Donatello Fisher

[CMRN]

Name: Donatello Fisher
Gender: Male
Age: 18
Grade: 12th
School: John Endecott Memorial Academy
Hobbies and Interests: Rock music, drumming, singing, cataloging and downloading albums, message boards, morbid/disturbing videos, video games, riding his bicycle

Appearance: Donatello stands at a respectable 6'0" and a lanky 141 lbs, thanks to his fast metabolism and slim diet. Though his gangly build and long, thin limbs don't show it, years of drumming have built up some muscle tone in his arms and upper body. His Italian heritage is not immediately obvious, as his skin is quite pale with freckles on his face and arms. There is a concentration of acne on his forehead which is usually covered by his hair. His thick, sweeping, dark brown hair is messy and untamed, long enough to reach the top of his shoulders in the back and often swept in front of his eyes. His face is long and thin with a solid nose, thick eyebrows and steel blue eyes. His teeth are slightly crooked and a minor buildup of plaque is visible due to poor hygienic habits in his youth.

Donatello's typical style tends to lean toward the alternative. He is more often than not wearing a jacket or hoodie of some sort, usually leather or denim, as he gets cold easily. He favors dark colors and his wardrobe primarily consists of band t-shirts, various pairs of boots and sneakers, and numerous pairs of jeans, which he typically accessorizes with studs and chains. In recent years, he has taken to wearing a silver pendant depicting two small drumsticks crossed over each other in an 'x' shape. His most distinctive accessory is his black bomber hat, lined with light grey faux-fur. Having obtained the hat during middle school in an attempt to establish a signature look, he is never seen in public without it and any attempts to remove it are met with staunch resistance.

On the day of the abduction, Donatello wore a black t-shirt depicting the cover of The Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat under a dark blue trucker jacket, a pair of black slim jeans with a chain attached to the belt loops, a pair of dark tan combat boots with black socks, his silver pendant, and his signature bomber hat.

Biography: Donatello Alfonso Fisher was born as an only child on August 9th, 2003 to waitress Christina Fisher. The daughter of two third-generation Italian immigrants, Christina dropped out of high school and left her native city of Boston for the smaller and more intimate Salem following a major falling out with her parents that she still hesitates to discuss in any significant detail. When she was 20 years old, she attended a small local concert with a close friend and found herself captivated by the band's bassist, leading to a backstage encounter after the show that night that resulted in Donatello's conception. By the time she became aware of her developing pregnancy months later, however, the band had since dissolved and the man had left town. With no partner to rely on and an aversion to abortion on religious grounds, she carried the young child to term and resolved to raise him as a single mother.

Early childhood was a difficult period for Donatello. Often unable to afford a babysitter and forced to work long shifts at the local diner to pay the bills, his mother was rarely present and as a result, he would often spend long periods alone at home with little stimulation. At school, he was a sullen and quiet child with very little genuine friendships and average grades, mostly keeping to himself and expending any pent up energy on the playground alone. Without any meaningful parental intervention, his hygiene began to suffer and he would often wear the same clothes every day without showering or brushing his teeth. This only contributed to the bullying and teasing he suffered from his peers, which subsequently drove him further into his shell. As time went on, his teachers became concerned for him and eventually reported the situation to Child Protective Services under suspicion of neglect. Following this incident, Christina promised to do better and focused her attention on teaching her son to take care of himself while she was gone, helping him to be more self-sufficient yet doing nothing to assuage his growing feelings of abandonment.

When Donatello was in elementary school, his mother purchased a new laptop she had been saving up for. Although the nature of her work schedule meant that she would rarely get to use it, it quickly became his primary method of entertainment and would soon overtake his life. His feelings of loneliness at school and home became less and less important to him as he plunged himself into the digital world while neglecting the real one. He would often find himself counting down the hours in class until he could return home and watch YouTube for hours on end. When he began to grow more ambitious in his virtual travels, he discovered and began browsing various message boards, including Reddit and 4chan, despite being much too young to properly understand them. Even so, he enjoyed the unique characteristics of internet culture and started to feel as if he had found a place for people like him online. Though these pursuits were fairly innocuous for a time, things took a turn for the morbid as he started delving into more adult content, which occasionally included pornography but mostly entailed violent shock sites featuring footage of beheadings and the deaths of those who had perished in the first few iterations of Survival of the Fittest. The brutality of these videos was initially off-putting to the young boy, but disgust soon gave way to curiosity and he began to develop a fascination with the morbid. He would soon find himself becoming desensitized to the violence and felt less and less empathy for the victims depicted. The effects of this period continue to linger and as a result, Donatello has developed a strong fear of death as he does not believe in any sort of afterlife.

Middle school marked a major change in Donatello's life as he began to establish his own identity. The primary catalyst for this development was his discovery of classic rock, which would lead to a life-long love of music. He soon became infatuated with the world of rock music, frequently carrying out various odd jobs for some of the wealthier neighbors in order to afford an expanded wardrobe that reflected his new sensibilities. In 7th grade, he briefly joined the school band as a member of the drumline but had quit by the end of the year as he found all the rules and structure to be overly restrictive. Although he had chosen the position on a mere whim, he had finally found his passion as a drummer and he set out to earn as much extra money as possible in order to purchase a drum set for himself. His hard work soon payed off as he was able to buy a well worn but functional drum kit from the nearby pawn shop. This decision proved quite fruitful as Donatello turned out to be a remarkable musician. He spent nearly the entirety of that summer practicing the songs he loved: replicating Lars Ulrich's rapid fire beats on "One" and attempting to match Neil Peart's mastery of the craft on "YYZ." By 8th grade, he had even started to successfully sing and drum simultaneously. These newfound skills left him with a renewed sense of confidence that quickly became evident in his public persona. He started spending less time online and more time socializing with like-minded peers. However, his grades began to suffer as he adopted an increasingly carefree and rebellious attitude. With her son soon to enter high school, Christina became concerned for his educational future and started pushing him to put more emphasis on his grades, with the hope of guiding him away from the path she had chosen.

As his teenage years kicked off in full force, Donatello distanced himself further from his mother; instead of studying and salvaging his grades, he only allowed them to plummet further until he was barely passing and threw himself deeper into his musical interests. In 9th grade, he formed a band called Bent along with a few classmates, with Donatello as the lead singer and drummer. The band practiced frequently after school and learned to play several punk and classic rock staples. For his part, Donatello came to enjoy the feeling of leadership and subsequently became more assertive during his time with the band. Bent ultimately made a fiery debut among the rest of the student body during that year's school talent show, where the group performed an explosive, energetic cover of The Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop." The technical skill Donatello had demonstrated during the performance led to a further boost in his popularity and confidence. As his freshman year came to an end, he had never felt better.

Sophomore year saw a shift in Donatello's musical priorities. Having stepped away from the mind-numbing escapism that defined his earlier years, he started to feel a clarity of mind that had become unfamiliar to him. Though he initially found the opportunity to delve deeper into his own psyche intriguing, the pain of repressed memories and emotions proved too much for him to bear and he settled on exploring these feelings indirectly through more abrasive and experimental music. As he expanded his musical taste, he especially became infatuated with the album format, spending a lot of his time listening to, cataloguing, and downloading to his personal collection as many albums as he could. No longer content to merely use his band as a vehicle to cover the songs he enjoyed, he began to write his own lyrics and decided that Bent would eventually release a concept album as its official debut. His first step in this plan was to have the band play some of the new songs he had wrote at their live shows around town. However, this shift in the band's direction led to conflict, both external and internal. Those who had initially enjoyed the band's performances at the various small venues and events around Salem, primarily older fans of the bands they had been covering, quickly lost interest in the group's new material while some of the more artistically oriented among the youth started paying attention. Meanwhile, Bent itself suffered from within as Donatello struggled to write material that would live up to his standards and could not decide on a cohesive idea for a hypothetical album. With no real direction, the band slowly faded into obscurity and by the end of the year, Bent had broken up.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Donatello's mental health took a significant decline. Unwilling to risk any sort of exposure to the virus, he chose to stay home and participate in virtual learning for the entirety of 11th grade. During this period, his passion for music started to dwindle and he fell out of practice entirely following the dissolution of his band. His personal relationships also suffered as he withdrew socially and deleted all of his social media accounts. In order to cope with his feelings of frustration and resentment, he fell back into old habits and spent increasingly excessive hours online. As his depression worsened, he continued to embrace the easy escapism that the internet provided and further buried his emotions, ultimately stagnating and accomplishing nothing of note throughout 2020.

In January of 2021, Christina lost her job when the diner at which she had worked for almost two decades was forced to close down due to a dwindling customer base. Although she was eventually able to secure a position as a Walmart cashier, she spent three months unemployed. During the period in-between jobs, she took the opportunity to reconnect with both her parents and Donatello. This proved invaluable to their relationship as they grew to understand each other much more intimately and Donatello started to recognize the humanity in his mother. In order to make ends meet, the family was forced to borrow money from Christina's parents and in the process, learned that her father had recently been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking. The family has since planned to visit them in Boston over the holidays. Though Donatello has only met his grandparents once when he was three, he looks forward to getting to know them and expanding his familial connections.

Although his social skills have somewhat deteriorated over quarantine, Donatello has started to recognize the rut he has fallen into and is currently making an effort to change things. With his mother's support, he has limited his internet usage significantly, though he still enjoys the occasional deep dive into an active Reddit thread or typing up a lengthy review on RateYourMusic.com. To bring in some extra income, he has been considering applying for a part-time job but hasn't decided on anything concrete.

With little responsibilities at home, Donatello has started drumming again over the summer and while his abilities have slightly diminished after a year of neglect, it remains a vital outlet for his frustrations and he has rediscovered his passion for music without any distractions or pressure to perform well.

He has also spent a sizable portion of his time learning to ride an old bicycle he had saved up for a few years ago and never touched. It has become his primary method of transportation around town as he does not yet have his license or any sort of vehicle. Though he initially found the process of learning such a basic skill for the first time to be difficult and embarrassing, it soon became another source of parental bonding as Christina offered to learn along with him. It now stands as a much healthier form of escapism and nighttime riding with nothing but his headphones and his thoughts has become Donatello's favorite outdoor activity.

Donatello enjoys video games as a casual hobby, often citing single-player action games like Devil May Cry as his favorite genre. He dabbled in more competitive online games when he was younger but found the toxicity to be off-putting and instead chose to stick with the more welcoming, story rich environment that a single-player experience could provide.

Donatello presents himself as a generally friendly person with a laid back, vaguely rebellious attitude. He enjoys discussing music with anyone who shares a similar passion for it, although he finds discussions with those who are more knowledgeable than him to be intimidating. He is naturally introverted as a consequence of his upbringing, but he is willing to put himself in the spotlight if the situation calls for it. He has a tendency to hold grudges against those who have wronged him in the past though he does not always express this explicitly. He is generally content to accept the status quo without making an effort to change things, although he can be quite driven if he feels passionate about something. His former band is a sore spot for him and he does not like to discuss the situation as he feels culpable for its dissolution. His insecurities primarily lie in his capabilities as an artist and he is quite harsh on himself in this regard.

One area where Donatello tends to falter is empathy. He often comes across as selfish and controlling to those who collaborate with him artistically. In addition to this, he struggles to sympathize with the victims of mass tragedies such as Survival of the Fittest and see them as individuals rather than a list of names, owing partly to his exposure to recorded acts of brutality from a young age. His attempts at songwriting usually concern themselves with dark and tragic subjects, yet his inability to connect with the material on a deeper level than finding them interesting gives the final work a cold and hollow feeling.

Donatello spent several years under the impression that he was aromantic since he had never felt any romantic attraction before. In recent years, he has come to the conclusion that he is heterosexual and heteromantic, although he has never had a crush or romantic relationship of any kind. This is a minor source of insecurity for him that he conceals by acting as if he has no interest in dating.

Donatello is relatively uninformed about politics and mostly tries to avoid discussing the topic whenever it comes up. He considers himself a leftist and opposes Canonism, although he spent a brief period early on in middle school falling down the alt-right rabbit hole online. He now considers this era of his life to be rather embarrassing and prefers not to talk about it.

At school, Donatello has historically earned lackluster grades, with his highest at any given point being a B. Both Christina and his guidance counselor have had countless conversations with him about his grades, yet it wasn't until his mother lost her job at the onset of 2021 that he began to think about his future in more detail. Throughout most of his high school career, Donatello had planned to become a professional musician, either with Bent or as a solo act, but as the group fell apart, he started to lose faith in this plan and began prioritizing his education more than he ever had before. His favorite subjects are English and history as he finds the framing of fiction and historical events in a narrative to be intuitive and easy to follow. Although his overall GPA is fairly low, he plans to apply for as many scholarships as he can and attend an inexpensive community college if possible.

Advantages: Donatello has built up a fairly positive reputation among the general student body for his musical talents and relaxed persona. He has developed his core and upper body strength throughout his many years of drumming. He has the ability to dissociate and repress his emotions if necessary and will likely be able to handle whatever is necessary to survive. Having spent a large amount of his life alone, he can handle excess periods of solitude and loneliness.
Disadvantages: Donatello has treated his former band members poorly and might have difficulty swaying them to his side if he encounters them. He will likely struggle to put aside his resentment for those who have wronged him in the past if their assistance becomes necessary. Removed from his primary coping mechanisms, Donatello's mental health could suffer and fall apart, potentially leading to severe depression, anxiety and even suicide. Although he has watched countless videos of SOTF deaths, he has not actually researched the events or strategies in any great detail and will likely be at a loss for what to do initially. He has very little survival skills or medical training and his fear of death could end up crippling him.

[Ruggahissy]

Critique go brrrrr

Hello! I'm Ruggahissy and I'll be your moderator. Keep your arms and legs inside the critique at all times.

FIRST OFF, I want to say that this is overall a pretty well-written and interesting character. I really like how passionate this character is about his music, I like his struggles with his creativity, and I think his style is really cool. Now to the critique.

- If dad is bassist of a local band, is there anyone she could ask around about him?

Christina promised to do better and focused her attention on teaching her son to take care of himself while she was gone, helping him to be more self-sufficient yet doing nothing to assuage his growing feelings of abandonment.

- I can see this situation going on for a small amount of time and rightly, CPS is called for the neglect and being left on his own and not being taken care of. However, CPS is definitely going to follow-up on this situation. She can't leave him alone at home or CPS will have to start taking next steps. He'll have to be put in after school care (I was raised by a single-mother situation and through elementary school I stayed at after school care until 6pm) or she will have to get a babysitter or maybe if she can't afford either, make a deal with a neighbor or friend or something.

Although the nature of her work schedule meant that she would rarely get to use it, it quickly became his primary method of entertainment and would soon overtake his life.

- Do they not have a tv? They're much cheaper now compared to computers and are usually an easy way to park your kid in front of a screen.


- I'm a little concerned about the section where he starts going to 4Chan and looking up pornography and shock gore. I think normally a parent would put some sort of child protections on their laptop or browser that would prohibit the worst of these things and 4Chan. I also think that elementary school is very very young to be looking these things up since that spans ages 4 to 10. I feel like this sort of thing would begin in middle school.

Unwilling to risk any sort of exposure to the virus, he chose to stay home and participate in virtual learning for the entirety of 11th grade.

- Small thing, but this isn't a choice. Everyone at JEM does the virtual learning during COVID.

n addition to this, he struggles to sympathize with the victims of mass tragedies such as Survival of the Fittest and see them as individuals rather than a list of names, owing partly to his exposure to recorded acts of brutality from a young age. His attempts at songwriting usually concern themselves with dark and tragic subjects, yet his inability to connect with the material on a deeper level than finding them interesting gives the final work a cold and hollow feeling.

This section reads a bit strangely to me. Why is SOTF being singled out as something he has no empathy for when there are a lot of other mass tragedies in the world that don't get a mention? It just seems a bit random to call it out as something he has no empathy for. I understand that he generally doesn't connect with dark subject matter from his watching of Internet shock gore, but the SOTF call-out is still oddly specific.

Also, I'm wondering if anyone has called his music cold and hollow to give him that idea.

- This isn't something you have to change, but I noticed that Christina loses her waitressing job in January of 2021. The COVID lockdown still happens and things are back to normal in spring of 2021, so it seems like that's when restaurant staff would be cut. However, it's also possible she stays on at the restaurant doing take-out orders and things and gets fired in January 2021 as you have here, so this isn't a must-change, maybe just a clarify.

He has the ability to dissociate and repress his emotions if necessary and will likely be able to handle whatever is necessary to survive.

- I don't think this is a realistic ability given what I've read about Donatello. It's stated that those gore videos have made him extremely scared of death, and I think being involved with SOTF in real-life isn't something that those videos would have prepared him for as far as dissociating.

Donatello has treated his former band members poorly and might have difficulty swaying them to his side if he encounters them.

- Who are his band members? Since they weren't mentioned specifically by name, I just assumed they were assorted kids from the neighborhood and didn't know they went to school with him.

Although he has watched countless videos of SOTF deaths, he has not actually researched the events or strategies in any great detail and will likely be at a loss for what to do initially. He has very little survival skills or medical training

- I don't think that the first is a true disadvantage because the majority of the students will not have researched SOTF or set out a plan. The same for survival skills and medical training.

That's it! Let me know when edits are done, and I'll take another look. If you have any questions or concerns, you can reach out via Discord or the board. Thanks!

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