[Fic meta] Character Development Journal #1: Christian
My take on the Inception canon tends to be fairly dark and gritty. I know most of the fandom is pretty much ship-driven, and really, more power to them. In my case a lot of the time the shipping and slashing winds up in the service of gen fic, and in particular in the service of cyberpunk-flavored gen fic.
This becomes pretty damn apparent in my Parlor Tricks timeline - which is my postmovie take on Inception and what the characters wind up in after the Fischer job.
This naturally influences my characterization, and as an easily-distracted daydreamer I tend to spend time before class (when my teacher hasn't walked in yet) and on commutes going through - well, my characters and how they'd act and react. There's a lot I know about them that may never actually make it to the fic, that still informs a lot of what they do and how they react to the world around them.
To that end I'm going to write these long, rambly meta posts about OCs and my headcanon interpretations of the canonical characters, as well as my own idea of their background and where they started out and how they got here.
I'm going to start with Christian, because hey, he's the Mystery Man of The Bullet Catch. I'll be leaving out spoilery content for the bits of The Bullet Catch that I haven't written yet, so you don't have to worry about reading this if you don't want to be spoiled for the rest of the fic. I will be relying heavily on TV Tropes for shorthand so you may want to avoid this if you don't want to spend the whole evening link-surfing.
Christian is Eames' mysterious ex. As far as the story goes the facts that I've let slip are: He's Finnish, has worked in dreamshare and for the mob, is missing his right hand, and is slowly dying from Hepatitis C. Here's the rest of the picture.
● He was born Christian Knut Enckell in Pernå in southeastern Finland. The population of Pernå was officially bilingual with a majority of Swedish-speaking Finns, hence the Swedish name. He grew up speaking Swedish as his first language, but was functionally bilingual. His mother Anna was a single parent and he didn't get to know his dad until later. (The only thing he knew then was that his parents met while his mother had worked in Helsinki, and she had gone back to Pernå shortly before he was born.)
● His mother loved him genuinely but was never all that together - she suffered from chronic depression and was borderline alcoholic, with a nasty dependency on sleep aids and, later, opiates for a back injury that never really healed right after a nasty fall down some steps. Her mother, on the other hand, resented him mostly because he was a walking, living symbol of how her little girl had gone astray.
● Anna died of an overdose when he was six and a half years old. Her death was ruled accidental and he spent a couple miserable months living with his maternal grandmother until his father came back into the picture and offered to take him in. Khristofor was a failed medical student with his own collection of prison tattoos who, at least as far as Anna knew, also did underground surgery for some rather unsavory sorts.
● Christian chose to go away with the father he barely knew, and that was his first unconscious step into the world he currently resides in. His father Khristofor was actually more than a backstreet sawbones - he took out hits and cleaned up for a faction of the Russian mob. While Christian never actually witnessed any hits in person he sometimes helped his dad hold the hairdryer while he was "processing".
(See Eastern Promises for a very, very good example of "processing" involves.)
● It probably didn't help that Christian was a slight, somewhat-waifish Finn who was going to school in Russia, which led to him skipping the schoolyard stage in fights entirely. He would allow bullies to kick his ass just to gauge how far they were willing to go (and establish a precedent of forbearance), and then end the fight in the most final way possible.
● Khristofor did not intervene in any of those fights - he felt that his boy had to learn to survive in a hard world, and dealing with peers who wanted to kick his ass was part and parcel of life. He did, however, wind up home-schooling Chris for a bit in between schools, and the curriculum was highly unusual - most schools don't grade you on the anatomy of stabbing someone at age nine. On the bright side, he was way above grade level in biology classes because Khristofor sometimes taught him out of old medical textbooks.
● Christian's attraction to other guys became apparent around the time he was fourteen, and while Khristofor was uneasy with his son's sexuality he also wasn't going to abandon his boy. He knew that Christian would be at a huge disadvantage in the criminal underworld - his associates were, to put it mildly, virulently homophobic and if Christian ever wound up in The Zone (ie: prison) he would probably spend the rest of his life as someone else's plaything.
● In the end Khristofor retired from the business and moved to Helsinki with Chris so Christian could finish his education in Finland and take the entrance exams for the University of Helsinki. Christian was two months away from completing his Bachelor of Medicine (Suomi: lääketieteen kandidaatti) when Khristofor was found floating face-down in the Baltic sea.
● Two more mutilated bodies washed up shortly after Khristofor's funeral. The murders were never solved and were attributed to organized crime. A week after that Christian was contacted by old friends of his father, who saw some potential in him. His skillset lent itself to handling dreamshare IV protocol and adjusting the dosages of various endosomnogens (somnacin included), and he wound up being initiated into the extraction world by a cashiered FSB agent with an aluminum briefcase. Instrumental in this decision was the fact that he fit the psych profile indicated in some rather sketchy dreamshare trials - justified by his ability to ghost.
● Christian was never a full member of the mob - extractors tended to fill a parallel sort of organization simply because of the more international nature of their dealings. His ties to the mobsters, however, and his fluency in Fenya (the unique thieves' cant used by the mob) allowed him to cross over from time to time. Those connections were two-way - while they allowed him to operate more freely in Eastern Europe he had to return those obligations with the occasional cleanup or processing job (something he rationalized as a nasty but necessary task, like cleaning up a litter pan.)
● He was, during that time, also completely open about his sexuality. It wasn't even a matter of controversy in the dreamshare scene but from time to time some low-ranking mob soldier with more balls than brains would try to start a fight with him and he would end it decisively. That, naturally, made him some enemies, but he was probably too cocky and coked-out-of-his-mind to care.
● Christian met Eames during a failed inception job - they had planted the suggestion but hadn't gone deep enough and the mark had realized that the idea did not originate with him. The actual job was as much as proof-of-concept as much as anything else and the involvement of freelancers was mostly for the sake of plausible deniability. Christian remained completely professional during most of the job but stole Eames' wallet before they parted ways so they'd have an excuse to talk to each other again. (Then he went back to his hotel room and found out Eames had done exactly the same thing.)
● Their relationship was intense and tempestuous - Christian had never been in love before, and his blend of intelligence and dysfunction made him want to seem "normal" to his lover. To that end Christian lied about almost everything - including the jobs he did for the mob from time to time. That led to a violent, angry breakup when Eames found Christian stitching up a bullet graze in the bathroom after a messy hit on a rival mobster's son.
● Eames packed his bags and left London for sunnier climes, simply so he wouldn't have to think about the betrayal. Christian, for his part, packed up and moved back to the house they had bought together in Helsinki. He had a few intense rebound flings but nothing of real emotional intimacy, and had resigned himself to being a single dad to a half-grown kitten when he took the job for Cobol.
● The job that Woodruff had him do involved him ruining a very powerfully connected Austrian businessman by outing him to his socially-conservative oil mogul contacts, after which Cobol could sweep in and displace him. What he didn't know was that the job was intended to go wrong - Sergey was not as fond of Christian as Mikhail had been and didn't really see the loss in letting "the queer" get killed.
● Christian managed to deliver the information to Woodruff but was tailed on his way out of the rendezvous and delivered to an irate mark. He had, in his usual paranoia, set up a dead-man's-switch system with the rest of his team so that they would know something was wrong if he didn't check in. He spent a week in the Austrian's hands before his point woman Maja tracked him down and rescued him. He was very nearly dead when she got there (the only reason he was alive was because they were keeping him that way with minimal medical intervention.)
● The situation was explained as a kidnapping-for-ransom gone terribly wrong, a fabrication helped by the fact that most of the thugs found dead at the scene had extensive criminal records. Maja was later killed in an accident in Bogota that seemed highly coincidental - Christian has never been able to get to the bottom of it, but he's blaming Woodruff for it anyway.
● Christian went through a selection of prosthetics following physiotherapy and opted for the very minimal body-powered Hosmer Dorrance hook after endless annoyance with a heavy, unwieldy myoelectric model. Function is more important than form in this case, seeing the amount of stuff one does with one's hands. He is now good enough with it that he can pick a paperclip off a tabletop with it and has compensated for the most part for his injury.
(For examples of the Dorrance hook in use, check out this blog kept by Wolf Schwitzer, a below-elbow amputee whose posts were instrumental in writing Christian without trivializing the situation or making him completely unable as opposed to just disabled.)
● I've been purposefully vague description-wise because I don't want the story to turn into five pages of how pretty he is. For the most part, mostly because he isn't so much pretty as much as, um, gaunt and creepy. Visually I based him off Julian Sands circa Warlock or Boxing Helena, if Sands were about 6'5" and had dishwater-blond hair that he bleached out to ash as a matter of habit. He hasn't had a haircut in three years (he doesn't like people touching him) and has lost quite a bit of weight, so he looks even creepier and gaunter than Sands does in that picture.
He's also a lot less of a GQMF than the canon cast - part of it is probably because he's Finnish, and I've noticed a more casual, inventive sartorial spirit among the more fashionable kind of Finn. Take these blokes for example. The other reason is the weather - he's more likely to be wearing comfortable layers from October to April. If he's going to wear a suit he's going to subvert the heck out of it, usually by taking the pieces of it apart as separates and assembling them around something that isn't strictly formal. For example, that shirt I mentioned in Chapter 3? It actually exists - it's by Comme des Garçons, which is one of my favorite design houses. I didn't state so in the actual chapter but he was wearing steel-toed boots with that suit, probably so he could kick people to death if he actually had to.
He is probably also the only person I am writing who I'll allow to wear a skinny tie, simply because, well, he's so tall and thin at this point that a regular tie might look like a napkin over his chest.
PS: skiriki, you're free to call me out on using all those photos of Helsinki hipsters, but that's really what I think Christian does, style-wise and he's definitely not above being a hipster.
● Arty/art history types may notice the reference in his last name - yes, it is a reference to Symbolist painter Magnus Enckell. There is no relation in this case. Some may also have noticed that his name and his father's name both shorten to "Chris". That is entirely intentional.
Applicable Tropes:
Antihero (Type IV verging on Type V, potentially redeemable into Type III)
Death Seeker (Some suicidal people shoot themselves. Others hang themselves. He has bigger plans - Suicide By Angry Mobster.)
Gayngster (Self-explanatory.)
Handicapped Badass (He's probably still fairly good with his left hand, but he still only has one hand.)
Jerkass Woobie (I never meant for him to be likeable, but he is sympathetic.)
Stepford Smiler (I have always meant for Christian to have Borderline Personality Disorder, but at this point in the fic his sense of self is so messed-up there really is nothing under that frozen smile he affects so often.)
I could add more tropes but we'd go on forever.
- Mel
This becomes pretty damn apparent in my Parlor Tricks timeline - which is my postmovie take on Inception and what the characters wind up in after the Fischer job.
This naturally influences my characterization, and as an easily-distracted daydreamer I tend to spend time before class (when my teacher hasn't walked in yet) and on commutes going through - well, my characters and how they'd act and react. There's a lot I know about them that may never actually make it to the fic, that still informs a lot of what they do and how they react to the world around them.
To that end I'm going to write these long, rambly meta posts about OCs and my headcanon interpretations of the canonical characters, as well as my own idea of their background and where they started out and how they got here.
I'm going to start with Christian, because hey, he's the Mystery Man of The Bullet Catch. I'll be leaving out spoilery content for the bits of The Bullet Catch that I haven't written yet, so you don't have to worry about reading this if you don't want to be spoiled for the rest of the fic. I will be relying heavily on TV Tropes for shorthand so you may want to avoid this if you don't want to spend the whole evening link-surfing.
Christian is Eames' mysterious ex. As far as the story goes the facts that I've let slip are: He's Finnish, has worked in dreamshare and for the mob, is missing his right hand, and is slowly dying from Hepatitis C. Here's the rest of the picture.
● He was born Christian Knut Enckell in Pernå in southeastern Finland. The population of Pernå was officially bilingual with a majority of Swedish-speaking Finns, hence the Swedish name. He grew up speaking Swedish as his first language, but was functionally bilingual. His mother Anna was a single parent and he didn't get to know his dad until later. (The only thing he knew then was that his parents met while his mother had worked in Helsinki, and she had gone back to Pernå shortly before he was born.)
● His mother loved him genuinely but was never all that together - she suffered from chronic depression and was borderline alcoholic, with a nasty dependency on sleep aids and, later, opiates for a back injury that never really healed right after a nasty fall down some steps. Her mother, on the other hand, resented him mostly because he was a walking, living symbol of how her little girl had gone astray.
● Anna died of an overdose when he was six and a half years old. Her death was ruled accidental and he spent a couple miserable months living with his maternal grandmother until his father came back into the picture and offered to take him in. Khristofor was a failed medical student with his own collection of prison tattoos who, at least as far as Anna knew, also did underground surgery for some rather unsavory sorts.
● Christian chose to go away with the father he barely knew, and that was his first unconscious step into the world he currently resides in. His father Khristofor was actually more than a backstreet sawbones - he took out hits and cleaned up for a faction of the Russian mob. While Christian never actually witnessed any hits in person he sometimes helped his dad hold the hairdryer while he was "processing".
(See Eastern Promises for a very, very good example of "processing" involves.)
● It probably didn't help that Christian was a slight, somewhat-waifish Finn who was going to school in Russia, which led to him skipping the schoolyard stage in fights entirely. He would allow bullies to kick his ass just to gauge how far they were willing to go (and establish a precedent of forbearance), and then end the fight in the most final way possible.
● Khristofor did not intervene in any of those fights - he felt that his boy had to learn to survive in a hard world, and dealing with peers who wanted to kick his ass was part and parcel of life. He did, however, wind up home-schooling Chris for a bit in between schools, and the curriculum was highly unusual - most schools don't grade you on the anatomy of stabbing someone at age nine. On the bright side, he was way above grade level in biology classes because Khristofor sometimes taught him out of old medical textbooks.
● Christian's attraction to other guys became apparent around the time he was fourteen, and while Khristofor was uneasy with his son's sexuality he also wasn't going to abandon his boy. He knew that Christian would be at a huge disadvantage in the criminal underworld - his associates were, to put it mildly, virulently homophobic and if Christian ever wound up in The Zone (ie: prison) he would probably spend the rest of his life as someone else's plaything.
● In the end Khristofor retired from the business and moved to Helsinki with Chris so Christian could finish his education in Finland and take the entrance exams for the University of Helsinki. Christian was two months away from completing his Bachelor of Medicine (Suomi: lääketieteen kandidaatti) when Khristofor was found floating face-down in the Baltic sea.
● Two more mutilated bodies washed up shortly after Khristofor's funeral. The murders were never solved and were attributed to organized crime. A week after that Christian was contacted by old friends of his father, who saw some potential in him. His skillset lent itself to handling dreamshare IV protocol and adjusting the dosages of various endosomnogens (somnacin included), and he wound up being initiated into the extraction world by a cashiered FSB agent with an aluminum briefcase. Instrumental in this decision was the fact that he fit the psych profile indicated in some rather sketchy dreamshare trials - justified by his ability to ghost.
● Christian was never a full member of the mob - extractors tended to fill a parallel sort of organization simply because of the more international nature of their dealings. His ties to the mobsters, however, and his fluency in Fenya (the unique thieves' cant used by the mob) allowed him to cross over from time to time. Those connections were two-way - while they allowed him to operate more freely in Eastern Europe he had to return those obligations with the occasional cleanup or processing job (something he rationalized as a nasty but necessary task, like cleaning up a litter pan.)
● He was, during that time, also completely open about his sexuality. It wasn't even a matter of controversy in the dreamshare scene but from time to time some low-ranking mob soldier with more balls than brains would try to start a fight with him and he would end it decisively. That, naturally, made him some enemies, but he was probably too cocky and coked-out-of-his-mind to care.
● Christian met Eames during a failed inception job - they had planted the suggestion but hadn't gone deep enough and the mark had realized that the idea did not originate with him. The actual job was as much as proof-of-concept as much as anything else and the involvement of freelancers was mostly for the sake of plausible deniability. Christian remained completely professional during most of the job but stole Eames' wallet before they parted ways so they'd have an excuse to talk to each other again. (Then he went back to his hotel room and found out Eames had done exactly the same thing.)
● Their relationship was intense and tempestuous - Christian had never been in love before, and his blend of intelligence and dysfunction made him want to seem "normal" to his lover. To that end Christian lied about almost everything - including the jobs he did for the mob from time to time. That led to a violent, angry breakup when Eames found Christian stitching up a bullet graze in the bathroom after a messy hit on a rival mobster's son.
● Eames packed his bags and left London for sunnier climes, simply so he wouldn't have to think about the betrayal. Christian, for his part, packed up and moved back to the house they had bought together in Helsinki. He had a few intense rebound flings but nothing of real emotional intimacy, and had resigned himself to being a single dad to a half-grown kitten when he took the job for Cobol.
● The job that Woodruff had him do involved him ruining a very powerfully connected Austrian businessman by outing him to his socially-conservative oil mogul contacts, after which Cobol could sweep in and displace him. What he didn't know was that the job was intended to go wrong - Sergey was not as fond of Christian as Mikhail had been and didn't really see the loss in letting "the queer" get killed.
● Christian managed to deliver the information to Woodruff but was tailed on his way out of the rendezvous and delivered to an irate mark. He had, in his usual paranoia, set up a dead-man's-switch system with the rest of his team so that they would know something was wrong if he didn't check in. He spent a week in the Austrian's hands before his point woman Maja tracked him down and rescued him. He was very nearly dead when she got there (the only reason he was alive was because they were keeping him that way with minimal medical intervention.)
● The situation was explained as a kidnapping-for-ransom gone terribly wrong, a fabrication helped by the fact that most of the thugs found dead at the scene had extensive criminal records. Maja was later killed in an accident in Bogota that seemed highly coincidental - Christian has never been able to get to the bottom of it, but he's blaming Woodruff for it anyway.
● Christian went through a selection of prosthetics following physiotherapy and opted for the very minimal body-powered Hosmer Dorrance hook after endless annoyance with a heavy, unwieldy myoelectric model. Function is more important than form in this case, seeing the amount of stuff one does with one's hands. He is now good enough with it that he can pick a paperclip off a tabletop with it and has compensated for the most part for his injury.
(For examples of the Dorrance hook in use, check out this blog kept by Wolf Schwitzer, a below-elbow amputee whose posts were instrumental in writing Christian without trivializing the situation or making him completely unable as opposed to just disabled.)
● I've been purposefully vague description-wise because I don't want the story to turn into five pages of how pretty he is. For the most part, mostly because he isn't so much pretty as much as, um, gaunt and creepy. Visually I based him off Julian Sands circa Warlock or Boxing Helena, if Sands were about 6'5" and had dishwater-blond hair that he bleached out to ash as a matter of habit. He hasn't had a haircut in three years (he doesn't like people touching him) and has lost quite a bit of weight, so he looks even creepier and gaunter than Sands does in that picture.
He's also a lot less of a GQMF than the canon cast - part of it is probably because he's Finnish, and I've noticed a more casual, inventive sartorial spirit among the more fashionable kind of Finn. Take these blokes for example. The other reason is the weather - he's more likely to be wearing comfortable layers from October to April. If he's going to wear a suit he's going to subvert the heck out of it, usually by taking the pieces of it apart as separates and assembling them around something that isn't strictly formal. For example, that shirt I mentioned in Chapter 3? It actually exists - it's by Comme des Garçons, which is one of my favorite design houses. I didn't state so in the actual chapter but he was wearing steel-toed boots with that suit, probably so he could kick people to death if he actually had to.
He is probably also the only person I am writing who I'll allow to wear a skinny tie, simply because, well, he's so tall and thin at this point that a regular tie might look like a napkin over his chest.
PS: skiriki, you're free to call me out on using all those photos of Helsinki hipsters, but that's really what I think Christian does, style-wise and he's definitely not above being a hipster.
● Arty/art history types may notice the reference in his last name - yes, it is a reference to Symbolist painter Magnus Enckell. There is no relation in this case. Some may also have noticed that his name and his father's name both shorten to "Chris". That is entirely intentional.
Applicable Tropes:
Antihero (Type IV verging on Type V, potentially redeemable into Type III)
Death Seeker (Some suicidal people shoot themselves. Others hang themselves. He has bigger plans - Suicide By Angry Mobster.)
Gayngster (Self-explanatory.)
Handicapped Badass (He's probably still fairly good with his left hand, but he still only has one hand.)
Jerkass Woobie (I never meant for him to be likeable, but he is sympathetic.)
Stepford Smiler (I have always meant for Christian to have Borderline Personality Disorder, but at this point in the fic his sense of self is so messed-up there really is nothing under that frozen smile he affects so often.)
I could add more tropes but we'd go on forever.
- Mel