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White Collar characters' D&D alignments
How much of a nerd am I? THIS MUCH OF A NERD: I found myself tonight pondering which D&D alignments would fit the White Collar characters. If you haven't played D&D, the alignments are described on Wikipedia.
My picks ...
Peter: Lawful Good
Neal: Chaotic Good
Mozzie: Chaotic Neutral
Elizabeth: Neutral Good
I think you could make a case for both Mozzie and Elizabeth tending in a Chaotic Good direction, but I like them better where I've got them.
The supporting characters are harder. Sara is probably Neutral Good, maybe Chaotic Good. Alex is definitely Chaotic Neutral. Diana & Jones -- probably Lawful Good (by definition!), but maybe Neutral Good, especially Diana. June ... True Neutral or Chaotic Good. Keller -- Neutral Evil or Chaotic Evil. James -- True Neutral or Neutral Evil. Pratt -- Lawful Evil. Kate -- I think this probably depends on one's headcanon for her, but I'd put her somewhere between True Neutral and Chaotic Good.
What do you think? Am I forgetting anyone?
My picks ...
Peter: Lawful Good
Neal: Chaotic Good
Mozzie: Chaotic Neutral
Elizabeth: Neutral Good
I think you could make a case for both Mozzie and Elizabeth tending in a Chaotic Good direction, but I like them better where I've got them.
The supporting characters are harder. Sara is probably Neutral Good, maybe Chaotic Good. Alex is definitely Chaotic Neutral. Diana & Jones -- probably Lawful Good (by definition!), but maybe Neutral Good, especially Diana. June ... True Neutral or Chaotic Good. Keller -- Neutral Evil or Chaotic Evil. James -- True Neutral or Neutral Evil. Pratt -- Lawful Evil. Kate -- I think this probably depends on one's headcanon for her, but I'd put her somewhere between True Neutral and Chaotic Good.
What do you think? Am I forgetting anyone?
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Great minds truly think alike.
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(Also, *hee* at your very appropriate icon!)
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But I shouldn't say too much, or my mini-meta will be spoiled!
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But yeah, what got me thinking about it in the first place is that Peter and Neal are such absolutely archetypical examples of Lawful Good and Chaotic Good. (Also, thinking about Lawful Good in terms of Peter helped me finally wrap my mind around that alignment, because most people who play it tend to play it in more of a Lawful Neutral type of way, i.e. law/order/black-and-white morality above all.)
... hey, GetBackers icon! I think. :D
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Yes! And it's not that at all. It's not lawful stupid.
Granted, I always play Chaotic Good characters (or at least, I did, when I was still playing), because it's easiest for me. As long as I act justly and with compassion, I can do whatever I damn well please. (I'm a lazy RPer.)
And yes, GetBackers. Which I chose because it had a die in it, not because Akabane has anything to do with a discussion on Lawful or Chaotic Good. Heh.
(Also, typos are evil. Argh.)
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As for the rest of them - yeah, Peter and Neal are the definition of Lawful Good and Chaotic Good, I think. I'd put Sara under Chaotic Good, Jones is Lawful Good, Diana is Neutral Good (but closer to the Lawful end of that spectrum than Elizabeth is) and Kramer is Lawful Neutral. Keller is Chaotic Evil (he likes to mess with people for fun, sometimes) and I could see James as either True Neutral or Neutral Evil. I'd put June under Chaotic Good.
Kate starts out as True Neutral when we first meet her (IMO) but by the time of her death she's closer to Chaotic Good. (I'm thinking of Adler's line to Neal in 2.16 about how Neal changed her, and "the Kate I knew would still be alive". One of the things I love about writing her is she's a very different person depending on when in canon the story is set.)
why yes, I am procrastinating on schoolwork ...
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I'm also glad I'm not the only one who thinks James might be more in the middle of the spectrum, if leaning evil(ish). I keep seeing him written as over-the-top evil in episode tags, but the thing about James that makes him chilling, I think, is that he isn't evil; he just cares about himself more than anyone around him. I still think of him as sort of a Neal-side counterpart to Kramer, someone who is a compelling bad guy precisely because you can relate to their motives and see how they got there. (As opposed to the gleeful, over-the-top evil of someone like Keller or Adler.)
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And yeah, part of what makes James (and Kramer) both so scary is that they're really not that over-the-top evil, even though they both get written that way a lot in fics. I've been trying to wrap my head around Kramer and James both lately (for big-bang-writing purposes *g*), and Kramer and James are something close to what you'd get if you took Peter and Neal and got rid of all their compassion and empathy for other people, I think.
James (IMO) has two main flaws - a) he cares about himself first, always (even though I think his affection for Neal was at least partly sincere - "the best cons come from a place of truth") and b) he reacts impulsively and doesn't think ahead about the consequences of what he's doing. And I think b) is where he's most like Neal, really - Neal is absolutely capable of being selfless and sacrificing for other people, but he has that same short-term mindset of "solve the problem right in front of me right now and worry about the long-term consequences later" which tends to get him (and people around him) in trouble.
I like it when some characters are allowed to remain morally grey and ambiguous.
(Speaking of which, where would we put Fowler on the D&D alignment?)
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I'm actually comfortable labeling Fowler as Evil. (Alignment wise, not necessarily on a deeper level.) He does evil things, and he does so with malice. None of which means I don't find him sympathetic. (Actually Fowler's alignment may shift depending on who you are. Peter and Neal vs. Kate, for instance.) What I'm trying to figure out is whether Fowler is Lawful or Neutral.
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My instinct is to say Fowler is a better person than James - partly 'cause I like him, and Kate sort of likes him as much as she likes anybody who's not Neal, but mostly because (at least some of) the bad things he does he does for other people rather than for himself. But I'm not sure how much that matters, in this case - is good vs. evil about a character's motivations, or only about their actions and the effect those actions have on the wider society? What do we call people who will make great sacrifices for the people they love but don't really care what effect their actions have on anyone they're not particularly close to (and I might put Kate and Fowler both in this category)?
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... which makes it hard to reconcile the two versions of him. I think you could look at it in terms of Fowler's enjoyment in other people's misfortune coming mostly from his own powerlessness -- that is, he gets off on hurting others because he himself is being controlled by Adler, so he enjoys seeing other people hurt and humbled because it makes him feel better about himself. Still, that is evil (if a petty, everyday kind of evil). I think I'd put him somewhere between True Neutral and Neutral Evil, shading towards the evil side. It's possible that he started out Lawful Neutral before his wife's death ("the law is the important thing!") and her death plus Adler's blackmail blew apart his belief in justice, which left him with basically nothing and tipped him towards the Neutral Evil side. After all, if he's getting screwed over, why shouldn't he screw other people too? Or something like that.
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I really don't think so - they were laying clues down for that ever since he first showed up in 1.07, and Mozzie mentions his wife's death when they're looking at his file.
Not only that, but there's a scene in 1.09 with Fowler and his agents in their van - they've bugged Peter's phone, and one of his agents tells him Peter is making a call, and Fowler says, in this kind of flat, expressionless voice, "If it's his wife I'm not interested."
It took me a couple rewatches to even catch it - but that read to me as him not wanting to listen to Peter and Elizabeth being adorable and happy talking to each other on the phone because he doesn't want to be reminded of what he doesn't have anymore. It's very subtle but it's there.
you could look at it in terms of Fowler's enjoyment in other people's misfortune coming mostly from his own powerlessness
I really don't think he's truly enjoying any of that, though. There's a cold, sharp-edged sort of contempt behind it all, which I think is directed as much at himself as it is at everyone around him, and a bitter sort of laughter at the irony of the power he has and the extent to which he's being controlled. He's at the point where he completely despises himself and so he has no compassion or respect for anyone else around him, either. His attitude in 2.09 is different from S1, but it doesn't come out of nowhere - it's more of a dark-mirror, subdued, minor key version of S1. It's the same cold, ironic contempt but this time (though he still lashes out and taunts Neal, once or twice) most of it is openly directed toward himself. And I feel it was always directed mostly at himself, but 2.09 is the first time all the masks come off.
And I've watched 2.09 ... a truly ridiculous number of times, so maybe it's just that except for the very first time I watched S1 I've always had that version of him in the back of my mind whenever I see him onscreen. And Fowler is one of those characters, like Kate, for whom I have an extensive headcanon, so sometimes it's hard to separate that from what's actually onscreen. But I really think the S1 and S2 versions fit together.
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he gets off on hurting others because he himself is being controlled by Adler, so he enjoys seeing other people hurt and humbled because it makes him feel better about himself.
I think this is true, though it's not the whole story. It's definitely relevant to how he treats Neal. Neal is one of the few people he can jerk around with no consequences. My head canon is that he treated Kate the same way at first. But while he's a ass to Neal, he does genuinely seem to want Neal and Kate to succeed. I think he sees himself in Neal--desperate for the woman he loves, manipulated by forces beyond his understanding. (And headcanon states that Kate was closest thing he had to a friend, but that's not in the text.) Peter is a different story. Peter is everything that Fowler used to be. He has the loving wife and the rising career. Fowler enjoys screwing with Neal, but he hates Peter.
And I think that to some degree Fowler is just a jerk. Some people are. Fowler managed to be one of the jerks who got to hold power over people.
Whereas season two Fowler seems genuinely ... humbled, in a way, not so much "I got caught" but "I truly didn't have a choice about the things I did".
Honestly, at that point I think he was ready for it to be over. He wasn't humbled, just tired. At the showdown at the museum, I felt like half of him wanted to talk his way out and save his own life, while the other half was almost daring Neal to shoot him. (Though I might be misremembering the line.) He had done everything demanded of him: controlled Neal and Peter, kidnapped and held Kate, got the music box (though he didn't keep it), and it still wasn't over. It was never going to be over.
The Fowler plotline is one of those "What happened to the mouse?" (to quote TV Tropes) things. Fowler's story is completely dropped. But whatever happened to him couldn't have been good. On the right side of the law, he's wanted in connection with murder at the very least, and he no longer has Adler to smooth things over. Which brings me to my next point, which is that Adler didn't like loose ends. And unlike Mozzie, Peter, Neal, and Alex, Fowler didn't have a cavalry riding in to rescue him. I suspect that Fowler is dead. And he knew it was coming. It's enough to make a guy reevaluate his priorities
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Yes - he wants them to make it, and not only because he sees himself in Neal (and Kate) but because this is the one way he can strike back against whoever's been manipulating him all this time. He knows he's never getting out of this situation, but if he can help Neal and Kate escape from Adler that would really piss Adler off. And that alone would be enough of a reason to help them even if he didn't have other reasons.
at that point I think he was ready for it to be over. He wasn't humbled, just tired
Yes. He never expected to get out of this, but working with Kate (in my head, at least) gave him some hope that he might at least take Adler down with him, and when her escape plan fails and she dies he's lost even that hope of revenge and he's got nothing left.
And yeah, Adler didn't like loose ends. In 2.01 it's made clear that Fowler was transferred into the custody of OPR and then "disappeared" within hours of Diana arresting him - if his arrest in 2.09 was on the record and processed through official channels he was almost certainly dead by the end of the day. If he escaped (or Peter let him go) he might have lasted longer, but probably not very long - he's got no backup and no reason to fight very hard to survive, by that point.
(Although me and my amazing beta who taught me all about parachutes for Penelope Weaving are totally writing the AU where Kate survived the explosion, and spent about 8 months in a hospital under Adler's control, and then sometime in S2.5 she escapes and runs into Fowler and they go on the run together. This is the one where she and Neal get a happy ending, but first she and Fowler have epic adventures and snark at each other a lot. It's going to be awesome. *g*)
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Ha, yeah. It's left in an interestingly ambiguous place, because the last time we see him, he and Peter are operating under a semi-friendly truce, and he doesn't seem to have been actually booked (yet). And then that's the last we ever see of him. It does make one wonder what happened to him. It's difficult for me to see S2 Peter letting him run (even S4 Peter doesn't do that sort of thing lightly; he goes ahead and arrests the Bonnie & Clyde pair, for example, even though he obviously sympathizes with them), but I also get the impression that, once Fowler's entire story comes out, Peter relates to him in a "there but for the grace" sort of way -- he sees what happened to Fowler as something that could have happened to him. On the other hand, I could easily see Peter brokering some kind of deal to get Fowler put into protective custody or WitSec as a protected witness, although as connected as Adler seems to be, you're probably right that he would have been living on borrowed time even so.
One of the problems I ran into when I tried to put together a coherent timeline of Adler and Fowler's movements in season one for the horse-ranch AU (and I imagine
Season four is kind of the same way (why was Ellen killed, and by whom? I suspect we'll never know), which of course is probably why there are about a half-dozen jumping-off points where I want to go AU and see what happens. Even if I might have to twist my brain into a pretzel to figure out what is supposed to be going on with various key players (Pratt, the Flynns, James, etc) at those moments in time.
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(I have a fic, somewhere in the WIPs folder, sometime later that day where Peter gets a call that the guys from OPR are in the elevator on their way up to take Fowler into custody right now. Which may or may not end up involving the two of them hiding out at one of Mozzie's old safe houses and having oblique non-conversations about the rewards and frustrations of chasing/working with art thieves. I have no idea if I'll actually make it work, but it's fun to imagine.)
very little about Adler's plan to acquire the music box makes sense
LOLOLOL oh God yes, THIS. Trying to work out a plot around that was ... interesting. I think what I came up with mostly worked, but I did have to make some things up in a couple places to get the whole plotline to make sense.
I eventually came to the conclusion that Adler was the kind of guy who just really enjoyed messing with people's heads for fun, because a lot of the things he does don't seem to accomplish anything else. Kate's and Fowler's motivations were easier to extrapolate from what canon we had, but Adler was always the shadowy bad guy who does shadowy bad things for mysterious reasons, and those mysterious reasons are never fully revealed.
And yeah, a lot of season four is the same way - one of the big bang ideas I'm playing around with for this year is an AU version where Neal and Diana are in DC with Kramer where their paths cross with James and Pratt and the Flynns, and trying to figure out how that would work gets very complicated very quickly. There's a lot of potential in S4 for interesting AUs, though!
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And now I have all sorts of questions about what Fowler would have done then. He didn't trust the system. He was the system, and knew exactly how trustworthy it was. He probably tried to book it the first chance he got. And maybe that's when he was shot trying to escape, or maybe he made it for at least a while. But, yeah, I think he's very dead indeed.
...And I don't need anymore fic ideas. I haven't made any progress on the ones I'm supposed to be working on.
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Yes! That's exactly how I see both of them, and that's why I think that the "totally EVOL" reading of both those characters is completely missing the point. They are "through a glass darkly" renditions of Peter and Neal -- they are Peter and Neal without ... something. I had a hard time putting my finger on it ("without whatever makes them good people" was about the closest I could come) but your reading of it, Peter and Neal without compassion and empathy, I think is 100% spot on.
And to me, that makes them much more fascinating and compelling "bad guys" than the True Evil ones like Adler or Keller. (Even though I have a total soft spot for Keller; the actor is adorable and the character's sadistic pot-stirring is a lot of fun.) There's just more you can do with a character like that, especially in light of their resemblance to the main characters. They are Peter and Neal who went down a different road -- and even though I don't think either Peter or Neal ever would go down that road (they're simply too compassionate, too kind), it's a vision of a possible future for each of them. And that makes it interesting to me.
And yeah, I do think that James genuinely loves Neal, and when he told Peter and Elizabeth that he was glad Neal had them in his life, it was genuine. Which makes the betrayal all the sharper, because it doesn't come from a place of malice, just pure selfishness. A selfish person can love, but in the end they put themselves first.
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And yeah, I do think that James genuinely loves Neal, and when he told Peter and Elizabeth that he was glad Neal had them in his life, it was genuine.
Yes, absolutely. Which makes me wonder how far he would go to protect himself. Obviously he's willing to betray Neal, but would he take it further? What if it were Neal who was framed for Pratt's murder? Would James do anything to help his son? And while he hurt Neal, that hurt was accidental. He didn't intend to hurt Neal, but by selling out Neal's real family, that's exactly what he did. But would he hurt Neal directly and knowingly if it got him what he wanted? I'm not sure, which is what makes it fun!
*I don't like villains that are too sympathetic in my cop shows. I feel sorry for them! It's not satisfying when they get caught.
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Whereas characters like Adler and Pratt who are written to be totally evil end up feeling flat and uninteresting and more like plot devices than actual people, and as a result neither of them (IMO) ever felt realistically scary.
I do think that James genuinely loves Neal
Yes - which in a way made Neal even more vulnerable. Because Neal is good at reading people, and at detecting deception, so if James had been only pretending to care about him all along Neal would have sensed something was off. He lets his guard down because he can tell James's affection is real ... it's real but it's still not enough to prevent James from hurting Neal to protect himself.
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Keller, James, and Kramer -- all very different people -- are comprehensible in a way that Pratt and Adler aren't.
He lets his guard down because he can tell James's affection is real ... it's real but it's still not enough to prevent James from hurting Neal to protect himself.
Yes, that makes a lot of sense! It's hard for Neal to be taken in -- he is an expert, after all. But James wasn't really trying to take him in at all. Most of what happens is accidental; you can tell when James shoots Pratt that he's almost as surprised as Peter is -- he never planned that to happen. He's not running some kind of long-term chess game; he's making plans, certainly, but mostly he's just scrambling to keep up with events around him.
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