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Francis Hoover
The Sidekick
Francis Hoover
The Sidekick
26
Cisgender man (he/him)
Francis John Hoover
Frankie, Hoover
Francis
Free Man
Fran-sis
John
God is Gracious
John
Hoover
Owner of a Patch of Farmland
Hoo-ver
Human (white)
Slightly below average height, pudgy
Above average
Light with some freckles
5'4"
Light brown
Brown
Nowhere near long enough to tie back, but he keeps it slicked back. Straight and fairly thin.
None
- Blind in both eyes due to ocular melanoma--one eye was surgically removed and replaced with a glass one in the same hue, and the other is still there but no longer works.
Francis is fairly short and has a stocky, pudgy build. He has a soft round face and light skin dotted with light freckles, especially across his nose and cheeks. His cheeks are round and rosy--while he generally doesn't have many complaints about his appearance, he dislikes this aspect as he thinks it makes him look childish. His eyes are brown--one is a glass replacement and one is natural, but fully blind due to ocular melanoma. He wears dark sunglasses at all times due to this. He's quick to smile and loves to laugh, which is something those around him appreciate.
Bright and full of energy
Francis is most noticeable due to his dark glasses and his white cane, but also due to his slightly unfocused gaze once you're closer to him. His love of obnoxiously patterned shirts also makes him stand out in a crowd.
Blue jeans, a tucked-in button down in some obnoxious color scheme (he can't see them, but asks his friends to get him the most annoying patterns), slide-on shoes with a checkered print, and his sunglasses. Sometimes he'll swap the patterned button-downs for a shirt with some nonsense joke or reference printed it on, usually as a gift from his friends. He enjoys just wearing the most ridiculous stuff, and he knows he doesn't have to look down and see, for example, a button-down printed with a bunch of Garfields on it.
Francis is one of those people who just lights up the world around him. He's energetic and has a good sense of humor, always trying to make others feel better and laugh--a position he's carved out for himself since childhood. He goes out of his way to cheer others up, even at the cost of himself. This is something he's trying to get under control, but it's still hard for him to stop since it was such a big part of his life and to an extent he thinks it's all he's good for and that people won't like him if he isn't upbeat.
Francis's borderline toxic positivity stems from his own experiences in life, mainly his experience with ocular melanoma in his early 20s, which was a deeply traumatic experience for him due to the pain of the cancer and its treatment, the loss of an eye and later his vision as a whole, and the loss of his dream career due to medical debt.
As he had wanted to go into law, he has a strong sense of justice and wants to make the world a better place. Although he knows that improving the entire world is impossible, he tries his best to improve the lives of those around him.
A lot of his more irritating personality traits--mainly his carpe diem do it now unrealistic sense of optimism--stem from his traumatic experiences with cancer: he lives in fear of it coming back again and so he figures he can either let the fear rule his life and be miserable until if/when he dies from cancer or live his life to the fullest so that if it does come back and he gets sick again, even if he dies, he'll have enjoyed the bit of life he got to live. In other words, his seemingly unrelenting optimism is like a thin plank of wood across a bottomless ravine of fear and despair.
Over the course of the story he goes from fiercely refusing to discuss his experience with ocular melanoma to becoming something of an advocate for eye cancer awareness and shares stories of his experiences as a blind man. As he says, cancer was quite literally a part of him and it's not any healthier to ignore that he had it than it would be to ignore having a tumor--if talking about his experiences can help even one person get tested early and save an eye or help someone learn that going blind is not the end of the world and they can still live a happy and fulfilling life, it's all worth it to him. On a less serious note, among his friends he's quick to say "but I'm recovering from cancer!" as a one-up to get something inconsequential, like to choose where to order in from or what station to listen to, or to get his favorite flavor of ice cream added to the shopping list (it's vanilla, which he will defend to the death. He adamantly insists it is not boring and that a good vanilla ice cream has lots of flavor.) He is also very quick to make jokes whenever someone just casually makes a reference to him "seeing" something/someone/etc. and other related comments. He doesn't do it out of annoyance, he just finds it funny.
Francis is borderline genre-savvy--he recognizes that he's the best friend of Caspar and struggles to see himself as more, often writing himself off because of that. When questioned on why he went out with no training to try and fight crime in Caspar's stead, he just says it's because it's what Caspar would do, and if he dies, he dies--after all, he's just Francis Hoover. There's a hundred Francis Hoovers. This struggle with self-worth is a result of his childhood, as his parents were emotionally and verbally abusive and somewhat neglectful, and made him feel worthless. He's slowly working through that.
Francis is pretty uninvolved in cape stuff, outside of the brief span where he donned the Xerxes costume in Caspar's stead, but given his proximity to Caspar (as well as Gene Federman ), he's a frequent target of villains. He's been captured and interrogated before, but he's never broken, not even when one of them broke his hip with a bat.
Francis tends to gesticulate a lot when he talks and is pretty touchy-feely, often putting a hand on someone's shoulder when talking with them. He tends to stand on the balls of his feet and rocks back and forth slightly, almost like a bounce. He's always the first to offer a high five or a handshake, mainly because it's otherwise pretty awkward since he can't see the person's hand.
Francis was a self-trained juggler and before he went blind, he had done some pretty impressive routines with them. He's slowly trying to get back into it now. He's dabbled in stand up comedy but it never stuck.
He is a gifted public speaker and uses this talent to give speeches for disability advocacy. He overall just has a natural skill when it comes to making people feel at ease, which would have come in handy as a lawyer.
To make the world a better place, and if not the whole world, then the worlds of those he cares about.
Homoromantic
Homosexual
Somewhat surprisingly given how otherwise awful they were, Francis's parents had no issue with him being gay. Their bigger issue, as Francis says, is that if he came home with a partner no matter their gender, it meant that he saw at least some worth in himself.
Cancer (he's made the joke, but no one else around him has dared to)
ENFP
Freeze
Francis has always been a people pleaser and the kind of guy who goes out of his way to make others happy. He knew from a young age that if he didn't want to be bullied and mocked, he needed to draw attention to himself on his own terms before the bullies did, and so he made himself into the class clown. He was well-liked in high school but the sort of liked where he had a lot of friends but no close friends--he was invited to parties but not really to hang out one on one. He knew from a young age that he wanted to pursue a degree in law and got into the local college, which was known for having a good law program. He did well in his classes but noticed an increase in eye irritation, which he chalked up to staying up late. But the irritation grew and grew and he began to feel a lump in his eye, which pushed him to go to the eye doctor. It was there that he received a diagnosis: ocular melanoma, a type of eye cancer. Francis tried to remain positive throughout the ordeal, but he ended up losing his left eye. It seemed like the cancer was gone once his eye was removed, but a year later he began experiencing the symptoms again and went back to the specialist, who broke the troubling news that the cancer was back. His right eye was able to stay intact, but he lost all vision in it.
The combination of medical debt, school debt, and the accommodations he'd have to make for his recent disability forced him to make a difficult decision: he left his dream school to avoid racking up debt and to adjust to his new life. He wound up sharing an apartment with Caspar Pahlavi, once known as the superhero Xerxes, who had recently gouged out his eyes and was also adjusting to a life without vision. The two became fast friends and Francis and Caspar ended up working together on solving some minor crimes.
Following a head injury, Caspar has to put the vigilante business on ice, and Francis begins to sneak out in his stead, which goes poorly. That being said, it helps Caspar to realize that it does neither of them any good to try and forcibly keep Francis out of the superhero work. He doesn't do much physical fighting (and besides, he's a pacifist), but he occasionally works alongside Mabel Brell and Moriah Martinez , the latter of whom eventually takes him on as an assistant once she starts up a law assistance business.
Due to his proximity to Caspar (as well as his surrogate father Gene, another ex-cape), Francis has been kidnapped and tortured for information before, but didn't give any up, even when he was threatened with a bat to the head. A gut instinct told him to move and he did, which resulted in a broken hip instead of a snapped neck--it was still miserable, but it didn't kill him, and that's what mattered.
High school and the first two years of law school
June 30th
A handmade braille plaque that his friends made for him upon hearing that he was going to go blind in his remaining eye. It says "We love you, Francis John Hoover. You light up our lives and we'll always be here for you." They didn't tell him what it said and made him wait until he could read it himself, and he cried when he first did since it showed that there were people who really cared about him.
Caspar Pahlavi
Gene Federman
Caspar Pahlavi
Gene Federman --Gene is not a blood relative of Francis's, but he's his father figure and he's been more of a father to Francis than his dad ever was.
His golden retriever, Nana
The law. He is a staunch pacifist.
Receptionist. Before he was fully blinded, he worked at a local ice cream parlor.
Liberal
Vaguely theist but of no particular faith
Yellow
Vanilla ice cream
Caspar Pahlavi: Caspar was initially put off by Francis's energy, especially since he was still recovering from severe eye trauma when they met. They bonded quickly though--their personalities meshed well and they were able to not just be roommates, but adapt to the changes in their lives with ease. While they usually get along, they have had one argument so large that it led to Caspar being kicked out of the apartment for a short period of time: Caspar did not initially tell Francis how he was blinded, and Francis didn't pry since it was something personal and also probably traumatic. Caspar eventually told him, however, and the story of how Caspar removed his own eyes due to the negative effects of his x-ray vision being too much to handle...was too much for Francis to bear at the moment. Francis, who had lost his vision due to cancer, was disgusted that Caspar had just chosen to ruin his eyes, and while it wasn't exactly that simple, his emotions were already running high and he was deeply upset by the revelation. He told Caspar that he should leave, but soon realized that he was too harsh on Caspar and that his reaction was heavily motivated by his own trauma and repressed emotions. He apologized and Caspar moved back in. Their quasi-romantic bond only got closer once they made up again, and they eventually started to date. Both have often felt like the odd one out among their large groups of not-that-close friends and so they value each other deeply. A lot of their best traits are mirrored in each other, but some of the less-good traits are too, such as protectiveness that can easily slip into being overbearing. Caspar is adamant about Francis being fully uninvolved in superhero stuff since he has no powers or training, both of which would give him a necessary leg up. Francis feels excluded by this, and when Caspar is incapacitated during a fight, he cobbles together a similar costume and goes out in his place, which ends badly. Eventually they actually talk about it, and try to work through these feelings with each other.