Voidtreckers App

[inachinashop]

Player Information

Name: Xil
Age: 32
Contact details: xiilnek on plurk (can't get the right kind of link to plurk to work here and don't know why), dipshitparade #1435 on discord 
Other characters: N/A

Character Information

Name: the Iron Bull
Canon: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Canon Point: After the game itself, before Trespasser
OU/AU/CRAU/OC: OU
Age: mid to late 30s

World Information: Wikipedia Link
Personal History: Fandom Wiki Link

Personality:
(Warning for Bull’s totalitarian home culture, mentions of slavery and brainwashing/reeducation, a hopefully vague description of the warzone Bull spent about a decade in, and more-than-hinting at depersonalization, PTSD, and a mental breakdown.)

To understand the Iron Bull’s personality, you have to understand at least a little bit about the culture he grew up in, the Qun. Bull would have had that urge to take care of the people around him no matter what, he would have felt a responsibility to his society no matter what, but growing up in the Qun took those qualities and magnified them, and then used them to turn Bull into what the Qun needed him to be.

The society of the Qun is, at its core, efficient. Efficient at every level, efficient at any cost. Every level of the Qun, from the military to farming to manufacturing to art to science, is broken down into not so much jobs as roles, pre-made identities, to each of which is attached a set of clearly laid out duties and expectations which an individual Qunari is expected to fit for their entire life. At around the age of twelve a Qunari's role is decided for them, and though Bull indicates that he could have let the Tamassran in charge of his role know if he hadn't felt it suited him, given how being a member of the Qun's secret police -- the Ben-Hassrath -- turned out for him that kind of 'choice' doesn't make a whole lot of difference against the weight of an entire culture's worth of propaganda and expectation.

To a Qunari growing up under that system, the Qun is everything. A culture, a way of life, a religion. In the language of the Qun singular pronouns are rare, and names are -- officially -- nonexistent. A Qunari's individual name is the series of numbers the Tamassrans in charge of breeding use to keep track of a Qunari's particular genetics, and outside of that a Qunari's only name is the name of their role.

Of course there are Qunari who are aware their whole lives of the ways the Qun is breaking them down. Bull never was. The love and care for the people around him that sits at Bull's core was easy to grow into other useful things. It grew easily into fear, fear because he’d always been big and powerful even when he was young and found out quick how easy that made it to hurt people, fear because of the Qun’s warnings about children who might not know they’re mages, of the dangers of magic and the demons drawn to those who use it, of the destruction and suffering that come from the lack of self-control that invites a demon in, the lack of self-control when a demon takes the mage’s mind and the mage’s power becomes a tool for that demon and its own selfish, unrestricted impulses, those forces which always beget suffering. Love turned to fear turned to need, and of course the Qun could meet that need. That’s what the Qun is for. Control and safety, not for himself but for the whole. Love was turned into selflessness, responsibility, and still that need, any sacrifice as long as the people around him would be safe, and the selflessness was easy to magnify until it eclipsed anything else, and any part of him which wasn't given completely into what he was told he needed to be was a problem with him, not with the pitiless pre-made role Bull had to sculpt himself to fit into. And it's not like Bull wasn't aware of that, of the conscious effort it took him to fit. He just never saw any problem with it. It's the way the world should be.

"It's like being a block of stone with a sculptor working on you," he says when asked about his role, how he got it and how it felt. "One day, the last of the crap gets knocked off, and you can see your real shape, what you're supposed to be."

To him that's just a fact of the world, instead of a telling little perspective that says things about him he doesn't know he's showing off. But he's not always as hard to read as he thinks he is, at least for someone with the right perspective. We get a piece of that perspective from Volume 2 of the World of Thedas, in a report from another Ben-Hassrath who worked under Bull, after Bull began his role uncovering smuggling rings and spies and hunting down Qunari desperate to leave the Qun and got good enough at it that he got noticed, and sent to keep order on the island of Seheron. That Ben-Hassrath had been a slave who Bull freed there, and that freed slave joined the Qun and grew up and went back as a Ben-Hassrath himself to work with Bull on Seheron, and he was there when Seheron broke him.

The island of Seheron is unlucky enough to sit right between two nations with delusions of empire-building, and Tevinter and the Qun both know that whichever of them gets enough control of the place has a very conveniently placed base from which to launch a full out attack on the other. The two of them, Tevinter and the Qun, have been in a tug-of-war for the place for a long time, and who's in control of what part tends to shift. Between the rebels, the soldiers, the violence of the Tal-Vashoth -- the Qunari deserters -- the salt-and-burn tactics of Tevinter's spies, and the people who just happen to live there, by about a decade in, about four or five times longer than most Qunari were expected to spend there, Bull's seen, done, and been through about as much horrific shit as you'd expect. The report from his friend -- Gatt, for what it's worth, one of those nicknames that tend to happen among the Qunari whether the Qun wants them to happen or not, so called after the Qunari version of gunpowder, for his explosive temper -- comes in after Bull's last mission in Seheron. Bull's turned himself in for reeducation, voluntarily, and the Qun's interviewing anyone who was there to try and get a better idea of what happened.

"Did you know his last commander became Tal-Vashoth?" Gatt's post-mission deposition record says. "Of course you do. You've got records on everything, including the attitude I'm displaying right now that will doubtless come up as an area for improvement. Your people will tell me, and I'll sigh, and I'll take it, because I've seen the world outside the Qun, and while I might bang against the walls of this life, I'd rather be here than anywhere else.

"So would Hissrad. The difference between him and me is that he's never known anything else. He grew up in this orderly world you all made, and it all makes sense to him, people make sense, and he thinks that if he does the right thing, then everything will work. He's been in Seheron for ten years trying to make everything work, telling himself that he's the tool you made him to be, doing the job he was meant to do. He hunted down and killed his old commander. He killed civilians working for the rebels. There are times I'm grateful for those Tevinter mages coming in to attack. At least Hissrad doesn't have to argue with himself after he kills them.

"Now he killed the Tal-Vashoth who killed those children, and he broke himself doing it. He thinks it's his fault, that he failed to live up to the demands of the Qun. But we all know that isn't really true, is it? Seheron was a mess. We and Tevinter made certain of that. We grind ourselves down until we end up dead or turning Tal-Vashoth, and Hissrad would rather die than do that.

"He's a good man. He believes in you. You owe him better than what you've done to him."

Those in charge of Bull's fate seem to agree. More or less. He doesn't get sent back into his job as it was, before Seheron -- too much chance of having to hunt down civilians. The things the tool of the Qun can do have changed, so the tool’s function has to change, too. He gets sent to live outside Qunari territory to fit in with all the people living savage outside of the Qun's civilizing influence, to watch and report back. A quieter job, calmer, where he could still be of use.

Hissrad wouldn't fit in there. Some parts of Hissrad would, the parts that'd made the civilians back in Seheron trust him, and the parts that'd made his enemies assume he was all muscle and underestimate him, but other parts would have to be built. He's not that comfortable with outright lying, though, for all his nickname's well earned. Hissrad, like most Qunlat words, has a meaning that varies depending on context and interpretation. Gatt -- long after Seheron, betrayed, angry -- interprets it as 'liar', while Bull insists on 'keeper of illusions' instead. He doesn't call what he does lying, and he doesn't think of it that way. He knows how to use the truth.

The truth is, Hissrad likes to laugh. Who doesn't? He hadn't for a while before starting on this new version of his role, hadn't for something a little less than ten years, but maybe that was the trouble. He likes it, and it helps people trust him, so the Iron Bull laughs more. He makes people laugh. Puns help him work on this other language that's most of what people speak out here and they make people laugh and underestimate him, sometimes, so the puns can stay. They come from a real place, and he knows how to use them. The truth is, Hissrad likes to fuck. Which meant something a little different inside the Qun, something a lot more organized and matter of fact, but it seems like it means something a little different for the people out here, especially when they look at a big, loud guy like him. It comes from a real place, and he knows how to use it, so the Iron Bull starts to brag and flirt, and he learns to enjoy it. The truth is, Hissrad likes to take care of the people around him. It's practical, helps the team work more smoothly, helps people trust him, helps move those trusting people from the mercenary crew he started out working for to the new one he ended up leading, which gave him more mobility, and so more use to the Qun. So the Iron Bull, like Hissrad did, keeps an eye on his men, their likes and dislikes, their emotional entanglements, who they're sleeping with and who they're mad at and where they get their comfort from when things get hard, keeps up with how the people he gives orders to are doing. It comes from a real place, and he knows how to use it. It can stay.

The truth is, Hissrad likes to fight. The more brutal and bloody the better. That part's a little trickier but, like anything, it can be used. Makes people trust him sometimes, underestimate him other times, as long as he plays it right and keeps that violent part of him on the tight leash he’s spent his life strengthening, the leash that’s only ever broken the once. So the Iron Bull brags about the fighting too, jokes about it, revels in it and defines himself by it. That part of him's going to stay anyway, so he might as well use it.

The Iron Bull was always real. As real as Hissrad, anyway. The Iron Bull was born out of what tools Hissrad had to use, built up into what Hissrad needed to be. What the Qun needed Hissrad to be. And when he left the Qun -- not a matter of deciding he disagreed with the Qun's principles but a matter of loyalty, a split second decision about whose orders to trust, the commander right here in front of him of the organization that'd become his home or the representative of a faraway nation whose demands threatened the people he'd come to think of as his own -- when he left and the Qunari assassins came to make sure he knew Hissrad was dead to them, he had the Iron Bull to fall back on. His men, the Bull's Chargers, needed the Iron Bull to lead them, and Hissrad needed to be someone, and the Iron Bull was there, as real now as Hissrad had ever been.

He'd been having doubts even before he left, about whether he was already too much the Iron Bull, whether living out there had already corrupted him too much. He didn't have doubts afterward. Guilt, but not doubts. It was what it was, and as with all these kinds of deep and personal pains, the Iron Bull kept his head down through this one and rode it out quietly. He didn't regret it, he reassured his commander, thanked his friends for their offers of support, quietly and politely left it there, and never talked to anyone about the whole thing any deeper than that. The only thing that really mattered, anyway, was whether that violent, bloodthirsty part of him he'd always feared, without the Qun's tight comforting net of restrictions and rules, would come loose and hurt the people he cared about, like he'd seen happen to so many Tal-Vashoth back on Seheron. As the time passes and that keeps on not happening the Iron Bull questions some of Hissrad's calls, his kills, the people he'd brought unwilling and desperate to the reeducators, and the reasoning that'd run underneath all of it, that defining thread of his life up to that point and after it, his need for control over himself and what he'd thought that meant.

He doesn't come to any conclusions. He doesn't have to. The pain is private and it settles into him, becomes as familiar as any one of his other old aches, and the Iron Bull gets on with his life.


Key themes:

- identity (of course)
- freedom versus safety
- community, what it means, and his place in it (ie, support goes both ways, not just from Bull to everyone around him but from his community/friends/family to him, too. That particular theme’s not one his canon ultimately followed through on, but it’s definitely there.)


Main Motivation:

Keeping the people around him safe, both from outside threats and from himself.


Skills:

He's extremely observant, both when it comes to people's expectations and personalities and when it comes to things like hidden weapons and out-of-place details. His spatial visualization is good -- in canon we see him playing a game of chess with someone in his head, so I think it's fair to say he's likely good at making maps in his head too, and as long as he's paying attention probably seldom gets lost. We know he's sent spy reports back to the Qun too, and it would be weird if at least some of them weren't in code. So he's got a talent for observation, writing in code, sneaking around, talking to people, all the usual spy stuff.

He's also a powerful fighter. This can be less obvious when he's sparring -- the times we hear about him having sparred with other characters it's in the contexts of him leaving a weak spot open with Cullen and him having lost to Cassandra -- but he's at his deadliest when he's in a real fight and able to use his reaver abilities. I'm not sure if the fact that he doesn't know he's a reaver is relevant here, he thinks he's just stumbled on a similar style, but the bottom line is that he can use what may be a kind of blood magic to draw power from his own injuries, doing more damage the worse he's hurt or drawing on his own health in exchange for a more powerful attack, and restoring a portion of that health by drawing it out of his enemies. In an RP format I tend to translate that last ability there as healing himself a little; he injures someone in a fight, does his thing, and any injuries he's suffered start to heal just enough that they're not as dire as they might otherwise have been (though, since he doesn't know he's a reaver, nothing heals so much that the process couldn't go unnoticed in the midst of a fight). I'd probably also translate that last ability with a couple limits: since it seems like it's blood magic he'll only be able to do it if his enemy is bleeding, and given the in-game mechanics it only seems to work if he's actually touching them.

There are also indications that his sense of smell is better than a human’s, or at the very least at the more sensitive/finely tuned end of the smell scale. He could get good at cooking, too, if he had a reason to put time and attention into it; he's certainly spent enough time paying attention to food, how how that food got made, and watching people making it to have picked up on a few things, and he'd like both being in control of his own food and the sense of taking care of people by feeding them. He's good at sharing his space with a lot of other people too, so he'll probably end up having a certain skill for sharing the one toilet with that many other bladders and assholes.


Item:

The metal ankle brace he wears on top of (and fastened into the sole of) his left shoe.


Sample:

It's not until he's inside the -- what, the train? -- that all the weirdness has time to set in. All that metal out there, and the clothes and the thing around his wrist and the noise it’d made before he ran, the dread and the doors closing by themselves and the Voidtrecker Express. When things get bad trusting your instincts keeps you alive, and his had told him to ignore everything he didn't understand and run in here while he could, so he had, and... well.

Could be a dream. It's not like he doesn't know about those. He's even had one a time or two, though he tries to avoid it even now. He doesn't want to send his mind out to the world of the Fade, where magic and demons spin people's sleeping thoughts into illusions or, if they're really unlucky, elaborate lies designed to trick the unwary into letting a demon inside their head, doesn't want to do it any more than the Qun wanted him to do it, back in the day. He always does the rituals he's taught, keeps his sleeping mind from connecting with the Fade, makes sure he stays himself, and safe. Sure some of the dream stuff he's heard about sounds cool, and the demon thing supposedly only happens to mages, but he's never really wanted to tempt fate.

It's the only thing he can think of. This style of clothes he’s never seen before, this place he doesn’t understand, the way he can’t figure out how to even think about half of what he's looking at, the materials some of this stuff’s made of, what any of it's supposed to do, it's all got to be some weird Fade shit, a dream, or--

He'd been fighting, hadn't he? He reaches for the memory and can't quite find it, but the Chargers had a job, and he'd been there on the front lines like always, and he's always kind of known that one day someone would get a lucky hit in. It'd be weird if he was dreaming, but--

People go to the Fade when they're dead. It's what everyone's pretty sure probably happens. Except the dwarves, he guesses, with all that stone stuff, and maybe the elves too, but he'd never really asked Dalish about that. She doesn't seem like she wants to talk to everybody about that stuff any more than he wants to give everyone lessons about the Qun, and he'd always respected that.

Might not get a chance to ask her now, he thinks distantly, looking down at the weird, unfamiliar bag weighing down his hands. He'd been fighting, he's pretty sure. He'd been fighting, and now--

He'd always kind of thought he'd die doing something big and impressive. Dying for a reason. He doesn't remember. He hopes it was good. A death the guys can respect, something they won't have to fight with. The Iron Bull's their leader, someone they need to look up to, and the deaths that come out of nowhere and don't mean anything at all, those are always the hardest ones to mourn.

Krem's always been a good lieutenant. The best. Put up with too much of the Bull's shit. He'll make a good leader. Pull the rest of them together. They're a good bunch. Good at their jobs, good to each other. And their little company's professional reputation's better than it's ever been. His guys are going to be okay.

It's the telltale pinching prickle under the lumped up scar tissue right where his eye patch should be that brings him back. He's here and they're not and he doesn't know enough about where he is or who -- or what -- might be in here with him to cry. Not now, maybe not for a while.

Focus. What do you need?

He needs to find out what's going on. He needs to know if he's back in the damned Fade, if he's really stuck inside that awful fucking shithole for the rest of--

Don't think about it. You need to find out more. That's doable. You're good at that. What do you need to get there?

The Bull looks up and around him. Tiny beds, two above, two below, all smushed in close to each other like he's only ever seen on ships and back home. Was more space though, the way they did it back home. Back home you could see the sky. He needs to get out of this tiny shitting room. He needs to get out of this weird-ass itchy shirt.

No. He wants those things. He needs to go out and talk to people. He'll be better at that if he feels a little better, and there's only a couple things building up inside him right now that he can control.

Fine. Fine. He'll start by getting rid of the shirt.


Notes:

I hope the sample is what y’all were thinking with the ‘introspective piece’ the application page mentions. If not I have a thread here.