cactusy | application for etraya

⏵ player information
name and pronouns: Iddy; she/her/hers
age: 34
contact:

Ihdreniel / banerries @ discord

⏵ character information
name: Sameen Shaw
canon: Person of Interest
age: 32
canon point: near the end of 5x13, "return 0" - after Samaritan is defeated, but before she finds out that the Machine survived
history: Wiki, player-written history | Shaw is a soldier at heart, and someone who has spent a long and eclectic career trying to do good (and sometimes even succeeding!). With her most recent job seemingly over and done with and her teammates either dead or MIA, she is currently alone and without purpose.
abilities:

She's a baseline human with no superpowers, but she's a well-trained fighter with plenty of experience and skill in both firearms and hand-to-hand combat, and she has familiarity with various other military-related skills such as intelligence and counter-intelligence work, in-field coordination, proper radio communication procedure, etc. She's also a medical doctor with a specialty in emergency medicine, though she is non-practicing.

personality:

She's strongly motivated to do good, despite her limitations. Shaw comes packaged with little to no natural empathy and muted to nonexistent emotional responses, and self-diagnosed herself with a personality disorder when she was quite young. It would've been easy for her to use this an excuse to be a monster, but she doesn't: because even though she may not process emotions the way that others do, she's been taught the importance of protecting others, and it's a concept that she's deeply internalized. Her first inclination was to become a doctor, because she figured that her emotional detachment would keep her level-headed during a crisis: but while she was right about that, it also made her interact poorly with patients, an issue that eventually got her kicked out of her residency program. Being told that she wasn't fit to save people in the traditional way led her to join the military, and though at one point she phrases the motivation behind this as being better at killing people than fixing them, it says something that her new career was about protecting and defending: she saw herself as continuing to help people, albeit in a very different way. Shaw doesn't always stick the landing in terms of doing good, sometimes because she's too quick to take orders from the wrong people and sometimes because other parts of her get in the way - but it's a consistently strong motivator for her, and she's always trying.

She's loyal to her allies and dedicated to her causes. Shaw feels duty and responsibility strongly, to the point that she was willing to keep working for a government agency that betrayed her: while she was furious about it, she still believed in their overall goal, and she saw that as more important than anything they'd done to her personally. This type of big-picture thinking comes naturally to her, and is another reason why she thrived in an environment where she was required to sacrifice the lives of a few in order to protect the many: and though she comes around to the idea that a more narrow focus can also be worthwhile, it never comes as easily to her. Still, Shaw is capable of caring about individuals, even if it looks differently on her than on others. Her love language is very much acts of service, and treachery for any reason is anathema to her.

She's resilient. The torture she underwent flayed at her to the point that she's genuinely vulnerable in its aftermath, and she's mourning her missing teammates in her own subdued way - but nevertheless, she's largely able to do what she needs to do, and while she may sometimes briefly falter, she never falls apart. It's a trait born not just of strength, but also of the wall between her and what emotions she does have: she's an amazing compartmentalizer, because her physiology automatically does it for her. For better or for worse, Shaw is someone who will always keep on trucking.

Doing good matters to her, but being nice doesn't. Shaw isn't a misanthrope, but she's also not a particularly social person. At best, she's impatient and insensitive; at worst, she's rude and unfriendly. Even with allies, she can be a difficult person to deal with, and she tends not to be well-liked on an interpersonal level. People who "get" her tend to have a better time, but on the whole, she doesn't make it easy.

She's prone to black and white thinking. Often when she's presented with a situation of moral complexity or ambiguity, Shaw will attempt to flatten it out into something more straightforward - and if she can't do that, she gets grumpy about it. Doing good is important to her, but she knows where her strengths lie, and it's not in waxing poetic about the intricacies of the human condition: as far as she's concerned, her job is to be the muscle, and she's most content when she has a gun in her hands and a clear-cut idea of who she is and isn't supposed to shoot with it. This isn't a shortcoming that she tries to compensate for, nor is it born of naiveté: it is in many ways an active choice, and one that she doesn't always make. She's shown to be capable of acknowledging that people aren't always strictly bad or good; she can also admit that the problem-solving-via-killing-the-perps methodology of her government work wasn't always the best option. She even occasionally gripes at other people for flattening out complexities that she thinks are important. These times when she chooses to recognize the intricacies of a situation only serve to highlight that it's not that she's incapable of seeing in shades of grey - it's that she often simply doesn't bother to.

samples: one, two