BN app, take two
1. Player Information
Name (or internet handle): Megan
Current characters in Bete Noire: Toshiko Sato
Past characters in Bete Noire: Gene Hunt
2. Character Information
Name: Gene Hunt
Livejournal Username: havinhoops
Fandom: Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes
Image: http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/88799942/19014005
Reserve: http://magistrated.livejournal.com/10038.html?thread=2123574#t2123574
3. Character Information II
Age/Appearance: Gene is in his mid-forties, just under six feet tall, with close-cropped sandy brown hair. He's got a stocky frame and what can only be described as a paunch - but despite that, he's still muscular enough to deliver a sound drubbing to most miscreants. He usually wears a suit and a long black coat. He's rarely seen without cigarettes and a number of flasks concealed in his coat - sometimes as many as four.
History: http://life-on-mars.wikia.com/wiki/Gene_Hunt
Headcanon note: I subscribe to the philosophy that Gene didn't create his world; rather, he stepped into his role. Likewise, once he passes on, someone else will take over his duty in "copper limbo". This doesn't actually have any influence on things, but I thought it might be worth noting. After all, if Gene created his own world, then logic - not that logic tends to apply anywhere in the canon of both shows - would sort of dictate that it would be stuck in the fifties. As it is, time moves inexorably on - since it mirrors the "real world", I assume that it draws bits and pieces of reality from the coppers Gene helps to build the rest of the world. If it was entirely his reality, then the theme of "becoming outdated" present in Ashes to Ashes wouldn't be as important, as you'd think he could subconsciously control that aspect of the world, so that it would always need him/have a place for him.
Personality: In canon, Sam sums Gene up quite succinctly: "an overweight, over-the-hill, nicotine-stained, borderline alcoholic homophobe with a superiority complex and an unhealthy obsession with male bonding". (Gene's response: "You say that like it's a bad thing.") To be fair, Gene isn't just homophobic/misogynistic/racist - he dislikes everyone equally, and insults them all, political correctness (or tact) be damned. He refuses to take shit from anyone and has a no-nonsense attitude towards investigations. He's convinced he's always right and won't back down from an argument. He always has to be in control of the situation. Basically, he's the classic alpha male, and he wants everybody to know it. He views himself as an Old West-style sheriff, dispensing justice as he sees fit. Sometimes - before he meets Sam - constructing evidence is necessary to make this happen. However, he claims that he would never fit anybody up who didn't deserve it. When Sam asks him if he's "the good, the bad, or the ugly" (referring to the classic movie poster in his office), Gene replies, "all three". To him, justice isn't a pretty thing, and achieving it sometimes calls for desperate measures - he's the one willing to go to those lengths personally to ensure that it happens.
Gene's own constructed self-image is how other people view him because of the nature of his world - it allows him to be perceived as what he is and shapes itself to him, sometimes in distinctly unlikely and over the top ways, in order for Gene to be larger than life. Canon says that the very nature of Gene Hunt was his own creation - after his death and consequent arrival in copper purgatory, he became what he thought he should be. He's not aware of ever having been anything else - he remembers being a derpy PC when he was nineteen, of course, but he has no knowledge of his own death, or of his role in the afterlife.
Canon and other information is vague at best as to whether Gene suddenly aged and became the age he appears to be in LoM/A2A after his death or actually grew up, so to speak, while in copper purgatory. I subscribe to the latter theory - however, there's still a certain immaturity to Gene because the world is shaped around a nineteen year old's view of things. The way he treats women, for example, making sexist - and occasionally overtly sexual - remarks to them, or his inclinations to extreme brutal violence. Keats claims he's still the same skinny kid he was, but Keats is obviously a liar by nature, being a representative of the "Dark Side" (and/or Satan/the Antichrist/a demon), nor does he know Gene half as well as he thinks he does.
He is right, though, that Gene is the absolute ruler of his kingdom, and his underlings are his subjects. Gene has to be in control of things; it's part of his very nature. The thought of losing control is one of the things he has to overcome in his own journey - to willingly relinquish that power and let everybody else move on (or to simply allow them more responsibility in investigations, which is how it starts). The constant struggle for control with Sam and Alex is one of the things that drives him crazy about them, one of the hardest things to deal with. Gene is too stubborn for his own good - ridiculously stubborn, in fact, often clinging to ideas or concepts that impede his duty.
On the other hand, the people he works with are his family - the most important thing to him, save his job. (And, technically, though he doesn't know it, they are his job.) They mean everything to him, and he expects his loyalty to be reciprocated. Maybe it's an uneven relationship in terms of power, but Gene figures that families often are. (Alex would probably remark on the highly Freudian implications of all this.) He doesn't understand when Chris betrays him in the second series of A2A because, as far as Gene's concerned, he's just sold out someone who's like a father to him. (In fact, Gene insists on sitting at the head table at Chris and Shaz's wedding reception - when told that it's a table for family, he points out that he's all the family in the world to both of them.) The betrayal of Harry Woolfe in LoM is the same way - except Gene's been betrayed by his own father figure (and eventually forced to shoot him). (Considering that Gene's own father was an abusive alcoholic and his younger brother ran away from home and dosed on heroin, Gene is not lucky when it comes to family life.)
The one thing that terrifies Gene the most is becoming old and outdated and past his prime - he can see it happening in London, as his style of policing falls by the wayside and the world becomes more and more modern. He feels increasingly like he's becoming a relic, and occasionally even admits to feeling useless or helpless, though this is then typically followed by successfully bringing the case at hand to a close despite his own self-doubt. He loves his job - probably more than he's ever loved anything or anybody - and can't picture himself doing anything else. He wants to be in the thick of it all, bashing heads in and bagging criminals, and he hates that policework is increasingly done behind a desk, and that logic and reason are taking all the passion out of the work. He trusts his gut instincts in a world that no longer accepts them as valid evidence.
Though Gene doesn't like to admit it, he also has his softer side. He believes in treating elderly women very politely (and, in fact, has distinct ideas on the "right" way to treat women, though these ideas are sometimes very arbitrarily applied) and would never be outright cruel to children - when they aren't brats, he can even be almost nice to them. When one of his informants attempts to leave a life of crime to provide for his wife and children, Gene lends him one of his own suits for the job interview. (This later backfires when said informant is shot in the head while wearing Gene's suit.) He's always there to save Alex - or just to carry her up to bed when she's too pissed to make it on her own - and has strange ideas about chivalry, possibly also lifted from old Westerns.
Sexual Preferences/Orientation: Gene is emphatically heterosexual (and also very, very homophobic). He's very aware of his own sexuality and tends to make inappropriate sexual comments from time to time (okay, a whole lot of the time), but rarely acts on his attraction, being entirely too busy with his job for such things. (It also admittedly has quite a lot to do with not knowing how to treat women.) He's never really been in a monogamous relationship (canon says he was married, but the creators of the series have claimed that his wife didn't really exist, and I choose to go with this interpretation.), but, on the other hand, he's never been in any serious romantic relationship, either.
Powers: He's a psychopomp-slash-guardian angel (Wikipedia describes him as an "archangel", but I am not sure this word means what Wikipedia thinks it means), guiding dead (or almost-dead) coppers to redemption (or not, as the case may be). Alas, this doesn't come with any Supernatural-type angel powers or even a set of wings. Not only that, but he can't even remember the nature of who and what he really is.
None of Gene's powers, such as they are, would have any effect on the game; he has the ability to subconsciously alter his reality, but only in his world. Note that this is never explicitly stated in canon, but when Keats shatters Gene's self-created illusion, the world starts to fall to pieces around him until Alex reassures him of her faith in him. It's nothing major, really, but it explains the over the top nature of canon - why Gene is the way he is, and why unlikely things seem to always work out (or why he can drink enormous amounts of whisky and almost never show any ill effects). It also helps to alter the minds of those around them - the world itself makes them forget who and what they were, but Gene also seems to have his own effect on them, like convincing everyone (including himself) that he has a wife who doesn't really exist, or not really having a home outside the police station (this is headcanon for Ashes to Ashes), or simply just having a number of seemingly bottomless flasks. His reality also "blurs" his memories of previous coppers (as well as of his true nature) as a coping mechanism; his destiny involves inevitably losing all his friends as they move on, and even copious amounts of alcohol can't dull that pain.
Reason for playing: Because the city needs more linefacing snarky bastard coppers. And, same as last time, I think it'll be interesting for Gene to have to resist the temptation to give into those moral grey areas - Sam and Alex tend to act as his conscience a lot, and forced to work on his own, he might give in to the parts of him that he doesn't like to acknowledge exist. (The parts that, for example, think that crushing a guy with a bulldozer for trying to hurt someone he cares about is a really great idea. Okay, this actually does happen in canon, but he was also trying to get a confession out of him, and Alex stopped him before he could do any permanent damage.) I feel like he'll stick better this time because a, I'm taking him from a canon point I'm more used to playing him from (Ashes to Ashes, versus Life on Mars), and b, I'm already more familiar with the game, the setting, and the players, and have ideas on how to make it work.
5. Samples
First-Person: http://sixwordstories.livejournal.com/65021396.html?thread=1921892820#t1921892820
Third-Person: When Gene steps out of the pub, he finds himself in an area of London he doesn't recognize. He wasn't that drunk in the first place, to go crawling into a boozer he doesn't know, and he's not drunk enough now to be disoriented. What's worse, his car isn't outside; he's got a bloody long hike back to the station now, and plenty of time in which to contemplate the fate of any scum stupid enough to nick a copper's motor. He'll have to get plod to keep an eyeball out - not that they could find their own arses with both hands and a map, but a missing car, even Gene's missing car, isn't exactly CID's department.
Besides, he's got his own bunch of incompetents to whip into shape. An entire new team, with a DI who insists on causing no end of trouble for him - maybe some DCIs are lucky enough to have underlings who actually listen to them and respect their authority. Gene vaguely remembers his own job being that way back in Manchester, prior to 1973. Now he's got one pain in the arse after another. God, if the new kid's responsible for this, there'll be hell to pay.
He's more used to the streets of Manchester, where he grew up, than he is to London - but after a few blocks, he can tell this isn't either city. Trust your gut, he's been told in the past, and what his gut says now is that he's about to find himself in deeper shit than a midget who's fallen down a portable toilet.
Third-Person #2: Gene sleeps fitfully, his dreams filled with brown curls, wicked red lips, and knowing hazel eyes. He remembers her, he misses her, but he only feels like that when he's sleeping. Their dance haunts his dreams, the memory of holding her closer than he ever had before, how bloody close they'd come. He only remembers fragments in his waking hours, but it's enough to make him want. He finds a busty ginger in a pub one night - his taste doesn't usually run to gingers, but he's pissed and she's been shoving her tits in his face all night long, and no red-blooded male can ignore that sort of thing. She sucks him off like a pro before they even make it to the bedroom; Gene swears he's about to have a heart attack when he comes in her mouth, her nails digging crescents in his hips. The sex is even better - he fucks her into the mattress, she rides him, and by the time the night is over, he's half convinced he's died and gone to heaven.
He leans back against the headboard of the bed and lights a smoke, inhaling for a long moment. None of it, as it turns out, is enough to make him forget about her.
Name (or internet handle): Megan
Current characters in Bete Noire: Toshiko Sato
Past characters in Bete Noire: Gene Hunt
2. Character Information
Name: Gene Hunt
Livejournal Username: havinhoops
Fandom: Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes
Image: http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/88799942/19014005
Reserve: http://magistrated.livejournal.com/10038.html?thread=2123574#t2123574
3. Character Information II
Age/Appearance: Gene is in his mid-forties, just under six feet tall, with close-cropped sandy brown hair. He's got a stocky frame and what can only be described as a paunch - but despite that, he's still muscular enough to deliver a sound drubbing to most miscreants. He usually wears a suit and a long black coat. He's rarely seen without cigarettes and a number of flasks concealed in his coat - sometimes as many as four.
History: http://life-on-mars.wikia.com/wiki/Gene_Hunt
Headcanon note: I subscribe to the philosophy that Gene didn't create his world; rather, he stepped into his role. Likewise, once he passes on, someone else will take over his duty in "copper limbo". This doesn't actually have any influence on things, but I thought it might be worth noting. After all, if Gene created his own world, then logic - not that logic tends to apply anywhere in the canon of both shows - would sort of dictate that it would be stuck in the fifties. As it is, time moves inexorably on - since it mirrors the "real world", I assume that it draws bits and pieces of reality from the coppers Gene helps to build the rest of the world. If it was entirely his reality, then the theme of "becoming outdated" present in Ashes to Ashes wouldn't be as important, as you'd think he could subconsciously control that aspect of the world, so that it would always need him/have a place for him.
Personality: In canon, Sam sums Gene up quite succinctly: "an overweight, over-the-hill, nicotine-stained, borderline alcoholic homophobe with a superiority complex and an unhealthy obsession with male bonding". (Gene's response: "You say that like it's a bad thing.") To be fair, Gene isn't just homophobic/misogynistic/racist - he dislikes everyone equally, and insults them all, political correctness (or tact) be damned. He refuses to take shit from anyone and has a no-nonsense attitude towards investigations. He's convinced he's always right and won't back down from an argument. He always has to be in control of the situation. Basically, he's the classic alpha male, and he wants everybody to know it. He views himself as an Old West-style sheriff, dispensing justice as he sees fit. Sometimes - before he meets Sam - constructing evidence is necessary to make this happen. However, he claims that he would never fit anybody up who didn't deserve it. When Sam asks him if he's "the good, the bad, or the ugly" (referring to the classic movie poster in his office), Gene replies, "all three". To him, justice isn't a pretty thing, and achieving it sometimes calls for desperate measures - he's the one willing to go to those lengths personally to ensure that it happens.
Gene's own constructed self-image is how other people view him because of the nature of his world - it allows him to be perceived as what he is and shapes itself to him, sometimes in distinctly unlikely and over the top ways, in order for Gene to be larger than life. Canon says that the very nature of Gene Hunt was his own creation - after his death and consequent arrival in copper purgatory, he became what he thought he should be. He's not aware of ever having been anything else - he remembers being a derpy PC when he was nineteen, of course, but he has no knowledge of his own death, or of his role in the afterlife.
Canon and other information is vague at best as to whether Gene suddenly aged and became the age he appears to be in LoM/A2A after his death or actually grew up, so to speak, while in copper purgatory. I subscribe to the latter theory - however, there's still a certain immaturity to Gene because the world is shaped around a nineteen year old's view of things. The way he treats women, for example, making sexist - and occasionally overtly sexual - remarks to them, or his inclinations to extreme brutal violence. Keats claims he's still the same skinny kid he was, but Keats is obviously a liar by nature, being a representative of the "Dark Side" (and/or Satan/the Antichrist/a demon), nor does he know Gene half as well as he thinks he does.
He is right, though, that Gene is the absolute ruler of his kingdom, and his underlings are his subjects. Gene has to be in control of things; it's part of his very nature. The thought of losing control is one of the things he has to overcome in his own journey - to willingly relinquish that power and let everybody else move on (or to simply allow them more responsibility in investigations, which is how it starts). The constant struggle for control with Sam and Alex is one of the things that drives him crazy about them, one of the hardest things to deal with. Gene is too stubborn for his own good - ridiculously stubborn, in fact, often clinging to ideas or concepts that impede his duty.
On the other hand, the people he works with are his family - the most important thing to him, save his job. (And, technically, though he doesn't know it, they are his job.) They mean everything to him, and he expects his loyalty to be reciprocated. Maybe it's an uneven relationship in terms of power, but Gene figures that families often are. (Alex would probably remark on the highly Freudian implications of all this.) He doesn't understand when Chris betrays him in the second series of A2A because, as far as Gene's concerned, he's just sold out someone who's like a father to him. (In fact, Gene insists on sitting at the head table at Chris and Shaz's wedding reception - when told that it's a table for family, he points out that he's all the family in the world to both of them.) The betrayal of Harry Woolfe in LoM is the same way - except Gene's been betrayed by his own father figure (and eventually forced to shoot him). (Considering that Gene's own father was an abusive alcoholic and his younger brother ran away from home and dosed on heroin, Gene is not lucky when it comes to family life.)
The one thing that terrifies Gene the most is becoming old and outdated and past his prime - he can see it happening in London, as his style of policing falls by the wayside and the world becomes more and more modern. He feels increasingly like he's becoming a relic, and occasionally even admits to feeling useless or helpless, though this is then typically followed by successfully bringing the case at hand to a close despite his own self-doubt. He loves his job - probably more than he's ever loved anything or anybody - and can't picture himself doing anything else. He wants to be in the thick of it all, bashing heads in and bagging criminals, and he hates that policework is increasingly done behind a desk, and that logic and reason are taking all the passion out of the work. He trusts his gut instincts in a world that no longer accepts them as valid evidence.
Though Gene doesn't like to admit it, he also has his softer side. He believes in treating elderly women very politely (and, in fact, has distinct ideas on the "right" way to treat women, though these ideas are sometimes very arbitrarily applied) and would never be outright cruel to children - when they aren't brats, he can even be almost nice to them. When one of his informants attempts to leave a life of crime to provide for his wife and children, Gene lends him one of his own suits for the job interview. (This later backfires when said informant is shot in the head while wearing Gene's suit.) He's always there to save Alex - or just to carry her up to bed when she's too pissed to make it on her own - and has strange ideas about chivalry, possibly also lifted from old Westerns.
Sexual Preferences/Orientation: Gene is emphatically heterosexual (and also very, very homophobic). He's very aware of his own sexuality and tends to make inappropriate sexual comments from time to time (okay, a whole lot of the time), but rarely acts on his attraction, being entirely too busy with his job for such things. (It also admittedly has quite a lot to do with not knowing how to treat women.) He's never really been in a monogamous relationship (canon says he was married, but the creators of the series have claimed that his wife didn't really exist, and I choose to go with this interpretation.), but, on the other hand, he's never been in any serious romantic relationship, either.
Powers: He's a psychopomp-slash-guardian angel (Wikipedia describes him as an "archangel", but I am not sure this word means what Wikipedia thinks it means), guiding dead (or almost-dead) coppers to redemption (or not, as the case may be). Alas, this doesn't come with any Supernatural-type angel powers or even a set of wings. Not only that, but he can't even remember the nature of who and what he really is.
None of Gene's powers, such as they are, would have any effect on the game; he has the ability to subconsciously alter his reality, but only in his world. Note that this is never explicitly stated in canon, but when Keats shatters Gene's self-created illusion, the world starts to fall to pieces around him until Alex reassures him of her faith in him. It's nothing major, really, but it explains the over the top nature of canon - why Gene is the way he is, and why unlikely things seem to always work out (or why he can drink enormous amounts of whisky and almost never show any ill effects). It also helps to alter the minds of those around them - the world itself makes them forget who and what they were, but Gene also seems to have his own effect on them, like convincing everyone (including himself) that he has a wife who doesn't really exist, or not really having a home outside the police station (this is headcanon for Ashes to Ashes), or simply just having a number of seemingly bottomless flasks. His reality also "blurs" his memories of previous coppers (as well as of his true nature) as a coping mechanism; his destiny involves inevitably losing all his friends as they move on, and even copious amounts of alcohol can't dull that pain.
Reason for playing: Because the city needs more linefacing snarky bastard coppers. And, same as last time, I think it'll be interesting for Gene to have to resist the temptation to give into those moral grey areas - Sam and Alex tend to act as his conscience a lot, and forced to work on his own, he might give in to the parts of him that he doesn't like to acknowledge exist. (The parts that, for example, think that crushing a guy with a bulldozer for trying to hurt someone he cares about is a really great idea. Okay, this actually does happen in canon, but he was also trying to get a confession out of him, and Alex stopped him before he could do any permanent damage.) I feel like he'll stick better this time because a, I'm taking him from a canon point I'm more used to playing him from (Ashes to Ashes, versus Life on Mars), and b, I'm already more familiar with the game, the setting, and the players, and have ideas on how to make it work.
5. Samples
First-Person: http://sixwordstories.livejournal.com/65021396.html?thread=1921892820#t1921892820
Third-Person: When Gene steps out of the pub, he finds himself in an area of London he doesn't recognize. He wasn't that drunk in the first place, to go crawling into a boozer he doesn't know, and he's not drunk enough now to be disoriented. What's worse, his car isn't outside; he's got a bloody long hike back to the station now, and plenty of time in which to contemplate the fate of any scum stupid enough to nick a copper's motor. He'll have to get plod to keep an eyeball out - not that they could find their own arses with both hands and a map, but a missing car, even Gene's missing car, isn't exactly CID's department.
Besides, he's got his own bunch of incompetents to whip into shape. An entire new team, with a DI who insists on causing no end of trouble for him - maybe some DCIs are lucky enough to have underlings who actually listen to them and respect their authority. Gene vaguely remembers his own job being that way back in Manchester, prior to 1973. Now he's got one pain in the arse after another. God, if the new kid's responsible for this, there'll be hell to pay.
He's more used to the streets of Manchester, where he grew up, than he is to London - but after a few blocks, he can tell this isn't either city. Trust your gut, he's been told in the past, and what his gut says now is that he's about to find himself in deeper shit than a midget who's fallen down a portable toilet.
Third-Person #2: Gene sleeps fitfully, his dreams filled with brown curls, wicked red lips, and knowing hazel eyes. He remembers her, he misses her, but he only feels like that when he's sleeping. Their dance haunts his dreams, the memory of holding her closer than he ever had before, how bloody close they'd come. He only remembers fragments in his waking hours, but it's enough to make him want. He finds a busty ginger in a pub one night - his taste doesn't usually run to gingers, but he's pissed and she's been shoving her tits in his face all night long, and no red-blooded male can ignore that sort of thing. She sucks him off like a pro before they even make it to the bedroom; Gene swears he's about to have a heart attack when he comes in her mouth, her nails digging crescents in his hips. The sex is even better - he fucks her into the mattress, she rides him, and by the time the night is over, he's half convinced he's died and gone to heaven.
He leans back against the headboard of the bed and lights a smoke, inhaling for a long moment. None of it, as it turns out, is enough to make him forget about her.