Every day, we have these little battles going on inside of us

User Name/Nick: Iddy
User DW: corknut
E-mail: ZieglerFan719 (at) gmail (dot) com
Other Characters:
Azula | sears
Tiffany Doggett | tucky

Character Name: June Harris
Series: Lost in Space (reboot)
Age: Her younger sister is 34 and as children they look to be only a few years apart, so let's say late thirties
From When?: mid-2x01, "Shipwrecked", while helping to sail a spaceship-turned-sailboat through a storm (I swear to god this makes sense in context). She doesn't die in canon, but it's a pretty dicey situation; the potential for slipping and falling into the churning water is high.

Inmate/Warden: Inmate. She's a con artist and a white collar criminal specializing in identity theft, having previously posed as at least three other people. Nearly everything she does includes shades of manipulation and falsehood; even moments of apparent altruism are generally done with the end goal of making people trust and approve of her so that she can turn around and use that trust and approval for her own ends.

June truly does want to move on from her past and start a new, better life, but to do that properly, she has to stop being who she was in the past, and it's clear that she hasn't. She needs to realize that her continuous cycle of trying to shortcut her way past consequences and committing more crime in order to erase the evidence of past crime is a terrible way to go. She doesn't have to become a self-sacrificing do-gooder, and it's okay for her to prioritize her own wants and needs to a certain extent, but completely ruining other people's lives in order to make her own just a little bit easier is not acceptable. She's capable of guilt, but unfortunately, she's very good at rationalizing it away, or closing herself off from it when it's too terrible even for rationalizations. Breaking down those walls and justifications and making her properly face what she's done will be an essential step in the process of creating a path for her to move forward.

Arrival: She'll have agreed to come!

Abilities/Powers: n/a; she's a baseline human.

Personality:
June is, to her own mind, a completely normal person. Everyone prioritizes themselves, even if it's in roundabout or not entirely obvious ways; everyone who's made mistakes wants to move past them and get on with life, and would jump at any chance that they were given to do so, no matter the potential consequences to others. Some people lie, to others and to themselves, and pretend that they do things for other people instead of for their own sake, but that's bullshit. Everyone is like her. She's not a bad person, she just admits what other people refuse to. She's fine.

Obviously, none of this is true, but it's what she continually tells herself to appease the twisted, withered thing that passes for her conscience. She's very, very good at absolving herself of the worst of her actions, and when she does things that are so terrible that even that doesn't work, she represses as best as she can. As an experienced con artist, lying about big things and small things and everything in between is something that nearly always comes effortlessly to her, and she manages this in part by completely embodying her lies: she doesn't have any trouble keeping them straight, because she's a method actor, and once she says them they become true for her. It's why she was so comfortable with the idea of stealing her sister's identity and living as her for the rest of her life - because if you live, really live, a lie for long enough, what's to stop it from becoming your new truth?

But the person that June lies to the most is herself. The proof of this is in how she talks (especially when she's alone, with no one else around to have to convince), but also the way she acts: she'll do things that will hurt and even kill others without a second thought, but only if she knows she'll be able to insulate herself from what she's done. Stranding someone in an alien desert and leaving them to die? Sure, why not. Abandoning her own sister on a dying world and running off with her identity? Absolutely. Allying herself with a hostile robot and enlisting it to fight her battles for her? Okay, but only because it's the one doing the actual killing and maiming, not her. Letting a guy who would have blown her cover be sucked out an airlock? Euuuugh. This last example is actually one that comes back to haunt her time and time again throughout the series, and her reaction is pretty consistent every time. When she first does it, she's horrified, standing frozen for a moment before walking away in a daze. When she's called out on it by the ship's captain (who saw the security footage), she has a very similar look on her face, and all she can do is mumble that she was defending herself; unlike nearly every other lie that she tells, this one doesn't sound even remotely convincing. When she breaks into the ship's security office to delete the incriminating footage, she winces and cringes and covers her eyes as it plays. When she unexpectedly runs into the guy's wife and young daughter, she has a literal traumatic flashback, then full on panic-sprints in the other direction, completely abandoning the very important task she'd been on her way to do. She's done equally terrible things to many other people, but this is the one that sticks with her the most - because she stood there listening to him plead for help; because she watched her hand slowly move towards the override button, knowing that she was never in a million years going to actually press it and let him ruin her ill-gotten fresh start; because she watched him fly out into space and die right in front of her. At one point, in a flashback, her sister asks her how she can cope with having conned and stolen from so many people. Her response is dismissive: "Do you know those people? Ever seen their faces? That's the beauty of it; neither have I." But she saw Airlock Guy's face, and now it will never leave her.

"Everyone starts off with the best of intentions, but they don’t always finish with them" is something that she tells another character at one point, and though she isn't talking about herself directly, it's still one of the most clear-headed, self-reflective things we hear her say. She isn't only on the ship to lie and con and fuck with people - she's genuinely excited about the opportunities that she thinks await her in the colony, and fascinated by some of the cooler things that the stranded colonists discover when they crash land. She stares up in awe at a magnificent aurora in the sky, grinning wildly. She heads off to explore, sometimes with purpose but other times just for the fun of it. She tries to get a weird bug that she finds to land on her hand. At the most basic level, her intentions are fine; there's nothing wrong with wanting to leave behind a shitty, mistake-filled past and start life anew. The problems start when she doesn't leave behind any of the behaviors that led to those mistakes - because it's hard, because they're habit, and because in the end, she's never truly been forced to be anything other than what she is, and she wouldn't know where to begin if she tried.

Barge Reactions:
First thing's first, she's going to figure out pretty quick that she won't be able to hide who she is forever. Is that going to stop her from trying for as long as possible, though? Of course not! Step one will be to start out pretending to be a warden, in order to gather intel and (she'll hope) leverage, while simultaneously working out a strategy for how to spin things once she's inevitably outed. Learning what types of inmates get the most sympathy, making friends, and gaining the respect of the people around her (particularly wardens) will be high on her list of priorities, and by the time she's revealed as an inmate herself, she'll have pre-prepared a story to explain both her lie and her inmatehood; the details will depend on what she ends up thinking will play best with people. This step two is where she'll hope to stay long-term; by now she'll have figured out that some people get permanently paired quickly, but most stay unpaired for months or even years, a time which she'll use to try to entrench herself deep into Barge life. Presumably there will be characters who won't trust her, either because of her initial lies or because she comes off as too slick, but she's good at playing the long game; she'll either try to win them over through sheer persistence, or if that doesn't work, use it as an opportunity to make herself look good to others by appearing to take the high road (likely with the intention of making her detractors look bad in the process). She'll actually hope to graduate herself during this step and be on her merry way, but this will absolutely never happen; part of her PTR will involve foregoing this sort of manipulation and deception entirely, and not recognizing that will be a clear sign that she's nowhere near ready.

Step three - where she'll move after she is permanently paired - will be the trickiest, from her perspective, and will involve a lot of variables. If she can, she'll try to manipulate her warden into agreeing not to read her file, and then continue on as usual. If that doesn't work (and if the warden is a good match for her, it shouldn't), she'll attempt to convince them to keep the file's contents to themselves, likely by making the argument that she's been a model Barger up until this point. (This may or may not actually be true, but if she did cause trouble, she would have done her best to cover her tracks, or at least maintain plausible deniability.) If that doesn't work, she'll attempt to paint her warden as an unreliable narrator, and possibly malicious and/or unhinged - though honestly, if things get to this point, she'll pretty much know that the jig is up and that she's fighting a losing battle. But hey, at least she'll be on a ship that offers second chances - and she'll be well aware that being in this situation on the Barge is a hell of a lot better than being in this situation on the Resolute.

Path to Redemption:
June is actually going to be pretty open to the idea of graduation from the get-go. She genuinely does want a fresh start in life, which is why she stole her sister's identity and got herself aboard the Resolute - but ultimately, she won't be married to that particular path, and will be totally fine with switching tactics and taking fresh-start-via-Barge instead. Hell, she'll even like the Barge option better; it'll mean that after graduation, she can go to another universe entirely, where it would be practically impossible for any of her old baggage to follow her.

But all that said, there’s a big difference between being down for the idea of graduating, and actually changing her mindset enough to graduate - and getting to the latter point is going to take some time. At first, she'll be in denial about what graduation will entail, believing that she'll be able to get herself there simply by being a nice, friendly, productive member of the Barge, even as she's simultaneously lying to and attempting to manipulate everyone else onboard. At least one person knowing the full truth about her will be essential to her graduation - without that, she'll be happy to keep up the lie forever.

Berating her about the shit she's pulled and forcing her to acknowledge that she is not the good person she thinks she is is something that absolutely should happen, but a good warden for her will be able to recognize the times when she's not as bad as she could be - and they'll also be able to recognize that those times won't necessarily be the most obvious ones. If asked to pinpoint moments of human decency in her past, she'd happily point out the way she pitched in to help the group after the colonists' first crash landing, or the time she rescued John while he was stranded, or the way she offered to use her sailing experience to try to get everyone through the storm, but those are cop-out answers that she shouldn't be allowed to get away with; they completely gloss over the fact that her own self-interest (gaining the favor of others so that they'd vouch for her, saving her own ass, etc.) was at the forefront of all those efforts. The way she gets upset anytime she's reminded of the guy she spaced, on the other hand, is something she wouldn't even think to mention, but is absolutely something her warden should seize on. What really needs to happen is for her to realize that that man is no different from every other person who's suffered by her hands, either directly or indirectly. Coming to terms with this will be an incredibly distressing experience for her, but it'll be a necessary one.

History: There's a short version here on the wiki, but be warned that it isn't 100% up to date; it states as fact a couple minor personal backstory bits that were later shown to be things that she made up. It also skips over some context and frequently leaves out details that I think would be important for her warden's player to know, so I'm also going to write out everything that would be in her file!

Edit, several days later: god this is so long, I'm sorry. I'm going to put it here in its own separate entry to spare everyone's scroll wheels.

Sample Journal Entry: Network TDM top-level
Sample RP: The link above also has a decently lengthy action thread; let me know if you need more!

Special Notes: n/a