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Dec. 6th, 2012 09:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynIn response to innerbrat's response to this post:
THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND WHILE WRITING ELLEN
First – She has lived her entire life with extremely limited resources. Vault 101 was a closed environment, at least as far as she knew, so possessions and food were limited to what they had on hand and what could be grown in a tightly controlled setting. (I can only stretch my suspension of disbelief so far when it comes to what we see in the game and have millicanoned the existence of a hydroponic farm, some protein extruders, and a warehouse room for the Vault.) On the surface… well, it's the post-nuclear DC area, where very little grows and everything is either scavenged or rebuilt from parts. Her whole life has been governed by 'use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without'. There's never been a time when she hasn't had to be concerned about how much she was using or how well she was taking care of her things. This is why she's always quietly planning ahead with anything she does- in case something breaks, in case she runs out of something, in case something goes bad, what have you. You have to have two or three plans in place to accommodate the possibility that your resources will run out in some way, regardless of a given situation.
Second – The first nineteen years of her life were spent in a space where she was never more than twenty or thirty feet away from a wall and never more than thirty feet from a ceiling. She is profoundly uncomfortable in large, open spaces. She won't look at the sky if she can help it, and even now after all this time on the surface, looking at the sky for too long will almost certainly induce a panic attack, because OH GOD WHERE IS THE CEILING. She's found that wearing power armor and a full-face helmet reduces this a great deal, which is part of why she wears it so much- being ensconced in that much metal is like carrying the Vault around with you. It's embarrassing to admit, which is why she's never mentioned it to anyone in her world, but there it is. (It's worth noting that when she went to Bryan Mills' world, she was actually perfectly comfortable on the airplane flight from California to Washington, DC. Being crammed into a small metal container full of other people and highly standardized equipment was like being at home, and the windows were small enough- and thick enough- not to bother her. Besides, the view out the window was so divorced from her experience that she had no context to process it; she treated it as an oddly mobile, somewhat overly large comic book panel.)
Third – She tends to believe people. In the Vault, most people were honest with her about most things other than 'the Vault closed two hundred years ago and hasn't been open since'. Dislike may have been cloaked in manners, but since everybody had the same set of manners it was basically a code that she understood and that they knew she understood- so it wasn't much different from them being straightforward about it. Those who weren't were generally Butch and his Tunnel Snake buddies, and their lies/trickery were usually pretty obvious or were swiftly exposed when they took to laughing at her for believing the latest one. She's aware that most people are more subtle than that, but her mental framework still defaults to 'if someone tells you something, unless they are really, really obvious about it being fake, you can believe them'. This has given her more than a few problems, but everyone has some kind of flaw or failing, so yeah.
Fourth – The Vault manners. This is something that colors all her interactions with people and I have to keep it in my head when I write her. In a closed system like Vault 101 people have to develop a system of social interactions capable of defusing nasty situations when they arise, or preventing them from arising in the first place. It's not as if you can get away from the situation, after all. Rather than go all Lord of the Flies they voluntarily adopted a code of behavior meant to put rubber bumpers on all the pointy corners of life, and they elaborated on that code for close to two hundred years. Most of it was geared towards avoiding saying or doing things that could contribute to people getting angry enough to get violent, and a lot of it involved ways of gracefully disengaging from a situation so that both parties could save face and smooth over their argument whether or not it was ever actually resolved. It also involved a lot of personal avoidance- in a closed community with little geographic space it's extremely bad manners to pursue someone's company if they're angry with you or otherwise don't want to see you, because privacy is so scarce to begin with. Ellen sees nothing wrong with backing off and not talking to somebody for close to a month after a massive argument, because to her that says 'I may have been angry at you and you may be angry at me, but I respect your right to privacy and space until we circulate into each other's presence again, at which time we'll both act as if nothing caused a problem in the first place, all for the sake of social harmony'. People who insist on pursuing arguments long past where she would usually disengage make her intensely uncomfortable even after the arguments are over. There's a reason she still resents Nicholas Angel all this time after the fact- aside from his thing about Canada, he kept trying to argue with her despite what she thought were perfectly clear 'we should stop talking and part ways' signals. He's the only person at Milliways who's ever gotten her angry enough to start shouting. That's actively disgraceful.
Fifth – The morals. Ellen was raised with a pretty strong sense of right and wrong, despite every adult in her life either actively or passively lying to her in one form or another for nineteen years. Her father was already introducing her to the Bible when she was a year old, and teaching her the importance of compassion and of standing up for herself and others throughout her childhood. I'm not sure how he got through the parts about honesty with a straight face, but that was in there too. When Reverend Avellone asked for a successor candidate and got her, he spent the next three years including morality, understanding, and human decency in her job training, so as to make sure the Vault would have a proper spiritual leader once he retired. All of that left a mark, obviously, and has to be kept in mind when I'm writing or playing her. And, yes, I know that she's killed an awful lot of people for someone who's had a moral-intensive upbringing. Nearly all of them were a matter of self-defense. Non-lethal response to someone who attempts to murder passers-by at random isn't really possible in her world, or even viable in the Capital Wasteland. That goes back to Thing #1, the limited resources –if someone attempts to murder you, and you incapacitate them, you then have to punish them in some way. Imprisoning them means taking resources away from people who have not attempted to murder anybody in order to feed the guilty parties while they are imprisoned, and hurts more people than before. Forcing them into physical labor at least gets some value out of them in exchange for the resources, but unless it's part of a recognized social contract and has a definite time limit on it, that's slavery. Letting them go free with a stern talking to isn't an option. Exacting physical violence upon their person and then letting them go just turns another would-be murderer loose on the Wasteland. So it's still killing, but… it's not the most immoral option. Believe me, she's as bothered by it as I am, and I keep that in mind when I play her too.
innerbrat's response to this post:THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND WHILE WRITING ELLEN
First – She has lived her entire life with extremely limited resources. Vault 101 was a closed environment, at least as far as she knew, so possessions and food were limited to what they had on hand and what could be grown in a tightly controlled setting. (I can only stretch my suspension of disbelief so far when it comes to what we see in the game and have millicanoned the existence of a hydroponic farm, some protein extruders, and a warehouse room for the Vault.) On the surface… well, it's the post-nuclear DC area, where very little grows and everything is either scavenged or rebuilt from parts. Her whole life has been governed by 'use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without'. There's never been a time when she hasn't had to be concerned about how much she was using or how well she was taking care of her things. This is why she's always quietly planning ahead with anything she does- in case something breaks, in case she runs out of something, in case something goes bad, what have you. You have to have two or three plans in place to accommodate the possibility that your resources will run out in some way, regardless of a given situation.
Second – The first nineteen years of her life were spent in a space where she was never more than twenty or thirty feet away from a wall and never more than thirty feet from a ceiling. She is profoundly uncomfortable in large, open spaces. She won't look at the sky if she can help it, and even now after all this time on the surface, looking at the sky for too long will almost certainly induce a panic attack, because OH GOD WHERE IS THE CEILING. She's found that wearing power armor and a full-face helmet reduces this a great deal, which is part of why she wears it so much- being ensconced in that much metal is like carrying the Vault around with you. It's embarrassing to admit, which is why she's never mentioned it to anyone in her world, but there it is. (It's worth noting that when she went to Bryan Mills' world, she was actually perfectly comfortable on the airplane flight from California to Washington, DC. Being crammed into a small metal container full of other people and highly standardized equipment was like being at home, and the windows were small enough- and thick enough- not to bother her. Besides, the view out the window was so divorced from her experience that she had no context to process it; she treated it as an oddly mobile, somewhat overly large comic book panel.)
Third – She tends to believe people. In the Vault, most people were honest with her about most things other than 'the Vault closed two hundred years ago and hasn't been open since'. Dislike may have been cloaked in manners, but since everybody had the same set of manners it was basically a code that she understood and that they knew she understood- so it wasn't much different from them being straightforward about it. Those who weren't were generally Butch and his Tunnel Snake buddies, and their lies/trickery were usually pretty obvious or were swiftly exposed when they took to laughing at her for believing the latest one. She's aware that most people are more subtle than that, but her mental framework still defaults to 'if someone tells you something, unless they are really, really obvious about it being fake, you can believe them'. This has given her more than a few problems, but everyone has some kind of flaw or failing, so yeah.
Fourth – The Vault manners. This is something that colors all her interactions with people and I have to keep it in my head when I write her. In a closed system like Vault 101 people have to develop a system of social interactions capable of defusing nasty situations when they arise, or preventing them from arising in the first place. It's not as if you can get away from the situation, after all. Rather than go all Lord of the Flies they voluntarily adopted a code of behavior meant to put rubber bumpers on all the pointy corners of life, and they elaborated on that code for close to two hundred years. Most of it was geared towards avoiding saying or doing things that could contribute to people getting angry enough to get violent, and a lot of it involved ways of gracefully disengaging from a situation so that both parties could save face and smooth over their argument whether or not it was ever actually resolved. It also involved a lot of personal avoidance- in a closed community with little geographic space it's extremely bad manners to pursue someone's company if they're angry with you or otherwise don't want to see you, because privacy is so scarce to begin with. Ellen sees nothing wrong with backing off and not talking to somebody for close to a month after a massive argument, because to her that says 'I may have been angry at you and you may be angry at me, but I respect your right to privacy and space until we circulate into each other's presence again, at which time we'll both act as if nothing caused a problem in the first place, all for the sake of social harmony'. People who insist on pursuing arguments long past where she would usually disengage make her intensely uncomfortable even after the arguments are over. There's a reason she still resents Nicholas Angel all this time after the fact- aside from his thing about Canada, he kept trying to argue with her despite what she thought were perfectly clear 'we should stop talking and part ways' signals. He's the only person at Milliways who's ever gotten her angry enough to start shouting. That's actively disgraceful.
Fifth – The morals. Ellen was raised with a pretty strong sense of right and wrong, despite every adult in her life either actively or passively lying to her in one form or another for nineteen years. Her father was already introducing her to the Bible when she was a year old, and teaching her the importance of compassion and of standing up for herself and others throughout her childhood. I'm not sure how he got through the parts about honesty with a straight face, but that was in there too. When Reverend Avellone asked for a successor candidate and got her, he spent the next three years including morality, understanding, and human decency in her job training, so as to make sure the Vault would have a proper spiritual leader once he retired. All of that left a mark, obviously, and has to be kept in mind when I'm writing or playing her. And, yes, I know that she's killed an awful lot of people for someone who's had a moral-intensive upbringing. Nearly all of them were a matter of self-defense. Non-lethal response to someone who attempts to murder passers-by at random isn't really possible in her world, or even viable in the Capital Wasteland. That goes back to Thing #1, the limited resources –if someone attempts to murder you, and you incapacitate them, you then have to punish them in some way. Imprisoning them means taking resources away from people who have not attempted to murder anybody in order to feed the guilty parties while they are imprisoned, and hurts more people than before. Forcing them into physical labor at least gets some value out of them in exchange for the resources, but unless it's part of a recognized social contract and has a definite time limit on it, that's slavery. Letting them go free with a stern talking to isn't an option. Exacting physical violence upon their person and then letting them go just turns another would-be murderer loose on the Wasteland. So it's still killing, but… it's not the most immoral option. Believe me, she's as bothered by it as I am, and I keep that in mind when I play her too.
