* DO read all of the posted character profiles. With so many senshi and villains it's very, very important to avoid overlap -- normally, each character has their one specific shtick that is what makes them unique and special. Do not infringe upon these things. We will reject you.
* DO NOT comment on inaccessibility of certain character profiles or use that as an excuse for lack of research. I don't know why some people do not realize this, but one half of the server administration team for seiryuu.org is one of the reviewing GMs: me, specifically. I will admit wholeheartedly to a great bias when faced with a new applicant whose sub-par application uses denouncements of my personal self and my hard work as an excuse for laziness: don't diss me or my server and expect my up vote. I'll probably end up abstaining and then Ali and Laris have to duke out a result with just two votes. That sucks. Don't make me do it, I won't like you. Ali says that the two votes will also be to reject you, because she and Laris will be extremely offended that you were too lazy to email either of them (or Cal) and ask for the profiles you couldn't see. It would take you five seconds to drop one of us an email asking for the profiles you're missing. Less than five seconds, if you're a faster typer than Ali.

* DO create multidimensional, interesting characters that people would LIKE to get to know and interact and deal with. Provide reasons for everything, include weaknesses and quirks and human foibles and cute little notes like an addiction to fishing or a fear of giant gummy worms or something else that makes these characters /human/.
* DO NOT be under the misconceived delusions that any of the following are acceptable:

1) Albinism. This is a horrible, horrible debilitating disease, and people don't seem to realize this -- they just want white hair. We do not care if you want white hair. We have lots of white hair already. You CAN NOT be albino and you can not have white hair. You can not use environment as an excuse for albinism/paleness, for that matter -- see above regarding unique shticks. It's been done, so you can't have it. The thing that upsets us the most about this is that everyone seems to think albinism makes your character seraphically beautiful. People, albinos are not beautiful. Albinism is a genetic boo-boo, and when you have a genetic boo-boo, it is seldom something you want to leap upon. Albino hair is not Sephiroth white or silver; it is pigmentless. Have you ever seen someone with stripped hair? It's a nasty, dull-straw color, and it's about as easy to brush as straw. Also, if any of you had ever known an albino, you'd know that you don't get pretty, flawless white skin, either. It usually has red blotches. Keep this in mind for applying for albinos in other games. Albinism is not a good excuse for your character to look like Kuja. This is mostly a moot point, though, since even if you research this and get the defects right, we're not going to accept you. To repeat ourselves: we have enough white hair already.

2) Excessive angst for no good reason. Not only has it already been done, Ali waxed eloquent in her own article on this awhile back. Read it. Learn it. Excessive angst includes, but is not limited to: uses of homosexuality, painful death of loved ones (normally while being forced to watch), Joan Crawford-esque familial relationships, or anything you might one day see on Jerry Springer or a Lifetime movie-of-the-week. Ali adds that most of you didn't seem to understand what we mean by angst even after she DID wax poetic on it, so she would like to direct your attention again to those previous examples. Especially pay attention to the Jerry Springer caveat. If Jerry would pay you money to put your story on the air, we are going to reject you. And just to stress this one more time: if you use your sexuality as an excuse to angst, we will kill you. We will hunt you down and kill you.

3) Antisocial loners. You won't get much rp if no one wants to talk to you, will you? Don't think that villains have to be antisocial loners by definition, because they /don't/. We will not accept any more antisocial characters. So there.

* DO read everything on every single one of the pages. EVERYTHING. And for the LOVE OF GOD, FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS. Please. Pretty, pretty please.
* DO NOT lie and tell us you have grasped our theme and then apply for a Britney Spears astral senshi look-alike with a giant flaming death of god sword whose parents died tragically in a car crash. We will not only reject you, but we will laugh heartily while doing so and then beat you for not following directions. And THEN we will all gather at my house and attempt to erase the pain of your app with the help of Jack Daniels, and there isn't enough Jack in the world, Spleen, I'm sorry.

* DO have a sense of humor. Show us that you can laugh at our jokes, make jokes that we can laugh with, and generally be a fun person to be around. Remember that this is a game, and games are supposed to be a FUN HOBBY. We like to be friends with our players, and we crack jokes. Often. If you can't appreciate it, everything gets all awkward and gross. Ew. We want people to have fun and enjoy themselves in this escapism hobby, not treat it like a way of life. We support RP the fun pasttime, not RP the sacred institution. We are not going to excommunicate you for cracking a joke. In fact, we'll probably stick it in parentheses and add it to the story. Laris and Ali went nuts with the Dune jokes in their first story, and you're welcome to do the same.
* DO NOT act like a rabid hyperactive crazed weasel on crack. There is a fine line between humor and terror-causing diatribes consisting of horse manure, rotten pickles, and epileptic shock. Do not be psychopathically insane, be /fun/. You can tell when someone has had fun writing their application, and that is what we want to see -- go re-read Shasa's example application. See how it makes you laugh just about everywhere? This is what we're looking for. We're not expecting you to pass yourself off as a runner-up for the American Comedy awards, we just want to make sure that you can convey the FUN that we want to see in your writing. Don't be all serious, it makes things too stiff. Any application you enjoy creating and writing will be just that much better when the GMs read it. For those of you who may be humor-challenged, here is an example:

Funny:

Mila's grandfather has been teaching introductory laboratory magic for younger mages for several years, so he is often the victim of minor spells gone awry. Since the students are young and ineperienced, this never causes him any actual harm, or even anything above minor discomfort... but it does sometimes cause his beard to glow phosphoresent green for a week or two. For some reason, this always seems to happen right before a meeting with the board of directors. Go fig.

Scary:

Mila's grandfather, alas, perished a long time ago due to a horrible accident involving a litter of Irish setters, a nail file, and ten tons of maple syrup.

* DO ask questions, if you have them. We have email addresses posted everywhere, USE them.
* DO NOT ever, and I mean EVER imply that we are bad people for not dropping everything to deal with this escapism hobby on someone else's time limits. We are all working adults with real lives -- yes, ADULTS, as in out-of-college people with JOBS -- and this is our hobby, not our life. We will get to your question/application/review/result as soon as is humanly possible with real life and a forty-hour fulltime job and rent and bills and groceries and whatnot. Trust us, we're delighted that you're exited enough about the game to glue yourself to the webpage 24-7 waiting for your results. However, please remember that for eight to thirteen of that 24-7, we're probably at work, and while we would LOVE to drop that to hang out with Tawela, Pelagia, and Shasa full time, a mysterious unnamed billionare has yet to offer us money to do so, so we work. Yes, this includes weekends. Welcome to the real world.

* DO be descriptive in EVERY instance. Powers should be clearly defined with limits described. We should be able to paint a mental picture of your character as soon as we read the description. We should know how they would react in most normal situations after reading the personality and history.
* DO NOT go overboard. We can tell when an application is written solely to be long and spammy. There's an enormous world of difference between excessive information that flows and some Jordan-esque SEVERE excess of adjectives. You can't destroy the world in three words. You can't control people's minds. You are not Thor McBadass, Asskicker of the Heavens. Ever. Normally, your parents are not particularly important characters and thusly do not require as much description as your primary senshi. Use the original series as a reference, people. The inners could hurt most youma with one shot, but couldn't kill them. Even the outers had trouble killing some things in one shot, and the Starlights did too. ONLY Sailor Moon could heal the souls of the possessed, and anything anyone INCLUDING Sailor Moon threw at Galaxia did little more than amuse her. The smarter villians were able to dodge or block quite a few of the attacks (remember Lead Crow and Aluminum Siren jumping on top of Pluto's staff in Stars?) From this, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out that you can't melt Marduk's cold cold heart with your attack, and you can't vaporize him with it, either. This goes for the acolytes, too. Even SHOULD you figure out that they're behind evil smackdown, you're not going to be able to vaporize or convert them with your individual mad phat powers.

With these guidelines in mind, you are far more likely to head on that happy path toward acceptance. Wouldn't that be nice? I think that would be nice.

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