Ivan Vorpatril (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ivanyouidiot) wrote2012-06-23 01:47 pm
ivanyouidiot) wrote2012-06-23 01:47 pm
Entry tags:
Luceti App
Character
Name: Ivan Vorpatril
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga
Gender: Male
Age: 22
Time Period: Post-Cetaganda
Wing Color: Brown with a blue patch, รก la this
History: Ivan
The planet of Barrayar was colonized in the 23rd century, via a wormhole that soon proved to be unstable. In the aftermath, the colonists' descendants created a feudal society over the next six hundred years, until contact with the outside world was reestablished via a new jump route. It's been a little over a hundred years since that contact, and Barrayar is still a world driven by its own, often backwater, instincts and its need to survive amidst the galactic reality.
Personality: The first thing that people (or at least men, women tend to see Ivan's charm and flirtatiousness and sometimes, if Ivan's lucky, not much else by way of personality) tend to notice about Ivan is that he isn't very bright. As a child, his name was more often than not accompanied with an epithet, making it Ivan-you-idiot. To some degree this is a deliberately cultivated impression. Only three people would have to die for Ivan to be Emperor, and far more than that died in the power struggle that killed his father and caused Ivan to be born in an abandoned building in the poor part of the city, instead of in a hospital. Ivan doesn't have political ambitions, and the best way to avoid being embroiled in politics anyway is to not be bright enough to keep up with them. The rest of it is that Ivan actually is that much of a fool. He's the picture-perfect version of a Barrayaran officer, so long as he stays out of any situations which would require him to take initiative or think for himself. While he notices the necessary details, he's been surrounded by people who will put together the pieces faster than he will, so he tends to simply sit back and expect someone else. He's technically capable of keeping up mentally, but it would require effort and it wouldn't gain him anything, so he doesn't struggle for it.
Ivan, in general, knows just enough about politics and intrigue and intergalactic struggles to know that he's quite happy being a glorified secretary for someone who makes the real decisions. He likes cities, and while ship duty is the siren call to nearly any Barrayaran soldier with a dream of galactic explorations, Ivan likes being stationed in Barrayar's capital, where both the threats and the women are known quantities. He would be happy to see his mother a little less obsessed with his future (which in her mind includes settling down and getting married) and give him a little more space, but beyond that he's fairly comfortable with a planetary assignment.
One of Ivan's undeniably positive traits is his loyalty. He believes in Barrayar, his emperor, and his cousin, and he will do what is asked of him in regards to those. While he would rather hand things off to a chain of command, rather than the more self-guided approach that his cousin favors, he does so as much out of a wish to see things properly handled and a belief that this is the way for it to happen as he does it out of a desire to cover his own back. He's uncomfortable making important decisions on his own, and is in fact very good at following orders, and he knows it.
Family also means quite a lot to Ivan. He has no siblings, his father died the day he was born, and his mother dotes on him to a degree that he finds uncomfortable, but his cousin, Miles, means a lot to him, even if Ivan doesn't always show it. Miles is everything that Ivan is not -- clever, extremely self-directed, paranoid, and independent -- and vice versa -- Ivan's tall, handsome and successful with women. Despite this, Ivan's loyalty to Miles is steady, and he lets himself get talked into ventures that he'd normally avoid simply because Miles is the one doing the talking. Family comes first, after all, and even if Ivan is sure a plan will fail he will follow Miles into it so he can help as much as he can.
Ivan's very accomplished when it comes to women. Part of it is that this is an arena that he's not particularly afraid to fail in. There are, in his mind, plenty of women out there, and while he'd like to make a positive impression on and hook up with all of them, if some of them don't want to, he'll simply move on to someone who would be more amenable to the idea. It doesn't really phase him, or hurt his ego, since if at the end of the night he manages to hook up with someone then it doesn't matter how many times he was rejected at the beginning of the night. He also doesn't fear playing even more the fool in front of them, if it gets a laugh.
He's also fairly shallow when it comes to women. While he doesn't make most of his sexual decisions based on social status (that would be rather too much like playing into his mother's hands, as far as Ivan is concerned) he does make them based on exterior attractiveness. While he tends towards defensiveness on anyone insulting his cousin's external (and not at all what one would expect of a Barrayaran Lord) experience, he can be viciously judgmental towards women who aren't attractive. This, to some degree, ties into Barrayaran views of gene lines and mutants. Mutants on Barrayar aren't to be tolerated, and the practice of infanticide against those with visible physical defects has only recently been outlawed. A woman who looks obviously unattractive not only has Ivan's own disappointment in the fact working in his interactions with her, but she will also be affected by his ingrained Barrayaran prejudices. On the other hand, Ivan thinks rather nice thoughts about women who are attractive, even if it's not in a conventionally accepted Barrayaran manner (aka there's obvious signs of genetic tinkering in their bloodline).
He can be rather entitled when it comes to women who are. Although he's willing to try and fail, Ivan doesn't always know when he really should just back off. Instead he can be pushy, because that behaviour has sometimes gotten him results in the past, and Barrayar's culture is intensely male-dominated. He doesn't really have the understanding that if he's making someone uncomfortable then he should back off, instead he'll keep pushing in order to, in his mind, help them get over the discomfort. He's not maliciously intended, but he doesn't always know where boundaries are being put down.
Ivan also has a protective side when it comes to women. While he pushes, he doesn't believe in leaving a lady in the lurch and he has a sense of chivalry that's been very deeply engrained in him. He's not looking to get married, but he does believe that both he and the woman he hooks up with should enjoy themselves and that there shouldn't be any regrets come the morning. Should she find herself in any outside danger, he'll happily play the gallant knight and perform a rescue to the best of his abilities. He knows he looks the part, and he's happy to play it as well.
Strengths:
Physical: Ivan is 6'1" and the picture model of a Barrayaran aristocrat. As well as being quite attractive, he had no problem with the physical regimen necessary to either qualify for or graduate from the Imperial Academy. He's been instructed in hand-to-hand and weaponized (stunners and nerve disruptors) combat. Despite having been on desk duty since his graduation from the Academy, he keeps himself quite fit. For all that, of course, he is a pretty typical fit man in his early twenties: his physical abilities aren't particularly noteworthy in the society he inhabits. He's also charming, to match his exterior attractiveness.
Mental: He plays dumb and is unambitious. In the politically charged atmosphere of Barrayar, he keeps remarkably under the radar for his potential status in society. He doesn't lean on the connection he has with the emperor and it's clear from everyone's perspective that he doesn't aspire to a political revolution. He very carefully makes himself out as a non-threat (although his lack of desire for a government overthrow is very genuine).
Emotional: He's very loyal. Treason is out of the question for him, and he'd do a lot to protect or serve a friend, or a woman he's flirted with. He'd do even more to protect family (of which Miles comes first).
Weaknesses:
Physical: He is in the end just an ordinary human male, without any special modifications or changes. With all the usual vulnerabilities to physical damage and drugs.
Mental: He can be a bit actually dumb at times. He's easily enough taken advantage and he tends to let an attraction to a woman sway him to doing things that he knows aren't a good idea, or even just trusting her because she's a women and attractive and he thinks she's interested in him. He's pretty used to letting other people do the thinking, which when he then finds himself in a position where no one else will sweep in and save him he isn't quite sure what to do. He does, in fact, spend a fairly high percentage of his time as the damsel in distress equivalent, to be rescued by Miles.
Emotional: He's very opposed to settling down and getting married, and avoids romantic connections with women as much as possible. He's a skirtchaser, at present, and has no desire to give that up, despite it being a source of conflict between himself and his mother. He favors short-term connections and then moving on, in part because he knows what to expect from that and it doesn't create any vulnerability in him. He has a fear that should he fall in love then he would get married and that would be the end of all of his fun.
Samples
First Person: (Feel free to shoot me a Q&A if this isn't sufficient)
This seems like a very Miles sort of situation. Mysterious location, mysterious change of clothing to just pants, what feels like Barrayar gravity and air... Oh. I hope the air's not toxic.
[He holds his breath for a moment, then lets it out in a woosh.] If it is I suppose I'm already good as dead. I don't see any oxygen masks around here anyway.
Oh, and wildlife's always a good sign when it comes to that... Or not wildlife, as it turns out. There are wings attached to me. Well shit.
Miles would have already figured out three ways to get off this planet and do it in a way that gets him some sort of medal in the process. I still don't have a clue where I am, or how long I was out while they did the surgery.
[He kicks out, sending a stone tumbling.]
I don't mind being picked for things just because I'm more attractive than him, but I do tend to prefer that the things I'm being picked out for be pleasant. Not that being 'picked out' and 'pleasant things' really belong in the same sentence.
Anyway, great, nice, cool planet, but I'd prefer to be released to the nearest Barrayaran embassy as soon as possible.
Third Person:
Ivan would be the first one to agree that he'd had a lot of stupid ideas over the course of the twenty-two years that he'd been alive, but even then, this was one of the stupidest. Sure, the wings on his back hurt a fair amount, indicating that whatever surgery -- and Ivan hoped like hell it had been surgery, rather than any sort of mutation at the genetic level -- had been recent, but there also wasn't any sort of stitch-mark indicating a clear seam where they'd been attached. That had been the first thing he had checked once he'd been able to make his way to a mirror. The barcode that that same mirror revealed was another unwelcome addition to his body, but it didn't fill him with the same sense of revulsion that the wings did. Those provoked a roughly equivalent sensation to what some people would feel on finding a cockroach crawling up on their arm, except for the fact that these wings weren't so easily brushed off.
He'd tried that before picking up the knife.
The knife now lay where he'd dropped it on the floor at the first spasm of pain, along with the one feather that his efforts had cut off. He hadn't even gotten to the point of seeing whether or not these wings could bleed -- which would have had a telling result, he was sure -- before he'd been forced to stop. An idiot, maybe, but he wasn't going to inflict pain that severe on himself for nothing more than to satisfy his own curiosity. It wasn't as though him knowing whether it was surgery or genetic manipulation would change the actual fact of it, and he only had a fifty percent chance of peace of mind in the first place.
Less than fifty percent, if he was going to be honest with himself, but there seemed to be no real motivating factor to push himself to that. He pocketed the knife, stuffed a shirt on over the wings, and resolved to just not think about them.
Name: Ivan Vorpatril
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga
Gender: Male
Age: 22
Time Period: Post-Cetaganda
Wing Color: Brown with a blue patch, รก la this
History: Ivan
The planet of Barrayar was colonized in the 23rd century, via a wormhole that soon proved to be unstable. In the aftermath, the colonists' descendants created a feudal society over the next six hundred years, until contact with the outside world was reestablished via a new jump route. It's been a little over a hundred years since that contact, and Barrayar is still a world driven by its own, often backwater, instincts and its need to survive amidst the galactic reality.
Personality: The first thing that people (or at least men, women tend to see Ivan's charm and flirtatiousness and sometimes, if Ivan's lucky, not much else by way of personality) tend to notice about Ivan is that he isn't very bright. As a child, his name was more often than not accompanied with an epithet, making it Ivan-you-idiot. To some degree this is a deliberately cultivated impression. Only three people would have to die for Ivan to be Emperor, and far more than that died in the power struggle that killed his father and caused Ivan to be born in an abandoned building in the poor part of the city, instead of in a hospital. Ivan doesn't have political ambitions, and the best way to avoid being embroiled in politics anyway is to not be bright enough to keep up with them. The rest of it is that Ivan actually is that much of a fool. He's the picture-perfect version of a Barrayaran officer, so long as he stays out of any situations which would require him to take initiative or think for himself. While he notices the necessary details, he's been surrounded by people who will put together the pieces faster than he will, so he tends to simply sit back and expect someone else. He's technically capable of keeping up mentally, but it would require effort and it wouldn't gain him anything, so he doesn't struggle for it.
Ivan, in general, knows just enough about politics and intrigue and intergalactic struggles to know that he's quite happy being a glorified secretary for someone who makes the real decisions. He likes cities, and while ship duty is the siren call to nearly any Barrayaran soldier with a dream of galactic explorations, Ivan likes being stationed in Barrayar's capital, where both the threats and the women are known quantities. He would be happy to see his mother a little less obsessed with his future (which in her mind includes settling down and getting married) and give him a little more space, but beyond that he's fairly comfortable with a planetary assignment.
One of Ivan's undeniably positive traits is his loyalty. He believes in Barrayar, his emperor, and his cousin, and he will do what is asked of him in regards to those. While he would rather hand things off to a chain of command, rather than the more self-guided approach that his cousin favors, he does so as much out of a wish to see things properly handled and a belief that this is the way for it to happen as he does it out of a desire to cover his own back. He's uncomfortable making important decisions on his own, and is in fact very good at following orders, and he knows it.
Family also means quite a lot to Ivan. He has no siblings, his father died the day he was born, and his mother dotes on him to a degree that he finds uncomfortable, but his cousin, Miles, means a lot to him, even if Ivan doesn't always show it. Miles is everything that Ivan is not -- clever, extremely self-directed, paranoid, and independent -- and vice versa -- Ivan's tall, handsome and successful with women. Despite this, Ivan's loyalty to Miles is steady, and he lets himself get talked into ventures that he'd normally avoid simply because Miles is the one doing the talking. Family comes first, after all, and even if Ivan is sure a plan will fail he will follow Miles into it so he can help as much as he can.
Ivan's very accomplished when it comes to women. Part of it is that this is an arena that he's not particularly afraid to fail in. There are, in his mind, plenty of women out there, and while he'd like to make a positive impression on and hook up with all of them, if some of them don't want to, he'll simply move on to someone who would be more amenable to the idea. It doesn't really phase him, or hurt his ego, since if at the end of the night he manages to hook up with someone then it doesn't matter how many times he was rejected at the beginning of the night. He also doesn't fear playing even more the fool in front of them, if it gets a laugh.
He's also fairly shallow when it comes to women. While he doesn't make most of his sexual decisions based on social status (that would be rather too much like playing into his mother's hands, as far as Ivan is concerned) he does make them based on exterior attractiveness. While he tends towards defensiveness on anyone insulting his cousin's external (and not at all what one would expect of a Barrayaran Lord) experience, he can be viciously judgmental towards women who aren't attractive. This, to some degree, ties into Barrayaran views of gene lines and mutants. Mutants on Barrayar aren't to be tolerated, and the practice of infanticide against those with visible physical defects has only recently been outlawed. A woman who looks obviously unattractive not only has Ivan's own disappointment in the fact working in his interactions with her, but she will also be affected by his ingrained Barrayaran prejudices. On the other hand, Ivan thinks rather nice thoughts about women who are attractive, even if it's not in a conventionally accepted Barrayaran manner (aka there's obvious signs of genetic tinkering in their bloodline).
He can be rather entitled when it comes to women who are. Although he's willing to try and fail, Ivan doesn't always know when he really should just back off. Instead he can be pushy, because that behaviour has sometimes gotten him results in the past, and Barrayar's culture is intensely male-dominated. He doesn't really have the understanding that if he's making someone uncomfortable then he should back off, instead he'll keep pushing in order to, in his mind, help them get over the discomfort. He's not maliciously intended, but he doesn't always know where boundaries are being put down.
Ivan also has a protective side when it comes to women. While he pushes, he doesn't believe in leaving a lady in the lurch and he has a sense of chivalry that's been very deeply engrained in him. He's not looking to get married, but he does believe that both he and the woman he hooks up with should enjoy themselves and that there shouldn't be any regrets come the morning. Should she find herself in any outside danger, he'll happily play the gallant knight and perform a rescue to the best of his abilities. He knows he looks the part, and he's happy to play it as well.
Strengths:
Physical: Ivan is 6'1" and the picture model of a Barrayaran aristocrat. As well as being quite attractive, he had no problem with the physical regimen necessary to either qualify for or graduate from the Imperial Academy. He's been instructed in hand-to-hand and weaponized (stunners and nerve disruptors) combat. Despite having been on desk duty since his graduation from the Academy, he keeps himself quite fit. For all that, of course, he is a pretty typical fit man in his early twenties: his physical abilities aren't particularly noteworthy in the society he inhabits. He's also charming, to match his exterior attractiveness.
Mental: He plays dumb and is unambitious. In the politically charged atmosphere of Barrayar, he keeps remarkably under the radar for his potential status in society. He doesn't lean on the connection he has with the emperor and it's clear from everyone's perspective that he doesn't aspire to a political revolution. He very carefully makes himself out as a non-threat (although his lack of desire for a government overthrow is very genuine).
Emotional: He's very loyal. Treason is out of the question for him, and he'd do a lot to protect or serve a friend, or a woman he's flirted with. He'd do even more to protect family (of which Miles comes first).
Weaknesses:
Physical: He is in the end just an ordinary human male, without any special modifications or changes. With all the usual vulnerabilities to physical damage and drugs.
Mental: He can be a bit actually dumb at times. He's easily enough taken advantage and he tends to let an attraction to a woman sway him to doing things that he knows aren't a good idea, or even just trusting her because she's a women and attractive and he thinks she's interested in him. He's pretty used to letting other people do the thinking, which when he then finds himself in a position where no one else will sweep in and save him he isn't quite sure what to do. He does, in fact, spend a fairly high percentage of his time as the damsel in distress equivalent, to be rescued by Miles.
Emotional: He's very opposed to settling down and getting married, and avoids romantic connections with women as much as possible. He's a skirtchaser, at present, and has no desire to give that up, despite it being a source of conflict between himself and his mother. He favors short-term connections and then moving on, in part because he knows what to expect from that and it doesn't create any vulnerability in him. He has a fear that should he fall in love then he would get married and that would be the end of all of his fun.
Samples
First Person: (Feel free to shoot me a Q&A if this isn't sufficient)
This seems like a very Miles sort of situation. Mysterious location, mysterious change of clothing to just pants, what feels like Barrayar gravity and air... Oh. I hope the air's not toxic.
[He holds his breath for a moment, then lets it out in a woosh.] If it is I suppose I'm already good as dead. I don't see any oxygen masks around here anyway.
Oh, and wildlife's always a good sign when it comes to that... Or not wildlife, as it turns out. There are wings attached to me. Well shit.
Miles would have already figured out three ways to get off this planet and do it in a way that gets him some sort of medal in the process. I still don't have a clue where I am, or how long I was out while they did the surgery.
[He kicks out, sending a stone tumbling.]
I don't mind being picked for things just because I'm more attractive than him, but I do tend to prefer that the things I'm being picked out for be pleasant. Not that being 'picked out' and 'pleasant things' really belong in the same sentence.
Anyway, great, nice, cool planet, but I'd prefer to be released to the nearest Barrayaran embassy as soon as possible.
Third Person:
Ivan would be the first one to agree that he'd had a lot of stupid ideas over the course of the twenty-two years that he'd been alive, but even then, this was one of the stupidest. Sure, the wings on his back hurt a fair amount, indicating that whatever surgery -- and Ivan hoped like hell it had been surgery, rather than any sort of mutation at the genetic level -- had been recent, but there also wasn't any sort of stitch-mark indicating a clear seam where they'd been attached. That had been the first thing he had checked once he'd been able to make his way to a mirror. The barcode that that same mirror revealed was another unwelcome addition to his body, but it didn't fill him with the same sense of revulsion that the wings did. Those provoked a roughly equivalent sensation to what some people would feel on finding a cockroach crawling up on their arm, except for the fact that these wings weren't so easily brushed off.
He'd tried that before picking up the knife.
The knife now lay where he'd dropped it on the floor at the first spasm of pain, along with the one feather that his efforts had cut off. He hadn't even gotten to the point of seeing whether or not these wings could bleed -- which would have had a telling result, he was sure -- before he'd been forced to stop. An idiot, maybe, but he wasn't going to inflict pain that severe on himself for nothing more than to satisfy his own curiosity. It wasn't as though him knowing whether it was surgery or genetic manipulation would change the actual fact of it, and he only had a fifty percent chance of peace of mind in the first place.
Less than fifty percent, if he was going to be honest with himself, but there seemed to be no real motivating factor to push himself to that. He pocketed the knife, stuffed a shirt on over the wings, and resolved to just not think about them.