PLAYER INFORMATION

NAME: demi
AGE: 22
CONTACT: inb4circlejerk
CHARACTERS PLAYED: n/a
RESERVED? n/a

CHARACTER INFORMATION

NAME: Clarke Griffin
CANON: The 100
CANON POINT: 4x13, right after passing out from radiation exposure
AGE: 18

HISTORY: everything is toxic and the world is actively trying to kill them: a summary | i am become death, destroyer of worlds: an indept narrative about long lasting guilt and grippling ptsd by clarke griffin

PERSONALITY:

Clarke Griffin is a big ol' hot mess and that's all that needs to be known.



Once upon a time, on a space ship long since destroyed, she was one of the elite. Her mother was the senior chief in medical, her father was the Senior Environmental Engineer, her best friend was the son of the Chancellor... Life was alright; Clarke had a very comfortable childhood that nurtured her love for drawing and ancient soccer matches, was educated and allowed all the finer things in life — when life was utilitarian at best, mass execution at worst. She never really had to face the problems on board the Ark until life support started to fail and her father was put to death for wanting to warn people, and she was named an accomplice. That shattered the illusion pretty effectively. When all the juvenile delinquents were sent down to Earth as equal parts science experiment and death sentence, her previous social status initially caused contention — most of the 100 were lower down on the hierarchy and resented her very presence — but that didn't stop Clarke slipping right into the oversized shoes of her parents; preaching what was right or wrong or fair, and defining themselves as anything but grounders.

She clung to those lighthearted ideals for a while. But as the events of canon wore on —as people died and stress mounted on stress; as Clarke found herself in shitty morally challenging situation after shitty morally challenging situation — she evolved, and very much became product of her bloody, ruthless, futile environment. Just another day on the ground.



She has a very strong presence as a leader; slips into the roles of caring doctor, diplomatic mouthpiece, and war chief as needed. She almost instantly became part of a joint leadership with Bellamy Blake when they touched down on Earth and has since stayed pretty firmly in that position. They're complementary in their approach to dealing with problems: Clarke is the heart and high moral compass, preaching about what's right and what rules they should stick to, and Bellamy is the head, stubbornly sticking to his whatever means necessary mindset. As they change as people, these roles flip; her moral compass breaks under the strain of losing and killing people, and his sense of responsibility expands beyond just Octavia.

When she has to deal with the grounders and try to negotiate war terms and the like with them, even they recognize Clarke as a leader. The leader. She is the one they actively seek out because they recognize that she has a good head on her shoulders, and eventually even the adults in Arkadia realize that she is really in charge here. They sent her down to die and followed her down to follow her. Clarke has the charisma and self-assurance of a leader, has the character and the presence of someone people want to follow, but lacks good decision-making skills, and isn't quite worthy of Monty's praise when he uses What would Clarke do? as a guiding reference in times of high stress. But when hard choices need to be made, she can make them.

(It's just not always the right choice, and sometimes so damn ExtraTM, like calm down and think of the consequences of your actions before you shoot a president Clarke, you just got your mother spite-drilled for her marrow god damn.)

All that said, she's not exactly... good... at it. She continually burns bridges whilst trying to maintain the moral high ground, betrays her friends out of necessity, goes behind peoples backs to broker deals, and is ultimately just winging it. Clarke seems to mimic aspects of all the leaders she's known, from Jaha's willingness to sacrifice people for the greater good, to Lexa's "love is a weakness", to Dante Wallace's "...deliverance comes at a cost. I bear it so they don't have to." That ends up being a motto that sticks with her for the better part of two seasons, and the justification she uses to abandon her people and put herself in danger to save them. She's struggling, it's a heavy mantle and she openly acknowledges that sometimes she doesn't have any idea what she's doing: just the intense drive and desire to keep people alive. It's really hard to live up to peoples expectations of what a leader should be — how they should think, feel, act — and Clarke has not yet found a happy medium between all of the people she seems to draw inspiration from. Playing a whole separate person in times of conflict whilst simultaneously trying to take care of herself has fractured some of her closest relationships (Bellamy and Abby, Octavia seemingly irreparably, and Raven is a constant crapshoot after the whole Finn Collin's fiasco) and has also upheaved her sense of self: who even is Clarke Griffin anymore? Don't ask her, she doesn't know — and doesn't really like what she's become.



Lord help whoever stands in the way of Clarke Griffin and her people, their shit is about to get wrecked.

She'd kill for them. Has killed for them: 650 grounders and Mountain Men for her people, and allowed another 250 grounders to die in order to keep Bellamy Blake's presence in Mount Weather a secret so he could continue being a spy in their quest to free their people. She'd also die for them, and has numerous times offered herself up to enemies in exchange for her friends; has rallied armies, made precarious alliances, waged wars and jumped out of mountains for them, and would it all again. When her friends are in danger and Clarke is on a mission, there is very little that can stand in her way. She's stubborn and a bit of a bulldozer; borderline ruthless and not above reverting back to the "us vs. them mentality" that has her readily dropping anyone she views as a threat to her friends.

But when the situation allows for it, her protective streak extends past her own people as well. Clarke insists that all lives matter down on Earth, and probably rooted in the humanitarianism that led her to pursue a medical career to save peoples lives, does her best to preserve life when she can. Yes, she will kill if she has to, and if it comes down to her people vs. other people, she'll always side with her own. But if she could save them all, she would go out of her way to do so, like with Anya in Mount Weather when the two of them escaped. Clarke didn't need to save her (...yes she did, but didn't know she did when she initially busted her out of her cage), but she did it anyway. Though she's constantly an emotional wreck and holds grudges to the moon and back, if she sees someone in need she will always try her best to save them, even if her attempts prove futile.



Speaking of stubborn as hell, Clarke also happens to be an incredible survivor, adaptable to the worst situations imaginable. Sent to Earth to die but didn't? Hey guys, let's gather water. Stuck in an underground bunker with people who want to harvest her bone marrow? Jumps off a cliff to escape them. Faced with an AI intent on turning everyone into mindless drones? Hey, let's put two AI chips in my skull and figure this shit out from there. Most of her success in these situations is credited to determination, level-headed thinking and pure luck — and sometimes not so level-headed thinking and questionable decisions that leave people dead.



Clarke's smart. She can read people, can see through Bellamy's attempts to cause chaos to keep the Ark-bound people from following them down, can immediately tell that Finn is reckless, that Murphy is violent and dangerous, and that Mount Weather is dangerous. And oh how right she usually is, because Bellamy is stirring shit to save his own skin, Finn murders people on a whim, Murphy murders people out of vengeance and tries to hang Bellamy, and Mount Weather is trying to keep all the 100/48 locked in the mountain to use them as science experiments.

That said, she doesn't trust very easily.

She's very keen-eyed, and spots all the red flags in Mount Weather. The fact that there were no exits on the maps they were given, the fact they've not been given key cards (so she has to steal one, you go Clarke), the fact they weren't allowed outside to help look for their people... Clarke is so suspicious that at first she refuses to eat the food provided, then refuses to believe that one of the guards was shot with an arrow, not a gun. And while the likes of Monty and Jasper aren't quite ready to believe her suspicions and back them (they do eventually, because she was right), Clarke doesn't need their validation and acts upon her own instincts. Which are spot on, and she honestly should have shanked President Dante Wallace with the shoe heel she impulsively broke off and hid in her sleeve that first day, or when he tried to manipulate her with that "sometimes we feel so strongly about our people, we see things that aren't there" crap, playing on her suspicions and trying to also play on her love of her companions.

Likewise, Clarke doesn't really trust the Grounders. She holds somewhat of a grudge, though not to the extend of Charles Pike and his inability to differentiate between the ruthless Ice Nation and the rest of the clans. When Finn initially sets up a meeting to sue for peace, Clarke immediately turns around and finds Bellamy so she can tell him to follow them and: "Bring guns." Even when she's established a tentative trust with Lexa, and then somewhat of a relationship with her, she's cautious of all the rest of them to the point she tries to assassinate Queen Nia of Ice Nation because she threatens her agenda.

She's cautious, and sometimes outright sneaky when it comes to sating her curiosity or following her gut. She's not above going against Bellamy (sending Octavia out to find Lincoln and the cure for the biological warfare the Grounders implemented) or stealing (the key card from Maya on her first attempt to escape Mount Weather), hurting herself (reopen her arm wound to get back into medical in Mount Weather because she was suspicious about how they recovered from radiation burns so quickly), killing people (or trying to, re: Nia again), or trickery (oh hey Luna, you won't take the Flame? Alright cool, don't mind me, I'm not plotting to put it in your head anyway, that'd be rude).



Even if she doesn't always do the good thing, the right thing, or the smart thing, Clarke tries really, really hard. It's difficult to keep up with all the crap this delightful post apocalyptic world throws at them all, but she does her best.

She has a really nice character arc of thinking she's a good person and realizing that in times of war, there aren't any good people and everyone is just out to save themselves and the ones they care about. It's a hot button issue every time it's thrown in her face that she fails or has hurt people. Bellamy telling her it's a good thing she's not in charge because people die when she's in charge has her in tears, chipped!Raven asking her if she sees the faces of all the people she's killed and blindly accusing her of getting Lexa killed has her snapping and screaming at Raven/ALIE to shut up. She desperately just wants the people she cares about to be safe, and is viscerally effected every time they lose someone; struggles with the notion that she can't save anyone/everyone, and is constantly driven to more desperate feats to save lives. She doesn't hesitate to kill to protect, but feels the weight of that almost equally.



Her guilt over all the people she's lost and killed simultaneously drives her and destroys her. It all started with thinking she got her father killed and has just snowballed from there. Under "guilt complex" in the dictionary, you'll find her picture. She's never really allowed a respite in the face of losing people; always has about 0.004 seconds to cry and fall apart before she has to stitch herself back together and dealing with the next big problem. As a result, even when she's the most composed and trying her best to deal with things, Clarke is falling apart. With each bid for survival ending in death, the measures she takes to ensure the survival of herself and those she holds close grow more and more desperate, to the point of recklessness. The end of season three (her canon point) is sort of the tipping point, and all throughout season four we see Clarke doing heartless things in the name of the human species — write a practical list of everyone worth saving in Arkadia that doesn't include all of her friends, steeling herself to submit Emori to questionable scientific practices despite Murphy's pleading, steal a bunker and lock some of her friends outside because at least most of her people would survive the impending death wave.

The quickest way under her skin is to bring up Jake Griffin, Finn, Lexa, all the other people who have died at her hand or because of her fault, but depending on who is throwing her failures in her face, it's a roll of the dice if they'll be met with tears or angry screaming. Fun times.



In the end, Clarke only finds a sliver of absolution and peace when she makes the conscious decision to die for her friends; to stay on the ground, to fix the satellite dish, and to die in the Death Wave. But that's all the way at the end of season four, so she's several brash and irresponsible decisions away from that and still stuck in a pretty spectacular downward spiral.

She doesn't seem to have a healthy respect for her own life anymore, or a whole lot of concern for her personal safety. This can be viewed either as gross bravery (it takes some serious balls to walk into an enemy camp with only a small knife and disrupt their revenge) or blatantly not caring if she lived or died anymore (taking the Flame on a whim and trying to shut down the City of Light despite knowing she could be killed in her own mind). As her guilt complex grows, so does her recklessness.



If holding a grudge were a superpower, Clarke's would be game breaking.

She can still love people in spite of the wrongs they've done her: she still loves Finn despite the fact he killed innocent people in an attempt to find her, and still loves Lexa even after she abandoned her at Mount Weather and just saved her own people. She still loves and needs her mother even if she was directly responsible for her father's death, and Clarke is quick to absolve Abby after being tortured. She believes in second chances, maybe even third chances, but outside her immediate circle of friends those chances are limited or nonexistent.

The only person she doesn't really see as worthy of forgiveness ever is herself. She's trying very hard to forgive herself for all her mistakes, but hasn't so far, and fills that space with self-loathing whilst simultaneously trying to convince everyone around her that all the bad things they've done "...isn't you". She offers comfort to those who feel like the world is turning them ugly, just to turn around and be the biggest hypocrite by not offering herself that same absolution.



Clarke has this incredible talent where she backs herself into a desperate corner and only gives herself one way out of it. She's done a lot of terrible things in the name of saving people and justifies it as "the only choice" when really it was just the first course of action she thought would work and then stubbornly stuck to. From irradiating Mount Weather, to allowing a bomb to drop on TonDC without warning the people inside it, to going to the City of Light, and later (past canon point) injecting herself with Nightblood and taking her hazmat helmet off in the middle of the world's nuclear tantrum.

She claims to be doing the "right" thing a lot when it's really just her own interpretation of what's right; her game plans are always hastily planned and she's unwavering in her position on them after she's got one. Generally, it seems like she's continually taking the trips down disaster road, and when things don't work out like she'd hoped, she doesn't say "I'm wrong and a bad leader", more something along the line of "it was a tough choice but I had to make it".



Oh yeah, she's gained a reputation for killing a lot of people and seems to hate it. But damn if she's not going to use every bit of status curried with the grounders to assert her dominance. #Wanheda



At the heart of her, buried deep down under layers of crap, there are a few important people in Clarke's life that really drive and define her.

Let's go chronologically and start with her mother. While she and Abby seem to have mended bridges after the revelation that Abby got Jake killed, Clarke doesn't seem to ever be able to relate to her the same way she had before she'd known the truth. There's an odd lack of respect for authority in Clarke after she learned that, but while she steadfastly tells her mother to get out of her way when she needs to make a decision, and Clarke flip-flops between shaking off her mother's attempts at comforting her and craving a quality hug, but they still love each other in the end. She'll always be her mom. They're very similar in their stubborn streaks, and how they're ready to let their loved ones die (Abby had Jake floated, Clarke didn't give up information to ALIE even when ALIE made Abby get up on a box and hang herself).

Next comes Finn Collins. The two had a fling just ten days after being Earth bound, and both Clarke and Finn get a little too invested in it. After she finds out that he has a girlfriend, she tries to be very diplomatic about the whole ordeal and put some distance between the two of them romantically, but they're like magnets and always end up together on some mission or another. And while Clarke puts kissing and gross stuff like that off the table, she still cries for him when he's wounded or running off into danger, or being dragged away by Grounders. She still obviously cares about him.

Though there's some serious wrenches thrown in the spokes when she escapes from Mount Weather, goes looking for Finn and finds him massacring and entire village on the pretext of finding her. He killed 13 people in the camp, and one more in cold blood after they (Bellamy, Murphy, Finn, etc) had questioned him on the whereabouts of the rest of the 100, and Clarke can't forgive mindless violence. She can't even look at him, and refuses to talk to him for a bit; definitely refuses to tell him that she loves him. But when the Grounders insist that the only alliance they can form is one that begins with Finn's dead body, she is ready to start World War 4 to protect him, and ready to sacrifice herself in his stead because he did those atrocious things "for me". The Commander says no, however; says that "now he shall die for you".

And when all of her attempts to save his life fail, Clarke takes it. Stabs him out of mercy so he can't be tortured, holds and kisses him until he dies, and makes a point to tell him that she loves him and forgives him (even if she probably doesn't entirely) before he dies. (Then she starts seeing his ghost, how's that for dramatic.)

Then we have Lexa! Her second great love — though a contentious one at times, they go from "You bitch, I'll kill you" to "I loved her" in like, seven episodes — the leader she tries to be, someone who challenged her and isn't always right, but opened new ideals for Clarke to explore in regards to the accepted ruthlessness of leadership while Clarke also forces Lexa to consider that kindness, caring, and mercy can be signs of strength as well; someone she genuinely admires for all her strength. They see a part of themselves in one another, and both feel the burden of being in power, someone their people look to.

Lexa is yet another person she cared deeply for that she then indirectly caused the death of. This hurt is a new hurt, and one that Clarke still feels viscerally. After Lexa's death, she agrees to become the Flamekeeper and carry the AI chip that had been Lexa's commander mantle to safety; Clarke develops a highly sentimental attachment to the Flame, cries when Jasper is about to destroy it because "it's Lexa!". And while she gets a chance to say goodbye and I love you before hitting the kill switch in the City of Light, I'm taking her from before all that for ample in-game pain.

Can't talk about Clarke without touching Bellamy Blake with endgame ideals ...But real talk, he is the yang to her yin. They're co-leaders, and rely on each other a lot, and compliment each others strengths and weaknesses. Where her ability to trust runs thin, and while she may not have trusted or liked him much initially, she trusts Bellamy completely; trusts him to have her back, trusts him to be harsh where she'd much rather be kind, and kind when she feels the need to be dangerous. They challenge each other, butt heads, and argue, but can concede when they know the other is right, and can comfort when the other is wounded. Clarke recognizes that Bellamy is the inspiration that the (their) people need, and Bellamy recognizes that Clarke is the logic and the peacekeeper, and sometimes the driving force of destruction that they need; that they've each got so much more to offer the 100 than gun skills and medical prowess.

They help each other out. Bellamy helps Clarke mend the bridge with her mother by making the two of them talk, Clarke talks Bellamy down from running away because he's scared of Jaha. Clarke tells Bellamy that he's not a monster, kills Atom out of mercy because Bellamy can't, and Bellamy pulls her out of a pit of spikes when he'd much rather drop her, and later puts his unarmed self between Clarke and a slew of angry Grounders. When she's strapping in to go to the City of Light and scared, he's the one that holds her hand. When Roan has him on his back with a sword to his throat, she outright begs for his life. Where they first couldn't stand each other and only cooperated out of necessity, now they hug. Now they lean on each other, care for each other, and can't quite function in a leadership capacity without the other.

POWERS/ABILITIES:

» arker Everyone born on the Ark was genetically engineered to be a universal donor. They were also all born in space and exposed to the radiation that came with living in a spaceship circulating the wasteland that is planet Earth. As a result, all the Sky People can metabolize higher amounts of radiation than a normal human.
» earth skills They had classes on the Ark about surviving on the ground, and the best kind of practical exam is dumping a bunch of kids on a radioactive planet and wishing them good luck, right? Between hunting, foraging, war waging, horseback riding, water collection, finding shelter, camouflaging herself, starting cook fires, and not eating anything poisonous for fun, Clarke would ace that survivalist class.
» gunplei Thanks to some crappy shooting lessons from the one and only Bellamy Blake, she's got a decent handle on gunmanship. And can very much hold her own in a fight, despite being more inclined to talk it out instead of immediately start punching people.
» natblida So the world was ending and Clarke was pretty desperate to find a cure to intolerable levels of radiation. She recently injected herself with the synthesized bone marrow of a Nightblood, a descendent of the first Commander, Becca. Nightblood is just like any other blood, except it is jet black and somehow prevents you from outright dying when exposed to radiation? I dunno man, it's probably magic.
» medical training Clarke did an internship under her mother while on board the Ark, which went on for an unspecified amount of time, but left her quite capable. She can do everything from basic sprained ankle tests, to removing knives from peoples rib cages, to relieving blood buildup from internal bleeding, to curing infections with some seaweed tea, to deciding who's not going to make it and putting them out of their misery.
» well read, knowledgable Clarke is intelligent; a self taught map reader and a quoter of Oppenheimer. She's one of the privileged and was accorded a quality education on board the Ark, and while she may not have the skills Raven and Monty possess when it comes to technology and engineering, she's a quick study and good at inferring things.
» oil pastel maps of escape routes She draws pretty things.
» what you did will haunt you until the end of your days aka Clarke Griffin's Massive Guilt Complex, aka I see dead people. Jokes, that's not an ability, that's just a side effect of her PTSD.

SAMPLES: Prose | Brackets (both samples set in my other game, station72 )

ANYTHING ELSE? I'd like her to arrive in-game only partially healed from the radiation burns she sustained right before passing out. So while she won't be all gross and blistered as in that gif, it'll probably look like she's got a pretty red rash all over her face and she'll feel pretty sick, but otherwise will be fine!