camwyn | (no subject)

If you've been following the post-canon Half-Life stuff that I've been doing with

hecu_marine at Milliways, you probably know that Shephard is out to recreate the United States Marine Corps despite the fact that he's the only active-duty-capable Marine left alive. You're probably also aware that he's going to go to Brazil quite soon, before his initial recruitment drive. For quite some time I've wanted to have his initial batch of Marines be about half composed of people he drummed up in West Virginia, and half people who sort of accreted to the Resistance along the way as they rescued humans from Combine combat terraforming installations around the world. The first person to sign up was always going to be Jan ten Boom, the big Dutch guy who they picked up from another Resistance cell early on. The second was originally slated to be Floyd Mason, as a sign of his progression as a character (from 'nimrod BSing his way through a conversation' to 'competent, if unnervingly weird, military man').

We wound up killing Floyd in the Combine Overworld, so Shephard's second Marine is going to be another NPC instead. When the Resistance went to destroy the Combine's center of terraforming operations in South America, I had some of the people they rescued be Amazonian natives. A lot of human survivors in South America and other places were slated to be from native populations rather than urban ones, on the grounds that I couldn't really see the Combine going particularly out of their way to wipe out low-tech rural or forest-dwelling humans unless they lived on top of particularly necessary resources. (At least not until the Combine decided to kill all the humans, but they were taking their time about that.) Since I tend to get annoyed at persistent use and reuse of certain tropes/cliches/whatever- What These People Need Is A Honky, Noble Savagery, White Boy Goes Native And Gets Free Native Princess In The Process, etc., I figured that at least one of the natives would instead say "hey, I'd kind of like to see the rest of the world, does anyone mind if I leave with these guys?". And because everybody and their brother writes about or knows about the same two or three Amazonian tribes (the only Amazonian people my parents can name are the Yanomami, and I think after that there's a large chunk of the New Age/pagan movement that knows about the Jivaro because of Michael Harner), I said he'd be from the Satere-Mawe people instead.

Now, if you know anything at all about the Satere-Mawe you probably know about their manhood ritual. It involves bullet ants and long wicker gloves and it got them an entry on Badass of the Week. (The people I know who read my drivel might also know that the Satere-Mawe are the people of guarana; if you've ever had an energy drink with guarana in it you can probably thank them because dollars to donuts, they're the ones who introduced outsiders to this funky plant that keeps you REALLY REALLY AWAKE.) I figured that the gentleman who would be going along with the Resistance would wind up hanging around Adrian long enough to decide that the rest of the world was more interesting than home, or at least worthy of being seen for a good few years before going back. And I also figured that if he was going to agree to stick around Shephard and join his corps of warriors, he would probably wind up in a metaphorical dick-measuring contest with him sooner or later, probably starting from some discussion of interesting scars and eventually ending up at "well, THIS is what I had to do to count as a man among my people, when I had JUST HIT PUBERTY- now, which one of us is tougher again?". That idea evolved eventually into "I'll join your Marines if you come back to Brazil with me and submit to at least one pass-through of the bullet ant rite, just to prove that you're capable of standing up to the same treatment as me".

And while I have all kinds of IC justification for that for Shephard, most of which involves him being able to say, afterwards, that he did it and that he didn't flinch once (this is part of the rite, actually) and that his new recruits can quit whining about how much pain he's putting them through unless they want to go to Brazil the next time Sergeant Maripyaipok goes to visit his family... the fact is that I realized today exactly why I really wanted to put Adrian through this.

I millicanoned Adrian as being from Rowlesburg, West Virginia. I've been there twice, a week at a time each time. On one trip I was helping to paint and repair a house outside of town. I don't remember much of that particular job, except that one of the guys who lived there was helping us visitors. There was, it turned out, a serious stinging insect population in the area. White-faced hornets, I think, as well as a few other species. Very unnerving, and not something most of us wanted to deal with. But what I remember of that job is the local guy kind of snorting and putting up a ladder to work on the side of the house where the bugs were, at least until he'd be getting too close to the nest for it to be practical. And I remember watching him paint, paint, paint, stop a moment, swat one of the bugs dead on his arm, scrape the stinger out or knock the corpse away, paint, paint, rinse, repeat. Just "Dammit, another one of yinz- WHAP- back to work."

I'm pretty sure the urge to send Adrian to get bitten repeatedly by the most painful ants in the world is rooted in that mental image more than any IC occurrence.