Marion Rosales
Name: Marion Al-Syed Claudio Rosales
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Grade: Senior
Hobbies and Interests: Violin, harmonica, non-western music, music theory, gossip, socializing, parties, massage therapy, languages, SOTF Champions, video games, streaming.
Appearance: Marion is 5’1”, weighing just shy of 105 pounds on average. She is a Hispanic girl with bronze skin and a generally waifish rectangular body profile; her hips and bust are average for her height and her shoulders are small. She has small hands and feet for her size and often must look to the children’s sections of stores to find shoes that appropriately fit.
Marion has a round face which generally is described as looking youthful, if slender to being almost bony. Her skin has a healthy glow to it, and she has only sporadically dealt with teenage acne. She has full cheeks and a narrow, button shape nose with a small bridge that loses definition before reaching her eye line. Her eyes are naturally expressive and the color of her iris is a vivid and rich brown. Her flesh-shade lips are slightly thin, and she has a natural overbite. Her jet black hair is easily styled into a layered shaggy bob due to its stubborn straightness, falling shy of her shoulders. She partitions and sweeps her hair over her right eye, though this stylistic choice is usually only visible when she is in casual settings or at home.
Marion’s voice is naturally thick and tonally deep, and she is often told she has a voice that does not match her appearance. She speaks fluent Spanish, and can understand spoken and written Arabic but is slow to speak it in conversation. She has a beginner's grasp of French but does not actively speak it outside of school.
Marion dresses conservatively, only very rarely wearing outfits that will expose her forearms or calves. She thus has an affinity for long sleeves, sweaters, and jeans — she generally does not wear dresses unless given special occasion to. She avoids jewelry and piercings, save for an ornate, slightly tarnished silver flower pin of a simple five petal shape. This pin is roughly the size of a half-dollar and she wears it in her hair. Normally Marion covers her hair and face in a hijab. Marion is modestly interested in fashionable statements — she likes polka dots and ruffles on her clothes.
On the day the version began Marion was wearing plain blue jeans, and a brown scoop neck short sleeve blouse on top of a thin white long sleeve. Marion was wearing a baby blue hijab, so her hair was cleared off her forehead by a plain black headband and her hair pin was hidden from view.
Biography: Marion Al-Syed was born on the 8th of October, 2003 to Javier Al-Biruni Rosales and Ysabel Claudio. Javier was a Columbian anthropologist of some renown in his field who travelled to Monterrey to teach in the prestigious Tecnológico de Monterrey in his 30s, ultimately meeting then custodial staff Ysabel and marrying her shortly thereafter. Marion has one younger sister, Danica Al-Iman, who was born five years after her. The Rosales family is a naturally patriarchal one, with Javier having a strong authority and intellectual influence on both his children. He strongly believes in the traditional family, and was from a young age quick to enforce discipline with his children, but also to encourage both of them to have hobbies and passions that they could excel in.
Marion, as a young child, didn’t tend to play outside too often, finding more enjoyment in more ‘indoor’ activities such as reading and block-building. She was quick to learn how to speak and quite talkative when young, so she was close to both her parents from a young age, often following them around the house during the periods of time where she’d be energetic enough to want to explore. She was thus close with both her parents from a young age. Her mother Ysabel was socially shrewd, street smart given her poor background, and when bringing Marion out to visit other family or the market would impress on her the importance of being alert and having friends to watch her back. Her father Javier’s academic passions were ones Marion would pick up from a young age. She was an advanced reader for her age, and as young as five was trying to pick up the Arabic tongue, which her father as a practicing Muslim and a scholar kept study resources for in the home.
By the time Marion was to start kindergarten, Javier received a better job offer in the United States, a senior research post for a museum services firm in the city of Miami, and after some discussion the family decided to go forward with the move as the money would help them support and uplift Ysabel’s extended family, who mostly remained poor. Javier did have an uncle living in the city, and they moved into their home to split costs and ease into an American lifestyle. Over eight people lived in the house, soon nine with the birth of Danica within the year of them moving. A busy home made for a happy Marion, who this early on in her development already seemed to adore people in general, sometimes being too friendly and honest with strangers she met while out with her mother, who could only teach Marion to be more cautious with difficulty. Marion being young however, was quickly a better English speaker than her mom, and she ultimately would help with translating during official business such as getting government documents, giving her a stronger sense of her own independence and helping her develop her speaking skills.
While Marion was in Kindergarten she began to experience unusual sensory feedback from certain sounds, which during art and play times would increasingly cause her to ‘hear’ colors while she was chatting with friends. The unusual hearing quickly began to also affect her in her home life, until she was soon actively trying to evoke the experience as it was joyous for her. Her chromesthesia is primarily linked to human voices and musical tones, though other sounds can rarely cause her to experience them visually. Thus she began to develop an interest in music, at first mostly in terms of more active listening to existing songs she was already familiar with — usually radio pop, or songs her mother had brought from home and listened to around the house. She picked out patterns and began to develop a natural sense for musical theory due to her specific interest in the colors of certain scales and riffs.
To this end, she began to develop an interest in playing instruments. She was introduced to harmonica playing in her first grade class as a class activity, and among her peers she developed the most fascination with it and would practice after class hours. She enjoyed the ability to manipulate her own chromesthesia, almost like a form of art and expression, and when the unit ended she kept her harmonica as the class had been required to buy them for the class activities. She learned age-appropriate songs, and was quite eager to practice daily, even normally mundane chores like her scales being sensory wonder for her.
Her parents noted her interest, and her father — who had attempted to learn the saxophone in his own youth, although doesn’t play now — was especially proud as he believed music would spur her developing intellect. He gave her a few options of classic instruments he preferred she’d play, she eventually settled on the violin as the more gracious profile of a violinist playing appealed to her. He decided to formally involve himself in his daughter’s music education as she entered the second grade, scheduling her practices — Marion’s teacher a tutor independent of any formal school or building for music, with the songs she practices typically being assorted classical and contemporary pieces not attached to any style or school of learning — and formally evaluating her skill. She practiced daily and was subject to the discipline of her father in making sure her childish mind stayed relatively focused. She typically learns songs via reading off of sheet music, and usually shifts to playing them from memory after a while, enjoying doing so as a ‘reward’ for mastering the song and as an exercise to explore her chromesthesia. It was hard work, but she craved his regular input, and he was also generous in rewarding her sometimes, though at other times distant and hard to get proper feedback from due to his work schedule.
By the time she was in sixth grade she was advanced in skill for her age, considering she’d shown no virtuoso leanings when young. She joined her school’s band and was practiced enough to be considered a teacher’s assistant, where she helped out with practice and band warmups. She was consistently popular among her peers in elementary school and was often invited to birthday parties — whenever she didn’t have the time she was already quite graceful in declining for her age, and showed a knack for avoiding the petty drama of her age. She generally showed a very strong social awareness this early on, just as puberty was starting to affect her.
As Marion graduated into middle school she thus had a lot of friends, and was also asked out semi-regularly by boys on dates and to dances. She engaged one boy out of curiosity, then would turn down subsequent events of that sort, learning that she was not particularly ready for any sort of romantic commitment. She felt generally conservative with herself as her body matured, finding it awkward and uncomfortable to draw untoward male attention she began to dress differently than she had as a child. This would coincide with an interest in expressing her father’s Islamic faith more openly. While she was not especially devout she did feel a comfort in being actively spiritual, and she would regularly engage in practices of the Islamic faith like prayer and study for most of her middle school life. This did little to dampen her social successes.
Her musical taste also began to develop at this time in her life, deepening from being whatever she heard on the radio. Due to her continuing involvement in band she primarily started listening to music designed to inspire her with new pieces to study. It was in this way that she developed an inroads into world and ethnic music due to their often heavy usage of strings in relatively exotic ways that excited her palette and her senses. In particular she began to extensively practice Arabic and Indian compositions, and had easy access to recordings and written notes on the matter due to her father’s job. Sometimes after school she’d visit the museum that her dad worked at, where she’d be quietly granted special privilege to browse through their archives.
It was in this way that she began to develop an interest in travelling more and in studying cultures. In particular she wanted to learn new languages, as she believed that would allow her to speak to a greater amount of people — she sometimes felt a bit insecure and out-of-place in areas of the city where other languages she could not speak were common in casual conversation. Instead of taking the easy route in school and taking classes with her native Spanish she took French classes, though at home she would focus on Arabic, as she had an easy source of practice in friends and readings at mosque.
Her family lived in the same area her entire schooling career, so by the time she graduated to high school — making it into Mangrove Garden through getting a high score on the entrance exam — she had a strong group of friends she was loyal to and vice versa. Her genial personality and love of conversing for its own sake had developed her into a very strong speaker, charismatic in a quiet and non-attention grabbing way. She’d had a good upbringing, taking even her father’s distance and calculating tendencies in her stride, and she felt blessed even as her phase of interest in her practicing religion mostly subsided into keeping on with certain traditions such as the hijab. Marion found herself the sort to be very thankful for her life and friends, and she graduated into high school with strong spirits, doing her best to provide support to her more troubled friends as a way to pay forward what she felt she’d been given.
She continued to be in the school’s band, a second-chair violinist from her freshman year on. She developed a passing interest in entering a sport such as soccer, but would never end up following up on it. She’d never been particularly good at PE, she was only average in fitness for her age. More pressingly she simply could not fit a full sport in her schedule. Her dad also did not support her when she brought up tryouts, dismissing it as a waste of her mental potential. Thus she ultimately elected to not pursue that fleeting desire, and would never develop much athletic skill.
Though she was only rarely inclined to stay out late, often facing restrictions from her parents who were both fairly strict about her after school time, she attended parties where she could. Friends often cajoled her into the ones she attended, and she felt the need to not let those friends down. She did not drink like some of her friends — and did not intend to even when she came of age, as she found the practice a bit too loud for her liking. She would often settle into quieter corners of parties and make new friends, sometimes practicing flirting as well, though she remained fairly coy in this regard and only did so for fun. She was often the designated driver when she got her license early in junior year and could be trusted with friends cars due to generally being considered reliable. She came to enjoy parties as a time to meet her peers in a different environment — sometimes she found some of them intimidatingly wild, but even that she could take in her stride, and she continued to develop a skill for disarming others who were aggressive or rowdy.
At these parties she also began to develop a specific inroads into massage. She found she liked helping people relax, especially since it would make conversation afterward easier and more free flowing. It became something she was known for among her various social circles, she was willing to practice on either gender, and developed a knack for it. Initially her efforts were purely instinctual, she had no formal training and carried no equipment but still developed the sense of touch to identify muscle tension that could be worked out with a few minutes of her attention. It became something of a craftsman’s hobby for her, she liked to explore different people’s bodies in this platonic way, to do something so intimate with a specific purpose and goal.
Also in junior year she began to play video games, though not because she had a particular interest in gaming, she was fairly neutral to the idea at first. Rather, she observed the popularity of streamers online through observing some of her gamer friends. She noticed how streamers were essentially selling the service of their personalities and ability to engage with audiences, and she loved the idea of being able to converse with more people from around the world and have another social group to explore. Her friends who were gamers encouraged her and were her first audience members, giving her the courage to initially stick with it.
SOTF Champions’ popularity at the time made it a natural fit for her to explore, and she practiced for some time to develop her skills. With determination she felt ready to begin streaming within a month, focusing on custom content, for-fun game modes, and providing an experience of friendliness for her audience. Dealing with the trolls and perverts of the internet was of little issue for her, as her online presence was strictly limited to her streaming, she had little other internet presence to be bothered and her social medias were not connected to her accounts at first.
She did find she enjoyed the community overall, however, finding anonymous trolls more cute and harmless than anything, even when they insulted and demeaned her, blithe cheerfulness and lack of attention-grabbing antics turned most of them away, leaving her with a fairly well curated audience that would grow by the month. She began to face cam and voice chat early on, and never looked back.
By the time she graduated to her senior year she found she very much had developed an interest in video games overall, fueled by recommendations and requests from her audience she also began a side segment for gaming reviews and reactions while keeping her main focus dedicated to Champions. Her relative novice status in the gaming community helped her out in this regard — she had a low bar for excellence and was impressed by nearly everything, giving her a niche of honesty and good general conversations in the way she presented her opinions that attracted a regular audience, akin to the appeal of mukhbangs and lifestyle channels. Her gaming skill improved to the extent that she could quickly learn new games of even technically difficult genres, and engage in for-fun matches in Champions with actual pro gamers from time to time without being decried for being a scrub. In SOTF Champions in particular she became a dedicated jungler main, in other games she gravitated towards more relaxed gameplay that allowed her to focus less and chat more, but she also showed an increasing talent for first persons, with a specific love for survival-horror as her audience enjoys her expressive fear reactions.
Thus her online presence grew into being respectable, drawing strong numbers for her scheduled content releases, and she’s well known within her school’s gaming community. Her father ignores this new hobby of hers, and pressures her to keep up with her music studies and language learning, where she sometimes falls behind schedule. She is not particularly stressed, personally believing she has an obligation to split her time well despite how much she has come to enjoy her newest hobby. She still greatly respects her father and hopes to graduate and enter a good college for the humanities — she is under no impression that her gaming will make any sort of proper career, and has yet to monetize her streaming presence beyond generic adverts. She keeps up her grades, and ranks fairly high, though she does slip often enough that she has Bs and As on her report cards, meaning she does not stand quite close to the top of the rankings. She intends to take the AP tests for French and Arabic before graduating, but otherwise does not engage in overly rigorous academic courses.
In regards to her opinions on SotF itself, Marion is for the most part neutral but veers positive on it. For the most part, her only real connection to the show is that she primarily plays and streams games based on it, but she does happen to enjoy SotF-watching as a primary activity at parties and as a way of chatting people up and breaking the ice. Because of this — and with her position as a Champions streamer sometimes calling for knowledge on the show — she often trawls Wikipedia and Reddit as each season airs, taking note of results and opinions for use in both causal conversation and engaging with her audience on-stream.
She has also quietly considered furthering her passion for massage and getting certified, but is hesitant to bring this up in the home, knowing she will likely not receive much support.
Advantages: Marion is both socially very well-developed and is well liked in Mangrove Garden, which can be of use to her in terms of attaining non-team allies and perhaps may protect her from the aggression of others. She has good listening skills due to her natural tendencies and will easily be able to pick up possibly crucial contextual details in even very chaotic conversations, which — with her conversational skill — can help her deal with difficult social situations.
Disadvantages: Marion is universally fond of people and is difficult to antagonize, which may make it difficult for her to find the impetus to pick fights and take kills for her own benefit. She is naturally passive and directionless in situations where she does not have social support.
Designated Number: BC08
---
Designated Weapon: Decorative Mareon Rosalales Nameplate
Mentor Comment: "Ooh, I wonder if she's tried tank Ben? I'm sure everyone will be playing it once the secret is out, that max hp% damage is nasty...
But, uh, yeah, adaptability is the name of the game here, and Mareon's got that in spades. It's good to be able to win a knock-down, drag-out fight, but it's even better to know how to avoid one."
The above biography is as written by Yugikun. No edits or alterations to the author's original work have been made.
Evaluations[edit | edit source]
Handled by: Yugikun
Kills: None
Killed By: Nadine Flores
Collected Weapons: Decorative Mareon Rosalales Nameplate (assigned weapon)
Allies: Nadine Flores, Jasper Suárez-King, Shoshanna Kowalczyk, Rhonda Rollins
Enemies: Sylvain Kessler
Mid-game Evaluation:
Post-Game Evaluation:
Memorable Quotes:
Other/Trivia[edit | edit source]
Threads[edit | edit source]
Below is a list of threads containing Marion, in chronological order.
Memories:
Sandbox:
TV3:
- ☪
- 9 PM, Day 1 (open, if you're interested in joining TEAM ESCAPE)
- cheesed to meet you
- ★★ dead mari :skull: ★★ (@radradradish)
- When Betting On High Card Pays Off
- First The Sirens, Then The Lights...
Your Thoughts[edit | edit source]
Whether you were a fellow handler in SOTF or just an avid reader of the site, we'd like to know what you thought about Marion Rosales. What did you like, or dislike, about the character? Let us know here!
- Marion was a cool character who tried a number of different things in her narrative, some of which worked great and some of which were perhaps more interesting in theory than they were functional in practice. She entered Sandbox on a strong note, diving into social media in a way that isn't necessarily new, but that works particularly well here because of where the focus lies. That the thread takes the form of a Twitter feed isn't meaningless, but it's also not the sole point of the posts, and the novelty isn't doing all the carrying. Rather, what the thread does particularly well is convey an external impression of how Marion presents herself and how she interacts with her friends and the world, stripped of the thoughts, internal monologue, and so on that normally feeds into a character's narrative (and also setting up a nice callback during the game proper, as well as her death sequence).
This distanced perspective is particularly interesting and effective when it comes to Marion because her normal narrative voice is one that leans on introspection and hypotheticals heavily. Marion is someone who puts a whole lot of work into how she comes across, and as her story is structured we get to see the results and then watch as that seemingly-effortless style is stripped back and revealed to be the product of careful, almost compulsive cultivation. This is a really cool trick, a way to introduce Marion and sell her as an effective social force without having to constantly remind the reader of that aspect of her character.
In-game, Marion positions herself as the aspiring leader of an escape attempt/resistance against the game, quickly finding an ally in Nadine Flores and a detractor in Laura Hakštok. The chemistry is mostly solid, though one place Marion occasionally stumbles is in her application of parody and the density of some of her social ruminations. Riffing on V3 text fights in the context of a normal conversation is legitimately hilarious, but at times she chases her tail to the point that it actually doubles back and makes her seem less in control—there's a sweet spot where interactions seem conscious but also practiced, like they don't take a ton of effort because the character has spent so long working these things that they're almost second nature, but Marion almost always comes off like she's trying really hard even if sometimes I'm not entirely sure why she needs to be.
The other spot where Marion occasionally struggles is in her role when it comes to the escape crew. This isn't her fault per se, but rather a function of the makeup of the group coupled with her handler's role as a member of staff who couldn't actually drive escape plots due to inside information. Marion is a leader sort, certainly when compared to Nadine, but she can't really push the action or offer a ton of material aid, which leaves the group spinning its wheels until it merges with the similarly-minded Shoshanna Kowalczyk and Jasper Suárez-King... at which point Shoshanna, unfettered by such technical constraints, ends up taking more of a lead, leaving Marion at times sidelined (which her narrative even comments on). It's not a disaster, and it has some good emotional moments, but it also feels like it maybe was a slightly unintended side effect of how her arc intersects with the realities of a staff position.
Fortunately, that doesn't carry over to Marion's death, which is one of the highlights of her story. The initial conversation/confrontation with Sylvain Kessler is a great piece, especially because the two have an established relationship through the Twitter thread but not one we've seen play out directly before; the mindsets and the chemistry are strong, and Sylvain's decision to pull the trigger is horrible and arbitrary and thoroughly earned, a great inciting point that is ultimately meaningless in origin and striking in repercussions. In her dying moments, Marion is allowed to take the lead in a way she never could when not doomed, coaching the others to experiment on her collar, trying to use her death to teach them something. This is a strong beat and works well with the multimedia, zoomed-out, cut-away exploration of her family, her inspirations, and her so-called friends online. It's touching, tragic, and has been cooking since her very first post, coming across not as a simple trick but rather the culmination of a long-running plan. I'd point to the use of media in Marion's story for anyone looking at integrating such things into their own works; she does it smoothly and effectively and it's never ever pointless. - MurderWeasel