the marquis de Carabas (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mattersverymuch) wrote2020-06-01 01:18 pm
mattersverymuch) wrote2020-06-01 01:18 pm
reapp | ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
lastvoyages
User Name/Nick: Anne
User DW:trustme_imthe
AIM/IM: N/A,![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
trustmeimthe.
E-mail: tavrosno@gmail.com
Other Characters: Toto Sakigami /espanola
Character Name: The marquis de Carabas
Series: Neverwhere
Age: Indeterminate, more than 200. He appears in his mid-thirties.
From When?: After Door sends the Angel Islington, Croup, and Vandemar to some weird death dimension, the marquis's manacles come loose before she can close the door, sending him into the void as well.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. The marquis has a very very long list of character flaws, the root one being he is self-serving to the point that he would commit any number of crimes (from minor to murder) to get ahead. Secondarily, he is unrepentantly manipulative of anyone and everyone in order to boost his own power, treating people as disposable at worst and tools at best.
Abilities/Powers: Because Neverwhere was written by Neil Gaiman, 1) there is magic and 2) it is never explicitly explained. It is implied that the marquis has learned to perform certain acts of magic during his time living in London Below, a place which completely ignores the rules of time and reality anyway. The brand of magic the marquis demonstrates largely consists of what can be equated to parlor tricks, designed to impress - for example, appearing in a certain place when called in a certain way (by someone who's turned thrice widdershins. Yep). However, certain aspects of the marquis's witchcraft are significantly more dramatic. Most notably, he's able to safeguard his soul in a small silver box and, upon his death, have someone else bring him back to life using that manifestation of his soul. All of these spells seem to be intrinsically connected to the magical nature of London Below and as a result would not work on the Barge.
The marquis is hundreds of years old. The preservation of his soul never renewed him or made him younger, it only brought him back at the same age; combine that with the fact that everyone in London Below is implied to be centuries older than they look, and his advanced age ends up being a side effect having more to do with his exposure to the confused time of London Below and less with any deliberate efforts he made to prolong his life. As such, he will age normally upon boarding the Barge.
Physically he's very strong, agile, and quick on his feet, which he has to be because he spends a good deal of his time running away from people who are angry with him. There's nothing supernatural about it, though, and he can be beaten in a fight fairly easily.
Oh, and he can talk to rats. For what that's worth.
Personality:
The first thing to note about the marquis's personality is that it is in large part a reactive, constructed personality that is a direct response to the incredibly dangerous environment in which the marquis lives. London Below is the sort of place where nobody trusts anybody and you can die at any moment, in stark contrast to plain old London above. Throughout Neverwhere it is implied that the marquis at some point made a conscious decision to put aside any disadvantageous aspects of his natural personality in order to survive and thrive in London Below. The fact that this decision was made - that he was capable of making this decision - says a good deal about his "true" personality, of course, and most notably signifies that he puts himself above all other people in the world; in fact, he puts his own well-being above even truth to his own personality and personal history.
Secondly, the marquis's chosen identity, a character from a fairy tale (Puss in Boots) who is fictional within the fairy tale, invented by a manipulative talking cat and used in order to win the hand of a princess, says a good deal about the marquis's worldview. He sees people as gullible and stupid; as a rule, he does not see them as pitiable in their stupidity, but rather as creatures that should be taken advantage of, like the king and his daughter are taken advantage of in the tale of Puss in Boots. Once again, it also shows that he has no problem whatsoever subsuming his own identity and history for his own self-interest.
The marquis's primary focus within his own world is the maintenance of his network of favors, which it is implied has been in place for many years. Many - possibly hundreds, even thousands - of people owe him favors, which are unspecified until he calls them in; this can happen at any time. The marquis has called in favors from arson to murder to the guardianship of his soul in a box, and because of the rules of barter in London Below and his own expertise at manipulation, no one refuses to do him a favor. His focus on favors as opposed to currency is in part because London Below does generally work on a barter system, but is also because the marquis finds satisfaction in having psychological rather than simply financial power over other people. This is reflected as well in his constant need to verbally best people and appear more intelligent and in the know than anyone else around him. When he is incapable of maintaining this air of effortless, careless, even lazy superiority, he becomes extremely irritable. Relatedly, the marquis is partial to information hoarding, which appears not to be terribly uncommon in London Below. He is certainly not the only one who buys and sells information like any other resource, but he is certainly the most smug about it when he has information to sell, and the most put out when there is information that he has to admit he needs. All of this reinforces the fact that the marquis feels a need for power over others for a) safety and b) personal gratification.
Because he feels the need to project a constant air of superiority and omniscience, he spends a good deal of his time and energy acting as uncaring about everything as humanly possible. His mannerisms are calculated to appear as unimpressed as he can manage. He yawns, inspects his nails, and often entirely ignores things that don't interest him. And while the marquis is not as clever as he thinks he is, he is still very, very intelligent. He's the mental equivalent of a chess master, only his entire life is the game and London Below is the board; he thinks at least ten moves ahead at all times, and has several ways to manipulate his opponents (and occasionally allies) at every turn. This intelligence occasionally demonstrates itself in physical ways. Richard notes that the marquis is always moving in some way, particularly his eyes, and assumes him insane, when in fact the marquis is simply preparing himself for the trap they'll likely all step into in a hundred pages or so.
He relishes the discomfort of others, particularly those that he considers to be especially stupid. When Richard is confused about something, the marquis becomes positively gleeful. He has a very strong, apparently irrepressible tendency towards mockery; even when it might not be strategically advantageous to tell someone he's an idiot, the marquis will pretty much do it anyway. Once again, this is reflective of his general worldview, which is that people are idiots and deserve what's coming to them.
Throughout the first half of Neverwhere, the marquis does not display empathy. Excellent examples of this include many of his interactions with Door. He doesn't move to help her until he's absolutely certain that she will owe him if he does, even though he owed a great debt to her father and her entire family had just been killed. When she's mourning the death of her family and reliving the memories of her discovery of their bodies, he seems to realize that he should be doing something to help her, but he just pats her awkwardly on the back and then moves away. Even that tiny gesture of comfort seems to be made only because she would appreciate the gesture, not out of any true empathetic sentiment.
Above all, the marquis is arrogant. He believes that he is the center of the universe and he alone is clever enough to deceive the idiots who surround him. London Below essentially serves as his playground, and he uses its rules and magics for self-preservation and the construction of an empire built of favors and double-crossings.
However.
The marquis's arrogance slips somewhat after his torture and death at the hands of Croup and Vandemar. The marquis does engage in occasional acts of selflessness, although he never acknowledges them as selfless, and also expresses empathy and regret on numerous occasions after his resurrection. Notable examples are when he threatens to kill Lamia if she doesn't give Richard his life back (and the uncharacteristic violence he uses in that interaction), closing Hunter's eyes after she's killed by the Beast, and moments of vulnerability at Blackfriars after Islington is destroyed. (The last example is from after I'll be pulling him this time, but will in my opinion still reflect his higher levels of emotional vulnerability for his first few weeks on the Barge.)
The marquis will react to the Barge pretty differently this time around than he did the first time I played him here. This time he wasn't expecting to die and didn't have an emergency plan set up in case he did, so he'll be a lot less blase about his death and will be in shock for at least several days. He'll still be pretty "this is stupid" about the idea of redemption, but will be coming from an initial place of unpreparedness, which will make him a little more approachable from a Warden's perspective. He'll bounce back from his shock pretty quickly, but not before he reveals a little more about himself than he'd want to.
Path to Redemption: By the end of the book, the marquis demonstrates a good deal of progress. The first sign of this progress is the fact that he volunteers to die for Door at all. One might argue (and the marquis probably would) that he was doing it for the same reason he did everything, in order to get a favor and have her owe him forever, but logically that doesn't entirely add up. Someone as clever as the marquis could surely have come up with some way of getting information about Croup and Vandemar that did not involve his prolonged torture and murder. This implies that the marquis had become at least slightly invested in Door's mission by the end of canon.
The marquis's first experience with death was a life-changing one. After the marquis is resurrected, he begins to openly display empathy not only to Door and Hunter, whom he grudgingly acknowledged as competent before his death, but also to Richard, to whom he had only been condescending and scathing beforehand. The marquis's death allowed him to see his own vulnerability and tore down any illusions of invulnerability that his manipulative network of favors had built up for him.
His second experience with death will shake him even further, especially since he died so close to victory and in such an unpredictable, freak-accident way. His second death and his presence on the Barge will reinforce the fact that he has a lot less control over the workings of the world than he thought he did and will shake his confidence enough to make him slightly emotionally accessible to Wardens and even other sympathetic Inmates. However, he will find a way to rebuild these walls before too long, because the marquis is nothing if not resourcefully arrogant. As before, the time during which a Warden will be most able to get a foot in the door for redemption (when the marquis is most vulnerable) will be the month or two following his arrival to the Barge.
That said, even after two months, he will still be redeemable; it will just be harder. In my opinion, the best, easiest way to redeem the marquis will be 1) to play to his arrogance and self-serving nature, such as by asserting that the best way to serve himself from this point forward is by becoming a functioning member of society, and 2) to address his empathy and force him to admit that sometimes he has actual positive feelings about other people. (Specific references to people in his life such as Door and Richard may or may not backfire.) The marquis is never going to be a nice person, but functioning and not actively evil he'll probably be able to manage.
History: Neverwhere synopsis @ Wikipedia.
Sample Journal Entry:
[ He's speaking to himself, like he's taking a memo: Notes on the Barge for later. His voice is unusually contemplative, tinged with only a hint of his normal superior tone. ]
If everyone dies all the time, there's hardly any point in dying at all. It's just a particularly painful timeout. Wicked children get the death toll and must think about what they've done. More severe than a slap on the wrist and no dinner, but still - what's the point? What are you meant to learn?
[ He sighs. ] Uncreative. Send a note to the Admiral - you need to work harder or we're all going to lose [ sarcastic pause ] faith.
Sample RP:
One can only watch a shark swim in circles for an hour and a half before beginning the descent into madness. Or at least this was the case with the marquis de Carabas, who had begun to feel that his eyes would fall out of his head if the thing moved ever again. It was meant to be a way of focusing, getting a grip on what was real and what had actually happened, but it had failed utterly.
Now he was tucked in a quiet corner of the library, fingers splayed on the pages of a book he'd picked at random from the nearest shelf, a book with text too small and words too long to be even remotely interesting, a book that as far as he could tell was about aviation. If he cared even an iota about entertainment he'd toss it over his shoulder in a fit of graceful carelessness, but here and now he wasn't interested.
Did he want distraction or focus? He was beginning to forget. Things hadn't gone as planned, not towards the end, but he didn't know if he wanted to delve and analyze and figure out why or if he wanted to let it be, let it seem more real before taking it apart to see what had broken.
He flipped the page back and forth irritably, causing a small tear by the binding. Someone - he couldn't tell if she was a librarian or a particularly zealous bookworm - shot him a glare that was probably meant to be scathing. He gave her his slow, I-know-things-and-you-don't-and-aren't-you-precious-for-it smile, and she looked away with a righteous readjustment of her collar.
Which was actually very grounding. Some things didn't change. This was just another city, after all. There was always space below the normal goings-on for people like him.
Note: To clarify, the marquis is going to have no memories of the Barge! Total reboot, if that's okay.
User DW:
trustme_imtheAIM/IM: N/A,
E-mail: tavrosno@gmail.com
Other Characters: Toto Sakigami /
espanolaCharacter Name: The marquis de Carabas
Series: Neverwhere
Age: Indeterminate, more than 200. He appears in his mid-thirties.
From When?: After Door sends the Angel Islington, Croup, and Vandemar to some weird death dimension, the marquis's manacles come loose before she can close the door, sending him into the void as well.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. The marquis has a very very long list of character flaws, the root one being he is self-serving to the point that he would commit any number of crimes (from minor to murder) to get ahead. Secondarily, he is unrepentantly manipulative of anyone and everyone in order to boost his own power, treating people as disposable at worst and tools at best.
Abilities/Powers: Because Neverwhere was written by Neil Gaiman, 1) there is magic and 2) it is never explicitly explained. It is implied that the marquis has learned to perform certain acts of magic during his time living in London Below, a place which completely ignores the rules of time and reality anyway. The brand of magic the marquis demonstrates largely consists of what can be equated to parlor tricks, designed to impress - for example, appearing in a certain place when called in a certain way (by someone who's turned thrice widdershins. Yep). However, certain aspects of the marquis's witchcraft are significantly more dramatic. Most notably, he's able to safeguard his soul in a small silver box and, upon his death, have someone else bring him back to life using that manifestation of his soul. All of these spells seem to be intrinsically connected to the magical nature of London Below and as a result would not work on the Barge.
The marquis is hundreds of years old. The preservation of his soul never renewed him or made him younger, it only brought him back at the same age; combine that with the fact that everyone in London Below is implied to be centuries older than they look, and his advanced age ends up being a side effect having more to do with his exposure to the confused time of London Below and less with any deliberate efforts he made to prolong his life. As such, he will age normally upon boarding the Barge.
Physically he's very strong, agile, and quick on his feet, which he has to be because he spends a good deal of his time running away from people who are angry with him. There's nothing supernatural about it, though, and he can be beaten in a fight fairly easily.
Oh, and he can talk to rats. For what that's worth.
Personality:
"The marquis de Carabas was not a good man, and he knew himself well enough to be perfectly certain that he was not a brave man. He had long since decided that the world, Above or Below, was a place that wished to be deceived, and, to this end, he had named himself from a lie in a fairy tale, and created himself - his clothes, his manner, his carriage - as a grand joke."
The first thing to note about the marquis's personality is that it is in large part a reactive, constructed personality that is a direct response to the incredibly dangerous environment in which the marquis lives. London Below is the sort of place where nobody trusts anybody and you can die at any moment, in stark contrast to plain old London above. Throughout Neverwhere it is implied that the marquis at some point made a conscious decision to put aside any disadvantageous aspects of his natural personality in order to survive and thrive in London Below. The fact that this decision was made - that he was capable of making this decision - says a good deal about his "true" personality, of course, and most notably signifies that he puts himself above all other people in the world; in fact, he puts his own well-being above even truth to his own personality and personal history.
Secondly, the marquis's chosen identity, a character from a fairy tale (Puss in Boots) who is fictional within the fairy tale, invented by a manipulative talking cat and used in order to win the hand of a princess, says a good deal about the marquis's worldview. He sees people as gullible and stupid; as a rule, he does not see them as pitiable in their stupidity, but rather as creatures that should be taken advantage of, like the king and his daughter are taken advantage of in the tale of Puss in Boots. Once again, it also shows that he has no problem whatsoever subsuming his own identity and history for his own self-interest.
The marquis's primary focus within his own world is the maintenance of his network of favors, which it is implied has been in place for many years. Many - possibly hundreds, even thousands - of people owe him favors, which are unspecified until he calls them in; this can happen at any time. The marquis has called in favors from arson to murder to the guardianship of his soul in a box, and because of the rules of barter in London Below and his own expertise at manipulation, no one refuses to do him a favor. His focus on favors as opposed to currency is in part because London Below does generally work on a barter system, but is also because the marquis finds satisfaction in having psychological rather than simply financial power over other people. This is reflected as well in his constant need to verbally best people and appear more intelligent and in the know than anyone else around him. When he is incapable of maintaining this air of effortless, careless, even lazy superiority, he becomes extremely irritable. Relatedly, the marquis is partial to information hoarding, which appears not to be terribly uncommon in London Below. He is certainly not the only one who buys and sells information like any other resource, but he is certainly the most smug about it when he has information to sell, and the most put out when there is information that he has to admit he needs. All of this reinforces the fact that the marquis feels a need for power over others for a) safety and b) personal gratification.
Because he feels the need to project a constant air of superiority and omniscience, he spends a good deal of his time and energy acting as uncaring about everything as humanly possible. His mannerisms are calculated to appear as unimpressed as he can manage. He yawns, inspects his nails, and often entirely ignores things that don't interest him. And while the marquis is not as clever as he thinks he is, he is still very, very intelligent. He's the mental equivalent of a chess master, only his entire life is the game and London Below is the board; he thinks at least ten moves ahead at all times, and has several ways to manipulate his opponents (and occasionally allies) at every turn. This intelligence occasionally demonstrates itself in physical ways. Richard notes that the marquis is always moving in some way, particularly his eyes, and assumes him insane, when in fact the marquis is simply preparing himself for the trap they'll likely all step into in a hundred pages or so.
He relishes the discomfort of others, particularly those that he considers to be especially stupid. When Richard is confused about something, the marquis becomes positively gleeful. He has a very strong, apparently irrepressible tendency towards mockery; even when it might not be strategically advantageous to tell someone he's an idiot, the marquis will pretty much do it anyway. Once again, this is reflective of his general worldview, which is that people are idiots and deserve what's coming to them.
Throughout the first half of Neverwhere, the marquis does not display empathy. Excellent examples of this include many of his interactions with Door. He doesn't move to help her until he's absolutely certain that she will owe him if he does, even though he owed a great debt to her father and her entire family had just been killed. When she's mourning the death of her family and reliving the memories of her discovery of their bodies, he seems to realize that he should be doing something to help her, but he just pats her awkwardly on the back and then moves away. Even that tiny gesture of comfort seems to be made only because she would appreciate the gesture, not out of any true empathetic sentiment.
Above all, the marquis is arrogant. He believes that he is the center of the universe and he alone is clever enough to deceive the idiots who surround him. London Below essentially serves as his playground, and he uses its rules and magics for self-preservation and the construction of an empire built of favors and double-crossings.
However.
The marquis's arrogance slips somewhat after his torture and death at the hands of Croup and Vandemar. The marquis does engage in occasional acts of selflessness, although he never acknowledges them as selfless, and also expresses empathy and regret on numerous occasions after his resurrection. Notable examples are when he threatens to kill Lamia if she doesn't give Richard his life back (and the uncharacteristic violence he uses in that interaction), closing Hunter's eyes after she's killed by the Beast, and moments of vulnerability at Blackfriars after Islington is destroyed. (The last example is from after I'll be pulling him this time, but will in my opinion still reflect his higher levels of emotional vulnerability for his first few weeks on the Barge.)
The marquis will react to the Barge pretty differently this time around than he did the first time I played him here. This time he wasn't expecting to die and didn't have an emergency plan set up in case he did, so he'll be a lot less blase about his death and will be in shock for at least several days. He'll still be pretty "this is stupid" about the idea of redemption, but will be coming from an initial place of unpreparedness, which will make him a little more approachable from a Warden's perspective. He'll bounce back from his shock pretty quickly, but not before he reveals a little more about himself than he'd want to.
Path to Redemption: By the end of the book, the marquis demonstrates a good deal of progress. The first sign of this progress is the fact that he volunteers to die for Door at all. One might argue (and the marquis probably would) that he was doing it for the same reason he did everything, in order to get a favor and have her owe him forever, but logically that doesn't entirely add up. Someone as clever as the marquis could surely have come up with some way of getting information about Croup and Vandemar that did not involve his prolonged torture and murder. This implies that the marquis had become at least slightly invested in Door's mission by the end of canon.
The marquis's first experience with death was a life-changing one. After the marquis is resurrected, he begins to openly display empathy not only to Door and Hunter, whom he grudgingly acknowledged as competent before his death, but also to Richard, to whom he had only been condescending and scathing beforehand. The marquis's death allowed him to see his own vulnerability and tore down any illusions of invulnerability that his manipulative network of favors had built up for him.
His second experience with death will shake him even further, especially since he died so close to victory and in such an unpredictable, freak-accident way. His second death and his presence on the Barge will reinforce the fact that he has a lot less control over the workings of the world than he thought he did and will shake his confidence enough to make him slightly emotionally accessible to Wardens and even other sympathetic Inmates. However, he will find a way to rebuild these walls before too long, because the marquis is nothing if not resourcefully arrogant. As before, the time during which a Warden will be most able to get a foot in the door for redemption (when the marquis is most vulnerable) will be the month or two following his arrival to the Barge.
That said, even after two months, he will still be redeemable; it will just be harder. In my opinion, the best, easiest way to redeem the marquis will be 1) to play to his arrogance and self-serving nature, such as by asserting that the best way to serve himself from this point forward is by becoming a functioning member of society, and 2) to address his empathy and force him to admit that sometimes he has actual positive feelings about other people. (Specific references to people in his life such as Door and Richard may or may not backfire.) The marquis is never going to be a nice person, but functioning and not actively evil he'll probably be able to manage.
History: Neverwhere synopsis @ Wikipedia.
Sample Journal Entry:
[ He's speaking to himself, like he's taking a memo: Notes on the Barge for later. His voice is unusually contemplative, tinged with only a hint of his normal superior tone. ]
If everyone dies all the time, there's hardly any point in dying at all. It's just a particularly painful timeout. Wicked children get the death toll and must think about what they've done. More severe than a slap on the wrist and no dinner, but still - what's the point? What are you meant to learn?
[ He sighs. ] Uncreative. Send a note to the Admiral - you need to work harder or we're all going to lose [ sarcastic pause ] faith.
Sample RP:
One can only watch a shark swim in circles for an hour and a half before beginning the descent into madness. Or at least this was the case with the marquis de Carabas, who had begun to feel that his eyes would fall out of his head if the thing moved ever again. It was meant to be a way of focusing, getting a grip on what was real and what had actually happened, but it had failed utterly.
Now he was tucked in a quiet corner of the library, fingers splayed on the pages of a book he'd picked at random from the nearest shelf, a book with text too small and words too long to be even remotely interesting, a book that as far as he could tell was about aviation. If he cared even an iota about entertainment he'd toss it over his shoulder in a fit of graceful carelessness, but here and now he wasn't interested.
Did he want distraction or focus? He was beginning to forget. Things hadn't gone as planned, not towards the end, but he didn't know if he wanted to delve and analyze and figure out why or if he wanted to let it be, let it seem more real before taking it apart to see what had broken.
He flipped the page back and forth irritably, causing a small tear by the binding. Someone - he couldn't tell if she was a librarian or a particularly zealous bookworm - shot him a glare that was probably meant to be scathing. He gave her his slow, I-know-things-and-you-don't-and-aren't-you-precious-for-it smile, and she looked away with a righteous readjustment of her collar.
Which was actually very grounding. Some things didn't change. This was just another city, after all. There was always space below the normal goings-on for people like him.
Note: To clarify, the marquis is going to have no memories of the Barge! Total reboot, if that's okay.