Age: 24
Gender: Non-binary/Demigirl (she/he/they, in order of preference)
Field of Study: Neuropsychology
Physical Description: Tess clocks in at 5’3 and 115 pounds when she weighs herself in the morning. Her ancestry is mostly Caucasian; her mother is Turkish and her father is half Turkish, half Eastern European. She has a triangular build with broad shoulders and some amount of musculature. Her skin is on the lighter side of beige, and her hair is dark strawberry blonde, fading from a darker red at the roots. She keeps it wavy and a bit over shoulder length, with bangs. She has blue eyes framed by relatively thick eyebrows and a short but straight nose on a plain face. When she speaks, it’s with a deep, expressive voice.
Tess dresses for comfort, with a preference for loose materials and against rough textures like denim. She wears fandom merchandise occasionally, and her personal style hasn’t changed much from her pre-teen years, resulting in a bright palette. During the final night on the Frontier, she was wearing striped a teal, orange-yellow, green and white shirt beneath a blue 90’s patterned hoodie and a puffy cream coat with a blue, red and yellow stripe running through the top/chest section. Her brown insulated ski pants were tucked into a pair of olive green boots, and beneath them she wore a pair of darker brown cotton pants. She also had on a pair of zig-zag white and orange gloves and a white knitted hat with dangling pom-poms and a rainbow band running through it. Inside her pockets are a small sticky-note pad shaped like an orange and a red pen.
Background:
- Tess is the only child of a middle-class family, born to Deniz and Alara Demir. Her parents aren't close to their own extended families, and left her isolated from both her kin and her heritage.
- Tess’ parents weren’t strict when she was growing up, but they had high expectations, especially since she was their only child- she felt pressured to perform well in school to the point where she lacked many in-person relationships. She adopted several English nicknames in a failed attempt to be more approchable before settling on Tess, which stuck.
- She was an avid reader and animation watcher as a child, and that, combined with unrestricted internet access and a lack of real friends, caused her to find solace and companionship in fandom spaces where it was easier for her to befriend others based on mutual interests and media. Her first forays into fandom are based off of Harry Potter and Riordanverse books, as well as My Little Pony.
- Tess’ defining years are marked by age-inappropriate online interactions. In the late 2000s to mid 2010s, she began using Tumblr, where she fell in with groups of fandom posters for animes and games that she liked, including Danganronpa, Hetalia, and PMMM. She quickly began to argue and pick fights with people who interpret media differently than she did. This behavior was encouraged by others in her group, who also had her join in on sending disturbing materials like gore, self harm, or odd pornography to these people, and sent these pictures to each other regularly to shock them as a joke. In middle school she was sexually groomed by one of her former online friends, who was eighteen at the time, and frequently exchanged pornographic material to others in her online circle that were about the same age. She was constantly praised for her apparent mental maturity throughout and sent discreet gifts, such as video game currency.
- Her high school years were miserable as she struggled to make or keep friends in real life, often driving them away by being too clingy or by not paying enough attention to their attempts at reaching out. Most of her friends were made by sharing interests in the same media, primarily anime and video games.
- Tess tends to have fixations on certain media, usually a few at a time. Currently she’s in the middle of a 8-month long obsession with popular RPG Genshin Impact, with lingering interests in Cyberpunk, Dragon Age and Arknights. She is willing to admit that she has developed some form of gambling addiction as a result of the game’s usage of microcurrency and chance-based rewards system, yet is unable to kick her gaming habit. Her finantial situation has been tight, yet she's nowhere near broke; she drops 15 dollars a month on the game as a baseline, and about a hundred more for every release of a new character, which she could keep up with working as a a TA and in retail. Despite her distaste for the game’s community, she is still an active participant in its fandom, frequently getting into arguments over characterization and shipping drama. Tess tends to be aggressive in these confrontations, and casually throws around death threats and suicide bait, mostly because they feel normalized to her after a childhood of a toxic online environment.
- Tess’ interest in psychology and sexology started in her mid-teens, soon after she realized that she was groomed online. In an attempt to disconnect herself from everyody inolved, she overhauled all of her online relationships and stopped using Tumblr for two years. Because of this, she was left emotionally vulnerable and missing support from her actual friends. After cutting contact with most of her former friends, she became depressed and withdrawn, and suddenly hyper-aware of her precocious hypersexuality. In the following years, she began to study psych, both independently and in school, to figure out the exact causes behind her poor mental health and her development of fixations on various erotic/romantic scenarios, beyond the grooming. Tess is quite open about her trauma and her interest in sexology, but feels repulsed about sex and romance irl, which has led to her being a stranger to dating until recently.
- Tess has a distant relationship with her parents, who are either unaware of or dismissive of her mental issues; when she came out as non-binary, they basically ignored that information. Their expectations for her grades were also a source of constant mental pressure, though now that she’s drifting further away from them she feels as if the relationship has actually improved since they are less suffocating now. She feels as if her youth was wasted away, because of how schoolwork overrode her interpersonal relationships and left her socially stunted and lonely. Part of her resents her parents for that, now that she is in college and coming to terms with her unhappy childhood. She thinks of the two of them as being too image-obsessed; they discouraged her from talking about her mental health issues with other people because they thought the family would be judged for it.
- Her decision to study psychology was a source of conflict. While Tess is arguably knowledgeable about the subject even before college, the lack of job opportunities was a concern. She wants to work as a researcher in the field, instead of working directly with patients as a clinical therapist or a psychiatrist. Partially it's because her parents are only willing to pay a portion of her tuition if she worked in a profitable field like IT or medicine, but it's also because she doubts her interpersonal skills and her inability to communicate with patients. Tess had slight empathy issues that worsened after her traumatic experiences- for her, it’s selective and difficult to express. Her sociopathic behaviors on the internet never bled into real life, but she easily disconnects herself from the ramifications of her actions because of the impersonal nature of many online interactions. Largely the reason why she has such an issue with showing empathy online is because of the toxic environment she was in as a child; she is unfazed by being threatened or insulted and thinks others should be, too. To compensate for her difficulty connecting with other people in real life, she tends to put up an act of normalcy, repeating phrases and gestures from others.
- Tess has concluded from her studies and personal experiences that she has, at the very least, depression. She is diagnosed with mild depression and is on Zoloft, though she feels like she also has unaddressed neurodivergent traits that she could get looked over, once she has the 'right mindset' and time.
- Tess had a slight superiority complex as a child as a result of constantly being on top of her class, until she began to struggle more in high school in terms of mathmatics. The two neurotic years of her freshman and sophmore year, which were affected by her sharp decline in mental health at the time, colored her view towards education as a whole. Nowadays, though she is nowhere near failing, she's a mediocre student with a tendedency to not study much in areas that don't fully interest her.
- She recently entered a relationship with Misha, but is not entirely committed to it. After the honeymoon period of a few months, her affection for her has been low, and she feels inadequate to perform the emotional labor needed to take care of her. The fact that Tess’ relationship experience has been confined to her traumatic experiences as a preteen further colored her perception of how she should treat her girlfriend-namely, she’s quite self-centered in the relationship, though she's trying to improve for her girlfriend's sake. Tess is far more invested in the relationship itself than Misha; several months of dating has added stability and a schedule to her life, and something to focus on, but it feels more of a routine than a romance to her. As a result, she is both possessive and distant. She also avoids physical touch as a love language, rarely hugging or kissing her.
- Tess is simultaneously indifferent, excited, and dreading the end of her post graduate education. She lived in Tacoma for all her life and feels a disconnect from the city's culture, so she wants to move out of not only her dorm but the state, yet knows that the latter is financially inadvisable. She has no idea what to do with her relationship with Misha. Her college experience overall was underwhelming; her loneliness only got worse, and she laments over the missed experiences she could've had with her peers if only she were less reclusive. She embarked on the trip both as a way to experience something new for once and earn easy credit while clearing her mind, though it's also because she was curious on just how she would be studying psychology in the arctic.
Assets: Tess is detached and analytical, with the ability to compartmentalize her emotions and troubles if needed. She may have less quelms than most when it comes to aggression and hurtful behaviors, or for prioritizing self-preservation to the detriment of others, because of her quite self-centered behavior.
Limitations: Tess has a bit of a one-track, obsessive mind. Her cold personality hasn’t endeared her to most of her peers, and she is unfamiliar with them due to her penchant for emotional and physical distance.
