DIADEM; app

[satanicpanics]

Player Information

Player: Hannah (2)
Contact: muttonchops
Invitation OR characters played: Dee invited me awhile back!
Are you over 18?: Yes


Character Information

Character: Eddie Munson
Canon: Stranger Things; after his Cool Guitar Solo but before his Tragic Death
Age: About 20
History: Link
Possessions: The clothes off his back, a lighter, and if acceptable, his electric guitar.
Weapon: He won't arrive with one, but he'll likely find a knife or a switchblade somewhere.

Powers/Abilities: No fancy powers or abilities! He’s just aa normal guy with some above average musical skill, some skill with cars, and the ability to run away from any situation.


Application Questions

Who is the most important person in their life and why? What might be different if this person hadn't been around?

Okay so stick with me here. We don’t get to see Eddie interact with his uncle Wayne on screen at all. Not even once. It’s one of the banes of my existence and I’ll never forgive the show for it. That being said…I’m still going to have to go with Wayne.

Pulling in a bit of canon from the tie-in book here, Eddie’s mother died when he was young and his father essentially took off—he works illegal schemes across the country and been known to show up every so often when he’s not in jail, but he’s essentially absent from Eddie’s life, enough so that Wayne stepped in. For all intents and purposes, Wayne is Eddie’s parent and Eddie is only as well adjusted as he is because of Wayne.

Wayne is a single man who lives in a trailer and works a low income job (Eddie feels guilty about the amount of money he soaks up and the tie-in book implies he begins selling drugs to take some of the financial stress off of his uncle), but he cares about his nephew deeply to the point of giving him the single bedroom in the trailer and sleeping on a cot in the living room himself. He doesn’t care that his nephew has long hair and tattoos because he knows who his Eddie truly is in spite of those things: kind and caring without a truly cruel bone in his body. When he comes home from a graveyard shift and finds a girl dead in his trailer and Eddie is nowhere to be seen, Wayne knows from the start that his nephew is innocent. He never questions it, even though everyone surrounding him views it as an open and shut case.

“My nephew, he may look dangerous, but he didn’t do this. It just ain’t in his nature. No matter what anyone says, and they will say things, this wasn’t Eddie.”

Again, we don’t get to see much of it, it’s easy to assume that Eddie would be nowhere with his uncle—except maybe jail. Even before Chrissy Cunningham’s death, he really had no one else on his side. He’s always been the local freak, viewed as dangerous or a troublemaker and eventually, a satanic cultist. The only adult on his side to the very end is his uncle.

Is there an event in your character's life that they'd do differently? How so and why?

If he could, he’d redo the whole thing with Chrissy Cunningham. She dies in his uncle’s trailer via the show’s then-unseen Big Bad called Vecna, Eddie grows frantic and scared and runs, leaving her there.

Her death wasn’t his fault and he knows that. She was already a target of Vecna and Eddie’s presence didn’t factor into it; it was simply just a perfect storm of him being in the wrong place with the wrong person at the wrong time, but he still harbors a lot of guilt over the situation. He was the only other person there, the only person who could have even tried to help her, and he ran away. This kind of acted as the catalyst for everything—Eddie’s fear, Eddie being wanted for murder, Eddie on the run.

If he could go back, he would have stayed with her. It’s unlikely that he could actually do anything to combat Vecna on his own or to convince the police he was innocent, but he knows that she deserved better than to be abandoned, and his uncle deserved an explanation.

What's the greatest challenge you foresee your character facing in the setting?

His own general fear, anxiety, and cowardice. One can assume that in his everyday life, Eddie isn’t always jumping at shadows and sounds. Season four exists mainly as a snapshot of him at an especially heightened level of anxiety that’s well above the baseline, and understandable so. He just watched a girl die, he’s wanted for her murder, and he’s just discovered that his small town is far more cursed than he initially thought. He’s got a lot going on!

But despite all this, it’s clear that he’s kind of hard-wired to become that frantic, anxious person under the right circumstances. In his natural state, he’s high-strung (“he’s always revved up”, according to Mike Wheeler) and easily set off. He’s pretty quick to label himself as a coward, like he views himself that way even outside of his situation in season four.

No one is harder on Eddie for this than Eddie himself, though, and he’s shown that he can hold his own. He’s constantly and overwhelmingly helpful to the rest of the group throughout the season. It’s Eddie who points the rest of the toward the War Zone, an army/navy surplus store where they can buy weapons to help defeat the season’s big bad. When they require the use of a vehicle, it’s also Eddie who hot-wires an RV for them. It’s Eddie whose morse code gets the attention of Dustin, Lucas and Erica through the lights, and Eddie and his guitar who act as a distraction for the demobats. He’s overcome his fear before, and he can overcome it again and again.

What's the easiest thing you foresee your character adapting to in the setting?

It may sound like I’m contradicting the above, but I see him quickly adapting to the strange and the unusual and taking it all in stride. Despite his anxiety, Eddie comes from a world where he has recently become very well acquainted with the supernatural. He’s experienced whatever he hell Vecna is, alternate dimensions, mutant monsters—and all in the span of a week! It freaks him out, but by the end, he’s facing it with a very “here we go again” type of attitude. Scared, but not shocked. He never rejects what he’s seeing and accepts it as the new normal very quickly. He’s no longer even questioning things by the time he’s in the Upside Down. So being saddled with a loan in a weird city with cosmic storms? Yeah, makes sense.

He’ll also thrive with the concept of loose laws. Eddie isn’t half as much of a troublemaker as the people of Hawkins make him out to be, but he’s still not exactly the shining example of an upstanding citizen. He never does it for the fun of it, but his morals are flexible and he does what he can to survive, even if it means dipping into the illegal: he sells drugs to make money, he puts his hot-wiring skills to use when his group needs a vehicle. He’ll find it nice to not automatically be a target because of his interests or what he looks like, whether he’s doing illegal things or not.

Most of all, I suspect he’ll be easily adapt socially with his fellow fluxdrifts. Eddie is genuinely good with people, especially the type of person who doesn’t “belong”. Eddie hate conformity and believes in just being himself, and he has a certain knack for collecting the fellow freaks, black sheep and outsiders of the world and shepherding them into a place they feel as if they can belong. Back home, that was Hellfire Club. Here, he’s likely to be able to replicate that in some way.


Samples

Sample: on the tdm
and an extra