Poppy Fontaine

[Pippi]

Name: Poppy Annabelle Fontaine
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Grade: Senior
School: John Endecott Memorial Academy
Hobbies and Interests: Video games, writing fiction, watching soccer, cooking, esports, games design, working out, looking after her pets, cross stitching

Appearance: Poppy is someone who’s very easy to pick out in a crowd. She stands at roughly 6’2”, allowing her to tower over many of her classmates, and weighs around 224lbs, a combination of her height, muscle from working out, and fat located in her stomach, hips, and thighs. She’s broad shouldered and has a strong, muscular back, something she’s particularly proud of. She also has decently toned arms and legs and a bust that’s smaller than average, the latter of which she attempts to boost with padded bras. Poppy is Caucasian, with pale skin that to her displeasure refuses to tan, no matter the circumstances.

Poppy has mixed opinions about her voice. She still retains her English accent, which she likes, as it allows her to stand out a little more, and she also enjoys playing it up, speaking in a stereotypical Cockney accent for comedic effect every now and then. However, it’s also much deeper than she’d like it to be, which often makes her self-conscious about speaking in front of strangers.

There are a couple of Poppy’s facial features that she’s also always felt self-conscious about. She has quite full lips, with heavy lower lips, and her small, round nose has a mole on the right-hand side; both of which have actually been complimented on by Poppy’s friends and previous partners, but which she still can’t help but feel uncertain about. As for the rest of her features, Poppy has wide, grey eyes, a pair of thick, dark brown eyebrows, and a small smattering of freckles on the bridge of her nose, which become more prominent when it’s sunny. She also recently pierced both of her ears, and wears stud earrings most days, often of a design related to one of her interests.

Poppy has been growing her hair out for the past few years, visiting the hairdressers every now and then to keep it tidied and maintained nicely, and so it now reaches down to her waist. It is a dirty blonde colour, that gets lighter in sunny weather, and is quite curly and wavy, particularly towards the tips. She occasionally ties it up into a loose ponytail, but more often than not just lets it flow naturally. She keeps her fringe parted to the right-hand side, brushing and sweeping it to the left just above her eye; depending on the weather, and how much effort she wants to put into altering it, it occasionally covers much of her left eye.

Poppy has a fairly simple style of dress, not going for anything particularly extravagant; most of her clothes are relatively inexpensive. She’ll commonly be found wearing a t-shirt and hoody, along with a skirt and either tights or knee socks depending on the weather. In warmer months she can be seen wearing tank tops and shorts, and in colder months, sweaters and jeans, along with a beanie and fingerless gloves if she’s going outside. She has a particular fondness for Converse shoes, along with hair accessories like bows and ribbons, and has recently started wearing other accessories like chokers and bracelets. She is very near-sighted, requiring a pair of black rectangular glasses in order to do almost anything.

On the day the students of John Endecott were abducted, Poppy was wearing a lavender t-shirt; the words ‘Dogs Hate Grapes’ along with a picture of a bunch of grapes crossed out were printed in white on the shirt. She also wore an unzipped, olive-green hoody with a white zipper and hood strings, which she had embroidered a pattern of brown paw prints onto, across the back and onto her right shoulder. In terms of her lower half, Poppy wore a sapphire blue skater skirt, stopping just above her knees, a pair of black knee socks, and a pair of light blue Converse. She also wore her glasses, and a number of accessories; a lavender bow pinned to the right-hand side of her hair, a pair of stud earrings in the design of the Cloud9 esports team logo, a black choker with a metal heart in the centre, and a woven bracelet with an amethyst in the centre on her right wrist.

Biography: Poppy was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, to Jill and Ewan Fontaine, a teaching assistant and an internal communications manager respectively. She has a younger brother, Brian, who is two years her junior, a pet cat named Ginny, and, after much pleading and hinting, a recently acquired pomeranian, who Poppy named Missile. Poppy’s immediate family are the only members of the Fontaines to live in the USA; her extended family still remains in Stratford and the surrounding area.

Poppy was assigned male at birth, and was educated at a Church of England primary school; due to this, she spent a lot of her life raised male and unaware of many topics surrounding gender and sexuality. Despite this, she regards her childhood fondly, and had a normal, happy upbringing. She was cheerful and easy to get along with, and was well-liked by both her classmates and her teachers, who considered her an excellent student.

Poppy was particularly outdoorsy when she was young, spending her break times at school outside, and playing or reading in the garden whenever the weather was good. The majority of her friends at primary school played soccer, either at lunch, at the weekend in the park, or for the local Under-11s team, and Poppy was eager to join in too, both to spend more time with her friends and to see what was the main draw of the sport. She proved to be fast and powerful, but less than graceful, and she struggled with the ball at her feet, and so didn’t enjoy playing football at first. Due to her height and solid build, however, she naturally gravitated towards defence or in goal, both of which she enjoyed a lot more. A few of her friends who played for the Under-11s team asked her if she wanted to join as well, which she happily did, and she found a position in the team as their first choice right-back, thanks to her strength and willingness to get stuck into tackles.

When Poppy was eight, the family adopted Ginny; a friend of the Fontaines had recently acquired a litter of kittens from their own pet cat, and had been looking to give them away to loving homes. Jill and Ewan had both grown up with pets and had both been looking to get one for a while, and were both eager to take this opportunity when it presented itself. Although Brian was mostly ambivalent about the new family pet, Poppy was enraptured and fascinated by Ginny. She spent several hours with her in the dining room on the first day, playing with her and giving her attention, and Jill eventually found the two of them asleep on the sofa together. Poppy quickly took it upon herself to feed Ginny daily, a task she maintains to this day, and would sometimes come home from school with handcrafted toys for her, such as corks on pieces of string.

Because of Poppy’s friendly and outgoing nature, she would frequently be invited to her friends’ houses after school. She would often spend this time playing football or made-up war games in the garden, but a number of her friends owned games consoles, something that she herself lacked. She was almost immediately hooked, fascinated by the experience of playing video games and intrigued by the huge range of games and genres available. She would spend hours with her friends playing co-op games like Lego Star Wars and Call of Duty, or even happily watching them progress through single-player games like Ratchet and Clank. Poppy began to save up money, from doing chores around the house and collecting money she received as gifts, and when she was nine, she had enough to purchase her own Nintendo DS. The following year, her parents bought her a Nintendo Wii for her birthday, something she had been asking about for the past two years, which she was ecstatic by; she still uses it frequently to this day, keeping it free of dust and damage in her room.

The transition from primary school to secondary school proved difficult for Poppy. Despite her friendly, outgoing nature, she was also very shy and nervous when presented with new and unfamiliar situations. She spent the first couple of weeks at her new school withdrawn and quiet; this, in combination with her gentle nature unfortunately led to her being the target of some bullying, her love of animals and the colours pink and purple being the main sources that led to her being picked on. Her bullies also found that she was very emotional, and that pushing her buttons could very easily make her angry or cause her to start crying. In addition to the bullying situation, Poppy had to deal with being a gifted and talented student now placed among a sea of similarly labelled classmates. She was no longer regarded as an excellent student, only an average one, and subjects that she had excelled at now seemed much more difficult, and like she was slipping further and further behind her peers.

Poppy retreated into her video gaming interest because of this; she remained a member of the local football team, but she spent much less time outdoors or hanging out with other people. She instead spent most of her free time playing Pokemon, Castlevania or Metroid Prime, even when the weather was nice out. Her parents noticed this, but weren’t overly concerned; they assumed that she was adjusting to life at a new school, as Poppy did not mention the bullying to them as she didn’t want them to worry, and figured that she just needed time and space in order to do so. They did, however, purchase a laptop for her, in order to help her out with her schoolwork.

This did go some way towards helping Poppy with her studying, and prevented her from feeling like she was being swamped with the new material she was expected to learn, and her mood started to take an upswing. More notably, however, she also discovered the vast array of content online for the video games she loved, something that shocked her, as her experience of the internet had been very limited prior to this. She spent hours on websites like serebii.net, and watching videos on YouTube of Let’s Plays and boss fights from games she hadn’t played but was interested in. She plucked up the courage to join websites and forums in order to talk about her favourite games; from there, she learned about video game emulation, which allowed her to play a number of titles she was interested in, which included the Fire Emblem series, which remains her favourite series to this day.

Poppy was also inspired by the number of fanworks she found online; she was particularly enraptured by one creator’s series of Pokemon fanfiction and fanart, a collection so huge that it was hosted on its own website. She began to write her own fanfiction set in the Pokemon universe, loosely based on the plot of Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen. Even at the time, she was fully aware it wasn’t a masterpiece; there were multiple other pieces of fanfiction that did the exact same thing, and it featured a self-insert protagonist with the ability to talk to Pokemon. However, she was fully aware that she was never planning on showing it to anybody else, and that she could be as self-indulgent as she liked with it, and she very quickly had Word documents and notebooks absolutely filled with stories and character ideas and made-up video games based in the universe she had created. To this day, even now that her writing skills have vastly improved, Poppy still has all of her original Pokemon fanworks saved, and she occasionally reads back over them with a mixture of embarrassment and pride.

After a few more months, Poppy was almost entirely back to her usual self. Although her shy nature had persisted, and she continued to struggle to talk to other people, whenever her classmates approached her, or worked with her for class projects, she always responded warmly and enthusiastically, something that was often reciprocated, and that frequently led to her discovering they shared similar interests and hobbies. Although the majority of the football team had no interest in writing or video games, they were also perfectly friendly and supportive of Poppy due to the effort and hard work she put into every game and training session. Poppy became fiercely loyal and protective of her friends, standing up for them if anyone tried to antagonise them, and she was always eager to hang out or buy them lunch or do favours for them.

Unfortunately, just as Poppy had regained a sense of normalcy in her life, there was further upheaval shortly after she turned 13. Ewan had been offered a new role at his company, one that came with a much higher salary than his prior position but with the caveat that he’d need to move to the company’s US branch in Salem. After some deliberation, the family agreed that it would be the best choice to accept the new position; the Fontaines had never been well-off, and the increase in salary would allow them to live in much greater security and comfort than before.

Poppy was very apprehensive about the move; while she was excited about the prospect of living in a new country, and how it might differ from her life in England, she was equally nervous about it for the exact same reasons, and upset at the fact that she would likely never see the majority of her friends from Stratford ever again. Although it wasn’t to as great an extent as when she first moved up to secondary school, she found herself retreating into her shell again for her first few weeks in Salem, staying quiet and out of the way at school, trying not to draw attention to herself.

Once again, she spent the majority of her free time during these weeks either online or playing video games. She had downloaded League of Legends shortly before the move, and spent several hours every evening playing it; she found it easy to focus on and divert all her attention into, and it had the added benefit of letting her keep in touch and interact with several of her previous classmates. The in-game client would frequently provide notifications about professional League of Legends matches that were currently being played, and although Poppy ignored these at first, they gradually piqued her interest, and one night, she clicked the link to take her to the YouTube stream for an LCS match between Cloud9 and Counter Logic Gaming.

She was fascinated by what she saw; both the production value and entertainment value were much higher than she had been expecting, thanks to the live audience and the energy and enthusiasm of the analysts and commentators. She was also intrigued by just how greatly professional play differed from games with her friends, from tactics and movement around the map to the characters being played. She ended up watching all the remaining games from the livestream, then spent several hours watching old games from earlier in the season, staying up until the early hours of the morning to do so. She has religiously kept up to speed with professional League of Legends ever since, watching as many games live as she can and catching up with the VoDs and highlight reels of games she’s missed. She keeps up to date with transfer news and all the latest signings from across the globe, and even pays attention to the minor and regional leagues in Europe and Latin America. Although she hasn’t managed to go to an event in person yet, Poppy is hoping to do so in 2022, when the World Championships are held in the United States.

The Fontaines’ first few weeks in America were hectic for the whole family, with them all adjusting to life in a new country, getting everything unpacked and set up, and Jill looking for a new job in the area. Generally Jill cooked dinner for the family each night, but as she was unsure of how much time she’d be able to spare in the evenings, and not wanting her children to eat takeout every night, she taught Poppy and Brian a few simple recipes for them to make. Poppy, always eager to learn new things, immediately took a shine to cooking; she found it very relaxing, being able to focus solely on what she was chopping up or frying, and she also found it very satisfying to be able to eat something that she herself had made. She continued to cook for herself, even after the Fontaines’ living conditions had settled down again, making the same recipe multiple times per week so that she could refine and develop it to her tastes with different seasoning and ingredients. Her favourite types of food to make are Indian and Central Asian cuisine, particularly curries, but she’s always been tentative about actually sharing what she makes with other people, as she doesn’t excel at the presentation side of things, and she’s nervous that her own taste in food will differ greatly from her friends and family.

It took a much shorter amount of time for Poppy to readjust herself and feel more like her usual self, the second time around. She had grown in confidence in the previous three years, and was more self-assured and open with her hobbies and interests. While she was still shy around new people, she was even more receptive to those who attempted to start conversations with her, and would happily and proudly talk about the things she enjoyed when prompted. She joined a number of clubs at school, including the Gaming and Cooking clubs; she was tempted to try out for the soccer team, but she figured that there would already be an established hierarchy within the team that would be difficult to break into. It didn’t take long for her to gain a tight knit close circle of friends, and she also grew to be on good terms with most of her other classmates due to her friendly disposition.

However, at the same time, Poppy was going through some serious inner turmoil. Thanks to her time spent online, and studying at a much more diverse school than her previous Church of England schools, she was gaining a much greater understanding of sexuality and gender than before. She had felt like something was off for years - many of her daydreams had revolved around her being a girl, and she often found herself hoping that she’d wake up as a girl one morning - but she’d never been truly able to understand what it was, or why she was feeling this way. It took Poppy a while to truly accept the possibility she might be transgender, as it was such a big thing to come to terms with, and it took over a year for her to work up the courage to tell her parents. Jill and Ewan were both taken aback, as both were rather clueless about the LGBT community, and asked Poppy if she was certain, and that it wasn’t just a phase. This caused her to break down completely and burst into floods of tears, trying to explain to them that this explanation was the only thing that made sense to her, that she had been feeling this way for years without properly understanding it, and that her gender dysphoria had only been building up without any way to combat it.

This reaction was enough to convince Jill and Ewan to seek out professional help for Poppy, and over the course of several therapy sessions spanning several months, they diagnosed her with gender dysphoria. Poppy was eager to start transitioning to female, and although her parents still had only a limited understanding of what she was going through, they could tell how important transitioning was to her, assisting her in starting hormone blockers and, later, HRT. She changed her name from her birth name, Adam, although it took a while for her to decide on her preferred name; she bounced between a few different ones for a couple of months, before she eventually settled on Poppy, naming herself after the League of Legends character. She is still in the process of having her name legally changed, but she hopes to have this completed before the end of this year.

Poppy came out as transgender publicy, to her classmates and friends, when she was 16. Although a number of them were surprised or shocked by this revelation, the majority of her closest friends were incredibly supportive of her, sticking with her and quickly adapting to her new name and pronouns, and defending her from any potential bullies and bigots at school. She is incredibly grateful for these friends, her loyalty towards them growing even stronger than before, and she supports them through thick and thin, hanging out with them at any given opportunity. However, there were also a good amount of people she was friendly or acquaintances with who dropped off of her radar after she came out, and a couple of classmates that she had considered close friends also started talking to her less and less, eventually cutting ties with her completely. Poppy still hasn’t really gotten over this, and feels very hurt and betrayed whenever she thinks about these people.

This is only exacerbated by the fact that Poppy suffers from both anxiety and depression, and while this tends to ebb and flow in how severe it is, her mental health was at its worst before she came out to her parents, and for a few months after she started on hormone blockers, frustrated and upset by their perceived lack of effect, and the reactions and accidental misgendering she was getting from many of her classmates. She has a couple of ways of dealing with this, however. She has started cross stitching, finding that the repetitive activity of needlework is good for focusing her mind, and also something incredibly soothing and relaxing. The majority of cross stitching work Poppy does is recreating video game sprites onto large pieces of cross stitching fabric, but she has also recently branched out to trying her hand at other forms of needlework, such as the paw prints she has sewn onto her favourite hoody.

The other main hobby Poppy uses to combat her depression is to work out, although she originally started doing so for an entirely different reason. She has a habit of stress eating when she’s in a bad way mentally, and several months of ordering Chinese takeout combined with a sedentary lifestyle led to her becoming noticeably overweight. Unwilling to sign up for any sports teams due to the potential for them to make her feel incredibly dysphoric, Poppy instead started doing push-ups and sit-ups in her room to try and exercise. While she was initially very sporadic with when she did this, she managed to instill a sense of discipline within herself when it came to exercising, by way of forcing herself to work out each day, regardless of how late it was. She added onto her routine with planks and crunches, and bought herself a set of weights online, continuing to work out long past the point where she thought she needed to lose weight, as the focus and discipline it brought her, similarly to cooking and cross stitching, allowed her to help shut out any anxious thoughts that intruded upon her mind. While Poppy still retains some fat, mostly in her stomach, hips and thighs, she carries it well, and she has some distinct muscle definition in her arms and back, which she is very proud of.

Due to her love of the Fire Emblem series, Poppy became very knowledgeable of the ROM hacking scene, something she is very interested in; she follows the development of projects such as Elibian Nights and Wrath of the Sun God on blog posts and on YouTube. Although she has never been able to figure out how to use ROM hacking tools herself, she was quite enamoured with the idea of turning the Fire Emblem fan stories inside her head and in Word documents into an actual playable state, sketching out designs for maps onto graphing paper. She saved up for programs such as RPG and SRPG Studio, and, after several weeks of tinkering with them and trying to figure them out by herself, she started looking up videos on the design philosophy of turn-based strategy games in order to get a better grasp of what would make her games enjoyable and engaging. This led her down a near endless rabbit hole of videos and essays on games design for all sorts of genres, and Poppy eagerly took down notes on as many as she could, spending hours watching videos explaining what made a boss fight fun to play, and how to create engaging inventory management systems. She still devotes time to her RPG Maker projects to this day, although sporadically due to her many other hobbies, and has found that her greater understanding of games design has led to her engaging with and appreciating the games she plays in a very different manner.

Although Poppy’s home life has changed drastically in the past three years, she considers it to be in a good state, although not without its issues. Jill and Ewan, despite their best efforts, can still make unintentionally offensive and ignorant remarks in regards to Poppy being trans. She is more than willing to forgive them for these remarks, however, as she knows they’re trying their best, and she is incredibly grateful for their support and love, knowing how lucky she is to be receiving it. Brian, on the other hand, still doesn’t seem to understand what Poppy being transgender means, and also appears unwilling to learn more; while she is understandably disappointed in this, the two have never been particularly close, and she just hopes that he becomes more aware of what she’s been going through as he grows older. Poppy also spends the most time out of anyone else in the house looking after Ginny and Missile - who Jill and Ewan only got because of how much time and attention Poppy put into looking after Ginny - and spends plenty of time each day playing with them, feeding them, and taking Missile for walks.

Poppy does decently at school in terms of grades, although her time of being considered exceptionally gifted and talented are long past. Her grades suffered badly when she first started HRT due to her fragile mental state, to the point there was a legitimate fear she might have to retake the year; however, she managed to put in a concerted effort towards the end of the year to scrape by. Poppy excels at English, getting As across the board, and is also good at PE and certain elements of the sciences. She turns in mediocre grades everywhere else, however, and particularly struggles at maths; her teachers remark that she puts in plenty of effort during class, but this doesn’t seem to translate into excellent grades, something which frustrates Poppy a lot, as she doesn’t know what else she can do to improve them. She also struggles when it comes to exams, due to poor time management and an inability to remember information under duress.

Poppy is generally well liked at school, with a close circle of friends, and a good number of people who enjoy her company and like talking to her; even those who wouldn’t exactly consider her a friend would agree that she’s very easy to get along with and to talk to. She’s naturally easygoing and happy-go-lucky, and although she’s still naturally shy around strangers, she becomes much more peppy and energetic when talking to her friends about things she likes. She is particularly close to other LGBT members of John Endecott, as well as members of the gaming and cooking clubs and the soccer team; while she’s not an actual member of the team, she turns up to each of their games to support them, and her love of the sport means she’s naturally close to most of the team. Poppy is incredibly loyal to those she’s close to, and to anybody who shows her kindness or support, and while this is normally a good thing, it means she also can be quite naive and overly trusting at times, often instantly believing anything her friends say and going along with their ideas, regardless of whether it’s a good plan or not. She’s naturally emotional as well, and while this normally results in her being a font of positive energy, it means that when she gets particularly upset or angry she can be quite volatile, lashing out at people or bursting into tears at the slightest provocation. Poppy is bisexual, and something of a hopeless romantic; she has a habit of developing pretty significant crushes on people who show her kindness and spend time with her, and while her shyness means she doesn’t act on the majority of these, she has had a handful of romantic partners during her time at John Endecott.

Poppy is still considering what she wishes to do post-graduation. She plans on going to college, but she’s not currently certain whether she wants to go immediately after graduating from John Endecott or if she wants to take a year off to earn money and spend time with her friends remaining in Salem. She is planning on earning a games design degree somewhere, and if she is unable to do so, then she is considering English literature as her back up.

Advantages: Poppy is friendly and likeable, with plenty of friends and plenty more people who know that she’s a friendly face. She’s also well known for being incredibly loyal to those she likes, and so shouldn’t find it difficult to gain allies and help while on the island. She’s big and strong, with significant upper-body strength, and so would be able to hold her own in a fight.
Disadvantages: Poppy’s loyalty means she can be quite naive and overly trusting; she could easily be manipulated and betrayed while on the island. She will have no way of dealing with her depression and anxiety attacks, which will only be exacerbated in a situation such as Survival of the Fittest, and could cause her to severely break down. She’s a very emotional person, and if something bad happens to her, she could react very poorly, spiralling into despair or lashing out at someone close to her, which could have disastrous consequences. Finally, she is incredibly nearsighted, and so if she loses or breaks her glasses she will be at a severe disadvantage, being unable to see much more than a foot ahead of her clearly without them.

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Hello Pip! I am here to critique this mysterious stranger who bears no resemblance whatsoever to any dogs I may happen to know.

As for the rest of her features, Poppy has wide, grey eyes, a pair of thick, dark-coloured eyebrows,

Dark is a shade and not a color. Are Poppy's eyebrows black, dark brown, dark blonde, etc.? If what you mean is that they're darker than the rest of her hair, you can just say that.

Although she hasn’t managed to go to an event in person yet, Poppy is hoping to do so in 2022, when the World Championships are held in the United States.

What did Poppy change her name from, and has it been legally changed yet?

Those minor things are all I really have, so take care of that, and Poppy should be ready to go!

[Pippi]

Hello Zee!!!!! I have made the changes you have requested of this definitely-not-a-dog-girl! Namely her eyebrows now have an actual colour, information about her name has been added, and a stray 't' has been captured and returned to its rightful place in the sentence! Wow!

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