(no subject)

[camwyn]

I probably should've done this ages ago, but... CHARACTER MEME TIME

Name a character that you know I write or have written, and I'll tell you:

a. What initially prompted me to like the character enough to write about him/her.
b. One of his/her best traits.
c. One of his/her worst traits.
d. How easy/difficult I find it to write the character.
e. The story/thread/chapter/post/paragraph/tag/phrase where I feel that I truly captured the character.
f. My plans (if any) to write the character in the near future.

(And for the record, I can't say for sure what my plans are with John Constantine. It depends on whether I want to go back into the cynical places at the bottom of my skull that make Gregory House look like a Buddhist monk.)

Comments

[paradisacorbasi.livejournal.com]

Ray, naturally.

[camwyn]

a. His enthusiasm. I mean, the brain is a very close second, but whichever version of Ray you’re dealing with- movie, cartoon, GB: Legion comic book- Ray’s a blazing enthusiast. He’s interested in all kinds of things and he doesn’t bother hiding it. It’s very endearing.

b. I’m not entirely sure he understands that certain things are impossible. Or if he does, he believes they’re only impossible until approached the right way. This carries him far.

c. When it comes to dealing with people, he tends to assume they’re the way they seem on the surface. This gets him in trouble on a fairly regular basis.

d. Ray’s bloody easy, whether it’s at Milliways, in the Nexus, or somewhere else. All I have to do is switch the mental ‘voice’ from its default text mode (I think in text unless I have a reason not to) and into ‘Dan Aykroyd’, and it follows from there. Even when Ray’s had a colossally bad day and is trying to hide under the blankets with his stuffed Mr. Stay-Puft and not think about the cosmic horrors lying in wait.

e. Oh, frell. I’ve been writing him in various games since 2005 and in fic since a little before that. I can’t even track down the earlier ones… although the Jekyll and Hyde Club-Central Park thread probably qualifies.

f. I have enough plots lined up for Milliways!Ray to carry me through October at the very least, if not through the end of the year. I’d like to get him back into the Nexus, though.

[paradisacorbasi.livejournal.com]

b. That's charming about him, yes.

c. I have that in common with him; maybe that's why I like him so much.

d. *chuckle*

e. That one is a fave. I reread it time to time.

There's a plot or two brewing on DMOOC which might be some fun.

[camwyn]

Oooh. Do tell?

[paradisacorbasi.livejournal.com]

This one (http://community.livejournal.com/dmooc/231989.html).

[camwyn]

Oo! We should definitely talk.

[paradisacorbasi.livejournal.com]

I get home from work around 9:45 pm.

[camwyn]

btw, you of all people will understand why this is an ad of extreme wrongness:

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

It's Viigo!

[valles-uf.livejournal.com]

The One Free Man.

[camwyn]

a. TVtropes.com articles that mentioned him. No, really. I kept running across Half-Life references- first the character section had him under ‘Badass Normal’, I think as ‘the biggest badass in the history of the universe’. Then there was a section that quoted Dr. Breen’s speech about ‘he’s not an infiltrator, he’s not a secret agent, he’s a damn physicist’. Then there was the Nerd Glasses entry. Eventually I went and started reading about him on Wikipedia, and then finally gave up and went to Valve and downloaded the game, and before I knew it there he was, in my damn brain, and I don’t think he’ll be leaving for a long, long time.

(Edit: I just found the line in the Badass Bookworm entry that really cemented it. First they rattle off the basics of Dr. Breen's speech, and then: "And yet, when the revolution comes, everybody's behind Gordon. Because things in front of him tend to die.")

b. He thinks- fast, and a lot- before he acts. The way I write him, he’s very, very good at mentally running multiple possible scenarios for something that’s about to happen, and running them in the space of a few seconds, or even less if he hasn’t got that kind of time. Constantly throwing up a bunch of possibilities or hypotheses, then discarding the ones that fail to fit with what’s actually going on, not only keeps him alive but avoids the ossification of thought that tends to get scientists in trouble when they won’t admit that their beloved theory isn’t quite working. (It also rather nicely explains his tendency to be quiet in conversation. He’s not silent. He just considers all his words before he speaks.)

c. I don’t think he’s ever actually questioned the ethics or consequences of his particular bit of science. He’s well aware of horrible things done in science’s name, but he’s the kind of man who would just roll his eyes at the possibility that it might apply to the analysis and teleportation research he’s doing. It’s a kind of blindness that leads only into trouble, and it’s absolutely going to kill him when he realizes that his science betrayed him as much as the Black Mesa higher-ups ever did. He’s going to be a very, very bitter man for a long time after that- but it’s going to be his fault, because he didn’t even acknowledge the possibility.

d. He’s actually pretty easy to write, except when he gets technical. I have a pretty clear idea of his personality and I’ve put together enough background and history to go with the background and history we have from his canon that I hardly have to think about it. I just have to dig the theoretical physics sources out when he talks about what he does scientifically. ‘Course, I haven’t written him under alien fire yet, but I doubt that’ll be much different.

e. He’s still kind of new for me. But I’d like to think this thread with a grown-up Veronica Mars is a good start, along with hearing back from Dr. Kleiner about the job and bleeding off anticipatory energy the day before he starts the new job.

f. Oh hell yeah. Poor bastard, he’s in for a world of hurting once I start running the RP version of him through canon… he’s not going to get any outside help for it, either. Yes, I know part of putting someone into a panfandom RPG is seeing how things change with the interaction with outsiders, but I feel that Milliways!Ray’s lost something by bringing in people from other worlds to help with gigantic events in his world. People tend to think that he can’t accomplish things by himself without someone there to protect him. I don’t want to let that attitude even start with Gordon.

[sdelmonte]

Annie Wells

[camwyn]

a. I needed her for a plot point. That’s about it, really- Annie wasn’t supposed to be a recurring character. She was supposed to turn up in Bar and panic Wells by not being there when he was still on the run, and she was supposed to stick around for some stuff with Sharpe, and that was it.

b. Annie is eminently sensible. There’s no point in going ‘oh God it’s horrible and impossible and what do I doooo’ when whatever it is is right there in front of you. Deal with the whatever-it-is and sort the strangeness out later, assuming you have the time at all.

c. Annie overworks herself like you wouldn’t believe, and often doesn’t mention it to Wells. Not that he can’t smell it on her, but she’s very tightly wound at times and doesn’t speak about it if she can help it. I’m not sure when she sleeps.

d. Annie’s pretty easy to write. There’s a panel in the Elfquest trade paperback of Rayek stories where a very short woman who runs a bordello with some inn-type services confronts a guy who’s about 6’6” and all growly about one of the girls not wanting to go with him. She thwaps him in the head with her spoon and shouts at him while he’s too discombobulated to argue. When I can’t think of what Annie’s response to a situation would be, I think back to that panel and there you go.

e. Afgh. I’m not sure about this one. It wasn’t her first couple of posts, though, I was still working out the wrinkles in her then.

f. Yeah, she’s probably going to be around for a while. Not as one of my mains, obviously, but she’s still worth writing and keeping in play.

[blackjack-svr.livejournal.com]

Dave (Dan?) Grishin

Because I have to be different.

[camwyn]

Dave.

a. My friend Brian and I were going through the Werewolf books at dinner in the Fribley cafeteria at Case Western and decided we wanted a pair of werewolves based on Penn and Teller. I took Penn. That was Dave's genesis right there.

b. He's adaptable, in a Ferris Bueller kind of way. In his stage magic Dave plans out absolutely everything, but if something goes wrong he usually has an alternative or two lined up so he can retreat to that on the fly and make it look like he intended it all along. Same deal in interacting with the rest of his pack and Sept and family.

c. He lets the urge to mess with people he doesn't respect get the better of him far too often. When last I played him I had him starting to learn to rein this in for his wife and daughter's sake, but he's still very much the kind of guy who'll screw with your head just because he doesn't like you.

d. Dave was easy to play; most of my difficulties with him were 'how far do I want to take this?' when I realized that people were buying into whatever BS he was pushing at the time.

e. Oh, hm. There was a session on the first game where I played him (set in Virginia, not Toronto) where he managed to convince a pair of Tradition mages that he was a high-ranked Technomancer even without him knowing that a) these guys were mages or b) that anything like the Technocracy existed. It was a matter of the way he dressed (Tilley Endurables grey suit with many hidden pockets), his open contempt for fuzzy-headed thinking (one of the mages was, I think, either a Dreamspeaker or a Cultist of Ecstasy), and his ability to do things that looked like coincidental magic without setting off the mages' Prime sense (it's called SLEIGHT OF HAND, people, look it up). That pretty much told me I'd hit Penn the Werewolf right on the spot.

f. No plans to return to working with Dave, I fear. He's off living his ever after.

[blackjack-svr.livejournal.com]

Dave was a werewolf???

... I always thought he was a mage with, yes, werewolf friends. Y'know, through some tangled social web or something. Like, perhaps his wife was one of them, etc. And he was one of my favorite characters to be weird and awkward at with my little crazy person.

Ivan, if you never found out exactly, was merely a fragile mortal+. Partially awakened speaker with the dead, living his life in a gastly double-image overlay seeing both the world of the living and that of the dead. Think about how that messes with someone's head, seeing every person on the sidewalk as who they are and ALSO their shambling corpse at the same time. Imagine having to see that in the mirror every morning. Imagine the uncertainty of it all: never knowing for sure whether or not you died in your sleep until someone alive greets you as if nothing's unusual. And oh, don't forget he was a widower. Trapped in a horrid reality where you can't escape all the dead people that terrify you and the only one that never seems to appear is the only one he really wants to see.

Angsty, yes, but I could really sink my teeth into it. The terror. The madness. Dribbling milk on the table at starbucks and watching it curdle instantly, yet somehow remain liquid at the same time. And whatever it was that held him together amidst all of that. I really, REALLY wish I had been able to play him till the end, but real life interfered. Best character I ever made, and there's a good chance he's going to show up in a comic idea I'm slow-cooking.

When Ivan saw Dave coming, it was a relief. Dave was one of the only people Ivan actually felt safe around. And he was a bloody werewolf. One frenzy would've killed him. Wow.

(though, Ivan did have one ace up his sleeve that I never got to reveal except to one other player: he was a frighteningly powerful telepath, and I'm talking about the old school, very broken telepathy rules. He only used it when threatened directly. Only ever used it on someone who was talking openly to him about sorcery and inadvertantly causing Ivan to have visions about demons, so I mucked about in his head to find out his intentions. I was saving the real telepathic apocalypse for when he was cornered by BSDs or Nephandi or something and then suddenly he'd goes all Tetsuo on everyone, destroying minds and rendering them docile and compliant. Yes, minions, you are mine now, and we're going to have a little word with those that sent you, oh yes we are..)

[camwyn]

Oh hell yeah! Glass Walker Ragabash, deed name Speaks-Like-Microsoft. Manipulation 4, Charisma 3-4, Subterfuge 4, Sleight of Hand 3. His wife was a mortal+ who had pyrokinesis and a tendency to see ghosts. His jacket was a level 1 fetish with a spirit that concealed all the stuff in his pockets.

It gets better. By the end of it he was Sept leader. None of the damn Wendigo wanted to challenge for it. So a squareheaded American white boy Ragabash from Detroit wound up alpha of a sept full of friggin' Canadian Wendigo. But, yes, Dave could've cacked somebody if things had gone horribly...

[minkhollow]

Whistler. (Sometimes I am v. v. predictable.)

[camwyn]

a. That damned, damned smirk on his face when he walked the rest of the gang through finding Janek's box- and the 'what did it sound like, Bishop' scene.

b. He doesn't let anything get in the way of his mission to make people who really ought to know better suffer for overlooking things, and he really enjoys doing so.

c. He gets in over his head a lot. Being caught on sixty-two counts of phone fraud is absolutely inexcusable; a man ought to know his limits, but Whistler clearly takes on more than he ought to, and that's never a good thing.

d. He's usually pretty easy to play, but I have to stop and extract all the visual cues from his stuff, then bring the sound cues to the fore.

e. I'm going to have to do some digging for this one, I'm afraid.

f. Yeah, I plan on playing him more in future. And on getting us all through canon, honest!

[daniidebrabant.livejournal.com]

I probably have a good idea on most, but...

Detritus. *goes WAY back*

[camwyn]

a. I have a fondness for writing characters who talk like they're cast members of the SNL soap opera "As World Turn", which starred Tonto, Tarzan, and Frankenstein's Monster. Detritus was such a character, and there were Discworld people aplenty in the Bar at the time. When I was one of the founding mods at Sages of Chaos, Detritus struck me as an excellent choice for an advice columnist (that's how the game originally started) because I wanted to see entire advice columns written in As World Turn-speak.

b. He knows how other people see him and he's not afraid to make use of it. "Don't mind me, I jus' writin' dis down so's der dumb troll don't forget..."

c. If he hasn't got the cooling helmet on, he really is that dumb. Temperature-dependent intelligence is a problem at best.

d. Detritus was fairly easy to play, but I wound up dropping him because I didn't feel comfortable tagging other people without their permission at the time.

e. Aw, hell, I don't even remember. Possibly one of the Sages of Chaos posts where Detritus had to speak for the moderator corps, though. This one is a good example.

f. Nope.

[leeshajoy.livejournal.com]

Because I'm a masochist and no one's asked about this character yet...

The Great Librarian of Pnakotus.

[camwyn]

a. I always rather liked the Great Race of Yith, and wanted to try my hand at one. The Librarian is the only one I've come across with enough of an individual presence in any canon to warrant an app at Milliways.

b. The Great Librarian takes the very long view. It makes individual issues and problems significantly less relevant when you have perfect acceptance of a plan that stretches to the end of all Time in the universe to fall back on.

c. By human standards, one of the Librarian's worst traits is that it sees no particular reason why it ought to care about what humans think matter. If it chooses to do so, it's a purely voluntary thing and based on an individual case, but for the most part its motives are purely its own and those of its race.

d. The Great Librarian requires a certain amount of mental adjustment to play, but once I've gotten into that headspace it's not all that hard.

e. I'll have to dig through some of the Librarian's threads for this one.

f. Oh, sure. Not htat I plan on playing it much, but a nonhuman perspective's a cleansing thing once in a while.

[blackswanevent.livejournal.com]

I think I know the answer to this, but the rest is making me curious..


Sgt. Wells.

[camwyn]

a. The 'what happened to Ryan is happening to me' speech. Damn that was a man to take seriously.

b. His sense of duty. To his squad, his family, his country- whatever.

c. He holds grudges, probably long past the point where they make any sense.

d. He's fairly easy to play, but if I have John Constantine in my head at the same time I have to do some careful separation. Wells is more basic than John, despite their 'angry lower-middle-class Englishman with a mouth like a sewer' overlap, and I have to keep that in mind.

e. This one, I think.

f. Yeah, he's gonna be around a good while.

[bogboblin.livejournal.com]

NOSTRADAMUS

[camwyn]

a. His impeccable fashion sense. Sorely overlooked by most historians.

b. He knows exactly how to screw with the minds of hundreds of years' worth of readers yet to come, and he isn't afraid to do it. I appreciate a guy who has that kind of talent.

c. He never bothered to include a pamphlet saying 'OMG WTF YOU PEOPLE SERIOUSLY NEED TO GET A GRIP' for those of his readers who missed the joke.

d. So easy I've never actually had to do it.

e. How long can I keep this up, I wonder?

f. That would depend, wouldn't it?

[kail-panille.livejournal.com]

Because I have a sentimental fondness for the guy who introduced me to this corner of the net: John Constantine. You've already answered (f), but I'm curious about (a) through (e).

[camwyn]

a. He's a bastard. He's an absolute asshole. Everyone knows this. I liked him for that because it meant I could vent any kind of general horribleness I liked through him.

b. He's clever as hell, even if most of it was developed to get him out of doing things that would probably be more easily handled some other way.

c. Nearly everything else about his personality, really. This is John. He's made of worst traits. The good ones are hiding in the back of his psyche playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance or something.

d. John is depressingly easy to write. I just think, "Hmm. What would I, personally, do in this situation if I took my conscience, beat it senseless, chained its hands behind its back, threw it down the stairs a couple of times, and locked it in the basement with the cops from the Abner Louima case?" And hey presto, there's my Johnny.

e. Probably the fight between John and Snape during John's examination for whether he could actually teach Defense Against The Dark Arts or not. Specifically, the bit where he said it didn't matter what spell they started, because it would just be a cover-up for them kicking their attacker in the goolies.

[aberrantangels]

Because nobody's asked about him yet, Hektor.

[camwyn]

a. He's a guy. Seriously. In the Iliad, you can't huck a rock in any direction without hitting somebody whose father or grandfather was a god, or whose mom was a goddess, or whatever. Hektor? You have to walk a long way back along the family tree by comparison with everybody else to find a Zeus-diddler. He's a guy, and he's a civilized guy, and he's still the most impressive hero Troy has to offer, and he can stand up to what the Greeks throw at his city without being an absolute bastard. That's what did it for me.

b. He's not an ass. Achilles is a jerk, Ajax is a psychopathic maniac, Odysseus ought to be running an intelligence agency somewhere and writing propaganda (because you KNOW the Odyssey was basically his way of covering up for getting lost and shacking up with hot chicks on the way home). Hektor? Civilized, and willing to fight to preserve that, even if it means defending his IDIOT BROTHER WHO THINKS WITH THE WRONG HEAD.

c. He expects other people to be reasonable. When you are dealing with Greeks who're using 'you stole mah wumman!' as an excuse to secure themselves a clear route to the Black Sea, this is a fatal failing. There was no reason in the Greek army, no matter how much he hoped it was there.

d. Hektor takes some work to write. His 'voice' is as close as I can get to Mary Renault's narrative voice, and his mindset is very much Bronze Age male of privilege. It's not the Greek mindset, but one of elsewhere in the Mediterranean, so it takes some doing to pull together. It's also not easy to write him when there's high amounts of magic or deific presence being slung around, because there's relatively little of that seen directly in Renault's work. Suddenly being confronted by multiple gods makes it hard to maintain the right attitude for him.

e. I think probably somewhere around here.

f. I honestly don't know. It depends on how the god situation in Milliways goes.

[vincentursus.livejournal.com]

Vimes.

[camwyn]

a. He's one big bundle of cranky with a conscience. I've only ever written him in the Silmarillion crossover stuff. In Tolkien you scarcely find cranky, other than the Hobbit. It's not epic enough. It needed irritation that shades into outrage, and Vimes was the perfect SOB to deliver it.

b. He isn't impressed by anyone. In a fantasy world, being impressed by somebody's power, audacity, whatever is a fast ticket to the Plot Railroad. Vimes is insufficiently impressed by other people's splendid whatever that he maintains a high degree of free will and autonomy where other people get shepherded along by narrative convention.

c. He's a cynic. I can't blame him for it, given his life to date, but it's still not healthy or attractive. I'm just sayin'.

d. Vimes' voice isn't too far off from either John's or Sergeant Wells', so once I strip the curse words out and make a few other minor adjustments, he isn't that hard to write.

e. I've written him all of once, in the Silmarillion crossover. I like to think this bit is where I nailed him:

"If you just wanted 'em recovered then you should've tapped Cohen the bloody Barbarian, all right? Only you'd've had a hell of a time getting them out of his hands once he'd taken the crown from Morgoth. Your Manwë called for a policeman, and a policeman he got! There's rules about this kind of thing." He stuck the burning thing back in his teeth. "Don't invite me to your party if you don't want me to dance, lads."

f. If I ever do write him again, it'll probably be his Letter to his Descendants. I have a few other members of the Vimes of Numenor household in my head and I'm dead certain that every single one of them is made to sit down and read the same letter that he wrote to all of those who'd follow after him in this mad excuse for a world.

[lone-gunfreak.livejournal.com]

Egon Spengler.

[camwyn]

a. Egon was actually pretty nearly my Ghostbusters character at Milliways. Batya suggested that I try either him or Ray at the Bar as someone easier to play and have people interact with than Detritus. I wound up choosing Ray instead because he was more sociable- but Egon has a nicely terrifying combination of brain and carefully concealed dry humour that made him worth writing.

b. He's got a horrifyingly effective deadpan that lets him get away with more than the other Ghostbusters put together if he ever really tries.

c. He really doesn't suffer fools gladly. I don't know how good his tolerance for other human beings is, but it's probably pretty low, and that's sort of self-reinforcing. I don't see him being willing to interact with other humans much unless he already knows them well, because they cheese him off, and since he avoids socializing anyway he gets more and more out of touch. It's not a good idea.

d. I owe a significant portion of my sense of humour to Ghostbusters, particularly the chunk of it that involves treating the impossible or outrageous as if it were perfectly everyday and normal, so I just combine that with pulling skience! out of my ass and hey, lookit that, it's Egon.

e. Gnh. I'm not sure exactly when I hit him best, unfortunately. I think possibly when he pulled the Jedi mind trick on the inspectors at Heathrow in Who Ya Gonna Owl!, which I do intend to finish someday, if I can just get back into the mindset...

f. See e.

[midnightlurker.livejournal.com]

Ecto.

[camwyn]

a. She's a talking intelligent car! What's not to like? ... seriously, I watched Knight Rider and Transformers as a kid, and I wound up really fond of the idea of a sentient vehicle. Ray is the only character I play or write on a regular basis who has anything approaching a Signature Vehicle, so Ecto got the prize.

b. She's terribly, terribly earnest. About everything. She throws a lot of herself into whatever she's doing, whether it's learning about the world or helping Daddy or investing her allowance or running SETI@home or laying the groundwork for research or whatever.

c. She's very impatient. Ecto has said several times that as much as she loves Daddy and her uncles, they 'think at the speed of meat'. Her processors run at faster speeds than the human brain does, so she's in the unenviable position of having a machine's lifespan- which is 'as long as there are working parts and fuel'- in a world full of biologicals. It makes her really itch sometimes, because she's mentally moving faster than everyone, but she dearly loves her squishy family, so instead of doing something regrettable she tries to accomplish all of her goals at once in the hopes that this will keep her occupied instead of fretting over them catching up to her.

d. Ecto's not hard to write, although she is a little unique. I'm trying to use Ecto's stuff as an exploration of an AI's mental structure. Thinking at the speed of electronics affects how she behaves. So does the fact that she doesn't have a subconscious- low priority threads of thought, yes, but not a subconscious. She doesn't sleep; that affects her, too. She's an undesigned AI, an accident, so virtually everything about her behavior is based on decisions she's made based on what she's been taught, rather than what she's been programmed to do. Unlike the Transformers, who're basically big metal humans with Polymorph Self (sorry, but it's true- Shockwave's one of the few with an even remotely alien psychology), I have to take all of that into account with her. It's still relatively simple, though. It just has to get lined up first.

e. Ecto's voice develops over time because she had the mentality of about a five year old human at first, and she's been cognitively developing at an accelerated rate ever since. This, for her early voice; this, for later.

f. Oh yes. She's going to be making a big ol' real estate purchase this year for plot purposes, actually...