April Roberta Ludgate (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
aggressiveapathy) wrote2012-02-27 08:50 pm
aggressiveapathy) wrote2012-02-27 08:50 pm
Application
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: April Ludgate | Janet Snakehole
SERIES: Parks and Recreation
CHRONOLOGY: Towards the end of Season 3 Episode 6 ‘Indianapolis’
CLASS: Hero
BACKGROUND:
Parks and Recreation is an Office-like (in that, for reasons unexplained, there are cameras following everyone around which the characters are aware of and speak to, therefore allowing them to break the fourth wall and address the audience directly throughout the show) droll comedy which takes place in the, you guessed it, Parks and Recreation Department of the small fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana. Pawnee is a town with a proud tradition of being the third most obese city in the US and having a complicated relationship with: the Native Americans (there are only a few square feet of Pawnee where an atrocity was not committed against the local tribes at some point in history), other cultures in general (they assume people of Venezuela wouldn’t know what toilet paper is), and ‘witches’ (the last witch was burned in the 1970s in Pawnee after a traveling magician pulled a rabbit out of his hat). Overall the world of Pawnee is exactly like our real world. The same major political events occurred, all the same wars and major historical events. The only thing that makes the show’s world different from 2012 in the real world is that Pawnee exists.
April Ludgate was born and raised in Pawnee. She is the eldest of two daughters, with a Puetro Rican mother and Indiana native father. How her parents met or what they do is never revealed, but April seems to have been raised in a normal upper middle class environment. Her family has a big enough house that both she and her sister have their own rooms and her family is able to continue to support April while she goes to college. While she has a drivers license, she doesn’t own her own car, relying on her bike or borrowing her family station wagon instead.
During her junior year of college she slept in on intern sign-up day (something she blames her sister on for not waking her up), and therefore ended up in the last available internship position open: the Parks and Rec department. She is a less than stellar intern and, later, full-time employee. She falls asleep at the desk, spends the day texting or playing online, and uploads videos of herself drinking at her desk to youtube. This behavior impresses the Libertarian head of the department, Ron Swanson, eventually leading him to hiring her as his personal assistant when she applies for the job by promising to scare away anyone who wants to meet with him. She also manages to earn a special place in the heart of the department’s deputy director, Leslie Knope, who somehow ignores April’s utter lack of motivation and enjoyment for the job, cheerfully assigning her tasks and gushing in excitement when April becomes a full government employee. Whether April in fact graduates college is not clarified in the show, but I’m stating she only attends part-time while working fulltime, thus adding a few years until she’ll be done with school.
During her time at the Parks and Rec Department, April’s personal life undergoes a few changes. She starts off dating a gay fellow college student Derek, who is also dating another student named Ben. As April describes it: Derek is gay, but he’s straight for me, but he’s gay for Ben and Ben is really gay for Derek and I hate Ben. She’s pretty involved in gay culture and (occasionally) the rights movement in addition to being in the non-traditional relationship, making up pro-Leslie posters when Leslie accidentally makes a stance on being pro-gay marriage, and frequenting the local gay bar even after she and Derek and Ben break it off. She gets bored of Derek and Ben’s obsession with irony when they start making fun of Andy, a man from work she becomes interested in, and cute old people, and breaks up with the pair for ‘being really gay for a gay couple.’ Shortly after this she enters into an awkward courting dance with Andy, who has reservations about pursuing her thanks to a near decade age gap between them. They eventually do get together and in fact get married, but April will be pulled from just after they officially settled on being girlfriend and boyfriend. For most of this time April has a semi-relationship with a Venezuelan intern (as in he is a government intern from and in Venezuela) named Eduardo, who became enchanted with her and her claims to power when he visited Pawnee in a Sister City program.
Overall April plays the role of Robin to the Batman of many of the show’s more prominent main characters, backing them up and following them around without having too much of a personal plotline of her own outside of her relationship dramas. She sticks around through the government shut-down and reopening and generally just follows along with what she’s ordered to do, though with near constant sarcastic commentary.
PERSONALITY:
April Ludgate is weird and she likes it that way. She love indie music, gay Halloween, and freaking out the norms. She doesn’t like labeling her relationships, or being called an adult, or in general being defined by outside standards in any way. She’s comfortable with uncomfortable silences, having no problem with just blankly staring at a person attempting to engage her in conversation and not caring how awkward it may make the other person feel. More than not care much herself, she in fact tends to outright dislike those that care too much about the opinions of others. She is far more inclined to like someone more the more they do what works for them rather than what is expected or wanted from them. For instance, the time she most likes her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend Ann was when Ann exploded and screamed at April for acting like a child.
Which isn’t to say April has no regard for how others see her. She’s actually kind of proud at how much of a strange person she is, and gets uncomfortable when that image is challenged. She’s a bit awkward at even smiling, for instance, though with Andy at her side that has become a more natural expression for her over the course of the show. She gets self-conscious when admitting for the first time she actually cares about someone, but can generally plow through with a ‘whatever’ or an exclaimed ’oh my god!’ at the end to take the edge off the sentiment. In the same vein, being uncomfortable with overt expressions of affection doesn’t mean April lacks those feelings. She loves her bosses Leslie and Ron like they were family, and even has an odd soft spot for Tom and his antics. She shows her loyalty in small ways, like helping Ron throw out vegan bacon at a health food store or going to the seedy Snakehole Lounge to show her support for Tom.
While she may care about people she works with, the work itself is another matter entirely. Ron describes April as his perfect assistant as she is both aggressively mean and apathetic, happy to hang up on people and vow to ‘never make a work related phone call at work.’ While she doesn’t have enthusiasm for the work, however, April always somehow manages to get her work done. She might notify Leslie that her next appointment has arrived by going ‘this guy is here,’ but she always still gets the guy where he needs to be. Even when the optimistic and driven Chris takes over as her boss for a time, April manages to do a good enough job (while constantly complaining she must be trapped in a nightmare) that Chris offers her a promotion and transfer. The only task she ever actually willingly failed to do was call Ann to cancel Chris’ lunch date with her, and that was because she had a personal grudge with Ann thanks to the woman’s former relationship with Andy.
A far more reactive than active person, April doesn’t deal with personal conflict particularly well. That isn’t to say she avoids fights. She’s often intentionally picks them through being annoying or petty for fun, and has no problem calling people out and bitching about them to their face for minor, ultimately meaningless offenses. Rather, it’s when she’s actually emotionally invested or concerned about something that she gets moody and passive-aggressive. She doesn’t tell Chris that she doesn’t want to be his assistant anymore outright, instead faxing a fake letter from Ron to him saying that she was needed back. When Andy replies to her confession of love with ‘awesomesauce,’ she sets about ignoring him or only replying to him with passive-aggressive sarcasm rather than outright telling him what was bothering her. Essentially, she doesn’t like people to know when something is really bothering her, but when it is she can cling to that grudge like there’s no tomorrow.
Last, but certainly not least, is April’s most easily noticeable trait: her deadpan sense of humor. April seems totally bored with the world at most times, and finds her own weird ways to fix that, usually without much if any thought to the consequences. The first line of attack is just the way she speaks to people. Her answers are almost always tinged with some amount of sarcasm or irony, though she does have moments of pure sincerity from time to time. Often her jokes are so monotone that people who don’t know her assume she is being serious. At those times she isn’t inclined to explain the sarcasm, leaving it to others to explain that she’s joking to the poor soul she’s speaking with. Her second method is just taking action when bored enough. When she was underage she video taped herself getting drunk at her desk at work just because ‘I was waiting for my sister and I was bored and my hair looked really good,’ then uploaded it to a Parks and Rec webpage for fun. Her favorite part of doing field work with Leslie was when Leslie fell into a giant dirt pit and she took pictures of it. Once she drove a riding lawn mower through a department store and posted the video on youtube. Her pranks do have some moral line to them, though. When she and Andy engaged in a competition to see which of them could get the most free stuff at the Snakehole lounge, they agreed to give the hundreds of dollars they acquired back to the staff in the tip jar.
POWER:
Spirit of Pawnee Animal: Raccoon
April can summon and control raccoons in a way which can only be described as Disney princess like. They will flock to her and, like the mice for Cinderella or the woodland creatures for Sleeping Beauty, perform tasks to help her. This means the raccoons are smarter than your average forest variety. When under April’s power, they can sew dresses, send faxes, set up her TiVo, whatever she requires of them. While they can’t speak, they can understand what other people are saying, but won’t necessarily obey them. They tend to show the same attitude towards an individual that April feels towards them, ie if April dislikes the person the raccoons will raise their hackles and hiss while if she likes the person they may coo and scamper around that person’s feet. Most of the raccoons are bilingual, but a handful only understand Spanish.
Apathy Zone
April has invulnerability to any event she doesn’t acknowledge to be happening. Lack of acknowledgement here being full blown not paying attention, totally didn’t even notice something was happening kind of lack of awareness. She cannot simply attempt to disbelieve something she’s already noticed, like looking away from someone holding a gun at her. Rather, she needs to be so apathetic towards the events around her that she doesn’t even notice they’re occurring. With this power, for instance, were she napping at her desk or had her headphones turned up so loud she was dead to the world around her and an earthquake that took out the City occurred, the room she was sitting in would somehow be miraculously still intact after the fact (as would any other people who were in the room with her). Should anyone grab her shoulder at yell at her to run because there was an earthquake, however, the invulnerability field would vanish and she’d be in as much danger as anyone else.
Taco Hands
April can fire tacos out of her hands. What type of taco, what condiments are on them, and their spiciness level is entirely random. They fire with a small ‘pew pew’ noise and can be shot at a maximum velocity of 35 miles per hour.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[The communicator has apparently been set on top of her computer monitor, acting like a webcam that she occasionally glances up at as she types away on the keyboard. Sitting on the back of her chair, one behind each shoulder, are two quietly chattering raccoons.]
Hey. It’s day five of April’s Nightmare. Still not waking up. That sucks. Not like I was busy being at a totally lame party with my stupid boyfriend or anything...
[She glances up at the camera, then over to one of the raccoons, then back at the camera again.]
But these guys started breaking into my apartment last night. It’s not my house, so. Whatever. It’s ugly anyway. But someone needs to come fix my locks or I’m gonna get murdered by a hobo with mad cow disease or crabs or get taken over by bees or something. I won’t pay you. But if you do it fast you can maybe have a leftover taco or some free mold scrapings. Just no talking to me while you’re here.
I mean it.
[One of the raccoons hisses at the lens for extra emphasis, and April actually raises a hand to scratch behind it’s ear for a moment.]
But, yeah. These things keep showing up so I guess they think I’m like their squirrel queen or something. That’s okay, I guess. They already stole someones cable for me. I get like five million channels now. So, whatever. That’s kind of cool.
I still need a new door.
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
Her back pressed against the hard metal of the filing cabinet as she pulled her knees closer to her chest, hands locked in a tight grip on the opposite elbow to hold her legs in place. Well. This had been a super idea. The office she’d ducked into only had one door in and out. What exactly had been the plan? Find out if flying was one of her stupid powers and jump out the window?
A creak of the hardwood floor outside the closed door and she held her breath for a moment, pressing her mouth against her knees to muffle any chance squeak that might escape from her as her pursuer passed by. Yeah. This had totally been a Jerry worthy idea. She wished the cube butt were here just so she could find a way to blame it on him. Not like it would be hard or anything. Even in this screwy place people would pick up on what a total air waste the guy was. Though in the City he could start his own club of them. Boring Morons Membership Only Club. Lame.
The handle to the office jiggled and April accepted that the game was up. He’d found her. She bit her lip a little as she rose on shaky legs to her feet and took a steadying breath. The door opened.
“You’ll never take me alive!”
The cry came out in a high pitch, false British accent. She held one hand up to the door, eyes wide and breath ragged as the man on the other side of the doorway came into full view.
“I never kidnapped anyone! It was the Mayor’s cat, Mrs. Pickles! He stole all those orphan nuns from the Piggly Wiggly! He set me up, then only made it look like those penguins had eaten him! You must believe me!”
April Ludgate, aka Janet Snakehole, didn’t go down in hide-and-seek without a fight.
CHARACTER NAME: April Ludgate | Janet Snakehole
SERIES: Parks and Recreation
CHRONOLOGY: Towards the end of Season 3 Episode 6 ‘Indianapolis’
CLASS: Hero
BACKGROUND:
Parks and Recreation is an Office-like (in that, for reasons unexplained, there are cameras following everyone around which the characters are aware of and speak to, therefore allowing them to break the fourth wall and address the audience directly throughout the show) droll comedy which takes place in the, you guessed it, Parks and Recreation Department of the small fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana. Pawnee is a town with a proud tradition of being the third most obese city in the US and having a complicated relationship with: the Native Americans (there are only a few square feet of Pawnee where an atrocity was not committed against the local tribes at some point in history), other cultures in general (they assume people of Venezuela wouldn’t know what toilet paper is), and ‘witches’ (the last witch was burned in the 1970s in Pawnee after a traveling magician pulled a rabbit out of his hat). Overall the world of Pawnee is exactly like our real world. The same major political events occurred, all the same wars and major historical events. The only thing that makes the show’s world different from 2012 in the real world is that Pawnee exists.
April Ludgate was born and raised in Pawnee. She is the eldest of two daughters, with a Puetro Rican mother and Indiana native father. How her parents met or what they do is never revealed, but April seems to have been raised in a normal upper middle class environment. Her family has a big enough house that both she and her sister have their own rooms and her family is able to continue to support April while she goes to college. While she has a drivers license, she doesn’t own her own car, relying on her bike or borrowing her family station wagon instead.
During her junior year of college she slept in on intern sign-up day (something she blames her sister on for not waking her up), and therefore ended up in the last available internship position open: the Parks and Rec department. She is a less than stellar intern and, later, full-time employee. She falls asleep at the desk, spends the day texting or playing online, and uploads videos of herself drinking at her desk to youtube. This behavior impresses the Libertarian head of the department, Ron Swanson, eventually leading him to hiring her as his personal assistant when she applies for the job by promising to scare away anyone who wants to meet with him. She also manages to earn a special place in the heart of the department’s deputy director, Leslie Knope, who somehow ignores April’s utter lack of motivation and enjoyment for the job, cheerfully assigning her tasks and gushing in excitement when April becomes a full government employee. Whether April in fact graduates college is not clarified in the show, but I’m stating she only attends part-time while working fulltime, thus adding a few years until she’ll be done with school.
During her time at the Parks and Rec Department, April’s personal life undergoes a few changes. She starts off dating a gay fellow college student Derek, who is also dating another student named Ben. As April describes it: Derek is gay, but he’s straight for me, but he’s gay for Ben and Ben is really gay for Derek and I hate Ben. She’s pretty involved in gay culture and (occasionally) the rights movement in addition to being in the non-traditional relationship, making up pro-Leslie posters when Leslie accidentally makes a stance on being pro-gay marriage, and frequenting the local gay bar even after she and Derek and Ben break it off. She gets bored of Derek and Ben’s obsession with irony when they start making fun of Andy, a man from work she becomes interested in, and cute old people, and breaks up with the pair for ‘being really gay for a gay couple.’ Shortly after this she enters into an awkward courting dance with Andy, who has reservations about pursuing her thanks to a near decade age gap between them. They eventually do get together and in fact get married, but April will be pulled from just after they officially settled on being girlfriend and boyfriend. For most of this time April has a semi-relationship with a Venezuelan intern (as in he is a government intern from and in Venezuela) named Eduardo, who became enchanted with her and her claims to power when he visited Pawnee in a Sister City program.
Overall April plays the role of Robin to the Batman of many of the show’s more prominent main characters, backing them up and following them around without having too much of a personal plotline of her own outside of her relationship dramas. She sticks around through the government shut-down and reopening and generally just follows along with what she’s ordered to do, though with near constant sarcastic commentary.
PERSONALITY:
April Ludgate is weird and she likes it that way. She love indie music, gay Halloween, and freaking out the norms. She doesn’t like labeling her relationships, or being called an adult, or in general being defined by outside standards in any way. She’s comfortable with uncomfortable silences, having no problem with just blankly staring at a person attempting to engage her in conversation and not caring how awkward it may make the other person feel. More than not care much herself, she in fact tends to outright dislike those that care too much about the opinions of others. She is far more inclined to like someone more the more they do what works for them rather than what is expected or wanted from them. For instance, the time she most likes her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend Ann was when Ann exploded and screamed at April for acting like a child.
Which isn’t to say April has no regard for how others see her. She’s actually kind of proud at how much of a strange person she is, and gets uncomfortable when that image is challenged. She’s a bit awkward at even smiling, for instance, though with Andy at her side that has become a more natural expression for her over the course of the show. She gets self-conscious when admitting for the first time she actually cares about someone, but can generally plow through with a ‘whatever’ or an exclaimed ’oh my god!’ at the end to take the edge off the sentiment. In the same vein, being uncomfortable with overt expressions of affection doesn’t mean April lacks those feelings. She loves her bosses Leslie and Ron like they were family, and even has an odd soft spot for Tom and his antics. She shows her loyalty in small ways, like helping Ron throw out vegan bacon at a health food store or going to the seedy Snakehole Lounge to show her support for Tom.
While she may care about people she works with, the work itself is another matter entirely. Ron describes April as his perfect assistant as she is both aggressively mean and apathetic, happy to hang up on people and vow to ‘never make a work related phone call at work.’ While she doesn’t have enthusiasm for the work, however, April always somehow manages to get her work done. She might notify Leslie that her next appointment has arrived by going ‘this guy is here,’ but she always still gets the guy where he needs to be. Even when the optimistic and driven Chris takes over as her boss for a time, April manages to do a good enough job (while constantly complaining she must be trapped in a nightmare) that Chris offers her a promotion and transfer. The only task she ever actually willingly failed to do was call Ann to cancel Chris’ lunch date with her, and that was because she had a personal grudge with Ann thanks to the woman’s former relationship with Andy.
A far more reactive than active person, April doesn’t deal with personal conflict particularly well. That isn’t to say she avoids fights. She’s often intentionally picks them through being annoying or petty for fun, and has no problem calling people out and bitching about them to their face for minor, ultimately meaningless offenses. Rather, it’s when she’s actually emotionally invested or concerned about something that she gets moody and passive-aggressive. She doesn’t tell Chris that she doesn’t want to be his assistant anymore outright, instead faxing a fake letter from Ron to him saying that she was needed back. When Andy replies to her confession of love with ‘awesomesauce,’ she sets about ignoring him or only replying to him with passive-aggressive sarcasm rather than outright telling him what was bothering her. Essentially, she doesn’t like people to know when something is really bothering her, but when it is she can cling to that grudge like there’s no tomorrow.
Last, but certainly not least, is April’s most easily noticeable trait: her deadpan sense of humor. April seems totally bored with the world at most times, and finds her own weird ways to fix that, usually without much if any thought to the consequences. The first line of attack is just the way she speaks to people. Her answers are almost always tinged with some amount of sarcasm or irony, though she does have moments of pure sincerity from time to time. Often her jokes are so monotone that people who don’t know her assume she is being serious. At those times she isn’t inclined to explain the sarcasm, leaving it to others to explain that she’s joking to the poor soul she’s speaking with. Her second method is just taking action when bored enough. When she was underage she video taped herself getting drunk at her desk at work just because ‘I was waiting for my sister and I was bored and my hair looked really good,’ then uploaded it to a Parks and Rec webpage for fun. Her favorite part of doing field work with Leslie was when Leslie fell into a giant dirt pit and she took pictures of it. Once she drove a riding lawn mower through a department store and posted the video on youtube. Her pranks do have some moral line to them, though. When she and Andy engaged in a competition to see which of them could get the most free stuff at the Snakehole lounge, they agreed to give the hundreds of dollars they acquired back to the staff in the tip jar.
POWER:
Spirit of Pawnee Animal: Raccoon
April can summon and control raccoons in a way which can only be described as Disney princess like. They will flock to her and, like the mice for Cinderella or the woodland creatures for Sleeping Beauty, perform tasks to help her. This means the raccoons are smarter than your average forest variety. When under April’s power, they can sew dresses, send faxes, set up her TiVo, whatever she requires of them. While they can’t speak, they can understand what other people are saying, but won’t necessarily obey them. They tend to show the same attitude towards an individual that April feels towards them, ie if April dislikes the person the raccoons will raise their hackles and hiss while if she likes the person they may coo and scamper around that person’s feet. Most of the raccoons are bilingual, but a handful only understand Spanish.
Apathy Zone
April has invulnerability to any event she doesn’t acknowledge to be happening. Lack of acknowledgement here being full blown not paying attention, totally didn’t even notice something was happening kind of lack of awareness. She cannot simply attempt to disbelieve something she’s already noticed, like looking away from someone holding a gun at her. Rather, she needs to be so apathetic towards the events around her that she doesn’t even notice they’re occurring. With this power, for instance, were she napping at her desk or had her headphones turned up so loud she was dead to the world around her and an earthquake that took out the City occurred, the room she was sitting in would somehow be miraculously still intact after the fact (as would any other people who were in the room with her). Should anyone grab her shoulder at yell at her to run because there was an earthquake, however, the invulnerability field would vanish and she’d be in as much danger as anyone else.
Taco Hands
April can fire tacos out of her hands. What type of taco, what condiments are on them, and their spiciness level is entirely random. They fire with a small ‘pew pew’ noise and can be shot at a maximum velocity of 35 miles per hour.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[The communicator has apparently been set on top of her computer monitor, acting like a webcam that she occasionally glances up at as she types away on the keyboard. Sitting on the back of her chair, one behind each shoulder, are two quietly chattering raccoons.]
Hey. It’s day five of April’s Nightmare. Still not waking up. That sucks. Not like I was busy being at a totally lame party with my stupid boyfriend or anything...
[She glances up at the camera, then over to one of the raccoons, then back at the camera again.]
But these guys started breaking into my apartment last night. It’s not my house, so. Whatever. It’s ugly anyway. But someone needs to come fix my locks or I’m gonna get murdered by a hobo with mad cow disease or crabs or get taken over by bees or something. I won’t pay you. But if you do it fast you can maybe have a leftover taco or some free mold scrapings. Just no talking to me while you’re here.
I mean it.
[One of the raccoons hisses at the lens for extra emphasis, and April actually raises a hand to scratch behind it’s ear for a moment.]
But, yeah. These things keep showing up so I guess they think I’m like their squirrel queen or something. That’s okay, I guess. They already stole someones cable for me. I get like five million channels now. So, whatever. That’s kind of cool.
I still need a new door.
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
Her back pressed against the hard metal of the filing cabinet as she pulled her knees closer to her chest, hands locked in a tight grip on the opposite elbow to hold her legs in place. Well. This had been a super idea. The office she’d ducked into only had one door in and out. What exactly had been the plan? Find out if flying was one of her stupid powers and jump out the window?
A creak of the hardwood floor outside the closed door and she held her breath for a moment, pressing her mouth against her knees to muffle any chance squeak that might escape from her as her pursuer passed by. Yeah. This had totally been a Jerry worthy idea. She wished the cube butt were here just so she could find a way to blame it on him. Not like it would be hard or anything. Even in this screwy place people would pick up on what a total air waste the guy was. Though in the City he could start his own club of them. Boring Morons Membership Only Club. Lame.
The handle to the office jiggled and April accepted that the game was up. He’d found her. She bit her lip a little as she rose on shaky legs to her feet and took a steadying breath. The door opened.
“You’ll never take me alive!”
The cry came out in a high pitch, false British accent. She held one hand up to the door, eyes wide and breath ragged as the man on the other side of the doorway came into full view.
“I never kidnapped anyone! It was the Mayor’s cat, Mrs. Pickles! He stole all those orphan nuns from the Piggly Wiggly! He set me up, then only made it look like those penguins had eaten him! You must believe me!”
April Ludgate, aka Janet Snakehole, didn’t go down in hide-and-seek without a fight.