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maggotmouth · 4 years

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hello, i’m nora ( she / her, 24, gmt ) and i almost exclusively join dark academia rps. please find below everything i have thus far on otto ballantyne, a theatre and classics student who was arranged to be married to one of the students who disappeared. i’ve honestly been itching to write otto again for months, so thanks to this lil group for giving me the opportunity. can’t wait to get my teeth stuck into him again. please bombard me with discord messages for plots. here is his pinterest.

act one: application.

THOMAS DOHERTY , CIS-MALE , HE/HIM → according to the school records , OTTO HORATIO BALLANTYNE has been attending sacred heart for the past four years . i last saw them hanging around the cliffs ; i think they were reciting shakespearean soliloquies to the wind and a weathered old skull. at twenty - three years old , otto has been studying theatre & classics and get this , i heard that he was arranged to be married to alice rosseau before her untimely disappearance , and was desperate to call off the affair — figure it’s true ? everyone around here always associates them with an aged bottle of malbec glugged carelessly at the after - show , the kind of confidence that only a private education gives , white lines of powder snorted off a marble sink with lovers you’ll later deny . in the time since these strange happenings , they have have not encountered any unexplained occurrences . ( written by nora , 24 , she/her , gmt )

act two: the muse !

ok so lemme start off by saying otto is heavily inspired by if we were villains by m l rio and the secret history by donna tartt. very serious actor. into the classical plays, but would definitely fit in a production of posh by laura wade. originally i wrote him for a murder mystery dark academia group but when the group ended i missed him so much i decided to bring him here.

born in south london, but raised in cheltenham. went to eton or harrow or one of those posh english boarding schools for boys. we love the homoeroticism of learning latin with your homies and chanting sonnets in caves by candlelight.

youngest son in his family. was fiercely competitive with his brother nathaniel growing up. having an older brother who was incredibly intelligent and successful made otto learn to treat his life like it was a fight. constantly trying to be better and ‘prove himself’.

otto’s a brat. filthy rich public school boy vibes, very riot club. champagne all over the ceiling and driving well over the limit. custom-made cuff links he loses in taverns when he rolls up his sleeves to lean on the bar. needing to know so much about a character you’re playing that it consumes you ; you can no longer tell which parts of you are otto and which parts are macbeth.

characters who have inspired him: alistair ryle in the riot club, francis abernathy in the secret history, anthony marston in and then there were none, oliver marks in if we were villains, achilles in the song of achilles, dorian gray in tpodg.

a fun fact is he is a natural blonde and spent most of his childhood that way but he now dyes it dark because he thinks that’ll give him more versatility in terms of the roles he can play. blonde ppl are usually cast as only the lover or the innocent n he wants to play villains and heroes and leading men as well.

very gay, n that’s pretty much a known thing by everyone but his family?? his family have arranged to have him married to women twice n both times its not worked out. the first time he basically drove her away with his reckless hedonism and alcoholism, and the second arranged marriage was to alice, one of the four students who went missing

archetypes: the figurehead. the challenger. the magician. the knight. the underdog.

ENTP-T / the debater personality.

theatre arts major, minoring in classics.

trigger warning for internalised homophobia / familial prejudice.

act three: the biography !

heavy is the head that wears the crown, though yours is the size of a tennis ball when you are born three weeks premature, barely formed enough to open your eyes. for those first few weeks all your parents knew were fear and love — fear that you would leave them, love that you had made it through so much, hooked up to wires like a fish in a cryogenic tank. to them your heart that learned one day to beat of its own accord was a miracle. perhaps that’s why you became their golden boy.

being born as a boy on the brink of death makes you invulnerable. you were achilles and the world couldn’t touch you for you were shielded from harm by a mother’s protective spell. should nathaniel lay so much as a finger on your skin, a voice would raise like the sound of a god from the veranda where she sat sipping her wine, play nice, boys! the sound of it thick with merlot. in every fight they took your side ; angel-headed creatures never lied. you soon learned that adults would believe anything if they liked you, that flattery will get you anywhere and to the well-trained mind, conversation was little more than a parlour game.

you harboured your mother’s beauty, the softness of her voice, the firmness of her skin and light in the corners of her smile. of your father, they’d say you inherited his wit, though that was your own — as was the golden hair that tousled your head, taken not from ambrose ballantyne but rather the bout of his three-week business trip to germany when your mother had bedded the gardener. if he knew, he never mentioned it. to believe such a fate would imply that he was not enough for her. though you noticed one day when you were nearing five and the sun was ripe on your freckle-flecked skin that the gardener had stopped coming at all. the grass, once shaven to its scalp, now grew to your knees.

at school, you learned with porridge still clinging to your mouth that the way to win over your teachers was through your smile. yours was the kind of school where the christmas play was not the nativity but rather the story of the gods, and stardom came to you in the role of apollo, sun shining from your beaming face, a bright halo of hair around your head. this was the first time you noticed a coldness in nathaniel’s eyes as your father threw you over his shoulder and your mother drenched you in praise. a bout of food-poisoning on your brother’s part rendered the italian restaurant, visited in your honour, abandoned. you never did find out if he was faking.

the room to his door remained shut after that and you learned to wile away your hours in the company of nannies and children from neighbouring castles, played at knights and rescued princesses from nearby dungeons, a tin-foil crown lopsided on your head. you learned to seek influence in the faces of those around you, how their eyes would widen as they hung like stalactites to your words. storyteller. prophet. riddler. prince. you cut your tongue into a well-kept sword and sparred with it thrice a day.

by nine you had read all of dickens novels. by eleven, all of shakespeare’s comedies — though you understood them as much as a cricket knows the meaning of the cosmos. still, it sounded rich and impressive when asked by aunties at dinner parties, what are you reading in school, otto? he finds the curriculum tiring, your mother would say, stroking a hand through your thick head of hair. otto’s just finished the merchant of venice. soon you grew to ignore your brother’s glowers at your back. your mother’s was the only smile you needed.

in cap and blazer your mother would drop you off at school, gated and turreted, the kind that was the envy of poorer neighborhood wives. when you were young, you were sure the gifts that came your way were yours alone, though as you grew older, you learned to expect them in the same way the school expected cheques from your parents. they named them benefactors, you noticed one day, on the wooden plaques fixed to the common room walls. the same plaques you would one day notice their names engraved upon in the arching hallways of sacred heart. acclaim was bought, not earned, and your success was littered with blood money.

what’s a king without a kingdom? your father surely wanted you to inherit his, though it was not in law and corporal finance that you found yourself a castle, but rather upon the stage. when red curtains split, you found you could become anything with the power of your will — boy, man, lion, snake, each of them wrung out by wordsmiths dead in their graves, a certain romance in the dusky smell of stage lights. when every eye in the room was focused on you — that was when you felt most powerful. like a piece of art, you were something to be looked at and admired — and perhaps in the absence of self-earned merit your vanity blossomed, for even if the trophies that lined your cabinets and the a-grades in columns on a sheet came from heavy pockets, your parents could never buy the sound of applause.

actors are by nature volatile. though your facade was swifter than an arrow, backstage they would call you tempestuous, bigoted, vain. still, it never left the wings of the theatre. there was a kind of reverence surrounding you that words could not taper, godliness following you from school to college, a peer admired in the practice rooms of sacred heart where you poured over chekhov and ibsen but yearned to read sophocles and euripides.

you learned to pride yourself on your looks — a sharpened jawline and a sharper tongue — and found that people would do almost anything for a beautiful face. in the beginning, alice was one so much. first colleagues, then friends, then a frequenter to the table in your family’s house. with arrogance carried in the curve of your brow, you only ever saw her as an accessory. that changed when you met her brother, let yourself stumble, brogues in a size that differed from your own kicked beneath your bed, a shirt with a larger neck size, pulled sheets, the smell of a foreign cologne.

talk travelled. it wouldn’t do to have word of your deviance spread further than the ballantyne house. while your parents would claim they were forward-thinking, more lenient than their parents had been, there was a conservative priggishness to the way they’d brush such matters under the rug, your father scarcely able to meet your eye over the dinner table. soon after, the arrangement was set with you all but exalted from the plans until alice had been informed. too late to back out, neither of you all that eager to be wed, though your families would coo when you fixed your hair or she, in keeping with the role, adjusted your tie. at first it amused you to play house with one such as alice, but soon you grew listless. like a caged beast you felt suffocated by the falseness of it all. you’d leave the dinners held by your joint households and return bedraggled, smelling of whiskey and sex. you’re not sure alice ever knew the reason why you couldn’t love her, though perhaps she suspected. at night, the names that would fall from your lips would never be hers. oliver. daniel. mason. rupert. charles.

act four: character investigation !

otto’s an extremely materialistic character who obtains pleasure through the things you can buy in life rather than that which comes to you by way of humble experience. he likes rolex watches, armani suits, louis vuitton travel bags, silk scarves imported from india. he likes to drink wine from decades gone by, where he can almost taste the funk of a victorian farmer hand pressing the grapes into a pulp, or to read a manuscript from the special collections section of the library that he knows has passed through hands which have gone on to achieve greatness. to otto, alice was always an extension of this hedonistic, pleasure-seeking attitude — she was something to be paraded like the equestrian trophies on his bookshelf, or his name on the honour roll. it’s not that he didn’t see her as a person — he’s hardly a chauvinist, although it could easily be inferred from the disdain with which he talks to some women — but rather that he saw her as someone ethereal and admirable and of high social standing who would elevate his social standing, by extension, were he to spend time with her. (this was such a convoluted sentence omg sorry)

the engagement was not his choice. even the idea of it had never crossed his mind. he had never thought to marry – marriage to otto was a tool used for financial gain — and being already wealthy, he was content to live out his days as a bachelor. he would take lovers, of course, but it would be on his own terms without the involvement of the law. alice was chosen as a match for otto because she was from a wealthy, well-liked family and the two had been friends since childhood. it seemed to their parents inevitable that they would marry, and so all that was left was the agreed arrangement between the families and the exchanging of rings. strictly speaking, if the marriage between otto and alice had gone ahead, then alice would have been nothing more than a trophy wife to otto. it would have been a miserable marriage for her, and he would have grown to resent her for it — not resent her for the fact that he could never truly be free to love someone he wanted (for he still would) but resent her, and by extension his family, for taking the option to do that openly and publicly away from him. she would always be seen as the beard, the scorned lover, the cuckold, and it would dampen any future relationships he held with the stain of that upset.

act five: wanted plots !

people who he was friends with as a child (either in london or cheltenham if anyone in this group has a muse from there) but grew apart from when he was sent to private school / they view him as entitled now and the two no longer have much in common

someone who auditioned for the same role as him, but otto got it, and they’ve resented him for it ever since ! want this bad. or put your thang down flip it and reverse it: someone who got the role otto wanted and he loathes them for it.

hasn’t really dated anyone? at college, he tends to hook up with people in a vapid sort of way? so he wouldn’t rEALly have past relationships with boys unless it was….. incredibly quiet and on the DL, literally meeting up in the woods after school to read plato and play with each others hair. suddenly realised i want this. someone give me someone he reads plato in the woods with and kisses up against tree bark because even though everyone basically KnOWS otto isn’t out n probably never will be :/

alternatively someone who he had a vapid, senseless hook up with and grew attached to :/ rude. in this house we lov angst

i guess some friends he actually likes would be cool. maybe someone who he has a hold over, because he’s quite an engaging character with good leadership qualities, like at parties he’ll be the one telling the story and gesticulating wildly and everyone’s watching him or looking to him for where they’ll go next / how the night will pan out. if he has a hold over someone maybe he has some sort of leverage whereby they’ll complete his work for him if he’s out getting drunk which he usually is. if tht sounds like ur character is naive n could be coerced, hit me up

people he knows on a very superficial and base level in the fact that their only interactions together involve doing coke off someone’s sink and stumbling home in the dark. otto’s a massive hedonist. if he were a greek god, he’d be a mix between dionysus and apollo, but he has achilles’ vanity.

#heretics:intro #heretics:ooc #throws my boy out into the wind x #hope u lov him as much as i do #sorry i will mostly be using medium gifs in his threads cos his icon resources are sparse x

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