#ainsleydoherty

Ainsely Doherty is a 26 year old northern Irish woman from a lower-middle class family of grocers. She was born in Londonderry in 1944. Her father was a Derry boy who instilled in her a strong sense of national pride before running off to South Africa with his new wife when she was ten. Ainsley was raised mostly by her aunts and uncles in and around their family business, because her mother was generally not that concerned with raising children. Her stepfather was a widower with two other daughters who were much younger than her, so she does not have much of a relationship with them. That stepfather was killed in a bar fight when she was fifteen, so she doesn't quite think of him fondly either.

Ainsley has always carried a sense of shame with regard to her origin. She sees herself as someone with high aspirations from a pathetic background and has an underdog complex. She has always been exceedingly studious with the intention of eventually rising above her classmates and friends. Her sense of duty is simultaneously one of self-advancement, because while she is very generous with her time it is always in pursuit of a new entry to her resume. While charity and youth group work took up much of her time as a child, she would consider them below her paygrade today.

Ainsley has extremely high political aspirations and has dedicated most of her life in pursuit of them. She received scholarship to Oxford University that facilitated her spending eight years in study and has since paused on pursuing further education to instead focus on gathering work experience. In 1968 she returned home briefly to relocate her aging mother to Letterkenny (against her will) out of fear of civil unrest during the troubles, and is trying to get her to move to Salisbury (or anywhere in England, really) again soon because that didn't really help much.

She rents a flat in Soho when she is in London, but has spent most of the last 16 months abroad in Canada on her first tour as a diplomat for the U.K. She mostly takes meetings and babysits ambassadors.

She is one of a pool of about 20 international diplomats sent intermittently to Amchitka on the behalf of the U.N. to observe the aftermath of March Hare. Largely to the frustration of the US authority on the island. She and her coworker V. Gorchakov are under special instruction to gather, compile and deliver information to the parliament of Great Britain. They are also specifically advised against sharing any findings with Russian diplomacy, who are also begrudgingly allowed on the island.

ON SEX:

Ainsley is more comfortable with casual sexual encounters than long term relationships. Unfortunately she is a lesbian and it’s 1969, and lesbian hookups are a little tough to organize when you’re addicted to doing your homework. She has blown through 4 or 5 girlfriends in Ottowa because she is secretive, entirely emotionally unavailable, and really accusatory when bothered. Her style of dress and haircut is in part for convenience (initially passing as male gets her foot in a lot of doors you wouldn’t expect, and she doesn’t like washing her hair) and also an intentional flag. Ainsley has a hard time conceptualizing consequences for her actions, and her awesome dyke behavior has put her in frequent danger both physically and socially. She is cold and closed off to men due to routine sexual harassment and staunchly refuses to talk about her sex life to most people, but develops intense fantasies in her own head when beautiful older women appear. She internally struggles with being sexually submissive because she feels like it undermines her masculinity. She is vaguely a sadist in that she enjoys pushing people off kilter, but has a hard time coping with the subsequent alienation when the person she is playing with doesn’t like her anymore.

ON DRUGS:

Ainsley abhors drug use, and unironically thinks it’s the plague and root of all evil. She is a perpetually relapsing alcoholic like her stepfather, but that doesn’t count. She has little empathy for addicts, but thinks they’re all mentally deficient and not fully in control of themselves.

ON WAR:

Ainsley is flippant about civil unrest. Her opinion on violent political action will shift based on what most benefits her in the moment. Unlike certain characters (RAJIVA.) she does have moral standards and will not argue a doomed point to be contrarian or preserve her psyche. She prefers not to argue at all but when pressed she often resorts to the rule of democratic law. She worships international law and often aligns her verdict with that of the U.N. And E.U. But wont bother to condemn atrocities overlooked by major world powers.

Ainsley thinks the United States government is overly hostile and treading into dangerous waters in the last 40 years. She thinks Americans and the american military tends to muck everything up, and prefers the passivity of her country’s governing.

She doesn’t like to talk about The Troubles as that is a civil conflict that is too personal to her. She is a unionist, naturally but isn’t opposed to republicanism if sorted peacefully and democratically. She dislikes that the IRA and the Unionists are largely split on religious lines because she is not personally that attached to her religious identity since leaving ireland, and has a hard time drawing a serious line between protestants and Catholics.

ON RELIGION:

Ainsley was raised devoutly Protestant, and a lot of her youth activism and outreach work was organized by her local religious/church groups. Her mother is intense in her belief and has been slowly slipping into religious psychosis while Ainsley pretends to ignore it. Since her stepfathers death she has struggled in trusting her faith, and The Troubles present a mental roadblock for her religiously. Ainsley has a persistent fear that her tendency to stray from the light of god has damned her to hell despite her best attempts to hold onto her belief. When her mom ranted about the second coming it was always annoying.

RELATIONSHIPS:

Red Gorchakov

Her coworker. Red is intended to be a trusted ally, but she doesn’t think he’s focused enough to be a backbone for her. She also doesn’t think he’s even qualified as a translator (mostly because his irish is bad.) and doesn’t believe he is observant enough for effective surveillance and intelligence communication. She talks to him a lot, unfortunately. Often in an attempt to keep him from saying something annoying or offensive. She finds him condescending and slimy. However, Red is the only person she is predetermined to be close with by the nature of their profession. She is relatively protective of him as a representative of the U.N. and G.B. And holds menial fondness for his antics, in the way that one commiserates with a coworker they would hate outside of their shift. She would find him disgusting if she had a more complete picture of his persona.

Danny Green

Ainsley loathes the security forces and never has a kind word to say to any if the security forces or construction workers on Amchitka. For good reason, as they do actively harass her. Danny isn’t an exception. She perceives him as a stupid and ugly teenager, and doesn’t gratify his sexual harassment with a response. Danny especially bugs her because he gives her intense gender envy. If she had her way he would be sent home, but she often forgets his name.

Rajiva Patel

She would describe him as shifty, and annoyingly opaque despite his excellent communication skills. She always feels like he is deliberately talking around something even if he is trying to be transparent. Her feelings toward Rajiva are racially motivated, he isn’t all that interested in lying to her, but she wouldn’t admit it to anyone (even herself) because its a faux pas and she, on some level, wants to maintain some decorum around government officials. She pursues a case around Rajiva and his coworkers for most of the narrative, initially for accountability under international law, but ultimately it is a search for meaning in a hopeless situation. Finding Raj guilty of anything would validate all her suffering with a result.

Jan Kosacki

Ainsley is desperate for a mentor in Jan. She knows there is no real career value she can extract from cuddling up to him, but does it anyway in pursuit of some solidarity in an awful workplace. She has nothing to really discuss with him, but being able to have conversations with someone who she knows acknowledges and respects her for who she is comforting. She doesn’t articulate any of this to him or even really demonstrate gratitude for his presence. But she makes an effort to treat him the way she thinks he wants to be treated. She develops some deeply strange feelings towards him as OPNERO progresses that have nowhere to go.

Ulysses Efthimiadis

From an outside perspective, they just seem like they don't like eachother. Rajiva is generally hostile in response to anything Red says, he addresses Ainsley over him and does not appear to like being near him physically and will not make eye contact with him or touch him if he can help it. Red appears mildly hurt but generally unbothered by his dislike, often brushing it off as the impotent rage of a man who is too smart to be friendly. He doesn't speak poorly of Rajiva, and is rarely especially rude in response to him. When he is upset about him in is more of a flustered anger than a seething distaste.

RAJ ON RED:

I highly recommend peeping Rajiva's bio. He encountered Red at a pretty formative time (mid 20s) so his bad impression shaped a lot of Rajiva's future behavior and personal hangups about relationships.

His opinion on Red is marked by discomfort, he holds a lot of resentment for him because he is a once-in-a-lifetime villain for him. The first and last time he encountered academic friction, someone he couldn’t prove wrong (Because he didn't care about right and wrong), and outright sexual harassment. Rajiva doesn’t KNOW a lot of people and he liked even fewer, he liked red and counted him in a small fraction of people he respected (even though he isn’t that smart, Raj is just not into humanities and is easily impressed by people that are socially liquid) 

He’s held onto a grudge for a decade partially because he has nothing better to do, but being confronted by the idea that he should probably let it go by now is only making him double down on it. At any point during OPNERO where he tries to calm down and let go of some if his resentment, or call up a little empathy for Red he finds himself unable to. He only knows him as a predator and does not want anyone to fall in with him, mostly out of jealousy for his magnetic personality. Red doesn’t interact with him directly with a lot of frequency, and he refuses to seek an advisor on how to deal with his feelings about him so its an internal debate. He also doesn’t know if red even really remembers him (awkward if he does, insulting if he doesn’t) or if he would find rajiva desirable now that their power dynamic is more level. He is a big question mark in his peripheral vision. The only good thing about seeing red again, for rajiva, is being able to dispel his former (mild) attraction to him that made the whole proposition issue so difficult. He doesn’t think red aged well. His magic has dissipated, he is yucky disgusting.

RED ON RAJ:

Awkward! Red is always a 50/50 tossup of being emotionally intelligent enough to notice but too mean to care or oblivious to how people feel about him. His resentment for Rajiva is incredibly juvenile and very much beneath him. Hes little worried hes going to take retributive action now that he has the power to do so, and hes a bit of a roadblock for him because he can’t start the relationship over and he cant apologize without admitting he fucked up in the first place (not that he wants to apologize, but its not even an option.) normally he would find his standoffishness appealing but Raj knows a little too much about him and his habits for him to inspire any emotion but dread. He avoids him out of a refusal to think about it, he doesn't even know what to say when cornered about it, and just falls back into staunch denial of any misdeed on his behalf.

IN OPNERO PROPER (RED-DANNY-RAJ):

It is Raj outing Red to Danny that Danny starts thinking he even has a chance at convincing red to traffick heroin for him. It’s kind of his fault they speak to eachother in the first place. Danny is really uncomfortable being in contact with men who are bigger than him in any way. Red being gay makes him 1. Less than Danny 2. Hypothetically more susceptible to flattery from a handsome young man (Danny is very certain that he is very sexy and also specifically attractive to submissive gay men, and he's not totally wrong)

What Raj DOESN’T tell Danny, in an attempt to posture or maybe preserve his pride, is that Red is highly manipulative, vindictive, and really aggressive about sex. So Danny has no idea that Raj’s hatred is anything more than petty dislike for a bad teacher (though, im not sure if knowing would have stopped him) Raj doesn’t really think for a moment that Danny would react to the fact that Red is gay with anything but disgust, because he has decided that Danny probably doesn’t get down with that sort of thing. He holds onto that assertion so strongly it doesn’t occur to him that Red and Danny would even KNOW each other, never in a million years would he clock that they're abusing each other (or rather, at that point, that red is abusing Danny) He’s too close to Danny and too detached from Red to be objective about dealing with the nightmare they created, he also isn’t very woke about it. A lot of “youre my homoerotic best friend why are you hooking up (hes ignoring the heroin and the sexual exploitation) with my number one faggot enemy” and “well if Danny is mad at you because youre a bad man thats deserved and im not interested in protecting you from him plus you deserve it” BOTH OF THESE OPINIONS ARE FLAWED FROM THE GROUND UP.

Danny, in part, kind of sees what he's doing with red as a way to degrade him. So it doesn’t occur to him that Raj would interpret him getting close to red as a betrayal, because they don’t have a relationship, they have a “deal” that allows Danny to hurt red in ways he couldn’t if he wasn't sleeping with him. Honestly, Danny sees Raj’s adoration of him as gay, which is why he likes him (nonthreatening because queers are weak, devoted to him beyond the realm of friendship) (Raj isn’t really into him, for the record. He’s just effeminate and friendless) His worldview changes pretty much immediately because red flips on him and he’s never encountered a sexually aggressive and domineering gay man, now any gay man could secretly be sexually aggressive and domineering, including RAJ. Totally fucks up their relationship, he can’t trust him because he can’t know if Raj is genuinely his friend or just trying to sleep with him too. Red doesn’t talk about Raj to Danny, or talk about him at all. He probably never figures out that raj feels almost as yuck about him as he does.

Red is anxious about Raj’s closeness to Danny, but in the back of his mind I think he recognizes that Raj would have never reported or outed him. It was by his infantilization and distrust in Raj’s maturity that he ended up making what was an embarrassing misstep into a full blown ethical issue. (Ok, aside, it was already an ethical issue because he is a PERVERT and was his TEACHER and also like A DECADE OLDER THAN HIM. but I mean an ethical issue by reds own warped standards.) His”thing” with Danny doesn’t concern raj, up until he needs someone to protect him from Danny. (Raj is not interesting in doing that, but do you know who is? His sexy girlfriend JAN KOSACKI!!!!)

(Rajiva and Danny have their own interesting, unrelated interpersonal tension WRT Vietnam. They are a weapon and a warmonger)

RAJ-JAN-RED BONUS ROUND:

I figure I have to mention this. Danny assaulting Red at the New Years party drives a rift between Raj, who doesn't appear to care, and the people who do care about Red remaining in one piece (Jan and Ainsley). Furthermore, Danny does also attack Jan and Ainsley so his aggression is evidently unchecked and overblown (From their perspectives). Unlike Raj, Jan is able to clock that Danny's desire to kill Red is intertwined with some kind of sexual violence, he just assumes that Red more the victim than he is the perpetrator. Red will not be open with him, and very explicitly does not want to be widely outed or even acknowledge that he knows danny on a personal level at all, so Jan has little to do with this information. His empathy for Red is too loud for Rajiva, who start to doubt Jan's sexual interest in him, drawing a lot of not unfounded parallels between Jan's behavior and Red's behavior a decade prior. He never fully trusts Jan, so this kind of just makes it worse.

Ainsley just doesn't think that Raj should have any authority if he can't be objective about it. She is a little protective over Red since he is her colleague and didn't want to see him hospitalized by a man she already considered a liability. It makes her afraid for her own safety because Danny also doesn't like her and has made her feel incredibly uncomfortable even before he attacks her on New Years. Male on Male apologia moment.

ON A GREATER SCALE: