Michael

Player Information
Name: Lu
Age: 26
Contact: lluosogrwydd
Current characters: Asgore

Character Information
Name: Michael
Series: The Good Place
Appearance: isn't that the guy from cheers
Age: Literally since the beginning of time
Canon Point: Season 3, episode 10
Canon History: THE WIKI'S BAD FAM. Also, a lot happened, it's complicated, and I am so sorry?

In the universe of The Good Place, every action that a person takes has a set positive or negative point value based on how "good" it is. When a person dies, their points are tallied up. The small percentage of people whose point value is over a certain threshold gets to go to the Good Place, and everyone else goes to the Bad Place to be tortured forever by demons.

Michael is one of these demons. After a long time of working in a low-ranking administrative role, he received a promotion to architect. Architects take a group of humans, craft a way to torture them forever, and then move on to the next group. This is the way it's been done for all of human history, so obviously Michael decided to use his very first assignment to pilot his own personal idea for a better way to torture humans. His plan was basically just the plot of No Exit: put the humans together in a fake Good Place, and then manipulate them into forming their own eternal feedback loop of toxicity and psychological torment. The argument was that this was both more effective and more entertaining. Michael's superiors were doubtful, but ultimately allowed him to proceed, with a warning that failure would be met with severe consequences.

In order to set up his neighborhood, he stole an artificial intelligence named Janet from the Good Place and pretended to be a legitimate Good Place architect to secure her assistance. Though he had a few moments of self-doubt about his grand plan, she also provided emotional support, as the only person around who genuinely wanted to help him and believed in him. With her help, he got everything ready, placed his four chosen humans into the world, and began.

Things went smoothly for several months. Michael took on the role of a kind, human-loving guardian to the humans, and spent his time engineering various types of unpleasantness for them. Part of the plan involved making two of the humans, Eleanor Shellstrop and Chidi Anagonye, live together as soulmates. Eleanor thought that she had been accidentally brought to the Good Place, and she turned to Chidi, a professor of ethics and moral philosophy, to help her keep her secret and teach her to be a good person. Michael's plan fell apart because he didn't believe that Eleanor could actually become a better person, and her Season One character development started throwing his plans off the rails, until eventually she ended up figuring out the truth. Michael was forced to ask his boss for permission to reset the humans' memories and try again. He received it, but was told that he only had one more chance, and that if it failed he would experience retirement, an eternal form of extreme torture that is the closest a demon can come to actually dying.

Michael's second chance failed within a day. He concealed this fact, lied to his own employees about having permission from the higher-ups to try as many times as necessary, and proceeded to spend a really, really long time continuing to fail in various ways. He became increasingly frustrated and despondent, but couldn't see a way out of the situation; he had to somehow make the experiment work to have any hope of survival, but with every unauthorized reboot, the shit he'd be in when he was caught only got worse.

Eventually, his employees lost patience and blackmailed him, threatening to reveal what he'd done unless he handed control of the experiment over to them for one last attempt. If they succeeded, they would get all the glory, and if they failed, they would turn him in anyway so that they could wash their hands of the whole thing. Michael was sure that they would immediately fail, so in order to save himself he decided to bargain with the humans. If the experiment ended, they would be sent to the normal Bad Place to be physically tortured forever, so both groups would benefit if things went well this time. Michael agreed to not wipe their memories and to find a way for everybody to escape to the Good Place, and the humans agreed to pretend as if they'd been reset and to play along with the other demons' psychological torture efforts. Eleanor added another condition at the last second, though - Michael had to attend Chidi's ethics lessons with the rest of them. Though he was scornful of this idea, he was also completely out of options, and signed on for that too.

The lessons did not start well. Chidi decided that Michael might be failing to engage with the material in part because he was immortal, and thus didn't have a finite human's understanding of consequences. He talked to Michael about how possible death actually was, with his current precarious position, and made Michael contemplate his own mortality until he eventually collapsed into an existential depression. Eleanor comforted him and helped him deal with his newfound feelings by understanding how humans deal with their mortality, and the two began to form a bond.

Over time, Michael grew to enjoy the humans' company, especially Eleanor's. They turned out to be pretty similar people, to the point that she could recognize a lot of her own behavior in him and variously help him out or call him on his bullshit. He also came to recognize that he really didn't understand human ethics at all. He lashed out at Chidi over this and got himself kicked out of class, which made him realize that he'd come to enjoy the humans' company and missed being around them. The realization that he'd be rejected for doing shitty things forced him to actually apologize for his behavior and apply himself more to the lessons. Much of this was still sort of self-serving. As a demon surrounded by other demons, he had never formed close positive relationships with anyone before, and though he didn't entirely understand his feelings about these new relationships, he didn't want to lose them.

One major breakthrough came when Janet began experiencing severe glitches that threatened to destroy the neighborhood. She decided that the best course of action was for Michael to kill her. He initially agreed, but found that he couldn't bring himself to do it; after a fight where he presented several excuses and got shot down on all of them, he was forced to admit to Janet and himself that he considered her his first and best friend, and would rather risk destruction than kill her. Later that day, he also realized that he felt the same way towards the humans, and couldn't bring himself to cause even emotional harm to them for his own safety. After that day of significant personal epiphanies, he went to Eleanor for advice, wanting to understand why she consistently worked to be better even when it was hard and unpleasant. The two had a heart-to-heart, where she explained her own views on morality from the perspective of another garbage person, encouraged him, and affirmed his place in the group.

About ten minutes later, Michael's boss showed up! He'd been fooled by all of Michael's lies and believed the experiment had been a huge success. He gave Michael a promotion, complete with a special senior staff pin, and explained his plans to put Michael in charge of a larger-scale psychological torture rollout, while the current group of humans would be taken and vivisected for study. The promotion was everything Michael had ever wanted - but upon being presented with it, he realized that it wasn't what he wanted now. Instead, he decided to gamble on the humans, leaving them hidden clues to communicate his plan for their escape while pretending to have flipped back to torturing them. Perhaps the most important clue was simply asking them to have faith in him. It worked out, and Michael hid the humans while tricking all the other demons into thinking they'd escaped. When they all went to recapture them, he was left alone with them once more. Having been unable to confirm their safety until that moment, he broke down in tears of relief when he reunited with them. It's been a long fucking couple of days at this point.

Once alone, the humans pressed Michael to reveal his plan for getting them to the Good Place. He created a golden balloon that required them to pass a test to board, but after they'd failed multiple times and broken down into arguing, he had the new experience of feeling overwhelmed with guilt and revealed that it was just a lie he'd made up to stall for time. Despite trying, he'd been unable to find a way to get to the Good Place, and he also had no way to escape the demons who would shortly realize what he'd done and come back for all of them.

Demoralized, the group decided to spend their last night of freedom partying. Despite their initial anger, everyone decided to forgive Michael, as he had tried his best to do right by them and admitted his mistakes when he couldn't. They named him an honorary human and presented him with a Human Starter Kit, filled with pointless junk that he didn't need, just like humans collect! He was extremely touched, having never been given forgiveness or that level of care before, and they all proceeded to get very drunk and have fun together. Late in the night, it came out that there was a judge who oversaw disputes between the Good and Bad Places. Michael had already considered taking the group to her to plead their case, but had dismissed it as a viable option because it would involve sneaking the humans through Bad Place headquarters to reach the portal to her chambers, getting them the senior staff pins necessary for portal access, and somehow convincing her to hear their case despite not approaching through the official channels. Everyone agreed it was a bad plan, but now that they had no other options, the humans decided they wanted to at least make the attempt, and Michael decided that failing at a stupid plan with his friends would at least be a good way to go out.

The plan almost immediately fell apart. Michael was unable to get any extra pins, and was reduced to stealing a bunch of senior staffer's jackets from a coat rack. They were quickly discovered and fled to the portal, where he began rushing the humans through. He and Eleanor were the last two remaining when their pursuers caught up to them, which was when Michael discovered that he hadn't managed to steal enough pins. He made a quick decision to give Eleanor his own, shoved her through the portal, and locked it behind her, sacrificing his own life in the process.

That was the intent, at least. Though Michael's treachery was now thoroughly known by the other demons, Janet managed to escape detection and rescued him, so the pair followed the humans not long after. By the time they arrived in the judge's chambers, the humans had already all failed their tests and been sentenced to the Bad Place. Michael stalled the decision by stepping up as their advocate and offering a new angle to the case: that the system by which humans were judged was fundamentally flawed and unjust, as proved by these four humans becoming better people even after their deaths. The judge argued that they had only worked to become better for selfish reasons; they thought that if they did it, they would be rewarded with passage to the Good Place. Being a good person with the expectation of reward was not really being a good person.

To prove that they would have improved even without knowledge of the aferlife, Michael convinced the judge to alter Earth's timeline to prevent their deaths, betting that with the near-death experience as impetus, they would still manage to become better people. He got the necessary paperwork to travel to Earth and save their lives, and then settled in with Janet to monitor their progress.

For a while, things went well! But life is hard and the humans all eventually backslid. Michael was unwilling to accept these results. He believed that the key to everything was the friendships the humans had formed, and that on their own, they were doomed. So, completely and utterly against the rules, he tricked the doorman to Earth and snuck back down several times to interfere and bring the four together again. Once they were united, he thought his work was done - he even brought the doorman a souvenir from Earth as a completely spontaneous gesture of goodwill.

Unfortunately, all his illegal back-and-forth allowed the Bad Place to form their own illegal channel to Earth, and Michael's boss sent a demon to sabotage the humans. Michael was unable to talk to them again, as they'd all recognize him as that rando who was somehow instrumental in their decision to move to Australia, so he and Janet traveled to Earth to try to protect the humans, and that was when they all got caught by the Judge. Furious at their rulebreaking, she declared that Michael would be retired and Janet would be destroyed. But Michael was probably the only person to show the doorman kindness in thousands of years, so he gave Michael the only key to Earth and helped them escape.

Michael and Janet spent over a year living together on Earth and secretly observing the humans. Though their powers didn't work there, both still had all their knowledge from before they left the afterlife, and they used that to continue interfering to make life easier on the humans. After a year, the humans started to consider all going their separate ways again, since they had actual lives and shit. Michael kinda fell apart at the thought of his group splitting - as far as he was concerned, they were his sole remaining purpose in life. He got desperate and reckless, leading to the humans catching him and Janet with the magic afterlife door open.

The two were forced to explain everything to the humans. Since knowledge of the afterlife meant that any good deeds they did were corrupt, they were now automatically doomed!

Despite this, Eleanor ended up deciding that the group should work together to help other people get into the Good Place instead. They brought Michael and Janet back into the group, and Michael re-befriended them as they traveled around trying to help people they knew better themselves. Michael ended up deciding this process was too slow, however, and went to visit the most perfect living human he knew about to observe him and learn how to get more humans into the Good Place. That human ends up being a miserable neurotic mess, obsessed with making everyone else happy at his own expense. This is not good!

At this point, Michael's old boss and a bunch of demons show up, having built their own illegal door to Earth, and there's a bar fight which ends with everyone escaping to the afterlife. Congrats, the humans are dead again!

Following a suspicious comment from his boss, Michael sneaks into the Accounting department to learn more about the Good Place's requirements, and finds out that no humans have been accepted into the Good Place for over 500 years. Furious, he confronts the head accountant, but he's a bureaucrat who doesn't care about humanity in general, only the rules. He's distraught - everyone he's turned to for aid in all of this has been unhelpful at best - but Janet tells him that there's no one else they can turn to, and that he is the person who's going to have to change things. Michael steals some records and breaks everyone into the Good Place.

His belief was that the Bad Place had somehow infiltrated the points system, resulting in no one ever gaining enough points, and he hoped to alert the Good Place and gain their help. The Good Place, however, is also a bureaucratic nightmare, and decides to form a committee to select committee members for the group who will, in a few hundred years maybe, decide if they ought to do something. Michael storms out, consults with the humans, and realizes that there was no Bad Place interference to begin with: no one is able to get enough points for the Good Place because THERE IS NO ETHICAL CONSUMPTION UNDER CAPITALISM

He is, at this point, a wanted interdimensional fugitive with a trail of afterlife crimes on his head. Nonetheless, he forces a meeting with the Judge at a neutral location and convinces her to go to Earth to observe how humans live herself, at which point she realizes that human life is now a miserable capitalistic hellhole from which there can be no escape and that it's basically impossible to live without making choices that have bad consequences somewhere down the line. She, with Michael's old boss representing the Bad Place and Michael acting as humanity's advocate, decrees that they will re-create Michael's initial neighborhood experiment to see if new humans would, in a setting where they're able to make truly ethical choices, improve as people in the same way that the initial group of humans did. Michael is put in charge of creating and running the neighborhood, just like before, and sets out with Janet to draw up plans.

Personality:
Michael is, first and foremost, an extremely dedicated, ambitious, and creative person. Despite being seen as something of an huge nerd in the Bad Place, he applied himself to his job hard enough to get promoted, and then tried even harder to make a splash in his new position. If he was hardworking at his desk job, which he was not passionate about, he's intense when it comes to a personal project. Every aspect of the fake Good Place project was engineered personally by Michael; he's good with both details and big-picture stuff, and he's extremely perfectionistic.

This can lead straight into neuroticism. Michael's generally self-confident; he didn't hesitate, after all, to present any of his crazy ideas, or to continue with them even when faced with the potential consequences. But when things go off the rails, or when he looks around and realizes that his big ideas have gotten him in way over his head, he’s prone to nervous breakdowns of various intensity. He also gets extremely frustrated when other people don’t put effort into their work; it’s just not an attitude he can get with at all.

Michael's always wanted to do big things. It might have been easier to do this within the bounds of tradition, but he's never put much stock in the status quo. He's willing to break with age-old demonic tradition near-instantly because he believes strongly in innovation and improvement; the current way is not always the best way. He’s also creative, willing to think outside the box and pursue ideas that spark his interest. All of this seems to have made him something of an oddball among demons, who mostly just like to torture people and dick around.

Demons do not seem to form friendships in general, but Michael specifically appears to have not been particularly well-liked among his own kind. Though he would have been unable to admit it for most of his life, his ambition was also deeply tied up with a desire for validation. He wanted to be famous for revolutionizing torture and show everybody that they were wrong about him - as a demon who had only ever really interacted with his own kind, that's about as far as he could conceptualize what he wanted. Some of his underlying anxiety does seem to have come from rarely feeling supported; after making friends with the humans, most of his freakouts only happen when he feels like he might lose them.

All of this makes Michael's heel-face turn pretty natural, when it comes right to it. He'd always been interested in humans, to the point that the Neighborhood he built was predicated on him living and interacting with them. While it took being backed into the last possible corner for him to actually deign to speak to the humans without some fake persona, once he did, he took to their generally friendly attitudes quickly. As someone who was already willing to throw out all demonic tradition to try new stuff he thought would be better, throwing out all demon stuff in general to try out human friends and morality was just an even bigger version of what he was already doing.

None of this is to say that he’s not still sort of an asshole. He’s got a mean sense of humor, even among his friends, and there’s a certain level of inherent callousness that he hasn’t really shaken. The principles of ethics have become the framework he uses for guiding himself along his new project of being a better person, and those have always been focused more on bigger-picture stuff - like, say, if people should be tortured or not. Michael will definitely still be rude, and only belatedly consider if he should feel bad about it. He’s also pretty petty. It’s a flaw he’s been made aware of, and as such tries to monitor somewhat, but he’s prone to lashing out and retaliating disproportionately to minor slights. He also doesn’t seem to have any particular remorse for the things he’s done in the past. In general, his attitude towards the past seems dismissive, possibly because he’s immortal.


Abilities:
This is a half-hour comedy, they're not big on explaining rules and mechanics of demons, I don't know what's happening and Mike Schur is never going to tell me.

Passive Abilities

Extrasensory Perception
Though he's currently inhabiting a human skin-suit, Michael still exists as some kind of multidimensional entity and can pick up on a lot of sensory data that actual humans can't. Some of this appears to manifest as a type of synesthasia; he associates other people's emotions with colors and tastes, for example, and he's made vague comments about auras before. As an afterlife employee, I figure he's naturally suited to perceiving people's souls and related information.

Durability
The human bodies created for demonic use can definitely experience pain. However, they seem to be able to take a lot more punishment than a normal human. Demons can walk off pretty nasty beatings, and also seem to ignore extreme temperatures, judging by Michael's ability to stand very close to lava and also wear those suits in fucking Florida without complaint. In Michael’s specific case, while his body is that of an old guy, it does not seem to have come with any age-related downsides. He’s spry as shit.

Strength
While he doesn’t display this particularly often, Michael is occasionally shown casually accomplishing things that humans and lesser demons find impossible, like separating conjoined super-magnets and stuff. It makes sense for a lot of the torture they do, honestly.

Lack of Human Needs
While demons are shown eating and enjoying human food, the show also goes out of its way to tell us that Michael does not need to use the bathroom. He can definitely get drunk, though, and then sober up very quickly. My conclusion is that he can sort of pick and choose whether his body processes things or if it's just goddamn vaporized or whatever he does???

Demons are also shown casually consuming shit like antimatter, physical manifestations of envy, and the concept of time. Basically, Michael can probably eat anything with no ill effects, including things that aren't actually made of matter. He doesn't need to sleep. I’m reasonably sure he does not have blood or internal organs. What’s in there? God knows.

Immortality
Michael is an immortal being from the dawn of time, and the closest he can come to dying is a form of eternal torture that would still not actually end him. If his body were destroyed, or if he left it, he would continue just existing in his natural form.

OBVIOUSLY WE DON’T WANT THAT. I figure there’s two options: a) Michael dies like a goddamn person, or b) the demon part pops out when the body dies, and then the demon part can also be murdered. I’m open to suggestions, bastard’s gotta be capable of dying somehow.

Information Processing
Michael has a perfect memory, and also seems capable of absorbing new information extremely quickly. He claims to be able to read all human literature in a couple of hours; while the scope of this could easily be a boast, he definitely does do things like that on a smaller scale. The flipside of this is that absorbing information doesn't always equate to comprehending it. He could perfectly recite all the philosophy texts he's read, but he still needed Chidi's teaching and a lot of effort to actually parse the words into something meaningful.

He seems to have strong mathematical and spatial reasoning abilities. He also just knows a lot of facts - it just comes with having lived forever and never forgetting anything.

Manipulation (the normal kind)
Michael's very good at lying and manipulating others. He can look anybody in the eye and spin a story without even thinking about it, and he's also good at predicting how people will respond to his actions. He can maintain large webs of lies and even entire fake personas for a long time. More recently, though, this ability has begun to degrade a little as he's gained the ethical awareness to feel bad about that kind of thing.

Doing…Harm?
Okay look the guy’s worked in torture for ages, he knows how to fuck somebody up and is probably extremely well-versed in human anatomy. This is distinct from any kind of fighting ability, because I imagine he has not regularly faced any kind of serious resistance. Demons generally seem to be okay in bar fights and that’s about it.

Miscellaneous
- Can draw pretty well
- Actually can do architecture the human way, with drafting and stuff
- Dances good
- Can bartend because obviously
- Somewhat inexplicably, can play the cello

Active Abilities

Matter Creation
Michael can snap his fingers and just make things? This extends to living creatures as well, though they are not technically considered "alive" and probably operate more according to what Michael wants, or what he thinks that kind of creature ought to do.

This seems OP and honestly the first nerf I thought of was “now he can only make potted cacti” a la that meme.

Manipulation (the memory kind)
Michael can wipe people's memories with a snap of his fingers. It's kinda his thing. He can choose a specific time range, but he can't edit memories; for example, he can erase a certain time period, but not all memories of a certain person while leaving everything surrounding them intact. It's all or nothing. Once erased, these memories are gone. They will not come back on their own, and Michael himself cannot restore them.

Obviously I wouldn't just spring this on people, but I'm onboard with it being nerfed entirely. Alternately it could just cover the past five minutes or something. He’s got Guilt surrounding this that would be interesting to poke at, but the ability doesn’t really need to be present for that to happen.

Astral Projection
This has never happened in canon, but Michael's not trapped in his human body, so in theory he's fully capable of abandoning it to dick around as an intangible horrorterror for a while, and then returning to it later.

I think it would be funny if he kept this, because the only reason he'd probably ever use it is to be a shitty poltergeist, but it's fine if he can't!

Have you tried turning it off and back on?
Michael seems able to just completely knock people out with a snap of his fingers, and then later on he does it again to wake them up? Because fuck them I guess

Inventory:
- A cell phone that exists extradimensionally? Can he keep this? Can he recharge his apparent extradimensional cell phone at the mana pool? The way it works is that he just swipes at the air like it's a screen when he wants something out of it and lo, a holographic screen.

Obviously this wouldn't be able to connect to anything, so I mostly just want it for the files it's got stored. Namely, photos, all of Michael's torture logs and plans, the song lyrics he writes in his spare time, and whatever other Hell stuff he has. Mostly the 2000 animated classic “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer”, which seems to be super popular in hell for reasons I cannot fathom, and which he would absolutely screen for everyone and anyone.
- A keyfob with a frog keychain, which would theoretically open an interdimensional portal to Earth. Presumably broken now.
- A cheap stress ball branded with the Lonely Girl Margarita Mix corporate logo
- The Book of Dougs. It’s a book (that can also show its contents in holographic screen form because that’s the show’s aesthetic) which contains complete point records on every human named Doug throughout all of time. In theory it’s still auto-updating, although I imagine that would stop when it left its home universe. I don’t know what happens if the Book of Dougs goes in the ocean but you know what fuck it

Sample

Thread Sample: Here's Michael trying to be a good friend

Q&A:

What’s more important: the way others see you, or the way you see yourself? Depends who the others are. You can't please everybody all at once, it's impossible. But it's important for some people, I guess...

If you could erase your worst memory, would you do it if it also meant erasing your best memory? No. Don't erase people's memories.

Describe your greatest achievement. I'm working on reforming the afterlife system used to judge humanity, but that's a work in progress...oh! I smuggled some humans out of the Bad Place once! It was very cool.

Do you consider yourself easily swayed by others? No, no. That human thing was a special case.

What’s your opinion on your circle of friends? Oh, my friends are fantastic! They're smart and good and whatever each on their own, but together they form this...ultimate friendship team. Now, Janet, she's - [Thus follows approximately three years of Michael individually describing each of his friends and why they are good.]

Do you think things like art, music, and literature are important? Why or why not? I think they're fun, don't know about important. We don't do things like that much in Hell, and I haven't had much opportunity since. [...] I let the humans pick most of the music in the fake Good Place, that was nice.

Are you proud of where you are now in life? Yeah. Be prouder if I don't crash and burn.