@shadowedvales sent 👤 for one npc relevant to larissa's lore 💜
okay y'all... it's time to start talking about larissa's parents. i will start with her mom, hermione. i do not have a faceclaim for her (just picture someone tall evil and blonde), so please see above for a moodboard instead. (i know ingrid is kind of a deep cut for this one lmfao.) just keep in mind that none of these comparisons are 1:1. hermione is her own fucked up thang.
hermione is a character that, unlike another significant evil figure in one of rissa's timelines (domina), i don't hold a lot of space for in terms of recognizing where she comes from and why she does what she does. i just don't think there's a way to make it reasonable or understandable that both the weems parents rejected larissa so thoroughly and exiled her so profoundly from their emotional and physical lives, such that she was sent to live on the other side of the atlantic as a 13-year-old and never came back.
what i will say about hermione is this: i believe she was repeating a pattern that was enforced on her by her own family, in that she was taught she was an extension and reflection of her parents, and that she had to be perfect, at all times, in order to be baseline acceptable, let alone worthy of love or praise. it's an impossible standard to live up to, but it was the only way she learned how to be a human being: to perform to exacting standards and to beat yourself up for every minute failure until you've internalized the rules of the game so deeply you never make a mistake again.
outside the family environment, hermione is extremely pleasant and likable. she considers herself the queen of her social circle and she's known for always having a witticism on hand. she's an extremely intelligent woman, deeply well-read, loves arts and culture, and i believe she worked for a number of years before she met her husband, edward, although she stopped working the moment they married, such that she has had experience navigating the political world of work. she is also a profound snob with little empathy for others and no interest in expanding her own horizons or interests.
she is a very high-anxiety individual with a number of deep seated fears, and she has always exorcised her anxieties by projecting them onto others and reversing the "order" of things: that is, if she is afraid about how she will be perceived, she will start attacking the nearest person for how they come off as a form of catharsis and a way of expelling her emotions and making the fear and dread somebody else's problem, not hers. her lack of willingness to relate, see alternate viewpoints, or explore new things doesn't come from an inherent lack of a certain quality (i.e. i would not say that she is some kind of narcissist or sociopath), but from an egoistic rejection of anything that could make her seem less than right or less than perfect.
all of this being said, i don't think she was always doomed to be a horrible parent to larissa. she has the emotions necessary to bond with and connect to a child--as she did with amelia years later. but i think her fear of the unknown and her revulsion and horror at having given birth to an infant shapeshifter (as i've discussed, larissa was prone to being... wobbly), in the extreme hormonal and physical crucible that happens after childbirth (which has its intense emotions, hills, and valleys for even mothers who have perfect pregnancies and births with perfect children--let alone what hermione went through), made it so that anxiety, fear, and disgust dominated her early relationship with larissa and she was never able to overcome it completely, if she really tried to do so at all.
if you had larissa and her mom side by side, things would be a bit uncanny because the exact voice that hermione uses while she's being queen bee is the voice larissa uses to chirp at people when she's uncomfortable or in a situation she's trying to control as pleasantly as possible. it is immediately obvious.
