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untoldtaleYOUR NAME: Keri
CHARACTERS IN TAXON: Glitch
CHARACTER NAME: Emma Swan
CANON: Once Upon A Time
MEDIA: TV
CANON POINT: 2x22, "A Land Withou Magic," as the magic purple smoke envelopes the town.
WHY THIS CHARACTER AND CANON POINT?: Because we need an amnesia-tastic princess savior who makes bad life choices and I'm not allowed to play DG.
I MEAN what can I say about Emma? She's a woman who's come up through terrible real world hardship - grew up bouncing around the foster system, had a baby at 18 while in jail - and then one day had that world turned upside down. She's a tough broad with a soft side who's both seen it all but still barely scratched the surface. It's an interesting dynamic, how she manages to be both worldly and somewhat naive at the same time, and I think it'll be cool to play with that.
In Taxon she'll...actually have a hard time adapting, I think. She's only JUST started to believe all the fairy tale nonsense she's been fed for months, so while it's not a leap to accept aliens and witches and vampires and guys with zippers on their heads she'll be skeptical for a while.
PROGRAMMED POSSESSION: Her father's sword. Because swords are cool and more useful than blankets.
HISTORY: Goddamn this is thorough: http://onceuponatime.wikia.com/wiki/Emma_Swan#Season_One
tl;dr - A magical land is overcome by evil and the only hope is a princess sent to Earth to be raised until such time as she can save them all. The girl is raised in foster care and has a horrible time with it until she gets out and briefly takes up a life of crime with a dashing con artist...until she ends up pregnant in a Phoenix jail at age 18. The baby is a boy and she gives up in a closed adoption, then spends the next ten years drifting around the United States, eventually ending up as a bail bondswoman in Boston.
On her 28th birthday she makes a wish to not be alone, and immediately there's a knock on the door. It turns out to be her son, Henry, who's come to bring her to Storybrooke, Maine. Emma goes along with intent to just drop him off, but he tells her about how the entire town is cursed and she's the only one who can save them. Convinced the kid is crazy Emma initially plans to stay one night, but a conversation with Henry's adopted mother the mayor (who Henry claims is really the Evil Queen) makes her revise that to a week.
Emma ends up staying much longer, moving in with Mary Margaret Blanchard (Henry's teacher, aka Snow White, aka Emma's mother) and becoming a deputy, then sheriff. Many shenanigans ensue which test Emma's disbelief in Henry's fairy tale stories, until finally the boy eats an apple turnover (made from the same apple which put Snow White into her enchanted sleep) and falls into a coma. This awakens Emma's belief, and though she's unsuccessful in retrieving a bottle of distilled true love she is able to wake him she is able to wake him with a kiss. Nice to know that trick works with parental love too.
PSYCHOLOGY/PERSONALITY:
One word to sum up Emma Swan is "independant." A few others include brash, impulsive, and lonely. She wears a mask of world-weary confidence but in truth is (all together now) a deeply damaged person.
She has been very much influenced by her early life, which canon has provided few details of so far: she came up through foster care, and Jennifer Morrison has hinted that she had been abused. She got out of the system at sixteen and just about everything after that points to a life of meandering loneliness. She had seven addresses in ten years prior to the start of canon; the longest stint in one place was two years in Tallahassee. The result of all this is a cynical woman who doesn't trust easy, but who still carries a spark of hope within her.
Emma's a survivor and not keen on being tied down (to people or places) and believes she can take care of herself. All of her worldly belongings fit in two cardboard boxes, everything else is disposable. She's typically skeptical and doesn't trust people easily, building a wall to hide her own pain and protect herself from more. Due to a lot of this being a front, she tends to act like she knows what's up, like she's in control, when really she isn't. Emma hates being or even appearing incompetent, as that dents her created image of self-reliance.
What drives her most is acting against injustice and sticking up for an underdog (except when it's herself). She sees people pushed into the same boxes she was - Ashley the pregnant teenager left on her own, Ava and Nicholas abandoned by their parents and being pushed into the system - and suddenly Emma will tear the world apart to protect them. In these instances she can be blind to trickery and finds herself breaking her "trust no one" rule in exchange for hope. She can adapt a sort of tenacity in which she grabs onto an idea, realizes it might not be the best course of action, and goes ahead anyway.
Coming to Storybrooke and interacting with the town's citizens, especially her son Henry, has had an impact on Emma's outlook. She's prepared to be Henry's mother and do whatever she has to in order to gain custody of him (including kidnapping but nobody's perfect), and though it has taken a lot of learning and false starts she's also ready to take on her role as a hero.
POWERS/ABILITIES:
Emma claims to have a superpower where she can tell if someone's lying. This apparently only REALLY works on children so I'll just say she has an enhanced (but faulty because ugh, Sidney and Regina forever) bullshit detector. She's also a pretty good bullshitter herself, able to convince the Mad Hatter she totally bought into his story and was going to help him before KO'ing him with a telescope. So she's got a knack for improvised weapons and also actual weapons, namely her handgun which will be coming along with her. SPOILER ALERT FOR SEASON 2 She's also, improbably, a savant with a sword. Takes after he pappi like that. She might also have some additional magical mojo, but if it gets explained and is useful/awesome then I'll just canon-bump her.
ARRIVAL POST:
"What is that?" Emma whispers, staring at the purple smoke speeding through town from the forest.
Beside her is Henry, the boy who moments before had been dead (a thought which fills her with emotions she can't name or tolerate), the boy with all the answers. He's staring along with her and shakes his head. "Something bad."
Before she can ask what that means the smoke fills the window and her vision, and when she blinks it away it, Henry, and in fact the entire hospital are gone. Instead there's a circular metal room, some steps leading down, a big machine thing, and a pedestal with...
A smart phone on top and a familiar sword and scabbard leaning against it.
"What. The. Hell." She reaches for the gun holstered under her jacket, remembers that a) the clip is empty and b) how useless it was last time she employed it, and strides over to pick up the sword instead. This doesn't look like any fairy tale she's heard of, but the past few days have taught her to prepare for anything. Awkwardly she pulls the scabbard's strap over her shoulder, trying not to think too much about her three awkward dates with Ken the LARPer from South Bend.
Though maybe she should have paid more attention to all his talk about the best way to kill an orc.
"All right, Regina, whatever you've done, whatever you've got planned--" Emma snatches up the phone and whirls around to face the opening door. What now? Guards? Wolves? The flying salamanders of Zo?
"Who's there?" she calls and starts down the steps, reaching back to (again, awkwardly) draw the sword. She adjusts her grip until it feels right. "I swear to God if you've done anything to my son I'll shove this thing straight up your ass!"
Later she'll regret how cliche that is but now's not the time for creativity.
ADDITIONAL SAMPLE:
So much of the past few months have been focused around a book's contents that Emma finds herself immediately drawn to the library. Mr. Long is kind enough to answer her initial questions, bestow her with a cup of tea, and then leave her the hell alone.
That's what she needs, some alone time to try and wrap her head around what's happened to her, and what's happened to her since she's found out fairy tales were real and that her best friend is her mother and also Snow White, not to mention the whole dragon-slaying and curse-breaking thing. Now she's been kidnapped by aliens and she's really, really hoping this is just a seriously fucked up dream.
However that's looking increasingly unlikely the more studies the evidence. The tea tastes like tea, and when she grabs a random book off the shelf and starts reading the words form coherent sentences and that never happens in a dream. Plus she's used to waking herself up once she starts questioning her subconscious, and then there's the sword...
Emma had set it and its scabbard on the reading table but now picks it up again and draws the blade free. Before going to face the dragon she'd never held a sword before in her life, but this feels absurdly natural and all of August and Henry and even Jefferson's talk of her great destiny rings through her mind.
"No," she says and shakes her head. "It's a dream, I'm dreaming, I've gotta wake up." A pinch hadn't worked, so she forcefully drags her finger against the blade's edge-- and immediately drops it with a cry. "Son of a bitch!"
She sinks to the floor and wraps her opposite hand around the injured finger, breathing harshly through her teeth. Just a little cut, but the pain is as real as the tea and the books and the bracelet and the dragon and the smoke and everything. Goddamn.
Some minutes later she opens her eyes again to study the wound. Just a little cut, no stitches, just hurts like a mother. Right, she'll get that taken care of and figure out how to get home-- Storybrooke, get back to Storybrooke, get Henry out of there and start again. It's what she's always done only now she'll have someone else along for the ride. She'll figure it out, for...for her son she'll figure it out. Right.
Emma gets up and walks to the gallery railing. "Hey!" she calls down to Mayland. "Got any Band Aids here?"
CHARACTERS IN TAXON: Glitch
CHARACTER NAME: Emma Swan
CANON: Once Upon A Time
MEDIA: TV
CANON POINT: 2x22, "A Land Withou Magic," as the magic purple smoke envelopes the town.
WHY THIS CHARACTER AND CANON POINT?: Because we need an amnesia-tastic princess savior who makes bad life choices and I'm not allowed to play DG.
I MEAN what can I say about Emma? She's a woman who's come up through terrible real world hardship - grew up bouncing around the foster system, had a baby at 18 while in jail - and then one day had that world turned upside down. She's a tough broad with a soft side who's both seen it all but still barely scratched the surface. It's an interesting dynamic, how she manages to be both worldly and somewhat naive at the same time, and I think it'll be cool to play with that.
In Taxon she'll...actually have a hard time adapting, I think. She's only JUST started to believe all the fairy tale nonsense she's been fed for months, so while it's not a leap to accept aliens and witches and vampires and guys with zippers on their heads she'll be skeptical for a while.
PROGRAMMED POSSESSION: Her father's sword. Because swords are cool and more useful than blankets.
HISTORY: Goddamn this is thorough: http://onceuponatime.wikia.com/wiki/Emma_Swan#Season_One
tl;dr - A magical land is overcome by evil and the only hope is a princess sent to Earth to be raised until such time as she can save them all. The girl is raised in foster care and has a horrible time with it until she gets out and briefly takes up a life of crime with a dashing con artist...until she ends up pregnant in a Phoenix jail at age 18. The baby is a boy and she gives up in a closed adoption, then spends the next ten years drifting around the United States, eventually ending up as a bail bondswoman in Boston.
On her 28th birthday she makes a wish to not be alone, and immediately there's a knock on the door. It turns out to be her son, Henry, who's come to bring her to Storybrooke, Maine. Emma goes along with intent to just drop him off, but he tells her about how the entire town is cursed and she's the only one who can save them. Convinced the kid is crazy Emma initially plans to stay one night, but a conversation with Henry's adopted mother the mayor (who Henry claims is really the Evil Queen) makes her revise that to a week.
Emma ends up staying much longer, moving in with Mary Margaret Blanchard (Henry's teacher, aka Snow White, aka Emma's mother) and becoming a deputy, then sheriff. Many shenanigans ensue which test Emma's disbelief in Henry's fairy tale stories, until finally the boy eats an apple turnover (made from the same apple which put Snow White into her enchanted sleep) and falls into a coma. This awakens Emma's belief, and though she's unsuccessful in retrieving a bottle of distilled true love she is able to wake him she is able to wake him with a kiss. Nice to know that trick works with parental love too.
PSYCHOLOGY/PERSONALITY:
One word to sum up Emma Swan is "independant." A few others include brash, impulsive, and lonely. She wears a mask of world-weary confidence but in truth is (all together now) a deeply damaged person.
She has been very much influenced by her early life, which canon has provided few details of so far: she came up through foster care, and Jennifer Morrison has hinted that she had been abused. She got out of the system at sixteen and just about everything after that points to a life of meandering loneliness. She had seven addresses in ten years prior to the start of canon; the longest stint in one place was two years in Tallahassee. The result of all this is a cynical woman who doesn't trust easy, but who still carries a spark of hope within her.
Emma's a survivor and not keen on being tied down (to people or places) and believes she can take care of herself. All of her worldly belongings fit in two cardboard boxes, everything else is disposable. She's typically skeptical and doesn't trust people easily, building a wall to hide her own pain and protect herself from more. Due to a lot of this being a front, she tends to act like she knows what's up, like she's in control, when really she isn't. Emma hates being or even appearing incompetent, as that dents her created image of self-reliance.
What drives her most is acting against injustice and sticking up for an underdog (except when it's herself). She sees people pushed into the same boxes she was - Ashley the pregnant teenager left on her own, Ava and Nicholas abandoned by their parents and being pushed into the system - and suddenly Emma will tear the world apart to protect them. In these instances she can be blind to trickery and finds herself breaking her "trust no one" rule in exchange for hope. She can adapt a sort of tenacity in which she grabs onto an idea, realizes it might not be the best course of action, and goes ahead anyway.
Coming to Storybrooke and interacting with the town's citizens, especially her son Henry, has had an impact on Emma's outlook. She's prepared to be Henry's mother and do whatever she has to in order to gain custody of him (including kidnapping but nobody's perfect), and though it has taken a lot of learning and false starts she's also ready to take on her role as a hero.
POWERS/ABILITIES:
Emma claims to have a superpower where she can tell if someone's lying. This apparently only REALLY works on children so I'll just say she has an enhanced (but faulty because ugh, Sidney and Regina forever) bullshit detector. She's also a pretty good bullshitter herself, able to convince the Mad Hatter she totally bought into his story and was going to help him before KO'ing him with a telescope. So she's got a knack for improvised weapons and also actual weapons, namely her handgun which will be coming along with her. SPOILER ALERT FOR SEASON 2 She's also, improbably, a savant with a sword. Takes after he pappi like that. She might also have some additional magical mojo, but if it gets explained and is useful/awesome then I'll just canon-bump her.
ARRIVAL POST:
"What is that?" Emma whispers, staring at the purple smoke speeding through town from the forest.
Beside her is Henry, the boy who moments before had been dead (a thought which fills her with emotions she can't name or tolerate), the boy with all the answers. He's staring along with her and shakes his head. "Something bad."
Before she can ask what that means the smoke fills the window and her vision, and when she blinks it away it, Henry, and in fact the entire hospital are gone. Instead there's a circular metal room, some steps leading down, a big machine thing, and a pedestal with...
A smart phone on top and a familiar sword and scabbard leaning against it.
"What. The. Hell." She reaches for the gun holstered under her jacket, remembers that a) the clip is empty and b) how useless it was last time she employed it, and strides over to pick up the sword instead. This doesn't look like any fairy tale she's heard of, but the past few days have taught her to prepare for anything. Awkwardly she pulls the scabbard's strap over her shoulder, trying not to think too much about her three awkward dates with Ken the LARPer from South Bend.
Though maybe she should have paid more attention to all his talk about the best way to kill an orc.
"All right, Regina, whatever you've done, whatever you've got planned--" Emma snatches up the phone and whirls around to face the opening door. What now? Guards? Wolves? The flying salamanders of Zo?
"Who's there?" she calls and starts down the steps, reaching back to (again, awkwardly) draw the sword. She adjusts her grip until it feels right. "I swear to God if you've done anything to my son I'll shove this thing straight up your ass!"
Later she'll regret how cliche that is but now's not the time for creativity.
ADDITIONAL SAMPLE:
So much of the past few months have been focused around a book's contents that Emma finds herself immediately drawn to the library. Mr. Long is kind enough to answer her initial questions, bestow her with a cup of tea, and then leave her the hell alone.
That's what she needs, some alone time to try and wrap her head around what's happened to her, and what's happened to her since she's found out fairy tales were real and that her best friend is her mother and also Snow White, not to mention the whole dragon-slaying and curse-breaking thing. Now she's been kidnapped by aliens and she's really, really hoping this is just a seriously fucked up dream.
However that's looking increasingly unlikely the more studies the evidence. The tea tastes like tea, and when she grabs a random book off the shelf and starts reading the words form coherent sentences and that never happens in a dream. Plus she's used to waking herself up once she starts questioning her subconscious, and then there's the sword...
Emma had set it and its scabbard on the reading table but now picks it up again and draws the blade free. Before going to face the dragon she'd never held a sword before in her life, but this feels absurdly natural and all of August and Henry and even Jefferson's talk of her great destiny rings through her mind.
"No," she says and shakes her head. "It's a dream, I'm dreaming, I've gotta wake up." A pinch hadn't worked, so she forcefully drags her finger against the blade's edge-- and immediately drops it with a cry. "Son of a bitch!"
She sinks to the floor and wraps her opposite hand around the injured finger, breathing harshly through her teeth. Just a little cut, but the pain is as real as the tea and the books and the bracelet and the dragon and the smoke and everything. Goddamn.
Some minutes later she opens her eyes again to study the wound. Just a little cut, no stitches, just hurts like a mother. Right, she'll get that taken care of and figure out how to get home-- Storybrooke, get back to Storybrooke, get Henry out of there and start again. It's what she's always done only now she'll have someone else along for the ride. She'll figure it out, for...for her son she'll figure it out. Right.
Emma gets up and walks to the gallery railing. "Hey!" she calls down to Mayland. "Got any Band Aids here?"