#kiskhs

spoiler time: all of the conjunxes started as the Leverage OT3. It was a convenient shorthand to make them all distinct and to be able to start writing right away. Their characterizations drifted in the course of writing, but at the beginning my thought was that Scattergun was Elliot Spencer.In connection with that, I needed him to have a violent past. Of course, everyone has a violent past (they’re at war) so I decided it would fit best if he was an ex-decepticon. From there several other things fell into place: his relative isolation from the other people at the institute, his distrust of the institute, the guilt that shapes his own self-worth.I also needed to give him a hobby: something outside of violence that Scattergun could pour his emotions into while remaining fairly taciturn from the outside. I dismissed cooking as a possibility and landed (somehow) on music. It might have been a suggestion from you or someone on the discord, I’m not sure. It was in writing the section on his favorite musical artists that I realized Scattergun had been motivated to defect by his music and specifically by the tragic seditious artist Semisonic. This was one of those Eliot parallels that took on a life of their own.

His actual emotions and interactions I don’t tend to plan in advance - I do most of my characterization by improvising and then editing to make things consistent. Since the plot demanded Scattergun pursue the medical mystery, I needed him to be devoted to the point of self-destruction as well as canny. He’s taciturn partly to cover that he’s painfully shy - he’s good at burying himself in his work so he doesn’t have to engage with people as himself.