Personality Analysis

[thegreatexperiment]

I want to know where I belong,
Want to know where I came from
Want to know the reason why I’m here
The way I am
Feeling the things I feel...

It would be easy to dismiss Samantha as “nothing serious.” She’s mouthy, brash, and never does things halfway. Her hair is blue. She paints graffiti. Pop culture and profanity pepper her speech. Her youth is one of her most noticeable features and, because of it, she’s often disregarded by Kindred. At the same time, enormous bits and pieces of her personality can be explained, in part, because of her youth.

Although she’s a vampire, she’s still well within the span of her mortal life. Therefore, much of who she was before the Embrace is still there, untouched by the ravages of time. For starters, growing up in an affluent suburb of Chicago, raised by successful and career-minded parents, Samantha was brought up with the understanding that she could be anything she wanted to be, a mindset that hasn’t gone away yet. This has had both positive and negative consequences for her.

On the one hand, it has given her a strong sense of entitlement. Since money was never an issue, there was no real cost to her quest to discover who she was. Samantha was able to drift between social circles (gifted student, Goth chick, quirky artist) with little more than a change of costume. She could afford it. This sense of entitlement, too, transferred over into her Kindred life. She joined the Carthian Movement by default. That’s what Karen was. But the second that she decided it wasn’t working out for her, she switched to the Ordo Dracul. While changing covenants is certainly not unheard of in the Kindred world, to do so at such a young age was outrageous. But Samantha didn’t see it that way. She knew some parties would be upset, yes. She didn’t realize anyone would be scandalized. To her, one thing hadn’t worked, so she was just trying something new.

On the other hand, Samantha’s mindset of exploration and self-discovery has had some positive consequences on her personality. She is open-minded and eager to experience new things. Only at the beginning of her immortal life, Samantha knows that there are things in the world that are beyond her wildest imagination. She’s open to new possibilities and optimistic that they’re not all terrible things. Her open-mindedness also means she can see past some of the dogma of her elders. The fact of the matter is, where Kindred political factions are concerned, Samantha is incredibly informal and casual. Whereas some vampires will pick and choose their friends based entirely on their alignment, Samantha doesn’t care. Her philosophy is to look at the individual, rather than their covenant. If she likes you, she likes you. If you’re an ass to her, she’s not going to fawn and curtsy and play nice. She’ll be really frank about the fact that you’ve offended her.

Although she’s drifted between different mortal social circles, and has chosen to manifest herself as a bit of a punk, the truth of the matter is that Samantha is really still just a gifted student at heart. In the battle between social, physical, and mental attributes, her mental ones always rise to the top. She’s wickedly smart, creative, witty, and observant. She’s good at picking up patterns out of chaos and has a sharp memory (she can tell you even the most minute of details about the Star Wars Space Wars canon from memory). She's excellent in math. When she tries to be, she can even come off as eloquent.

Of course, this cleverness, too, is a double-edged sword. After a lifetime of being told that she’s clever, Samantha sometimes overestimates her own mind. Or rather, underestimates the abilities of others. When she comes up with a plan that she deems brilliant, it’s hard to get her to change her mind. She will stubbornly insist that her idea is the right idea and anyone who argues is just being difficult. And she decidedly holds a grudge against those she perceives as “questioning” her intelligence.

Cleverness doesn’t make for a mastermind, but Sam does scheme a bit. As a Ventrue, Samantha is particularly prone to suspicion. It doesn’t help that she’s begun to realize that her entire life has been a series of lies. Most of her schemes, however, are constructed with the purpose of protecting both herself and her loved ones. For example, she changed her name from Samantha Halper to Samantha Moon (self-aware enough to realize that she could never believably answer to a name other than “Samantha”) and she wears her blue wig when dealing with the Kindred community, all to keep the Kindred from getting to her family back home. Lies of omission frequently confuse her narrative. She’s very, very slow to trust people, especially vampires. She even kept much of the truth of her identity from Avery. But when she realized that she trusted him, she went all the way, throwing her lot behind him entirely. Did she tell him some of the truths she’d known all along? No. But did she stand by his side to the bitter end? Actually, she stood in front of him half the time.

Avery came to represent an important piece of Samantha’s personality as well. As part of her quest of self-discovery, Samantha has always been desperate for family. Bouncing from foster home to foster home for the first nine years of her life, Samantha grew up with the sense that she’d never really experienced unconditional love. It was always about behaving herself and not getting into trouble and, as a young child, she certainly couldn’t control the fact that she had nightmares, that she was different in some ephemeral sort of way. So when she was finally adopted by the Halpers, there was always a bit of distance perceived on her end. She came to realize that she was loved, but it wasn’t what she’d been seeking. And when she was finally presented with a path to finding her family, she immediately took it. In the end, her parents weren’t the beautiful dream of a loving and supportive force. But Avery was. And, having gotten a taste of that once, Samantha wants nothing more than to feel that sense of belonging again.

She certainly doesn’t “belong” as a Ventrue. In the Kindred world, there are certain stereotypes about the Ventrue. They’re seen as dignified statesmen who wield their unique powers of mind control like chisels, carefully cultivating and crafting Manchurian candidates and carving out small empires for themselves. Samantha doesn’t fit the mold. She wields her abilities more like a sledgehammer, acting in the moment, without leaving behind mindless drones. She understands the necessity of using her powers on others from time to time, but being so very close to her mortal life herself, she has an impressive amount of empathy for humankind. Samantha is able to put herself into the shoes of her victims. And she could forgive being compelled to fall asleep so that someone could make a quick getaway. But she could never forgive someone manipulating her memories. So she just doesn’t do it.

This empathy was also part of the reason why she wanted to support the dropping of the Masquerade. Given the circumstances of her birth, she feels that human beings have a right to know what else is out there. It’s the only way they can learn to protect themselves. Did she expect torches and pitchforks? Yes. Did she expect human beings to immediately embrace the fact that they were not at the top of the food chain? Hell, no. But she believed, and still believes, that coexistence is possible. At least if worked out in a thoughtful, mutually beneficial, respectful way.

So what is Samantha in a sentence? Samantha is a mouthy gifted student who was too smart for school—but not yet clever enough to be a vampiric big wig—who will choose her alliances based on the people she comes to know and trust, rather than on titles because, in the end, what she’s looking for is the unconditional love and sense of belonging that she never felt as a foster child. It’s a very long sentence. And Samantha is only at the beginning of what could, in fact, be a very long adventure.

(If you'd prefer to sum Samantha up in a song, it would be Everything That I Am by Phil Collins, for the record.)

Is this my family?
Can it really be them that I see?
My father and mother,
And in their arms can it really be me?

Being both young and inexperienced, a great deal of Samantha’s personality has derived from an external locus of identity. It’s impossible to look at the whole person without looking at the individual pieces of the puzzle.

Robert and Anne: After being bounced from foster home to foster home for the first nine years of her life, Robert and Anne were the first real parents Samantha ever knew. Although she was never quite able to see them as loving her unconditionally (she always had an unconscious sense that they’d eventually send her back), they contributed immensely to her ultimate personality. As stated above, they encouraged her to try new things and to find out who she was. They gave her a cultural identity as well, bringing her up Jewish. They also encouraged her to cultivate her mind, plying her with books and paying for a college education. It’s entirely possible that they did, in fact, love her unconditionally, but Samantha never had the chance to find out. In her final conversation with them, a few hours before the sky fell, Samantha warned them to stay inside that night, fearing for their safety in the wake of the Masquerade drop. Anne ended the conversation by telling Samantha that she loved her, words that would haunt Samantha deeply as she finally encountered her loveless biological parents.

Tom and Tina: If Robert and Anne gave Samantha a cultural identity, it was Uncle Tom and his girlfriend Tina who gave Samantha her passion. As the fun aunt and uncle, they were the ones who introduced her to new forms of expression. Music. Poetry. Most especially art. Samantha carried this love over into her immortal life, even finding ways to use it to communicate. It also became therapy for her, a place to channel her frustration. Although there’s nothing supernatural about her artistic talent, it’s strong. She can often capture an object, feeling, or message in her painting, if she sets her mind to it. This skill made her particularly valuable for some investigations as a vampire, serving as a sort of police sketch artist to capture the image of vampires, who don’t show up on film. It should also be noted that it was Tom’s death, protecting Samantha, that launched her into her first mad quest to find the truth. Losing her uncle felt like losing a piece of herself and it opened her up to the much bigger, scarier world. Indeed, she came to believe that if Tom had not been killed by a vampire, she would never have become one. But it was inevitable that he would be killed by a vampire, because she was vampire bait from the day she was born. This unending guilt cycle has never left her and has extended out to her other relationships. Samantha often blames herself and what she is for things that were clearly outside of her control.

Karen: If it weren’t for Karen, Samantha as she knew herself would not exist. Samantha would have grown up as the great experiment and nothing more. The people who contributed to her personality would never have touched her life and it’s very likely Samantha would never have had any agency at all. Because Samantha recognizes this fact, it’s hard for her to hate Karen. But it’s hard for her to feel grateful most of time. Karen, after all, set in motion many of the events of Samantha’s life by kidnapping her as a baby and putting her into foster care without any kind of protection against the vampires that dhampir naturally attract. Karen also lied and omitted crucial information about her origins after the Embrace, prompting Sam to seek out the truth on her own. Had Karen told her everything, it’s possible Samantha would never have put herself and her friends in California on a path to confrontation with the Predators. But who knows? Samantha will always play the “what if” game.

Avery: Avery was the family that Samantha had been seeking. She just didn’t know it. Her brother by Embrace, Avery was the very epitome of “stuck in the past.” Embraced in the 1950s, Avery had a hard time adjusting as the world around him changed. He was a perfect foil to Samantha’s youth and modern sensibilities. She never expected to feel close to him, but his work to uncover his own truth (the belief in a great conspiracy) intertwined with Samantha’s, leading the two of them to work together. Their unlikely partnership served them well, Avery doing the delicate work, Samantha as the blunt instrument. In the process, Samantha came to realize that she loved Avery.

The Ordo Dracul: After her Embrace, Samantha inherited a world of prejudice against the Ordo Dracul from Karen. Karen told her that they were cruel, brutal, and cold. She told her that their politics took no consideration for collateral damage, especially if it was human-shaped. With no basis of her own, Samantha believed what Karen said, at first. But in Los Angeles, she came into contact with members of the Ordo who defied her expectations, causing her to reevaluate. Notable friends she made among the Ordo include some remarkable women; Iris, Eve, and two different women named Grace. They, along with Avery, helped her to understand that no group or organization is a monolith. There are more than fifty shades of gray to anything. Like Avery, they became something of a family to Samantha. She was able to trust them with her secret and, despite her fears of becoming some kind of science project, they protected her and welcomed her and helped her to further investigate her own origins.

Daniel Jericho: As the head of the Carthian Movement in Los Angeles, Daniel Jericho’s relationship with Samantha was as much responsible for her decision to defect to the Ordo Dracul as Avery’s relationship with Samantha was. To Samantha, Jericho was the epitome of the “walking dead” she feared becoming. Although efficient and very good at his job, everything Jericho did served to remind Samantha that many vampires do not view human beings as people. His arrogant use of the word “kine” to refer to people, along with his constant complaints about young vampires, put fire in Samantha’s belly, giving her the motivation and the passion to reject the rigid social structure of Kindred life in favor of following her own path.