#his brothers start complaining about old age and leo is just like ‘shut up <3’< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[turtleblogatlast]

AU starts here!

Previous | Next

Coming face to face with an inevitability you’ve been avoiding for so long is a harrowing thing.

[drbobbimorse]

Any new headcanons for YOUR The West Wing plot bunny? ;) haha

Okay, this is literally 3-4 months late so I’m sorry but here we go:

Headcanons under the cut!

☆ Karen Lorraine Landingham was seven when her older twin brothers died in Vietnam. As a result, her parents became very protective and smothered her a bit but she didn’t begrudge them (once she was old enough to understand it; she resented them so much as a teen in the late 1970s and early 80s). The trade-off of being raised so protectively meant that her dreams of joining the Air Force and following in her USAF Major father’s footsteps had been immediately quashed when she was quite young

☆ Because of Jed’s influence, she speaks four languages. The one she uses frequently around Jed is French because it’s one of the languages he can’t speak. He berates her for it constantly, which she just mockingly responds to in French

☆ WH interns jokingly call her the “Ice Queen” but Secret Service refers to her as “Buckeye” when she travels with the First Family or the President, which isn’t often but is often enough

☆ She married young but, after a series of miscarriages and a stillbirth, her marriage became extremely strained. She and her husband, Ben, divorced two years prior to her mother’s death (so pre-s1) after discovering he was having an affair. They’d been living in New York but, after the divorce, Karen moved to DC and lived with her mother for a bit. After becoming President, Jed offered to have Ben “taken out” but Karen refused claiming, “No thanks. I’d rather he die an agonizing death drawn out over many months, maybe years, with a multitude of unfortunate side effects. If you could get the CDC on it...”

☆ Karen isn’t very politically minded so, whenever someone from the staff starts to ramble at her about whatever situation is going on (lbr, its always gonna be Josh and Sam), she typically either tells them to shut up or that she’s not listening and just walks away (except for Jed and Leo cause, obviously)

☆ Avid baker and chef, she studied in some of the best culinary schools and opened her own restaurant in DC (in s4). She’s the one who makes the cookies in the glass container on her mother’s desk and, even after she died and her restaurant opened, she still baked and managed to deliver a batch for that container every other week

☆ The Bartlett family always eat free at her restaurant, which the WH staff complains about to no end and try to bribe her to get on the ‘eat free’ list. The only time this works is when Zoe is abducted and she closes the restaurant in order to cook for the staff working around the clock

☆ Animal lover, Karen learned how to ride horses on Jed’s family farm and helped teach his daughters. She fosters cats and dogs regularly and adopted a sheltie, Lenny

☆ She and Jed are very close and he’s actually her godfather. Karen was born a few years after he first met her mother and the two stayed in touch after he started at Notre Dame; as Dolores and her husband were only children, she decided Jed, despite his young age, was the best possible person to name godfather to her daughter

☆ Winter is her favorite season so she eagerly awaits the first snowfall all year

☆ When her mother dies, Jed takes care of everything for the funeral for Karen – much to her protest. She ends up taking a month off prior to the opening of her restaurant to clean out her mothers house. Jed, Abby, Charlie and a few others of the WH staff stop by to help her whenever they can until the job is done

☆ Karen didn’t actually speak at her mother’s funeral service. She’s not religious like her mother was (a product of her “heathen years abroad”, according to Dolores) but she’d prepared a reading from the Bible for her. When the time comes, she can’t physically move or even speak from her grief so Charlie steps up to do it for her

☆ Out of everyone on the staff, Karen is probably closest to Charlie. Their friendship is very similar to that of Jed and Dolores’. They snark at each other and reassure one another, giving advice when need be

☆ Karen starts an odd friendship with Will Bailey when she finds out he’s in the Air Force reserves during poker night. She’d only heard about him in passing from Josh and CJ, and even helped orchestrate some pranks on him. But, as a child who grew up with an AF Major father, they find they have more common ground than initially thought

☆ She opts to put her life temporarily on hold (again) to help Jed. Poor Charlie mentioned so many times that Jed hadn’t hired a replacement for her mother, so she took it upon herself to temporarily take up the position. Jed has always been family to her and her mother, and she knows her mother would say he needs a Landingham woman to look after him, keep him on his toes

☆ When she gets (very rarely) wine drunk, all she wants to do it dance and do karaoke. At which point she will drag the nearest person she knows onto the stage to sing whatever she wants with her whether they like it or not

☆ Jed only calls the Butterball hotline on Thanksgiving after Karen tells him that he’s going to get his family and guests sick by not cooking his stuffing separately. He says he can cook it inside the turkey and it’ll be fine. He believes she’s wrong and aims to prove it. She is, of course, right and tells him that’ll teach him to question a professional chef

☆ Around the final season, Karen decides it’s finally time to fulfill her dream of flying and gets her pilots license and sets a goal of breaking the record for microlight aviation. The day she gets her license, she drags Will up with her to help him get over his fear of flying. He proposes when she hits 20,100 feet; she says yes

☆ At their wedding, Jed gives Karen away but the topic of who will be the maid of honor and best man is the subject of much debate and betting around the WH staffers. Ultimately, Karen and Will decide to keep their party small with just one apiece and everyone loses the bet since her “maid” of honor is Charlie while Will’s best “man” is his sister

☆ The fact that she’s a staunch Independent drives everyone in the WH mad to no end. Most of them question her on this and try to argue with her about her position, to get her to switch to the Democrat side, but she never budges. Surprisingly enough, Ainsley is the only one who doesn’t bother her about “switching teams”