w4sp | app for clockbox

PLAYER INFORMATION

PLAYER: Jenni

AGED 18+? Yep!

RESERVED? Nope

IN-GAME CHARACTERS: Mi invited me. c:

CHARACTER INFORMATION

NAME: Lisbeth Salander

CANON: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo / Millennium series by Stieg Larsson

CANON POINT: Between The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire, after she rage-quit having feelings for Blomkvist and decided to fuck off forever, but before she actually got out of Sweden.

ARRIVAL TYPE: Accidental.

IC USERNAME: wasp

HISTORY: On the Millennium Wiki (please excuse the sabotage re: sword fights) and on Wikipedia. CW: fire, violence, rape, domestic abuse, abuse of power by mental health professionals, and brief mention of pedophilia. Related themes also discussed below.

PERSONALITY:

Cagey: The first impression most people get of Lisbeth is that she doesn't like you and doesn't trust you - and that's not inaccurate. Lisbeth learned from a young age that no one was going to save her but her; the social structures that were meant to protect her and her mother failed, so she stopped relying on them, and stopped trusting anyone but herself. At 24 years old, she has two friends - her former guardian Holger Palmgren and her recently-ex-lover Mikael Blomkvist, one of whom she already regrets giving a shit about, and neither of whom are privy to that many of her secrets. She's an intensely private person, at least when it comes to her privacy.

A few others have wormed their way behind Lisbeth's defenses over the years, but her defenses are considerable. Everything from her choice of clothing to her tattoos and piercings to her attitude are constructed to convey the message Keep Out in as bold of terms as she can comfortably muster. She doesn't try to be accommodating; she wants people to default to leaving her alone. That doesn't mean she wants to be left alone all the time, but she does want explicit control over who gets to see what parts of her. Her time institutionalized taught her to see her own head as one of the few fortresses she could reliably protect, and choosing whether or not to share her thoughts became a point of pride. She went 2 years without speaking to a single psychiatrist out of pure spite, so she can be stubborn about it (and everything else) when she wants to. If she doesn't want to open up, she's not going to.

Rude: Sorry. Even when she's not trying to push people away on purpose, she often comes across as short, rude, or abrasive. She has difficulty connecting to people, making friends, or even making small talk. While she often manages to pass her poor social skills off as assertiveness or aggression, she is also self-conscious about it, particularly in those rare instances when she does connect with someone for whom she might want to provide emotional support.

Vengeful: Lisbeth has had problems with anger and violence for most of her life. It takes a concrete provocation to set her off; her childhood episodes of violence were always in response to bullying or in defense of someone else, and she will even typically wait for the offense to be repeated or the offender to indicate they won't otherwise stop before she takes action. But because of her total distrust of authority, her temper, and her physical size, her solutions tend to be brutal and final — like, say, lighting her father on fire for abusing her mother. She doesn't believe she'll get more than one shot, so she makes sure it counts.

As an adult, Lisbeth has learned not to let her anger rule her quite so much. Her former guardian successfully conveyed to her that actions have consequences, and if she smashed in the faces of everyone she thought deserved it, she would end up committed again. That lesson didn't actually make her less violent or vengeful, though; it just made her more calculated. Rather than immediately trying to murder people who wrong her, nowadays she just ties them up, tortures them, tattoos their crimes on their chests, and blackmails them for the rest of their lives. ... :')

Analytical: Her calculating nature is helped along by the fact that Lisbeth is extraordinarily intelligent. Her formal education was sparse, but she has a voracious appetite for math, science, and above all, computers. She has a photographic memory and is able to perform complex calculations solely in her head. In the rest of her life, that means she is extremely observant, logical, and confident in the validity of her observations and conclusions - sometimes to the point of arrogance. While she doesn't consider herself fundamentally better than anyone else for having a high IQ, she also doesn't doubt herself often. She frequently makes snap judgements about people and situations, and she acts on those assumptions just as quickly. Granted, she's usually right, at least in a technical sense if not a moral one, but that doesn't make it not a flaw.

Invested: Despite being a cagey misanthrope with all the social graces of a rusty nail bat, Lisbeth is deeply invested in other people's problems. She doesn't believe in the power of the usual social systems to protect people or punish wrongdoing, so she takes it upon herself to fix problems she thinks society won't. When Blomkvist is set up for libel, she provides him with the (illegally obtained) evidence required to clear his name, then sets up a series of monetary transactions that get the offender killed. When she discovers a woman's husband is trying to murder her under the cover of a hurricane, she not only saves the woman, she goes back to knock out the husband and leave him outside to get killed by the hurricane. She pays close attention to strangers' troubles, and when she can, uses her hacking abilities and whatever other resources in her wheelhouse to help them, preferable permanently.

INVENTORY: So many layers of black clothes (jeans, tank, underclothes, t-shirt, hoodie, jacket, gloves, scarf, boots), and her shoulder bag. The bag typically contains her taser, mace, macbook, phone, misc power cords, and other odds and ends, but I am fine with nerfing whatever.

CHANGES: Lisbeth has no super powers, but she does have IC knowledge of 1980s/1990s Marvel Comics, having gotten her handle from Janet van Dyne. But I'm fine with either nixing that completely, renaming things so what she knows is a coincidentally similar parallel, or saying her knowledge is limited to specific characters, pending players' permission. I'll make a permissions post for that + hacking things, if accepted.

SAMPLES

ONE: Hedge mazing with Rey
TWO: Making Matt Murdock's life more difficult
THREE: What the shit, Howl.

(Note: I can write more samples if needed, just. not by midnight EST. .-.)