i keep referencing this video and apparently no one i know in real life has seen it, and there’s really no way to explain it, so every time i bring it up we just have to suffer through the awkwardness of a failed comedic reference together. which i guess is...bonding in its own way, but @ me what the fuck, stop doing this
[EDIT: The information in this post has been largely superseded by the character page I have on Mar. If there's any conflicting information or the characterization in this post doesn't match, the character page should be believed over this post.]
Oh wow did this get long. Thanks for sending in all these questions!
1. What name do you give your Boss?
My main is named Guiomar—”[p]ossibly derived from the Germanic name Wigmar meaning ‘famous in war.’” I don’t know if that meaning translates over to the name’s use in Portuguese/Spanish, but I’m hoping it does! She usually goes by Mar, though, not in any small part because she was tired of people fucking her name up. Here are some pictures of her from SR4.
(I also have another boss—Valeriya—but she’s not quite as fleshed out as Mar at this point.)
2. What is your favorite headcanon about the Boss?
I hope by “favorite headcanon” you meant “top five.” The lesson here is to never ask me about headcanons unless you want a stream of talking directed at you.
Mar loves cars and motorcycles. Loves them. Her father was a mechanic for the Saints on the side and a lot of her earliest memories as a kid have to do with sitting on her dad’s workshop bench while he worked on the Saints’ cars. Working on her cars and bikes is one of the main ways she relaxes and driving has always been her main source of entertainment, and she takes an incredible amount of pride in her collection, which is arguably better protected than any of the living spaces in her cribs.
If she isn’t driving she’s the pissiest, most sarcastic backseat driver you’ll ever come across, but god help you if you say so much as one “holy shit” when she’s driving. Everyone in the gang is continually surprised that she has a 100% legal license that she doesn’t bribe anyone to keep. (Though, granted, she’s actually a very good driver—it’s mostly that she’s a very good driver who enjoys going fast and gets a real kick out of the Near Miss diversion, which makes her generally terrifying to ride along with.)
If she’s upset or trying to work something out, she’ll go out on a long bike ride by herself around the city. No radio, no homie, just her and her helmet and her Kaneda. They all end at the same scenic vista areas in both Stilwater and Steelport, regardless of where she starts from. She’s spent a lot of hours looking out over both cities and just thinking. Provided she gets there, that is; she tends to be much more reckless on them than when she’s out driving around normally, so most of her driving-related injuries come from them.
Mar owns exactly two suits—the one she bought years ago for Aisha’s funeral, and the purple one she has in SR4. She wears the purple one on a semi-regular basis for when Kinzie forces her to dress up for an event she has to make an appearance at; the one she bought for Aisha’s funeral she’s only worn at Aisha’s funeral and the re-do of Gat’s funeral that was held after STAG and the Syndicate were taken care of. (I’m well aware that this is probably directly in opposition to what the Boss is canonically shown wearing, but I don’t care.)
She’s tall. Really fucking tall. Like, 6’2” or 6’3”, depending on who you’re asking. She also eats like a pro swimmer to go with her swimmer’s build—long, lean, muscular in a lithe way. She’ll mess you up, don’t get me wrong, but she’s not what most people would consider a bodybuilder. (Also, despite the fact that she’s built like a swimmer, she actually hates being in the water and avoids any sort of water-based anything whenever she has a choice in the matter. She’s in the “completely loses all muscle coordination when put in a body of water where she can’t touch the ground” boat, which makes for some interesting home videos of the two times the crew’s been able to convince her to get into a pool.)
Queer as fucking get out. That might be my favorite headcanon.
I’m going to stop, but I want you to know I could go on and on. I’ll save it for the big post I do on her, I suppose.
6. We all have a favorite method of killing—what weapon can’t you live without?
An RPG with infinite ammo is a girl’s best friend.
In terms of melee, I’ve got a lot of attachment to the baseball bat with barbed wire wrapped around it, though the hand-to-hand in SR3/4 really makes just going and wailing on some jackass that whistles at you when you’re walking down the street very rewarding. Among the conventional guns I don’t have a favorite, though I tend to default to dual wielded pistols if I don’t know what sort of combat situation I’m going into. With the special guns…man, the Abduction Gun makes me laugh every time, and the Singularity Gun is really handy when you get up into higher notoriety situations just because of how much it can take out.
13. What’s your jam? Favorite song featured in the games?
If I had to pick just one song, I’d say that Face Down from SR2 (tw: abuse) and Renegades from SR3 are tied for my favorite. That’s a hard choice, though—there’s a lot of good music spread across the series.
14. Describe in detail the Boss’s relationship with your favorite NPC.
I got this question two other times, so I’m doing it for a few different NPCs! Check the other answers for more…uh, answers. I’m also excluding Homies from this, since there’s a question specifically for them. That being said, I’m going to do Carlos for this first one—he should probably count as a Homie, but you can never actually call and roll with him, I don’t think, so.
Mar has a very interesting, unique relationship to Carlos, in that he’s the only one of any of her lieutenants in any of the games—outside of perhaps Gat—that she really treats like a sibling. All the other lieutenants are her family, definitely, but Carlos…she thinks of Carlos (at least subconsciously) as her little brother. She grew up an only child but there’s something about him that brings out a protective and mentoring side in her that the other lieutenants don’t.
She tells Carlos that she’s “gonna make a banger out of [him] if it kills [her]” on a subway train in one of the Brotherhood missions. Ignoring the really skewed everything in that statement, it’s fundamentally different from anything she says at any other point to anyone—she doesn’t have to “make” anyone else. She doesn’t feel any sort of responsibility in shaping their growth or personal development, for whatever reason. With Carlos? She does. She wants to be there for him and help him really come into his own as a lieutenant and as a Saint member, and she can see the potential he has to grow into a thoroughly impressive example of both. In a lot of ways, her relationship to Carlos is similar to Gat’s relationship to her—role model, mentor, and leader. Carlos is…very young, very naïve, and very determined to “make it” in and with the Saints, and that sort of combination resonates deeply with her as the Saints’ new leader, because not so long ago she was in his position.
So of course his death—and, in particular, the way it happened and the people responsible for it—hit her incredibly hard. It’s like watching what her brush of death was like, except from an outside perspective and except that Carlos doesn’t make some miraculous recovery. Carlos dies at her hand after being put through an excruciating experience. It’s a mercy killing, but think about it—this is someone she thought of as a younger brother, her protégé. “Out for revenge” doesn’t even begin to cover it. Her anger at the Brotherhood’s a goddamn tornado, but there’s also a pretty sizable part of her that’s incredibly angry at herself for letting him down. I imagine she spends a lot of nights after Carlos’s death asking herself if she could’ve done anything else, if she should’ve done things differently.
She grieves for Carlos for a long, long time, and, like Gat’s death, I don’t think it’s a heaviness that ever fully leaves her. It colors her interactions with both her core crew and other gangs in a subtle way; she’s much more protective of her crew after it, though it may not always be outwardly visible, and when people fuck with them she goes after them with enough vitrol and fury to take down entire mountains. Carlos’s death makes fucking with any of the Saints, but fucking with her lieutenants in particular, the worst thing you could ever do to Mar—and the worst thing you could ever do to you, too, because she will hunt you down to the ends of the Earth and make you regret ever existing. It’s a weakness as much as it is a strength, and Mar won’t hear a word about it either way.
19. Is your Boss a sociopath or simply a misunderstood puckish rogue?
…I think Mar has a very seriously skewed sense of morals when it comes to things that goes way, way beyond misunderstood puckish rogue. Even looking purely at canon events, the things that go on in the series generally go beyond “gray morality” and straight into the Boss being either a ruthless jackass or a wholly reprehensible person.
Like at the end of Act II in SR3, when you get all the prostitutes off the Morningstar’s boat and have a choice about either handing them over to the Morningstar for a big cash payout or keeping them for yourselves? Is a really thoroughly shitty choice all around. These women were being kept in fucking shipping containers for god knows how long, seemingly without any food or water, and were going to be incorporated into a prostitution network that is known for being incredibly brutal…and you take them and just turn them into prostitutes for you instead. Really? Really?
Add in a bunch of other really shitty stuff you do in the name of the Saints or just because you don’t give enough of a shit about anyone but the Saints, including and certainly not limited to the casual and disregarded deaths that happen in the course of missions, diversions, and just travelling around Stilwater or Steelport, and…well. Mar’s not a nice person to know if you’re not in the Saints—or, rather, if you’re not in her core people. She’s got a lot to answer for.
Sociopathy’s a whole other ballpark, and I really don’t have the knowledge about it to say anything without sounding like I’m talking out of my ass, so I’m going to let it alone. (Though I know it’s a reference to that joke in…god, either SR3 or 4, I don’t remember which. But…I don’t know. Sociopathy is just a really muddied topic in general because of how casually it’s thrown around. I don’t feel comfortable rolling with the joke.)
