the city application.

[miyagimagic]

OOC INFORMATION.

NAME: Jelle

CONTACT: queeningsquare

AGE: 18+

OTHER CHARACTERS: N/A

IC INFORMATION.

BASICS

CHARACTER NAME: Daniel LaRusso

CANON: Cobra Kai

CANON POINT: Season 5, episode 5. After getting beaten up by Terry Silver.

AGE: 53

BACKGROUND

HISTORY: Here.

PERSONALITY:

What impression does your character give when meeting someone for the first time? How does the first impression differ from your character’s true nature?

Daniel is absolutely amazing at giving out the most stereotypical first impression in all situations. At work, he's exactly what one might expect from a salesman - always smiling, friendly, helpful, perhaps a little bit too flattering and smooth in order to get the sales done. It's an attitude you see Daniel carry to a whole lot of other places we see him in canon too, especially places that involve a lot of socialisation, like the country club. It's not that all of the impression is fake, after all: Daniel really is the friendly and helpful type, none of that is faked. But he's definitely gotten better at plastering a smile on his face even during moments when he doesn't feel like smiling at all.

After all, Daniel may be living the rich lifestyle right now, but he didn't grow up that way. In the original Karate Kid movies we see Daniel growing up in poverty, living in a crappy small apartment together with his mother. The money isn't something that entered his life until much later, when his car dealership became succesful. This meant that Daniel had to quickly learn how to socialize with an entirely different group - or perhaps more accurately, class - of people. So though we see Daniel being friendly to other people too when first meeting them when he's young in the Karate Kid movies, we also see him being a whole lot more awkward in doing so there. The older Daniel is much more polished, seemingly better at knowing the right thing to say and always ready to laugh something awkward away. He basically knows how to play up his charming traits a little better and hide the things - like the awkwardness, but also more stress and fear than he'd let on to - he doesn't want other people to see.

How does your character handle stress? What do they do in an emergency?

If there is one thing Daniel LaRusso is absolutely terrible at, it's dealing with stress. Daniel is a whole lot of things. He's inherently good, he's friendly, he's brave, he's selfless-- but he is also very much like an anxious chihuahua, always worrying about things that could go wrong or imagining the worst case scenario.

There are plenty of examples of this in canon too. The moment Daniel finds out his karate student is actually his rival's son, he immediately flips and angrily tells the kid to never come see him again without giving said kid even a moment to explain what's actually going on. When he finds his daughter didn't come home after a party one night, he immediately flies into a worried rage and kicks in the apartment door of the place he assumes she is staying. When someone he's had bad experiences with in the past suddenly shows up again, he overthrows the entire plan he had with another guy to work together at one dojo and teach both of their fighting styles, insisting on only teaching his own fighting style since he believes it's better for the kids to protect themselves against this new threat.

You can see the pattern. Something unexpected and bad happens, Daniel's mind immediately flies to the worst case scenario effect of that unexpected bad thing, and without letting anyone explain themselves or without even Daniel explaining himself, he immediately shifts into flight or fight mode (with heavy emphasis on the fight) to do the most instinctive (and often stupid) thing to try and prevent that worst case scenario from happening, regardless of how much sense it makes.

What are your character’s ambitions/goals? Why are they important to your character?

Daniel is a pretty interesting character in this regard, since while he does have ambitions and goals, they're actually all really selfless.

That answer up there about stress already kind of shows it, but Daniel is an extremely protective person. Half of the time the reason he flips out in stressful situation is because he desperately wants to protect someone - like his daughter in that one example, or the kids he's teaching in the last example.

This is practically Daniel's first goal in life: keeping kids safe. It's not hard to see where his protective streak comes from when you see the way he grew up himself. Daniel gets harassed by so many people in the original Karate Kid movies despite being a teenager in those, to the point where he's almost killed multiple times. Of course Daniel would want to prevent any other kid from having to go through that, hence his overprotectiveness.

Daniel's second goal very much has to do with his style of karate. He's so fond of Miyagi-do and thinks of it as better than any other style of karate, and it's his goal to teach it on to the next generation. It's something that seems a little less selfish, especially when he's so headstrong in refusing to admit any other form of karate could be just as good as Miyagi-do, until you realise why the style is so important to him: because it was the style of his now deceased teacher, mister Miyagi. Sure, Daniel really does believe in Miyagi-do and it's part of why he wants to pass it on, but you can tell that he is mainly doing it to keep the memory of the mentor he's grieving over alive. Daniel misses the man so much, and practicing the same style of karate with kids that mister Miyagi taught him makes him feel like being with him again, if not just a little bit. He just wants to give his teacher the honour he deserves.

INVENTORY: His wedding ring and his smartphone. The emotional value of the former is most likely obvious, but as for the latter, it has pictures of his kids, which would make it important to Daniel.

POWERS

SKILLS/ABILITIES: Daniel has no canon powers. He's really good at karate (a defense-focused style of it called Miyagi-do), and it does have a technique through which he can (temporarily!) disable people's use of their limbs through pressure points, but he doesn't have any sort of power that would be considered supernatural in his own world or any other world.

NERFING: N/A

WEAKNESSES: N/A

SAMPLES.

TDM toplevel. There are multiple threads on that, but in case you'd like another sample, or something tonally a little different, there's a sample here from my previous game.