[bio]
[series]: Supernatural
[character]: Joanna Beth Harvelle
[character history / background]:
Her family used to be normal.
Normal being the watchword, that is. Normal as in her father was a hunter. Not the sort of hunter who shoots at furry woodland creatures and has two hounds at his heels at all times. Her parents both avoided telling her the full story, but she knew enough to imagine her father sword fighting some strange cross between the bogeyman, Casper and the creature from Alien.
Normal as in her mother slept with a Smith & Wesson .45 underneath her pillow when her husband was away. Jo found it once when climbed into her mother's bed after having a nightmare (the usual one where her father came home covered in blood). Her mother warned her never to touch it, never to play with it. And then she told Jo a story (a wild one about werewolves and ghosts) in which the hero saved the day, and the little girl fell asleep with a smile on her face.
Her father held a certain appeal, partly because of his extended absences and partly despite them.. There was an air of grandeur and mysticism to what he was always working against. Sometimes it was hard on her mother, whose face got tight and filled up with lines and grey hairs. But when he would be home, things were too good for Jo to ever begrudge him.
He would tuck her in, singing Visions of Johanna in his gruff voice. He smoked cigars, and his clothes smelled heavily, which Jo always found intriguing. He'd bring her small toys and postcards for her to tack up on her wall. He was the one who would play with her hair, brushing it until it shone, braiding it gently. Her mother's hands were always rough, practical. His brought out Jo's glimmer.
And then Bill Harvelle didn't come home, and his family moved on. Her mother became proprietor of the Roadhouse, which was a role she took with surprising ease. It was natural for her to be a tough-lovin' Momma, and now she got to play that role for every hunter who came through the doors. It helped that she began going through her late husband's books, as if desperately for a clue on how to turn back time. Instead, she learned a lot about spirits, demons and the supernatural, more than she'd already gleaned from being married to a hunter.
It wasn't knowledge she treasured, but she knew it would keep her and her daughter alive. But that didn't mean it was glamorous or something to be passed on like a family business, the way John had tried. Ellen, on the other hand, wished for her daughter to have nothing to do with the world which killed her father. Unfortunately for Ellen, it wasn't as if she could pack her off to boarding school and separate her from it all. So Jo grew up around hunters and different mysterious storytellers, the outside world like this huge sparkling diamond. Lovely, but expensive. Paid for, in full, with lives.
But for Jo, there was no other life she would consider decent. She spent her adolescence in a cloud of cigarette and marijuana smoke, with the guitars and growls of music slipping out of the jukebox. In the small Nebraska town there were more than enough boys (and the occasional girl) with whom she could run around with, playing with knives and fires and sharing impossible stories with. The Roadhouse was their central hub, and they came in and out, but where usually unsuccessful in trying to sneak drinks past Ellen. But nothing lasts forever, and Jo was forced to move on. She graduated high school and her mother expected her to walk along the path of higher education. To step away from the life she'd always held dear.
Ellen didn't understand, or maybe this was simply Jo's melodramatic teenage self speaking. She didn't care about what Jo wanted or Jo's happiness. Just her own sense of security, knowing that her daughter was holed away in some school filled with ignorant innocents. At least, this is what Jo told herself during that last year of high school, where the relationship between she and her mother was the most strained it had been since then.
It was hard to apply, it was difficult to pay for and it was damn near impossible to make friends once she arrived. She'd gone in as an American History major, figuring that at least with that she might be able fit some of that knowledge into her life when she became a hunter in her own right. Because...really, there was never any doubt in her mind that she could become one herself. She could see it clearly, putting on her boots like her father would before he left the Roadhouse for another hunt, tying back her hair, checking all her knives and guns and selective protective knickknacks. And the salt, of course.
There was no other horizon but that one.
Freshman year she was mostly ignored, and she spent her nights out in bars, trying to pretend they were the Roadhouse, and learning how to play a mean game of poker. It was during her sophomore year when the rumors started gathering speed. They moved slowly at first, since she wasn't exactly surrounded by high-drama. But the ridicule just...increased steadily, a train intent on impact, and despite not having exactly felt at home there to begin with, now she felt like a complete pariah.
People wondered if she was going to come into class and shoot everyone, so no one actively went after her. In a way, that was even harder, because she had no one to lash out at. Only whispers and silence. So she flipped her knife in her hand, backwards, forward, sometimes tossing it up and catching it (or cutting herself, depending on how distracted she was).
So she dropped out halfway through her junior year, and came back to the Roadhouse, even more convinced that she just wasn't cut out collegiate life. She figured if Ash could do the dropout dance and still be a genius, she could come out in a similar state. It didn't quite happen that--in fact, it didn't happen that way at all. Her mother never said outright that she'd run away (like a coward, is the implication there), but Jo always felt it in her cool manner right after she came home. But Ellen was happy to see her, in her own way, and that overcame her disappointment. Ash was company, but he wasn't very good company.
So her life went back to normal.
Normal being the watchword. Normal as in strangers coming in and out with stranger tales. People with dark eyes and darker pasts. Normal as in twelve guns under the bar, nestled against the alcohol and the towels.
season two antics desc. ♥
[character abilities]:
Jo might like to think she has a lot of abilities on hand, but to be completely honest, she's a little stunted when her skills are compared to, say, the Winchesters'. The list of things she does well include:
⊕ Holding a flashlight steady.
⊕ Research. (Is dangerous with a highlighter, especially those awesome ones with the mini-post-its built in.)
⊕ Punching Dean in the face. (This may or may not be followed by Dean pissing his pants.)
⊕ Fitting into small enclosed places big manly men cannot.
⊕ Being bait.
⊕ Naming all presidents and vice presidents in order.
⊕ Playing music Dean pretends to hate but secretly loves.
⊕ Doing fun flipping tricks with her favorite knife.
⊕ Shooting a gun. (Possibly. She could be bluffing.)
⊕ Getting into trouble so the Winchesters can get her out of it.
⊕ Wearing gay lumberjack plaid shirts.
⊕ Knows too many Bob Dylan songs by heart. There's no such thing as too many Bob Dylan songs. (Unfortunately cannot sing.)
[character personality]:
The two most influential people in her life have been her parents. This is typical for most people, but Jo is perfectly okay with admitting it. She holds certain grudges against them (moreso toward her mother, but as a teenager there was definitely a solid amount of rage aimed at her father for choosing escapades over his family). Even so, at the end of the day, Ellen Harvelle is her goddam mother, and Jo loves the hell of out her. It was her mother's strength and her mother's ability to take control of a situation that Jo has always tried to emulate. At one point she even tried to copy her mother's heavy way of walking and her speech patterns. It is her mother who initiated the spark that would become Jo's feminist streak.
Nonetheless, her father manages to smash his way past death to invade her decisions, her hopes and dreams. He left so much unfinished, his shoes not even worn the way she feels they should be. She has to fill them, even if only to finish walking down that road. Even if only to feel close to him again, as if his tender hands are back, running through her hair and calming her nerves. And if she's got a bit of an Electra complex, so be it.
She just happens to dig stoic-but-protective hunters (who may actually just be sassy teddy bears). Don't judge.
Despite any issues she may have (or she's come up with to make herself seem more at home in this crazy world she inhabits) Jo is a simple person to read. She's not the sort who desires very much from life. There are no mansions, no huge piles of money, no white picket fences and no block parties in her future. At least, not the future she imagines.
There's something she wants to get done, a certain path she's always known she has to take. And while there's a part of her which adores her mother, there's a bigger part of her which is just stubborn. She won't let anything get in the way of what she believes to be her right. Still, for a long time, she let her mother dictate her life in the usual manner parents with crazy past/presents tend to.
Because, for them, no one would choose this path.
In Jo's own mind, of course, she's well-informed enough to make these decisions. In reality, she's a little amateur hunter whose heard stories only from those who have survived and returned. She's listened to enough melancholy folk songs that she can see a hunter's life always being a lot like being on the set of a movie, harmonica always in the background. The end, close curtains. Riding a horse into the sunset is optional.
She's happy...or well, content with the choices she's made. But deep down, she wonders. Jo rolls her mother's advice and Dean's hard words around in her brain. She's got no experience, limited knowledge, questionable strength and no curses or powers to speak of. She's painfully, irreconcilably normal.
Normal being the watchword, of course.
[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: A couple of days after Born Under a Bad Sign for her character, but chronologically before the shit hits the fan in All Hell Breaks Loose.