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ranger_i ([personal profile] ranger_i) wrote2010-03-29 03:22 pm

Welcome Back, & All About Pansy

Note: I started writing this Wednesday afternoon, March 24th, and ended up having to finish it later. Wednesday I ended up with a migraine, and Thursday... well, Thursday was a long day. I worked on it some more Friday, got distracted over the weekend, and am now hoping to actually get this done today, the 29th. In case anyone, y'know, actually cares when I wrote this thing.

I have a killer headache coming on, which makes writing this now maybe not the best idea I've ever had, but whatever. I've dusted off this mun journal and have started trying to clean up the profile and update the icons and whatnot, because I'm actually *gasp* going to be trying to use it again.

Why, you ask? Because I'm going to start roleplaying again, if I can remember how. It's been a long time, but I think it'll come back to me. I'm going to be playing [livejournal.com profile] purelypansy in [livejournal.com profile] teamarchangel.

I love Pansy. In a lot of ways she's the most fun and unexpected character of mine to have come out of our old Harry Potter game. I remember taking her on kind of as a lark, after her old player- well, it's water under the bridge now. I told Star that I'd change things up a bit, maybe a lot, that I'd take the character in my own direction. As I recall she said something to the tune of, "Good", or "Fine, whatever, have fun." 'Cause she's cool like that. So I did. I went my own way, I had fun.

It's funny, because sometimes Pansy's the one I feel myself having to reach with the most, because we're pretty different. And then once I settle into her voice, it kind of just flows.

Back in the days of the HP game, I'd have told anybody who asked (not that you needed to, back then) that Penny was my favorite of the characters I played. I'm not sure that's true anymore. I love Penny, will always love writing Penny, but sometimes, sometimes she just makes my teeth hurt. And I don't mean that in a bad way, it's just- I gave Penny a lot of shit to cope with from her childhood, and when the HP game started, she was at a point where she was starting to overcome that stuff. Starting to grow up, figure out who she was, what she wanted. I kind of knew where I wanted her to end up- knew exactly where I wanted her to end up ship-wise. I always wanted her to end up happy, because she deserved it, and because writing that stuff, playing it out with my friends back then, was somehow what I needed. It was soothing. When I needed to chill out, calm down, de-stress, there was Penny, falling in love, making a family with her friends, fighting for the things she believed in, helping save the world.

I still go back to that stuff sometimes, to the old game posts and the fic I wrote back then, but it's- I don't want to say that I'm done with Penny, because I'll probably go back to her at some point, but I think she needs to spend, as she has been, some time on the shelf.

I want to do something new, anyway. And while I've played Pansy before, she was always second string to Penny. After a while, everybody was.

And Pansy is... I'm trying to think of how best to describe her, trying to decide what to write for her character information bio for [livejournal.com profile] teamarchangel and it's difficult. I always feel so self-conscious writing the personality stuff, like it's somehow not going to be good enough. I feel the same way about the backstory sometimes. Of course, I have a complex and someday I might even learn to get over it. Today? Not that day.

So, Pans. She started off, of course, the typical almost one-dimensional cardboard cutout in the Harry Potter books, the snobby Slytherin girl who hangs around/hangs all over Draco Malfoy. Boring. As usual I've taken the canon, what little of it there is, and run with it. I think I'll work on the backstory first, even though personality is listed first in the form, because I really think her personality comes from that, from where she's been. Her past doesn't define her, but it's a part of her.


Pansy is a rich girl. She was born to money, and she's never really been without it. Growing up she and her sister would have had most anything money could buy, but as she got older, she found out that there's a lot money can't buy. The money and the family name were her ticket into high wizarding society, but she's never quite had the sense that she belongs there, the way her sister does. Pansy can play the spoiled princess, she enjoys her designer clothes and her creature comforts, and she can act as if these things are all that matter to her.

She has one sibling, a younger sister, Amaranth. There are times when Pansy and Amaranth are best friends, times when they're rivals, times when Pansy wants to protect her sister and times when she wants to beat some sense into her. None of these things are actually mutually exclusive. Pansy loves her sister, but in a screwed up, Slytherin kind of way.

Pansy has been out of school for years now, but being Slytherin is still a huge part of who and what she is. It's almost a kind of shorthand, a way that links her to those she went to school with, and those who've come before and after them. Her father was a Slytherin, and it doesn't excuse anything he's done. Pansy considers him one of the fuck-ups, almost on the Crabbe and Goyle level of "just not getting it." Overall, Slytherin has always been way more than a school thing. In Pansy's mind she'll always be a Slytherin. Her roots will always be there.

In a lot of ways she was more comfortable at school, more comfortable on her own and away from her parents. They never actually did much to raise her, her mother because she couldn't, her father because that's what he had nannies and house elves for. Pansy's mother, Lorelei was often bed a lot with "nerves" or "staying in the country," which it didn't take Pansy long to realize meant her mother was less than sane. She figures Lorelei was always fragile, and that being married to her father had broken her somehow.

Not that Lorelei was a saint before she got broken. I don't think she expected marriage to Tobias Parkinson to be as bad as it turned out to be, but she was pleased with her pureblood match. And she didn't disagree with him on any major point. She felt there was a particular way children of pureblood families ought to turn out, and whatever had to be done to them to make them turn out that way... She wanted her children to obey her and their father, to toe the line of what good daughters from good families ought to do.

Tobias Parkinson was an ambitious man even before he was a Death Eater. He was always trying to do more than the others, be stronger, be better, to bring himself more to the Dark Lord's attention and favor. Tobias had always been ruthless and cold, but he found his passion in curses and causing pain. I've never had any real desire to dig too deep into the abuse Pansy, Amaranth, and their mother went through, other than to say it was there, it wasn't pretty, and it framed who they all were. He wanted sons and he got daughters, I think that was part of his problem.

When he figured out that two daughters was all he was going to get, Tobias tried to make the best of it. He began treating Pansy as his heir, and this gave her a little protection. But he wanted her to follow in his footsteps, and that, Pansy had problems with. It wasn't that she objected to the use of Dark magic- like every good Slytherin purebred daughter she'd learned the spells at her parents' knees, had soaked up everything she could get at Hogwarts or from her sister- but Pansy didn't want to be a Death Eater. At first it was only because she didn't want to be relegated to the sidelines like Narcissa Malfoy, but the more she thought about it, she didn't want Bellatrix Lestrange as a role model either.

She wanted to go her own way. Whatever that was.

It was never as simple for Pansy as it might have seemed for do-gooder Gryffindor types. "Tell a responsible adult and..." Who was she going to turn her father in to? The Muggle authorities? Or the wizarding ones who he and his friends had paid off before, and would pay off again? Aside from which, the only adult she halfway trusted was Severus Snape, who even a self-centered teenager could figure out, had his own problems.

So she endured, because what else could she do? While her mother stayed broken and her sister went off to Durmstrang, where everyone else's parents were like that, if not worse.

The home life sucked, so Pansy was happy to go away to school. Happy to take her place, to naturally fall in with the kids her parents would have approved of. She used to think of them as the "preordained friends", but the funny part was that she really did like some of them. The Slytherin girls gravitated towards her as a natural leader, and it was a comfortable position for her. Pansy also ran with the Slytherin boys, Draco Malfoy and Blaise Zabini in particular. They pretty much smoke, drank, swore, and screwed their ways through school. Cutting classes, smoking weed, sneaking off to go to clubs.

So for a while she was a selfish, shallow hedonist. It worked. She didn't have to think much about what she was doing or why she was doing it. It was an escape, and Pansy stuck with it for as long as it worked.

Then it stopped working. Pansy started to hear voices coming from the standing stones on the Hogwarts grounds. She thought she was going crazy. Then she started having visions, and the visions started coming true. Over time she's gotten used to the visions, but part of her still feels like they've disrupted her life. Part of her still thinks, "Why me?"


Okay, so I was right. That helped a lot with figuring out who Pansy is, where she comes from. Now onto the character info. Later, when LJ isn't lagging so damned bad.