(no subject)

[camwyn]

Stolen from mmexlibris:

Pick a character I write/RP, and I will give you the top five ideas/concepts/other I keep in mind while writing that character that I believe are essential to depicting them accurately.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and include characters who only showed up as secondary characters or NPCs, since I'm feeling masochistic today. Sue me, yesterday's workout included 45 floors of stair climbing and a cumulative total of 90+ pushups (even if I did rest for 2 minutes between each set of 15-to-20). In the case of secondary characters I reserve the right to cut back to three ideas/concepts because I can only do so much for someone who appears for two scenes and then goes away.

THE LIST
My Primaries
Ray Stantz, Harry Wells, Quinn Abercromby (Reign of Fire), Gordon Freeman, Adrian Shephard, Ellen Park, Bumblebee, Ironhide, Whistler (Sneakers), Belar, Vergil the Huragok, Roger Maxson (Fallout), Arcade Gannon (Fallout), Mordin Solus, Hektor of Troy, Father (Equilibrium), the Silver Corporal, Sergeant Preston, Gimli son of Gloin

My Secondaries
Any of the other Ghostbusters, Annie Wells, Star Paladin Cross, Fawkes, Dogmeat, Sideswipe and Sunstreaker, Arcee, Perceptor, Sam Witwicky, Colonel Robert Spindel, Sergeant Preston's dog Prince (yes, I know, the one in canon is King- I wrote Preston for an RP situation taking place years after the original radio series, so he had another dog by then), Jan ten Boom and/or Floyd Mason (Half-Life 2 NPCs), Jah-lila (Firebringer trilogy)

Comments

[innerbrat]

Harry!

[camwyn]

1. Harry Wells has a job to do, goddamnit. In the movie it's "be a good sergeant", which means getting through the bullshit training exercise at the start of the movie but morphs into keeping his boys alive in the middle of the film and eventually changes to 'kill every furry motherfucker left alive before anyone else gets hurt'. RP of him after the movie is over has to include the duty drive, otherwise he's just not the same.

2. He cusses on purpose, not reflexively. Listen to the Eddie Oswald story. Harry might be vulgar as hell in much of his dialog but given how far he can go with the Eddie Oswald speech without cussing, or with strategically placed cussing, it's clear that he uses his profanity on purpose rather than out of careless habit.

3. He is amazingly protective, which is tied somewhat into #1. Threaten, harm, or even just moderately mess with the heads of people he cares for and you are in his black books for the rest of time. Ask Captain Ryan, if you can get hold of a handy necromancer.

4. He is not an aggressive man by nature. Yeah, he can commit mayhem as thoroughly and as often as necessary, but this is not a man who makes claims to being a 'warrior' or who has any particular urge to go out and hurt the enemy before the enemy can hurt him. He wants to do what needs to be done and go home and leave it at that.

5. He knows when he's outclassed. Some characters insist on carrying on with what they're doing to the bitter end, whether they're in over their heads in a fight or too sick to do what they think they should be doing. Harry knows better than to think he can keep command of his squad when he's badly injured, and when the lycanthropy infection sets in he knows he's not going to overcome it by willpower or anything like that. This is not a man who is going to make anyone else die for his ego, and if he is written that way, he is being written wrong.

[innerbrat]

♥ so hard for Sgt. Wells.

[genarti]

Hektor?

[camwyn]

Hektor:

1. I begin with the assumption that Hektor is from the classical world depicted by Mary Renault. Nothing is particularly codified religion-wise in his world, social development and tech levels vary wildly from one region to the next, and while the people of the time are firmly convinced that the gods are real and palpable, a modern reader who looks at the events they describe as divine intervention or magic would probably find half a dozen mundane possible explanations. He is very, very, very much a child of this world.

2. He has a slew of brothers, but most of them are half-brothers; Priam is legendary for his 'fifty sons' because most of them are children of the women of the household. Hektor is noteworthy because he's one of a handful of sons of Priam and Hekabe and therefore the heir to the throne of the city. He sees nothing unusual about this. It's what kings do.

3. He's been raised to pay primary heed to Apollo and Poseidon among the gods. The primary face of the Mother in the world he knows is Cybele, but he's been raised to understand that the Goddess has many names and many faces, and that it is never wise to disrespect the local name or form of the Gods, whatever they might be. People may say he's favored of Apollo but he doesn't dare presume that this entitles him to neglect any other gods.

4. In his youth he used to sneak out of the palace and into the horse pens to watch the animals, even the most dangerous stallions, for hours at a time. He developed an understanding of equine behavior very similar to that of Monty "The Horse Whisperer" Roberts as a result. People with less patience think his knack with horses borders on the supernatural, which is how he gets memorialized by Homer as 'the tamer of horses'.

5. He has no patience for his idiot brother Paris, the youngest of Hekabe's children. It's one thing to lay with the house-women of another king while visiting. That's normal. That's what house-women are for. Menelaos was only king of Sparta by right of marriage, though; Paris essentially declared war on Sparta by choosing to creep into its queen's chambers. He understands how it is when you're traveling but there are things you just don't do. Had it been up to him he would have come to terms with Menelaos and his Hellene horde, even if it meant public punishment for his brother, but a) it wasn't up to him and b) Menelaos and the High King of Mykenai were using the incident as an excuse to attempt conquest of the region and wouldn't have accepted terms anyway.

[ceitfianna]

Adrian?

[camwyn]

Adrian:

1. He's a Marine. I cannot stress this enough. That aspect of his identity is primary to him, ahead of things like 'human' or 'male'. There is no such thing as an ex-Marine even if there is no more United States. The others might be dead, and he knows he'll die eventually, but the Corps lives forever. That's just how it is.

2. He's a country boy at heart and grew up in a very rural environment. Cities and urban areas are really not his thing. He considers the outdoors and the living world more of his place but he goes where he has to because that's how you protect what's yours.

3. Related to #2: he grew up with a gun in his hands, with people who saw hunting and fishing and slaughtering farm animals as being just another aspect of daily life. Death, and taking personal responsibility for it, was always part of life for him. Events from Black Mesa onward did not particularly change that; they just changed the particulars from animals to sapient beings. He has crystallized this internally as the tenet 'I kill shit so folks don't die'. Whether that's hunting dinner or blowing up aliens, it comes down to the same thing.

4. He's intelligent but didn't like school much. The extracts from his journal that appear in the documentation for Half-Life: Opposing Force sound very much like the stuff my classmates wrote in high school when they really didn't want to do a writing assignment or otherwise didn't like a class. He is not happy in an academic setting and any report or other writing he produces will always sound stilted and formal at best.

5. He doesn't like Gordon Freeman. They may work together, and he may have forgiven Gordon for doing what he had to do in order to survive Black Mesa- especially since Adrian hates that his unit was essentially given the order to kill anything that moved, which he views as an illegal order since unarmed civilians were involved- but that does not mean he has to like the man. Forgiveness does not imply or require that friendship follows.

[renshai.livejournal.com]

I'm torn between Gordon Freeman and Mordin Solus. Pick one?

[camwyn]

I'm still getting used to Mordin, so I’m going with Gordon instead.

1. Gordon does not want to be in the position he is in. This is crucial to handling him properly. He'll fight the aliens, lead Resistance people who follow him, etc., but he'll do it because it has to be done, not because he wants to do it or particularly enjoys it. Joy in battle is for other people. He'd like his science back.

2. Gordon is an atheist and has been since he was seven or eight. No particular event prompted this; he just came to the conclusion that he didn't need to invoke an unknown entity or entities to round out his view of the universe. Leaving things unexplained until fully investigated was fine. This is important because it means he operates from the unspoken philosophical premise that help is not coming. If anything is going to happen to save the world, drive off the aliens, liberate humanity, whatever, humanity (and any allies they may be able to acquire) is going to have to do it themselves.


3. Gordon believes in thoroughness. Check your premises, check your hypotheses, check your execution, and afterward, check your consequences. This has led to some psychological issues because he actually sat down and thought through the consequences of forcing the Combine Empire off Earth once and came to the realization that doing so would mean the only way to ensure Earth's safety would be a war across universes, to eradicate the whole of the Combine forever. That's a terrible thing to realize at three in the morning.

4. I do not write a mute Gordon, although some people do. However, I feel that Gordon does not speak to people he does not respect, and he does not speak if he thinks he might come off sounding foolish or embarrassing himself in some way.


5. Gordon has a pretty strong sense of right and wrong, and one of the things he considers highest on his list of 'this is wrong' is the destruction of hope. This is one of the reasons why he keeps going in the face of the Combine and of the Resistance thinking he's some kind of hero. People are willing to fight back and try to seize their lives and their world again because they've seen him in action and have hope. He is not going to destroy that. And any Objectivist who tries to give him the line about 'I will not live my life for the sake of another man' will get snorted at and ignored.

[renshai.livejournal.com]

Frankly, anything is a terrible thing to realize at three in the morning.

[antepathy.livejournal.com]

I have to give props to Ray Stantz.

And if you're feeling frisky, Perceptor.

[camwyn]

Percy first. Ray I'll do later.

1. Percy is a flyer. Not a particularly combat-intensive one, although he's capable of aerial combat, but he's a flyer; an aerial platform allows for so much more data gathering than a land-bound one. In my headcanon of the Bayverse, he scanned a NOAA atmospheric data-gathering P-3 Orion upon arrival to Earth.

2. Percy's voice actor is David Hyde Pierce. Seriously, I do consider this important. I can't write his dialogue unless I can hear that voice in my mind's ear.

3. Percy tends to think out loud when he's working, just in case something he says sparks outside input or correction; he's aware that he may not be right, or that he may be blinded by his angle of pursuit, and if someone else can spot this fact and correct him then that's kind of important.

4. Percy's not a combat monster and he knows it. If he's put into direct combat he does not expect to win against most military bots unless they are exceptionally stupid. His fighting strategy can best be summed up as 'make the fight last as long as possible- don't fight to win, just fight so that the enemy hasn't won yet'. It's amazing how often this has stood him in good stead, as reinforcements tend to arrive if he can last any real length of time.

[sakon76.livejournal.com]

David Hyde Pierce as Percy? O.O Brilliant! I think I must borrow and adopt this as my Bayverse headcanon too.

[hannahrorlove.livejournal.com]

Bumblebee.

[camwyn]

Bumblebee:

1. Bee is immensely protective of the people (metal or squishy) who matter to him. Maybe not so much their property, but it's not his fault squishies build stuff that breaks easily.
2. Bee still blames himself to some degree for not being able to stop the Decepticons from getting past his unit on Cybertron and following the launch of the Allspark into space; if he could have held Lord Megatron at by long enough, somehow, the Cybertronian civil war would never have spread to other worlds.
3. Bumblebee believes it is incredibly important to learn everything he can about the humans his people are living among, and probably spends the most time connected to the human Internet on any given day than any other Autobot. This has led to at least one horrific incident in which he attempted to watch all the porn on the Net to determine why it was important enough for humans to give it that much data storage.
4. After the battle at Tyger Pax in which Megatron tore Bee's arm off and crushed his voice capacitor, Bee determined that he would make anyone who tried to kill him again pay for every angstrom of advantage they got, and downloaded every single program he could find for hand-to-hand combat and self-defense. He has been practicing them all since and is essentially an Autobot ninja without all the 'ooo, creepy shadow warriors of bizarre honor code' stuff that Westerners have tacked onto the ninja image.
5. Even if his vocalizer were repaired Bumblebee would stick with the radio/movie/tv/whatever system for communicating with humans; he feels that if a human has already said what he wants to convey, using a human language, then it's better to use their own words and voices than try to fumble through it himself.

[minkhollow]

I pick Whistler. (And/or the Medic. Because I'm predictable, in both cases.)

[camwyn]

Whistler:

1. Whistler is a little brother. So much about his behavior speaks of somebody who derives pure joy from needling an older sibling.

2. Whistler despises monopolies and large power blocs. Sixty-two counts of phone fraud takes a while to accumulate. I would venture to guess that a lot of that was done during the days of THE PHONE COMPANY and was at least partly Robin Hood-style motivation rather than just technical challenge.

3. Whistler's been blind since a few weeks to a few months after he was born. He does not remember anything about being sighted and has no mental context for processing visual imagery. He'll use phrases like 'I see' to mean 'I understand', but that's because people around him expect it.

4. Whistler's hearing range is significantly wider than an average human's, although it's still within human bounds. It's not a side effect of being blind. He was simply born with better hearing than most and has taken better care of it than most because of how important it is to him.

5. Whistler is extremely stubborn about maintaining his own independence, partly because he likes it that way, and partly because he gets a charge out of pissing off people who pity the poor handicapped blind man. Actually, he just enjoys pissing off people who make assumptions about him, period. It's the little brother thing.

[leeshajoy.livejournal.com]

Because no one's done her yet, Ellen Park.

[camwyn]

Ellen:

1. Ellen loves her father very much. Ellen also harbors enormous resentment towards him for lying to her for nineteen years, despite his having a good reason for it, and for his failure to provide for the possibility that something might not go perfectly with his purifier project. She is doing her best to overcome this, or at least put it aside, but under the surface she is still immensely angry at her father.

2. Ellen considers Reverend Avellone to have been a better father figure than her dad- not more of one, just better- in that he was more honest with her and helped her to understand more about people, both positive and negative. She prays for the souls of the dead she leaves in her wake, whether they're human or mutant or ghoul some poor horror like a centaur; actually she considers centaurs mercy kills.

3. There are very few people in the world that Ellen has ever actually wanted to kill. The unrepentant cannibals of Andale and Dr. Stanislaus Braun were among them. It takes a lot to get her to the point where she's genuinely angry at a person, and even more to get her from anger to genuinely wanting them to die. I think after Stanislaus Braun the only other one was Col. Autumn. Possibly Eulogy Jones, although Jones talked himself into that position- she probably would have let him go if he hadn't tried to smarm his way out of her grip.

4. Ellen has no concept of certain things other people take for granted. She has no concept of a drinking age, does not understand the idea of pets (she considers Dogmeat to be an inconveniently derpy companion who gets overenthusiastic at times), does not really grasp portable computers, two-way radios, or telephones, isn't entirely clear on why people wear skirts, and is utterly boggled by small music players and rock and roll.

5. Ellen is very, very, very bad at lying, and while she recognizes irony and sarcasm- sometimes- it's generally something that other people do. She's also no good at swearing, and not interested in it; the worst word she's ever used was 'bastards', and that was to describe the aliens who kidnapped her, removed several of her (admittedly vestigial) organs, and installed an extra spleen. She once told Col. Autumn to go to hell but she was under the influence of sodium pentothal at the time.

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

Gimli!

[camwyn]

Gimli:

1. Movieverse Gimli is biologically female. The conversation in The Two Towers between Gimli and Eowyn, in which Gimli lays out the material from the Appendixes about dwarven women, just reeked of "You ain't the only chick in this picture, sister."

2. Gimli was married once, and may even have had a child, but both child and spouse died in an accident while visiting kinfolk long ago.

3. Gimli has no fear of dying, as he believes with perfect faith and without question that when he dies he'll be brought to the house set aside by Mahal for the souls of the Dwarves, in which all of them will learn more craft and skill from the time of their death until the day when Arda itself is unmade, at which point the Dwarves will assist in the forging and crafting of a new one.

4. Regardless of whether we're dealing with a biologically male or female setting, Gimli's friendship with Legolas does not lead to anywhere particularly sexual. Emotionally intimate, deeply personal, yeah, but not physical. The elf is so not Gimli's type. Too skinny, too hairless, and there's just something weird about someone who doesn't have to genuinely sleep. It'd be a different story if the same personality and memories were in a Dwarven body, though.

5. Gimli is something of a perfectionist when it comes to craft and combat, but believes in the perfection of simplicity. Intricacy of craft is very nice but it takes more skill and shows more respect for the material to work with simple, uncomplicated forms. See his speech about the work that might be done in the Glittering Caves of Aglarond.

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

I'd never thought about Movieverse Gimli being female before. Now I love the idea. (I honestly don't remember the scene you refer to, which is sad.) I love the reason he doesn't have any fear of dying, and I completely agree with you on the subject of Legolas/Gimli--the elf just isn't physically the dwarf's type.

[vincentursus.livejournal.com]

Father (Equilibrium) please.

[camwyn]

Father:

1. Prior to the Third World War, Father was a psychological anthropology professor named Andrew Tuttle. It takes in-depth study combined with horrific life experience to sour somebody on humanity that much.

2. Father was not on the Prozium dose, but unlike whatsisface the guy who wound up having the EPIC SLAP FIGHT with Preston, this is not hypocrisy. this is because Father actually trained his emotional responses out of himself and genuinely does not need the stuff.

3. As a matter of fact, unlike many other highly cynical leaders, Father believes every single word he says in his propaganda speeches, writings, etc. He is of the opinion that he just hasn't explained himself clearly enough and that if people only understood they'd agree with him, so he keeps TALKING AND TALKING AND TALKING.

4. But just in case he was wrong, he keeps a letter in his desk at all times, sealed and addressed to whoever finds it after his death. It's one last attempt at explaining what he wanted to achieve for humanity and begging whoever finds it to look after his people before it's too late.

5. He never saw his murder at whatsisface's hands (seriously, I can't remember the guy's name) coming. Not because of an inability to judge reactions or responses, but because he was too damn busy to realize that something was up.

[sakon76.livejournal.com]

Okay, I gotta bite, seeing him on your list. Sam Witwicky? Or failing descriptive inspiration on him on your part, what do you see as making Sideswipe and Sunstreaker tick?

[camwyn]

Sam is a secondary for me because I was writing him as an NPC in the AU plot we were working on at one of my RPs. This is what I kept in mind for him:

1. Sam has a reputation as a result of being 'that kid who hangs out with the Autobots' and 'the human who killed Megatron'. The reputation has gotten him a long way. He has developed a complex about it. He chose Princeton University because he wanted desperately to prove that he was able to live up to their standards because of his own merits rather than having to be 'that kid with the Autobots' in order to accomplish anything. He wasn't thinking as far ahead as 'I want to have a normal life'; he was just thinking 'I have worth on my own, right?'.

2. The scene where he told Bumblebee that he was going to Princeton alone? That was a breakup scene. There is no way that was anything but a breakup scene. It might not have been recognized as one by either of the two principals but Sam and Bee had a level of emotional bond there that rivals any human-human romantic bond, and it hurt Sam immensely to try to sever it in order to prove that he was worth something, anything, without his relationships with the Cybertronians.

3. Off and on, ever since Sam opened the Allspark into Megatron, he's been having dreams that aren't his. Not every night, but often enough that he worries about them. They're images and elements of the memory data that individual Cybertronians' Sparks carried with them when they returned to join with the Allspark upon death. This is not doing his mental health any good, although he's trying to overcome it.

4. Sam hasn't decided on a major yet. He tells his parents it's because he has a couple of things he wants to try, but really it's because he wants to find out just how much he knows from data the Allspark memories left in his brain and how much he actually has to learn. He intends to major in something he actually has to study. Anything else would be weird.

5. He's very much attached to Mikaela. He suspects she's more attached to the 'bots than to him. He's aware that this is paranoid of him but he can't entirely help it. Kid's got insecurity issues.

[purplekitte.livejournal.com]

Jah-lila? (So cool to see a Firebringer character mentioned anywhere.)

[camwyn]

It's been a dog's age since I played her, but I had her for a while at a panfandom where 99% of the characters were humans, so...

1. Jah-lila has no reason to trust humans. She does not have a 'two legs good, four legs bad' ideology, but in canon she's still seriously bitter about her youth in the City of Fire. Playing her in any setting where there are humans requires that the player remember this. This is not a prejudice you get over by means of a few meetings with nice people. This is years of abuse at the hands of Bronze Age humans who don't have access to even so much as Xenophon's writings on how to deal with horses.

2. Jah-lila does not have human psychology. While she's as intelligent as a seriously intelligent human, and while I would bet good money that she could follow the conversation and teaching of any senior shaman a human culture could put forward, she does not look at the world the way a human does and she does not react to stimuli the way humans do. She knows a lot about humans and the things humans know and do, but she's not going to think of them in any kind of human terminology, or react to them the way humans do.

3. Jah-lila knows how to hold her tongue. If there's one overriding theme I saw with her character in the Firebringer trilogy it's that she might very well know something, or know nearly everything, about a given situation, but she only mentions as much of it as she has to. Granted, a lot of this is because Meredith Ann Pierce takes a childlike delight in unreeling plot developments with flourishes and reveals even when the reader's probably already spotted them a mile off, but still. This is not a character who is going to up and tell someone all about herself just because they asked. She barely tells her own daughter anything until the right time. RPG characters in general tend to spill all their beans pretty easily; Jah-lila doesn't do that.