Why not.

[camwyn]

Stolen from a number of people: rp memeage.

A. Has my portrayal of a character(s) changed the way you think of him/her?


B. Pick one of my characters and I'll answer the following questions about him or her.
1. What would your character kill for? What would they die for?
2. What would they refuse to do under any circumstances? Why?
3. What do they dream about?
4. What’s their biggest fear?
5. What single object would they be most hard pressed to part with? Why?
6. What is their fondest memory?
7. What is their worst memory?
8. What or who was were their most significant influence? Expound.
9. What do they believe makes a successful life?
10. What makes them laugh?
11. What are their religious views?
12. What is their greatest strength?
13. Do they have a fatal flaw? If so, what is it?
14. Who is the most important person in their life?
15. If they died, who would miss them most? How would they die?

C. Pick a fandom, any fandom I'm in. I will tell you some stuff that may involve canon ships, fanon ships, fanon trends, and whether or not I think things jumped the shark or went absolutely nuts, or where I myself stopped watching and why!

For reference, my current character list is something like: Ray Stantz¹, Belar², the Vault 101 Dweller³, the BLU Medic⁴, Whistler⁵, Movie!Bumblebee, Movie!Ironhide, Dr. Gordon Freeman⁶, Corporal Adrian Shephard⁷, Hua Mulan, Ambassador Calyn⁸, Vergil the Huragok⁹, Captain Roger Maxson¹⁰. Notable past characters to leap to mind include Sgt. Harry Wells¹¹, Quinn Abercromby¹², Gimli son of Gloin¹³, and... I think I had four hours of sleep last night, I'm coming up a bit blank.


¹Ghostbusters
²The Belgariad
³Fallout 3
⁴Team Fortress 2
⁵Sneakers
⁶Half-Life
⁷Half-Life: Opposing Force
⁸Mass Effect
⁹Halo 3 ODST
¹⁰Fallout universe history
¹¹Dog Soldiers
¹²Reign of Fire
¹³Lord of the Rings

Comments

[ceitfianna]

I love your portrayal of Belar since I enjoyed him in the books but you've filled him out wonderfully. Also I now look at video game characters in a new light.

B: Tell me about Gordon

[minkhollow]

a) WHISTLER. Considering without him, I wouldn't have paid proper attention to the movie, and... well, look where we are now. XD

b) Let's go for the Medic, for this one.

[leeshajoy.livejournal.com]

a) Gordon. You took a character who is, in canon, little more than an empty suit, and made him a person--one whose story was compelling enough to make me purchase his canon even though it doesn't even run natively on my computer. Half-Life has taken over my brain, and I'm loving it.

b) Let's go with Hua Mulan.

[camwyn]

1. Gordon's kinda had to kill for a lot of reasons, the first and foremost being 'not to die'. His general motivation for 'adventuring' or what have you is that he doesn't want to die. Other than that, he'd do it to protect the people around him, or he'd do it as an act of final mercy; he shot one of the Stalkers in the railroad car he and Alyx were in after Nova Prospekt rather than make that person continue to suffer an enslaved, mutilated, dehumanizing existence. He'd've shot the rest of them if the train hadn't crashed.

As far as what he'd die for, he'd do it to put right all the things that Black Mesa put so very, very wrong. Nobody said it aloud either in the original canon or the OOM, but I'm firmly convinced that Gordon knew on some level that there would be no return ticket from the Xen borderworld once he'd killed whatever was holding the portals open. He'd do the same again to put down the Combine threat to Earth once and for all, because a, it's an extension of 'we made this mess, we'd better clean it up', and b, if it has to be done he's pretty sure there isn't anybody else who's going to do it.

2. Under no circumstances would he surrender to his enemies as part of a bargain. This is not some kind of noble death wish. This is because the central theme of the original Half-Life game, as I see it, was betrayal- it can all be summed up in the instant Gordon sees the first HECU Marine kill the scientist who runs up to him expecting to be saved. That act of betrayal was repeated over and over and over again throughout Black Mesa, and when he got to City 17 he saw it again, writ large, in the person of Wallace Breen. Gordon barely trusts science not to fuck him over at this point, and it was the love of his life since he was a boy. His default assumption is that his enemies can't be trusted, so why should he assume that any bargain they offer is going to be followed through on in the slightest?

3. Oh, he still has lots of nightmares about Black Mesa. THe most common one is the 'green glass dream', where he's walking through the New Mexico desert and realizes he's not walking on sand but on fused green glass, and then looks around and sees that everything around him as far as he can see's been nuked. Otherwise most of his dreams involve all the horrible ways he could've died during the Incident, and to a lesser degree the fates he could've met in City 17, etc. This is because I declared during my first playthrough that all the death-and-reload incidents in my games (and there were lots of them, many involving falling down thirty foot pits and bouncing) would be treated as his post-traumatic nightmares.

4. Losing Alyx, followed closely by losing Barney and now losing his niece Ellie. (She was the baby whose picture he had in his locker at Black Mesa; she survived to adulthood though most of the rest of his family is long since gone.)

5. I'd say the crowbar, but he keeps either losing them or having them destroyed, and he's been separated from the gravity gun a few times too. On the other hand he would be dead as a brick of Spam at a starving wolf convention without the HEV suit, so I'll say that.

6. His fondest memory involves the evening Alyx gave him a shiny new custom-made crowbar and then things took off from there.

Part 2

[camwyn]

7. AHAHAHAHAHAHA.

*cough*

Sorry. Um. Gonna have to go with the moment he realized that his suit was starting to finally run out of power- while he was an ungodly distance underground- without radio contact- in a warren full of breeding and hostile antlions- being chased by the biggest, angriest, most toxic antlion he'd ever seen- with Alyx being maintained in stasis somewhere for only as long as the Vortigaunts could keep her alive. Because he was absolutely, positively sure that his suit was going to die and everything was going to fall apart.

8. Science-wise, it's canon that his heroes were Feynman, Hawking and Einstein, so that's got to have influenced his career and so on. Person-wise, his father deliberately held back from imposing much in the way of expectation or approval on his kids in the intention of having them grow up to be men who already knew how not to be dependent on others. And when it comes to not dying and not giving up, Lance Armstrong. There's been more than a few times when the only thing that's kept Gordon going is repeating the phrase 'pain fades, fear fades, but if I quit it lasts forever', which is derived from a more complicated quote of Lance's.

9. There was a time when Gordon would've said something about a good education and making one's mark on the world of science being the sign of a successful life, but that was before 'a successful life' became 'one that isn't terminated bloodily and with quite a lot of pain courtesy of the alien oppressors of the week and their stinking human quisling'. Ask him again when he makes it to peacetime, assuming he ever does.

10. Very little. I'm sorry, but it's true. Alyx can occasionally get some laughter out of him, but he's had a lot of trouble with that since Black Mesa.

11. He's an atheist. He is not the standard God Sucks For Not Doing X, Therefore I Don't Believe In Him Hollywood atheist, nor is he the Mighty Humanistic And Rationalistic Scientist Who Laughs At Your Silly Superstitions atheist. When he was around seven or eight he thought about religion for a while and finally decided that he didn't really think he needed it, since mostly it seemed to be a way of explaining things that hadn't been explained otherwise. Since he was okay with things being unexplained until they were properly investigated, and he figured science would eventually get around to explaining the stuff that was still up in the air (so to speak), he didn't see a reason to throw a god or gods into the mix. He has nothing against religion and he's fine with people around him believing as long as they don't evangelize at him.

12. The man's stubborn as hell. Frankly, I think he's got the kind of willpower that, in a kinder universe, would result in a Green Lantern ring. He'd've died a long time ago otherwise.

13. Well, he's got plenty of flaws, but I don't know that I'd call any of them fatal. He tends to be mistrustful of people he doesn't actually know. He withholds information if he doesn't think people outright need it- for example, he didn't tell the Question that Alyx's father had died, partly because he didn't want Alyx's grief to be made a thing of public display, partly because he just plain disliked the Question after the way things went in the battle for City 17. He doesn't talk to people he doesn't respect or who make him angry, even if he really ought to. He's not very good at playing to crowds, which is a serious flaw in someone who's been dubbed the equivalent of the messiah. He makes very little effort to put himself in other people's shoes; it never occurred to him that anyone else in the world would be crazy enough to pass themselves off as him, because why would anyone want to be in his situation? Etc.

14. Gonna have to go with Alyx on this one.

15. Again, Alyx, although 'the rest of the human population' would probably come a close second. As for how he'd die I don't know the specifics but the word 'KABOOM' would probably be involved.

[feonixrift.livejournal.com]

a) Constantine in Hellblazer:Hogwarts. Didn't really get *into* him before that, loved his stuff after. Kicking Snape just made so much sense, and the scenes with Moody were unbeatable.

b) Since you don't write Methos, I'll have to go with Constantine.

c) Harry Potter. Good grief, why go through the pain of crossing anything with that?

[camwyn]

1. Science. Or money. Or because somebody annoyed him enough, although usually annoyance results in deliberately fucked-up medical procedures rather than killing. As for what he'd die for, eh, he's been blown up, shot, stabbed, etc. enough to say 'his own carelessness' and be right.

2. Well, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't rape anybody, but other than that...

3. I have some difficulty getting an answer on this one. I'm willing to bet it's just the usual chaotic subconscious garbage of somebody who works hard every day of the week. It probably has more blood than most people's subconscious garbage, that's all.

4. He's not admitting to having a biggest fear, but I think it'd probably be BLU closing down and him not being able to get another mercenary company to hire him, because dear God can you imagine him trying to get a job at any legitimate hospital?

5. Try to take away his medigun for any reason other than an upgrade or maintenance and YOU WILL BE HURT.

6. "Oh, no, isn't it tragic, the Hall of Records for the medical school burned down and took all proof of my chief rival's legitimacy with it. Such a terrible shame!"

7. "... and my own papers were in there too. DAMN IT TO HELL."

8. I don't know who his greatest influence was ICly, because I don't know enough about the history of specifically terrifying medicine (I know my medical history but mostly it's in the sense of 'and then so and so figured out how NOT to do it in an awful way'). OOCly I have to admit that my biggest influence in shaping him as a character was Herbert West. Utter disregard for human dignity? Check. Perfectly willing to join up for a horrible war because it gives him unlimited access to experimental subjects? Check. Deep and abiding personal interest in giving Death the bitchslap? Check.

9. As far as he's concerned a successful life is one where you get to pursue whatever goals you have and have enough of a reputation that nobody tries to stop you.

10. The looks of anguish on other people's faces as they realize they've been outsmarted's a prime candidate in this category.

11. He's technically a Lutheran. Doesn't really bother practicing much, though. And he's not really all that fussed over the afterlife. BLU keeps resurrecting him when he gets killed on the battlefield, what's one more?

12. While he would argue that it's his competence, I would be more inclined to say that he admits to himself when he doesn't know enough about something. He views ignorance as a weakness to be overcome, not something to be covered up, glossed over, or otherwise hidden, and that takes brass.

13. Oh, God, other than the ignorance thing he's arrogant as hell.

14. His pet guinea pig Katyusha. Look, we're talking about a man who sees nothing wrong with putting an annoying teammate's legs back on backwards until they agree to behave themselves in future. You seriously think even his best human friend qualifies?

15. That would be the BLU Heavy, who's currently his best human friend. As for how he'd die, well, RED would have to overrun BLU headquarters to the point of destroying their respawner technolgy, and then there would be fire, because the RED Pyro would probably do him in herself.

[genarti]

B. Hua Mulan.

C. Lord of the Rings.

[bodldops.livejournal.com]

B: Sgt. Harry Wells!

[zwol.livejournal.com]

C) Movie!Transformers.

[camwyn]

I'm working my way through the fifteen questions for other people atm, but I can answer this one relatively easily inna meantime while the rest percolates.

I honestly don't know a damn thing about fanon or the fandom at large for the movie!Formers. I've read maybe three movie fics that were written after the first movie came out, and I've adopted some ideas from them- that they don't have families but 'cohorts' of mechs of similar function who serve the roles of family, work group, scout troop, and military unit all at once; that while they mourn their dead they do so very differently from humans and they place absolutely no relevance on the corpse as anything other than parts to be integrated back into the living, hence the reactions to Jazz's death; that the Primus religion exists on movie!Cybertron, although it isn't practiced by all of the mechs, and that the Prime is generally treated as the high priest of that religion. Oh, and that 'Prime' and 'Lord' are titles passed on from one set of co-rulers to the next, not this dynasty/family crap we see in the second movie; that twins are generally an accident of inception requiring an overcharged spark to be split into two protoforms; that 'brother' is a term in Cybertronian that doesn't translate well into English, usually meaning something more along the lines of the way members of the Marine Corps speak of the whole Corps as being their brothers; and that gender doesn't mean a goddamn thing to them. That one I got from Wayward, the Insecticomics lady- movie!Former gender is entirely mental since reproduction is a function of the Allspark and societal gender roles don't actually mean anything to them. If pressed to name somebody a human would consider female it's very likely that they'd say Ultra Magnus, because a car carrier fulfils the role of 'hauls unsparked and unconscious protoforms around until they're brought online' which is as close as they get to pregnancy. Arcee has a female voice and hologram because when she consulted Earth's networks for some means of presenting herself to the humans, she happened to like Ofra Haza's voice and face.

One day I am going to write a ficlet in which someone tells Mikaela that there are actually seventeen genders of Cybertronian, but English doesn't translate the words properly, so sixteen of them come out as 'he'. And she'll never know if they're messing with her or not.

[cameoflage.livejournal.com]

Your treatment of Gordon Freeman has had a major influence on how I see the character; it's made him much more human than I first perceived him, since he's geeky and reacts like a normal person to being forced to slaughter a path to freedom and then held up as a messiah figure for it. (I encountered the much flailier Camwyn Sucks At Video Games incarnation before the Milliways one, which makes for an interesting perspective as well.)

...actually, my original perception of Gordon really wasn't that different, considering all the "ô_o Okay?" and "this... doesn't look good at all/this is creepy" and "AUGH I'M GONNA DIE" that came out of me on my first playthrough of HL2. But he was more... reserved, probably because he was being played by somebody with all the emotional capacity of a wooden chair.

Also Ellen! More the way her upbringing would have shaped her personality and worldview, rather than the character herself, since, y'know, customizable player character. I'm kind of in love with the worldbuilding you've done for the Falloutverse.

I'll take Ellen for B, 'cause my other two favourite characters of yours are Gordon and the Medic, who've been done already.

Also, didn't you play Carcer Dun once upon a time?

[camwyn]

Hua Mulan

1. She'd kill for the protection and honor of her family, and all things considered she'd die for the same; she's heard enough tales of the military life from her father not to have gone off to the army if that weren't true. People in the army die more often than they come home covered in glory and medals.

2. She'd refuse to trap someone in a life they didn't want to preserve her gender masquerade. There's one version of her legend where the reason she leaves the army after twelve years is because someone offered her his daughter in marriage, and the only way she could get out of it honorably was by telling him that his daughter would not be marrying a general or even a titled man, because General Hua was about to step down and return to his humble village. I don't plan on doing that to her, but I can see that as part of her character- not making someone else desperately unhappy just to keep her masquerade up.

3. She dreams about home, a lot, and about daily life, and she periodically has a really distressing variant on the naked-in-public dream involving strolling through an army camp.

4. See the bit about the naked-in-public dream.

5. The lacquered red medallion she's got on under her clothing, armor, padding, etc. Her father gave it to her when she defeated him in single combat for the right to go to the army.

6. Her fondest memory involves running through one of her family's fields when she was eight, flying a kite with her father and her mother looking on.

7. Her worst memory... Her family raises rabbits for meat. The first time one of them wasn't killed swiftly enough, she found out what it sounds like when a rabbit screams. She was maybe, I don't know, five or six. Traumatizing as all hell.

8. I'm gonna have to go with Dad here. Father Hua was a former soldier and a military reservist who took his earnings and plunder and bought himself a farm and got himself a good wife, and when he had kids he trained all of them in the martial arts despite two out of three being girls. And he made it absolutely clear that the family was the most important thing in life. Mulan wouldn't have gone to war if she didn't think that Dad trying to go in his weakened condition (an old arrow injury that plagued him all of his life, and lungs weakened by another wound) would have shaken the family to pieces. So, yeah.

9. Dignity, honor, tradition, and a strong family. And while she may never have one of her own, given that she's serving on the field of combat, at least she's making sure her little brother will keep the family up, and that counts too.

10. Jugglers. And some of the more raucous stories her village's old grannies used to tell when the men weren't around.

11. There are gods and ancestral spirits and spirits of places to placate and be on the good side of. The dead are reborn in some other form when they die, probably within their descendants or at least family line. One ought to look after the graves and images of the dead, they like it when you do that. Buddhists are a bit silly but have some interesting ideas. There are eight immortals and a number of lesser immortals who've reached their status through the pursuit of the Tao. Barbarians have their own gods, which is fine, just as long as everyone is clear that the Chinese gods are better.

12. She's adaptable as all get-out. Plus, she has a good poker face, which has saved her a number of times when the possibility of her masquerade slipping has come up.

13. I wouldn't say she has a fatal flaw, but she is a racist in a completely casual way. People who aren't Chinese can't help being inferior. That's just how it is. She tries not to say it to their faces, of course, that would be rude and it looks bad to be rude to people who're beneath you, but still.

14. Right now that would be her sergeant, because as much as she's doing all this for her family and misses her mom and dad, when you are a new soldier in the field far from home, your sergeant is GOD. Period, end of sentence.

15. Her parents, and her older sister and younger brother. She'd die with a Xiongnu arrow through one or both lungs.

[camwyn]

Hu boy. It's been ages since I read his canon, I'm afraid, so this is just me going off memory.

1. John has a tiny handful of friends who aren't dead yet, and his niece Gemma. I expect he'd kill for them, but then again he's done a number of fairly bastardy things in his life; he's killed indirectly as punishment (it is not a good idea to try and assault a man who knows an incredibly powerful sorceror whose favorite place in life is the London Underground; you will end up on the wrong end of a train and about a quarter of an inch thick). As for what he'd die for, well, John's not real big on dying, but he once flatlined himself hard to avoid detection/possession by an extremely powerful evil entity and somehow managed to hide deep inside his own mind even though he was technically dead, so there you go.

2. John is sort of all about the things you do under extreme circumstances. However, I'm pretty sure that whatever other awful things might need to be done in order to prevent Earth from being overrun by Hell or Heaven (Heaven being just as full of assholes as Hell), he'd still consider his niece to be hands off, dammit.

3. All kinds of things, I'd imagine, but I don't go into John's subconscious if I can avoid it. It's sticky there, and that's before the nightmares start.

4. John's biggest fear... oh, crumbs, I don't know. It's probably been covered in the comic and I haven't read it yet.

5. .... you know, considering how many of John's things have been destroyed over the years, I'm not sure he's that deeply attached to any of them. He's replaced the coat four or five times at least. Can I say his nicotine habit?

6. Can't say. Haven't read that much canon.

7. Again, probably covered in canon somewhere, but I'mma gonna go with what happened in Newcastle, it's probably up there.

8. Unf. Don't know. His horrible father probably put a lot of a spin on him, though.

9. This is John. Knowing him, he'd say 'Not dying horribly'. And then something about booze.

10. Human existence in general, I'd expect, and things that other people would consider fairly sick.

11. That humanity would be a whole fucking lot better off without the entities behind the religions.

12. That he is a devious, unscrupulous bastard who is generally pretty much always willing to go one step below or to the side of what his opponent thinks he is willing to do.

13. AHAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAA

... sorry, this is John, he's made of fatal flaw.

14. Gonna have to go with Gemma here. John doesn't put as much importance on people as he'd probably like. That tends to make them die.

15. Most of those who know him would probably be of the 'good riddance!' variety, but I expect his niece would probably mourn Uncle John, and I have a feeling that the Phantom Stranger would probably be sorry to see him go. Can't vouch for Tim Hunter just atm as I haven't been reading Books of Magic.

[camwyn]

And as for the Potter thing... well, it's like being in a fantasy universe and having access to either humans or dragons. It may seem awkward and not logistically sensible to do so, but sooner or later you can cross either one with just about anything, so why not put the one stock to another and see what happens? Besides, there is a certain element of morbid curiosity about what happens when people from a marginally more logical/sensible canon (and yes, I include Ghostbusters in that) have to deal with the Potterverse. Just for sheer wtf.

[camwyn]

B. Answered above.

C. I liked the Peter Jackson movies a great deal, even after the initial OH THANK GOD NOT ANOTHER BAKSHI fear wore off. I understand why Arwen had to get trotted out for her appropriation of Glorfindel's part, for all that the book purists scream about that; if she didn't, the entire audience would go 'wait, WHAT?' when Aragorn shot down Eowyn to go marry the chick whose entire visible contribution to the trilogy was 'I knitted you a FLAG!'. I'm also convinced that movie!Gimli was a girl; that little bit from the Appendixes where Gimli explains to Eowyn about dwarf women felt very much like 'you're not the only chick in this picture, sister'. Once the Extended Edition came out I had an easier time accepting movie!Faramir, and I will admit I actually liked him a little better than in the book, because book!Faramir was a wonderful person but having flaws like other people humanized him nicely.

That being said, in general I prefer the books, and I liked the Silmarillion, and I am deeply fond of the entire goddamn History of Middle-Earth even though by now it's roughly the size of the entire island of Guam. I am not fond of the Children of Hurin stuff, though. Oh boo hoo, Turin, you're a grumpy angsty cranky boy who grew up without his father and got arrogant and bloodthirsty and wound up murdering one of your allies and fucking your sister without knowing it, cry me a river. Glaurung should've eaten you both. Master of angst by angst mastered, more like.

[camwyn]

1. Well, he's an ex-soldier, so 'his country' comes up on both lists. Also he'd kill to protect his family and to ensure the fair treatment of generations of future soldiers. People have to die in warfare, that's how it works, but he doesn't want their lives going for nothing. This also applies to the girls at the Academy.

2. The stuff that happened at Gruinard Island? The experimentation that went down there? Yeah, that's his big no.

3. Oh, lots of stuff. When he was on the run he dreamed of home and Annie a lot, and oddly his time in the Gulf War (it was a time of involuntary separation then, too). He gets dreams of his time in ancient Greece sometimes. And of working with Zuko, the kid was his closest and only companion for years. And other things. However, I've actually got a few sample dreams of his written up. http://milkbonesoldier.livejournal.com/tag/dreams about covers it.

4. Flipping his lid and hurting the people around him 'cos he couldn't keep the wolf in line. Followed closely by getting the security wrong on his check-in-every-two-to-three-days info about Gruinard, seeing all that info released, and thereby making himself and his family fair targets for elimination in the chaos that followed.

5. Objects don't matter quite so much to him at this point as they might've done once, but it's down to either his wedding ring or the sword Hephaestos gave him. For the record he doesn't consider holding the ring in a pocket or under his shirt to be parting with it, he's had to do that as part of his disguise.

6. I'm inclined to go with the first time his daughter Philippa fell asleep in his arms after they got her and her mum home from the base hospital.

7. He's read most of the files and watched most of the vids that came out of Gruinard. None of them more than once. They all more or less count.

8. Much as I'd like to cite his parents or something along those lines I'm really going to have to go with Annie. The way I wrote their backstories, so very much of how he turned out as an adult is because of things to do with her- wanting to please her, or reacting to problems she had, etc. If he hadn't had her and Phils, he and Zuko would've had things go very, very differently during the time when he was running around England gathering evidence and whatnot, and I doubt he'd have put nearly so much effort into learning to keep himself under control.

9. Working at something you're good at, supporting the people who depend on you, and having a family that loves you. He's kind of a simple guy that way.

10. Dirty jokes, not-so-dirty jokes, puppies trying to establish who's in charge, goats getting the better of dogs who're too clever by half, some of the things the girls at the Academy think they ought to be wearing, etc., etc....

11. He was born and raised Church of England but never put that much stock in it. After a long string of experiences at the Bar he wound up following Hephaistos, because Heph was, well, there and understandable and worked with him, helped him, etc. He is now in the rather weird position of technically being the champion of the smith-god in modern-day England in the Buffyverse, but he hasn't mentioned this to anyone except his cousin Andrew. (Annie doesn't need the mention, she already knows- and Spoon's so C of E that Harry just does not talk religion in front of him.)

12. I think it's that he's able to sort out what's important and latch himself on to protecting/upholding/living up to it.

13. I know I ought to have something about his personality here but 'violently allergic to silver' is pretty bloody fatal, wouldn't you say?

14. I'm going with Annie at the moment, although Phils and Spoon are close behind, with Phils' kids and the girls at the Academy coming in right after that.

15. See the list at #14, but add the dogs from the farm for candidates for missing him most. As for how he'd die there would probably be some massive threat to the school involved.

[camwyn]

Yeah, I did play Carcer briefly, for a plot. He wasn't a headvoice- he was one of those parts that I just did because someone needed him. I'm told I did pretty well, though.

As for the questions:

1. What would your character kill for? What would they die for?

Ellen, like Gordon and a few of my other pups, would kill in self-defense. When she first got out of Vault 101 she made the mistake of stumbling into Springvale School, which was populated with raiders who like to decorate with body parts. If she'd been a little less terrified- she'd spent all morning fleeing for her life from Security, and then she'd been forced into the big blue room with no ceiling or wals- she might have either tried to reason with them or just wound them and run away, but at that point it was pure survival reflex. And after you've beaten three or four guys unconscious with a baseball bat and shot ten people to death in the space of a single day, well, you're gonna go one of two directions: horrified 'never again' pacifism, or 'I guess I can do that if I have to'. She didn't go pacifist.

As far as what she'd die for, the question hasn't come up yet. But she's still got Reverend Avellone's influence under the skin, from when she was training to be the Vault's next chaplain. If it came down to 'my life for the lives of others', with no other way available, she'd do it.

2. What would they refuse to do under any circumstances? Why?

I'd say 'use a nuke herself', but given that she's only fought one Behemoth to date and she's had backup on that one, I can't guarantee that she wouldn't be forced into using a Fat Man launcher on another. Once she finds out about the Vault Experiment, though, 'cooperate with the people responsible' shoots straight to the top of the list.

3. What do they dream about?

The Vault, mostly, since that was her world for nineteen years. Space, a little, as being an agoraphobe and having to GO OUTSIDE OF EVERYTHING, EVER, with nothing between her and OUTSIDE OF EVERYTHING, EVER but a single piece of clothing kinda leaves an impression. The stuff she reads in comic books shows up in her dreams, too. She dreams more about people she's met/talked to/known than strangers or random faces.

4. What’s their biggest fear?

Finding out that Dad died somewhere along the way while she was in the middle of doing something else.

5. What single object would they be most hard pressed to part with? Why?

Her Pip-Boy. Because she physically cannot get it off her arm. Even the aliens left it in place. (They found it a remarkably easy way of monitoring her physical condition and were going to stick a tracking device in it the next time they took her for examination, but they wound up dead first.)

6. What is their fondest memory?

When she was about six years old, something happened- she doesn't remember what- that made most of the other kids she was playing with start laughing at her and making fun of her. Most of them basically just stopped playing with her after that, and their parents didn't do anything about it that she remembers. Ellen's fondest memory is of her father asking her to stop crying, wash her face and straighten her hair, because Amata had come over and wanted to play with her anyway.

7. What is their worst memory?

OUTSIDE. OF EVERYTHING. EVERYWHERE. EVER.

Seriously, even finding the dismembered, gutted corpses of raider victims, or being attacked by her first OMGWTFGIANTBEAR yao guai, or the Behemoth that she vaguely remembers as having blotted out the sky? They all sort of pale compared to OUTSIDE. OF EVERYTHING. EVER.

A spacewalk is not a nice thing to do to an agoraphobe.

[camwyn]

8. What or who was were their most significant influence? Expound.

yeeeeeah, I'mma have to go with Dad here, followed by Reverend Avellone. Dad raised her, after all, and was her only family since her mother died. Reverend Avellone doesn't exist in the game, but I figured that if someone was being trained to be the Vault's next chaplain, someone had to be the existing chaplain. Reverend Avellone was one of those ministers who would have liked very much to teach the message of the Gospels properly, but was stuck in a situation where if he really did speak truth to power and call the Overseer on all his bullshit, he'd be replaced with a puppet. The most he could do was guide and nudge and influence and set an example, and I like to think that even before Ellen took the GOAT she picked up on a lot of his teachings.

9. What do they believe makes a successful life?

In the Vault she would've said something about contributing to the survival and continuation of the human population, and probably raising a couple of kids to healthy, productive adulthood. Right now I don't know what she thinks qualifies instead but it's probably different at this point.

10. What makes them laugh?

Well, Tyler Marlocke's pretty good at that. I wish I could say the absurdity of her world did, it'd probably be good for her, but she just doesn't laugh that much. Smile, yes, maybe find things funny inwardly, yes, but laughing out loud isn't that common for her. She's an awfully serious person at times, and while she recognizes the existence of irony and sarcasm, most often she considers those to be things that happen to other people. She's more likely to outright laugh if she's dealing with someone else who's already laughing.

11. What are their religious views?

She's a Christian of an ecumenical Protestant variety. I've said that Vault 101 was primarily populated by Episcopalians, Methodists, and Lutherans, and that Vault-Tec orders said that whoever was chaplain had to be able to minister to all three denominations. Over the years, without any influx or significant exodus, the lines between them have been blurred to the point of invisibility. Ellen believes very firmly in God's benevolence and Jesus' coming to show people the Way and to redeem sinners. She also believes that when people do horrible things, they have to bear the consequences of their own actions as far as they're able, and if that's more than they can handle then that's where God comes into it (since one can't redeem all one's own sins). God allowed the Great War to happen because people turned away from Him and insisted on pursuing their own paths of destruction. He allowed the innocent to die because all human actions have human consequences, and if he were to intervene it would have simply left those who started the War thinking that they could get away with even worse because God stopped things from getting bad last time, didn't he? As for survivors, she'd always thought of the Vaults as being rather like Noah's Ark, although Reverend Avellone absolutely refused to teach any kind of parallel between Vault-Tec and Noah. I'm going to have to figure out what she's going to think about that once she learns the truth about the Vault Experiment. In the meantime she's operating on as much compassion as she can muster, day to day, and what Castiel said when she spoke with him about killing, self-defense, defense of others, and repentance tends to be pretty big when she has to fight.

12. What is their greatest strength?

Iiiii'm gonna have to go with adaptability here, because otherwise she'd be dead about six times over by now.

13. Do they have a fatal flaw? If so, what is it?

I don't know that I could call either of them fatal, exactly, but her two biggest flaws are that she accepts an awful lot at face value, and she expects people to make sense. She's getting better about the first, thankfully, but the second is going to be with her for a very long time.

14. Who is the most important person in their life?

Dad. no question.

15. If they died, who would miss them most? How would they die?

Probably Dogmeat. Dad doesn't know where she is. He thinks she's still in Vault 101. As for how, oh, there are just so many ways to die in the Wasteland...