Application for counted_stars
Player Information:
Name or Handle: Brandi
LJ: muggles
Email: kupocakes@yahoo
AIM or MSN name: zombiebag
Any current characters here?: Claire Bennet
Would you like a protocol droid?: nah
Character Information:
Character Name: Joanna Beth Harvelle, but just call her Jo.
Age: 25
Canon: Supernatural
Appearance: Jo is a Caucasian female with blonde hair and brown eyes, is about 5'4", and she isn't particularly curvy or well endowed. She has some muscle, but is pretty petite and looks a lot more delicate than she actually is. She is in her mid twenties, but she has the body and facial features of someone younger. Her face makes her seem younger than she actually is, simply because it is very youthful and she doesn't wear makeup. Her hair is long and naturally curly, when worn down, it usually falls right below her shoulder blades. When it comes to her personal style, she's simple and wears things that are easy to move around in. She prefers jeans and a tank top over skirts and dresses, and she never goes out of her way to dress up to impress others. She's pretty much a stereotypical tomboy, when it comes to her appearance, but she doesn't really care what others think of her or what she looks like. When she walks, she has a tendency to strut, and she always holds her head up high. When she talks, it's with a southern drawl, and she makes no apologies for having one. She's usually found with an amused grin or a smirk on her face, and she's even managed to hold a smile when facing her death. She's very much so the stereotypical plucky sidekick figure, but she has a saucy twist to her mannerisms that sets her apart from other females that fall into her trope.
Personality: Introduced as a bartender with spunk and determination, Jo is a female hunter who is set in following in her father's foosteps. Growing up at the Roadhouse, Jo was introduced to hunters right and left, most of which taught her little bits and pieces of how to get the job done. From the time she was a young girl, she wanted to train and actually be allowed to help, but her mother refused to let her. Starting from the time she was a teenager, Jo has been trying to get her mother to see her as an adult, so that she can go out and help others. She's helped Sam and Dean Winchester on several occasions, generally as bait, much to her mother's dismay.
Reckless and headstrong, Jo rushes into most every situation without a solid plan. She's the kind of girl who prefers to act and think on her toes, but unfortunately, this leads her to getting into trouble more often than not. She thinks she's a great deal more durable than she actually is, but her own personal safety is often forgotten when it comes to helping others, especially those that she cares for. She is able to use a variety of weapons, although she seems to favor knives and shotguns. She can both take and throw a punch, and she's able to hold up her courage even while in a great deal of pain. She's very skilled at gathering and organizing information, and she's able to piece together clues pretty quickly. She's most definitely a southern tomboy, but she doesn't really care waht others think of her and the way she acts. She's likely to just shrug off being made fun of by strangers, but tease and taunt back someone she knows or thinks she can get the upper hand on. And on that note, Jo likes to win. She's fiercely competitive, especially with males, because I think she feels that she has something to prove. Jo wants to be a hunter, and she wants to run and fight alongside the men. So she feels that she constantly has to prove herself, and that she has to be stronger and tougher, and constantly upshowing them. She doesn't really get the fact that this can be annoying until it's pointed out to her, but the fact that she's constantly trying to prove her worth has made her stronger and more resilient than other women her age.
She's generally upbeat and quirky, but she doesn't tolerate people messing with her. If you piss her off, expect to be confronted and hear about it. She's social enough and befriends those she sees eye to eye with, but her entire focus in life is hunting and becoming like her father. Through that, she feels connected and closer to him, and nothing is going to stand in her way of achieving her goal.
An area that I wanted to touch base on, since it seems to make up a large part of the fandom, is shipping Jo with one of the Winchesters. This is merely a precautionary basis for myself, but I feel that a large and very essential part of Jo's character is the fact that she's a sidekick. She wants to be more than that, she wants to be a hero that fights alongside the brothers, but as she's gotten older, she's realized that her place is to support them. When she was younger, she forced her way into being involved multiple times and endangered herself, and now that she's older she understands where she falls and what her role needs to be. And while she did die protecting Dean and Sam, her role with the brothers is as their sidekick. Canon made it more than clear that she had a crush on Dean for a while, but Jo gets that it's a crush and she doesn't confuse it for being love or anything romantic. When presented with an opportunity to have sex with Dean, she turns him down, in favor of keeping her self-respect. Even faced with the prospect of it being the last night of her life, she laughs in Dean's face and tells him straight up that she values herself too much to just be a one night stand with him. I think that moment is Jo's finest, simply because of the fact that so many other women have fallen for Dean and have given in; and Jo, while interested, flat out rejects him. This self-respect and sense of self worth is one of Jo's greatest assets, ad I think it's a very defining characteristic that sets her apart from every other female that has appeared on the show. The kiss that Jo and Dean share right before she dies wasn't necessarily romantic. I viewed it as being simply a sign of acceptance, a silent way for both to show that they cared for one another, and that they both appreciated what they both had done for the other. It was something simple and almost painfully innocent, one of the only gestures of its kind that Dean is shown giving to a woman that isn't his mother.
I feel that another defining characteristic is the fact that in this dark world of hunters and demons, Jo is still very much an innocent person. She's supported her fair share of hunters, and she's acted as a friend and younger sister figure to many fo them. Her mother sheltered and protected her, despite the fact she raised her in a bar and let her daughter work in the bar at a young age. Jo's known hunters her entire life, and has been curious to learn more about their job and to help them, but because of the fact she was seen as a cute little girl well into her adult years, the people that she did help acted as a buffer between Jo and the harsh realities of the supernatural. Even her first boyfriend let her go along on hunts, but stood in between Jo and a demon when harm came her way. Her father was killed when she was just a small girl, still in pigtails, so Jo doesn't remember him. And because of this, there's a degree of separation between Jo and the cruel realities of being a hunter, and she doesn't always see hunting in a realistic view. As she became older, she did get to see more realities and more harsh sides of hunting, and she does understand that sacrifices will have to be made and that there aren't always going to be happy endings. But as she'll be coming in post-death, she'll remember everything, and will have a much more cynical and realistic view of not only being a hunter, but being a hunter that fell in order to protect the Winchesters. Her father died alongside their father, and I believe a lot of old wounds will be reopened when she stops to realize that her and her mother's death was alongside Sam and Dean.
The fact that she smiles through her tears and her acceptance of not only her death, but her mother's choice to stay and die alongside her, really speaks a lot about Jo. In her final scenes on the show, she's finally shown as having realized the casualties of being a hunter, and the short lifespan her mother always had warned her about. And while Jo has died along with almost every other female that's appeared on the show, the key distinction in Jo's death is that she chose to go down fighting. Her death wasn't in passing or meaningless, she chose to let her death be the key to Sam and Dean's escape from Meg and hellhounds. She wasn't going to just lay there and watch everyone die, she wanted to make a difference. And so she volunteered to stay behind and create an explosion. Despite her injuries and her very clear upset at dying, she was strong enough to stand up and say that she had to be sacrificed and she wasn't going to be saved. This is really Jo's shining moment, in her final hour of life. She's really grown up here, and she's able to clearly show it to her mother, who finally is able to accept Jo's adulthood and let her go.
Background:
Bam!
I will be pulling Jo in right after her death, in episode 5.10, Abandon All Hope. I am interested in exploring Jo's acceptance of her death, only to wake up somewhere where Sam and Dean both exist. Her sacrifice for their lives is really the key defining moment of her character, in my opinion, and it will be interesting to see how she adapts to knowing she died and then being in a place she may assume is some really screwed up version of Heaven or Hell at first. She'll remember that her mother wanted to stay behind with her when she was dying, and will just assume that her mom died as well, which will cause a great deal of guilt and remorse for her to get over. Basically, I just think that it will be a nice change from the usually plucky and upbeat personality that she shows nonstop when she's onscreen in canon. It's a good chance to show some real emotional range with her and get some interesting development to her character.
Oh, plus, she'll get to work in a space bar instead of a regular bar. Her life will be so much more awesome here, she just doesn't know it yet.
Special Abilities or Weapons: Jo was raised around hunters, and her father was a hunter. She knows about hunting the supernatural, and is excellent at research and tracking. She's well trained in using knives and daggers, and the way she is shown twirling a knife in canon displays that she is well above average in her usage of them. The weapon she's shown using multiple times in canon, however, is a shotgun. And while she's not the best, she's most certainly skilled, especially for a woman who has a mother who is bound and determined to keep her away from being a hunter. It's never clearly shown in the show, but in Jo's journal that was on the Supernatural website, it is revealed that Jo knows some Latin incantations to dispel spirits and she is also well aware how to take care of supernatural things that attack her. Also, she's the world's best Duck Hunt player. Really.
Buuuut these skills aren't really special, as anyone can learn them, so she'll just stick with a blaster gun of some kind and she'll be a happy camper.
Sect: Civilian
Job: Jo's going to work at some awesome bar somewhere, and eventually acquire ownership of it after her boss has a very unfortunate accident...at some point. An accident that won't be caused by her. Promise.
Samples:
First Person: [The camera clicks on to a very disheveled young woman, looking more confused than anything else. She's quiet for a few moments, and just looks around, and then finally makes eye contact with the camera as she clears her throat.]
Didn't really think that this is what Heaven would be like. Always figured maybe Dad would be here waitin' for me. Maybe something got messed up and I ended up on the other end of things. Wouldn't be all that surprising, knowin' my luck.
[The camera jostles as she's bumped into by someone walking down the sidewalk, and in a smooth movement the phone is shoved into her jacket pocket, causing the image feed to go dark.]
Hey, watch it, would ya? I'm trying to talk here!
[This is the last thing that's heard before the audio cuts off and the transmission abruptly ends.]
Third Person: She always had figured that Heaven would be something a little different than waking up in some kind of crazy place with not a scratch on her. She had supposed that there'd be more clouds, or maybe her Dad and Mom would be waiting for her. Hell, maybe even the head guy himself would be there welcoming her for giving up everything to help the Winchesters. But maybe God was used to that happening, since it seemed to be a big trend in the world of hunting. Good people went out to fight alongside those boys, and hardly any of them came back to talk about it. She couldn't really blame them, though, they just inherited the trait from their old man. So really, she wasn't all that pissy when she woke up in a strange place, some place that was out of some kind of movie or something. She was confused more than anything, and on high alert due to the fact she had just been slashed through by hellhounds.
Nothing was going to convince her that she had ended up in the right place, however, because whatever in the hell was going on, she knew for an absolute fact that she was Joanna Beth Harvelle, and not some space princess or whatever it was her Heaven was trying to pass her off as. As much as she appreciated the throwback to a childhood favorite film, it just wasn't going to happen. Over her dead body was she going to just up and abandon everything her parents meant to her, and give up her identity along with her life.
"It could just be some kinda test." She murmured to herself, pressing her back up against the cool concrete wall of the room she was in. The drab pajamas she was in were too big on her, and the only thing that made them fit relatively well was tying them off in the back with the hairtie she had woken up with. She stared down at her new clothes with blank interest, as the gears in her head began to turn and she attempted to work out some kind of plan.
She needed to find out where she was before anything else, determine if this was a jaded version of Heaven or possibly some kind of lite version of Hell. Whatever it was, she had to figure the person in charge had some kind of sense of humor, aside from trying to force a new identity upon her. Whoever was trying to pass that one off as being normal was going to get a fist to the face and a size eight shoe up their ass, assuming she ever managed to come across a pair of shoes in this place.
... maybe one of those little robots could get her a pair. They looked relatively useful.
She laughed at the thought of that, at not being able to acquire something as simple as a pair of shoes. It came out sounding dry and hollow, a shell of her former laugh. Even when she had been sitting there in the hardware shop, dying, she had managed a more genuine and light sound. Now that everything had been stripped away from her and she was left with nothing she understood, she wasn't sure if she could manage anything more than a half attempt at a smile. She knew it wasn't always going to be like this, though. No, she'd sort things out and then make a plan, and then she'd be able to laugh again. But she couldn't very well just sit around and pretend nothing was wrong with the picture, not when she needed to find out where her mother was, and especially not when she needed to find out if Sam and Dean had managed to make it out of that building at all. If they had been caught up by the hounds, or worse...
"Probably shouldn't think that. It's not gonna get me back home." She thumped her head back against the wall, and was surprised when she felt a slight pang of pain strike through her skull and down her spine. But instead of being annoyed that she had hurt herself, she was glad that she had felt it at all. Maybe there was still a chance she was alive, if she had felt something like that. The feeling of pain was what put a confident smirk on her face. Whatever was going on here, she was going to find her way out of. It wasn't a matter of if, it was only a matter of when.
And then, once she and her Mom were safe and back together, they were going to find Dean and Sam. And once those boys were located? Oh, the oldest Winchester better run and hide. 'Cause there wasn't anything out there that was going to stop her from giving him a big 'told you I could, you idiot', in reference to his opinion that she couldn't take care of herself.
Anything Else: She'll want to be a creepy stalker live with Dean this time around. To keep a close eye on him. Um...Corellian brandy and... gizka and other words I forgot the first time around.