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Sep. 19th, 2015 10:48 amUser Name/Nick: Steph
User DW:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
knights_say_nihAIM/IM: UndrwO, and on plurk
E-mail: underwater.owl@gmail.com
Other Characters: Ricki Tarrrickitikitarr, Furiosa witness_this, and Quentin Coldwater magician_king
Character Name: Alfie Solomons
Series: Peaky Blinders
Age: 40-ish
From When?: Post-canon. Alfie survives up to current (season 2) of Peaky Blinders, so this will be a fictionalized assault in the street, he will presume by members of an enemy gang but will not be aware who; most likely candidate will be Darby Sabini.
Inmate: Alfie is a menacing, violent character, the duplicitous leader of the Jewish gang that controls Camden Town and parts of London. He orders murders, sets up men for betrayal, and is not above committing senseless violence to make a statement. He is what one might call one of the farther gone inmates. However, as horrible as all this is, he's one of those interestingly compelling characters who is semi-redeemed by his sense of humour, and by coming around to the side of the good (sort of) in the end. Being in an environment where he is not in charge of anyone will be good for him, and working with a warden to break him of his most reputation-oriented violence will do him a world of good. He's the kind of inmate who will never leave a life of crime, exactly, but could be persuaded to develop a moral code about it.
Abilities/Powers: Baseline human. Strong, and nasty in a fight, but nothing special to see here.
Personality:
Alfie Solomons is the temperamental, dangerous, aggressive leader of one of the main gangs in the television show Peaky Blinders. Alfie runs the Jewish gang, out of the 'Aerated Bread Company of Camden Town,' which is a front for an illegal rum distillery, smuggling operation and protection agency. He is a smart, but temperamental, prideful man, with a real black streak in him.
One of the defining aspect of Alfie's character is his volatility. He has a temper on him. When something happens that makes him angry, he yells. When someone disobeys or frustrates him, he puts a gun in their face, or hits them. He slaps his underlings when they behave poorly. He enters into the story because he is losing a war, and it's revealed that this is because he has a pathological mistrust of police officers and won't bribe them, like the other gangsters in the city will. When sat down to discuss this situation, Alfie launches on a soft spoken but graphically violent tirade, complete with racial epithets, ending along the lines of 'don't sit there in my fucking chair and tell me I'm losing my war.
Interestingly, while he has a bit of a habit of grandstanding, he has very little tolerance of the habit in others. Alfie frequently admonishes other gangsters to get to the point- 'you want to sell me something. What?'/'Look mate, I genuinely want to hear you.' It's a powerfully controlling behaviour, subtly belittling others for wanting to make an impression, gaining him back control of the situation.
Another defining characteristic of Alfie's personality is his pride. Part of that is disliking being called weak. Being told his approach needs changing, he doesn't take particularly gracefully. Nor does he handle it well when people jockey for power with him. He also, despite his willingness to dispense vile language in kind, reacts very badly to the anti-semitic language used by other gangsters. The fact that Jewish bookies are excluded from the Epsom races is, according to him, 'the big fuck-off elephant in the room,' and it isn't just a territoriality issue, either.
Being a member of the Jewish community in London at that point in history was a very fraught thing, and it shows in the television show. Alfie negotiates a complicated relationship with his own faith, community and criminality. For background, the show takes place in the years following World War One, a period where there was a lot of local backlash against the Jewish community for the apparent 'profiteering' of merchants who became rich supplying the army or taking contracts to produce uniforms. There was also a great deal of historical revisionism, saying that volunteerism in the Jewish community had been low, when in fact it was higher per capita there than in the rest of the population. Alfie admits to having fought in the trenches, but now lives in the criminal underground of a world that is very intent on erasing that service.
Alfie speaks openly about the persecution of his people (his words) and bars all of the non-Jewish members of Tommy's gang, who have been subcontracted to him for a few episodes, from ever laying a hand on a Jewish woman. Many of the gang members wear yarmulkes, as does Alfie (though only periodically.) He also sometimes wears a tallit katan, a surprising contrast to the gang tattoos (a pair of crowns) he has on both hands.
For all that Alfie defends his faith, he also isn't above using it to wrongfoot an enemy or to make a statement. He stages a traditional seder dinner, and uses a biblical lesson about the history of Egypt time with the slaughter of the passover goat as a timely (and terrifying) way to take out his enemies.
He is a big believer in the making of statements in general. In one scene of the show, one of his new employees breaks one of the cardinal rules of the bread company (which makes rum- always referred to as bread) by referencing, even indirectly, the 'bread' as alcohol. Alfie shuffles up to him, looks him dead in the eye from three inches away, then in a flurry of violence hits the man next to him hard enough that he crumples, unconscious. To the jokester, he says 'He'll wake up. Granted, he won't have any teeth left, but he'll be a wiser man for it. And the last thing he'll remember is your funny little joke.' It's incredibly sinister, and a surefire effective way of making sure no one takes that rule lightly ever again.
Honestly, he is one of those characters who is technically pretty awful, but who wins audience approval (and more to the point, the reluctant and begrudging interest and respect of his peers) through sadistic charisma. Part of that is his sense of humour. With a keen wit, a penchant for absurdism, and a horrifyingly macabre streak, you get the sense that Alfie always has a snicker hidden in the corner of his mouth, even if everyone around him is a little too afraid to join in. He gives a new business associate deliberately terrible rum, them laughs at them when they politely say that it's not bad, knowing they'll be intimidated into lying. He can verge into being mean spirited about it, but he can also really engage in banter, even (particularly?) with his enemies.
Barge Reactions: Alfie will react to the barge... well, likely violently. He's probably going to be a 'problem' inmate, and will have no qualms about leaving a swathe of carnage behind him the first few weeks he's here. He's likely to try to pick feuds, will probably create/steal weapons, and will be ambivalent to a lot of the wondrous aspects of the barge- magic will give him pause, but will be more of an obstacle to getting his way than it will something to actually worry about.
Path to Redemption: To redeem Alfie Solomons will require his exhaustion, and his respect. He's likely to tip only after something involving his warden, or someone he kind of likes, that is high stakes and horrible. Good, pro-social bonding and healthy relationships will be an excellent first step- despite the carnage, if anyone has the stomach.
I'm struggling to put the precise path into words, because whatever it is that turns him, it is likely to be something of a fluke, a product of the weirdness and emotional intensity that the barge has to offer. Alfie needs something to convince him to come back from his real problems (namely the violence, and violence directed in the name of power, status, and image against comparatively uninvolved individuals.) He has years of warped bitterness to recover from- and while he does have it in him to gradually recover, it'll take some weirdness, and some good people, and a goodly amount of time.
History: Alfie Solomons is a minor character in the television show Peaky Blinders. He appears in season two, when Tommy Shelby expands his business to London. Tommy is aware that there is a war going on between the Jewish and Italian gangsters in the city, and that the Jewish side is being beaten, partially because of Alfie's horrific mistrust of police officers, and refusal to work with them or bribe them. Alfie's organization has two stated streams of income; he operates the 'Bread Company of Camden Town,' where his 'bakers' produce white and dark rum for local sale, and he offers protection to bookies at the local races.
The head of the Italian gang, Sabini, has been chasing Alfie's bookies off the race courses, and has been closing premises that serve his rum. Because of this, his protection racket is evaporating; people know that they cannot trust him any more. Tommy comes in to lend Alfie muscle, and to offer him a new relationship with the police, who know him to be a reliable person to look to for a bribe, as opposed to the Solomons crew.
The alliance is fraught to begin with. Alfie knows that Tommy betrayed the last gangster he made a pact like this with, and is none too fond of the way the Peaky Blinders sweep into the city ("Yeah they're out of fucking control mate, they come down the canal, they spread like the fucking clap."); in his view, Tommy was working for him, and he's not too pleased to discover he has opened Pandora's box.
Sabini, who is in a fit of rage at Tommy for largely unrelated reasons, contacts Alfie to begin peace talks. They discuss the situation, and it's decided that Shelby needs to be betrayed and sent packing, in return for which Alfie's bookies will be let back onto the race courses, and the assaults against his businesses will stop.
Alfie's betrayal of Tommy is pretty spectacular. He Arthur Shelby and a few other key Shelby officers over for Seder, and then explains Passover to them and the history behind the sacrifice of the Passover goat, only in the middle of a story about the Jews being persecuted and enslaved in Egypt, the moment the goat's throat is cut, Alfie goes full on Red Wedding on them, leaving their chief Lieutenant dead, their men casually disposed of, and Arthur Shelby unconscious and framed for murder. It's pretty horrific.
Fortunately for Tommy, Sabini fails to keep his word, and continues to bar the Jewish bookies from entering the most prestigious racetracks. Livid, Alfie reallies himself with Tommy, putting his force behind the Peaky Blinders and allowing him to retake Epsom.
In that reshuffling, Alfie makes an attempt to take over Tommy's export business in the resulting power struggle. They enter into bitter negotiations, with Alfie threatening to shoot Tommy in the face if he doesn't sign the business over, and Tommy producing a grenade pin and announcing that if he doesn't walk out of the office alive within the next ten minutes the whole building will be blown up by the secretly planted grenade, which is now on a wire, controlled by an anarchist waiting for him at the doors. They negotiate down to 35% of Tommy's business going to Alfie, spit in their palms and shake, and part with a grim but apparently mutual respect.
Sample Journal Entry:
Well now. Well.
[Alfie murmurs, with his hoarse voice, a nearly incomprehensible mumble in a thick accent, to boot.]
Well, as I see it, yeah, this is the part where I make a speech, right? That's how it goes. All the big fishes from their little [Camden is so thick in him the word is li-oh] ponds swimmin' in here, into the see, biting one another with their little fishy teeth;
[teef]
Well, yeah, let's give it a miss then? We all know the script. We'll say I was bold. We'll say you was knowing, were jaded, put me good and proper in my place, you make sure I know I'm no different than a hundred men who've come before. And we're gonna skip right to the part where if you want to find me, you will fucking find me.
[His thumb scratches along the ragged scar on his jaw, the break in the cut of his beard.]
I think that's fair.
Sample RP:
Alfie picks up a kitchen shift. He teaches the shift supervisors what's involved in keeping kosher. A lot of it is repeating himself, finding a place to tuck the dishes, and a huffy insistence on being involved in the prep. No one really knows what to do about the fact that he keeps trying to make off with the paring knives. It's only after the third time they catch him walking away with one (this time with part of the handle broken off and the blade smuggled inside his hat) that someone finally gives in to his exasperated admonition to 'just fucking fire me already, I'll actually eat anything, mate.'
He nicks bits of small metal wherever he can get his hands on them to load them into the toes of an old sock for a kosh. He's also informally banned from the greenhouse, on account of persistently making off with the small stones and pebbles incorporated into the decorative ponds.
Alfie doesn't mind. Gets to be, virtually every single sock he owns has been first weaponized and then confiscated. He can be found sitting out on the deck most days, unrepentantly wearing the fuzzy slippers that someone opted to send him when he complained about his shoes giving his bare feet blisters, peering down his nose through the pince-nez glasses at pen and paper.
"Crosswords don't make any fucking sense any longer, mate," he'll answer, if asked, "none of the clues scan. But this sudoku thing, yeah?"
Half rhetorical question, half mumbly approval.
Special Notes: None
User DW:
knights_say_nihAIM/IM: UndrwO, and on plurkE-mail: underwater.owl@gmail.com
Other Characters: Ricki Tarr
rickitikitarr, Furiosa witness_this, and Quentin Coldwater magician_kingCharacter Name: Alfie Solomons
Series: Peaky Blinders
Age: 40-ish
From When?: Post-canon. Alfie survives up to current (season 2) of Peaky Blinders, so this will be a fictionalized assault in the street, he will presume by members of an enemy gang but will not be aware who; most likely candidate will be Darby Sabini.
Inmate: Alfie is a menacing, violent character, the duplicitous leader of the Jewish gang that controls Camden Town and parts of London. He orders murders, sets up men for betrayal, and is not above committing senseless violence to make a statement. He is what one might call one of the farther gone inmates. However, as horrible as all this is, he's one of those interestingly compelling characters who is semi-redeemed by his sense of humour, and by coming around to the side of the good (sort of) in the end. Being in an environment where he is not in charge of anyone will be good for him, and working with a warden to break him of his most reputation-oriented violence will do him a world of good. He's the kind of inmate who will never leave a life of crime, exactly, but could be persuaded to develop a moral code about it.
Abilities/Powers: Baseline human. Strong, and nasty in a fight, but nothing special to see here.
Personality:
Alfie Solomons is the temperamental, dangerous, aggressive leader of one of the main gangs in the television show Peaky Blinders. Alfie runs the Jewish gang, out of the 'Aerated Bread Company of Camden Town,' which is a front for an illegal rum distillery, smuggling operation and protection agency. He is a smart, but temperamental, prideful man, with a real black streak in him.
One of the defining aspect of Alfie's character is his volatility. He has a temper on him. When something happens that makes him angry, he yells. When someone disobeys or frustrates him, he puts a gun in their face, or hits them. He slaps his underlings when they behave poorly. He enters into the story because he is losing a war, and it's revealed that this is because he has a pathological mistrust of police officers and won't bribe them, like the other gangsters in the city will. When sat down to discuss this situation, Alfie launches on a soft spoken but graphically violent tirade, complete with racial epithets, ending along the lines of 'don't sit there in my fucking chair and tell me I'm losing my war.
Interestingly, while he has a bit of a habit of grandstanding, he has very little tolerance of the habit in others. Alfie frequently admonishes other gangsters to get to the point- 'you want to sell me something. What?'/'Look mate, I genuinely want to hear you.' It's a powerfully controlling behaviour, subtly belittling others for wanting to make an impression, gaining him back control of the situation.
Another defining characteristic of Alfie's personality is his pride. Part of that is disliking being called weak. Being told his approach needs changing, he doesn't take particularly gracefully. Nor does he handle it well when people jockey for power with him. He also, despite his willingness to dispense vile language in kind, reacts very badly to the anti-semitic language used by other gangsters. The fact that Jewish bookies are excluded from the Epsom races is, according to him, 'the big fuck-off elephant in the room,' and it isn't just a territoriality issue, either.
Being a member of the Jewish community in London at that point in history was a very fraught thing, and it shows in the television show. Alfie negotiates a complicated relationship with his own faith, community and criminality. For background, the show takes place in the years following World War One, a period where there was a lot of local backlash against the Jewish community for the apparent 'profiteering' of merchants who became rich supplying the army or taking contracts to produce uniforms. There was also a great deal of historical revisionism, saying that volunteerism in the Jewish community had been low, when in fact it was higher per capita there than in the rest of the population. Alfie admits to having fought in the trenches, but now lives in the criminal underground of a world that is very intent on erasing that service.
Alfie speaks openly about the persecution of his people (his words) and bars all of the non-Jewish members of Tommy's gang, who have been subcontracted to him for a few episodes, from ever laying a hand on a Jewish woman. Many of the gang members wear yarmulkes, as does Alfie (though only periodically.) He also sometimes wears a tallit katan, a surprising contrast to the gang tattoos (a pair of crowns) he has on both hands.
For all that Alfie defends his faith, he also isn't above using it to wrongfoot an enemy or to make a statement. He stages a traditional seder dinner, and uses a biblical lesson about the history of Egypt time with the slaughter of the passover goat as a timely (and terrifying) way to take out his enemies.
He is a big believer in the making of statements in general. In one scene of the show, one of his new employees breaks one of the cardinal rules of the bread company (which makes rum- always referred to as bread) by referencing, even indirectly, the 'bread' as alcohol. Alfie shuffles up to him, looks him dead in the eye from three inches away, then in a flurry of violence hits the man next to him hard enough that he crumples, unconscious. To the jokester, he says 'He'll wake up. Granted, he won't have any teeth left, but he'll be a wiser man for it. And the last thing he'll remember is your funny little joke.' It's incredibly sinister, and a surefire effective way of making sure no one takes that rule lightly ever again.
Honestly, he is one of those characters who is technically pretty awful, but who wins audience approval (and more to the point, the reluctant and begrudging interest and respect of his peers) through sadistic charisma. Part of that is his sense of humour. With a keen wit, a penchant for absurdism, and a horrifyingly macabre streak, you get the sense that Alfie always has a snicker hidden in the corner of his mouth, even if everyone around him is a little too afraid to join in. He gives a new business associate deliberately terrible rum, them laughs at them when they politely say that it's not bad, knowing they'll be intimidated into lying. He can verge into being mean spirited about it, but he can also really engage in banter, even (particularly?) with his enemies.
Barge Reactions: Alfie will react to the barge... well, likely violently. He's probably going to be a 'problem' inmate, and will have no qualms about leaving a swathe of carnage behind him the first few weeks he's here. He's likely to try to pick feuds, will probably create/steal weapons, and will be ambivalent to a lot of the wondrous aspects of the barge- magic will give him pause, but will be more of an obstacle to getting his way than it will something to actually worry about.
Path to Redemption: To redeem Alfie Solomons will require his exhaustion, and his respect. He's likely to tip only after something involving his warden, or someone he kind of likes, that is high stakes and horrible. Good, pro-social bonding and healthy relationships will be an excellent first step- despite the carnage, if anyone has the stomach.
I'm struggling to put the precise path into words, because whatever it is that turns him, it is likely to be something of a fluke, a product of the weirdness and emotional intensity that the barge has to offer. Alfie needs something to convince him to come back from his real problems (namely the violence, and violence directed in the name of power, status, and image against comparatively uninvolved individuals.) He has years of warped bitterness to recover from- and while he does have it in him to gradually recover, it'll take some weirdness, and some good people, and a goodly amount of time.
History: Alfie Solomons is a minor character in the television show Peaky Blinders. He appears in season two, when Tommy Shelby expands his business to London. Tommy is aware that there is a war going on between the Jewish and Italian gangsters in the city, and that the Jewish side is being beaten, partially because of Alfie's horrific mistrust of police officers, and refusal to work with them or bribe them. Alfie's organization has two stated streams of income; he operates the 'Bread Company of Camden Town,' where his 'bakers' produce white and dark rum for local sale, and he offers protection to bookies at the local races.
The head of the Italian gang, Sabini, has been chasing Alfie's bookies off the race courses, and has been closing premises that serve his rum. Because of this, his protection racket is evaporating; people know that they cannot trust him any more. Tommy comes in to lend Alfie muscle, and to offer him a new relationship with the police, who know him to be a reliable person to look to for a bribe, as opposed to the Solomons crew.
The alliance is fraught to begin with. Alfie knows that Tommy betrayed the last gangster he made a pact like this with, and is none too fond of the way the Peaky Blinders sweep into the city ("Yeah they're out of fucking control mate, they come down the canal, they spread like the fucking clap."); in his view, Tommy was working for him, and he's not too pleased to discover he has opened Pandora's box.
Sabini, who is in a fit of rage at Tommy for largely unrelated reasons, contacts Alfie to begin peace talks. They discuss the situation, and it's decided that Shelby needs to be betrayed and sent packing, in return for which Alfie's bookies will be let back onto the race courses, and the assaults against his businesses will stop.
Alfie's betrayal of Tommy is pretty spectacular. He Arthur Shelby and a few other key Shelby officers over for Seder, and then explains Passover to them and the history behind the sacrifice of the Passover goat, only in the middle of a story about the Jews being persecuted and enslaved in Egypt, the moment the goat's throat is cut, Alfie goes full on Red Wedding on them, leaving their chief Lieutenant dead, their men casually disposed of, and Arthur Shelby unconscious and framed for murder. It's pretty horrific.
Fortunately for Tommy, Sabini fails to keep his word, and continues to bar the Jewish bookies from entering the most prestigious racetracks. Livid, Alfie reallies himself with Tommy, putting his force behind the Peaky Blinders and allowing him to retake Epsom.
In that reshuffling, Alfie makes an attempt to take over Tommy's export business in the resulting power struggle. They enter into bitter negotiations, with Alfie threatening to shoot Tommy in the face if he doesn't sign the business over, and Tommy producing a grenade pin and announcing that if he doesn't walk out of the office alive within the next ten minutes the whole building will be blown up by the secretly planted grenade, which is now on a wire, controlled by an anarchist waiting for him at the doors. They negotiate down to 35% of Tommy's business going to Alfie, spit in their palms and shake, and part with a grim but apparently mutual respect.
Sample Journal Entry:
Well now. Well.
[Alfie murmurs, with his hoarse voice, a nearly incomprehensible mumble in a thick accent, to boot.]
Well, as I see it, yeah, this is the part where I make a speech, right? That's how it goes. All the big fishes from their little [Camden is so thick in him the word is li-oh] ponds swimmin' in here, into the see, biting one another with their little fishy teeth;
[teef]
Well, yeah, let's give it a miss then? We all know the script. We'll say I was bold. We'll say you was knowing, were jaded, put me good and proper in my place, you make sure I know I'm no different than a hundred men who've come before. And we're gonna skip right to the part where if you want to find me, you will fucking find me.
[His thumb scratches along the ragged scar on his jaw, the break in the cut of his beard.]
I think that's fair.
Sample RP:
Alfie picks up a kitchen shift. He teaches the shift supervisors what's involved in keeping kosher. A lot of it is repeating himself, finding a place to tuck the dishes, and a huffy insistence on being involved in the prep. No one really knows what to do about the fact that he keeps trying to make off with the paring knives. It's only after the third time they catch him walking away with one (this time with part of the handle broken off and the blade smuggled inside his hat) that someone finally gives in to his exasperated admonition to 'just fucking fire me already, I'll actually eat anything, mate.'
He nicks bits of small metal wherever he can get his hands on them to load them into the toes of an old sock for a kosh. He's also informally banned from the greenhouse, on account of persistently making off with the small stones and pebbles incorporated into the decorative ponds.
Alfie doesn't mind. Gets to be, virtually every single sock he owns has been first weaponized and then confiscated. He can be found sitting out on the deck most days, unrepentantly wearing the fuzzy slippers that someone opted to send him when he complained about his shoes giving his bare feet blisters, peering down his nose through the pince-nez glasses at pen and paper.
"Crosswords don't make any fucking sense any longer, mate," he'll answer, if asked, "none of the clues scan. But this sudoku thing, yeah?"
Half rhetorical question, half mumbly approval.
Special Notes: None
