tajappomi

Please provide well articulated answers to the following questions in a paragraph format. One paragraph minimum per question.

Why do you wish to play this specific race?
Both the quality and quantity of the associated lore attached to the species. I have no real desire to play them from a mechanical or aesthetic point of view, but the various fun and interesting characters I've seen other Taj players come up with during my time on the server so far drove me to finally look more deeply into their lore, and I'd like to see what I can do with the roleplay space it offers. They're a race with a lot of potential I feel like I'm missing out on by virtue of not having the whitelist -- even if I don't end up sticking with a Tajara character long-term as a result of having it, I think the time I'm going to end up investing in becoming more familiar with their lore through playing them at least a little will help me appreciate it more from the perspective of other characters of mine that I already enjoy.

Identify what makes role-playing this species different than role-playing a human:
Tajaran society is playing catch-up compared to their human analogues -- many of their views and societal concepts, like their historical caste system, excessive resistance to concepts like intercaste/interspecies relationships, and the fractured and disunited nature of their homeworld mirror analogues in human history that humanity might view as outdated or 'past' them. They also tend to be more politicised than humans on average, at least as far as I've seen and understand -- the nature of the cold war their homeworld is locked in playing a major part in this. They tend to hold a lot of values close to heart that the average human in 2462 might find alarmingly conservative, with only a few exceptions.

Character Name:
Marhaa Rhaalmazjiam

Please provide a short backstory for this character:
Born in 2443, in a smaller town near Trizar in Southern Rasn'rr, Marhaa's childhood was shaped both by the middle-class social status of her family and by being in very close proximity to one of the hotspots for conflict during the Second Civil War. Trizar and the surrounding areas were impacted heavily by the ongoing violence in the southern part of the continent as a whole, and while Marhaa's town escaped any direct destruction at the hands of the People's Republic's forces, the experience was enough to set her against them from a relatively young age.

Having long considered enlisting in the Adhomai Liberation Army as a method to achieving her goals of a career in medicine -- galvanised by her experiences growing up in such a volatile area of Adhomai -- a change of heart midway through her schooling saw her instead scraping together the grades to secure a place at the Trizar State Medical Academy instead. This was an experience she enjoyed on the whole, in spite of the ongoing political tensions brought on in neighbouring states and provinces by the ongoing Revolution, which was only to stop towards the end of her initial two-year course.

Education proved a cornerstone to temper her initially fiery views on Adhomian politics, however, and following her graduation from the Academy itself Marhaa found herself openly describing her views as aligning most closely with those of moderate Al'maariism. Despite Almaariist ideology's inherent xenophobia and the skepticism for alien species it engendered in her, however, a natural level of curiosity surrounding the Spur beyond Adhomai itself -- where these advanced aliens had come from, what their cities were like -- sparked a desire to push her immediate future off-world to see for herself how the rest of the galaxy operated in practice. One of the Democratic People's Republic's sponsorship campaigns proved to be her lifeline for this particular avenue -- but although this allowed Marhaa to springboard herself to Tau Ceti in search of experiences to sate her curiosity, when she arrived there the realities of megacorporate influence quickly hit home.

Balancing the ideals instilled in her by her Adhomian upbringing with Tau Ceti's uncharacteristic and alien blend of megacorporate influence and unprecedented freedoms proved challenging, and settling for putting her skillset to use in the employ of NanoTrasen was something of a bitter pill to swallow. Facing a lack of any alternative employment offers -- at least those that catered to her species and skillset in equal measure, going beyond simple warehouse jobs in Mendell itself -- she eventually deigned to apply for NanoTrasen employment as a certified paramedic, noting with some surprise that her Adhomian qualifications were in fact taken on board as valid to some extent by Biesellite standards.

tl;dr A young and energetic M'sai equally full of motivation and skepticism, due to both her excitement at seeing the world beyond Adhomai and the inherent suspicion brought on by such a heavy megacorporate influence in her new home. Marhaa counts herself as both fortunate and a little surprised to have ended up in her current line of work, although time will tell if she'll be able to reconcile her existing distrust of alien megacorporate influence with the opportunities that tolerating it provides her. Working as a paramedic aboard the NSS Aurora carries its own challenges beyond simply performing her job to a high standard -- the melting pot of cultures, races, viewpoints, and so much more that Tau Ceti embodies is in many ways difficult for a citizen of the DPRA to wrestle with. Learning the medical intricacies of other races is one thing, but learning how to live, work, and coexist alongside them is quite another.

What do you like about this character?
There are a lot of Tajara-specific elements of lore that I look forward to being able to dig into with this character -- specifically the religious and political differences that divide them even among themselves. You get shut out of being able to interact with many of these without directly playing Tajara, and I'd hope to be able to delve into these and explore them more thoroughly through Marhaa. As both a staunch adherent to the S'randmarr faith and a moderate Al'mariist, the Aurora offers more than enough opportunity for her to come into conflict with some of her contemporaries.

How would you rate your role-playing ability?
I've been around, both on SS13 and on other games with roleplaying scenes. I think I could stand to emote a lot more -- there are some roleplayers here and elsewhere that still manage to blow my mind in terms of the inventiveness and overall quality of their roleplay as well as the speed with which they can come up with it. I don't want to put a number out of ten on what I think my ability is, but I've been roleplaying for upwards of a decade now and feel as if I have a pretty good grasp on building and playing new characters as a whole.

Notes:
More so than any other species lore I've seen on Aurora, Tajara lore relies very heavily on an immense catalogue of uniquely Tajaran words, specific geographical locations on a single planet, and an alarming amount of things which can be easily misspelled or confused with one another. I've tried to do the same thing I did here with my Skrell app except to an even greater extent, because as much as I appreciate the volume of lore provided my eyes began to glaze over when I tried to tackle the whole thing at once. I don't think regurgitating content from the Aurora wiki shows any true character-building ability, and so I've tried to minimise that for the application's sake. I've had enough interactions with Tajara at this point to confidently say I had a basic, surface-level grasp of many of their concepts and motivations as a whole before even starting this app, and I hope it's been able to prove that I've managed to convert that into a sufficient understanding of the lore and an ability to apply that understanding towards character creation.

Also, I first started this app literally five or six months ago, maybe even longer. I didn't want to re-do it from scratch, but I did try to bring it up to date when I was finally getting around to finishing it. If there's anything that looks weird or out of place, it might be because I wrote it half a year ago and just didn't notice it when I re-read over the app before finishing it off.