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lastvoyages
User Name/Nick: Iddy
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corknut
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ihdreniel
Other Characters Currently In-Game:
Misty Quigley |citizendetective
Tiffany Doggett |tucky
Character Name: Sameen Shaw
Series: Person of Interest
Age: Early thirties
From When?: Towards the beginning of 5x11, "Synecdoche". She taunts her enemies with a "Here I am, come and get me!" in an attempt to restart a virtual reality simulation that she erroneously believes herself to be in; instead, the Admiral will go "lol k", swoop in, and make her an offer.
Warden Justification: Shaw struggles with alexithymia and self-identifies as a sociopath, but she continually chooses to dedicate herself to causes and professions that she believes will help innocent people. She has experience with both personal redemption (not all of those causes that she believed would help innocent people actually did help innocent people, and many of them put an outsized focus on problem-solving via killing the troublemakers, both things that she became more discerning about as canon progressed), as well as aiding in the redemption of others (her team semi-domesticated a misanthropic feral assassin over the course of the show). Despite her prickly personality, difficulties in connecting with others, and tendency towards black-and-white thinking, Shaw feels duty and responsibility strongly, and believes that doing good is an important thing to strive for; she'd dedicate herself unfailingly towards both protecting and reforming any inmate placed in her care. She definitely wouldn't be the right warden for everybody, but she could still be the right warden for somebody.
Item: One of her burner phones (which will of course be stripped of all of its communicative properties).
Abilities/Powers: n/a; she's a baseline human. She will, however, be coming aboard with an assortment of weaponry in her cabin (guns, knives, grenades) that she's very adept at using.
Wardening Strategies and Philosophies:
Shaw is a believer in institutions, but also in her own methods: she likes to do her own thing within the framework of a preexisting system. This means that the Barge will be both liberating and frustrating for her, because she'll appreciate have the freedom to warden largely as she sees fit, but she'll be baffled by the lack of clear direction or expectation from the Admiral, as well as by how loose the ship's organizational structures are. While she won't necessarily expect all wardens to operate exactly as she does, she will find a lot of other wardening styles to be ineffective, inefficient, or just plain flabbergasting, and she won't be shy about saying so. Intensely focused and often incurious, she won't have much patience for common Barge pastimes like network philosophizing or discussions of moral relativity and ambiguity, and she's sometimes prone to inflexibility and even hypocrisy. All that said, she may grumble and sass and roll her eyes, but she's not unused to working with people who she disagrees with, and while she's capable of great stubbornness, she doesn't always employ it. She'll probably always lean towards the hardass side of things herself, and she'll probably always think touchy-feely wardening is kind of stupid - but if she realizes that her methods truly aren't working in a given situation, she's not the type to dig her heels in just for the sake of doing so. She may very well end up being a thorn in many of her fellow wardens' sides (and they a thorn in hers, in turn), but ultimately, the fact that they have the same motivations and end goals will mean something to her. Other wardens might often be annoyances in her eyes, but they won't be enemies.
Shaw will see the role of warden as that of a protector, an enforcer, and a guiding hand. She's much better at the first two than she is at the third, but she'll recognize the importance of all three, and will do her best to provide all of them. The temp cycle will feel very familiar to her: receiving a rotating cast of subjects to monitor and look out for and then move on from when the work is done is basically her job description at home, and she'll feel free to use similar tactics on the Barge, up to and including covert surveillance. Even when it comes to permanent inmates, her initial attitude will be very much "I'm here for a job, I'm not here to make friends"; while she has, at this point in her timeline, started to come around to the idea that personal bonds are something that she wants in her life, she still much prefers a small social circle, and she still usually takes a while to warm up to people. Even if she ends up growing close to her inmate eventually (not an inevitability, but also not outside the realm of possibility!), she'll always be comfortable with pulling rank when she thinks it's necessary. Blunt and direct to a fault, she'd flounder hard with inmates who would need to be handled with gentleness or sensitivity, but she'd do well with inmates who would need a firm hand and who wouldn't begrudge her some amount of professional distance, as well as with those who would benefit from a lot of hands-on learning. While needing to talk her inmate through some things is inevitable, Shaw is a very straightforward, concrete person who excels at action above all else, and her methods would reflect this: she'd rope her inmate into things like non-lethal self-defense training, useful service work on the Barge, and helping out during crises. All of this would be mandatory in her mind, with the logic that you can't pick up better behavior patterns without actually practicing them.
Emotions and feeling are a complicated issue for Shaw, and one that is likely to come up with some amount of frequency. She matter-of-factly professes not to feel anything at all, at one point explaining further that while she gets angry easily enough, she never feels fear, sadness, happiness, or loneliness. It's not something that she seems particularly proud of (though she is quick to point out the ways in which unemotional responses to situations can sometimes be useful), but it's not something that she really angsts about, either; for the most part, her approach is very "it is what it is". But the thing is that, over the course of the series, we as viewers see her unequivocally experience almost every single one of these emotions, albeit in a muted way that's easy for those around her to overlook. Other characters who know her well occasionally note this discrepancy, and one of them sums her up thusly: "It's not that you don't have feelings. It's just like the volume is turned way down, like the sound on an old tape. The voices are there - you just have to listen." The problem isn't that Shaw doesn't feel, and it also isn't that she consciously lies about not feeling because she's scared of being weak or because she wants to make herself look badass - it's that she has very little ability to recognize most feelings within herself, which in turn makes it difficult-to-impossible for her to outwardly express them. While people who are used to her and good at reading her might be able to pick up on her emotions - turned down and quiet, but still very much present, and no less potent in their own way - Shaw herself cannot. Accordingly, she (almost) always expresses concern, care, and love not through words, or even through quiet gestures like hugs and gentle touches, but rather though concrete, productive acts of service. She awkwardly hugs a kid who she knows needs it, and she's gradually started to let Root (her lover) do things like stroke her face, rub her arm/back, and hold her hand, but none of that really comes naturally to her, and she'll never do any of it with others by instinct as opposed to by conscious choice. She could be really interesting with an inmate who might want her to open up to them emotionally, and who would ask or challenge her to, but she wouldn't do well with someone for whom it's a necessity: the chances are just too great that she'd never be able to do it enough to help them if it's a baseline requirement for their progress.
Finally, it should be noted that she'll be coming aboard just a couple of weeks after finally freeing herself from eleven-ish months of intense psychological torture, and a mere day or two after Root's untimely death. As such, she's going to be in a pretty awful place, and this will be compounded by the fact that many aspects of the Barge will be actively triggering for her. She's an excellent compartmentalizer, and it's unlikely that she'll fall apart to the extent of demotion or otherwise being unable to do her job, but chances are high that being onboard will be more retraumatizing than healing for her. The all-seeing, all-knowing Admiral with no known human oversight will be a tough pill to swallow, even as she works to earn a deal from him. Things like magic, nonhumans, and the Barge's willingness to break the laws of reality as she knows them will all read to her as strong evidence that everything onboard is just another part of the hyper-realistic VR simulations that she's been tortured with. The mere existence of the Enclosure will really wig her out, and getting her to go in under any circumstances other than absolute necessity will be a tough sell. Breaches, as well as floods that affect passengers' minds, memories, and/or senses of identity, will have a destabilizing effect on her that she'll have to actively work to push through. Even on the days when she feels relatively sure that what she's experiencing is real, she'll still worry that she might be an unwitting sleeper agent, that she might have a tracker or mind-control chip inside her, and that she might be a danger to her inmate or others that she cares about (a side effect of the aforementioned psychological torture, which was largely based around trying to gaslight her into submission). And yet staying despite all this will be proof positive of both her loyalty, as well as her ability to care deeply for those that she's close to. She may wonder if Root will eventually want or need something from her that she can't give, but she at least knows that she can do this: stick it out for months, or possibly years, in a place that she hates and that hurts her, all so that she can save the one person in the world who makes her feel truly safe and comfortable. It is, as far as she's concerned, the purest expression of love that she's capable of.
Deal: For Root to survive the gunshot wound that canonically kills her.
History: Her wiki page is very comprehensive, but I also like writing my own (which I hope is a little more canonblind-friendly).
Sample Network Entry:
TDM top level
Sample RP:
TDM top level
Special Notes: I'll make use of an opt-in permissions post for the suicide-within-the-simulation stuff, particularly if she ends up in a situation in-game where she'd either discuss it or consider trying it (which is not in any way guaranteed, but also not completely out of the realm of possibility).
User DW:
corknutE-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact:
Other Characters Currently In-Game:
Misty Quigley |
citizendetectiveTiffany Doggett |
tuckyCharacter Name: Sameen Shaw
Series: Person of Interest
Age: Early thirties
From When?: Towards the beginning of 5x11, "Synecdoche". She taunts her enemies with a "Here I am, come and get me!" in an attempt to restart a virtual reality simulation that she erroneously believes herself to be in; instead, the Admiral will go "lol k", swoop in, and make her an offer.
Warden Justification: Shaw struggles with alexithymia and self-identifies as a sociopath, but she continually chooses to dedicate herself to causes and professions that she believes will help innocent people. She has experience with both personal redemption (not all of those causes that she believed would help innocent people actually did help innocent people, and many of them put an outsized focus on problem-solving via killing the troublemakers, both things that she became more discerning about as canon progressed), as well as aiding in the redemption of others (her team semi-domesticated a misanthropic feral assassin over the course of the show). Despite her prickly personality, difficulties in connecting with others, and tendency towards black-and-white thinking, Shaw feels duty and responsibility strongly, and believes that doing good is an important thing to strive for; she'd dedicate herself unfailingly towards both protecting and reforming any inmate placed in her care. She definitely wouldn't be the right warden for everybody, but she could still be the right warden for somebody.
Item: One of her burner phones (which will of course be stripped of all of its communicative properties).
Abilities/Powers: n/a; she's a baseline human. She will, however, be coming aboard with an assortment of weaponry in her cabin (guns, knives, grenades) that she's very adept at using.
Wardening Strategies and Philosophies:
Shaw is a believer in institutions, but also in her own methods: she likes to do her own thing within the framework of a preexisting system. This means that the Barge will be both liberating and frustrating for her, because she'll appreciate have the freedom to warden largely as she sees fit, but she'll be baffled by the lack of clear direction or expectation from the Admiral, as well as by how loose the ship's organizational structures are. While she won't necessarily expect all wardens to operate exactly as she does, she will find a lot of other wardening styles to be ineffective, inefficient, or just plain flabbergasting, and she won't be shy about saying so. Intensely focused and often incurious, she won't have much patience for common Barge pastimes like network philosophizing or discussions of moral relativity and ambiguity, and she's sometimes prone to inflexibility and even hypocrisy. All that said, she may grumble and sass and roll her eyes, but she's not unused to working with people who she disagrees with, and while she's capable of great stubbornness, she doesn't always employ it. She'll probably always lean towards the hardass side of things herself, and she'll probably always think touchy-feely wardening is kind of stupid - but if she realizes that her methods truly aren't working in a given situation, she's not the type to dig her heels in just for the sake of doing so. She may very well end up being a thorn in many of her fellow wardens' sides (and they a thorn in hers, in turn), but ultimately, the fact that they have the same motivations and end goals will mean something to her. Other wardens might often be annoyances in her eyes, but they won't be enemies.
Shaw will see the role of warden as that of a protector, an enforcer, and a guiding hand. She's much better at the first two than she is at the third, but she'll recognize the importance of all three, and will do her best to provide all of them. The temp cycle will feel very familiar to her: receiving a rotating cast of subjects to monitor and look out for and then move on from when the work is done is basically her job description at home, and she'll feel free to use similar tactics on the Barge, up to and including covert surveillance. Even when it comes to permanent inmates, her initial attitude will be very much "I'm here for a job, I'm not here to make friends"; while she has, at this point in her timeline, started to come around to the idea that personal bonds are something that she wants in her life, she still much prefers a small social circle, and she still usually takes a while to warm up to people. Even if she ends up growing close to her inmate eventually (not an inevitability, but also not outside the realm of possibility!), she'll always be comfortable with pulling rank when she thinks it's necessary. Blunt and direct to a fault, she'd flounder hard with inmates who would need to be handled with gentleness or sensitivity, but she'd do well with inmates who would need a firm hand and who wouldn't begrudge her some amount of professional distance, as well as with those who would benefit from a lot of hands-on learning. While needing to talk her inmate through some things is inevitable, Shaw is a very straightforward, concrete person who excels at action above all else, and her methods would reflect this: she'd rope her inmate into things like non-lethal self-defense training, useful service work on the Barge, and helping out during crises. All of this would be mandatory in her mind, with the logic that you can't pick up better behavior patterns without actually practicing them.
Emotions and feeling are a complicated issue for Shaw, and one that is likely to come up with some amount of frequency. She matter-of-factly professes not to feel anything at all, at one point explaining further that while she gets angry easily enough, she never feels fear, sadness, happiness, or loneliness. It's not something that she seems particularly proud of (though she is quick to point out the ways in which unemotional responses to situations can sometimes be useful), but it's not something that she really angsts about, either; for the most part, her approach is very "it is what it is". But the thing is that, over the course of the series, we as viewers see her unequivocally experience almost every single one of these emotions, albeit in a muted way that's easy for those around her to overlook. Other characters who know her well occasionally note this discrepancy, and one of them sums her up thusly: "It's not that you don't have feelings. It's just like the volume is turned way down, like the sound on an old tape. The voices are there - you just have to listen." The problem isn't that Shaw doesn't feel, and it also isn't that she consciously lies about not feeling because she's scared of being weak or because she wants to make herself look badass - it's that she has very little ability to recognize most feelings within herself, which in turn makes it difficult-to-impossible for her to outwardly express them. While people who are used to her and good at reading her might be able to pick up on her emotions - turned down and quiet, but still very much present, and no less potent in their own way - Shaw herself cannot. Accordingly, she (almost) always expresses concern, care, and love not through words, or even through quiet gestures like hugs and gentle touches, but rather though concrete, productive acts of service. She awkwardly hugs a kid who she knows needs it, and she's gradually started to let Root (her lover) do things like stroke her face, rub her arm/back, and hold her hand, but none of that really comes naturally to her, and she'll never do any of it with others by instinct as opposed to by conscious choice. She could be really interesting with an inmate who might want her to open up to them emotionally, and who would ask or challenge her to, but she wouldn't do well with someone for whom it's a necessity: the chances are just too great that she'd never be able to do it enough to help them if it's a baseline requirement for their progress.
Finally, it should be noted that she'll be coming aboard just a couple of weeks after finally freeing herself from eleven-ish months of intense psychological torture, and a mere day or two after Root's untimely death. As such, she's going to be in a pretty awful place, and this will be compounded by the fact that many aspects of the Barge will be actively triggering for her. She's an excellent compartmentalizer, and it's unlikely that she'll fall apart to the extent of demotion or otherwise being unable to do her job, but chances are high that being onboard will be more retraumatizing than healing for her. The all-seeing, all-knowing Admiral with no known human oversight will be a tough pill to swallow, even as she works to earn a deal from him. Things like magic, nonhumans, and the Barge's willingness to break the laws of reality as she knows them will all read to her as strong evidence that everything onboard is just another part of the hyper-realistic VR simulations that she's been tortured with. The mere existence of the Enclosure will really wig her out, and getting her to go in under any circumstances other than absolute necessity will be a tough sell. Breaches, as well as floods that affect passengers' minds, memories, and/or senses of identity, will have a destabilizing effect on her that she'll have to actively work to push through. Even on the days when she feels relatively sure that what she's experiencing is real, she'll still worry that she might be an unwitting sleeper agent, that she might have a tracker or mind-control chip inside her, and that she might be a danger to her inmate or others that she cares about (a side effect of the aforementioned psychological torture, which was largely based around trying to gaslight her into submission). And yet staying despite all this will be proof positive of both her loyalty, as well as her ability to care deeply for those that she's close to. She may wonder if Root will eventually want or need something from her that she can't give, but she at least knows that she can do this: stick it out for months, or possibly years, in a place that she hates and that hurts her, all so that she can save the one person in the world who makes her feel truly safe and comfortable. It is, as far as she's concerned, the purest expression of love that she's capable of.
Deal: For Root to survive the gunshot wound that canonically kills her.
History: Her wiki page is very comprehensive, but I also like writing my own (which I hope is a little more canonblind-friendly).
Sample Network Entry:
TDM top level
Sample RP:
TDM top level
Special Notes: I'll make use of an opt-in permissions post for the suicide-within-the-simulation stuff, particularly if she ends up in a situation in-game where she'd either discuss it or consider trying it (which is not in any way guaranteed, but also not completely out of the realm of possibility).