#kiswar murad

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“Ladies, I’m begging you, rethink your life choices,” the game - OC CHARACTER ASSIGNMENTS!

Thank you to @adelaidedrubman for tagging me to take this test for some OCs and share five Choices™ from the top 20! This was one of the most interesting things I’ve done writing-wise in a while.

Tagging: @henbased (do Brit you coward) @strafethesesinners @deputy-morgan-malone @derelictheretic @shallow-gravy @florbelles @poetikat

Nora Kingston (Far Cry 5)

1. Inspector Kido, The Man in the High Castle

2. Ash, Alien

3. Mr. Saito, Inception

4. Ava, Ex Machina

5. Theresa Cullen, Westworld

Faith Escajeda (Far Cry 5)

1. Snow White, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves

2. Ted Lasso, Ted Lasso

3. Charles Bingley, Pride and Prejudice

4. Phil Dunphy, Modern Family

5. Maid Marian, Robin Hood

Margaret Vaughn (Far Cry 5)

1. Will Hunting, Good Will Hunting

2. Cypher, The Matrix

3. Nick Dunne, Gone Girl

4. Rachel Garrison, Ozark

5. Ryan Howard, The Office

Kiswar Abdel Murad (Metal Gear Rising)

1. Russel “Stringer” Bell, The Wire

2. Dr. Wendy Carr, Mindhunter

3. Blondie, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

4. Melinda Warner, Law & Order: SVU

5. Cedric Daniels, The Wire

Yuko Nishikiyama (Yakuza)

1. Norman Bates, Psycho

2. Will Graham, Hannibal

3. Beast, Beauty and the Beast

4. Rust Cohle, True Detective

5. Leland Palmer, Twin Peaks

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OC SONG ASSOCIATIONS, BABEY!

Thank you to @strafethesesinners and @adelaidedrubman, who certainly knew what they were getting into when they tagged me in this.

Tagging: @henbased @smithandrogers @amistrio @shallow-gravy @florbelles @cranky-kyrati @broken-balance-baby @snake-in-the-garden @smithandrogers @aceghosts @derelictheretic @purplehairsecretlair

Faith Marisol Escajeda, Far Cry 5 - I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl, Nina Simone

This one's pretty lighthearted, relative to the rest of the list. I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl is about an intense desire to experience the pleasures of life; which is, on the surface, a very trivial thing to be losing sleep over. But there's more to it than that, a level of genuine emotional distress which cuts the impact of the whimsical, homely lyrics - "I want a little sugar in my bowl / I want a little sweetness down in my soul / I could stand some lovin', oh so bad / I feel so funny, I feel so sad."

Faith is defined largely by her desire to escape cycles of suffering, and the way the social mores of her time encourage her to rely on men to do that. She would've just been coming of age when the song was released in 1989, just losing Joseph after he aged out of foster care before her, and just beginning to learn how to navigate her adult, professional, and romantic lives.

The chorus in particular eludes to a lot of the mentalities she adopts in this process, like her attempts to rely on the moral certainty of traditional religious values and the way those attempts are often thwarted by the reality of the environment of constant struggle she's in, her desire to be a fully autonomous woman and the way that contradicts her desire for the support and normalcy of a relationship - "I want a little steam on my clothes / Maybe I could fix things up so they'll go / What's the matter daddy? Come on, save my soul / I need some sugar in my bowl." The switch from "I want" in the first verse to "I need" in the second emphasizes the true emotional significance of these desires very well.

Caroline Seed / Margaret “Maggie” Vaughn, Far Cry 5 - When the Night is Over, Lord Huron

I’m trying to stick to songs I haven’t touched on for these OCs before, but I think this one's relevance to Meg's story warrants closer examination. When the Night is Over is a slow moving, mournful ballad which follows a singer searching in the night for the love his life, who has disappeared. Listening to the lyrics, it's easy to come to the conclusion that this person's lover is dead, and that this is an examination of the tole grief has taken on their mind.

Meg was raised in the south, and meant to spend her life there. She came to Hope County when she was 23 to attend the funeral of her fiancé Devon, a former soldier who committed suicide. His family, partially to get to know their estranged/late son's would-be wife and partially out of guilt for not taking better care of him, offered her financial support, which Meg used to establish herself permanently in HC - a stranger in a strange land where she never meant to live, connected to it only by the memory of a loved one who killed himself. Devon's distance from his homeland and family render the County a physically representative of a side of her lover that Meg never knew. Every moment she spends entrenching herself in this community and it's culture, she uncovers another reason for why Devon was who he was, another chunk of the past he ran from, and how she may have failed him. (And, of course, she gets to know the people she eventually figures out are her biological family, and comes to realize why she is the way she is. Fun!)

The emotional processes Meg goes through, in both the game and the events leading up to it, are closely mirrored in the emotional process of the distressed singer in When the Night is Over. You can easily imagine her wandering around in a haze one cold night, going through these very motions, seeing apparitions (literal or metaphorical) of her lover everywhere which cause her to doubt her own sanity - "In every window I pass, Your reflection in the glass, Makes me wonder if my mind is going / Shadows shifting in the rain, Slowly driving me insane."

Even though the singer in WTNIO never outright acknowledges that the lover he's searching for is dead, he refers to their relationship in the past tense - "By the stars above, I know we were in love." You could compare that to Margaret's difficulty processing her feelings over Devon's death juxtaposed against how thoroughly everything in Hope County is connected to him. The singer’s consistent personification of the physical environment as his lover contributes to this reading as well, while his repeated mentions of "an emerald in the sky" make reference to the manner in which Devon's death guided her, North Star-like, to the place where she would eventually discover her birth family. The singer goes back and forth between asserting that this search must end when the evening does and wondering if he'll actually find his missing love at sunrise - "I have only 'til the night is over" / "Will I find you when the night is over?" / "When the night is done, you'll vanish in the sun / Will I hold you when the night is over?" It's emblematic of the mixed feelings Meg has about Devon's significance in Hope County; learning more about him feels almost like having him back in a certain way, but it also causes her to reconsider the relationship they had in life. Sometimes, she just wishes they never met, a shameful thought to say the least.

Midway through the song, there's a long breakdown which leads to the singer seeming to begin to realize that they're never going to find this person; "Now the trail has gone cold, I don't know where else to go, And my time, I fear, is nearly over." / "Am I lost inside my mind? There's an emerald in the sky." But by the end of the song, they're right back where they were in the beginning, reiterating how little time they have, that they must keep going. The final line is another repetition of "I have only 'til the night is over." The point of the song isn't development, it's just to offer a brief view into the experiences of a person dealing with grief that their psyche can't cope with.

Margaret changes in the campaign against the cult, but not for the better. Her circumstances just don’t allow for it. For every step she takes forward in processing the loss of her fiancé, she takes two steps back due to the torture inflicted on her by the Seed family - the family that is revealed to be hers, in the end. What a gut punch. Keeping in mind Meg's final transformation into The Judge, When The Night is Over 's purpose of briefly exploring a person's grief and suffering without seeking to improve on it connects with her negative arc excellently.

Nora Jean Kingston, Far Cry 5 / Various - I’ll Stay, Funkadelic

I sort of surprised myself with this one, since until today I’ll Stay wasn’t even featured on Nora’s character playlist. I'll Stay is literally about awaiting the return of an emotionally erratic lover, going through one of the bad moods which offset their euphoric good ones. Figuratively, it's about accepting unwarranted hardship gracefully for the purpose of an unspoken future reward - "I'll stay, For she'll be coming back / You know her head went out to play, She'll get over that / I know that my reward, When she returns Woo-woo! / Keeps me hanging on, I'll stay."

In essence, it's a love song, which eludes to the way Nora's loved ones help set her on the paths she chooses to follow - her parents (unintentionally) drove her to alcoholism and self-destruction, her grandfather to self improvement and proactivity, Burke and Grace to police service and militarism. But considering the underlying theme of the addiction-like cycle of toxic situations, the justifications people use to keep themselves in those positions, and the resigned, almost hypnotic rhythm maintained throughout, when asking the question "what song provides the best ambiance for a narrative about a person directed by their misguided faith in a lot of awful belief systems," no better answer comes to mind.

Evelyn Seed, Far Cry 5 - Delilah, Tom Jones/Amigo the Devil

Evelyn wasn't originally going to be on this list, but since I just brought her up for the first time, now's as good a time as any to talk about her. Tom Jones' version of Delilah was released in 1968, right around the time Evelyn would've been marrying Josiah Seed. It's an operatic power ballad told from the POV of a man who murdered his girlfriend after she unrepentantly cheated on him. The narrator is essentially screaming, his performance so intense and over-enunciated that if he were talking about anything else, it could almost be funny.

It's comparable to one of the seemingly random bouts of rage people in long term abusive relationships sometimes exhibit, the swallowed resentments and embittered fantasies. Evelyn is a talented appeaser of volatile men, but she's pretty damn histrionic in private. She loves the music of her time, the outlet it provides for feelings she has no release for in the real world - outside of taking them out on her sons, which is emotionally taxing in its own way. You can easily picture this record being apart of her secret collection. The way the narrator describes himself as a victim of Delilah only to end by apologizing to her for the murder is also reflective of Evelyn's mindset in the late stages of her marriage. Her acknowledgement of the horrors Josiah has subjected their family to exists in conflict with the grief she feels over the fact that all that love they had for each other failed to culminate in anything but the two of them both devolving into domestic monsters - “I could see that girl was no good for me, I was lost like a slave that no man could free" VS "Forgive me Delilah, I just couldn't take anymore."

The chorus in which the murder takes place is repeated once, and the only break in sound comes after the line describing it - "I felt that knife in my hand, and she laughed no more” - even though the lyric itself is told in exactly the same way the rest of the lyrics are, like it doesn't hold the weight such a crime should. That's symbolic of a lot of things; slow building anger which culminates in outbursts of physical violence, the normalization of abusive habits because "that's just what they do," the ego death living with that treatment causes and the horrible things people do to salve that wound.

Amigo the Devil's cover is, tonally, the original's polar opposite. Some of the songs in the album it was a part of were recorded outside on a summer night, a setting choice which is very Southern in nature, reminiscent of the habit Evelyn develops of spending time in the swampy area surrounding the Seed family home after her domestic life takes a turn for the worst. The only instrument in AtD's Delilah is an untuned banjo, a choice which creates an intimate, workaday atmosphere which is itself evocative of the impoverished Seed family. The disparity in Evelyn's feelings for her husband mentioned earlier is also reflected in Amigo the Devil's more emotionally varied delivery of one of the choruses: a judgmental "My, my, my, Delilah!" followed by a depressed "Why, why, why, Delilah." The cover's consistent moroseness injects the apology at the end with more genuine remorse than the original, which I think is just as suitable for Evelyn’s story as the old-fashioned version.

Evelyn is not at all a good person, but she's also not an evil demon who chewed her way out of Satan's womb with the express purpose of growing up to abuse little boys, yes? People don't become this way overnight. My first choice was another of Amigo the Devil's songs, Perfect Wife, but that story's exclusively about a woman who murders her abusive husband, and there's a lot more to Evelyn's role in the family than that. Delilah connects Evelyn to both the murderer and the murdered - it's her as a victim of Josiah and as the torturer of their children, and all the types of misery that come along with being those things, underlaid with the lingering remnants of their warped bond as Christian husband and wife.

Kiswar Abdel Murad, Metal Gear Rising - Fu Gee La, Fugees

The opening line of Fu Gee La makes reference to digital electronics, and the proceeding line - “In the battle lost my finger / mic became my arm” - is extremely on the nose for the seven-and-a-half-fingered Kiswar. It was released in 1996, right around the time she would’ve been coming of age in the United States, so it easily could’ve been on one of her own playlists, and the name of the group and song both derive from the word “refugee.”

The hazy, repetitive echo of the background track and the creepy closing lines of the first verse contributes to an almost hallucination-like atmosphere, which is more than fitting for a passion-oriented, morally vacuous bioengineer like her. One of those lines in particular - "Nobody's shootin', my body's made of hand grenade / Girl bled to death while she was tongue kissin' a razor blade" - can be taken both as a literal reference to her job as a designer of weaponized cyborg bodies and as a metaphorical wink to the way her obsessive dedication to her work has hollowed her out emotionally and ethically. She also sleeps with some of the weaponized cyborg bodies she creates, if you wanna interpret "tongue-kissin' a razor blade" in that way.

The overarching narrative of the song itself revolves largely around the conflict between the black-nationalist Rastafarian movement and the imperialistic western society that the writers find themselves in as immigrants of the Caribbean diaspora in the east coast- New Jerusalem VS New Jersey, in a sense. My understanding of the Lebanese Civil War is that it was in large part a conflict over whether or not Lebanon should join the United Arab Republic or remain an independent nation. Regardless of where Kiswar's loyalties once lied, (I'm sorry if that sentence is insensitive, I'm new to learning about this) Fu Gee La, in this way, connects Kiswar to the grit and gravel of her birthplace, bringing her character back to the war that influenced her so much before she tried to transcend ideology into a being of pure, commoditized violence. Like that one Reductress headline, "How To Show People You're More Than Your Unethical Career Choice."