Mike Johnson (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
justwonthegame) wrote2012-10-23 09:23 pm
justwonthegame) wrote2012-10-23 09:23 pm
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[nick / name]: Leah
[personal LJ/DW name]:brb_evil
[other characters currently played]: Luke :: Eight Days of Luke ::infernoandhearth
[e-mail]: malea.botor [at] gmail [dot] com
[AIM / messenger]: moralsremitted
[series]: The Almighty Johnsons
[character]: Mike Johnson
[character history / background]: The wiki!
[character abilities]: Mike is Ullr, the Norse god of the hunt, and games. This means a couple of things. For the hunt, if he sets himself onto finding something or someone, he just instinctively knows the direction in which to go to find it. This ranges from hunting down Axl when he goes missing, to never losing his car keys. The god of games aspect means he can’t lose games. Any of them. Ever. For games of skill, it means he’s automatically incredibly skillful. His darts never miss the exact mark. He sinks every billiard ball with ease. He can throw a sword across the forest, right by his youngest brother’s head and bury it deeply into the tree in front of him. In games of chance, like Blackjack, the universe seems to work itself around to make sure he’s always provided with exactly the cards he needs.
[character personality]: Mike’s entire personality and how he reacts to everything stems almost entirely from his 21st birthday, after his dad had buggered off. His mum took him to the forest, told him he was a god now, and then left him alone with his three younger brothers (16, 14 and 6) to look after them by himself. Happy Birthday, Mikkel, you’re a dad. He took to it with a little bit of difficulty, as his natural instinct was to want to show off his powers and be a god about town, but after the addition of his best friend Rob ending up in a coma because of a bar fight he accidentally instigated with his powers, he swore off his powers from then on. Gods are, at their heart, kind of cocky and godly, and you see Mike’s goddishness emerging every time he uses his powers. He’s a very smug and cocky person, and he’s been stamping it down and being incredibly sensible for the sake of his brothers. So whereas it’s easy to see Mike’s sensibility and responsibility in practically everything he does, it’s important to realise that for him, responsibility is a constant struggle against his base nature. But he insists upon it.
Mike has seen firsthand what a poor god dad is like, through his own, who was abusive towards his mum. So whereas you can see the mark his father and mother’s poor parenting left on him and his older younger brothers, Anders and Ty, with Axl who was raised almost exclusively by Mike, you can see the mark of Mike’s parenting. Which has honestly left Axl the most regular, well-rounded, NICEST one of the four of them. Mike gave him the most regular upbringing he possibly could, and did it well, which means he’s been buckling down since he was 21. He managed to develop a business as a builder while raising three bratty kids, not to mention he clearly managed to raise all of them well and in good conditions, as none of them were taken by Child Services. This has contributed to his strong moral drive. In one episode, thanks to shoddy work by one of his contractors, his client ends up with a leaky house. His client is poor, and can’t afford to pay for an entirely new roof, and for the damage, so Mike takes it on as his problem. He promised them a good house, and he intends to give them one, even if it means scrimping and saving in his home life in order to make it happen for them. Another time, when his constant winning at blackjack caused a woman to lose her job, he offered her all the money he’d won to make up for it.
Mike has an interesting relationship with his powers. He’s always automatically using his skill at hunting to find lost objects and the like, but he stays away from them outside of helping Axl with his quest, up until the point that Coma Rob comes out of his vegetative state. Anders mocks Mike for not using his powers, saying it’s “such a waste”, so Mike has clearly not used them outside of the baseline, and demonstratively to prove gods are a thing to his brothers in their god ceremonies since he was 21. After Val leaves him, he has about three months where he lives with Axl and his friend Zeb, sits around shirtless eating cereal, screws random ladies, and does a bunch of gambling to earn his keep. After this, he goes back to his usual, responsible self, winning a bar and managing it as responsibly as he does anything else. The three months were essentially Mike’s way of getting his lost twenties out of his system: once he’d experienced a lack of responsibility, he was done with it, and went back to his usual responsible self. And again, he runs the bar normally, staying away from his powers once more. Even once he loses Val, he sees god powers as dangerous, and the hubris of gods as something to be avoided.
Mike is brave, and would do anything for his family. In the final episodes of season one, Colin, or Loki, tricks them into signing a magical marriage contract for Axl and his daughter, who turns out not to be Frigg, but Hela instead. When Axl finds out and tries to break the marriage, Colin informs them that if Axl breaks it, the witness from his side of the family, who is Mike, will die. And Mike, although pissed, is ready to go along with it. If Axl has to break up the marriage to keep searching for the Frigg, so be it. He’ll die so Axl won’t be trapped into a marriage he doesn’t want, so that he won’t die without finding the Frigg and cause a massive natural disaster, so that his brothers and granddad won’t die. In the finale of season 2, when Anders leads the gods killer right to them, Mike runs off to distract her, and get her away from the rest of his family. She’s heavily armed and he puts himself in danger of dying to save his family, once again.
Despite all of his responsibility, he does, as I said, have a tendency towards cocky smugness, especially in relation to his powers. This can lead him to not thinking through situations very well. In order to win a bar off of Colin once, he gets his grandfather to toss him into the circle of fire Colin put the keys into, not thinking about how the hell he’s going to get back out. Whenever he’s winning at pool or at cards, he doesn’t think about spreading out his winning, he just keeps winning until he pisses people off. He goes very smug whenever he interacts with Michelle, too, the goddess Sjofn. Flirty to the point of smirkiness, whereas he was always very quiet and kind with his human ex-wife, Val. It’s probably what being a god brings out in him, although he does occasionally have trouble thinking through things, when they’re godly. It might be because he’s made his life so ordinary that thinking ahead when magic is involved doesn’t gel with him.
[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: The end of season 2.
[journal post]: [Another Johnson Accidental Audio Post]
[Someone is muttering into their device intermittently in a New Zealand accent.]
Come on…..answer your bloody phone, Axl. … Pick up… Ugh, come on!
[A pause. Mike is holding his phone away from his face and looking at it, and the reason you can tell, is he’s pressed a button and switched the video on. He frowns at the screen, and ends up talking quietly to his phone.]
What the hell are you doing?
[He turns the phone off. A few minutes later, a text message goes up on the Network.]
Axl if this is your phone I’m reaching I’ve got no idea where the hell I am. Call me back and pass the phone to Olaf.
Don’t tell him to text me back.
Don’t tell him to read this.
Are you all ok?
[third person / log sample]:
Rob is back, and Mike is…well, he’s conflicted. ‘Persistent vegetative state’ had sounded permanent, and Rob had been his best mate before he’d ruined everything with his fucking god powers. So of course he was glad he was back, he’d been horrified to see Rob’s blood spreading across that pool table, and gutted to know that he’d essentially killed his best friend by being a god. Being a god was only really harmful, in the end, to yourself, but especially to everyone around you. It had taken Rob to teach him that, had taken him ruining his best friend’s life.
But he’d managed to move on, in the end. He and Val were the only ones who could really talk about it, who properly felt the loss, and they’d become closer and finally ended up marrying. There was always the tragedy in their past, but it united them, so that was alright, in the end. He’d managed one golden thing from this entire shitty scenario. Just him and Val. She grounded him, made sure he found his humanity. He relied on her to keep him from becoming his dad, and to help him raise Axl to be a better man than he’d managed to be.
He’d always sensed it, though, he’d always known that Val had never stopped loving Rob. He and Val were only together by the grace of Rob, after all, together only because of the event and the result. So now that he’s back…well. What’s really keeping Val with him? In a relationship based on mutual comfort, once the tragedy is undone, Mike becomes irrelevant. There’s only Rob, and Val, smiling at each other, and Mike is the irrelevant third wheel.
Mike’s best friend has come back from the dead, and all Mike can think—as he looks from Val’s radiant tearful smile to Rob, reacting to her, eyes open for the first time in fifteen years –is that honestly? He’d really like to punch him.
[personal LJ/DW name]:
brb_evil[other characters currently played]: Luke :: Eight Days of Luke ::
infernoandhearth[e-mail]: malea.botor [at] gmail [dot] com
[AIM / messenger]: moralsremitted
[series]: The Almighty Johnsons
[character]: Mike Johnson
[character history / background]: The wiki!
[character abilities]: Mike is Ullr, the Norse god of the hunt, and games. This means a couple of things. For the hunt, if he sets himself onto finding something or someone, he just instinctively knows the direction in which to go to find it. This ranges from hunting down Axl when he goes missing, to never losing his car keys. The god of games aspect means he can’t lose games. Any of them. Ever. For games of skill, it means he’s automatically incredibly skillful. His darts never miss the exact mark. He sinks every billiard ball with ease. He can throw a sword across the forest, right by his youngest brother’s head and bury it deeply into the tree in front of him. In games of chance, like Blackjack, the universe seems to work itself around to make sure he’s always provided with exactly the cards he needs.
[character personality]: Mike’s entire personality and how he reacts to everything stems almost entirely from his 21st birthday, after his dad had buggered off. His mum took him to the forest, told him he was a god now, and then left him alone with his three younger brothers (16, 14 and 6) to look after them by himself. Happy Birthday, Mikkel, you’re a dad. He took to it with a little bit of difficulty, as his natural instinct was to want to show off his powers and be a god about town, but after the addition of his best friend Rob ending up in a coma because of a bar fight he accidentally instigated with his powers, he swore off his powers from then on. Gods are, at their heart, kind of cocky and godly, and you see Mike’s goddishness emerging every time he uses his powers. He’s a very smug and cocky person, and he’s been stamping it down and being incredibly sensible for the sake of his brothers. So whereas it’s easy to see Mike’s sensibility and responsibility in practically everything he does, it’s important to realise that for him, responsibility is a constant struggle against his base nature. But he insists upon it.
Mike has seen firsthand what a poor god dad is like, through his own, who was abusive towards his mum. So whereas you can see the mark his father and mother’s poor parenting left on him and his older younger brothers, Anders and Ty, with Axl who was raised almost exclusively by Mike, you can see the mark of Mike’s parenting. Which has honestly left Axl the most regular, well-rounded, NICEST one of the four of them. Mike gave him the most regular upbringing he possibly could, and did it well, which means he’s been buckling down since he was 21. He managed to develop a business as a builder while raising three bratty kids, not to mention he clearly managed to raise all of them well and in good conditions, as none of them were taken by Child Services. This has contributed to his strong moral drive. In one episode, thanks to shoddy work by one of his contractors, his client ends up with a leaky house. His client is poor, and can’t afford to pay for an entirely new roof, and for the damage, so Mike takes it on as his problem. He promised them a good house, and he intends to give them one, even if it means scrimping and saving in his home life in order to make it happen for them. Another time, when his constant winning at blackjack caused a woman to lose her job, he offered her all the money he’d won to make up for it.
Mike has an interesting relationship with his powers. He’s always automatically using his skill at hunting to find lost objects and the like, but he stays away from them outside of helping Axl with his quest, up until the point that Coma Rob comes out of his vegetative state. Anders mocks Mike for not using his powers, saying it’s “such a waste”, so Mike has clearly not used them outside of the baseline, and demonstratively to prove gods are a thing to his brothers in their god ceremonies since he was 21. After Val leaves him, he has about three months where he lives with Axl and his friend Zeb, sits around shirtless eating cereal, screws random ladies, and does a bunch of gambling to earn his keep. After this, he goes back to his usual, responsible self, winning a bar and managing it as responsibly as he does anything else. The three months were essentially Mike’s way of getting his lost twenties out of his system: once he’d experienced a lack of responsibility, he was done with it, and went back to his usual responsible self. And again, he runs the bar normally, staying away from his powers once more. Even once he loses Val, he sees god powers as dangerous, and the hubris of gods as something to be avoided.
Mike is brave, and would do anything for his family. In the final episodes of season one, Colin, or Loki, tricks them into signing a magical marriage contract for Axl and his daughter, who turns out not to be Frigg, but Hela instead. When Axl finds out and tries to break the marriage, Colin informs them that if Axl breaks it, the witness from his side of the family, who is Mike, will die. And Mike, although pissed, is ready to go along with it. If Axl has to break up the marriage to keep searching for the Frigg, so be it. He’ll die so Axl won’t be trapped into a marriage he doesn’t want, so that he won’t die without finding the Frigg and cause a massive natural disaster, so that his brothers and granddad won’t die. In the finale of season 2, when Anders leads the gods killer right to them, Mike runs off to distract her, and get her away from the rest of his family. She’s heavily armed and he puts himself in danger of dying to save his family, once again.
Despite all of his responsibility, he does, as I said, have a tendency towards cocky smugness, especially in relation to his powers. This can lead him to not thinking through situations very well. In order to win a bar off of Colin once, he gets his grandfather to toss him into the circle of fire Colin put the keys into, not thinking about how the hell he’s going to get back out. Whenever he’s winning at pool or at cards, he doesn’t think about spreading out his winning, he just keeps winning until he pisses people off. He goes very smug whenever he interacts with Michelle, too, the goddess Sjofn. Flirty to the point of smirkiness, whereas he was always very quiet and kind with his human ex-wife, Val. It’s probably what being a god brings out in him, although he does occasionally have trouble thinking through things, when they’re godly. It might be because he’s made his life so ordinary that thinking ahead when magic is involved doesn’t gel with him.
[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: The end of season 2.
[journal post]: [Another Johnson Accidental Audio Post]
[Someone is muttering into their device intermittently in a New Zealand accent.]
Come on…..answer your bloody phone, Axl. … Pick up… Ugh, come on!
[A pause. Mike is holding his phone away from his face and looking at it, and the reason you can tell, is he’s pressed a button and switched the video on. He frowns at the screen, and ends up talking quietly to his phone.]
What the hell are you doing?
[He turns the phone off. A few minutes later, a text message goes up on the Network.]
Axl if this is your phone I’m reaching I’ve got no idea where the hell I am. Call me back and pass the phone to Olaf.
Don’t tell him to text me back.
Don’t tell him to read this.
Are you all ok?
[third person / log sample]:
Rob is back, and Mike is…well, he’s conflicted. ‘Persistent vegetative state’ had sounded permanent, and Rob had been his best mate before he’d ruined everything with his fucking god powers. So of course he was glad he was back, he’d been horrified to see Rob’s blood spreading across that pool table, and gutted to know that he’d essentially killed his best friend by being a god. Being a god was only really harmful, in the end, to yourself, but especially to everyone around you. It had taken Rob to teach him that, had taken him ruining his best friend’s life.
But he’d managed to move on, in the end. He and Val were the only ones who could really talk about it, who properly felt the loss, and they’d become closer and finally ended up marrying. There was always the tragedy in their past, but it united them, so that was alright, in the end. He’d managed one golden thing from this entire shitty scenario. Just him and Val. She grounded him, made sure he found his humanity. He relied on her to keep him from becoming his dad, and to help him raise Axl to be a better man than he’d managed to be.
He’d always sensed it, though, he’d always known that Val had never stopped loving Rob. He and Val were only together by the grace of Rob, after all, together only because of the event and the result. So now that he’s back…well. What’s really keeping Val with him? In a relationship based on mutual comfort, once the tragedy is undone, Mike becomes irrelevant. There’s only Rob, and Val, smiling at each other, and Mike is the irrelevant third wheel.
Mike’s best friend has come back from the dead, and all Mike can think—as he looks from Val’s radiant tearful smile to Rob, reacting to her, eyes open for the first time in fifteen years –is that honestly? He’d really like to punch him.