Meet Mrs. Johanssen (Part 4: The Bare Facts)

Using Mrs. Johanssen in fanfic is difficult and requires a lot of thought. You don’t have very many hooks on which to hang a story involving her, even a weird one. Food is her driving quirk, so much so that in “Café Disaffecto” Jane Lane tells Ms. Li that Mrs. Johanssen has no family because she ate them. I do recall a fanfic in which she turned out to be an alien who ate everyone who came to her door, which was entertaining but pretty much took care of all further stories in that vein.

Aside from food and chocolate, there’s the issue of who and where Mr. Johanssen is, which I believe was the hook used by Thea Zara and Deref in their All My Children series. Does she have children or grandchildren who might be familiar to us? Her medical problems with diabetes and so forth might come into play if she is hospitalized and a student volunteers (for a school project) to visit her and keep her company. She collects snow domes, perhaps something can be done with that. Why doesn’t she remember Daria, Jane, Quinn, or any other girls who come by her house? What does she keep in the basement? What might turn up in her psychiatric sessions with Dr. Millepieds at Quiet Ivy? Speaking of which, she must be well off to be able to afford to seek therapy there. Might she get into another duel of wits and physical might with Mr. DeMartino over something other than food?

Mrs. Johanssen has potential for fanfic, but one has to really work to build the framework on which the tale will hang. Otherwise, she will merely pass in and out of stories in search of chocolate and snow domes, accomplishing little else. So it goes. Ted is next.