought away.

= Distant - Lots of people like Horatio well enough, but few would consider him a friend. This has little to do with his likeability as a person and almost everything to do with the myriad ways he clamps down to hold himself back from other human beings. This is largely a matter of self-preservation, bound up in his general insecurities as they continue to dog his footsteps.

Some of this simply comes from his general presentation of self. The older he gets, the better Horatio becomes at holding himself like other confident officers he's observed. He tries in particular to model himself after Captain Pellew: harsh but fair, a disciplinarian but not an unreasonable one. Many people who get to know him begin to notice the fraying around the edges, where the person he's attempting to be doesn't quite fit the person he is. When pressed on personal matters, he tends to simply turn into a brick wall, minimizing himself in part to minimize the blemish he tends to see his past as in the context of his employment.

Fatal Flaw: Horatio has a tendency to be self-destructive. His sense of duty tends to combine with his insecurity and impulsiveness, which often leads him down dangerous paths. Often, this is as simple as self-sabotage: he buries his accomplishments when he doesn't think they're deserving of praise or advancement and years after the fact still reminds people that he was violently seasick the first time he ever boarded a ship. Sometimes it reaches a much higher crescendo: when he finally has the things he's wanted most for his own life (i.e. a wife and children, things purely for himself and utterly unrelated to his duty to the Navy), he actively drives wedges to pry himself away from enjoying them because he never truly feels he could possibly deserve them.

Driving Force: Horatio is fairly well-defined by his sense of loyalty, although there are subtle shifts throughout his life. The constant overarching loyalty is to King and country, followed closely by loyalty to the Admiralty in particular. The higher he rises in the ranks, the more the immediate object of his loyalty becomes those he's meant to be leading. (Unfortunately, this loyalty remains largely professional, with very few exceptions of personal loyalty poking through. The best example is William Bush, a friend he makes on the HMS Renown and, after re-meeting during the Peace, protects personally with the same rabid devotion he usually reserves for the abstract concept of duty to the crown.)

Patron: My suspicion is that Vulcan edges out Mars, although I've been back and forth with them. Although being dutiful is one of his greatest strengths and he tends to be both solution-seeking and exhaustedly strong, his core perception of himself is as an insecure and highly withdrawn individual. He's spent most of his career in a defensive posture, constantly hyperaware of the fact he'll always be fighting the flaws others have continuously pointed out to him: his low birth, his late arrival in the Navy, even his never-entirely-outgrown sea sickness. This constant defense makes him incredibly hard-working, and his recklessness makes many of his solutions thoroughly innovative (if occasionally law-breaking) in his never-ending attempts to improve himself. And, well, at this point in his career, having a command (and thus a chance to both actually support himself and protect his men properly) snatched away from him has made him perhaps just a tad resentful.

GAME INFORMATION

Setting Suitability: Horatio needs to feel like he has a purpose. He inherently wants to be part of something bigger than himself, and knows that his best use is probably to be sent into danger so others can sleep in safety at night. After nearly a decade living under the Admiralty's direction, being shoved onto shore to make his own way during the Peace has left him with a huge hole in his life. The Gods offering him a purpose (particularly one that promises to be useful and violent) and his incredible frustration with the Navy make for a perfect storm of swearing himself to this new cause without hesitation.

Fighting far from home is most of the life he's known. Oddly enough, of all the places he could be fighting for something other than king and country, ancient Rome is a pet fascination since his days as a Grecian and would be an easy enough substitute. He's always been mature for his age, and other than the usual traumas associated with war, he's got the mental fortitude of someone over the age of eighteen.

As for plans, it would be nice for him to get the faintest sense of the inherent free will of man back. Trading the Navy for the Gods will be an interesting reflection for him.



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