Inmate App for TLV (Draft)
Sep. 15th, 2014 07:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fancy_pantsUser Name/Nick: Rei
User DW:
AIM/IM: SchmooeyFoo, Plurk is ImpureTale
E-mail: jacqui.larson84@gmail.com
Other Characters:
Character Name: Dr. King Schultz
Series: Django Unchained
Age: 50
From When?: After his death in the film.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate - Schultz, while he presents himself as a conscientious, insistently pleasant individual, is many times as morally gray as his signature suit. In fairness, he is a bounty hunter, but he does not solely take the lives of people he's receiving money for. He kills people he finds morally reprehensible and those who directly threaten him, but he also does this in situations where there are other avenues he could take. He is also not above leaving people he doesn't like in situations that will ultimately lead to their deaths. For his marks, he doesn't show much regard for whether they've turned over a new leaf in the time he's been hunting them -- in essence, while redemption is a lofty, godly ideal, he doesn't care much for it when there's a high enough price on someone's head. You see him twice in the screenplay kill (or facilitate the killing of) wanted men who since leaving criminal life have settled down and made something good for themselves. If he has their handbill, it doesn't matter. This may go in direct opposition to what got him on the Barge as a Warden before, since when he was there he seemed willing to try his hand at facilitating redemption. He was very clear he wasn't certain he believed in it, including for himself, but that it was his duty to try. He tried and his pessimism won out. Right now it's his own soul he needs to work on.
Item: N/A
Abilities/Powers: He is a doctor, worked for a time as a dentist and presumably received schooling in his home country. His skills in those areas would reflect the limitations of his time, however. He is also a skilled marksman, a consummate actor and pianist, and remarkably quick for a man his age.
Personality: The doctor's gift of gab is probably his most notable quality. He is a man who knows the truth behind the "catching flies with honey" philosophy, and for this reason and several others, he is exceptionally talkative. Despite that English is not his first language (nor his second, likely), he is given to extreme verbosity and gets annoyed when people don't understand what he's saying because he's not being simple enough for them. He even expresses this frustration toward Django once or twice. The talking is a disarming mechanism -- when he speaks, people are given to listen, though persons of limited intellectual weight have labeled him something of a "fancy pants" because of this, and it is easy for persons such as that to quickly become as frustrated with his banter as he is with their inability to follow it. It has gotten him out of several scrapes and usually grants him the opportunity to get the drop on someone. Not easily outwitted, he's also a fine negotiator, catching many tiny details most people miss. Beyond even his need to use this skill for business, he's talkative because he's a lonely person and engages people, even a single person, to break the silence and solitude. Until his alliance with Django, he did not travel often with company, and so he uses conversation as a way to get as much as he can from each little encounter. He is often observed as delighted to have someone to talk to and amenable whether company is prolonged or ways are parted.
His generally amiable nature conceals his ability and willingness to kill in the blink of an eye, often without batting an eyelash, though this is mostly seen in the context of his job as a bounty hunter. When it comes to said work, Schultz only takes bounties with a Dead or Alive status, because he is confident that if he kills a target he will get his bounty, whereas taking them alive (when they're likely to be executed anyway) invites far too many potential complications. His preference is to approach his prey under a guise of some sort, preferring not to even leave them thinking he's pursuing them. His general appearance as a dentist and a dapper older gentleman, with his trained horse and his dentist's cart (with that ridiculous bouncing tooth on top), tends to disarm many. He is the picture of harmlessness, a relatively well-off foreigner who comes off as generally ignorant of the harsher realities of the frontier, and this kind of cunning is what he prefers to employ. One can imagine he put these methods to work even when he worked as a dentist: his casual, friendly manner and quick, unpredictable hand completing his tasks with all the efficiency of tearing away a band-aid (if such a thing were to have existed back then), earning him the reputation of being the most "painless" of dentists, as advertised on the side of his cart. This said, his decision to kill a person who is not on the handbill can come as a matter of convenience or personal dislike. He also has few qualms with leaving a person he does not like in dire situations.
Schultz is also the kind of person who, even in his work, would sometimes sooner come to harm, himself, than risk being impolite...with several exceptions. He is shown more than once in the screenplay dropping all pretense after he's been insulted or too much of his time is being wasted. Even people that threaten him are generally given a chance to change their minds before he will defend himself (even though he doesn't ever let on that's what he's giving them), and when he does he skirts the line between "efficiency" and "going too far." In the film we are shown very few instances where he will ignore or outright reject manners or local custom or convention, and those are in instances where the individual that demands them offends him beyond reason. Even then, he does not easily resort to vulgarity and (until he outright kills someone) often only removes himself from manner and convention so far that it preserves his personal space. He outright snaps at someone a few times in the screenplay -- once at the Speck brother who keeps spitting and cursing at him (who he menaces with a knife until the man behaves as he wants him to), another time when Django's ignorance frustrates him, and then at Calvin Candie's sister, in a moment of extreme emotional upheaval, and almost every time he is visibly embarrassed by his response afterward. As good manners would dictate, he removes himself in some fashion each time to collect his wits.
It is perhaps appropriate to identify Schultz as something of a romantic. He is moved to help Django to find and rescue his wife, Broomhilde, because of her name, seeing it as his duty as a German to help a real life Sigfried to complete his quest. He likes the idea of serendipity, things happening when they are meant to happen, because with all of the terrible things he sees in the world, it helps to preserve his sense of optimism. This moment in the film is one of several that suggests a strong kinship with his home country and culture -- as a German he has come over at a time when Germany is not yet an independent nation in the way that it is now, and has only in recent years made attempts to form a united confederation of states. Its legitimacy is in its infancy, and Germans in general have much to prove. Schultz finds it important to identify strongly with his roots and to carry those things with him in America and beyond. Likewise, he is likely to commit to a course of action on the Barge if what calls for it arouses his passions in just the right way.
Killing is, as mentioned before, something that comes with seeming ease. If he holds a warrant for the dead or alive apprehension of a criminal, he has few, if any compunctions when it comes to ending their lives. Some might even assume it is simple for him because a criminal wanted dead or alive generally deserves the price they have on their heads and will give him reason enough to complete his work. The screenplay shows that this is far from simple, as he still displays a willingness to kill a wanted man, even in front of his own children. When there is a reward on the line he seems to be able to allow himself not to ask hard questions. There's some paradox in his character in that, while Django calls this behavior "getting dirty" for the sake of the job, he is at first unable to tolerate it when Django similarly "gets dirty" in order to play his role as a black slaver convincingly, and afterward he only quietly disapproves, which perhaps reveals him to be too soft-hearted to antagonist Calvin Candie. It is safe to assume that he began to confront this duplicity on his part toward the end of the film, but it's debateable because he knowingly exercised poor judgment to a dangerous level.
That said, his ethics show in how he openly detests the notion of slavery and feels guilty to have been compelled to take advantage of it in order to acquire Django, the only person he could find who could identify a set of targets he pursued. His dislike of the institution as a whole nearly blows their cover on numerous occasions as they search for Django's wife. When he should have been playing the role of a rich man looking to get into Mandingo fighting, he displayed more than once a general hesitance, if not inability, to cope with the "sport"'s violent nature -- he feels guilty that his refusal to break character led to the death of a man he could have and very nearly saved. Most people that catch him in a more melancholy mood may read him for a penitent man, but not bitter. He genuinely believes there are things he should attempt to atone for, not because he deserves it but because the people that he has wronged deserve his effort. The people he directly killed or deliberately left in harm's way are not on this list. While many view that it's ultimately his guilt that leads him to kill Calvin Candie, it's also pride -- refusal to adhere to custom and shake the man's hand -- and it is a decision that he can't even adequately apologize for. He killed Candie in cold blood knowing he was endangering both Django and Broomhilda in the process, leading to the deaths of many, Django's capture and subsequent torture, and Broomhilda's implied assault by Billy Crash. All because he wouldn't shake a man's hand and get the Hell out of Chickasaw County, Mississippi.
Barge Reactions: On the Barge, Dr. Schultz has had and will have much to marvel at, from the technology to the variety of people. An optimist and again a romantic, seeing so many people there, many of whom are not even human, surprises, certainly, but he has little reason to deny that what he sees is real. He is already dead and is mostly all right with that, so the visions before him, while sometimes seemingly impossible, just tell him there are greater wonders in the universe than he could have imagined. The floods and breaches startled him, but he often saw purpose in them, or chose to take purpose from them, which should continue. Overall, as he enjoys travel anyhow, he finds the Barge more exciting than frightening or dismal.
Path to Redemption: Schultz is a complicated sell because he's not a typical fit for a lost soul. Schultz is not as sold on the notion of second chances as he seemed to be upon coming to the Barge the first time, and him not liking slavery does not create a counterbalance to his pride or his unflinching instinct to kill his obstacles. The fact that he lived in a terrible, harsh world that necessitated such a view does not excuse, either. A Warden for Schultz needs to train him past that because he is capable of much more. They need to get him thinking on his feet without need of killing. Someone with a code against killing would actually be a great fit for him -- show him how he might put his skills to use and develop new ones that allow him to apprehend marks without ending their lives. He can be empathetic, so he needs to steer toward applying that to the people he hunts or that he opposes.
He needs to believe in redemption in life and not simply after it (if and when God chooses to forgive and redeem). This applies to both the people around him and in himself. He does not believe he deserves to go to heaven or be redeemed. He definitely doesn't believe he deserves another shot at life, but a return to it would allow him to get his affairs in order for his family and apply what he's learned to make the frontier a better place. He needs to see redemption pay off. He needs to see how it makes things better, not just for the person being redeemed but the people around them as well. He didn't make it as a Warden because he couldn't believe. His Warden has to make him a believer.
History: Movie Synopsis at the Wiki
Barge History: Schultz's stay on the Barge as a Warden was a very brief one. He was mostly pleasant, his nature remaining a mystery to most who believed him a dentist and nothing more. The dual nature of his first and only Inmate perplexed him, forcing him to confront not only his dislike for what Alpha had done but also his lot in life as, essentially, a slave. It was ultimately too much for him to handle, and he was lost in Silent Hill.
Sample Journal Entry:
Sample RP:
Special Notes:
User DW:
AIM/IM: SchmooeyFoo, Plurk is ImpureTale
E-mail: jacqui.larson84@gmail.com
Other Characters:
Character Name: Dr. King Schultz
Series: Django Unchained
Age: 50
From When?: After his death in the film.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate - Schultz, while he presents himself as a conscientious, insistently pleasant individual, is many times as morally gray as his signature suit. In fairness, he is a bounty hunter, but he does not solely take the lives of people he's receiving money for. He kills people he finds morally reprehensible and those who directly threaten him, but he also does this in situations where there are other avenues he could take. He is also not above leaving people he doesn't like in situations that will ultimately lead to their deaths. For his marks, he doesn't show much regard for whether they've turned over a new leaf in the time he's been hunting them -- in essence, while redemption is a lofty, godly ideal, he doesn't care much for it when there's a high enough price on someone's head. You see him twice in the screenplay kill (or facilitate the killing of) wanted men who since leaving criminal life have settled down and made something good for themselves. If he has their handbill, it doesn't matter. This may go in direct opposition to what got him on the Barge as a Warden before, since when he was there he seemed willing to try his hand at facilitating redemption. He was very clear he wasn't certain he believed in it, including for himself, but that it was his duty to try. He tried and his pessimism won out. Right now it's his own soul he needs to work on.
Item: N/A
Abilities/Powers: He is a doctor, worked for a time as a dentist and presumably received schooling in his home country. His skills in those areas would reflect the limitations of his time, however. He is also a skilled marksman, a consummate actor and pianist, and remarkably quick for a man his age.
Personality: The doctor's gift of gab is probably his most notable quality. He is a man who knows the truth behind the "catching flies with honey" philosophy, and for this reason and several others, he is exceptionally talkative. Despite that English is not his first language (nor his second, likely), he is given to extreme verbosity and gets annoyed when people don't understand what he's saying because he's not being simple enough for them. He even expresses this frustration toward Django once or twice. The talking is a disarming mechanism -- when he speaks, people are given to listen, though persons of limited intellectual weight have labeled him something of a "fancy pants" because of this, and it is easy for persons such as that to quickly become as frustrated with his banter as he is with their inability to follow it. It has gotten him out of several scrapes and usually grants him the opportunity to get the drop on someone. Not easily outwitted, he's also a fine negotiator, catching many tiny details most people miss. Beyond even his need to use this skill for business, he's talkative because he's a lonely person and engages people, even a single person, to break the silence and solitude. Until his alliance with Django, he did not travel often with company, and so he uses conversation as a way to get as much as he can from each little encounter. He is often observed as delighted to have someone to talk to and amenable whether company is prolonged or ways are parted.
His generally amiable nature conceals his ability and willingness to kill in the blink of an eye, often without batting an eyelash, though this is mostly seen in the context of his job as a bounty hunter. When it comes to said work, Schultz only takes bounties with a Dead or Alive status, because he is confident that if he kills a target he will get his bounty, whereas taking them alive (when they're likely to be executed anyway) invites far too many potential complications. His preference is to approach his prey under a guise of some sort, preferring not to even leave them thinking he's pursuing them. His general appearance as a dentist and a dapper older gentleman, with his trained horse and his dentist's cart (with that ridiculous bouncing tooth on top), tends to disarm many. He is the picture of harmlessness, a relatively well-off foreigner who comes off as generally ignorant of the harsher realities of the frontier, and this kind of cunning is what he prefers to employ. One can imagine he put these methods to work even when he worked as a dentist: his casual, friendly manner and quick, unpredictable hand completing his tasks with all the efficiency of tearing away a band-aid (if such a thing were to have existed back then), earning him the reputation of being the most "painless" of dentists, as advertised on the side of his cart. This said, his decision to kill a person who is not on the handbill can come as a matter of convenience or personal dislike. He also has few qualms with leaving a person he does not like in dire situations.
Schultz is also the kind of person who, even in his work, would sometimes sooner come to harm, himself, than risk being impolite...with several exceptions. He is shown more than once in the screenplay dropping all pretense after he's been insulted or too much of his time is being wasted. Even people that threaten him are generally given a chance to change their minds before he will defend himself (even though he doesn't ever let on that's what he's giving them), and when he does he skirts the line between "efficiency" and "going too far." In the film we are shown very few instances where he will ignore or outright reject manners or local custom or convention, and those are in instances where the individual that demands them offends him beyond reason. Even then, he does not easily resort to vulgarity and (until he outright kills someone) often only removes himself from manner and convention so far that it preserves his personal space. He outright snaps at someone a few times in the screenplay -- once at the Speck brother who keeps spitting and cursing at him (who he menaces with a knife until the man behaves as he wants him to), another time when Django's ignorance frustrates him, and then at Calvin Candie's sister, in a moment of extreme emotional upheaval, and almost every time he is visibly embarrassed by his response afterward. As good manners would dictate, he removes himself in some fashion each time to collect his wits.
It is perhaps appropriate to identify Schultz as something of a romantic. He is moved to help Django to find and rescue his wife, Broomhilde, because of her name, seeing it as his duty as a German to help a real life Sigfried to complete his quest. He likes the idea of serendipity, things happening when they are meant to happen, because with all of the terrible things he sees in the world, it helps to preserve his sense of optimism. This moment in the film is one of several that suggests a strong kinship with his home country and culture -- as a German he has come over at a time when Germany is not yet an independent nation in the way that it is now, and has only in recent years made attempts to form a united confederation of states. Its legitimacy is in its infancy, and Germans in general have much to prove. Schultz finds it important to identify strongly with his roots and to carry those things with him in America and beyond. Likewise, he is likely to commit to a course of action on the Barge if what calls for it arouses his passions in just the right way.
Killing is, as mentioned before, something that comes with seeming ease. If he holds a warrant for the dead or alive apprehension of a criminal, he has few, if any compunctions when it comes to ending their lives. Some might even assume it is simple for him because a criminal wanted dead or alive generally deserves the price they have on their heads and will give him reason enough to complete his work. The screenplay shows that this is far from simple, as he still displays a willingness to kill a wanted man, even in front of his own children. When there is a reward on the line he seems to be able to allow himself not to ask hard questions. There's some paradox in his character in that, while Django calls this behavior "getting dirty" for the sake of the job, he is at first unable to tolerate it when Django similarly "gets dirty" in order to play his role as a black slaver convincingly, and afterward he only quietly disapproves, which perhaps reveals him to be too soft-hearted to antagonist Calvin Candie. It is safe to assume that he began to confront this duplicity on his part toward the end of the film, but it's debateable because he knowingly exercised poor judgment to a dangerous level.
That said, his ethics show in how he openly detests the notion of slavery and feels guilty to have been compelled to take advantage of it in order to acquire Django, the only person he could find who could identify a set of targets he pursued. His dislike of the institution as a whole nearly blows their cover on numerous occasions as they search for Django's wife. When he should have been playing the role of a rich man looking to get into Mandingo fighting, he displayed more than once a general hesitance, if not inability, to cope with the "sport"'s violent nature -- he feels guilty that his refusal to break character led to the death of a man he could have and very nearly saved. Most people that catch him in a more melancholy mood may read him for a penitent man, but not bitter. He genuinely believes there are things he should attempt to atone for, not because he deserves it but because the people that he has wronged deserve his effort. The people he directly killed or deliberately left in harm's way are not on this list. While many view that it's ultimately his guilt that leads him to kill Calvin Candie, it's also pride -- refusal to adhere to custom and shake the man's hand -- and it is a decision that he can't even adequately apologize for. He killed Candie in cold blood knowing he was endangering both Django and Broomhilda in the process, leading to the deaths of many, Django's capture and subsequent torture, and Broomhilda's implied assault by Billy Crash. All because he wouldn't shake a man's hand and get the Hell out of Chickasaw County, Mississippi.
Barge Reactions: On the Barge, Dr. Schultz has had and will have much to marvel at, from the technology to the variety of people. An optimist and again a romantic, seeing so many people there, many of whom are not even human, surprises, certainly, but he has little reason to deny that what he sees is real. He is already dead and is mostly all right with that, so the visions before him, while sometimes seemingly impossible, just tell him there are greater wonders in the universe than he could have imagined. The floods and breaches startled him, but he often saw purpose in them, or chose to take purpose from them, which should continue. Overall, as he enjoys travel anyhow, he finds the Barge more exciting than frightening or dismal.
Path to Redemption: Schultz is a complicated sell because he's not a typical fit for a lost soul. Schultz is not as sold on the notion of second chances as he seemed to be upon coming to the Barge the first time, and him not liking slavery does not create a counterbalance to his pride or his unflinching instinct to kill his obstacles. The fact that he lived in a terrible, harsh world that necessitated such a view does not excuse, either. A Warden for Schultz needs to train him past that because he is capable of much more. They need to get him thinking on his feet without need of killing. Someone with a code against killing would actually be a great fit for him -- show him how he might put his skills to use and develop new ones that allow him to apprehend marks without ending their lives. He can be empathetic, so he needs to steer toward applying that to the people he hunts or that he opposes.
He needs to believe in redemption in life and not simply after it (if and when God chooses to forgive and redeem). This applies to both the people around him and in himself. He does not believe he deserves to go to heaven or be redeemed. He definitely doesn't believe he deserves another shot at life, but a return to it would allow him to get his affairs in order for his family and apply what he's learned to make the frontier a better place. He needs to see redemption pay off. He needs to see how it makes things better, not just for the person being redeemed but the people around them as well. He didn't make it as a Warden because he couldn't believe. His Warden has to make him a believer.
History: Movie Synopsis at the Wiki
Barge History: Schultz's stay on the Barge as a Warden was a very brief one. He was mostly pleasant, his nature remaining a mystery to most who believed him a dentist and nothing more. The dual nature of his first and only Inmate perplexed him, forcing him to confront not only his dislike for what Alpha had done but also his lot in life as, essentially, a slave. It was ultimately too much for him to handle, and he was lost in Silent Hill.
Sample Journal Entry:
Sample RP:
Special Notes:
