extemely beth and incredibly greene (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
littlemissfutility) wrote2016-11-25 09:52 pm
littlemissfutility) wrote2016-11-25 09:52 pm
Entry tags:
app
OOC
Name: Dove
Preferred pronouns: She, her
Over 16?: Yes.
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
prettydoes
Other characters: N/A.
IC
Type: OU
Name: Beth Greene
Canon: The Walking Dead
Canon point: Episode 05x08 "Coda," just as she's about to stab Dawn
Age: 18
Appearance: Beth at time of arrival.
Personality: Beth is an unlikely survivor. At sixteen, she was a fairly typical teenage girl, caught up in music, school, church, and her boyfriend. And then the world ended.
Beth was safe on her family's farm for a long stretch of time, believing that they'd find a cure for whatever changed her mother and brother into slavering monsters. She was able to live in a world that was still normal, just smaller--with her father, her sister, her boyfriend, her neighbors, and a group of drifters camping out in the yard. It couldn't last, however; eventually, one of those drifters found out about the undead family and friends lurking in the barn, and every single one of them was gunned down in front of Beth. The loss of her mother and brother devastated her, her mother especially; thinking she was dead, Beth rushed to cradle her head and was attacked by what was left of the woman who raised her.
Her grief comes on soon after. It's overwhelming, and it forms the basis of the problem Beth struggles to solve for the rest of her life: How do I live in this world? How do I live with myself?
Her first answer is simple and brutal. After collapsing in a feverish shock, she lies catatonic in bed, overcome with a mix of horror and grief. She won't talk to the people around her. She doesn't eat the food she's brought, though she takes a steak knife away from the tray. The reason becomes clear: She doesn't want to live anymore.
Her life-loving sister is horrified. Beth and Maggie argue, neither of them able to convince the other of their side, until they're exhausted. While Beth's sleeping, another person in the house convinces Maggie to take a break from watching her sister. When Beth wakes, that person leaves her alone--purposely, which is pretty fucked up, but that's another story--and Beth takes the chance to lock herself in the bathroom and break a mirror, so she can cut open her wrists with the resulting shards.
As soon as Beth tries it, she realizes she was wrong: She doesn't want to die. Even if she doesn't know what she does want, she knows it's not that.
What she takes from this incident, the formative moment of her life post-apocalypse, is not only that overwhelming question of how do I live in this world but a stubborn need for self-determination in everything she does. She wants to die because she's afraid of a death she hasn't chosen; her greatest fear at that time is dying surrounded by encroaching walkers, or worse, torn apart by them. Later, she strongarms Daryl Dixon into going on a quest for the alcohol she's never been allowed to drink:
The opportunity to try the forbidden is something she's choosing. It might not be much of a purpose, but in the wake of the tragedies she just lived through--her father's murder, the destruction of her home, the knowledge that she might never see her sister or the rest of their group again--it's enough to keep her going. She's going to get a damn drink, and for one day, that'll be the difference between living and merely surviving.
That moment also reveals how tenuously she manages the sadness she continues to feel. She's besieged by the desire to give up the way she did after her mother and brother died, but she knows she can never do that again. She's in a forest crawling with walkers, with little to her name besides the clothes on her back and a knife at her belt. She doesn't have the luxury of malingering. She keeps going because she knows she has to, but that doesn't always lead to smart decisions, and it definitely doesn't lead to personal fulfillment--except slowly, and with great effort.
For a while, when Beth and Daryl are on their own, she finds ways to live in the world that surrounds them. Her philosophy is fairly simple, but that doesn't mean it's easy to live by:
Look forward, she's saying, instead of dwelling on the ugliness of the past. It's advice for Daryl--whose childhood was a place of pain, fear, and tacky ashtrays--but it's also advice she's taken for herself. She can't be the person she was when the corpses of her family were shot in front of her. That girl, and her responses to the world, have to remain buried inside the stronger, more capable person she's become.
And for a while, she can do that. She and Daryl travel in search of the rest of their group, and they spend a night in a well-kept funeral parlor. Beth doesn't allow herself to be dragged down in worries over whether she'll ever see her sister or brother-in-law again; she looks for the beauty in the world right in front of her, and she finds it. Whoever lived in the funeral parlor before them embalmed walkers and gave them the dignified deaths they deserved, and she appreciates it enough to defend the idea to Daryl. She plays the piano she finds in the building and sings along to her chords, grimaces over the thought of eating pigs' feet, and keeps an eye out for a stray dog wandering around the cemetery beyond.
The world she lives in is one of chaos, however, and the turmoil beyond the funeral parlor eventually leaks into the world she's starting to build with her friend. A walker attack sends them running, and Beth is kidnapped and taken away to Grady Memorial Hospital, a community that ostensibly helps the injured but really uses them as indentured labor. Beth is a prisoner of her own medical care--and of the police officers who keep the hospital in a stranglehold. The people in charge range from passive to actively malicious; in her time there, Beth witnesses unprovoked physical and sexual violence and comes to realize that the woman in charge is letting it all happen.
Grady is a test of all the truths she spoke to Daryl. It becomes her opportunity to find out if the beliefs that sustained her in the woods could stand up to the cruelty of an isolated society--one in which nobody has any reason to care for Beth in particular. The answer, it turns out, is yes, they can--though they can't help but be transformed by her experiences.
Beth kills her first person--her first living, breathing person, rather than an undead walker--at Grady. It's an accident born of administering the wrong medication to a patient, and it results in a friend of hers taking the blame and being beaten for the mistake. Every other person she kills there, she kills with great (and often frantic) purpose.
Those deaths represent a great shift for her. Beth Greene, who wept hysterically when her mother and brother were shot in front of her, moves from hapless bystander to a willing participant in death, and most of that shift comes from the hospital. After she mismanages Trevitt's medication, she knows what it feels like to kill someone who didn't harm anybody at all. Later, when she's trapped in a room with Gorman, an unrepentant rapist who's turned his eye towards her, she finds out what it feels like to cause the death of someone who meant a great deal of harm to her (and just about every other female patient in the building). It becomes evident that one of those deaths is harder for her to live with than the other; Beth later murders two more members of the hospital's leadership, knowing that each of them has abused their power and hurt innocent patients as a result.
She becomes, in other words, a killer with morals. More than that, she becomes a killer with goals. When she realizes that she was manipulated into killing Trevitts, she plans to stab the doctor who used her. That plan stops on a dime, however, when somebody she cares about is rushed into the hospital. Carol won't survive without Dr. Edwards to treat her--and for that reason, Beth lets him live. It's her opportunity to use him as he used her, toward a better ending.
Beth's willingness to kill, however, is tempered by her empathy and kindness toward others. She begins to live by a sort of inverse of the golden rule: Do unto others as they have done unto you. She brings Noah, another indentured patient and one of the only friendly faces in the hospital, with her when she attempts to escape. She does everything she can to keep Carol alive even when others in the hospital want to remove her from life support.
The warmth she shows for others goes back to the girl she's always been at heart, the one who cares for Rick Grimes' infant daughter as carefully as if she were her own and who treats Michonne's wounds after she's injured. Beth's had to learn to be tough, but she's never truly lost the virtues that guide her. If anything, she's learned that they're powerful tools in themselves. Near the end of her stay in the hospital, she spells out what is, essentially, her raison d'être:
She says it to Dawn, the head of the hospital, who turns a blind eye to the evils that have gone on around her. But it's more than an accusation; it also serves as a statement of purpose for Beth, a pointed look into how she's come to function in the zombie apocalypse. Who Beth is and what the world around her looks like--those are her choices to make. She's grown into somebody who sees problems and tries to fix them, even if it means getting her hands dirty. It's not enough for her to keep her head down and try to survive, because there's no promise that anything else is coming to make up for what happens in the present. Nothing is left in the world but what she makes of it.
And for that reason, she kills Dawn in cold blood. Dawn, who manipulated her from the start and who let others abuse and manipulate in turn, has to die if anything in the hospital is ever going to change. Beth is shot for it, but the people left in the hospital have another chance, to try and make a world where the casual cruelty of the old guard is no longer tolerated. It's a harsh death for a girl who was once terrified of having no control over her own end--but by the time Beth's digging a pair of surgical scissors into Dawn's shoulder, an untimely death doesn't look anywhere near as unbearable as a life lived at the expense of others.
Background/AU details: TWD wiki
Strengths & weaknesses:
✔ Basic survival skills: Beth lives in the zombie apocalypse for two years, and before that, she was a born and bred farm girl. She knows how to scavenge for food and survive in the circumstances she's given.
✔ Knife skills: Beth carried a Browning hunting knife and used it to kill numerous walkers.
✔ Basic tracking skills: Daryl taught her to read tracks, though she's still a novice at it.
✔ Babysitting: This might seem unimportant, but Beth loves children and is shown to be good at taking care of baby Judith and keeping her quiet. A loud baby is a baby who attracts attention, and Beth is more than capable of soothing them.
✔ Music: This basically is unimportant, aside from ~morale~ and ~personal edification~, but Beth can play piano okay and sing quite well.
✘ Stubborn: On the one hand, it's good to be stubborn when you're surrounded 5000-to-1 by things that want to kill you. On the other had, she's undeniably bull-headed and willing to argue when she disagrees with a person, and if she wants to do something, Heaven help the person getting in her way.
✘ Depressed: Beth recovers from her suicide attempt with one scar to show for it. However, due to the nature of the world she lives in, she never gets professional help. For the rest of her life, she essentially has to bootstraps her way through any remaining darkness in her mind. Even at the end of her life, she steals the key to the hospital's elevator so she can open it up and sit at its edge, staring into the darkness of the empty shaft. The void is always with Beth; she just learns to change how she handles it.
✘ Not a natural survivor: Beth has picked up the basics she needs to survive in the world she comes from--tracking, lighting fires using broken car parts, stabbing things with her knife--but these are skills she has no real inborn talent for. Everything she's learned has been hard-won.
✘ Potential for alcoholism: Beth's father was a recovering alcoholic who banned liquor from their home. One of the most important things Beth realized when she got drunk for the first (and last) time in her life was just how easily she could slip into that same situation. "I get why my dad stopped drinking. [...] I wish I could feel like this all the time. That's bad."
Depowering/humanization: In Beth's iteration of Earth, everyone on the planet carries some kind of gross pathogen that causes them to reanimate as zombies after they die--unless someone stabs them in the head before it can happen. For Barrayar, Beth will continue to be a carrier, but she won't be able to infect anyone else--and unless we need her to go out with some kind of crazy bang, it probably won't come up in any meaningful way.
Placement preference: Barrayaran
Character goals: OOC-ly, one of the interesting things about Beth is that she has a lot of character development, and then she dies. I'd like to look at what that character development does when she doesn't end up dying.
IC-ly, she's going to be willing to fight pretty whole-heartedly for the Barrayarans. Having their home threatened by outside forces reminds her enough of the Governor's attacks on the prison her group used to live in; she might well feel that this is an opportunity to use what she's learned to help others, a reason for her continued existence. Unfortunately, as a teenage girl, she's unlikely to be taken quite as seriously by the Barrayarans as some of their other new fighters--so she'll also have reason to want to prove herself.
She's also in the process of developing a personal theory of what's acceptable in terms of violence--what she's able to live with, even in death. People who are making the world a worse place? She's willing to kill them, and in the past, she has. People who live without hurting others? Not acceptable. She has the very beginnings of a possible career as an assassin, but not necessarily as a general soldier.
Beth is going to fight, basically, and hopefully for the side that uses all those wilderness skills she's spent a few years developing.
Sample: TDM
Name: Dove
Preferred pronouns: She, her
Over 16?: Yes.
Contact:
Other characters: N/A.
IC
Type: OU
Name: Beth Greene
Canon: The Walking Dead
Canon point: Episode 05x08 "Coda," just as she's about to stab Dawn
Age: 18
Appearance: Beth at time of arrival.
![Beth at time of arrival.](http://i.imgur.com/W5V8Pv0.png"){kind=link}
Personality: Beth is an unlikely survivor. At sixteen, she was a fairly typical teenage girl, caught up in music, school, church, and her boyfriend. And then the world ended.
Beth was safe on her family's farm for a long stretch of time, believing that they'd find a cure for whatever changed her mother and brother into slavering monsters. She was able to live in a world that was still normal, just smaller--with her father, her sister, her boyfriend, her neighbors, and a group of drifters camping out in the yard. It couldn't last, however; eventually, one of those drifters found out about the undead family and friends lurking in the barn, and every single one of them was gunned down in front of Beth. The loss of her mother and brother devastated her, her mother especially; thinking she was dead, Beth rushed to cradle her head and was attacked by what was left of the woman who raised her.
Her grief comes on soon after. It's overwhelming, and it forms the basis of the problem Beth struggles to solve for the rest of her life: How do I live in this world? How do I live with myself?
Her first answer is simple and brutal. After collapsing in a feverish shock, she lies catatonic in bed, overcome with a mix of horror and grief. She won't talk to the people around her. She doesn't eat the food she's brought, though she takes a steak knife away from the tray. The reason becomes clear: She doesn't want to live anymore.
I don't wanna be gutted. I wanna go. In this bed, tonight. With you beside me. Please.
Her life-loving sister is horrified. Beth and Maggie argue, neither of them able to convince the other of their side, until they're exhausted. While Beth's sleeping, another person in the house convinces Maggie to take a break from watching her sister. When Beth wakes, that person leaves her alone--purposely, which is pretty fucked up, but that's another story--and Beth takes the chance to lock herself in the bathroom and break a mirror, so she can cut open her wrists with the resulting shards.
As soon as Beth tries it, she realizes she was wrong: She doesn't want to die. Even if she doesn't know what she does want, she knows it's not that.
What she takes from this incident, the formative moment of her life post-apocalypse, is not only that overwhelming question of how do I live in this world but a stubborn need for self-determination in everything she does. She wants to die because she's afraid of a death she hasn't chosen; her greatest fear at that time is dying surrounded by encroaching walkers, or worse, torn apart by them. Later, she strongarms Daryl Dixon into going on a quest for the alcohol she's never been allowed to drink:
All I wanted to do today was lay down and cry, but we don't get to do that. So beat up on walkers if that makes you feel better. I need to do this.
The opportunity to try the forbidden is something she's choosing. It might not be much of a purpose, but in the wake of the tragedies she just lived through--her father's murder, the destruction of her home, the knowledge that she might never see her sister or the rest of their group again--it's enough to keep her going. She's going to get a damn drink, and for one day, that'll be the difference between living and merely surviving.
That moment also reveals how tenuously she manages the sadness she continues to feel. She's besieged by the desire to give up the way she did after her mother and brother died, but she knows she can never do that again. She's in a forest crawling with walkers, with little to her name besides the clothes on her back and a knife at her belt. She doesn't have the luxury of malingering. She keeps going because she knows she has to, but that doesn't always lead to smart decisions, and it definitely doesn't lead to personal fulfillment--except slowly, and with great effort.
For a while, when Beth and Daryl are on their own, she finds ways to live in the world that surrounds them. Her philosophy is fairly simple, but that doesn't mean it's easy to live by:
You got to stay who you are, not who you were. Places like this, you have to put it away. [...] You have to. Otherwise, it kills you.
Look forward, she's saying, instead of dwelling on the ugliness of the past. It's advice for Daryl--whose childhood was a place of pain, fear, and tacky ashtrays--but it's also advice she's taken for herself. She can't be the person she was when the corpses of her family were shot in front of her. That girl, and her responses to the world, have to remain buried inside the stronger, more capable person she's become.
And for a while, she can do that. She and Daryl travel in search of the rest of their group, and they spend a night in a well-kept funeral parlor. Beth doesn't allow herself to be dragged down in worries over whether she'll ever see her sister or brother-in-law again; she looks for the beauty in the world right in front of her, and she finds it. Whoever lived in the funeral parlor before them embalmed walkers and gave them the dignified deaths they deserved, and she appreciates it enough to defend the idea to Daryl. She plays the piano she finds in the building and sings along to her chords, grimaces over the thought of eating pigs' feet, and keeps an eye out for a stray dog wandering around the cemetery beyond.
The world she lives in is one of chaos, however, and the turmoil beyond the funeral parlor eventually leaks into the world she's starting to build with her friend. A walker attack sends them running, and Beth is kidnapped and taken away to Grady Memorial Hospital, a community that ostensibly helps the injured but really uses them as indentured labor. Beth is a prisoner of her own medical care--and of the police officers who keep the hospital in a stranglehold. The people in charge range from passive to actively malicious; in her time there, Beth witnesses unprovoked physical and sexual violence and comes to realize that the woman in charge is letting it all happen.
Grady is a test of all the truths she spoke to Daryl. It becomes her opportunity to find out if the beliefs that sustained her in the woods could stand up to the cruelty of an isolated society--one in which nobody has any reason to care for Beth in particular. The answer, it turns out, is yes, they can--though they can't help but be transformed by her experiences.
Beth kills her first person--her first living, breathing person, rather than an undead walker--at Grady. It's an accident born of administering the wrong medication to a patient, and it results in a friend of hers taking the blame and being beaten for the mistake. Every other person she kills there, she kills with great (and often frantic) purpose.
Those deaths represent a great shift for her. Beth Greene, who wept hysterically when her mother and brother were shot in front of her, moves from hapless bystander to a willing participant in death, and most of that shift comes from the hospital. After she mismanages Trevitt's medication, she knows what it feels like to kill someone who didn't harm anybody at all. Later, when she's trapped in a room with Gorman, an unrepentant rapist who's turned his eye towards her, she finds out what it feels like to cause the death of someone who meant a great deal of harm to her (and just about every other female patient in the building). It becomes evident that one of those deaths is harder for her to live with than the other; Beth later murders two more members of the hospital's leadership, knowing that each of them has abused their power and hurt innocent patients as a result.
She becomes, in other words, a killer with morals. More than that, she becomes a killer with goals. When she realizes that she was manipulated into killing Trevitts, she plans to stab the doctor who used her. That plan stops on a dime, however, when somebody she cares about is rushed into the hospital. Carol won't survive without Dr. Edwards to treat her--and for that reason, Beth lets him live. It's her opportunity to use him as he used her, toward a better ending.
Beth's willingness to kill, however, is tempered by her empathy and kindness toward others. She begins to live by a sort of inverse of the golden rule: Do unto others as they have done unto you. She brings Noah, another indentured patient and one of the only friendly faces in the hospital, with her when she attempts to escape. She does everything she can to keep Carol alive even when others in the hospital want to remove her from life support.
The warmth she shows for others goes back to the girl she's always been at heart, the one who cares for Rick Grimes' infant daughter as carefully as if she were her own and who treats Michonne's wounds after she's injured. Beth's had to learn to be tough, but she's never truly lost the virtues that guide her. If anything, she's learned that they're powerful tools in themselves. Near the end of her stay in the hospital, she spells out what is, essentially, her raison d'être:
You keep telling yourself you have to do whatever it takes, just until this is all over, but it isn't over. This is it. This is who you are and what this place is until the end.
She says it to Dawn, the head of the hospital, who turns a blind eye to the evils that have gone on around her. But it's more than an accusation; it also serves as a statement of purpose for Beth, a pointed look into how she's come to function in the zombie apocalypse. Who Beth is and what the world around her looks like--those are her choices to make. She's grown into somebody who sees problems and tries to fix them, even if it means getting her hands dirty. It's not enough for her to keep her head down and try to survive, because there's no promise that anything else is coming to make up for what happens in the present. Nothing is left in the world but what she makes of it.
And for that reason, she kills Dawn in cold blood. Dawn, who manipulated her from the start and who let others abuse and manipulate in turn, has to die if anything in the hospital is ever going to change. Beth is shot for it, but the people left in the hospital have another chance, to try and make a world where the casual cruelty of the old guard is no longer tolerated. It's a harsh death for a girl who was once terrified of having no control over her own end--but by the time Beth's digging a pair of surgical scissors into Dawn's shoulder, an untimely death doesn't look anywhere near as unbearable as a life lived at the expense of others.
Background/AU details: TWD wiki
Strengths & weaknesses:
✔ Basic survival skills: Beth lives in the zombie apocalypse for two years, and before that, she was a born and bred farm girl. She knows how to scavenge for food and survive in the circumstances she's given.
✔ Knife skills: Beth carried a Browning hunting knife and used it to kill numerous walkers.
✔ Basic tracking skills: Daryl taught her to read tracks, though she's still a novice at it.
✔ Babysitting: This might seem unimportant, but Beth loves children and is shown to be good at taking care of baby Judith and keeping her quiet. A loud baby is a baby who attracts attention, and Beth is more than capable of soothing them.
✔ Music: This basically is unimportant, aside from ~morale~ and ~personal edification~, but Beth can play piano okay and sing quite well.
✘ Stubborn: On the one hand, it's good to be stubborn when you're surrounded 5000-to-1 by things that want to kill you. On the other had, she's undeniably bull-headed and willing to argue when she disagrees with a person, and if she wants to do something, Heaven help the person getting in her way.
✘ Depressed: Beth recovers from her suicide attempt with one scar to show for it. However, due to the nature of the world she lives in, she never gets professional help. For the rest of her life, she essentially has to bootstraps her way through any remaining darkness in her mind. Even at the end of her life, she steals the key to the hospital's elevator so she can open it up and sit at its edge, staring into the darkness of the empty shaft. The void is always with Beth; she just learns to change how she handles it.
✘ Not a natural survivor: Beth has picked up the basics she needs to survive in the world she comes from--tracking, lighting fires using broken car parts, stabbing things with her knife--but these are skills she has no real inborn talent for. Everything she's learned has been hard-won.
✘ Potential for alcoholism: Beth's father was a recovering alcoholic who banned liquor from their home. One of the most important things Beth realized when she got drunk for the first (and last) time in her life was just how easily she could slip into that same situation. "I get why my dad stopped drinking. [...] I wish I could feel like this all the time. That's bad."
Depowering/humanization: In Beth's iteration of Earth, everyone on the planet carries some kind of gross pathogen that causes them to reanimate as zombies after they die--unless someone stabs them in the head before it can happen. For Barrayar, Beth will continue to be a carrier, but she won't be able to infect anyone else--and unless we need her to go out with some kind of crazy bang, it probably won't come up in any meaningful way.
Placement preference: Barrayaran
Character goals: OOC-ly, one of the interesting things about Beth is that she has a lot of character development, and then she dies. I'd like to look at what that character development does when she doesn't end up dying.
IC-ly, she's going to be willing to fight pretty whole-heartedly for the Barrayarans. Having their home threatened by outside forces reminds her enough of the Governor's attacks on the prison her group used to live in; she might well feel that this is an opportunity to use what she's learned to help others, a reason for her continued existence. Unfortunately, as a teenage girl, she's unlikely to be taken quite as seriously by the Barrayarans as some of their other new fighters--so she'll also have reason to want to prove herself.
She's also in the process of developing a personal theory of what's acceptable in terms of violence--what she's able to live with, even in death. People who are making the world a worse place? She's willing to kill them, and in the past, she has. People who live without hurting others? Not acceptable. She has the very beginnings of a possible career as an assassin, but not necessarily as a general soldier.
Beth is going to fight, basically, and hopefully for the side that uses all those wilderness skills she's spent a few years developing.
Sample: TDM