Maxine “Max” Schwimmer

[The Honeless Beard]

Name: Maxine “Max” Schwimmer
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Grade: Senior [12]
Hobbies and Interests: Softball, video games, drawing

Appearance: Maxine’s natural hair colour is a mousey brown, though she usually dyes it to a deep red and styles it into twin braids that fall to her shoulders. Other than a basic wash and dry, Maxine tends to avoid effort with regard to her hair, resulting in more than a few split ends and broken follicles. Her eyes are bright green and are almond-shaped, and sit around a large, hook-shaped nose. Her eyebrows are thin and wispy from aggressive plucking and her cheekbones are sharply defined, combining to give her the appearance of always squinting. She has deep crow’s feet from both smiling and straining to see in the sun. Her lashes are very light and almost blonde, requiring her to wear mascara most days with eyeshadow being busted out for special occasions to highlight her eyes.

Maxine is caucasion with a pale complexion and a smattering of freckles, with skin that doesn’t so much tan as burn in the sun. Despite her 5’2” frame, Maxine is mostly leg, and has built up quite a bit of muscle from both her interest in softball and recreational running. At 115 lbs, Maxine is slender and resents her body shape, usually dressing in baggier clothing to hide or disguise it as often as possible. Maxine keeps her nails trimmed short and unpainted, and prefers open-toed footwear to combat constantly wearing baseball cleats that are a size too small for extra grip.

On casting day, Maxine was wearing blue jeans and a muscle shirt with a tight collar, with a purple hoodie pulled over it. On her feet she wore black and gold gladiator sandals, and her hair was past-due for a re-dye, showing brown roots underneath the deep red and tied in twin braids held together by blue hair elastic. She also wore a dark purple knee brace with a prominent Nike swoosh on her left knee.

Biography: Born to 2nd generation German immigrants Noel and Sativa Schwimmer, Maxine is the youngest of two children. Her sister Denise is four years older than her, and though their social circles didn’t have much overlap, they got along well all throughout their childhood. Noel works as a graphics designer in the freelance sector, and Sativa works as a physical therapist in downtown Miami. Denise is in her fourth year of a Mathematics degree at FIU. Maxine grew up happy and full of empathy, making her a very social, fun-loving child. Of her two parents, Maxine is closer to her dad due to his work meaning he was at home more often than her mother, who tended to work somewhat outside a fixed schedule depending on her clients needs. Despite this closeness, Maxine has generally taken more of the traits of her mom, who is far more outgoing and active than her more meticulous and worried father and sister. Maxine and her father clashed some during her middle school years, when she found school difficult to focus on and homework impossible to complete. Maxine, through some help from Sativa, found coping strategies towards the tail end of grade 7 involving a blend of physical activity and breaking things into sports analogies, and by grade 8 Maxine was doing much better in school, though all understood that she would never be a star pupil. With these coping strategies and an understanding of how his daughter learned, Noel and Maxine’s relationship returned to its close status.

The decision to start dyeing her hair was also met with some resistance by Noel, though Sativa talked him down behind closed doors due to having gone through similar impulses as a girl. Though both expected it to be just a phase, Maxine kept dyeing her hair all through middle school - even saving allowances and taking paper routes to continue paying for products - and Noel and Sativa accepted it as part of their daughter’s lifestyle. Through high school, Maxine's relationship with both parents got very close, especially with Denise moving away to college. The three try to do an activity together once per week, with these activities becoming more frequent with Maxine's recent injury.

Maxine has always been a fairly popular girl, being adept socially and approachable. She has a large circle of friends and tends to be a floater - sitting with a certain group at lunch one day, selecting a different group the next - though she does have a handful of confidantes that she calls her close personal friends. Maxine tends to favour the company of boys over girls, viewing them as less complicated and more easy to interact with.

From a young age, Maxine’s parents wanted her to play sports. While Denise didn’t take to any organized sport save for swimming, Maxine warmed immediately to both soccer and softball, and enjoyed the batting aspects of softball more than anything else in soccer. Maxine has played organized softball since she was six, and has competed in every level of her school teams since middle school. She is considered one of the best fielders and hitters on the team, though she sometimes displays over-eager tendencies and makes the wrong decision while on base due to how aggressive she plays. Late last season, Maxine suffered a Grade 2 ACL sprain when attempting to steal home plate in the 11th inning of a crucial game. The ACL sprain had to heal throughout the winter months and is in its late stages of the healing process, still wearing a bulky brace.

Despite her performance during softball games, Maxine is fairly relaxed as a person and tends to not let things bother her. When she’s not in competitive environments, she finds it hard to summon motivation both socially and academically. Whenever there’s a contest or a prize attached to a situation, however, Maxine thrives - finding a clear goal easier to push towards. Maxine views Mangrove’s ‘grading system’ as one of her biggest failures in this respect - despite trying at times to increase her ranks, she’s never been able to compete with the truly intelligent at the school. She’s grateful to her parents for the opportunity provided by paying her tuition, and wishes she could reward that with being better than average, but her attention on academics tend to be maxed out on achieving average scores.

Video games are generally how Maxine unwinds at home. She mostly prefers platformers, thrilling at the reflexes and simple solutions that these games provide for her. She also plays JRPGs - mostly for the stories, which are goofy enough that she considers them entertaining in the way that bad movies are good.

Maxine also draws in her free time, though usually doesn’t share this talent with others much, not even some of her closer friends. Usually she practices with tutorials on YouTube, and has found that drawing from imagination is generally better than attempting to copy real life. Her drawings often resemble characters from video games she plays, with wild hair and outfits befitting the JRPG genre.

Maxine is considered an average student, her parents having paid the tuition for her to attend the school rather than her achieving it based on scholastic merit. Her favourite class is Phys-Ed. When she graduates, she's likely going to take a year off to work and figure out what she wants to do with her post-secondary career.

Maxine doesn’t feel strongly towards SOTF-TV either way, though she does keep up with it in order to not be left behind in conversations, though this usually takes the form of browsing headlines on aggregate sites rather than deep-dives.

Advantages: Maxine has a slender frame and is skilled at hand-eye coordination from softball practice. She also has excellent stamina, and likely has very few enemies at the school.
Disadvantages: Maxine has recently suffered an ACL sprain and cannot run currently at full speed, and is more relegated to a slow gait. Her competitive nature may come back to bite her, as well as her tendency to tunnel-vision onto a single obstacle.

[Namira]

Hi Naft, Max has a framework right now, but I need you to build on that framework before she can be approved.

Currently there's not really much of a sense for how Max was growing up, what made her into the person she is now. She's always been fairly popular and played sports since young, but that's more suggestive around the edges than it is a proper depiction of her formative years. I'd like you to elaborate a bit on these foundations.

There are a couple of internal inconsistencies in the softball paragraph. There's a reference to 'played organized baseball since she was six' - wrong sport - and her ACL injury is referred to twice as a sprain and once as a tear.

I like the softball paragraph in general and I think it could be used as a springboard for other areas. What about her personality has led her to be overeager and aggressive? Or, is this a contrast to her usual personality? That in itself is a little bit of a missing link for Maxine, because otherwise all we have is that she's approachable and social. I'd like you to expand more on the kind of person Max is.

I'd like you to include some information about Max's feelings/opinions on SOTF-TV, as it's a key part of the setting and is currently not mentioned at all.

I don't really gave a good grasp on her relationship with her parents. Please add a little bit more background about who they are to Max: there's a couple of seeds with her dad introducing her to softball and them paying for tuition, but those need to be cultivated. Another missing element is how she feels about the grading/leaderboard system in Mangrove, so perhaps those elements could be combined together.

Max is a senior: what's she planning on doing in life after school? Does she have college plans? Working plans?

The advantages/disadvantages could us a little bit of expansion, as her friendships are used both as an advantage and a disadvantage. I can see how she would likely have few enemies, but there's nothing in the biography that would suggest that Max is overly trusting. That would be interesting for you to build on.

Let me know when you've made edits and I'll take a second look.

[The Honeless Beard]

Edited!

[Namira]

Hi Naft, still some work needed here. Max is improving, but the edits have introduced a few more points needing revision.

It's a little confusing when you state that Maxine is closer to her dad than her mom, but go on to say that she has 'taken more to her mom'. You also characterise Sativa as the active, sporty parent, but it's Noel who encourages Max to play ball: it's pretty muddled and I'd like you to clarify a bit. It's obviously not out of the question for Max's less sporty parent to prompt this, but the current state of play makes it seem almost like she dislikes her dad.

Sativa found coping strategies towards the tail end of grade 7 involving a blend of physical activity and breaking things into sports analogies, and by grade 8 Maxine was doing much better in school, though all understood that she would never be a star pupil.

This is worded oddly as the focus is on Sativa finding strategies rather than Max using them. The idea's solid but requires restructuring to refocus on Max.

The decision to start dyeing her hair was also met with some resistance by Noel, though Sativa talked him down behind closed doors. His reasons for not wanting her to dye her hair were twofold: if they started allowing it, when would it stop? Would there be piercings next? The other reason was mostly vanity - what was wrong with the hair colour he had been born with? Sativa, who had gone through similar impulses as a girl, didn’t see a problem with these and gently convinced him to come around.

The questioning is a little on the informal side, here, and overall comes across as a bit of a digression. The important part is how this all impacted Max and her relationship with her dad, not the precise detail of dad's beef.

The clashes with dad are also left as a hanging thread as there's nothing to say how these resolved between Maxine and Noel.


Finally, the second half of the previous critique still needs to be addressed:

I'd like you to include some information about Max's feelings/opinions on SOTF-TV, as it's a key part of the setting and is currently not mentioned at all.

I don't really gave a good grasp on her relationship with her parents. Please add a little bit more background about who they are to Max: there's a couple of seeds with her dad introducing her to softball and them paying for tuition, but those need to be cultivated. Another missing element is how she feels about the grading/leaderboard system in Mangrove, so perhaps those elements could be combined together.

Max is a senior: what's she planning on doing in life after school? Does she have college plans? Working plans?

The advantages/disadvantages could us a little bit of expansion, as her friendships are used both as an advantage and a disadvantage. I can see how she would likely have few enemies, but there's nothing in the biography that would suggest that Max is overly trusting. That would be interesting for you to build on.

You've included more background with her parents, but how is she getting along with them in the here and now? What about Denise?

Let me know when you've made edits and I'll take another pass.

[The Honeless Beard]

Here's edit 2! Let me know what else needs fixing.

[Namira]

Nearly there.

How is Maxine with her parents, currently?

What are her plans after graduating from school?

[The Honeless Beard]

Another edit!

[Namira]

Approved