[OOC] About Brennan
[series]: Bones
[character]: Temperance "Bones" Brennan
[character history / background]: Wiki knows all
[character abilities]: Temperance is a freakish overachiever. She is one of, if not the best, forensic anthropologists of her day. She's a licensed hunter & diver, is trained in three branches of martial arts, has an intimate knowledge of kinesiology, and speaks at least five different languages (Spanish, French, Latin, Chinese, and German). She's also a best-selling novelist. Pretty much the only thing she can't do is carry on a "normal" conversation with a "normal" human being.
[character personality]: Temperance Brennan kicks ass. Literally and figuratively. She is a crack shot, a strong martial artist, and can run intellectual circles around just about anyone. She is extremely self-confident and somewhat aggressive, sometimes using too much force too quickly to defend herself against perceived attacks. She rejects social conventions, such as the desire to marry and have children. She is independent and brilliant.
The one area where she's lacking is emotional intelligence. She's not very good at understanding other people's emotions, and she's even worse at understanding her own. She sees the world in black and white: people are either good or bad; she has trouble understanding that sometimes they can be both. She rejects and denies emotions that have little basis in rationality, fighting them until someone finally forces her to accept them. In some sense she's always been this way -- she never really fit in with most people, even before her parents disappeared when she was fifteen. But their disappearance, her brother's abandonment, and her subsequent shuffling into the foster care system entrenched her in her isolation. She is the eternal observer, treating her own life as a long term ethnographic study. She looks at everything with the detached eye of science.
Which isn't to say she doesn't care. Her best friend Angela says that she detaches because she cares too much. Certainly Brennan's world isn't her work -- her work is the world. Her job? Identifying murder victims. Her vacations? Traveling to dangerous countries and identifying victims of genocide. She is a passionate advocate of human freedom and dignity and a devout liberal pluralist. Yet she is also a zealous empiricist, and while she accepts other cultures and social mores, she has little tolerance for other people and any behavior she deems irrational. She derides psychology as a soft science and frequently derides Booth for the more touchy-feely aspects of his job and his personality. She ensconses herself in reason like it's a protective blanket.
Still, this is changing. Hodgins credits this to Angela's influence, saying that seeing Angela live a big and full live made Brennan want to live one as well. If Angela is the reason, then Booth is the means. Through her work with him, Brennan is coming to see people as more than just collections of bones.
[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: Early season three, after Zach returns from Iraq
[character]: Temperance "Bones" Brennan
[character history / background]: Wiki knows all
[character abilities]: Temperance is a freakish overachiever. She is one of, if not the best, forensic anthropologists of her day. She's a licensed hunter & diver, is trained in three branches of martial arts, has an intimate knowledge of kinesiology, and speaks at least five different languages (Spanish, French, Latin, Chinese, and German). She's also a best-selling novelist. Pretty much the only thing she can't do is carry on a "normal" conversation with a "normal" human being.
[character personality]: Temperance Brennan kicks ass. Literally and figuratively. She is a crack shot, a strong martial artist, and can run intellectual circles around just about anyone. She is extremely self-confident and somewhat aggressive, sometimes using too much force too quickly to defend herself against perceived attacks. She rejects social conventions, such as the desire to marry and have children. She is independent and brilliant.
The one area where she's lacking is emotional intelligence. She's not very good at understanding other people's emotions, and she's even worse at understanding her own. She sees the world in black and white: people are either good or bad; she has trouble understanding that sometimes they can be both. She rejects and denies emotions that have little basis in rationality, fighting them until someone finally forces her to accept them. In some sense she's always been this way -- she never really fit in with most people, even before her parents disappeared when she was fifteen. But their disappearance, her brother's abandonment, and her subsequent shuffling into the foster care system entrenched her in her isolation. She is the eternal observer, treating her own life as a long term ethnographic study. She looks at everything with the detached eye of science.
Which isn't to say she doesn't care. Her best friend Angela says that she detaches because she cares too much. Certainly Brennan's world isn't her work -- her work is the world. Her job? Identifying murder victims. Her vacations? Traveling to dangerous countries and identifying victims of genocide. She is a passionate advocate of human freedom and dignity and a devout liberal pluralist. Yet she is also a zealous empiricist, and while she accepts other cultures and social mores, she has little tolerance for other people and any behavior she deems irrational. She derides psychology as a soft science and frequently derides Booth for the more touchy-feely aspects of his job and his personality. She ensconses herself in reason like it's a protective blanket.
Still, this is changing. Hodgins credits this to Angela's influence, saying that seeing Angela live a big and full live made Brennan want to live one as well. If Angela is the reason, then Booth is the means. Through her work with him, Brennan is coming to see people as more than just collections of bones.
[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: Early season three, after Zach returns from Iraq