[app]

[reallyhatesharks]

OOC INFORMATION
Name: R (Reili, if you're into multiple letters)
Contact: flyingthesky
Other Characters: n/a

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Jenny "Nova" Clarke
Age: Twentysomething, probably more toward 25.
Canon: Sharknado
Canon Point: end of the movie
Character Information:
The wikipedia summary is shit so I'm just gonna sing you the song of Sharknado.

When Jenny Clarke is eight, her grandfather takes her on a fishing trip with some of his friends. Because Jenny lives in a horror movie, obviously the boat they're on gets attacked by sharks and everyone protects Jenny. They set her off in a lifeboat and she survives, but everyone else dies.

Needless to say, Jenny fucking hates sharks after this.

Still, in the wake of the attack Jenny's life is presumably normal. She grows up and decides to reinvent herself, as people do. She adopts the name "Nova" for herself and moves to the sandy beaches of Santa Monica, getting a job as a waitress at Finley "Fin" Shepard's bar. Everything is settled into a nice, normal pattern and Nova's life is pretty picture perfect.

Then a shark bursts through the window of Fin's bar and nothing will ever be the same.

Nova grabs a harpoon gun and stabs the shark to death, and then she vacates the bar with Fin, his friend Baz, and the resident drunk, George. With the impending sharknado, Fin's primary concern is getting to his estranged family and so the band sets off toward them, saving some people and losing George along the way.

When they finally get to Fin's ex-wife (April) and his family, Fin gets turned away by April's new boyfriend. Then her boyfriend gets eaten by a shark because he's a douchebag.

Everyone escapes and once they're in the car, safe from sharknados, Fin's daughter Claudia reveals that her brother Matt is in flight school! The band goes to pick him up, stopping to save a bus full of children on the way, and then everybody decides to arm themselves for the incoming sharknados.

Because this is totally how science works, Matt and Nova decide that dropping bombs out of a helicopter is a 100% not at all stupid way to get rid of a sharknado. Because the other flight school students aren't even close to being able to fly solo, Matt tells his father that it has to be him that flies the helicopter.

They throw the bombs into the sharknados, and everything is going great until a shark attacks the helicopter and Nova falls out and gets eaten by a shark.

This is a shitty SyFy original movie, though, so after Fin does some hero stuff and saves the day, he jumps into a shark, chainsaw-first and cuts Nova out. Yes, you read that correctly.

He jumps into a - you know what, just watch this goddamn clip it's 20 seconds long:

"" (Watch on YouTube)

And then Nova chokes herself back to life and smiles at Matt while April and Finn kiss and everybody walks off into the sunset like they would in a real movie with a sensible plot.

Personality:
The most important thing about Nova is that she isn't ever really what she seems. Our introduction to Nova is a girl who looks a little like she belongs in a triple X spring break video: she's wearing a hot pink bikini, her hair in beachy waves, and she's got her full face on. However, we only see this Nova for about five minutes, and it's pretty clear that even though she's capable of being the sort of ditzy, bubbly waitress that sells drinks with her looks, that's just an act.

When the bar's resident drunk, George, feels her up, Nova shakes him off and says "You can touch anything in this bar but me." This is our first glimpse of Nova's true personality, and a facet of one of her most prominent traits: her take-action attitude. Unlike most girls in monster horror movies, Nova's first reaction upon seeing the shark crash into Fin's bar isn't to scream and stand around uselessly. No, she grabs a harpoon and stabs the shark to death. When bad things are happening around Nova, she doesn't just sit and let them happen if there's something she can be doing to help - which is probably the reason why she was drawn to Fin in the first place.

Being a former marine, Fin's motto is semper fi and Nova seems to adopt that attitude as well. Even when unexpected things like sharknados happen, Nova seems to roll with the punches and adapt to the situation. In fact, the inherent absurdity of a sharknado doesn't seem to bother Nova so much as new and benign information about Fin does. There's a repeated refrain of her saying "You have a [blank]?" whenever a new family member is introduced, and while she seems genuinely at a loss for words during those moments, the fact that sharks are infesting Los Angeles doesn't seem to bother her at all. She even casually drops a fact about tiger sharks while they're driving to get Fin's family, claiming she learned it from Shark Week.

Which, the fact that Nova clearly watches Shark Week is interesting because this is girl who was (rightfully so) traumatized by sharks and yet still watches Shark Week and pays enough attention to remember facts about sharks. Like most people, Nova is a collection of conflicting personality traits and in her case the conflicting aspects of her personality arise from the split between who Nova was before she took that name and who she wanted to become when she took the name Nova.

Her cool and unaffected attitude seems to be somewhat of a coping mechanism, born in the aftermath of ditching "Jenny" as an identity. Every time someone dies gruesomely in Sharknado and there's nothing that Nova can do about it, the death seems to really take a toll on her, and it's reasonable to assume that while her previous shark attack experience made her tough, it didn't make her cold. Nova cares about people - hell she rushes out to the beach when she hears Fin's been injured at the beginning of the movie and frets even when he says he's fine. She offers to get into a helicopter flown by an amateur and throw bombs into the sharknados without a second thought, too, so even though Nova's a survivor it doesn't mean she can't be somewhat self-sacrificing and reckless.

That self-sacrificing and reckless nature sometimes manifests itself in selfish ways as well. Nova is written with an explicitly one-sided crush on Fin, which would be fine except Nova seems to like Fin purely because she views him as a kind of project. By the end of the movie, once he's somewhat reconciled and reunited with his family, Nova no longer seems to care for him romantically. This is partially the result of poor writing, since Sharknado is clearly not a Criterion film, but also seems to be born of her views on Fin himself changing. Since her initial impression of Fin is a single, unmarried 40-something, the introduction of Fin's family fundamentally changes who he is to Nova and she finds that she isn't interested in who Fin actually is, but who she wanted him to be.

Nova has rewritten herself at least once, if not more than once, so it isn't particularly surprising that she would rewrite people to fit into her ideal world as well. In this sense, Nova is somewhat of a dreamer. She sees the world how she believes it to be and not necessarily how it is, which is why events like Fin having a family and people dying hit her so hard. They force her to realize what the actual situation is, whether she likes it or not.

However, it's safe to say that aside from the extreme experiences in Sharknado, Nova probably behaves somewhat like an average twentysomething in the twenty-tens - not in the sense that she would post selfies to Instagram, but in the sense that modern American culture and political climate have influenced her behavior.

5-10 Key Character Traits: survivor/adaptable, caring, hates sharks, revisionist, conditioned to accept horror, twentysomething

Would you prefer a monster that FITS your character’s personality, CONFLICTS with it, or EITHER? Either!

Opt-Outs: Troll, Arachne

Roleplay Sample: Test drive link!