@phasemacha sent: what is your character afraid of? , how many friends does your character have? , what seemingly insignificant memories stuck with your character?
4. What seemingly insignificant memories stuck with your character?
Chell doesn’t really have a lot of memories from her life before testing (being stuck in suspended animation for a dangerously-long amount of time will do that), so any memories of her childhood at all she considers to be rather significant. However, it’s hard for even her to really think that the texture of the rug in her childhood bedroom, before the orphanage, is all that important, and yet it’s one of her most distinctive memories from before. Any other memories she has from then are brief flashes, and things she’d consider important-- her parents, someone who seems like a friend (but that can’t be right, she has no friends and is unlikable, of course), things like that. Any memories at all after starting testing, however, she doesn’t consider insignificant-- since anything held a potential importance to her own survival, there was little that she discounted.
8. How many friends does your character have?
And that’s not even an exaggeration to be honest. She genuinely does consider the Weighted Companion Cube her friend. While she’s met some people since arriving here that she gets along with, that she could potentially consider to be friends at some point, she doesn’t know when an acquaintance becomes a friend. And a ‘friend’ implies some level of trust. Chell doesn’t trust anyone-- and won’t until she knows them pretty well. Trusting people, even if they seemed alright, has never worked out well for her. Looking at you, Wheatley.
15. What is your character afraid of?
GLaDOS. But she’s not gonna actively admit it, and she tries very hard to act like she isn’t afraid of her. But to Chell, GLaDOS represents everything about what she truly fears-- being powerless, being unable to escape, trying and trying and trying but never truly succeeding, never reaching her goals, never truly being free. Chell doesn’t really fear GLaDOS herself-- the AI is simply the embodiment and physical form of her trauma. Not to mention, the negative voice in her head. In reality, Chell fears a loss of any control. She fears going to sleep and waking up somewhere else, or waking up and realising that years and years have gone by and everything around her is different. She fears things happening, things changing, and being unable to do anything to escape or to fight back. She fears helplessness, because deep down she knows that there will come a point where she can’t push through. There will be a test she can’t solve. There will be something she can’t survive. She denies her own weaknesses, compensating with sheer stubbornness, but she knows that there is an end at some point. While that fear could easily take a nebulous form, in Chell’s mind it often comes in GLaDOS’ voice and from Her. She’s not afraid of GLaDOS the way Wheatley was by any means, but rather the concepts and goals and things she represents.