Geosurge app
Jan. 12th, 2019 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
urrastithornPlayer: Ark
Contact: Arkstar#1003 (Discord)
Character: Laia Asieo Odo
Canon: Ursula K. LeGuin's The Hainish Cycle, specifically the short story The Day Before The Revolution. Which is better known by its predecessor novel, The Dispossessed.
Canon point: In the last year of her life, but before her stroke.
Age: 72
Appearance: Short, grey-haired, tanned. Icons are portraits of the author.
Background / Homeworld:
Laia is from Urras (which means Earth in Urrasti). It's a planet not unlike our own circa perhaps the late 19th to early 20th century, with two big differences. The first is that Urrasti nations figured out early how to mitigate the environmental impact of their industrial revolution, and most have had the foresight to implement solutions before the problems get big.
The second is that country girl Laia Odo came to the capital city of Esseia when she was twenty-two with a load of her farmer friends, campaigning for womens' rights to vote and equal wages. A lot of riots, arrests, workers' insurrections, police brutality, yelling at politicians, property damage to national monuments, and martial law ensued.
Somewhere in the early days of marches and speeches and underground meetings, Laia met Taviri Asieo and fell in love. They married quick, took each others' names, argued daily, and wrote letters to each other at night. How else to record the brilliant ideas they were building, all the new worlds they were imagining together?
During a massive riot in Esseia's central square, Laia was arrested. She learned in prison that some cop had murdered Taviri in the same riot, along with dozens of their nearest and dearest friends in the workers' movement. She was sentenced to nine years.
So she paused a moment, for the first time in her life. And then she got pissed, picked herself up, and went on. Laia wrote more letters, in prison: to her surviving friends, to the remains of her found family, and to the future.
In prison, Laia had the time to grasp a few truths. She realized that equality wouldn't be reached by grasping for the same money and power that the oppressors kept over the oppressed. The only way to really achieve equality, she figured, was to dismantle capitalism altogether, and live as independent, free-thinking parts of a whole commune, each with equal power over the other, each interdependent and needing the other to live.
Odonian anarcho-communism, as she drafted during her nine years in prison, was based on a central analogy: that a society is a body, and each human being in it is a cell. Cooperation is key to survival, but each individual cell has its own function, and the purpose of each individual under the Odonian Analogy is to find their ideal, essential function to the whole body.
That's the theory, anyway. Odo just wrote the book, she doesn't live it the way the youngsters do, the kids who read her work and changed their whole lives. Those kids are a mystery to her. She's out of time; she won't see whether her vision will succeed or fail, or even really be executed at all.
She lives now in a co-op house full of "Odonians" who follow her teachings and read her writings and take care of her. Which she kind of accepts as her due, and also kind of completely hates.
Personality:
Laia is tired. A lifetime of anger and loss has capped off with the absolute triumph of a worldwide revolution, and she doesn't feel glad for it; it's just done, that part of the work, and now all these young energetic people will be raised up in Odonian ethics and create a new generation. She's just going to write letters and dispense advice until she dies.
She is helpful as a matter of course. It is the function of a human being to find how they may be helpful to the whole, and her function, she's found, is to advise. But she's impatient, both with people who don't listen and with people who listen without thinking for themselves.
(She's impatient a lot of the time.)
Canon abilities: Charisma. Stubbornness. She will keep walking 'til the world ends.
But nothing supernatural, at all.
Game power: She's been cursed with a healing factor. She's not invincible; in fact, anything that would kill a baseline human would still kill her. And injuries will still hurt, a lot. But they'll heal within a few days to a week.
Inventory: Plain, serviceable clothes; a pair of handmade leather shoes; a dry, white puffball of a flower hidden away in one pocket.
She also picked up a stout stick in the woods on the way to the Bastion.
Sample: Link: Laia swings across a canyon with Trevor Belmont! They bond about never-ending journeys, and she assures him that feudalism is crumbling, it's fine. (She's right for all the wrong reasons.)
Contact: Arkstar#1003 (Discord)
Character: Laia Asieo Odo
Canon: Ursula K. LeGuin's The Hainish Cycle, specifically the short story The Day Before The Revolution. Which is better known by its predecessor novel, The Dispossessed.
Canon point: In the last year of her life, but before her stroke.
Age: 72
Appearance: Short, grey-haired, tanned. Icons are portraits of the author.
Background / Homeworld:
Laia is from Urras (which means Earth in Urrasti). It's a planet not unlike our own circa perhaps the late 19th to early 20th century, with two big differences. The first is that Urrasti nations figured out early how to mitigate the environmental impact of their industrial revolution, and most have had the foresight to implement solutions before the problems get big.
The second is that country girl Laia Odo came to the capital city of Esseia when she was twenty-two with a load of her farmer friends, campaigning for womens' rights to vote and equal wages. A lot of riots, arrests, workers' insurrections, police brutality, yelling at politicians, property damage to national monuments, and martial law ensued.
Somewhere in the early days of marches and speeches and underground meetings, Laia met Taviri Asieo and fell in love. They married quick, took each others' names, argued daily, and wrote letters to each other at night. How else to record the brilliant ideas they were building, all the new worlds they were imagining together?
During a massive riot in Esseia's central square, Laia was arrested. She learned in prison that some cop had murdered Taviri in the same riot, along with dozens of their nearest and dearest friends in the workers' movement. She was sentenced to nine years.
So she paused a moment, for the first time in her life. And then she got pissed, picked herself up, and went on. Laia wrote more letters, in prison: to her surviving friends, to the remains of her found family, and to the future.
In prison, Laia had the time to grasp a few truths. She realized that equality wouldn't be reached by grasping for the same money and power that the oppressors kept over the oppressed. The only way to really achieve equality, she figured, was to dismantle capitalism altogether, and live as independent, free-thinking parts of a whole commune, each with equal power over the other, each interdependent and needing the other to live.
Odonian anarcho-communism, as she drafted during her nine years in prison, was based on a central analogy: that a society is a body, and each human being in it is a cell. Cooperation is key to survival, but each individual cell has its own function, and the purpose of each individual under the Odonian Analogy is to find their ideal, essential function to the whole body.
That's the theory, anyway. Odo just wrote the book, she doesn't live it the way the youngsters do, the kids who read her work and changed their whole lives. Those kids are a mystery to her. She's out of time; she won't see whether her vision will succeed or fail, or even really be executed at all.
She lives now in a co-op house full of "Odonians" who follow her teachings and read her writings and take care of her. Which she kind of accepts as her due, and also kind of completely hates.
Personality:
Laia is tired. A lifetime of anger and loss has capped off with the absolute triumph of a worldwide revolution, and she doesn't feel glad for it; it's just done, that part of the work, and now all these young energetic people will be raised up in Odonian ethics and create a new generation. She's just going to write letters and dispense advice until she dies.
She is helpful as a matter of course. It is the function of a human being to find how they may be helpful to the whole, and her function, she's found, is to advise. But she's impatient, both with people who don't listen and with people who listen without thinking for themselves.
(She's impatient a lot of the time.)
Canon abilities: Charisma. Stubbornness. She will keep walking 'til the world ends.
But nothing supernatural, at all.
Game power: She's been cursed with a healing factor. She's not invincible; in fact, anything that would kill a baseline human would still kill her. And injuries will still hurt, a lot. But they'll heal within a few days to a week.
Inventory: Plain, serviceable clothes; a pair of handmade leather shoes; a dry, white puffball of a flower hidden away in one pocket.
She also picked up a stout stick in the woods on the way to the Bastion.
Sample: Link: Laia swings across a canyon with Trevor Belmont! They bond about never-ending journeys, and she assures him that feudalism is crumbling, it's fine. (She's right for all the wrong reasons.)
