some vergessenheit questions: which of your characters would be a slytherin? any scorpios? also can you tell us more about sara's friends (not saul and his family, but the girls) and how they met? they're all so different and I'm interested on how they came to be a unit.
aw yay these kind of questions make me v happy!
Question 1:
There are quite a few Slytherins, actually! Sara’s mother, Petra, is 100% Slytherin, and Aunt Kitty has a lot of it in her, too, though is headstrong and rebellious enough to lean more towards Griffindor; I’m on the fence with Hanna, as well, since she’d probably also be a fairly even mix of the two. Plus, Klaus is a Slytherin, as is Resi, Markus Annacker, and Fritz & Marie Eberstark.
And as to Scorpios, yup: Aunt Kitty is a Scorpio :D
Question 2:
A lot of that will definitely be elaborated on in coming chapters, but I’d be happy to provide some details!
Sara has actually known Resi the longest out of any of her other friends--even Saul! The Annackers have been very close with Petra’s side of the family since the 1890s: Petra and Aunt Kitty practically grew up with Markus and Resi’s mother, Emi. Some context: Resi’s grandparents immigrated from the African Great Lakes to Germany along with a significant number of others to pursue higher education and perform mission work: her grandfather (Hasa --> Hans) met Sara’s grandfather (Kurt) at Cologne University. Kurt eventually convinces H and his wife (Itidal --> Isolde) to move back to Boppard after graduation to help manage the family restaurant. To make a long and complicated story short, Isolde eventually becomes a governess to Kurt’s wife, so both sets of children are basically raised together, despite the obvious racial barriers that existed during early 19th century Germany. (Y’all are going to meet Isolde and Markus very soon: just haven’t gotten to it yet). So yeah, Resi and Sara grew up together. R is about a year younger than Sara, and is taught from home: the local secondary school refuses to admit her, since she’s the bastard child of a technically illegal mixed-race relationship. Sara is quite protective of her, and has gotten into a number of tussles with peers to prove it.
My current faceclaim for Resi is a (younger) Amandla Stenberg: she’s an average height, thin-boned and slender, with collar-length curly dark hair that she often straightens with her mother’s iron and braids in the traditional German way. Though she has an admiration for the art of fashion, she has limited means and a fear of standing out, so she tends to dress in a very reserved, boring way. Personality-wise, I based Resi off a typical profile of a Pisces: adaptable, intuitive, and imaginative, but also sensitive, a bit on the serious side, and insecure. She’s quite clever, though, and has high ambitions to rise above her meager position in life and pursue a career in music. Sings in the church choir with Sara, and plays the violin and piano as well: desperately wishes to play in a professional orchestra one day.
Sara’s only other proper friend aside from the Eberstark kids is Edith, one of the few people in Boppard either patient enough or oblivious enough to put up with the little shit’s moody, confrontational nature for extended periods of time. Edith moves from Düsseldorf in the summer of 1936 after her father secures the position of the local Dienstsleiter (Service Leader: high-ranking party politician) in Boppard. Edith’s father enrolls the chubby, overzealous 8-year-old in a theatre program for local children to help her make new friends before the new school year begins; unfortunately, though she possesses an endless amount of enthusiasm for it all, she is practically tone-deaf, can’t dance worth a damn and struggles to remember her lines and stage directions. Not surprisingly, poor Edith is quickly shunted off as an outsider despite her greatest efforts otherwise. Therefore, she finds herself having to pair often with an equally hyperactive (albeit far more ill-tempered and competitive) young girl that most of their peers simply call “the Shrew” (guess who?). In this sense, though, Edith’s social, somewhat naive nature serves her well, for she is wholly unfazed by Sara’s quirks and decides to befriend the stand-offish little brat without hesitation. They soon grow close despite their strikingly different temperaments, and remain so even as Edith’s popularity skyrockets over the coming years.
Edith has never really had a steady faceclaim as of yet, since her appearance frequently changes from draft to draft. Right now, though, I see Edith in my head as looking a lot like Georgie Henley, though I can’t decide whether she should be blonde or brunette. At this point in the story, I picture her as quite tall (maybe 5′10″), curvy, and plump, with long, glossy hair often styled into chignons and updo’s. She’s enthusiastic about fashion and dresses beautifully, as her wealth affords her a wide selection of choices: frequently gives clothes that she’s outgrown to Sara and Resi, and will even go so far as to get them specially tailored so they can fit the two girls.
When it comes to how Sara’s friends interact as a unit, I actually tried to stray from the norm insofar as the fact that they’re not a traditional “squad” as most friend groups are portrayed in literature and media. Rather, they function in a way thats a bit more realistic, at least in my personal experience when I was their age: rather than being just the four of them, most of them have their own friend groups outside each other.
Saul has a very wide circle of friends outside of Sara, Edith and Resi for a number of reasons. On a technical note, he was actually a class ahead of Sara and Edith until the end of his sixth year of primary school, after which he was held back due to his ongoing failure to preform well academically. Because of this, most of his friends everyday companions were completely different than theirs until he was twelve/thirteen. But he’s also just a very friendly, easygoing guy who gets on well with most people and is only hostile towards those who have messed with Sara or his family. Plus, since he’s the only guy in our little nuclear friend group, he spends a fair amount of time in male-dominated spaces by default, and therefore has an entirely separate set of male friends too: was a member of the local Hitler Youth, but dropped out after graduating to the higher level in order to work, and also played on his secondary school’s soccer team. He did so until late 1942, which was when the coach refused to let Sara try out for the team or any other school sport, with her being a girl and all; Saul quit in solidarity soon after.
Edith's social situation is quite similar to Saul’s: she’s very extraverted and charismatic, and is fairly welcome in just about every social circle of teenagers in Boppard. However, due to the overly-trusting and somewhat-ditzy aspects of her personality, Edith is often taken advantage of and is none-the-wiser to it unless actively told by a more observant individual. While many of Edith’s other companions dislike Sara and Resi for whatever reason, Edith herself refuses to let this get between her relationship with her two closest friends, and is therefore willing to hop from circle to circle in order to both satisfy her need for a wide social horizon as well as keep in line with her surprisingly intense streak of loyalty.
Because Resi is both a rather reserved person as well as a racial “other”, she has a limited access to the local social scene and thus spends a lot of her free time helping her mother and grandmother with the upkeep of the Bellevue hotel or practicing the violin. However, she’s close with several of the younger girls in the church choir that have personalities less at odds with her own than those of Sara, Saul and Edith, and thus isn’t dependent solely on those three for friendly company.
I’d say that Sara is really the only person with just one set friend circle, seeing as she’s also the only difficult and disagreeable individual among them. Plus, the group dynamic is completely different depending on who’s present: though it’s sometimes all four kids together, most of Sara’s interactions with her friends are quite unique depending on who she’s with and her relationship each person individually.
But thanks so much for your interest! This is probably way longer than you wanted, but I just can’t help blabbing about my characters ;-;