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a_sporking_ratAfter Ruthven, Delilah, and Gaspard, these are the biggest players in the Ruthven/Swans/Delilah plotline. And they are at a mostly reasonable length instead of the books I posted for the aforementioned previous three, haha!
CARLISLE
Gaspard's cousin, was also a participant in the rebellion, was one of the rebels who was able to escape to America after said rebellion failed. Lived with Gaspard ever since, and, in our AB roleplays, moved in along with her to the Lir's Estate after Odette inherited it. Beyond this, I don't have a whole lot developed yet on Carlisle Glass. I know that he just basically stays in his room all the time on the top floor, playing piano and almost never coming out. He's rarely seen even by the other Flock members who live there, let alone by anyone outside it.
Beyond this, my notes say that he is dapper, brittle, morbid, devoted to his art because it lets him lose himself and leave his pain and failure behind, and that the piano has become like his best friend; if you damage it he will fucking kill you. He was definitely fucking traumatized by SOMETHING in the rebellion. I don't know what it was. Maybe he used to be a fighter like Gaspard, but the rebellion failing broke him in a way it didn't break Gaspard. He put his ALL into it...and lost it. Or maybe he didn't used to be a fighter. Maybe he never dared put a toe out of line prior to the rebellion. So the first time he did be brave and break the rules, it ended horribly, and that just made him withdraw completely, never daring to give the world a chance to do that to him again. Or maybe it was just that Ruthven hurt his inner beast, pulled and forced it more than had ever been done to him before, literally hurt his soul, because that's what the "beast" of therians is like, a second soul inhabiting their bodies, especially for born therians like swans. Or maybe it's something else. I don't know. I don't think I'll find out till I write him. Or maybe it'll always be a mystery, something for the reader to draw their own conclusions about. Who knows.
Writtenelision also had some ideas about him for me: He doesn't like summer. Because it's hot and he doesn't like the heat outside. (He's very much an English swan.) He keeps a window garden in his room, and quietly adds fresh herbs to the fridge. And he collects swan figurines (He knows more about the Estate then any of the others, and he has a pet budgie named Stardust. Which no one knows about.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Blue_male_budgie.jpg
In roleplay, writtenelision's character Detty quite regularly tries to find him someone to 'get him out of the house a bit'. He quietly loses the phone numbers she gives. He quietly loses the phone numbers she gives him.At the same time he's very fond of her, and is the one who ends up hugging her when she messes up something during practice and has a mini break down. Neither of them talk about that. (Mostly because Detty doesn't like talking about her occasional break downs) And Carlisle is also... quietly very displeased with Detty's sister Odile, because Detty's breakdowns have increased since she moved in....Odile doesn't give a damn of course. (She doesn't actually notice Detty's breakdowns. Except to be annoyed by them.)
Other than that and Gaspard, he doesn't really have much of a relationship with anyone, not even the other swans at the Estate, in roleplay or in my personal writing. Like I said, he just stays shut up in his own room most of the time. Speaking of Gaspard, he damn well hates Celia and will say horrible things about her and that's about the only thing he and Gaspard fight about, especially since he's in such a fragile state that Gaspard wouldn't think it worth upsetting him over anything else BUT GASPARD STILL DEFENDS HIS SISTER DAMMIT!
He and Gaspard look a lot alike. You know how Tilda Swinton and David Bowie are clearly the same person? And Gaspard is Tilda Swinton? Well, Carlisle is David Bowie. Which is kind of too broad, since David Bowie has had a hundred different looks, so more specifically he's David Bowie at whatever age and period this is for him
http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/3646145/David+Bowie+dbowi.jpg
He's physically around Gaspard's age (early forties) though of course chronologically much older, and despite never going out he still dresses well in nice suits and such (I mentioned he was dapper, did I not?) but in a somewhat slovenly, rumpled way, like he got dressed in the dark. Blond hair, and one of his eyes is a normal blue eye, while the other is the solid gray-white of a blind or glaucomic eye. It was injured by a silver weapon during the rebellion, and thus never healed properly. I'm not sure how well, if at all, he can see out of it.
CELIA
Celia is, as mentioned, not only the younger sister of Gaspard Glass but also the one who sold out the swan rebellion that Gaspard led in exchange for Ruthven giving her power and protection among her people, a higher status among them. In her defense, her reasons were not wholly selfish. Yeah, part of it was that she saw room for advancement for herself in the power structure if Ruthven had reason to give it to her, but also really did think that the rebellion would fail anyway, and that this way, if she blew the whistle early on it, only those planning the revolt would be punished, rather than the entire Flock being punished as would have been done otherwise. She wanted to *save* those that hadn't participated in rocking the boat, because that was better than everyone going under for it like she thought would happen otherwise. (And in my original, non-AB stories, there's also the factor that the swanmanes will die if Ruthven is killed, so there's the 'live enslaved or die free' thing and Celia doesn't think it's up to Gaspard and the rebels to decide for everyone else). The fact that she was powerless in 1800s human society because of her gender (though she did have a degree of class-based advantage) and powerless in the supernatural world because Ruthven ruled the wereswans (and everyone sees swans as prey) also contribute as to why she was willing to betray her people to Ruthven in exchange for power from him over other wereswans that she didn't have anywhere else in life.
So, besides her motivations, what's she like, what's she all about?
Well, ever since the whole rebellion thing went down, things have actually sucked for her more than they did before. The other swanmanes hate her, and while they're not allowed by Ruthven to hurt her, they don't speak to her, don't interact with her, won't have anything to do with her. She has gone through over fifty years of the silent treatment from her entire species. And unlike Anita's poor tragic precious mixed-line tiger men, she actually *doesn't* have that many other opportunities or options for other relationships. The only other people in the manor are the vampires and therians employed by Ruthven, and they don't deign to speak to her because she's just 'food' and food that they see as belonging to the boss and thus off-limits at that. And as for going off the manor to visit the little towns on the other sides of the moor and maybe make some friends/lovers with humans, well, she leaves the demesne grounds at her own risk. Ruthven will stop the swanmanes from harming her under his roof, but if they jump her when she's too far away for him or one of his vamps/therians to come help, she's on her own. He might punish them after the fact, not out of any affection for Celia but because they disobeyed him, but that won't help her out. And there are definitely those among the English Flocks that would happily face anything Ruthven can dish out if it means getting back at the woman they see as being the reason they're still under his power in the first place.
So she's pretty much stuck out there on the moor manor if she knows what's good for her. And it's driving her...not nuts, but it is really hard and she really just wants someone to talk to and be with. She's a human being for crying out loud, she needs contact! Okay, not human, but you know what I mean! The most that she gets, though, is Ruthven. Who is not much in the way of conversational guy at all. She'll talk at him for a good while at a time though while he's just going about his business. He'd probably rather she not, but he also doesn't usually give enough of a shit to say anything. If he really wants her to shut up he can always just put a hand over her face. Not just her mouth; her entire face. He has big hands, they're useful for that with people when he wants noise to stop coming out of their heads. They also seem to have fallen into a sexual relationship somewhere down the line, though I wouldn't call them lovers since there's no love, and I wouldn't even call them fuck-buddies because, much to Celia's chagrin, there's really not that much fucking going on either since Ruthven has next to nothing in the sex drive department. Unfortunately for Celia she's got a perfectly average one, though it kinda seems over-average at times because of how FRUSTRATED she is...especially since sex is pretty much the only human (so to speak) contact she's getting anymore. Kind of playing with the Women Are Lustful trope, I guess. A running gag is her trying and failing to get any sexy-times out of him, and complaining about it to others at inopportune times.
She really wants to get a reaction from Ruthven. Not sexual, but as in like...an emotion. Swans are by trolls by nature, after all. So she's taken to trying to troll him. For example, one Christmas she took him out of his coffin during the day, stood him up in the corner, and decorated him. Then she decided Christmas was too predictable so she did it at random for the next few years. The therians who were supposed to guard his coffin during the day let her because they knew she wasn't going to do anything Ruthven gave a shit about...and they were right, he didn't care, just brushed the stuff off when he woke up and went about business as usual, didn't even say a word about it. She knows she can't go as far as, say, blowing up his office, because if she does something that risks serious harm to him and/or his property, he'll just kill her (and still probably have no outward expression about it or particular feelings about it) because clearly she is a liability and he has no reason to keep her around since it's not like any future swans are ever gonna trust her...so yeah, she is continuously trying to set him off with minor things. And failing. But she has yet to even come close to giving up, and it is hilarious.
Growing up as a woman in her era she learned how to "mime the mimes", to deliberately imitate the stereotypes and expectations for her sex in order to get ahead. For a long time, the only way she knew how to get by was to play up all the exact female stereotypes that would people underestimate her the most and use that to her advantage (she especially didn't dare try anything else because she'd seen the social consequences firsthand with how it went for Gaspard as an unladylike "invert"). Now, however, that routine doesn't really do her much good in her situation, so she's turned more to straight-up cleverness. She's gotten more openly snarky and critical since the roles of women started to really change in the last few decades, but she's still gone through so much repression that she's often just suddenly cruel for no reason, and she doesn't even know why, as well as passive-aggressive and deceptive. Clever as fuck too, and knows it. She's begun to resent and blame Gaspard for creating the situation where she 'had' to do what she did; she sees no real point in even getting mad at Ruthven for it though because taking over therians and being terrible, well, that's just what vampires do, that's what EVERYONE does to swans anyway. It's like blaming a virus for making you sick. Sure, it's technically the cause, but it's not going to do any good. Gaspard is someone she can really get bitter at though, namely because she does still love Gaspard and on some level is, more than anything deep deep down, just angry about Gaspard causing the event that tore them apart. She'd definitely want to hurt Gaspard if she could, to get back at her for the pain of losing her. Yeah, it's wonky like that. (Gaspard, for the record, still loves her too and is a lot more conscious of it, and is really defensive about other swanmanes talking smack about her)
She likes crystal glass, Christmas ornaments and all the gold/white around at Christmastime, the color white (it's all she wears), porcelain sculptures, meringue pies and meringue cookies and just plain meringue. She is contemptuous and disgusted by weak, effete men. Because dammit if she had been born a man in this society you can bet she wouldn't have wasted it by being a damn milksop dandy. She wants Ruthven to make her his Therian Servant not because she fears old age and death (though she does have about the same normal fear of those as most people) but because she just feels that he OWES her that much on principle alone.
Looks-wise, she's physically in her early thirties despite being born in the 19th century, and is, conventionally speaking, a very attractive white woman with blue eyes, medium-pale skin, and blonde hair that's cut just above her shoulders. She's got a very nice hourglass figure going on, and dresses exclusively in white. Yeah, I know, Emma Frost ripoff, but she's not the first/only character to have that design. Default outfit is a simple strapless sheath dress and white heels.
With Celia, I wanted to avoid the two biggest cliches that are common to situations/characters like her: The "evil slutty betrayer who did it because she is evil and slutty" and the "poor innocent girl led astray by love of a bad man", one of which has agency but not sympathy, the latter vice versa, and both are pretty 2D. Celia's actions had everything to do with her own opinions, the advancement of both herself and (she thought) saving what of the Flock she could, and fuck-all to do "well, she's a woman, and Ruthven is a man..." hell they didn't even start hooking up (sparsely as they even do) until after the whole thing. I also have really wanted for a while to take a road with a woman who lived in a time where things...really weren't so great for women...and make her not be the "mindlessly proper lady who does everything she should and never has a thought out of line" or the "absurdly ahead of her time rebel who espouses modern acceptable feminist ideals, though never goes beyond them in any potentially controversial way" with a woman who was very aware of the rules for her sex and consciously played by them for her own benefit. Honestly, I personally don't see Celia as evil. She acted out of both self-interest and mistaken heroism, and ended up suffering for it despite getting all the benefits she'd bargained for (power, protection) by losing her sister and, in a way, her entire species. But though she's bitter, snarky, and frustrated in so many ways, she's nowhere near broken, hasn't given up on her life at all.
It leaves her in a place where she really could do anything and go anywhere in terms of her role in my stories, and I look forward to playing with that and being surprised wherever it leads.
MORELLA
Morella, as was mentioned in Ruthven and Delilah's post, is the rotting vampire that was forced by Ruthven to change Delilah, as well as numerous other people, into vampires to be used for his experiments (which were done with the goal of creating a vampire/therian hybrid from someone who started as just a vampire, so that he could then apply the process to himself). Morella herself was the victim of the previous round of experiments, and since she came the closest to a success from that batch, he figured he might have more luck with the next if she turned them and potentially passed on whatever it was that had let her get closer than the others to what he wanted. He used all-rotters specifically because of they can endure more than even other vampires and not die, and the experiments were...unpleasant.
Morella has a bizarre appearance. Her skin is chalk-white, and she is not only bald but completely hairless all over. All of her teeth are sharp, not just her canines, and she has clawed hands as well. This is not due to anything natural; it is a side effect of the experiments. The main effect, which is what marks her as the most successful of his experiments from her batch, is that she can sort of...partial-shift is perhaps not the right word, but she can hideously elongate the front of her face into a wolflike muscle. Her ears also become pointed and sort of halfway to lupine, and her hands and feet become pawlike, a mutated point between human and wolf. However, she is still 100% hairless. The overall look is grotesque, not all the seamless merging of real therians in hybrid form. Besides that, she dresses entirely in black, mostly in ornate and/or period clothing, and is modeled on the bizarrely lovely Anna Varney Cantodea.
Morella is an overly morbid, overly dramatic, utterly hysterical type. To some degree, it's deliberate, especially that last bit. She just loves to swoop around moaning and weeping and wailing and screaming and lamenting, it's great dreadful fun. She's absolutely miserable and loves it. She frequently pretends to be ill despite vampirism making her immune to disease, and sits for up to an hour staring into the fire or out the window at nothing. The reason that, among all those that Ruthven forced her to turn for the next round of experiments, she favored Delilah so much and even gave her her name is because Delilah, being suicidal, was accepting and even grateful when she thought Morella was just going to kill her, rather than freaking out like most people understandably did. Morella, of course, was absolutely infatuated with this attitude and proclaimed that "The others were mere miscarriages, induced by that brute Ruthven. Only you did I truly birth."
Unfortunately, her affection for Delilah and desire to care for her means that she also tries to make Delilah miserable a lot because that's what Morella believes is beautiful. She's pretty much like if a teenager with the mistaken but wholehearted belief that Angst Makes You Deep were taken to an illogical extreme. She was a little bit like that, to only a normal degree, as a human, then becoming a vampire pushed her a little further into that attitude, and then the trauma of the experiments did the rest. Perhaps it's her way of coping with it, to romanticize her own pain and to try to believe it was really something beautiful and made her something beautiful, etc.
Morella's original name as a human was Clara Crofton. She was turned by a rotter named Valdemar, who did it as an act of vengeance. Her family knew what he was and had done him great wrongs both wittingly and unwittingly, and he knew that turning her into something like him would hurt them even more than her mere death would. This is yet another case of me being unable to hold back from literary references (it's passion, not pretentiousness, I assure you)...Clara Crofton is the name of a woman turned by Varney in the Varney the Vampire serialized horror story from the Victorian era in vengeance against her family, while the names Morella and Valdemar are from stories by Edgar Allen Poe. In these stories, Morella is a woman who dies in childbirth but then possesses her daughter only to die a second time, while Valdemar is a man who is put into a hypnotic state upon the moment of his death, and, when taken out of the trance, immediately decays into a "nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putrescence." Fittingly enough, Morella can call grubs and worms and maggots and things like that. If it's slimy, legless, and lives in the ground and/or corpses, basically. She once made the corpse of a little black kid goat dance around for Delilah by controlling the maggots in it. Cool, huh? She had a number of nicknames for Delilah besides Dolly like most people use, including My Little Goat.
I believe she's still under Ruthven's control and on his property, quite possibly kept concealed and out of sight from others. After all, not only is she still of great value to his work, but her existence is also evidence of what he's been up to, and it's quite possible that the Council wouldn't be happy about his little project if they knew about it, let alone that he's gotten this close to his goal. After all, if he succeeds, he could potentially become too powerful for their control...which, come to think of it, is probably why he's doing these experiments anyway, since he's not fond of being beholden to anyone (hence how hard he's worked to escape living in the traditional vampire political setup and answering only to the Council in the first place) Not to mention she'd probably be happy to blow the whistle on him herself if she ever got a shot.
Asa note, I've gotten into a habit of naming Ruthven's staff after various literary characters from supernatural and/or gothic stories, as you can tell from Morella and her maker. He's got three werewolves in his employ named after a trio of baddies from The Mysteries of Udolpho, a werehyena and werewolf that I based on tales by Saki (no, the werewolf is shockingly not Gabriel-Ernest, even I thought that'd be too obvious), and a wereleopard based on The Brazilian Cat by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. None of them are really important though, so they're not listed here, though I'll be happy to elaborate on them if asked (no worries, there's just a sentence or two for most of them, paragraph at most, not novels unto themselves like the major characters!)
ROY
Roy is not my character. Roy is not from my writing. Roy is from roleplay, and I don't recall if it was Cygnusrex or Writtenelision who originally made him up, but he needs to be mentioned.
Roy is a swan. Not a swanmane, but a swan. Not, however, a normal swan. You know how swans are normally mean, nasty, and vicious animals? Roy is EVEN MORE SO THAN OTHER SWANS. And he is big. Really, really big. About as big as a normal swan can get.
Roy lives in Central Park with the rest of NYC's population of ordinary swans, and he is essentially the Flock's guard dog. Whether this is by his own choice or if the swanmanes are controlling him (like how Rafael could control ordinary rats), I forget, but you fuck with the Flock, you fuck with Roy.
You do not want to fuck with Roy.
You really, really don't.
(Secret: He may in fact be the escaped swan from Hot Fuzz. Especially since Stephen Merchant, who is the play by for Sig the Flock Prince, played his owner in that movie.)
CARLISLE
Gaspard's cousin, was also a participant in the rebellion, was one of the rebels who was able to escape to America after said rebellion failed. Lived with Gaspard ever since, and, in our AB roleplays, moved in along with her to the Lir's Estate after Odette inherited it. Beyond this, I don't have a whole lot developed yet on Carlisle Glass. I know that he just basically stays in his room all the time on the top floor, playing piano and almost never coming out. He's rarely seen even by the other Flock members who live there, let alone by anyone outside it.
Beyond this, my notes say that he is dapper, brittle, morbid, devoted to his art because it lets him lose himself and leave his pain and failure behind, and that the piano has become like his best friend; if you damage it he will fucking kill you. He was definitely fucking traumatized by SOMETHING in the rebellion. I don't know what it was. Maybe he used to be a fighter like Gaspard, but the rebellion failing broke him in a way it didn't break Gaspard. He put his ALL into it...and lost it. Or maybe he didn't used to be a fighter. Maybe he never dared put a toe out of line prior to the rebellion. So the first time he did be brave and break the rules, it ended horribly, and that just made him withdraw completely, never daring to give the world a chance to do that to him again. Or maybe it was just that Ruthven hurt his inner beast, pulled and forced it more than had ever been done to him before, literally hurt his soul, because that's what the "beast" of therians is like, a second soul inhabiting their bodies, especially for born therians like swans. Or maybe it's something else. I don't know. I don't think I'll find out till I write him. Or maybe it'll always be a mystery, something for the reader to draw their own conclusions about. Who knows.
Writtenelision also had some ideas about him for me: He doesn't like summer. Because it's hot and he doesn't like the heat outside. (He's very much an English swan.) He keeps a window garden in his room, and quietly adds fresh herbs to the fridge. And he collects swan figurines (He knows more about the Estate then any of the others, and he has a pet budgie named Stardust. Which no one knows about.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Blue_male_budgie.jpg
In roleplay, writtenelision's character Detty quite regularly tries to find him someone to 'get him out of the house a bit'. He quietly loses the phone numbers she gives. He quietly loses the phone numbers she gives him.At the same time he's very fond of her, and is the one who ends up hugging her when she messes up something during practice and has a mini break down. Neither of them talk about that. (Mostly because Detty doesn't like talking about her occasional break downs) And Carlisle is also... quietly very displeased with Detty's sister Odile, because Detty's breakdowns have increased since she moved in....Odile doesn't give a damn of course. (She doesn't actually notice Detty's breakdowns. Except to be annoyed by them.)
Other than that and Gaspard, he doesn't really have much of a relationship with anyone, not even the other swans at the Estate, in roleplay or in my personal writing. Like I said, he just stays shut up in his own room most of the time. Speaking of Gaspard, he damn well hates Celia and will say horrible things about her and that's about the only thing he and Gaspard fight about, especially since he's in such a fragile state that Gaspard wouldn't think it worth upsetting him over anything else BUT GASPARD STILL DEFENDS HIS SISTER DAMMIT!
He and Gaspard look a lot alike. You know how Tilda Swinton and David Bowie are clearly the same person? And Gaspard is Tilda Swinton? Well, Carlisle is David Bowie. Which is kind of too broad, since David Bowie has had a hundred different looks, so more specifically he's David Bowie at whatever age and period this is for him
http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/3646145/David+Bowie+dbowi.jpg
He's physically around Gaspard's age (early forties) though of course chronologically much older, and despite never going out he still dresses well in nice suits and such (I mentioned he was dapper, did I not?) but in a somewhat slovenly, rumpled way, like he got dressed in the dark. Blond hair, and one of his eyes is a normal blue eye, while the other is the solid gray-white of a blind or glaucomic eye. It was injured by a silver weapon during the rebellion, and thus never healed properly. I'm not sure how well, if at all, he can see out of it.
CELIA
Celia is, as mentioned, not only the younger sister of Gaspard Glass but also the one who sold out the swan rebellion that Gaspard led in exchange for Ruthven giving her power and protection among her people, a higher status among them. In her defense, her reasons were not wholly selfish. Yeah, part of it was that she saw room for advancement for herself in the power structure if Ruthven had reason to give it to her, but also really did think that the rebellion would fail anyway, and that this way, if she blew the whistle early on it, only those planning the revolt would be punished, rather than the entire Flock being punished as would have been done otherwise. She wanted to *save* those that hadn't participated in rocking the boat, because that was better than everyone going under for it like she thought would happen otherwise. (And in my original, non-AB stories, there's also the factor that the swanmanes will die if Ruthven is killed, so there's the 'live enslaved or die free' thing and Celia doesn't think it's up to Gaspard and the rebels to decide for everyone else). The fact that she was powerless in 1800s human society because of her gender (though she did have a degree of class-based advantage) and powerless in the supernatural world because Ruthven ruled the wereswans (and everyone sees swans as prey) also contribute as to why she was willing to betray her people to Ruthven in exchange for power from him over other wereswans that she didn't have anywhere else in life.
So, besides her motivations, what's she like, what's she all about?
Well, ever since the whole rebellion thing went down, things have actually sucked for her more than they did before. The other swanmanes hate her, and while they're not allowed by Ruthven to hurt her, they don't speak to her, don't interact with her, won't have anything to do with her. She has gone through over fifty years of the silent treatment from her entire species. And unlike Anita's poor tragic precious mixed-line tiger men, she actually *doesn't* have that many other opportunities or options for other relationships. The only other people in the manor are the vampires and therians employed by Ruthven, and they don't deign to speak to her because she's just 'food' and food that they see as belonging to the boss and thus off-limits at that. And as for going off the manor to visit the little towns on the other sides of the moor and maybe make some friends/lovers with humans, well, she leaves the demesne grounds at her own risk. Ruthven will stop the swanmanes from harming her under his roof, but if they jump her when she's too far away for him or one of his vamps/therians to come help, she's on her own. He might punish them after the fact, not out of any affection for Celia but because they disobeyed him, but that won't help her out. And there are definitely those among the English Flocks that would happily face anything Ruthven can dish out if it means getting back at the woman they see as being the reason they're still under his power in the first place.
So she's pretty much stuck out there on the moor manor if she knows what's good for her. And it's driving her...not nuts, but it is really hard and she really just wants someone to talk to and be with. She's a human being for crying out loud, she needs contact! Okay, not human, but you know what I mean! The most that she gets, though, is Ruthven. Who is not much in the way of conversational guy at all. She'll talk at him for a good while at a time though while he's just going about his business. He'd probably rather she not, but he also doesn't usually give enough of a shit to say anything. If he really wants her to shut up he can always just put a hand over her face. Not just her mouth; her entire face. He has big hands, they're useful for that with people when he wants noise to stop coming out of their heads. They also seem to have fallen into a sexual relationship somewhere down the line, though I wouldn't call them lovers since there's no love, and I wouldn't even call them fuck-buddies because, much to Celia's chagrin, there's really not that much fucking going on either since Ruthven has next to nothing in the sex drive department. Unfortunately for Celia she's got a perfectly average one, though it kinda seems over-average at times because of how FRUSTRATED she is...especially since sex is pretty much the only human (so to speak) contact she's getting anymore. Kind of playing with the Women Are Lustful trope, I guess. A running gag is her trying and failing to get any sexy-times out of him, and complaining about it to others at inopportune times.
She really wants to get a reaction from Ruthven. Not sexual, but as in like...an emotion. Swans are by trolls by nature, after all. So she's taken to trying to troll him. For example, one Christmas she took him out of his coffin during the day, stood him up in the corner, and decorated him. Then she decided Christmas was too predictable so she did it at random for the next few years. The therians who were supposed to guard his coffin during the day let her because they knew she wasn't going to do anything Ruthven gave a shit about...and they were right, he didn't care, just brushed the stuff off when he woke up and went about business as usual, didn't even say a word about it. She knows she can't go as far as, say, blowing up his office, because if she does something that risks serious harm to him and/or his property, he'll just kill her (and still probably have no outward expression about it or particular feelings about it) because clearly she is a liability and he has no reason to keep her around since it's not like any future swans are ever gonna trust her...so yeah, she is continuously trying to set him off with minor things. And failing. But she has yet to even come close to giving up, and it is hilarious.
Growing up as a woman in her era she learned how to "mime the mimes", to deliberately imitate the stereotypes and expectations for her sex in order to get ahead. For a long time, the only way she knew how to get by was to play up all the exact female stereotypes that would people underestimate her the most and use that to her advantage (she especially didn't dare try anything else because she'd seen the social consequences firsthand with how it went for Gaspard as an unladylike "invert"). Now, however, that routine doesn't really do her much good in her situation, so she's turned more to straight-up cleverness. She's gotten more openly snarky and critical since the roles of women started to really change in the last few decades, but she's still gone through so much repression that she's often just suddenly cruel for no reason, and she doesn't even know why, as well as passive-aggressive and deceptive. Clever as fuck too, and knows it. She's begun to resent and blame Gaspard for creating the situation where she 'had' to do what she did; she sees no real point in even getting mad at Ruthven for it though because taking over therians and being terrible, well, that's just what vampires do, that's what EVERYONE does to swans anyway. It's like blaming a virus for making you sick. Sure, it's technically the cause, but it's not going to do any good. Gaspard is someone she can really get bitter at though, namely because she does still love Gaspard and on some level is, more than anything deep deep down, just angry about Gaspard causing the event that tore them apart. She'd definitely want to hurt Gaspard if she could, to get back at her for the pain of losing her. Yeah, it's wonky like that. (Gaspard, for the record, still loves her too and is a lot more conscious of it, and is really defensive about other swanmanes talking smack about her)
She likes crystal glass, Christmas ornaments and all the gold/white around at Christmastime, the color white (it's all she wears), porcelain sculptures, meringue pies and meringue cookies and just plain meringue. She is contemptuous and disgusted by weak, effete men. Because dammit if she had been born a man in this society you can bet she wouldn't have wasted it by being a damn milksop dandy. She wants Ruthven to make her his Therian Servant not because she fears old age and death (though she does have about the same normal fear of those as most people) but because she just feels that he OWES her that much on principle alone.
Looks-wise, she's physically in her early thirties despite being born in the 19th century, and is, conventionally speaking, a very attractive white woman with blue eyes, medium-pale skin, and blonde hair that's cut just above her shoulders. She's got a very nice hourglass figure going on, and dresses exclusively in white. Yeah, I know, Emma Frost ripoff, but she's not the first/only character to have that design. Default outfit is a simple strapless sheath dress and white heels.
With Celia, I wanted to avoid the two biggest cliches that are common to situations/characters like her: The "evil slutty betrayer who did it because she is evil and slutty" and the "poor innocent girl led astray by love of a bad man", one of which has agency but not sympathy, the latter vice versa, and both are pretty 2D. Celia's actions had everything to do with her own opinions, the advancement of both herself and (she thought) saving what of the Flock she could, and fuck-all to do "well, she's a woman, and Ruthven is a man..." hell they didn't even start hooking up (sparsely as they even do) until after the whole thing. I also have really wanted for a while to take a road with a woman who lived in a time where things...really weren't so great for women...and make her not be the "mindlessly proper lady who does everything she should and never has a thought out of line" or the "absurdly ahead of her time rebel who espouses modern acceptable feminist ideals, though never goes beyond them in any potentially controversial way" with a woman who was very aware of the rules for her sex and consciously played by them for her own benefit. Honestly, I personally don't see Celia as evil. She acted out of both self-interest and mistaken heroism, and ended up suffering for it despite getting all the benefits she'd bargained for (power, protection) by losing her sister and, in a way, her entire species. But though she's bitter, snarky, and frustrated in so many ways, she's nowhere near broken, hasn't given up on her life at all.
It leaves her in a place where she really could do anything and go anywhere in terms of her role in my stories, and I look forward to playing with that and being surprised wherever it leads.
MORELLA
Morella, as was mentioned in Ruthven and Delilah's post, is the rotting vampire that was forced by Ruthven to change Delilah, as well as numerous other people, into vampires to be used for his experiments (which were done with the goal of creating a vampire/therian hybrid from someone who started as just a vampire, so that he could then apply the process to himself). Morella herself was the victim of the previous round of experiments, and since she came the closest to a success from that batch, he figured he might have more luck with the next if she turned them and potentially passed on whatever it was that had let her get closer than the others to what he wanted. He used all-rotters specifically because of they can endure more than even other vampires and not die, and the experiments were...unpleasant.
Morella has a bizarre appearance. Her skin is chalk-white, and she is not only bald but completely hairless all over. All of her teeth are sharp, not just her canines, and she has clawed hands as well. This is not due to anything natural; it is a side effect of the experiments. The main effect, which is what marks her as the most successful of his experiments from her batch, is that she can sort of...partial-shift is perhaps not the right word, but she can hideously elongate the front of her face into a wolflike muscle. Her ears also become pointed and sort of halfway to lupine, and her hands and feet become pawlike, a mutated point between human and wolf. However, she is still 100% hairless. The overall look is grotesque, not all the seamless merging of real therians in hybrid form. Besides that, she dresses entirely in black, mostly in ornate and/or period clothing, and is modeled on the bizarrely lovely Anna Varney Cantodea.
Morella is an overly morbid, overly dramatic, utterly hysterical type. To some degree, it's deliberate, especially that last bit. She just loves to swoop around moaning and weeping and wailing and screaming and lamenting, it's great dreadful fun. She's absolutely miserable and loves it. She frequently pretends to be ill despite vampirism making her immune to disease, and sits for up to an hour staring into the fire or out the window at nothing. The reason that, among all those that Ruthven forced her to turn for the next round of experiments, she favored Delilah so much and even gave her her name is because Delilah, being suicidal, was accepting and even grateful when she thought Morella was just going to kill her, rather than freaking out like most people understandably did. Morella, of course, was absolutely infatuated with this attitude and proclaimed that "The others were mere miscarriages, induced by that brute Ruthven. Only you did I truly birth."
Unfortunately, her affection for Delilah and desire to care for her means that she also tries to make Delilah miserable a lot because that's what Morella believes is beautiful. She's pretty much like if a teenager with the mistaken but wholehearted belief that Angst Makes You Deep were taken to an illogical extreme. She was a little bit like that, to only a normal degree, as a human, then becoming a vampire pushed her a little further into that attitude, and then the trauma of the experiments did the rest. Perhaps it's her way of coping with it, to romanticize her own pain and to try to believe it was really something beautiful and made her something beautiful, etc.
Morella's original name as a human was Clara Crofton. She was turned by a rotter named Valdemar, who did it as an act of vengeance. Her family knew what he was and had done him great wrongs both wittingly and unwittingly, and he knew that turning her into something like him would hurt them even more than her mere death would. This is yet another case of me being unable to hold back from literary references (it's passion, not pretentiousness, I assure you)...Clara Crofton is the name of a woman turned by Varney in the Varney the Vampire serialized horror story from the Victorian era in vengeance against her family, while the names Morella and Valdemar are from stories by Edgar Allen Poe. In these stories, Morella is a woman who dies in childbirth but then possesses her daughter only to die a second time, while Valdemar is a man who is put into a hypnotic state upon the moment of his death, and, when taken out of the trance, immediately decays into a "nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putrescence." Fittingly enough, Morella can call grubs and worms and maggots and things like that. If it's slimy, legless, and lives in the ground and/or corpses, basically. She once made the corpse of a little black kid goat dance around for Delilah by controlling the maggots in it. Cool, huh? She had a number of nicknames for Delilah besides Dolly like most people use, including My Little Goat.
I believe she's still under Ruthven's control and on his property, quite possibly kept concealed and out of sight from others. After all, not only is she still of great value to his work, but her existence is also evidence of what he's been up to, and it's quite possible that the Council wouldn't be happy about his little project if they knew about it, let alone that he's gotten this close to his goal. After all, if he succeeds, he could potentially become too powerful for their control...which, come to think of it, is probably why he's doing these experiments anyway, since he's not fond of being beholden to anyone (hence how hard he's worked to escape living in the traditional vampire political setup and answering only to the Council in the first place) Not to mention she'd probably be happy to blow the whistle on him herself if she ever got a shot.
Asa note, I've gotten into a habit of naming Ruthven's staff after various literary characters from supernatural and/or gothic stories, as you can tell from Morella and her maker. He's got three werewolves in his employ named after a trio of baddies from The Mysteries of Udolpho, a werehyena and werewolf that I based on tales by Saki (no, the werewolf is shockingly not Gabriel-Ernest, even I thought that'd be too obvious), and a wereleopard based on The Brazilian Cat by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. None of them are really important though, so they're not listed here, though I'll be happy to elaborate on them if asked (no worries, there's just a sentence or two for most of them, paragraph at most, not novels unto themselves like the major characters!)
ROY
Roy is not my character. Roy is not from my writing. Roy is from roleplay, and I don't recall if it was Cygnusrex or Writtenelision who originally made him up, but he needs to be mentioned.
Roy is a swan. Not a swanmane, but a swan. Not, however, a normal swan. You know how swans are normally mean, nasty, and vicious animals? Roy is EVEN MORE SO THAN OTHER SWANS. And he is big. Really, really big. About as big as a normal swan can get.
Roy lives in Central Park with the rest of NYC's population of ordinary swans, and he is essentially the Flock's guard dog. Whether this is by his own choice or if the swanmanes are controlling him (like how Rafael could control ordinary rats), I forget, but you fuck with the Flock, you fuck with Roy.
You do not want to fuck with Roy.
You really, really don't.
(Secret: He may in fact be the escaped swan from Hot Fuzz. Especially since Stephen Merchant, who is the play by for Sig the Flock Prince, played his owner in that movie.)
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Date: 2013-09-04 05:41 pm (UTC)Basically, here is what happens: people of one time always think they are better than people of a certain previous time, and especially regarding women's place in society. We (way overgeneralizing here) think the 1950s were a heinous time of repression. In the 1950s, they thought the Victorian and Edwardian eras were heinous times of repression. In those eras, they thought the early modern period was a heinous time of repression. (Virginia Woolf's "Shakespeare's Sister" essay is based on an utterly false premise, but it's what she read in a history book.) And so on and so on, back to at least the High Middle Ages. This gets passed down to every era, so every era ends up thinking they were the first to treat women as anything other than chattel, in which women could have power, in which they weren't beaten and raped regularly, in which they were allowed jobs, in which men fell in love with women or cared about their mothers and sisters, etc.
Celia would still work as a character, since there were (and are) families that oppress their female members terribly. She would also work as a not-so-oppressed woman who decided to play the gender game as a way to get power, since plenty of women do that too. Lots of people of her time would fall for it. But lots of people of her time would also see right through her and think she was a manipulative, useless pill.
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Date: 2013-09-04 05:51 pm (UTC)Please do let me know if you find those book titles! Don't sweat it if you don't though, I live near a library =D