Jordan Brankovich

[Brackie]

Name: Jordan Miroslava Brankovich
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Grade: Senior
School: George Hunter High School
Hobbies and Interests: Tumblr, anime, manga, video games, activism, field hockey, roller derby, hairstyling

Appearance: Jordan stands at 5’11” and 178lb. She is Caucasian of direct Slavic ancestry, which makes her quite pale in skin tone compared to her peers. She has a round-shaped head, soft chin, and wide cheeks, which give her face a soft look and would make her seem slightly younger than she actually is if it weren’t for her size. She has downturned lips, sitting beneath a short, medium-size nose, which itself sits between round droopy eyes, dark green in colour, and they themselves sit below softly arched brows. Jordan has several acne scars on her neck and back due to improper skin care, and skin tags on her legs and shoulders that make her extremely self-conscious about showing those parts of her body. Her hair alternates between a bob and a shag cut, with it currently being in a bob cut, and the colour is naturally dark brown, but it is currently bleached and dyed bright pink, touched up every couple of weeks.

Jordan tends to wear plain boring clothes from large retail outlets that make her wardrobe mostly nondescript, but she usually spruces this up through simple occasional accessories and pieces of geek apparel from anime, manga or video game outlets or online. She wears a watch with a rainbow wristband on her right wrist, and she has a necklace with the Skyrim logo. Her hair had been touched up just a few days before the abduction, and she was also wearing a short-sleeved dark onyx shirt with a rainbow design and the words “I’ve Got Anxiety” on the front, with white shorts, and black and red sneakers.

Biography: Jordan was born on July 7th, 2000, the oldest child of Senka and Lukas Brankovich, a waitress and office building custodian at the time respectively. The two were both third and fourth generation Serbian immigrants respectively who met in high school and fell in love, with the relationship continuing after high school. Senka became pregnant with Jordan a few months following graduation, and the two decided to raise their child and start their family together, marrying a few months later. Senka’s parents insisted that the newlywed couple move in with them in order to help save money for starting their family, and as such, Jordan was born into a household with both loving parents and grandparents who always looked after her. Her siblings, Ana and Ivan, were born three and six years later respectively.

Jordan was always quiet and shy as an infant, a late talker who preferred staying in her room and playing with her toys over exploring the house and the garden around it. While this was of some slight concern to her parents, they were far too busy with their jobs and studying at the local community college to treat it as a priority, and most of the child-rearing responsibility fell on Senka’s parents, Adam and Davina, who didn’t see anything wrong with it. As such, when Jordan made the transition into preschool, she had a very hard time making friends. She preferred reading by herself to socializing or sports, even though her teacher insisted she play and talk with her fellow classmates. The few times she did interact with her fellow preschoolers she rarely said much of anything.

The same happened during the transition into elementary school, only this came with another added hindrance - a lack of real regular activity and exercise meant that over the course of her time at elementary school, Jordan gained a fair amount of weight for someone under ten years old. This meant that not only was she more shy and antisocial than before due to a fear of being noticed for her size, she was also picked on by cruel other students for her weight. The few friends she managed to make during elementary school were complete flukes, and though their existence pushed her to be more social, Jordan was barely managing as best she could for someone in her situation.

Jordan’s earliest hobbies were what some would call geeky - her grandparents bought her a second-hand Nintendo Wii when she was six years old that she played nearly every afternoon, and many afternoons not spent doing homework were instead spent watching Pokemon, Powerpuff Girls Z, or reruns of Cardcaptor Sakura. These hobbies would grow with her - Jordan would become a big fan of Nintendo games as she grew up, not progressing onto another console until her parents bought her a laptop in her teens, and her anime tastes would progress onto more mature shows like Naruto, One Piece, Dragon Ball Z, and eventually Cowboy Bebop, Trigun and Death Note, although she still has a soft spot for serialized children's shows such as the later Pokemon series.

However, while these hobbies may have been fun and even helped her make a few more friends at her new middle school, they were only a distraction from the troubles of her school life. When she was in middle school, she developed anorexia and eventually started starving herself to lose weight, causing her to yo-yo for almost a year, going from a healthy weight back to her original weight and back again. When her parents found out, they were horrified and began making her see a psychologist. While the psychologist helped somewhat, implementing a family-based psychotherapy approach in which the adults of the family were educated on how to help her condition and Jordan herself was taught how to help herself through thorough nutritional information, they also forced Jordan to begin participating in a school sport. Senka signed up Jordan for her school’s field hockey team against Jordan’s will, and although Jordan was initially fairly resistant and constantly afraid of doing something wrong or embarrassing herself, it proved to be a net plus. Not only did Jordan begin eating regularly again rather than starving herself due to the energy requirements of the sport, with her anorexia finally becoming manageable for the first time, but she began to gain confidence and social skills that she had lacked all throughout her youth. While she was never the best member of any of her teams, she began to evolve - she started out scared to make moves or passes, sticking to being the goalkeeper, but she eventually started branching out and became a main rotating player. The physicality of the sport also meant that she began to steady her weight, but in a much healthier way.

When Jordan was 13 years old, Senka and Lukas had progressed enough in their careers and studies that they were able to save up enough money to make a deposit on their own house - Senka was now a sales manager, and Lukas was now a customer service representative. While this meant moving out of Jordan’s grandparents home, it also meant they decided to splurge on a gift for their children - Ana got flashy new shoes, Ivan got new bedspreads and room decorations, and Jordan, as their oldest child, got her own personal laptop. While not the newest or flashiest model, in fact being second hand from work, this meant that Jordan could finally have access on demand to a near endless fount of information - she mostly used to access her games and anime at school or in her bed, though. She also discovered numerous websites that allowed her to read manga online, something that had been out of her access due to being a shy, unadventurous girl living in a small town in Tennessee, and it was added to her other geeky pursuits. She liked how the art looked most of the time, and some of them were often the original versions of the anime she already watched, or even darker takes like the Pokemon Adventure series, which was an easy selling point.

As she entered high school, field hockey was not her only sporting interest. A friend of Jordan’s linked her to a roller derby match with competing female teams, and she was immediately hooked. The main hook for her was how many of the most prominent teams and players were women, and not just women who looked like female Olympians or bodybuilders - there were women who looked like her, not overweight but not supermodels either. She managed to convince her parents to take her to local games, and though they were shocked by how easy it was to get hurt, they could see their daughter enjoyed the sport. Jordan would never have enough time to play roller derby, as she was just entering high school and her workload and hockey responsibilities meant that her time was spread thinly enough as it was, but she considered herself a derby superfan, following nearly all of the leagues and teams in her area and rejoicing when she found players competing on a national level who were part of local or state teams, which gave her a sense of pride even though she wasn’t a player herself.

While high school was an awkward transition for most people, Jordan becoming a freshman coincided with her finding a confidence in herself she’d lacked all her life. She no longer completely hated her own body as much, she was a competent if not star member of her school’s field hockey team, and she’d managed to find friends who enjoyed the same interests she did, and encouraged her to talk about them. Something that also initially helped was when she discovered the website Tumblr when she was 15 years old, making her blog soon after. She mostly followed video game and anime pages and didn’t have many followers herself, but she was always happy when they noticed she’d posted something and gave it a like, be it a selfie or a text post she was particularly proud of.

However, this also led to her diving into a social justice curve - a few months after beginning on Tumblr, one of her posts was ripped apart by someone who found one of her word choices problematic, using “guys” instead of “people”. Following that, she ended up discovering the far left political/social side of Tumblr, and wanting to educate herself more on the subject for which she was attacked, began following more and more social justice blogs in addition to her regular ones, and over the course of her time on Tumblr began to become more and more confident and outspoken in what she had to say and post. Most of her education was simply around subject matter, such as ancient history that was more centered around female figures than exclusively men like she had been taught in school, but she also began to unintentionally mimic the behaviour of a lot of the big blogs she followed - she started reacting a lot more aggressively to disagreements than before, she unfollowed social justice blogs that used “problematic” language when other blogs announced they were unfollowing, and some of this behaviour began to bleed into her real life as well.

She became confident enough to join the activism and debate club, as she considered herself an activist and debater, but her time in the latter was short-lived, as she found herself unable to formulate arguments well and often resorted to ad hominem, straw man, and other logical or argumentative fallacies, which were not acceptable. While she ended up quitting the club in under a fortnight, declaring it wasn’t the right environment for her, she remains a member of the activism club, as they remain closer to her interests.

Jordan eventually also started dyeing her hair around this same time. She decided to do so after seeing how much better some of the bloggers she followed looked with bright, unusually coloured hair, and wanted to see how it would look on herself. Taking all necessary precautions, she bleached and coloured her hair one night from its natural brown to a bright green. The bleaching was sub-par, as she’d accidentally left streaks in the back a darker shade than the rest, but she did a good job on the actual dyeing. Every month when it grew out, Jordan would bleach and dye it again, taking care not to wear it out with the bleach, and it eventually became a hobby. She became quite good at it, eventually earning enough confidence to try it on the hair of friends, regardless of how tame or fantastic the colours were - the happiness she felt when she did it was palpable, as she very much liked doing something creative for her friends.

She has a strong relationship with her family - Jordan is very close with both her parents and grandparents, who have often worried about how outspoken and vocal she is becoming but are convinced it is merely a phase to grow out of. She is even closer with her siblings - they have their fights, but she is very protective of them both, partially due to being a close family in general, but Jordan also wants to make sure they don’t make the same mistakes she did when she was their age. They often borrow games from her whenever their friends want to play them, or watch her movies on DVD, and she’s more than happy to oblige. Her anorexia has been hard to manage, as her body image issues flare up whenever she loses her confidence, but with the help of her family and friends, it remains under control.

Jordan is known around school for being a geek with geeky interests, as well as being a member of the school’s field hockey team. She is also more infamous around school for being impossible to argue with due to how badly she puts together an argument. Jordan has a good number of close friends from different social groups, although most of them are from the same interest groups as her, mostly centered around video games, anime, and manga. Her classes are the average senior classes, although she has a particular affinity for U.S. History and World History, as she likes to know what mistakes her country and the world has made and how to avoid them in the future. Jordan will be attending the University of Chattanooga after graduating from George Hunter High School, studying a Bachelors of Political Science, which she hopes to use to expand her worldview.

Advantages: While not the fittest person in her grade, years of practice at field hockey has given Jordan stamina and the ability to make split-second decisions, which not everyone has. Being a fan of roller derby has also taught her the best ways to knock someone over, which could become situationally useful.
Disadvantages: Jordan does not have the best reputation around school due to her nature, which may prevent her from making allies in alien situations. She is also prone to lacking interpersonal perspective and prioritizing things that don’t matter in the moment, such as latching onto minute parts of conversations in order to drive home her own point, even if she is incapable of delivering it.

[backslash]

Hey Brackie! Jordan's a solid start, but she is temporarily DENIED pending some editing and expansion. Let's get into it.

Small thing in the appearance section: does Jordan have any piercings, and does she wear makeup?

Now, my main concern with the profile is Jordan's anorexia, which I'd like more detail and expansion on. Put in somewhat oversimplified terms, anorexia is a morbid fear of gaining weight and restricting one's diet in order to deal with this, which often manifests in eating very little or very infrequently, or purging after eating. Unhealthy eating habits or excessive dieting aren't necessarily anorexia, and if Jordan has been starving herself for nearly a year, there's going to be a whole host of health problems that come up with that including sleeping and mood problems, irregular menstruation, skin discoloration, etc. on top of any weight loss. Right now, I'm not clear on how Jordan's anorexia was manifesting and what symptoms she was showing that finally caught her parents' attention, which is important for knowing how far things had progressed.

Additionally, signing up a recovering anorexic for a rigorous sport like field hockey is a bad idea and not one that I think a doctor would be okay with if Jordan was still in the early stages of treatment. I think the timeline here needs some clarification, because right now it reads like Jordan was signed up for a sport right after she entered therapy for her eating disorder. Treatment for anorexia focuses on helping the patient return to a healthy weight, identifying and treating the psychological issues which lead to the disorder manifesting, and reducing the behaviors and thoughts which lead to disordered eating in the first place. This is usually a long-term thing even after the patient's diet and weight have been corrected, and a significant change in activity like joining a sport which would require Jordan to adjust her diet would probably be something to run by her therapist and bring up with them regularly, so as to ensure that her new activity isn't having a negative effect on her mentality regarding her weight and food intake.

To summarize: right now it seems that Jordan was signed up for sports during early therapy, before she had begun to better manage her diet and mental state, and it should be the other way around, plus it's very likely that she would receive longer-term therapy to help her identify and cope with the issues which led to her developing an eating disorder in the first place. Anorexia is a mental illness as well as a physical one, and the psychological effects stick around even after the physical ones are under control.

Since "activism" is listed as one of Jordan's hobbies, is there any particular issue that she focuses on or a specific activity that she does for the school's activism club? It's fine if her interest is more general, but I'd like it clarified what exactly she does with her blog and club membership.

Post in here once you've made those changes, and I'll give Jordan another look!

[backslash]

This character biography has had no alterations for more than two weeks and has been put in the abandoned characters forum. This profile is eligible for resubmission by the handler upon alterations requested by the staff.