Ana Lewis

NAME: Kim
CONTACT: Aproclivity@plurl
OTHER CHARACTERS IN THE PINES: None



NAME: Ana Lewis
CANON: G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra
CANON-POINT: The end of the movie when she's on the prison barge.



HISTORY: Movie wiki and Ana's character wiki

WHAT ARE YOUR CHARACTER'S STRENGTHS?: One of Ana’s biggest strengths is her intelligence. While she is not as much of a genius as her brother Rex is, she is still no slouch in that department. Before she became the Baroness, Ana was intensely interested in books, even to the point where she was reading them on dates with Duke. Further, when circumstances change quickly, she also shows great adaptability in dealing with the change of situation. More than that, Ana can be extremely cunning when she needs to be. She’s adaptive to different situations, especially when it comes to things like fighting. This is especially shown in the fight that Ana has with Scarlett after Scarlett has put on basically an invisibility suit. During the fight, Ana throws oil on Scarlett to short out the suit, and then uses that moment to her advantage. More than that, she shows improvisational skills by using what’s around her to fight even when she no longer has her concussive guns.

Ana’s skills are something that she comes by quite honestly through the use of another strength, being a quick learner. In less than four years, Ana becomes the second greatest ninja in the world’s (sorry Storm Shadow, but you like die twice) best student. Her skills are not something that Rex has programmed into her: she fights and uses weapons because those are things that she learned through determination and grit.

Another of her biggest strengths is her determination, even in the face of large odds. Despite the nanomite warheads being in one of the most heavily fortified places on the planet, Ana grits her teeth and promises that she will get the warheads back. More than that, even when Ana is not the Baroness, she still has that determination. When Duke proposes to her, Ana quite seriously makes the comment that she will only marry him if he promises to keep her brother safe. Yes, it comes off as a joke but it also is enough that coupled with his own guilt, that he completely cuts off contact with her following Rex’s “death” because he expects her to do it to him first.

Not only that but Ana is incredibly strong. When she fights her programming in order to save Duke from being turned into a neoviper, it’s outright stated that no one had ever been able to do it before, not even for a few moments. Ana fights it long enough that she is able to free Duke, but then following when he uses the nanomites to subdue her, she still has her conscious and her emotions and feelings intact. In fact, Ana’s being able to fight is so unprecedented that McCullen outright says that it wasn’t supposed to be able to happen and they were meant to have complete control. More than that, overriding the programming is described as “excruciating” and yet she did it because of her memories of Duke and her conscience resurfacing. I think that it’s no coincidence that the memories kick in quite strongly immediately following the launch of the missiles that will destroy Washington, Moscow and Beijing.

After Ana is no longer the Baroness, and her programming has been broken, she also shows an innate sense of independence which is certainly growth from earlier in the movie. Duke is determined to save her (after quite literally carrying her to safety after she’s fought off the programming even though she doesn’t need it and he forgets the very remote that could probably remove the nanomites entirely if he had grabbed it) and Ana rejects the idea that he can save her from the things that she has done. He can’t, and she tells him such.

WHAT ARE YOUR CHARACTER'S WEAKNESSES?: One of Ana’s biggest weaknesses is going to be her anger. Yes, the nanomites that Rex injected into her definitely lowered her inhibitions when it came to her anger trigger, but it was certainly always present in her life. She is extremely angry at Duke for abandoning her, and Rex for faking his death, and later once she gets the rest of her memories back, Ana is going to be extremely angry at McCullen for manipulating her as he did and knowing about Rex without telling her.

In fact, I would argue that the reason why Ana kept having flashbacks to her life before being the Baroness and her time with Duke happened at first was because she most definitely had a moment of ‘if I can’t kill him, no one can.’ Four different times throughout the movie, Ana attempts to kill Duke, and while he manages to save himself during the attempts, she most certainly does not have any glitching. In fact, after one attempt where she hits him in the face with the extremely heavy weapons case and knocks him into a seemingly endless elevator shaft, Ana just snarks at him, “see ya Duke!” This is most assuredly not the actions of a woman who’s going to be triggered simply but Duke’s imminent death. No, she is furious with him at that point in time, and wants to be the one to end his life, not “The Doctor” or McCullen with his plans for Duke.

A second huge weakness of Ana’s is how petty she can be. No other neoviper expresses the same sort of emotion that she does, so it’s something that comes from within her. After her husband Daniel has outlived his usefulness, she has him killed literally with a kiss after Storm Shadow tells her that McCullen had given “strict orders to kill him if the Baron touched you again.” Ana’s only response is a smirk along with “I heard you the first time.” This is something that Ana does simply because she can. In the end, she could have left him alive in the lab and it wouldn’t have had any more or less effect on the outcome of what happened. Further, killing him with a kiss when earlier in the movie Daniel has made a point of saying how much he loves her (and indeed, he acts like a man who is quite in love with his wife, even after she shoves a gun into his face and tells him that she’s got warheads) is something that is exceedingly cruel. It’s a sign that she didn’t care about him in the least and that he is entirely expendable.

More than that, Ana stops a neoviper from killing Duke in order to basically emotionally torture him with the idea of what she’d become after he’d abandoned her. If Ana hadn’t wasted the time to do that, then she would have gotten the nanomite warheads and the rest of the movie literally wouldn’t have happened. Further, during her one on one fight with Scarlett, when Ana has her down on the ground, she punches her again because the redhead is someone who pisses her off. Her pettiness perhaps comes most into play when she’s both firing missiles at Duke and waving at him when he can see her in the care.

In addition, Ana can snark at people at inopportune times, simply because she can. While it’s not strictly in the family of the villain monologue, it’s still something that Ana engages in more than a few times throughout the course of the movie, especially when it comes to Duke. After the Joes fail to stop the detention of the warheads, but Duke hits the kill switch, stopping the damage from continuing even further Ana just grins at the carnage and congratulates Duke saving “most of it.” She doesn’t need to rub his nose into what happened, but she does because she’s angry and hurting around him. Later, Ana makes a point of making out with McCullen in front of Duke because she knows just how much it bothers him.

Additionally, as both the Baroness and as Ana herself, Ana can be a bit bloodthirsty. There’s the above mention of the killing of her husband, and the killing of the soldiers in Duke’s convoy to get the warheads and all of the Joes that were killed while she was getting the warheads, not to mention the entire city of Paris. However even once Ana is back to herself, and her and Duke are chasing down Rex and McCullen, when he tells her to shoot at the neovipers chasing them, Ana’s response is “gladly” and then she proceeds to take a bunch of them out. Even more than that, when given the option of going to safety or going after McCullen and the brother who she loves beyond all reason, Ana choses to go after the other men in her life, even though it could possibly end in death for all of them.

Duke, Rex and even to an extent McCullen all make up another of Ana’s weaknesses, which is how dependant that she can be on the men in her life. After all, all of this begins because of how completely wrecked Ana is when Rex “dies” and Duke abandons her. For most of her life, Ana has allowed the men in her life to define herself. At least in her own head, especially after their parents died, Ana defined herself as “Rex Lewis’ sister” and then as “Duke’s girlfriend” before settling into her role as the Baroness and all that went along with it with following McCullen’s orders and wishes in order to make MARS the most powerful thing in the world. While she is fighting it now with her newfound independence, it’s something that’s always going to be there in the back of her mind if she allows herself to get too comfortable with it.

Perhaps the biggest weakness that Ana’s going to be facing is how she copes with her guilt on her way to redemption, this time without having someone like Duke to back it up with. After all, Ana had more than a little bit of autonomy when it came to the nanomites that she was injected with and she was certainly never totally brainwashed. What was put in her basically just made her the darkest self that she could be, and she needs to deal with the fact that “The Baroness” really isn’t a separate entity from herself. All of that anger and hate that drove her to do what she did is still inside of her, and she is the one who killed countless people and nearly destroyed multiple cities. That’s not going to be something that’s easily put aside, especially when Ana already has the tendency to sink down into deep depressions. This guilt is going to take a lot of personal strength to pull her out of, and if she’s not careful, it most certainly could be something that paralyzes or destroys her.


WHAT EVENTS OR CIRCUMSTANCES IN YOUR CHARACTER'S PAST HAVE IMPACTED THEM THE MOST?: The thing that probably impacted Ana most was her brother’s “death” and her fiance's subsequent abandoning of her following his inability to save Rex. In the movie, it’s implied that Ana is suffering from an extreme form of depression after Rex died, and that Rex felt like the best way that he could save her was to inject her with experimental microscopic machines that turned off things like her pain centers and her conscience so that she did all of the terrible things that she does in the movie. The implantation with nanomites is of course a big thing, but being as it’s directly caused by Rex faking his death, the two events are completely linked in my mind.


WHAT MOTIVATES YOUR CHARACTER?:
Ana is motivated by redemption at this point in time. After all, she has been a part of a terrorist network for four years, and has personally been responsible for countless deaths, including that of her husband and a good chunk of Paris. Where as when she was the Baroness, Ana acted with a complete disregard for life and quite a bit of snark, she is attempting to overcome what she did when she was the worst version of herself that she could be. The nanomites that Rex injected her with didn’t brainwash her into complete obedience. If they did, she never would have been able to argue back to McCullen, and reject his advances when he offered to send a jet to go pick her up.

But the nanomites did magnify the worst pieces of herself, including making her anger more vicious, bringing out her more sadistic streak (including a part of her that enjoys McCullen’s murderous jealousy.) Indeed, the nanomites helped create a woman who’s hate of Duke was basically eating her alive. Now, without that, she wants to attempt to do some good in the world, because as she says, “no one can save me, Duke, not after all the things I’ve done.” And she means it. No one can save her, but she has to make the effort to save herself.

WHAT IMPRESSION DO OTHERS TEND TO HAVE OF YOUR CHARACTER?: To most people, Ana seems like the persona of the Baroness, only muted somewhat. She’s not as vicious, and she has a conscience but she’s definitely adapted some of the attitude because it’s far more familiar than the sarcastic “nice girl” that she used to be. After all, it’s been four years since that’s who Ana was and it doesn’t feel as familiar to her as it used too. So, she uses ‘darling’ in order to cover the fact that she doesn’t want to remember people’s names until she knows that they’re trustworthy, and she definitely snarks at people more than a little bit. While she’s not going to be wearing a leather catsuit in town, Ana will certainly move like she is, and in many ways act like she is. The catsuit has become armor, and in an uncertain situation, Ana is going to feel like she needs it.


IN WHAT WAYS DOES THAT IMPRESSION DIFFER FROM WHO YOUR CHARACTER REALLY IS?: Ana is not a marshmallow now, despite how that may have been who she once was. While she is not as sharp as The Baroness, she does have some edges that she will use to keep people from getting too close to her until she’s ready for it. She’s not always a bitch, and she’s not always someone who is a nice person. Really, at this point in time, the impression of how she's perceived and who she is are not very far apart.


HOW DOES YOUR CHARACTER HANDLE CRISIS OR ADVERSITY?: Initially when faced with crisis or adversity Ana’s first instinct is to either sink into a depression or sink into the nearest safety gate of a person around her. However, that first instinct passes quickly now that she has been the Baroness into far more of a kicking ass and taking names than it had before. This is shown in how quickly she goes from being carried by Duke and whimpering “how could it be Rex?” to shooting neovipers down under the sea.


WHICH 5 THINGS WILL YOUR CHARACTER REMEMBER UPON ARRIVAL, AND WHY DID YOU CHOOSE THEM?: 1. Ana’s parents are dead and she took care of her brother until he came of age.
2. Rex died in the army and it was her fiancee's fault.
3. The speech that Ana gives Duke about him killing her once already with a cocked gun in her face.
4. The Eiffel Tower turning green and falling down.
5. That her mind has been tampered with in some way.
The first two memories I’ve chosen are because they are such a huge part of Ana’s motivation as a person and her not having them feels like not actually playing Ana. The third I’ve chosen because it’s an example of how manipulative Ana can be while also telling the truth from her point of view. Duke’s abandoning her already killed her once, and him doing it again with a gun would actually be kinder. Still, she’s not going to remember what happened, or who Duke is other than the idea that she once loved him and then he had a gun to her head. I selected the Eiffel Tower turning green and failing down because other than Daniel, it’s one of the scenes of outright villainy that Ana participates fully in. She won’t know why it’s important, just that it’s something that happened. And lastly I chose Ana having some idea that her mind has been tampered with, but not the specifics of it basically because I don’t want her to have the whole movie in her head, but I want her to be able to explore the idea that she’s not right and she doesn’t know why.


IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU FEEL WE NEED TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER?: In the movie, much is made about how the neovipers are completely obedient, feel no pain, feel no remorse and basically devoid of anything that makes them human. Ana’s nanomites do not make her like that. We know that she’s not obedient because she argues with McCullen multiple times. We know that she feels pain in the way she responds after the car that she was riding in gets hit by a truck. Yes, the nanomites heal her (or she would be dead) but she definitely hurts as she’s crawling out over the dead body of the neoviper below her. While Ana feels no remorse, she definitely feels love. All of her actions come from anger in response to the loss of Rex and if she didn’t have that love then she wouldn’t feel the anger that she has with Duke.

More than that, the other neovipers don’t have a personality and are basically interchangeable, even the one that is stationed in Washington as a secret service agent. Ana has a large, sarcastic personality no matter if she’s the Baroness or herself. Her personality is shown with more than just dealing with people she’s got a personal connection to in some way (Duke, McCullen, Storm Shadow or Daniel) it even comes out when she’s in Paris and firing a gun to make a building clear. As she gets into the elevator, Ana even makes the comment about the woman running out having nice shoes. These is not the actions or responses of a woman who has absolutely no personal autonomy.

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SKILLS, ABILITIES, & PHYSICAL WEAKNESSES:Ana is extremely skilled at hand to hand combat, having been trained by the second best ninja in the world and being called his “best student.” She also has considerable skills with gun, especially concussive guns which were a MARS/COBRA specialty. But perhaps the most important thing about Ana is that she’s been injected with nanomites. Nanomites are millions of little robots which “act as one” and in canon are called “perfect little healers.” Yes, they have the side effect of having completely wrecked her life for a while, but they also saved it as well. There are several things that there’s no way Ana could have survived if Rex hadn’t implanted them in her body.

INVENTORY: The clothing that Ana’s wearing at the end of the movie which are basically underwear and prison scrubs as well as her awesome glasses.

PROSE-HEAVY: Ana as a Sheriff taking down Bucky Barnes
DIALOGUE-HEAVY: Ana at the tfln meme.