Application
Jan. 14th, 2018 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chromeplatedUser Name/Nick: Naomi
User DW: ehhh n/a
E-mail: asyndeta@gmail.com
Other Characters: Eggsy Unwin; Credence Barebone
Character Name: Phasma
Series: Star Wars universe
Age: Never specified but around mid-30s
From When?: After her fight with Finn, she is knocked into a massive fire consuming the Supremacy.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Phasma is the worst; longer explanation to follow. However, in all seriousness, she's never really been in a situation where she hasn't felt like she's been fighting for her life in some context or another; a warden could help her realise that there might be more to life than just survival.
Arrival: Phasma will appear without an invitation or any prior knowledge.
Abilities/Powers: Nothing supernatural, however, Phasma has been a warrior since her childhood and is highly skilled with a range of arms. She's also talented at improvising weapons and tools, having grown up in an environment where that was very necessary. Her training in the First Order has included strategy, various languages, and working with technology - including some hacking.
Personality:
Captain Phasma is presented as a taciturn and loyal stormtrooper commander, obeying orders regardless of what they are: in her very first appearance in Episode VII, she orders the massacre of civilians and burns their village on Kylo Ren's command, despite it being a wanton and unnecessary act of violence. She chastises FN-2187 (later Finn) for his behaviour after he fails to participate and is clearly affected by the death of a fellow trooper: she expresses a belief that loyalty among soldiers should be to the organisation as a whole and not to any particular individual. Yet despite this seemingly unconditional allegiance to the First Order, she makes no real attempt to resist when Finn, Han Solo and Chewbacca threaten her into lowering the shields on Starkiller Base. This act ultimately cost the First Order its superweapon, and the lives of an unknowable number of her comrades - yet she was narrowly able to survive, which would have been much less likely had she refused to give into Finn's demands. She went on to frame and execute a lieutenant for lowering the shields, after discovering he knew she was responsible. (In the process, she manipulated a colony of settlers to start a battle with the native dominant species that they were bound to lose, just to create a distraction, because if you're going to be terrible you might as well go all out.)
Phasma's only true loyalty is to herself. Since her childhood, she's followed the same pattern: take whatever option gives the greatest chance of survival, by whatever means necessary, and leave no witnesses. The people around her only stay alive for as long as is convenient to her. She engineered the massacre of her own family - save her older brother Keldo, who she crippled - to forge an alliance with a larger encroaching tribe, the Scyre. While Keldo was forming an uneasy alliance with a neighbouring tribe, Brendol Hux crash-landed on their planet; seeing a chance to escape her marginal and doomed life there, Phasma betrayed her clan and defied Keldo's orders. She later killed him and participated in the massacre of the Scyre people, only sparing the life of a young girl because Hux said she would be useful. (The girl was later killed in stormtrooper training, a 'weapons malfunction' likely engineered by Phasma.) Having joined the First Order, she conspired with Armitage Hux to kill his father. It's likely that she only let the younger Hux live because he had yet to outlast his usefulness to her.
It's hard to know what her motivations are. Although she held a position of seniority and influence in the First Order, she doesn't seem particularly interested in power except for its fringe benefits: it gives her more security, limits the number of people she has to take orders from, and makes it easier for her to cover her tracks. While she relishes acting as a leader, she considers herself a warrior, and worked on the Finalizer to make the same of stormtrooper cadets. She's held up as a paragon among them, and their loyalty to her is so immense that - for example - when ordered to keep their posts on the rapidly disintegrating Starkiller Base, they do so without question. However, she has no affection toward them, or pride in their accomplishments. Cardinal, who trained younger cadets, noted that he memorized their troop numbers so he could track their progress and know who to single out for praise and advancement; Phasma also memorized their numbers, but only so she knew who might need to be eliminated.
While this does seem to add up to 'irredeemable sociopath', to some extent Phasma is a product of her environment. She grew up in incredibly harsh conditions, in a tiny inhospitable corner of a planet ravaged by radiation, and from her childhood she was forced to fight to defend the tiny but coveted patch of territory her family controlled. By choosing to engineer the deaths of her parents' generation (keeping in mind they would have died before long anyway - 'old' on Parnassos was 35 or more), she prevented a final blow that would have killed all of them. By injuring her brother, who would never have agreed to her plan, she negated him as a threat to the incoming tribe and herself while probably saving his life. It was a successful gambit that she adopted again and again in various forms, shedding those she may have once genuinely loved in order to remain safe. As she grew older and amassed stronger followers, the stakes rose. It's such ingrained behaviour that it's probably the only way she knows how to feel secure.
She wept for her tribe and the family she abandoned. There is a remaining trace of humanity in her, however deeply she's had to hide it in order to flourish in the First Order. Without wanting to psychoanalyse too deeply, there's something in the fact that she started wearing a mask in her second tribe and has been wearing some variation on a mask ever since - in the First Order, nobody alive has (to her knowledge) ever seen her face. While attributing that to shame is probably a step too far, she's come to identify with the masks she wears more readily than she does with her own face, and is vastly more comfortable in them than she is in her own skin.
Barge Reactions:
Spaceships are nothing new to Phasma, though she'll be disgusted by the lack of hierarchy and discipline. She also has some observed experience of the Force, so supernatural powers won't come as a huge surprise (the variety of them might). Being relatively well-travelled, she'll adjust to Everything Else fairly easily, or at least pretend to. Affecting bewilderment is just a sign of weakness, after all.
Initially she'll be reeling from her defeat at Finn's hands, and more than a little frustrated, but then she'll start networking in the pursuit of a way forward - off the ship, or at least onto the bridge.
Path to Redemption: Getting through to Phasma will take a long, long time. It's been years since she's had anyone she might have thought of as a friend, even in passing. She will not respect a warden's authority or any attempts to befriend her. Physical prowess and personal discipline (preferably from someone who is not 'cheating' with superpowers) will at least get her attention, though that'll cause its own frictions as well. Someone who just refuses to rise to her aggression and just decides they're friends might eventually have some success as well.
The main lesson Phasma has to learn - alongside the more obvious stuff like 'maybe quit killing civilians' and 'murdering your family was a dick move' is that it's okay to just....stop. The constant cycle of ascending, then turning back to kill everyone who saw how she did it, can't and doesn't have to go on forever. There are more sustainable ways to find security for herself, and better communities of people to find it with, if she can learn to accept they won't stab her in the back if she doesn't get to them first.
History:On Wookiepedia
Sample Journal Entry:
[This post, like all Phasma's updates, is audio only.]
I can see the utility of these...floods.
The effect is remarkably subtle in its application, albeit clumsy in its effects. Arbitrary. If the 'Admiral' had any grasp whatsoever on the nature of the environment in which he operates his vessel, he might face a far easier task in shaping the weaker minds among his prisoner populace. A sustained immersion in some...imagined, 'idealised' existence...eventually a person will forget they had any other life.
There's no reason why this rehabilitation needs to come about through choice, so long as it persists.
Sample RP:
Phasma has faced all kinds of indignities, in her life. Most from the more distant reaches of her past, certainly - before the First Order, when Brendol Hux lifted her above the mass of faceless numbers, hopelessly gambling the desire to be so much as noticed by their commanders against the need to be obedient to orders. She has been held captive, and peered down the barrel of a blaster, and forced to fight to the death for the entertainment of madmen.
Merely waking on a strange ship, without her weapons, is a frustration but not insurmountable. That she has awoken in a (reduced) replica of her own suite on the Supremacy is peculiar but not beyond the realms of possibility.
Some exploration suggests some kind of pleasure craft, albeit one extremely out of date or intentionally anachronistic. There is a room which appears to contain several crude devices for physical training; another which contains more books than Phasma had presumed to be left in the galaxy, outside certain private collections, perhaps. A glasshouse on deck, containing a variety of flora she doesn't recognise, not that she would ever claim to be versed in botany beyond the strictly functional. A needlessly ornate mess hall. There are some doors she cannot pass through - to be expected - but no service droids.
The shield around the ship, protecting its open deck from the vacuum of space, is not even remotely palpable. Not so much as a shimmer of refracted light. Given the primitive nature of the rest of the ship, it is...impressive.
She goes back below decks. She's been disarmed too long. The training room offers up a long steel bar, that - when freed of the weights at both ends - is comfortingly similar to her own staff. Another weight, this one smaller and with its own looped handle, might have some function at a shorter range, and she straps it to her belt.
Pleasure craft or not, she is here entirely against her will and in unknown circumstances, and it's past time she found the persons who'll tell her why.
Special Notes: I'd like her to come on board with her armor and broke-ass helmet, although I appreciate that she'll probably get to keep it for like...five minutes.
User DW: ehhh n/a
E-mail: asyndeta@gmail.com
Other Characters: Eggsy Unwin; Credence Barebone
Character Name: Phasma
Series: Star Wars universe
Age: Never specified but around mid-30s
From When?: After her fight with Finn, she is knocked into a massive fire consuming the Supremacy.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Phasma is the worst; longer explanation to follow. However, in all seriousness, she's never really been in a situation where she hasn't felt like she's been fighting for her life in some context or another; a warden could help her realise that there might be more to life than just survival.
Arrival: Phasma will appear without an invitation or any prior knowledge.
Abilities/Powers: Nothing supernatural, however, Phasma has been a warrior since her childhood and is highly skilled with a range of arms. She's also talented at improvising weapons and tools, having grown up in an environment where that was very necessary. Her training in the First Order has included strategy, various languages, and working with technology - including some hacking.
Personality:
Captain Phasma is presented as a taciturn and loyal stormtrooper commander, obeying orders regardless of what they are: in her very first appearance in Episode VII, she orders the massacre of civilians and burns their village on Kylo Ren's command, despite it being a wanton and unnecessary act of violence. She chastises FN-2187 (later Finn) for his behaviour after he fails to participate and is clearly affected by the death of a fellow trooper: she expresses a belief that loyalty among soldiers should be to the organisation as a whole and not to any particular individual. Yet despite this seemingly unconditional allegiance to the First Order, she makes no real attempt to resist when Finn, Han Solo and Chewbacca threaten her into lowering the shields on Starkiller Base. This act ultimately cost the First Order its superweapon, and the lives of an unknowable number of her comrades - yet she was narrowly able to survive, which would have been much less likely had she refused to give into Finn's demands. She went on to frame and execute a lieutenant for lowering the shields, after discovering he knew she was responsible. (In the process, she manipulated a colony of settlers to start a battle with the native dominant species that they were bound to lose, just to create a distraction, because if you're going to be terrible you might as well go all out.)
Phasma's only true loyalty is to herself. Since her childhood, she's followed the same pattern: take whatever option gives the greatest chance of survival, by whatever means necessary, and leave no witnesses. The people around her only stay alive for as long as is convenient to her. She engineered the massacre of her own family - save her older brother Keldo, who she crippled - to forge an alliance with a larger encroaching tribe, the Scyre. While Keldo was forming an uneasy alliance with a neighbouring tribe, Brendol Hux crash-landed on their planet; seeing a chance to escape her marginal and doomed life there, Phasma betrayed her clan and defied Keldo's orders. She later killed him and participated in the massacre of the Scyre people, only sparing the life of a young girl because Hux said she would be useful. (The girl was later killed in stormtrooper training, a 'weapons malfunction' likely engineered by Phasma.) Having joined the First Order, she conspired with Armitage Hux to kill his father. It's likely that she only let the younger Hux live because he had yet to outlast his usefulness to her.
It's hard to know what her motivations are. Although she held a position of seniority and influence in the First Order, she doesn't seem particularly interested in power except for its fringe benefits: it gives her more security, limits the number of people she has to take orders from, and makes it easier for her to cover her tracks. While she relishes acting as a leader, she considers herself a warrior, and worked on the Finalizer to make the same of stormtrooper cadets. She's held up as a paragon among them, and their loyalty to her is so immense that - for example - when ordered to keep their posts on the rapidly disintegrating Starkiller Base, they do so without question. However, she has no affection toward them, or pride in their accomplishments. Cardinal, who trained younger cadets, noted that he memorized their troop numbers so he could track their progress and know who to single out for praise and advancement; Phasma also memorized their numbers, but only so she knew who might need to be eliminated.
While this does seem to add up to 'irredeemable sociopath', to some extent Phasma is a product of her environment. She grew up in incredibly harsh conditions, in a tiny inhospitable corner of a planet ravaged by radiation, and from her childhood she was forced to fight to defend the tiny but coveted patch of territory her family controlled. By choosing to engineer the deaths of her parents' generation (keeping in mind they would have died before long anyway - 'old' on Parnassos was 35 or more), she prevented a final blow that would have killed all of them. By injuring her brother, who would never have agreed to her plan, she negated him as a threat to the incoming tribe and herself while probably saving his life. It was a successful gambit that she adopted again and again in various forms, shedding those she may have once genuinely loved in order to remain safe. As she grew older and amassed stronger followers, the stakes rose. It's such ingrained behaviour that it's probably the only way she knows how to feel secure.
She wept for her tribe and the family she abandoned. There is a remaining trace of humanity in her, however deeply she's had to hide it in order to flourish in the First Order. Without wanting to psychoanalyse too deeply, there's something in the fact that she started wearing a mask in her second tribe and has been wearing some variation on a mask ever since - in the First Order, nobody alive has (to her knowledge) ever seen her face. While attributing that to shame is probably a step too far, she's come to identify with the masks she wears more readily than she does with her own face, and is vastly more comfortable in them than she is in her own skin.
Barge Reactions:
Spaceships are nothing new to Phasma, though she'll be disgusted by the lack of hierarchy and discipline. She also has some observed experience of the Force, so supernatural powers won't come as a huge surprise (the variety of them might). Being relatively well-travelled, she'll adjust to Everything Else fairly easily, or at least pretend to. Affecting bewilderment is just a sign of weakness, after all.
Initially she'll be reeling from her defeat at Finn's hands, and more than a little frustrated, but then she'll start networking in the pursuit of a way forward - off the ship, or at least onto the bridge.
Path to Redemption: Getting through to Phasma will take a long, long time. It's been years since she's had anyone she might have thought of as a friend, even in passing. She will not respect a warden's authority or any attempts to befriend her. Physical prowess and personal discipline (preferably from someone who is not 'cheating' with superpowers) will at least get her attention, though that'll cause its own frictions as well. Someone who just refuses to rise to her aggression and just decides they're friends might eventually have some success as well.
The main lesson Phasma has to learn - alongside the more obvious stuff like 'maybe quit killing civilians' and 'murdering your family was a dick move' is that it's okay to just....stop. The constant cycle of ascending, then turning back to kill everyone who saw how she did it, can't and doesn't have to go on forever. There are more sustainable ways to find security for herself, and better communities of people to find it with, if she can learn to accept they won't stab her in the back if she doesn't get to them first.
History:On Wookiepedia
Sample Journal Entry:
[This post, like all Phasma's updates, is audio only.]
I can see the utility of these...floods.
The effect is remarkably subtle in its application, albeit clumsy in its effects. Arbitrary. If the 'Admiral' had any grasp whatsoever on the nature of the environment in which he operates his vessel, he might face a far easier task in shaping the weaker minds among his prisoner populace. A sustained immersion in some...imagined, 'idealised' existence...eventually a person will forget they had any other life.
There's no reason why this rehabilitation needs to come about through choice, so long as it persists.
Sample RP:
Phasma has faced all kinds of indignities, in her life. Most from the more distant reaches of her past, certainly - before the First Order, when Brendol Hux lifted her above the mass of faceless numbers, hopelessly gambling the desire to be so much as noticed by their commanders against the need to be obedient to orders. She has been held captive, and peered down the barrel of a blaster, and forced to fight to the death for the entertainment of madmen.
Merely waking on a strange ship, without her weapons, is a frustration but not insurmountable. That she has awoken in a (reduced) replica of her own suite on the Supremacy is peculiar but not beyond the realms of possibility.
Some exploration suggests some kind of pleasure craft, albeit one extremely out of date or intentionally anachronistic. There is a room which appears to contain several crude devices for physical training; another which contains more books than Phasma had presumed to be left in the galaxy, outside certain private collections, perhaps. A glasshouse on deck, containing a variety of flora she doesn't recognise, not that she would ever claim to be versed in botany beyond the strictly functional. A needlessly ornate mess hall. There are some doors she cannot pass through - to be expected - but no service droids.
The shield around the ship, protecting its open deck from the vacuum of space, is not even remotely palpable. Not so much as a shimmer of refracted light. Given the primitive nature of the rest of the ship, it is...impressive.
She goes back below decks. She's been disarmed too long. The training room offers up a long steel bar, that - when freed of the weights at both ends - is comfortingly similar to her own staff. Another weight, this one smaller and with its own looped handle, might have some function at a shorter range, and she straps it to her belt.
Pleasure craft or not, she is here entirely against her will and in unknown circumstances, and it's past time she found the persons who'll tell her why.
Special Notes: I'd like her to come on board with her armor and broke-ass helmet, although I appreciate that she'll probably get to keep it for like...five minutes.
