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identityformationsPLAYER INFO
NAME: Tory /letterblade
AGE: 27
TIMEZONE: EST
CONTACT: arkady [dot] lizard [at] gmail [dot] com
I WILL NEED A DREAMWIDTH CODE: No
CHARACTER INFO
NAME: Mark Vorkosigan
CANON: The Vorkosigan Saga
REFERENCE LINKS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Vorkosigan
CHARACTER INFO: Things We Have Learned From Speculative Fiction: Being
A Clone Sucks Donkey Balls: Episode II, Return Of The Clones!
...yeah, in some ways I didn't look far afield for another character.
My first draft of this section clocked in at about 1,700 words, FML. The briefer version...
Revenge-addled terrorist, Galen, comes up with a Cunning Plan to get his revenge and free his planet from annexation all at once: replace his enemy's son, Miles Vorkosigan, with a clone, who would then assassinate him and go on to effect the planet-freeing. The clone he commissions--doesn't get a name of his own until much later--is raised in a lab with growth acceleration and surgical alteration (to match the effects of a bone-damaging teratogen that crippled Miles during gestation.) When he's fourteen, Galen takes him away for four years of intensive training in Being Miles Vorkosigan, often at the wrong end of a cattle prod. Systematic physical and sexual abuse, to the point of a conditioned panic-attack response to sexual situations.
Backstory aside, the clone makes his first appearance in the novel Brothers in Arms, when Galen makes his bid to replace Miles. Epic twin hijinks ensue. Events of note:
- "Miles" meets Miles for the first time, and is angry, proud, and defensive. Miles claims him as his brother, by certain planetary laws, and gives him his name, by family tradition: Mark Pierre Vorkosigan. Tries to talk him into joining him and living his own life. "Miles" brushes him off. Epic trust issues: go!
- During a showdown, Galen has Miles helpless at gunpoint, and in that classic you-must-learn-to-kill stunt, hands the gun to "Miles." Who shoots Galen instead, destroying his entire life's mission and taking his first stem towards forming his own identity.
- Mark and Miles don't get on, and Mark disappears into the underground.
After two years of flailing about, Mark surfaces in Mirror Dance, the core of his story. My best attempt to bullet-point summary...
- Impersonates Miles' alternate identity to use the Dendarii Mercenaries (long story) to free some of his fellow clones (slated for brain transplants.) Fails miserably, Miles shot dead trying to rescue him. (Frozen and revived elsewhere; it's complicated.)
- Tries to make out with one of the clones they rescued, has a seizure, gets locked up for attempted rape. Suicidal guilt-wallowing ensues. Develops compulsive overeating as a stress/depression response, half so he can never be mistaken for Miles again, half for far more complicated reasons.
- Delivered to Miles' home and family, where his parents take him in. All the feelings. All the awkward identity formation. Meets Kareen, future girlfriend (and epic lady in her own right.) Finally becoming Mark Vorkosigan.
- With mom's help, takes off again to look for Miles. Finds him, immediately gets captured by a local Baron who has a major grudge against Miles' alternate identity. (Long story.) Like, years-of-torture major.
- Survives torture by forming a five-way split identity, kills Baron, sells out Baron's holdings to Baron's arch-enemy, and walks off with a fabulous stack of cash and a positive relationship with his (revived) brother.
After a year of psychotherapy and awesome sex with Kareen, Mark pops up again in A Civil Campaign (which is what happens when Bujold, exhausted from shit like Mirror Dance, decides to write a comedy of manners.)
- Working with a mad scientist who has bio-engineered bugs that produce, much like honey, a nutritionally ideal substance that's cheap, efficient, etcetera. Butter bugs. They're ugly, but with some help, Mark manages to make them marketable.
- During a disastrous dinner party, said scientist mentions that Mark and Kareen are sexually active. (A Barrayaran lady Does Not Do Those Things, or her family might insert the gentleman in question into a pot of basil.) Mark narrowly avoids death by basil, and eventually they work things out.
Mark's life: rape, torture, and butter bugs.
Since I have some space left, I'm going to copy this portion of the previous draft, as it's the section where bullet-point summary does the least justice, IMO.
Unlike Galen, the Baron is a pro. He hits Mark on three axes. Force-feeding, subverting his own coping mechanism into a torture. Injecting him with a powerful aphrodisiac, strong enough to override the conditioning, making him an agent in his own rape. And pure physical torture that starts with skinning him alive and goes from there.
But Mark's a pro too. (Check the page-header quote for Too Kinky To Torture on TV Tropes.) In a masterful case of getting better by breaking, Mark splits, sortof. To psych-geek for a moment, he does not split in the classic DID sense. No memory loss, no dissociation. Just four personas, formed in response to the Baron's tortures, but also having their roots in some of Mark's long-standing issues. They take shifts, while Lord Mark, barely twelve weeks old, sleeps deep inside. And Lord Mark himself, I should note, is a persona, referred to on the same level as the other four by the unnamed 'he' who narrates, the overarching consciousness. Lord Mark is merely the most complicated, the most human, the most socially acceptable. But then there's Gorge, the over-eater; Grunt, the sexual hedonist; and Howl, the insatiable masochist. And the unnamed fourth, the Other, who lurks at the edge and makes droll commentary. The Black Gang.
Eventually his captor, frustrated, gives him a private audience, as it were, at which point the Other fully manifests: Killer, the trained assassin, who kicks him to death with his bare feet with both hands tied behind his back.
Mark's therapy, I should add, did not reintegrate that split. The Black Gang remains, sometimes providing running commentary on Mark's life. For one would not reward such loyal troops by eliminating their existence. It's implied that Kareen is rather fond of Grunt.
CONSIDERATIONS: So this is the part of the app where I really have to sit down and think. With the way Bujold characterizes, it can be very difficult to sort out where basic nature ends and event-based psychological developments begin. Mark's complex issues with trust, family, identity, body image, and sex all stem from his memories, as do his various coping mechanisms for the above. Due to how specifically memory-bound things are, there are some psychological quirks which might be listed under skills for other characters, but which I will consider tied to the relevant memories (over-eating as stress release, panic attacks during sex, and the formation of the Black Gang. It's worth noting here that Grunt's existence pretty much fixes the panic attacks.)
So it's more a process of elimination: what is Mark underneath his layers of fucked-up (and sometimes nice) memories? His high willpower and stubbornness I would consider to be pretty much inherent; yes, it's been developed in reaction to his shitty life, but if he didn't have the capability for that, he wouldn't have survived at all. He's a bit of a deadpan snarker, which seems to have bloomed almost spontaneously once he started developing his own identity. I would interpret that he has some instinctive tendencies to knight-errant and try to help the underdog, which his life and his interactions with Miles heightened.
Mark by nature, I can say with confidence, is fairly introverted and not particularly socially ept. (Dude, I'm apping him to balance out Ven.) He's quite intelligent, but in a slow, analytical sort of way. He wouldn't entirely enter Aather as a blank slate, but he doesn't have a strong identity without his memories. Honestly, I would not be surprised if he wound up forming a sixth persona in Aather, during the time it takes him to assemble Lord Mark from his memories, and possibly even continued to use that as the primary. (The Black Gang are each tied to one particular memory--I'd break up those torture memories into the appropriate sections for each of those guys, and consider the respective persona to reform and activate when he receives their memory. But Lord Mark was formed over a long while and a number of memories.) He'll probably be very reactive at first, putting himself together from his responses and experiences in Aather as well as his memories.
I don't have any particular team placement requests with this app, although I should note that he would not be the sort to respond well to either hostility/infighting or outpourings of affection. Despite being on the older side for Aather (thirty in appearance, twenty-four in actuality), he's not inherently a leadership sort, so he's highly unlikely to fall in as team dad or leader. Probably more team cranky uncle. He'll take kill/trama games pretty much in stride, and wouldn't have issues with being on either a ruthless or self-sacrificing team. Obviously some of his memories are going to hit him hard. (Yes, I was specifically searching for a high-trauma character, why do you ask?) He's not the sort to ignore or smile through his trauma, but neither will he appreciate being lovingly coddled through it. Given that he's spent most of his life being a lone operative (when he wasn't a prisoner), it's going to be very interesting to see how he forms a team bond. It won't come instinctively to him, but I think he'll get there eventually.
He's from a hard-sci-fi universe, so his reactions to this magical fairy-tale land are probably going to be deadpan-hilarious.
I guess I'm just sort of rambling a bit with the personality description and stuff here, because the backstory/plot took up most of the first section. I hope the above is useful to you.
SKILLS: Being Miles Vorkosigan (but not Admiral Naismith, FML), general assassin training, hand to hand combat, high pain tolerance, Cunning Schemes (that are doomed to fail if they are not business plans), really good backrubs.
WRITING SAMPLE: OPTION 3: fill out the below IC survey (as the normal canon self, not amnesia self)
Introduce yourself in a few sentences
Lord Mark Pierre Vorkosigan, cloned second son of a rather infamous military-aristocrat family. My existence is a complicated and unsavory story. In my own right, I'm a galactic businessman, currently marketing a scientific breakthrough in the food service industry, particularly suited to low-budget situations and planetary colonization. I just have the pitch memorized. If you want proper salesmanship, talk to my partner, Kareen Koudelka.
"The suffering of a few is okay if it benefits a great many" -- do you agree with this sentiment? Why or why not?
Efficient, practical, and morally questionable. You could talk in circles all day on this sort of thing. I've got roots in Jackson's Whole and Barrayar, neither of which are noted for egalitarian protection of the suffering few. I was raised as part of an insane plot to save a planet by dooming a cloned pawn to a violent death, and I'm not going say that there aren't parts of my life where I've tried to play the hero. What's truly questionable is trying to make decisions like that in the abstract, or without complete information.
What event from your past has impacted you the most? Please describe
This is a ridiculous question. I could think, offhand, of about five or ten things that might qualify. And it depends upon what sort of impact you're talking about. Identity formation? Meeting Miles, much as I hate to admit it, or meeting my parents. Personal happiness? Kareen. The path and purpose of my life? Being taken from my creche by Ser Galen, and then shooting him, both of which were satisfying at the time, but only one of which continues to please me in retrospect. The overarching structures of my psychology, as my therapist would put it? My memorable days at Baron Ryoval's health spa, during which I discovered that having only one persona is far duller than the alternative.
If you were a kind of food item, what item would you be and why?
Raw bug butter. It's a long story.
Three things you're good at?
Investments, business planning, and money management. Surviving some of the more foul tortures devised by man, which include my brother's dinner parties. Neckrubs.
Three things you're not so good at?
Military strategy, to an extent that would be laughable if it weren't tragic. Thinking on my feet. I could say something brusque about keeping my hands off girls who don't want me, or keeping my brother alive, but that would both make a bad impression and be a poor expression of my profound regret about those incidents.
Do you believe in soulmates or love at first sight?
From time to time, if a man is so desperately unfortunate that his luck decides he needs a lucky break, he might encounter a beautiful, intelligent, kind woman who looks past her first sight of him. I think that's the closest you'll get to that sort of thing.
"Killing criminals is okay if they've committed a grave crime" -- do you agree with this? Why or why not?
I wouldn't call it okay. I'd call it necessary, justified, and grimly satisfying.
Do you consider yourself a strong person? Why or not why?
Myself, alone? As merely Lord Mark? Not particularly. But due to a series of psychological processes which my therapist and I both agree make perfect sense, Lord Mark is not the only persona available to me. And between the lot of us, we can not only survive but conquer the most dire situation.
Free section: So what about your weight?
Good god, you sound like my father. Consider that my progenitor, Miles, came from a family of tall and well-built soldiers, but due to the soltoxin damage he sustained prenatally, topped out at four-foot-nine. His metabolism is out of whack due to the many medical procedures of his youth, and he's hyperactive and lives mainly on coffee. Now consider that I have his family genetics and have been artificially--and rather painfully--shrunk to his size, but with no metabolic changes. And that I am hardly hyperactive and prefer a meal with my coffee. Galen kept me Miles-sized by putting me through the shock-stick diet, which is not exactly medically recommended. Even without certain habits of mine, if I eat normally, I come out looking like a small tank, as my father once put it.
As far as those habits go, consider that I despise being mistaken for my skinny brother. That being raised on the shock-stick diet might induce the desire for the opposite. That I have masochistic and depressive tendencies and find the pain and abandonment of overeating quite relaxing when I'm distressed. And that I spent five days being rather grotesquely force-fed by a vengeful Jacksonian baron, and the best way to cope with such things is to enjoy them. I have lost a fair bit of that weight, to be fair, some in a rather shameful bid to seem more presentable to my Barrayaran family. But I can still rest peacefully in the knowledge that a scope-blinded sniper at two thousand yards could not possibly mistake me for my twin.
CHARACTER INFO: FIRST DRAFT
Explaining the full circumstances that led to Mark Vorkosigan's creation would involve a large chunk of complicated political and military world background. Suffice it to say, he was commissioned by a vengeful terrorist leader as the centerpiece of a long-term plot to both get personal revenge and free his planet from its annexation by a military neighbor by replacing a particular man (Miles Vorkosigan, the general series protagonist) with a loyal clone-duplicate. He was raised, with no particular name or identity of his own, in a lab with his fellow clones, subject to aging acceleration and some unpleasant medical procedures to duplicate the effects of the bone-damaging teratogen that crippled Miles during gestation. (He appears six years older than his actual age, and is very short, with some spinal deformations.)
When he was fourteen, the aforementioned terrorist, Galen, took him away for four years of intensive training in the fine art of being Miles Vorkosigan, often at the wrong end of a cattle prod. Galen, after all, was not completely sane, and bent on revenge, and his clone was to be the son of a man he hated beyond reason; some wires got crossed. "Miles," as he was called, was systematically physically and sexually abused, to the point of developing a conditioned panic-attack response to sexual situations.
That's the backstory. Mark makes his first appearance in Brothers in Arms (about halfway through the Vorkosigan Saga as a whole) when Galen's plot to replace Miles comes to a head. Unfortunately for Galen, Miles has been leading a secret double life as Admiral Naismith, eccentric commander of a galactic mercenary fleet, which makes the substitution more difficult than expected. When Miles is captured to effect the substitution, "Miles" finally meets his progenitor face to face. Not surprisingly, he's bitter, closed off, proud, and defensive. Miles, an only child, says that by certain planetary law, "Miles" is his brother, tries to convince him to run off with him, and tells him what his name would be, by family tradition: Mark Pierre Vorkosigan. Initially, Mark sneers at this offer. Epic trust issues, yes. (The entire book is from Miles' POV, as a note.)
After Miles is busted out and some truly epic twin hijinks ensue, Galen eventually pulls Miles into a showdown via taking his cousin as a hostage, and gets the drop on him. Instead of shooting Miles himself, though, he pulls an oh-so-classic villain stunt and hands the gun to "Miles." And then "Miles" shoots Galen instead, throwing off the mission that he'd been created for, and taking his first step towards forming his identity as Mark. He still rather hates Miles, but accepts a gift of money (Miles had extra due to other hijinks) and disappears.
Two years later, at the end of his finances, he surfaces again in Mirror Dance, which is the core book of Mark's story (alternating between Mark and Miles for POV). He takes the identity of Admiral Naismith, no matter how he hates doing so, in a desperate plan to break into the lab that made him and free his fellow clones from their body-transplant fates. Unfortunately, he has none of his progenitor's tactical genius, and gets cut off. Fortunately, Miles got wind of him and hared off to rescue him. Unfortunately, Miles gets shot dead during that operation.
Fortunately, cryogenics exist in this universe, and Miles gets safely frozen and shunted off to a revival facility, but nobody knows where, because the soldier who sent him gets blown up shortly after.
Wallowing in failure and guilt (though at least they got the clones out), Mark is held by his brother's mercenaries and transported back to Barrayar, Miles' home planet. On the way, he has a brief encounter with one of the cloned girls, growth-accelerated and biologically altered to be way too hot at way too young an age; he asks for a kiss, which she innocently gives, and then he gets a little carried away, for he is not at all with the sane at that moment. Until he goes into a panicked fit on the floor due to Galen's conditioning. The mercenaries lock him up for attempted rape after his confession, and he spends his time in solitary, nigh-suicidal depression. This is when he develops a habit of compulsively overeating as a stress/depression response, partially out of a desire to never be mistaken for Miles again, and partially out of deeper metabolic and psychological issues which are too complicated to go into.
Delivered home to Barrayar, he is greeted by Miles' parents, who greet him, rather awkwardly, as the son they never knew. Those weeks are profound and wrenching in ways that are difficult to describe, and it is there, with Miles' family, that he slowly, spasmodically, begins to develop his identity as Mark Vorkosigan, and first meets Kareen Koudelka, who will eventually be his long-term girlfriend. (Kareen is an epic lady in her own right, progressive, intellectual, mischievous, and lovely; I wish I had more space to detail her in.) His father, who he was meant to kill, has a heart attack, though survives. He badgers Barrayaran security into letting him help with the search for Miles' frozen body. All the feelings, all the time.
Eventually, he gets entirely frustrated with sitting on his ass and leaves Barrayar, in a ship his mother bought for him (by mortgaging the family vacation house), to hunt for Miles himself. He finds him, alive and revived from cryostasis, bewildered and temporarily amnesiac--but just then, he's captured by a local business-lord, the Baron Ryoval, who has a serious grudge against Admiral Naismith. The sort of grudge that could only be repaid with years of torture. At this point, with everything that happened, Mark is honestly starting to be fond of his brother, and goes in thinking better-him-than-me, Barrayaran-security-should-get-here-soon, and been-there-done-that.
Unlike Galen, the Baron is a pro. He hits Mark on three axes. Force-feeding, subverting his own coping mechanism into a torture. Injecting him with a powerful aphrodisiac, strong enough to override the conditioning, and handing him to his mooks, making him an agent in his own rape. And pure physical torture that starts with skinning him alive and goes from there.
But Mark's a pro too. (Check the page-header quote for Too Kinky To Torture on TV Tropes.) In a masterful case of getting better by breaking, Mark splits, more-or-less. To psych-geek for a moment, he does not split in the classic DID sense. He has no memory loss, no dissociation. Just four personas, formed in response to the Baron's tortures, but also having their roots in some of Mark's long-standing issues. They take shifts, while Lord Mark, barely twelve weeks old, sleeps deep inside. And Lord Mark himself, I should note, is a persona, referred to on the same level as the other four by the unnamed 'he' who narrates, the overarching consciousness. Lord Mark is merely the most complicated, the most human, the most socially acceptable. But guarding him now are Gorge, the over-eater; Grunt, the sexual hedonist; and Howl, the insatiable masochist. And the unnamed fourth, the Other, who lurks at the edge and makes droll commentary. The Black Gang, he calls them, and they take shifts, reveling in the Baron's ministrations.
Eventually his captor, frustrated, gives him a private audience, as it were, at which point the fourth persona fully manifests: Killer, full of Galen's assassin training, who kicks the Baron to death with his bare feet with both hands tied behind his back. And then it's safe for Mark to come out; he makes his escape along with the Baron's collection of codes, the keys to his kingdom. Then, after a bath and an industrial-strength dose of painkillers, he negotiates a deal with one of the Baron's enemies: the codes in exchange the freedom of some friends and a ten-percent share of the Baron's holdings. Rich and triumphant, he has a few gloriously snarky but finally friendly exchanges with his brother, dances another dance with Kareen, and heads off to make his fortune.
Mark appears again in a later book, A Civil Campaign, which can best be described as what happens when Bujold, having written several brutal and devastating books in a row, decides to take a break and write a Barrayaran comedy of manners. The main focus is still on Miles, but Mark is visiting his house along with Kareen and a off-world scientist who he's sponsoring for a brilliant invention. Mark's just spent a very pleasant year on Beta Colony, working with a very competent therapist and having mad sex with Kareen, who was taking a year off Barrayar to get a galactic education--and who, for the record, is fully aware and accepting of the Black Gang, who are still tooling about in Mark's mind. It would be rather unfair, after all, to suppress those personas who had saved him so admirably in the past.
Mark and Kareen's turn in the comedy of manners comes when the clueless off-world scientist lets slip, in the middle of a (disastrous) dinner party, that they're sexually active--and Barrayar is NOT a planet where unmarried ladies have sex, ever, never mind with fat little clones in a pleasure dome on Beta Colony. Her family goes spare and tries to separate them, but Cordelia's wise meditation saves the day. The invention Mark is sponsoring, for the record, is a nifty piece of bio-engineering: this scientist (who is wanted on unrelated charges, leading to a hilarious battle with some policemen) has basically taken the food creation ability of honeybees and stepped it up a notch. The butter bugs, as he calls them, eat pretty much any foliage and convert it to a thick, buttery substance that is perfectly nutritionally balance. Superfood by bug vomit. Unfortunately, the butter is fairly tasteless by itself, and the bugs are phenomenally ugly. Miles' cook and love interest help with those things, respectively, and the butter bugs are eventually a huge hit. Kareen gets leave from her parents to go back to Beta Colony and be with Mark, and they ride off into the sunset, presumably to be quite rich once the bugs take off.
Mark's life: rape, torture, and butter bugs.
NAME: Tory /
letterbladeAGE: 27
TIMEZONE: EST
CONTACT: arkady [dot] lizard [at] gmail [dot] com
I WILL NEED A DREAMWIDTH CODE: No
CHARACTER INFO
NAME: Mark Vorkosigan
CANON: The Vorkosigan Saga
REFERENCE LINKS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Vorkosigan
CHARACTER INFO: Things We Have Learned From Speculative Fiction: Being
A Clone Sucks Donkey Balls: Episode II, Return Of The Clones!
...yeah, in some ways I didn't look far afield for another character.
My first draft of this section clocked in at about 1,700 words, FML. The briefer version...
Revenge-addled terrorist, Galen, comes up with a Cunning Plan to get his revenge and free his planet from annexation all at once: replace his enemy's son, Miles Vorkosigan, with a clone, who would then assassinate him and go on to effect the planet-freeing. The clone he commissions--doesn't get a name of his own until much later--is raised in a lab with growth acceleration and surgical alteration (to match the effects of a bone-damaging teratogen that crippled Miles during gestation.) When he's fourteen, Galen takes him away for four years of intensive training in Being Miles Vorkosigan, often at the wrong end of a cattle prod. Systematic physical and sexual abuse, to the point of a conditioned panic-attack response to sexual situations.
Backstory aside, the clone makes his first appearance in the novel Brothers in Arms, when Galen makes his bid to replace Miles. Epic twin hijinks ensue. Events of note:
- "Miles" meets Miles for the first time, and is angry, proud, and defensive. Miles claims him as his brother, by certain planetary laws, and gives him his name, by family tradition: Mark Pierre Vorkosigan. Tries to talk him into joining him and living his own life. "Miles" brushes him off. Epic trust issues: go!
- During a showdown, Galen has Miles helpless at gunpoint, and in that classic you-must-learn-to-kill stunt, hands the gun to "Miles." Who shoots Galen instead, destroying his entire life's mission and taking his first stem towards forming his own identity.
- Mark and Miles don't get on, and Mark disappears into the underground.
After two years of flailing about, Mark surfaces in Mirror Dance, the core of his story. My best attempt to bullet-point summary...
- Impersonates Miles' alternate identity to use the Dendarii Mercenaries (long story) to free some of his fellow clones (slated for brain transplants.) Fails miserably, Miles shot dead trying to rescue him. (Frozen and revived elsewhere; it's complicated.)
- Tries to make out with one of the clones they rescued, has a seizure, gets locked up for attempted rape. Suicidal guilt-wallowing ensues. Develops compulsive overeating as a stress/depression response, half so he can never be mistaken for Miles again, half for far more complicated reasons.
- Delivered to Miles' home and family, where his parents take him in. All the feelings. All the awkward identity formation. Meets Kareen, future girlfriend (and epic lady in her own right.) Finally becoming Mark Vorkosigan.
- With mom's help, takes off again to look for Miles. Finds him, immediately gets captured by a local Baron who has a major grudge against Miles' alternate identity. (Long story.) Like, years-of-torture major.
- Survives torture by forming a five-way split identity, kills Baron, sells out Baron's holdings to Baron's arch-enemy, and walks off with a fabulous stack of cash and a positive relationship with his (revived) brother.
After a year of psychotherapy and awesome sex with Kareen, Mark pops up again in A Civil Campaign (which is what happens when Bujold, exhausted from shit like Mirror Dance, decides to write a comedy of manners.)
- Working with a mad scientist who has bio-engineered bugs that produce, much like honey, a nutritionally ideal substance that's cheap, efficient, etcetera. Butter bugs. They're ugly, but with some help, Mark manages to make them marketable.
- During a disastrous dinner party, said scientist mentions that Mark and Kareen are sexually active. (A Barrayaran lady Does Not Do Those Things, or her family might insert the gentleman in question into a pot of basil.) Mark narrowly avoids death by basil, and eventually they work things out.
Mark's life: rape, torture, and butter bugs.
Since I have some space left, I'm going to copy this portion of the previous draft, as it's the section where bullet-point summary does the least justice, IMO.
Unlike Galen, the Baron is a pro. He hits Mark on three axes. Force-feeding, subverting his own coping mechanism into a torture. Injecting him with a powerful aphrodisiac, strong enough to override the conditioning, making him an agent in his own rape. And pure physical torture that starts with skinning him alive and goes from there.
But Mark's a pro too. (Check the page-header quote for Too Kinky To Torture on TV Tropes.) In a masterful case of getting better by breaking, Mark splits, sortof. To psych-geek for a moment, he does not split in the classic DID sense. No memory loss, no dissociation. Just four personas, formed in response to the Baron's tortures, but also having their roots in some of Mark's long-standing issues. They take shifts, while Lord Mark, barely twelve weeks old, sleeps deep inside. And Lord Mark himself, I should note, is a persona, referred to on the same level as the other four by the unnamed 'he' who narrates, the overarching consciousness. Lord Mark is merely the most complicated, the most human, the most socially acceptable. But then there's Gorge, the over-eater; Grunt, the sexual hedonist; and Howl, the insatiable masochist. And the unnamed fourth, the Other, who lurks at the edge and makes droll commentary. The Black Gang.
Eventually his captor, frustrated, gives him a private audience, as it were, at which point the Other fully manifests: Killer, the trained assassin, who kicks him to death with his bare feet with both hands tied behind his back.
Mark's therapy, I should add, did not reintegrate that split. The Black Gang remains, sometimes providing running commentary on Mark's life. For one would not reward such loyal troops by eliminating their existence. It's implied that Kareen is rather fond of Grunt.
CONSIDERATIONS: So this is the part of the app where I really have to sit down and think. With the way Bujold characterizes, it can be very difficult to sort out where basic nature ends and event-based psychological developments begin. Mark's complex issues with trust, family, identity, body image, and sex all stem from his memories, as do his various coping mechanisms for the above. Due to how specifically memory-bound things are, there are some psychological quirks which might be listed under skills for other characters, but which I will consider tied to the relevant memories (over-eating as stress release, panic attacks during sex, and the formation of the Black Gang. It's worth noting here that Grunt's existence pretty much fixes the panic attacks.)
So it's more a process of elimination: what is Mark underneath his layers of fucked-up (and sometimes nice) memories? His high willpower and stubbornness I would consider to be pretty much inherent; yes, it's been developed in reaction to his shitty life, but if he didn't have the capability for that, he wouldn't have survived at all. He's a bit of a deadpan snarker, which seems to have bloomed almost spontaneously once he started developing his own identity. I would interpret that he has some instinctive tendencies to knight-errant and try to help the underdog, which his life and his interactions with Miles heightened.
Mark by nature, I can say with confidence, is fairly introverted and not particularly socially ept. (Dude, I'm apping him to balance out Ven.) He's quite intelligent, but in a slow, analytical sort of way. He wouldn't entirely enter Aather as a blank slate, but he doesn't have a strong identity without his memories. Honestly, I would not be surprised if he wound up forming a sixth persona in Aather, during the time it takes him to assemble Lord Mark from his memories, and possibly even continued to use that as the primary. (The Black Gang are each tied to one particular memory--I'd break up those torture memories into the appropriate sections for each of those guys, and consider the respective persona to reform and activate when he receives their memory. But Lord Mark was formed over a long while and a number of memories.) He'll probably be very reactive at first, putting himself together from his responses and experiences in Aather as well as his memories.
I don't have any particular team placement requests with this app, although I should note that he would not be the sort to respond well to either hostility/infighting or outpourings of affection. Despite being on the older side for Aather (thirty in appearance, twenty-four in actuality), he's not inherently a leadership sort, so he's highly unlikely to fall in as team dad or leader. Probably more team cranky uncle. He'll take kill/trama games pretty much in stride, and wouldn't have issues with being on either a ruthless or self-sacrificing team. Obviously some of his memories are going to hit him hard. (Yes, I was specifically searching for a high-trauma character, why do you ask?) He's not the sort to ignore or smile through his trauma, but neither will he appreciate being lovingly coddled through it. Given that he's spent most of his life being a lone operative (when he wasn't a prisoner), it's going to be very interesting to see how he forms a team bond. It won't come instinctively to him, but I think he'll get there eventually.
He's from a hard-sci-fi universe, so his reactions to this magical fairy-tale land are probably going to be deadpan-hilarious.
I guess I'm just sort of rambling a bit with the personality description and stuff here, because the backstory/plot took up most of the first section. I hope the above is useful to you.
SKILLS: Being Miles Vorkosigan (but not Admiral Naismith, FML), general assassin training, hand to hand combat, high pain tolerance, Cunning Schemes (that are doomed to fail if they are not business plans), really good backrubs.
WRITING SAMPLE: OPTION 3: fill out the below IC survey (as the normal canon self, not amnesia self)
Introduce yourself in a few sentences
Lord Mark Pierre Vorkosigan, cloned second son of a rather infamous military-aristocrat family. My existence is a complicated and unsavory story. In my own right, I'm a galactic businessman, currently marketing a scientific breakthrough in the food service industry, particularly suited to low-budget situations and planetary colonization. I just have the pitch memorized. If you want proper salesmanship, talk to my partner, Kareen Koudelka.
"The suffering of a few is okay if it benefits a great many" -- do you agree with this sentiment? Why or why not?
Efficient, practical, and morally questionable. You could talk in circles all day on this sort of thing. I've got roots in Jackson's Whole and Barrayar, neither of which are noted for egalitarian protection of the suffering few. I was raised as part of an insane plot to save a planet by dooming a cloned pawn to a violent death, and I'm not going say that there aren't parts of my life where I've tried to play the hero. What's truly questionable is trying to make decisions like that in the abstract, or without complete information.
What event from your past has impacted you the most? Please describe
This is a ridiculous question. I could think, offhand, of about five or ten things that might qualify. And it depends upon what sort of impact you're talking about. Identity formation? Meeting Miles, much as I hate to admit it, or meeting my parents. Personal happiness? Kareen. The path and purpose of my life? Being taken from my creche by Ser Galen, and then shooting him, both of which were satisfying at the time, but only one of which continues to please me in retrospect. The overarching structures of my psychology, as my therapist would put it? My memorable days at Baron Ryoval's health spa, during which I discovered that having only one persona is far duller than the alternative.
If you were a kind of food item, what item would you be and why?
Raw bug butter. It's a long story.
Three things you're good at?
Investments, business planning, and money management. Surviving some of the more foul tortures devised by man, which include my brother's dinner parties. Neckrubs.
Three things you're not so good at?
Military strategy, to an extent that would be laughable if it weren't tragic. Thinking on my feet. I could say something brusque about keeping my hands off girls who don't want me, or keeping my brother alive, but that would both make a bad impression and be a poor expression of my profound regret about those incidents.
Do you believe in soulmates or love at first sight?
From time to time, if a man is so desperately unfortunate that his luck decides he needs a lucky break, he might encounter a beautiful, intelligent, kind woman who looks past her first sight of him. I think that's the closest you'll get to that sort of thing.
"Killing criminals is okay if they've committed a grave crime" -- do you agree with this? Why or why not?
I wouldn't call it okay. I'd call it necessary, justified, and grimly satisfying.
Do you consider yourself a strong person? Why or not why?
Myself, alone? As merely Lord Mark? Not particularly. But due to a series of psychological processes which my therapist and I both agree make perfect sense, Lord Mark is not the only persona available to me. And between the lot of us, we can not only survive but conquer the most dire situation.
Free section: So what about your weight?
Good god, you sound like my father. Consider that my progenitor, Miles, came from a family of tall and well-built soldiers, but due to the soltoxin damage he sustained prenatally, topped out at four-foot-nine. His metabolism is out of whack due to the many medical procedures of his youth, and he's hyperactive and lives mainly on coffee. Now consider that I have his family genetics and have been artificially--and rather painfully--shrunk to his size, but with no metabolic changes. And that I am hardly hyperactive and prefer a meal with my coffee. Galen kept me Miles-sized by putting me through the shock-stick diet, which is not exactly medically recommended. Even without certain habits of mine, if I eat normally, I come out looking like a small tank, as my father once put it.
As far as those habits go, consider that I despise being mistaken for my skinny brother. That being raised on the shock-stick diet might induce the desire for the opposite. That I have masochistic and depressive tendencies and find the pain and abandonment of overeating quite relaxing when I'm distressed. And that I spent five days being rather grotesquely force-fed by a vengeful Jacksonian baron, and the best way to cope with such things is to enjoy them. I have lost a fair bit of that weight, to be fair, some in a rather shameful bid to seem more presentable to my Barrayaran family. But I can still rest peacefully in the knowledge that a scope-blinded sniper at two thousand yards could not possibly mistake me for my twin.
CHARACTER INFO: FIRST DRAFT
Explaining the full circumstances that led to Mark Vorkosigan's creation would involve a large chunk of complicated political and military world background. Suffice it to say, he was commissioned by a vengeful terrorist leader as the centerpiece of a long-term plot to both get personal revenge and free his planet from its annexation by a military neighbor by replacing a particular man (Miles Vorkosigan, the general series protagonist) with a loyal clone-duplicate. He was raised, with no particular name or identity of his own, in a lab with his fellow clones, subject to aging acceleration and some unpleasant medical procedures to duplicate the effects of the bone-damaging teratogen that crippled Miles during gestation. (He appears six years older than his actual age, and is very short, with some spinal deformations.)
When he was fourteen, the aforementioned terrorist, Galen, took him away for four years of intensive training in the fine art of being Miles Vorkosigan, often at the wrong end of a cattle prod. Galen, after all, was not completely sane, and bent on revenge, and his clone was to be the son of a man he hated beyond reason; some wires got crossed. "Miles," as he was called, was systematically physically and sexually abused, to the point of developing a conditioned panic-attack response to sexual situations.
That's the backstory. Mark makes his first appearance in Brothers in Arms (about halfway through the Vorkosigan Saga as a whole) when Galen's plot to replace Miles comes to a head. Unfortunately for Galen, Miles has been leading a secret double life as Admiral Naismith, eccentric commander of a galactic mercenary fleet, which makes the substitution more difficult than expected. When Miles is captured to effect the substitution, "Miles" finally meets his progenitor face to face. Not surprisingly, he's bitter, closed off, proud, and defensive. Miles, an only child, says that by certain planetary law, "Miles" is his brother, tries to convince him to run off with him, and tells him what his name would be, by family tradition: Mark Pierre Vorkosigan. Initially, Mark sneers at this offer. Epic trust issues, yes. (The entire book is from Miles' POV, as a note.)
After Miles is busted out and some truly epic twin hijinks ensue, Galen eventually pulls Miles into a showdown via taking his cousin as a hostage, and gets the drop on him. Instead of shooting Miles himself, though, he pulls an oh-so-classic villain stunt and hands the gun to "Miles." And then "Miles" shoots Galen instead, throwing off the mission that he'd been created for, and taking his first step towards forming his identity as Mark. He still rather hates Miles, but accepts a gift of money (Miles had extra due to other hijinks) and disappears.
Two years later, at the end of his finances, he surfaces again in Mirror Dance, which is the core book of Mark's story (alternating between Mark and Miles for POV). He takes the identity of Admiral Naismith, no matter how he hates doing so, in a desperate plan to break into the lab that made him and free his fellow clones from their body-transplant fates. Unfortunately, he has none of his progenitor's tactical genius, and gets cut off. Fortunately, Miles got wind of him and hared off to rescue him. Unfortunately, Miles gets shot dead during that operation.
Fortunately, cryogenics exist in this universe, and Miles gets safely frozen and shunted off to a revival facility, but nobody knows where, because the soldier who sent him gets blown up shortly after.
Wallowing in failure and guilt (though at least they got the clones out), Mark is held by his brother's mercenaries and transported back to Barrayar, Miles' home planet. On the way, he has a brief encounter with one of the cloned girls, growth-accelerated and biologically altered to be way too hot at way too young an age; he asks for a kiss, which she innocently gives, and then he gets a little carried away, for he is not at all with the sane at that moment. Until he goes into a panicked fit on the floor due to Galen's conditioning. The mercenaries lock him up for attempted rape after his confession, and he spends his time in solitary, nigh-suicidal depression. This is when he develops a habit of compulsively overeating as a stress/depression response, partially out of a desire to never be mistaken for Miles again, and partially out of deeper metabolic and psychological issues which are too complicated to go into.
Delivered home to Barrayar, he is greeted by Miles' parents, who greet him, rather awkwardly, as the son they never knew. Those weeks are profound and wrenching in ways that are difficult to describe, and it is there, with Miles' family, that he slowly, spasmodically, begins to develop his identity as Mark Vorkosigan, and first meets Kareen Koudelka, who will eventually be his long-term girlfriend. (Kareen is an epic lady in her own right, progressive, intellectual, mischievous, and lovely; I wish I had more space to detail her in.) His father, who he was meant to kill, has a heart attack, though survives. He badgers Barrayaran security into letting him help with the search for Miles' frozen body. All the feelings, all the time.
Eventually, he gets entirely frustrated with sitting on his ass and leaves Barrayar, in a ship his mother bought for him (by mortgaging the family vacation house), to hunt for Miles himself. He finds him, alive and revived from cryostasis, bewildered and temporarily amnesiac--but just then, he's captured by a local business-lord, the Baron Ryoval, who has a serious grudge against Admiral Naismith. The sort of grudge that could only be repaid with years of torture. At this point, with everything that happened, Mark is honestly starting to be fond of his brother, and goes in thinking better-him-than-me, Barrayaran-security-should-get-here-soon, and been-there-done-that.
Unlike Galen, the Baron is a pro. He hits Mark on three axes. Force-feeding, subverting his own coping mechanism into a torture. Injecting him with a powerful aphrodisiac, strong enough to override the conditioning, and handing him to his mooks, making him an agent in his own rape. And pure physical torture that starts with skinning him alive and goes from there.
But Mark's a pro too. (Check the page-header quote for Too Kinky To Torture on TV Tropes.) In a masterful case of getting better by breaking, Mark splits, more-or-less. To psych-geek for a moment, he does not split in the classic DID sense. He has no memory loss, no dissociation. Just four personas, formed in response to the Baron's tortures, but also having their roots in some of Mark's long-standing issues. They take shifts, while Lord Mark, barely twelve weeks old, sleeps deep inside. And Lord Mark himself, I should note, is a persona, referred to on the same level as the other four by the unnamed 'he' who narrates, the overarching consciousness. Lord Mark is merely the most complicated, the most human, the most socially acceptable. But guarding him now are Gorge, the over-eater; Grunt, the sexual hedonist; and Howl, the insatiable masochist. And the unnamed fourth, the Other, who lurks at the edge and makes droll commentary. The Black Gang, he calls them, and they take shifts, reveling in the Baron's ministrations.
Eventually his captor, frustrated, gives him a private audience, as it were, at which point the fourth persona fully manifests: Killer, full of Galen's assassin training, who kicks the Baron to death with his bare feet with both hands tied behind his back. And then it's safe for Mark to come out; he makes his escape along with the Baron's collection of codes, the keys to his kingdom. Then, after a bath and an industrial-strength dose of painkillers, he negotiates a deal with one of the Baron's enemies: the codes in exchange the freedom of some friends and a ten-percent share of the Baron's holdings. Rich and triumphant, he has a few gloriously snarky but finally friendly exchanges with his brother, dances another dance with Kareen, and heads off to make his fortune.
Mark appears again in a later book, A Civil Campaign, which can best be described as what happens when Bujold, having written several brutal and devastating books in a row, decides to take a break and write a Barrayaran comedy of manners. The main focus is still on Miles, but Mark is visiting his house along with Kareen and a off-world scientist who he's sponsoring for a brilliant invention. Mark's just spent a very pleasant year on Beta Colony, working with a very competent therapist and having mad sex with Kareen, who was taking a year off Barrayar to get a galactic education--and who, for the record, is fully aware and accepting of the Black Gang, who are still tooling about in Mark's mind. It would be rather unfair, after all, to suppress those personas who had saved him so admirably in the past.
Mark and Kareen's turn in the comedy of manners comes when the clueless off-world scientist lets slip, in the middle of a (disastrous) dinner party, that they're sexually active--and Barrayar is NOT a planet where unmarried ladies have sex, ever, never mind with fat little clones in a pleasure dome on Beta Colony. Her family goes spare and tries to separate them, but Cordelia's wise meditation saves the day. The invention Mark is sponsoring, for the record, is a nifty piece of bio-engineering: this scientist (who is wanted on unrelated charges, leading to a hilarious battle with some policemen) has basically taken the food creation ability of honeybees and stepped it up a notch. The butter bugs, as he calls them, eat pretty much any foliage and convert it to a thick, buttery substance that is perfectly nutritionally balance. Superfood by bug vomit. Unfortunately, the butter is fairly tasteless by itself, and the bugs are phenomenally ugly. Miles' cook and love interest help with those things, respectively, and the butter bugs are eventually a huge hit. Kareen gets leave from her parents to go back to Beta Colony and be with Mark, and they ride off into the sunset, presumably to be quite rich once the bugs take off.
Mark's life: rape, torture, and butter bugs.