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Sep. 15th, 2015 01:26 pmBASIC PLAYER INFO
Name/Nickname: Kim
Age: 35
Current Characters: None
Email/IM/Plurk: aproclivity@plurk
BASIC CHARACTER INFO
Name: Debra Morgan
Source: Dexter
Age: 33
Canon Point: Season 8, episode 3, when Dexter doses her.
Humanoid?: Yes
Inmate/Warden: Inmate
Item: (Warden Only) N/A
Fetched?: No. Appearing.
Canon Link: wiki
Personality: The best way to describe Debra is 'dearly damaged.' More than once the show describes her this way, so it seems important that we start with that now. Debra Morgan almost seems to have some sort of magnet that draws damage to her. It likely started because she was a girl who was always jealous of what she viewed as her father's love for her brother, and how it was so much greater than the love he showed her. At first she had thought that it was because Dexter was a boy, and that was the reason that he had been brought home and adopted, that the daughter that he had wasn't enough. That was the first sign of her swearing off anything that was traditional feminine. She started to act more like a boy and to emulate her father and his cop friends. Eventually, as becoming what she perceived as more masculine failed to work, Debra then used those skills as a sort of shell to protect her from the outside world. If the true her was inside, then it would be more difficult for someone to get through and hurt her.
Debra has a large heart that she's afraid to let people see, and yet , paradoxically, she can't keep it from showing up upon her sleeve. She can be incredibly sensitive to things, though she has grown out of most of that. She can often care too much about the victims of the crimes that she investigates, becoming too involved in their lives, and often in their deaths. This is especially shown if the crime gets below her skin, such in the case of the barrel murders, or in this last season, in the case of the man whom hunted his victims to death inside his labyrinth. Deb feels personally responsible when she is unable to solve some of these cases, and they often follow her home at night. When she is upset about something, Debra throws herself into her work, and really, her job has become a surrogate for any sort of personal life. If you ask her, her life is homicide, and that's not going to likely change. Her cop life being her only life is a large layer of the shell she uses to protect herself.
The largest of this shell, obviously is the way in which she uses her swearing as both a crutch and as as a barrier between herself and others. Sometimes, the swearing is to her benefit, in that it gives her a divide from a circumstance that she clearly needs. But other times, it can make people think that she's stupid, doubt her intelligence or her abilities as a police officer. In spite of that, and the time that she has been first a detective and now a lieutenant, Deb still hasn't stopped her swearing in most ways, save for around the children who are important parts of her life: Harrison, Astor and Cody.
But it can still be a sign of her insecurity. Over the years, Debra has to a large extent overcome the deep inferiority complex that growing up with her father and brother had given her. No longer does she think of herself as second best to the ghost of a man who killed himself because he couldn't handle the 'monster' that he helped create. Now, Debra Morgan realizes that her father was a fuck up just as she was, and he never made it to get the lieutenant shield that she now has. Despite the way in which she earned it (leapfrogging over Angel, and getting it because she became a Youtube phenom after killing some people who showed up to rob a bar) Debra has grown into her shield. She was, at her core, one thing: a good cop.
I say 'was' because now there is a darkness there poisoning that bit of her that was such a good cop. From her earliest upbringing, Debra Morgan believed in the sanctity and truth in the law. She became a police officer to offend the law. We only see her faith in the law be broken once (despite the several other times that it could have been, such with her association with Rudy, and then when Lundy died) and that was with the question of vengeance and justice versus anything else. We see that she chooses to let the escaped barrel girl killer (Lumen) go, because the law would disagree with what she had done in order to have vengeance for her terrible rape, torture and her attempted murder, along with the rape and torture and murder of the twelve girls before her. Debra at no point knew that her brother was involved with Lumen, or that he was helping her behind the sheet of plastic. There can be no doubt that Deb let this woman go not because of any personal reasons, but because of the fact that she had been wronged, and to stick her in jail for it would have been just as wrong.
The difference between that case and the case of Dexter is huge. After having trouble with another failed relationship, Debra begins to see a therapist, and her therapist then suggests that the deep affection and dependency that she feels for her brother (him being the only one she can count on, and the like) is her being in love with him. I think that this is a sort of lifeline for all of the failed relationships that Debra has been in, and a way for her being the one who is "broken" to make sense. Of course she couldn't love someone else, because she was fucked up in this fashion! Debra herself explains how fucked up it is, describing herself as more fucked up than the brother who was a serial killer.
Ever since the discovery that her beloved brother was a serial killer, Debra has been very slowly tumbling off the wagon. At first, she just believes that he just snapped, and she goes into defensive mode, something that will later come back to haunt her. But then when her cop instincts and memories kick in, Deb is unable to deny what's in her gut: her brother kills people. Later, that gut instinct will become: my brother kills people and I can't do anything about it.
But the code that Harry gave Dexter feels like justice to Deb. She says it herself after Hannah McKay kills Sal: his kind will work here, and if the law won't work this will. The code is how Debra lives with herself, very badly, but she manages it. In the end, it is the bond that Dexter is her family that pulls her through what she needs to do: how she helps keep his secrets from being splashed all over by LaGuarta, and how Debra tries to keep him alive.
There is the question of jealousy when dealing with Hannah McKay, but Debra's sense of justice overrides even the idea of removing her as a problem from both her and Dexter's life. She could have let Hannah bleed out after she found her with a possibly fatal stab wound but Debra couldn't. She left Hannah alive not because her brother loves her, or because she loves her brother, but because of a simple fact: her values meant enough that she couldn't allow the woman to die when she could have saved her. That decision was one Debra made for herself and for no one else. At her core, Debra wants to be a good person.
But when it comes to choosing between being a good person, and her brother's life, Debra will pick her brother's life every time. Had LaGuarta instead of demanding that Debra shoot her brother and "put him down" that she arrest him, she might have gotten somewhere. However, even then it's doubtful. Debra sees Dexter as her rock, and she can't imagine her life without him. Now that she sees herself as a killer (rather than in the past someone who has killed in order to save lives, such as the club shooting) Debra's entire world is upside down.
Deb's killing of LaGuarta has put her into a deep depression, where she believes that all she deserves is terrible things. She quit the police force because she considers herself too horrible a person to be a cop, and then she began to doctor shop so that she could get anything to numb the pain. The show says that she has severe PTSD, but I believe that it's more than that. It's PTSD and depression, and she engages in several extremely risky behaviors (coke, booze, pills, sex with bad men, taking on trained killers in order to get jewels.)
She has thrown herself into inactive ways of killing herself. Once she never would have even considered doing drugs, but now she smokes pot and does coke. She fights people whom she has no chance of winning, and she is taking massive amounts of prescription drugs as she tries to find a way of not feeling or killing herself. Deb doesn't care which comes first so long as it stops.
Powers:
First Person Sample: [For a second there's nothing, and then there's a hushed]: Fuck.
[The woman breathes for a moment, and then she breathes again, closing her eyes, and resting one hand on the side of her neck. There's nothing there, even though she knows what fucking should be: the bump where her brother dosed her. He had to have dosed her again because there was nothing else that happened.
She's home, but it's not right: there's no ocean sounds around her, and it's like missing a beat of her heart for a moment.]
What the fuck is this?! Where the fuck did you put me, Dex? Is this some new fucking version of your table? My punishment for violating rule one of the god all mighty fucking code. Don't get fucking caught, right? Well, I wasn't getting caught, I was fucking confessing! [There's a hysterical note there.]
I don't want to fucking do this anymore!
Third Person Sample: It's so simple, just walking through a crowd, but right now it feels like the most difficult fucking thing in the world. Her skin is crawling, and she wonders if everyone in the world here can see into her, can see what she did. Funny, she never noticed it on Dexter's face, not even when they were kids, not even when she couldn't get a fucking dog. Debra had always thought that there was something in someone's face; something that she could see. Even after Rudy--Brian fucking Mosher tied her ass up and gave her over to her brother like some sort of fucking present-- couldn't think of that. If she thought of that again then whatever fucking sleep she had would be gone again and this time she doubted there would be someone who would give her some drugs to calm her down. But even after him, she thought that there had been some sort of light over a killer's head, making them visible. Something just not right.
Deb wondered if she gave it off now. If people could look at her and see LaGuarta's blood clinging to her the way that it did and normally needed to be seen with luminol. Did someone have it on like some sort of sight? Could a better cop than her fucking see it. She took several deep breaths through her nose, trying to find the quiet that Lundy had taught her to seek out all those years ago. If she focused now, she could see him standing in the kitchen and making her breakfast and smiling at her in a fucking parking lot before that little bitch Christine shot him down to save her father. How she hated that fucking bitch!
Hated her and now she was just fucking like her. Only now instead of some fucking psycho killer who had abused the shit out of his family and terrorized them for years, she had killed her own captain in order to protect her brother. Well, there was one good thing about being in this place; at least here she didn't need to look fucking Angel in the face, and see his grief. Even ex-wives still had a hold on him, especially one he had been so close to. Everyone had been so close to. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Even she had been so close to her once upon a time.
Deb took a minute, and she leaned over and inhaled deeply through her nose, trying to stop the first strings of panic from crawling up her stomach into her fucking lungs. She couldn't panic now, she wouldn't. Panic was giving shit away and the first fucking rule that Harry had was don't fucking get caught. 'Get your shit together, Deb.' The words were ground silently into her teeth and she closed her eyes for a moment, to draw her back here to the present and to the fucking freak side show that she was in. One step, and then another, and with her hands doubled into fists and her jaw set, she moved forward with the thought of not getting caught ringing through her head.
Additional Notes: (Please provide any additional notes you think we should bear in mind or consider while reviewing your application.)
Name/Nickname: Kim
Age: 35
Current Characters: None
Email/IM/Plurk: aproclivity@plurk
BASIC CHARACTER INFO
Name: Debra Morgan
Source: Dexter
Age: 33
Canon Point: Season 8, episode 3, when Dexter doses her.
Humanoid?: Yes
Inmate/Warden: Inmate
Item: (Warden Only) N/A
Fetched?: No. Appearing.
Canon Link: wiki
Personality: The best way to describe Debra is 'dearly damaged.' More than once the show describes her this way, so it seems important that we start with that now. Debra Morgan almost seems to have some sort of magnet that draws damage to her. It likely started because she was a girl who was always jealous of what she viewed as her father's love for her brother, and how it was so much greater than the love he showed her. At first she had thought that it was because Dexter was a boy, and that was the reason that he had been brought home and adopted, that the daughter that he had wasn't enough. That was the first sign of her swearing off anything that was traditional feminine. She started to act more like a boy and to emulate her father and his cop friends. Eventually, as becoming what she perceived as more masculine failed to work, Debra then used those skills as a sort of shell to protect her from the outside world. If the true her was inside, then it would be more difficult for someone to get through and hurt her.
Debra has a large heart that she's afraid to let people see, and yet , paradoxically, she can't keep it from showing up upon her sleeve. She can be incredibly sensitive to things, though she has grown out of most of that. She can often care too much about the victims of the crimes that she investigates, becoming too involved in their lives, and often in their deaths. This is especially shown if the crime gets below her skin, such in the case of the barrel murders, or in this last season, in the case of the man whom hunted his victims to death inside his labyrinth. Deb feels personally responsible when she is unable to solve some of these cases, and they often follow her home at night. When she is upset about something, Debra throws herself into her work, and really, her job has become a surrogate for any sort of personal life. If you ask her, her life is homicide, and that's not going to likely change. Her cop life being her only life is a large layer of the shell she uses to protect herself.
The largest of this shell, obviously is the way in which she uses her swearing as both a crutch and as as a barrier between herself and others. Sometimes, the swearing is to her benefit, in that it gives her a divide from a circumstance that she clearly needs. But other times, it can make people think that she's stupid, doubt her intelligence or her abilities as a police officer. In spite of that, and the time that she has been first a detective and now a lieutenant, Deb still hasn't stopped her swearing in most ways, save for around the children who are important parts of her life: Harrison, Astor and Cody.
But it can still be a sign of her insecurity. Over the years, Debra has to a large extent overcome the deep inferiority complex that growing up with her father and brother had given her. No longer does she think of herself as second best to the ghost of a man who killed himself because he couldn't handle the 'monster' that he helped create. Now, Debra Morgan realizes that her father was a fuck up just as she was, and he never made it to get the lieutenant shield that she now has. Despite the way in which she earned it (leapfrogging over Angel, and getting it because she became a Youtube phenom after killing some people who showed up to rob a bar) Debra has grown into her shield. She was, at her core, one thing: a good cop.
I say 'was' because now there is a darkness there poisoning that bit of her that was such a good cop. From her earliest upbringing, Debra Morgan believed in the sanctity and truth in the law. She became a police officer to offend the law. We only see her faith in the law be broken once (despite the several other times that it could have been, such with her association with Rudy, and then when Lundy died) and that was with the question of vengeance and justice versus anything else. We see that she chooses to let the escaped barrel girl killer (Lumen) go, because the law would disagree with what she had done in order to have vengeance for her terrible rape, torture and her attempted murder, along with the rape and torture and murder of the twelve girls before her. Debra at no point knew that her brother was involved with Lumen, or that he was helping her behind the sheet of plastic. There can be no doubt that Deb let this woman go not because of any personal reasons, but because of the fact that she had been wronged, and to stick her in jail for it would have been just as wrong.
The difference between that case and the case of Dexter is huge. After having trouble with another failed relationship, Debra begins to see a therapist, and her therapist then suggests that the deep affection and dependency that she feels for her brother (him being the only one she can count on, and the like) is her being in love with him. I think that this is a sort of lifeline for all of the failed relationships that Debra has been in, and a way for her being the one who is "broken" to make sense. Of course she couldn't love someone else, because she was fucked up in this fashion! Debra herself explains how fucked up it is, describing herself as more fucked up than the brother who was a serial killer.
Ever since the discovery that her beloved brother was a serial killer, Debra has been very slowly tumbling off the wagon. At first, she just believes that he just snapped, and she goes into defensive mode, something that will later come back to haunt her. But then when her cop instincts and memories kick in, Deb is unable to deny what's in her gut: her brother kills people. Later, that gut instinct will become: my brother kills people and I can't do anything about it.
But the code that Harry gave Dexter feels like justice to Deb. She says it herself after Hannah McKay kills Sal: his kind will work here, and if the law won't work this will. The code is how Debra lives with herself, very badly, but she manages it. In the end, it is the bond that Dexter is her family that pulls her through what she needs to do: how she helps keep his secrets from being splashed all over by LaGuarta, and how Debra tries to keep him alive.
There is the question of jealousy when dealing with Hannah McKay, but Debra's sense of justice overrides even the idea of removing her as a problem from both her and Dexter's life. She could have let Hannah bleed out after she found her with a possibly fatal stab wound but Debra couldn't. She left Hannah alive not because her brother loves her, or because she loves her brother, but because of a simple fact: her values meant enough that she couldn't allow the woman to die when she could have saved her. That decision was one Debra made for herself and for no one else. At her core, Debra wants to be a good person.
But when it comes to choosing between being a good person, and her brother's life, Debra will pick her brother's life every time. Had LaGuarta instead of demanding that Debra shoot her brother and "put him down" that she arrest him, she might have gotten somewhere. However, even then it's doubtful. Debra sees Dexter as her rock, and she can't imagine her life without him. Now that she sees herself as a killer (rather than in the past someone who has killed in order to save lives, such as the club shooting) Debra's entire world is upside down.
Deb's killing of LaGuarta has put her into a deep depression, where she believes that all she deserves is terrible things. She quit the police force because she considers herself too horrible a person to be a cop, and then she began to doctor shop so that she could get anything to numb the pain. The show says that she has severe PTSD, but I believe that it's more than that. It's PTSD and depression, and she engages in several extremely risky behaviors (coke, booze, pills, sex with bad men, taking on trained killers in order to get jewels.)
She has thrown herself into inactive ways of killing herself. Once she never would have even considered doing drugs, but now she smokes pot and does coke. She fights people whom she has no chance of winning, and she is taking massive amounts of prescription drugs as she tries to find a way of not feeling or killing herself. Deb doesn't care which comes first so long as it stops.
Powers:
First Person Sample: [For a second there's nothing, and then there's a hushed]: Fuck.
[The woman breathes for a moment, and then she breathes again, closing her eyes, and resting one hand on the side of her neck. There's nothing there, even though she knows what fucking should be: the bump where her brother dosed her. He had to have dosed her again because there was nothing else that happened.
She's home, but it's not right: there's no ocean sounds around her, and it's like missing a beat of her heart for a moment.]
What the fuck is this?! Where the fuck did you put me, Dex? Is this some new fucking version of your table? My punishment for violating rule one of the god all mighty fucking code. Don't get fucking caught, right? Well, I wasn't getting caught, I was fucking confessing! [There's a hysterical note there.]
I don't want to fucking do this anymore!
Third Person Sample: It's so simple, just walking through a crowd, but right now it feels like the most difficult fucking thing in the world. Her skin is crawling, and she wonders if everyone in the world here can see into her, can see what she did. Funny, she never noticed it on Dexter's face, not even when they were kids, not even when she couldn't get a fucking dog. Debra had always thought that there was something in someone's face; something that she could see. Even after Rudy--Brian fucking Mosher tied her ass up and gave her over to her brother like some sort of fucking present-- couldn't think of that. If she thought of that again then whatever fucking sleep she had would be gone again and this time she doubted there would be someone who would give her some drugs to calm her down. But even after him, she thought that there had been some sort of light over a killer's head, making them visible. Something just not right.
Deb wondered if she gave it off now. If people could look at her and see LaGuarta's blood clinging to her the way that it did and normally needed to be seen with luminol. Did someone have it on like some sort of sight? Could a better cop than her fucking see it. She took several deep breaths through her nose, trying to find the quiet that Lundy had taught her to seek out all those years ago. If she focused now, she could see him standing in the kitchen and making her breakfast and smiling at her in a fucking parking lot before that little bitch Christine shot him down to save her father. How she hated that fucking bitch!
Hated her and now she was just fucking like her. Only now instead of some fucking psycho killer who had abused the shit out of his family and terrorized them for years, she had killed her own captain in order to protect her brother. Well, there was one good thing about being in this place; at least here she didn't need to look fucking Angel in the face, and see his grief. Even ex-wives still had a hold on him, especially one he had been so close to. Everyone had been so close to. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Even she had been so close to her once upon a time.
Deb took a minute, and she leaned over and inhaled deeply through her nose, trying to stop the first strings of panic from crawling up her stomach into her fucking lungs. She couldn't panic now, she wouldn't. Panic was giving shit away and the first fucking rule that Harry had was don't fucking get caught. 'Get your shit together, Deb.' The words were ground silently into her teeth and she closed her eyes for a moment, to draw her back here to the present and to the fucking freak side show that she was in. One step, and then another, and with her hands doubled into fists and her jaw set, she moved forward with the thought of not getting caught ringing through her head.
Additional Notes: (Please provide any additional notes you think we should bear in mind or consider while reviewing your application.)
[Deb is standing in front of her mirror, and there's writing on it, it's black and thick and from the way she's staring at it, it's pretty clear she didn't put it there.
The words: "The stars have all gone away" are there in thick black writing, and from the streaks on the mirror, it's clear Deb has tried to wipe them away.
More than once.]
This is so not fucking funny. I fucking mean it. I don't get this whole mirror shit, and I don't like it, and someone please explain what the fuck this shit means.
[A beat, and there's a quieter, more personal sort of anger there, the one that comes with Deb being scared.]
And how to make it fucking stop!
The words: "The stars have all gone away" are there in thick black writing, and from the streaks on the mirror, it's clear Deb has tried to wipe them away.
More than once.]
This is so not fucking funny. I fucking mean it. I don't get this whole mirror shit, and I don't like it, and someone please explain what the fuck this shit means.
[A beat, and there's a quieter, more personal sort of anger there, the one that comes with Deb being scared.]
And how to make it fucking stop!
[Deb has decided that she's going to be treating this as a normal post, and if anyone Dexter happens to show up, then they he shows up. If not then it's no big deal.]
I am fucking bored off of my ass. There has to be something that I can do here. A job or something. I just can't take sitting around anymore. It's driving me fucking batshit insane.
[A beat.]
Even more fucking insane.
I am fucking bored off of my ass. There has to be something that I can do here. A job or something. I just can't take sitting around anymore. It's driving me fucking batshit insane.
[A beat.]
Even more fucking insane.
[For a second there's nothing, and then there's a hushed]: Fuck.
[The woman breathes for a moment, and then she breathes again, closing her eyes, and resting one hand on the side of her neck. There's nothing there, even though she knows what fucking should be: the bump where her brother dosed her. He had to have dosed her again because there was nothing else that happened.
She's home, but it's not right: there's no ocean sounds around her, and it's like missing a beat of her heart for a moment. And then she gets pissed]
What the fuck is this?! Where the fuck did you put me, Dex? Is this some new fucking version of your table? My punishment for violating rule one of the god all mighty fucking code. Don't get fucking caught, right? Well, I wasn't getting caught, I was fucking confessing! [There's a hysterical note there.]
I don't want to fucking do this anymore! Is this your fucking creepy ass shrink? Is that what this is? Fuck it, Dexter, I just want to go home!
[The woman breathes for a moment, and then she breathes again, closing her eyes, and resting one hand on the side of her neck. There's nothing there, even though she knows what fucking should be: the bump where her brother dosed her. He had to have dosed her again because there was nothing else that happened.
She's home, but it's not right: there's no ocean sounds around her, and it's like missing a beat of her heart for a moment. And then she gets pissed]
What the fuck is this?! Where the fuck did you put me, Dex? Is this some new fucking version of your table? My punishment for violating rule one of the god all mighty fucking code. Don't get fucking caught, right? Well, I wasn't getting caught, I was fucking confessing! [There's a hysterical note there.]
I don't want to fucking do this anymore! Is this your fucking creepy ass shrink? Is that what this is? Fuck it, Dexter, I just want to go home!
