#IF YOU ARE ONE OF THE PEOPLE THAT DONT LIKE FUN WITH BENREY ALIEN STUFF GO AWAAAAAY!!!!!!!!!!!

[randomgooberness]

BENREY ALIEN HEADCANONS

because i love speculative biology and i love dumb animal traits :D its 3:30 AM 

-most important to me is obviously he pins his eyes like a parrot when he’s happy but I decided he also boggles like a rat too so it means he looks like this: 

-boggling is caused by a teeth grinding motion in rats as well as parrots also grind their beaks to soothe themselves. as well as wayne mentioned the idea of benrey being able to rattle his teeth. so he does this but he also:

-purrs. but not like a cat. he does it with his teeth. it sucks so much.

-rocks side to side and paces when he’s stressed, which he doesn’t do a lot. If he’s REALLY stressed for a prolonged period of time he’ll “pluck” AKA bite at himself. It doesn't hurt but its not a good habit 

-makes nests. this looks very very awful and messy to gordon whos bed usually gets destroyed in this process 

-speaking of gordon. he brings him dead animals as presents. when he learns how much gordon hates this he replaces it with shiny trash and trinkets. sometimes he gets him actual presents though :) 

-mirrors. he mirrors so much. tommy is his favorite to mirror. tommy is also not a good role model for “human”. 

-retractable claws/constantly changing teeth/sometimes a tail. for funsies dont worry about it 

-giraffe tongue. im sorry it sucks so much and makes me laugh. i really really hate it 

-we all know he can canonically shapeshift but i hc that its physically painful to watch the process of if you’re just a human guy and can give you nosebleeds and make you sick if you don't look away. it sucks a lot 

-sheds his skin :/

-despite the fact that theres an entire running gag telling people they arent supposed to be there and he can “let people” into black mesa, hes not territorial in the slightest. the only reason he wouldnt shrug if someone walked into the house is because he knows gordon would flip his entire lid 

-hibernates! But its not based on an internal clock, its moreso “i can stay awake for a month straight but ill need to sleep for like a week after”. So not really biologically hibernation but very close to it w the physical aspects of it(deep ass sleep with slower body)

-uhhh ive said this in my fic descriptions/other places i think but my rule of thumb for his sweet voice is warm colors: emotions and cold colors: thoughts. this is INCREDIBLY vague and makes it fun for me to work with. if you dont get it its ok i do its basically left vs right brain shit 

[tigerdrop]

hey i just wanna say the long posts genuinely make my day. also can you talk more about gordon freeman character because the way you write him makes me quake in my gay little boots

i would love to talk about gordon freeman. thank u for the opportunity

the first thing i need to communicate about gordon is that this dude sucks. and i say this in the fondest way possible. he is a bitch from the moment he drops into the world until the moment he goes out. if you dont believe me, give it another watch! gordons mouthy and rude for no real reason, at least so far as “being a regular dude on his way into work” goes, and this dude goes around calling his coworkers names with zero provocation. (of course, we all know that the reason is because its a funny guy improv stream that borrows a bit from freemans mind, but im talkin from a character sense.)

but my argument isnt just that gordon freeman sucks. its that he sucks in a very specific way that i find insanely endearing. i love this dude. i love to hate him. hes awful in a very mundane sense - weve all known a guy like this, at least if youve spent too much time online - and its cathartic to watch him suffer because of it.

gordons a smart guy. as written, hes gotta be - hes a recent MIT grad, on his way to work at a top-secret research facility to do weird shit with crystals and theoretical physics. but the thing about smart guys is that theyre often......selectively intelligent. we can see this in the way that he has a hard time navigating his surroundings, and needs the science crew to guide him through it and keep him alive.

this is one of those things that is a natural consequence of somebody going through the game for the first time, but that i am interpreting as “gordon is kind of stupid sometimes”. its uncharitable but its not like he doesnt deserve it. he likes to boss around the crew as if he knows what hes doing, when he often very much does not, and is fond of demeaning their intelligence. hes real bad about this with tommy in particular, treating him like hes a kid whos playing at being a scientist when tommy is actually a decade older than him. all i am saying is that gordon ought to stay humble. hes awful cocky when he perceives himself as better than others.

which, i think, tracks with how cocky he gets when he gives up on the whole “well-meaning citizen” thing and just unloads bullets into people. he puts up a front of being a Nice Guy, you know, just some dude caught in a bad situation who doesnt like seeing his companions obliterate every NPC they come across, but that doesnt stop him from cackling like a fucking madman and mowing down aliens (and soldiers) every once in awhile. when he stops seeing himself as helpless and starts seeing himself as the one in control, the gloves come off. he gets mean. and i think thats very sexy of him

this, among other things, is why i am insistent that gordon freeman is a control freak. he desperately wants to be in control of the situation at all times, shepherding around the science crew primarily by bitching at them, but its of limited success. its futile. sisyphean. tommy, coomer, bubby, and benrey exist almost to torment him with exactly the thing that would make him suffer the most: a gaggle of people running around causing problems for him, but he cant go anywhere without them b/c hes reliant on them to make it out alive.

its perpetual suffering, and its cathartic to watch. and funny, too. and if youre a little weirdo like me, its very, very enjoyable. how twisted up he gets when nobodys listening to him! how sweaty and frazzled he must look. its cute, and it also makes me want to reach through the screen and shake him and tell him to just be a little nicer. he wants control but he doesnt know how to attain it, he doesnt know how to play nice like a real leader. i think its a neat contrast to gordon freeman as we know him in HL2, where he literally is the leader of the resistance and has to live up to it. this is gordon freeman but if he was moe through helplessness.

“helpless” is, i think, a great way to describe him. a core bit of imagery in half life is this sense of railroadedness and helplessness, with gordon freeman being put into play like a chess piece and having no choice but to move forward. and this iteration of gordon leans into that by being totally dependent on the science crew in order to make progress and Not Die. and hes also subject to the whims of benrey, local eldritch weirdo who has basically made it his life mission to fuck with gordon.

gordons anxieties dont help with that. if he wasnt so fun to stress out and fuck with, the science crew probably wouldnt do it so much! too bad for him that they like fucking with him so much that he was driven into a panic attack (multiple times, even, depending on your interpretation). hes got that real neurotic mindset. always worrying about shit that could go wrong, and attempting to exert control over his surroundings in an effort to control the anxiety.

IMO the real way to nail the Neurotic Gordon Freeman Experience is to combine the ever-present anxiety with his pervasive sense of self-loathing. he openly states that he has no friends and nobody seems to like him, and to that, i really gotta say, i wonder why. he doesnt really seem to factor in that hes kind of a bitch, and has way too high an estimation of his own intelligence relative to everybody elses. its really one of the worst ways to be: aware that people dont like you, but unaware of exactly why. if he was like, 10% nicer, he probably wouldnt have had half as many issues getting through black mesa, but also, its funny to see him squawking his way through the game. so, you know.

its stuff like that that makes me headcanon him as a dude with low self-esteem in general. convinced that hes not likable, not attractive, out of his element......impostor syndrome, except that theres some truth to it. this is a guy who truly does not realize how good he has it: he really is just an average shitty dude, and yet, somehow, benrey took a shine to him. some poor motherfucker out there actually likes him and wants to suck his dick. thats dedication

also, i keep bringing up “repression” when i talk about gordon. and hopefully, what ive been talking about helps explain why. he has a strong desire to be a regular dude, not just murdering his way through black mesa, but if hes pushed hard enough he leans into it. gets bossy. picks up a cigar off a dead soldier and takes a long drag, before smacking forzen around with a pistol and ordering him around. gordon freeman is a regular, kind of anxious guy who likes competitive swimming and streaming on justin.tv and making anime references, and he is also a guy who takes a filthy pleasure in making a trained soldier his bitch. and i didnt make up any of this shit - this is purestrain canon, baby. this is a guy with problems

to me, this screams the kind of guy who represses a lot of shit b/c he doesnt feel like its morally decent. you run into this guy a lot online: the wokeboy, the online leftist, the guy who spends too much time on social media websites. (like reddit. i think he would actively use reddit and he would never get any appreciable amount of karma but he never stops posting. its sisyphean! cathartic.) from the way he talks about “bootboys”, i think it tracks. he knows about imperialism, he knows about feminism, but at the end of the day hes your average american white dude who struggles with internalizing it.

a lot of those dudes struggle with sex and gender issues. (dont we all.) when youre trying to be a Good Person(tm), you spend a lot of time thinking about your own relationship to sex and kink and all that shit. and i maintain that a too-online dude who buries a lot of his control freak tendencies would also try to bury a lot of weird sexual shit in an attempt to seem Normal and Well-Adjusted and not like a little freak. i justify this by the sheer number of times gordon blurts out weird sex shit as a joke. there are only two outcomes to making that many piss jokes: either youre secretly a piss guy, or you lathe-of-heaven yourself into becoming one. i will stand by this

ive talked a lot about why this dude sucks. now, let me talk to you about what makes gordon so much fun to write. first things first: hes funny! a subjective evaluation, yeah, but both in- and out-of-character, hes aiming to be funny. and being the straight man to everybody else plays into that whole “helplessness” thing.

secondly: underneath it all, there is a good dude under there. gordon worries when his companions get hurt, he tries to clean them off and patch them up, and hes got his lil leftist heart in the right place. you could even read a lot of his bossy, bitchy demeanor as him wanting to make sure everyone gets out okay and doesnt hurt themselves. when it comes to animals and anti-imperialist sentiment, gordons a pretty good guy.

hes the kind of guy who would probably see a dog on the street and get excited and play with it, but would get really prickly about the correct way to put dishes in the dishwasher. control freak tendencies.

finally, subjecting such a miserable, tormented guy to even more psychological anguish is really, really fun. you feel a little bad for him, but he kind of deserves it. so many problems he goes through are purely of his own making, and if gordon would just relax and quit trying to hard to maintain control - of himself, of the people around him - and own up to having Problems and Issues, he would be a happier guy. but thats why its fun to bend him until he breaks. being a little control freak myself, putting gordon freeman thru psychosexual torment is cathartic.

when it comes to writing his thought processes, the fact that he is canonically some kind of psychotic (yes, i am boldly claiming this. suck me) and i am also canonically some kind of psychotic makes it easier to write what i think his thought processes are. i just give him my brain issues of “getting lost in thought” and “overthinking fucking everything”. a touch of paranoia helps. even if i dont explicitly label him as schizophrenic please know that i am writing him as a paranoid little nutcase at all times because, uh, you write what you know.

paranoid. anxious. of the mindset that everyones out to get him (which isnt helpful when everyone is out to get him). repressed and deeply Not Normal but trying so very fucking hard to be normal and well-adjusted. a control freak with sadistic tendencies who also really, really likes getting bullied by his best frenemy. a hapless little nerd who sounds really cute when his voice starts to break from nerves. and, most importantly, a dumb jock. do not ever forget this.

thats gordon freeman, babey. hope that helps

[tigerdrop]

What is your Benrey’s motivation for everything that happened in Black Mesa? Getting Gordon’s hand cut off, trying to kill the Science Team, etc. Was it all a game to him and he didn’t realize the seriousness of it to the others? Did he actually want to kill them but is chill now?

oh man i have thought about this anon. way more than perhaps i should

so, you know, initially his motivation is just doing his job. you see a guy with his dick out and without the credentials to be where he is, you do your job and ask for it. but at the same time, hes also literally been described as “openly lustful” after gordon by WRTV, and i think that plays a factor here too - benrey keeps following him b/c he just plain likes the guy. how he actually expresses that desire notwithstanding

but then u get into the betrayal and the final boss fight and everything. and my long-winded and unorganized rationale for all that stuff is: what i think is that benrey is, you know, self-aware as the title implies, and he knows that hes got a part to play here. hes kind of “supposed” to be the bad guy. and at first he has fun playing the game - he really gets a kick out of making gordons life difficult and stressing him out and scaring him a little sometimes. its all games to him! and if theres one thing benrey makes clear, its that he just wants to play games with people, whether its video games or thinly-veiled power play games. he likes pushing gordons limits and seeing him get all fuckin sweaty and anxious and hearing him yelp with surprise. you know, for normal reasons.

but at the same time, he also really seems to like making gordon laugh, and theres a constant push-pull between these aspects of him. benrey doesnt have a very high level of emotional intelligence/awareness/whatever you wanna call it, and he processes his feelings for gordon much like a fuckin kindergartner pulling their crush’s pigtails. benrey likes being mean, he likes being obnoxious, and he likes being condescending, that much is all true. but its all in service of one thing: getting a rise out of gordon, b/c he fucking likes the guy and likes having his attention, whether its positive or negative. (although judging from how much he goes out of his way to do silly shit to make gordon laugh, he really likes the positive stuff, too.)

(on a side note: its really, really funny how much more/harder gordon laughs at benreys jokes than anybody elses. he clearly likes benrey a lot, at least to an extent. like, whenever theyre underwater and theyre all going BBBBB, gordon only really laughs when benrey does it, and he only plays along and makes the noise himself when benrey does it. thats fucking cute, man)

its also worth pointing out that for all that benrey gets in gordons way and makes life difficult for him, hes also pretty protective of him and tries to be helpful in his own way. see: benrey stepping in to “protect” him from the other security guard at the very beginning, and leaping into action to shoot shit to protect gordon, and pulling him up from the ladder when gordons struggling to get out of fucking sewage, and attempting to help out with puzzles. he also gets jealous of other people being the target of gordons affection/attention, too. honestly benreys just really fuckin capricious, but at his core he does a lot of the shit he does b/c he really likes gordon. even if that manifests as him being a condescending asshole who does shit specifically to piss gordon off or scare the daylights out of him (b/c, at his core, he is also kind of a creep.)

he doesnt really seem to understand the consequences of his actions and the games he plays a lot of the time, either. at his core i dont think benrey wants to hurt gordon for reals - he sounds genuinely surprised and upset that the military was cutting off gordons hand. and he was probably Actually Unhappy to see gordon being in severe pain like that. thats not fun anymore, right, thats not playing the game that benrey wanted to play. my understanding is that he sold gordon out because he knows the part hes gotta play, right. somebodys supposed to be the “bad guy”. whether hes being pushed into it by gman or for whatever other reason. he just.......never anticipated that it would lead to that, i think. the entire science team was shocked at gordons hand getting cut off, too, and honestly theyre all culpable for what happened to gordon! they were all conspiring for one reason or another, whether deliberately or through being tricked into it

as like further justification for that idea, benrey intermittently forgets what the deal is with gordon missing his hand, like at the end of part 3 where he sounds genuinely worried about what happened to gordons arm. and he also doesnt really seem to “get” what the deal is with people being dead - stuff cant really hurt him, and he expresses surprise and confusion during part 4 when they keep running into dead scientists. probably all he really “gets” is that humans are supposed to have all their body parts, and theyre supposed to be, you know, alive and well, but his grasp on the concepts of severe bodily harm and death is.......loose at best. along with his grasp on “human concepts and needs” in general

and honestly during part 4 i get the vibe that benrey doesnt.......actually want them to get to the end. he doesnt want to have to be the big bad boss. he keeps trying to get them all to turn back and go back to black mesa proper. and hes really dialed up to 11 during this part, both in terms of being an obnoxious obstacle to gordons goals and in terms of doing as much as he can to be cute and nice and make gordon laugh. its really pointed IMO. like, the conflicting goals of thinking, “if i get in his way enough, hell give up and he wont go to xen and have to fight me” and also “maybe if im really nice to him and make him laugh a lot, hell listen to me and we wont have to fight”. hes really wringing the most that he can out of their interactions before they have to fight each other. unfortunately for benrey, that gives off some really mixed messages, and thats just not gonna work

theres also the bit during the final boss fight where gordon cant find the last passport, and benrey just so happens to pull one out and be like “oh nooo haha you mean this one? you better not shoot it and beat me”. which really hammers home the point that he doesnt necessarily want to be the big bad evil guy, and he doesnt really want to kill gordon. but he has to play the part he was given. all he really wants is to be friends, and also to suck gordon freemans dick. (why not both?)

but at the same time, i imagine that benreys really confused and unhappy by the mixed messages that gordon gives him, too. benrey sounds so like........genuinely sad and dejected after gordon gets mad at him during part 4 over the events of the past day, focused on benrey alone. benreys probably really stressed out by all of this. he just wanted to be gordons friend, but gordon keeps taking out all his anger on him. and gordons mad at him for killing people, but gordons killed a bunch of people too. he doesnt get why the rules are different for gordon or why the rules keep changing or why gordon keeps getting mad at him and then laughing at his jokes like it’s nothing. the whiplash is probably hard to deal with and might well contribute to him being like “you made me bad!”

anyway god that is. so much to read and isnt super organized. tl;dr benrey may be mean and obnoxious and outright malicious at times, but not b/c he hates gordon or actively wanted to severely hurt him/kill him. hes just kind of a fucking creep with an alien sense of morality and a poor grasp on how humans work

thanks 4 reading,