(no subject)
User Name/Nick: Melanie
User LJ: I never use it anyway.
AIM/IM: crimsongrace07
E-mail: dumb_blonde_142007@yahoo.com
Other Characters: Jim Kirk, Ravenna
Character Name: Jon Snow
Series: A Song of Ice and Fire
Age: 17
From When?: The end of Storm of Swords. Right before he is voted the 998th Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch.
Inmate/Warden: Warden. Jon is tightly bound to the ideas of honor and chivalry that his father upheld. He decided to come to the Barge because it’s better than being killed for being a turncloak and a warg or becoming King Stannis’s man.
Item: His bastard sword, Longclaw
Abilities/Powers: Jon was trained in the arts of medieval warfare since he was a child. He grew up under the direction of a master of arms at Winterfell. He can handle a sword well, shoot a bow and arrow and joust, etc. He’s not the best, he's still young but he’s better than anyone who hasn’t had any training obviously.
There’s emerging evidence that he’s a warg. Simply put this means that he has a supernatural connection to his direwolf, to the point where he is able to possess the wolf when he is asleep at night and see the world the way that Ghost does. This ability is getting stronger, where at points he isn’t sure if he’s sensing things as himself or as Ghost does when he’s awake. He’s completely untrained when it comes to being a warg though, and has no control over the ability.
Personality: Whether he will admit it or not, the fact that he is a bastard defines most of what Jon Snow is. In the world he’s from, bastard children are forced to grow up faster than trueborn children. They realize at an early age that the world will look down on them because of how they were conceived and born and there’s nothing that they can do to combat that. So while he's only seventeen years old, he's one of those old souls trapped in a young body types. He has a maturity that you wouldn't find in modern day teenagers, and he isn't a child anymore. He's an adult by his world's notions and fully capable of taking responsibility for himself, something that he tries his hardest to do.
Jon is a quiet young man. He isn’t a loud, brash youth like Theon Greyjoy and he lacks the natural charm and openness that his half brother Robb has. He’s someone that can blend into the shadows easily and if he has the choice, he tries not to bring attention to himself. Part of this is just naturally the person he was born, he takes after his father in that regard and part of it was growing up a bastard in the Stark home under the scornful eye of Catelyn Stark. Jon learned early on that staying out of her way was the best option. Though away from Winterfell, he has proven to have a natural leadership when it comes to commanding men.
He comes off as solemn and sometimes a little cold without realizing that he’s doing it by now. Because of this, it seems like he doesn’t really have much of a sense of humor. Most of the time, he doesn’t. He isn’t the sort to crack jokes, especially the crude kind, and he is never the first one to laugh at someone else’s humiliation, something he rarely does anyway. At most, he'd be more like to crack a smile if the person being humiliated was someone he especially disliked. His wit is quiet and often only teasing towards people that he knows really well. Jon has a habit of teasing his little half sister Arya and his brother Robb the most, though all of the Stark children have been subjected to his wry comments. When he's feeling particularly chastised by someone he doesn't think has the right to do it, he tends to get a little cheeky with them, handing them sassy comments instead of politeness.
There’s a stiffness to Jon that is hard to break him out of sometimes. If he isn’t sure about something or feeling exceptionally sad, Jon closes down and pushes people out. He doesn’t have much to say and he’s more prone to one word answers when he gets like this. He has a habit of making himself scarce to go and brood when he gets into a funk as well. He doesn’t let people in very much even when he isn’t in one of his moods, honestly. Jon is a very private person, another thing that he picked up from Ned Stark.
But as private as he tries to be, he can be easy to read. When he feels particularly strongly about something, it's written all over him. It's easy to pull it out of him, if you know what buttons to push. His Stark siblings, the vows he took and then proceeded to break a few short weeks later, the fact that he has no idea who his mother was, etc are the easiest triggers to use against him. If he's conflicted about something, he's terrible at lying. Not that he's really all that great to begin with, but the more guilt he feels over something, the harder it gets for him to keep his impulses under control. It goes back to the deeply rooted sense of honor he has. His instincts almost always point towards the most honorable course and diverging from that is never something he'll learn to do well.
On the flipside though, Jon has a nasty temper when it comes out. It's swift and fierce and unforgiving. He's been known to beat on a man relentlessly when in a temper, ignoring all calls of yield or mercy. He lashes out badly, insulting everyone and everything around him and wants to kill whoever insulted him too. It usually takes calm reason and logic from someone who doesn't take the bait he throws at them in hopes of a fight to snap him out of it.
He has a strong sense of honesty that isn’t always flattering. He doesn’t have any problem saying things like they are, instead of glossing over unfortunate facts. And he doesn’t care much about hurting someone’s feelings if he thinks that it needs to be said. It’s something that he recently embraced on his way north to the Wall. There isn’t any room for bullshit there, not when the Watch is fighting a millennia old enemy with a fraction of the strength it had the last time the Others were seen. As Tyrion Lannister put it once, most men would rather run from a hard fact than face it and he noted that Jon wasn’t one of those men.
Again because he was born a bastard, Jon has a deep rooted need to prove himself. Because of the stigma that is attached to bastards in his world, that they are black hearted people without a shred of honor, Jon takes a particular care to prove that he is nothing like that. He clings to his honor like a lifeline and stubbornly insists on the honorable course of action regardless of the practical consequences. He is the kind of man who will chose duty over his family. Who will choose honor over love. He joined the Night’s Watch because it was the only way that he could make something of himself, the only place where even bastards could be raised to levels of trusted command.
While he set aside his Stark past when he joined the Watch, part of him still considers the Stark children his brothers and sisters. When the War of Five Kings broke out, Jon nearly deserted the Watch to join his brother Robb’s army, despite the fact that the cost of desertion was death across the realm. It was only because of his friends following him that he came back at all. He constantly needs to remind himself that the men of the Night’s Watch are his brothers. With many of the men it’s easy to come to love and accept them as brothers and he is fiercely loyal to them. Some test his patience and his resolve nearly daily.
When Jon joined the Night's Watch, he swore to never hold lands, to take a side in a war, to father children or to take a wife. When he broke the vows to ride with the wildlings (even though he was ordered to do), the guilt nearly ate him alive. That didn't stop him from falling in love with a wildling girl named Ygritte. She died recently and the guilt from feeling like he failed her is something that he thinks about daily. Little things remind him of her and whether he admits it or not, he's a man grieving for his first (and probably only) love.
Path to Redemption: n/a
History: A wiki of Jon's history. A Dance With Dragons isn't on there but that doesn't matter since he's taken from before that point in canon.
Jon was born in the last year of Robert's Rebellion, a war that uprooted the ancient house of Targaryan from the Iron Throne and settled the Baratheons on the chair instead. While there are rumors as to who his mother was, Ned Stark has never revealed her openly. All anyone is sure about is that Ned married Catelyn and then a year later, rode back to Winterfell with his infant bastard and the child's wetnurse. Jon and the woman were actually set up in residence at the castle before Catelyn and her trueborn son Robb arrived, a fact that Catelyn has never forgiven Jon for.
Ned wasn't like other men, in that he chose to raise his bastard alongside his trueborn children instead of sending the child off to be raised as someone's ward or given to the Citadel or anything like that. Because of this, Jon developed close bonds to all of his siblings, even Sansa who never referred to him as anything except her half brother since she found out what the word bastard was. He was particularly close to Robb, who was of the same age as him and so they became best friends and rivals. Even more than that, he was closest to Arya, partially because they were the only two to have the Stark coloring.
When Jon was fourteen, nearly fifteen the Stark men attended the beheading of a deserter from the Night's Watch. Afterwards, the party found a dead direwolf in the wolfswood and the bitch's five pups. In a spot of humility, Jon urged Ned Stark to take the pups for his children to raise, as the sigil of House Stark is a direwolf and he had five trueborn children. The math only worked because Jon pointedly left himself out. As they were leaving however, Jon found the runt of the litter in the snow, an albino wolf that has never made a sound.
Soon after, King Robert came to visit Winterfell. In a quick succession of events, his brother Bran fell from one of the towers, injuring himself gravely, his father Ned was named Hand of the King and Jon himself decided that it was time he rode with his Uncle Benjen back to the Wall to join the Night's Watch. It was a dream that he'd had for a few years and now he was finally considered a grown man to be able to join.
The Wall wasn't everything that he dreamt it would be. Because of all of the stories about the Night's Watch from the dawn of time, Jon imagined it as a glorious and honorable venture when in reality, it was a sorely understaffed, cold and mean place, manned by rapers, thieves and other criminals given the choice between their lives and taking the black. Jon persisted in his choice however and said his vows within a few short weeks of training.
To his dismay, Jon was assigned to the stewards rather than the rangers. Sam Tarly had to talk him down from the temper tantrum he was essentially throwing by pointing out to Jon that their Lord Commander had asked for him to be his personal steward, which meant that the Old Bear was intending to groom the young Snow for command later down the road. It was that subtle sign of respect that calmed Jon down in the end and helped him to accept his new role in life. Right after he said his vows, a wight attacked Castle Black with the intention of killing the lord commander. It was only because Ghost, freaked out by the smell of the thing, that Jon knew anything was wrong and was able to save Lord Mormont's life. For this, Mormont gave Jon what was called a bastard sword. Made of Valyrian steel, the short was too short to grasp with two hands but too long for use with just one hand.
Mormont decided that he was going to go into the forest himself and fish out what was happening with the wights and the wildlings there. He took most of the fighting force of Castle Black with him and as his steward, Jon accompanied the group as his squire. The men made camp at a place called the Fist, from which Jon and a few of the rangers struck north on their own to see if they could find out what the wildlings were up to. On their way, they ran across the camp of some wildling lookouts. The two men were killed instantly but Jon spared the life of the woman, because his honor wouldn't let him kill a woman in cold blood.
Soon after, Jon had a warg dream, where as Ghost, he saw the wildling host digging up graves in search of something. An eagle attacked Ghost, forcing Jon out of his mind but he'd seen enough. This same eagle later attacked Jon and tried to gauge out his eye, leaving the bastard with a permanent scar on his face from the attack. Qhorin Halfhand, knowing that the wildlings were going to catch the Night's Watchmen before they could make it back to camp, ordered Jon to ride with the wildlings, to act like he'd abandoned his vows, to do everything they asked of him, so that he could better learn what they were up to. The wildlings did corner them and asked that Jon kill the Halfhand to prove that he was really abandoning his post on the Wall. Reluctantly, Jon did.
Jon rode with the wildlings south towards the Wall for a few weeks. Suspicions were still high about him and his motives, and many wildlings didn't trust him. To finally put the doubts to rest, Jon slept with one of the wildling girls, Ygritte, the same woman whose life he spared earlier. This also meant that he lost his virginity to her. For weeks, Jon and Ygritte were lovers, fucking like rabbits all over the place. It became increasingly harder for him to leave her behind and on several occasions he seriously considered actually turning his cloak and abandoning the Wall for a life with Ygritte.
In the end, Jon chose honor over love. He managed to slip from the tight grasp of his wildling comrades, thanks in part to the help of his brother Bran's direwolf Summer. He rode straight for Castle Black to warn them of the impending attack from the wildlings that managed to slip over to the south side of the Wall. Jon helped to lead the defense against the wildlings, and against all odds, he and his brothers survived the attack while all of the attacking wildlings perished. Including Ygritte.
Heartbroken at her loss, Jon stepped up to do his duty regardless. He ended up with command of the Wall, and held the Wall against the onslaught of the wildling forces from the North for days until Alliser Thorne and Janos Slynt arrived with reinforcements and named Jon as a turncloak. In an attempt to force him to prove his loyalty (and really, to kill him off without doing the deed themselves), Thorne and Slynt told Jon to assassinate the leader of the wildlings, Mance Rayder during a parley, or to not bother with coming back.
Before Jon was forced to make a choice however, Stannis Baratheon showed up in force. The sight of mailed soldiers and knights sent the wildlings running and ended their seige on Castle Black and the Wall. Stannis, hoping to claim the Iron Throne for himself, knew that he needed a Stark in Winterfell to hold the North and as such, offered to legitimatize Jon and make him the Lord of Winterfell, since all of his truborn brothers were assumed dead.
Jon refused and as he was still considered a turncloak by a number of his brothers, he made an impulsive choice to enter into the service of the Admiral and be a Warden for a while in exchange for the clearing of his name.
Sample Journal Entry: [After a fair amount of poking and prodding, Jon has decided that this... thing is too weird for him. He's seen flashes of people in it (also known as videos but he doesn't know that) and text writes itself. Give him wights and the Others any day, that makes more sense than this thing.]
Hello.
[He waits like, a minute for a response. Apparently this isn't an instant response magical thing.]
I assume that I'm using this thing right. [How else can there be? You write on page, words appear. Right?] My name is Jon Snow. I hope to have the pleasure of meeting my fellow Wardens soon, since we will be working together from now on.
[ooc: If needed, I have this dear_mun post.]
Sample RP: If there was one thing in this ship's favor, it was that it wasn't cold. After two years or so (it had been hard to keep track of the days and weeks when he rode with the wildlings) on the Wall, Jon was just starting to forget what it was like to even be warm. It was always cold there, in a way that even Winterfell didn't even experience during the last winter or the summer snows that they were subject to.
The Wall was a different place. Another world really. A place where the snow never melted, even in summer and now that winter was closing in, the drifts were starting to pile up, taller than a full grown man in places. It didn't matter how many fires you lit or how many blankets you piled on, the chill never left the bone. Not really.
The first thing Jon noticed about his quarters was that they looked exactly like his small cell at Castle Black but under the layers of cloth and fur he was wearing, he was actually starting to break a sweat. The fur cloak was the first thing to be stripped off, followed by his leather jerkin and the belt holding his sword. Both items were laid carefully over the back of a chair in the corner, Longclaw across the seat.
Ghost brushed against his side, and Jon moved to place a hand on the direwolf's head, stroking the white fur for a few moments. The sleeping cell seemed smaller than usual with the wolf in it, and Jon was tempted to open the door and let him go run around their new home, until he remembered that he had no idea what was on the other side of the door. Or who.
There was a small leather bound book on a table that hadn't been there when he agreed to serve on the Barge, so Jon supposed that was a good place to start. When he opened it, there was nothing written inside. And it looked more like a sheet of glass was nestled there than paper as he expected.
"Gods," Jon muttered under his breath, as he started to investigate the strange device. This place was even stranger than he thought.
Special Notes: Jon has a direwolf as his constant companion. Direwolves are like, huge. Ghost responds to every command that Jon gives him though and Jon would not let him roam the ship so he shouldn't be a danger to anyone. Unless it's plotted.
Also if there's any questions about my activity because I just got back, I have pretty much hit the ground running with RP since then and I haven't failed an activity check in the entire time I've been here. I'm not going anywhere, haha.