#roberta greene

[hell-creek-colony]

Random character backstory time!

As I mentioned previously Roberta used to be a guntuber, and during that time she got involved in a few instances of Drama with other guntubers. Who are (barely) fictionalized versions of actual guntube personalities.

The first happened when a much more prominent guntuber who is definitely not Michael Jones, AKA Garand Thumb, who made being all tradcath a part of his identity, tried to slide into her DMs. So, of course, she posted screenshots of the messages to her social media like "Aren't you married lol" which attracted some heat in both directions. Eventually it died down but she got the last laugh when his wife ended up divorcing him for his enthusiastic attitude toward infidelity.

The second instance began when she took part in the same shooting competition as another guntuber who is definitely not Lucas Botkin, AKA the guy who until recently was the face of T.rex Arms. She already had zero respect for this guy due to his tendency to portray himself as a top-tier tacticool badass despite never having had any sort of actual training, speeding up his shooting footage to make himself look better, posting "training videos" of himself basically assassinating unarmed targets, belonging to a weird culty Christian sect that treats women like breeding stock, and also being a massive racist and homophobe, so to troll him she showed up to the event wearing one of these patches on her gear:

And then she absolutely smoked his ass on every stage. (She didn't place first, since she'll be the first to acknowledge that competitive shooting is not her thing, but her times were still a hell of a lot better than his were.) To which he naturally responded by posting several passive aggressive tirades online laced with some very...unkind terms for certain groups of people. For her part she simply ignored him; she had better things to do than get into internet slapfights, and by this point most of the chud types who'd been watching her content had been driven away by her controversial stance of "racism and homophobia are bad" and she really didn't give a shit what people in that sphere thought of her anyway. The guntube shit was only ever a hobby for her, so it wasn't as if she was losing valuable income if she lost followers because she pissed off an influential bigot.

Not long after that she started to pivot her content more towards camping and outdoor survival, and then she was one of the volunteers selected for the first expedition to the Late Cretaceous, at which point her follower count blew the fuck up because hey, she had photos and video of dinosaurs. So now she still does the occasional gun-related content, but she mostly just does stuff related to life in the Cretaceous and around the colony.

(She's not the only one to see a jump in followers after moving to Laramidia, either. Every other colonist with an active social media presence got a similar boost in popularity, especially if they do any sort of fieldwork.)

[hell-creek-colony]

One of Roberta's biggest dreams as a prominent figure in the survival enthusiast community is to get her own signature model of camp knife. Not for vanity reasons, she just really likes knives and she thinks it would be cool.

[hell-creek-colony]

Character trivia: Roberta Greene

I don't feel like writing out like a biography, so I'm doing a bulleted list. I did a similar trivia post about Roberta on my main blog in the past, but new ideas have rendered that outdated so I'm not gonna reblog it here.

Before Roberta was conceived her father served in the United States Marine Corps, which is how he met her mother; he was stationed at Camp Butler in Okinawa and she was there on vacation from mainland Japan, and they hit it off, kept in touch, and eventually married. Then he took her home to the US when he got out of the Corps.

Roberta was born and raised in northeastern South Dakota.

As a result of living in northeastern South Dakota she was kind of a troublemaker during her teenage years, simply because there's not a whole lot to do out here besides make questionable decisions.

As a kid she was really into her dad's collection of old issues of Soldier of Fortune, though she was also smart enough to not take them very seriously. She did pick up a lifelong fascination with the whole late Cold War paramilitary aesthetic from them though.

She used to bully the shit out of her little sister as a teenager, which she now regrets.

Her mom taught her and her sister Japanese when they were kids. I don't speak Japanese. I'm sure that won't cause any issues if I ever have to write her speaking Japanese.

After graduating high school she joined the Marines like her pops, and managed to become one of only a handful of women to make it into Force Recon.

She served in a war, but I'm still nailing down the details of the setting and whether it's in the future or an alternate present or what so I don't yet know where it was or who it was with. She thought it was bullshit, though.

After getting out of the Marines she started working at a McDonald's in her hometown and became a shift manager.

She was always pretty outdoorsy, but it really ramped up after getting out of the Marines. After coming home she got really into extreme outdoor survival stuff, deliberately going out camping with as few supplies as possible.

At one point she took six months off work to hike the entirety of the Appalachian Trail, and then a year later she took part in a month-long survival course in the Peruvian Amazon. By this point her coworkers pretty much saw her as equal parts badass and insane.

At some point during this she also started a YouTube (or a lawyer-friendly in-universe equivalent) channel, where she would post video reviews of various firearms, knives, and pieces of gear that she owned. She only ever did it as a hobby and didn't put a lot of effort into the videos at first, but she still garnered a bit of a following by virtue of being a conventionally attractive woman who had served in the military and knew stuff about guns.

Eventually though a large chunk of the guntube community turned on her, after she had the absolute nerve to voice her support for the LGBTQIA+ community as well as other marginalized groups. This did help her standing among more left-leaning gun owners, though.

Because of the above she gets asked her orientation a lot, to which she usually answers "mostly straight."

Both due to the shooting community being so full of shitheads and just running out of guns in her collection to review, she eventually pivoted to more survival-oriented content.

During the first trip to the Cretaceous she was photographed staring down a big male Triceratops that had happened upon their group; the photo quickly went viral when it was published back home, and she sort of became the unofficial face of the expedition upon their return. She wasn't entirely comfortable with this, as she felt it unfairly minimized the contributions of the other team members.

She still did the media appearances though, since she really really wanted to go back through the gate and she figured a second expedition was more likely if people stayed interested.

She did turn down the offer to pose for Playboy however.

As a result of bringing her entire collection of surplus and reproduction military rifles with her to the Cretaceous when Hell Creek Colony got up and running, she is the most heavily armed person on the planet and could probably outfit a good chunk of the colony's security personnel out of her own safe if she had to.

In addition to her trips out into the field as a survey team leader she'll also just disappear into the Cretaceous wilderness for a few days to keep herself sharp. This has not helped convince others of her sanity.

She's hoping she can get her sister a spot in the next wave of colonists, since she's grown up to be a paleontologist specializing in Mesozoic birds. She figures that should make up for being such a shit to her growing up.

[hell-creek-colony]

I was going to be all like "Dumb idea: animated show about Roberta as a Race Bannon-style bodyguard to a colony scientist and his dumbass kid," but then I realized that's basically already a part of her job, escorting scientists out into the field.

Minus the kid, 'cause they're not bringing them through the gate yet. But they're planning on it...someday...

[hell-creek-colony]

So, since I lazily just made Roberta from my hometown, and decided that she worked at a McDonald's for a while after getting out of the Marines, there's a 50/50 chance that she worked at the same one I do right now. So every now and then when a coworker is being especially shitty, I'll catch myself thinking "Man, this fake person I made up in my head would not like you." (And some of them, like the racist, sexist, homophobic Trumper who treats a woman not letting him do whatever he wants like a declaration of war, would not like her either.)

Also, if she worked at the same McDonald's as me, at a time when I definitely would have been working there...would I exist in this reality???

...Oh god, I can just see our coworkers shipping the two of us together like they did with the last Asian woman who worked there, just because I'd been to Japan one time. Much to our annoyance.

[hell-creek-colony]

So for a brief while I was toying with the idea of Roberta Greene having gotten a foot blown off in whatever war she fought in as a Marine and having to wear a prosthetic, but I ultimately decided against it. Not because I think writing someone with a disability would be too hard or that an amputee couldn't do all the cool outdoorsy shit she does, but because I already have a shit-ton of dark-haired badass warrior women with tattoos in my stories so I'm already falling back on previous ideas, and I feel like if I make another one of them an amputee that's just another concept I'm recycling like the unoriginal hack piece of shit that I am.

I still keep coming back to it every now and then so I might change my mind and go with it anyway though, we'll see.

[hell-creek-colony]

Talking about the colonists' electric dirtbikes has reminded me, this wouldn't be the first time I've written about a badass warrior woman with black hair and tattoos who rides a dirtbike in dinosaur country. Though I assume Roberta is a lot less reckless about it.

And thinking about that made me briefly wonder who would win in a fight between Roberta Greene and Gina Herodias. I think Gina would have the upper hand in a physical brawl, she'd been training for that since she was seven so she'd take Roberta to the fucking cleaners no question. But I think in any other situation, Roberta's taking her out. Gina may have spent time in her tribe's militia, but Roberta was a Recon Marine trained specifically for sneaking around and, if necessary, dealing with people before they know she's there.

...Not like, lethally of course, and they'd probably become buddies after that, bonding over their various shared interests.

[hell-creek-colony]

I imagine Roberta Greene really enjoys St. Patrick's day, solely for the confused reactions she gets from people who don't know her family background when she makes a big deal of celebrating her Irish heritage while looking extremely Asian.

Also she used to drink a lot so that also helped, but she's been trying to cut back on that. (That part had less to do with her being half Irish than with growing up in a sparsely populated largely rural area where there's not much to do for fun besides get shitfaced.)