#eof characters

[educationoffathers]

« THOUGHTS on the EDUCATION of FATHERS »  characters → vrtanes aslanian

“ For a long time, Vrtanes had held that breath with them, had choked on the grief and guilt of a million souls until he felt as though his own heart had stopped in his chest, and the world was pale and soundless around him. But in time, he had permitted himself to exhale. Permitted himself to let go, and to breathe again. There were ghosts enough among the dead. It did not do to walk as a ghost among the living. ”

[educationoffathers]

« THOUGHTS on the EDUCATION of FATHERS »    characters → theo marlowe

“ There are some individuals who have too strong a craving, a will, and a nostalgia for happiness ever to reach it. They always retain a bitter and passionate aftertaste, and that’s the best they can hope for. ” (x)

[educationoffathers]

Wow... that's A Lot of questions. Would you do Crimson, Butterscotch, Blue, and Slate, for Emory and/or Vrtanes, as applicable?

Thank you so much for your interest in my fellas!

Crimson: Have you ever been in war? If so, describe how it impacted you.

Emory hasn’t seen war firsthand, but it has affected his family. His older brother George was drafted to serve in WWI and was killed at the Battle of Belleau Wood in 1918. It was a devastating loss for the entire family but especially for Emory, who was closer to his brother than to anyone else in his family.

Vrtanes hasn’t served in a war as a soldier, but he has seen and felt its impact keenly. It was the advent of WWI that triggered the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, when more than a million Armenians died after being deported from their homes to distant prisons, driven into the desert on forced death marches, or conscripted into the Ottoman military before being disarmed and executed.

By sheer luck, Vrtanes was spared from that fate, but he lost everyone dear to him and suffered imprisonment and beatings before his eventual escape across the ocean to America.

Butterscotch: Is there candy in the world you live in? If so, do you have a favorite one?

Emory’s favorite is, coincidentally, butterscotch. Vrtanes’s favorite confection is homemade halva, a dense nougat-like paste of walnuts, oil, and sugar and a traditional treat in the Middle-East and Western Asia.

Blue: Are you a creative person? How do you like to be creative? 

Emory is definitely creative in his work as an architect. He sees architecture as more than merely a technical study – for him, it’s a form of art and a platform for self-expression. His buildings always start as abstract sketches where he lets himself freestyle and experiment with creative new approaches.

Vrtanes’s creativity shows itself in his words. He’s a writer of both poetry and prose and an aspiring novelist, with an advanced degree in comparative literature. He loves story-crafting and storytelling and has a talent for improv and making up stories on the spot. He’s also a hobbyist musician who sings and plays the oud.

Slate: If you could erase any memory from your life, would you do it? If so, which memory would you chose?

Emory would erase the memory of seeing his wife’s body in the hospital after she was struck and killed by a car. He had insisted on being allowed to see her, but afterwards he wished that he hadn’t. It’s a memory that haunts him.

Vrtanes wouldn’t erase any of his memories. He certainly has some horrible memories of events that he wishes hadn’t happened, but he would say that the past is a part of who he is, and that to erase any of his memories would be to erase a part of himself.

Send me a shade of color for my OCs to answer.

[educationoffathers]

1 for winsome and 21 for vrtanes?

1. How does your character think of their father? What do they hate and love about him? What influence – literal or imagined – did the father have?

Winsome’s relationship with her father is going to evolve quite a bit over the course of the story, but when we first meet them at the beginning of the story, their relationship is tender and loving but somewhat…awkward.

Winsome loves Emory. She thinks he’s brilliant and good and the best father in the world, and she knows that he loves her tremendously. But she also sees his shortcomings and how much he struggles to take care of her after Theo’s death, which leads Winsome to believe that she needs to be strong for him, even though she’s the child and he’s the parent.

As a result, Winsome holds back a lot of her own feelings about her mother’s death and pretends that she’s doing better than she actually is, for Emory’s sake. She loves her father and wants him to be okay, wants him to be able to do his job and finish the plans for the building he was commissioned to design, and she thinks that she can help by doing her best not to be a burden for him.

There’s nothing Winsome hates about her father, but she sometimes wishes that he would be a little less absent-minded, and a little better at being the parental figure she really needs in her life. Her mother was the one who cooked and cleaned for her and made sure she got to school and spent time making sure she had everything she needed, and she misses that attention, which she doesn’t get from Emory to the same degree.

Emory has always been the fun parent – the one who plays with her and reads her stories and takes her for ice cream, but doesn’t necessarily know how to be a father in the sense of being a role model for his daughter. How that will change, and what kind of influence he’ll eventually have on Winsome as she grows into a young woman, will be explored in the story.

21. What are your character’s manners like? What is their type of hero? Whom do they hate?

Vrtanes’s manners are old world and old school. When he addresses someone unfamiliar, he bows to acknowledge them, or at the very least inclines his head. Everyone is “sir” or “madam” or “friend,” depending on his level of acquaintance. He holds open doors for both women and men, serves everyone else at the table before himself, and never interrupts another person while they’re speaking.

In everything he does, Vrtanes embodies a humble and unassuming air that comes to him naturally, and he’s a stickler for courtesy even in the face of absolute disrespect.

Vrtanes’s heroes are those who strive to do the greatest good and the least harm to their fellow human beings. He admires artists and writers and creators of all kinds for this reason, because surely telling the shared stories of humanity and bringing a smile to someone’s face as an artist or entertainer is the purest form of good one can contribute to society.

One of his personal heroes is Theodore Blythe, the pseudonymous author who was actually Emory’s wife, and whose satiric novels tackled issues such as gender, sexuality, education, social inequality, and religion.

Vrtanes would say that hate is a wrongful and poisonous emotion, one that does more harm to the person feeling it than the object of their hatred. However, he would also admit that he is not perfect – he has known and felt hatred, most significantly toward those in the Ottoman government who orchestrated the Armenian genocide.

For most wrongs that have been committed against him or others, he’s able to find forgiveness in his heart, but for what was perpetrated against his people, Vrtanes has yet to find that forgiveness. He is not sure that he wants to forgive them, or that he should.

Send me character-solidifying asks.

[educationoffathers]

How much will we see of Winsome in the story? Anything you can share about her personality? How she's handling things?

Oh, you’ll see a lot of Winsome! A lot of the story is going to deal with her relationship with Emory and how the two of them navigate their new life after Theo’s death – how they both learn to move on from that loss and heal.

Winsome’s personality is high-energy, intelligent, curious, assertive, and self-sufficient. She tends to be matter-of-fact and can be too clever for her own good, often picking up on subtle cues from the adults around her. She has always been very loved and encouraged, and has a lot of confidence in her personality as a result. Winsome loves the natural world – plants, animals, rocks, insects, you name it – and loves spending time outdoors. Her best friend is her dog Beauregard, who follows her practically everywhere.

Her mother’s absence since her death has been hard on Winsome. She and her mother were exceptionally close and were always together. Her mother was her role model, the person she looked up to and aspired to be like. Her death has left a void in Winsome’s life that she has faced bravely, for her father’s sake. Being as perceptive as she is, it hasn’t escaped Winsome’s notice that Emory is struggling with his grief and his new responsibilities as a single father, and she’s trying to do her best to make things as easy for him as possible.

Unfortunately, that has meant that Winsome has withdrawn into herself. She spends more time in her room, alone, reading or doodling or daydreaming instead of doing her schoolwork. She doesn’t go outside as much as she used to, or play with other children her own age. She’s become quieter and more mature, out of some sense that she has to be the woman of the house now. How she and her father ultimately heal will be a major focus of the story.

[educationoffathers]

« THOUGHTS on the EDUCATION of FATHERS »   characters → winsome marlowe

“ If Emory Marlowe was a man who seemed half a boy, then his daughter was a girl who seemed half a woman. Her eyes, a gay shade of blue that befit her name, nonetheless bespoke a maturity and a keen awareness of the adult world in which she found herself far too early. ”

[educationoffathers]

Brown for vrtanes pls?

Brown: Where do you call home?

In certain ways, it has been the hardest truth for Vrtanes to face -- that both Western Armenia and the Ottoman Empire, the two lands he once called home, have ceased to exist.

The trauma of genocide is something Vrtanes can recognize and name. The trauma of rootlessness, of placelessness, of the gnawing sense of unbelonging -- that is something else, something he can’t as easily label and place in a box.

It would be tempting to say that Vrtanes’s home is his community and culture. To an extent, that’s certainly true. His Armenian neighbors and congregation members have become an adoptive family for him in New York. Their presence and support helps to remind him that he’s not as rootless as he feels, that there are others who share his culture and understand what he went through to reach this new place and new life in America.

But while his cultural identity is important to him, I think it’s more complex than that for Vrtanes. There are parts of his culture that he has never identified with, both as an agnostic and as a man who is attracted to other men, and that can be difficult for his neighbors and friends to understand. There are times when even in a room full of Armenians, he still feels isolated and rootless, still feels that sense of not quite belonging.

The only place Vrtanes has always felt at home is in his books and his writing, in words. All his life, he has found strength and comfort and hope through fictional stories and characters. He believes that language and the stories we tell with language are at the very heart of humanity, that the act of telling and sharing stories defines what it is to be human.

His own native language, Western Armenian, is especially precious to him. As long as stories continue to be told in that language, Western Armenia can never truly disappear.

So, to answer your question, Vrtanes would say that stories are the closest thing to a home he has, and he only home he needs.

Send me a shade of color for my OCs to answer.