Clarion app
Jan. 8th, 2016 10:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theveilisinStudent Application
PLAYER
name | Emi
age | 28
new or returning player? | N/A
preferred contact method |![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
sweetjerry
CHARACTER
character name | Luvander. He has no last name in canon, because it's silly like that, but I'm going with Pavlukhin for the purposes of this game.
age | 16
year | Second.
gender | Male.
appearance | He's fairly short, his build rather wiry and angular, with the musculature of someone who engages willingly in sports and moves around a lot, without being too serious about honing his physical condition actively. He's got medium blond hair which is normally worn in a ponytail at the nape of his neck, though nothing can tame his messy bangs. His eyes a a fairly unremarkable shade of blue. He has a fondness for well-tailored, flattering clothes, preferably with tasteful splashes of bright colors without being too eye-catching.
history | Luvander hails from Volstov, a pseudo-Russian country in a world which appears to be some sort of vaguely steampunk-y fantasy alter reality to our own Earth. Very little is told about his own personal backstory in the books, but happily the authors are rather forthcoming with extra details, and have implied that Luvander's parents were somehow involved in the construction of the mechanical dragons which a large part of the series centers around. Most of the dragon riders appear to have been trained specifically for the task from an early age, some of the few lucky of a large group of such young men to actually be picked by a dragon. But in Luvander's case, it was a complete accident. He came to check up on his parents' work - most likely while he was still a teenager - was spotted by one of the dragons, and was picked by her to be her rider. And no one seems inclined to argue with the dragons once they make up their minds.
At the beginning of the series, Luvander is therefore one of the fourteen airmen, chosen to ride dragons, kick ass, and defend his country against the forces of the Ke-Han (Ke-Han, Xi'An - yeah, it's China with a few extra parts of Asia thrown into the mix). They are lauded as heroes, but are also kind of problematic in a lot of ways since they are more or less irreplaceable and therefore allowed to get away with a lot more than most men would. Meaning they have a tendency to act like huge dicks in public at times - and in private as well. Being a collection of rather strong personalities being confined in one building, the atmosphere at the Airman is fairly tense at all times, with everyone posturing and trying not to give an inch or risk being seen as weak, because that's an invitation to brutal hazing from the rest. They're also not the most enlightened group of people - or at least pretend not to be - and homophobic, racist and misogynistic slurs is basically the local language within the building. Yet at the same time, they are all extremely loyal to each other, and they all share an unspoken bond in that they put their dragons before anything else in the world.
A lot of shenanigans and politics happen in the book, but it ends with all of the dragon riders heroically flying out on what is most likely a suicide mission for all involved, trying to wreak as much destruction as possible on the Ke-Han capital and thereby saving the lives of the Volstov magicians which are under a curse. They succeed in their task, but it comes with a fairly steep bill: Only five out of fourteen dragon riders survive (well, actually six, but they don't know this for long while) and the few of the dragons that manage to not be smashed into bits are dismantled as a part of the peace treaty with Ke-Han. Luvander is one of these few survivors, although it's a close-run thing. He takes a hit from a catapult for his sergeant and goes crashing down with his dragon, but another of his comrades who also ends up surviving manages to somehow dive down and pick Luvander out of the rubble of the burning city, presumably carrying him to safety.
Book two is all about Ke-Han politics going terribly awry, book three concerns Rook and Thom backpacking around and trying to prevent some Ke-Han rogue magician from reconstructing Rook's dragon, Havemercy. The latter is somewhat relevant, since it leads up to how in book four, Steelhands, the ruler of Volstov - going by the subtle title the Esar, or th'Esar for short - decides to start rebuilding the Dragon Corps. Except this time, he wants dragons and riders who are personally under his control, and since it's also a flagrant violation of the peace treaty as well as going against the wishes of the powerful council of mages, it's done in secrecy and using rather unpleasant methods - including making the new dragons from the pieces of the old ones. When ex-sergeant Adamo asks the wrong people the wrong questions, the remaining airmen and a couple of University students decide to break him out of jail, accidentally bringing about a revolution and overthrowing their monarch, replacing him with his much more sensible wife. Oops?
AU history Obviously, at age 16, ingame Luvander hasn't been anything as glamorous as any kind of airman. He was born in Russia into a very well-to-do merchant family specializing in import. The political climate in Russia was very tense at the time, and when he was still just a baby, the Revolution of 1905 - and most particularly the Bloody Sunday - started to get his parents worried. His father, as a rich man who had also expressed some socialist and marxist opinions in an indiscreet manner when he was younger, found himself in a rather awkward position vis a vis both sides in the mounting conflict, and neither he nor his wife enjoyed the idea of their children getting caught in the middle of it. Seven years later, with two children and another on the way, and with tsar Nicholas II getting more aggressive in his attempts to beat down the brewing revolution, they left the country for good under the pretense of a business trip.
Of course, they couldn't expect quite the same standards of life in America. But they had a couple of business contacts and good friends there, and so managed to at least afford a comfortable life, which couldn't exactly be said for a lot of other so-called New Immigrants at the time.
Luvander, once he grew into his teens, found himself drawn to and fascinated by the close-knit immigrant societies at the time, despite his family fancying themselves a slightly better class than them. He'd slip away and hang out with a gang consisting mainly of Slavic, Polish and Russian Jewish youth who, persuaded by his non-judgmental mannerism and his sense of humor, generously forgave him for being Russian upper class eventually.
His parents weren't as judgmental as all that, but they took note of how insular those communities tended to be and they didn't want their son to get "stuck" there - they wanted a better life for him. So, digging deep into their savings and selling off some of the valuables they'd brought with them from Russia, they managed to get their hands on enough money to afford tutelage at Clarion. Luvander could of course guess their motives, and he wasn't entirely happy about it, but on the other hand it would be incredibly ungrateful to turn down what was only done out of love and the best intentions, and so he complied. At the time of the game start, he's already spent one semester at the school.
personality | If you want to be charitable, you could definitely call Luvander eccentric. Since most of the people he knows are not much interested in being charitable in the first place, it’s more likely to hear him referred to as being crazy as a soap teacup. A more accurate assessment would be that he is a man who has figured out his own personal peculiarities while living within a group full of equally colorful men, and has worked out how make them work to his advantage – and that he’s just a little bit insane, just like all the other airmen.
Most noticeable is probably the fact that he never shuts up. He appears very fond of the sound of his own voice, in fact, and is extremely prone to meandering monologues which are most of the time both colorful and nonsensical in nature. He doesn’t much seem to care if what comes out of his mouth is entirely suitable for the situation, or makes sense at all, or even if it makes him come off as either hugely insensitive or just plain weird. Since his attention span is also a little bit erratic, it’s not unusual for him to jump from one subject to another without warning. All of this might seem like traits solely belonging to someone rather incredibly self-centered, but as Adamo points out, it’s actually often a case of Luvander trying to fill up the silence so no one – presumably including himself – is going to have to feel awkward. Regrettably this doesn’t always work, especially in the case of more timid and cautious personalities, but that doesn’t change that it is just as much an attempt to make people feel included as it is a symptom of verbal incontinence.
Despite his blatant weirdness, he is also among the most well-balanced of the motley band of madmen he belongs to. This is made particularly obvious if you compare him to the other surviving airmen after the war, and how well they seem to cope. Balfour is quite frankly neurotic, shows signs of suffering from PTSD, and describes himself as suffering from 'phantom airmen' in the absence of his dead comrades; Adamo feels uncomfortable with his new place in life and is generally angry with the world; Rook escapes the city and is an absolute mess of grief and rage after losing his dragon; Ghislain also leaves to become a pirate. Meanwhile, Luvander manages to wriggle out of any responsibility toward the government which might otherwise limit his career choice, buys himself a hat shop right next to the great big statues erected in the honor of the airmen, and names the shop after his dragon. While the others seem caught up in their past lives, unable to move on, Luvander seems to have landed on his feet and is adjusting admirably to life as a civilian, and although he clearly mourns his dragon and the people he lost, he seems to have put that part of his life to rest.
He has been described by the authors as being a natural caretaker due to having a fair number of younger siblings growing up, and this is made rather obvious by his behavior in Steelhands as well. The moment he realizes that Balfour is having trouble with his new prosthetic hands, he - without waiting for consent - tracks down his address and invites himself over, apparently to make sure the younger man has a proper breakfast, but probably also just to check that he's okay. And once he and Adamo decide to keep an even closer eye on the younger man, he seems to take very naturally to it. All the later secret meetings are held at his hat shop, it being a neutral location, and despite the tense situation he also seems to rather enjoy his role as a host. It could be speculated that a man who at first comes from a very lively home, only to spend years and years living at the Airman, might find that living on his own all of a sudden feels a bit empty.
However, as an alumnus of the bro culture at the Airman, Luvander does appear to have a somewhat unkind sense of humor at times. He mentions how he at one point in the past put fire ants in Balfour’s clothes – most likely underwear by the sound of it – and in Havemercy his only remark when Thom is miserably lamenting the ink handprint across his face is that he thinks it looks dashing. Adamo also recalls that he has a tendency of innocently resolving a situation – Raphael’s missing books, in this case – that he probably caused in the first place, suggesting that he perhaps strives to be somewhat more subtle about his pranks than some of the rest of them, but that he nonetheless finds amusement in them. And some of the jibes and jokes he makes are definitely on the insensitive side on the whole. Yet you never get the feeling that there is any true malice behind his actions, but rather a somewhat skewed sense of humor, cultivated in an environment where not picking on others in one way or another were seen as signs of weakness. This, coupled with a temperament that compels him to not let go of a joke unless more or less forced to, seems to be the cause of his sometimes disrespectful behavior, rather than outright cruelty.
Even when things start to get serious, Luvander seems to be unable to stop running his mouth or simply making light of the situation in ways which understandably are taken as rather offensive by some. On the flip side, you can definitely tell that sometimes, this very way of acting is a kind of defense that he employs. It appears that he’s not good at – most likely not comfortable with – expressing anything that touches him on a more personal level, and making fun of a situation or telling random anecdotes allows him bypass having to deal with actually talking about his feelings. Balfour notes that for someone with an extremely expressive face and lively mimicry, he very rarely expresses any genuine emotions at all, and the best way of telling if something has gotten to him is usually via the absence of any expression at all.
That is not to say that he's emotionally deadened or compromised as such, and some things definitely get under his skin. Often this is hinted at by a flicker in his carefree demeanor, a pause that goes on just a bit too long, or as mentioned above, him simply going still and unmovable, suddenly devoid of hyperbole and absurdities. He is certainly capable of serious moments and speaking directly about important/emotional matters when he feels the situation calls for it, most particularly out of empathy for others. However, the only time you ever really see him properly break character is when the dragons and his comrades are concerned, and when there is a direct risk of actual, right-this-moment physical danger to people. When faced with seeing what’s left of their dragons disassembled and ready to be built into new dragons, he definitely displays open rage, even if it’s expressed through a helping of venom and sarcasm and an inability to move or look away, rather than a lot of shouting and punching people. When Raphael turns up after having been presumed dead, Luvander is noticeably moved to the point of actually being speechless, something that really doesn't happen often. And when it looks like they’re going to have a fight, he immediately and unthinkingly gets in front of the civilians, clearly focused on the task at hand, even if he might still let a glib line or two slip.
And of course, being a trained soldier, he will not show a moment’s hesitation in putting himself in danger for someone else, or even giving his life if he has to. This is obviously best demonstrated by him taking a direct hit by a catapult with his dragon rather than letting Adamo get hit from behind, but also by how readily he and the others decide to break into a prison and defy their on ruler for the sake of a former comrade. He does seem more inclined to think before he leaps than some might be, but that doesn’t mean that he won’t still leap with gusto once he’s figured out what he’s supposed to do next.
Word Of God from the authors has made clear that all the airmen are “somewhere on the Kinsey scale”, but that Luvander is definitely gay. In Steelhands he tells Balfour that once he’s holding a secret, it’s gone forever, and that indeed seems to be the case. Even after he leaves the Airman and the oppressive environment there, he still keeps making oblique comments which seem to suggest attraction toward the fairer sex, and it doesn’t seem as if anyone else is aware of his orientation (except possibly Adamo, but if he does it's probably because of an educated guess). After all, if you spend enough time playing a role, that role is sooner or later going to become a part of you, and telling yourself apart from it might no longer be possible. Perhaps this is another reason for why Luvander seems prone to acting carefree even in face of serious situations, and why expressing himself without his perpetual jargon seems to come so very hard. Generally speaking, leaving yourself open and showing your true feelings in the Airman was more or less an invitation to merciless bullying, and Luvander had more to hide than most.
SAMPLES
sample 1 | He'd gotten his fair share of ribbing and taunts when he'd told the gang back home where he was going, of course. A posh, private school full of of the rich and mighty - or rather, full of their spoiled kids? It was an open invitation to be made fun of, and Luvander bore it with grace and by gamely joining in on the jokes when he could. After all, it wasn't as if he couldn't guess that a name like Pavlukhin and his faint but still noticeable accent wasn't going to act like a 'Kick Me'-note to some people there, so he might as well laugh at them in company while he still had the chance. He'd maintained a fairly cavalier attitude about the whole thing with everyone apart from Yesfir, and even with her he tried not to dwell too much on the future.
But in truth, he did experience a healthy amount of apprehension as he approached the school, dragging his trunk behind him. It wasn't really all the strangers housed in these venerable halls, from a variety of places and backgrounds - he had never been shy, thankfully, and the he honestly found the prospect rather exciting. No, his worries were somewhat less easily identified, and concerned how very different the context for meeting these new people was, and how confined he was going to be to this place. If he found himself not fitting in, his options would be fairly limited, after all.
Oh, and he already missed his family.
It wasn't the kind of thought that was easy for a teenage boy to admit to - barely at all to his friends, under no circumstances to his future peers at school, and only haltingly and awkwardly to his family. He'd tried not to look too glum about it, because he didn't want his parents to second-guess their decision or feel like he blamed them, and nor did he want to make his little sisters cry. Of course Inessa, the youngest, had cried anyway, and Oksana had held onto his hand right until the moment the car arrived to take him to the train station, and Emilia had made him promise to write every week or she would do something terrible to his room. His parents had held up fairly well, even if his dad's voice had failed as he pressed a couple of dollar bills into his hands as either consolation or encouragement. As the car drove away, he'd turned around only once to see his mother patting his cheek and starting to herd the whole family back inside, and he'd tried to capture that image and save it for the nights to come.
Now, raising his chin and forcing his shoulders to relax, he took out his best smile just for this new school and whoever he was going to meet once inside. He'd never taken any great enjoyment in self pity, and right now, he couldn't see the point of it. And he was certain, absolutely so, that he would find a way to make his stay at Clarion interesting.
sample 2 | The problem, as Jeannot would probably put it, was that Luvander didn't know when to shut his damn mouth. And while that wasn't near as likely to get him knifed around here as some streets back home, it nonetheless wasn't always appreciated. Which was what had landed him a hand at his collar and a trip to detention.
Another thing Luvander didn't know how to do, however, was sit still. Sitting still and keeping his mouth shut, as far as he was concerned, was probably recognized as some form of torture - or at least it really ought to. Tapping his fingers and drumming his feet only did so much to alleviate the boredom, and also resulted in the teacher on detention duty to testily threaten to tie him to his chair if he didn't stop. Luvander considered this unlikely unless the man employed his own suspenders for the task, but felt that the off chance that he might try was enough of a deterrent to force himself to stop. Better save the poor fellow the indignity of quite literally losing his pants in front of his students, and so on. Rather charitable of him, he felt, but he had enough sense to guess that the teacher wouldn't share his sentiments, should he voice them.
So what else was he supposed to do? He had his bag with him, and he habitually kept a novel in it, but trying to read it unnoticed might lead to having it confiscated. But, well, there was his pen knife, and there was the edge of the desk... and what was wrong with a bit of decoration, right? Having it confiscated wasn't nearly as inconvenient, so really, as far as Luvander was concerned there were no downsides.
By the end of the one hour period he'd managed quite a nice floral pattern halfway along the edge, and really had to come back later and see if he couldn't finish it. Maybe he could try painting it as well. Turning to the person sitting behind him, who must have seen what he was doing but thankfully hadn't alerted the teacher to his activities, he grinned and gestured at his work of art. "What do you think?"
PLAYER
name | Emi
age | 28
new or returning player? | N/A
preferred contact method |
CHARACTER
character name | Luvander. He has no last name in canon, because it's silly like that, but I'm going with Pavlukhin for the purposes of this game.
age | 16
year | Second.
gender | Male.
appearance | He's fairly short, his build rather wiry and angular, with the musculature of someone who engages willingly in sports and moves around a lot, without being too serious about honing his physical condition actively. He's got medium blond hair which is normally worn in a ponytail at the nape of his neck, though nothing can tame his messy bangs. His eyes a a fairly unremarkable shade of blue. He has a fondness for well-tailored, flattering clothes, preferably with tasteful splashes of bright colors without being too eye-catching.
history | Luvander hails from Volstov, a pseudo-Russian country in a world which appears to be some sort of vaguely steampunk-y fantasy alter reality to our own Earth. Very little is told about his own personal backstory in the books, but happily the authors are rather forthcoming with extra details, and have implied that Luvander's parents were somehow involved in the construction of the mechanical dragons which a large part of the series centers around. Most of the dragon riders appear to have been trained specifically for the task from an early age, some of the few lucky of a large group of such young men to actually be picked by a dragon. But in Luvander's case, it was a complete accident. He came to check up on his parents' work - most likely while he was still a teenager - was spotted by one of the dragons, and was picked by her to be her rider. And no one seems inclined to argue with the dragons once they make up their minds.
At the beginning of the series, Luvander is therefore one of the fourteen airmen, chosen to ride dragons, kick ass, and defend his country against the forces of the Ke-Han (Ke-Han, Xi'An - yeah, it's China with a few extra parts of Asia thrown into the mix). They are lauded as heroes, but are also kind of problematic in a lot of ways since they are more or less irreplaceable and therefore allowed to get away with a lot more than most men would. Meaning they have a tendency to act like huge dicks in public at times - and in private as well. Being a collection of rather strong personalities being confined in one building, the atmosphere at the Airman is fairly tense at all times, with everyone posturing and trying not to give an inch or risk being seen as weak, because that's an invitation to brutal hazing from the rest. They're also not the most enlightened group of people - or at least pretend not to be - and homophobic, racist and misogynistic slurs is basically the local language within the building. Yet at the same time, they are all extremely loyal to each other, and they all share an unspoken bond in that they put their dragons before anything else in the world.
A lot of shenanigans and politics happen in the book, but it ends with all of the dragon riders heroically flying out on what is most likely a suicide mission for all involved, trying to wreak as much destruction as possible on the Ke-Han capital and thereby saving the lives of the Volstov magicians which are under a curse. They succeed in their task, but it comes with a fairly steep bill: Only five out of fourteen dragon riders survive (well, actually six, but they don't know this for long while) and the few of the dragons that manage to not be smashed into bits are dismantled as a part of the peace treaty with Ke-Han. Luvander is one of these few survivors, although it's a close-run thing. He takes a hit from a catapult for his sergeant and goes crashing down with his dragon, but another of his comrades who also ends up surviving manages to somehow dive down and pick Luvander out of the rubble of the burning city, presumably carrying him to safety.
Book two is all about Ke-Han politics going terribly awry, book three concerns Rook and Thom backpacking around and trying to prevent some Ke-Han rogue magician from reconstructing Rook's dragon, Havemercy. The latter is somewhat relevant, since it leads up to how in book four, Steelhands, the ruler of Volstov - going by the subtle title the Esar, or th'Esar for short - decides to start rebuilding the Dragon Corps. Except this time, he wants dragons and riders who are personally under his control, and since it's also a flagrant violation of the peace treaty as well as going against the wishes of the powerful council of mages, it's done in secrecy and using rather unpleasant methods - including making the new dragons from the pieces of the old ones. When ex-sergeant Adamo asks the wrong people the wrong questions, the remaining airmen and a couple of University students decide to break him out of jail, accidentally bringing about a revolution and overthrowing their monarch, replacing him with his much more sensible wife. Oops?
AU history Obviously, at age 16, ingame Luvander hasn't been anything as glamorous as any kind of airman. He was born in Russia into a very well-to-do merchant family specializing in import. The political climate in Russia was very tense at the time, and when he was still just a baby, the Revolution of 1905 - and most particularly the Bloody Sunday - started to get his parents worried. His father, as a rich man who had also expressed some socialist and marxist opinions in an indiscreet manner when he was younger, found himself in a rather awkward position vis a vis both sides in the mounting conflict, and neither he nor his wife enjoyed the idea of their children getting caught in the middle of it. Seven years later, with two children and another on the way, and with tsar Nicholas II getting more aggressive in his attempts to beat down the brewing revolution, they left the country for good under the pretense of a business trip.
Of course, they couldn't expect quite the same standards of life in America. But they had a couple of business contacts and good friends there, and so managed to at least afford a comfortable life, which couldn't exactly be said for a lot of other so-called New Immigrants at the time.
Luvander, once he grew into his teens, found himself drawn to and fascinated by the close-knit immigrant societies at the time, despite his family fancying themselves a slightly better class than them. He'd slip away and hang out with a gang consisting mainly of Slavic, Polish and Russian Jewish youth who, persuaded by his non-judgmental mannerism and his sense of humor, generously forgave him for being Russian upper class eventually.
His parents weren't as judgmental as all that, but they took note of how insular those communities tended to be and they didn't want their son to get "stuck" there - they wanted a better life for him. So, digging deep into their savings and selling off some of the valuables they'd brought with them from Russia, they managed to get their hands on enough money to afford tutelage at Clarion. Luvander could of course guess their motives, and he wasn't entirely happy about it, but on the other hand it would be incredibly ungrateful to turn down what was only done out of love and the best intentions, and so he complied. At the time of the game start, he's already spent one semester at the school.
personality | If you want to be charitable, you could definitely call Luvander eccentric. Since most of the people he knows are not much interested in being charitable in the first place, it’s more likely to hear him referred to as being crazy as a soap teacup. A more accurate assessment would be that he is a man who has figured out his own personal peculiarities while living within a group full of equally colorful men, and has worked out how make them work to his advantage – and that he’s just a little bit insane, just like all the other airmen.
Most noticeable is probably the fact that he never shuts up. He appears very fond of the sound of his own voice, in fact, and is extremely prone to meandering monologues which are most of the time both colorful and nonsensical in nature. He doesn’t much seem to care if what comes out of his mouth is entirely suitable for the situation, or makes sense at all, or even if it makes him come off as either hugely insensitive or just plain weird. Since his attention span is also a little bit erratic, it’s not unusual for him to jump from one subject to another without warning. All of this might seem like traits solely belonging to someone rather incredibly self-centered, but as Adamo points out, it’s actually often a case of Luvander trying to fill up the silence so no one – presumably including himself – is going to have to feel awkward. Regrettably this doesn’t always work, especially in the case of more timid and cautious personalities, but that doesn’t change that it is just as much an attempt to make people feel included as it is a symptom of verbal incontinence.
Despite his blatant weirdness, he is also among the most well-balanced of the motley band of madmen he belongs to. This is made particularly obvious if you compare him to the other surviving airmen after the war, and how well they seem to cope. Balfour is quite frankly neurotic, shows signs of suffering from PTSD, and describes himself as suffering from 'phantom airmen' in the absence of his dead comrades; Adamo feels uncomfortable with his new place in life and is generally angry with the world; Rook escapes the city and is an absolute mess of grief and rage after losing his dragon; Ghislain also leaves to become a pirate. Meanwhile, Luvander manages to wriggle out of any responsibility toward the government which might otherwise limit his career choice, buys himself a hat shop right next to the great big statues erected in the honor of the airmen, and names the shop after his dragon. While the others seem caught up in their past lives, unable to move on, Luvander seems to have landed on his feet and is adjusting admirably to life as a civilian, and although he clearly mourns his dragon and the people he lost, he seems to have put that part of his life to rest.
He has been described by the authors as being a natural caretaker due to having a fair number of younger siblings growing up, and this is made rather obvious by his behavior in Steelhands as well. The moment he realizes that Balfour is having trouble with his new prosthetic hands, he - without waiting for consent - tracks down his address and invites himself over, apparently to make sure the younger man has a proper breakfast, but probably also just to check that he's okay. And once he and Adamo decide to keep an even closer eye on the younger man, he seems to take very naturally to it. All the later secret meetings are held at his hat shop, it being a neutral location, and despite the tense situation he also seems to rather enjoy his role as a host. It could be speculated that a man who at first comes from a very lively home, only to spend years and years living at the Airman, might find that living on his own all of a sudden feels a bit empty.
However, as an alumnus of the bro culture at the Airman, Luvander does appear to have a somewhat unkind sense of humor at times. He mentions how he at one point in the past put fire ants in Balfour’s clothes – most likely underwear by the sound of it – and in Havemercy his only remark when Thom is miserably lamenting the ink handprint across his face is that he thinks it looks dashing. Adamo also recalls that he has a tendency of innocently resolving a situation – Raphael’s missing books, in this case – that he probably caused in the first place, suggesting that he perhaps strives to be somewhat more subtle about his pranks than some of the rest of them, but that he nonetheless finds amusement in them. And some of the jibes and jokes he makes are definitely on the insensitive side on the whole. Yet you never get the feeling that there is any true malice behind his actions, but rather a somewhat skewed sense of humor, cultivated in an environment where not picking on others in one way or another were seen as signs of weakness. This, coupled with a temperament that compels him to not let go of a joke unless more or less forced to, seems to be the cause of his sometimes disrespectful behavior, rather than outright cruelty.
Even when things start to get serious, Luvander seems to be unable to stop running his mouth or simply making light of the situation in ways which understandably are taken as rather offensive by some. On the flip side, you can definitely tell that sometimes, this very way of acting is a kind of defense that he employs. It appears that he’s not good at – most likely not comfortable with – expressing anything that touches him on a more personal level, and making fun of a situation or telling random anecdotes allows him bypass having to deal with actually talking about his feelings. Balfour notes that for someone with an extremely expressive face and lively mimicry, he very rarely expresses any genuine emotions at all, and the best way of telling if something has gotten to him is usually via the absence of any expression at all.
That is not to say that he's emotionally deadened or compromised as such, and some things definitely get under his skin. Often this is hinted at by a flicker in his carefree demeanor, a pause that goes on just a bit too long, or as mentioned above, him simply going still and unmovable, suddenly devoid of hyperbole and absurdities. He is certainly capable of serious moments and speaking directly about important/emotional matters when he feels the situation calls for it, most particularly out of empathy for others. However, the only time you ever really see him properly break character is when the dragons and his comrades are concerned, and when there is a direct risk of actual, right-this-moment physical danger to people. When faced with seeing what’s left of their dragons disassembled and ready to be built into new dragons, he definitely displays open rage, even if it’s expressed through a helping of venom and sarcasm and an inability to move or look away, rather than a lot of shouting and punching people. When Raphael turns up after having been presumed dead, Luvander is noticeably moved to the point of actually being speechless, something that really doesn't happen often. And when it looks like they’re going to have a fight, he immediately and unthinkingly gets in front of the civilians, clearly focused on the task at hand, even if he might still let a glib line or two slip.
And of course, being a trained soldier, he will not show a moment’s hesitation in putting himself in danger for someone else, or even giving his life if he has to. This is obviously best demonstrated by him taking a direct hit by a catapult with his dragon rather than letting Adamo get hit from behind, but also by how readily he and the others decide to break into a prison and defy their on ruler for the sake of a former comrade. He does seem more inclined to think before he leaps than some might be, but that doesn’t mean that he won’t still leap with gusto once he’s figured out what he’s supposed to do next.
Word Of God from the authors has made clear that all the airmen are “somewhere on the Kinsey scale”, but that Luvander is definitely gay. In Steelhands he tells Balfour that once he’s holding a secret, it’s gone forever, and that indeed seems to be the case. Even after he leaves the Airman and the oppressive environment there, he still keeps making oblique comments which seem to suggest attraction toward the fairer sex, and it doesn’t seem as if anyone else is aware of his orientation (except possibly Adamo, but if he does it's probably because of an educated guess). After all, if you spend enough time playing a role, that role is sooner or later going to become a part of you, and telling yourself apart from it might no longer be possible. Perhaps this is another reason for why Luvander seems prone to acting carefree even in face of serious situations, and why expressing himself without his perpetual jargon seems to come so very hard. Generally speaking, leaving yourself open and showing your true feelings in the Airman was more or less an invitation to merciless bullying, and Luvander had more to hide than most.
SAMPLES
sample 1 | He'd gotten his fair share of ribbing and taunts when he'd told the gang back home where he was going, of course. A posh, private school full of of the rich and mighty - or rather, full of their spoiled kids? It was an open invitation to be made fun of, and Luvander bore it with grace and by gamely joining in on the jokes when he could. After all, it wasn't as if he couldn't guess that a name like Pavlukhin and his faint but still noticeable accent wasn't going to act like a 'Kick Me'-note to some people there, so he might as well laugh at them in company while he still had the chance. He'd maintained a fairly cavalier attitude about the whole thing with everyone apart from Yesfir, and even with her he tried not to dwell too much on the future.
But in truth, he did experience a healthy amount of apprehension as he approached the school, dragging his trunk behind him. It wasn't really all the strangers housed in these venerable halls, from a variety of places and backgrounds - he had never been shy, thankfully, and the he honestly found the prospect rather exciting. No, his worries were somewhat less easily identified, and concerned how very different the context for meeting these new people was, and how confined he was going to be to this place. If he found himself not fitting in, his options would be fairly limited, after all.
Oh, and he already missed his family.
It wasn't the kind of thought that was easy for a teenage boy to admit to - barely at all to his friends, under no circumstances to his future peers at school, and only haltingly and awkwardly to his family. He'd tried not to look too glum about it, because he didn't want his parents to second-guess their decision or feel like he blamed them, and nor did he want to make his little sisters cry. Of course Inessa, the youngest, had cried anyway, and Oksana had held onto his hand right until the moment the car arrived to take him to the train station, and Emilia had made him promise to write every week or she would do something terrible to his room. His parents had held up fairly well, even if his dad's voice had failed as he pressed a couple of dollar bills into his hands as either consolation or encouragement. As the car drove away, he'd turned around only once to see his mother patting his cheek and starting to herd the whole family back inside, and he'd tried to capture that image and save it for the nights to come.
Now, raising his chin and forcing his shoulders to relax, he took out his best smile just for this new school and whoever he was going to meet once inside. He'd never taken any great enjoyment in self pity, and right now, he couldn't see the point of it. And he was certain, absolutely so, that he would find a way to make his stay at Clarion interesting.
sample 2 | The problem, as Jeannot would probably put it, was that Luvander didn't know when to shut his damn mouth. And while that wasn't near as likely to get him knifed around here as some streets back home, it nonetheless wasn't always appreciated. Which was what had landed him a hand at his collar and a trip to detention.
Another thing Luvander didn't know how to do, however, was sit still. Sitting still and keeping his mouth shut, as far as he was concerned, was probably recognized as some form of torture - or at least it really ought to. Tapping his fingers and drumming his feet only did so much to alleviate the boredom, and also resulted in the teacher on detention duty to testily threaten to tie him to his chair if he didn't stop. Luvander considered this unlikely unless the man employed his own suspenders for the task, but felt that the off chance that he might try was enough of a deterrent to force himself to stop. Better save the poor fellow the indignity of quite literally losing his pants in front of his students, and so on. Rather charitable of him, he felt, but he had enough sense to guess that the teacher wouldn't share his sentiments, should he voice them.
So what else was he supposed to do? He had his bag with him, and he habitually kept a novel in it, but trying to read it unnoticed might lead to having it confiscated. But, well, there was his pen knife, and there was the edge of the desk... and what was wrong with a bit of decoration, right? Having it confiscated wasn't nearly as inconvenient, so really, as far as Luvander was concerned there were no downsides.
By the end of the one hour period he'd managed quite a nice floral pattern halfway along the edge, and really had to come back later and see if he couldn't finish it. Maybe he could try painting it as well. Turning to the person sitting behind him, who must have seen what he was doing but thankfully hadn't alerted the teacher to his activities, he grinned and gestured at his work of art. "What do you think?"
