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[judgementcrime]

PLAYER INFORMATION

Player Name: Gen
Are you 18+?: Yes
Preferred Contact: PM
Current Characters: N/A

CHARACTER INFORMATION

Character Name: Rico Dredd
Canon: Judge Dredd
Canonpoint: Just after arrest in 2080.
Character Age: 21 ish

Appearance: N/A

Background/History: Wiki link here.

Strengths:

Determined. Rico carries around with him an enormous strength of will. To become a Judge requires that you are the best of the best - not just quick-thinking and physically capable, but also mentally stubborn and have an innate drive to survive the Academy of Law. All Judges are rigorously drilled and trained from age five, and unsuitable candidates are slowly weeded out of the ranks, and can be expelled for any reason at any point, whether for unacceptable emotional displays (e.g. crying) or not being able to keep up with studies.

And to gain a full eagle and become a Judge - particularly a successful one - you have to believe that you can move the earth. Judges are constantly exposed to the sheer mental pressures of insanely brutal shifts, constant vigilance for criminals taking potshots, and the simple fact that they can only respond to a single fraction of the sheer number of calls that come flooding in from a city of 800 million. Rico drinks this all in, and converts it into results with an unbounded energy that still leaves time for planning heists and other "personal" ventures. Burnout is a very real thing in Mega-City One when beaten down by the constant criminality and witnessing the height of horrors humanity can reach, but Rico seems to reach no end of that rope. He shows a stubborn and determined intention to do as he wants, regardless of the consequences.

Charismatic - when he wants to be. When Rico was finally arrested, Chief Judge Goodman warns a potential interviewer "...I know that Rico can - and will - use you. And he's a lot stronger-willed than you are. Trust me: fifteen minutes in his company, and you'd be signing up to be his second-in-command. Now, is that everything?"

Any charisma Rico may possess depends entirely on the angle of which he approaches you. This isn't always evident through his actions, especially not if you caught him on a bad day, or if he can't see anything he wants from you. But it's present in how he wrangles criminals such as Strader into working with him, how he commands the pull that he does when he's barely twenty, the kind of presence that fills up the entire room when he enters and attracts everyone's attention, for good or ill. He presses people into just going along with things, through carefully placed insistence, and a wink and a nudge if that greases the wheels. He has a way of making these things seem inevitable, and people are easily caught and swept up into events before they realise it, such as in his heist of the Infernodrome. He's managed to cultivate a circle of people who higher ups have determined would die for him, and certainly makes friends easier than his stubborn, stern brother.

Intelligent. He set records for the highest scores upon graduating from the Academy of Law, often referred to as "the toughest school on earth", and graduated two years early with his brother. It's a very easy mistake to make to think that Rico’s nothing but a thug. While he utilizes violence quite often as a problem-solving method, he's more dangerous beyond his ability to wield a heavy stick. He managed to recognize a flaw that he could exploit during his morning briefing of an upcoming sports event, implement a plan to steal a hundred million credits and execute it within three days, where it came within an inch of success if it weren't for some unforeseen circumstances. He has an eidetic memory when it comes to the laws and bylaws of Mega-City One and can twist every possible interpretation to suit him, and almost-eidetic memory when it comes to other things such as quickly memorizing/recognizing faces or profiles. Judges are judge, jury, and executioner, but they're also trained forensic investigators, field medics, and detectives.

Weaknesses:

Rico is emotional, and excessively, indulgently so - he creates a markedly different counterpoint from his much more stoic brother. He's pleased when it suits him, and flies into rages when embarrassed. He's been conditioned his entire life to treat emotions and attachments as unnecessary, to be cast off in the pursuit of becoming a perfectly neutral arbitrator of justice, and it only half-worked. He works in extremes, appearing to be reasonable and calm one moment, then utterly emotional and embarrassing the next.

And not only is he only emotional, he's also capricious in his treatment of people. Once using his authority to interfere on the Quasarano family's behalf multiple times by keeping Evan and his father out of the iso-cubes, as well as finding Evan a job (albeit illegal) in a city that has ridiculously high unemployment rates, he later turns around and discards them, with the exception of Evan. He's also irritated by his clone brother one day, not wanting to remember that he even exists as "...he didn't like his brother. In fact, he kind of hated him. He pretty much never brought Little Joe up in company", but then later says "...he'd ask his straight-laced clone-brother Joe along on a patrol with him" and that it always cheered him up, which is really the only social moment he'd have to go out of his way to align patrol schedules with him.

Cruel. He's cruel because he’s used to using violence as a tool, and he wants to make a point about how messed up and ludicrous the state of affairs are. He delights in intimidation, in leveraging his authority as a Judge over particular criminals he feels have deserved it. He has instant authority to kill (under circumstances that are easy to fake), can beat a man and get away with not even a slap on the wrist with minimal lying, and he knows that violence is something that has always been expected of him. He torments a blackmailed criminal contact over months by breaking into his house whenever and threatening to kill him or worse with a grin on his face, which he justifies it as ‘playing a part’. It's simple cruelty, and because he finds it funny.

Manipulative. Rico absolutely exercises unscrupulous control over people and situations. He manipulates Buddy Mooney into informing on his criminal friends and acquaintances, then tricks him into ingesting an explosive that Rico then detonates. Constantly tests the limits with his clone brother into overlooking his actions through willful blindness. Tricks Judge Kenner, who had been suspicious of him, into meeting with him in a secluded area then murdering him by impersonating his twin. Impersonates his twin again to intimidate his ex-girlfriend when she starts to make things difficult for him by constantly asking after him at the Sector House, risking exposing their relationship. There's not much he doesn't do in this respect.

Egotistic/Narcissistic - which he prefers to think of as natural charm. "Rico was the best. And Rico knew it." He looks at himself in the mirror and explicitly sees himself as a handsome, strong, youthful, square-jawed version of the man he was cloned from, the original "Father of Justice". A princeling of Mega-City One, playing games in the city he loved and owned. And not only is he as good as this man, he's better. Physically, and mentally. Even to his identical clone twin, he refers to them as "Big Rico" and "Little Joe", because he came out of the cloning tanks twelve minutes earlier. Once an affectionate moniker, it eventually turned sour. He also graduated with the highest cumulative score ever recorded at the time, and this definitely informs his general attitude. This, of course, leads to a problem with overconfidence and underestimating his opponents, although it rarely comes to bite him in the ass considering for all his arrogance, it isn't entirely unfounded.

Fatal Flaw: Rico's defining flaw would be his ego. He's arrogant and egotistical enough to think that he can single-handedly "fix" the system by undertaking the actions that he does. He can't be wrong - that would mean there's something wrong with him. Something sick, that he isn't perfect. It has to be the system. That's the justification he uses to allow himself to keep doing what he does - taking bribes, beating criminals, being in relationships - under the flimsy pretext that he's solving the city's problems in a way everybody else is simply too blind and narrow-minded to ever get. He understands the citizens in a way his superiors don't, gazing from on top of their golden thrones. He's actually reducing crime rates in this fashion, and it's a much more efficient solution to scare off juves, or to have crime lords in his pocket, rather than arrest them and waste ten Judge's time processing them. He doesn't hold himself accountable for his actions, always blaming it on external factors.

Compounding this, is that Rico is also undeniably psychologically damaged by carrying out the duties expected of him as a Judge, and his experiences living through the immediate aftermath of a massive nuclear war that left most of the world devastated, as well as a near-death experience soon after. Starting you right at summary executions of looters at age ten, no matter how much he was willing and volunteered, will probably mess you up just a little. But where most cadets would drop out or be expelled once they've demonstrated they're not capable, Rico's record-breaking performance and politics behind his genetic lineage hid it for much longer. And once he graduated, his excellent statistics and clean-up rate made higher-ups not look any closer than they had to until it was too late.

Driving Force: All of his actions are undeniably motivated by greed and emotion. He covets the life that being raised in the Academy took away from him, and in a way, that makes him more human than some other Judges, even if the methods used to pursue them are monstrous. He craves experiencing a ‘normal’ life for a twenty year old - dating, being in a relationship, drinking, watching movies, and living in his own apartment. Not having to put bullets in people or sentence them to a lifetime of isolation and imprisonment on a daily basis. The fact that he needs to resort to blackmail and extortion to achieve it is simply incidental, and he’s selfish enough that he would do it. It's mingled with pride, but he's primarily motivated by things he can't have.

And he wouldn't do half the things he does mentioned above if he wasn't motivated by emotion as well. It started out as pity for the Quasarano family's living conditions, and a visceral response to the basic level of human care and interaction offered to him when he was invited to eat with them at dinner. Then it developed for the worse from there, hurtling down with his worsening mental state.

Patron: I believe that Venus would choose to be Rico's patron, for many reasons. Rico's decisions come from emotions - there's not an ounce of rational thinking in him. And if there is, it's eventually overridden - by disgust, by impulse, by mischievousness. His decisions come from the heart - what he feels is right, and the system on which the Justice Department operates does not feel right. Rico is capable of charm, a superficial one that inexplicably draws people in, but he is also extremely fickle with his attentions. After he gives up a lifetime of conditioning and risks expulsion from the ranks to enter a romantic relationship with Stacy Quasarano, seven months later we see him with a different, more attractive woman. He lived his illegal lifestyle doing nothing to curb his brother's suspicions, even openly flaunting his relationship in front of him, whilst knowing that it couldn't possibly last forever and it was an inevitably self-destructive path he was taking.

Human connections and relationships is a particularly large part of why Rico defected from the Justice Department's teachings in the first place. Also, the Goddess of love, beauty, and sexuality seems fitting for somebody whose slide into corruption started by deciding to hold hands with a girl, going against the law by doing so.

GAME INFORMATION

Setting Suitability: Rico's just recently been arrested for his many, many underhanded dealings, and is facing a 20 year prison sentence on a penal colony in deep space. He wasn't expecting this to happen, to say the least, and so if there is literally any option that is offered to him, he'll take it. And considering that he has a larger range of freedom provided here than he did as a Judge back home, he's perfectly happy to offer his services in exchange, even if it takes on a mercenary bent to it, rather than from the sincere depths of his heart to make a difference.

Rico is trained to within an inch of his life to effectively utilize a range of useful skills such as close quarters combat, investigation and forensics, interrogation techniques, memory retention, tactics and strategy, perception skills, and the fanatical capability of single-minded determination to forge through pain and adversity above all else. Even if he has little personal stake in this battle, his ego demands that he does the best job that he possibly can.



Sample: link one and link two