For the headcanon meme for your 7kpp MC's! ☾ (sleep), ☆ (happy), and/ or ♦ (quirks/hobbies)
I have two MCs who are incurable night owls: Marguerite and Yaling. For quite different reasons.
☾ - Marguerite (of Corval)
Marguerite is a quintessential party girl. She’s pretty, popular and fashionable, and her weapons are gossip and intrigue. It’s the perfect theater for her to perform in. Of course, parties like that tend to run quite late, all night as often or not. At least, the events all the most fashionable young people at court attend do. The kind of events where people tend to get drunk and indiscreet. A wonderful place to collect information, and weed out the weak and incautious, those who don’t have what it takes to survive at court. Marguerite attends (and throws) parties like these often, sometimes every night for weeks through. As young aristocrats, of course, they’re not usually required to be anywhere the next morning, and certainly none of them work for a living. Her usual breakfast hour is around noon, and even that often amounts to less than eight hours a night. But she’s better informed on goings on in the inner court than almost anyone, short of the Emperor’s actual hired spies. And maybe Zarad.
Yaling also favors the night life, and part of it is because she’s a lively extrovert who’s quite popular with a certain crowd, very much like Marguerite in a way. Except that Yaling’s social circle has always revolved around the university. Sure, they’re mostly young nobility, and they love to drink and party as much as the next person. But they’re also academics and thinkers (at least in their own minds), and rebels (primarily in their own minds). At Marguerite’s parties people eat and drink, dance and gossip and flirt. At Yaling’s parties… well, they do all of that, but they also debate. Philosophy, politics, art… often, arguing just for its own sake, with the kind of philosophical detachment of glib intellectuals who are not affected by the policies they suggest.
A debate between smug, arrogant young scholars, each of them adamant to prove that they are right and everyone else is wrong, is bound to run into the wee hours of the morning. Especially when social status very often depends, not so much on the quality of your arguments, but on maintaining the appearance of being right. This is fine by Yaling. There’s no love lost between her and daylight. Did I mention she has albinism? I think I only mentioned it in fanfic, never in any of my meta posts. But yeah, it runs in her mother’s family, and as much as she prefers to conceal it, it does still affect her physically. And an aversion to sunlight is part of that.
A happy headcanon? Or a headcanon about happiness? Because I could get real meta up in here about some of my kids…
Fine, fine. Here’s some of the best parts of Yaling’s backstory, since I was just writing about her. I thought I had posted about it before, but I guess I haven’t.
Yaling’s parents are divorced. Yes, this is a happy headcanon. They made each other miserable, although they both loved her very much. After about a decade of trying to make it work, her mother decided that she wanted to live openly as a lesbian. Her father was first stunned and, yes, angry, but he came around when he realized that the divorce would allow them both to pursue a life that let them each be happy. They still co-parent and they’re event sort of friends, even though they run in wildly different social circles. Divorce is rare in their world, and amicable divorce almost unheard of. Sometimes people gossip about her family situation, or look at her with pity, but Yaling has always felt that they set her a good example for pursuing what she wants with zeal and energy.
So they really have no one to blame but themselves, when they find out that she’s run off to marry a pirate prince.
I couldn’t pick just one.
Periwinkle likes long walks and is an amateur botanist. She even does pressed flower art, sometimes, although she’s self-conscious about it and doesn’t like to show it to people, because she feels it’s imperfect.
I actually write a great deal about Verity’s hobbies in D&F: I have her drawing and sketching, she does a lot of reading, she plays the harp, and she mentions doing poetry recitations (and also that she hated it). And Onvu, of course.
Most of them play Onvu, to some extent or another. Marguerite is a notable exception. Jack inherited an heirloom Onvu set from her paternal grandfather. Allegra plays using a set that her husband, Quentin left her. Periwinkle never had a set of her own, but that’s because her family owns several sets, scattered around the family home, and no one has ever claimed ownership of any particular set. Christabel has a set that her father, Gabriel carved out of driftwood and hand-painted, as a gift for her sixteenth birthday. Claude bought and paid for his own board and pieces as a point of pride. Yaling has received several as gifts, over the years, but most of them were from would-be suitors, so she sent them back.
