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Mar. 2nd, 2026 10:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khakishortsPlayer Name: Carolyn
Player Contact(s): PM,![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
kadath, ask for Discord
Are you over 18? Considerably
Do you have any other characters in game?: None
Who invited you?: Joys
Character Name: Ellie Sattler
Canon: Jurassic Park (film)
Canon Point: The helicopter ride at the very end of the movie
Age: late 20s according to the screenplay
History:
The JP fan wiki with the whole movie and Ellie specifically. There's almost no canon about her pre-movie life, but presumably it was an uneventful middle class American childhood/adolescence/college Gen Xer experience. I've decided her father is a veterinarian, to explain why she's so comfortable shoulder-deep in Triceratops crap. (Don't worry, I have a file where I'm writing down all the stuff I make up.)
Is this character an AU? What type?: Teeeeechnically yes but functionally no? No wait, hear me out.
AU History:
Please I just want to fix the Velociraptor name thing so I don't have to RP (or dodge) 30 separate "wasn't Velociraptor the size of a turkey?" conversations with people from the 21st century. Honestly, if the raptors weren't so important to Ellie personally/the movie generally, I'd just put the whole thing in an OOC note in relevant threads, but here we are.
The only change is to a few lines of dialogue. It goes like this:
tl;dr Ellie knows what the at-the-time monophyletic genus Velociraptor looks like, and those things ain't it.
Okay, listen: I can't hide this. I don't want to try to hide this. I hate Ian Malcolm with the passion of a supernova. Everything he says is pseudo-intellectual nonsense (the real problem with the park is capitalism, you blowhard), and his conduct towards Ellie is atrocious. Her appearing to welcome it is a clear case of Written-By-Dudes-itis and I refuse to take the intended positive reading of either of the scenes where he flirts with her. It's wildly, glaringly inappropriate behavior and marks Malcolm as a sex pest at best. He owes Ellie a groveling apology and should be thanking whatever sophomoric philosophical principles he believes in that she's a better person than he is and was willing to give him morphine for his dinosaur-inflicted wounds instead of playing as dumb as he treated her during the car ride.
...I feel better.
Anyway, let's talk about Ellie. She's great! She's smart, witty, brave, and unlike everyone else in the movie, has more emotional intelligence than a turnip. She's warm but gently teasing to her friends, polite and cordial to strangers. She's confident but not overbearing, and secure enough not to wave her academic credentials around. She can rock denim on denim with a shapeless bucket hat. She'll happily stick her whole arm into a pile of Triceratops poop. Just the total package, truly. You shoulda put a ring on it, Alan.
Like all good scientists, Ellie is driven by the urge to understand. As far as she's concerned, the universe is a logical, knowable place, and she's doing her bit to help assemble the enormous jigsaw puzzle of reality. It won't be finished in her lifetime, and maybe not in anyone's lifetime, but that's no reason not to try. She lives for the moments of discovery when a piece snaps into place and the world makes just that much more sense. She's also the type of scientist who loves being out in that world, collecting more puzzle pieces. I don't ever see Ellie at a desk job. She takes too much joy from every dinosaur she sees (up until meeting T-rex under unfortunate circumstances, anyway) and purely intellectual pursuits wouldn't cut it.
Ellie is easy to get along with and a go-with-the-flow type until something catches her interest, or she decides the flow is headed in the wrong direction. At that point, she's doing what she wants and you'd better have a damn good reason for trying to stop her. She's tenacious, a necessary quality in a scientist, and has enormous patience as long as she's making progress, like when exercising the care required to unearth fossils without damaging them. However, when nothing's getting done, or she just thinks that nothing's getting done, she becomes impatient and impulsive. This bent towards immediate action means she doesn't freeze in a crisis, but does almost get her eaten a couple of times, like when she announces she's going after a disappeared group member and Robert Muldoon has to invite himself along to keep her from attempting these shenanigans alone and unarmed on unfamiliar turf crawling with raptors.
But hey, it's what a protagonist would do, and she proves able to handle herself. Importantly, however, she doesn't turn into a steely action hero. That's Muldoon, and he miscalculates and gets eaten for it. Ellie's a normal person. An unusually courageous one, perhaps, but still someone who collapses sobbing after being jumpscared and chased by a raptor in a claustrophobic, badly-lit utility building. (Not to mention the dismembered arm thing. You'd sob, too.) Even in non-life-threatening circumstances, Ellie usually doesn't make an attempt to hide her feelings, positive or negative, though she does have a more neutral professional demeanor she drops into when appropriate. Having emotions is good, and if anyone wants to give her crap for crying tears of happiness over a for-real living Triceratops, they can go joylessly pound sand. Ellie is simply no good at pretense and regards it as a waste of effort. In the same vein, she doesn't wear makeup and puts no more thought into her outfits than her male compatriots do theirs.
There is, however, one big exception to this. Ellie tends to treat socially awkward situations by acting more stereotypically feminine and agreeable, which seems odd given her no-nonsense behavior in other unpleasant scenarios, but makes sense when you consider the bigger picture. As much as we'd like to pretend otherwise, when you're an attractive young woman in academia, making your male colleagues feel good about themselves is a survival tactic, even in our "enlightened" 21st century, and Jurassic Park was released in 1993. That means Ellie was born in the 60s, an early Gen Xer. When she was grad school in the 80s and as a young postdoc in the early 90s, it would have been even worse. Viewing her interactions with Hammond and most especially Malcolm through that lens makes it easy to see her responses not as positive ones, but as her unflattering-to-the-men answer to the question "Will this guy try to ruin my career if I hurt his pride?"
Now, near the end, you may be wondering why I haven't covered her relationship with Alan Grant yet, and that's because it isn't that important to Ellie as a character. They seem to have a mostly happy, mostly egalitarian arrangement and good for them, but a tweak to the script to make them merely friends would change nothing about Ellie or her part in the plot. As a narrative driver, the disagreement about children is huge to Alan's emotional arc of learning to like kids, but you get the sense that Ellie is self-sufficient. She cares about Alan and is worried for him when the Dinosaur Nation attacks, but they spend much of the action portion of the movie separated, and she's fine. Thriving, even, if you can use that word for someone in mortal danger and fearing for a loved one and a pair of children in even worse danger. During the denouement in the helicopter, Ellie and Alan aren't even sitting next to each other. He's cuddling the kids instead. It's not a criminal miscarriage of storytelling when they break up between then and the third movie, is what I'm saying.
Powers and Abilities: Ellie is a healthy and athletic adult human woman near her physical prime, with a PhD in paleobotany and no powers except possibly a preternatural capacity for tolerating men who deserve to be kicked in the shins.
Inventory: The dirty, bloodstained clothes on her back, earrings, analog watch, random pocket junk...and no glasses
Sample: beep beep here comes the TDM
When presented with a choice, is the character more likely to stick with tried and true methods? Or make something new up on the fly?
It would depend on the type of choice. Science is a cautious discipline, and as far as problem solving goes, Ellie would start with the tried and true, but have no issue moving on to winging it if the old fashioned way didn't work. Every tried and true method started as someone trying something new, after all. For minor stuff like, I don't know, getting ice cream at the bougie food truck, she'd absolutely go for the strawberry-basil lemonade sorbet over the chocolate chip.
What is more important to your character, preserving the past or forging a future?
Similarly to the previous question, Ellie wouldn't see the latter as necessarily excluding the former. If forced to choose, you'd think a paleontologist would be a shoo-in for preserving the past, but Ellie would pick the future. That's where she and everyone else are gonna be living the rest of their lives. She does regard knowing about the past as important because it has a great deal to teach, and she thinks deep time is neat, and other various cool things about digging up ancient rocks, but ultimately, the past is a completed book, and that's less important than the book you're writing now.
How does your character influence their own story? What about the stories of others?
???? come back to this one my brain is empty
Are you alright with your character’s canon being used as a Recommended Reading?: My love/hate relationship with JP says No.
Player Contact(s): PM,
Are you over 18? Considerably
Do you have any other characters in game?: None
Who invited you?: Joys
Character Name: Ellie Sattler
Canon: Jurassic Park (film)
Canon Point: The helicopter ride at the very end of the movie
Age: late 20s according to the screenplay
History:
The JP fan wiki with the whole movie and Ellie specifically. There's almost no canon about her pre-movie life, but presumably it was an uneventful middle class American childhood/adolescence/college Gen Xer experience. I've decided her father is a veterinarian, to explain why she's so comfortable shoulder-deep in Triceratops crap. (Don't worry, I have a file where I'm writing down all the stuff I make up.)
Is this character an AU? What type?: Teeeeechnically yes but functionally no? No wait, hear me out.
AU History:
Please I just want to fix the Velociraptor name thing so I don't have to RP (or dodge) 30 separate "wasn't Velociraptor the size of a turkey?" conversations with people from the 21st century. Honestly, if the raptors weren't so important to Ellie personally/the movie generally, I'd just put the whole thing in an OOC note in relevant threads, but here we are.
The only change is to a few lines of dialogue. It goes like this:
tl;dr Ellie knows what the at-the-time monophyletic genus Velociraptor looks like, and those things ain't it.
- In Montana, the dinosaur skeleton at Grant and Sattler's dig is properly identified as Deinonychus antirrhopus (rather than the nonexistent Velociraptor antirrhopus, which, NOBODY MADE YOU DO THAT, MICHAEL.)
- Grant and Sattler question the identity of the "Velociraptor" chick and then those of the yet-unseen adults, because Muldoon's description of them sounds a lot more like Deinonychus than Velociraptor. They get some breezy but questionable reassurance from Wu/Hammond and reluctantly drop the subject for the time being.
- Everything goes to hell and taxonomic questions fall waaaaay down the priority list.
Okay, listen: I can't hide this. I don't want to try to hide this. I hate Ian Malcolm with the passion of a supernova. Everything he says is pseudo-intellectual nonsense (the real problem with the park is capitalism, you blowhard), and his conduct towards Ellie is atrocious. Her appearing to welcome it is a clear case of Written-By-Dudes-itis and I refuse to take the intended positive reading of either of the scenes where he flirts with her. It's wildly, glaringly inappropriate behavior and marks Malcolm as a sex pest at best. He owes Ellie a groveling apology and should be thanking whatever sophomoric philosophical principles he believes in that she's a better person than he is and was willing to give him morphine for his dinosaur-inflicted wounds instead of playing as dumb as he treated her during the car ride.
...I feel better.
Anyway, let's talk about Ellie. She's great! She's smart, witty, brave, and unlike everyone else in the movie, has more emotional intelligence than a turnip. She's warm but gently teasing to her friends, polite and cordial to strangers. She's confident but not overbearing, and secure enough not to wave her academic credentials around. She can rock denim on denim with a shapeless bucket hat. She'll happily stick her whole arm into a pile of Triceratops poop. Just the total package, truly. You shoulda put a ring on it, Alan.
Like all good scientists, Ellie is driven by the urge to understand. As far as she's concerned, the universe is a logical, knowable place, and she's doing her bit to help assemble the enormous jigsaw puzzle of reality. It won't be finished in her lifetime, and maybe not in anyone's lifetime, but that's no reason not to try. She lives for the moments of discovery when a piece snaps into place and the world makes just that much more sense. She's also the type of scientist who loves being out in that world, collecting more puzzle pieces. I don't ever see Ellie at a desk job. She takes too much joy from every dinosaur she sees (up until meeting T-rex under unfortunate circumstances, anyway) and purely intellectual pursuits wouldn't cut it.
Ellie is easy to get along with and a go-with-the-flow type until something catches her interest, or she decides the flow is headed in the wrong direction. At that point, she's doing what she wants and you'd better have a damn good reason for trying to stop her. She's tenacious, a necessary quality in a scientist, and has enormous patience as long as she's making progress, like when exercising the care required to unearth fossils without damaging them. However, when nothing's getting done, or she just thinks that nothing's getting done, she becomes impatient and impulsive. This bent towards immediate action means she doesn't freeze in a crisis, but does almost get her eaten a couple of times, like when she announces she's going after a disappeared group member and Robert Muldoon has to invite himself along to keep her from attempting these shenanigans alone and unarmed on unfamiliar turf crawling with raptors.
But hey, it's what a protagonist would do, and she proves able to handle herself. Importantly, however, she doesn't turn into a steely action hero. That's Muldoon, and he miscalculates and gets eaten for it. Ellie's a normal person. An unusually courageous one, perhaps, but still someone who collapses sobbing after being jumpscared and chased by a raptor in a claustrophobic, badly-lit utility building. (Not to mention the dismembered arm thing. You'd sob, too.) Even in non-life-threatening circumstances, Ellie usually doesn't make an attempt to hide her feelings, positive or negative, though she does have a more neutral professional demeanor she drops into when appropriate. Having emotions is good, and if anyone wants to give her crap for crying tears of happiness over a for-real living Triceratops, they can go joylessly pound sand. Ellie is simply no good at pretense and regards it as a waste of effort. In the same vein, she doesn't wear makeup and puts no more thought into her outfits than her male compatriots do theirs.
There is, however, one big exception to this. Ellie tends to treat socially awkward situations by acting more stereotypically feminine and agreeable, which seems odd given her no-nonsense behavior in other unpleasant scenarios, but makes sense when you consider the bigger picture. As much as we'd like to pretend otherwise, when you're an attractive young woman in academia, making your male colleagues feel good about themselves is a survival tactic, even in our "enlightened" 21st century, and Jurassic Park was released in 1993. That means Ellie was born in the 60s, an early Gen Xer. When she was grad school in the 80s and as a young postdoc in the early 90s, it would have been even worse. Viewing her interactions with Hammond and most especially Malcolm through that lens makes it easy to see her responses not as positive ones, but as her unflattering-to-the-men answer to the question "Will this guy try to ruin my career if I hurt his pride?"
Now, near the end, you may be wondering why I haven't covered her relationship with Alan Grant yet, and that's because it isn't that important to Ellie as a character. They seem to have a mostly happy, mostly egalitarian arrangement and good for them, but a tweak to the script to make them merely friends would change nothing about Ellie or her part in the plot. As a narrative driver, the disagreement about children is huge to Alan's emotional arc of learning to like kids, but you get the sense that Ellie is self-sufficient. She cares about Alan and is worried for him when the Dinosaur Nation attacks, but they spend much of the action portion of the movie separated, and she's fine. Thriving, even, if you can use that word for someone in mortal danger and fearing for a loved one and a pair of children in even worse danger. During the denouement in the helicopter, Ellie and Alan aren't even sitting next to each other. He's cuddling the kids instead. It's not a criminal miscarriage of storytelling when they break up between then and the third movie, is what I'm saying.
Powers and Abilities: Ellie is a healthy and athletic adult human woman near her physical prime, with a PhD in paleobotany and no powers except possibly a preternatural capacity for tolerating men who deserve to be kicked in the shins.
Inventory: The dirty, bloodstained clothes on her back, earrings, analog watch, random pocket junk...and no glasses
Sample: beep beep here comes the TDM
When presented with a choice, is the character more likely to stick with tried and true methods? Or make something new up on the fly?
It would depend on the type of choice. Science is a cautious discipline, and as far as problem solving goes, Ellie would start with the tried and true, but have no issue moving on to winging it if the old fashioned way didn't work. Every tried and true method started as someone trying something new, after all. For minor stuff like, I don't know, getting ice cream at the bougie food truck, she'd absolutely go for the strawberry-basil lemonade sorbet over the chocolate chip.
What is more important to your character, preserving the past or forging a future?
Similarly to the previous question, Ellie wouldn't see the latter as necessarily excluding the former. If forced to choose, you'd think a paleontologist would be a shoo-in for preserving the past, but Ellie would pick the future. That's where she and everyone else are gonna be living the rest of their lives. She does regard knowing about the past as important because it has a great deal to teach, and she thinks deep time is neat, and other various cool things about digging up ancient rocks, but ultimately, the past is a completed book, and that's less important than the book you're writing now.
How does your character influence their own story? What about the stories of others?
???? come back to this one my brain is empty
Are you alright with your character’s canon being used as a Recommended Reading?: My love/hate relationship with JP says No.
