Amanda Brooks

[Spindarene]

Name: Amanda Brooks
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Grade: 12th
Hobbies and Interests: Music, journaling, jogging, volunteering at the humane society.

Appearance: Amanda is average height and weight, standing at five foot eight inches and weighing a hundred and thirty pounds. She has straight dark brown hair that falls just past her shoulders, with a pale complexion and light blue eyes. Her nose is on the slightly large end and is roughly triangular in shape. Her eyes and mouth are slightly wider than average. She has three horizontal self-harm scars on the inside of her left ankle, stacked on top of each other a few millimeters apart. They are faintly pink but mostly faded, as they are about two years old.

On the day of the abduction, Amanda was wearing a plain gray t-shirt, jeans, black zip-up hoodie, and white sneakers.

Her clothing style is usually fairly plain, wearing mostly black, gray, blue, and other neutral colors. In the spring and summertime she will wear tank tops and crop tops, sometimes cut in creative ways, and in the fall and winter she usually wears long sleeve shirts and sweaters. She almost always wears either blue or black jeans as pants. She doesn’t like showing off her legs, so she hardly ever wears shorts or mini skirts. Generally, she never wears skirts unless she has to because she finds them inconvenient and they get in the way of her mobility. When running she wears a variety of workout tank tops, sports bras, and yoga pants, usually in black or gray. She doesn’t like neon colored workout gear, thinking that it looks tacky and associates it with annoying pretentious middle class, middle-aged women (like her mom).

She usually wears her hair loose unless she’s working out, in which case she keeps it in a simple, practical ponytail. She has a complicated relationship with makeup, some days not wearing any at all, while on other days she’ll put on the basics (foundation, eye makeup, neutral lipstick). She almost always puts on makeup when she’s feeling insecure about herself, and uses it to try to hide her imperfections. On days when she’s feeling more confident, or is just too busy to care about her appearance, she either forgets to put it on or decides it’s not worth the hassle.

Biography: Amanda was born on March 18th, 2003 to John and Karen Brooks. Her dad is a civil lawyer that defends corporations against lawsuits and her mother is a copyeditor for the local newspaper. Amanda is an only child who had a comfortable, upper-middle class upbringing.

Despite their material comforts, however, Amanda’s family is not a happy one. Her father is distant both physically and emotionally. He spends most of his waking hours away from the house, and when he is home he doesn’t make an effort to connect with either his wife or his daughter beyond essential interactions, subtly rebuffing most of the attempts that his daughter made to connect with him when she was a child. She has since given up on having much of a relationship with her father.

Her mother, on the other hand, is perfectionistic and overbearing, making frequent criticisms of her daughter’s weight and appearance and interrogations about her achievements (such as grades). Given the inhospitable home environment, Amanda became emotionally withdrawn and shy as she aged, usually preferring to keep to herself.

Amanda struggled some in her early school years, due to some tension at home. She was a naturally shy and emotionally sensitive kid, and when criticized, she would usually feel very embarrassed and stop trying. Because of this, she never excelled in school, but she managed to get passing grades throughout elementary and middle school. Her mother decided to send her to Mangrove Garden in part because she hoped that it would somehow smarten her daughter up, or at least get her to take school more seriously. In subsequent arguments that they had about Amanda's academic performance, her mother would sometimes use the high tuition fees as a way to try to guilt Amanda into doing better in school. Amanda is mostly a B-grade student, with a couple A’s and one or two C’s, and she falls toward the middle of the ranking system. Amanda hates the ranking system, especially because her grades and ranking are a constant point of contention between her and her parents; they both want her to excel and be at the top of her class, and the more they push her, the more she resents the system.

When Amanda was thirteen she began self-harming after a particularly bad fight with her mother. During her sophomore year, one of Amanda’s friends noticed the cuts on her ankle, and persuaded her to seek help from the school counselor. Amanda was reluctant at first, out of fear that the counselor would tell her parents, but she eventually agreed. Fortunately, she and the counselor started off on a good note and built up a rapport fairly quickly. The counselor was concerned about Amanda’s cutting, but ultimately decided not to tell her parents because Amanda did not seem to be endangering her own life or the lives/well-being of others. Eventually, the counselor persuaded Amanda to stop cutting herself, partly by offering her alternative coping mechanisms to deal with her emotional distress. The coping mechanism that Amanda took to the best was running. Now, she runs one to two miles almost every day. The counselor also suggested that Amanda take up journaling to become more aware of her own thoughts and feelings, which Amanda does fairly regularly.

Amanda has also found comfort in music, both by listening to it and making some of her own. She always loved listening to music, and when she was a young child she loved to sing. During her late elementary and early middle school years she stopped singing for a while, due to some criticism from her classmates, but she started up again in high school at the counselor’s suggestion. While she will occasionally do some collaborative projects with friends, she prefers to do most of her musical work by herself. However, she has to wait for a time when her parents aren’t home in order to make music because of the noise, which restricts the times that she can create.

Journaling and counseling have helped Amanda understand that she doesn’t really have a sense of self or identity. She felt like she was just something floating through space, feeling very little connection to herself, her own body, or other people. While Amanda still mostly feels like this, she’s becoming more aware of how she feels and is slowly coming to realize that feeling the way she does about herself and life is not normal.

Amanda has a few friends, but not many. Many of her friends are a grade or two younger than her, partly because she had a rough freshman year. She felt insecure and anxious being at a new school, especially one that her mother pressed upon her was very prestigious and that she therefore needed to make a good impression at. Amanda frequently felt like her classmates were judging her, which made the relationships between herself and the other people in her grade tense. However, the longer she stayed at the school, she felt a little more secure and less threatened. She never fully trusted the majority of her classmates, but opened herself up a little more to some of the younger students.

Perhaps because of the lost connection with her father or the tumultuous relationship with her mother, and/or a lot of factors in between, Amanda has a serious fear of abandonment. During her childhood she would fervently, almost desperately try to make friends with other children, but had a hard time connecting with them, in part due to her intensity and unreliability. Most of her friendships ended either with one or both parties losing interest in the friendship, or in a big fight over some sort of (real or perceived) betrayal. Eventually, Amanda developed some pretty serious trust issues and resisted her desire for intimacy with other people. While she usually convinces herself that she doesn’t need other people, when she meets a friend or romantic prospect that she feels a connection with, she will often jump into the relationship with both feet at once which is sometimes off-putting to the other person. That, plus Amanda’s extreme sensitivity to rejection and abandonment, makes it hard for her to form close relationships.

When she was fifteen, Amanda realized that she was bisexual, and although she has done some discreet experimentation with other girls at school, she keeps her bisexuality firmly under wraps because of her mistrust of other students at her school. She only keeps her romantic feelings for and events with other girls a secret, she is fairly open about her relationships with boys. She has not told her parents about her bisexuality.

Because of her extreme shyness and fear of abandonment, Amanda will sometimes take a less direct route to getting to know her crushes, particularly if her romantic prospect is a boy. If the boy has not initiated contact with her or if she’s unsure of his interest, Amanda will often ask mutual friends about his personal qualities instead of actually talking to him. Sometimes she will watch her crush from a safe distance away at school, and occasionally she has followed her crushes home. Once or twice, she has hidden herself in a neighbor’s yard across the street and watched what little she can glimpse of her crush’s life through the windows of his house. She knows on some level that what she does is wrong, or at the very least weird, but she justifies it to herself as curiosity and nothing more.

Amanda started volunteering at the local humane society when she was sixteen, during the summer between her sophomore and junior year. She originally started volunteering because her parents had been hinting that she should get a job, but volunteering seemed easier and got her parents off her back. Amanda found that she really enjoyed being around animals, because they were cute and were affectionate with her, for the most part, if she was affectionate with them. She had a hard time dealing with some animals with behavioral issues at first, but has since become more attuned to them and their specific needs, and so she generally gets along well with all the animals she works with. She feels like animals are easier to predict and get along with than people. While she has a slight preference for cats, in general she loves working with both cats and dogs.

While Amanda is normally shy and withdrawn with most of the people in her life, she can be extremely warm and kind with people that she likes but also has a temper. If someone annoys her she usually gets frosty, cold, and uncommunicative, but she has had a few angry and explosive fights with people. Most of those fights are between her and her mother, but there have been a few instances when her temper has flared up with other people. While Amanda is not fully aware of this, her moods change very frequently and are considered to be more extreme than the emotions that most people generally feel and display.

Amanda has the ability to be very kind and compassionate, although those sides of her don’t show up very often. She will display those qualities with a few chosen friends, but those parts of her mostly show up with the animals that she works with at the humane society, finding it easier to display the more emotionally vulnerable parts of herself with animals than humans.

Amanda’s main goal after she graduates is to go to college in another state. She’s applied to a couple of colleges in New York, California, and Austin. She’s not sure what she wants to study yet, right now her main goal is to move out of her parents’ house. She secretly hopes to study music, but she knows that being a musician isn’t a stable career option. Since she doesn’t excel in anything academic at school, she’s not quite sure what all of her options are.

Amanda is a fan of the SOTF TV show. She will often get caught up in the plot lines and relationships of the characters on the show, and finds an odd kind of comfort in watching the relationships play out between the characters who love each other, whether romantically or as friends or siblings. Amanda experiences these relationships vicariously, and they can be an escape for her when she feels lonely. Also, she finds the extreme violence and drama of the show to be cathartic, and has sometimes fantasized about being a player on the show when she feels powerless or when she’s particularly angry at someone.

Advantages: Amanda is relatively fit and jogs regularly. This will give her an advantage over less fit students in a situation where running away from a threat is needed. She also has a very hard time trusting other people. While this makes it harder for her to function in her normal day to day life, her trust issues could actually be an asset to her in a situation where people are actually out to kill her.
Disadvantages: Amanda has an unpredictable temper, which could get her into trouble in a confrontation in an already tense situation. Her temper and trust issues might make allying with people that she doesn't know and like difficult, which could leave her largely alone during the game without anyone to look out for her.

[Namira]

Hi Irene, Amanda is looking great, I just have a couple of minor tweaks I'd like to see before waving her on through.

Firstly I'm just going to reprise a small portion of Backslash's original critique and post it again:

Since the hobbies list is just to give a brief overview of what a character is into and detail is better left for the bio, let's adjust this a bit. "Music" as a monolith can be replaced with "playing guitar, singing, and composing," if you want to keep specifics in the list, or it can just be left as "music." Likewise, her last hobby can just be listed as "volunteering at the humane society" with the detail that she goes specifically to work with dogs and cats going in the biography.

The hobbies and interests are still laid out as they were before, so I'd like to see an update there.

Currently, it's still not 100% clear by which means Amanda accessed Mangrove. Her mom sent her there but I have to infer that it's probably a scholarship based off other context, if you could explicitly state that her mom sent her on a scholarship, that would be great.

There's a couple of mild tonal issues where it slips into a bit too much informality. Primarily this is referring to 'flaking out on the friendship' and later 'blow-out fights'. If you could tweak the wording slightly in both spots it'd be great.

Finally, I think you have something with her compassion/trust issues in the advantages and disadvantages, but I think it's almost presented opposite to being a benefit to Amanda. The phrasing is about her usefulness as an ally and not how it supports her in the game and I think you need to flip it around. It is definitely a good idea, though.

Once you've made the edits drop a post and I'll have another look.

[Spindarene]

I made the suggested edits, let me know if there's anything else I need to fix!

[Namira]

Approved.