PLAYER NAME: Elizabeth CONTACT:detectivefiction HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: Heard on Plurk, invited by Rachel
CHARACTER: Jon Snow CANON: Game of Thrones (with A Song of Ice and Fire being the primary source for filling in any information the show doesn’t give, as long as it doesn’t conflict with show continuity) CANON POINT: Between 7x02 and 7x03, en route from Winterfell to Dragonstone. Jon has been King in the North for a few months and is trying to prepare to fight the White Walkers; Dragonstone is where he hopes to find help and equipment that he needs.
ABILITIES | POWERS: Jon has the basic education and abilities that are reasonable for someone with his background: outdoorsmanship, survival, tons of training (and some teaching experience) in various medieval fighting techniques/weaponry (swords are a specialty), a privileged academic history for his time and place, administrative and military command experience, experience as a steward (general household servant), etc.
As far as potentially magical abilities: He has an affinity for and ability to bond with dragons (or at least dragons from his canon), which he is completely unaware of, and he has a skinchanger/warg bond with his direwolf, Ghost, which was not really depicted in the show anyway. Ghost's absence from this game means that it's likely irrelevant!
The rules for ASOIAF dragons are basically that each dragon only has one bond/rider at a time, for the rider’s lifetime, and each rider can only ever bond with a single dragon… but depending on whether or not you want to use this and how, his Targaryen dragonlord ancestry could still make dragons take a friendly interest in him.
PERSONALITY:
Genuinely Good Person: Admittedly more of a cluster of personality traits than a single one. Jon is honest, kindly, fair, helpful, decent, affable, generous, humble, stoic, loyal, reliable, and relatively easygoing in most of his interpersonal interactions. While he is not universally popular, he loves his friends and family and they love and admire him in return. He's hard-working, almost uncomplaining, and at this canon point, there's little he thinks he's too good to do. In general, he's a solid, stand-up guy with a big heart.
Quiet: Jon is soft spoken, an attentive listener, observant, reserved, sometimes so reticent as to seem gruff, and when he was a child, he was mature for his age in most ways. However, he was also considered sullen by people who didn't know him well, and as an adult, he's sometimes seen as brooding. There is an exception to his tendency to be soft-spoken: when he's commanding men or addressing a crowd, he speaks in a ringing tone that carries.
He was raised to behave with integrity, and doing so is important to him, so much so that he's emotionally troubled in circumstances that make it difficult. His conscience weighs heavily on him, and he genuinely tries to do the right thing. In many situations, he acts selflessly, for the greater good.
It is worth noting that integrity and reliability can shade into stubbornness. Determination to do the right thing is not always convenient or popular, and Jon can rarely be dissuaded from it.
Brave: This is a good trait, in that it's tied to his integrity, his selflessness, and his care for others. If there's a chance that he might die protecting people, so be it: he's still going to try to protect them.
But bravery sometimes combines with some of his other personality traits to manifest as reckless bravado, which nearly gets him killed on more than one occasion. Also, Jon enjoys the physical act of fighting in the same way that other people might enjoy participating in a sport. This is usually confined to training, but not always, and it contributes to the issue.
Bright and capable: Jon is neither bookish nor intellectual. However, he is intelligent enough to have excelled academically as a child, to have been picked out as leadership material by a series of mentors, and to have both put together the broader implications of the things he learns about the Army of the Dead and a series of plans for how to deal with them. In the books, he adopts his dead lover's taunt about his ignorance of her people's ways -- "You know nothing, Jon Snow" -- as his own internal mantra to remind himself to be humble about his assumptions. In other words, he's smart enough to remind himself that he doesn't know everything, and he continues to seek out new information.
Shame: Jon grew up painfully conscious of the popular Westerosi stereotype of bastard-born people: lustful, dishonest, worthless, malignant, and a stain on their parents' honor. Internalized shame related to this manifests in a lot of ways.
Jon has always had a strong motivation to disprove people's negative assumptions and to live up to the example set by Ned Stark, the man who raised him. It's not the only reason for his positive qualities, but it's a big part of why Jon seems to have a psychological need to be as good a person as he can manage to be. At his pull point, the fact that the Northern lords have chosen him as their king is a sign of Jon's success at proving that a bastard can be worthy of trust and respect.
Jon attempts to detach from sexual attraction, mostly because of a great resistance to the idea of fathering a bastard himself; his empathetic nature means that the idea of saddling his own child with the same stigma he grew up under doesn't sit well with him. While he becomes more willing to engage in relationships after leaving the Night's Watch, he doesn't do so easily, casually, or hastily. He is never opportunistic or predatory about sex.
Jon tends to isolate himself. He has both cultural and personal reasons to keep his emotional struggles close to his chest, and while he has many friends, he has few close ones to whom he'll open up. Many of his emotional troubles in early life were related to his bastardy: his fear that people would make negative assumptions about him based on who they might think he was rather than his actions, his worries about finding a place in the world, his profound wish to make his father proud, his feelings of otherness within the Stark family, and the fact that he never knew his mother and his father's wife wanted nothing to do with him. They wounded him deeply, and they were not something he could share with his trueborn siblings, who would not have understood. In adulthood, he rarely speaks extensively about his feelings to anyone other than his friend Sam, and being fully accepted and appreciated by Sansa as her brother is a big deal to him.
While he made great strides in overcoming the shame as an adult, it's still a core formative aspect of his personality, and his demeanor can be moody or brooding as a direct result. Jon grew up as an apparently sullen boy who often hung back on the sidelines while his siblings had fun together. As an adult, he's still too much in his own head.
Dutiful: Jon's integrity, bravery, and drive to overcome his internalized shame combine into a strong sense of duty, which is an overriding motivation. If he is forced to violate one of his other ideals in the name of duty, he will usually do so, although it will distress him.
As an example: Jon's Night's Watch vow of celibacy is very important to him, but he breaks it with Ygritte to preserve his cover as a "deserter," so he can learn what Mance's plans are. While he comes to genuinely care for Ygritte, he eventually leaves her, partly because warning the Night's Watch of the oncoming attack is part of his mission. It's enough of a betrayal to cause him considerable guilt, not what he wanted to do on a personal level, and not one he would have committed under other circumstances, but staying with her would have been a greater betrayal of his duty and values. The Watch, the North, and the people he has sworn to protect are more important than his happiness -- or hers.
Violent temper: Like anyone else, Jon has buttons that can be pressed, and while other aspects of his personality help keep him on an even keel most of the time, sometimes he's pushed too far and his stoicism breaks. Threats to or disparagement of his family or others he cares about are most likely to cause a flare of temper, but when he was younger, taunts about his bastardy also acted as a reliable trigger. Years apart, he: pulled a knife on one man who mocked him while he was under emotional strain; nearly beat a man to death at the end of a hard-fought battle in which the man had just murdered Jon's younger brother; and nearly strangled a third man, who had exploited Jon's sister.
He wants people to unite for practical reasons in canon (and to that end, he's a successful diplomat), but he is not a pacifist. He was raised to be a soldier in a martial culture. He's more likely to defend than to attack, and he'd prefer not to kill in situations where he doesn't feel that it's necessary; however, if someone is coming at him or someone he cares about with intent to kill or seriously injure, he has no problem meeting them with lethal force.
Summary: There are few easy choices in GoT, and characters are repeatedly forced to compromise one of their values to serve another. What someone’s duty even is in a situation is sometimes a tough call. What if your loyalty to your lover is in conflict with your loyalty to your brother, or your king? What if obeying the spirit of a law requires breaking the letter of it? These situations come up again and again in Jon's storyline, and each time, the stakes are higher and the fallout is more devastating.
Jon is only human, and deeply human. He’s a very good person, but not a saint, nor so bright and capable that he's any kind of tactical genius (his tactics aren't bad when he sticks to them, but his greatest skill is probably with a sword), nor so resilient that he never falters and never needs a pep talk, nor so charismatic and persuasive that he's always 100% successful at talking people into things. His strengths are always in balance with his weaknesses, and sometimes the weaknesses win; other times, his strengths are used against him; other times, his strengths simply aren't good enough on their own, and he succeeds partly because of help from his allies.
SAMPLE:
1: Jon apologizes to Yennefer: A note about context! This occurred just after a complex in-game AU that lasted something like 6-8 weeks in real time and in which characters had a lifetime of AU memories and no knowledge of their canon selves. In the AU, Jon was a spoiled, womanizing rich kid who had begun to awaken to his privilege and the rot in his society: my idea was to mirror a little of what he might have been like if he had grown up as a prince. This thread essentially involves Canon Jon’s disapproval of his other self, and remorse for his past actions in the AU.
INVENTORY: Canon outfit (socks/underclothes, a high necked grey linen shirt, black wool breeches, padded arming jacket, brigandine/reinforced leather armor tunic, plate gorget with Stark sigils, leather boots and gloves, velvet cloak trimmed with wolf fur) with sword belt (includes his sword Longclaw and a small dagger for utilitarian purposes). Probably a few mundane personal items like a flint and a wooden comb, which are in a leather pouch somewhere on his person.
NOTES: Nothing exciting off the top of my head! This is a character who is pretty prepared for Adventure and can handle rough conditions, but was also raised in an aristocratic family. He might stand out as a soldier in a more refined setting, but he’s unlikely to come off as a barbarian. He's comfortable around people from all walks of life.
I would like to note that, if accepted, I don’t think it would be hard to work out ways to keep him from blowing any cover that Sansa needs to maintain. While he’s a protective big brother, he did also have that “Night’s Watch defector” arc: I doubt he’d cause trouble for a sibling who’s in a similar situation, outside of being sure they know he’s there to help whenever they need him.
IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? I love plot, it’s the surest way to lock me into a game, but I am also always hesitant to tax mod resources. Do what’s best for you!
Jon Snow ✥ Game of Thrones
CONTACT:
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: Heard on Plurk, invited by Rachel
CHARACTER: Jon Snow
CANON: Game of Thrones (with A Song of Ice and Fire being the primary source for filling in any information the show doesn’t give, as long as it doesn’t conflict with show continuity)
CANON POINT: Between 7x02 and 7x03, en route from Winterfell to Dragonstone. Jon has been King in the North for a few months and is trying to prepare to fight the White Walkers; Dragonstone is where he hopes to find help and equipment that he needs.
BACKGROUND: 1 | 2
ABILITIES | POWERS: Jon has the basic education and abilities that are reasonable for someone with his background: outdoorsmanship, survival, tons of training (and some teaching experience) in various medieval fighting techniques/weaponry (swords are a specialty), a privileged academic history for his time and place, administrative and military command experience, experience as a steward (general household servant), etc.
As far as potentially magical abilities: He has an affinity for and ability to bond with dragons (or at least dragons from his canon), which he is completely unaware of, and he has a skinchanger/warg bond with his direwolf, Ghost, which was not really depicted in the show anyway. Ghost's absence from this game means that it's likely irrelevant!
The rules for ASOIAF dragons are basically that each dragon only has one bond/rider at a time, for the rider’s lifetime, and each rider can only ever bond with a single dragon… but depending on whether or not you want to use this and how, his Targaryen dragonlord ancestry could still make dragons take a friendly interest in him.
PERSONALITY:
As an example: Jon's Night's Watch vow of celibacy is very important to him, but he breaks it with Ygritte to preserve his cover as a "deserter," so he can learn what Mance's plans are. While he comes to genuinely care for Ygritte, he eventually leaves her, partly because warning the Night's Watch of the oncoming attack is part of his mission. It's enough of a betrayal to cause him considerable guilt, not what he wanted to do on a personal level, and not one he would have committed under other circumstances, but staying with her would have been a greater betrayal of his duty and values. The Watch, the North, and the people he has sworn to protect are more important than his happiness -- or hers.
Jon is only human, and deeply human. He’s a very good person, but not a saint, nor so bright and capable that he's any kind of tactical genius (his tactics aren't bad when he sticks to them, but his greatest skill is probably with a sword), nor so resilient that he never falters and never needs a pep talk, nor so charismatic and persuasive that he's always 100% successful at talking people into things. His strengths are always in balance with his weaknesses, and sometimes the weaknesses win; other times, his strengths are used against him; other times, his strengths simply aren't good enough on their own, and he succeeds partly because of help from his allies.
SAMPLE:
1: Jon apologizes to Yennefer: A note about context! This occurred just after a complex in-game AU that lasted something like 6-8 weeks in real time and in which characters had a lifetime of AU memories and no knowledge of their canon selves. In the AU, Jon was a spoiled, womanizing rich kid who had begun to awaken to his privilege and the rot in his society: my idea was to mirror a little of what he might have been like if he had grown up as a prince. This thread essentially involves Canon Jon’s disapproval of his other self, and remorse for his past actions in the AU.
2: A bunch of threads from a TDM earlier this year
3: A very recent thread that was also used as a sample by Dany's player
INVENTORY: Canon outfit (socks/underclothes, a high necked grey linen shirt, black wool breeches, padded arming jacket, brigandine/reinforced leather armor tunic, plate gorget with Stark sigils, leather boots and gloves, velvet cloak trimmed with wolf fur) with sword belt (includes his sword Longclaw and a small dagger for utilitarian purposes). Probably a few mundane personal items like a flint and a wooden comb, which are in a leather pouch somewhere on his person.
NOTES: Nothing exciting off the top of my head! This is a character who is pretty prepared for Adventure and can handle rough conditions, but was also raised in an aristocratic family. He might stand out as a soldier in a more refined setting, but he’s unlikely to come off as a barbarian. He's comfortable around people from all walks of life.
I would like to note that, if accepted, I don’t think it would be hard to work out ways to keep him from blowing any cover that Sansa needs to maintain. While he’s a protective big brother, he did also have that “Night’s Watch defector” arc: I doubt he’d cause trouble for a sibling who’s in a similar situation, outside of being sure they know he’s there to help whenever they need him.
IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? I love plot, it’s the surest way to lock me into a game, but I am also always hesitant to tax mod resources. Do what’s best for you!