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recreancyrpg · 2 years

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WELCOME TO RECREANCY, NICKY!

You have been accepted for the role of ELLIOT VANITY!

The shelter of his family name and his sister's protection allowed Elliot to be brave without ever having to be tested…at least until now. Now that he's in the Order of the Phoenix, where the stakes are so much higher than a scandal at a dinner party or a sneer in the street from one's social superior, will his bravery last? It's easy to scoff at society's norms when no one is paying attention to make you back up your words with actions, and that's the only sort of scoffing that Elliot has engaged in before. The only sort of rebellion. He has the confidence of an untried youth, and a person can go far on that sort of courage—but far enough to win a war?

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OUT OF CHARACTER:

NAME & PRONOUNS: Nicky (she/her)

AGE: 30+

TIMEZONE: EST

ACTIVITY LEVEL: Moderate. Certainly I will more than meet the minimal requirements every week, and most weeks I expect to post multiple responses on most days, although there will be some days when I don’t post at all; I am more available later in the week than I am in the beginning (and regrettably, not available much at all most Saturdays until the evening, but as I understand that is most people’s best rp day I am perfectly willing to jump into events late and play catch-up after).

ANYTHING ELSE: Squicks: death of cats.

CHARACTER DETAILS:

NAME: Elliot Alphard Vanity

AGE: 23

GENDER, PRONOUNS, and SEXUALITY: pronouns: he/him. sexuality: panromantic homosexual. gender: it's complicated.

Elliot has never thought about being anything other than a boy, because as far as he knew growing-up there were only two options and he knew he certainly wasn't a girl. Ergo, there was only one choice left, so he shrugged and went with it. And he's fine with the results, really. Being a wizard isn't hard for him. He's never really leaned-in on what it means to "be" a man, though—and he always quite enjoyed being dressed-up in ruffles and ribbons and mum's old dress robes for his sisters' tea parties and doll balls and garden fashion shows. Had he had better representation of diverse genders, Elliot might not actually be his parents' only son-and-heir—or maybe he would, but with the comforting flourish of cross-dressing and drag and general fluidity to blunt the sharper edges of masculinity when they chafe him. Perhaps that's part of why he's never felt like that role of son-and-heir really fits him. But it's the role he was given, and so he'll fulfill those family obligations…eventually. (He does sort of miss when he was little and his sisters treated him like their own personal living dress-up doll, though. That was the closest he ever came to getting to explore gender presentation outside the binary, and while he was too young at the time to really appreciate and understand the freedom of being himself without being him-self, he did revel in the experience even then. Perhaps he'll have the chance to come more into his own with the Order—or perhaps he's spent so long carving a space for himself out of the box that his parents placed him in when he was born that he no longer knows how to look beyond its confines to find the Elliot he might have been outside it. Or maybe he's fine with the box, and just wants to dress it up a bit more. We'll see. It's definitely something I'd be interested in exploring with him, should the opportunity arise.) As for romance, Elliot has flirted and will doubtless continue to flirt with people regardless of their gender, and he finds both male and female aesthetics attractive, but he appreciates the male form for its carnal attributes more. (In truth, his favorite aesthetic would be one that lies between the classical wixen standards of masculine and feminine, but that's not something he's encountered much of in his life so far.) He enjoys admiring women and flirting with or even dating them, but it's men who make his pulse quicken when the clothing comes off. Which isn't to say he doesn't fall in love with women, because he does; gender has no impact on Elliot's affections. He feels quite positively towards the idea of women in his bed, too. He has no complaints about how much fun it is to take a woman to bed. But while he can, and has, loved women, it's men he mostly lusts for. He considers this perfectly normal, and it was always all to the good in the past because Elliot comes from a school of thought that says it's best for young men to fool-around with other young men, because that way there's less chance of leading them on; less chance of promises—spoken or presumed—that a boy, or more importantly his family, may not want to keep later. Family comes paramount, of course, Elliot was taught that from an early age. That means that regardless of his inclinations or preferences, he knows that someday he will find a proper witch to wed. He knows his duty, even if he's in no rush to rush into it. But with any luck, the witch he falls in love with will be as pragmatic as most pure-blood spouses and will not only allow dalliance but will genuinely enjoy the company of Elliot's other lover(s). Preferably she will have her own extramarital entertainments, too, so that everybody's equally happy whether apart or together. Isn't that the sort of understanding that a proper relationship is built on, after all?

BLOOD STATUS: pure-blood

HOUSE ALUMNI: Gryffindor

ANY CHANGES: none.

CHARACTER BACKGROUND:

PERSONALITY:

On the surface, Elliot seems like nothing more or less than an ordinary bloke, and most people tend to overlook him for that very reason. He's nothing special, nothing significant. He leans into that assumption, happy to pass unremarked and thus unrestrained by society. He knows how to smile at the right jokes, nod to the right people, mouth the right platitudes and pleasantries. And if those empty, obligatory smiles never quite reach his eyes…well, who's going to be looking closely enough at simple, ordinary Elliot Vanity to notice? He's earnest and sincere but not (overly) naive. He understands how the world works; that's exactly why he's always taken care to hold himself a little bit apart from it. Elliot doesn't exactly wear his heart on his sleeve, but he's always preferred omission to outright deception. Better to not be noticed in the first place than to have a spin a lie to cover for yourself, isn't it? Not that he can't lie when he needs to, or has any moral objection to deception for a good cause—not in the least! But when you're a quiet and unpreposing lad with a habit of going overlooked, you have a front row seat to watch all the tenuous stacks of lies built by your more active social peers crinkle and crumble around them when the little details don't quite add up. Elliot thus learned early that it was easier to simply avoid having to spin a lie; then you don't need to worry about keeping it up later. He can be charming when he wants (or needs) to be, of course; he's not a bore. (His parents would never have stood for that.) He's perfectly amiable, perfectly pleasant. But his charm is a quieter, plainer sort than the ostentatious displays put on by most of his peers, so no one really tends to think of him as charming—which means no one tends to suspect they've been charmed by him, either. Elliot is subtle, but he can be sly when he wants to be, too. He's not flashy about that, either, and he doesn't feel the need to boast about his successes when he fools someone, which enables him to keep fooling people later. Ego tends to be most people's undoing, Elliot thinks; that's part of why he's always tried hard not to let himself develop much of one. He hasn't quite succeeded as much as he likes to think. He is, after all, the son of privilege and fortune and elegance, and in a society that puts a great deal of value on the weight of not just bloodline and lineage but the patrilineal descent of a family name, he is the only son. Elliot Vanity was always going to be a sheltered, spoiled boy to a certain extent and maybe a little more than that, even. Having an older sister who paved the way so well—who strove to be so perfect that everyone who looked at him after seeing her would assume that he'd tried and succeeded just the same—helped, but also hindered, because it meant Elliot never had to try even at that. He could simply exist, and be content. With nothing to strive against, he never bothered to learn how to strive for either. Like his sisters, Elliot is a victim of his family's expectations and complacency alike. He wasn't told "don't be smart," like Emma was; it's fine for a son to be smart, as long as he doesn't go so far as to become a swot. (Reading is fine; hiding in his room when there's a party going on in order to read wasn't.) He wasn't told to mind his tongue; he learned that lesson on his own, after seeing what happened to those who didn't. He was told to be charming and pleasant and jovial, told to be someone that people would like to be around. He learned, instead, to be someone unobjectionable—which is much like being liked, only smaller. He never learned to temper his flaws, only to smother them. To suppress rather than improve. The shelter of his family name and his sister's protection allowed Elliot to be brave without ever having to be tested…at least until now. Now that he's in the Order of the Phoenix, where the stakes are so much higher than a scandal at a dinner party or a sneer in the street from one's social superior, will his bravery last? It's easy to scoff at society's norms when no one is paying attention to make you back up your words with actions, and that's the only sort of scoffing that Elliot has engaged in before. The only sort of rebellion. He has the confidence of an untried youth, and a person can go far on that sort of courage—but far enough to win a war? Only time will tell…

BRIEF OVERVIEW OF FAMILY: See more family details here.

Elliot loves his family. That's why he's here, even though he knows he can't tell any of them about his joining the Order of the Phoenix because they would never understand—well, at least he didn't think so. But it turns out that Emma understood better than he would have ever thought; turns out she was here before him. That's his sister: always leading the way for the rest of them, even when her siblings don't always notice or appreciate how hard it has to be. Elliot notices more than Evelyn, though. Well, he's older, he should. Evelyn still has a year left at Hogwarts, she's practically a child. Not that Elliot doesn't dote on his baby sister, because he does—but it's his big sister, the one he's only a year away from in age, that he was always closest to. Eugenia is fine as far as mothers go, Ignatius died so long ago that Elliot remembers him with fond distance, and Evelyn is the baby of the family, the precious younger sibling to be protected and guided. Emma was the other half of Elliot's childhood—at least until Hogwarts pulled them apart for a year, a gap that they somehow never managed to close. A gap that, maybe, now he finally can… Elliot's father died when he was seven. Maybe that was partly why he was so quick to acquiesce to his mother's insistence that there was a right way to be a son-and-heir: he was trying to make-up for the fact that he didn't have a father whose lead he could follow. Trying to make mum proud of him in Ignatius's stead. Maybe that's also why he was so quick to give-up on that plan and decide to wear that expectation as a thin coat to conceal himself behind rather than as an actual identity. Or maybe that was because of Emma: he saw how she embraced the role that their mother laid-out for her, saw how she diminished herself to become "the perfect daughter" and he decided that it was better to hide than shrink. Or maybe Emma sacrificing herself on the altar of those expectations just freed Elliot up enough that he could get away with not following her lead into that void. He was never a hero—heroism is for fools or those with something to prove, and Elliot was never either—but he wasn't a doormat, either. He didn't stick his neck out for other people, but he did have a knack for quietly diverting the attentions of bullies (or of his more boisterous housemates) when they were bothering someone. Not always, of course; sometimes a subtle comment wasn't enough to deflect unwanted interest; sometimes he was more interested in seeing what would happen next than putting a stop to it. But Elliot has never understood the appeal of picking on the underdog—of punching down. Isn't it more funny, more witty, more satisfying to poke the people on the top of the ladder? Yes, that does tend to be him a lot of the time given his position so near the top echelons of pure-blood society, but Elliot's never had any trouble taking a joke. And he certainly believes you shouldn't start something if you can't take it in your turn, so he's especially merciless to those who can't handle themselves when a situation reverses and puts the shoe on the other foot. Maybe that's why he ended-up quietly befriending the very sort of people whom his mum always told him he should look down on. Maybe that's why he wasn't insulated enough by his privilege to fail to see how much of that privilege was built on lies. (Doesn't mean he's necessarily deconstructed all of it, but at least he's caught-on to the artificiality of it all.) Maybe that's why he eventually ended up in the Order of the Phoenix when so many of the wix he'd grown-up with had their eyes turned towards the Dark Lord.

OCCUPATION:

Elliot's occupation is "son and heir" and everything else is just a hobby.That said, he did indeed have a "hobby" of a job for a few years there—insisting to his mother that understanding business would be useful once he inherited the family fortune and was thus responsible for the management thereof; she had to agree with the logic of this point, although she probably didn't expect him to choose a joke shop, of all places, as the means for learning those lessons. Elliot isn't what people think of when they think of a Zonko's employee, either: he's too quiet, too calm. He'd rather curl up in a corner with a book than bounce around the room telling jokes and pulling pranks. But he does like excitement; he just prefers standing well back from the splash-zone and observing from a distance, which made a joke shop—where he sells the products, and thus gets to hear the stories about their use—an ideal diversion for his time. Of course, now that he has a new "hobby" in the form of the Order of the Phoenix, Elliot has decided there's no reason to keep spending time at Zonko's, so he resigns only a week after his induction, much to his mum’s relief—although that relief would be short-lived indeed if she ever found out why he quit.

LIVING SITUATION:

Elliot lives at home in the family estate in Wiltshire. Between the floo and Apparition, it's not too inconvenient—but perhaps once he joins the Order, his sister Emma might invite him to join her in her London flat? After all, they both have to keep the same secrets, so it only makes sense for them to share lodgings outside their parents' gaze—and it's not like they need to keep those secrets from each other, is it?

ORDER OF THE PHOENIX:

Elliot's most obvious use is his very lack of obviousness: as someone who can move among the societal ranks from which many of the Death Eaters are drawn practically unobserved, Elliot is a useful source of information. Of course, other members of the Order are far more enmeshed in said ranks—but Elliot is distinguished from many of them by the fact that (although neither he nor most anyone else knows this) he actually is loyal to the Order, for one, and for another he's so much less noticeable than they are. People are used to seeing Elliot Vanity lurking around the edges of their parties without noticing him; can he sidle in a little closer and see what he can learn without getting spotted and killed? Maybe. Maybe it's worth trying. (Maybe he should snog Lucius Malfoy. The man's a little old for him, but undeniably gorgeous, and Malfoy would certainly be interested—and he certainly knows things, is privy to knowledge, that would help the Order. Elliot could totally flirt with him, or others like him, to get a little closer to information that could help save lives. It's not like it would be a sacrifice. Well, it would be in some cases—the Lestrange brothers, for instance, and not just because one of them dated his sister once; and getting too close to Crabbe’s dead-eyed stare already makes his skin crawl.) But surely he can be more than just another set of ears. For once, he'd like to do more than just observe. He's only just joined the Order of the Phoenix, and he's excited to be here. Excited to be part of something that matters. He just needs to prove—to them and to him, and to Emma—that he belongs, that he's valuable, that he's someone worth noticing instead of overlooking, for once. For once, he wants to be. (While he's a brand new addition to the Order, and thus likely to have to A: be trained and B: prove himself, I think that he'll actually prove to be good in a fight because while it will take him a bit to stop flinching and second-guessing himself in a duel, he's extremely observant and astute at gauging other people, which will help him adapt to and even anticipate his enemy's attacks. Anything that requires an eye for detail is something that Elliot would be helpful with, probably. He might even be useful as an assistant on strategy issues, because while he lacks the experience to necessarily be able to make good proactive suggestions for the Order, said keen-eye is likely to be handy for assessing the strategy of their enemies or targets. An unwillingness to risk others—at least at first—will hold him back there, but Elliot is likely to learn how to see the "bright, clear line" from A to B very quickly and once he grows a thick enough skin to understand that sometimes one has to be ruthless, he'll be able to apply those observations in a helpful way I think.)

RELATIONSHIPS:

His non-Order, pre-Order relationships are surprisingly unchanged by his new allegiance. Elliot has always been the sort of person whose friends take him for granted, assuming he'll be there; assuming he won't object; assuming he'll stay the same. And in large part, they're right and always have been. He's the back-up friend, the one who never gets called first for a gathering but is never unwelcome there, either. For the most part, Elliot likes it that way. Sometimes—sometimes—he wonders wistfully what it would be like to be somebody's first choice, somebody's favorite…but then he thinks about how much effort that would be, and decides he's happy with the way things are, actually. Especially now. Joining the Order would put strain on closer bonds with some of those old friends, but if Elliot Vanity can't make a party—well, the party just goes on without him, and no one will really notice if he's not there. Conversely, if he does show-up, no one is going to question it. No one ever does.

(Obviously all of the following is subject to change upon plotting with players!) Emma Vanity — he always loved his big sister, of course; they were so close in age that when they were small, it was almost more like having a twin than anything else. But then Emma left for Hogwarts and left Elliot behind, and suddenly everything seemed to change. Suddenly Emma had responsibilities that Elliot didn't; suddenly she wasn't just his sister but his older sister, always just a little bit wiser and more experienced. Always just a little bit more. And then…well, it wasn't that she ever became less, of course, but she never quite seemed to be as much of what she'd once been, before. She was still Emma but she was just…well, Emma. Always did what she was supposed to, never caused a fuss, never spoke out of turn, was never ever anything less than perfect. Elliot still loved her, he just didn't think about her much. Took her for granted, assumed she would always be just what she was and no more, no less, ever. Then he came to the Order and found her already here, and it was like someone had blown the blinders away and showed him a whole new sister. Just as he had always allowed the world to overlook him, he had somehow overlooked her. Incredible. He can't wait to get to know her true self now, finally, for the first time since they were small. How wonderful. Nicky Edgecombe — it's probably a good thing they weren't in the same year. Having Nicky in his classes would have been bad for both Elliot's grades and for his reputation of…well…not having a reputation. The problem with Nicky is that she's always been not just enthusiastic, but welcoming—sometimes whether the other party wants to be welcomed or not. Seeing Elliot sitting smirking on the sidelines like that told most of their housemates that he wasn't interesting enough to be worth reaching out to; for Nicky, that just put him in a convenient place from which to be dragged in to things. Elliot rarely protested; part of going with the flow means…well…going with the flow. And Nicky was always fun, if sometimes exhausting and almost always baffling. Elliot knows he can't keep up with her, and honestly doesn't really want to—but he has no objections to running alongside sometimes to catch the show up-closer. He's honestly not even surprised to find her here in the Order of the Phoenix. Where else would someone with such an explosive personality end up? Edgar Bones — for about ten minutes after realizing that his sister definitely has a huge crush on this kid, Elliot is going to be extremely distrustful of Edgar Bones. Then he's going to actually meet him, and probably very quickly decide that no, actually, his big sister has excellent taste in men, in fact, who would have figured? John Dawlish — Elliot doesn't exactly have a crush but…okay, it's a crush. So what? John is forthright and trustworthy and reliable and fair and strong and so so hot. Frankly the surprising thing is that more people don't have a crush on him, Elliot thinks, and he's not ashamed who knows it. He'd rather that John not hear about it from somebody else first, though, so he tries to keep said crush on the down-low for now…but he's not above mooning over the bloke in conversation with people he trusts not to blab, either. Andromeda Tonks — She was the cautionary tale, one that the Vanity family told almost like a fable to scare the children (not so young anymore, when Andromeda left, but there had been other stories before hers along the same theme; hers was simply the most current and the most shocking, because she wasn't just any pure-blood witch she was a Black). Elliot spent his whole youth assuming she must be miserable and lonely and mired in regret, when he bothered to think about her at all—which was more often than it might have been, given how many hushed whispers made reference to her sad fate—but now that he's met her, he realizes those assumptions were utterly wrong. Andromeda is happy. She might not have "everything she ever wanted" (presumably she would have wanted her new family and her old, together; Elliot certainly wouldn't want to give-up his parents or siblings in trade for a lover and child) but she's happy enough. Happier than anyone in the world she left behind would ever admit. Which makes Andromeda just one more piece of proof that so much of what his parents—his whole society—tried to teach him, to base his whole life on, is bullshit. That's in keeping with what Elliot has already observed, yes, but it's also a whole new level of that observation. Because this is Andromeda Black…happy. He's fascinated. And elated for her, of course. But also captivated by her existence, by her reality. By the reality of her. Maybe it's not the most comfortable thing, to be regarded with such unabashed wide-eyed wonder…but it's got to at least be flattering too, right? Right? Ted Tonks — the man who muddied Andromeda Black, who was somehow so enchanting that he lured one of the perfect sisters from the Noble House of Black to be not so toujours in her purity after all. Ted fascinates Elliot in an almost anthropological way: why this wizard, rather than any other? How? Was Tonks the first chink in the family's armor, the first crack that severed first Andromeda and then Sirius from that heretofore impregnable family tree? The scandal of him will live in infamy for generations! And yet, he seems so…normal? Elliot is captivated, but not in the way that Andromeda must have been. He's fascinated by the very ordinariness of Ted Tonks. He's nothing like the man that Elliot pictured before, when he heard the salacious stories and gossip about Andromeda's flight and fall. He's kind and honest and strong and genuine—all qualities that Elliot admires, of course. (And handsome, too. Definitely can't forget that.) But he's also just a man. How did someone so…grounded pull Andromeda Black down from her perch so far above the rest of them? It's incredible. Which makes Ted incredible simply for that feat alone…even if he doesn't look it. Daisy Hookum — He can't say he understands her (how crazy do you have to be to even contemplate the idea of giving up magic voluntarily?) but he understands where she's coming from. Sure, Elliot is quieter—less obsessive—in how he studies things, but he does like to learn and understand new things. People, mainly. That's a large part of why he watches the world the way he does: he's interested. The way Daisy goes through the world, so loud and bubbly and engaged with things, is anathema to him—but he understands why she does it, at least. He admires her for it, even if he shies away from the cacophony of her process; respects her for the urge they share to understand what's alien to them both. Alastor Moody — Elliot definitely. doesn't. have. a. crush. That would be weird! Alastor is so old. He's practically old enough to be Elliot's dad! Well, not quite. (Er, technically…?) But close. Close enough that it would be weird. (Probably.) Anyway, it doesn't matter if Alastor looks kind of a little hot despite being so old, because Elliot does not have a crush. He's just…impressed. By Alastor's competence. And efficiency. And alertness. And leadership. He's a very impressive man, and Elliot recognizes that. That's all. That's all, Emma! James Potter — on one hand, Elliot feels like he owes James (and the other three boys who formed Potter's little cohort) a debt. After all, with them around, it was easy to go overlooked due to always being overshadowed. Whatever Elliot did, whenever he did it, there was always somebody else in Gryffindor Tower doing something bigger, louder, and messier. And they were so good at it, too. They blazed like bonfires, those boys. Especially Potter. Beautiful, irrepressible James Potter. It was hard to look away from the blaze of him, sometimes. On the other hand…Merlin's teeth but they were noisy. Obnoxious, too. And Elliot didn't really fancy the way they tended to flock. Maybe it's because he was always a loner, but he didn't like their habit of outnumbering their prey before they picked a fight. Not that they picked on him much (it often seemed like they picked on everyone a little, because that's what boisterous boys like that were supposed to do, but it was never targeted enough that Elliot thought they were picking on him on purpose) but it was a matter of principle: he didn't like bullies. Not that he ever said much to them in opposition, either, so it's not like he could take a moral stance on the issue. But they made him nervous, those loud, happy, popular, wonderful boys. They seemed to have everything so easy, and to never quite understand how easy it was. Especially James. Especially James. Hearing that Potter was dead…well, it had shaken Elliot a little. Back at Hogwarts James had seemed like the kind of boy who would never die—but on the other hand, if he was going to die, burning out fast and early was fitting. Except he didn't, and now Elliot isn't quite sure what to make of James or his friends. They aren't the two-dimensional caricatures he remembers from Gryffindor Tower; aren't the happy, cheerful, perfectly united, skating-through-life-unscathed icons he always thought they were. They're people, with all the flaws and problems that that entails. Potter and his crew weren't ever Elliot's heroes, by any means, and yet…well, the fact that he didn't worship at their altar doesn't mean he didn't idolize them a little. They might not have been his heroes, but heroes they clearly always were. And now Elliot has met them up close as people, and the illusion is shattered. He supposes he ought to be pleased by that…but mostly, he just feels sad. Wila Travers — he was in the same year as her little sister. They didn't overlap a lot, with Sarai in Hufflepuff and Elliot in Gryffindor, but they shared some classes. And of course they attended the same sorts of social events. So he knew her, and he grieved when she died. Finding out that that didn't happen in the accidental way he had been led to believe…well, that was a shock. Sobering. Finding her sister here, fighting tooth and nail to avenge her…Elliot can understand that. He'd do the same thing for Emma or Evelyn, after all. He's not quite sure exactly how to act around Wila sometimes, because yes he knew her sister but they weren't super close so what's the appropriate way to show that he's sad without seeming ghoulish or exploitative or pretentiously overdone…? Certainly he doesn't dislike Wila! He thinks she's (intimidatingly) clever and (terrifyingly) beautiful. Being around her just feels awkward, because of circumstances that don't really have anything to do with being around her. Regulus Black — the newest addition to the Order before Elliot, yes, but because Regulus was there before him, Elliot will for quite a while at least have no idea that Regulus is such a new addition, nor will he had any reasons to distrust him the way so many others do (not any understanding of why they don't trust Regulus more). Elliot's initial assumption will be that Regulus faked his death years ago to help the Order somehow, and until that's corrected he'll be extremely confused why someone who has given so much to the cause isn't being treated with more respect and acceptance by the rest of their allies. Even after the truth manages to fight its way through Elliot's garbled presumptions and misunderstandings, he'll still lack the innate distrust that so many in the Order feel towards Regulus Black. After all, he's here just his sister is; Regulus is here just like his brother is. Both pure-blood heirs and younger siblings simultaneously, both grew-up closer to the world of their enemies than their allies, both chose to take a stand for right instead of sitting back in the safety of their privilege… Why, they're practically echoes of each other! Why wouldn't he trust—and appreciate—Regulus and his perspective?

OOC EXPLORATION:

SHIPS/ANTI-SHIPS:

Anything with chemistry. Elliot is very open to relationships of both romantic and casual natures, and while he's rather sweet in the expression of his affections he's not overly sappy either. He can definitely approach things in a pragmatic sense, and he's never experienced much in the way of jealousy. Of course, he's never really fallen in love before, either, for all that he's had several dalliances. So I'm really up for taking him wherever the dash (or Karli's sixth-sense) leads!

INTERPERSONAL STRUGGLES:

One of the hardest things for Elliot is going to be the way his optimism grates against the (justifiably) more cynical outlook of many of the Order members who have been here longer. He's only just joined this war, and he's still full of vim and vigor—a feckless youth who thinks he can change the world for the better just by hoping hard enough. Many of the people he's now fighting beside know from experience that it takes a lot more than just hope to rewrite the rules of the world, and no amount of optimism will stop a Killing Curse in its fatal tracks. But Elliot doesn't know that yet, and there's bound to be some strife between him and those who have learned that particular lesson the hard way. He also comes from a life of privilege and comfort and a strata of society that says he's not only safe from this war, but from the perspective of many their enemy is actually fighting for him. That's bound to rub some people the wrong way, especially those who have so much more to lose in this fight than he does. To some, Elliot's easy-going attitude is probably going to come across as indifference or even callousness due to that; to others, he may always be somewhat distrusted because he doesn't actually have a dog in this fight. The fact that he grew-up in a world that flung words like mudblood around as common slang likely won't help him endear himself to anyone, because while he knows it's not a good word, there's no guarantee it won't slip-out sometime when he's not paying attention. Which isn't to say that Elliot himself hasn't protested when others say it, or things like it; he has. But not often. Most of the time he keeps his head down and rolls his eyes where nobody can see him—and that's not exactly using his privilege in a proactive way, is it? Elliot might mean well—and he does. But good intentions only go so far. How far is a good question, especially for someone who has spent most of his life as a deliberate wallflower. He's used to being a bystander on purpose, and now he's in a war. An active, purposeful participant. Sure, it's a secret vigilante group—but while the Order doesn't go around advertising their identities, they certainly aren't standing on any sidelines. Acting instead of watching is going to be an adjustment for Elliot—and for anyone who knew him before this, and very likely might doubt just how much good he's going to do them. And then of course there's the fact that his beloved sister is working for the enemy… What will happen when that comes out? Will people leap to the conclusion that if Emma's a traitor, he must be one too? If he finds out the truth before the Order as a whole does, how will he balance his loyalty to the cause against the weight of his sister's secret? If he doesn't find out early, how will he balance his memories of a sister who would do anything for him and Evelyn against the reality of one who betrayed him? Elliot is an earnest, trusting young man. What happens when the person who matters the most to him shatters that?

WHAT ARE YOU MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO? This is what we do to each other, Karli. This is what we do. It's our lot in life. We were made to suffer.

PLOT DROP IDEAS (OPTIONAL):

I'd love to eventually see something happen that either outs Emma as a spy, or causes her to feel like she has to confess her status as a double agent to her brother…or possibly even something that results in Elliot getting hurt (or even killed?) badly enough that he has to drop out of the fight, leaving Emma to shoulder the burden for both of them. Vanity Sibling Angst for the win!

More specifically, I was thinking it might be fun for the recent disastrous deception of the Death Eaters (nice unintentional alliteration there, wasn't it?) to be the impetus for Elliot's joining the Order. There's a little too much destruction—too much attention—to be brushed under the rug, and it's more than just a single home or business being visited by murder underneath a Dark Mark. This is something that Elliot (along with a great many other magical people) are going to notice. Perhaps he actually comes to the site of one of the incidents and tells whoever he finds there that he wants to help—no, not just in this one moment, but long term, please!—or maybe he somehow figures out the identity of someone who was there at one of them (a blurred photograph in the Daily Prophet that he recognizes from school or some social overlap?) and comes to speak to them individually afterwards, asking to join? I don't have anything specific in mind (other than that I don’t want it to be Emma he finds/recognizes, because I think it will be more fun for both of them if he’s brought to the Order and then they see each other), but this event does seem a good excuse for how he gets in touch with the Order, at least.

ANYTHING ELSE?

#recreancy accepted #elliot vanity app

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