Taxonomites app
Aug. 30th, 2011 07:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ownlittleprisonYOUR NAME: Sofie
PERSONAL JOURNAL: sochan.livejournal.com
E-MAIL: sofie.pettersson@gmail.com
AIM: sakuraofrureo
CHARACTERS IN TAXON: Wyatt Cain
CHARACTER NAME: Mick St. John
CANON: Moonlight
MEDIUM: tv show cancelled after one measly season
BIRTHDAY/AGE: In 1952, at the age of 35, Mick was turned. In canon, he'll be "Eighty next November". But a quick bout of mathematical fun says he's actually closer to 90 years old. That isn't to say he'll always be entirely truthful about age. Let's say his birthday is November 16.
CANON POINT: At the very end of 1.05, Arrested Development. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Moonlight_episodes On the way home from Buzzwire HQ, Mick finds himself walking into the Sanctuary’s Arrival chamber rather than his high security, very posh flat.
WHY THIS CHARACTER AND CANON POINT?:
I actually don't play this character (yet). I've been wanting to for over a year since first watching Moonlight. While Mick is a stereotype in a lot of ways (a private investigator in what I feel is a delightfully cheeky nod at noire classics and pulp fiction, a vampire struggling with the moral dilemma of being a monster with a conscience, trying to do what's right), he's a very likable stereotype. More than that, he's a sweet guy who'll go out of his way to help a stranger, even at great risk to himself.
I’ve been wanting to play Mick in Taxon for well over six months now, but due to the comm climate at the time, it just didn’t feel like a good idea. I feared not getting tags for being lumped in with the other vampire castmates, or not getting tags or plot for not being part of one of the major vamp shows.
However. My ideas for Mick are pretty straightforward. One being that he’s much more proactive than Cain, and much more likely to go out and make friends, get to know people and actually get along with them. He’s likable, approachable, and it would just overall help spread CR over several fandoms.
As for plots and such, I would be approaching Taxon as an ample opportunity for outing Mick as a vampire. Not only because I love how it was done in canon, but because I feel having that as a short-or-long term goal would change the vibes somewhat. Investigative characters could investigate, Mick could try his best to cover tracks, it could be like one big cat and mouse type game for a while, up until a big reveal that ultimately can’t be undone. And then what happens? That’s something I would love to explore.
Another thing I can see Mick doing is dig deeper into just what the heck is up with Taxon. He’s nosy, and he’s had a few decades worth of experience in investigating stuff big and small.
I would also love to see Mick facing moral dilemmas that would seem natural for a human protagonist, but maybe not so much for a vampire. Saving human lives at the risk of his own, risking being found out as a monster... He may be a reluctant hero, but that’s still what he is.
Why this canon point: Things are looking up for Mick. He’s just helped reunite a young woman with her parents, him and Beth are once again on comfortably friendly terms... And he got a kiss for the trouble, too. So, while he’ll be just as confused and disproving of being kidnapped, he’ll be better equipped to deal with it than, say, after being peppered with silver buckshot and outed as a vampire earlier in the show. And that’s another thing: He now knows it isn’t the end of the world should someone find out his true nature. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll come after him with a wooden stake. It’s tough going, but it can be overcome.
PROGRAMMED POSSESSION: 1960 Mercedes 220 SE
ABILITIES/WEAKNESSES:
Shamelessly nicked from Wikipedia and bullet pointed/added to/rephrased where needed:
The conventions of Moonlight are based, in part, on a unique mythology. Some parts are instantly recognizable from what one might call the vampire cliché:
* Vampires don’t age. They don’t necessarily grow wiser, but you need a bit of cunning and wit to survive in this day and age, perhaps even especially if you don’t age and have to migrate and get your backgrounds faked and so on and so forth. Networking within the vampire community is key if you’re in it for the long run.
* Conventional in this day and age, but not so much before Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the vampires of Moonlight have two distinct looks: the human face, and the pale, dark around the eyes, white iris, long-nailed vampire face. The more distressed/agitated, the more exaggerated the vampire face.
* To become a vampire, you need to exchange blood with another vampire. They drink your blood (drain you to the point of near death), you drink theirs.
* They have to drink human blood to survive. This is important: Human blood.
* Vampires develop near psychic powers, being able to see glimpses of the past as well as the future. Like lifting a print off of a door knob, vampires can smell someone’s blood and get an impression of recent events. Sometimes they can get psychic impressions off of sites, granting them brief visions of the near future.
* Vampires are stronger, faster, more agile than humans. They can do things that would make the best human parkour enthusiast in the world green with envy.
* They can sustain heavy damage and regenerate in a matter of minutes. However, the heavier the damage, the more in need of blood they are.
* Daylight doesn’t immediately kill vampires, but it does weaken them. However, prolonged exposure will severely mess with the vampire’s system. They’ll grow sluggish, feverish to the point of burning up from within, and all resources they have key into survival.
Not-so-cliché:
* A newly sired vampire needs the sire to act as mentor. If the vampire is abandoned for some reason or other it will turn feral and go into a blood frenzy before long, killing indiscriminately.
* Silver is toxic, fire will burn vampires to a crisp and ultimately kill them (with very few exceptions)
* A vampire’s image can’t be caught on silver emulsion type film; digital camcorders and cameras on the other hand, no problem
* Garlic, holy water and crucifixes are useless
* Vampires have a pulse. They are not cold blooded, yet don’t produce enough body heat to be detected by heat signature cameras. They can’t turn into a bat or mist. Neither can they fly.
* The best way to kill them is by decapitation or burning, while a stake through the heart causes painful paralysis and what might be misinterpreted as death.
* Vampires have heightened senses, which allow them to hear and smell very well.
As for the more personal, character specific abilities and flaws:
* Key ability: He was a field medic in WWII, which means he knows more than your basic first aid. He can set up a friggin’ tourniquet using only his necklace! A regular MacGyver, he is.
* Less key abilities include research, puzzle solving, and he can play the guitar fairly decently.
Mick is a sweet guy. He’s loyal to a fault, and decent too, and has an incredibly sizable soft spot for the human race. At the same time, he won’t hesitate to use less than gentlemanly ways of persuasion when dealing with people who have crossed a line (assault, deceit, breaking the law or moral code of either the human or vampire community). He’s prone to jealousy induced temper tantrums, or was when he was human. He does have a territorial/protective streak which still lingers on, but in a much more subtle way than before. He’s had a few decades to mature, shall we say.
Mick’s moral compass is set due north. If he could choose, he wouldn’t hurt a fly, but he recognizes that the world doesn’t work that way, and that with his increased powers as a vampire, he can do a lot of good.
Unlike most vampire leads in today’s mainstream culture, he’s a less costume-y shade of vigilante. He works by his own moral code, which in and of itself isn’t too different from most protagonists’ moral codes. Safeguard the innocent, protect the weak, get the bad guys where it really hurts. And if you have to break lesser laws to get the job done, then that’s the way you play the game.
Depending on who you ask, his deep seated reluctance to kill people (even when his own life depends on it, he won’t harm an innocent) is a character flaw/disadvantage. His predisposition to save lives, as well. It most certainly could be used against him, if applied correctly.
He also has a habit of going into Very Obviously Dangerous Situations all on his lonesome. If that isn’t a character flaw, I don’t know what is. It’s plain stupid, is what it is.
PSYCHOLOGY/PERSONALITY:
Mick is friendly, kind, and a bit of a blue eyed boy even when well on his way to his hundredth birthday. He doesn’t trust people too easily, but he does tend to want to believe the best of people. One thing in particular that shaped Mick’s outlook on life is serving in World War II as a young man. He saw a lot of tragedy, and I think that’s where his humanitarian (for a vampire), sheer appreciation for life comes from. Seeing all the lives lost, on both sides, really served to wipe off the glitz and glam of warfare, the way the government spun it in the early 1940s.
By the time the show starts, he’s made quite a few mistakes in the past, both as a human and as a vampire. He had a brief affair with his best friend’s wife, both of them believing him dead. He moved on and fell in love with the most fascinating woman he’d ever met. A femme fatale just like in the books, strong and sultry and so very confident in herself and her charms. She was unlike anyone he’d ever met, and at least on his end, it was love at first sight. Passion, the kind that burns you up from the inside out and consumes you, makes you a bit stupid and rash; makes you jealous and reckless to the point where you don’t even recognize yourself anymore. It was a whirlwind romance, and they married shortly after their first meeting. In canon, you don’t really get all that much information. You get tiny little scenes from the party Mick and Coraline met, another few tiny scenes depicting the morning he woke up as a vampire, and very little else. It’s up to you to fill in the blanks while watching the show. But the fact remains, Coraline’s done a lot of damage. Not only does Mick have issues with being a vampire, he views himself and other vampires as monsters. He knows full well humans can be just as dangerous, just as monstrous as any vampire. He believes that the choices you make define who you are, whether you’re human or otherwise. The problem is when you live for a long enough time, it gets easier and easier to lose perspective of what truly matters.
To illustrate this point, here is a brief canon quote between the two main characters, Mick and Beth, the young woman he saved some twenty years ago.
Beth: What could be the downside of feeling like that and living forever?
Mick: The scrounging, the hiding. Missing all the things that you once loved: sunbathing, food. I used to love prime rib, now I can't even remember what it tastes like. They say it gets easier the longer you live, but I hope that's not true.
Beth: Really? I'd think you'd hope for the opposite.
Mick: To forget what it's like to be human? No way, never.
Coincidentally, meeting Beth has a marked effect on Mick. Not only do they become friends more or less overnight, but little by little he starts to fall in love. The biggest problem is Beth is human, the second biggest problem is she has a boyfriend. Regardless of how complicated their friendship is, they’re good for each other, and keep growing closer over the course of the show.
HISTORY:
Mick was born in 1917, November 16th (my fanon'ed birthday date), the son of loving parents. He was an only child, and as such he was ever so slightly spoiled, but raised good and proper. He grew up with just a touch of arrogance, which asserted itself as an ambitious streak mixed with self confidence. Now, until the 1840's, the educational system was a highly localized and only available to the wealthy. By 1918 all states had passed laws requiring children to attend at least elementary schools. While the Catholics opposed the idea of public schools and won legislative rights to start private schools of their own by 1925, private school was never an option for Mick. His family was well off, but not well enough to send him off to school. And certainly not a Catholic one. He charmed his way through his public school years, getting by as much on a keen eye for detail as paying attention in class. What he didn't learn in school, he picked up in the real world. Still to this day, Mick relies heavily on street smarts and drawing the right conclusions.
When World War II was a fact, Mick was enrolled like so many others, and received training as a field medic. He served in the war alongside his best friend, Ray. When Ray died in battle, Mick was discharged and went home to the States, where he (despite knowing better) had a brief affair with Ray’s widow. This stopped when the two got word that Ray was in fact alive, and Mick left the scene. A few years later, Mick worked as a guitar player and singer in a cover band, and during one of their gigs he came across a striking brunette in a red dress. Her name was Coraline, and little did Mick know that meeting her would irrevocably change the course of his life. In 1952 he and Coraline got married, and on their wedding night she turned him against his will, calling it her wedding gift to him. Mick disagreed, but found himself unable to cope without her. They stayed married for the better part of thirty years, after which they separated for unknown reasons.
Somewhere along the way, probably when the cracks in his and Coraline's marriage got too hard to ignore, Mick reinvented himself as a private investigator. Unable to join the force for obvious reasons (not aging, sleeping in a freezer, drinking blood instead of coffee), he still wanted to help people. And what better way to do so than use his observational skills, his near sixty years of experience in human behaviour, and unorthodox info gathering skills? In the eighties especially, his good reputation led to him getting a contact within LAPD by the name of Bobby. Still to this day they're good friends - in part due to the fact Bobby is now an old man, whose eyesight is no more.
Once Mick at long last got fed up with his wife's mind games and left, Coraline took more drastic measures to keep him. In the mid-eighties, Coraline kidnapped a young girl in order to start a family with Mick, who in a stroke of luck or kismet had been hired by the girl’s mother to find her. Coraline refused to let the girl go, and Mick find himself having to fight his ex wife to save the girl. He stabbed her in the chest and left her paralysed while Mick set fire to the room and took the girl with him. As the little girl grew up, Mick chose to stay close, keeping a watchful eye on her. They meet again after roughly twenty years have passed, the once young girl now a news reporter for an ever so slightly sleazy online news site. Though she doesn’t remember him, there’s an instant connection. From there on in, their paths keep crossing in the start of a beautiful but very complicated friendship.
ARRIVAL POST:
If there's one thing I've learned in 85 years, it's that what we want doesn't always matter. Yeah. You can say that again.
It had been a good twenty something hours, all things considered. He’d saved the day, saved the girl, gone on the strangest roller coaster ride of his life - literally - and at the end of it, he got a curve ball to rival all others. It came in the shape of a kiss.
Soft, warm lips touching his; there one second, gone the next, over before it had even started, and absolutely, positively perfect. For the duration of that one, precious little moment, with Beth’s heartbeat vibrant and loud in his ears and palpable on his lips, she’d made him forget everything else. All his worries evaporated, all his troubles went poof! Gone. Just like that.
He’d said goodbye.
He’d gone home, fighting the dopey smile that kept tugging at his lips, stars in his eyes when there were none to be seen in the polluted LA sky. He’d felt more alive on the drive home than he had in decades.
And now this.
There one second, gone the next; the hallway leading to his apartment, poof! Gone. Replaced by a metallic cylinder taken right out of one of those dentist horror flicks, or one of the sci-fi double features of the ‘50s. A weird, Star Trek type thing right above him, stairs right in front of him.
“I think someone needs to have a serious chat with Scotty,” he murmurs to himself, his pale blue eyes widening slightly as confusion creeps into the shell shocked disbelief. He’s had some weird fever dreams over the years, but this has got to be the single weirdest one of all. A raised platform, a circular room (cylindrical, that’s what it is, like some kind of test tube gone wrong) - and for a moment his mind races in panic: Is it silver? No, it can’t be. He’d be able to smell it (burning flesh and blood and silver oxide and gun powder, and the smell is just a memory but it makes him feel sick). He moves, pushes himself out of the daze and takes the steps two at a time. His eyes never stop moving, gliding over too shiny surfaces that look too Weird Science even for his taste, and the light from above reflects too brightly on the elaborate white gold ring on his index finger. ...and is that a bracelet? Fused into his wrist? “--what the Hell?”
Time to breathe. Don’t panic. It’s just a metallic room with no visible way out. “Hello? Is there anyone there?”
It’s the first rule of horror movies, I know. ‘Never ask if there’s anyone there’, ‘cause there always is. The guy with the axe hiding behind the curtain. The zombies pouring out of the only house for miles. The vampire trapped in a tomb, just waiting to be let out.
Bad example.
“Look, I’m sure there’s some way we can figure something out,” he adds with a crooked smile - it’s a bit of bravado, of course it is, but it’s either that or literally climbing the walls to look for an exit. The last thing he wants is to show his captors that they got one up on him, which they did, but a guy’s got his pride.
“I like the iPad. And the, uh, accessory. Nice touch, but not exactly my style.”
Sometimes what we want doesn't matter. But sometimes... Sometimes it's the only thing that does.
ADDITIONAL SAMPLE:
It’s all Bram Stoker’s fault. Hear me out. If vampires are the next big thing in Hollywood - and they are - it’s Bram Stoker’s fault. You can argue that he isn’t responsible for the last two waves of glam vamp fad courtesy of Anne Rice in the nineties, Charlaine Harris and Stephenie Meyer picking up where she left off in the noughties. Of course he isn’t. That isn’t my point. The point is he started the trend of turning a legendary monster into a sex symbol. He got a few things wrong in the process, like the bat thing. We’re not shape shifters. Well... Not in that sense. And don’t let anyone convince you we sparkle like diamonds in sunshine, either. That would be downright traumatic.
What I’m really getting at is, fiction is a lot like darkness; once you get deep enough into it, nothing is what it seems. Everything gets distorted, and even after your eyes have adjusted, you still don’t have a clear picture. The pop culture vampire trend is good in some ways. It completely disregards the facts and reinforces the idea that vampires are pure fiction, and for those of us who prefer freshies over blood bags the hype has spawned another generation of groupies. On the other hand, some of the groupies never make it back after their date with real life Edward. The hype means everyone and their granny wonders what it would be like to meet a real vampire. What if there really are vampires among us. Wouldn’t that be neat?
No.
Truth of the matter is, vamps don’t sparkle like diamonds. Vampires are monsters who feed off human blood, and they don’t have a choice about it. We don’t get to choose. We blend in to survive, we hunt you like the sitting ducks you most often are, and it is not pretty.
Being a vampire sucks. Literally. It isn’t glamorous, it isn’t full of passion and eternal love and disturbing grave yard pornography - thanks HBO, for that mental image.
Being a vampire is like a bed of roses. Smells nice, looks nice, seems like a pretty sweet deal right up to the point where you lie down and the illusion shatters from all the thorns digging into your skin.
Be honest. Would you give up all the things you love about life just so you could live forever, suspended in a bubble of agelessness? Think about it. No more food - no pizza, no coffee, no ice cream, say good bye to fine dining and bar hopping. No sleeping in a nice, big bed with clean sheets under soft covers. No sunbathing. No kids. No career. Your loved ones gone long before you’re ready to say goodbye.
Would you, really?
No?
Then maybe there’s still hope for you.
PERSONAL JOURNAL: sochan.livejournal.com
E-MAIL: sofie.pettersson@gmail.com
AIM: sakuraofrureo
CHARACTERS IN TAXON: Wyatt Cain
CHARACTER NAME: Mick St. John
CANON: Moonlight
MEDIUM: tv show cancelled after one measly season
BIRTHDAY/AGE: In 1952, at the age of 35, Mick was turned. In canon, he'll be "Eighty next November". But a quick bout of mathematical fun says he's actually closer to 90 years old. That isn't to say he'll always be entirely truthful about age. Let's say his birthday is November 16.
CANON POINT: At the very end of 1.05, Arrested Development. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Moonlight_episodes On the way home from Buzzwire HQ, Mick finds himself walking into the Sanctuary’s Arrival chamber rather than his high security, very posh flat.
WHY THIS CHARACTER AND CANON POINT?:
I actually don't play this character (yet). I've been wanting to for over a year since first watching Moonlight. While Mick is a stereotype in a lot of ways (a private investigator in what I feel is a delightfully cheeky nod at noire classics and pulp fiction, a vampire struggling with the moral dilemma of being a monster with a conscience, trying to do what's right), he's a very likable stereotype. More than that, he's a sweet guy who'll go out of his way to help a stranger, even at great risk to himself.
I’ve been wanting to play Mick in Taxon for well over six months now, but due to the comm climate at the time, it just didn’t feel like a good idea. I feared not getting tags for being lumped in with the other vampire castmates, or not getting tags or plot for not being part of one of the major vamp shows.
However. My ideas for Mick are pretty straightforward. One being that he’s much more proactive than Cain, and much more likely to go out and make friends, get to know people and actually get along with them. He’s likable, approachable, and it would just overall help spread CR over several fandoms.
As for plots and such, I would be approaching Taxon as an ample opportunity for outing Mick as a vampire. Not only because I love how it was done in canon, but because I feel having that as a short-or-long term goal would change the vibes somewhat. Investigative characters could investigate, Mick could try his best to cover tracks, it could be like one big cat and mouse type game for a while, up until a big reveal that ultimately can’t be undone. And then what happens? That’s something I would love to explore.
Another thing I can see Mick doing is dig deeper into just what the heck is up with Taxon. He’s nosy, and he’s had a few decades worth of experience in investigating stuff big and small.
I would also love to see Mick facing moral dilemmas that would seem natural for a human protagonist, but maybe not so much for a vampire. Saving human lives at the risk of his own, risking being found out as a monster... He may be a reluctant hero, but that’s still what he is.
Why this canon point: Things are looking up for Mick. He’s just helped reunite a young woman with her parents, him and Beth are once again on comfortably friendly terms... And he got a kiss for the trouble, too. So, while he’ll be just as confused and disproving of being kidnapped, he’ll be better equipped to deal with it than, say, after being peppered with silver buckshot and outed as a vampire earlier in the show. And that’s another thing: He now knows it isn’t the end of the world should someone find out his true nature. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll come after him with a wooden stake. It’s tough going, but it can be overcome.
PROGRAMMED POSSESSION: 1960 Mercedes 220 SE
ABILITIES/WEAKNESSES:
Shamelessly nicked from Wikipedia and bullet pointed/added to/rephrased where needed:
The conventions of Moonlight are based, in part, on a unique mythology. Some parts are instantly recognizable from what one might call the vampire cliché:
* Vampires don’t age. They don’t necessarily grow wiser, but you need a bit of cunning and wit to survive in this day and age, perhaps even especially if you don’t age and have to migrate and get your backgrounds faked and so on and so forth. Networking within the vampire community is key if you’re in it for the long run.
* Conventional in this day and age, but not so much before Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the vampires of Moonlight have two distinct looks: the human face, and the pale, dark around the eyes, white iris, long-nailed vampire face. The more distressed/agitated, the more exaggerated the vampire face.
* To become a vampire, you need to exchange blood with another vampire. They drink your blood (drain you to the point of near death), you drink theirs.
* They have to drink human blood to survive. This is important: Human blood.
* Vampires develop near psychic powers, being able to see glimpses of the past as well as the future. Like lifting a print off of a door knob, vampires can smell someone’s blood and get an impression of recent events. Sometimes they can get psychic impressions off of sites, granting them brief visions of the near future.
* Vampires are stronger, faster, more agile than humans. They can do things that would make the best human parkour enthusiast in the world green with envy.
* They can sustain heavy damage and regenerate in a matter of minutes. However, the heavier the damage, the more in need of blood they are.
* Daylight doesn’t immediately kill vampires, but it does weaken them. However, prolonged exposure will severely mess with the vampire’s system. They’ll grow sluggish, feverish to the point of burning up from within, and all resources they have key into survival.
Not-so-cliché:
* A newly sired vampire needs the sire to act as mentor. If the vampire is abandoned for some reason or other it will turn feral and go into a blood frenzy before long, killing indiscriminately.
* Silver is toxic, fire will burn vampires to a crisp and ultimately kill them (with very few exceptions)
* A vampire’s image can’t be caught on silver emulsion type film; digital camcorders and cameras on the other hand, no problem
* Garlic, holy water and crucifixes are useless
* Vampires have a pulse. They are not cold blooded, yet don’t produce enough body heat to be detected by heat signature cameras. They can’t turn into a bat or mist. Neither can they fly.
* The best way to kill them is by decapitation or burning, while a stake through the heart causes painful paralysis and what might be misinterpreted as death.
* Vampires have heightened senses, which allow them to hear and smell very well.
As for the more personal, character specific abilities and flaws:
* Key ability: He was a field medic in WWII, which means he knows more than your basic first aid. He can set up a friggin’ tourniquet using only his necklace! A regular MacGyver, he is.
* Less key abilities include research, puzzle solving, and he can play the guitar fairly decently.
Mick is a sweet guy. He’s loyal to a fault, and decent too, and has an incredibly sizable soft spot for the human race. At the same time, he won’t hesitate to use less than gentlemanly ways of persuasion when dealing with people who have crossed a line (assault, deceit, breaking the law or moral code of either the human or vampire community). He’s prone to jealousy induced temper tantrums, or was when he was human. He does have a territorial/protective streak which still lingers on, but in a much more subtle way than before. He’s had a few decades to mature, shall we say.
Mick’s moral compass is set due north. If he could choose, he wouldn’t hurt a fly, but he recognizes that the world doesn’t work that way, and that with his increased powers as a vampire, he can do a lot of good.
Unlike most vampire leads in today’s mainstream culture, he’s a less costume-y shade of vigilante. He works by his own moral code, which in and of itself isn’t too different from most protagonists’ moral codes. Safeguard the innocent, protect the weak, get the bad guys where it really hurts. And if you have to break lesser laws to get the job done, then that’s the way you play the game.
Depending on who you ask, his deep seated reluctance to kill people (even when his own life depends on it, he won’t harm an innocent) is a character flaw/disadvantage. His predisposition to save lives, as well. It most certainly could be used against him, if applied correctly.
He also has a habit of going into Very Obviously Dangerous Situations all on his lonesome. If that isn’t a character flaw, I don’t know what is. It’s plain stupid, is what it is.
PSYCHOLOGY/PERSONALITY:
Mick is friendly, kind, and a bit of a blue eyed boy even when well on his way to his hundredth birthday. He doesn’t trust people too easily, but he does tend to want to believe the best of people. One thing in particular that shaped Mick’s outlook on life is serving in World War II as a young man. He saw a lot of tragedy, and I think that’s where his humanitarian (for a vampire), sheer appreciation for life comes from. Seeing all the lives lost, on both sides, really served to wipe off the glitz and glam of warfare, the way the government spun it in the early 1940s.
By the time the show starts, he’s made quite a few mistakes in the past, both as a human and as a vampire. He had a brief affair with his best friend’s wife, both of them believing him dead. He moved on and fell in love with the most fascinating woman he’d ever met. A femme fatale just like in the books, strong and sultry and so very confident in herself and her charms. She was unlike anyone he’d ever met, and at least on his end, it was love at first sight. Passion, the kind that burns you up from the inside out and consumes you, makes you a bit stupid and rash; makes you jealous and reckless to the point where you don’t even recognize yourself anymore. It was a whirlwind romance, and they married shortly after their first meeting. In canon, you don’t really get all that much information. You get tiny little scenes from the party Mick and Coraline met, another few tiny scenes depicting the morning he woke up as a vampire, and very little else. It’s up to you to fill in the blanks while watching the show. But the fact remains, Coraline’s done a lot of damage. Not only does Mick have issues with being a vampire, he views himself and other vampires as monsters. He knows full well humans can be just as dangerous, just as monstrous as any vampire. He believes that the choices you make define who you are, whether you’re human or otherwise. The problem is when you live for a long enough time, it gets easier and easier to lose perspective of what truly matters.
To illustrate this point, here is a brief canon quote between the two main characters, Mick and Beth, the young woman he saved some twenty years ago.
Beth: What could be the downside of feeling like that and living forever?
Mick: The scrounging, the hiding. Missing all the things that you once loved: sunbathing, food. I used to love prime rib, now I can't even remember what it tastes like. They say it gets easier the longer you live, but I hope that's not true.
Beth: Really? I'd think you'd hope for the opposite.
Mick: To forget what it's like to be human? No way, never.
Coincidentally, meeting Beth has a marked effect on Mick. Not only do they become friends more or less overnight, but little by little he starts to fall in love. The biggest problem is Beth is human, the second biggest problem is she has a boyfriend. Regardless of how complicated their friendship is, they’re good for each other, and keep growing closer over the course of the show.
HISTORY:
Mick was born in 1917, November 16th (my fanon'ed birthday date), the son of loving parents. He was an only child, and as such he was ever so slightly spoiled, but raised good and proper. He grew up with just a touch of arrogance, which asserted itself as an ambitious streak mixed with self confidence. Now, until the 1840's, the educational system was a highly localized and only available to the wealthy. By 1918 all states had passed laws requiring children to attend at least elementary schools. While the Catholics opposed the idea of public schools and won legislative rights to start private schools of their own by 1925, private school was never an option for Mick. His family was well off, but not well enough to send him off to school. And certainly not a Catholic one. He charmed his way through his public school years, getting by as much on a keen eye for detail as paying attention in class. What he didn't learn in school, he picked up in the real world. Still to this day, Mick relies heavily on street smarts and drawing the right conclusions.
When World War II was a fact, Mick was enrolled like so many others, and received training as a field medic. He served in the war alongside his best friend, Ray. When Ray died in battle, Mick was discharged and went home to the States, where he (despite knowing better) had a brief affair with Ray’s widow. This stopped when the two got word that Ray was in fact alive, and Mick left the scene. A few years later, Mick worked as a guitar player and singer in a cover band, and during one of their gigs he came across a striking brunette in a red dress. Her name was Coraline, and little did Mick know that meeting her would irrevocably change the course of his life. In 1952 he and Coraline got married, and on their wedding night she turned him against his will, calling it her wedding gift to him. Mick disagreed, but found himself unable to cope without her. They stayed married for the better part of thirty years, after which they separated for unknown reasons.
Somewhere along the way, probably when the cracks in his and Coraline's marriage got too hard to ignore, Mick reinvented himself as a private investigator. Unable to join the force for obvious reasons (not aging, sleeping in a freezer, drinking blood instead of coffee), he still wanted to help people. And what better way to do so than use his observational skills, his near sixty years of experience in human behaviour, and unorthodox info gathering skills? In the eighties especially, his good reputation led to him getting a contact within LAPD by the name of Bobby. Still to this day they're good friends - in part due to the fact Bobby is now an old man, whose eyesight is no more.
Once Mick at long last got fed up with his wife's mind games and left, Coraline took more drastic measures to keep him. In the mid-eighties, Coraline kidnapped a young girl in order to start a family with Mick, who in a stroke of luck or kismet had been hired by the girl’s mother to find her. Coraline refused to let the girl go, and Mick find himself having to fight his ex wife to save the girl. He stabbed her in the chest and left her paralysed while Mick set fire to the room and took the girl with him. As the little girl grew up, Mick chose to stay close, keeping a watchful eye on her. They meet again after roughly twenty years have passed, the once young girl now a news reporter for an ever so slightly sleazy online news site. Though she doesn’t remember him, there’s an instant connection. From there on in, their paths keep crossing in the start of a beautiful but very complicated friendship.
ARRIVAL POST:
If there's one thing I've learned in 85 years, it's that what we want doesn't always matter. Yeah. You can say that again.
It had been a good twenty something hours, all things considered. He’d saved the day, saved the girl, gone on the strangest roller coaster ride of his life - literally - and at the end of it, he got a curve ball to rival all others. It came in the shape of a kiss.
Soft, warm lips touching his; there one second, gone the next, over before it had even started, and absolutely, positively perfect. For the duration of that one, precious little moment, with Beth’s heartbeat vibrant and loud in his ears and palpable on his lips, she’d made him forget everything else. All his worries evaporated, all his troubles went poof! Gone. Just like that.
He’d said goodbye.
He’d gone home, fighting the dopey smile that kept tugging at his lips, stars in his eyes when there were none to be seen in the polluted LA sky. He’d felt more alive on the drive home than he had in decades.
And now this.
There one second, gone the next; the hallway leading to his apartment, poof! Gone. Replaced by a metallic cylinder taken right out of one of those dentist horror flicks, or one of the sci-fi double features of the ‘50s. A weird, Star Trek type thing right above him, stairs right in front of him.
“I think someone needs to have a serious chat with Scotty,” he murmurs to himself, his pale blue eyes widening slightly as confusion creeps into the shell shocked disbelief. He’s had some weird fever dreams over the years, but this has got to be the single weirdest one of all. A raised platform, a circular room (cylindrical, that’s what it is, like some kind of test tube gone wrong) - and for a moment his mind races in panic: Is it silver? No, it can’t be. He’d be able to smell it (burning flesh and blood and silver oxide and gun powder, and the smell is just a memory but it makes him feel sick). He moves, pushes himself out of the daze and takes the steps two at a time. His eyes never stop moving, gliding over too shiny surfaces that look too Weird Science even for his taste, and the light from above reflects too brightly on the elaborate white gold ring on his index finger. ...and is that a bracelet? Fused into his wrist? “--what the Hell?”
Time to breathe. Don’t panic. It’s just a metallic room with no visible way out. “Hello? Is there anyone there?”
It’s the first rule of horror movies, I know. ‘Never ask if there’s anyone there’, ‘cause there always is. The guy with the axe hiding behind the curtain. The zombies pouring out of the only house for miles. The vampire trapped in a tomb, just waiting to be let out.
Bad example.
“Look, I’m sure there’s some way we can figure something out,” he adds with a crooked smile - it’s a bit of bravado, of course it is, but it’s either that or literally climbing the walls to look for an exit. The last thing he wants is to show his captors that they got one up on him, which they did, but a guy’s got his pride.
“I like the iPad. And the, uh, accessory. Nice touch, but not exactly my style.”
Sometimes what we want doesn't matter. But sometimes... Sometimes it's the only thing that does.
ADDITIONAL SAMPLE:
It’s all Bram Stoker’s fault. Hear me out. If vampires are the next big thing in Hollywood - and they are - it’s Bram Stoker’s fault. You can argue that he isn’t responsible for the last two waves of glam vamp fad courtesy of Anne Rice in the nineties, Charlaine Harris and Stephenie Meyer picking up where she left off in the noughties. Of course he isn’t. That isn’t my point. The point is he started the trend of turning a legendary monster into a sex symbol. He got a few things wrong in the process, like the bat thing. We’re not shape shifters. Well... Not in that sense. And don’t let anyone convince you we sparkle like diamonds in sunshine, either. That would be downright traumatic.
What I’m really getting at is, fiction is a lot like darkness; once you get deep enough into it, nothing is what it seems. Everything gets distorted, and even after your eyes have adjusted, you still don’t have a clear picture. The pop culture vampire trend is good in some ways. It completely disregards the facts and reinforces the idea that vampires are pure fiction, and for those of us who prefer freshies over blood bags the hype has spawned another generation of groupies. On the other hand, some of the groupies never make it back after their date with real life Edward. The hype means everyone and their granny wonders what it would be like to meet a real vampire. What if there really are vampires among us. Wouldn’t that be neat?
No.
Truth of the matter is, vamps don’t sparkle like diamonds. Vampires are monsters who feed off human blood, and they don’t have a choice about it. We don’t get to choose. We blend in to survive, we hunt you like the sitting ducks you most often are, and it is not pretty.
Being a vampire sucks. Literally. It isn’t glamorous, it isn’t full of passion and eternal love and disturbing grave yard pornography - thanks HBO, for that mental image.
Being a vampire is like a bed of roses. Smells nice, looks nice, seems like a pretty sweet deal right up to the point where you lie down and the illusion shatters from all the thorns digging into your skin.
Be honest. Would you give up all the things you love about life just so you could live forever, suspended in a bubble of agelessness? Think about it. No more food - no pizza, no coffee, no ice cream, say good bye to fine dining and bar hopping. No sleeping in a nice, big bed with clean sheets under soft covers. No sunbathing. No kids. No career. Your loved ones gone long before you’re ready to say goodbye.
Would you, really?
No?
Then maybe there’s still hope for you.
