app (WSH).

CHARACTER INFO.
NAME: Amanda Brotzman
CANON: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
CANON POINT: S1 E8, “Two Sane Guys Doing Normal Things”
AGE: 24
GENDER: Female

HISTORY: Link

APPEARANCE: Link

ABILITIES: Amanda has some psychic abilities that were scantly explored when the series was cancelled and had only slightly manifested as of her S1 canon-point. She has a disease – pararibulitis - that causes her to experience painful physical hallucinations, and it’s revealed that while doing so she gives off psychic energy and also has vague, confusing visions. In S2 she’s learned to harness this psychic energy for combat purposes, but she doesn’t know that she can yet. All that would happen alongside her attacks are quick bursts of contextless psychic images having to do with whatever’s going on in-game that month, and anyone sensitive to psychic energy would notice that she’s absolutely oozing the stuff.

SUITABILITY: While Dirk Gently is by nature an upbeat show that treats even its worst situations with humor and catchy music, it isn’t kind. There’s quite a bit of casual violence in nearly absurd amounts, and while Amanda herself hasn’t been exposed to the surprise shark attacks or Fantasyland chainsaw massacres, she has a lot of experience with grisly torment. As mentioned above, her pararibulitis causes her to hallucinate horrific experiences that she can actually feel – knives impaling her hands, her skin melting as she burns alive, all sorts of lovely things. They feel real to her, so facing a graphic injury being real here won’t change things too much. Later on she’s also shown to have a fairly innate knack for leadership, adaptability, and courage under fire, so she won’t crumble too hard under a new, terrifying setting.

PERSONALITY.

● Your character has a chance to undo a terrible mistake, but in doing so, there could be unintended consequences for everyone they know. Is it worth the risk? Or should the dead stay dead?

No solution is worth that level of risk. Amanda is a staunch believer that once you make your bed, it’s up to you to lie down in it and repay your own debts, no matter what it takes. There is no quick way out of guilt and regret. This is evidenced in canon by her treatment of her brother, Todd, after he confesses to his fairly egregious wrongdoing: sometimes when you fall, she says, you fall all the way down. Nothing can soften that impact, and nothing should, because you fucked up. It’s all on you, and you have to figure out how to live with it now, no matter how much it sucks for you. You certainly shouldn’t take others down alongside you in your scramble to fix things. If presented with this choice, she would probably find undoing the mistake a tremendously selfish act, born more out of embarrassment and injured pride than a true desire to make things any better. Instead of taking that risk and undoing your error, you should own up to it and pour your energy into fixing it with your own two hands. Don’t hide behind a redo switch that might only make things worse.

● If your character had the option to permanently lose the ability to feel certain negative emotions like fear or grief, or permanently forget certain memories, would they take it? What if they will never know that something has been taken from them? Does loss only matter if it's known what's missing?

She would not take the opportunity, at least not now. Prior to canon, during her long isolation due to illness, she would have been more eager to dispel the fear she lived with every day. Not being in constant terror of a pararibulitis attack would have allowed her a degree of normalcy she hadn’t had in years. At her current point though, she’s just beginning to ease into the knowledge that just because her disease is scary doesn’t mean her life needs to be controlled by the fear. It’s going to hurt like hell and she’s going to be terrified, and then it’s going to be fine. And what’s more, one major facet of Amanda’s character arc, which she’s barely stumbled upon at the point from which I’m playing her, is actually taking that fear and that pain and using them as tools instead of letting them isolate her. Her episodes bring visions that she begins to instigate herself, forcing terrifying situations that start to faze her less and less, until panic isn’t an all-encompassing state but a refined blade. Fear, she learns, is merely a thing that happens to someone’s body, and with enough focus she can separate herself from it entirely.

With her illness-related panic and agoraphobia beginning to heal, she has nothing else that she would accept an offer to erase or block out. Her fury and heartbreak over her brother’s lie coming to light is the one big thing that she struggles with at her current canon point, but she wouldn’t get rid of it, even if she would never know it was missing. This in part goes back to her prior statement: “Sometimes when you fall, you fall all the way down.” Her relationship with her brother was broken, maybe in a way that will never be fixed, but forgetting what he did wouldn’t be right. It’s an easy out for both of them, one he doesn’t deserve, even if it means her hurting more from it too. Erasing the pain doesn’t solve anything for anyone. While she hasn’t suffered any major losses, it seems likely that she would approach the idea of forgetting grief similarly. Sometimes you just lose, and it sucks, and then you keep going.

● Could your character ever forgive themselves for something morally wrong that they've done? No matter how much time has passed? No matter how much penitence has been done? Is being sorry enough to be a good person?

Based upon Amanda’s reaction to others’ morally reprehensible actions, forgiving oneself doesn’t seem to be a concept that she would place much stock in. She would probably even view it as selfish; when you royally fuck up, who are you to grant clemency? Who gives you any right to determine that it’s time to stop punishing yourself? Even penitence itself is a tricky matter in Amanda’s world view - when her brother comes out with his massive betrayal, she condemns many of his attempts to make things right as self-serving. She tears up the $10,000 lottery ticket he had planned to heal their relationship with, and when he tracks her down later to “make things right”, she accuses him of only doing it to make himself feel better. This may be harsh, but she’s serious about penitence only being on the victim’s term, if at all. Being sorry is so far away from being enough, it isn’t even in the same hemisphere. Remorse, after all, is about you, not the person you hurt. Given her views, it seems unlikely that she would think to let herself off the hook for a serious misdeed any more than she would allow from others.


● Your character has a secret they have been sworn to, but revealing this secret could save the lives of countless others. Is it worth breaking the promise to save others, or is betrayal never justifiable?

To save the lives of others, Amanda would tell the secret. Saving the lives of others, as she demonstrates during her desperate plight to save the people of Wendimoor, is always worth the effort, no matter how painful or inconvenient. Human (or non-human) lives wouldn’t stand up to any sense of personal debt to one other person, so long as sharing the secret didn’t then somehow endanger them. If that were the case, she would likely still tell the secret, and then try to do everything she could to prevent whatever harm she had just caused. Apologizing to the person she betrayed wouldn’t be top priority during any of this – for one thing, she’d understand that she had done something that may irreparably harm the relationship, and they would be well within their rights to never forgive her. On the other hand, she would expect them to understand that there are far more important things than a promise between two people. Breaking trust is a big deal, but saving lives is much, much bigger, and she wouldn’t hesitate to explain that to a friend’s face if they took issue with her telling the secret. The good of the universe doesn’t have time for squabbles.

● Has your character ever gotten joy out of hurting others, physically or mentally? If they have, does it scare them?

Amanda has never gotten joy out of directly inflicting unprovoked bodily or psychological harm on another person. That being said, she has expressed utter delight at committing rampant property damage, which probably says a great deal about her status as a pacifist. She’s the newest addition to a gang of van-dwelling anarchist psychic energy vampires known as the Rowdy 3 (there were already four, before she joined), who essentially roam around creating utter chaos and feeding off of people’s emotions. Amanda joins in gladly, grinning as she takes a baseball bat to a police car. It could perhaps be said that she was taking delight in the officer’s distress, but, well. Amanda Brotzman said ACAB, et cetera.

Later on, Amanda and the other Rowdies do take part in a large-scale fight against some bad guys, and she recounts the story with some excitement, telling her brother, “We beat them up”. This could also be interpreted as some degree of unnecessary glee in having committed an act of violence against another person, but it wound up saving the day, and she was still amped on adrenaline and triumph. It seems safe to say that while she does enjoy property damage and maybe kicking some cultist ass, she doesn’t get a kick out of others’ pain in any kind of a sadistic or unusual way. What she does enjoy is fighting The Man and triumphing against an oppressor.