Post (from Mizfits)

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Post (76)

Project: Comic (Mizfits)

Known as: Post

Real name: Alexandria Church

Group affiliation: CounterAct

Physical description: Post is sixty-two, thin with gray hair. She is in good shape and takes her appearance seriously.

Personality: Post is extremely extroverted. She loves parties, concerts and big events; and gets more energetic when she is around people. If she spends too much time alone, she gets very restless and eventually depressed. She is fun, and people love her parties. She is also vain and overreacts to criticism (a bit dramatic at times).

History: Alexandria Church (Post) was born to a well-to-do Manhattan family. She loved living in the city and was constantly asking to go and see things. She quickly built up a large circle of friends and rare was the weekend (or weekday night) she didn’t have plans. Attractive and charismatic, she grew into the type of socialite that made the newspapers.

Her family very much approved of her as she built an impressive network that greatly benefitted the family’s business. She did some modeling, party planning, and generally found doing whatever her impulses lead her to was quite lucrative. Unfortunately, one day a musician she was dating secretly videotaped them having sex. He shared the tape liberally and it caused quite a scandal. While the media at the time wasn’t so gauche as to cover it as a news item, it was rather well known and bootleg copies became quite popular. She became scorned (while the musician’s popularity only rose) and, being sensitive to criticism, became overwhelmed and was admitted for psychiatric treatment (leading to further scandal).

Eventually what she valued so much (fame) faded and she was able to go back into public being only occasionally recognized. Still loving to be around people, she opened a successful nightclub to give her a place where she could (mostly anonymously) still be around lots of people having fun. Happiness eluded her, however, especially as she realized she was simply born a little too early. Society’s views evolved and what caused her downfall proved to only increase the fame of her modern equivalents. Bitterly, she became obsessed with consuming social media.

She was with her brother (who would become Meme) when All Saint’s Anarchy hit (the event where Boost overloaded Random’s powers and the laws of reality were suspended). She was trying to convince him to get into social media when her tablet turned into a radioactive bee and stung her (it then flew down her brother’s throat and died). It is unclear if the bee had anything to do with it (she didn’t get bee-themed powers), but Post emerged from the event with super human abilities.

Discovering that her powers were tied to people’s positive feelings towards her, she paid for a documentarian to create a sympathetic film about her. People became interested in her story and her fame rose (many feeling like the morays of society at the time had treated her unfairly). In modern times, Post feels the line between fame and infamy are so paper-thin that she has joined Counter’s group of miscreants. She either feels Counter’s challenging of the status quo will help make her more popular or set up another redemption story for her down the road. She has sworn to herself that no one will forget her again.

Role in the narrative: An antagonist. She was originally going to be younger but that felt like too much of a cliché (even for me who has been known to embrace cliché). Her character formed up after that (to further tweak clichés I wanted an older character who has failed to find wisdom).

Abilities: Post’s powers are at the same time strange and subtle while also being direct and destructive. Whenever someone has a positive thought or reaction to Post she gains some power (no matter the distance). The power gained from each moment of positive regard is fairly small, so she needs many, many such moments for her power level to increase to a notable degree. The positive reaction need not only be focused upon her but can also result from something she has created.

She can store up this power indefinitely and she can use it to fly and shoot beams of concussive force from her hands. While using her power, she is highly resistant to damage. If she has stored up many viral moments, she is an absolute wrecking ball of force.

There are limitations however. Once she uses up her reserves, she needs many moments of positive regard to replenish. Also, negative thoughts and reactions can weaken her. As a result, she is constantly working social and other forms of media to get positive attention (she’s gotten pretty good at it).

She will likely eventually find that hitching her wagon to Counter is a mistake and may eventually find that the negative reactions begin to outweigh the positive ones. What she will turn into when this is the case will be startling.

Inspirations: There was a comic I read once that I can’t recall the name of where people could donate small bits of their energy to a hero. Therefore, this hero had to stay popular with the people to have power. So all credit to that creator for the concept – I’ve been Googling and unable to find so far (I’ll edit to add the name of the title if I can find it). I just combined the concept with the trope that people who value popularity above all else are often evil (think Mean Girls).