Nathaniel Black

➣ An only child, born to upper middle-class parents in a stable marriage.
➣ Active and athletic from a young age, much of his childhood and teen socialization revolved around playing team sports. Even beyond them, though, he was popular and well-liked among his peers—particularly once adolescence hit, thanks to his ~friendly and flirty~ personality.
➣ Got a football scholarship out of high school; Nate proved himself to be a promising defensive lineman with a Bright Future Career Ahead Of Him.
➣ Then his mom started acting really weird, his parents' marriage began to deteriorate, and his father took the first steps of filing for divorce.
➣ And then his mother died in an apparent suicide-by-car-crash.
➣ Somehow, things still continued to get worse for Nate. A teammate dragged him to a house party to help get his mind off of... everything; midway through the evening, a mysterious fanged woman with no reflection attacked him in the backyard. However unbelievable the thought of vampires might have been to him, there wasn't exactly much ambiguity left when she subdued him and drained him of his blood.
➣ Or when he woke up again half-an-hour later, extremely thirsty for the blood of every living human around him.
➣ Needless to say, he's had a hard time adjusting to his new life! There's a lot he's still struggling to come to terms with—not the least of which is his entire prospective football career having been derailed by the fact that he no longer picks up properly on film.

➣ Tender-Hearted | By nature, Nate is both sensitive to his own feelings and deeply empathetic toward others'. He catches on quickly to what those around him are feeling, and he has a hard time ignoring the pain and distress he sees in others. Compounding this is the fact that Nate is a very impulse-driven person; he tends to act on what feels right to him, emotionally, with very little hesitation—even if, when pressed, he couldn't begin to articulate why he feels such a decision would be right or moral.

With that said, he has also dedicated himself from childhood to a sport with a severely macho culture surrounding it, where coaches are notoriously harsh about "toughening up" their players. This hasn't worked to actually make Nate any less softhearted; however, he has certainly internalized the idea that displays of vulnerability or compassion are both undesirable and inappropriate, at least coming from him in particular. He bottles up his "weak" emotions—except when they can be safely expressed as anger—and often feels flawed for continuing to experience them despite his best efforts to the contrary.

➣ Image-Conscious | But even if Nate can't change his nature, he can at least control how his nature is perceived. The friendly and fun and flirty sides to his personality are all very genuine—and he makes sure that those sides are the only ones people ever see.

➣ Obstinate |

Due to his upbringing, Nate struggles with accepting feelings of weakness, expressing vulnerability, and other such symptoms of toxic masculinity. He also experiences internalized homophobia; specifically, he is uncomfortable with his attraction toward men and does his absolute best to avoid acknowledging it. Given the nature of these issues, I generally try to include them fairly sparingly, unless the thread is intended to cater to them or a player has given me explicit permission to explore them. If you're comfortable with me doing so, always feel free to let me know!

As a note, Nate always holds himself to "higher" standards than he does other people. He won't respond negatively to men not quite so hung-up on maintaining a "strong" persona, expressions of same-sex attraction from others, etc (though men flirting with him might make him freeze up in embarrassment!).

Other potentially distressing topics that may be mentioned include parental death and suicide.

Kinklist

Nate is bisexual. However, as mentioned above, he has a pretty deeply ingrained discomfort with his attraction to men. The process of self-acceptance is something I am interested in playing out (or at least touching on) in shipping and smut threads with other men—confessions of attraction, first boyfriends, sloppy drunk fooling around with a bud he Totally Doesn't Have Feelings For, that kind of stuff.

Conversely, Nate is much more easygoing with women—too much so, some might even say. He can't actually claim to have had very many girlfriends, but he has had plenty of friends-with-benefits who happen to be girls. When it comes to women, Nate flirts easily, and he's very physical in his affection, even without any romantic feelings attached; some prime tropes here would be fuckbuddies-to-more, or just... a fun male/female friendship that also happens to also involve a lot of playful sex.