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deerington
Mar. 10th, 2020 08:38 pm- deep-voiced with a thick Cockney accent
- average height
- bulky and broad-shouldered
- has a little tattoo of a crown on the side of his right hand, near his knuckles
- walks with a cane
- usually wears several rings and bracelets, all gold metal
- uses pince-nez glasses for reading, and usually keeps them on a gold chain around his neck
- has a long, thin scar cutting through his beard on the right side of his face, but it's faded, and only noticeable to those who look closely
- has some rash-y looking legions on his face, particularly around the cheeks
- the left side of his face is heavily scarred and that eye is visibly blind
- average height
- bulky and broad-shouldered
- has a little tattoo of a crown on the side of his right hand, near his knuckles
- walks with a cane
- usually wears several rings and bracelets, all gold metal
- uses pince-nez glasses for reading, and usually keeps them on a gold chain around his neck
- has a long, thin scar cutting through his beard on the right side of his face, but it's faded, and only noticeable to those who look closely
- has some rash-y looking legions on his face, particularly around the cheeks
- the left side of his face is heavily scarred and that eye is visibly blind
application for deerington
Feb. 28th, 2020 10:24 amIN CHARACTER
Character Name: Alfie Solomons
Canon: Peaky Blinders
Canon Point: the end of 4x06, after being shot by Tommy
In-Game Tattoo Placement: On his upper left shoulder
Current Health/Status: Critically injured due to a gunshot wound to the left cheek + terminal lung cancer; since the gunshot wound is more life-threatening in the short term, it'll be healed and scarred over when he wakes up, and he'll lose the use of that eye just like he does in canon
Age: Unknown, but looks to be in his late forties
Species: Human
Content Warnings: gang warfare/violence, terminal illness, quasi-suicide
History:
Alfie's wiki page is not very canonblind-friendly, and parts of it contain some weird spots of random fanfic headcanon to boot, so I'm just going to write up my own summary!
Alfie is the son of a Russian refugee mother who fled the pogroms of the late 19th century, and a (presumably) English father; theirs is a powerful crime family, and he's the current head of a Jewish gang in 1920s London. Their primary income comes from illegal bookmaking at horse-racing tracks, but they also make and sell rum illegally to disreputable businesses, and offer protection from other gangs to those who pay them. By his first appearance on the show, his gang is at war with a rival Italian gang, and they're losing - largely because Alfie doesn't trust the police and refuses to pay them off in exchange for their protection, something that the Italian gang leader, Darby Sabini, has no qualms about doing. Things are further strained because of racial tension - Sabini commonly makes anti-Semitic comments about Alfie and his men, and Alfie's own stories about being brutal towards at least one Italian soldier while serving in the first world war likely don't help things, either.
This is the climate that Tommy Shelby, a Birmingham gang leader, steps into. When he and his men stage an attack against Sabini's gang that Alfie takes notice of, Alfie invites Tommy to come over for a talk. Tommy frankly informs Alfie that he needs help if he wants to win his gang war, and offers to ally their two gangs together. Though initially dismissive of the idea - especially since Tommy wants to start paying off members of the police force - Alfie eventually comes around. But despite their alliance, they very much remain two separate and distinct gangs, and Alfie clearly expects his to remain top dog. When Tommy and his men start becoming too autonomous, taking over clubs and making moves without Alfie's prior permission, Alfie and Sabini arrange a secret meeting to discuss the situation. They agree to broker a truce between the Italians and the Jews in order to take down the Birmingham gang; in addition, it's agreed that Alfie's bookmakers will be allowed to operate on the racetracks that Sabini controls.
While pretending to still be on their side, Alfie invites two of the Birmingham gang members - one of them Tommy's older brother, Arthur - over to his warehouse to celebrate a traditional Passover Seder. He tells them the story behind Passover, and announces that it's tradition to sacrifice a goat in representation of killing the Egyptian pharaoh who had enslaved the Jewish people - a man who had, in Alfie's words, "pushed [his] fucking luck". He informs the Birmingham gang members that this year, he's named the sacrificial goat Tommy Shelby - and immediately, the Jewish gang attacks, followed quickly by the Italians bursting in to help. One of the Birmingham members ends up shot to death, while Arthur is framed for his murder and hauled away by Sabini-allied police. However, this alliance ends up being even shorter than Alfie's original alliance with the Birmingham gang: Sabini breaks his promise to allow Alfie's bookies back on the racetracks, and tensions flare up once more. Tommy shows up at Alfie's place again, Alfie arranges the release of Arthur from prison, and after a tense negotiation of terms (and more than a few very serious death threats), they agree to renew their alliance against the Italians.
A couple of years later (there's generally a two-year timeskip between seasons), Tommy taps Alfie for help again, wanting to have him pose as a jeweler to help him gain access to a treasure vault owned by exiled Russian royalty. Alfie agrees, and everything appears to go off without a hitch - though later on he ends up double-crossing Tommy again, selling information that he'd learned during the caper to an enemy group. Said group also takes Tommy's toddler son for ransom, which Alfie hadn’t known would happen, though that doesn't stop him from temporarily pretending that he had in order to make the point to Tommy that he shouldn’t get to participate in gang warfare while at the same time expecting him and his to be off-limits. (He admits the truth after a few minutes, though, and Tommy tells him that he’d known from the beginning, because Alfie hadn’t put on a good enough poker face to hide his regret when he’d found out.)
Despite literally all of this, they're working together again a few years later, this time organizing a high-profile underground boxing match between Alfie's nephew and the son of one of Tommy's associates. During one of their meetings, Alfie mentions that he's heard that Tommy has been clashing with the Italian-American Mafia. He passes along the information that he knows about them (namely, that they're allied with Sabini), but also expresses quite frankly that he believes they'll kill Tommy if he keeps messing with them. Tommy, in turn, warns Alfie that the Mafia has grand expansion plans, and that if he falls to them during a takeover attempt then Alfie's gang, Sabini's gang, and all the rest will be next.
Sure enough, it's not long before Alfie is approached by members of the Mafia. They want Alfie to disguise their men as his own in order to give them easy access to the Shelbys during the upcoming boxing match. In exchange, they’ll smuggle Alfie’s rum to America and sell it for jacked-up prices on the black market. Alfie spends the entire conversation being dismissive, openly baiting them, and continually adding on extra fees that he’s clearly making up on the spot - in additional to his normal rate for a contract killing, he tells them he’ll be charging them more for things like being Italian, being assholes, wanting him to aid in the killing of people from an oppressed minority group (the Shelbys are Romani), and so on. Despite all this, the Mafia members end up agreeing to his terms without argument or attempt at negotiating them down, and Alfie (correctly) surmises that this means that they have no real intention of going through with their part of the bargain at all, and will likely try to neutralize him as well once he’s outlived his usefulness. Still, Alfie goes through with the deal - but he has ulterior motives of his own. He appears to be using the Mafia as part of his preparations for peacing out of both the London criminal underworld, and his life entirely. You see, somewhere along the line, Alfie has been diagnosed with cancer - he’s “riddled with it”, as he tells Tommy later, and apparently there’s no hope for him; the doctor told him that he probably developed it due to exposure to gas during the war. Rather than dying a slow, painful, undignified death (as he likely would have; Word of God confirms that it’s lung cancer, which doesn’t have the best prognosis even in modern times, let alone in the early 20th century), he’s decided to die on his own terms and go out with a bang - namely, by baiting Tommy Shelby into killing him.
After the meeting with the Mafia but before the ill-fated boxing match, Alfie seeks Tommy out and tells him that he's decided to retire to Margate, a beachside town a couple of hours from London. As a parting gift, he delivers him some ambiguous advice ("big will fuck small; it's been that way ever since the war"), then cryptically tells him that he'll "see [him] by the pier". He then skips town, leaving a grenade wired to the door of his warehouse as a parting gift for the Mafia. Tommy, meanwhile, takes his advice to heart and ends up making a deal with Al Capone - someone bigger than any of the comparatively small Mafia associates currently swarming around England. After successfully stopping the Mafia in its tracks, he immediately heads off to Margate to hunt down Alfie; the men who'd been smuggled into the boxing match had nearly killed his brother (Arthur again; poor Arthur), and he's pissed. He finds Alfie walking his dog on the beach, waiting for him. Alfie asks Tommy to take care of the dog for him, then confides to him about the cancer. Tommy is clearly taken aback by the news, and seems to hesitate even after Alfie admonishes him to "get on with it", so Alfie pulls out his gun and fires off a grazing shot to Tommy's arm, prompting Tommy to finally shoot him in the face. We find out later that he ended up surviving, and that he's spending his retirement under the care of a hospice nurse and undergoing the slow, drawn-out cancer deterioration that he'd wanted to avoid - but that's later. For now, he'll wake up in Deerington, scarred and blind in one eye and not entirely sure whether he's alive or dead.
Personality:
As his background shows, Alfie Solomons is not someone to be trifled with. He's been very involved in the gang lifestyle and in criminal activities in general, and he's both capable of and willing to use violence to accomplish his goals whenever he deems it necessary. He's not lawless, but he very much follows his own set of rules, and he doesn't much care if the rest of the world disagrees with his judgements of what is and isn't acceptable. Really, he's as much a businessman as he is a criminal (albeit a businessman who might pull a gun on you while you're meeting with him). He's a seasoned negotiator, he has an actual office where he does actual crime-related paperwork, and his gang has a lawyer on retainer. His wars are fought with words and deals as much as they're fought with guns on the streets.
Alfie's default state seems to be somewhat gruff, but he's certainly capable of being charming and polite when he wants to be, and he'll sometimes use that to his advantage when he has an ulterior motive - once, when greeting a man who he’s planning to frame for murder, he’s even downright sociable, all smiles and shoulder-pats and smalltalk. And he can change on a dime, too - he'll go seamlessly from congenial to sinister (or the other way around) in no time flat, and neither one seems false in him. It's easy to mistake him for being capricious, but he actually isn't: when he's in Big-Time Gang Leader mode, every move, every word, and every change in tone or mood is carefully calculated and chosen to try to elicit the type of reaction he's looking for. When he puts his poker face on and goes tight-lipped, it's extremely hard to guess what he's really thinking, and he likes it that way. When he goes off on a rambling tangent or acts strange and eccentric, it takes people off-guard, putting him solidly in control. He'll yell at people sometimes, or even physically attack them, but it’s always very methodical and deliberate - he actually has an incredibly good handle on his emotions. When he shows his anger, it's usually because he wants to - to intimidate, or to punish, or to gain the upper hand - and rarely because he genuinely loses his temper. His preferred role is something of a chessmaster type, doing his best to carefully arrange both people and situations in a way that will work to his favor. Still, he's mature and experienced enough to know that he can't expect to control everything, and when a plan of his fails (due to an unforeseen variable, or simply a miscalculation on his part) he's able to roll with it and adjust accordingly.
One of Alfie's stand-out traits is how remarkably clearheaded he is about... well, basically everything. This is not to say that he's always right, because he definitely isn't, but he's very good at avoiding psychological pitfalls like self-deception and hypocrisy, and he delights in pointing them out in others. He knows exactly what he is - a man who breaks the law, and who occasionally hurts and tortures other people - and he makes no excuses or apologies for this. He's also stubborn to a fault when it comes to his own beliefs and standards; for instance, he doesn't like or trust law enforcement, and so he flat-out refuses to pay them off and work with them the way all the other gangs do, even though his own gang clearly suffers as a result (he does let Tommy do it on his behalf while they're temporarily allied, but that seems to be as far as his willingness to compromise will go). It's also worth noting that Alfie is quite Jewish both religiously and culturally. He somehow manages to reconcile his faith with his gang activity, and it's something that he takes seriously. He celebrates the holidays, donates a lot of his ill-gotten money to Jewish charities that help the elderly and infirm, and he clearly feels a strong sense of connection with his people, both with regards to his ancestral ties and with those he knows in the present day. He would be very aware of the fact that nobody in Deerington is really his - he didn't grow up with them, they're not a part of his community, and they don't share the same history or blood - but if he develops close CR, he may still subconsciously apply intra-gang dynamics to them, and the gangs of Peaky Blinders have a definite air of looking out for their own. As much as they're willing to break their alliances with other gangs (Alfie specifically does this near-constantly, to the point that his yo-yoing loyalties are something of a fandom joke), relations within a gang are generally quite loyal, and the family and loved ones of members are looked after. Alfie has the potential to be a formidable enemy or an unpredictable, ultimately untrustworthy ally - but still, given the right circumstances (meaning, if he were actually genuine about it, and in it for the long haul as opposed to just forming an alliance of convenience), he wouldn't necessarily be a bad person for someone to have at their side.
Currently, Alfie is at an important turning point in his life. His cancer diagnosis has forced him to reassess his priorities, something that he hints to Tommy at one point: he talks of revelations, and of a beautiful house he'd seen outside the gritty, smoggy city, and he wistfully wishes that he could sell everything he owns and "buy [himself] some time". It's important to note that at no point does he express regret over the way he's spent his life up to this point; his circumstances are causing him to turn to a quieter, less criminally active life, but they aren't making him into a softer, gentler, more moral person, and later canon shows that even in retirement, he still has considerable influence in London's Jewish criminal underground. This is the style of retirement he'd likely stick to even in Deerington: he wouldn't attempt to jump feet-first into the town's own criminal underworld, but he may very well still orbit it, making himself known to the major players while at the same time making no attempts to become one of them himself. Getting involved in shady business might very well still happen at some point, but it wouldn't be a major driving force for him, nor would it likely be a huge part of his daily life. Instead, he'd spend his days walking his dog around town, reading books, contending with whatever horrors the town threw at him, and contemplating the nature of his own mortality (is Deerington the afterlife, or just a detour? if he disappears from town, will he be sent back to oblivion?). You know, all the things that most retired people do.
Abilities/Powers/Weaknesses & Warping:
He's an ordinary human with no powers whatsoever!
Inventory:
- his revolver
- a box of bullets
- one of his standard outfits (slacks, shoes, a lightweight shirt, a lightweight vest, a heavier coat, a scarf, a hat, a yarmulke, a tallit katan, his metal rings and bracelets)
- his cane
- his pince-nez
- his pet mastiff, Cyril
Writing Samples:
link one, link two, link three
OUT OF CHARACTER
Player Name: Iddy
Player Age: 29
Player Contact:
Other Characters In Game: Mazikeen /
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bearattackIn-Game Tag If Accepted: alfie solomons: iddy
Permissions for Character: Here!
Are you comfortable with prominent elements of fourth-walling?: Of the kind that appears in-game, sure!
What themes of horror/psychological thrillers do you enjoy the most?: Unreality, paranoia, slow-burn creeping dread under a veneer of normalcy
Is there anything in particular you absolutely need specific content warnings for?: n/a
Additional Information: n/a
