Sorting Hat Application

[preanimator]

Player Information
Name: Terry
Timezone: PST
Personal Journal: inkblotted
Players Contact/AIM/MSN/YAHOO: Email or PM, plurk is inkblotted.
Email Address: inkblotted23@gmail.com
Former/Other Characters in the RP: Gamzee Makara, Rhys Rhydderch
How did you hear about us?: I’m in the game!

Character Information
Name: Herbert West
Canon Origin/Series: The Reaninmator movies
School Year: 6th
Gender: Male
Age: 15, 16 in November
Out of school living location: Weston-Super-Mare, England
Blood status: Halfblood

Personality: Herbert is a bit of a jerk, not to mince words. He’s arrogant, believes in his innate intellectual superiority, and has really poor social skills. He is both prone to bragging about his intelligence as well as calling others stupid or short sighted. He tends to dismiss people who don’t agree with him as idiots, and sometimes takes great delight in tearing down people who think they’re better than him. A lot of this attitude, however, has been developed in defense of himself. Truthfully, Herbert IS brilliant, but most of his life has been spent being made fun of or told he was crazy or strange or both. He had two choices – to believe in himself, or to go along with what everyone said. Herbert chose to become mouthy, instead of a mouse. It’s gotten him in trouble plenty of times, even gotten him beat up on many occasions, but he refuses to back down for people he considers thugs and fools.

But Herbert’s personality isn’t all haughtiness and snubbing the morons of the world. He’s also obsessive, hard-working and single minded in pursuit of his goals to the exclusion of all else and all others. He turns his sharp mind onto a problem and worries at it, like a dog with a bone, doing whatever he has to do to solve it. This is the true thrill for him, tackling puzzles and problems and conquering them through sheer will and brains. He’s never quite as happy as when he’s reading a new book, or doing some experiment to discover a new way of doing something. And he doesn’t set small tasks before himself – Herbert is obsessed with death, and how to overcome it. Inferi are not enough – he wants to know how to reanimate the dead, body AND soul. He can actually become quite boyish and giddy when he’s working on something relevant to his interests, and will babble excitedly to those he knows about what he’s discovered.

Herbert likes to pretend that he doesn’t really care about other people, that all that matters to him is science and magic, but it’s not true. While he does a good job of isolating himself from others through his prickly exterior and his claim to find emotions useless, really he just wants to find someone who understands him and recognizes both his genius and the importance of his work. He wants both respect from those he considers his peers, and a partner to share his work with, as becomes obvious whenever he makes some new discovery or breakthrough. It’s difficult to be the boy’s friend – he goes through periods of over sharing and excited rambling side by side with periods of intense secrecy and shoving people close to him away, afraid to be made fun of or hurt. He’s just not good with people, and it shows. He’s the same with teachers – mouthing off to those he considers patronizing or stupider than he is, and earning himself detentions by arguing that certain assignments are a waste of time, while lavishing hero worship and adoration on those he considers brilliant and open to his own ways of thinking. In short, he runs hot and cold, and this makes him both difficult to predict and to get along with.

Canon Background: History and canon background on Herbert can be found at his general wiki article, or in more detail at the wiki for the first Reanimator film.
Background (AU!Canon; HP): (pooting) Herbert West was born to a Muggle mother and a squib father, who left when Herbert was around seven years old. He has two older siblings, a sister about ten years his senior who inherited their father’s magic and promptly married a wizard out of school and tried to distance herself from the family, and a non-magical brother a few years older than he who has both bullied him mercilessly throughout his life, and who is really, really into sport. Herbert never had much in common with any of his immediate family members, even his wizard father who was really a rather ordinary man with a job as an apothecary clerk. Unlike the rest of them, he loves to read, is rather small, and is terrible at socializing. He has a tendency to go on and on about the intellectual things that interest him, often to the disdain of his brother or the confusion of his mother who worked as a waitress and later as a bartender in a local pub. He collected bugs when he was young, first in jars, then pinned to paper or cork, as he saw in the books he read, or he picked up roadkill or deal birds he found and tried to strip the flesh from the bones so he could study the skeletons. He was the kind of boy that was always putting dead things in the fridge, much to the disgust of his family, and he never could understand why anyone would ever object to any of this. He was learning, after all!

The only outlet and understanding Herbert ever really got was from a strange great-uncle, Hans Gruber, that he visited in New England every summer. The man was his paternal grandmother’s brother, an odd old duck who was one of the few members of the wizarding side of the family who still talked to Herbert’s father. He took an immediate interest in Herbert when the boy showed him his youthful forays into amateur entymology. Since none of his family particularly minded having him gone, he was allowed to go see Uncle Hans for weeks at a time over the summer, where he picked up all sorts of odd interests – the old man wasn’t exactly a Dark wizard, but he did have some questionable hobbies and moralities when it came to magic and what one did with it. He also had Herbert’s perhaps unhealthy fascination with death, and every summer the boy was happily surrounded with dead animals, and sometimes even, to his great delight, preserved human parts. He was thrilled to be in a place where he was understood and even encouraged in his interests, and it was always a great let-down to come home again, and then have to go back to a Muggle school where he wasn’t even allowed to talk about magic, let alone the rather grotesque experiments he helped his uncle with. Sometimes things slipped, though, and Herbert gained a reputation as not only a creepy boy, but a downright nutter. He got used to being beat up and picked on, and having no one in the way of friends.

That is until he got his letter to Hogwarts. Finally, somewhere he could fit in, somewhere he would be understood and encouraged, his intellectual talents nurtured and allowed to blossom into the pure genius and greatness he was destined for! He was so excited the first day of magical school, until all his dreams came crashing down, when he discovered wizards could bully and ostracize just as well as any Muggle, and a lot of the magic he’d learned about from his uncle was frowned upon. His teachers scolded and discouraged him from the things that interested him, a bitter disillusionment that he never quite got over.

Of course, it wasn’t all bad. There were things he excelled at, and he tended to get excellent marks in most of his classes. He loved potions and herbology, and could spend countless happy hours in the library, devouring magical knowledge and coming up with his own thoughts and theories. He was more understood here than at home, and if he still got picked on for his small size and lack of social skills, at least he was learning how to defend himself in a way that didn’t take muscles or physical skill. Not that dueling would ever be Herbert’s forte, but he was no longer totally helpless. There were other students who got him a little bit, and while he’d never be popular – he was far too arrogant and mouthy for that – he could still relate and interact a little. And there were always owls to Uncle Hans, and the summer visits to sustain him when he was feeling particularly thwarted. He learned that just because a teacher forbade him from doing something didn’t mean there weren’t ways around it, and he could sometimes get away with private research under the guise of extracurricular schoolwork. But he knew, even early on, that he’d never fit in with the prestigious jobs other students longed for after graduations – positions with the Ministry, quidditch players, or aurors. He knew he would be a shoo-in to become a healer at St. Mungo’s – his test scores were outstanding – but he also knew that was only a stepping stone on a much more rocky and treacherous path. Herbert wanted no more and no less than to reclaim necromancy from the forbidden and Dark arts, and develop it into a viable magic that could be used to conquer death. (dragon)

How would your character fit in to each House?
Gryffindor: Herbert would probably always be the odd man out here, but no one can argue that he isn’t bold and willing to break the rules. Valiant and brave … maybe not so much.

Hufflepuff: Again, this House would be an odd fit for him, and he isn’t what many people would call loyal, other than to SCIENCE. However, he does work hard, and so might make a decent, if out-of-place Hufflepuff.

Ravenclaw: Herbert was born to be a Ravenclaw. He puts intellectual pursuits and study above all else, disdaining petty concerns like friends and emotions. This isn’t to say he doesn’t want friends and doesn’t feel things, but he doesn’t prioritize them. He’s always looking to learn more and will risk almost everything for the sake of discovery and mental stimulation – nothing thrills him quite like a mystery or a puzzle solved.

Slytherin: Herbert certainly doesn’t lack for ambition – the boy wants to conquer death, no small order. But he isn’t always very clever about it. He’s smart, but perhaps not as sneaky or cunning as he could be to be truly effective at what he does.

RP Samples: Here and here are samples from an open event. If it needs to be something specifically from the Dressing Room, let me know, and I’ll write something separate up.