B051 - Meyers, Jonathan [DECEASED]

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DECEASED

Name: Jonathan Meyers
Gender: Male
Age: 18
Grade: 12
School: George Hunter High School
Hobbies and Interests: Video Games, internet forums, theatre, playing the guitar, singing, social justice

Appearance: Jonathan, although tall, has a very scrawny figure, standing at 6'1” and weighing 145 lbs. Most of his weight comes in his height, and he has very little body fat, only having built up muscle from passive work around the house. He is Caucasian, and due to time spent inside is very pale in skin tone. His face is fairly thin, and in order to keep up the image that he desires, he has modified it, slightly. His hair, which is naturally of a light brown colour, has been dyed black. It is straight, goes down to his lower neck, and is fairly messy in style. In the case that he needs to look neat, he ties it back in a ponytail. He has light blue eyes, a hook nose, and fairly thin lips. He has traces of acne on his face, but they tend to be naturally covered up, with his hair going over the top part of his forehead and with the ones on his nose and lower face being picked off when they appear.

Jonathan dresses in a style that he uses to keep up his image of a punk or delinquent. The colour black dominates his wardrobe, and the types of clothing that he buys for himself tend to be more casual, sometimes getting clothing with gangster-esque connotations or items of clothing that he feels would make him look more threatening. His wardrobe tends to be filled with t-shirts — often with an emblem or a symbol on them — assorted types of jackets and hoodies, assorted types of jeans, and more casual shoes. Due to personal uncomfortableness with the idea of it, Jonathan has not pierced himself and neglects wearing any sort of jewelry on his body. On the day of the abduction, Jonathan was wearing a black t-shirt with a white skull emblazoned on it, a black leather jacket, unzipped and let loose, black jeans, and black running shoes. His hair was not put into a ponytail on that day, and was let loose to the sides, going down to around his chin in a fairly messy way.

Biography: Jonathan Liam Meyers was born on the 17th of February, 2000, in the Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt. His birth parent was a seventeen year old by the name of Lisa Meyers. Jonathan was conceived after a drunken one night stand, and due to a strict Christian upbringing was a conception that Lisa's family did not approve of, Jonathan was given up to the foster care system, with him not being old enough to remember the reason as to why he was given up. Issues with the foster care system meant that Jonathan never tended to stay in one home for more than a year at a time because of problems with the foster families in question; financial troubles within the foster families or occasional need to take Jonathan out to make room for kids more in need of care. However, when Jonathan turned fifteen, this changed, as due to the caretaker’s — a young nurse named Lilian — financial stability Jonathan was able to stay in this home until the point where he ever elected to leave himself. His relationship with Lilian is a friendly one, and the two like each other, although the relationship to Jonathan is more akin to being a neighbourly one, rather than a motherly one.

As he was growing up, Jonathan was a very exuberant, friendly child. The lessons that he learned in preschool about positive values, being nice and friendly to everyone else, regardless of who they were or what they were doing, held especially true to him even through kindergarten and elementary, and he tried to be friends with everyone he met. This included bullies, who he would try to convince to change their ways, often to low levels of success. He would usually have a large circle of people he played with at school, and although he had difficulty remembering who they were — especially as he moved from home to home, necessitating his transfer to different schools — this wasn’t something that Jonathan cared about, and he didn’t mind the fact that he tended to change schools often.

Something fostered from Jonathan’s childhood was his love for classic video games — in particular, those from the NES and SNES period — which evolved into a full-blown love for video games of many kinds, primarily due to his finding them a fun and fulfilling use of his spare time. One of his foster owners had a NES with many of the classic Mega Man games on it, which Jonathan was allowed to play during a select time frame every day or so. He enjoyed playing the games, and although he was no longer able to play those games when he left that foster home he still possessed fond memories of them, and once he was able to get a personal laptop he used emulation in order to be able to play these games again. In addition to this, he was able to get his laptop to play video games, and now in addition to playing retro games, he plays whatever has been recommended to him on Steam, in particular, liking any game which has a good enough story and valuing many genres that do that or have unique or fun enough gameplay.

As he grew older, he began to engage in longer and more personal friendships with other people, ones that he however had to end when he had to change houses, something that caused him emotional grief whenever it happened. The part where these feelings were at their worst — and the part where these feelings acted as a breaking point — was when he was eight years old, where he became very close friends with a girl named Jennifer, to the point where he spent nearly all his time with her. When it came time to move — and be unlikely to ever see Jennifer again — the fact that he had to say goodbye reduced him to tears, and took him into a temporary depression, one that he promised himself wouldn’t have to happen again.

So, when he arrived at his next school, he decided that the only thing he could do to stop that was to try and actively avoid making friends. Instead of acting friendly and throwing himself into social situations like he used to, Jonathan instead opted to actively avoid these situations, trying to make it so that he was alone during lunchtimes and trying not to work with other people in class. If people ever tried to approach him, he would often use words to push them away, trying to act like a jerk to them in order to make them not try to approach him again. This technique, which he started to employ in the last year of elementary school, was successful, and resulted in Jonathan having no friends and relatively few acquaintances for that period of time.

Eventually, elementary school ended for Jonathan, and after another move to another foster home he began middle school. He used the same tactics within his new school as he did during elementary school, although the feelings of loneliness that emerged from this became more prominent to Jonathan than they did in elementary school. A search on the internet while at his foster home revealed forums dedicated to video games and topics that Jonathan enjoyed, and Jonathan elected to join them, integrating with the communities and becoming friends with the members. These forums provided an important lifeline to Jonathan at the time, as they provided him with actual friends who he knew he wouldn’t have to say goodbye to, and some people on these forums are people who Jonathan would rank amongst his best friends. In addition to this, during high school, he was pointed to Reddit, a set of forums that he has also elected to stay in because of the information it gives him on his favourite fandoms and topics, even if there is less of a sense of community on Reddit than there is on his other forums.

In addition, some of the middle schools that Jonathan went to during his time there forced him to pick up hobbies or do club activities. The first of these activities was theatre, which he decided to do because it was the most interesting thing to do at the time and — because of experience with playing up or lying about his views or ideas in his attempts to drive off other people — he thought he might be slightly talented at it. Once he started to do it, he found that he began to like it due to the fact that it allowed him to play roles, something that he was capable at, and although he didn’t do it at all of them he temporarily entered theatre programs at subsequent schools he was at, including at George Hunter.

The other two hobbies he picked up in middle school were playing the guitar and singing — albeit with the latter being a more casual hobby until recently. One of his school's mandatory music classes required that students learned an instrument, and — due to his liking the way the instrument sounded, and liking the variety of ways it could play — the instrument that Jonathan picked was guitar. The class also had a unit where students had to sing, and Jonathan enjoyed doing this, to the point that when he left that particular school he still wanted to do that, along with playing the guitar. In subsequent towns he went to, he would often take up guitar lessons from whoever happened to be teaching there, and is now fairly proficient at the instrument, enough to be able to copy chords and rhythms that he hears. He likes playing the instrument casually, although doesn’t really care enough to do anything professional with it. In terms of singing, he mostly kept a skill level where he could repeat songs he heard if he’d heard them before enough times, but only started recently taking classes around a year ago. This is more of a private hobby for him, but he doesn’t mind performing to his friends or at talent shows, enjoying the fact that these performances seem to make other people happy.

High school arrived for Jonathan at this point, and although George Hunter was not the first high school Jonathan went to he was still able to join near the end of freshman year, where, for the first year and few months, he kept up his act of being aloof and jerkish to other people. Even though he joined the drama club and the vocal ensemble at Lilian’s request, he mostly just tried to stay away from the other people in the club at this point in time, and played up a jerkish, angry personality in order to drive away the friendly types who did try to get close. Although he noted that the period in which Lilian was his caregiver was longer than usual, he did not assume much from it, instead choosing to think the worst and that his stay would not be permanent.

His personal belief that he had to drive people away from him so that he wouldn’t have to say goodbye to them was challenged and then destroyed in the 11th grade. Noting that his stay in Chattanooga was considerably longer than usual he began to have doubts about the paranoia he had. Soon after this point, another student by the name of Ji-hyun Christensen was successfully able to break this barrier down, not having given up when Jonathan rebuked her and being persistent to the point where she cornered him on the school grounds after school had ended. Having doubts about whether he was leaving George Hunter or not, and realizing that Ji-hyun legitimately cared about him, he broke down, beginning to cry as he opened up to Ji-hyun about what his life was like and why he was the way he was. Ji-hyun was very receptive to what he said, and offered to be his friend, even mentioning social media platforms to him as a method for the two to communicate if in the case that he did have to leave school.

However, this turned out not to be needed. As 11th grade progressed further, Jonathan had not been transferred to another school, and upon asking Lilian about this, she said that she was keeping Jonathan for as long as she could — having thought that she had already made this clear to him. Realizing that this meant that he was staying in George Hunter for the rest of his school years, he decided to make active attempts to make more friends. His attempts have been slightly successful, having made a few friends within the gaming and punk crowds, and having a couple of friends on the bottom of the social stratosphere, attempting to provide company to them that he thinks they might need or want. To him, though, old habits have died hard, and many of the traits that he tried to adopt previously are ones he still uses. He is fairly aloof in both drama and the vocal ensemble, and can still act fairly snippy to other people at times, something which bothers him, and something which — along with his previous actions — still wards people away from him.

Out of all the people he has become friends with however, since this change, Ji-hyun has remained his closest friend, and the two regularly spend time with one another. Ji-hyun, within the duration of their friendship, has attempted several times to get him to follow the hobbies that she follows, and although many of these attempts aren’t successful, one hobby that she did manage to get him into was activism, in particular social justice. He often tends to tag along with her to the social justice clubs at his school, and outside of school typically mentions the causes he fights for and — although he hasn’t done this much — goes to protests if anyone else he knows is already going. To him, he feels that minorities — such as people of colour and LGBT people — are equal to non-minorities, and is confused as to why others discriminate against them. He believes that with enough ability, he can change the minds of people against the rights of minorities, and uses his social justice mediums as a method of doing that.

Academically, Jonathan does fairly okay. Although he doesn’t study — finding it boring and wanting to use his time in a way more fun to him — he can get Bs and Cs pretty easily, with the occasional A. His easiest subject is social studies — mostly because of what he feels is easy course content and his slight interest in the topic itself — while his hardest subject is math — finding it boring and tedious to do. Socially, Jonathan does less than okay, still finding it hard to talk to other people despite his mind wishing that he could do so, but he still has a core group of friends that he can hang out with one-on-one. Recently, the foster care organization communicated with Lilian, allowing Jonathan to meet his birth mother for the first time due to expressed interest on her part. Jonathan agreed to the meeting, and as of now is planning on meeting her during the trip, Lisa having moved to Washington state over the past eighteen years in order to get away from her family.

Advantages: Jonathan due to his talent for acting, and his experience in putting on social masks is a very capable liar, and can very easily put on social masks on the island to fulfill whatever needs he has. In addition to this, his loner nature, something now inbuilt in him due to years acting it, can help him divorce himself from other people on the island, potentially allowing him to enter a mindset that can be beneficial for survival in the last stages of the game.
Disadvantages: Jonathan does not have many close friends, and this in addition to his reputation as a jerkish person might result in allies being hard for him to find, something which might hinder him in the early stages of the game. In addition, as shown with his beliefs in how to deal with bullies at a young age and his hobby of social justice, Jonathan has a nature where he believes that anyone morally bad or with a morally bad viewpoint can be talked down to have their ways changed, something that may result in issues if the person is not willing to listen or consider his points.

Designated Number: Male Student No. 51

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Designated Weapon: Pair of deer antlers

Conclusion: Don't say it, Baines. - Matt Richards

I'm being discriminated against. B051 should come to my rescue. Or he would, but he's going to get shot in the face while trying to talk the competition to death. - Josh Baines

...Oh deer! - Josh Baines

You piece of shit. - Matt Richards

DECEASED