multiversal: Application

[wearyheadtorest]

In Character Information

Basics

Character Name: Dean Winchester
Username: noburdenishe
Fandom: Supernatural
Played By: Jensen Ackles
Icon:

Canon Character Section

Physical Description: Dean is 30 years old. He is 6'1" with a fit, athletic build. He carries himself with an easy confidence, like a man who seems comfortable in his own skin . He has green eyes and brown hair, freckles across his cheeks, and a handsome, all-American sort of face. When he smiles—real smiles, not fake ones—the corners of his eyes crinkle. He has a tattoo on the left side of his chest, between his collarbone and his heart that wards off demonic possession.

He lives in jeans, work boots, and a mix of pullovers, t-shirts, and flannel shirts in enough layers to conceal guns and/or knives on his person. His outfit is usually topped with a beat-up dark brown leather coat that used to belong to his father. He always wears a gold pendant on a leather cord around his neck--a childhood Christmas gift from his brother—and a thick silver ring on his right hand.

Sexuality: Dean loves sex. He thinks it's fun and a legitimate source of stress relief. He works hard as a hunter, and when it's time to play, he plays just as hard. Sex is about the only time he lets go of his sense of duty and responsibility, and is the only time he puts himself first. Not in a “I get off and my partner does not” selfish way—he’s a generous partner in bed—but more in the sense of sex being something he does for himself, an indulgence and meeting of his needs.

He's heterosexual and he makes no secret whatsoever of his love of and appreciation for women. Canon is full of instances of him making passes at many attractive women wherever he and his brother travel, and the two women we’re shown in canon who have remained important to him—his first love and the love of his life—are both women.

He's not monogamous as a matter of course, though he's had some deeper love affairs in his past. The problem there is his lifestyle and his calling have interfered, tearing him away; rather than risk being hurt again or having to abandon anyone, he just doesn't let anyone get close anymore. If he meets the right person, he may be willing to settle down into something more long-term and committed—he's just not looking very hard for that right person, however. So sex, in addition to being a stress release and an indulgence, has become a quick substitute for the intimacy he feels he can’t have long-term.

History: For Dean’s canon, pre-Bete-Noire history: : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Winchester Through season 3, but stopping just short of him dying and going to hell. Dean's canon point is just after episode 3X12, "Jus in Bello".

I pulled him from that canon point because I wanted to play him with the contract for his soul still hanging over his head. He sold his soul not only as a means for saving his brother from Hell (assuaging his feelings of failure in the process), but because at the time he held himself in so little regard that selling himself seemed like a reasonable thing to do. A bit before his canon point he realizes he doesn’t want to die, and while he does try to fight his fate, at the end of the season he’s come to a certain peace with it, and he gives himself over as contracted. I wanted to play with that growth and that rise in his self-worth that he felt. I also wanted to play a bit with the idea of destiny, of getting him to the same major events through different paths. I liked the potential for making him wonder if he was free of his contract, and him possibly winding up in Hell despite his best efforts.

Bete Noire history: On their way out of Monument, Colorado, just after the demon siege at the police station, Dean and Sam were plucked off the highway, Impala and all, and wound up in Bete Noire. The first thing they learned after they got past the “what the shit” portion of their introduction was that their father was alive and well and in the city. The second thing they learned was that in their future Dean picked up a linefacing Angel of the Lord as a comrade. And the third thing they learned was that the city apparently loved their family so much it had pulled multiple versions of Dean in, including one that was a girl.

During his time in the city, thanks to its influences and habits, he suffered through the following:
• Cat magnet: every cat in the city was in love with him and would follow him everywhere, for a week.
• His brother and father at each other’s throats, like they do.
• His father calling him a dumbass for doing the exact same things he had done, like he do.
• Cleaning up after the murderous rampage of his brother from another universe, and deciding that the fact that this one had become a demon was all the justification in the world he needed for selling his soul.
• Meeting Lyla at Thanksgiving dinner at the Creepy Gothic Mansion, and developing an odd paternal sort of interest in her. These feelings were probably an outgrowth of his contract with Hell punching him in the face with his own mortality.
• A demon from his world rolling into the city, claiming ownership of his contract, and sending hellhounds to his hotel room to underscore the point.
• Alienating most of his family and friends when the city gripped him with uncontrollable rage. He legit punched everybody he could get his hands on and said awful things. This rampage culminated in a drunken brawl with Castiel wherein he got his ass handed to him.
• As a result of said alienation, he didn’t find out his father had been punted from the city for weeks, which added guilt to his grief over losing his dad a second time. He also missed Castiel’s vanishing for some time.
• Joined Hellsing at Sam’s urging. His initial skepticism gave way to respect and affection for the team there. And he was glad for the work, which gave him a way to bury his grief.
• Then the city punted his brother, too. By now the grief was crushing but he soldiered on as best he could, taking the other Castiel under his wing to try to fill the void.
• And then he lost most of the rest of the people he cared for at Hellsing, including Lyla. This was pretty much the final straw as far as his stability. He withdrew into himself and threw himself completely into his work at Hellsing, hoping that and a fifth of whiskey every night would help him fake it since he couldn’t ever make it.

When he arrives in Baedal he will have been promoted to senior staff at Hellsing. But he’s more or less been a hermit in the mansion, working on cars when he’s not training new staff or overseeing shifts. He’s broken inside but being reunited with people he knew from Bete Noire will hopefully help pull him out of that and restore some of his security. He’ll still be grieving for his father and brother and still trying to figure out if his contract is valid and when it might be called in.

Powers: Dean is your standard human being. No powers here.

Talents/Abilities: Dean is a hunter, thrust into that lifestyle at the age of four and raised in it. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of supernatural creatures, how to detect them, and what steps to take against them, and a basic working knowledge of magic and spellcraft (though his pronunciation of Latin is not the best). He’s been trained in hand-to-hand combat and the use of all kinds of weaponry from knives up to sniper rifles, and he is an excellent shot. He also is skilled in the use of explosives, proper and improvised; lock picking; pool hustling and poker; identity theft and social engineering including impersonation of law enforcement and other government and media representatives; basic forgery and creating fake IDs and credentials; and epic trolling and jackassery. And he’s an excellent mechanic—he knows and loves the inner workings of cars and is skilled enough to translate that into similar types of hands-on repair and construction work.

Personality: Outwardly, Dean is the very definition of cocky bastard. He's self-sure, smart-mouthed, no-nonsense, and direct. He's comfortable assuming authority and responsibility, and he isn't afraid to step up and take charge of a situation. He loves his car, he loves women, and he's dedicated to being a hunter. At times he doesn't seem to take things very seriously, but when push comes to shove he does the right thing. He uses humor to maintain distance between himself and other people, cracking a joke when things get far too serious or emotional for his liking.

Inwardly, he sees himself as something of a soldier. His father raised him to be a hunter, and he took on the responsibility of standing between other people and supernatural threats. He was loyal and obedient, without question, to his father and their cause; since his father's death and the end of their quest to avenge their mother's death, Dean's remained committed to his work, even in the face of great personal loss and conflict. He feels he has a duty to carry on in his father's footsteps, to protect the innocent and kill every evil thing he comes across along the way.

Above all, he feels a duty to protect his younger brother, Sam. From the moment his father handed him his infant brother the night their mother died, Dean's life has revolved around keeping his brother safe, taking care of him and making sure nothing bad ever happens to him. His devotion to and faith in his brother is absolute; Dean is willing to lay down his life for Sam, without hesitation or reservation, and he in fact does so when Sam is killed and Dean makes a deal with a Crossroads Demon—his life, after one year, for Sam's. It was far preferable to him to give up his life than it was to have failed his brother.

The truth of the matter is that Dean, deep down inside, is a very broken man with no sense of self-worth. He fears everyone he cares about will leave him someday. He envies Sam having taken the opportunity to pursue a normal life; at one point exploring Dean's dreams leads to the revelation that he, too, has yearned for a settled, domestic life and a family of his own. Dean believes Sam was actually their father's favorite and that he was merely an instrument for keeping the favored son safe. Dean's sense of self-worth is so completely absent that the deal he makes to bring Sam back doesn't require any reflection, and despite his brother's insistences, he refuses to fight it. Just before his arrival in Bete Noire, however, Dean has been shocked into wanting to live, and has begun to join Sam in his efforts to figure out a way out of his deal.

Dean is a man full of conflict. He yearns for a different life but is committed to being a hunter and saving people. He struggles with the pain of feeling like he didn't matter to his father and was abandoned by his brother, but remains willing to sacrifice himself for his family at any moment. He feels immense guilt for being alive because of a similar demonic deal his father made, and as much as he was angry at his father for trading his soul for Dean's, when Dean wanted to save Sam he made the same deal without regard for how Sam would feel about it.

Above all, two ideals drive him. The first and most important is the need to protect his brother at any cost; the second is the duty to fight evil.

His time in Bete Noire shook up his worldview, forcing him to re-examine a lot of his attitudes and taking away a lot of what meant the most to him. At the start of his canon he was sort of a knee-jerk, kill-every-monster-ever kind of guy, but over time his brother had gently coaxed him into a more open-minded position when it came to supernatural creatures. He was more willing to take a minute to consider motivations rather than blindly killing; enlisting in Hellsing and working side-by-side with people who were like the things he used to kill without question made him revise that stance even further.

That was his second ideal given some reframing, but while that ideal needed a shift his first one was thrown entirely out the window with his brother’s vanishing. He’s hiding it for all he’s worth, but losing his brother has gutted him entirely. His job, since he was four years old, was to protect Sam, and now that he doesn’t even know where Sam is, if he’s even okay, or how to get him back, he’s a wreck. Being Sam’s protector was a huge part of his identity and his drive, and not being able to do that has left him at a complete loss for what to do with himself.

Object: His father’s journal. This is a leather-bound three-ring binder that resembles a day planner, but it’s crammed with notes, drawings, slips of paper. It’s his father’s record of all the things he ever learned about the supernatural, interspersed with personal entries about the family’s life after Dean’s mother’s death. The journal is a practical resource, but it’s also Dean’s closest remaining connection to his late father.

Reason for playing: I have a great love of following and playing characters who are ordinary people forced to deal with extraordinary circumstances. Dean is an iteration of that idea, a guy who should have grown up to be your average Midwesterner with an everyday job and an unremarkable life, who instead was thrown into the world of hunting with his mother's death and his father's desire for vengeance. Events in his childhood permanently diverted the course of his life, and sculpted him into the person he is today.

Dean has carried on in his father's footsteps, committed to carrying on as the good soldier and fearless hunter his father was before him. His number one duty has always been to his family, good or bad; in Baedal I'd like to see him struggle to hold to those ideals in the face of his losses, the new CR he builds, and the influences of people and events around him. How can he be dutiful to his family when his family’s gone? What will happen to his identity now that he’s lacking a brother to protect, and what impact will that have on him? How will getting back together with people he knew help him?

I'm also looking forward to playing with the ideas of choices, and destiny. It's been hinted in canon that while you can change individual choices and events along the way, if something is Fated to Be, there is no changing the final outcome. Heaven and Hell have Plans for Dean and Sam, though at the canon point from which Dean is entering the game, he doesn't yet know all of this. I'd like to see if he would remain on the same path. I'd like to see how encountering knowledge about the path not yet taken and being in a different environment will affect him and his choices.

He's coming to Baedal with the contract for his soul still hanging over his head. It should have run out a couple of months ago; he's going to hope not being back in his proper world will void that contract or at least let him hide a little longer. I would, however, like to have his contract somehow called in or have him otherwise sent to Hell at some point in the game, though I’d like a slow build toward that.

I also want to reintegrate him into Hellsing; he genuinely enjoyed working there and being with the people there. Without his family he’s going to need some stability and consistency with other people. I’d like to get him back into handling supernatural threats when possible.

Gods: A case could be made for Gediron, who favors fighters and loyal soldiers. Dean is both, a warrior of sorts by trade and a dutiful soldier in the mold of his Marine father, loyal to John’s orders and training without question.

I think, though, that Eliandre is a better fit. Dean is a hunter above all—they even call what he does “hunting” in his world. A huge part of his work is investigating, figuring out if something’s going on in a given place, what it might be, how to prove it, and how to deal with it. He works for justice in what he does, righting wrongs, removing threats, saving people.

Eliandre is also said to watch over the dying. Technically, with time running down on the contract for his soul, Dean is slowly dying. If we want to get metaphorical, Dean’s been dying inside for a long time, with his inner conflicts and doubts and his lack of self-worth.

Writing Samples

First-Person Network Post:

[Hello, Baedal. Have Dean Winchester and his :D face.]

Hey, uh, hi. Is this working? Am I on the air or whatever?

Awesome.

So listen, I have this problem and I kinda need some advice. Maybe someone out there in my listening audience can help me.

It's about my brother.

What do you do when you think your brother's really a mythical beast who should be lumbering around in the woods?

…What? It's a legitimate question. You'd wonder too, if you saw him.

First-Person Journal Post:

[Written on a rare blank page near the back of his father’s journal.]

I can’t tell if this is the kind of touchy feely crap Sammy would be into and I would make fun of him for or if this is something that Dad would like because he did it and maybe it helped him too. Dad used to write stuff down and maybe I should too. Maybe Sammy will find this someday or something.

Hell doesn’t matter a whole hell of a lot anymore because it feels like my soul is already gone. Lost a bit with Cas and more with Dad. Lost goddamn near the whole thing with Sammy. Then everyone else was gone and the little I had left went with them.

They say time heals stuff but time is the one thing I don’t have a lot of. I’m sorry, Sammy. I know you wanted me to fight and I’m trying to still be that brave soldier and keep on but I don’t got a lot of fight left either. I will do what I can but it probably is not enough and I feel like I’m failing you again. I hope you understand and if you’re still around you can forgive me.

I was always proud of you. Wish I had the chance to tell you that.

Third-Person Action Post: http://betenoire-logs.livejournal.com/290553.html?thread=16784633#t16784633

Misc

Other: Eight minutes of trolling and other activities for your viewing pleasure.