RP character thoughts

[camwyn]

For those of you who haven't seen the commercials or trailers or whatever, in Pacific Rim, Stacker Pentecost is the Idris Elba character. He's the big black guy who gives the speech that ends in the line 'today we are canceling the Apocalypse'. He spends very little time in the armor they have him wearing during the speech; most of his screen time is spent in a five-star uniform or a dark blue suit and greatcoat even Captain Jack Harkness would envy. He's the Marshal of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps; he's in command of humanity's last and only active line of defense. (I say active because part of the premise of the movie is that the nations who have previously contributed to the defense effort against the kaiju by building the Jaegers have given up on the Jaeger Program and are trying to protect themselves by building a massive wall around the Pacific instead- passive defense, which does not work at all.)

He's got a name like a Southern preacher. He's British. He has an adopted daughter- Mako Mori, who he rescued from the kaiju that destroyed Tokyo. For the majority of the movie he suffers periodic unexplained nosebleeds which prompt him to take some form of medication. These turn out to be the result of radiation exposure in his original Jaeger, Coyote Tango; he's been told that if he has to pilot a Jaeger again it will almost certainly kill him, which is why he hasn't piloted one since Coyote Tango. He's one of two people on record as having successfully handled a Jaeger solo without going into seizures. When he Drifts with another pilot, he doesn't bring anything in with him- he's capable of holding his memories out of it, holding them that tightly under control.

I bought the prequel comic, Tales From Year Zero, to get more background on him. From the comic we find out that he had a sister named Luna, who was in the RAF, and who died fighting the Trespasser, the kaiju that destroyed San Francisco (she was working with American pilots and said she was flying with them to pay the States back for what American pilots did for Britain during World War II). Luna was, at that point, his only family; his father is said to have died when he was a teenager. His mother is never mentioned at all.

Stacker is shown as a major participant several times in the course of the Pan Pacific Defense Corp's development. He makes a speech to what looks like some kind of United Nations-esque assembly exhorting them to pursue a course of developing the technology to fight the kaiju. He visits the lab of the neuroscientist who's working on creating an interface capable of letting a human control a gigantic robot arm by moving their own hand, right before she's about to run out of funding, and volunteers as a test subject. He successfully controls the arm and although he says it's like pushing his fingers through wet concrete, the scientists say afterwards that he did it with ease.

His partner is a woman named Tamsin Sevier, and the reason he had to pilot a Jaeger alone is because during the battle with Onibaba, the kaiju that destroyed Tokyo, Tamsin blacked out. Not for emotional reasons, but medical ones; the radiation exposure had given her cancer. When they're taken out of the Jaegers, she goes for medical treatment, but tells Stacker to go on with his life wherever they send him and not stick around to watch her die. According to the narration boxes, he considers her family, but does as she asks him to. Later he comes back, though, to bring his adopted daughter Mako to meet her.

At one point in the comic he's met by a reporter who's doing a fluff piece on the twilight of the Jaeger program now that they're putting the Wall up instead. She asks him if he believes humanity can survive the kaiju, let alone beat them, and he says:

“In all our eons, we’ve seen continents frozen and the sun blotted by ash- and we’re still here. A decade after K-Day and we’re still here.

“I’ve never believed in the end times. We are mankind. Our footprints are on the Moon. When the last trumpet sounds and the Beast rises from the Pit- we will kill it.”

This is all material from the movie and the comic. I realize there's another book about the world and background of Pacific Rim, but I haven't got hold of it yet. Everything from here on out is extrapolation on my part.

To start with - the name. 'Stacker Pentecost' is, like I said, the kind of name one expects to come out of the American Bible Belt. Not Britain, at least not from what I know of British names, which admittedly is confined to the names common among white English, Welsh, and Scots residents of the British Isles. I'm really not sure what a name like 'Stacker' is doing in the same family as a name like 'Luna'. It's like a Harry Potter fanfic where the Black family suddenly has a child named 'Serenity' alongside Sirius and Andromeda and Regulus... but that's her name and that's what I've got to work with. The last name is also a little unusual. 'Pentecost' does exist as a surname in the UK. I went to http://gbnames.publicprofiler.org/ to check it out. The distribution map the site offered placed the most common occurrences of the surname in Cornwall and in the EC postcode area of Greater London.

For RP purposes, I'm going with the assumption that the Pentecosts were originally an immigrant family and that they- oh, buggrit, apparently there's background info for them that places them in Tottenham. Fine, whatever, Tottenham it is. I'm also going to stop speculating about his family origins because there's probably material del Toro wrote that I just haven't found yet. What I am going to say, until I run across something that contradicts it, is this: I figure Stacker is probably Church of England by affiliation, because that's what you do, but is a secular humanist at heart. He speaks like somebody who's at least read the Book of Revelations a couple of times, and he knows the imagery, but a believer would not be talking about canceling the apocalypse or fighting the metaphorical Beast- which he is, in that conversation I mentioned. Yes, he's in an interview about fighting kaiju, but he is invoking very specific Christian imagery and speaking about a particular figure from a particular prophecy. He knows the stories. He's just of the belief that humanity is capable of averting the end of the world- which is not something you generally see in a religious believer.

Other than maybe Winston Zeddemore, anyway.

Comments

[bjornwilde]

Here I was think Stacker couldn't be any more awesome.

I kind of want Ben to meet Stacker now.

Is there any hint that Stacker is a call sign/military nickname?

[camwyn]

Not that I can tell. I don't have the book with me at the moment but I think even Luna calls him Stacker- and other than the PPDC there's nothing in the comic about military service.

I'm going to have to locate some more source material to clear things up. Del Toro probably has all of this information somewhere and we just haven't seen it yet, knowing him.

[bjornwilde]

I'm going to leave this link here rather than trust you'll see my reblog over on Tumblr.

Some more info about the pilots which you may or may not have seen already.

[camwyn]

I've seen most of it. I wasn't aware they were saying Choi was half-Mexican. I didn't catch his name, so I spent most of the movie calling him 'Elvis dude', and I got kind of a shock when I saw him in Tales From Year Zero trying to rescue his Yeye in Chinatown. There's no way that man had Asian ancestry.

[bjornwilde]

Agreed. He was a fun character but I got no hint of anything but Latin America from him. Which is possible. Not every person of mixed race wears both cultures on their sleeve.

[thewickedlady]

I have also been researching for fic related reasons, and I totally agree! It is such a strange name for a British raised man, and especially with a sister named Luna. It is a complete bible-belt name. Where I grew up in NC, it was a common Primitive Baptist family name, which I found kind of funny even back then.

I read the prequel comic, as well, and I was kind of perplexed by its own retconning within (the whole wet concrete thing). Let me know if you get your hands on the novella! I keep thinking about buying it off of amazon. Maybe next pay check.

[camwyn]

My thing about immigrant parents was actually partly rooted in the idea that just possibly, one or both of them might have interacted with Americans doing missionary work and been sufficiently impressed to borrow the name. Doesn't explain the Luna part, though.

I didn't mind the wet concrete part so much, figuring that it was the equivalent of "don't buy version 1.0 of a Microsoft product; wait for the service pack to come out". Some of the rest of the comic kinda threw me- f'rex, there is no way in hell I would have guessed that Elvisboy was supposed to be part Chinese. I can only assume his Yeye was the only Chinese family member he had, which would also explain to some degree why he spoke almost no Cantonese. That... that was just weird.

If I get hold of the novelization I'll let you know, for sure.

[thewickedlady]

YES. I was so confused by that, too! The actor has mixed European and Hispanic descent. I decided it was a blended family.

[muji]

This is lovely to read. I've got the novelization, which is primarily useful for phrasing of official documents and newspaper articles, etc. Carly and I are working on the Gipsy Danger first Drift scene from the movie now, which is coming along.

Parentage/family background for Raleigh is awkward too. Nobody gets names except for Jazmine, but where'd she go? Etc etc. I also kind of protest the idea of the Beckets living all their lives in Alaska. Thinky thoughts!

[camwyn]

I realized after watching the movie a second time that I can't use Tendo's comic story as canon. Becket says during the prologue that the first kaiju rampaged into San Francisco and "by the time tanks, guns, and planes brought it down six days later" etc. Tendo's comic story has the thing dying by nuke during the initial destruction of SF. Movie takes precedence, far as I'm concerned; I'm writing that part off.

I have also privately decided that unless somebody else apps folks from the canon and objects, I'm millicanoning that at least one pair of Canadian Jaeger pilots during the course of the program was a married lesbian couple, because Canadian battle lesbians are the kind of thing that almost make you feel sorry for the kaiju.

[muji]

*_* I have zero problem with Canadian battle lesbians.

[leeshajoy]

So I just got back from seeing the movie and ZOMG WE TOTALLY NEED A NEWT IN MILLIWAYS. :D

I'd try him out myself, but given that he's a scientist as opposed to a soldier, I feel like I'd need to know a shitload of technical stuff that the movie glossed over.

[camwyn]

Oh gods yes. We could so use a Newt, but yeah, he'd be up there with Ray in terms of the amount of ass-pulling involved. Although I understand there's a fair deal more detail about him in the novel (including, apparently, confirmation that he's not neurotypical), I don't know how much use that would be playing him in the long run.