piper90 App

[morebetter]

APPLICATION

Player Name/Handle: Lisa
Plurk Handle: hotpinkcoffee
Player Status: New Player
Other characters:
Invited by: Korel

Character Name: Ronald “Mac” McDonald
Fandom: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Character Journal: morebetter
CANON, AU, CRAU, or OC? Canon
Canon point: After Season 11, Episode 10 “The Gang Goes to Hell Part 2”
PB: Rob McElhenney

Setting Background: Mac hails from a world like our own, except with a television writer’s sense of how law, science, medicine and basically everything works. Mac’s canon is set in South Philly, although he actually isn’t sure which one is the state and which one is the city between Pennsylvania and Philadelphia. Mac’s milieu is a bunch of low-income white Irish-Catholics; he’s additionally from the demographic of people who haven’t traveled much, slash, at all, and yet still consider themselves worldly on account of having watched Planet Earth while high on paint fumes. He’s from the more innocent time of summer 2016, so from before politics got really fucked up but after David Bowie, famed knife inventor, kicked the bucket.

History:

• Mac was born in 1977, the unintended and only child of a South Philly mechanic and her drug-dealing husband. The most charitable term for his parents would be “inattentive”; the most accurate would be “neglectful and abusive”. Mac’s mother is an apathetic barely-verbal lump of a woman who outright tells him she doesn’t love him and wouldn’t care if he died, and Mac’s father would withhold affection, use Mac as an unwitting tool in criminal enterprises, mock and threaten him, and otherwise ignore him. Mac’s sole source of true care came from his best friend, Charlie, and the two were inseparable throughout childhood.

• As a child Mac latched onto religion as a means of finding comfort and security. In grade school Charlie introduced him to using inhalants to get high, and in sixth grade the two of them began heavily abusing alcohol.

• When Mac was seven, his father was arrested for dealing meth. Mac’s father proceeded to cycle in and out of the jail system until Mac was nine, and from that point on was incarcerated for nearly the entirety of Mac’s adolescence and young adulthood.

• In high school, Mac took advice from his father and began to deal drugs to wealthier kids in the high school. He met the Reynolds twins, Dennis and Dee, through this, and formed a deep bond with Dennis. The twins, Mac and Charlie became a unit that would later be known as “the Gang”. After high school, Mac moved in with Dennis.

• A few years after high school, the Gang used money from Dennis’ mother to purchase a bar and start their own business, “Paddy’s Pub”. Mac is co-owner and “head of security”, i.e. the doorman.

• The canon begins a few years into their attempts to run the bar; following is a summary of the most eventful episodes for Mac’s characterization:
• In Season 3: “Dennis Looks Like a Registered Sex Offender”, Mac’s father is released from prison and orders Mac to hotwire a car and drive him around to “take care” of former enemies, after which he promises he’ll “take care” of Mac. When Mac and Charlie realize that this sounds an awful lot like murder, they call the cops and Mac’s father is arrested and returned to prison. As he’s arrested, Mac’s father tells Mac that he plans to kill him for this.

• In Season 4: “Mac and Charlie Die”, Mac’s father is granted parole. Mac and Charlie try to fake their deaths by crashing a car into a wall (Mac fails to bail out of the vehicle in time and sustains a nasty concussion). Mac’s father leaves a note pinned with a knife to the bar door explaining that he’s not going to kill Mac but wants Mac to never contact him again.

• In Season 7, Mac gains sixty pounds and happily sees himself a “scary” “monster” who can “keep everyone safe”. He abruptly loses the weight due to Dennis secretly drugging him with ephedra, causing Mac a great deal of anxiety and unhappiness with his body. In Season 8: “The Gang Gets Analyzed”, a therapist diagnoses Mac with body dysmorphia.

• In Season 9: “Mac Day”, the Gang gets so fed up with Mac’s obvious repressed homosexuality and delusions of grandeur that they attempt to break him down by publicly humiliating him and having him get his ass kicked at a karate tournament. Despite getting his face kicked in, he rebounds immediately.

• In Season 9: “The Gang Gets Quarantined”, the Gang realize that they’re alcoholics after going without alcohol for a few days puts them through debilitating withdrawals. They then begin to justify continuing to drink as “for their health”.

• In Season 11: “Mac and Dennis Move to the Suburbs”, after burning their apartment down, Mac and Dennis move to the suburbs for a month, where Dennis convinces Mac to stay home and tend to the house. Feeling lonely and bored, Mac becomes so depressed and dysfunctional that he lets the house fill with trash, stays in pajamas most days, makes nothing but boxed mac ‘n’ cheese and eventually forgets to feed the dog until the dog starves to death. When Dennis doesn’t pay enough attention to him that evening, he butchers the dog and feeds it to Dennis to try and get a reaction. Realizing that they’ve both lost their goddamn minds, they book it back to the city.

• In Season 11: “The Gang Goes to Hell”, Mac comes out of the closet as gay and decides that life is pointless and empty, as God must not exist if He made Mac gay. After a near-death experience where the entire Gang nearly drowns, Mac leaps back into the closet with renewed faith in a God who would never make Mac a queer. Mac’s taken from a few days after this event.

Personality:

Mac has one great gift: self-delusion. His ability to reject reality and substitute it with his own interpretation is incredible. In Mac’s view, he’s a powerful, intelligent, heterosexual badass who really only hasn’t gotten anywhere in life because he just hasn’t been given enough opportunities to thrive. In his view, he’s respected by others and loved by his parents, who just aren’t particularly great at showing it. To him, he’s a decent, sensible guy tasked with the mighty burden of protecting his best friends, totally capable of handling any obstacle life throws his way thanks to his strong will and faith in God.

In Mac’s view, he’s okay and nothing is ever his fault.

The truth is that Mac is a mess, a bottomless void of personality flaws, poor decisions, repression, avoidance, irresponsibility, shame and need. He leaves disasters in his wake and zooms past social norms, unwilling to expand his understanding of the world or other people enough to coexist with them. In Philadelphia, he and his friends have become an isolated cloister of toxic codependence, having alienated everyone around them, and are completely incapable of reintegrating healthily to society, each one of them only tolerable because the others are equally depraved.

Mac views his role in the world as the protector and trendsetter, a byproduct of his self-righteousness. Mac has a tendency to believe that he knows what’s best for people, or knows what they really need; his ideas for what would benefit people he cares about are often horrifically self-serving, but that hardly stops him. He’s bossy and rude and passive-aggressive when he doesn’t get his way, resorting to tactics as extreme as drilling holes in people’s hands and feeding them a dead dog to try and get what he wants out of them - what he assumes they secretly want as well.

His most frequent projection is that people actually do want to give him attention, love and validation, and are just incapable of expressing it or finding time for it; this is an emotional survival tactic he developed growing up to cope with his childhood’s ruinous neglect and abuse. Mac’s actions are driven by a transparent, guileless and desperate need to feel loved and wanted, as all people want. Unable to meet that need from his family and having become such a disastrous person that he earns no affection from his peers, Mac mostly-unconsciously rewrites how he experiences the world into one he can actually cope with.

As a further means of inventing love in his life, Mac’s adopted a fundamentalist, restrictive version of Catholicism that allows him to judge people from on high. Between his parents and his Old Testament God, Mac’s idea of being loved is not of receiving affection, understanding and support, but instead of being spared punishment by someone who has the power to abuse you. Mac sees God as a violent authority figure who sends floods and thunderbolts to punish sinners, and sees the fact that he hasn’t been blasted off the earth as proof that he’s loved and special (he also sees it as his duty to convert his completely disinterested and resentful friends). His problem here is that he feels perpetually on eggshells - not because of the variety of horrible acts he commits with abandon, but because he knows, deep, deep down, that he’s gay, and is trying to just deny that fact hard enough to bury it forever.

His repression and shame over his homosexuality is misplaced, because he has so many other things to feel guilty about. Mac’s a person with very few, if any, redeeming qualities. He’s deeply selfish, cowardly, hypocritical, temperamental, greedy and clingy. In spite of his self-image as a badass karate master, he’s the first to run from confrontation, stammers out excuses when challenged, and only ever seems to get his way by tattling or appealing to authority. He leaps to shouting and threats with very little provocation. He jumps onboard with any harebrained scheme, completely oblivious to the ethics of it, if it will potentially yield attention or entertainment. He’s desperately needy and sees people humoring his demands for attention as proof of his worth, and is eager to manipulate scenarios to get that payoff.

He’s also jawdroppingly stupid across many different facets of intelligence. He’s gullible, impulsive, slow, distractible, childish, prone to fixation and completely lacking in self-awareness. Some of this is straight-up brain damage from a life of substance abuse and head trauma; the rest is just being innately dumb and too overconfident to ever try and make up for the vast holes in his fund of knowledge or analytical abilities. He believes completely bizarre “facts” about science and actively rejects changing his mind about things. Simple mental demands, such as understanding gameshow rules or following the plots of the action movies he loves so much, are often beyond him. He believes his plans are excellent, even when they’re based on entirely incoherent understandings of how the world or other people operate. Even if most of his decisions weren’t made on a baseline level of boozed up, they’d be ill-informed and poorly thought-out. Despite being nearly forty, he has a child-like understanding of other people as separate human beings with their own needs and agency.

The result is that Mac is a wrecking ball of a person, crashing through life without taking responsibility for or even noticing the chaos he wreaks. Outside of the Gang, basically no one’s life is better for having Mac in it. Fortunately for him, he doesn’t notice; Mac’s self-delusion defenses are so bulletproof as to protect him from anything keeping him down for too long. Unfortunately for everyone else, to use his own words, that means he’s dug in, and he’ll never change.

Power Selection: Noospheric

For noospheric powers: I would like Mac to have incredible martial arts skills, the way he’s always dreamed and pretended he’s had. Nothing outright superhuman, but definitely world-class athlete-level, a la Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee in their prime. The flip side will be that Mac’s ability to access these crazy karate powers evaporates entirely when he knows other people are watching, which means proving he has them to others will be difficult if not impossible. As part of his character growth at P90, I would like him to eventually be able to access his karate powers in others' presence, as a result of learning to loosen his grip on his need for validation.

Non-Powered Abilities: Mac makes real enthusiastic posterboard presentations whenever the opportunity presents itself. He also is a decent singer a capella.

SETTING/SUITABILITY

➤ How do you expect your character to respond to the setting? Even if they plan to rebel in the long term, will they be able to at least obey enough to not get shocked to death?

Overall, Mac’s alarmingly good at taking things in stride, and once he has the basics of food, shelter and alcohol covered, he’ll keep on keepin’ on at his baseline level of quasi-functionality. He’s too much of a dipshit to sustain the attention necessary to rebel, and he’ll go where the self-interest is, so Jorgmund will be able to get him to cooperate easily once they know what his priorities are and what he responds to. He’s bound to get into trouble, but I doubt in a way that will lead the Jorgmund to want to permanently take him out of commission; he very much does not read as a threat so much as just a liability, and not one that you can improve by zapping it a lot. He’s destructive and a handful, but not in a way likely to seriously jeopardize Jorgmund’s interests.

➤ What do you hope to do with your character long-term?

I’m a big fan of reform arcs, and while I don’t think Mac’s ever going to be a good person I’d love to push him in the direction of being someone who isn’t just a net toxic and negative influence on everyone around him. His whole life has been bereft of decency; being surrounded by people who treat each other with respect and compassion is going to rub off on him in ways that never would have happened back home. Over time I want him to develop a stronger sense of other people as people, rather than vending machines he has to rattle open to get sweet $1.25 attention-doritos. Mac’s tragedy is that his dysfunction has turned him into someone nearly incapable of being loved, and I’d like to start the process of turning him into someone who others might want to care for.

➤ Does your character currently have skills that would allow them to adapt, survive, and do the heroic things being asked of them? If your character doesn't, do you think they'd have the capacity to learn quickly?

Mac’s fantastically durable for someone as fundamentally damaged as he is. It’s not that he’ll be particularly rising to some of the demands asked of him, but that he’ll bounce back instantaneously from any failures he runs into. He’s also easy to manipulate, and characters can likely find ways to trick him into focusing that chaotic, unpredictable energy into productive ways once they get a sense of how he operates. It will take time and creativity, but there are ways Mac’s irrepressibility, spontaneity and shamelessness can become an asset to the team.

➤ If they're not used to cooperating with others, what makes you think they'll be able to adapt to cooperating with the group?

Mac’s inherently a social person who needs to be around others, and he’s full-on incapable of taking a hint, so he’ll be working himself into the fabric of the group whether they like it or not. As for actively cooperating, Mac’s as likely to cooperate with someone because he’s bored and needs something to do as he is to throw them under the bus because Jorgmund promised him a slightly softer pillow, but he’s guileless and transparent and the damage he causes is usually small potatoes. Once people learn to expect nothing more from him than fairweather friendship and incompetence, he’ll find his niche in the group as the resident village idiot-slash-scapegoat-slash-diversion-slash-upcycle project-slash-cautionary tale-slash-canary-in-the-mine.

➤ Will your character have long-term plans to rebel against Jorgmund? If so, how? Will they betray the other PCs and cooperate with Jorgmund? If so, how do you plan to handle the negative CR that might arise?

Mac’s incapable of longterm planning or even of keeping a solid goal in mind for more than 48 hours. He’s also easily manipulated, amoral and deeply selfish, so at any given moment Jorgmund or the other PCs could use him for their ends. I love negative CR and am happy to play out the consequences of alienating other PCs, though I imagine for some PCs their ire will be mitigated by the fact that Mac generally isn’t malicious so much as impulsive, petty and greedy, and the fact that Mac’s so brick-stupid incompetent that he’s limited in the amount of damage he can do. Mac’s additionally a friendly guy who forgives instantaneously, which means fences really only needed to be mended from one direction.

SAMPLES

Network Sample


[Seeing as Mac’s only ever had one job interview in a corporate environment, he doesn’t really grasp how weird it is to be strapped into a polygraph while looking at clip-art of smiling employees eating a birthday cake projected onto a whiteboard; after all, he’s always heard that employers these days get way too invasive, on account of it being a bold market stacked against the worker. He tents his fingers and bounces his leg slightly, bored, letting his mind wander over what the movie selection’s going to be like in this place before the interviewer speaks up and gets his attention again.]

- If you were a kitchen appliance, which kitchen appliance would you be and why?

A knife, obviously, if that counts as an appliance, because it’s the only thing in a kitchen that’s dangerous, and I have this intimidating aura for a reason. I feel like a single knife’s a little limiting, though, since it only has the one edge. [He cups his chin in his hand in thought.] I like to think I’m a very complex person, so I’d have to be multiple knives, to reflect all the different parts of my personality. What’s an appliance that has multiple knives?

[He snaps his fingers.] Oh, right, a chainsaw. I mean, you wouldn’t use a chainsaw in the kitchen because that’s just incredibly unsafe, so I’m going to stay with the same spirit as the chainsaw and settle on lawnmower as my final answer.

- What is your least favorite thing about humanity?

The Cowboys. Next question. [Mac and the interviewer squint at each other as the polygraph determines that’s a lie, and after a moment Mac heaves an exceptionally dramatic sigh and gives a different answer.] It’s true. But I guess you’re thinking more, like, big concept? I can do big concepts.

[He lowers his voice.] If I’m not hired yet, do I still get reported to HR if I just say “women”? Or are the people at HR, you know…on the same page. [He tilts his head and shifts his eyes.]

- On a scale from 1 to 10, rate me as an interviewer.

Well, you asked for it. I’m bored as shit so I’m thinking like…three. I feel like you haven’t asked for a demonstration of my practical skills, so you can’t really assess what I’m bringing to the table. [He sits forward.] You know, if I was designing this, I’d make it way more interactive. Like, maybe multiple stages, and instead of one-on-one interviews turn it into a competition.

[He gestures with his hands while he talks, marking off where in the room each aspect of the competition would take place.] Obviously the first challenge would have to be a physical test, to chaff out the wheat. We have this board game back home, CharDee MacDennis – I’ll tell you about it later if you’re interested in helping us with the copyright – and that has plenty of prompts for feats of strength and stamina. So I figure you’d take like, the top three competitors or so and move them to the next stage.

[He moves his focus to the middle of the room, grinning.] Now, you might think that since we just did strength, we should do smarts next. But that’s where you’d be wrong, because I read somewhere that there’s no accurate way to measure intelligence on account of bias, so you’d need to find something easier to assess. I’m thinking you look for charisma, and make part two a sales pitch. Test people’s creativity and see if they can come up with a fantastic product and then sell you on it. You can even measure enthusiasm to see if they choreograph a routine or come up with promotional art for it, but don’t suggest that to them, because they need to come up with ways to go above-and-beyond without getting handheld the whole way. So you take the top two from this section of the competition.

Next you need a third challenge, because all the important things in the world come in threes. Musketeers, the white guys on the A-Team, the Holy Trinity. And I know we already did a physical assessment but I think that the last one should be a combination of strength and aesthetic. Strip them down and have them really settle who’s the better man with a straightforward wrestling competition, right here in the interview room. I’m a little torn on whether you should provide them with weapons because on one hand, you don’t want a prime slab of muscle to get fucked up before he’s even hired, but on the other there’s so much entertainment to watching two dudes beat the shit out of each other with hammers. Then you take the winner and boom, there’s your candidate. Easy hire.

[He sits back again, looking like he’s deeply disappointed.] Honestly, I’m doing your job for you right now, so I’m docking you all the way down to a one out of ten.

- What are three positive character traits you don't have?

Really the only positive character trait I don’t have is money. I do have a temper, so I guess I lack, uh, serenity, but I like to think that that just makes me spontaneous and exciting.

[He reaches for a pen on the table, tapping it against his front teeth as he tries to come up with more traits and yet sensing that this isn’t something he wants to think about too much, like he’s teetering on a high wire and the more he tries to peek downwards to see if there’s a net there the more likely he is to fall.]

For the third I’m going to have to go with the unfortunate fact that I just lack understatedness.

- You’re on your way to your best friend’s wedding and your boss calls and says a client needs something, what do you do?

I’m going to ask if that bozo client needs a sock in the eye. Like, don’t get me wrong, my friendships are basically built on IOUs and disappointments, but weddings usually happen in the house of God.

[He chews the pen.]

Now, if my boss wanted to interrupt a funeral, that’s a different story. Funerals are the worst. Who wants to stand around on a lawn listening to people compliment someone who isn’t even going to hear it? I can conduct myself at a funeral because, you know, I’m not a piece of shit, but I am absolutely taking the first excuse that shows up to get out of it, and we’re a very career-focused nation, so. [He makes a shrugging “can’t be helped!” gesture.] Bulletproof excuse.

[He pops the cap of the pen off in his mouth.] So, let’s talk promotions.


Prose Sample
TDM Sample

ADDITIONAL INFO
Mac’s a physically-dependent alcoholic, so while he’ll be taking advantage of alcohol that’s available as it comes throughout the game, for plots or scenarios where that isn’t at hand I’d love to handwave some sort of prescription Jorgmund can give him to prevent withdrawal.

FINAL QUESTIONS

➤ Will your character suspect some kind of guiding intelligence has brought them to the game? Or will they think it was random or done by Jorgmund?

God did it. God does everything, He’s pretty badass that way. And God definitely has a plan, although Mac’s not sure what it is which means Mac’s completely at liberty to disregard thinking too hard about it or modifying his opinions or participation in the rig in any way.

➤ If they think it was something other than Jorgmund, like God or some other force of fate, what character traits do they think of that intelligence as having? Is it cruel or kind? Capriciously punishing them or doing it for good reason?

Mac’s view of God is, like the rest of him, kind of a mess. He gravitates towards the idea of a fearsome authority figure who expresses love by being “hands off” and letting things play out, as his view on religion was a reaction to a neglectful childhood and is so tied into his efforts to concoct proof that his threatening, disengaged parents love him. God is not warm and comforting; God smites people with lightning and withholds Heaven. But God is reassuring in a way because He listens and, if things are going well for you, you know that you’re doing right by Him and have license to lord that over others.

In this case, God isn’t punishing them, but He is testing them – and the only way to know if you passed the test is if you avoid Hell.