would you rather see susan, pansy or millicent?
We would rather see whichever of those three you have the most inspiration for.
I know that sounds like a cop-out answer, but it’s true! All three of those witches have so much potential for this game, and are positioned to offer a lot of fun interactions for our players…which I suppose means it’s time for another…
Susan Bones is someone we’ve talked about before, and you can find more of our ramblings about potential directions to take that character in this tag, but to sum-up: she’d be a great character if you want somebody angry. Somebody’s who’s ready to burn the world and damn the consequences. Somebody who’s solidly on the anti-Voldemort bandwagon, but who isn’t necessarily going to toe whatever line the D.A. and Harry Potter preaching either – not if they don’t go far enough for her. There are other directions you can take her, of course; that’s just the one that seemed most obvious to us. But the core of Susan Bones is: She’s lost a lot. So what’s she going to do about it?
Millicent Bulstrode would be a very interesting choice, and there are a lot of directions you can take her in because we don’t see all that much of her in the books really. She comes from a family that was listed among the Sacred Twenty-Eight back in the 1930s, but she’s a half-blood – because the family as a whole have lost their so-called “pure” status, or is it a more recent and individual thing? We don’t know, and we don’t actually know what Millicent’s feelings are about blood-purity, but we do know that she shared a dormitory with people who cared a lot. People like Pansy, who would have thought themselves better than Millicent because of her blood; would Millicent agree? Or would she rebel against the presumptive norms of Slytherin House? She did join the Inquisitorial Squad under Dolores Umbridge in her fifth year – but that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with blood-supremacy (although most of the other kids we know of who were on the squad were indeed blood-supremacists), she could have just been in it for the power or prestige, or maybe she had family at the Ministry who wanted her to get in good with Umbridge or…
Really we don’t know much about her motivations, although it’s easy to lump her in with people like Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle, since she was usually mentioned in conjunction with them. But even her repeated tussles with Hermione Granger don’t necessarily indicate that she hated Hermione – but maybe she did. We don’t know who Millicent hated, who she liked, what she wanted out of life. All we know is she was a half-blood witch in Slytherin who owned a black cat and who once played enforcer for Dolores Umbridge. Oh, and Harry and his friends certainly disliked her – so it’s not like she’d be welcomed into the D.A. with open arms even if she wanted to join them now. Certainly she had no problem helping Umbridge before, but does that mean she’s eager to help the Carrows? Her head of house is the new headmaster, and maybe that’s inspired some loyalty – or maybe not. Maybe she’s playing a game of personal ambition, or trying to hedge her bets and seek the safety that her blood isn’t quite good enough to guarantee her, or maybe like Severus (and Harry) she just hates her Muggle relations. Maybe she’s sick of being pushed around and happy to be the one doing the pushing now; maybe she hates what’s going on and wants to stop it. The only thing we really know about Millicent is that she’s no push-over…but where has she chosen to throw her weight?
Pansy Parkinson is also an interesting option, because she’s not really like anyone else in the game right now. She is utterly and wholly opposed to Harry Potter and all of his nonsense and filth-blooded friends…but she doesn’t seem to be happy about what’s going on in the world, either. It’s sort of like what happened to Draco, but on a smaller scale: Pansy got what she thought she wanted, and found she didn’t like it one bit. (At least by May she doesn’t; maybe she’s still trying to convince herself everything is fine, at the moment.) Unlike with Draco, it doesn’t seem to change her opinions on blood-supremacy later in life however; she just disliked all the violence and danger that came along with Lord Voldemort’s coup. Does that mean that she spent most of her seventh year blustering and bluffing, “talking the talk” so to speak while only pretending to “walk the walk” but really just trying to keep herself out of anything messy? Did she throw herself into things 100% in hopes of riding the wave through safely? Did she lie to herself that she was happy to be helping the Dark Lord and his minions? Or did she just try to keep her head down and not draw attention?
Personally we don’t think the latter a likely option for a girl like Pansy, who made a point of being so visible and so cruel to people for so long; she was quick to join the Inquisitorial Squad, after all…but the stakes are higher than they were in fifth year. Maybe they’re too high for her. Maybe bullying, belligerent, bigoted Pansy Parkinson has crumbled under the strain…or maybe she refuses to break. Maybe she’s scared, maybe she’s overwhelmed, maybe she feels like she’s drowning – but she’s still Pansy Parkinson, dammit! And that means that nobody gets to see her flinch. There are several different ways you can tilt Pansy but regardless of how you choose to play her, having someone around who isn’t enthusiastically on Voldemort’s side but who is still passionately opposed to Harry Potter and the D.A. (even if it’s mostly just because she’s afraid their antics are endangering her own skin) offers an interesting monkey wrench to future plotlines. The basic question to ask yourself is: Pansy’s world isn’t going the way she planned; what’s she going to do about it?
In Summation: the biggest thing to think about in deciding which character to choose, in our opinion, is what are you going to do with them? Also consider, where do you want your character standing when the chips are down? Do you want to play the angry girl who’s honed her grief into a weapon? The girl who’s never been good enough who’s going to carve herself a place if it kills someone? The girl who’s terrified to discover that her dreams have turned into nightmares?
We’d be excited to see any of them…so who do you want to see?
