Heroes/Villains

Good? No. Evil? No. Chaotic? Yeppers

When you meet David what should you think of first? Dungeons and Dragons? An amazing actor with a great singing voice? A positive attitude? A fashion sense with no equal? You should think about all of these things and more.

Born on June 22nd, 2003 in Orland Park David has always felt happiest living in the moment so that every moment can be his happiest ever. In a booth at the Subway near Carl Sandburg High School with his bass guitar leaning against the wall next to him. He graciously let me interview him because “You’re a friend, and I really would do anything for a friend because I knew you would do so for me.” Growing up he was greatly influenced by his sister who taught him extremely valuable lessons such as, hating lasagna. However, he doesn’t have just one person he looks up to all the time for him it fluctuates depending on who he is around most. Everything seems perfect for him and he seems like a protagonist in a book, but not everyone sees him like this and not because he dresses like a “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure” villain. In his sophomore year of high school, he was betrayed by a friend in a horrible way and spent the better part of the year listening to this person spreading lies about him. He had never felt more alone but you would’ve never known because it is his endeavor to always appear okay and not share anything. A reason that people may not have believed him could be because he is very secretive by nature and willingly admits to lying a lot but “never to friends.” He also displays a disregard of authority and actively doesn’t mind rule-breaking. One time he sent an email to his parents for an assignment and the teacher had to be sent a bling carbon copy, that updated his parents on the class. He got in trouble because he wrote his opinion of the teacher on the email, the teacher was understandably upset. For how much he gets in trouble for a small offense like not being on time to class, being late on homework and using his phone during lessons it is surprising how much he loves singing and performing arts.

Mary Poppins, Les Miserables and You Can’t Take It With You are just a few examples of shows he’s been in. In the production of Mary Poppins, he played one of the main roles of Burt. As for singing he’s been in school choirs for a long time. At Carl Sandburg High School he is in the varsity level choir called Chorale. In the summer of 2019 he had a rare opportunity, he was able to be a part of the Quadrennial trip to Edinburgh Scotland for The Fringe Fest.

The Fringe Fest is one of the largest performing arts festivals in the world that lasts for a whole month in August. A whole year before leaving the members of the trip met to create their own show to perform at the Fringe. The show created was called Self Check, which was about four teens in a psychiatric ward. David played one of the four named Justin who was committed because of severe anxiety. The trip its self was really fun for David other than the place that cast stayed for the first six days in London. The place was a hostel called The Generator. The Generator was hell on Earth for him for several reasons. First, off the time they stayed there happened to coincide with the hottest days in London for 20 years and, The Generator had no air conditioning. Also, his room was positioned on the third floor and since warm air rises he and his roommates were overheating. Secondly, his room was too small for the number of people in his room, with the three beds and the three suitcases there was no room to walk. Third, the room stunk as it does when there are three teen boys sharing a room. Fourthly The Generator had an open bar until 3 am so random drunks would be walking the halls so going the communal bathrooms at night was always risky. Fifthly he once got locked out of his room in nothing but a towel for 10 minutes since he forgot his keycard when he went to shower. All and all he would dread going back to the hostel after every long tour day in London. Edinburgh for him was a lot better, he saw several shows he liked also several he hated. Self Check’s performances were very successful and almost all attendees loved the show.

Besides a love for performing in shows he loves seeing them, almost every show he attends he buys a mug with the show title on it. He gets really upset when shows don’t sell merchandise. Part of the reason he may love performing arts is that his mom is a costumer for a ton of shows and is well known in the theater community. His mom is a wonderful person who fully supports David’s weird but fancy fashion sense, besides telling many stories about the outfits, she’s made him shirts such as the one that says “All My Pants Are Fancy. Some are sassy, too” and she also bought him a full kilt set in Scotland. He has no qualms at all about all of his slightly excentric outfits because he usually never cares what people think of him. The exception is that time in Sophomore year that was mentioned before. He otherwise has tons of self-confidence, even when being asked to be the subject of this paper he said: “This is the first of many research papers to be written about me.” I think besides representing his overabundance of self-confidence that quote also represents a positive attitude towards the future because “first of many” implies he expects a lot more people in the future to be interested in his life.

He is really hedonistic so everything he does usually has a purpose; he does everything to be entertained. A friend of David’s, Kevin told me, when asked about David’s hedonism. “David came into school sick, and ate food because he wanted to, even though he knew it would make him worse.” For another aspect of hedonism David once admitted that if he was stuck in a time loop, he would probably kill all of his friends at least once just to see what would happen. That and the fact he lies to the point one is unsure whether he is telling the truth or not may lead one to mistrust him. However, he endeavors to help his friends in any way he can and he keeps his friend's secrets when asked. As well as that he gives a lot of good general advice when people ask. Even though he himself lies sometimes he views the human race as an inherently good group of people. He gets really heated when people assume that humans are bad or are going to fail you or abandon you at some point. He points out that humans are social creatures and need others to survive.

He is quite sensitive to real-life issues of humans being terrible to each other, however, in games such as Dungeons and Dragons he doesn’t mind hurting his player’s characters. For example in his first homebrew campaign he ran he forced the one character to get married to the big bad evil guy and then cut her arm off, without the players permission since she was absent that session, then he killed this character's parents and finally at the very end had an NPC(non-player character) kidnap her and force her into a zoo for magical creatures because she was a powerful sorcerer. Kevin has also had a bad thing happen to one of his characters because of David, “He vibe checked(without warning) my robot with a lightsaber from behind, killing him. In a game of Edge of the Empire.”

David is a very confusing person whose motives are very hard to read and can neither be classified as a hero or villain. He is closer to a mysterious being of chaos.

Citations/titles mentioned

Allen, Dave; Carman, Shawn and Little, Jay. Edge of the Empire, August 2012, Fantasy Flight Games.

Araki, Hirohiko. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, 1st January 1987, Shueisha

Gygax, Ernest Gary . Dungeons and Dragons, 1974

Hart, Moss; Kaufman, George S. You Can't Take It With You. 14th December 1936.

Hugo, Victor. Les Misřables. Albert Lacroix, 1862, ‎Boublil‎, Alain ; Schönberg, Claude-Michel,1980.

Travers, P. L. Mary Poppins. HarperCollins , 1934.