Application | Asgard

[hotlips]

OOC Information;

Name; Rowan
Personal Journal; (PM contact) hotlips or sheloves (no personal journal)
Contact; illusionarymind@gmail.com, brilliantrouble (AIM), crimespace (plurk)
Other Characters; Ril Sorrin, sheloves
Activity proof; MARCH


IC Information;
Character Name; Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan
Canon; M*A*S*H - It's a crappy wiki, I'm sorry. :(
Canon Point; Season 10 - Post/right before Klinger and Margaret get back to camp in the episode Birthday Girls
Age; 32~

House; Heimdall (Margaret is and always will be duty first, though an argument could be made from Sigyn as a Healer. There's an episode called Dreams, where her dream is that she's getting married, leaving the Army behind to become the wife she's always wanted to be, but her husband marches off to war, and her bed is filled with wounded. She's left in her wedding gown, streaked with blood. The Army will never leave her, and she will never leave it. Her duty is to the men who risk their lives out in the field, fighting the war, and her desire to be 'normal' and a woman as well as a wife, is a goal she may well have to abandon in the face of duty.)
Power; Energy Transfer

Personality; Margaret Houlihan is a complicated woman with complicated issues. She is a fundamentally flawed human being who both says she worked her way to her rank as Major through her own merit and yet seems to know an awful lot of generals in the biblical sense. She's had her share of affairs and we catch her in the beginning of the series with the awful Frank Burns who seems to have a particular knack in bringing about her worst nature. She continually attempts to get surgeons Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John in trouble through various means (though sometimes, they need no help from the terrible two).

She can be horribly spiteful, even mean. Case in point? Her treatment of Frank Burns, though he's pretty much a lousy human being, when she gets engaged to Lt. Col. Donald Penobscott. Over the course of seasons, she had continually professed her love for Frank despite the fact that he was apparently happily married back in the United States, wanted him to divorce his wife, etc., etc. and yet when Penobscott put a (tiny) ring on her finger she dropped Frank like a pinless grenade and let him completely crack up. It was not at all her finest hour.

Despite these qualities, she has wonderful moments where she is all too human. Margaret is the kind of person who stuffs most of her feelings away into some black box deep in the back of her head and insists that she's "by the book" - really, Korea and every loud noise out there scares the holy shit out of her. She manages to pull herself together and keep moving though. She stays with Hawkeye on several occasions when the camp is threatened and they have to bug out, helping him operate on a patient who couldn't be moved due to a spinal injury and sits with him when his claustrophobia gets the better of him. She even admits to him that when the bombs/mortars drop or there's loud noises, all she wants to do is run away. But she doesn't, she makes herself stay and soldiers on because there are people who need her hands and her help. When lost in the wilderness trying to get home from an Aid Station, she and Pierce are nearly blown up by North Korean artillery, she admits to him that she's actually scared and cracks enough to let him in. She has a few moments like this, even admitting to her nurses that she's terribly lonely.

It takes her a divorce from her cheating, rather terrible husband, a visit from an old friend, and a failed relationship with front line man, Jack Sully, to really change. Eventually she starts to show a kinder, softer side. There's a great deal of Margaret to dislike, a whole lot to like. Her struggle to admit and address her flaws as well change them is a difficult, often painful process for her, but like everything in her life, she meets her challenges head on, even if that means she takes the long route to resolve them.

She takes zero shit from anyone and frequently (drunk or not) will slap or punch out someone being a complete ass. Margaret's intense, highly focused, a fabulous nurse, and a woman who will tell someone off if there's enough disrespect going on. In fact, she told Hawkeye off spectacularly for objectifying the nurses and being more than a little chauvinist about a visiting female doctor who'd taken over a surgery for him. Despite her gruffness and her series long love/hate relationship with Chief Surgeon Hawkeye Pierce and the others in her unit (BJ Hunnicutt as his second and before that Trapper John -- and there were pranks and fights and trying to get them kicked out under the influence of Frank Burns), she has this enormous amount of respect for each and every one of them. You just...need to catch her at one of those human moments to scrape it out of her.

Despite all of her faults, and her journey to overcome them, she really is one hell of a woman.

Samples;
Network Sample;

How many of you know combat medicine properly? How many of you know how to triage a series of wounded? I'm going to say 'probably not many'. Since I find myself in yet another war, I want as many people as possible who want to learn how to save lives out in that park tomorrow morning. [Margaret's jaw tightens.] If you think you can't do it, you'd be surprised. If we're fighting a war, that means someone right next to you might be hurt. There might not be someone who can help in the immediate vicinity --- just you.

Bright and early tomorrow. If I can find some, we might just get what passes for coffee. Speaking of coffee, there has to be a place to get some that doesn't taste as bad as the mess tent's.

[And then she realized the few dollars she had in her pocket and no pay day meant she might not be able to afford that terribly wonderful cup of coffee and her face fell as she stared at the few crumpled bills in her hand.]

Also, from the test drive.


Log Sample;

She's sure about it, now. The Army, any Army, it sticks to her, it knows her and it's mad enough to pull her from her own bed to fight death in another war. Waking up in Heimdall will be a shock every morning. It's same sort that comes with the sound of helicopters she knows she's straining for, the same that makes her reach for an absent helmet at a loud noise in the street. Sometimes, she dreams she's back at the 4077th and they're bugging out as choppers arrive with half the O.R. dismantled. And the North Koreans bomb the rest of it. She walks through bodies, trying to find a doctor, trying to find her friends because that's what they've become, but they're all dead and it's just her.

It's just her and she doesn't know what to do.

The clothes now in her closet are civilian, save for the heavy parka and military issue uniform she'd arrived in. Margaret slept for a full twenty-four hours upon arrival, woke disoriented, and stared out her window in the same disbelief that had her wandering out onto the street shaking her head.

She still didn't believe it.

Taken from one war only to be jammed into another, but here she is.