me: apply yourself | murphy: no

[noncriminal]

OUT OF CHARACTER:
Name/Handle: Max
Contact: salanderne at gmail, slutbonwalla (aim), noncriminal (pm)
Reference: Ren
Other characters: --

IN-CHARACTER:
Character name: Jonathan Murphy
Character journal: noncriminal
Series name: The 100 (TV)
Canon notes: Post S02E10, "Survival of the Fittest". After Murphy leaves with Jaha to enter The Dead Zone.

Species: Human (Pluckiti assholius)

History: The 100 Wiki, plus the important points are mixed into the next section.

Personality: It's hard to find a defense for someone who spends half of the first season misspelling graffiti threats, peeing on dehydrated laborers and chasing 12-year-old girls through the jungle with a small - yet not especially devoted - lynch mob of his own making, but... here goes?

Murphy doesn't find it easy to make friends. It might be due to his regular undermining, making up his own rules, trying only minimally to contain violent outbursts and speaking almost solely in lies and insults and sarcasm, but he doesn't want to start making any, like, accusations without merit here. If you've got a complaint, take it up with HR. (Additionally, there should be a memo in your inbox informing you that all of HR has been fired.)

This isn't totally completely entirely his fault, as is the case with many of the delinquents who were sent down to Earth. The Ark, their home, was run like a fine clock and there was no room for error. This wasn't simply a project; they believed they were the last dregs of humanity and so took no humor with outliers. Any crime whatsoever that was committed on the Ark Station was treated as a capital one, and therefore deserved a capital punishment: floated out the airlock. This helped to aid population reduction and preserve resources, as well as sending a harsh warning to anyone else who may not want to follow the rules. Only adults were executed, but adolescents may have well been; anyone under the age of 18 was confined to the Sky Box until they became of age. There, the Council would determine whether they should be freed or executed accordingly.

As a result, most of the delinquents in the 100 were angry, repressed and lonely when they were sent down to Earth, many of them imprisoned for violent crimes. And all of them embracing the simple belief that they would have been dead up there so they may as well live it up down here.

Murphy's crime is unknown, as is the age at which he was orphaned, but one can assume he spent the majority of his adolescence (a) in the care of an abusive mother, or (b) either in lockup or the Ark's equivalent of foster care. He came down with the flu as a child, his father was floated for stealing him (the wrong) medicine, and his mother subsequently drank herself to death. In a short period, he crossed from normal uneventful childhood into cesspool of depressing adult uncertainty. He's still very bitter about it.

So he antagonizes. Since life has never been fair to him, Murphy operates under the crass assumption that he is entitled to more. It helps him miss the simple fact that life has not been fair to anyone, not on the Ark or on the ground. His motivations tend to be selfish, and he has little to no regard for any consequences of his actions until they burn his bridges. He raised discord at the camp, threatening some people and sparking fights with others. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that Murphy was the one that killed Wells, based solely on his knife at the crime scene and character reference. He goaded Charlotte into killing herself, demanding the consequences to her actions were as severe as his almost were. He was banished, tortured, used as a biological weapon against his camp, and he STILL didn't put much effort in making amends with the Sky Crew to improve his circumstances. They were on the brink of war and Murphy was smothering wounded allies because he believed his vengeance and suffering were more necessary than everyone's safety. He murdered Connor and Myles. He nearly hanged Bellamy. He crippled Raven.

Murphy has never actively sought a path to redemption. He doesn't particularly know how, and regularly believes that any effort to do so will be too little too late. He is fully expecting to be treated like a shithead at any point and acts according to his reputation. The times he's made a point to try to be useful or help out, he's shown fast frustration when things don't immediately turn around. He helped at the camp when the delinquents were sick with the fever he'd brought to camp; people told him he shouldn't be there and he deserved to be dead, and that day he killed Connor. He tried to stop Finn from massacring the village at Tondc, and ended up being blamed for it by the grounders and the sky crew both. Clarke is one of two people to stick up for Murphy when he's almost hanged by the kids, but when Murphy explains he's been pardoned for his crimes, Clarke tells him she still doesn't trust him.

Murphy's not really one for the long haul. He likes things his way, which often ends up cutting corners. He likes things quickly, and lacks any kind of real patience or faith in the betterment of humanity. To Murphy, the world sucks and he just has to live with it. It's easier for him to operate when he blithely doesn't have to blame himself, and instead can operate on the assumption that it's everyone else that's the problem. He claims his fear is dying alone at the same time he continues to ostracize himself and ensure that he will die alone. Because of the regard he received in his pubescent years, between his alcoholic mother and the dehumanizing way that criminals on the Ark were treated (of age or not), Murphy internalizes a flagrant disregard for human life, because humans are trash and they have treated him like trash. So he's allowed to treat them like trash, right? Wait, why isn't this fun yet? Should he be doing something different?

Nah, this has worked for him so far.

tl;dr Murphy is an ass. But he's the kind of ass who spends so much time proving he's an ass that he ends up getting hit by a backwash of other ass-y things people have done, thus drenching himself in such a strong ass smell that he can only be further convinced that he is, along with every assier ass on the planet and otherwise, an ass.

Abilities: Though the Ark survivors are more resistant to radiation poisoning due to long-term exposure to solar radiation, Murphy's basically just a teenager who likes to pretend he knows how to use knives. Nothing particularly special here.
Augment Skillset: 1) Lab Support, or 2) Engineering
Sample: "This is it?"

The pack of anesthetic was wrapped in a loose strip of cloth, tucked away nearby and out of sight. This poor shmuck had some idiot in their quarters with some mysterious combat wounds he couldn't talk about and couldn't get clinic access for. Whatever, it wasn't up to Murphy what it was for; it just mattered if this guy was gonna follow through. Next step meant passing his stuff over, deal was a deal, but not yet. Murphy instead shifted his weight to one foot and stared the stranger down.

"What? I thought you said someone was dying." The gun being offered to him was small and inconsequential. Maybe some kind of shock probe? He didn't really know what the weaponry here was, and he'd barely gotten his hands on any real artillery before but at least he knew what a useful firearm looked like. This little slip of a thing in his hand? "Doesn't seem like you're as desperate as you were in your call. Maybe I oughta be takin' my business elsewhere-"

"Come on, man-"

"No, you come on. I'm risking my ass for this. Obviously they can trace this crap back to our augments. You're already done for stealing something. You might as well have made it something that could've helped me." Murphy laughed and rolled the pistol over in his hands. "What is this even for? Herding toddlers?"

"Do we have a deal?"

"I'm thinking."

"About what?"

"How badly you want it." Murphy's look was warning, but without any specific threat. Bored, almost. "This doesn't seem like a trade that says, 'I really don't want my friend to die,' to me."

"This is what I could get. Do you want it or not?"

"Not," Murphy replied with a sigh. His head shook as he extended the unclipped pistol back to the stranger. "You can't mutiny crap with a gun that's only gonna scare someone under two feet tall. Get me a - real - gun -" His eyebrows raised and his arms shrugged. "Maybe we'll have a deal then? I don't know. Depends."

"On what?"

Murphy checked the time.

"How fast you get back with what I want."