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Mar. 6th, 2015 07:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bollyknickersAPPLICATION
▸PLAYER
Name: Megan
Means of Contact: plurk/dreamwidth: sparklepwny
Age: 28
Other Characters Played: the Twelfth Doctor
▸CHARACTER
Name: Alex Drake
Journal: http://bollyknickers.dreamwidth.org
Canon: Ashes to Ashes
Age: 35
Canon Point: just after being shot in 2x08
World Description:
n/a
Background Information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Drake
Personality:
Alex is nothing if not persistent, a trait she acquired from her mother. She is inordinately stubborn in everything she does, from researching to psychological profiling to solving cases - something that causes her no end of trouble when she butts heads with Gene, as neither of them are ever willing to back down. (Of course, Alex is also willing to admit to being wrong, unlike her DCI.) She is also very intelligent and highly analytical; she pursued a career in psychological profiling because she wanted to know how the criminal mind works and what drives people to commit crimes. Though her colleagues in the 1980s consider this to be absurd, she persists in doing it - and occasionally has the satisfaction of being right.
At the very least, plotting things out and analysing everything that happens to her helps her to get a grasp on her situation. She keeps a countdown of the days until her parents’ death and eventually tries to make connections using what little she can remember, tracking down a nearby billboard, locating what she thinks is the car her parents borrowed, and attempting to figure out who planted the bomb in their car (ultimately, as it turns out, the same man who shot her in 2008). She makes recordings of herself talking aloud, discussing her situation and what it might mean, attempting to figure out how to get home and, ultimately, trying to figure out Gene and his world. Alex is focused entirely on her work and her attempt to get home/work out the truth of the world she’s in, which means that she doesn’t have much time for a personal life (she literally lives across the street from the Fenchurch East station, above the restaurant where all the cops spend their free time).
Her relationships with other people are confusing, at best, and frustrating, at worst; she always has to lie to them about her past and why she's really there, something that causes no end of trouble when Gene is given the recordings she's made to analyse her situation. And, well, thinking that everybody is actually a construct of her subconscious doesn't help - like when she seduces a Thatcherite businessman in order to anger her mother, who she calls a part of her id. In fact, her relationship with her mother is particularly troublesome - she remembers her as cold and distant, and, indeed, they get off to a rough start. By the end of the first series, though, they've almost become friends, in a way; she confesses to Alex that she's going to take a sabbatical in order to spend more time with her daughter, and Alex realises that her mother really did love her all along. She also has a somewhat confusing quasi-romantic relationship with Evan, her godfather, and tries to deny her feelings for Gene before ultimately accepting them. She’s a devoted mother, having raised her daughter, Molly, single-handedly for the last eleven and a half years, and she’s fixated on trying to return home to her, even when her memories of Molly start slipping with the more time she spends in Gene’s world. In the first series, she imagines Molly regularly, but the visions become more and more infrequent as time goes on, ultimately becoming supplanted by visions of a young man with half his face ruined by a gunshot wound (who is, as it turns out, Gene himself).
Most of the people around her think she's a little bit batty, between referencing things that haven't happened yet, calling them constructs, referring to the real world, and other signs that she might be less than sane. She also occasionally has visions/hallucinations related to what's happened to her that cause her to stop paying attention to what's going on - like Sam before her, she thinks that she’s in hospital, fighting for her life, and that her subconscious (and the people around her unconscious body) is trying to communicate with her. At one point, she’s convinced that her body temperature is dropping because she’s dead, and she imagines frost forming on the car window; at another point, she believes that her surgeon is telling her that she’s been given a new medication to combat her fever, and that she has to fight to stay alive. The former example is simply a moment of hesitation on her part, staying in the car a little too long while her colleagues continue walking without her; the latter leads to mild delirium and confusion.
Alex is supremely confident - sometimes too much so - moving through a male-dominated career without so much as batting an eyelash at the rampant misogyny that surrounds her. She takes control of situations because she feels that she needs to in order to have a grasp on what's happening to her. In fact, beneath the veneer of confidence, her world is filled with uncertainty, not knowing whether she'll live or die, not knowing if she'll make it back to see her daughter again, not knowing what's really happening to her, if her world is real or merely a figment of her imagination. Her overconfidence often results in missteps when she thinks she’s following the right path, only to discover that she was wrong all along - whether it’s her attempts to thwart her parents’ deaths, mistakes in solving a case, or her investigation to discover whether Gene had a hand in Sam’s death.
In the end, though, it turns out that her entire character arc revolves around needing to learn when to relinquish control and simply admit when it’s time to move on - something that is difficult for someone who’s as much of a control freak as Alex, particularly when she’s spent two series convinced that she’s in the past to change everything that went wrong. This is especially evident at the end of the first series, when she tries to keep her parents from dying - Alex puts the man who created the bomb in jail (although he’s later released on bail by her father), crushes the car she thinks they’re going to borrow with a tank (it was someone else’s car), and does everything she can to try to prevent the inevitability of her parents’ death, but it still happens. In the third series, this spreads to the entire cast: they have to relinquish control of their lives and accept that they’re all dead, and confront their collective reasons for death before they can “move on” to the afterlife. Alex spends all of the third series trying to discover the truth about Gene because she thinks that it will allow her to return to her daughter - in the end, she has to give up and acknowledge her own death, even when it means abandoning her daughter.
In her time in Gene’s world, like Sam before her, Alex learns to relax and enjoy life, to open up and make friends instead of isolating herself from everyone around her. When she finally accepts that she’s really dead, it’s after also coming to terms with the fact that she loves Gene, and she kisses him for the first time before she walks into the pub (the canon’s equivalent of the afterlife for coppers).
Appearance: http://imgur.com/agGjej0
Abilities:
n/a
▸SAMPLES:
First Person:
My name is Alex Drake. I’m from London, England, circa2008 1982 2008. Quite frankly, I’m still not convinced that this entire place isn’t some sort of bizarre hallucination created by my subconscious mind, which would mean that I’m typing a message to imaginary constructs.
…although I suppose it wouldn’t be the first time.
[After all, she’s used to a world populated by imaginary constructs, ones who are far too real to be entirely creations of her own imagination. Particularly Gene Hunt - and with the importance of sex in this place, she half expects him to be around the corner, cracking lewd jokes and checking out her arse. She wishes he were here, in fact; maybe his presence would fill up a corner of a world that seems far too empty.]
This is entirely too far-fetched for even my mind to conceive of on its own, though - particularly the bit about the sex. I mean, female sexuality is a perfectly healthy and natural thing, and certainly not anything to be ashamed of, but having it in order to survive in a landscape like this is simply too much, like something out of bad seventies science fiction pornography. I half expect to be wearing some sort of skintight bodysuit, perhaps in silver - though I’m afraid silver’s never been my colour.
[Now she’s just rambling. It’s better to talk about inconsequential nonsense than focus on what’s happening: that she’s been shot (again) and is in a coma (again) and has found herself in a dream world (again). She’d half hoped that being shot in Gene’s world would make her wake up in her own, but it seems she’s ended up in a different reality. Is her brain like some sort of Russian nesting doll? Is reality - well, she might be good at psychology, but philosophy is another thing entirely.]
Is anyone else here- did you experience a traumatic event before arriving, perhaps? Something like a car crash or a stabbing or a…a gunshot wound?
Third Person:
Alex finds herself in a warren of rubble, and she wonders for a moment if she's finally dead (did the surgery kill her?) or mad (as if she wasn't mad already), or maybe both. Here and there, she spots fragments of her life strewn amongst the rest: a face from the mural at Luigi's, a bit of linoleum from CID, a flash of red that looks like it might be part of the paneling of the Quattro. The whispers twine about her like cats rubbing up against her legs, her failures come back to haunt her. Her mother's constant disappointment echoes in her ears, her father's voice on the tape he'd recorded before blowing them up, Gene's frustration at what he'd thought was a betrayal, all of it her fault.
And there, in the corner, a flash of mousy brown hair, a birthmark. Alex is no stranger to visions (hallucinations?), especially not this one. "Molly?" she whispers, pressing manicured fingertips to her mouth. She was supposed to make it home in time for Molly's party, supposed to save herself, supposed to leave Gene Hunt and his bloody world behind. Instead, she's in a place that even her psyche couldn't have dreamt up; at least 1982 is familiar (more so than her own time, becoming more and more real by the day, and that's what terrifies her the most). This is some dystopian hellhole, enough to make her worried that she's died, and that this is her afterlife: penance for all her sins and shortcomings. She glances down at her clothes, the evidence of her injury still apparent in the dried dark stain on her red blouse, rust brown spreading across the white of her coat. The wound itself is gone, all too reminiscent of the last time she got shot and found herself elsewhere (elsewhen).
"Molly?" She turns around at another sound, but it's not her daughter. "Have you seen a little girl? About twelve years old, with brown hair. Please, it's very important."
▸PLAYER
Name: Megan
Means of Contact: plurk/dreamwidth: sparklepwny
Age: 28
Other Characters Played: the Twelfth Doctor
▸CHARACTER
Name: Alex Drake
Journal: http://bollyknickers.dreamwidth.org
Canon: Ashes to Ashes
Age: 35
Canon Point: just after being shot in 2x08
World Description:
n/a
Background Information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Drake
Personality:
Alex is nothing if not persistent, a trait she acquired from her mother. She is inordinately stubborn in everything she does, from researching to psychological profiling to solving cases - something that causes her no end of trouble when she butts heads with Gene, as neither of them are ever willing to back down. (Of course, Alex is also willing to admit to being wrong, unlike her DCI.) She is also very intelligent and highly analytical; she pursued a career in psychological profiling because she wanted to know how the criminal mind works and what drives people to commit crimes. Though her colleagues in the 1980s consider this to be absurd, she persists in doing it - and occasionally has the satisfaction of being right.
At the very least, plotting things out and analysing everything that happens to her helps her to get a grasp on her situation. She keeps a countdown of the days until her parents’ death and eventually tries to make connections using what little she can remember, tracking down a nearby billboard, locating what she thinks is the car her parents borrowed, and attempting to figure out who planted the bomb in their car (ultimately, as it turns out, the same man who shot her in 2008). She makes recordings of herself talking aloud, discussing her situation and what it might mean, attempting to figure out how to get home and, ultimately, trying to figure out Gene and his world. Alex is focused entirely on her work and her attempt to get home/work out the truth of the world she’s in, which means that she doesn’t have much time for a personal life (she literally lives across the street from the Fenchurch East station, above the restaurant where all the cops spend their free time).
Her relationships with other people are confusing, at best, and frustrating, at worst; she always has to lie to them about her past and why she's really there, something that causes no end of trouble when Gene is given the recordings she's made to analyse her situation. And, well, thinking that everybody is actually a construct of her subconscious doesn't help - like when she seduces a Thatcherite businessman in order to anger her mother, who she calls a part of her id. In fact, her relationship with her mother is particularly troublesome - she remembers her as cold and distant, and, indeed, they get off to a rough start. By the end of the first series, though, they've almost become friends, in a way; she confesses to Alex that she's going to take a sabbatical in order to spend more time with her daughter, and Alex realises that her mother really did love her all along. She also has a somewhat confusing quasi-romantic relationship with Evan, her godfather, and tries to deny her feelings for Gene before ultimately accepting them. She’s a devoted mother, having raised her daughter, Molly, single-handedly for the last eleven and a half years, and she’s fixated on trying to return home to her, even when her memories of Molly start slipping with the more time she spends in Gene’s world. In the first series, she imagines Molly regularly, but the visions become more and more infrequent as time goes on, ultimately becoming supplanted by visions of a young man with half his face ruined by a gunshot wound (who is, as it turns out, Gene himself).
Most of the people around her think she's a little bit batty, between referencing things that haven't happened yet, calling them constructs, referring to the real world, and other signs that she might be less than sane. She also occasionally has visions/hallucinations related to what's happened to her that cause her to stop paying attention to what's going on - like Sam before her, she thinks that she’s in hospital, fighting for her life, and that her subconscious (and the people around her unconscious body) is trying to communicate with her. At one point, she’s convinced that her body temperature is dropping because she’s dead, and she imagines frost forming on the car window; at another point, she believes that her surgeon is telling her that she’s been given a new medication to combat her fever, and that she has to fight to stay alive. The former example is simply a moment of hesitation on her part, staying in the car a little too long while her colleagues continue walking without her; the latter leads to mild delirium and confusion.
Alex is supremely confident - sometimes too much so - moving through a male-dominated career without so much as batting an eyelash at the rampant misogyny that surrounds her. She takes control of situations because she feels that she needs to in order to have a grasp on what's happening to her. In fact, beneath the veneer of confidence, her world is filled with uncertainty, not knowing whether she'll live or die, not knowing if she'll make it back to see her daughter again, not knowing what's really happening to her, if her world is real or merely a figment of her imagination. Her overconfidence often results in missteps when she thinks she’s following the right path, only to discover that she was wrong all along - whether it’s her attempts to thwart her parents’ deaths, mistakes in solving a case, or her investigation to discover whether Gene had a hand in Sam’s death.
In the end, though, it turns out that her entire character arc revolves around needing to learn when to relinquish control and simply admit when it’s time to move on - something that is difficult for someone who’s as much of a control freak as Alex, particularly when she’s spent two series convinced that she’s in the past to change everything that went wrong. This is especially evident at the end of the first series, when she tries to keep her parents from dying - Alex puts the man who created the bomb in jail (although he’s later released on bail by her father), crushes the car she thinks they’re going to borrow with a tank (it was someone else’s car), and does everything she can to try to prevent the inevitability of her parents’ death, but it still happens. In the third series, this spreads to the entire cast: they have to relinquish control of their lives and accept that they’re all dead, and confront their collective reasons for death before they can “move on” to the afterlife. Alex spends all of the third series trying to discover the truth about Gene because she thinks that it will allow her to return to her daughter - in the end, she has to give up and acknowledge her own death, even when it means abandoning her daughter.
In her time in Gene’s world, like Sam before her, Alex learns to relax and enjoy life, to open up and make friends instead of isolating herself from everyone around her. When she finally accepts that she’s really dead, it’s after also coming to terms with the fact that she loves Gene, and she kisses him for the first time before she walks into the pub (the canon’s equivalent of the afterlife for coppers).
Appearance: http://imgur.com/agGjej0
Abilities:
n/a
▸SAMPLES:
First Person:
My name is Alex Drake. I’m from London, England, circa
…although I suppose it wouldn’t be the first time.
[After all, she’s used to a world populated by imaginary constructs, ones who are far too real to be entirely creations of her own imagination. Particularly Gene Hunt - and with the importance of sex in this place, she half expects him to be around the corner, cracking lewd jokes and checking out her arse. She wishes he were here, in fact; maybe his presence would fill up a corner of a world that seems far too empty.]
This is entirely too far-fetched for even my mind to conceive of on its own, though - particularly the bit about the sex. I mean, female sexuality is a perfectly healthy and natural thing, and certainly not anything to be ashamed of, but having it in order to survive in a landscape like this is simply too much, like something out of bad seventies science fiction pornography. I half expect to be wearing some sort of skintight bodysuit, perhaps in silver - though I’m afraid silver’s never been my colour.
[Now she’s just rambling. It’s better to talk about inconsequential nonsense than focus on what’s happening: that she’s been shot (again) and is in a coma (again) and has found herself in a dream world (again). She’d half hoped that being shot in Gene’s world would make her wake up in her own, but it seems she’s ended up in a different reality. Is her brain like some sort of Russian nesting doll? Is reality - well, she might be good at psychology, but philosophy is another thing entirely.]
Is anyone else here- did you experience a traumatic event before arriving, perhaps? Something like a car crash or a stabbing or a…a gunshot wound?
Third Person:
Alex finds herself in a warren of rubble, and she wonders for a moment if she's finally dead (did the surgery kill her?) or mad (as if she wasn't mad already), or maybe both. Here and there, she spots fragments of her life strewn amongst the rest: a face from the mural at Luigi's, a bit of linoleum from CID, a flash of red that looks like it might be part of the paneling of the Quattro. The whispers twine about her like cats rubbing up against her legs, her failures come back to haunt her. Her mother's constant disappointment echoes in her ears, her father's voice on the tape he'd recorded before blowing them up, Gene's frustration at what he'd thought was a betrayal, all of it her fault.
And there, in the corner, a flash of mousy brown hair, a birthmark. Alex is no stranger to visions (hallucinations?), especially not this one. "Molly?" she whispers, pressing manicured fingertips to her mouth. She was supposed to make it home in time for Molly's party, supposed to save herself, supposed to leave Gene Hunt and his bloody world behind. Instead, she's in a place that even her psyche couldn't have dreamt up; at least 1982 is familiar (more so than her own time, becoming more and more real by the day, and that's what terrifies her the most). This is some dystopian hellhole, enough to make her worried that she's died, and that this is her afterlife: penance for all her sins and shortcomings. She glances down at her clothes, the evidence of her injury still apparent in the dried dark stain on her red blouse, rust brown spreading across the white of her coat. The wound itself is gone, all too reminiscent of the last time she got shot and found herself elsewhere (elsewhen).
"Molly?" She turns around at another sound, but it's not her daughter. "Have you seen a little girl? About twelve years old, with brown hair. Please, it's very important."
