Board Thread:Off Topic/@comment-26397825-20151206235105/@comment-26397825-20151230101554

Wooo! I will get this done tonight, I swear! And then the winner can think all day tomorrow in preparation for the next contest...which is in two days. Eheh. God December sucked for me.

Anyways, onto Gideon's character, Philip Grå.

1) 10 points Seems fair enough, everything is good.

2) 24 points Until there is in-show evidence of a characters aura changing colour naturally (and not because they get some sort of super-Maiden power or someone else's aura shoved into them), I suggest avoiding having characters change aura colours with age. The indication seems to be that a persons aura colour does not change, though the visual effect of their semblance may be different to their aura.

Face is where you describe the shape of the characters face, though things like wrinkles and crows feet at the edges of the eyes do go here as well. His body weight is a bit high when compared to his height to be calling him thin; I suggest using a bmi calculator. For muscular characters go a bit high on the bmi scale as muscles weigh more than fat (overly muscular characters should be considered overweight when you calculate their bmi), but for thin characters it should be on the lower scale of things.

With your clothes, shoes are a surprisingly important part of the character (at least, in my opinion they are). You can tell quite a bit about a character by the type of shoes they wear. Other than that, decent outfits.

3) 10 points Oh dear. Okay, a bit of fact checking could have helped you out a lot here. Hunstman wasn't an official job until after the Great War, as the Academies were built in the aftermath of it alongside Amity Colloseum. Mantle was the name of the Kingdom beforehand, though we are not certain when Mantle fell and Atlas took over.

The biggest problem with your backstory is that you put Atlas as having been already built during the Great War when the WoR video says otherwise, which means he couldn't have been headmaster. Also, he would have been 14 when the War ended, which was 80 years before the start of RWBY, which means he would not have been able to oversee the end of the war and become a decorated war hero.

Interesting ideas, but you need to research the dates a bit better. If you'd kept the dates straight and perhaps made him born quite a few years earlier, you would have garnered a lot more points here. Deceased characters, even ones that died years before the start of RWBY, still count for contests, so don't be afraid to make slightly historical characters in future contests.

His personality is a bit bland, but it ties in well enough with his backstory.

4) 4 points Nice mention of his family, though a few notes about how he interacts with them wouldn't go astray in helping to flesh out your character even further.

5) 9 points A nice, simple but effective weapon.

6) 3 points That semblance is...very OP. It enhances everything? Try to trim it back to enhancing one or two things only. I suggest either enhancing aura - so an allies aura regenerates twice as fast, or takes half as much to perform the same technicques - or enhancing physical capabilities - whether it be strength, speed, endurance, stamina, reflexes, etc, but not all at once. Two or three different things being enhanced would be fine as level caps, but no more than that. Also, cut back the range and how many people he can affect or add a quantifier; something like 'he must tag the person with a glyph or mentally mark everyone he wants to enhance' rather than using a blanket statement like you did.

It's an interesting idea, but not the best execution, I'm afraid.

7) 5 points Pretty standard, but it suits the information you have given.

Total: 10 + 24 + 10 + 4 + 9 + 3 + 5 = 65 points

Not bad for a first try. Keep at it, and take my advice into consideration and I can see you getting a much higher score in the next contest.

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