Brendan Frye (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pale_blue_arrow) wrote2017-04-26 06:49 pm
pale_blue_arrow) wrote2017-04-26 06:49 pm
Application for Mask Or Menace, Take One
〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Troy
AGE: 25
JOURNAL: None.
IM / EMAIL: troythetrekkie@gmail.com
PLURK: ACloudOfSnakes
RETURNING: I’m new.
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME:
Brendan Frye
CHARACTER AGE: 16
SERIES: Brick
CHRONOLOGY: Directly post-canon
CLASS: Anti-Hero/Private Investigator
HOUSING: Gov. housing in Heropa
BACKGROUND:
The world of Brick is in essence like reality unless otherwise noted. Other than Brendan's usage of payphones, which are still prevalent in his world, the rest of the cast uses cellphones. The slang everyone uses is a mixture of terms used in the 20's through to the 40's and some are unique to this particular film. Though we get some nice shots of the area, for the most part the story itself never leaves San Clemente, where it's established there are both upper and middle classes, but few lower class people. High crime rates seem to be an accepted fact in the Brick universe. Everyone from the Vice Principal to sixteen year olds are aware of the various drug rings going through town, there's a party where a girl more or less hands out what has to be a thousand dollars worth of liquor to her guests and no one finds it remotely noteworthy, there are no less than three gangs shown and two others referenced. The police are completely inept at stopping any of this, and are derisively referred to by most people as 'the bulls', because they're only good at charging in at the first sign of red and doing damage.
As for the character himself, Brendan grew up with very, very absentee parents. They work all the time and aren’t even seen in the film, though the feaurette reveals some of the broad strokes of their lives – that they both work at a law firm and they see their jobs as the most important thing in their lives, which their son seems perfectly well aware of. Brendan prepares his own meals, goes out and returns when he pleases, and while the principal does call his mother about absences, this has no effect on Brendan's life, something he accurately predicted with total confidence before it happened. Brendan’s childhood was being spent in front of a TV (he admits he has ‘a mild manic addiction’ to detective movies), running around on his own and getting into trouble with virtually no consequences. He references a lot of movies and slang that are from noir films, which doesn't speak to a normal childhood, though to be fair, most people in the Brick universe use some degree of outdated slang.
His teenage years were something of an improvement. Brendan has been in accelerated classes since middle school, where he met his two best friends, Brian 'the Brain', and Emily Kostich. Emily immediately became Brendan's obsession; he didn't form a crush on her, he fell in love so hard he showed no interest in any of the things going on around him aside from her for a while. As one character observes, “You look at her like she’s the only person in the world.” Unfortunately, Brendan quickly got clingy, jealous and overly involved in Emily’s life, over her objections. Emily made friends with a drug dealer named Jerr, which Brendan didn’t approve of, so Brendan proceeded to lie his way into Jerr’s inner circle under the guise of wanting to sell drugs alongside him, earned his trust, and then turned him and his drug racket over to the Vice Principal, Truman, who called in the cops. Feeling betrayed and a little scared by Brendan's actions since he cleared none of this with her beforehand, Emily fought with him, culminating in him shoving her to the ground, her screaming and two months of excruciating silence before the plot proper kicks off.
Two months later, Brendan has been moping about doing nothing, going to classes and keeping his ear to the ground on what's going on with the people around him. Emily calls him, frantic, and shouts a bunch of disconnected words and phrases that later become critical to the plot before screaming and hanging up. Brendan senses things have gone south, and goes on a hunt for Emily, who has vanished at that point. When he finds Emily's body in a drainage tunnel on the outside of town, he begins his own investigation. Brendan fully admits the cops could take care of it, but they wouldn't find the person who put her in this position. He wants to, and I quote, 'break some well deserving teeth' and ‘find who put her in front of the gun’. There is a difference between someone getting arrested and the right person getting arrested, after all.
He proceeds to lie, cheat, manipulate, plot, interrogate, break and enter, steal, and fight his way through a long list of people in the name of this goal. He manages to get in with the drug gang that Emily was in, looking for answers under the guise of being willing to give misinformation to the school authorities that trust him in exchange for money; no one has a problem believing one more person in San Clemente would throw away their morals for cash, it’s practically the city’s slogan. There, he meets the Pin, the head of a series of drug rings in town, Tug, the Pin's hair trigger temper enforcer, and Laura, the professional lookout and driver for the Pin. Things get complicated from there on out as everyone's lies and plans crash into each other, but Brendan manages to bluff and fight his way through everything with a suicidal disregard for his own life and a remarkably good poker face – but while he can keep people from suspecting that he’s investigating Emily’s death, he can’t stop the drug and gang politics around him from going up in flames.
Eventually, he gets involved in a shootout between Tug's side of the gang and the Pin's, after trying to keep the peace for long enough for the cops to show up and arrest everyone. Since he had put Emily's body in the Pin's car after borrowing it, he was in the clear when he managed to escape so long as he kept people on the scene. While he does keep tensions from erupting initially, both gangs assume the other is responsible when a brick of cocaine they were exchanging goes missing, and guns are drawn. Brendan has to get out via a window and book it into the night, leaving the Pin, who actually opened up to him and genuinely considered him a friend, crying out for his help, which never comes.
The initial gang fight Brendan was there to mediate (fail though he did) was all about the last in a series of ten bricks of heroin that went missing twice, once at the start of the film, once at the end, which is something only one person could have possibly had time to do: Laura. While it took two weeks in-universe to put it together, Brendan confronts her about it on the football field later that morning. (The shootout took place around four, the confrontation around seven-thirty.) Calmly, coldly, Brendan breaks down her entire plan as a stalling tactic, because he also figured out she didn't have enough time to stash the brick anywhere but her locker. Before he met with her, he slipped a note under the Vice Principal's door explaining the entire mess to him and then kept Laura talking out on the football field long enough for them to find the drugs.
Laura, however, not to be outdone, ends the story by emotionally devastating Brendan the best way she knows how: telling him the truth. It was no secret after the midway point of the film Emily had been pregnant, but she had also been dating Dode, a local gangster wannabe nobody, and Tug. The catch was that she was already starting to show before she died. Laura notes she looked four months along. That makes it Brendan's child, because they were together at that time, and Brendan, already emotionally unstable, seems to take no joy in the victory of stopping what could have erupted into a city-wide gang war and bringing justice to an unjust situation. He’s just exhausted. His last line in the film is telling Brain to cover for him as he skips school to go home and sleep.
PERSONALITY:
Brendan is outwardly calm and detached, and talks in a series of similes and slang. He has no interest in being friends with people outside of Emily and Brain, he has virtually no manners, but when he needs to be, he's a great actor. He successfully tricks his way into Laura's party with a fake voice, some politeness and a feigned aireheadednss he doesn't truly possess. He's a fantastic liar and improviser that way; whatever a moment calls for, he can usually fake for the duration of that moment. Once he's in, though, he makes no effort to socialize. There’s the implication he's solely there for information from Laura, yes, but also that he’s not great with crowds, something reinforced by the fact this is the only time he willing deals with one. As for the info, he gets it in the cold, unwavering manner of an interrogator or the bad cop in a good cop bad cop scenario. This is also how he treats Kara, a drug dealer and associate of his from the aforementioned Jerr incident who helped him get the dirt on Jerr. She does everything within her power to seduce him and his voice never wavers from an emotionless cool tone. He refuses to play her games and walks out on conversations with her three times over the course of the film, clearly not in the mood. When he burn bridges – and he has burned quite a few – they stay burned. He keeps an emotional distance from everyone, partly out of trust issues, partly out of a seeming inability to be open, though everyone implies he at least let Emily in prior to the film.
Brilliant but unchallenged by school, Brendan's treatment of Jerr, something he's never lived down in-universe, is not indicative of a heroic personality. He did it for Emily's sake. At one point he tells Principal Truman, "I sent you Jerr to see him eaten, not to see you fed." In fact, Brendan can be very cruel despite being the most level headed person in the movie. He very calmly marches up to where Dode and his gang hang out and beats him senseless for information about Emily, without the tiniest twinge of regret. He justifies this to himself with Dode being a drug dealer and a possible suspect in Emily’s death, and really, that’s all Brendan seems to need. So long as he can come up with a reason to start a fight or turn on someone and that someone isn’t Emily or Brain, he’s fine. Brendan is self-centered not in a narcissistic way, but in a way that serves to help him survive without doing much else. He doesn’t even bother acting like he’s going to help Principal Truman take down the drug dealers at his school despite it being what he’s planning until Truman offers him immunity from legal charges. Brendan Frye looks out for himself. If he’s not doing that in a scene, it is always an act.
The real Brendan is only truly displayed twice, excluding the ending seconds of the film. He lies and improvises like he breathes, capable of making up plans on the fly. When he realizes he needs to get into the Pin's gang, he beats the ever loving crap out of a minor dealer and is rewarded by having the Pin's enforcer, Tug, beat him up. This is all part of the plan. He specifically states said plan has a fifty-fifty chance of getting him killed while talking to Brain. This speaks to his insane disregard for his own safety, but we'll cover that in a minute. Brendan, stuck without a lead, spots Tug's car and deliberately allows himself to be beaten up again while shouting he wants to talk to the Pin, hoping this gambit will work. It does, and he's thrown into the trunk of the car, which he opens slightly to get the address of the biggest dealer in the area rather than having any panic like a normal person might. He spins a good, convincing story about wanting to join the Pin's racket, but it's obvious to the viewer he's making it up as he goes along. He's improvising like crazy at all times. His ability to deceive people is half intelligence, half confidence. Even his boldest lies never get called out because, well, he’s willing to risk getting hit by a car and beaten twice over for them. Most people will never come close to doing for their convictions what Brendan will do just to have a convincing story. It’s what he does.
The near-suicidal disregard for his own life I mentioned earlier is a big part of what makes Brendan who he is. He lets himself be beat up twice and nearly hit by Tug's car without flinching away. He starts a fight with a star football player/dealer. He volunteers to take on Dode's gang of six men, and although they decline the offer, he was either serious about it or, again, bluffing his way to victory in a way that could very well have backfired spectacularly on him. When gang negotiations go south and he knows he needs to stall a few more minutes before the cops arrive towards the end of the movie, he volunteers to take a hit of heroin from the titular brick to prove to the warring sides it's clean and untampered with. He has no idea whether or not it's actually untampered with and has never, for the record, done heroin before, but will for the sake of the plan volunteer to and showed every indicator he was going to do it if push came to shove. He's impressively, astoundingly unconcerned with his own wellbeing, which is interesting when his I-only-look-out-for-myself mentality is considered. These two things may seem to be in conflict; actually, it’s an indicator of how much Brendan loves Emily and wants justice for her. Even though she’s dead, his loyalties are to her over himself.
Brendan didn’t deal with Emily’s death very well emotionally. He stared at Emily's body for at least twenty minutes before moving it when he found her, in total shock. At the accusation from Dode he killed Emily, followed up by the information Emily had been pregnant, Brendan is left shaking and unable to speak for several minutes, clearly distraught, one of three times in the entire film he’s visibly emotional. The suggestion Dode makes later that Brendan killed Emily visibly hurts Brendan, who of course responds with angry verbal warfare, but looks substantially less confident than usual while doing so. Just before the gang war has its' disastrous negotiation session, he has a complete sobbing breakdown as he has flashbacks to Emily, and is unable to pull himself out of it. Her death destroyed him thoroughly, and, given his family is almost non-existent with how uninvolved they are, it's not a stretch to say she was the only living person he loved. He seeks comfort in the arms of Laura, allowing himself to be held, something he never mentions again. He doesn't like having a heart. It doesn't work well with his plans and he doesn’t seem to know what to do with his own humanity.
Despite what he might like to think, he does have a heart, though, even regarding people who aren’t Emily. There is a point where he has the option of saving the Pin from being murdered by Tug or escaping the house and subsequent police investigation at the scene. It takes him a long moment to make the decision to leave, and even then he looks like he could break again while he does it. Brendan has no regrets about beating someone up, but murder (well, leaving someone to be murdered) is a very different story. He legitimately is concerned about the casualties throughout the film, not just Emily but a minor character as well as the Pin. He actually listened to the Pin and let him open up to him without judgment, and while there's no denying that the Pin was a drug dealer, he was also a vulnerable, lonely, disabled guy and Brendan understood that enough to feel genuinely bad about his death. He also does what he can to shield Brain from the fallout of his actions, making sure Brain has an alibi for when Brendan does something stupid, clarifying to the Vice Principal that he’s acting alone when Truman looks Brain’s way, and takes care not to be seen with Brain so the gangsters he’s now hanging with won’t have reason to talk to Brain.
That said, his relationships with Emily and Brain respectively show that Brendan's affections can be a curse to those he's close to. He was too controlling of Emily, telling her who she could and couldn’t hang out with, getting her friends thrown in jail when she didn’t obey his wishes to stay away from them, and then still acting as if he was in the right when she calls him out on it. In his mind, the fact that he was trying to protect her made all of that justified. He clearly does care about Brain, but he controls Brain’s involvement in events, too, basically dictating what the plan of the moment is without leaving room for Brain to call the shots at any point. Everyone he loves, he wants to keep safe, yet by that same measure, everyone he loves, he pushes away by attempting to be in charge of their lives. While he has good reason not to trust Kara, his issues with her and later with Laura can be summed up as not liking it when someone he’s interested in won’t play by his rules. Of his loved ones, the only people he doesn’t try to manipulate are his parents, simply because they just aren’t around enough for that to happen.
The one thing he holds in check more than his vulnerable side is probably his anger. Brendan reigns a huge amount of his actual emotions and thoughts in, but he has flashes of startling violence when he gets sufficiently furious. He throws Emily to the ground in a flashback in a very rapid spur of the moment manner (though he does seem shocked at himself and guilty about it), finally snaps at Kara's continual lies and mockery of his actions and throws a rock at the mirror behind her in a flash of violence (he was aiming for her head and missed only when she ducked), and in the ending scene grips Laura's arms so tightly his knuckles turn white as he explains with utmost tranquil fury exactly how he figured out her part in all this and how he's going to ruin her for it. This is to say nothing of the composed violence involved in beating other people up, where he never looks angry so much as focused. He resorts to violence frequently as a means to solving problems and fights dirty enough to win despite being rather physically unimpressive.
The thing about him fighting dirty, though, is that it's not just that Brendan knows he lacks physical strength. He's smart. He is able to piece together a probable time of death for Emily, figure out who she was hanging with, infiltrate their group and pick up on exactly who in a wide pool of suspects did her in by focusing on details. Brendan notices small things in the span of short periods of time. The phone call Emily makes to him two days before her death that he pulls all his leads from is just under forty seconds long, but he isolates every key phrase and unfamiliar word and investigates them. His only clue to her location when she vanishes is a piece of paper with a symbol on it he corrects figures out is a stylized drawing of a drain pipe, where he finds her body. Yes, he chased down incorrect leads, such as not realizing Tug was a nickname for someone with the surname Tugger and having to look at multiple tunnels and drains throughout the city, but when he's right, he's usually right because something other people overlooked actually registered with him. The way he identifies Laura as the killer is by realizing the cigarettes of the person Emily was afraid of, who he never saw, and Laura's cigarette brand, both have pale blue arrows on their sides. Given he sees the first cigarette for maybe a minute on the ground and the second for about thirty seconds in a room with much more pressing matters going on, that's a frankly ridiculous level of piecing details together. He uses this to his advantage wherever the opportunity presents itself, but when all else fails, he has one fallback that always works in the criminal underworld: turning people on each other.
In the world of Brick, particularly in the circles Brendan ends up in, everyone is a crook, therefore everyone is always on edge (with the exception of Kara, who's just too arrogant to care). Turning people on each other is the best way to keep heat off of him, but what's interesting is that, son of lawyers as he is, you can't actually say he lies to anyone in the process. He points out to Tug how the Pin doesn't keep them in the loop and is withholding information, and that feeds Tug's paranoia into what eventually turns into the endgame confrontation at the end of the film. He points out to the Pin how hair-trigger Tug's temper is and how starting a fight with his half of the gang will only result in the police going after everyone and this results in the peace-out-of-paranoia treaty the two groups meet to discuss. Then he plays middle man, negotiating for a ceasefire and standing literally inbetween them, never breaking a sweat despite the fact that if he plays his cards wrong, either one or both of the groups will have reason to off him. He manipulates everyone's fears because he reads them well, which is why he volunteers to take a hit of heroin to seal the peace treaty. On the surface, this is a terrible idea that risks his life. Upon closer consideration, it is the only possible thing he could offer up that would keep the Pin from insisting the brick of cocaine had been tampered with and also keep Tug from exploding into more violence at the very idea. Brendan knows violence and paranoia and is good at handling violent and paranoid people. He is a great detective. He's a barely functioning human being, a talented but unmotivated student and an awful friend.
POWER:
Brendan doesn’t canonically have any powers, but a Healing Factor is practically a universal fandom headcanon. It is, quite frankly, laughable and horrifying how many times Brendan gets beaten up or at least hit during fights. He’s been beaten until he couldn’t stand and then kicked repeatedly in the stomach and gotten back up afterwards (after he blacked out) to go pursue a lead. By the end of the film he has been knocked out twice, choked almost to death and beaten four times in just over a week and while his face is messed up, he’s remarkably coherent and stable given he should be dying of internal bleeding or concussed at the least. While I doubt Brendan could take a bullet or anything more substantial than what he canonically did even with a Healing Factor, I would like it if his Healing Factor was bolstered by sleep. The two times Brendan has the most implausible recoveries canonically are after he gets a few hours of sleep in. This will both keep his in-game power consistent with his old life and keep a cap on it so it can’t be abused as a get-out clause whenever he does something stupid that results in grievous bodily harm of some kind, as otherwise, it’s probable with his personality he would overuse it constantly.
Related to the above, I would like Brendan to have mild Super Strength. Not to a ridiculous extent, but above-average, since he’s canonically strong – not as strong as other people, he simply cheats more in fights, a dynamic I would enjoy having preserved in-game, where he would not have, say, Superman levels of Super Strength, but enough to catch someone off-guard the way his usual fighting skills do. He would never be able to, say, lift a car and hold it above his head, but he would be able to tilt it so one of the wheels was off the ground briefly. He wouldn’t be able to punch through a wall, just kick down doors and hit hard enough to dent walls.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[The video opens with Brendan not looking right at the camera; his head is tilted in thought, and his gaze is distant for a moment.] Hey. Hate to break into your day but I need some words. I’ve been trying not to bother anyone since I got here – figure we’re all busy with our own circles and crises, that’s the status quo of the world. But if I’m gonna be trying to go the hero route, much as I hate to say it I need some info. Laws were different back home. [He adjusts his glasses, shakes his head once and amends,] Laws were optional in San Clemente. Cops were as bad as the crooks, sometimes worse. It’s not a matter of me wanting to know what I can get away with, I’m not here to make waves, I just need to know what’s actually enforced, who I can go to when things go south that isn’t part of the bull-in-a-china-shop operation I know the cops always are, that sort of thing.
Also, call me paranoid, probably am, but this joint doesn’t have nearly the number of two-bit dealers and petty kleptos San Clemente did. I doubt that they’re not there just because I’m not seein’ ‘em so if and by if I mean when I come across them, who can I actually trust to handle them? I don’t mind doing it myself but flying solo is high-risk and I don’t got a safety net here just yet.
[He fiddles with the camera, clearly done talking, or at least, not used to talking at length.] You have any advice, howl at me, I’m not hard to find. Appreciate it.
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
Brendan never did keep good hours, even when he planned on going to school the next morning. It was nearly four in the morning, those dead hours where even San Clemente’s hustle and howl turned to a wordless whisper of inactivity. Here, he didn’t know the hours the locals kept, where the payphones were to keep from leaving a paper trail, the shortcuts that could make all the difference in staying safe or at least out of a shallow grave. He was near-silent as he walked, kept his shoulders relaxed and his hands in his pockets like always. To anybody not in the know, he was just some unthreatening loser out walking the streets.
More than just helping mentally chart out the town of Heropa, though, he was doing some digging of his own. Maybe it was nothing, or maybe the trail had gotten too cold, but there was something off in the pattern of robberies people had reported. The similarities were close enough to make it look like one person; time spent reflecting on the differences made it clear there had to be two. That’d make for better alibis, better protection against the bulls, probably helped with selling whatever had up and gone missing, but Brendan wasn’t going to come into this as a hero. He’d ditched the idea of spandex and masks as soon as they were purposed to him. He’d have more luck sticking to his old tricks - but the government was the same as the VP was the same as the bulls. Everybody loved having some crooks handed to them. Brendan wouldn't say he loved having someone owe him one, but he needed someone to, for safety's sake. No telling when he might need a favor.
For the last few nights, he’d kept an eye on the pawn shops, bastions of ill-gotten goods as they were. He’d made some vague talk about a girl in order to get a look at the jewelry, which matched the descriptions of the stuff that had been stolen. Brendan had had to drink his weight in coffee and pretend to read half a book in a ritzy café to ‘overhear’ everything he needed to in order to verify his suspicions. Regardless of what places they hit up, the partners in crime kept their buys and sells in this area.
He made a show of looking at his phone’s map as if he was lost before disappearing into an alley. Crouched up against the wall, he waited. A few moments later, when he should have been long gone, two figures emerged from a different alley, slipping soundlessly through the night and into the alley behind the pawn shop, carrying what looked like some suspiciously heavy bags. The sensible thing was to go ring the bulls, let them handle this. But nobody had ever accused him of doing the smart thing.
High-tailing it after them, he put on his best confused, lost voice. “Hey! Hey!” he called out to them, and they turned, taking in his lost schoolboy look with vague annoyance more than anything else.
Then he decked one of them right under the eye, since they couldn’t dodge with their hands full.
Heropa felt more like home in that moment than it had since he arrived.
FINAL NOTES: Brendan has a weird thing in canon about using payphones so that he can’t be tracked. I’m not sure how many payphones are around in the M.o.M. universe but I will try to keep that spirit of overwhelming paranoia going as best is realistically possible. Also, in the DVD commentary it’s mentioned that Brendan is bi and he and Brain could have been a thing at one point, but it’s not official canon/there’s no indicator in the movie proper that was a relationship that really happened so I’m not going to consider that as part of his backstory.
NAME: Troy
AGE: 25
JOURNAL: None.
IM / EMAIL: troythetrekkie@gmail.com
PLURK: ACloudOfSnakes
RETURNING: I’m new.
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME:
Brendan Frye
CHARACTER AGE: 16
SERIES: Brick
CHRONOLOGY: Directly post-canon
CLASS: Anti-Hero/Private Investigator
HOUSING: Gov. housing in Heropa
BACKGROUND:
The world of Brick is in essence like reality unless otherwise noted. Other than Brendan's usage of payphones, which are still prevalent in his world, the rest of the cast uses cellphones. The slang everyone uses is a mixture of terms used in the 20's through to the 40's and some are unique to this particular film. Though we get some nice shots of the area, for the most part the story itself never leaves San Clemente, where it's established there are both upper and middle classes, but few lower class people. High crime rates seem to be an accepted fact in the Brick universe. Everyone from the Vice Principal to sixteen year olds are aware of the various drug rings going through town, there's a party where a girl more or less hands out what has to be a thousand dollars worth of liquor to her guests and no one finds it remotely noteworthy, there are no less than three gangs shown and two others referenced. The police are completely inept at stopping any of this, and are derisively referred to by most people as 'the bulls', because they're only good at charging in at the first sign of red and doing damage.
As for the character himself, Brendan grew up with very, very absentee parents. They work all the time and aren’t even seen in the film, though the feaurette reveals some of the broad strokes of their lives – that they both work at a law firm and they see their jobs as the most important thing in their lives, which their son seems perfectly well aware of. Brendan prepares his own meals, goes out and returns when he pleases, and while the principal does call his mother about absences, this has no effect on Brendan's life, something he accurately predicted with total confidence before it happened. Brendan’s childhood was being spent in front of a TV (he admits he has ‘a mild manic addiction’ to detective movies), running around on his own and getting into trouble with virtually no consequences. He references a lot of movies and slang that are from noir films, which doesn't speak to a normal childhood, though to be fair, most people in the Brick universe use some degree of outdated slang.
His teenage years were something of an improvement. Brendan has been in accelerated classes since middle school, where he met his two best friends, Brian 'the Brain', and Emily Kostich. Emily immediately became Brendan's obsession; he didn't form a crush on her, he fell in love so hard he showed no interest in any of the things going on around him aside from her for a while. As one character observes, “You look at her like she’s the only person in the world.” Unfortunately, Brendan quickly got clingy, jealous and overly involved in Emily’s life, over her objections. Emily made friends with a drug dealer named Jerr, which Brendan didn’t approve of, so Brendan proceeded to lie his way into Jerr’s inner circle under the guise of wanting to sell drugs alongside him, earned his trust, and then turned him and his drug racket over to the Vice Principal, Truman, who called in the cops. Feeling betrayed and a little scared by Brendan's actions since he cleared none of this with her beforehand, Emily fought with him, culminating in him shoving her to the ground, her screaming and two months of excruciating silence before the plot proper kicks off.
Two months later, Brendan has been moping about doing nothing, going to classes and keeping his ear to the ground on what's going on with the people around him. Emily calls him, frantic, and shouts a bunch of disconnected words and phrases that later become critical to the plot before screaming and hanging up. Brendan senses things have gone south, and goes on a hunt for Emily, who has vanished at that point. When he finds Emily's body in a drainage tunnel on the outside of town, he begins his own investigation. Brendan fully admits the cops could take care of it, but they wouldn't find the person who put her in this position. He wants to, and I quote, 'break some well deserving teeth' and ‘find who put her in front of the gun’. There is a difference between someone getting arrested and the right person getting arrested, after all.
He proceeds to lie, cheat, manipulate, plot, interrogate, break and enter, steal, and fight his way through a long list of people in the name of this goal. He manages to get in with the drug gang that Emily was in, looking for answers under the guise of being willing to give misinformation to the school authorities that trust him in exchange for money; no one has a problem believing one more person in San Clemente would throw away their morals for cash, it’s practically the city’s slogan. There, he meets the Pin, the head of a series of drug rings in town, Tug, the Pin's hair trigger temper enforcer, and Laura, the professional lookout and driver for the Pin. Things get complicated from there on out as everyone's lies and plans crash into each other, but Brendan manages to bluff and fight his way through everything with a suicidal disregard for his own life and a remarkably good poker face – but while he can keep people from suspecting that he’s investigating Emily’s death, he can’t stop the drug and gang politics around him from going up in flames.
Eventually, he gets involved in a shootout between Tug's side of the gang and the Pin's, after trying to keep the peace for long enough for the cops to show up and arrest everyone. Since he had put Emily's body in the Pin's car after borrowing it, he was in the clear when he managed to escape so long as he kept people on the scene. While he does keep tensions from erupting initially, both gangs assume the other is responsible when a brick of cocaine they were exchanging goes missing, and guns are drawn. Brendan has to get out via a window and book it into the night, leaving the Pin, who actually opened up to him and genuinely considered him a friend, crying out for his help, which never comes.
The initial gang fight Brendan was there to mediate (fail though he did) was all about the last in a series of ten bricks of heroin that went missing twice, once at the start of the film, once at the end, which is something only one person could have possibly had time to do: Laura. While it took two weeks in-universe to put it together, Brendan confronts her about it on the football field later that morning. (The shootout took place around four, the confrontation around seven-thirty.) Calmly, coldly, Brendan breaks down her entire plan as a stalling tactic, because he also figured out she didn't have enough time to stash the brick anywhere but her locker. Before he met with her, he slipped a note under the Vice Principal's door explaining the entire mess to him and then kept Laura talking out on the football field long enough for them to find the drugs.
Laura, however, not to be outdone, ends the story by emotionally devastating Brendan the best way she knows how: telling him the truth. It was no secret after the midway point of the film Emily had been pregnant, but she had also been dating Dode, a local gangster wannabe nobody, and Tug. The catch was that she was already starting to show before she died. Laura notes she looked four months along. That makes it Brendan's child, because they were together at that time, and Brendan, already emotionally unstable, seems to take no joy in the victory of stopping what could have erupted into a city-wide gang war and bringing justice to an unjust situation. He’s just exhausted. His last line in the film is telling Brain to cover for him as he skips school to go home and sleep.
PERSONALITY:
Brendan is outwardly calm and detached, and talks in a series of similes and slang. He has no interest in being friends with people outside of Emily and Brain, he has virtually no manners, but when he needs to be, he's a great actor. He successfully tricks his way into Laura's party with a fake voice, some politeness and a feigned aireheadednss he doesn't truly possess. He's a fantastic liar and improviser that way; whatever a moment calls for, he can usually fake for the duration of that moment. Once he's in, though, he makes no effort to socialize. There’s the implication he's solely there for information from Laura, yes, but also that he’s not great with crowds, something reinforced by the fact this is the only time he willing deals with one. As for the info, he gets it in the cold, unwavering manner of an interrogator or the bad cop in a good cop bad cop scenario. This is also how he treats Kara, a drug dealer and associate of his from the aforementioned Jerr incident who helped him get the dirt on Jerr. She does everything within her power to seduce him and his voice never wavers from an emotionless cool tone. He refuses to play her games and walks out on conversations with her three times over the course of the film, clearly not in the mood. When he burn bridges – and he has burned quite a few – they stay burned. He keeps an emotional distance from everyone, partly out of trust issues, partly out of a seeming inability to be open, though everyone implies he at least let Emily in prior to the film.
Brilliant but unchallenged by school, Brendan's treatment of Jerr, something he's never lived down in-universe, is not indicative of a heroic personality. He did it for Emily's sake. At one point he tells Principal Truman, "I sent you Jerr to see him eaten, not to see you fed." In fact, Brendan can be very cruel despite being the most level headed person in the movie. He very calmly marches up to where Dode and his gang hang out and beats him senseless for information about Emily, without the tiniest twinge of regret. He justifies this to himself with Dode being a drug dealer and a possible suspect in Emily’s death, and really, that’s all Brendan seems to need. So long as he can come up with a reason to start a fight or turn on someone and that someone isn’t Emily or Brain, he’s fine. Brendan is self-centered not in a narcissistic way, but in a way that serves to help him survive without doing much else. He doesn’t even bother acting like he’s going to help Principal Truman take down the drug dealers at his school despite it being what he’s planning until Truman offers him immunity from legal charges. Brendan Frye looks out for himself. If he’s not doing that in a scene, it is always an act.
The real Brendan is only truly displayed twice, excluding the ending seconds of the film. He lies and improvises like he breathes, capable of making up plans on the fly. When he realizes he needs to get into the Pin's gang, he beats the ever loving crap out of a minor dealer and is rewarded by having the Pin's enforcer, Tug, beat him up. This is all part of the plan. He specifically states said plan has a fifty-fifty chance of getting him killed while talking to Brain. This speaks to his insane disregard for his own safety, but we'll cover that in a minute. Brendan, stuck without a lead, spots Tug's car and deliberately allows himself to be beaten up again while shouting he wants to talk to the Pin, hoping this gambit will work. It does, and he's thrown into the trunk of the car, which he opens slightly to get the address of the biggest dealer in the area rather than having any panic like a normal person might. He spins a good, convincing story about wanting to join the Pin's racket, but it's obvious to the viewer he's making it up as he goes along. He's improvising like crazy at all times. His ability to deceive people is half intelligence, half confidence. Even his boldest lies never get called out because, well, he’s willing to risk getting hit by a car and beaten twice over for them. Most people will never come close to doing for their convictions what Brendan will do just to have a convincing story. It’s what he does.
The near-suicidal disregard for his own life I mentioned earlier is a big part of what makes Brendan who he is. He lets himself be beat up twice and nearly hit by Tug's car without flinching away. He starts a fight with a star football player/dealer. He volunteers to take on Dode's gang of six men, and although they decline the offer, he was either serious about it or, again, bluffing his way to victory in a way that could very well have backfired spectacularly on him. When gang negotiations go south and he knows he needs to stall a few more minutes before the cops arrive towards the end of the movie, he volunteers to take a hit of heroin from the titular brick to prove to the warring sides it's clean and untampered with. He has no idea whether or not it's actually untampered with and has never, for the record, done heroin before, but will for the sake of the plan volunteer to and showed every indicator he was going to do it if push came to shove. He's impressively, astoundingly unconcerned with his own wellbeing, which is interesting when his I-only-look-out-for-myself mentality is considered. These two things may seem to be in conflict; actually, it’s an indicator of how much Brendan loves Emily and wants justice for her. Even though she’s dead, his loyalties are to her over himself.
Brendan didn’t deal with Emily’s death very well emotionally. He stared at Emily's body for at least twenty minutes before moving it when he found her, in total shock. At the accusation from Dode he killed Emily, followed up by the information Emily had been pregnant, Brendan is left shaking and unable to speak for several minutes, clearly distraught, one of three times in the entire film he’s visibly emotional. The suggestion Dode makes later that Brendan killed Emily visibly hurts Brendan, who of course responds with angry verbal warfare, but looks substantially less confident than usual while doing so. Just before the gang war has its' disastrous negotiation session, he has a complete sobbing breakdown as he has flashbacks to Emily, and is unable to pull himself out of it. Her death destroyed him thoroughly, and, given his family is almost non-existent with how uninvolved they are, it's not a stretch to say she was the only living person he loved. He seeks comfort in the arms of Laura, allowing himself to be held, something he never mentions again. He doesn't like having a heart. It doesn't work well with his plans and he doesn’t seem to know what to do with his own humanity.
Despite what he might like to think, he does have a heart, though, even regarding people who aren’t Emily. There is a point where he has the option of saving the Pin from being murdered by Tug or escaping the house and subsequent police investigation at the scene. It takes him a long moment to make the decision to leave, and even then he looks like he could break again while he does it. Brendan has no regrets about beating someone up, but murder (well, leaving someone to be murdered) is a very different story. He legitimately is concerned about the casualties throughout the film, not just Emily but a minor character as well as the Pin. He actually listened to the Pin and let him open up to him without judgment, and while there's no denying that the Pin was a drug dealer, he was also a vulnerable, lonely, disabled guy and Brendan understood that enough to feel genuinely bad about his death. He also does what he can to shield Brain from the fallout of his actions, making sure Brain has an alibi for when Brendan does something stupid, clarifying to the Vice Principal that he’s acting alone when Truman looks Brain’s way, and takes care not to be seen with Brain so the gangsters he’s now hanging with won’t have reason to talk to Brain.
That said, his relationships with Emily and Brain respectively show that Brendan's affections can be a curse to those he's close to. He was too controlling of Emily, telling her who she could and couldn’t hang out with, getting her friends thrown in jail when she didn’t obey his wishes to stay away from them, and then still acting as if he was in the right when she calls him out on it. In his mind, the fact that he was trying to protect her made all of that justified. He clearly does care about Brain, but he controls Brain’s involvement in events, too, basically dictating what the plan of the moment is without leaving room for Brain to call the shots at any point. Everyone he loves, he wants to keep safe, yet by that same measure, everyone he loves, he pushes away by attempting to be in charge of their lives. While he has good reason not to trust Kara, his issues with her and later with Laura can be summed up as not liking it when someone he’s interested in won’t play by his rules. Of his loved ones, the only people he doesn’t try to manipulate are his parents, simply because they just aren’t around enough for that to happen.
The one thing he holds in check more than his vulnerable side is probably his anger. Brendan reigns a huge amount of his actual emotions and thoughts in, but he has flashes of startling violence when he gets sufficiently furious. He throws Emily to the ground in a flashback in a very rapid spur of the moment manner (though he does seem shocked at himself and guilty about it), finally snaps at Kara's continual lies and mockery of his actions and throws a rock at the mirror behind her in a flash of violence (he was aiming for her head and missed only when she ducked), and in the ending scene grips Laura's arms so tightly his knuckles turn white as he explains with utmost tranquil fury exactly how he figured out her part in all this and how he's going to ruin her for it. This is to say nothing of the composed violence involved in beating other people up, where he never looks angry so much as focused. He resorts to violence frequently as a means to solving problems and fights dirty enough to win despite being rather physically unimpressive.
The thing about him fighting dirty, though, is that it's not just that Brendan knows he lacks physical strength. He's smart. He is able to piece together a probable time of death for Emily, figure out who she was hanging with, infiltrate their group and pick up on exactly who in a wide pool of suspects did her in by focusing on details. Brendan notices small things in the span of short periods of time. The phone call Emily makes to him two days before her death that he pulls all his leads from is just under forty seconds long, but he isolates every key phrase and unfamiliar word and investigates them. His only clue to her location when she vanishes is a piece of paper with a symbol on it he corrects figures out is a stylized drawing of a drain pipe, where he finds her body. Yes, he chased down incorrect leads, such as not realizing Tug was a nickname for someone with the surname Tugger and having to look at multiple tunnels and drains throughout the city, but when he's right, he's usually right because something other people overlooked actually registered with him. The way he identifies Laura as the killer is by realizing the cigarettes of the person Emily was afraid of, who he never saw, and Laura's cigarette brand, both have pale blue arrows on their sides. Given he sees the first cigarette for maybe a minute on the ground and the second for about thirty seconds in a room with much more pressing matters going on, that's a frankly ridiculous level of piecing details together. He uses this to his advantage wherever the opportunity presents itself, but when all else fails, he has one fallback that always works in the criminal underworld: turning people on each other.
In the world of Brick, particularly in the circles Brendan ends up in, everyone is a crook, therefore everyone is always on edge (with the exception of Kara, who's just too arrogant to care). Turning people on each other is the best way to keep heat off of him, but what's interesting is that, son of lawyers as he is, you can't actually say he lies to anyone in the process. He points out to Tug how the Pin doesn't keep them in the loop and is withholding information, and that feeds Tug's paranoia into what eventually turns into the endgame confrontation at the end of the film. He points out to the Pin how hair-trigger Tug's temper is and how starting a fight with his half of the gang will only result in the police going after everyone and this results in the peace-out-of-paranoia treaty the two groups meet to discuss. Then he plays middle man, negotiating for a ceasefire and standing literally inbetween them, never breaking a sweat despite the fact that if he plays his cards wrong, either one or both of the groups will have reason to off him. He manipulates everyone's fears because he reads them well, which is why he volunteers to take a hit of heroin to seal the peace treaty. On the surface, this is a terrible idea that risks his life. Upon closer consideration, it is the only possible thing he could offer up that would keep the Pin from insisting the brick of cocaine had been tampered with and also keep Tug from exploding into more violence at the very idea. Brendan knows violence and paranoia and is good at handling violent and paranoid people. He is a great detective. He's a barely functioning human being, a talented but unmotivated student and an awful friend.
POWER:
Brendan doesn’t canonically have any powers, but a Healing Factor is practically a universal fandom headcanon. It is, quite frankly, laughable and horrifying how many times Brendan gets beaten up or at least hit during fights. He’s been beaten until he couldn’t stand and then kicked repeatedly in the stomach and gotten back up afterwards (after he blacked out) to go pursue a lead. By the end of the film he has been knocked out twice, choked almost to death and beaten four times in just over a week and while his face is messed up, he’s remarkably coherent and stable given he should be dying of internal bleeding or concussed at the least. While I doubt Brendan could take a bullet or anything more substantial than what he canonically did even with a Healing Factor, I would like it if his Healing Factor was bolstered by sleep. The two times Brendan has the most implausible recoveries canonically are after he gets a few hours of sleep in. This will both keep his in-game power consistent with his old life and keep a cap on it so it can’t be abused as a get-out clause whenever he does something stupid that results in grievous bodily harm of some kind, as otherwise, it’s probable with his personality he would overuse it constantly.
Related to the above, I would like Brendan to have mild Super Strength. Not to a ridiculous extent, but above-average, since he’s canonically strong – not as strong as other people, he simply cheats more in fights, a dynamic I would enjoy having preserved in-game, where he would not have, say, Superman levels of Super Strength, but enough to catch someone off-guard the way his usual fighting skills do. He would never be able to, say, lift a car and hold it above his head, but he would be able to tilt it so one of the wheels was off the ground briefly. He wouldn’t be able to punch through a wall, just kick down doors and hit hard enough to dent walls.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[The video opens with Brendan not looking right at the camera; his head is tilted in thought, and his gaze is distant for a moment.] Hey. Hate to break into your day but I need some words. I’ve been trying not to bother anyone since I got here – figure we’re all busy with our own circles and crises, that’s the status quo of the world. But if I’m gonna be trying to go the hero route, much as I hate to say it I need some info. Laws were different back home. [He adjusts his glasses, shakes his head once and amends,] Laws were optional in San Clemente. Cops were as bad as the crooks, sometimes worse. It’s not a matter of me wanting to know what I can get away with, I’m not here to make waves, I just need to know what’s actually enforced, who I can go to when things go south that isn’t part of the bull-in-a-china-shop operation I know the cops always are, that sort of thing.
Also, call me paranoid, probably am, but this joint doesn’t have nearly the number of two-bit dealers and petty kleptos San Clemente did. I doubt that they’re not there just because I’m not seein’ ‘em so if and by if I mean when I come across them, who can I actually trust to handle them? I don’t mind doing it myself but flying solo is high-risk and I don’t got a safety net here just yet.
[He fiddles with the camera, clearly done talking, or at least, not used to talking at length.] You have any advice, howl at me, I’m not hard to find. Appreciate it.
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
Brendan never did keep good hours, even when he planned on going to school the next morning. It was nearly four in the morning, those dead hours where even San Clemente’s hustle and howl turned to a wordless whisper of inactivity. Here, he didn’t know the hours the locals kept, where the payphones were to keep from leaving a paper trail, the shortcuts that could make all the difference in staying safe or at least out of a shallow grave. He was near-silent as he walked, kept his shoulders relaxed and his hands in his pockets like always. To anybody not in the know, he was just some unthreatening loser out walking the streets.
More than just helping mentally chart out the town of Heropa, though, he was doing some digging of his own. Maybe it was nothing, or maybe the trail had gotten too cold, but there was something off in the pattern of robberies people had reported. The similarities were close enough to make it look like one person; time spent reflecting on the differences made it clear there had to be two. That’d make for better alibis, better protection against the bulls, probably helped with selling whatever had up and gone missing, but Brendan wasn’t going to come into this as a hero. He’d ditched the idea of spandex and masks as soon as they were purposed to him. He’d have more luck sticking to his old tricks - but the government was the same as the VP was the same as the bulls. Everybody loved having some crooks handed to them. Brendan wouldn't say he loved having someone owe him one, but he needed someone to, for safety's sake. No telling when he might need a favor.
For the last few nights, he’d kept an eye on the pawn shops, bastions of ill-gotten goods as they were. He’d made some vague talk about a girl in order to get a look at the jewelry, which matched the descriptions of the stuff that had been stolen. Brendan had had to drink his weight in coffee and pretend to read half a book in a ritzy café to ‘overhear’ everything he needed to in order to verify his suspicions. Regardless of what places they hit up, the partners in crime kept their buys and sells in this area.
He made a show of looking at his phone’s map as if he was lost before disappearing into an alley. Crouched up against the wall, he waited. A few moments later, when he should have been long gone, two figures emerged from a different alley, slipping soundlessly through the night and into the alley behind the pawn shop, carrying what looked like some suspiciously heavy bags. The sensible thing was to go ring the bulls, let them handle this. But nobody had ever accused him of doing the smart thing.
High-tailing it after them, he put on his best confused, lost voice. “Hey! Hey!” he called out to them, and they turned, taking in his lost schoolboy look with vague annoyance more than anything else.
Then he decked one of them right under the eye, since they couldn’t dodge with their hands full.
Heropa felt more like home in that moment than it had since he arrived.
FINAL NOTES: Brendan has a weird thing in canon about using payphones so that he can’t be tracked. I’m not sure how many payphones are around in the M.o.M. universe but I will try to keep that spirit of overwhelming paranoia going as best is realistically possible. Also, in the DVD commentary it’s mentioned that Brendan is bi and he and Brain could have been a thing at one point, but it’s not official canon/there’s no indicator in the movie proper that was a relationship that really happened so I’m not going to consider that as part of his backstory.