Application
Sep. 1st, 2015 02:03 pmUser Name/Nick: Steph
User DW:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
knights_say_nih
AIM/IM: UndrwO on Plurk
E-mail: underwater.owl@gmail.com
Other Characters: Ricki Tarr and Furiosa
Character Name: Quentin Coldwater
Series: The Magicians Trilogy, by Lev Grossman
Age: 30
From When?: Postcanon
Inmate/Warden: Wardens-- Quentin is a character who went through an agonizingly slow (in some respects) maturing process. He faced serious business before he was really ready for it, made mistakes, hurt people very, very badly, and then learned over many years the complexities around making something right, and the fact that you sometimes just can't. Quentin is a life lesson in how sometimes it just isn't enough to want to be the hero. He's a great candidate for a warden because he comes from a canon with a really unique blend of high magic and really deep emotional introspection. His story is about perfectionism and failure and self-image, and it'll enable him a lot to help those inmates who have a lot of self-deception.
Item: Quentin's warden item will be his glorious Fillorean pocket watch;
"He took the silver watch out of his pocket, the one Eliot had given him before he left Fillory. He'd hardly glanced at it before- he'd been too shocked and angry when they told him he had to leave- but now that he did he saw that its face was studded with a really glorious profusion of detail: two extra dials, a moving star chart, the phases of the moon. It was a beautiful watch."
One of those extra dials will be devoted to the tracking of his inmates.
Abilities/Powers: Quentin is an extraordinarily powerful character, but with a lovely failsafe built in to keep him from being plot/setting breaky. Although he's a deeply, terrifyingly talented magician, the system of magic in his world is ruled by what are called 'circumstances.' Every spell Quentin casts needs to be cast differently depending on, well, the circumstances. To so much as knock a nail into a piece of wood, Quentin needs to know any number of things in order for the spell to fully succeed;
"He cast Legrand's Hammer Charm at noon and at midnight, in summer and winter, on mountaintops and a thousand yards beneath the earth's surface. He cast the spell underwater and on the surface of the moon. He cast it in early evening during a blizzard on a beach on the island of Mangareva, which would almost certainly never happen since Mangareva is a part of French Polynesia, in the South Pacific. He cast the spell as a man, as a woman, and once- was this really relevant?- as a hermaphrodite. He cast it in anger, with ambivalence, and with bitter regret."
Luckily, his honours thesis involved magic and space travel, (he went to go visit the moon, in just his skin- failed at it, but did the prep work nonetheless, to know how to transfer a lot of his skills to space) so he will be less lost on board than the average magician. However, anything he shouldn't be able to do at any given moment can easily be explained as failing due to the wacky circumstances.
For a brief summary of some of the things Quentin can do in canon;
Levitate/fly
Make himself impervious to blows
Improve his reflexes and reaction time
Cast a spell to create an invisible umbrella over someone's head in heavy rain
Draw a sword from a place beyond space and time, so long as he has a few coins to hand
Mess with probabilities; card flips, coin tosses, etc
Manage a few basic transformations; he's familiar with geese, foxes, bears, and whales, and could accomplish more with a little prep work
All manner of minor mending- all magicians have a discipline, and this is Quentin's- small broken objects long to spring together and resolve themselves in his hands.
Create barriers to keep people out of things
Break down most magical enchantments, given time and study
Mini, showy things; lights flashing, baby bits of levitation, glass smashing; special effects.
Plus one very handy 'Peruvian fainting hex,' harmless unless they hit themselves on the way down and highly useful in many situations.
I would give him access to these slowly, at a measure of one or so a month over his time on the barge (and nixing any the mods need nixed!) to make his adaptation to space travel realistic. I'd also like to periodically make him lose one or two of them, either for a month or for good, as the barge passes through unknown and untold locations.
Given time and research (upwards of MONTHS) in the book, Quentin accomplishes;
Creating one pocket dimension in the attic of his own house (a fucked up mirror verse where everything is backwards and deeply uncanny)
Eventually, creating a whole new Narnia, fundamentally.
Restoring a demon (niffin, rather- the magical core/monster that a magician burns down to if they lose control of their own magic) to human form- sort of related to restoring the soul to a body.
Many of these need ingredients that would be impossible or very difficult to procure on the barge- leaves from plants from a garden that grows on the underside of the world, where every emotion every human is experiencing flourishes as something living, or ununoctium, plus learning new languages, developing high theory. Each could rightly take years of study, and each could easily fail, entirely.
Personality: In many respects, because the books are so much about his growth, a lot of Quentin's personality is really a product of what has happened to him; the magician I'm apping here has very little in common with the boy in the first book. Quentin goes through a difficult adolescence, with a lot of horrible self-consciousness and self-sabotage.
He’s unflatteringly immature, fixated on children’s literature, unable to cope with the idea of being happy. He’s used, as he puts it, to having a monopoly on suffering, mostly on account of being a brilliant teenager with emotionally neglectful parents and all the pains of a normal highschool life as a socially awkward nerd. He made a decision, at some point in his childhood, that he was going to be incredibly unhappy. He describes this as a sensation of preparing for something, putting hours of dedication and effort and brilliance into it, and then at the very last second feeling a familiar anticlimactic sense that he doesn’t care anymore whether all the effort pays off or not, and consequentially never enjoying his triumph.
He is frequently triumphant, at least on a material level, because he is incredibly smart. He was shipped out to university level calculus classes during highschool, and was one of a few hundred students nation-wide to be selected into the entrance test for his school for magic. Of those students, he was one of twenty to be accepted, and of those twenty he was one of two to be moved up to second year after his first semester. Unfortunately these incredible gifts only seem to make him more easily dissatisfied, quickly bored with even the completely miraculous.
As a child he is miserable and sulky around his friends and family because a major part of him believes that he should not be living this life, that he must have been switched at birth from what he was really meant to be doing. He becomes hopelessly obsessed with the children’s books ‘Fillory and Further,’ a Narnia stand-in series about British children going to the countryside during the war and discovering a passage into another world through the back of a grandfather clock, where they meet talking animals and have wild adventures fighting a witch who wants to freeze time itself. Many children who don’t fit in withdraw into fiction. A fair number get obsessed with ‘waiting for a Harry Potter letter’ or what have you, but few let it isolate them, and paralyze them with resentment the way Quentin does. When Fillory never opens up to him, he begins to hate the real world for failing him.
It turns out he simply wasn’t waiting long enough. At what he thinks is going to be an interview for Princeton Quentin does end up receiving a summons to a magician’s college called Brakebills. He is initially completely enraptured, and does well in his new environment. One of the more redeemable things about Quentin is that he’s very seldom overtly cruel. While he has a slight penchant for sarcasm he mostly turns it on targets who understand and can fight back, and he goes out of his way to include and be friends with shy students (even though they might be smarter than him, which rankles him notably but doesn’t change how he treats them) or ones who are falling a bit behind in the competitive academic environment at Brakebills. He’s prone to taking risks, taking extra credit assignments to prove himself, and he isn’t afraid of work or of physical suffering. In one chapter, he’s on a small team playing a competitive sport, and the weak link of the team isn’t showing up for starting time. Quentin leaves to go find him, because he’d rather lose with him than win without him, and after some touching encouragement brings him back to play. It’s little glimmers of personality like this that save him from being a complete and utter pill, which is a risk when you’ve got as much self-pity going on as Quentin does.
He also has a few devastating experiences while he is in school. In one, he is trying to screw around with a teacher who has been picking on him, and whispers something to fuck up a spell he’s working on. The spell goes wrong. Instead of changing the weather, it summons a man into the classroom, with too many fingers and too many teeth. The students sit frozen, by magic, as it circles them. With all of them sitting there, trapped, unable to look, it eats one of the girls alive, before vanishing back into the world it came from. Quentin is appropriately devastated, and it takes him a long time to begin to be able to study again, with a profoundly renewed respect for spellwork.
After that, he demonstrates intelligence and dedication, learning magic deftly and voraciously, and even makes a solid circle of friends, but soon his disaffectedness begins to follow him, and dissatisfaction sets in in even the most magical of settings. He spends his last semester at school irate and bored once more.
Post-graduation, as though being basically let into Hogwarts wasn’t enough, the curtain peels back further. An old schoolmate shows up with the news that there are worlds beyond their own, and when they go through Quentin finds himself in Fillory. Yes, the Fillory from the books he was obsessed with as a child was mostly real. The author was rendering the wild storytellings of children who had actually travelled there and come back to share their adventures. What he’d penned as fiction had actually all been true, if simplified for narrative purposes. And yet, Quentin is miserable in Fillory. This finally forces him into a little self-examination, and he begins to confront the fact that all his life he has set himself up to be miserable by pretending that it’s just his goals that aren’t being realized. After all, here, against all odds, the most fantastical, impossible desires he’s ever had have come true, and still he walks around in a sulk.
Though he’s working hard to do away with this habit, but at the canon point I’m bringing him in from he still has vestiges of it, the occasional fallback into angry cynicism. However, after a few brutal object lessons in ‘why self-sabotage is stupid’ and the death of a loved one, he is at least on the mend from this particular all-encompassing personality trait. On the mend, but only very slowly.
Then, at Brakebills, Quentin does manage to get into something approaching a healthy relationship with his classmate, Alice. They are together for a few years and are initially very much in love with one another. Quentin is brilliant, but Alice is even more so, and he wishes he could resent her for it but simply adores her instead. However, after they graduate, things go sour for the pair. Alice’s parents’ are magicians, so she knows the trap very well; when you leave an all-encompassing, terribly rigorous school for magic behind, and are thrown out into the real world with tremendous power and no real need to work to make a living, you can go kind of off the rails if you don’t find something meaningful to do with yourself. She throws herself into her studies and goes from ‘great’ to ‘fucking phenomenal,’ and Quentin throws himself into the New York party scene and goes from a minor alcoholic to a pretty solid one. He dabbles with a number of harder drugs, too, and generally lets his brilliant mind stagnate in resentment. Then in a fit of alcohol induced self-sabotage he fucks one of their roommates (actually he possibly fucks around a little two of them, he knows he was with Janet but also has vague memories of Eliot being there as well.) He isn’t remotely discreet about it. He wakes up with Alice sitting at the foot of the bed, and whether or not the pair would have properly reconciled the reader never finds out, as a few minutes later Quentin is plunged into Fillory for the very first time.
The Fillory adventure is action packed, blood curdling, and terrifying. Many of them die. One young magician has his hands bitten off at the wrists. Most tragically, Quentin and Alice never have time to reconcile. They have a few more fights on their travels. She gives him the gift of some extraordinary insight, explaining that she thinks he hates himself so much that he punishes people who love him. Quentin decides he still loves her and will win her back. Apparently, she still loves him too, because she sacrifices herself there fighting the monster of the piece, knowingly giving her life to save Quentin, despite the fact that he has broken her heart. He is badly, badly injured in the same fight and spends a number of months unconscious or barely aware. This results in some interesting physical characteristics he'll be bringing to the barge- his shoulder and knee are made of living wood, where the crushed and chewed away parts of him were grown back like a tree by centaur magic. He has no feeling in the areas, and has one nasty chip in the shoulder where he was hacked at by a sword.
One of the best things about Lev Grossman’s writing his that he handles the trauma of battle and loss and metaphysical crisis really really well. Quentin immediately tailspins, cycles rapidly between frantic energy and total soul-crushing self-loathing and depression. He learns every single thing about magic he can, following in Alice’s footsteps and going from ‘great’ to ‘the best there is.’ Afterwards, returning to Earth, he gives up magic entirely (and picks up drinking with renewed vigor) using magician connections to land himself a cushy job as a VP in some huge firm where he fucks around on the internet all day and has three-martini lunches. He languishes in this blackness for months. Periodic bouts of depression and drinking are an aspect of Quentin's character- the narrative frequently acknowledges that he probably needs to be on some kind of serious medication, but isn't. The characters reference and expressly handle the PTSD they all have as a result of that first book.
The only good news for Quentin is that eventually he does seem to learn from some of his behavior. His grief for Alice plays out in the books naturally and touchingly, and he seems to take to heart what she’d said about his deliberately hurting people for caring about him. He becomes one of the four kings and queens of Fillory (again, check the Narnia reference) and becomes a much nicer person. He frequently reflects on how much better he is now than he was when he was a teenager. As he transitions into actual adulthood his sarcasm becomes less self-loathing and more externally focused (he’s not a much nicer person to BE around, admittedly, just slightly more healthy.) And to be fair to him, he really does have his nice moments. He sneaks down to the kitchens and brings up a piece of cake to a little girl who has been unfairly sent to bed without dessert by her tyrannical mother, and talks gently and seriously with the child on a number of occasions. He becomes less vindictive with Julia, who has re-entered his life, and makes genuine steps to make amends for what a son of a bitch he was when they were kids (their original relationship had a horrible, whiny 'she's friend zoned me' vibe to it- and he gets the hell over himself). He still drinks and he still resents, but he also takes personal responsibility, about a tablespoonful at a time. He goes on a quest. He begins to make choices not because they seem logical or seem comfortable, but because they are the right thing to do. He becomes a hero. He learns, most of all, that a hero isn’t someone who comes home victorious, a hero is someone who pays the price.
Sent back to earth, Quentin finally begins to learn the lesson that 'wishing doesn't make it so' (which can be a real stunting point for the emotional growth of a magician- since for them it frequently does.) He gets work as a teacher, and develops a lovely sensitivity for talking to people younger than him; he trains other magicians tenderly and kindly, much unlike his teachers, coming up through school.
He learns what real failure feels like. He's fired from his job, and launches on a quest to put right the horrible wrong in his life, the death of Alice. The adventure is a lesson for him in making amends without expectation of what he's owed- when he does return her to the land of the living, she is furious with him, and says horrible things to him, and has no intention of beginning dating him again- and Quentin is actually just totally fine with that, absorbs the criticism and allows her to lash out and respects her boundaries, and generally just leaves behind that huge and nasty personality trait that many nerd boys have of expecting his princess to be in this castle. A bunch of other huge, important, climactic stuff happens, but the really big thing is that he just takes off the proverbial fedora already and grows up.
Grown-up Quentin is a balm, a soft and level-headed result of all of the mortifyingly childish and awkward life lessons involved in the earlier novels. He shares his wisdom carefully and judiciously. He cries openly whenever he feels great sorrow or great joy. He loses the petty need to win every argument, to have the last word. He gives himself permission to be proud, and to be content. He becomes... more of a Prospero, really, a powerful, wise wizard who would often rather die than give up, who harnesses great power and uses it not always entirely wisely, but mostly for good, wrapped in the skin of a modern young man who was raised on Harry Potter and ipods and comes from Brooklyn.
Barge Reactions: Quentin will react to the Barge with a certain amount of acerbic equanimity. A lifetime of finding doors into alternate magic worlds has prepared him for this setting brilliantly; he is used to there being something behind the walls, and is very well prepared for it to be bloody and horrifying. The moral questions around the inmate/warden power structure will be a little more difficult for him to wrestle with; magicians tend to be a pretty decrepit lot in that respect- there's an awful lot of 'can we?' and not a lot of 'should we?' and a certain amount of nose-looking-down with regards to real people- but then again, as a boy raised on fantasy and adventure stories he'll be sort of a sponge for some of the main concepts once he does start thinking about it, and has a few deepset beliefs in the areas of silver, gold and wooden cups, righteous woodcutters rescuing princesses and swords that lift from stones. He'll catch on quickly.
Deal: Quentin is a character who steps through doorways into other worlds almost professionally. Additionally, the books end pretty well for him, in terms of resolving everything, giving him what he needs (if not necessarily all of what he wants) and teaching him the difference between those two things. As such, his deal is a kindness, rather than something he badly needs. In the final fight to keep magic in the world, the dragons from earth fought the gods, and sustained heavy casualties. (Whenever a god worked out it was being attacked, it would erase the dragon from existence.) In the aftermath, their numbers were few and they had all forgotten how to reproduce. Quentin's deal will be to offer them what they say they need, be it their vanished comrades restored or the knowledge of how to mate.
History: Three novels:
The Magicians
The Magician King
The Magicians Land
Sample Journal Entry: The theory is called 'inverse profundity.' It's actually a documented phenomena, if you're talking to the right people. The premise is, the bigger you go in terms of scope, the more abstract and metaphorical or awesomely powerful the concept, the more mundane the presentation turns out to be. God, in my world, looks like a big, silvery janitor. Oh, and there are a fleet of Him. Same awe inspiring and miraculous behaviour, wrapping itself up in- well. Meat loaf Mondays. Salvation of souls in manila envelopes and legal scale file-folders. I mean, fuck, the Admiral probably uses a label maker. Inverse profundity.
Sample RP: Quentin is good with 'I'm a magician' for the first few months. It gets the usual responses; a raised eyebrow, a smile, a shake of the head, a look of disbelief and some questions about Davids Copperfield & Blaine. He laughs it off, shakes his head politely, insists, no, not a wizard, not a wiccan, not a hobbyist- He gets a deck of cards thrust into his hands one day in the cafeteria, smiles, and starts to shuffle.
No one knows cards like Quentin Coldwater. The con artists on board know it by the way his clever fingers rifle the deck, pulling off neat tricks, flipping the four of clubs four times after thorough shuffles. He cuts to it, cuts to it again, pulls it from an onlooker's breast pocket, produces it from thin air. He throws it, like it's a razor, embedding it in the mess hall apples from three, then five, then ten feet back. He laughs it off, tucks it back into the deck, demurs.
"Bullshit," says someone, under his breath, and Quentin should let it go, he should- but then again, why should he?
He flips the four of clubs. Hands the deck over to the detractor, and has him flip the four of clubs. Shuffle, flip the four of clubs- when examined, the deck is full of every card in every suit- the top card is the queen of hearts, but when he turns the deck over, and Quentin nods, it flips up again, four of clubs, and so, too, does the one below that. Despite another check- the next five cards when fanned are two diamonds, a jack, a queen, and then another club, but this one is a nine- when flipped from a closed deck the pull four of clubs, again, again, again.
The room crackles a little, as the improbability takes its' toll. The next card is a four, yes, but it's the four of hearts, diamonds- and then another four, but rather than a spade, it's the four of swans, four of cups, four of keys, four of bees, four of glass, four of swords, four of cyanide, four of despair, four of clubs, four of clubs, four of clubs-
The last one, instead of the little configuration of clover, is a pictured creature, a caveman-like beast, holding a large stone club in its' paw- and it would be cartoonish, except for the malevolence in the beady little eyes, except for the twisted jaw, the splayed out carcass in the backdrop.
"Once more?" Offers Quentin, into the soft silence, and pulls, yes, a four of clubs, the real card this time, and only because the room is perfectly, frighteningly silent, is it audible when the little figure standing over the corpse opens its' blackened maw and screams for meat.
He will not, any time soon, be invited by anyone to play a hand of poker.
Special Notes: None I can think of.
User DW:
knights_say_nihAIM/IM: UndrwO on Plurk
E-mail: underwater.owl@gmail.com
Other Characters: Ricki Tarr and Furiosa
Character Name: Quentin Coldwater
Series: The Magicians Trilogy, by Lev Grossman
Age: 30
From When?: Postcanon
Inmate/Warden: Wardens-- Quentin is a character who went through an agonizingly slow (in some respects) maturing process. He faced serious business before he was really ready for it, made mistakes, hurt people very, very badly, and then learned over many years the complexities around making something right, and the fact that you sometimes just can't. Quentin is a life lesson in how sometimes it just isn't enough to want to be the hero. He's a great candidate for a warden because he comes from a canon with a really unique blend of high magic and really deep emotional introspection. His story is about perfectionism and failure and self-image, and it'll enable him a lot to help those inmates who have a lot of self-deception.
Item: Quentin's warden item will be his glorious Fillorean pocket watch;
"He took the silver watch out of his pocket, the one Eliot had given him before he left Fillory. He'd hardly glanced at it before- he'd been too shocked and angry when they told him he had to leave- but now that he did he saw that its face was studded with a really glorious profusion of detail: two extra dials, a moving star chart, the phases of the moon. It was a beautiful watch."
One of those extra dials will be devoted to the tracking of his inmates.
Abilities/Powers: Quentin is an extraordinarily powerful character, but with a lovely failsafe built in to keep him from being plot/setting breaky. Although he's a deeply, terrifyingly talented magician, the system of magic in his world is ruled by what are called 'circumstances.' Every spell Quentin casts needs to be cast differently depending on, well, the circumstances. To so much as knock a nail into a piece of wood, Quentin needs to know any number of things in order for the spell to fully succeed;
"He cast Legrand's Hammer Charm at noon and at midnight, in summer and winter, on mountaintops and a thousand yards beneath the earth's surface. He cast the spell underwater and on the surface of the moon. He cast it in early evening during a blizzard on a beach on the island of Mangareva, which would almost certainly never happen since Mangareva is a part of French Polynesia, in the South Pacific. He cast the spell as a man, as a woman, and once- was this really relevant?- as a hermaphrodite. He cast it in anger, with ambivalence, and with bitter regret."
Luckily, his honours thesis involved magic and space travel, (he went to go visit the moon, in just his skin- failed at it, but did the prep work nonetheless, to know how to transfer a lot of his skills to space) so he will be less lost on board than the average magician. However, anything he shouldn't be able to do at any given moment can easily be explained as failing due to the wacky circumstances.
For a brief summary of some of the things Quentin can do in canon;
Levitate/fly
Make himself impervious to blows
Improve his reflexes and reaction time
Cast a spell to create an invisible umbrella over someone's head in heavy rain
Draw a sword from a place beyond space and time, so long as he has a few coins to hand
Mess with probabilities; card flips, coin tosses, etc
Manage a few basic transformations; he's familiar with geese, foxes, bears, and whales, and could accomplish more with a little prep work
All manner of minor mending- all magicians have a discipline, and this is Quentin's- small broken objects long to spring together and resolve themselves in his hands.
Create barriers to keep people out of things
Break down most magical enchantments, given time and study
Mini, showy things; lights flashing, baby bits of levitation, glass smashing; special effects.
Plus one very handy 'Peruvian fainting hex,' harmless unless they hit themselves on the way down and highly useful in many situations.
I would give him access to these slowly, at a measure of one or so a month over his time on the barge (and nixing any the mods need nixed!) to make his adaptation to space travel realistic. I'd also like to periodically make him lose one or two of them, either for a month or for good, as the barge passes through unknown and untold locations.
Given time and research (upwards of MONTHS) in the book, Quentin accomplishes;
Creating one pocket dimension in the attic of his own house (a fucked up mirror verse where everything is backwards and deeply uncanny)
Eventually, creating a whole new Narnia, fundamentally.
Restoring a demon (niffin, rather- the magical core/monster that a magician burns down to if they lose control of their own magic) to human form- sort of related to restoring the soul to a body.
Many of these need ingredients that would be impossible or very difficult to procure on the barge- leaves from plants from a garden that grows on the underside of the world, where every emotion every human is experiencing flourishes as something living, or ununoctium, plus learning new languages, developing high theory. Each could rightly take years of study, and each could easily fail, entirely.
Personality: In many respects, because the books are so much about his growth, a lot of Quentin's personality is really a product of what has happened to him; the magician I'm apping here has very little in common with the boy in the first book. Quentin goes through a difficult adolescence, with a lot of horrible self-consciousness and self-sabotage.
He’s unflatteringly immature, fixated on children’s literature, unable to cope with the idea of being happy. He’s used, as he puts it, to having a monopoly on suffering, mostly on account of being a brilliant teenager with emotionally neglectful parents and all the pains of a normal highschool life as a socially awkward nerd. He made a decision, at some point in his childhood, that he was going to be incredibly unhappy. He describes this as a sensation of preparing for something, putting hours of dedication and effort and brilliance into it, and then at the very last second feeling a familiar anticlimactic sense that he doesn’t care anymore whether all the effort pays off or not, and consequentially never enjoying his triumph.
He is frequently triumphant, at least on a material level, because he is incredibly smart. He was shipped out to university level calculus classes during highschool, and was one of a few hundred students nation-wide to be selected into the entrance test for his school for magic. Of those students, he was one of twenty to be accepted, and of those twenty he was one of two to be moved up to second year after his first semester. Unfortunately these incredible gifts only seem to make him more easily dissatisfied, quickly bored with even the completely miraculous.
As a child he is miserable and sulky around his friends and family because a major part of him believes that he should not be living this life, that he must have been switched at birth from what he was really meant to be doing. He becomes hopelessly obsessed with the children’s books ‘Fillory and Further,’ a Narnia stand-in series about British children going to the countryside during the war and discovering a passage into another world through the back of a grandfather clock, where they meet talking animals and have wild adventures fighting a witch who wants to freeze time itself. Many children who don’t fit in withdraw into fiction. A fair number get obsessed with ‘waiting for a Harry Potter letter’ or what have you, but few let it isolate them, and paralyze them with resentment the way Quentin does. When Fillory never opens up to him, he begins to hate the real world for failing him.
It turns out he simply wasn’t waiting long enough. At what he thinks is going to be an interview for Princeton Quentin does end up receiving a summons to a magician’s college called Brakebills. He is initially completely enraptured, and does well in his new environment. One of the more redeemable things about Quentin is that he’s very seldom overtly cruel. While he has a slight penchant for sarcasm he mostly turns it on targets who understand and can fight back, and he goes out of his way to include and be friends with shy students (even though they might be smarter than him, which rankles him notably but doesn’t change how he treats them) or ones who are falling a bit behind in the competitive academic environment at Brakebills. He’s prone to taking risks, taking extra credit assignments to prove himself, and he isn’t afraid of work or of physical suffering. In one chapter, he’s on a small team playing a competitive sport, and the weak link of the team isn’t showing up for starting time. Quentin leaves to go find him, because he’d rather lose with him than win without him, and after some touching encouragement brings him back to play. It’s little glimmers of personality like this that save him from being a complete and utter pill, which is a risk when you’ve got as much self-pity going on as Quentin does.
He also has a few devastating experiences while he is in school. In one, he is trying to screw around with a teacher who has been picking on him, and whispers something to fuck up a spell he’s working on. The spell goes wrong. Instead of changing the weather, it summons a man into the classroom, with too many fingers and too many teeth. The students sit frozen, by magic, as it circles them. With all of them sitting there, trapped, unable to look, it eats one of the girls alive, before vanishing back into the world it came from. Quentin is appropriately devastated, and it takes him a long time to begin to be able to study again, with a profoundly renewed respect for spellwork.
After that, he demonstrates intelligence and dedication, learning magic deftly and voraciously, and even makes a solid circle of friends, but soon his disaffectedness begins to follow him, and dissatisfaction sets in in even the most magical of settings. He spends his last semester at school irate and bored once more.
Post-graduation, as though being basically let into Hogwarts wasn’t enough, the curtain peels back further. An old schoolmate shows up with the news that there are worlds beyond their own, and when they go through Quentin finds himself in Fillory. Yes, the Fillory from the books he was obsessed with as a child was mostly real. The author was rendering the wild storytellings of children who had actually travelled there and come back to share their adventures. What he’d penned as fiction had actually all been true, if simplified for narrative purposes. And yet, Quentin is miserable in Fillory. This finally forces him into a little self-examination, and he begins to confront the fact that all his life he has set himself up to be miserable by pretending that it’s just his goals that aren’t being realized. After all, here, against all odds, the most fantastical, impossible desires he’s ever had have come true, and still he walks around in a sulk.
Though he’s working hard to do away with this habit, but at the canon point I’m bringing him in from he still has vestiges of it, the occasional fallback into angry cynicism. However, after a few brutal object lessons in ‘why self-sabotage is stupid’ and the death of a loved one, he is at least on the mend from this particular all-encompassing personality trait. On the mend, but only very slowly.
Then, at Brakebills, Quentin does manage to get into something approaching a healthy relationship with his classmate, Alice. They are together for a few years and are initially very much in love with one another. Quentin is brilliant, but Alice is even more so, and he wishes he could resent her for it but simply adores her instead. However, after they graduate, things go sour for the pair. Alice’s parents’ are magicians, so she knows the trap very well; when you leave an all-encompassing, terribly rigorous school for magic behind, and are thrown out into the real world with tremendous power and no real need to work to make a living, you can go kind of off the rails if you don’t find something meaningful to do with yourself. She throws herself into her studies and goes from ‘great’ to ‘fucking phenomenal,’ and Quentin throws himself into the New York party scene and goes from a minor alcoholic to a pretty solid one. He dabbles with a number of harder drugs, too, and generally lets his brilliant mind stagnate in resentment. Then in a fit of alcohol induced self-sabotage he fucks one of their roommates (actually he possibly fucks around a little two of them, he knows he was with Janet but also has vague memories of Eliot being there as well.) He isn’t remotely discreet about it. He wakes up with Alice sitting at the foot of the bed, and whether or not the pair would have properly reconciled the reader never finds out, as a few minutes later Quentin is plunged into Fillory for the very first time.
The Fillory adventure is action packed, blood curdling, and terrifying. Many of them die. One young magician has his hands bitten off at the wrists. Most tragically, Quentin and Alice never have time to reconcile. They have a few more fights on their travels. She gives him the gift of some extraordinary insight, explaining that she thinks he hates himself so much that he punishes people who love him. Quentin decides he still loves her and will win her back. Apparently, she still loves him too, because she sacrifices herself there fighting the monster of the piece, knowingly giving her life to save Quentin, despite the fact that he has broken her heart. He is badly, badly injured in the same fight and spends a number of months unconscious or barely aware. This results in some interesting physical characteristics he'll be bringing to the barge- his shoulder and knee are made of living wood, where the crushed and chewed away parts of him were grown back like a tree by centaur magic. He has no feeling in the areas, and has one nasty chip in the shoulder where he was hacked at by a sword.
One of the best things about Lev Grossman’s writing his that he handles the trauma of battle and loss and metaphysical crisis really really well. Quentin immediately tailspins, cycles rapidly between frantic energy and total soul-crushing self-loathing and depression. He learns every single thing about magic he can, following in Alice’s footsteps and going from ‘great’ to ‘the best there is.’ Afterwards, returning to Earth, he gives up magic entirely (and picks up drinking with renewed vigor) using magician connections to land himself a cushy job as a VP in some huge firm where he fucks around on the internet all day and has three-martini lunches. He languishes in this blackness for months. Periodic bouts of depression and drinking are an aspect of Quentin's character- the narrative frequently acknowledges that he probably needs to be on some kind of serious medication, but isn't. The characters reference and expressly handle the PTSD they all have as a result of that first book.
The only good news for Quentin is that eventually he does seem to learn from some of his behavior. His grief for Alice plays out in the books naturally and touchingly, and he seems to take to heart what she’d said about his deliberately hurting people for caring about him. He becomes one of the four kings and queens of Fillory (again, check the Narnia reference) and becomes a much nicer person. He frequently reflects on how much better he is now than he was when he was a teenager. As he transitions into actual adulthood his sarcasm becomes less self-loathing and more externally focused (he’s not a much nicer person to BE around, admittedly, just slightly more healthy.) And to be fair to him, he really does have his nice moments. He sneaks down to the kitchens and brings up a piece of cake to a little girl who has been unfairly sent to bed without dessert by her tyrannical mother, and talks gently and seriously with the child on a number of occasions. He becomes less vindictive with Julia, who has re-entered his life, and makes genuine steps to make amends for what a son of a bitch he was when they were kids (their original relationship had a horrible, whiny 'she's friend zoned me' vibe to it- and he gets the hell over himself). He still drinks and he still resents, but he also takes personal responsibility, about a tablespoonful at a time. He goes on a quest. He begins to make choices not because they seem logical or seem comfortable, but because they are the right thing to do. He becomes a hero. He learns, most of all, that a hero isn’t someone who comes home victorious, a hero is someone who pays the price.
Sent back to earth, Quentin finally begins to learn the lesson that 'wishing doesn't make it so' (which can be a real stunting point for the emotional growth of a magician- since for them it frequently does.) He gets work as a teacher, and develops a lovely sensitivity for talking to people younger than him; he trains other magicians tenderly and kindly, much unlike his teachers, coming up through school.
He learns what real failure feels like. He's fired from his job, and launches on a quest to put right the horrible wrong in his life, the death of Alice. The adventure is a lesson for him in making amends without expectation of what he's owed- when he does return her to the land of the living, she is furious with him, and says horrible things to him, and has no intention of beginning dating him again- and Quentin is actually just totally fine with that, absorbs the criticism and allows her to lash out and respects her boundaries, and generally just leaves behind that huge and nasty personality trait that many nerd boys have of expecting his princess to be in this castle. A bunch of other huge, important, climactic stuff happens, but the really big thing is that he just takes off the proverbial fedora already and grows up.
Grown-up Quentin is a balm, a soft and level-headed result of all of the mortifyingly childish and awkward life lessons involved in the earlier novels. He shares his wisdom carefully and judiciously. He cries openly whenever he feels great sorrow or great joy. He loses the petty need to win every argument, to have the last word. He gives himself permission to be proud, and to be content. He becomes... more of a Prospero, really, a powerful, wise wizard who would often rather die than give up, who harnesses great power and uses it not always entirely wisely, but mostly for good, wrapped in the skin of a modern young man who was raised on Harry Potter and ipods and comes from Brooklyn.
Barge Reactions: Quentin will react to the Barge with a certain amount of acerbic equanimity. A lifetime of finding doors into alternate magic worlds has prepared him for this setting brilliantly; he is used to there being something behind the walls, and is very well prepared for it to be bloody and horrifying. The moral questions around the inmate/warden power structure will be a little more difficult for him to wrestle with; magicians tend to be a pretty decrepit lot in that respect- there's an awful lot of 'can we?' and not a lot of 'should we?' and a certain amount of nose-looking-down with regards to real people- but then again, as a boy raised on fantasy and adventure stories he'll be sort of a sponge for some of the main concepts once he does start thinking about it, and has a few deepset beliefs in the areas of silver, gold and wooden cups, righteous woodcutters rescuing princesses and swords that lift from stones. He'll catch on quickly.
Deal: Quentin is a character who steps through doorways into other worlds almost professionally. Additionally, the books end pretty well for him, in terms of resolving everything, giving him what he needs (if not necessarily all of what he wants) and teaching him the difference between those two things. As such, his deal is a kindness, rather than something he badly needs. In the final fight to keep magic in the world, the dragons from earth fought the gods, and sustained heavy casualties. (Whenever a god worked out it was being attacked, it would erase the dragon from existence.) In the aftermath, their numbers were few and they had all forgotten how to reproduce. Quentin's deal will be to offer them what they say they need, be it their vanished comrades restored or the knowledge of how to mate.
History: Three novels:
The Magicians
The Magician King
The Magicians Land
Sample Journal Entry: The theory is called 'inverse profundity.' It's actually a documented phenomena, if you're talking to the right people. The premise is, the bigger you go in terms of scope, the more abstract and metaphorical or awesomely powerful the concept, the more mundane the presentation turns out to be. God, in my world, looks like a big, silvery janitor. Oh, and there are a fleet of Him. Same awe inspiring and miraculous behaviour, wrapping itself up in- well. Meat loaf Mondays. Salvation of souls in manila envelopes and legal scale file-folders. I mean, fuck, the Admiral probably uses a label maker. Inverse profundity.
Sample RP: Quentin is good with 'I'm a magician' for the first few months. It gets the usual responses; a raised eyebrow, a smile, a shake of the head, a look of disbelief and some questions about Davids Copperfield & Blaine. He laughs it off, shakes his head politely, insists, no, not a wizard, not a wiccan, not a hobbyist- He gets a deck of cards thrust into his hands one day in the cafeteria, smiles, and starts to shuffle.
No one knows cards like Quentin Coldwater. The con artists on board know it by the way his clever fingers rifle the deck, pulling off neat tricks, flipping the four of clubs four times after thorough shuffles. He cuts to it, cuts to it again, pulls it from an onlooker's breast pocket, produces it from thin air. He throws it, like it's a razor, embedding it in the mess hall apples from three, then five, then ten feet back. He laughs it off, tucks it back into the deck, demurs.
"Bullshit," says someone, under his breath, and Quentin should let it go, he should- but then again, why should he?
He flips the four of clubs. Hands the deck over to the detractor, and has him flip the four of clubs. Shuffle, flip the four of clubs- when examined, the deck is full of every card in every suit- the top card is the queen of hearts, but when he turns the deck over, and Quentin nods, it flips up again, four of clubs, and so, too, does the one below that. Despite another check- the next five cards when fanned are two diamonds, a jack, a queen, and then another club, but this one is a nine- when flipped from a closed deck the pull four of clubs, again, again, again.
The room crackles a little, as the improbability takes its' toll. The next card is a four, yes, but it's the four of hearts, diamonds- and then another four, but rather than a spade, it's the four of swans, four of cups, four of keys, four of bees, four of glass, four of swords, four of cyanide, four of despair, four of clubs, four of clubs, four of clubs-
The last one, instead of the little configuration of clover, is a pictured creature, a caveman-like beast, holding a large stone club in its' paw- and it would be cartoonish, except for the malevolence in the beady little eyes, except for the twisted jaw, the splayed out carcass in the backdrop.
"Once more?" Offers Quentin, into the soft silence, and pulls, yes, a four of clubs, the real card this time, and only because the room is perfectly, frighteningly silent, is it audible when the little figure standing over the corpse opens its' blackened maw and screams for meat.
He will not, any time soon, be invited by anyone to play a hand of poker.
Special Notes: None I can think of.
