App for Anemoi
May. 3rd, 2012 12:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
longstreakofnothingName: Yume
Personal Journal: Haven't got one
Contact Info: AIM: IIMDYinker; YIM: yumegari_2; PLURK: memorylikeasieve
Character Name: Oh, bloody hell. He's going to come round in the labs thinking he's called Theta Sigma. After a while he'll remember he's also called The Doctor. And after that he'll remember the two dozen titles people have lumbered him with over the centuries. And if he remembers his real name he sure as hell isn't going to announce it, mainly because WE don't know what it is.
Character Series: Dr Who. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who
Background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ka_Faraq_Gatri (Careful, these two entries are veritable tomes.)
Point in Canon: Uh. Crap. Ask the hard questions. Waitwaitwait he did go gallivanting of on his own for a few after 'The Stolen Earth' and before 'Last of the Time Lords/End Of Time/blablabla' So probably then.
Personality: Okay, I'm gonna try to keep this brief and to avoid all the famous quotes about his personality and motivations. If you wish for canon examples I can dig them up but this is already a wall of text so forgive me if I just type it out. Ahem.
The Doctor's personality is easy to see and next to impossible to understand. His degree of approachability varies from one incarnation to the next, as does his sense of humour, his level of pessimism/optimism, his relations with others, even his speech patterns. We will, therefore, focus on the incarnation being used (Tenth), and try to focus on the constants, of which there are three that could be considered readily discernible: intelligence, bravery, and compassion.
Ten's personality is, in short, the sort of mercurial one hasn't seen since Hartnell and, to a lesser extent, Davison. His emotional compass is caught in a magnetic storm at all times, swinging wildly from euphoric to enraged to guilt-ridden. He never does emotions halfway and he has the energy level to back it up. For the most part he is cheerful, irreverent, has a tendency to blather whatever is on his mind and is a bit thoughtless regarding the more superficial emotions of others. However, that personality is a mask and a not-perfectly-fitted one at times. His eyes are ancient and he has lost a part of his soul with the destruction of Gallifrey. His cheer feels a bit brittle and forced at times. When he's happy he's bouncing off the walls. When he is angry he's bringing those walls down and he gets so, so very angry.
Intelligence is quite obvious in that the Doctor uses his mind to solve any problem he comes across. He thinks his way out of trouble, often at a lightning fast pace. Intellect, reason, and detachment are highly valued qualities on Gallifrey, which he has been brought up around and strives to maintain (though detachment is rather difficult for him at times, hence the reason he's out do-goodering in the first place). Because he thinks up solutions that are often five steps ahead of everyone else, he is often impatient and downright tetchy with other people who, more often than not, are left in his cognitive dust. His preference for brains over brawn also explains why he abhors violence and guns in particular.
However, this intellectual speed and the detachment he does achieve means he leaves others behind, disregards their opinions, and cannot understand why they have faith in him.
His abhorrence of violence is not to say he runs from a challenge--rather, his bravery is clearly evident in his tendency to regularly traipse into places where proverbial angels (Weeping or not) fear to tread. He will face down the tyrannical leader, the mad gunman, or the rampaging beast because someone has to do it and that someone might as well be him, otherwise why is he there? This tendency to stymie the plans of every Tom, Dick, and Davros he comes across has, of course, earned him some rather terrifying epithets, not the least of which being "Destroyer of Worlds." He's the person monsters have nightmares about.
That said, this bravery is often a pretty name for recklessness. He tromps in with little to no sense of self-preservation and, worse, little sense of preservation of those around him. Wherever he goes, innocents die. Sometimes his companions die. And sometimes even he dies.
However, he doesn't do these things for glory or power or even personal fulfilment. He does it because there are defenceless races out there, oppressed civilisations, and beings in danger. He does it because the underdogs and the downtrodden need someone to stand up to the people and creatures who are, er, downtreading them. Because he knows how to save these civilisations from the Daleks or the Sontarans or the Master or the roving singularity or the collapse of reality and he's the only one with the hearts to care about doing these things over and over and over and over. If he didn't, 'remiss' wouldn't even begin to cover it. He wouldn't be able to live with himself, either figuratively or literally, if he ever stood by and did nothing. This, of course, tosses him into repeated dilemmas wherein he regularly has to choose the needs of the many over the needs of the few, even if that few includes his travelling companions or people he's trying to extract from collapsing space stations or even himself.
His compassion does not extend as far as it used to, and he has trouble stopping. At times he is a force of nature, uncaring and unheeding. He turns a deaf ear to the pleas of his enemies and that invariably ends up terrifying his friends and allies. He doesn't know how to comfort people and becomes hurt when his attempts to do so meet with failure. And he is just as deaf to the pleas of his companions when he feels what he is doing is right.
Good is rarely the same as nice. Good is terrifying. Uncompromising. It'll burn you if you get too close to it as surely as evil will.
SO. Without 900+ years of memories, what will he turn out like? Well, he will still be mercurial and all-out with his states of mind. He will look at everything through a lens of science. He will find himself compelled to help those who need it, will abhor violence, will have little tolerance for people who devalue the lives of others, will still think at least five steps ahead of everyone else. He will be drawn to people who stand out by, say, education or cleverness or strong personality. His morality will be extremely rigid. He will still love adventure and will still traipse right into danger. He will still come up with clever solutions so outside the proverbial box that said box is still in the factory and he's already moved on to installation of something completely different that somehow does exactly what the thing in the box would have done.
Sample Entry:
The phone shows a view of Theta Sigma, grinning from ear to ear in that manner only he is really capable of. "Hullo, Sirocco!" he enthuses. Oh, lord, he's remembered something, hasn't he? "I've just remembered something!" Oh. Lovely. What is it this time?
He holds up a pair of spoons held back to back. "I just remembered I can play the spoons!" And then he demonstrates, striking the things between a hand and a propped-up knee, resulting in a rapid, complex beat. This goes on for several moments as he improvises surfaces to beat the things against like a virtuoso drummer--the table, a chair, several random objects, even the phone. Granted, they do all make very distinct sounds and he does seem to have an innate sense of rhythm, but... it's spoons. "No idea when or where I picked that up, but I'm sure it'll be useful for something. Parties, maybe. Parties with improvised music, like jug bands and square dancing and lots of hay everywhere and the smell of farm animals--" snffffffffffff! "--nothing quite like the smell of cows about the place while you're dancing your cares away!"
Oh, god, he'll continue like this for ages if someone doesn't shut him up.
----
Notes: This was discussed somewhat in chat, but I figured I'd put out my ideas here so that they can be stared at at one's leisure. Right.
The TARDIS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TARDIS My plan: It will know the Doctor has lost all of his memories and is not going to regain them in the space of an episode or a TV movie. Therefore, as a security measure, it will fold down its interior configuration and shrink its exterior form. The TARDIS is simply mathematics made solid, and these configurations can be changed drastically. What that means for everyone else is that the lab guys will find a six-inch-tall replica of a London Police Box from the 1960s in his coat pocket. Scanning it will reveal that it's denser than any object should have any right to be and will therefore just be a curiosity sitting on someone's desk until he remembers what it is and what it's for.
WITHOUT THE TARDIS HE CANNOT TRAVEL IN TIME SAVE FOR LITTLE JUMPS OF UP TO A MINUTE MADE BY WIRING TOGETHER BITS AND BOBS.
Now. Even if he has the TARDIS, there are some things he cannot change. They are referred to as 'fixed points.' The eruption of Vesuvius is a good example. He couldn't just pack the population of those three towns into the TARDIS and cart them off someplace safe. Another one is the sinking of the Titanic. Or the JFK shooting. Think of an important event that changed the world and he cannot do shite about it. What it means here is that HE CANNOT CHANGE THE EVENT THAT MADE SIROCCO THE WAY IT IS. Second or Third Law of Time sort of thing. Also, he cannot cross his own timeline. What that means is that if someone's squashed by a truck on 15 May and he gets his TARDIS back later than that, he cannot go back to 15 May and save them because he was already there. He can't save someone's parents from being killed, etc etc. First Law of Time.
The Sonic Screwdriver: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Screwdriver This thing has been anything from a useful little device that makes things vibrate apart to the 'get out of jail free card' to 'thing that does whatever the hell the writers want it to.' They got rid of it in the mid-80s because it was becoming too much of a deus ex machina but the writers found it increasingly difficult to move the story along without it unless they resorted to the Doctor either jury-rigging devices or just waiting for serendipity, which ended up happening with eye-rolling regularity. So when the new series started up, they redesigned the device...and made it even WORSE. Sure, they invented the concept of the 'deadlock seal' that even a sonic device can't open, but when he uses the thing to regularly do anything from scan people to see if they are what they say they are to hacking everything with even a hint of a computer to it, the deadlock seal is kinda closing the barn door after the chickens have escaped.
THEREFORE. He is not going to remember that it's a thing that exists for a very very long time. By then, one hopes he'll figure out ways to get along without it. The Lab will most likely confiscate it, just like they will his itty bitty TARDIS.
The Psychic Paper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_paper#Psychic_paper Pfff. He can lose that thing no problem. Half the writers don't even remember that it's a thing that exists, so I'm cool with not having it.
These are all things that are integral to the Doctor being the Doctor. Well, except the psychic paper.
He will still be telepathic to a small degree. HOWEVER, HE WAS, IS, AND ALWAYS WILL BE INCAPABLE OF MIND CONTROL. He cannot deep scan without considerable effort. He can see an individual's 'time stream,' so to speak. He can get bits of their past or future but it is not reliable and is entirely up to the discretion of the other player. It's a native ability of a Gallifreyan to be able to see time from the outside, so he occasionally gets snippets of past or future when he's not paying attention. Otherwise it's just a shittonne of data that he works to screen out.
As to whether his ability to understand any language is a result of his own telepathy or of the TARDIS, I'm going to go with the former. Otherwise all of his posts are going to be in a gibberish of Gallifreyan and nobody wants that.
Whew. Any other questions, don't hesitate to ask me. It's 30+ years of canon and is overwhelming even to me and I've been watching it since I was six.
Personal Journal: Haven't got one
Contact Info: AIM: IIMDYinker; YIM: yumegari_2; PLURK: memorylikeasieve
Character Name: Oh, bloody hell. He's going to come round in the labs thinking he's called Theta Sigma. After a while he'll remember he's also called The Doctor. And after that he'll remember the two dozen titles people have lumbered him with over the centuries. And if he remembers his real name he sure as hell isn't going to announce it, mainly because WE don't know what it is.
Character Series: Dr Who. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who
Background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ka_Faraq_Gatri (Careful, these two entries are veritable tomes.)
Point in Canon: Uh. Crap. Ask the hard questions. Waitwaitwait he did go gallivanting of on his own for a few after 'The Stolen Earth' and before 'Last of the Time Lords/End Of Time/blablabla' So probably then.
Personality: Okay, I'm gonna try to keep this brief and to avoid all the famous quotes about his personality and motivations. If you wish for canon examples I can dig them up but this is already a wall of text so forgive me if I just type it out. Ahem.
The Doctor's personality is easy to see and next to impossible to understand. His degree of approachability varies from one incarnation to the next, as does his sense of humour, his level of pessimism/optimism, his relations with others, even his speech patterns. We will, therefore, focus on the incarnation being used (Tenth), and try to focus on the constants, of which there are three that could be considered readily discernible: intelligence, bravery, and compassion.
Ten's personality is, in short, the sort of mercurial one hasn't seen since Hartnell and, to a lesser extent, Davison. His emotional compass is caught in a magnetic storm at all times, swinging wildly from euphoric to enraged to guilt-ridden. He never does emotions halfway and he has the energy level to back it up. For the most part he is cheerful, irreverent, has a tendency to blather whatever is on his mind and is a bit thoughtless regarding the more superficial emotions of others. However, that personality is a mask and a not-perfectly-fitted one at times. His eyes are ancient and he has lost a part of his soul with the destruction of Gallifrey. His cheer feels a bit brittle and forced at times. When he's happy he's bouncing off the walls. When he is angry he's bringing those walls down and he gets so, so very angry.
Intelligence is quite obvious in that the Doctor uses his mind to solve any problem he comes across. He thinks his way out of trouble, often at a lightning fast pace. Intellect, reason, and detachment are highly valued qualities on Gallifrey, which he has been brought up around and strives to maintain (though detachment is rather difficult for him at times, hence the reason he's out do-goodering in the first place). Because he thinks up solutions that are often five steps ahead of everyone else, he is often impatient and downright tetchy with other people who, more often than not, are left in his cognitive dust. His preference for brains over brawn also explains why he abhors violence and guns in particular.
However, this intellectual speed and the detachment he does achieve means he leaves others behind, disregards their opinions, and cannot understand why they have faith in him.
His abhorrence of violence is not to say he runs from a challenge--rather, his bravery is clearly evident in his tendency to regularly traipse into places where proverbial angels (Weeping or not) fear to tread. He will face down the tyrannical leader, the mad gunman, or the rampaging beast because someone has to do it and that someone might as well be him, otherwise why is he there? This tendency to stymie the plans of every Tom, Dick, and Davros he comes across has, of course, earned him some rather terrifying epithets, not the least of which being "Destroyer of Worlds." He's the person monsters have nightmares about.
That said, this bravery is often a pretty name for recklessness. He tromps in with little to no sense of self-preservation and, worse, little sense of preservation of those around him. Wherever he goes, innocents die. Sometimes his companions die. And sometimes even he dies.
However, he doesn't do these things for glory or power or even personal fulfilment. He does it because there are defenceless races out there, oppressed civilisations, and beings in danger. He does it because the underdogs and the downtrodden need someone to stand up to the people and creatures who are, er, downtreading them. Because he knows how to save these civilisations from the Daleks or the Sontarans or the Master or the roving singularity or the collapse of reality and he's the only one with the hearts to care about doing these things over and over and over and over. If he didn't, 'remiss' wouldn't even begin to cover it. He wouldn't be able to live with himself, either figuratively or literally, if he ever stood by and did nothing. This, of course, tosses him into repeated dilemmas wherein he regularly has to choose the needs of the many over the needs of the few, even if that few includes his travelling companions or people he's trying to extract from collapsing space stations or even himself.
His compassion does not extend as far as it used to, and he has trouble stopping. At times he is a force of nature, uncaring and unheeding. He turns a deaf ear to the pleas of his enemies and that invariably ends up terrifying his friends and allies. He doesn't know how to comfort people and becomes hurt when his attempts to do so meet with failure. And he is just as deaf to the pleas of his companions when he feels what he is doing is right.
Good is rarely the same as nice. Good is terrifying. Uncompromising. It'll burn you if you get too close to it as surely as evil will.
SO. Without 900+ years of memories, what will he turn out like? Well, he will still be mercurial and all-out with his states of mind. He will look at everything through a lens of science. He will find himself compelled to help those who need it, will abhor violence, will have little tolerance for people who devalue the lives of others, will still think at least five steps ahead of everyone else. He will be drawn to people who stand out by, say, education or cleverness or strong personality. His morality will be extremely rigid. He will still love adventure and will still traipse right into danger. He will still come up with clever solutions so outside the proverbial box that said box is still in the factory and he's already moved on to installation of something completely different that somehow does exactly what the thing in the box would have done.
Sample Entry:
The phone shows a view of Theta Sigma, grinning from ear to ear in that manner only he is really capable of. "Hullo, Sirocco!" he enthuses. Oh, lord, he's remembered something, hasn't he? "I've just remembered something!" Oh. Lovely. What is it this time?
He holds up a pair of spoons held back to back. "I just remembered I can play the spoons!" And then he demonstrates, striking the things between a hand and a propped-up knee, resulting in a rapid, complex beat. This goes on for several moments as he improvises surfaces to beat the things against like a virtuoso drummer--the table, a chair, several random objects, even the phone. Granted, they do all make very distinct sounds and he does seem to have an innate sense of rhythm, but... it's spoons. "No idea when or where I picked that up, but I'm sure it'll be useful for something. Parties, maybe. Parties with improvised music, like jug bands and square dancing and lots of hay everywhere and the smell of farm animals--" snffffffffffff! "--nothing quite like the smell of cows about the place while you're dancing your cares away!"
Oh, god, he'll continue like this for ages if someone doesn't shut him up.
----
Notes: This was discussed somewhat in chat, but I figured I'd put out my ideas here so that they can be stared at at one's leisure. Right.
The TARDIS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TARDIS My plan: It will know the Doctor has lost all of his memories and is not going to regain them in the space of an episode or a TV movie. Therefore, as a security measure, it will fold down its interior configuration and shrink its exterior form. The TARDIS is simply mathematics made solid, and these configurations can be changed drastically. What that means for everyone else is that the lab guys will find a six-inch-tall replica of a London Police Box from the 1960s in his coat pocket. Scanning it will reveal that it's denser than any object should have any right to be and will therefore just be a curiosity sitting on someone's desk until he remembers what it is and what it's for.
WITHOUT THE TARDIS HE CANNOT TRAVEL IN TIME SAVE FOR LITTLE JUMPS OF UP TO A MINUTE MADE BY WIRING TOGETHER BITS AND BOBS.
Now. Even if he has the TARDIS, there are some things he cannot change. They are referred to as 'fixed points.' The eruption of Vesuvius is a good example. He couldn't just pack the population of those three towns into the TARDIS and cart them off someplace safe. Another one is the sinking of the Titanic. Or the JFK shooting. Think of an important event that changed the world and he cannot do shite about it. What it means here is that HE CANNOT CHANGE THE EVENT THAT MADE SIROCCO THE WAY IT IS. Second or Third Law of Time sort of thing. Also, he cannot cross his own timeline. What that means is that if someone's squashed by a truck on 15 May and he gets his TARDIS back later than that, he cannot go back to 15 May and save them because he was already there. He can't save someone's parents from being killed, etc etc. First Law of Time.
The Sonic Screwdriver: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Screwdriver This thing has been anything from a useful little device that makes things vibrate apart to the 'get out of jail free card' to 'thing that does whatever the hell the writers want it to.' They got rid of it in the mid-80s because it was becoming too much of a deus ex machina but the writers found it increasingly difficult to move the story along without it unless they resorted to the Doctor either jury-rigging devices or just waiting for serendipity, which ended up happening with eye-rolling regularity. So when the new series started up, they redesigned the device...and made it even WORSE. Sure, they invented the concept of the 'deadlock seal' that even a sonic device can't open, but when he uses the thing to regularly do anything from scan people to see if they are what they say they are to hacking everything with even a hint of a computer to it, the deadlock seal is kinda closing the barn door after the chickens have escaped.
THEREFORE. He is not going to remember that it's a thing that exists for a very very long time. By then, one hopes he'll figure out ways to get along without it. The Lab will most likely confiscate it, just like they will his itty bitty TARDIS.
The Psychic Paper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_paper#Psychic_paper Pfff. He can lose that thing no problem. Half the writers don't even remember that it's a thing that exists, so I'm cool with not having it.
These are all things that are integral to the Doctor being the Doctor. Well, except the psychic paper.
He will still be telepathic to a small degree. HOWEVER, HE WAS, IS, AND ALWAYS WILL BE INCAPABLE OF MIND CONTROL. He cannot deep scan without considerable effort. He can see an individual's 'time stream,' so to speak. He can get bits of their past or future but it is not reliable and is entirely up to the discretion of the other player. It's a native ability of a Gallifreyan to be able to see time from the outside, so he occasionally gets snippets of past or future when he's not paying attention. Otherwise it's just a shittonne of data that he works to screen out.
As to whether his ability to understand any language is a result of his own telepathy or of the TARDIS, I'm going to go with the former. Otherwise all of his posts are going to be in a gibberish of Gallifreyan and nobody wants that.
Whew. Any other questions, don't hesitate to ask me. It's 30+ years of canon and is overwhelming even to me and I've been watching it since I was six.
