hijinks' Journal

profile.
Name: Jonathan David McMillan, but his nickname from childhood has inescapably stuck with him; just call him Jinks, cause nearly bloody everyone else who knows him does.
Date of birth: April 19, 1940.
House: Slytherin.
Year: 1958.
Allegiance: The bad guys.
Bloodline: Pure.
Theme song: Bloc Party, "She's Hearing Voices"

Appearance: Jinks is a deceptively normal looking guy. While there is perhaps a certain degree of animation to the upper lip that gives him the ability to smirk and sneer rather more than the average Englishman could hope to do, the fact remains that as a general rule, Jinks looks like your average middle-aged man. He has light hair and a generally unremarkable face, stands at 5'9, and has an average build. He keeps himself neat and tidy, and prefers robes of a classic cut, generally black.
PB: John Simm.

Personality:
There are lots of perfectly good people who, for one reason or another, ended up becoming Death Eaters. Jinks is not one of them. He is one of the people who will be read about in the history books, who performed shocking atrocities above and beyond the call of duty simply because he appeared to enjoy them. (Assuming, of course, that he is not one of the people destined to write the history books, which nobody can guarantee just yet.) He has not yet razed Japan just to watch it burn, but in his defence, he has also not gotten his ass royally kicked by some time-traveling pansy in Converse, either. Jinks could be described as having antisocial personality disorder (although he must register his dissent, viewing most psychology as being inherently faulted by being based on generalizations). What this means is: Jinks does not give a fuck about any of you. In many cases, Jinks would genuinely enjoy seeing you in pain.

Jinks isn't about blood and gore and guts, though. What Jinks truly appreciates is watching the steady decline of the human spirit, in quite a variety of senses of the words. Jinks likes watching people go bad. He likes watching them become corrupt, become murderers, sink into despair, give up entirely. All the world's a stage, and Jinks bought season tickets. However, Jinks serves not only as a simple audience member in this everlasting global play; he also has cultivated an extraordinary talent as a playwrite. Jinks manipulates people endlessly. The best evidence of this is probably the fact that of all the many, many people he interacts with on a regular basis, hardly any of them have even a suspicion of the sort of person he is, and those who do are generally not in a position to say so, either out of respect or fear.

In the public eye (which he is in quite often, being head of the PR department at the Ministry of Magic; yes, he is that wonderful man who tells the Prophet and the WWN and Witch Weekly that they have gone too far; he is the one distributing the propaganda; he is the one doing everything in his power to make you think that Bellatrix Lestrange is a very nice young lady who will save us all), Jinks is quite a likable man. Professional, accomplished, and funny without being flippant, Jinks McMillan has successfully managed to stop the entirety of Wizarding Britain from freaking the fuck out and realizing just how bad things are. He is generally liked by his co-workers, although there are certainly factions in the Ministry (certain Aurors, for instance, and various other high-ups; he believes he has a particularly dedicated hate club in the Department of Mysteries, which sits a bit ill with him, really, as he's been nice enough not to allow the public to pay overmuch attention to the fact that they're a bunch of bloody psychos who are given free reign to do whatever the hell they please, without telling anyone, while using up all the taxpayers' money) who find his methods unsound. Generally, if people dislike Jinks, it's because they dislike the methods and purposes of the propaganda the Ministry distributes; they don't like the amount of information kept from the public, or how certain government actions are spun. Even those who oppose his policies tend to like the man personally.

In private, Jinks is, in the most concise terms possible, concerned only with his own well-being and personal enjoyment of life. When rumours of You-Know-Who first began to circulate, Jinks compared the flimsy tenure the Ministry held over the public with the appeal of the Dark Lord's ideas to the average witch or wizard, and the terror the Dark Lord himself was capable of inspiring, and decided that the winning side was not the legal one. He became a Death Eater in late 1968 at the age of 28, and eventually rose through the ranks not only because he was very good at getting out of sticky situations alive and unidentified, but also because he was extraordinarily good at recruiting people. Over the past 10 years, Jinks has probably been single-handedly responsible for more recruits to the Dark Lord's army than any other single person excepting the Dark Lord himself. Combining his personal charisma with a great deal of intelligence and a surprisingly apt knowledge of the human mind, Jinks has managed to turn people from Muggle-supporting liberals into fascist killers on multiple occasions, usually within the course of a year at best. He is exceedingly dangerous and, admittedly, in a great deal of danger himself; Jinks supports the Dark Lord, but he'd much rather be in a position of power than bowing to someone else in one, and he is quite sure the Dark Lord, with his incredible skills as a Leglimens, is well aware of this. However, Jinks is an exceedingly useful Death Eater and for this reason he is fairly certain that, for now at least, his life is in no immediate danger.

History:
Jinks was no PR protege. He comes with no history of quirky anecdotes in which he successfully manages to convince his mother that his accidental destruction of her Ming Vase was all for the best, or actually spins the "dog ate my homework" story successfully at a school where dogs aren't allowed. True, he's always maintained an exceedingly good reputation with most people, but lots of people do that. (True, he may have convinced the general Hogwarts population that his first girlfriend had syphillis, but lots of people would love to try to pull that off and succeed.) Mostly, he was a charming, unremarkable kid from a middle class family who spent most of his time trying to talk his dad into buying him a new broom, or reading comics. Sure, there were a couple incidents where his cousins or neighbourhood kids would come to their parents in tears talking about some horrible thing he'd done, but it was always sorted out in the end that Jinks was innocent, and besides, most of them never even realized he'd done them wrong.

Once Jinks reached Hogwarts, he was promptly sorted into Slytherin. This is a bad PR move in a lot of people's eyes, but it's never been the majority who hold the bulk of the wealth and power in a capitalist society, and God bless Wizarding Britain, it's one of those. Jinks is a pureblood, so his sorting made his family and friends happy, and it got him a whole lot of new powerful friends to boot. Jinks fit in with the Slytherin crowd easily, but earned a reputation around the other houses as one of those Slytherins who weren't so bad, who sure, maybe were a little bit full of themselves, but didn't mean much by it, in the end. Jinks had a few discrete friendships with people from other houses. He was never directly rude to any Gryffindors or Hufflepuffs or any of that. He was a good student, and made Prefect in his fifth year. He was never on the Quidditch team, although he certainly enjoyed the occasional skirmish with his friends. He was, in general, liked by both his fellow students and his professors (even if a few people, sometimes, got a weird feeling about him).

Following Hogwarts, Jinks went immediately into the Ministry. Even though he hadn't given it much thought beforehand, throughout seventh year Jinks had developed a conviction that PR was definitely the place for him. Viewed as a superfluous department by some -- most of these, people who have absolutely no concept of what effect the PR department has on the way they see the world -- Jinks fit in immediately (again), and quickly rose through the ranks as one of the brightest newcomers the department had. He was in the executive by the age of 26, and finally made head at the age of 33. Certainly a young man to be made head of a department, but then again, what's better for PR than a fresh, unoffensively appealing face?

Family:
The McMillans are purebloods; Jinks' aunt, in fact, is Melania McMillan, the grandmother of Sirius and Regulus Black. (This makes Jinks second cousins with the lads, and some degree of cousin to the Minister herself.) Jinks' parents are Dimosthenis and Mildred, both born in 1917. Both are Slytherins, and Jinks is, as you may well have suspected, an only child. Jinks' family essentially means connections to him; he has very little affection for any of them, but he makes sure to demonstrate that affection he's lacking regularly and within socially acceptable parameters to reinforce loyalty. He has made a point of not sucking up to Bellatrix following her election to the post of Minister; he knows that if he earns a favour, she'll give it to him.

Also of note is his wife May (born a Goyle), and his two young songs, Joffrey and Myles. May is 6 years Jinks' junior and blonde; Joffrey and Myles, both blond, are respectively 6 and 3.

Haiku demonstrating your desire to play this character:
whilst i stand above
grinding your life 'neath my heel
remember: blame media.