More recent studies on hypnotism, as well as notes made by old pros, have shown that personality and individual’s way of seeing the world around them has a lot to do with how easy they are to hypnotise. While a lot of this still needs further research and precise lines are hard to draw, one common indicator that comes up time and time again is that the ability to focus on one thing at the time makes you more open to suggestion. People who lose track of time because of a pleasant task or forget what they were doing because they saw something interesting are easy to hypnotise because the objective of hypnosis is to hijack that focus and make the subject forget everything but the hypnotist’s commands.
The fact that Dylan isn’t capable of being hypnotised is a key indicator of how his mind works. It means he is constantly aware of his surroundings, focusing on several tasks at once, and is completely incapable of just staring at a pocket watch or focusing on someone’s voice without thinking about it. It also means he can’t become hyperfocused on a single thing and needs complete and forced concentration to spend hours and hours working on a trick. This is not purely a positive trait, especially when paired with his need for control — it also means he can’t just lose himself when he’s doing something fun, but that there’s constantly a part of him reminding him how much time has passed, how else he could be using this time more effectively, making complete relaxation a challenge: I personally would pin this as a possible subcause for his drinking and overeating habits.
If The Eye noticed this about Dylan as a child, this could also be why Dylan didn’t become a magician in the traditional sense at first: a magician, especially one excelling in sleight of hand, needs hours and hours of practice for obscene amounts of time — something that would need a lot more willpower without a natural tendency to lose yourself in a task. As a planner and a technical genius, however, the ability to focus on several things at once allowed him to prosper and (upon being exposed) become one of the most famous names in magic without ever needing to touch a deck of cards.
out of tricks. so i finally saw the rest of the deleted scenes from the first film ( since most of them are not available online and i had to buy an australian bluray to get access to them ) and given how wonderful the scenes were, i need to alter a few things from my canon:
DYLAN’S MUM IS ( italian- ) FRENCH. lionel met her there and lived for a short while, but when henriette got pregnant, they decided it was best they moved to the us where lionel would be able to work more. henriette kept the house there in her name and the family visited there often until lionel’s career came to a stop and the bank foreclosed on the house almost immediately after lionel’s death.
FULLER IS AWARE OF DYLAN’S LIFE AS THE FIFTH HORSEMAN. shortly after the new york show, dylan told him through a text where to find the rest of the money from the elkhorn safe in order for the bureau to return what they can to their rightful owners and for fuller to keep his job.
DYLAN HAD TO BEG TO KEEP HIS JOB.
EVANS CONSIDERS DYLAN ( and fuller ) TO BE HIS BEST AGENT.
THE HORSEMEN WERE GIVEN THE CHOICE to take a cut of the elkhorn money and leave, or join the eye and continue to do what they do. merritt almost walked away.
DYLAN WAS EXPECTING ANOTHER INTERPOL AGENT. alma claimed she came in as a substitute for an unexpected illness, but dylan found out she’d lied about it and pushed her to the sidelines during the elkhorn mission.
there’s a lot more in the scenes i prefer to take as canon, but given that not nearly everyone has seen them all, by default, i am only incorporating only what i can without going against strictly movie!canon muses.
Hello, my name is Aurora, I’m 21 years old and Finnish. EET time zone, naturally not a native speaker — if my replies make no sense, please let me know, it’s either because of me being tired or fucking up grammar. Please tag choking, somnophilia, eating disorders, suicide and bluespace, including screenshots of the dash: essentially, if the sides of the picture are the same colour as the dash, tag it.
selectivity
I am open to ocs and crossovers. This blog is mutuals only: threads, plotting and im are only for people who I have followed back. However, non-mutuals can send me asks and memes and reply to opens. I do tend to form mains and practice exclusivity, especially shipping exclusivity: the list can be found here. Note that I fully admit to being a lazy ass about checking my followers: I am currently using an extension that hides my follower count, so it is up to my own memory to remember to check the list: thus, it can take up to anything from a week to a month to check out a blog — more, if it’s a muse from something I haven’t seen yet.
pre-established relationships
If you have a non-romantic relationship idea (friends, colleagues, even family) between our muses, chances are I’ll be up for that, but do please run it through me first. This is twice as important for Horsemen ocs. The Horsemen and the dynamic between them form a large part of Dylan’s life, so I am more hesitant than most about writing with them because I need to understand why Dylan would have chosen them. I hope you can understand this.
shipping
Shipping-wise, Dylan is free game, but only if it happens with chemistry. This is even more highlighted by the fact that I play Dylan as demisexual, meaning that he doesn’t feel sexual attraction to anyone until he has a strong relationship with them, platonic or romantic.
Statistics
FULL NAME: Dylan Caspian Shrike
ALIAS: Dylan Rhodes (active from 1990 to 2015)
AGE: 44
BIRTH DATE: December 21, 1971
GENDER: Cis male
ROMANTIC ORIENTATION: Panromantic
SEXUAL ORIENTATION: Demisexual
RELIGION: Atheist
SPOKEN LANGUAGES: English (native), Mandarin, Cantonese, French, Italian, some Greek
CURRENT HOUSING: Apartment connecting to The Eye’s headquarters in London
OCCUPATION: The “fifth” Horseman, leader of The Eye’s western base. Worked as a mole in the FBI until being exposed publicly at the end of 2015
relationships
PARENTS: Lionel Shrike (deceased in March 6, 1984), Henriette Shrike (deceased in October 20, 1988)
SIBLINGS: None
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: Currently, none
CHILDREN: Unable to have
physical traits
EYE COLOUR: Brown
HAIR COLOUR: Dark brown, greying
HEIGHT: 5'7½
BODY TYPE: Short, square, somewhere between builtfat and chubbyfat.
personality
INTELLIGENCE: Book-smarts: studied engineering in college, degree in Criminology, mathematical brain. Strategist by nature.
DISPOSITION: Intelligent and calculating. Extroverted, but prefers a small social circle. Needs to feel in control, tends to take a leadership position very easily, as well as responsibility over others. Strong moral compass and need to see justice served.
Biography
Dylan Caspian Shrike was the first and only child born to Henriette Wilson, a former actress, and Lionel Shrike, a famous magician and a member of The Eye. The family lived in an apartment New York they owned, greatly relying on Lionel’s profession to supply for them. Partly to this, Lionel was largely absent at home, always performing, practicing, or travelling to China to buy equipment for his tricks. Dylan always knew his father first as a magician, and only then as a father.
This not-ideal but functioning life came to a stop when Thaddeus Bradley revealed how all of Lionel’s magic tricks were done in the pilot of his show, leaving the family unsure how Lionel’s career would handle such a blow. In an attempt to regain spotlight, Lionel insisted on doing a trick Thaddeus had called impossible: to break out from being handcuffed in a safe in the middle of a river. Dylan watched his father go down in the safe but the metal the safe was made of warped, making the escape impossible and causing Lionel to drown. Because his body nor the safe was ever found, his life insurance claim was denied, and the family was left without a penny.
Dylan always blamed the death of his father above all on Thaddeus Bradley, and after his mother had to give him up for adoption at the age of 12, Dylan started to plan for revenge. He spent most of his teenage years in a group home and two foster families, copying his father’s tricks and practicing some of his own, never specialising in anything in particular, finding himself more interested in the behind-the-scenes work that went into the larger tricks.
He started to study engineering in college, but The Eye gave him another task: take a new identity — that of Dylan Rhodes — and move to study Criminology in order to become a mole in the FBI. This alias gave him a possibility to start working on his plan to bring those responsible for his father’s death and the hardships that followed: a group of magicians that would bring the art back to a global spotlight whilst using their abilities to deceive for a greater cause. Gathering resources, perfecting his plan, and making it possible to do without known help from The Eye — as is required from applicants — was a long process, but he finally got it to motion in February 2013.
