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Cpl. Jake Jensen ([personal profile] igotacrossbow) wrote2016-07-06 06:53 pm

ooc | application

BASICS


Your name or nickname: Feebs

Your year of birth: 1989

Character name: Jake Jensen

Character type: Canon character

Fandom/Canon: The Losers (film)


HISTORY


http://www.writeups.org/jensen-losers-dc-comics/


PERSONALITY OVERVIEW


Jensen’s personality is layered, and while he may seem one thing at first glance, more often than not, he’s something completely different.


The most common first impression people walk away with after having spent time with Jake Jensen is that he’s incredibly obnoxious. He’s loud, he’s goofy, he’s irreverent, his mouth goes a million miles a minute and he doesn’t seem to care if anyone actually wants to hear what he has to say. He doesn’t take anything seriously, and he certainly doesn’t take orders well. He’s a kid trapped in an adult’s body, and surely the fact that anybody gives him any kind of responsibility is a joke. How can someone that childish be in charge of anything, let alone a gun? He probably survives on Mountain Dew and Cheetos and would live in his boxers and nothing else if given half the chance. (That’s actually true, but that’s not the point.)  


Dig a little deeper, and it becomes clear that Jake’s running mouth is just a way for him to let out some of the pressure of what’s brewing in his head, like the vent on the top of a pressure cooker. He needs to let off a little steam as he cooks so he doesn’t explode all over the kitchen. And he does take things seriously, deadly seriously, especially when they involve the people he cares about. It’s easy to forget that Jensen is, in fact, a soldier, and a Special Ops soldier at that. In fact, sometimes even Jake can forget that he’s a soldier, as he’s been known to rush headlong into a situation while forgetting his gun in the van. Thankfully, that doesn’t happen often. His overall childish demeanor hides a very competent man who is strong and well trained and more than capable of handling almost anything that gets thrown at him (as long as he remembers his gun). If he handles it while spouting off about the mating habits of ungulates… Well. Nobody’s perfect.


His intellect isn’t really masked, but it can be somewhat obscured by his motor mouth. It’s easy to tune out what he’s saying, as he discusses both Brangelina’s relationship drama and the current mission specs in the same tone of voice, and often the same breath, but that means missing out on the fact that Jake is actually smart. He’s basically Mozart with computers, a wunderkind able to weasel his way into any wireless network, secured or not, any satellite, any hard drive, any system at all as long as he has some piece of tech in his hands. All the Losers’ equipment has been “upgraded” thanks to Jensen’s tinkering, and they all guard their stuff jealously.


Beneath his eye-searing ironic tee shirts and John Lennon-style glasses, however, hides someone who is cripplingly afraid of being left behind. Before the Losers, he’d been punted from one company to another, his skills making him too valuable to get rid of but his personality making him impossible to keep around for longer than a mission or two. He’s used to being used and then discarded as soon as he stops being useful, and the worst part is that he gets it. He’s not oblivious to how annoying he can be, and he doesn’t begrudge anyone for wanting to get rid of him. This means, however, he clings that much tighter to anyone who has demonstrated an ability to withstand the endless barrage of Wikipedia-style information that spews from his mouth, well aware when he’s onto a good thing, and meaning to hold on to it with both hands.


His loyalty and general boisterous personality has led to him being compared to a big, dumb dog, and he honestly can’t really refute that comparison. Not only is he loud and loyal, but he’s also incredibly physically affectionate. Personal space is practically a non-entity in his mind.


He also isn’t totally impervious to what happens around him. Sure, he may continue to joke and laugh and try to wheedle smiles out of everyone around him, but Jake can be affected just as much as anyone else. After their last mission, when he witnessed the death of twenty five children they had just rescued from a drug-runner’s compound, he had been affected deeply. But instead of withdrawing into himself, as perhaps a normal person might, Jake tried all the harder to project normalcy on those around him. And for the most part, it worked. He can spend his day as cheerful as he’s ever been, having put a tragedy he couldn’t prevent behind him (or at least having put it out of his mind for the moment). It’s too bad that his nightmares won’t follow the same logic. Jake tends to come up swinging, so waking him is not the best idea.


PERSONALITY QUESTIONS


What skills does your character bring to the situation?:


Unfortunately, a large portion of Jake's skills won't really be much help in an Edwardian-era town. Apart from his encyclopedic knowledge of random facts, which may come in handy if he can remember what plants are poisonous or the hypotheticals of how to construct a grain mill, Jake's skills tend to lean towards the technical side. He's capable of building shelter with minimal tools if he has to, and has better than average general survival skills from being in Spec Ops for so long, but his area of expertise is technology.


All that aside, he's strong, and he's stubborn, and once he's set his mind to something, he's going to see it through. Being a corporal means he's fine with being on the lower end of the hierarchical totem pole, and he's good at following orders (as long as he respects the person giving them and agrees that they are necessary). His relentless cheer would also be considered a strength; despite how low and helpless he may feel, he will ruthlessly suppress that and insist on looking on the bright side of life for the sake of the others around him.


Jake’s also a good guy to have around in a crisis, because despite his propensity to spout off at the mouth even in the middle of a fire-fight, he's calm and efficient when shit hits the fan. He’s well trained in how to handle seemingly impossible situations, and he’s good at working as a team with people he can trust to have his back.


Explain how your character would react to the following:


- Discovering that their memories may have been tampered with:


Jake would be pretty freaked to find out someone's been poking around in his head, but he wouldn't completely lose his shit over it. His life hasn't been his own since he was eighteen, and he's used to not having any secrets. Still, to know that his thoughts and his memories have been shuffled around like a deck of cards will be unsettling. Not being able to trust his own perceptions will be difficult for him, but Jake is nothing if not a survivor. He'll find a way to deal.


Once he got used to the idea, he'd be morbidly curious about it. Jake is the type of person who picks at scabs to see how they're healing, and he'd want to know how someone was able to crack into his skull and poke around in his brain to alter his memories. He doesn't believe in magic, being so grounded in science and technology, so magic just won't be a good enough answer for him. He'll want to know specifics, want to see how it's done, want to understand how it works.


Not being able to find out is going to drive him nuts.


- Having to do physical labor to survive:


Physical labor is not a problem for Jake. He's a big, muscular dude, and has been put through both basic training and Spec Ops training. He's used to running around with a full pack on his back and having to scramble out of sticky situations, relying on his strength to get him out without getting hurt.


Doing manual labor of the farm- or general repair-variety will be a different experience for him, as he's more used to working out for the sake of working out or sparring to keep his reflexes sharp, but he's got no problem with putting his shoulder to the wheel, as it were, and doing what he has to in order to survive.


In all honesty, having something to do with his body will help calm his mind. If he’s exhausted from chopping wood or working in the fields, he’ll be too wiped to let his mind wander at the thousand-miles-per-hour pace it usually works at.


- Having to share resources with others:


This depends on the resource. On the one hand, Jake is very friendly and open to others, which means he will be likely to share whatever he has in order to make sure that everyone has a fair chance of survival, but he'll also be a little petulant about sharing things that he deems his for one reason or another. He'll be more likely to make sure that those he cares about are looked after before turning his attention to others. Once the people he loves are warm and well-fed, then he'll worry about the rest of the village.


- Being unable to leave the area:


This is where things start to get sticky. Jake is capable of lying low, keeping his head down, and avoiding detection, but it's one thing to hunker down in a favela somewhere in an effort to avoid being caught, and something completely different to be practically caged by outside forces that he doesn't understand and can't fight.


Still, that being said, being in Spec Ops has made Jake incredibly practical when he has to be. Once he realizes he can't leave and has exhausted any and all efforts to do so, he'll knuckle down and figure out how the hell to live with his new reality. The best way to keep from going stir-crazy would be to focus on the minutiae of daily life, and on whoever is stuck in the village with him. Keeping himself busy is one of Jake's best defense mechanisms. While laying low in Bolivia after a disastrous op with the team, Jake had managed not being able to do what he wanted to do or go where he wanted to go by getting himself a job at a doll factory. It had been mind-numbingly boring work, but it had given him something to do with his hands that helped keep him busy enough that he didn’t completely lose his mind.


- Doing without modern conveniences and technology:


This is going to be even harder than not being able to leave. Jake is the hacker of the group, the communications and tech guy, the one who's able to hack into any wifi signal he can find so that he can stream the video feed of his niece's soccer team's semi-finals or show a teammate his pregnant wife as she walks across a grocery store parking lot. He can handle not having hot water, or even the inconvenience of not having a fridge or a washing machine, but not having a phone, or worse, the internet, is going to drive him absolutely bonkers. His mind runs a thousand miles a minute, and having the distraction of Wikipedia has made it much easier for him to cope. Reading books just isn't the same, he can't flip from topic to topic when his mind wanders as easily without juggling multiple books. And what about when he finishes them?


He’s going to struggle a lot with having to live as a luddite. Basically, the only thing that will wind up saving him is the other people in the village and the minutiae of daily life. If he can’t scroll through endless articles about random facts online, he’s going to have to get information elsewhere, and that will mean picking the brains of everyone around. He will also need to learn new skills. It’s not that Jake is a one-trick pony, but most of his skills and abilities revolve around technology. Learning more practical, “earthy” skills will be very useful in general regarding his life in the town, but it will also give him something else to focus on mentally. Hopefully there will be others in the town who will be able, and willing, to share their knowledge with him.


- Being separated, possibly permanently, from loved ones and their previous life, including loss of powers, if applicable:


As much as Jake would like to say this would be the hardest thing to come to terms with of all, to be quite honest, he's kind of used to it. He's been in the military all of his adult life, and most of that time has been spent being punted around the globe, going places he can't talk about to do things nobody knows about. Being separated from his sister and his niece is sort of par for the course, and he's always liked the fact that he knows that they're safe back home, living normal lives; their normalcy has always acted as a sort of talisman for him. No matter what's going wrong in the shit show that's his life, at least Julie and Beth are okay and nothing's wrong in their little world.


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