fathographer

How's my playing of Maes? Is there anything off, anything I should pay better attention to, etc? Drop me a note.

OOC

Handle: Jackie
Contact: Nadat on Plurk
Over 18? Yes
Characters Played: N.A

THE CHARACTER

Character Name: Maes Hughes
Series: Fullmetal Alchemist
Canon Point: First anime, Episode 25, a split-second before Envy's gun goes off
Character Age: 29
Background: http://fma.wikia.com/wiki/Maes_Hughes

Personality: Maes Hughes is an intelligent, calculating man who hides a lot of that under his genuine love of his wife and daughter, as well as deep layer of honest friendliness. He's always paying attention, always making connections between things he's read and things he's seen (he saw "Juliet Douglas'" nametag once but recalled it later, for instance,) but you'd never know it if you'd only met the man in passing. He's even got several people who are fairly familiar with him fooled, as demonstrated in the episode in which he first appears when he gets yelled at by Riza Hawkeye for babbling on about his wife while actually trying to make sure the line was secure.

It's an easy mistake to make, assuming that all there is to Maes is shoving pictures of his daughter in people's faces and gleefully talking their ears off, because he does that a lot. His daughter Elicia is his pride and joy. It only makes sense that he'd show her off at every opportunity, like he does promptly when joining Ed Elric at Eastern HQ. Ed knows Elicia, helped deliver Elicia, and yet he still gets subjected to a whole serving of pictures before Maes goes serious.

Alongside the caring and warmth, Maes has a keen mind for figuring things out. Ed Elric, the teenage protagonist of the series, tells no one his birthday, was born in a rural area, and Maes comes strolling up to him anyway to invite him to Edward's own birthday party. More telling is that when Maes is running for his life and under a lot of stress, he notices the misplacement of a small facial marking on a 'coworker' in one quick glance and knows things have gone wrong. He calls the counterfeit out... and that leads to Maes' greatest weakness: overconfidence.

Maes has faith and confidence. He's an optimist in a great many situations, and partly out of necessity - he needs to be an optimist to believe that he and Roy can make the world a better place for the daughter he's brought into it. The faith is seen often, like when he tells Roy he'll help push Roy to the top, when he trusts Alex Louis Armstrong to escort Ed and Al back home despite the fact that Scar is after all of them, and especially when the train he's on is attacked and he backs Ed up rather than taking over the operation. It's part of Maes' nature to believe in people and their abilities and to trust them to do what they say they can do.

Unfortunately, sometimes that belief and faith goes too far - he overworks Sciezka because he's focused on her abilities rather than her physical limits, and believes in himself to the point that he walked knowingly into a trap against creatures he knew he didn't have the measure of, told no one what he was doing until he did it, and expected to walk back out again. There was no real backup plan except 'run' and that didn't work out too well.

That's not to say he's not a skilled fighter - Maes is very handy with the small knives he keeps on his person, capable of hitting someone right between the eyes when on the run - but when many people in his canon fight with the magic of alchemy and his opponents are virtually immortal, knives don't do much. All the same, he fights back instead of giving up. When his train is attacked by a terrorist, Maes is there slinging his knives, when Scar is running amok Maes is... hiding at a safe distance because the alchemists can deal with that mess. Specifically, he trusts Roy to handle it, which almost gets them in more trouble.

Speaking of Roy Mustang, the man is one of three cornerstones of Maes' world. Maes has his wife, Gracia, his daughter, Elicia, and his best friend, Roy, and they're the reasons he works as hard as he does and is as determined as he is. Ages ago, he made a promise to Roy, that he would work underneath Roy and help push him to the top so they can fix their nation for the better. This demonstrates the great deal of faith that Maes has in Roy as a person, that he would choose to follow Roy and choose to put that much power in Roy's hands. Very few could handle that sort of power without turning around and abusing it, but he knows Roy well enough that he believes Roy can manage things. They're best friends, and Maes cares about Roy deeply, to the point of helping snap Roy out of a depressed state after Roy kills two doctors in a case of mistaken identity, bringing over deserts baked by his wife, and sometimes just harassing Roy with giant pictures of Elicia on the day of an intended duel between Roy and Edward. It's all done in love. And loving harassment.

Without any of those three in his life, Maes would be at a loss. He doesn't fully believe in his government anymore because it's been thoroughly infiltrated and it has committed some horrible atrocities, and he wants a future that doesn't involve more of those. From those three he derives his reason for advancing in the military and putting up with long hours that keep him away from his wife and daughter - making a better world for them all.

Powers/Abilities: Knife-throwing
Hand-to-hand combat
Strong investigative skills
Photography


Power Nerfs (if applicable): None.

Inventory: Uniform
Glasses
Walled full of pictures of his wife and daughter (mostly his daughter)
1 small throwing knife, entirely regular


Incentives: The well-being of and eventual reunion with his daughter and his wife. He knows full well that he wasn't going to dodge a bullet from that range, and that he wasn't going to make it out of the situation.

...in the meantime, he'd really like a few more knives instead of just the one. And maaaaaybe that photo album that always sat in Elicia's room.

SAMPLES

TDM thread is here