Character survey
Body and Appearance
1. Describe the character's height and build. Is he heavyset, thin, short, rangy?
About 5’10”, not particularly tall. He has a build suited to acrobatics, lean and muscular but not built-up to the point where it would make him sluggish.
2. How old is he?
Going by Luck’s canon age of 21 I’ve guessed 22.
3. Describe his posture. Does he carry himself well or does he slouch?
Relaxed but never slouching (unless he’s demonstrating an emotional state like unhappiness).
4. How is his health? Is he fit or out of shape? Any illnesses or conditions? Any physical disabilities?
Peak physical condition.
5. How does he move? Is he clumsy, graceful, tense, fluid?
Typically his movements are smooth, veering into effortlessly fluid if he’s fighting. He’s very aware of his surroundings and extremely coordinated, so he’s almost never clumsy.
6. How attractive is this character physically? How does he perceive himself in the mirror?
He’s attractive enough that he’s never worried about his appearance and basically doesn’t think about it. In a way he’s quite vain; he never questions that the women he propositions might not be attracted to him. He’s just quietly sure about his looks.
7. Describe his complexion. Dark, light, clear, scarred?
Pink in tone but rather pale. I'm also a big subscriber to the fanon that he's super-freckly.
8. Describe his hair: color, texture, style.
Coppery red, thick and wavy. He has a side-parting and a slight widow's peak, with bangs on one side that don't reach his eyes. The shorter side generally gets pushed back from his face.
9. What color are his eyes?
He’s one of those lucky gingers whose eyes are a similar colour to their hair - so they look brownish in most lights but almost red in some.
10. Does the character have any other noteworthy features?
His ears stick out just a little too much for him to stand any chance at being classically handsome.
11. What are his chief tension centers?
Shoulders and neck - he has a habit of rolling them to deal with this.
12. What is the character's wardrobe like? Casual, dressy, utilitarian? Bright colors, pastels, neutrals? Is it varied, or does he have six of the same suit?
A lot of black - he is slightly conscious of the need not to be noticeably covered in blood in busy urban areas, but he has a number of regular white shirts too. He's fairly dressy by modern standards, simply because suits were the norm in his day.
13. Do his clothes fit well? Does he seem comfortable in them?
Out of habit he goes to the same tailor as the Gandors if he’s in the city, so he’s always reasonably well-dressed.
14. Does he dress the same on the job as he does in his free time? If not, what are the differences?
The smart thing would probably be to wear black shirts on the job and leave white ones for off it, but to be honest he only thinks of that on particularly serious missions and usually just throws on whatever’s close to hand. Luckily he’s good at travelling to and from work in inconspicuous ways.
15. You knew it was coming: Boxers, briefs or commando?
Some sort of awesome 1930s pants.
Speech
1. What does this character's voice sound like? High-pitched, deep, hoarse?
I play him like Jerry Jewell's version in mind, which is a little rough with lots of intonations and inflections. I sort of prefer Morita's take on him, which is smoother and more monotonous and has a detached air, but I make him too goofy for that.
2. How does he normally speak? Loud, soft, fast, evenly? Does he talk easily, or does he hesitate?
Once his mouth is open whatever's going on in his head just comes out. Luckily he thinks pretty quickly.
3. Does the character have a distinct accent or dialect? Any individual quirks of pronunciation? Any, like, you know, verbal tics?
A strong Noo Yoik accent. He also talks with his hands. A lot.
4. What language/s does he speak, and with how much fluency?
English as first language. Some Italian - enough to do a bit of business in, but think of the restaurant scene in the Godfather where Michael drops into English halfway through: he's not practised enough to have whole conversations.
5. Does he switch languages or dialects in certain situations?
Not really, except if business is being carried out in Italian.
6. Is he a good impromptu speaker, or does he have to think about his words?
He basically only does impromptu speaking, but he’s not actually that great at it.
7. Is he eloquent or inarticulate? Under what circumstances might this change?
He’s more eloquent than he generally makes himself out to be. He dumbs down his vocabulary a bit just because he doesn’t think it suits him. To pick an example word off the top of my head, he knows the word “vestibule” but would be more likely to describe one as a “thing”, unless he was getting carried away with whatever he was saying in which case it might slip out as “vestibule-thing”. He sometimes drops this habit when he’s being serious. In terms of sentence structure he’s never particularly sophisticated.
Mental and Emotional
1. How intelligent is this character? Is he book-smart or street-smart?
Pretty damn intelligent where it counts, which for him lies in knowing how best to kill or psychologically attack people. He makes a point of showing that he could easily kill Ladd, and then chooses to make him jump off the train himself by knowing what means the most to him. He works out fairly quickly what motivates Chane and he can understand her fairly well just through body language. I’ve made the comparison to Derren Brown before but I think it stands: he intuitively has a very good grasp of people’s tells (although he can’t influence people in return). Huey Laforet seeks him out in the 1920s because he has a reputation as a genius - but he doesn’t seem to use it apart from in this respect, in bettering himself physically, and in getting out of tough situations. He would say that he’s street-smart but he’s spent too long with his youngest stepbrother and killing time on train journeys not to be well-read. He’s not at all inclined toward literary criticism, he just reads for the stories.
2. Does he think on his feet, or does he need time to deliberate?
We mainly see him thinking on his feet because he throws himself into things and trusts he’ll make it work. However his job involves a certain amount of planning - it takes a lot of work to get close enough to certain people to kill them.
3. Describe the character's thought process. Is he more logical, or more intuitive? Idealistic or practical?
It’s a funny mixture of all four of those things. He presents himself as very intuitive and idealistic, but because he has a natural tendency to think things through logically and have practical targets he actually manages to pull shit off.
4. What kind of education has the character had?
The Gandor family ensured that he had a good basic education (Claire was the greatest threat to his own chances of getting a good schooling due to the number of fights he got into) but he left to join the circus before graduating.
5. What are his areas of expertise? What, if anything, is he interested in learning more about?
As he happily relates to Czeslaw, his main area of expertise is torture. He’s surprisingly well-versed in tortures used all over the globe, and takes some pride in being able to say that he introduced some of them to the States. Presumably he has ways of keeping up to date with this. He enjoys injecting variety into his work.
6. Is he an introvert or an extrovert?
Although he spends a lot of time on his own he’s an extrovert around other people. He very rarely worries about how others perceive him so he just goes all-out with whatever he wants to say or do.
7. Describe the character's temperament. Is he even-tempered or does he have mood swings? Cheerful or melancholy? Laid-back or driven?
In terms of temper he normally has quite a long fuse - he doesn’t seem to hold it against people when they pick fights with him, although he will fight back. Perhaps because he doesn’t think anything should faze him he just doesn’t allow it to happen. One way to provoke him into actually starting a fight is to dismiss him off the bat - he needs to know that people are taking him seriously even if he rarely returns the favour. This is how most of his scuffles with Berga start.
Although always optimistic he has been described by his brothers as “aloof”, although they note that this seems to have mellowed recently. As he likes meeting new people he strikes most people as cheerful.
He gives the impression of being quite relaxed but he is always driven by his desire to be at the pinnacle of human strength - or beyond it. He seems to consider this the central point of his personality: “That’s what it means to be human - no, that’s what it means to be me.”
8. How does he respond to new people or situations? Is he suspicious, relaxed, timid, enthusiastic?
Well, he thinks they’re some new figment of his imagination, so he’s fearless about coming up against new things/people and openly shows curiosity toward them.
9. Is he more likely to act, or to react?
When it comes to fighting he’ll only react - either to an attack someone else started or to something about them which he morally objects to. The rest of the time he varies - although he often keeps to himself he occasionally goes out of his way to do something or to interact with people for what seems like no good reason.
10. Which is his default: fight or flight?
Fight.
11. Describe the character's sense of humor. Does he appreciate jokes? Puns? Gallows humor? Bathroom humor? Pranks?
Unsurprisingly he has a somewhat dark sense of humour when it comes to his work and enjoys finding irony in it. He keeps that mostly to himself and most people will only see his goofy side, which is also fairly well-developed. He plays the occasional prank, usually on his brothers or Firo, but he often can't resist taking the opportunity to make people jump.
12. Does the character have any diagnosable mental disorders? If yes, how does he deal with them?
I don’t know enough about mental disorders to say, but if he does he copes pretty damn well. He’s a fairly well-rounded human being if you ignore the killing and the solipsism.
13. What moments in this character's life have defined him as a person?
Being adopted by the Gandors - not only was it a new family unit, it was a gateway to the criminal world. Reading with Luck also had some formative effect on his solipsism ("All that we see or seem/Is but a dream within a dream"). Leaving home and the various jobs he took on after that were also definitive, although they were more about refining personality traits that were already there.
14. What does he fear?
Pretty much nothing. He just doesn’t think that bad things will happen to him. I could say that in some unconscious way he fears death because he so blatantly refuses to accept his own mortality, but it’s not something that ever bothers him because... he doesn’t accept it!
15. What are his hopes or aspirations?
They’re strangely normal. He’d like to have a house and raise a family and roast chestnuts over an open fire at Christmas and take his lady on trips to the seaside. And he also wants to be the pinnacle of humanity or become whatever is above humanity. Pretty typical stuff.
16. What is something he doesn't want anyone to find out about him?
That’s a tough one. There aren’t many things in his life he’s committed to keeping entirely to himself. I will hazard a guess and say his feelings about his parent’s death - there probably are negative feelings bound up in this, which he wouldn’t want to talk about because they are an example of the world not going his way. Claire lives in a deliciously angst-free mental zone so I don’t want to say that he has repressed feelings about this but - he might? Unless it ever comes up in canon I’m just not going to deal with this because I like having a character that doesn’t give a shit.
Relationships
1. Describe this character's relationship with his parents.
His parents died when he was a child. He never demonstrates that this has had any effect on him; he seems fairly well-balanced, unless you want to pin his homicidal tendencies on being an orphan. If his relationship with them was too poor to warrant him missing them he doesn’t mention this either. It’s an oddly undeveloped point and I don’t want to speculate too much about it.
2. Does the character have any siblings? What is/was their relationship like?
No.
3. Are there other blood relatives to whom he is close? Are there ones he can't stand?
No.
4. Are there other, unrelated people whom he considers part of his family? What are his relationships with them?
The Gandor family, more specifically the three brothers who are the current heads of that family. He seems to have a great deal of respect for Keith, offering him a rare apology when he offends his sense of honour. Berga is the person he gets into fights with most regularly, but he’s also the brother he most openly shows affection to. Luck, being the closest to him in age, is possibly the brother he feels closest to, and Luck’s even temper and love of reading were a good influence on him for a while. He still mocks the three of them for being un-mafia-ish, and the one that bears the brunt of this is Luck, for lacking any inherent ruthlessness. It’s a little funny that Claire embodies the traits that he sees each of his brothers as lacking in their role as mafia bosses - talkativeness, intelligence, and ruthlessness, yet he isn’t a part of the mafia himself.
Although he left the family and often acts aloof with them the Gandors are very dear to him. He rarely gets close enough to people to have any objections to their personalities, and although he doesn’t count himself as part of their family anymore he still feels immense loyalty to them.
5. Who is/was the character's best friend? How did they meet?
The fifth member of his childhood friendship group was Firo, who also lived in the area. The two had a lot in common, especially after Claire lost his parents. Even before that they shared very similar interests in things like climbing tall pointy stuff, building tall pointy things, and getting into places they shouldn’t have. Although he doesn’t see Firo all that often now he still counts him as his closest friend, along with the Gandors.
6. Does he have other close friends?
Not particularly. He likes people quite easily and would do a lot for friends he’s not actually that close to (just because he finds grand gestures easy to pull off), but it’s rare for him to develop any deep connections to people.
7. Does he make friends easily, or does he have trouble getting along with people?
Generally he gets along well with people - or at least he tends to like people quite easily regardless of what they think of him. He usually doesn’t worry over whether a person likes him in return, so it’s hard to say whether any of those people are really his friends.
8. Which does he consider more important: family or friends?
What with being adopted and coming from a mafia family those concepts are a little blurred in his mind. The people who are most important to him could fit in either category.
9. Is the character single, married, divorced, widowed? Has he been married more than once?
He’s in a slightly funny position of engagement limbo. Although he proposed to Chane and wasn’t turned down they agreed to start out as friends, so he’s not-quite engaged.
10. Is he currently in a romantic relationship with someone other than a spouse?
Their relationship isn’t quite romantic yet, despite the fact he’s already confessed his love and proposed. He's weird like that. Because he assumes that the world will go the way he wants it to he thought it was fine to propose to random women first, and whoever said yes would be the person he'd have a fairytale ending with. Luckily he ended up being accepted by a lovely and loving woman who benefited from his odd proposition drawing her out of her comfort zone.
11. Who was his first crush? Who is his latest?
Some woman he saw on the street and decided to propose to. His latest is some woman he saw on the train and decided to propose to - but it’s sticking this time.
12. What does he look for in a romantic partner?
Commitment. Apart from that he doesn't look for anything, he assumes whatever he needs in a partner will come to him.
13. Does the character have children? Grandchildren? If yes, how does he relate to them? If no, does he want any?
By the 2001 novels he has at least two great-grandchildren, and presumably there are others to fill in the gaps. He sees them as extensions of the world he and Chane built and is devoted to all of them.
14. Does he have any rivals or enemies?
A lot of rival assassins want him dead, as well as some of the Gandor family’s enemies. You could also count the people he punishes without killing - a lot of them don’t take it too well.
15. What is the character's sexual orientation? Where does he fall on the Kinsey scale?
In deference to that DS game I'd place him at Kinsey 1. Having said that he doesn't doubt his own straightness and any sex he had with Ladd in that alternate continuity would have been more about power play than sexual attraction.
16. How does he feel about sex? How important is it to him?
In line with his view of life as being like a story of a film Claire has a rather idealistic view of sex that comes across as a bit old-fashioned. Although not against sex before marriage he does think it should be with the right person, and as there is only one right person out there for him he hasn’t lost his virginity yet (it hasn’t helped that his idea of a chat-up line is "Let's get married"). He’s not in a great rush to have sex but he assumes it will happen and in the spirit of being a 22-year old male virgin with no real hang-ups about these things he's looking forward to it!
17. What are his turn-ons? Turn-offs? Weird bedroom habits?
I'm just answering this as "with Chane" seeing as with the whole idealism thing I just mentioned she'd be the only person he'd have sex with. Of the times when one of them is being dominant about 60% of the time it would be Chane - she enjoys getting to decide what to do and knowing that he’ll go along with it, and he does go along with it because he finds that side of her insanely attractive. For a guy whose job is coming up with particularly painful ways of hurting people he’s not actually that kinky. They’ll use bondage, but if it’s on him he’ll ruin it by claiming he could get out of it if he wanted to; they occasionally have sex in places where they shouldn’t (private train compartments? Yes); they throw in mild bdsm like hair-pulling, scratching or orgasm denial. A lot of the time they just use the fact that they’re both extremely fit and flexible to their advantage.
Beliefs
1. Do you know your character's astrological (zodiac of choice) sign? How well does he fit type?
As far as I know he doesn’t have a canon birth date. I picked early January 1910 (because it made keeping track of his age easy) which makes him a Capricorn and a Rooster. Apparently Capricorns only feel content if they’re bettering themselves or at the top of their league while Roosters are confident, motivated, loyal, and want to be the centre of things. So... that turned out weirdly accurate.
2. Is this character religious, spiritual, both, or neither? How important are these elements in his life?
He’s a staunch atheist who gets annoyed that so many people tell him he has a god-given talent - “Like hell I was. Why would any god give anything to a guy who doesn't believe in him?”
3. Does this character have a personal code of morals or ethics? If so, how did that begin? What would it take to compromise it?
Oh man. I talked about this in his app -
“He has a strong but idiosyncratic moral code. Most of us will have read stories where we wish we could reach into the world to inflict revenge on a villain or rescue the protagonists that appeal to us. Claire lives this out with the world as his story and its inhabitants as characters. He sometimes goes out of his way to help people he likes, as if bestowing a happy ending on a favourite character. More often, likely due to his immersion in the violent underbelly of society, he ends up exacting punishment on those who don’t fit in with his own ethics. Said punishments fit in with the MO that earned him the nickname Vino: brutal, messy and often ending in death for his target.”
Basically “don’t kill innocent people, or people he likes or feels responsible for” is the main gist of it. The latter bit is important - he almost refuses to help Jacuzzi in The Slash because he doesn’t feel any obligation to him (or at least this is what he says - he sometimes puts on a slightly tougher exterior than what is actually true, such as when he criticises the Gandors for using hair-cutting as a punishment when he’d been the one to suggest it to Tick. It’s hard to say - he’s a bit of a wild card in these things).
4. How does he regard beliefs that differ from his? Is he tolerant, intolerant, curious, indifferent?
As a solipsist he doesn’t expect anyone to hold the same beliefs as he does for logical reasons. That no one else believes him can do nothing to dissuade him from his position, so he doesn’t care particularly about it.
5. What prejudices does he hold? Are they irrational or does he have a good reason for them?
Coming from 1930s America it might be expected that he’d hold some of the prejudices that were common to that time and place. There are a couple of points in canon where this is briefly touched on, but what they suggest is that he’s very open to changing his mind about any societal prejudices he does hold. In the DS Game alternate ending he describes Ladd’s proposing to him as “quite worrying”, then a few minutes later shrugs that off because his declaration of love outweighs how weirded out he is by the fact they’re both men. There are also at least two times when he briefly talks about prejudice against women. When Maria claims that the reason he doesn’t take her seriously is because she’s a woman he rebukes her, saying that he respects women and that it’s just her in particular he’s looking down on. There’s also this exchange with a member of Jacuzzi’s gang:
"And come to think of it, what kinda guy cuts a girl's face, anyway? And he still calls himself a man?"
"Uhh, actually, the one who fought her was a woman too."
"...I'm an equal rights activist!"
"That doesn't make any sense!"
Judging from those snippets I’d say that he feels that he has no good reason to hold prejudices, but he has a few residual tendencies simply due to being embedded in a highly prejudiced society. He’s quick enough to dismiss these when the world shows him evidence that disproves them.
Daily Life
1. What is the character's financial situation? Is he rich, poor, comfortable, in debt?
For someone his age who started off on circus peanuts he had a surprisingly comfortable amount of money already saved up from his work. He’s a little annoyed that it’s not available to him in the Port - people died for that money!
2. What is his social status? Has this changed over time, and if so, how has the change affected him?
He’s been a bit of an outcast of normal society for as long as he can remember, what with being taken in by a mafia family. As that was a kind of society of its own and carrying its own kind of social status he never suffered because of it. However the organised crime life didn’t suit him, so he tried the kind of social outcasts that wear round red noses and leotards instead. Similarly the circus was its own self-contained unit, albeit smaller and more mobile and a little bit more silly. It could maybe be considered a downgrade in social status from the mafia in some ways, although more law-abiding. Since after that he became a freelance assassin we can assume he’s not particularly worried about social status or law-abiding-ness, although he keeps up the basic appearance of both in his everyday life.
3. Where does he live? House, apartment, trailer? Is his home his castle or just a place to crash? What condition is it in? Does he share it with others?
He had an apartment in Manhattan which was slightly run-down since he spent most of his time travelling. He thought it had a charming bachelor quality. Since he got back after the Flying Pussyfoot incident he’s been meaning to do it up.
4. Besides the basic necessities, what does he spend his money on?
Good food. Movie tickets. Paperbacks. He actually saves a lot of it because his tastes aren’t that fancy and he’s on his own most of the time.
5. What does he do for a living? Is he good at it? Does he enjoy it, or would he rather be doing something else?
His main career is an assassin, although he takes cover jobs as he sees fit. He has an extremely high status as an assassin, variously described as the best in the world, or the States, or the second best after Felix Walken (whose name and title he eventually inherits). Whether he enjoys it is something I’m not entirely clear on - I would like to say for certain that he does but there’s a bit at the end of Drug&TheDominos which suggests that he has mixed feelings about it: “From the very day you regarded killing as a kind of profession, stuff like pride is no longer an issue for us!” As far as I know this is the only time he suggests that he has any negative feelings about being an assassin, and it at least indicates that he feels that there is no honour among assassins. However he might not feel that this affects him too much, since his moral code governs the world. The rest of the time he seems fairly happy about his work, wheedling his brothers to give him more challenging jobs or boasting about the number of ways he knows to kill people.
6. What are his interests or hobbies? How does he spend his free time?
He’s a bit of a film geek. He admits that he goes to the cinema whenever he can (and it’s a obvious when he quotes lines from films) but he also secretly keeps up-to-date on all the new developments in film technology. It was like Christmas for him when the first talkies came out.
7. What are his eating habits? Does he skip meals, eat out, drink alcohol, avoid certain foods?
He dines out a little too much for someone on his, er, salary. He can cook but it’s not something he particularly enjoys doing and he often cuts corners with it. That said he grew up with enough Italians to throw together some good pasta and meatballs. He almost never skips meals, even when travelling, eats a lot and then burns it off quickly. He can handle his booze and never really drinks enough to get drunk anyway. If he does drink it’s usually whiskey or beer - he only drinks wine for the effect, or for his own amusement (see ironic/morbid sense of humour), or with Chane.
Associations
Which of the following do you associate with the character, or which is his favorite:
1. Color? Red
2. Smell? Iron, wool and cologne
3. Time of day? Night
4. Season? Winter
5. Book? The Pit and the Pendulum Edgar Allan Poe
6. Music? Jazz
7. Place? Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan
8. Substance? Blood
9. Plant? Vine
10. Animal? Bears and dogs.
END
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