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Nov. 28th, 2015 02:19 pmUser Name/Nick: Conwaaaaaaay!
User DW: knownoguilt
AIM/IM: stoptheworld26
E-mail: michael heroin at gmail dot com
Other Characters: nope! (have u missed me tlv? because I missed youuuuuu!)
Character Name: Elliot Alderson
Series: Mr. Robot
Age: 28
From When?: At the end of season two, after getting shot!
Inmate/Warden: INMATE! Elliot suffers from a lot of conflict and indecision about the morality of his actions, and spends a lot of time warring against himself. Over the course of the show, he succumbs to increasingly extreme actions, chasing his desire to create social change no matter the cost to human life or prosperity. He does dangerous, violent things, while blocking those things out from his conscious mind, so as to avoid confronting his own guilt about them.
There are also less extreme abuses (like hacking, invasion of privacy, theft, fraud) which he doesn't even feel guilty for. He sees these as victimless crimes, which he is entitled to commit.
Arrival: Elliot will have been invited to come aboard the Barge of his own free will after being shot by the Admiral, and he will have accepted!
However, because voluntarily choosing to submit to captivity under an omniscient and all powerful figure who holds multiple people against their will and without a release date is so in conflict with the values he wants to embody, Elliot will have completely blocked this conversation from his mind, and will be coming in blind!
Because I'm a jerk.
Path to Redemption:
Elliot's Path to Redemption is complicated by his disassociative disorder, but his various delusions should not be seen as the sickness which needs treating in order to graduate him. (This is a mistake that Elliot himself makes, which leads him into self destructive spirals which accomplish nothing.)
His illness is fueled by the same things which he needs to address in order to graduate: His contempt for society, his superiority complex and social isolation, his paranoia, and his inability to deal with difficult emotions (something with roots that go back to his abusive childhood.)
While he'd definitely participate in a talk-therapy style of wardening, but it's worth noting that this is the kind of therapy that Elliot has done many times before, and is pretty adept at faking his way through / paying lip service too.
It would be useful for him to be paired with someone he can't trick, and someone who won't let him think that he's smarter than them. Possibly even someone who'll drive him out of his comfort zone and put him into situations where not being in total control doesn't end in disaster. He fixates on searching for the bad sides of everyone and everything, and being surprised/having his expectations surpassed would probably be good for him as well.
Abilities/Powers: Elliot is an accomplished computer technician, and lifelong hacker. He's going to be trying and failing to find a bug that he can exploit in the communications network for the entire duration of his time on board.
He's also good at picking locks, pockets, and breaking non-technological security systems, and these skills have all fed the same impulse since he was a kid.
Personality: Society disappoints Elliot. This is not a unique, or even particularly rare thing. For the majority of people, the solution to all the worlds problems is just to set them aside and get on with living your life in a relatively moral way.
This, perhaps, is where Elliot differs from the majority of people. He can't properly process the things that make him unhappy. He can't just ignore the fact that society worships capitalist tycoons, or idolizes fake heroes, or ignores suffering in the name of comfort, or treats it's own pain with consumerism, rather than trying to change the world. Knowing that things are wrong on a scale that he can't fix gnaws at him, and casts an anxious, unhappy shadow over his perception of the world.
This reflects a certain compulsive quality that Elliot possesses. He's paranoid, anxious, and he searches for patterns and problems even when they aren't necessarily there. He uses his hacking abilities to investigate every single person he meets, reading their emails, searching through their social media, and occasionally watching them on their laptops without them ever knowing about it. He does this to people whether he likes them or not, compulsively searching for their very worst qualities, trying to satisfy his paranoia.
Despite the immoral and criminal implications of doing this, Elliot doesn't often abuse the information he obtains from people in this way, instead he acts as something like a vigilante. Sometimes reporting his findings to the authorities, or sometimes using what he knows to try and help those around him, albeit in kind of a messed up, creepy way. Elliot is, at his core, an idealist struggling to control the world around him. So he isn't perfect, so he might get a little power mad sometimes, that doesn't mean he can't save the world.
Socially, Elliot is a distant, and awkward young man. He wants to know everything about the people around him, without having them know anything at all about him. He's a bad listener, and has a tendency to drift off while people are talking to him, or assume that he's figured people out based on whatever he can find online, without actually bothering to get to know him. He has a certain degree of unconscious arrogance, in this, assuming that he understands people in a way that they don't understand themselves, or him. Emotionally, he keeps people at arms length, even when he loves them very deeply, he struggles to trust anyone, and can detach himself relatively easily from the grief of losing friends.
This might explain, in some part, the terrible loneliness, and fear of solitude that he suffers from, which leaves him so overwhelmed with emotional pain that he regularly spends his nights crying alone in his apartment.
Seriously.
This brings us around to talking about Elliot's mental health problems, which are... y'know... plentiful.
He suffers from severe social anxiety, clinical depression, mania, and delusions, and at the beginning of the series, he is in court mandated therapy sessions to try and manage these symptoms. Some of these illnesses drive certain personality traits in him, and others are caused by his personality.
For instance, many of his delusions seem to stem from a disassociative disorder, as suggested by the series creator here and by a psychiatrist's evaluation of the character here.
This disorder, in part, is likely rooted in his inability to process things which hurt him as mentioned earlier in this application. His methods of dealing with traumatic memories and distressing thoughts, by distancing himself from the things that make him uncomfortable, have grown into a disorder, where he is completely disconnected from problematic parts of his mind.
For instance, at the beginning of the series, Elliot is self medicating for his depression and anxiety. He is taking morphine to help himself cope with his emotional pain, and is crippled by his loneliness. During this time, he completely forgets about a very close relationship with someone who cares deeply about him and his safety, and who would support him if he allowed them too. Instead, he isolates himself, turns to drugs, and his mind closes off the knowledge that he isn't alone, and shouldn't be doing this to himself.
He also disassociates in order to deal with his own indecision, and his conflicting morals. During the series, Elliot embarks upon an attempt to change the world by bringing down a huge, evil corporation named E Corp. He does this through illegal, and sometimes dangerous means, and struggles to rectify his desire to save the world, with his rage against the company, his fear of arrest, and with the question of how much harm he could do, and is willing to do, in the name of the greater good.
He deals with these conflicting desires and emotions by channeling many of them into a separate, seemingly omniscient personality. This personality guides him into making the decisions that he finds frightening or difficult, and who voices the darker, more unpleasant thoughts he has about himself and the world. Over the course of the series, this personality goes from being a guide, who implores Elliot to take a certain course of action, which he is free to refuse? To being the controlling force of his psyche, keeping memories suppressed, and driving Elliot towards a single course of action.
And in the end, Elliot doesn't resist, because there's one more core trait that drives his disassociation: His loneliness.
Elliot opens the first episode of Mr. Robot with the words, "Hello Friend", knowingly addressing an imaginary person, who he has invented to help him deal with the pressures of his life. At first he is aware that this might send him on a dangerous road, and is perfectly clear that he's talking to someone who doesn't exist, but as the series goes on, these lines become less clear to him. He accuses his imaginary friend of knowing things he doesn't, of conspiring against him, and tells it that he's missed it, wondering if it had left him on his own, when he goes through a spell of not talking to himself.
By the end of series one, despite knowing that both of these identities are in his head, he still sees them as distinct and independent from his own self. He is, on some level, aware that he could get rid of them if he really wanted too, but his fear of being alone again prevents him from doing so.
In the second series, it becomes increasingly clear that one of the things Elliot lies to himself about, are just how strong his violent and radical urges are, even towards himself. He enters a highly self destructive cycle of trying to overcome his other personality, in which he injures himself, attempts another disastrous attempt at self medicating, and fantasizes vividly about suicide and being murdered or assaulted by the other part of his identity.
At first it may seem like these tendencies are the result of escalating tensions in the world at large, but as more of the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the escalation is at least partly by design. That although he's blocked it from his memory, Elliot always anticipated a violent outcome in "phase two" of his revolution, and by the end of the second season, it seems unavoidable.
He has crashed a global financial system, caused the deaths of multiple friends, ruined the life of the only good person he ever knew, has aligned himself with a terrorist hacker cell in league with the Chinese government, and is about to mount a second attack which will result in major civilian casualties, and he's put measures in place that ensure that the small, moral part of himself that tries to stop him, is doomed to fail.
He can't quite convince himself that the ends justify the means, but by god he's doing it anyway.
The last thing to know about Elliot, is that despite all of this, he's full of potential. He is extremely organized and capable of inspiring faith in other people. Once committed to his plan, he is focused to a fault. He drives those he's working with, pushes his plan onward against impossible odds, even overcomes his addiction to opiates, riding out his withdrawals cold turkey because taking morphine no longer fits in with his other plans.
At his best, Elliot is a passionate anarchist trying to make a better world. At his worst, he is an angry, frightened nihilist struggling to control not only the world and the people around him, but his own self.
Barge Reactions:
Elliot's first conscious reaction to the Barge will be disbelief. He'll think that it's a fantasy of his own making and that he has to wake up in order to stop the sequence of events that he's set in motion. Once he settles in, however he'll begin to view it as something to contain the parts of himself that he can't control. He's unlikely to sincerely throw himself into attempting to graduate, but he'll try to accept a life of captivity with as much passivity as he can muster.
On the other hand, when he arrives on the Barge, Elliot will be deep in the throes of dissociation, and the other side of his personality, "Mr Robot", will be acting relatively independently.
And he'll be pissed.
Mr Robot will manifest all of Elliot's frustration over having died / not seeing the final outcome of his plans / not wanting to be contained or complicit in the Admiral's design. He'll shit talk all over the network, give wardens grief, and spout revolutionary rhetoric to the other inmates. Besides which, by being far more verbose and confident, he'll try to establish himself as being more "real" than Elliot, and nudge towards causing more trouble.
History: Wikilink here!
Sample Journal Entry:
this is elliot alderson.
someone else has been going anon on my hardware. if you've been talking to them, buying into their shit, then you've been getting trolled.
asshole. i know.
if you've got a block / delete function, then block this user. if you need me, get me irl.
Sample RP:
Everything is warm and soft - with fuzzy, blood loss, morphine edges - when Elliot meets the Admiral. So Elliot doesn't think that he is real.
He invites him into his apartment (into the hyper-real fantastic shadow of his apartment). Lets him drop into the armchair, uninvited, just like Darlene and Shayla both would have done, if it'd been one of them knocking at his door. He doesn't bother to check the corridor for men in black. For other aliens or businessmen or cops, because he knows-- knows in his very bones, that this isn't real. And because he has a guest, and he doesn't want to miss anything.
You're definitely missing something, kiddo. Whispers someone who isn't supposed to be here right now.
Elliot doesn't offer him tea, or anything to drink, but he shuts his apartment door, and the Admiral paints him a picture of something that Elliot knows is impossible. Something that cements the certainty in Elliot's mind that the Admiral is definitely not real.
Your imaginary friends are getting weirder, Elliot. Who's gonna show up next, Patrick Bateman? The voice echoes so loud in his head this time, that Elliot isn't entirely certain that he hadn't spoken the words aloud. The Admiral tells him that he should really get that looked at. You don't like it, then you're free to leave. You can see yourself out, and we'll get back to work.
"I won't sign anything." Says Elliot, short, and loud enough to drown out the other voice, "And I'm not giving you my bank details."
Then one of them's laughing at him, and the other is yelling, and Elliot isn't immediately certain which is which.
Turns out all that's required is a handshake.
Special Notes: Voice sample for Mr Robot/Elliot's disassociated personality is below. I haven't written him a separate personality section, because it's very much the same dude, he's just how all of Elliot's angriest, most amoral, bitter-teen feelings manifest.
Also he's a lot chattier.
User DW: knownoguilt
AIM/IM: stoptheworld26
E-mail: michael heroin at gmail dot com
Other Characters: nope! (have u missed me tlv? because I missed youuuuuu!)
Character Name: Elliot Alderson
Series: Mr. Robot
Age: 28
From When?: At the end of season two, after getting shot!
Inmate/Warden: INMATE! Elliot suffers from a lot of conflict and indecision about the morality of his actions, and spends a lot of time warring against himself. Over the course of the show, he succumbs to increasingly extreme actions, chasing his desire to create social change no matter the cost to human life or prosperity. He does dangerous, violent things, while blocking those things out from his conscious mind, so as to avoid confronting his own guilt about them.
There are also less extreme abuses (like hacking, invasion of privacy, theft, fraud) which he doesn't even feel guilty for. He sees these as victimless crimes, which he is entitled to commit.
Arrival: Elliot will have been invited to come aboard the Barge of his own free will after being shot by the Admiral, and he will have accepted!
However, because voluntarily choosing to submit to captivity under an omniscient and all powerful figure who holds multiple people against their will and without a release date is so in conflict with the values he wants to embody, Elliot will have completely blocked this conversation from his mind, and will be coming in blind!
Because I'm a jerk.
Path to Redemption:
Elliot's Path to Redemption is complicated by his disassociative disorder, but his various delusions should not be seen as the sickness which needs treating in order to graduate him. (This is a mistake that Elliot himself makes, which leads him into self destructive spirals which accomplish nothing.)
His illness is fueled by the same things which he needs to address in order to graduate: His contempt for society, his superiority complex and social isolation, his paranoia, and his inability to deal with difficult emotions (something with roots that go back to his abusive childhood.)
While he'd definitely participate in a talk-therapy style of wardening, but it's worth noting that this is the kind of therapy that Elliot has done many times before, and is pretty adept at faking his way through / paying lip service too.
It would be useful for him to be paired with someone he can't trick, and someone who won't let him think that he's smarter than them. Possibly even someone who'll drive him out of his comfort zone and put him into situations where not being in total control doesn't end in disaster. He fixates on searching for the bad sides of everyone and everything, and being surprised/having his expectations surpassed would probably be good for him as well.
Abilities/Powers: Elliot is an accomplished computer technician, and lifelong hacker. He's going to be trying and failing to find a bug that he can exploit in the communications network for the entire duration of his time on board.
He's also good at picking locks, pockets, and breaking non-technological security systems, and these skills have all fed the same impulse since he was a kid.
Personality: Society disappoints Elliot. This is not a unique, or even particularly rare thing. For the majority of people, the solution to all the worlds problems is just to set them aside and get on with living your life in a relatively moral way.
This, perhaps, is where Elliot differs from the majority of people. He can't properly process the things that make him unhappy. He can't just ignore the fact that society worships capitalist tycoons, or idolizes fake heroes, or ignores suffering in the name of comfort, or treats it's own pain with consumerism, rather than trying to change the world. Knowing that things are wrong on a scale that he can't fix gnaws at him, and casts an anxious, unhappy shadow over his perception of the world.
This reflects a certain compulsive quality that Elliot possesses. He's paranoid, anxious, and he searches for patterns and problems even when they aren't necessarily there. He uses his hacking abilities to investigate every single person he meets, reading their emails, searching through their social media, and occasionally watching them on their laptops without them ever knowing about it. He does this to people whether he likes them or not, compulsively searching for their very worst qualities, trying to satisfy his paranoia.
Despite the immoral and criminal implications of doing this, Elliot doesn't often abuse the information he obtains from people in this way, instead he acts as something like a vigilante. Sometimes reporting his findings to the authorities, or sometimes using what he knows to try and help those around him, albeit in kind of a messed up, creepy way. Elliot is, at his core, an idealist struggling to control the world around him. So he isn't perfect, so he might get a little power mad sometimes, that doesn't mean he can't save the world.
Socially, Elliot is a distant, and awkward young man. He wants to know everything about the people around him, without having them know anything at all about him. He's a bad listener, and has a tendency to drift off while people are talking to him, or assume that he's figured people out based on whatever he can find online, without actually bothering to get to know him. He has a certain degree of unconscious arrogance, in this, assuming that he understands people in a way that they don't understand themselves, or him. Emotionally, he keeps people at arms length, even when he loves them very deeply, he struggles to trust anyone, and can detach himself relatively easily from the grief of losing friends.
This might explain, in some part, the terrible loneliness, and fear of solitude that he suffers from, which leaves him so overwhelmed with emotional pain that he regularly spends his nights crying alone in his apartment.
Seriously.
This brings us around to talking about Elliot's mental health problems, which are... y'know... plentiful.
He suffers from severe social anxiety, clinical depression, mania, and delusions, and at the beginning of the series, he is in court mandated therapy sessions to try and manage these symptoms. Some of these illnesses drive certain personality traits in him, and others are caused by his personality.
For instance, many of his delusions seem to stem from a disassociative disorder, as suggested by the series creator here and by a psychiatrist's evaluation of the character here.
This disorder, in part, is likely rooted in his inability to process things which hurt him as mentioned earlier in this application. His methods of dealing with traumatic memories and distressing thoughts, by distancing himself from the things that make him uncomfortable, have grown into a disorder, where he is completely disconnected from problematic parts of his mind.
For instance, at the beginning of the series, Elliot is self medicating for his depression and anxiety. He is taking morphine to help himself cope with his emotional pain, and is crippled by his loneliness. During this time, he completely forgets about a very close relationship with someone who cares deeply about him and his safety, and who would support him if he allowed them too. Instead, he isolates himself, turns to drugs, and his mind closes off the knowledge that he isn't alone, and shouldn't be doing this to himself.
He also disassociates in order to deal with his own indecision, and his conflicting morals. During the series, Elliot embarks upon an attempt to change the world by bringing down a huge, evil corporation named E Corp. He does this through illegal, and sometimes dangerous means, and struggles to rectify his desire to save the world, with his rage against the company, his fear of arrest, and with the question of how much harm he could do, and is willing to do, in the name of the greater good.
He deals with these conflicting desires and emotions by channeling many of them into a separate, seemingly omniscient personality. This personality guides him into making the decisions that he finds frightening or difficult, and who voices the darker, more unpleasant thoughts he has about himself and the world. Over the course of the series, this personality goes from being a guide, who implores Elliot to take a certain course of action, which he is free to refuse? To being the controlling force of his psyche, keeping memories suppressed, and driving Elliot towards a single course of action.
And in the end, Elliot doesn't resist, because there's one more core trait that drives his disassociation: His loneliness.
Elliot opens the first episode of Mr. Robot with the words, "Hello Friend", knowingly addressing an imaginary person, who he has invented to help him deal with the pressures of his life. At first he is aware that this might send him on a dangerous road, and is perfectly clear that he's talking to someone who doesn't exist, but as the series goes on, these lines become less clear to him. He accuses his imaginary friend of knowing things he doesn't, of conspiring against him, and tells it that he's missed it, wondering if it had left him on his own, when he goes through a spell of not talking to himself.
By the end of series one, despite knowing that both of these identities are in his head, he still sees them as distinct and independent from his own self. He is, on some level, aware that he could get rid of them if he really wanted too, but his fear of being alone again prevents him from doing so.
In the second series, it becomes increasingly clear that one of the things Elliot lies to himself about, are just how strong his violent and radical urges are, even towards himself. He enters a highly self destructive cycle of trying to overcome his other personality, in which he injures himself, attempts another disastrous attempt at self medicating, and fantasizes vividly about suicide and being murdered or assaulted by the other part of his identity.
At first it may seem like these tendencies are the result of escalating tensions in the world at large, but as more of the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the escalation is at least partly by design. That although he's blocked it from his memory, Elliot always anticipated a violent outcome in "phase two" of his revolution, and by the end of the second season, it seems unavoidable.
He has crashed a global financial system, caused the deaths of multiple friends, ruined the life of the only good person he ever knew, has aligned himself with a terrorist hacker cell in league with the Chinese government, and is about to mount a second attack which will result in major civilian casualties, and he's put measures in place that ensure that the small, moral part of himself that tries to stop him, is doomed to fail.
He can't quite convince himself that the ends justify the means, but by god he's doing it anyway.
The last thing to know about Elliot, is that despite all of this, he's full of potential. He is extremely organized and capable of inspiring faith in other people. Once committed to his plan, he is focused to a fault. He drives those he's working with, pushes his plan onward against impossible odds, even overcomes his addiction to opiates, riding out his withdrawals cold turkey because taking morphine no longer fits in with his other plans.
At his best, Elliot is a passionate anarchist trying to make a better world. At his worst, he is an angry, frightened nihilist struggling to control not only the world and the people around him, but his own self.
Barge Reactions:
Elliot's first conscious reaction to the Barge will be disbelief. He'll think that it's a fantasy of his own making and that he has to wake up in order to stop the sequence of events that he's set in motion. Once he settles in, however he'll begin to view it as something to contain the parts of himself that he can't control. He's unlikely to sincerely throw himself into attempting to graduate, but he'll try to accept a life of captivity with as much passivity as he can muster.
On the other hand, when he arrives on the Barge, Elliot will be deep in the throes of dissociation, and the other side of his personality, "Mr Robot", will be acting relatively independently.
And he'll be pissed.
Mr Robot will manifest all of Elliot's frustration over having died / not seeing the final outcome of his plans / not wanting to be contained or complicit in the Admiral's design. He'll shit talk all over the network, give wardens grief, and spout revolutionary rhetoric to the other inmates. Besides which, by being far more verbose and confident, he'll try to establish himself as being more "real" than Elliot, and nudge towards causing more trouble.
History: Wikilink here!
Sample Journal Entry:
this is elliot alderson.
someone else has been going anon on my hardware. if you've been talking to them, buying into their shit, then you've been getting trolled.
asshole. i know.
if you've got a block / delete function, then block this user. if you need me, get me irl.
Sample RP:
Everything is warm and soft - with fuzzy, blood loss, morphine edges - when Elliot meets the Admiral. So Elliot doesn't think that he is real.
He invites him into his apartment (into the hyper-real fantastic shadow of his apartment). Lets him drop into the armchair, uninvited, just like Darlene and Shayla both would have done, if it'd been one of them knocking at his door. He doesn't bother to check the corridor for men in black. For other aliens or businessmen or cops, because he knows-- knows in his very bones, that this isn't real. And because he has a guest, and he doesn't want to miss anything.
You're definitely missing something, kiddo. Whispers someone who isn't supposed to be here right now.
Elliot doesn't offer him tea, or anything to drink, but he shuts his apartment door, and the Admiral paints him a picture of something that Elliot knows is impossible. Something that cements the certainty in Elliot's mind that the Admiral is definitely not real.
Your imaginary friends are getting weirder, Elliot. Who's gonna show up next, Patrick Bateman? The voice echoes so loud in his head this time, that Elliot isn't entirely certain that he hadn't spoken the words aloud. The Admiral tells him that he should really get that looked at. You don't like it, then you're free to leave. You can see yourself out, and we'll get back to work.
"I won't sign anything." Says Elliot, short, and loud enough to drown out the other voice, "And I'm not giving you my bank details."
Then one of them's laughing at him, and the other is yelling, and Elliot isn't immediately certain which is which.
Turns out all that's required is a handshake.
Special Notes: Voice sample for Mr Robot/Elliot's disassociated personality is below. I haven't written him a separate personality section, because it's very much the same dude, he's just how all of Elliot's angriest, most amoral, bitter-teen feelings manifest.
Also he's a lot chattier.
