Trudy Chacon

Application

Your name: Ashie
Your LJ name: ashen_key
Your email: ashysaki@gmail.com
Your AIM: lamorgne
The character you want: Trudy Chacon (hallelujahpilot), James Cameron’s Avatar
Who?

In the year 2145, Trudy Chacon is a SeCops Marine pilot stationed on the alien moon Pandora. At the time of the movie, she has thousands of flight hours in her helicopter, and has been assigned to escort teams of scientists out into the wilds of Pandora for their study of the moon. By the time the movie is over, she’ll have fallen in love with one of the scientists, defected to the point of turning her guns on her former comrades (the two are not as connected as one might think, although they are not unrelated), and died in battle to protect the native inhabitants of Pandora.

Trudy was assigned to science escort because she’s a tough, highly experienced and capable pilot, and also because she’s easy-going. Trudy is one of those people who genuinely gets along everyone, and unlike a lot of the other Marines, this includes those “limp dick” scientists. Truth be told, Trudy is a closeted admirer of the scientists, and has a lot of respect for the work that they do. There is a part of Trudy who really wishes that she could have studied something like botany, something with more earth than it than the mechanical chopper that’s been her life for so many years. In a lot of ways, this craving for a bit of earth and her genuine admiration for the land and Pandora, can be seen as part of her more feminine side. While she is comfortable with her femininity, this side of her doesn’t exactly get a lot of outlets in the Marines. It’s this feminine, down-to-earth and land-loving part of her that eventually helps her to relate to the Na’vi, although it’s not the only thing. I always found it interesting that it was the Hispanic Trudy who said “I didn’t sign up for this shit” and broke away from the ordered attack on the Na’vi’s Hometree – like Grace, Jake, Norm and Max, she could see the injustice of the RDA’s actions, but I suspect that it resonated a bit more with her own people’s history rather than just her respect with the Na’vi.

What is also interesting about Trudy is that she doesn’t really change through the movie. Post-canon, she remains herself, but a self who has her eyes opened (she’d trained herself not to think about the why of her orders, but her contact with Norm in particular opened her eyes) and a self who has made the best decisions she could under the circumstances. Even when playing her post-canon and dead in Mixed Muses, she remained refreshingly straight-forward and angst-free – she made her choices, and there is no real point in wishing that she’d done differently. This lack of angst (not to mention the easy way she takes people), makes her a refreshing break from my other characters. Trudy’ll be played pre-canon, in order to explore her world and herself a bit before the drama of canon.