#elle park

[koldunia]

Danae: 7, 9, 10, 13, 15, 17, 25

Emma: 6, 9, 13, 15, 17, 25

Elle: 4, 7, 9, 13, 15, 17, 25

Fully realise there is a lot here, but I regret nothing.

THANK MEW SO MEOWCH!!! and sorry for the loooong delay, the past week's been a bit stressful ^_^'

Danaë: 7) What's one way your OC has changed since you first came up with them? Danaë started out in my noggin as a "mere" tomboy, and ended up a veritable butch of a knight who's been ambivalent (at best) about her own womanhood through play. It's been especially fun to play with gender change and fluidity through her (our) experiments with Vicissitude! 9) Do you have a specific lyric or quote which you associate with your OC? In a high-production television adaptation of my Prague by Night chronicle, Unto Ashes' cover of Don't Fear the Reaper would be playing in the background of her very violent Embrace: Come on, maiden (And she had no fear) And she ran to him (Then they started to fly) They looked backward and they said goodbye (She had become like they are) She had taken his hand (She had become like they are) Come on, maiden (Don't fear the reaper)

10) What's an AU that would be interesting to explore with your OC? Werewolf, specifically Dark Ages (again!) Werewolf, as a Shadow Lord or one of the last pre-Revenant Danislavs! 13) If you met your OC, would the two of you get along? Language barriers aside, Danaë would chide me for (amongst others): taking up too much time in the bathroom/the showers every morning (we're roommates in this hypothetical scenario), being a picky vegan, choking her/our limited shared living space out with too-heady incense and scented candles, and buying too much takeout for dinner... the list goes on for a bit here. Prolly not, tbh! :')

15) Does your OC have a faceclaim? If so, who? Yes! Anya Chalotra, whose likeness was closely captured in this lovely artwork of her by shripscapi.

17) What is the worst thing you have put your OC through story-wise? Danaë just came back from a month-long raid of a koldun rival of her sire's a much more subdued (and internally disturbed and psychologically unstable) woman. She struggled against and ended up breaking the vow she'd previously held up against harming "those (women and children) who cannot defend themselves", itself an implicit tenet of the Road of Chivalry, but was tragically superseded by a more urgent need to fulfill her sire's cruel instructions to the letter; allowing a fellow coterie member (and Paladin) to convince her to follow through with the scorched earth tactics the elder Tzimisce had recommended for this "expedition". She tried not to prolong their suffering, of course, but the acts were wet plaster against the crackling veneers of a hardened, but ever heavy heart. She spent the next year in a self-imposed, semi-eremitical seclusion, in her ghoul Mother Monika's old anchorite cells at their shared monastic haven, as a sort of penance for those crimes.

25) What is your favorite thing about your OC? According to another player in the chronicle: "her pluck and decisiveness", and I kinda have to agree, she's one of the most hot-headed and action-oriented characters I've played so far who's not also concurrently a bimbeauxTM. I love how shounen-manga protagonist coded she feels sometimes to roleplay (of the non-heroic variety, though). -- Emma: 6) How easily could your OC be convinced to do something that goes against their moral compass? Emma is nominally independent like her Autarkis sire Eustace, who hasn't (to her spotty knowledge) taken advantage of their shared blood bond into pressuring her to do anything they'd both deem unspeakable in polite company. That same bond wears at her Humanity, though, which is currently sitting quite prettily at six.. and it shows itself most presently in her haughtily airy and fae-like demeanour around ghoul favourites and kine strangers alike. She's broken their besotted hearts at her sire's word, and tries not to follow up on the consequences -- at again, his recommendation. 9) Do you have a specific lyric or quote which you associate with your OC? The opener of her Roll20 bio comes from a Georg Trakl poem "From Revelation and Defeat" "…and the earth threw out a childlike body, a creature of the moon, that slowly stepped out of the darkness of my shadow, with broken arms…" I strongly associate Emma with The Moon, the 18th major arcana of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, and her many faces and phases come up quite a lot in my character studies and fics both during and outside of in-game RP. 13) If you met your OC, would the two of you get along? I'd be ordering for her at Maccas and telling them that she didn't want pickles. Despite her age, I've got a fair bit more life experience and a better (but not much) handle of my own social anxiety, especially in a big stuffy crowd of delicious humans. I hope I'd be gentle and approachable enough for her to want to reciprocate an attempt at friendship, and not as suffocatingly protective as her sire in my own reactive big sis instincts around girls who are miraculously more distressed than I am in public. 15) Does your OC have a faceclaim? If so, who? No one definitive, she's ethnically Korean, culturally Japanese and grew up in a post-WWII Australia that's still 20 years away from the repealment of the White Australian Policy. Emma is more classically feminine than I am irl, and dresses and comports herself like the classic late-50s/early-60s coquette that modern tumblr girlies spam Lana Del Rey tags with. I've saved a lot of Yuko Kitajima's art in my folder, as well as a few editorial shots of the Chinese actress Ni Ni and pioneering Japanese American ballerina Sono Osato (for her late 50s looks) -- they share that soft, but prominently femme, cultivated Nadeshiko Yamato "look" to them that Emma embodies. 17) What is the worst thing you have put your OC through story-wise? Emma survived a particularly "fiery" Embrace that nearly claimed both hers and her sire's lives. I wrote a bit about it here :> 25) What is your favorite thing about your OC? I love her fashion sense and taste! I dressed her up in a very expensive "dream wardrobe" that I joked to my then-ST that I could only afford to play with in a make-believe game with fanciful (and fancy) vampires xD. Apart from her insane Fortuny collection, Emma is also fond of Madame Grès' designs, and wore a custom Dior dress (with that extravagant New Look silhouette) when she met and subsequently travelled with Talley on her first US visit in the early 60s. -- Elle: 4) When scared, does your OC fight, flee, freeze or fawn?

The girls are always fighting in the Sabbat, and Elle does not give the current company she keeps in the Camarilla a chance to see her in a truly vulnerable-enough state and front anything other than the same effortless bravado that she brings to every party in town. 7) What's one way your OC has changed since you first came up with them? Elle did not want to be a politician, much less a decorated Camarilla toady on the Primogen Council, she just needed an in after getting out of the Sabbat (and getting rid of her old pack on said way out). Her mawla (and ancestor) Talley's tacit encouragement and casual mentions of similar goings-on in NYC and Chicago spurred on her hyper-competitive side, though. 9) Do you have a specific lyric or quote which you associate with your OC? So many! I picked one standout from her playlist that I remember adding after an emotionally charged conversation/confession she had/received from a fellow coterie-member, a newly minted Malkavian who, between bloody crying fits, told her that he "was unable to get close to" her because she reminded him too much of the sire he's been running away from, and all but broke down when she offered to "end her permanently" for "his own benefit". An excerpt from Florence + The Machine's Dream Girl Evil: Watch me shimmer (shimmer) A projection of your mother (mother) But don't come crying (crying) I am nobody's moral center

13) If you met your OC, would the two of you get along? I think we'd have a lovely night out goth clubbing, we both love dancing, dressing up in outlandish outfits and club culture. We'd share a cig in the lounge out back that she'd not even pretend to smoke, and overshare with each other in ways only strangers in such a liminal hour and place could. I don't know if she'd text me back in the morning (or the evening after), though. :) 15) Does your OC have a faceclaim? If so, who? I've cycled amongst a few: Sora Choi, but also Ayami Nakajo and Marie Matiko for her late 90s stylings as a promising Ductus of her pack and an energetic climber of the Sabbat's own darkly cursus honorum.

17) What is the worst thing you have put your OC through story-wise? The first "season" of our Seattle by Night chronicle ended in a high-octane bang (followed by several explosions off camera) for her. She carried her two other coterie members out of a crumbling, flaming Setite temple by her lonesome, and managed to succeed both the strength rolls and Frenzy checks to throw all three of their exhausted asses into the freezing safety of the Puget Sound below. Potence is a favoured Discipline of hers and it certainly showed up in just the right time and place. 25) What is your favorite thing about your OC? Her moral complexity, Elle is one of the darkest of the darkest grey characters I've written and played so far. She's managed, though great adversity and personal sacrifices, to wrangle herself from a Path of Enlightenment to Humanity, and ended the first season of her chronicle at an uncomfortable rating of 4 in the latter. She fought to eliminate a cannibalistic kindred cult in the same tumultuous months as she'd built up a precarious portfolio as the Seattle Slasher, the city's latest (and one of its most gruesome) serial killer. She, like Talley, preferred not to dwell on the past, and was unapologetic about who she was and where she'd come from to her coterie. She's acutely aware of her role as a model Lasombra in the city, and the first to be formally (re)admitted into its folds through a series of rigorous tests of loyalty that ended with the same "sacrifice" that her counterparts in other Camarilla domains around the country were forced to make. Her outlook from then onward very much brings to mind that scene of Marion Cotillard's Edith Piaf performing Non, je ne regrette rien on stage at the end of La Vie En Rose; Elle's betrayed and systematically erased all that she needed to of her past, and she's got nothing but the future (of Clan Lasombra moreso than her own), as uncertain as it seems, to look and strive forward to.

[koldunia]

VtM OC Wardrobe: Eleanor "Elle" Park / Seattle by Night Clan: Lasombra Humanity: 4 Generation: 12th Favourite Discipline: Dom(me)inate

Double tagged by @witchknightblack from a week ago, oopsie :> but thank youuu! My first V5 oc from a long time ago, made mostly to test out the new Lasombra ruleset. Her chronicle is currently on a (in)definite hiatus though.

[koldunia]

Thinking of how much flack Elle would hypothetically catch in the 80s/90s from Asian American activists for being an on the surface Dragon Lady Stereotype

And have her unwisely retort with an indignant "no you don't understand I prey on all genders/races and not just impressionable white men!" lmao...

[koldunia]

Thinking about the different (and similar) ways Celine (my Wraith) and Elle (my ex-Sabbat of a Lasombra) embodied, internalised and processed their own respective murders. Their shared, dogged attachments to the (material) body; Celine's determination in finding and repossessing what's left of it -- lest she falls to the loftier callings of a coldly idealist Oblivion to not only abandon her quest, but scrub the Skinlands of all physical traces of what she once was -- one secreted-away limb and misplaced fetter at a time. Celine is disgusted by what the Route 8 Killer had done to "it"; calling "it" a body, referring to it as her body (and worse, her corpse) still rolls awkwardly off the tongue of her Corpus. She covers herself up in a conservatively-cut dress that would not have appealed to her in life, choking in and wrapping away the leaking, bloodied Deathmarks that marked and bruised her every joint, ignoring the stains they still left on her spectral shroud.

Elle suffered a similarly "rough" treatment at the hands of her sire, clawing and kicking a way out of the Kiss (and her subsequent Embrace) to no avail. She emerged out of that shovelheaders' pit mangled and disoriented and nude (and dubiously sated), to the jeers of her to-be pack and a full-forced slap across the face from her own murderer and sire before she could even gather an inkling of where and how and who she's become. Elle had bought into her "classical" Lasombra upbringing, a privilege that her previously absent sire had deigned to grant her after she's elevated herself into True Sabbathood. Her body, long-healed of its post-Embrace injuries through the vitae mirabilis, was dressed and made-up in a calculated mimicry of heightened kine sex appeal to lure in a steady stream of readily disposable vessels for her own consumption and nourishment. Thinking about Elle's own passions (of the non-wraithly variety) being stirred by the sieges and ritae and feasts, gorging herself on the remnants of her kills but never staying around to study them in a much closer proximity and for longer than her own disgust of them could endure. Celine is an (un)living Abject, she could even have been one of Elle's own victims, as circumstances go. Elle, on the other hand, would never contend with any attempt at self-marginalisation of her cainite (now kindred) condition, she's brute-forced herself onto the Via Humanitas (to the satisfaction of the Seattle Camarilla), a feat that comes part and parcel with a chastising "thou shalt not kill", and moreover, a reminder to never recognise her capacity for and extensive history of murder.

[koldunia]

The more I think about it, the more I'm growing attached to the idea of Elle being stuck with a very dated hairstyle (with a permed fringe and all) for the next 40+ years of her unlife because she had the misfortune of being Embraced as a not-yet-20 club kid on the eve of 1980.

She *does* resort to straightening it every now and then after settling into the Sabbat, then leaving it and relocating to Seattle with a more or less permanent haven under her belt -- to keep up appearances at court as a newly minted Primogen. But when she can't or don't have a reason to bother with it, she *really* doesn't.