#redgorchakov

HISTORY:

Born in Surrey, GB. Red is the oldest surviving son of a wealthy Russian oil baron. His family was forced to flee Russia prior to the Bolshevik revolution before he was born, but never expected to be barred from returning. Red is the fourth child and second son of seven children. His eldest brother (Nikolai IV) was killed on a Christian mission to Nigeria when Red was twenty, having converted to Protestantism and gone abroad against the will of his parents. Red has never lived in Russia, but he would loathe to admit that. He has always been an oddity, often unreasonably sensitive, erratic or an active liability. They were not very protective of any of their children. Red was molested by his piano teacher at thirteen, and has been subsequently variably sexually abused by older men until he was about 22. At 16 he had an extreme prolonged mental breakdown where he assaulted a opponent after a polo game, quit polo, and attempted suicide. Nobody in his family really wants to talk about it.

He proposed to his wife, Natalya Lebedev at 19 prior to them attending University college London together. Natalya and red are childhood family friends, she has always been like a little sister to him. His courtship of her was a checklist field for him to successfully pass, and a move to "preserve her potential". He married her because he felt like she could do much better as an artist or scholar than a housewife, which is what he feared she would be if she had married a man who wanted to "stifle" her. His intention was to "allow" her independence as her husband, and continue on with his own affairs while sparing her from the scrutiny directed towards spinsters. Natalya doesn't appreciate this, and would prefer to have a husband that wants to sleep with her.

He currently works as a professor of foreign policy at Kings College in London, far away from his family estate in Surrey. Red isn't a very thoughtful or creative person, His published writing is sound, but uncompelling and lacking in insight. Publicly he is overall quite average, besides the fact that he is a talented polyglot with a fluent grasp on around 15 different languages.

Since he was never the eldest son growing up, Red skirted most of his parents scrutiny. Only reaching a boiling point immediately prior to the birth of his first child. Red has twin elder sisters. He is not present, or worse a poor influence on his nieces and nephews, and was outright disinterested in his brother prior to his death. He has three daughters, he tends to step away from his children the moment they start developing the ability to hold opinions.

ON SEX:

Red is gay, but masquerades as bisexual for plausible deniability, or maybe just attention. Naturally he is a serial adulterer, but doesnt have sex with women who are not his wife. He is allergic to intimacy, and does not want to be known or had by anyone. Red is avoidant of close friends and family and overly personal with random strangers. He has a compulsive need to be the dominant party in every sexual encounter, he is role-flexible as long as he has complete control over the dynamic and relationship. As such, he only ever solicits sex from men who are in some way hierarchically beneath him. He is body-shy, forever preoccupied with his own lack of physical masculinity, erotically fascinated with the high-testosterone physique and being able to control men that are so much stronger than him. He seeks out partners that are in some way easy to "train" into being the kind of person he likes being around, or generally eager to please. He does not necessarily want to hurt people, nor does he want to be hurt, but he is not self aware in the slightest and does not recognize his behavior as predatory.

ON DRUGS:

Red has a long history of dealing and purchasing drugs. He is smart enough that he has managed to skirt addiction to anything particularly damaging. Red likes trafficking exotic hallucinogens and novelties to people he likes more than he even enjoys doing them himself. He doesn't see drugs as a social ill, rather a social lubricant and necessary refreshment for a good party. All things in moderation. He is stuck on nicotine, cycles through periods where he dependent on coke to get through his workday, and drinks in excess when the mood arises.

ON RELIGION:

Red was raised Russian Orthodox Catholic. He cannot see god's hand in the mechanism that is his life or in the natural world around him. He thinks if there is a god, he is cruel. He only invokes him to ask why he made him like this. Red does not pray, does not attend mass, and only wears a cross for aesthetic value. He only claims his religion for its aesthetic value.

ON WAR:

Red does not care much about war. (WIP)

FUNCTION:

Red is obscenely selfish and immature. He is unable to see how his actions hurt those around him, and will do anything that benefits him in the moment without thought for the future. He acts as an antagonist in OPNERO because his presence accelerates the breakdown of good social standards established on the island.

RELATIONSHIPS:

AINSLEY DOHERTY

Ainsley is his most immediate coworker. She is intended to be one of the few people Red is meant to trust. He doesn't. As she is directly employed by the U.N. she technically outclasses him, which makes him feel a bit insecure given she is a woman and also twenty six. He tends to think he knows better than her, and often their only interaction is him delivering a lecture she does not appreciate.

DANNY GREEN

Danny is virtually invisible to Red before he approaches him directly. He doesn't have any strong feelings about him from the get-go. He is annoyed by his request to traffic drugs for him, embarrassed by his ability to clock him as a user, and put off by his desperation. He implies he would accept sex as bargain to play chicken with him, but isn't going to ever refuse a hookup with a big hairy italian. Danny says and does things that unsettle him, but he brushes most of it off as tantrums or harmless play. He refuses to capitulate to Danny on anything because he refuses to relinquish power to someone he already perceives as slightly too powerful to be involved with in the first place.

RAJIVA PATEL

He did do that, and he does remember it. He outright lies about not recalling Rajiva. Frankly, its slightly humiliating that he's here at all, so pretending it didn't happen is the only way he can tolerate their proximity. Red gets rejected occasionally, but rarely does anyone react like Rajiva did. he feels he made a series of missteps in that interaction and regrets a lot of what he said and did. Not because it hurt Patel, but because it made him look very stupid. He still thinks Rajiva is very handsome, but he probably should keep his mouth shut from now on. He has been able to keep up a fairly seamless oblivious front, but tries to avoid him when possible because he makes him feel very weird. There is palpable hostility that Red does not want to be the target of.

JAN KOSACKI

Cautiously hostile. Red knows of Kosacki via his writing, which he genuinely enjoys. Though, he doesn't know how to feel about the author in question. He doesn't like that Jan is (as he wants to understand it) a self hating gay man who is transitioning to avoid scrutiny, because he sees it as unfair. Red fosters a lot of misogynistic hatred for women because they are allowed to freely be with men and he isn't. When Jan behaves in unexpected ways or reveals unexpected information to him or empathizes with him through his hostility, Red is taken aback. They don't begin the narrative on good terms, but Jan is one of few characters with which red's relationship improves.

ANNA WEISS-BABIKOV

I feel like its pretty clear red is a kinda unhappy person, right? Like hes a gleeful grinner but… ehh

He is and has been persistently somewhat depressed for the last 20 years, despite otherwise leading a very stable life. Existing in this space where nothing is “that bad” but just painful enough to monopolize most of his attention. Like a blister. One might be able to hash out why after reading his bio.

In order to manifest this malaise physically (probably in an attempt to care for or resolve something that can’t actually be dispelled) red engages in a lot of self harm behavior. That’s where most of his avoidant personality comes from and it defines a lot of his character that he destroys his own life in flights of fancy. He’s particularly prone to extreme risk taking behavior, mostly in the realm of dangerous sex, illegal businesses, cultivating career destroying scandal and burroughs-esq levels of narcotic experience seeking.

Image related, seeking out abusive relationships in which he was the victimized party as respite from his “idyllic” married life was his primary pastime as a young man. I think, in his mind he’s grown up past this suite of behaviors, hence why in the narrative he’s so domineering and has big boy grown up addictions. like liquor and prescription valium. The impulse is persistent though it may be baked into him at this point.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR OPNERO PROPER:

it is notable that he, despite being this untenably strict authority figure (from dannys perspective) i frequently demonstrate red being uncharacteristically tolerant of danny being disinterested in, threatening or cruel to him. This is the same guy that freaked out caustically when he was politely turned down by rajiva a decade ago shrugging off clear insane red flag behavior repeatedly and to immediate detriment to his mental (and sometimes physical) health.

This is the result of a combination of factors but underpinning all of them is the fact that red has this long history of putting himself in danger. As well as being classically desperate for attention (though only when he wants it and not for a moment longer)

THE ACTUAL FUCKING IMAGE JESUS:

This image chronologically takes place way after their professional relationship has long since been torn to tiny little pieces anyways. This is a post-trumpets scene, probably inches away from the end of his soggy life. This weird dirty fucked up version of red also shows up in this artwork and post:

Yay more text. Uh kinda related image!

Ill say the symbolism is light, i was listening to a kind of tacky song (pinc louds take me tie me) that i liked the imagery of (begging a scorned lover to grab you by the legs and otherwise beat the fuck out of you as repentance) even if i didn’t think it tracked 1:1 to reds mentality. I liked dressing him in a calculated way when he is objectively at his most vulnerable, these are his jammies but the shoes and garters are both aesthetically distinctly gorchlike and are, in my mind, defensively coded. It’s a weird way of reaffirming his authority even if it isn’t strictly literal (no idea what kind of rags hes running around in atp, ill figure it out later) also like, clearly he has a gun. (Ainsleys service pistol as introduced in the “diana” piece, another one about fleeing fate lol) I’ll get into the gun later.

The big red stars are directly representative of his brain tumor, which has grown up just enough to start causing him notable symptoms. He isn’t strictly aware of it, but he is under the impression that something “broke inside his head” when danny attacked him on new years. I like the idea of red being uniquely doomed, while being the character who is most stubbornly insistent on continuing to live and suffer. In aforementioned post i pose the question of “why not just kill yourself when faced with the alternative? (that being torture humiliation and eventual death)” and i still don’t have an answer for that. Ive never been terminally ill, but i also can’t imagine living past the immediate future. I can then imagine a character as listless and stagnant as red unable to make definitive choices even when the path of least resistance is obvious. I was thinking of the claw as a less immediately obvious representation of the “close” of the arc of Babylon the Great and The Beast. (Another use for the stockings symbolically is that they are distinctly feminine)

Maybe he’s recognized this failure to assert within himself. And the choice to arm himself gun-wise even though it statistically poses more of a risk to his own life if he crosses paths with danny while armed is an intentional choice, making it exceedingly easy for danny to kill him in the hopes he’ll forgot about all the wrath he was planning on enacting. Or maybe he’s fully intending to put some lead in that crazy bitch italian. Somewhere inbetween? Red is very contradictory to his core, and prone to making weird decisions under pressure and kicking the metaphorical can farther down the metaphorical road all the way to metaphorical hell. I would not be his friend.

Okay, so in order to break down this piece it helps to approach it as a companion piece to the previous one “body as weapon without teeth”, “fixing my itch (with teeth)” isn’t necessary chronologically succeeding it, because (without teeth) is more of a mood piece which (with teeth) is an actual scene abstracted.

The beast, as referenced in this post I JUST MADE!!!!! Is present in both these images, far less distinct in the second as it becomes less tangible and indistinguishable from the environment and characters.

Obviously the big difference is the teeth. It kind of looks like a big wildebeest with a huge soft bleeding mouth. Not necessarily a hackjob situation, ostensibly the beast could have undergone surgical extraction by a licensed oral surgeon. Point being, it’s missing its teeth.

The beast has no visible (or hypothetically useful) hands in this image, and danny’s hands are rendered at his sides and pretty indistinct. I meant for the noise around his head and blood from the beasts mouth to be reminiscent of falling water. Combined with Danny’s nudity its pretty safe to call this a “man seething in shower” piece.

Arguably its a more sophisticated/more corrupted version of “Puppy Dog Eyes”, where the beast is both belonging entirely to Danny (in previously characterized as something that oppresses on him) and now “neutralized” (the beast doesn’t distinguish between perceived slight and actual slight, because it isn’t conscious, point being, the mind of the nationalist cannot differentiate between faux pas and intentional, hateful language / assault.) (red being cruel to him is always considered hateful, even if that wasn’t his intention, all entities that deny Danny what he wants are persecuting him, etc.)

Hence the lack of teeth rather than a muzzle or something rendering the beast “helpless” (i mean, look at it. In the same way a lot of Danny’s helplessness is tied to his addiction, which is a real illness but not one he himself even considers truly insurmountable.) It’s generally about Danny feeling dominated in his engagement with red, and specifically referencing his rock and hard place, when he’s neck deep in addiction, fresh out of attacking red at the new years party, and still indebted to him BECAUSE red doesn’t retaliate. Red refusing to litigate against Danny or even publicly acknowledge he did anything to him at all makes Danny feel that he is defenseless even in the most basic of means. If attacking red doesn’t dispel him or destroy their deal or even put danny where he can’t find his way back to the object of his obsession, nothing will. Real low point for mister Danny, so (without teeth) is steeped in impotence, sexual vulnerability (i dont think i need to talk about the imagery of the mouth in that context.) and consumptive, almost feral rage.

SO! Continuing onwards to (with teeth) occurring literally (hence reds incredibly haggard appearance) somewhere in the final days of Armageddon. Ive lifted a lot of abstraction from red’s design in specific, he takes on a idol quality in a lot of art i make of him from danny’s perspective, who sees him as generally unfeeling and all powerful. In this piece he’s pretty smashed up, the scars on his nose and eyebrow are specifically from danny, and his general gauntness is the result of a combination of a few factors, point being he’s as humanized as he’s going to get in this image and danny still can’t conceptualize him in his current state as human. (Hence the emphasis on his eyes being kind of flat and on a different plane. I intended for a kind of animal wall eyed vibe, or like painted on. He looks like that i guess)

He certainly wants red to be human because he wants to hurt him, but i guess his reasoning for doing so is kind of cyclical. (I have to hurt him to see if hes human, i need him to be human so i can hurt him, he is human because i hurt him. That kind of thought process.)

The dialogue, which is hard to see because it isn’t necessarily spoken, and is equally implied as it is said. Reads;

“You don’t want to die?”

A kind of ridiculous question out of context, but given that this is Armageddon and most people on earth are now dead, and a short life of autonomous suffering is hard to find preferable to eternal suffering (hell) or absence of consciousness (no hell but no heaven either) or heaven (heaven), given that they don’t know what is true for either of them, what constitutes right and wrong according to god (its arguable that Danny killing anyone past the advent of Armageddon is hastening their journey to the afterlife and is a morally good action that could get him into heaven. It depends on how much you value obedience as a virtue. Danny is very obedient!) Red, in this context, doesn’t have much of a reason to fear death. He’s questioning why he doesn’t just give up, but the way he does so is inherently facetious. HOWEVER.

“You aren’t going to kill me.” Isn’t an appeal to Danny’s conscious or morals, or a plea/bluff or anything of that nature. He knows Danny’s intentions pretty well because he’s told him a hundred different times in a hundred different ways that his only desire is to hurt him. Via fear, injury, rape, torture and consumption. Red doesn’t think Danny will kill him, he thinks Danny will chew on him until he dies on his own. That’s a little more than the standard suffering left for him on earth and certainly more undesirable than the unknowable afterlife.

(With teeth) just illustrates what happens when Danny gets his hands and teeth back. The knife that merges with his silhouette at waist height is both obviously a violent phallic/sexual metaphor, but it’s also a tooth in a big mouth. Referring back to The Beast ultimately falling upon and devouring Babylon The Great. Hence, happy toothful beast that melts into the shadow and into Danny, making his personal intentions immiscible from those of a greater force of evil. I don’t think Danny is happy, nor will he be happy ever again, but he does have the opportunity to be satisfied.

Red doesn’t want to be eaten! It goes without saying that he knows he’s human and he doesn’t want to be tortured, burned, raped and devoured, just to ultimately go to hell (maybe heaven? He thinks he’s suffered enough, but he wouldn’t subject himself to any of that for the potential promise of a beautiful afterlife) a later part of this conversation questions why he wouldn’t just kill himself to dodge Danny. Aaaaand thats a great question! Haha! I can’t say for certain why someone wouldn’t kill themself when being threatened with further suffering and humiliation beyond what one experiences in the process of LIVING. I imagine he might be doing the same kind of thinking I'm currently doing, trying to work out pathways to heaven based on what choice is ultimately most christlike. Choice paralysis, lack of identity, whatever. At current moment in this illustration he is trying to find a way out of this room and back out into the light.

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: