Survival Of The Fittest

Name: Céline Sharpe
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Grade: Senior
School: Southwest Red Rock High School
Hobbies and Interests: Puzzles, nature, camping, meditation, journaling

Appearance: Céline is a 5’10”, 125 lbs Caucasian with cream-colored skin contrasted by vibrant orange hair that cascades down her shoulders and back in extremely messy curls. She has shallow cheekbones and a rather pointed nose, her ears small and flat. Her build is slim, though very lightly toned, and her arms are longer than most. Her wardrobe tends to consist of loose, layered outfits in earthy tones, often incorporating scarves and long skirts, with several mystical charms and other accessories. She typically keeps her journal and a pen in an inner pocket of these outfits. Her eyes are colored a light brown that resembles a dull orange and have dark grey bags under them. Her teeth are lightly yellowed from occasional lack of brushing.

During the abduction, Céline was wearing a faded, slightly oversized olive-green and brown knit button-up sweater, slightly frayed at the cuffs, and a long, flowy ankle-length skirt in a muted earthy pattern. She also wore worn-out, lace-up hiking boots. She was accessorised with multiple small occult charms and trinkets worn as bracelets and necklaces.

Biography: Céline Sharpe was born in Las Vegas, the result of a brief encounter between Raymond Park and Danika Sharpe, a fortune teller. Raymond currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts and is unaware of his illegitimate daughter.

Danika runs a small fortune-telling shop on the Las Vegas Strip called the Emporio Mysterio. Though she presents herself as a gifted psychic, her business is built on practiced deception. This has given her a locally infamous reputation as a fraud and a scammer, and she makes the vast majority of her profit from the tourists who largely populate the Strip. She is deeply self-centered, and currently often neglectful of Céline. While she provides the basics—food, shelter, and clothing—her parenting is transactional, viewing her daughter more as an extension of her business than an individual.

Homeschooled through preschool and kindergarten, Céline was raised to believe in the mystic arts from an early age through storytelling and even through education as she was taught to practice a few of its aspects such as tarot reading. Danika doted on her daughter, encouraging her imagination and often letting her "help" around the shop. Their relationship, while occasionally strained by Danika's erratic and demanding work schedule along with her fluctuating moods, was at that time genuinely affectionate. When her daughter came of age, Danika decided it was best to send Céline to school so she could bond with other children. She also encouraged Céline to be open about her credence at school, providing her with stylized clothing and accessories from her shop to support it, and Céline was in fact excited to do so.

However, once she actually began to attend school, Céline began to struggle socially. With her mother as her only human connection during her formative years, she had difficulty reading the unspoken rules of social settings, and her tendency to over-explain things she’d read in books and facts about her mystic beliefs often left her peers disinterested or annoyed. There were also a few isolated incidents of teasing, which occasionally escalated into more serious mockery exclusion, but these were sporadic, as teachers did take notice and stepped in when they could. A couple of counselors met with Céline once or twice after reports from observant staff, but her struggles often fell through the cracks in a busy, under-resourced school system. Most of the time, she wasn't being actively tormented—she was just invisible. Nevertheless, this combined isolation and even just the occasional mockery cut deep enough into her self-esteem and perception towards others that the few shallow but amicable relations she maintained during this time couldn't overcome those feelings. She thusly began to gradually retreat into solitary activities.

She found particular comfort in puzzles. Whether on paper such as sudoku and crosswords in scattered magazines or in a physical format such as a Rubik's cube, solving them provided a mental escape, and more importantly, a sense of accomplishment which she could draw on for comfort. She began to focus on them during her free time, both at school and at home, using them as a means of disengagement from her peers who she began to take less and less interest in connecting with due to the lack of progress from her active attempts as well as the teasing and isolation she felt on the receiving end of.

Middle school brought more loneliness than cruelty. Disheartened by her apparent lack of ability to form proper bonds with others, and wary of any more teasing or mockery despite how scarce it'd been in elementary school, she positioned herself as something of a recluse, not contributing much to any manner of social scene or situation unless prompted, typically falling into occasional inattentive states. What friendships she did form were often shallow or situational. To protect herself from any further mockery, a prospect which increased with her newfound status as a loner, she taught herself to move quietly and unnoticed and developed an acumen towards intuiting situations and the intentions of others.

Internally, however, Céline felt disheartened at the isolation she experienced, and continued to turn to her mother for comfort, support and advice. Danika, still invested at this point, tried to help. She encouraged Céline to keep being herself and tried to keep her morale up with pep talks alluding towards a time when Céline was happier, with a mix of vague spiritualism and self-empowerment. When things didn’t improve socially, Danika began to simply shrug it off as “just part of growing up.” Over time, her enthusiasm for supporting Céline waned in a slow, tired shift. Her priorities subtly changed. Her business needed her full attention, especially during financial slumps. The warmth didn’t disappear all at once, but it faded, replaced with distracted tolerance. Céline began to sense the gap forming, but couldn’t name it.

Despite this newfound apathy, at 14, Danika began to employ Céline directly in the Emporio Mysterio. She'd decided that she could still get some use out of her daughter one way or another, paying her an hourly minimum wage salary, though Céline would find little to spend on. On Céline's part, this new position allowed her to witness her mother's mystic falsifications and scamming nature first-hand, and the realization she'd only been used and lied to since she was born pushed her already low morale down to depression. Her belief in mysticism ended then and there as well, although she was unable to change her style of clothing due to her mother's insistence on Céline at least continuing to wear Emporio Mysterio branded merchandise clothing, a demand Céline relented to without resistance. By high school, the distance between her and Danika had hardened. What had once been affection became formality. They coexisted under the same roof, rarely talking unless it involved money, chores, or the shop. Danika wasn’t cruel, but she had stopped trying to be a parent in any emotional sense. Céline, in turn, stopped expecting it, though she began to inwardly feel a gradually mounting resentment towards her for her apathy.

During her freshman year at Southwest Red Rock High, Céline fully embraced isolation as a coping mechanism. She moved through life with minimal engagement, avoiding attention and keeping to herself, outright dissociating at times as a response to stress even though all but the most persistent of bullies had left her alone. Though she did the bare minimum to maintain her grades, she had no true aspirations in that time of her life. Her ability to go unnoticed and her perceptiveness in reading people’s behaviors became second nature. Full of negativity and pessimism, she took to the ideal of life simply being something to trudge through and endure, being at the lowest point of her life.

But despite her social and emotional withdrawal, Céline began to try and find solace in solitary activities beyond simple puzzles, drawing inspiration from books and online articles. One of the more prominent of these activities was meditation. Drawn to the promise of mental clarity and peace described in what she read on the topic, she began to regularly practice the methods described in her readings. Over time, she incorporated it into her daily routine, using it to manage stress and regulate her emotions as a healthier alternative to dissociation, though she'd still fall into the latter as a response to great stress.

Her biggest escape, however, came from nature. Though she had rarely left the city, she was captivated by the sight of the Mojave Desert from her window and from the school campus, particularly Red Rock Canyon. She read extensively about nature and outdoor living, fascinated by the idea of solitude and peace in the wilderness and the associations of nature with happiness and tranquility, as well as the direct visual beauty she found in nature itself. Eventually, she decided it wasn't enough to just keep reading about these; she wanted to experience them for herself.

Using money she discreetly saved from her part-time job at the Emporio Mysterio, she acquired basic camping supplies from thrift stores and discount shops. One weekend, under the guise of staying with a classmate, she took a bus to a free use campground on the outskirts of the city. She spent two nights alone in the desert, testing the survival skills she had learned through reading. Though her first outing was clumsy, it was transformative. Completely separated from the pressures of daily life, she felt a sense of freedom she had never experienced before.

Since then, Céline has taken every opportunity she could to escape into the desert, refining her outdoor survival skills and finding peace in solitude. While she remains socially withdrawn, her love for the wilderness has given her a sense of purpose beyond simply enduring each day. She began dreaming of turning this into her life, going out and travelling and finding solace in nature, and writing about it in articles much like the ones she'd found in magazines and online which had prompted her to venture on her first camping trip. She began to recreationally write mock articles of her camping experiences as a part of facilitating this potential dream for the future on pieces of scrap paper. Being able to put her thoughts and feelings down as something real and tangible, the ability to express things she couldn't say out loud with syntax, clarity, and structure, felt as equally liberating as her camping experiences, and she soon began to keep a small leatherbound journal dedicated to organizing and archiving these articles. While she initially perceived this dream as an impossibility due to her pessimistic worldview, the more she wrote and the more excursions she went on, the more her hope for the future built up.

At school, Céline began to approach her subjects with more energy and effort, especially finding enjoyment in her English class, in which she became more and more of an active participant due to how it helped her in learning to detail and format her journal entries properly. Though she continued to avoid most social interaction as well, maintaining a quiet, detached presence, this would begin to slightly change for the better as well. A few classmates, such as Claude O’Neil Porter, showed genuine intent to befriend her, and others, such as Alyson Solace and Trent James Taylor, extended understanding and empathy toward her and her experience.

Though she was initially skeptical and distrustful of their intentions due to her experiences, their patience and consistency, along with their ability to empathize with her experiences, gave her a small but meaningful boost in confidence. Realizing that not everyone dismissed or mocked her, Céline found in them the courage she needed to solidify what had once solely been daydreams about her future. Though she remained largely withdrawn in terms of the school's social scene, the knowledge that there were people who could understand her struggles helped solidify her determination to pursue her post-graduation dream of exploring nature, making the prospect feel less like a desperate escape and more like a true beginning.

She did consider dropping out at 16 to exacerbate her plan for the future. She'd take the GED, then purchase the cheapest van she could find with all the money she'd saved from the Emporio Mysterio and leave town as soon as she could. But something kept her tethered. A mix of fear of something going wrong with her leaving so young, with a finite and unstable income due to her lack of employability without a diploma, a slowly building positivity and momentum from her newfound friends and improving mental state and the desire to keep improving thusly, and—more than anything—resentment. She didn’t want to give Danika the satisfaction of watching her walk away with nothing, not even a high school diploma. She didn’t want the kids at school, especially her friends, to think she'd been beaten into giving up and vanishing. So she resolved to stay in school until graduation, running on a burgeoning, stubborn determination and desire to prove to herself and others that she wouldn't just be a footnote.

Her relationship with her mother remains distant. Danika has expressed a vague intent for Céline to attend community college after graduation, largely to keep her working at the Emporio Mysterio, to keep her business above ground. However, Céline has formulated her own plan: she intends to leave Las Vegas entirely and embark on a long-term backpacking journey across the national parks of the western United States. She has already mapped out an initial route and planned essential supplies according to the budget she'd build up and saved from her part-time job. She dreams of documenting her experiences through her journaling, finding fulfilment in nature and self-sufficiency. For the first time in her life, she feels truly excited about the future, determined to carve out a life for herself beyond the shadow of pessimism and self-doubt.

Advantages: Céline is adept at remaining unnoticed and reading people’s intentions. Her time spent camping has given her useful outdoor survival skills, including navigation and resourcefulness. She is perceptive and cautious, making her difficult to ambush or deceive.
Disadvantages: Céline’s withdrawn nature makes it difficult for her to form alliances, as she struggles with trust and emotional connection. Her dissociative stress responses can leave her slow to react or detached from immediate dangers.

Hey L! My name is Chad/Buko and I will be the one taking a look at Céline for pre-game registration! You’ve been through this a few times before but I still like to start all my critiques with a little song and dance—so let me dance. The profile process is just that, a process. It may take multiple rounds and I may point things out in subsequent rounds that I miss in this initial one. It isn’t to create hoops or barriers but rather because that’s the way things go sometimes and also, I’m human and sometimes miss things. Everything said here is said with the goal of making Céline a better character and to make getting her onto island later as smooth a process as possible. I prefer to take a holistic, top-down and conversational approach to my critiques because I believe it is the most effective way for me to articulate both directly and honestly. I apologize if anything I say goes against my intention and desire to help make Céline's story start as best as it can.

With that said, let’s get cracking.

Hobbies and Interests

This is a list format and so only the first one of these need to be capitalized.

Appearance

This section for the most part is sparse but looks passable to me. I do think you could benefit from some specificity in terms of fashion and outfits beyond just a stylistic and tonal umbrella. Does she prefer pants or skirts? Does she prioritize style or function? That sort of thing. You do not need it at the moment but you will need it in final apps and so you may want to list the outfit she’s wearing on the day of the abduction. At the moment this is bonus content, but it is something to think about.

You may be asked to Americanize the grammar at final applications for consistency, at this stage it’s also bonus content-DLC, but I figured it was worth mentioning in case you wanted to be a busier bee.

Biography

I’ll be honest and candid here—the biography, as written, will need to be reworked and reimagined in several significant ways. The problem is largely twofold: one-part concerns tonal issues, while the other relates to realism and probability. Céline’s relationship with her mother is borderline theatrical and cartoonish in its total control and unchallenged abuse. It falls into a category of realism that, while technically possible with a stretch of the imagination, is not entirely probable.

To put it plainly: it’s too much. It needs to be toned down and stripped to a more grounded character core. I’ll go through the problematic and improbable aspects of the biography, and at the end, I’ll outline my suggested approach.

Danika is a diagnosed and unmedicated psychopath, a narcissist, an alcoholic, and a manipulative individual who holds markedly little empathy for those other than herself. Her business is one of the more prolific fortune-telling shops on the Las Vegas Strip: the Emporio Mysterio. Against all of her claims, it's entirely a scam. Danika is a proficient actress, versed in telling people exactly what they want to hear at any given moment, strategically coinciding these statements with those which she expects will generate the most profit from the current customers. Her skills in special effects are employed to convince them further.

So, we start off with the crux of the issue—the thread that, once pulled, causes the whole profile to unravel. As I said before, this is just too much all at once. You have Danika as a diagnosed and unmedicated psychopath, but psychopathy is not a diagnosis recognized by any psychiatric or psychological organization. This phrasing itself suggests a lack of research, leading to a cascade—and a clown car—of diagnoses, paired with a bizarre caricature masquerading as character. As presented, Danika is equal parts Miss Cleo and Mommie Dearest. While both are real figures of cultural significance, compounding all these traits into a single character stretches believability beyond reasonable doubt and plausible deniability.

As a young man, I was once told: one law at a time. The idea was that if you were smoking weed in the car—don’t be speeding. If you were going to be speeding—don’t be smoking weed in the car. This isn’t legal or life advice, don’t smoke weed or speed…but definitely don’t do both at the same time! I understand that limits are meant to be tested and rules exist so their holes can be looped, but do yourself a favor and avoid flying too close to the sun. Danika has too much going on. Pick an issue, research it, and shape a character out of the caricature. You’ll have a much easier time doing that with one or two well-developed issues rather than a half dozen.

Danika is a foundational part of this story and so you change her, you change a lot of the story. That’s why I called this a thread that sort of causes the whole thing to unspool. There is a lot in this profile that provokes scrutiny and then doesn’t pass the smell test. It starts with Céline’s mother. There will be a few other issues I point out in this profile, but I fundamentally believe that starting at the core and fixing this issue will go a long way in fixing all others.

Thus, Céline was born after nine months of Danika struggling to keep herself from her addictions and named something her mother just thought sounded fancy and mystic at a glance. Danika herself quickly took to falsifying the role of a loving mother in order to raise Céline for the purpose of the business aforementioned idea: so she could serve as a living advertisement for the Emporio Mysterio. The childcare subsidies Danika received from the state as a single mother padded her wallet, and reinforced her view that having Céline was a good idea.

This is such a bizarre reason to have a child that I wonder why we didn’t just keep it as her having the child by accident. Bigger than Danika’s motivations, the finances also don’t make sense. I presume this is because of an unfamiliarity with the United States, but single mothers are not subsidized like this through the state. They are most often assisted in support via child support payments extracted by the father—sometimes by choice and sometimes by court order. There does exist subsidy for people in the United States, but it is often needs-based and based on income. Danika is a business owner who can afford a storefront on the Strip. The math literally does not math here.

Beyond that, the actual portrayal of someone just having children to take advantage of government welfare programs is exceptionally problematic on its face and borderline offensive to me as a person who did receive government benefits and support growing up. I chalk this up more to ignorance than ill intent, but keep in mind that this stereotype of a welfare queen—or poor people having children solely to extract resources from the system—is not rooted in fact. Welfare fraud is most often seen in grocery stores with people looking to feed themselves. What is the purpose of portraying Danika this way? She’s not a poor person; she’s just a fraud. Is being a fake fortune teller not enough that we need to have her also be a welfare fraud as well?

This is where we get to the one-law-at-a-time philosophy. Both of these things happening at once invite too much scrutiny. This needs to be changed and much better researched.

During her time at elementary school, she played the part Danika had moulded her to because she believed in it wholeheartedly. With her mother as Céline's only source of interaction and love during her infancy, she trusted her candidly. With a wide smile on her face, she mouthed off to every person that she’d be seeing and interacting with for the next decade and a half of her life about Madame Mystra and her glory and beauty and how she could do anything in the world with her real, amazing powers, all with completely genuine intent.


At first, most of the student populace would react with confusion at it being the only thing she'd talk about. As she continued, day after week after month, confusion turned to jokes at her expense. Eventually, when it was clear this was something she genuinely believed in and that she wouldn’t stop talking about no matter the circumstance, the people who didn’t simply ignore her began to outright ridicule her. It was relentless mocking, insulting and bullying both from behind her back and in her face. Céline’s upbeat attitude and genuine motivation began to fade.

Teachers would notice this and step in. You have them do so only after years of abuse in middle school, and it functions largely as narrative window dressing to make Danika look eviler. This needs to be toned down and more grounded in a plausible, probable, and realistic experience. Furthermore, we continue to run into and suffer from what I call the ‘Danika Problem’ in this biography. This is why I said that when you pull this thread, the whole profile comes undone. Even in her own terrorist dossier, Céline plays second fiddle, and I read this work thinking that, at times, you would rather be roleplaying Danika. You have to center this profile around Céline and focus more on her reactions and responses to growing up around Danika, rather than simply burying the point that Céline exists purely for Danika’s ambitions. That’s what Danika believes—it isn’t the reality, nor should it be the perspective of Céline’s profile.

Even she couldn't bear it forever, though, and eventually began to ask her mother if she could stop wearing the clothes, and stop telling people about her business. Asking turned to pleading which turned to begging. Danika didn’t care. She never did care about Céline as a person, even shrugging off any attempted call or conversation from the school about her bullying, convincing the staff that the situation was under control to avoid further calls. To Danika, her daughter was nothing beyond a business investment. Eventually, when she recognized it had stopped paying off for good, instead of trying to convince Céline to keep going, Danika started hitting her whenever she tried to complain. If she wasn’t going to turn a profit, she didn’t want to hear about her problems. These beatings became regular occurrences, only stopping when Céline herself stopped her begging. Danika thus instilled a deep fear of herself into Céline through physical abuse and threats thereof. To avoid being found out, she'd cover her daughter's bruises with her makeup and additionally threaten her not to tell anyone about her abuse at school. Céline, with her newfound fear of her own mother, obliged. Otherwise, Danika stopped paying attention to her daughter other than to make sure she was going to school, keeping quiet about her abuse and not running away from home. Additionally, despite her recognition that Céline was now failing as an active advertising product, Danika continued to mandate her daughter's wardrobe with outfits that could at least be recognized as Emporio Mysterio merchandise. She thought it cheaper to skim a few outfits from her own line instead of going out of her way to pay for the clothes of a child she didn't care for.

This is going to have to be cut. Even if she was not telling the teachers, schools are filled with mandatory reporters trained to see signs. This is too much. It needs to be toned down tremendously. Céline exists so little as an individual, and Danika exists so purely as a force of abusive nature that this portrayal and incident seem purely exploitative rather than explorative or expressive. It’s gonna have to go in its current form.

Around the beginning of her freshman year at Southwest Red Rock, which her Mother had sent her to due to it being the closest high school to her apartment, Céline completely sunk into her newfound stratagem of total avoidance and dissociation. It was worse than simply that, though: The trauma, abuse and neglect she’d suffered up until then developed alongside a set of genetic predispositions she inherited from her mother, and Céline began to develop a series of psychopathic traits. The reluctant sneakiness and misanthropy she developed during her middle school years became essentially second nature as she learned she wasn't safe at home either, picking up perceptive skills to discern approaching possible threats ahead of time in concordance as she now had to account for her mother. She took to the ideal of life simply being something through which to endure, losing her empathy for the people around her. This entailed putting very little thought towards each day, separating herself from its events and soldiering on, taking to emotional detachment and losing herself in partially aware dissociative states. She found it made things easier to bear, as the detachment to physical feelings produced by this trance-like state numbed pain from physical abuse both in and out of home, and numbing herself emotionally let her bear her trauma more easily. At school, her lack of reaction to the things happening around her served to make her a less common target for bullies, but remaining partially aware helped her avoid them in the first place and avoided attention and worry on the teachers' part, the effectiveness reinforcing her idea that this was the only way for her.

Teachers would also notice this and get in contact with her mother for her to seek treatment or assistance for Céline. If this didn’t happen, they’d likely follow up with Child Protective Services and thereafter expose Danika’s abuse and likely have her and Céline face legal consequences. This trickles down to the derealization stuff. You need to bring this down to earth. Less is more. It feels almost like something you would see in an anime or read in a manga rather than something rooted in reality.

Still refusing to turn to others for help, she began to try to pull information or answers from the hoards of magazines her mother kept in the apartment. This was where she discovered meditative practices. The actions described in them, ranging from breathing exercises to actively tuning into surrounding sounds to physical contact with strikingly sensory objects such as ice cubes, became instrumental in her efforts to counter her episodes of derealization.

This is what I mean by a sort of cascade of problems, we’re so resistant to doing something basic and normal like sending this clearly mentally ill child to a medical professional or counselor that we have her learning to meditate from a magazine in an era where magazines are essentially dead if not dying. You’re hustling backwards here, working hard to go in a direction opposite of where you need to be going. Cut this plot, ground this more in reality.

But the biggest interest she picked up from the magazines was one of nature and outdoor living. Late into Céline’s freshman year, she pulled from one of the many stacks a nature magazine. Specifically, one on the topic of the surrounding Mojave desert.

We're going to want to capitalize the Mojave Desert, but this is a similar problem to the meditation from magazine thing. Why does she not learn to love nature by, y’know, being outside? Vegas is more than The Strip. There’s desert to be seen without opening a magazine on a bathroom floor.

She began by studying, reading as much as she could from magazines which specifically contained practical instruction on camping and general wilderness living, and memorizing as many facts and techniques as possible. When she believed herself ready, she decided on a time and a place: a weekend during late Freshman year, when she knew her mother wouldn’t be paying close attention to her location as there wasn’t any school for Danika to make sure she was being sent to, at a nearby conserved stretch of the Mojave where camping was allowed free of charge. She then pulled a series of largely unused camping materials from Danika’s piles of abandoned hobby equipment, including appropriate although ill-fitting outfits, stockpiled few enough canned goods and bottled enough water that their disappearance wouldn’t be noticed if Danika checked the kitchen, and quietly left the apartment when Danika was out drinking.

This whole paragraph is just three extremely long sentences. You have to rewrite this and streamline it in a way that makes better sense. Shorter sentences and less commas, but fundamentally, this whole plotline should be reimagined if not cut out completely. It just seems like, once more, a lot. We’re doing too much to get too little out of this.

She’d taken a bus to the free-use stretch of undeveloped campground which was not far from the city itself.

It’ll just be free use, no hyphen needed.

Presently at school, she does the bare minimum of classwork to reach graduation, and maintains her philosophy of dissociation and avoidance, as it had been effective in deterring some bullies and avoiding others, though she still faces overwhelmingly common general mockery and some physical bullying. Though some continue to reach out to her with good intentions, such as Claude O’Neil Porter, she remains at best hesitant and at worst averse to reaching back out to them. Even when she does speak to them, she remains inwardly unconvinced there’s any genuine intent behind their words and actions, and finds it difficult at all to emphasize with or perceive them as people like her.

Red Rock has zero tolerance for bullying, this wouldn’t fly there, you’re going to have to change this or make it less overt.

And that’s all I can see at the moment that hasn’t been touched on previously. Mechanically and in terms of grammar and syntax, you’re in a pretty decent place and there wasn’t a lot to correct and everything was relatively easy to understand. Fundamentally, this is an issue of conceit and concept and so it is going to require in revision a large degree of reconceptualization. I told you at the beginning that I would give you a suggested approach to this character and the biography. You need to strip down the core to what is necessary for the concept to function and cut out everything else. The problem you run into in this profile is not so much that there are problematic or elements that require explanation, but rather, that there are several at once. You need to pick a struggle for Céline and remove everything else. I understand that can be both disappointing to expectations and challenging in execution, but I do not think it is impossible.

My take is that what we want from Céline is a shy girl struggling in the face of an overwhelming and abusive parent who is a fake fortune teller. We do not need the Mom to be a psychopath, a narcissist and an alcoholic to do that—we could just pick one of these things to dictate her abuse and character. If the concept is a sentence, strip it and break it down to a word—and build the character with only that word in mind.

Advantages & Disadvantages

Céline can dissociate to numb physical and mental pain, and her misanthropy reduces guilt or hesitation in harming others for her own survival.

This makes it seem like her disease/disability is a magical power, just say she has a high pain tolerance.

Céline's misanthropy and psychopathy make it virtually impossible for her to form alliances, as she struggles to justify empathy and comes across as emotionally detached. Her dissociation can spiral into derealization under stress, leaving her disconnected from reality until she can ground herself, though physical wounds and dangers remain very real.

She’s 125lbs and doesn’t work out. The way this section and the other section is written makes Céline come off as more of a murder monster than a person. You need to ground this more and balance it more. Look at approved characters to get a better sense of what would be an acceptable and tonally cohesive here.

And that’s all! I know this is a lot and can be considered a little overwhelming, but I fundamentally believe that if given both effort, energy and time, we can get Céline to acceptability and into the game. If you have any questions or need any help with your edits, don’t hesitate to reach out to me via Discord, PM, messenger pigeon, astral projection or smoke signal. In that order.

Good luck and happy edits!

Right, so I wholly rewrote the entire profile from the ground up. Should be a lot less insanity and psychopathy and Danika being literally Hitler and also the main character in this one. At the very least you have 1000 fewer words to read now; take it away.

Hey L! Firstly, I’d like to thank you for your patience and apologize for the time it has taken me to get to this revision. I was dealing with back-to-back family health emergencies and it demanded a lot of my emotional bandwidth and attention. Not an excuse, just an explanation. It is my sincere hope and plan that this is not delayed in similar fashion in the future.

So, let me get the schpeal out the way again: profile process is just a process, I may mention things in subsequent rounds that I do not mention in this one and everything I’m saying is because I’m trying to get the best version of Celine as possible out and into pre-game!

In the words of Trick Daddy—let’s go!!!

Appearance

This section is serviceable but still a bit sparse, I was thinking that we could maybe get something on her teeth and smile (or pout). As said before, you will need an island outfit when it comes time to submit her for final apps, but that’s also a future!Céline problem. Just let us know if she brushes and flosses regularly or has RBF and we should be good here.

Biography

So, overall, this is a better product than last time as it is more Céline focused. However, we still have some issues in that she still exists more as caricature than character. The main issue is the bullying, how constant and pervasive it is, and Céline’s reaction to it and how it functions a bit as a soft-godmod. Just like you can’t say that your character is the most popular character to ever popular, we can’t really have you saying Céline is the most bullied girl to ever get bullied. You need to continue to center this profile around Céline and her characterization much more than characterizing her classmates and the world around her. Be completely and totally centered on the character that the profile is about and focus on everything within the profile being a vehicle toward characterizing her and her alone.

I’ll show you the sections that I feel are a bit problematic and need addressing as we go through the biography top-down.

However, once she entered elementary school, she quickly learned that her beliefs made her a target for ridicule, especially with how she'd repeat them almost mindlessly in any given situation. Her genuine, almost zealous insistence on her mother’s powers gradually alienated her from her peers, and she became the subject of frequent teasing and exclusion.

I think this is a little bit of a silly reason for Céline to get bullied and a bit of a thread-pull since so much of her characterization is centered around the bullying. Because this is so silly of a reason for this persistent and pervasive bullying, everything else feels contrived and flimsy. We pull the thread—our vision of a balanced character becomes undone. We have the reaction toward the bullying as the motivating factor to several bad traits exhibited by Céline (namely misanthropy and disassociation). So, this bullying cannot be what our character hinges on as the result is her coming off as fairly unhinged. This whole section reminds me a little bit of a scene from an Adam Sandler comedy from the late 90s—and that’s not really a good sign tonally or realism wise. We can’t have Céline be The Water Boy.

As said, I think the key here is to have the bullying be toned down significantly so it is more incidental and situational rather than persistent and systemic. Exert narrative control only upon Céline more so than the world around her. If you want your character to be the most bullied girl to ever get bullied, earn it and express it via the RP rather than trying to establish it as a law of our world with the same strength as gravity. You soft-godmod any character who attended middle or elementary school with Céline as being a bully and every teacher and school as being ineffectual and complicit. You can’t do that. Scale this back and center it around Céline.

As the bullying persisted, Céline slowly began to withdraw from the social scene.

As said, this persistent and systemic bullying doesn’t really work as you presented. The focus and love of puzzles is good, but make this more as a reaction toward incident or internalizing rather than a culture that specifically targets traffickers of tarot. The puzzle stuff is good characterization, just center the motivation as being more internal and out of personal comfort than purely the result of a reaction to bullying.

However, bullying persisted, and Céline needed more comfort than could be achieved through solving puzzles recreationally. Though she initially confided in her mother, Danika dismissed her concerns, insisting that Céline simply needed to “convince” her fellows at school better. The original idea was working on her end, anyway; the parents of a few of Céline's classmates had become returning customers. Teachers intervened in Céline's treatment at school when they could, but the damage to Céline's reputation had already been done, and she'd become a remarkably widespread target for mockery.

So, we have three paragraphs essentially of bullying exposition paired with one sentence of teachers ‘doing what they can’, but ultimately doing nothing. The impression I get here is that we want Céline to be alienated and isolated and mocked relentlessly, but also sort of an innocent waif that the world has responded to with undue cruelty. That’s a fine story to tell and I think a fine tonal goal, but the problem is that you alone are not shaping this world and how it responds and reacts to Céline. You can dictate how Céline reacts and responds to the world around her, but the actual thing you control in this world is Céline. At the moment, you’re characterizing the entirety of the Clark County school district, you gotta chill and scale this back. This isn’t going to work as you’ve presented it. Center on and focus on Céline.

On a note less to do with approval and more to do with just writing advice in general—try to vary up your vocabulary somewhat. The two successive uses of persistent was both jarring and sort of heightened my scrutiny and skepticism. Take your time and read things aloud for flow, the things that jump out and sound awkward to you—likely will sound awkward and jump out for me.

Though it was initially difficult for her to detach herself from the student body to this extent, she felt it was necessary due to the constancy this mockery was having on her, the impact of which was causing her to gradually build a small amount of general misanthropy towards her fellow students.

As said before, stuff like this is a bit of a soft-godmod. Cut it and focus more on Céline’s reaction and response toward incidents rather than making things out to be systemic or institutionalized. You can characterize individuals; you can’t characterize entire elementary and middle schools ad-hoc.

Entering middle school, things didn't get any better; as her reputation spread and her link to her fraudulent mother was made further known, the bullying she received became more severe even with her detachment, beginning to border into the physical, reaffirming her misanthropic tendencies as abuse only worsened. She thus abandoned any efforts at socialization entirely. She avoided confrontation, kept to herself, and due to their ineffectiveness at actually stopping the bullying even as they noticed it and attempted to help her, developed an aversion to authority figures. She felt forlorn and alone outside of home, though this would soon change as well.

Now, like, this is a bit anecdotal and forgive me if I’m wrong here—this is another thread-pull that doesn’t really make sense. People, especially teenage girls, like mystical stuff and tarot cards and are willing to believe in magic and the occult for both fun and faith. It’s why we have this love for Goth Mommies and why fishnet never goes outta style. It’s why we have a Crystal Mommy Coalition empowering RFK Jr. I think you sort of want this mystical and occult to be the crux of her social isolation, but it just doesn’t hold water. I don’t think kids would care that much, I don’t think Céline cares all that much and it’s mostly here to have Céline’s mother be responsible for both the hell of her home life and the hell of her school life. We have no character or agency or struggle with lack of agency with Céline, she simply just is. That may be your character concept and thesis, but you need to focus more on how that would be illustrated purely through the lens of Céline than trying to sort of fit square pieces in round holes to get your intended narrative goal.

Her continued seeming numb reactions even to physical abuse did serve to make her a less frequent target for bullies, reaffirming her idea that this was the only way through life for her.

Yeah, this isn’t going to work. I would cut this physical abuse angle out completely. You have more than enough mental isolation and alienation and sort of social awkwardness baked in. This is seemingly here to only create a bit of a compounding sympathy machine in the profile itself. It feels a bit cheap and unexplored in the character design. I don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze here.

Thus, during her freshman year at Southwest Red Rock High, Céline fully embraced isolation as a coping mechanism. She began outright dissociating from her surroundings to numb physical and mental pain, moving through life with minimal engagement. To avoid situations where she'd need to face bullying at all, she developed her skills in staying unnoticed and perceiving people's approaches. Though she did the bare minimum to maintain her grades, she had no aspirations beyond graduating. Her continued seeming numb reactions even to physical abuse did serve to make her a less frequent target for bullies, reaffirming her idea that this was the only way through life for her. Mockery persisted, however, her reputation becoming more solidified through her familial link to her mother and her own fraudulent infamy.

Here we go again with persisted which doesn’t do good to characterize this bullying as anything but a plot device designed to grind a character that is already pretty much mush into dust. You have to sort of conceive and conceptualize Céline beyond her victimhood even if she does not. The world around her is being characterized as a constant cruel place and she a simply grey blob within it. That doesn’t really function well for a profile, but definitely doesn’t function for a character. I said it before and will say it again, center this profile around Céline.

This reputation of hers was fully established by an attempt by Danika to continue to use her daughter for her own profit and ambition even as Céline failed as an advertising tool: employing her part-time at the Emporio Mysterio itself, being paid a meagre salary. Despite having completely dropped her belief in mysticism since it prompted her bullying, Céline was made to learn several actions of the trade, such as tarot and palm reading, but her main duties were running errands for supplies the shop needed. Spreading rumors of her being spotted on these errands throughout the city and at the shop itself was what reaffirmed her freak mystic reputation at school even as she'd long stopped trying to interact with the rest of the student body, furthering her sense of resentment towards both her mother and the student body at large.

I spoke with my younger sister and a laaaaaaaaaaady staffer so I could get some perspective beyond my own sort of anecdotal experience and they both agreed that this isn’t something teenagers would likely exclude her for. She’d be doing free tarot readings in the cafeteria for snacks. Rethink this, it’s not working how you want it to.

She revelled in the sense of peace and self wrought from meditative actions, receiving the same sense of calm and relaxation from them that she received from puzzles through the stimulation of the emotional side of her brain instead of the logical side. She'd often meditate in her room to calm herself down after long days, or to pass the time in general.

A little grammar thing, but we want it to be ‘reveled’ and to be ‘self-wrought’. I use Microsoft Word as my word processor and I put every profile through it. If you can get past Word in terms of a grammar and spell check, you have a pretty good chance of getting past Chad. Just free advice.

Presently, in terms of academia, Céline does the minimum required to graduate, finding no particular enjoyment in any particular subject. She continues to avoid most social interaction, maintaining a quiet, detached presence at school to avoid continued mockery and abuse.

So, she doesn’t care about school and her mother doesn’t care about her—why is Céline still going to Red Rock? At sixteen she could drop out, get her GED if she desired (she wouldn’t have to) and start backpacking and camping in the woods. She is bullied constantly at school, abused constantly at home—why would she even care or want to graduate or continue working toward academics? I mean, aside from the fact that we want her on the trip because you the author want her to play the game.

You see what I mean in terms of how the bullying and the persistence (chosen purposefully here) of it create a scenario in which we pull the thread and the whole character and concept becomes undone. Ground this more in reality and in a subtler scenario so you can still reach your goals and intentions. You do not need all that you have in here if the goal is simply to make Céline an awkward kid with a uniquely sort of abusive and fucked up home life. Less is more.

Danika has expressed a vague intent to have Céline attend a local community college after graduation, largely to keep her under her control working at the Emporio Mysterio, and even to perhaps "take over the family business" one day. Though Céline deeply resents this plan, she has yet to formulate a clear path forward otherwise.

Did Danika get a degree in the Occult at the local community college? You wouldn’t need schooling to take over a fraud fortune telling business. Think about this and pull on the threads yourself to sort of anticipate where my skepticism would be. Think of the logic and the logistics of the situation you’re painting for Céline.

I think we’re still in the reconceptualization and expansion phase in some respects, but we’re making progress. We’ll get through this together!


Advantages & Disadvantages

Céline has a high pain tolerance from her experience with facing physical abuse and is adept at remaining unnoticed.

You don’t need this qualifier, but perhaps rethink this characterization of abuse as an advantage. Céline is so two-dimensional and exists so little outside of her status as victim and abused that it’s literally the first advantage you give her. Give this girl some depth, agency and existence beyond what others do to her. Give her an actual advantage aside from the fact that her Mom smacks her around. That's not an advantage.

And that’s all for this go-round. If you need any clarification or want to get anymore advice or direction, don’t hesitate to reach out to me via Discord DM, board PM, smoke signal or messenger pigeon. I once again apologize for the delay and I thank you for your patience. Happy editing!

So help me God I will rewrite this thing as many times as it takes

A tough February led into an extremely tough March and I apologize again for the delay. But, after some waiting, we’re here for round 3! You know the deal at this point, everything is said with the goal and intent of making Celine the best that she can be, I may say things in this review that I didn’t say in past reviews, etc, etc.

Let us get to cracking.

Hobbies & Interests


You need to capitalize the first thing being listed in a list and so we need puzzles to be Puzzles.


Appearance


She’d probably have the pencil confiscated. If she carries a journal with her all the time, that’s fine to put in the appearance IMO, but I would probably move this up and sort of phrase it as something general as opposed to having to do with the trip in specific. Honestly, the journal note is something that I think you could also have room to just ex out of the appearance and just use the actual pre-game RP to characterize. We don’t, for example, have people list which pocket they carry their phone in. This is a bit your choice on how you want to handle it. If you want to keep it in here, keep it in here, just move it to the previous paragraph discussing her normal everyday appearance as opposed to the abduction day one.


Biography

She tried to go to her mother for advice and comfort, and while Danika provided the comfort, her only advice to her daughter was to keep trying despite their mockery. This advice of course only resulted in more ridicule from the group. The staff at the school didn't take these actions seriously, viewing it as harmless teasing between children, and classmates refused to intervene out of desires not to become the group's next target. Céline, thus, was left on her own to try and deal with the incessant bullying.

You’re still stuck here on the bullying thing. You cannot have it both ways and have both teachers and parent be involved and nothing come of it, over several years. You cannot have the teachers and staff, over 6-7 years with constant changing of personality and deposition, not be involved. If this bullying is so intense that a child is clearly being mocked and isolated, they wouldn’t just let it happen and consider it 'normal teasing'. You're not characterizing it as normal teasing, you're characterizing it as persistent and targeted and then allowed by the staff, so systemic. You cannot do that. Make the incidents isolated and circumstantial, make at the very least the school involvement more than just a sentence to satisfy my objections. This is not enough as you currently have it and it builds into the middle school characterization. You have to make this less zero-sum and while we can have Celine as the consistent and constant victim, you cannot have and characterize the world as okay and making it so. Elementary school is for 7 years, from pre-K to fifth grade. You are characterizing not just one classroom, but seven, you are characterizing not just one staff member, but several dozen and you're doing it in one sentence, fifty words or less. You need to continue to bring this down another few degrees. It's not working as you currently have illustrated it. Danika also has some inconsistency here, but we'll get into that in the next section.

Her home life became increasingly distant as well. While Danika had once lathered her with support and attention, she gradually lost interest in her daughter when it became clear Céline wasn’t attracting new customers. Danika's attitude changed, and she began to remain indifferent to Céline’s life outside of work, engaging with her only when necessary. While she wasn’t outright abusive, her neglect left Céline with a lack of love and support from whom she had perceived to be the main source of those things in her life up until now, leading to her feeling isolated even within her own home.

Danika changed? Our first introduction to her is as a narcissistic, manipulative and abusive scammer—she hasn’t changed, she has only intensified to fit your narrative need to break Céline down to mush. It doesn’t make sense how you’ve laid it out and it stretches believability still into the realm of caricature. You have the seeds planted now: Danika is involved, caring and loving to Celine up until middle school where they then have a gigantic falling out and Danika becomes outright neglectful and abusive. This then solves her mother and teachers not doing anything in elementary school, they do get involved and are invested in Celine, and it makes the eventual distancing from Danika feel earned and like a true betrayal rather than a narrative inevitability. You need to clean this up, ground it more in realistic human behavior and take it down a few notches from theatricality. This doesn’t work on a dramaturgical nor execution level at this stage.

Thus, Céline continued to do only the minimum required to at school, finding little enjoyment in her studies other than in English, in which she became more and more of an active participant due to how it helped her in learning to detail and format her journal entries properly.

Why is Celine still going to school? She only likes English class because it helps with journaling which is something that she does anyway. She doesn’t like most people and she doesn’t like any teachers and she has saved up thousands of dollars. Celine could’ve dropped out at 16, gotten her GED a few months later while working at her mother’s store and be working as a nature guide or simply living a ‘van life’ existence by the time we have our RP. Why doesn’t she? You still don’t have a character that realistically seems to belong in the school until her Senior year and the way we list these activities and friendships is similar to how we handled the bullying in the elementary school years. You can’t just name drop and hand-wave, you have to truly synthesize and rationalize why something is on a logical and logistical end. Why does Celine keep coming to school? Why does she find solace in Red Rock where she initially found herself isolated and disconnected to the point of disassociation? Nearly 1/5th of Nevada high school students drop out before graduation. Why isn't Celine apart of that number? You have to answer that and answer it in a way that makes sense in a narrative and realism sense, not just a legal "get off my back, Chad" sense.


Advantages & Disadvantages

outside of with a scarce few others

You can cut this out, it reads clunky and sort of goes without saying.

And that’s it! We’re closer now than we’ve ever been. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to PM/DM/summon me via séance. Thank you again for your patience and happy editing!

Right, I think I've cleaned up all the BIIIG things by now? Maybe. Hopefully. We'll see

This will likely have to go through another revision or two in terms of final applications. Before posting it once more, I'd give it another read, not so much looking with an editorial eye in regard to content but rather in terms of grammatical flow. There's some fat still to trim and some sentences that still run long and could be said simpler or cleaner...

But, we've come a long way and in concern to content and character, I think we're working with a dog that has both legs and a waggly tail. I also feel I've kept you long enough and this is at the standard of what is needed for pre-game.

Remember, one law at a time. Read your writing aloud before posting it--and pull on the threads yourself so you know how to keep them from unraveling.

And, I imagine, most important for you...APPROVED!