all of my enemies are turning into my teachers
NS59/DS60
Jesse wakes up. → It's no fun. → Zombie apocalypse? → Shit ain't right. Help me, Woody. → SHIT AIN'T RIGHT HELP ME MACK. → Someone tells Jesse a story about Homestuck.
NS60/DS61
Time for the second round.
Name/Handle: Kris
Age: 25
Gender: Female
Timezone: EST
Personal LJ: N/A
E-Mail: thepequod[at]gmail[dot]com
AIM/other: exposgay
Is English your primary language?: Yes
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Series: Breaking Bad
Series' Medium: Television Show
Character: Jesse Pinkman
Age: 25
Sex/Gender: Male
Canon Role: Sidekick/Partner to Anti-Hero
"Real" Name: Aaron Paul
How long have you roleplayed your character, if at all?:
This would be my first try with this series and this character. It's a little bit out of my comfort zone and I'm nervous for that, but I'm also excited to try something different!
Where have you roleplayed in general and/or with this specific character?:
In general, I've RPed either in group games on livejournal or in private prose logs through e-mail or museboxes. Each time I dip back into group games or pan-fandom, I find myself drawn to Damned for its formatting and friendly crew. :)
Are you personally familiar with your character's canon?:
Breaking Bad as a canon is a recent interest of mine, but I've watched what has since been released, seasons 1-4, twice through.
Please give us a personal history of your character's life and explain to us in detail how they grow and develop over the course of their canon:
Jesse comes from an upper or middle-upper class background, but lost the good graces of his family because of his persistent involvement with drugs. His first appearance is as both a distributor and a user, working under the alias "Cap'n Cook" to make a brand of meth he calls "chili p." Even though he flunked out of High School and has a lifestyle his parents don't approve of, he took care of his ailing aunt during her last days and was allowed to continue living in her house because of this contribution. It's hinted that out of all his familial relationships, Jesse was closest with his aunt and suffered from losing her to cancer. He has a little brother that is an excellent and talented student, a stark contrast to himself, but doesn't resent him in the least. In fact, he covers for him when his parents find pot in the house that they automatically assume is Jesse's. In general, he seems to like and connect with children, showing something of a soft spot for them over the course of the series.
Although he has the know-how when it comes to peddling meth on the streets, he doesn't become a high-level drug dealer until he teams up with his old chemistry teacher, Walter White. With his expertise on the chemistry involved in the process, they are able to cook high-grade methamphetamine which rapidly becomes notorious in their town of Albuquerque. Walt has his secretive reasons for wanting to cook, which is confusing to Jesse at first, but he's satisfied enough with the product and the money they are able to make to want to continue the deal. However, Walt is almost never satisfied (because he is dying of cancer, something Jesse only learns later) and demands they start earning better profits very early on -- which gets them into trouble much faster than they would have otherwise. It's one bad drug deal after another from there on out, until they both end up kidnapped by a psychotic drug lord who had previously mangled Jesse badly enough to land him in the hospital.
The drug lord's name was Tuco. Walt's brother-in-law (a DEA officer) ends up finishing him off after the duo injures him in order to escape. Walter is quick to flee so that his double life is not discovered by his family and Jesse flees with him, even though he leaves his car and his money behind at the scene of Tuco's death. The cops are on him after that and things take a turn for the worse; now he's homeless (his parents evict him from his aunt's house), penniless and a major suspect in the DEA investigation surrounding Tuco. Jesse manages to ward them off with a false alibi and find a new place to stay, all the while reorganizing his strategy with Mr. White so they can keep selling meth. This time they try to become their own bosses without involving any other parties, but Jesse doesn't have the heart to crack skulls the way a drug lord would. Instead he ends up romantically involved with his landlady, Jane.
When things inevitably get messy again, Jesse turns to drug use to cope with the stress and the PTSD. Unfortunately his new girlfriend is a recovering addict whom he ends up influencing. They soon spiral out of control together when she introduces even harder drugs into his life, and although they come up with a plan to take Jesse's drug money, get clean and run away together, it's easier said than done. Walt ends up intervening and more or less allowing Jane to pass away so that he can steer Jesse away from this lifestyle. Her death hits Jesse hard, however, marking the loss of the most important person in his life up until then. The guilt and remorse he feels (not knowing about Walt's involvement) overwhelms him in rehab, until he comes to a sort of impasse and decides he will neither deny what has happened nor will he run from it.
In his own eyes he is definitely a criminal and low-life; that is how he finds self-acceptance. However, a rift between Jesse and Walt forms, since Walt wants to cut himself off from the meth scene completely by this point. They have a violent parting of ways that is only amended after Walt returns to the scene and decides he wants his partner back, but Jesse feels more than a little bit spurned and pours his heart out about it after getting the shit kicked out of him (the tally count for this is astronomical in this series) by Walt's DEA brother-in-law. They eventually reconcile and work the high ranks together, under a cold and calculated businessman with much more notoriety and money than Tuco. Their new boss is a man named Gustavo Fring, or Gus. He dislikes Jesse because he dislikes unpredictable elements, which addicts, recovering or not, tend to be. An attempt to replace him with an actual chemist is foiled by Walt, while Jesse causes trouble by seeking revenge on a few of Gus' men, at which point Gus decides he would rather kill them both and steal the meth formula than deal with their combined unpredictability.
In order to keep them both alive, and against Jesse's protests and wishes, Walt decides that the other chemist has to go so that he keeps an edge with Gus. The plan is for Walt to assassinate him, but in the end Jesse is the one forced to do the deed. It's only through tears that he's able to pull the trigger. This is the first person Jesse is forced to murder by his own hand, sending him spiraling into an episode of PTSD that he never formally addresses. For a while it doesn't seem as though he cares whether he lives or dies, but after reconnecting with an old flame and her adorable little son, his mood and behavior stabilizes somewhat. Out of the blue, Jesse rises up in the ranks all of a sudden and winds up one of Gus' right hand men, while Walt falls further from grace. His relationship with his ex-teacher all but deteriorates after Jesse fails to kill Gus and Walt more or less tells him to go die since he's such a screw-up.
But even then, Jesse, the new replacement meth cook, refuses to give Gus the consent to kill Walt. Using this knowledge, Walt goes so far as to poison the child of the woman Jesse has been seeing so that he can blame the act on Gus and regain Jesse's loyalty and help. Walt kills Gus; they torch the meth lab to the ground together; Jesse goes back to the woman he's seeing, Andrea, and her recovering son, Brock.
What point in time are you taking your character from when he/she appears at Landel's and why?:
The end of Season 4, after Gustavo's death and Brock's recovery. Those are the latest developments in the series and Jesse has been through a lot to get there. I'm interested in playing him with all that baggage.
Please give us a detailed description of your character's personality:
The first impression we get of Jesse is of a typical High School drop-out, a slacker with a drug addiction in place of any sort of ambition. He speaks with street slang and the sort of exaggerated machismo only an insecure young man can produce. Although he is immature, much more so at first than he is later, and none too bright, his edge is that he understands the street scene much better than his ex-chemistry teacher does. In the beginning, each time they have a success Walt becomes overenthusiastic and demands they go an extra step despite Jesse's apprehensions. He's much younger, but he has a much more intuitive understanding of how dangerous the drug dealing game can be. At the same time he's also easily manipulated by Walt into taking those extra steps. This is because not only is he not very bright, but he starts to feel a begrudging respect for the old teacher he still refers to as Mr. White. With his parents more or less abandoning him, Walt becomes the only older role model available to Jesse out of necessity and an interesting combination of irritation bleeding over into respect. They have an almost brother-like relationship; they do look out for each other in a world that can be very alienating, but they argue constantly and exist on completely different planes from one another.
Not only that, but Jesse feels Walt's constant criticism and judgment start to weigh on him very deeply. A lot of the time this is played for comedic effect, but later it becomes clear Jesse is looking for the approval and recognition that he didn't get from his parents in Walt. Not that he would ever admit it, or that he's even conscious of it, but the extent to which he feels abandoned when Walt rejects him and calls his meth inferior shows how much he does not consider their relationship to be a business-only expenditure. After Jane's death he feels particularly alone and lost, so much so that the smallest nod of approval from Walt has Jesse change his mind about cutting off relations with the man out of wounded upset. At this point he feels inferior, like he is no good even in the eyes of the man he's been cooking with for so long, and most of all he feels like Walt has only been using him the entire time when it was convenient to do so.
Jesse is a very soft-hearted character with a lot of bravado on display. He's squeamish and emotional when it comes down to dealing with dead bodies or cold-hearted murderers, and easily riled or rattled by the blatant disrespect others in this business might show towards human life/human dignity. In truth, he doesn't really have what it takes to remain in the world that he ends up trapped in. The only coping mechanism he seems to know how to employ to get through is getting high. He's an addict, to be sure, but before meeting up with Walt again he was more interested in staying out of trouble and partying than anything else. On the surface, Jesse's character is a parody -- he is white hip-hop personified, beginning most of his sentences with "yo" and often ending them with "bitch", exuding a tough boy persona that is most of the time just plain ridiculous. At the center of it all he's just a young man with a good heart, but he's fundamentally insecure and lacking in proper guidance. Jesse didn't even originally come from the streets, and he's so non-threatening that when his parents outright abandon him and take away his only home, it comes across as a bizarrely cold thing for his own family to do to him.
He has a sense of right versus wrong, not easily forgiving himself or others for what he considers immoral actions. That's a funny place for a drug pusher to be, but he seems to be able to navigate it on a sliding scale, recognizing himself as a "bad guy" but refusing to spin out any kind of rationalization for it. Most of the time he's understanding, but he's not a pushover or even above manipulating others for his own personal gains. He's smart about his own personal safety, but sometimes he's slow to come up with good ideas or prone to screw-ups under pressure. Whatever grace he does have is because he knows how to act like he's bigger than he is, an art that is sometimes sloppy and sometimes honed to perfection depending on the severity of the situation. Jesse isn't used to finding fulfilling relationships with other people, but that's only because most of his friends are zoned out druggies and most of his role models are absent.
When he inevitably starts suffering from PTSD, he has no idea how to cope. He just fills every waking moment with distractions, drugs and noise, going so far as to allow homeless addicts to stay in his house and destroy it so he doesn't have to deal with how he feels when he's alone. Walt mentions that he doesn't seem to care whether he lives or dies, which is an apt observation about the current trauma-riddled and alienated Jesse. Even when it comes to the very serious life-or-death situation with Gus, he's cavalier, not willing to go without a fight if it comes down to it but not necessarily anxious about the future. There are two things that semi-snap him out of it: the reemergence of a woman he once tried to deal meth to but ended up having a relationship with (along with her son Brock) and the fact that Gus suddenly brings him to the top of the ranks.
It's the type of acknowledgement he usually craves, someone to tell him he's doing a good job and he's important to keep around. Even Jesse is suspicious with how perfectly it works out to alienate him from Mr. White, but he's not detached enough to disallow the position to affect him. By this point Jesse has been through so much just to keep this arrangement going that his outward personality has shifted; he's more sober, less of a stereotype and more of a grown-up, although he's been ejected into forced maturity by extremely shitty circumstances rather than healthy ones. At the heart of it all he remains malleable and too soft for his own good -- it's safe to predict that if he ever finds out just how much Walt has took from him and lied to him, it will tear him apart.
Please give us a physical description of your character:
Scrappy, scrawny, young white male. Sandy-colored or light brown hair, short length (recently shaved off actually and only now growing back in), and blue eyes. He looks like he has at least two tattoos, wavy-looking horizontal black tribal tattoos. There's one on his left front wrist and one on the right side of his chest. 5'8"/173cm tall.
What kinds of otherwordly abilities does your character have, if any?:
None at all.
If present, how do you plan to tweak these powers to make your character appropriately hindered in the setting of Landel's?:
Nothing to tweak. I'm lovin' it.
Does your character have any non-otherworldly abilities/training that surpass the norm?:
Jesse's main abilities or skills seem to consist of intuitive street-smarts and the knowledge he has gained offhand by working alongside Walter White, chemist extraordinaire. By Season 3 his crystal meth is officially "as good as" Walt's, by the admission of said chemist himself. This doesn't mean that he's a science whiz -- just that he's gained enough experience to learn how to do things on his own and has probably absorbed more practical knowledge from working with his ex-teacher than he'd like to admit. For instance, if he came across what might be useful tools or chemicals, he might remember a past lesson or two.
What do you see your character doing in the scope of the game and how do you plan to use the setting of Landel's Institute to develop them and affect their psychology in a unique, interesting way?:
Jesse is in an interesting place in current canon in regards to his damaged psyche and his relationships with other people. Having a new range of very different characters to interact with has a good chance of going well for him, despite the horror atmosphere of Damned. He's yearning for something healthy, happy and simple, as evidenced by his attempts to reconnect with Andrea and her son, but he's been hurt by his environment, by the inability to separate work from his everyday life because his work is so very damaging to the human condition. Having new faces to see and a new place to be might just be the thing he needs. That said, he's going to have his guards up, especially during those times of heightened danger, but getting away from Walter White and the meth game will provide him with a fresh perspective.
This will inevitably have new consequences for his character development, which has so far hinged on the exact kind of stress and pressure his environment lays on him. There will be demons to deal with as well as opportunities for growth and I'm interested in playing out both. There are also plenty of opportunities for conflict, since he's so rough around the edges.
Given that this RP takes place in an unsettling and outright horrific environment, how do you justify your character as being appropriate in both body and mind for this kind of setting?:
Breaking Bad is primarily a grim-dark drama and therefore not too far a stretch from unsettling, the major difference being that there is nothing fantastical about the horrific circumstances the characters face. Jesse would come from a modern-day real world setting with drug cartels and the violence that exists at the U.S. and Mexican borders. After getting in over his head as a major manufacturer/distributor, he's certainly been through and seen a lot unsettling things. Damned would just be an entirely new kind of horror to face.