Catherine Selwyn (![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} selwife) wrote,@ 2022-01-05 00:46:00 |
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OOC INFORMATION Name: Sara Age: 24 Email & AIM: xgirlxanachronismx@gmail.com & SavageFlight Timezone: EST Previous Experience: Here for a graphical rundown; to sum up: I've been RPing online for OMFG 15 years now wtf, and in journal RPGs for like 10 years, and yes I am just as disturbed by these numbers as you are. Currently I have 4 characters at confundo_mod including Lily Evans; and my most significant-yet-recent stint was the entire continuity of wah_mods as Mandy Brocklehurst, Chelsea Holy, Callum Selwyn and Rhona MacFusty. But obviously there are lots and lots more, since I'm a total RP Lifer. CHARACTER INFORMATION Name: Catherine Maris Selwyn, nee Mulciber Nicknames: Cate, Cathy Birthdate & Age: May 11th 1955, 24 Blood Status: Pureblood Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual Occupation: Socialite, Pureblood Wife and generally useless person Current Residence: Domus Aurea- the Selwyn manor house in Builth Wells, Wales Character Quote: (it doesn't need to be long. Just some song lyrics, or a quote, or an IC catch-phrase to use as flavor text for the character information pages.) Family: Hair Color: Brunette / Eye Color: Hazel Height: 5'6" / Weight: PB: Jessica Pare Former House & Years: Slytherin, 1966-1973 Extracurriculars: Boggart: Patronus: (if they can't cast one, say so and list a hypothetical shape for it.) Wand: Willow, 13 inches, unicorn hair core Allegiance: Her family; and, as a result, the Death Eaters, though she is not counted among their ranks and doesn't wish to be. Political Views: Cathy doesn't really like to think about those things; they're so...unpleasant and ugly. If she must, however, she falls squarely under the heading of 'purist.' She finds muggles to be strange and frightening creatures, so like wizards on the outside and so different in the ways that count. The idea of a magical person having relations with a muggle is one she finds revolting, and she does not feel much better about the same involving a muggleborn. She wouldn't be so crass as to use a term like 'mudblood,' but she believes in her heart that it applies, that such people are somehow intrinsically dirty and wrong. It would be so very much better if they didn't exist at all, if the Wizarding world was completely untouched by the muggle one, if they could all be clean and pure and happy in peace. Role in the War: As the daughter of one Death Eater, the sister of another, and the wife of a third, Catherine is intimately involved whether she likes it or not. She has no desire to take the mark and even less to join in any fighting, but she'll support the men in her life blindly and do whatever must be done to aid and comfort them. Is your character's allegiance known? To what extent?: Given her family, it can be fairly assumed by anyone who knows their leanings that Cathy supports the Death Eaters, and anyone who has seen her reaction to being forced to interact with muggleborns in school and in society will definitely think the same. However, she tries to avoid unpleasantness so much that it's unlikely anyone outside of her immediate circle will ever have heard her so much as mention the war, much less which side she takes. If your character's been marked as a predetermined death, do you have any thoughts on/ideas for how you'd like that to happen? N/A If your character hasn't been marked as a predetermined death, would you be okay with them dying in-game at some point? If yes, do you have any circumstances under which you'd like it to happen? I'm going to say a tentative yes, here; eventually she could become collateral damage for the dark side, I suppose. However I'd really like her to have a chance to grow as a character for a while first. Personality: There are those- including her own husband- who would call Catherine Selwyn a silly girl; and how could she be anything else? The daughter of a doting father who indulged every whim and assuaged every want, never letting a moment's unpleasantness touch his little girl and who passed her off in marriage to a friend he trusted to do the same, she's never had opportunity or reason to be anything else. Catherine grew up a little princess, if princesses were spared the burden of rule and told from the start that they were never to worry about a thing, and so worry and want, hardship and harshness, are foreign to her. How could she be anything but a silly girl? It would be easy to say that Catherine is a spoiled and vain creature, and to a certain extent she certainly is. She has no doubt of her own worth, beauty and place in the world; it wouldn't even occur to her to doubt these things. It's a sort of unconscious vanity, then. As for being spoilt, she is definitely that- she lives under the assumption that anything she wishes for will be provided hastily, and this assumption has proved correct in almost every instance that she can possibly recall. She is, however, saved from being entirely ruined and unbearable by a natural sweetness that shines through in spite of her less savory characteristics. Nobody has any clue where she got it from; certainly neither of her parents is inclined to any sort of natural kindness. But there it is: Catherine is sweet and loving and entirely guileless, traits rare enough among women of her rank and society, and no outside influence has ever been able to cure her of them. She couldn't hurt a fly, Catherine, would forgive any slight, and can't lie to save her life. As a result, Catherine is rather more forgiving of the impure within Wizarding society than the rest of her family. While she is genuinely frightened of muggles and, ever worse, the muggleborn, she is extremely accepting of halfbloods and the like; after all, they're demonstrably more civilized than their non-magical kin, and as far as she's concerned are no threat to her own well-being or that of her loved ones. And if there's one thing that Catherine can't bear, it's to be cruel to the less-fortunate. Halfbloods may not be entire people, but they deserve to be treated as such, as they're not dangerous and it's not their own fault that they're lesser. At least, that's what Catherine thinks, and she couldn't bear to be less than loving to any one of their number. How can you punish an innocent for being less than you are, after all? History: Catherine was born as the third child and first daughter of Bertram and Araminta Meliflua Mulciber. As the family already had its 'heir and spare,' so to speak, both mother and father were pleased that their final child was a sister for their young sons. A girl would, they expected, balance out the family nicely; rather than a new source of competition for the boys, she would be something for them to look after, a way for them to learn the responsibilities of family and manhood. What nobody expected was Bertram's reaction to his youngest child. After all, he'd never paid the boys much attention when they were babies, and only gave them slightly more of his time now, enough to be a dominating and somewhat forbidding presence at mealtime encouraging Jonathan and Samuel to recite their lessons and to behave; but he was not a demonstrative man and had little interest in children until they could speak like adults even when they were his own. His affection for the infant Catherine was entirely unprecedented, and even he could not really have explained it. Maybe it was her apparent preference for him from the very start, evident in the way she watched him with solemn baby eyes when he entered a room and stopped crying to gurgle contentedly instead when he held her; maybe he simply felt free to love a girl child in a way he never had with his sons. At any rate, from the moment of Catherine's birth her father belonged utterly to her, was wrapped completely around her tiny, chubby little fingers. Nothing was too god for his little girl, and no unhappiness of hers could be tolerated. The boys learned very quickly that there would be no brotherly teasing of this sibling, not if they wanted to go to bed unpunished; and as for getting their father's attention, well, there was simply no chance of that if Catherine was in the room. If they resented this preference for their baby sister's time, company and happiness, they were wise enough to hide it from Bertram and Catherine both. And so Catherine grew up a little princess, the doted-upon apple of her father's eye. Her mother despaired early on of ever being able to discipline the girl without her husband instantly revoking whatever punishments were applied; it was fortunate for her, then, that Catherine was never a girl much in need of disciplining. If anything, Araminta would have liked her daughter to have more spark and fire to her. Instead the little girl was all sweetness and a desire to please. She might have been able to do anything and get away with it as far as her father was concerned, but from the time she could speak Catherine seemed extremely worried about everyone liking her as much. She never tried to get away with anything, never broke the rules or even pushed their boundaries. She couldn't have hurt a flea if it had bitten her, that was the most troubling thing in Araminta's mind, and nothing she did to toughen her young daughter up seemed to do any good. Oh, Catherine would try to follow her example, that much was obvious (and infuriating; if she was going to fail so spectacularly, Araminta would rather she had refused than try at all,) but it was no good. The girl was soft through-and-through. Her father's coddling couldn't spoil what was already so yielding and useless; and so Araminta Meliflua wrote her daughter off early and left her entirely to the care of her nurse and Bertram himself, giving up any hope of influencing her nature- despite her unspoken fear that Catherine would end up in Hufflepuff. This did not, however, turn out to be the case- fortunately for Catherine, who would have had any number of panic attacks had she been forced to room with muggleborn students, of which Slytherin of course admitted none. Having been raised to believe that muggles were both dirty and dangerous, the young girl had managed to convince herself early on that they were somehow monsters in human skin; in short, she was- and remains- terrified of non-magical people, and the idea that there offspring are welcomed into Hogwarts- into the Wizarding world- is horrifying to her. And so, while she would not have done well in any house but Slytherin, in the House of the purists and the snakes she did well enough. Her ambition was a modest one- to marry well and carry on the pure line of her blood- but it was a true and honest one in her heart, and that was evidently good enough for the Hat. Those she lived and interacted with on a daily basis were her equals, her peers, the sort of people she'd grown up with; and if they never truly respected her, they didn't reject her either. She might have been less cunning than some of the other pureblood girls, but she was no less well-bred, no less loyal, and perhaps a good deal more malleable. Her peers liked her as much for her faults as her virtues; and if they didn't, well, Catherine never noticed. As far as her marks went, Catherine was always average at best, but her pedigree was inarguably perfect, and that was good enough for her and her family alike. There was no question of a career for Catherine; upon graduation she would marry, that was taken for granted and unquestioned by both her peers and the girl herself. That her father would choose her husband was equally inevitable; while she had had one or two romances during her years at Hogwarts, none of them had been serious, and that had been on purpose: Catherine always knew that her marriage would be at the disposal of her family and had only engaged in the bare minimum of intrigue to ensure that she knew what she was doing. She was more than happy to be betrothed to one of her father's closest friends, and Mr. Marcus Selwyn, upon her 18th birthday, though her husband-to-be was a number of years older than she was. Not only had she expected such a match all her life, she welcomed it: her father loved her to distraction, and surely any man he chose to be her husband would do the same. And indeed, Marcus doted upon her in a way entirely reminiscent of the indulgence of Bertram, except that he flattered her as well. Catherine loved and loves everything about marriage; she is a woman created to be adored, and she would never question the adoration of the men in her life, instead chooses to bask and revel in it. Of course every pureblood bride is expected to prolong her husband's familial line, and while it has taken several years for Catherine to prove fertile, she has at last done so: as of January 1980 it is evident that she is several months pregnant with her first child. The Selwyn line will live on through her, and Carherine could not be prouder or more overjoyed. She is aware of the war, if tangentially, and considers her part in it to be bringing more purebloods into the world to fight the muggle scourge that threatens to destroy the society and culture she holds most dear. Her husband fights for Voldemort, as does her father and eldest brother; and while she would never, as a lady, take the Mark herself, she supports those who do with all the love in her heart. And if some of those she cares for have less than perfect pedigrees, well, Catherine has always been adept at overlooking that which does not suit her. |
