<b><u>OOC INFORMATION</b></u>
<b>Name:</b> Lisa
<b>Contact:</b> <user name=“hotpinkcoffee” site=plurk.com>
<b>Other Characters:</b> Jason Compson

<b><u>CHARACTER INFORMATION</b></u>
<b>Character Name:</b> Matthew “Punchy” O’Connor
<b>Age:</b> 17
<b>Canon:</b> Intimates
<b>Canon Point:</b> After jumping into the vortex at the end of <i>Intimates #12</i>
<b>Character Information:</b>

Born to an unexceptional family in rural Missouri, Matthew O'Connor spent most of his childhood playing outside seeking adventure. He had an innate sense of justice and compassion, and policed other children into rescuing frogs from the middle of the road and performing other such mundane acts of heroism. When he was eight, while playing in the backyard he discovered a box with a magical puppet inside. The puppet, when worn, gave him the strength to punch through walls and create a temporary telekinetic shield from debris.

When he was a youth, his sister, who had always encouraged his sense of adventure and interest in super heroics, was murdered by an escaped convict. He began to dress the puppet up as a nun in her honor, and transformed his grief into a key element of his personal mythology. He started to view himself as a tragic hero with a gritty past, rather than an average kid who had suffered a terrible tragedy.

As a teenager, he was shunned in his public school for his strange dialect (absorbed from hip hop music and gangster movies) and his 'geeky' interests in superheroes, comic books and the internet. He and his best friend Flora both applied to The Seminary, a school for superheroes in training, though only he was accepted. Despite his powers and enthusiasm, he had enough discipline problems that he was held back a year, with the potential to be expelled.

During his repeat sophomore year at the Seminary, Punchy’s attention was divided between unraveling a conspiracy theory about the contents of the cafeteria food, trying to win the affections of his “hot” classmate Destra, and trying to prove his heroism by rescuing a new student, Dead Kid Fred, from suicidal depression. When his attempts at friendship were rebuffed, a concerned Punchy began to follow Dead Kid Fred's blog, and eventually broke down Dead Kid Fred's door in time to intervene with Dead Kid Fred's suicide attempt. Rather than a dramatic and triumphant moment, the reality of the suicide attempt was humiliating for Dead Kid Fred and sobering for Punchy, who was unequipped to handle the emotional fallout of such an event. He had expected fanfare and received only cold reality.

Punchy and the other students later became involved in a mass psychosis when they unleashed a classmate’s telepathic powers out of curiosity. Each student was trapped in a personal psychodrama. In Punchy's hallucination, he was a small child being sexually assaulted by an older man, and he admitted to wishing Dead Kid Fred had died so that that Punchy could have had a dramatic moment that spurred him to superherodom. He also admitted that he was secretly glad his sister had died, but that it 'wasn't enough for a good origin story'.

After the mass hallucination was ended, Punchy finished the school year without incident, although he continued to investigate the cafeteria food conspiracy.

Over the summer, Punchy and his childhood friend Flora reconnected and lost their virginity to each other, and Punchy demonstrated his compassion in stopping Flora from murdering two peeping toms who caught them in the act. Later that summer, he and Destra later teamed up to find out more about the Seminary food, but failed to find any meaningful information from Destra's sources. While infiltrating the school, they were attacked by a mind-controlled upperclassman, who died in the ensuing fight. Destra and Punchy determined that the Seminary was no longer a safe haven for superpowered teenagers.

Upon their return to school, the Seminary administration discovered the breach in security. In a race to avoid capture, Punchy and other classmates broke into a lab Punchy knew about from earlier networking. To escape from the school administration, the kids used the computers to open up a mysterious portal. They jumped into it and their fates are now unknown.

Punchy is taken from right after he jumps into the portal.



<b>Personality:</b>

Punchy is the actual definition of a “wannabe”. Since he was young, he's idolized superheroes, hip hop MCs, vigilantes and action heroes, and has been profoundly dissatisfied with pretty much every aspect of his 'boring' white, middle-class, rural life. Punchy has a core belief that he is somehow exceptional, and that his purpose is to become a famous, much-applauded force for good.

As a teenager, he is desperately obsessed with the idea of becoming a true superhero. He has secretly wished for horrible things to happen to people close to him to give him a 'tragic past' that would explain his love for heroics. Punchy often sees the world as being like a comic book or action movie, and makes plans according to common tropes, and when speaking about himself to others often lies to make his life seem more interesting. He interprets life in terms of pre-set narratives; he warps his idea of reality around the story he wants to be the center of, rather than changing the story of his life based on the actual events. On a deep, maybe even subconscious level he’s aware of this habit and is horribly ashamed of it, but it’s a method of navigating life that is by now his nature.

Punchy is, in addition to being a wannabe, a complete fuckboy. He is often crude, spiteful, and egotistical in a painfully transparent way. He hits the gym with embarrassing frequency. He brags about all the women he’s supposedly getting nasty with but can’t hold a conversation with a cute girl without looking like a cherry tomato. He fronts like a motherfucker but takes criticism personally. He wears crotch-bling with his initials and rhinestones and dresses like T-Pain. He believes himself to be a natural-born leader but often ends up as an unwitting sidekick. He talks like he’s auditioning for the role of those guys speaking jive in the movie Airplane!.

This whole act is completely transparent to anyone who spends more than thirty seconds with him, but Punchy is incapable of the sort of humility required to let up the ruse. He’s so committed to the idea of the baller he wants to be that he can’t turn the act off, or even really acknowledge what an idiot he looks like to just about everyone around him. The jury’s still out on whether he’s even physically capable of speaking English like a normal American and not like an extra in Malibu’s Most Wanted.

Perhaps even more tragically, his persona does not truly reflect that Punchy is, in fact, a sensitive, compassionate and justice-oriented person. At his core, Punchy believes in mercy and justice, and that following these ideals should be absolute - even if he occasionally misses when there are opportunities to live up to those ideals. Punchy is, at his core, a good-hearted young man who reaches out to outcasts and underdogs. He has a tendency to befriend people no one else wants to, and is capable of deep empathy for those in pain. He can be surprisingly adept at divining the reasons for someone’s upset, and he is willing to lay his own life and reputation on the line in a heartbeat to aid others.

He does not even always require recognition of his good deeds; he spent most of his middle school years sabotaging pedophiles in internet chatrooms and anonymously reporting them to the FBI. When Punchy is hurtful, it is usually less out of malice than out of pure idiocy; because he only thinks of other people as they relate to his own “story”, he can be extremely inconsiderate just because he didn’t stop to consider the consequences of his actions on someone else.

Punchy is also very intelligent, having taught himself to read at a young age and having self-trained as a hacker and cyber vigilante. He is not, however, book-smart, since his anti-authoritarian streak also extends to teachers, and he is certainly not emotionally intelligent in the slightest. His obliviousness is legendary, and because he prefers to knuckle down on bad ideas than admit fault, he tends to get more self-deluding and more cartoonish the further into a corner he’s pushed.

He also has one-sided conversations with his puppet, which is dressed like his dead sister. He doesn’t see why that’s weird.

<b>5-10 Key Character Traits:</b> Deluded, Ridiculous, Ostentatious, Oblivious, Compassionate, Courageous, Egotistical, Insecure, Heroic, Embarrassing
<b>Would you prefer a monster that FITS your character’s personality, CONFLICTS with it, EITHER, or opt for 100% RANDOMIZATION?</b> Fits
<b>Opt-Outs:</b> Arachne, Nephilim, Demon, Lich, Faerie, Pooka

<b>Roleplay Sample:</b>
<a href=“http://www.dreamwidth.org/go?redir_type=threadroot&journal=graveyardsmash&talkid=18864084”>Test Drive Meme</a>