(no subject)
[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: gabbie.
AGE: 21
JOURNAL: supergabbie
IM: See contact page.
E-MAIL: See contact page.
RETURNING: 5; Norman, Felicia, Electro, Two-Face, Bob.
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Andrew Baines Bernard
FANDOM: The Office (US)
CHRONOLOGY: Season 7, Classy Christmas, Part 2.
CLASS: Hero!
SUPERHERO NAME: The ~Music Man~. Tildes optional. Maybe.
ALTER EGO: Mild-mannered Andy Bernard.
BACKGROUND:
First and foremost, The Office is a sitcom based on observational and occasionally insane humor about the lives of workers in a mundane office building.
Andrew Bernard -- formerly Walter Bernard Jr. until his parents changed his name at the age of six -- was born and raised in Connecticut to a wealthy old money family, and attended the Ivy League school Cornell. He has described his life as "not very hard", which may be referring to being forced to take golfing lessons as a child, taken on fishing trips with his father and spending a lot of time on cruise ships. Not that any of that is easy, so who can know for sure. In college, which he got accepted to because of his excellent credentials (a rich father) after an initial wait-listing, he was part of an a cappella group and frequently went to frat parties despite having been an RA. He remains to this day proud of his habit of getting drunk every day in college and still maintaining "solid B's", and he got a tattoo on his lower back during his semester at sea (not to be mistaken for a tramp stamp) in what appears to be Chinese, which he says means "Nard Dog".
Following college and fast-forwarding several years to where his role in the series actually begins, Andy found himself with the extremely prestigious title of Regional Director in Charge of Sales at Dunder Mifflin Paper Company's Stamford Connecticut branch. He initially struck up a sort of self-imposed rivalry with Jim Halpert, a transfer from the Scranton, Pennsylvania branch, not helped by the office pranks Jim occasionally would play on him -- even or maybe especially the hilarious ones. Easily frustrated and angered, Andy became a frequent target of Jim's pranks even after his later stay in Anger Management. He was a much easier target after the fact, so that's not surprising.
Once the Stamford branch was forced to close, Andy had to transfer to Scranton (along with Jim), and relations between Jim and Andy became more amiable, though Jim still found him obnoxious. Andy focused his attention instead on the Scranton office suck-up, Dwight Schrute, because he intended to usurp that role despite being one of the worst sellers in the branch. For a while this rivalry continued, both of them trying to appeal to their boss in different ways, most of which backfired for at least one of them each time.
One fateful day, Jim hid Andy's phone in the ceiling as a prank and Andy punched a hole through the wall in anger over not being able to find it. Andy was sent to Anger Management for what was supposed to be ten weeks, but he completed his training in five with his creepy psychopath techniques of behavior imitation and was promptly pepper-sprayed in the face by Dwight when he returned to the office.
After his return Andy was considerably more mild-mannered and friendly with the rest of the office, becoming closer friends with Dwight even in the face of their continuing rivalry and despite Dwight's initial attempts to shun Andy following his return. However, things took a soap opera turn when Andy began to date Angela Martin, another co-worker and Dwight's secret ex-girlfriend. Their relationship progressed painfully slowly for a year and mostly consisted of nuzzling their necks against each other (necking), because although Andy didn't know it, Angela was still in love with and sleeping with Dwight behind his back.
Andy proposed to Angela in the parking lot and fervently went about planning their wedding (with difficulty since Angela hated all his ideas, which led to him making several non-refundable honeymoon deposits) but shortly after the proposal since we all knew this was a dramabomb waiting to explode, another co-worker walked in on Dwight and Angela having sex and told the rest of the office about them -- minus Andy, who was in the other room teaching himself the sitar -- at the office's Christmas party.
Unsurprisingly, when Andy found out two weeks later he was furious at everyone for lying to him, and challenged Dwight to a duel in which he tried to run him down with his car but instead just ran him into a bush. However, finding out they were both being hurt by Angela, Andy walked away from the duel and simply went about canceling the wedding and later went on all four honeymoons by himself.
Following this Andy nursed his bitterness for a good long while, offering bad relationship advice to other co-workers where the opportunity strikes, until he finally started recovering with feelings for the new receptionist, Erin. Little progress was made at first because he'd become more reluctant to make the first move and she was also incredibly shy, so their combined shyness became an obstacle. After the Secret Santa fiasco that I will get into in the personality section, Andy ripping his scrotum on his car keys during Jim and Pam's wedding, and several attempts to ask her out while playing a Murder Mystery game (and thus making Andy unsure if she was responding in-character or not) among other things, they had their first kiss at a landfill and finally started dating and, keeping in the tradition of the past office romances, tried to keep it a secret. This failed miserably, and no one really cared either.
Another company, Sabre, ended up buying Dunder Mifflin out as the company continued to struggle in business, so they all had to adapt to selling printers and printer products in addition to paper from that point on. Discovering that some of the printers caught fire when operated, Andy went to confide this information in Darryl Philbin, former warehouse worker turned direct co-worker. Darryl didn't believe Andy at first but went along with his idea to film a demonstration, hoping to prank Andy in return for Andy blaming a mistake he made on the warehouse workers two years earlier. However, Andy turned out to be right and the printer burst into flame on camera. Shortly after, news of the exploding printers reached the news, and the CEO of the company came to their branch demanding to know who the whistleblower was. Everyone suspected it was Andy and though he adamantly denied speaking to the press, the IT guy who was instructed to search all their computers outed Andy as the snitch. Andy accepted the blame (he says he didn't want the printers to set fire to a hospital or a school and kill a bunch of kids), though unbeknownst to the rest of the office, three other workers as well as a former CFO of the company also leaked the news. Andy was, however, sated when Erin commended him for what he did.
They had a pretty happy (if somewhat weird) few weeks together, until Erin found out Andy had been engaged to Angela and for some reason assumed it was some kind of huge conspiracy that he hadn't told her about it yet after three weeks of dating. She smashed the cake that'd he'd gotten for her for Secretary's Day in his face and presumably broke up with him, since after the following summer she came back to work dating Gabe Lewis, a representative of Sabre under the main CEO and immediate target of Andy's immense dislike, despite the fact Gabe asked him permission to date her and Andy granted it because Gabe asked so politely holy run on sentence. That is about where we are. Lots of relationship drama with some office work in between because there is no way I'm detailing the series episode by episode.
PERSONALITY:
Born in Connecticut, Andrew Bernard is a pompous self-proclaimed blue-blood (from, he says, a long line of WASPs) and Cornell graduate, a fact that he is fond of flaunting. Because he was born with so many preset opportunities and privilege, Andy grew accustomed at a young age to getting what he wanted, or to keep trying until he did. Not through means of hard-work, usually; before his anger management therapy, he took pride in his techniques of "personality mirroring", positive reinforcement through nods and smiles, and the persistence to slowly wear a person down.
He is overconfident, yet at the same time often not too self-aware, frequently engaging in bizarre behavior that everyone else but him finds strange. Oftentimes this overconfidence fails him, as now that he is no longer in college (wait-listed, and then admitted after a donation from his father) he does have to in fact work for his success, even though his parents still pay his credit card bills. For the most part, he is very adaptable and takes to new challenges with vigor -- much of his success does come from his talent to endear himself via his optimistic attitude and his often sycophantic desire to impress and please others. However, most sane people find his overeagerness and quirkiness fairly off-putting. He's quickly trusting, but not easy to trust.
Before he entered anger-management, Andy's behavior was a lot more precarious and erratic. Although he is still very competitive, it only took little provocation to tick him off at that time, and his overconfidence was even more excessive; his desire for popularity left his interactions with people a bit vacant, he was very clingy, easily annoyed, and he more often showed borderline psychopathic behavior (more than his violent mood-swings, in his tendency to manipulate social interactions that he perhaps didn't feel capable of achieving organically). He used his "success techniques" to leave anger-management five weeks early, but it seemed to work as he returned to the office a much, much calmer and more stable man (though he still later describes himself as a "total drama queen"). The core of his personality stayed the same, but there was much more sincereness in his behavior after this point, and he was more receptive to rejection and unexpected upsets.
Currently, he is what some might call a "decent guy". He is still clingy and comes on too strong, yes. Still overeager and obsessed with popularity, yes. Still kind of an asshole, yes! But he's considerably less belligerent, and more able to control his emotional outbursts. Much of his overzealousness now comes more out of the desire to make friendships rather than move up in the ranks of business, and he is more capable of thinking beyond just himself -- that said, he remains for the most part tragically unaware of his social awkwardness, despite his best efforts to appeal to people. He tries to make sure everyone is happy, usually going out of his way to do so whether it be stealing an ice sculpture for a party, trying to get a co-worker laid in Canada, or getting the parking spaces back for their office when construction workers had taken to using them every day. Having been an RA in college, Andy frequently takes it upon himself to mediate conflict in the office even if it has nothing to do with him.
Andy is fond of music and dance. He plays the banjo, and has the habit of singing whenever the mood strikes, which is often, work-time included. When he initially asked out his ex-fiancee, Angela Martin, he serenaded her in the office with ABBA's Take A Chance On Me with his band singing back-up on the speakerphones. He usually expresses his mood or thoughts through song and is often cheered up by it, especially on the rare occasions where someone else joins in. He still considers his bandmates from college some of his best friends, and told Angela that not having them perform for their wedding was a "deal breaker." Additionally, he taught himself to play the sitar during the office's Moroccan themed Christmas party and later played the role of Anthony in a local production of Sweeney Todd. It's clear that music is not only incredibly important to Andy, but also is the thing about himself that he finds most charming, as it has taken the lead as his main method of impressing others right behind his Cornell background.
Although a self-proclaimed ladies man, Andy is actually a dire romantic, and put quite a bit into both visible relationships he has had; for Christmas he gifted a woman in his office "the Twelve Days of Christmas" in an attempted grand romantic gesture, but the dozens of birds it encompasses ended up attacking her. When he was still engaged to Angela he was outraged and hurt to find out that she had been cheating on him throughout their engagement with her ex-boyfriend, Dwight Schrute. He at first challenged Dwight to a fight and planned to run over him with his car, but managed to pull back his temper once he found out Angela was hurting Dwight, as well. He walked away from the duel and cancelled their wedding. It's unknown just to what degree he represses his anger, but moments like this go to prove he has improved immensely in controlling it, even if it is initially explosive and potentially dangerous.
Regardless, he is generally a cheerful and relatively pleasant -- though annoying -- person, nearly always optimistic. Think of a preppy Ned Flanders.
POWER:
No powers in canon, obviously, but in the City he is going to have flight, super strength, and a sonic voice (think Black Canary).