⇓in character⇓

PHYSICAL AFFECTION: John will accept most platonic affection from people he likes, though he will likely remind each and every person that he's married. You know, just so nobody gets the wrong idea.

PHYSICAL VIOLENCE: John comes from a culture and era that is just recently starting to think "hey, maybe we shouldn't solve all our problems by shooting someone in the face." So while he will try to avoid a fight, he won't hesitate too much if attacked. Even less so if no weapons are involved. (Unless his opponent has powers. Then he's getting the fuck outta Dodge as fast as he can.)

ROMANCE/FLIRTING: Sorry ladies and gents, he's happily married. You can flirt all you want, but John will just politely ignore it. Maybe casually mention his wife a few times.

SEXUAL CONTENT:

(That means basically the same as above.)

PSYCHIC ABILITIES: John has one brain cell. You can read his mind, but don't expect anything profound.

MAGIC/POWERS: This asshole can't even swim, much less do any magical crap.

MEDICAL INFORMATION: Large number of scars, most noticeably on his face. Bit of a crooked walk/stance due to a leg injury from a wolf attack. May have somewhat more dense than usual bones, since he has trouble swimming and does not seem to break bones easily: his nose isn't shaped like one that's been broken despite numerous fistfights and accidents, and he's shown remarkable resiliency in hobbling long distances with gunshot or wolf attack wounds.

OFFENSIVE SUBJECTS OR TRIGGERS: John is overall fairly tolerant, but he does have a short fuse for a few things, particularly overt racism, adultery, people talking shit about his family, and liars. His only real trigger I guess would be... being attacked by big scary beasties. Which, you know. Isn't all that unusual.

⇓out of character⇓

BACKTAGGING: Always.

FOURTH WALLING: Bring it on.

THREADHOPPING: It's cool, just check with me before you do it on a serious thread.

OFFENSIVE SUBJECTS/TRIGGERS: I don't have anything I'd say is a trigger persay, but I am not fond of reading super detailed descriptions of pets/animals being injured or killed. If anything else comes up in a thread that makes me uncomfortable, I'll let you know.

ANYTHING ELSE: Check out John's shitty drawings of animals!

code by laenavasse

⌈ PLAYER SECTION ⌉
Player: Mouself
Contact: Mouse#0862 on Discord
Age: 29
Current Characters: Nada


⌈ CHARACTER SECTION ⌉
Character: John Marston
Age: 34-ish
Canon: Red Dead Redemption series
Canon Point: post-epilogue for RDR2

Background: Link to wiki

Note: While RDR2 isn’t a flexible narrative style game, there is some minor variation in the story based on Arthur’s choices and honor level. In particular, at the end of Chapter 6, Arthur has a choice of accompanying John to safety or leaving John to go get some hidden money elsewhere, leading to one of four separate endings based on if Arthur has high or low honor. Additionally, after Arthur’s death, his honor level in life affects how other characters, including John, remember him. I’ll be using high honor Arthur who stayed to help John, since that’s generally considered the “true” ending. (As in, if you let the timer on the choice run out, I believe that’s the option the game picks for you.)

Personality: To know who John Marston is, you first must look at who he was. It’s the framework through which John views himself—after Abigail and Jack return to him at Beecher’s Hope, he writes in his journal that “whole of my life suddenly makes some kind of sense” and that wishes he “could have been a different man all these years I wasted being a fool.” If John sees himself through that lens, I think it’s only fair that we do as well.

The most major change for John is, as implied by his “some kind of sense” comment, that prior to Abigail and Jack coming back to Beecher’s Hope, he was a man with no true purpose. As a member of Dutch’s gang, he tries his hardest to commit to the ideals Dutch believed in: glorifying “living free” away from the supposed savagery of civilization and robbing the rich to give to the poor. But even though John seems to have taken the Robin Hood-esque noble outlaw bit more to heart than some of Dutch’s other followers—in the two thefts he initiates, he targets rich people and greedy ranchers and specifically mentions avoiding killing innocent people—he still questions the gang’s (and his own) morality on a number of occasions, usually in conversations over the campfire. It’s hard to keep the moral high ground as a noble outlaw in an increasingly civilized land, where robbing the rich inevitably leads to killing dozens of lawmen just doing their jobs, persistent investigations by detective agencies, and a lot of collateral damage. John tries to justify the gang’s actions by saying “I guess sometimes you gotta do really bad things to survive” and accept that living free requires sacrifices, but it’s more defeatist resolution than acceptance. (“All I got now is doubts. Doubts and scars.”)

Jack’s birth marks the start of another purpose John can’t fully embrace, at least not at first. A man who kills and robs and wanders and lives free from the troubles of the world can’t be a father, and John initially rejects the idea of having a family despite his misgivings about the gang’s lifestyle. See, John Marston is naturally a cynic, a product of a life where nothing has been fair, everything is pretty terrible, and you take the best you can get and don’t hope for anything better. His role in the gang is bad, but it’s the best he believes is possible at the time, and the role of a father and husband seems too different and too good for him.

Nearly losing Jack to Angelo Bronte changes his mind—because John is an idiot and rarely does anything to change without some kind of big dramatic event happening, instead of doing something about the big red flags he sees in front of his stupid face—and John embraces the idea of having a family. The transition is a bit awkward, as is pretty much everything John does that isn’t robbing or killing, and while John isn’t the greatest role model ever, he gets points for being protective and attentive and inviting Abigail and Jack to live in his room instead of on the other side of the damn camp. E for effort, buddy. Unfortunately, while Dutch remarks that John seems happy for a change, he also makes sure to remind John that the gang should always be most important. When the person who raised you and saved your life numerous times but is always telling you to do things you feel might be morally wrong later explains that this one tiny good thing you have in life is not important, and you should be focusing on that stuff you feel super guilty doing, you have a right to feel conflicted. John nosedives back into pessimism, and one night over the campfire he says he “ain’t never never gonna see my son grow up, ain’t never gonna atone for my sins, ain’t never gonna do nothing but get shot for them.”

Remember how I said John is a moron who sees red flags and responds like the “this is fine” dog? Yeah, that’s this part of his arc. John Marston is nothing if not loyal, and when you combine that with general world-weariness, you get a man whose father figure a) actively discourages dedication to his family, b) straight up abandons him during a robbery to get arrested, c) is in absolutely no hurry to rescue him from federal prison and a threat of hanging, and d) reacts with hostility when he is rescued by a brother figure, and John’s response to all of this is to stick with Dutch anyway. Arthur has to actually convince him to make plans to escape with Abigail and Jack, and John even acts shocked when Dutch later leaves him to die during a train robbery. He repeats “you left me” in disbelief when confronting Dutch—when in emotional stress, John tends to either repeat the same short phrases or go silent—because it’s finally an action so cold that he can’t dust it under the this is the best I’ll get cynicism rug or justify it as one of those bad things Dutch had to do to survive.

Dutch’s betrayal and Arthur’s sacrifice motivate John to escape the outlaw life, but he doesn’t magically become an upstanding citizen as soon as he’s out of a gang. While his loyalty to Dutch no longer conflicts with dedication to his family, a big part of John is still very much hung up on the ideas of frontier justice and civilized people’s lives being somehow inferior. By the time of the Epilogue, it’s been 7-8 years since Dutch’s gang fell apart, and John has been forced to move his family to a new area after he, in his own words, “killed a feller because he looked at me funny.” Abigail confirms this isn’t the first time they’ve moved due to John doing something stupid. It doesn’t matter whether or not the people he’s killed were assholes, as John claims in attempt to defend himself, because at the end of the day John Marston isn’t the person who gets to decide whether someone deserves to live or die. It doesn’t help that John is a very genuine person by nature, and he is physically incapable of not barrelling full speed into whatever his first instinct might tell him to do. Sometimes that’s being an utterly abysmal liar and catastrophically failing to maintain a double life or use a fake name, sometimes it’s taking out his frustration with civilization’s dumb rules by being snippy and defensive with his (not technically married) wife and son, and sometimes it’s ruthlessly gunning down 20 asshole ranchers for stealing his employer’s cattle and being hailed as the big damn hero when he’s supposed to be keeping a low profile for the sake of his family’s safety.

That’s the last straw for Abigail, and her last straw is John’s wake-up call. Like I said, unless something catastrophic happens, this idiot doesn’t learn, and coming home to an empty house and a goodbye note is certainly catastrophic enough. To his credit, he does indeed learn. After a few months of moping working on a ranch and gaining newfound appreciation for people with “boring” lives, John sets out to do what Abigail has wanted him to do for nearly a decade: buy land, own a house, put down roots for the first time in his life. He gets a bank loan—under his real name, since John can’t be someone else—something that would have been entirely unthinkable only a year earlier, and he buys some land. Trouble is, this is so far outside of John’s experience and previous comfort zone that once he gets the land, he has no idea what to do with it. His plan appears to be to mope about Abigail leaving him, mope about the ranch being terrible, make some bitter comments about Abigail coming back to fix up this awful shack, and mope about Abigail not coming back because the shack is awful and so is he and everything sucks. Fortunately, Uncle shows up and calls him out for his cynicism and says he’s hopeless—in that he literally has no hope—and tells him to “get some self-respect, you miserable sack of shit.”

This is the part called John Tries To Do Something Right And Not Be A Total Disaster I Mean Really Tries And Isn’t Bratty About It He’s Actually Trying And Is Rewarded For His Efforts I’m So Proud Of My Boy He’s Doing His Best. At Uncle’s prompting and with much griping, he tears down the stupid shack. He and Charles (Uncle helps… sort of) build a house and a barn and a fence, and the result is a lovely ranch fit for an aspiring outlaw-turned-rancher. He writes a somewhat clumsily worded but heartfelt letter to Abigail, and true to his pessimistic nature, he’s genuinely surprised when she and Jack return. Surprised and so happy he can barely speak. It’s shortly after this that he writes in his journal that his life makes sense in a way it never has. He makes attempts to connect with Jack, with... varying degrees of success, and he asks Abigail to marry him, with a legal, “proper” ceremony and a ring and such.

He hasn’t fully shaken that sense of justice, as shown by his need for revenge against Micah for all his fallen friends, and he never truly will. John is rough and at times abrasive, and he has a fiery spirit that he had long before Dutch took him in. But he does feel he finally has a purpose in life, and for the most part he’s able to keep his priorities in check. And for the time being, at least, John is about as happy as he’s ever been in his life. He’ll admit to strangers that he’s “feeling pretty good about life at the moment,” which for a cynical bastard like him is saying a lot. I wouldn’t say he has a heart of gold, but maybe a heart of bronze. Or copper. He doesn’t mean any harm to most folks, unless he’s given a reason. He’s just a man who’s lived a hard life, but he’s doing the best he can.

Abilities: Ranked in order of skill level:
1. Shooting guns
2. Fatherhood Husband stuff LOYALTY
3. Punching
4. Building fence
5. Ranching????

Alignment: Sosyne. John is frequently described as an angry man, but while he certainly has a temper, he is also the one keeping a level head in several situations. When he rustles sheep and horses with Arthur, and their buyers end up paying less than originally planned, Arthur is the one losing his cool while John just negotiates.

Other: In RDR2, John can own a massive arsenal of guns and weaponry, because it’s a cowboy game about shooting stuff. For the sole reason that porting this guy in with 40 knives, guns, hatchets, and a machete strapped onto his skinny noodle body would be objectively absurd, I’ll be limiting him to a Cattleman Revolver and a custom Double-Action Revolver taken from Micah Bell’s corpse, a hunting knife, and a Rolling Block Rifle that John tells Arthur to buy in a story mission.

⌈ SAMPLE SECTION ⌉

General Sample: Test Drive 1 Test Drive 2 Test Drive 3

Emotion Sample: Most of this thread and latter parts of this thread


Questions: YOU BOYS FOUND MY PAPPY'S WATCH YET??