JD - Jason Dean

Name: Nagia
Age: 30
Contact: shok_chama
Other Characters: Cole


Journal: freezeyourbrain
Name: Jason "JD" Dean
Age: 17
Canon: Heathers: The Musical
Canon Point: Post-Finale (read: post-death)

Canon World

The world of Heathers: The Musical is just like ours -- except for a few things. For one, it's 1989 there, and the police are extremely stupid. Or maybe forensic science isn't really much of a thing in that world. In any case, they're easily fooled by forged suicide notes in defiance of forensic evidence. Or, you know, basic logic, like, "why is this dead football player's body twenty yards away from the other one if they committed suicide together?"

History

Most of JD's history prior to arriving in Sherwood, Ohio is never mentioned. We know that his father, Big Bud Dean, is in demolition. JD claims to have been in ten high schools all over the United States and that his father has never stayed anywhere longer than six weeks. He also implies that his life was "halfway normal" -- or at least had less moving around and fewer adult responsibilities overtly placed on him -- before his mother died. After she died, he apparently learned to pay the rent.

Later, JD reveals that his mother committed suicide in front of him when he was a child. Specifically, she walked into a building Big Bud was about to demolish and waved at her young son just before the charges went off. This was seriously damaging to young JD, and his only stability after her death came in the form of 7/11 stores (especially slushies).

Eventually, he moved to Sherwood, Ohio and enrolled in Westerburg High. He apparently kept a low profile until the Heathers played their first cruel prank -- he had apparently somehow not drawn Kurt's or Ram's attention before he beat the everliving hell out of them. Shortly after that, he and Veronica Sawyer connected (and she eventually figured out where he lived, sneaking into his room with basically no invitation), and Veronica became JD's new fixed point.

That wasn't really a good thing for either of them. JD has enough psych problems that he was perfectly willing to kill anyone who threatened or hurt Veronica, and when Veronica rejected him because of his little murdering people problem, he first targeted her before deciding that it was Westerburg's fault. Rather than take his anguish out on Veronica, he decided to blow up the high school with a fake mass suicide note.

Veronica intervened, as heroines do, and in the struggle, she shot him with his own gun. She offered to take the bomb herself, proving JD's belief that she was the "only thing that's right" about the world correct (to him, at least), and he chose to sacrifice himself rather than allow her to die.

Personality

There are a number of ways to see JD, so this is wholly my own interpretation of him as played by Ryan McCartan in the 2014 Off-Broadway production.

JD describes himself as damaged, and he's not wrong. Maybe if his mother had been a little a stronger, had lived a little longer, he might have had a better chance of turning out normal. He doesn't seem to see value in many people outside himself and his father (and that latter is debatable), but whether that indicates innate antisocial personality disorder/low empathy is ambiguous. After all, teens and children are so self-absorbed that they frequently read as sociopaths: they're still developing empathy.

His lack of interest/empathy for others is not helped by his perception of the world. He sees it as inherently broken and not particularly worth saving or even trying to improve. "We are all marked for evil," he says at one point (quoting Baudelaire), and at another, he says that the mass suicide of Westerburg will not be "not because society doesn't care but because that school was society."

All in all, JD seems to be only out for himself and the very few people he considers his. But that doesn't mean he has a high tolerance for cruelty: he sees the Heathers, Kurt, and Ram as beneath him, both because of their pointless meanness and lack of intellect. He approves of people showing mercy ("you've got a soul, you just need to do a better job of keeping it clean") in most cases, especially if it does no harm to his plans.

Essentially, JD is most interested in finding stability, and prefers the methods that will effectively carry him from intent to goal, but he's not interested in going out of his way to harm those who haven't harmed him first.

However. That stability JD's looking for? If something threatens it, he will remove that threat with extreme prejudice. And if his fixed point were to shift? Bad news. Really bad news. Like, unhinged, blow-up-schools level bad news: he may at first blame his fixed point, but then he'll blame everything around them, and he's a big believer in Murder The Hypotenuse.

Waking up after the explosion will be deeply confusing for him, and at least for now, he doesn't really believe he can be better than he was. He might like to be, but it feels like a distant, unattainable goal.

Special Abilities

None! He has some explosives knowledge, some martial arts knowledge, some firearms knowledge, and he's overall pretty intelligent and well-read, but he's just a normal high school senior.



Sample 1 (TDM) // Sample 2 (TDM) // Sample 3 (TDM)