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Dec. 4th, 2012 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynIn response to ceitfianna's response to this post:
THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND WHILE WRITING GORDON FREEMAN
First: Gordon does not want to fight. He does it because he has to. Adrian Shephard voluntarily joined the Marines fresh out of high school in order to defend his country and make a name for himself, but Gordon was shoved into his situation without warning and has been stuck with it ever since. He's kept going with it all this time because until the Combine threat was finally put down once and for all, it would never be over. Destroying the Combine's power meant he got to stop. It can all be summed up in his paraphrase of a Lance Armstrong quote from some years back: "Pain fades. Fear fades. If I quit, it lasts forever."
Second: He has a powerful sense of obligation. There were a few points during the original Black Mesa incident when he probably could have made a break for it, but he kept going because he'd promised Eli Vance that he'd try to get help. When he found himself twenty years in the future, he probably could have gone to ground somewhere and just hidden under a desk with his hands over his ears or something. He turned to Sir Nicholas Fury and others for lessons in soldiering during his time at Milliways after Black Mesa because he felt he had an obligation to assist in cleaning up everything that'd been turned loose by the resonance cascade he initiated. Finding out how many people had placed so much hope in him meant that that would never happen, because he considers it morally wrong to deliberately wreck a desperate person's hopes like that. He'd love to go back to science now that the Combine Overworld is no longer in the picture, but he's aware that people will look to him for some kind of leadership or start grabbing power for themselves and claim it in his name somehow, so he's gearing up for a long stretch of politics before he can finally turn the reins over to someone else and start teaching. Stuff like that is part of his character and I have to keep it in mind when he makes decisions.
Third: While I don't play him as a silent protagonist, I do try not to have him be an especially talkative one. If he can get away with a gesture or a facial expression or something to convey a point in a scene instead of words, I try to go with that. Also he refrains from speaking to people who make him angry or who he doesn't respect, or from talking if he thinks there's a strong chance he might embarrass himself. On top of that, he's got a habit of not giving out information he doesn't think people need- particularly if they fall into the 'people who make him angry or who he doesn't respect' category. This is often arbitrary and petty, because Gordon is only human, but it's something to remember.
Fourth: Gordon is very much not a show-off and is profoundly uncomfortable with being in the spotlight. He just tends to wind up there whether he wants it or not. I tend to translate this into him winding up profoundly uncomfortable and/or unimpressive around other shooter-game protagonists, because he doesn't see the need to tell, say, Master Chief that he slaughtered his way through most of a first-wave alien invasion by himself. If people are going to be impressed by him, it's not likely to be because of anything he did for that purpose or anything he told them about- not unless he's recruiting, anyway.
Fifth: Zero Punctuation to the contrary, Gordon is not some kind of emotionally stunted autistic mime (or whatever the hell Yahtzee said about him). He has the same mental and emotional reactions to stuff as anybody else. It's just that he's very, very good at Thinking About That Later. He does have his breakdowns and his moments of being utterly overwhelmed, but by and large he tends to put himself into a mental space where he doesn't let that affect him until he's somewhere safe. The major exception is the breakdown he had in the cave at Black Mesa, where he had to hold off a Marine Corps helicopter with a rocket launcher and he started thinking 'twenty-eight hours ago I was doing physics, and today I’m the goddamn Taliban', because a man can only hold off emotional reactions so long when he's suffering from massive blood loss, low blood sugar, and experimental chemicals in his bloodstream. I have to keep in mind when I play him that just because he's not showing how something affects him right now doesn't mean he's not going to be profoundly affected by it soon.
ceitfianna's response to this post:THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND WHILE WRITING GORDON FREEMAN
First: Gordon does not want to fight. He does it because he has to. Adrian Shephard voluntarily joined the Marines fresh out of high school in order to defend his country and make a name for himself, but Gordon was shoved into his situation without warning and has been stuck with it ever since. He's kept going with it all this time because until the Combine threat was finally put down once and for all, it would never be over. Destroying the Combine's power meant he got to stop. It can all be summed up in his paraphrase of a Lance Armstrong quote from some years back: "Pain fades. Fear fades. If I quit, it lasts forever."
Second: He has a powerful sense of obligation. There were a few points during the original Black Mesa incident when he probably could have made a break for it, but he kept going because he'd promised Eli Vance that he'd try to get help. When he found himself twenty years in the future, he probably could have gone to ground somewhere and just hidden under a desk with his hands over his ears or something. He turned to Sir Nicholas Fury and others for lessons in soldiering during his time at Milliways after Black Mesa because he felt he had an obligation to assist in cleaning up everything that'd been turned loose by the resonance cascade he initiated. Finding out how many people had placed so much hope in him meant that that would never happen, because he considers it morally wrong to deliberately wreck a desperate person's hopes like that. He'd love to go back to science now that the Combine Overworld is no longer in the picture, but he's aware that people will look to him for some kind of leadership or start grabbing power for themselves and claim it in his name somehow, so he's gearing up for a long stretch of politics before he can finally turn the reins over to someone else and start teaching. Stuff like that is part of his character and I have to keep it in mind when he makes decisions.
Third: While I don't play him as a silent protagonist, I do try not to have him be an especially talkative one. If he can get away with a gesture or a facial expression or something to convey a point in a scene instead of words, I try to go with that. Also he refrains from speaking to people who make him angry or who he doesn't respect, or from talking if he thinks there's a strong chance he might embarrass himself. On top of that, he's got a habit of not giving out information he doesn't think people need- particularly if they fall into the 'people who make him angry or who he doesn't respect' category. This is often arbitrary and petty, because Gordon is only human, but it's something to remember.
Fourth: Gordon is very much not a show-off and is profoundly uncomfortable with being in the spotlight. He just tends to wind up there whether he wants it or not. I tend to translate this into him winding up profoundly uncomfortable and/or unimpressive around other shooter-game protagonists, because he doesn't see the need to tell, say, Master Chief that he slaughtered his way through most of a first-wave alien invasion by himself. If people are going to be impressed by him, it's not likely to be because of anything he did for that purpose or anything he told them about- not unless he's recruiting, anyway.
Fifth: Zero Punctuation to the contrary, Gordon is not some kind of emotionally stunted autistic mime (or whatever the hell Yahtzee said about him). He has the same mental and emotional reactions to stuff as anybody else. It's just that he's very, very good at Thinking About That Later. He does have his breakdowns and his moments of being utterly overwhelmed, but by and large he tends to put himself into a mental space where he doesn't let that affect him until he's somewhere safe. The major exception is the breakdown he had in the cave at Black Mesa, where he had to hold off a Marine Corps helicopter with a rocket launcher and he started thinking 'twenty-eight hours ago I was doing physics, and today I’m the goddamn Taliban', because a man can only hold off emotional reactions so long when he's suffering from massive blood loss, low blood sugar, and experimental chemicals in his bloodstream. I have to keep in mind when I play him that just because he's not showing how something affects him right now doesn't mean he's not going to be profoundly affected by it soon.
