throne of shadows } { application

[braveandstupid]

1. Player Information
Name: Emily
Username: iluvroadrunner6
Current characters in ToS: AU!Dean Winchester
Reserve: Here!

2. Canon Character Information
Name: Elena Gilbert
PB: Nina Dobrev
Journal: braveandstupid
Age: 18
Appearance:

Elena is about 5’6” and slender of build. She’s pretty, with long dark hair that she usually wears straight and dark eyes. She usually dresses casually—mostly solid colored shirts with jeans, and light make-up.

History: Here!

Powers/Talents:

Elena is a smart, capable eighteen year old Petrova doppelganger. Essentially, she is descended from the line of the girl who’s blood was used to create the first vampires, so her blood is a very powerful magical tool. She was also the doppelganger who’s blood broke the Sun and the Moon curse placed on Klaus, suppressing his hybrid side. This means that a werewolf in transition needs to drink her blood to make the change from almost-dead werewolf into hybrid.

However, as far as what Elena can actually do—she’s basically about as effective as most eighteen year-old girls who have only just started training to protect herself, and get constantly put in supernatural danger every day.

(Read: Not very. She is kidnapped often.)

So basically, there doesn’t need to really be any power limitations because she … has no power. She’s the humany-est human to ever human.

Personality:

“I learned that she’s just a girl. And that she lost her mom too young, and she loves blindly and recklessly, even if it consumes her.”

Granted, this is an Elena quote, describing someone else, but she might as well have been describing herself in the same breath. Elena describing herself accurately is actually rather hard to find—usually she’s described in terms of who she is to other people. The girl who lost her parents, the girl who looks like Katherine, the Petrova doppelganger—there are all these roles that she is meant to play to other people, but when you look at Elena herself, you’ll find that she’s a person who hasn’t really been given the chance to know herself yet.

She’s eighteen years-old, and while she’s been shown to have the propensity for introspection--she keeps journals of her life, and has since she was a child—she hasn’t really been given the chance to prove herself and show what she is capable of. At her core, Elena is a girl who has had very little control over the course of her own life, which is something she struggles for regularly. She’s always struggled with knowing what she wants, and this is brought into even sharper relief with the death of her parents shortly before her seventeenth birthday. Prior to this, she was a good student, heavily involved in a lot of extracurricular activities as well as the Founding Families events with her mother, and had a long term steady boyfriend in Matt Donavan. Then she lost her parents, which lead to her pulling away from most of those things including Matt. At first, she only did so out of depression—these things were reminders of not only her parents, but the parts of herself that she felt she lost in that accident—but when she tries to throw herself back into them again, she finds that some of those things had lost her spark, and aren’t really a part of who she is now. She also later finds out that she is adopted, which only caused her to further question her sense of identity. A lot of Elena’s journey on the show is her search to find herself and acceptance of herself, and a major part of that journey in Season 1 is Stefan Salvatore.

Stefan, second to Jeremy and possibly Bonnie, is one of the most important people in Elena’s life. Stefan is the one who opens her eyes to the idea of a world beyond the natural, and furthermore her acceptance of that world. Elena is one of the few human characters on the show who look at the vampires and other supernatural entities on the show as people, and not monsters. She doesn’t ignore that part of them, but more accepts it as an aspect that they had to deal with, which can put her at odds with a lot of other people in her life, mostly notably Bonnie, her best friend who is also a witch and sees vampires as her enemy, and her birth father/uncle, John Gilbert, who has hunted vampires his entire life. Even her brother has reached a point where he’s seeing what having vampires in her life is doing to his sister, but she continues to stand her ground on the issue. Essentially, if those three plus the founders’ council represent the conservative “KILL ALL THE VAMPIRES” camp, Elena would be the hippie, vampire-loving liberal preaching peace and love in the streets of Mystic Falls. This isn’t to say that she doesn’t understand what vampirism is, or that she isn’t careful. She is acutely aware of how dangerous vampires are—there have been many that have tried to kill her on more than one occasion—but she’s not stake-happy, nor is she confrontational, and she has met enough vampires who just want to live their lives and not hurt people, and have found ways to fight their nature and do that to know that not all vampires are evil.

This also isn’t to say that she didn’t struggle with the idea of vampirism at first. Her first instinct is to push him away, to try and get some distance between herself and Stefan for her own protection, and there’s a long time where she blames a lot of the things in her life on the fact that she is with Stefan and he is a vampire, but when she learns her identity as the Petrova doppelganger, and what’s coming for her in the form of Klaus, she starts to take more responsibility for herself and trying to protect her friends and family from any further harm on her account. Regardless of the fact that she’s seventeen and should be scared enough to let her friends try to protect her, she refuses for any of them to die just so that she can live. She doesn’t see the big picture of it—the fact that Klaus should not be allowed to get what he wants, and should be killed before he does any more damage—she only sees the people that she cares about and not wanting them to get hurt. After her parent’s death, Elena is extremely prone to survivor’s guilt—the car accident that killed her parents would have killed her too if Stefan hadn’t saved her, and the fact that she managed to escape when they didn’t haunts her to this day. She doesn’t want this to happen to her again, which puts her friends at a priority above all else. In the end, it comes down to a matter of Elena not wanting to lose anyone else. She constantly has people taken away from her through circumstance, and she won’t do anything as simple as choose between Stefan and Damon, even though she knows that it’s wrong to string them along. This is an attitude that even carries through even up until her death, where she insists that Stefan saves Matt before he saves her.

Stefan, however, is the person who makes her happy to be alive, and it’s a large part of the reason why she loves him. He’s the one who keeps her looking for ways to save both herself and everyone else, and even though he may not like where she gets that help from, he backs her play and he trusts her, which means more to her than someone who simply saves her without her input—ie, Damon. He saves her from herself, and when she loses him to the darker side of his nature as well as Klaus, she fights for him the way he fought for her. She never gives up on him, regardless of how many times he tells her that he doesn’t want to be with her, or hurts people to drive them away, she holds on to the fact that he loves her, and eventually he would come back to her. It takes Klaus compelling Stefan to turn off his emotions to bring to light the fact that even if he did love her, Elena isn’t the bond that would bring him back from the brink if he needed it. She tries everything she can to save him from himself, even going so far as to lock him down and try to forcibly detox him, hoping that that might help break the compulsion somehow, but in the end she came to realize that while she and Stefan may have had a strong bond, it wasn’t strong enough. Stefan isn’t going to stop because he loved her—he would have to be something else that broke through to him on that level, but she still believes that he can be saved—it’s just a matter of trying hard enough.

That doesn’t meant that once Stefan is released from his compulsion, that things are automatically better. Regardless of the fact that Elena still fights for him, he is convinced that he’s lost her, and focuses all of his energy into stopping Klaus and getting his revenge. While initially Elena could blame the Darker Side of Stefan (which, for the record, is quite a bit different from the Softer Side of Sears), on Klaus’s compulsion, she isn’t prepared for what happens when Stefan indulges of his own accord. It comes to a head in Stefan nearly driving her off Wickery Bridge after force feeding her his blood, essentially taking the choices that she’s used to him giving her, never mind the fact that it’s the bridge her parents died on, and where Stefan saved her life. It’s a fairly traumatic moment, and calls into question a lot of what she believed she could trust in Stefan.

He, slowly but surely, tries to redeem himself to her, and for the most part she lets him. He’s still unpredictable and trying to prove himself worthy of her trust again at the same time, which sends a lot of mixed signals. Stefan also wants her to deal with her apparent (to him) feelings for Damon, and that … makes things even more complicated. But in the end, Elena makes her choice and makes it clear that when it comes to the Salvatores, it’s always going to be Stefan.

(This is also not to say that Elena doesn’t have feelings for Damon, but that’s for later in this personality section.)

Stefan and Elena’s romance happens quickly, and even with that speed it immediately becomes very complicated, not for the fact that he’s a vampire, but more with the addition of two people who will probably always been in tangent to the relationship, no matter what form it’s in—Katherine Pierce, and Stefan’s brother Damon. Katherine, being the first Petrova doppelganger, is one of Elena’s ancestors, and the vampire who sired both Salvatore brothers, is Elena’s exact visual double, and the biggest complication in Elena and Stefan’s relationship. Katherine, despite the visual similarities, is Elena’s exact opposite—where Elena is warm, giving and selfless; Katherine is cold, calculating and self-serving. Elena hates her, as much as Elena can hate anyone, but at the same time, she understands her. She knows why she did what she did, and if anything, she doesn’t want to become Katherine, and her first step in that respect is giving Klaus what he wants and playing her role as the Petrova doppelganger.

According to the show’s mythology, a doppelganger is created to break a curse placed on someone by a witch. She’s a supernatural entity, solely created for the purpose of breaking the hybrid curse placed on Klaus, one of the Original vampires, where her purpose is to die in order to set Klaus free, and her mere existence is further evidence of how Elena’s choices aren’t truly her own. According to the supernatural community, she’s not treated as a girl with a life—in fact, the life that she desperately wants to keep has been used as a bargaining chip against her on more than one occasion. She’s seen as something to be fought over. Her friends rally around her to try and protect her as oppose to letting her fight for herself—even when she doesn’t want them to. She’s been given very few opportunities to try and save herself from what’s coming for her, and she’s often not treated by the other characters as an equal in her own fate, which is something she spends a lot of Season 2 fighting for. They come up with plans behind her back and keep secrets from her all under the guise of trying to protect her without considering her input at all, which only prompts her to return the favor, by making a deal with Elijah to protect the lives of her friends at the expense of herself.

In the end, there is still fallout. Klaus finds her, and the curse proceeds as planned. In the process, she proceeded to lose the three paternal figures she had left—her biological mother, Isobel, and her aunt and legal guardian, Jenna were both killed by Klaus, while John bound his life force to hers in order to keep her from becoming a vampire after Damon force-fed her his blood. Elijah betrays them, she nearly loses Jeremy and Damon, and Stefan binds himself to Klaus in order to save Damon’s life. This is the point where she really starts to fight for herself and having her own choices, rather than letting Klaus and the other vampires around her continue to take them from her, especially once it’s learned that her blood is the key to making more hybrids for Klaus to lead. She starts to train in fighting against vampires, as opposed to having other people do the fighting for her.

However, all the training in the world cannot prepare for her role as a living doppelganger when Esther, the Original witch, is revived and rejoins her family. It becomes clear from the beginning that Esther doesn’t see Elena as much more than a spell ingredient, possibly due to her involvement in the death of the head of the Petrova line, Tatia. She initially makes it seem as though Elena has a choice in how her blood is used, but in the end, Esther makes it perfectly clear that as far as she’s concerned, Elena was created to be used for magic, and her life is forfeit because of it. Elena refused to use her blood when Esther tries to turn Alaric into a vampire through magic, but Esther used magic to take it anyway, forcing Elena to watch in horror as her last surviving parental figure was turned into a monster of a vampire.

Her life is fairly traumatic as a whole.

She regains a small bit of agency with regards to her role as a magical ingredient when she figures out that Alaric’s life as a vampire is bound to hers. As long as she’s alive, Alaric lives, which is why he won’t allow anything to happen to her. It’s not the most fantastic option available considering that basically she has a choice of whether she can take her own life or not, and that’s about it—she has no power to actually change what has happened to him—but it gives her a small bit of power that her life normally lacks.

In fact, Elena’s choices where she asserts her ability to choose what happens in her life usually come with her threatening to kill herself and ruining all the supernatural people’s plans. It’s not really the healthiest life choice, but unfortunately it’s all she has.

Elena understands people, regardless what side of the supernatural line they fall on. This has been exhibited several times throughout the series, especially with the Originals, and is most recently evident with Rebekah, Klaus’s sister. Despite the fact that she’s a thousand year-old vampire, Elena doesn’t treat her like one. She never speaks to her like she’s afraid of her—she simply confronts her with the facts and refuses to play her games. There’s more to it than just knowing how to play people, which her past history with Damon shows she’s surprisingly good at, she’s able to bond with Rebekah on an emotional level as well, and in the end, she’s able to get her on their side in the fight against Klaus.

This all goes up an epic fireball of doom, however, when Elena daggers Rebekah (in the back) to help protect their plan to kill Klaus. She believes that Rebekah will never be able to turn on her brother completely. This pretty much ruined any chance she had of maintaining a friendship with Rebekah. Partially because Rebekah is slightly psychotic 1000 year old vampire who she essentially killed, but also because Rebekah had thought they were friends, and in the end, with the way that Rebekah sees Elena treat her friends, that kind of betrayal brought stark realty to the fact that Elena only sees her as a means to an end. Elena wanted her on her side to get to Klaus.

At the same time, however Elena is also the kind of girl who, in a sense, believes you could rehabilitate a serial killer. In fact, she’s trying to rehabilitate a serial killer in her friendship with Damon. It’s a tenuous relationship at best, but Elena and Damon are very similar in a lot of ways—not that Elena is anywhere close to being a rapist or a serial killer though I submit that she would be terrifying as a vampire—but they both have their own way of just throwing themselves into things, regardless of the harm that will come to themselves. They love without question, despite the things that should scare them away or make them stop, because they’ve both accepted the fact that you can’t control who you love, and when the going gets rough, they don’t give up. On the flipside, however, Damon is a sociopathic vampire who enjoys the kill, and caused her a lot of pain with his reckless behavior. Damon Salvatore is one of those characters who’s the epitome of the expression “This is why we can’t have nice things.” He is self-destructive in a way that slowly expands into everything he touches, and Elena is all too keenly aware of this. Damon is in love with Elena, and Elena both knows that and has made it very clear that she doesn’t—and more to the point can’t—return his feelings, and not just because of how she feels about his brother. The worst thing that he’s ever done to her so far is force-fed her his blood when he thought she was going to die at Klaus’s hands. If Bonnie and John Gilbert hadn’t found the spell to bind her life force with John’s, she would have become a vampire, which was the last thing in the world she wanted. Damon took that choice from her, and to this day, she still hasn’t entirely forgiven him for it—but she hasn’t given up on him.

Over time, he’s become a close friend and probably the best ally she has in trying to get Stefan back. She trusts him to, above all else, keep her safe, and for the most part, he delivers. Elena also isn’t entirely guiltless in their relationship. She’s been known to use his feelings for her to his advantage, as well as manipulate his trust in order to get what she wants. It’s for that reason that Damon doesn’t always entirely trust her, which can lead to complications, but he still puts her safety above all else—both emotionally and physically, whether she knows it or not. As time has passed, though, it becomes clear that there are feelings of lust for Damon, not love. She’s said that there’s something about Damon that consumes her in the moment, makes her want to go there, but it’s more out of curiosity and want then it is with regards to what she really needs. There is a moment where she’s given the opportunity to pursue a relationship with Damon, to have that moment that she wants, but she’s daunted by the fact that Damon wants an eternity, and she’s not ready for that yet. She just wants the moment, and neither Salvatore is young enough to indulge that for her. She actually admits that she expects Damon to sabotage the relationship if anything did happen, and that’s why she allowed herself that moment, and Damon turns it around on her and forces her to choose.

In the end she does, and it’s not him. But at least the choice has been made.

When Elena arrives in Dagaz, she’s going to be dying. Matt’s car would have just gone over the bridge, and she will wake up in the city after Stefan saves Matt, but before she actually dies, and goes into transition to become a vampire. With the fact that she has no cast members in game at the moment, I think that the closure of that moment is important to Elena moving forward in the station and putting her life in Mystic Falls behind her. At the time of her death, she doesn’t know that she has vampire blood in her system, and with her death, she knows that Alaric will die and subsequently stop going after all the vampires, and all of her friends will be safe. She will be concerned about her brother in the wake of her death, but she trusts that the rest of her family will take care of him. My goal for her in TOS is to worry less about the people that are already in her life and losing them, and making her choices because of that. Here, she will be able to make more decisions about what’s right for herself, and live her life for her own reasons, and I think having that kind of closure from her life back home will allow her to get that.

Why would your character be chosen?

Because she’s Elena Gilbert. /shot

On a more serious note, Elena possess a great deal of compassion. In fact, her sense of compassion often overrides her survival instinct, which can be a Problem, but it also allows her to identify with nearly anyone, regardless of gender, species, or past actions. In fact, if there were any candidate who would be able to get to know Tristan and eventually fall for him and actually consider the idea of marrying him, even though it’s practically an arranged marriage, it would be Elena Gilbert.

At the same time, Elena would also fight for Tristan’s choice. The fact that he’s being forced into this for whatever reason would not sit well with her, and she would speak up about it—not because she doesn’t want to marry him, but because he should have the right to find a mate in his own time. Unfortunately, that might not make her a favorite for whoever is running the Dagaz version of The Bachelor, it might help win her brownie points with Tristan.

How much does your character know about nonhumans?

Elena only knows as much about the supernatural as she’s been told by Stefan or Damon, or as much as she’s needed to know to deal with life in Mystic Falls, so basically not much. Vampires, yes. Werewolves, sure. Witches, a little. But beyond that, nope.

Why this character:

Elena is a character that I love tossing into panfandom settings because I get to avoid the pitfalls of being surrounded by people that are stronger than she is and like making her choices for her. The show has a way of giving her a distinct lack of agency, and ninety nine percent of the time it really pisses me off. Especially given what’s happening this season, but that’s a rant for another day.

What I mean is, Elena has a lot of people protecting her, or backing her into corners in terms of choices, and I like to take her away from those people and let her make her own, standing on her own two feet and having to deal for herself. Elena can make a lot of morally dubious choices, but it would be interesting to see how she makes them without the influence of the Salvatores, or on the flip side, her friends like Bonnie and Matt.

4. Samples
First-Person:

[The video that comes up on the communicator is a girl who looks a bit like a drowned rat. Which would make sense because moments ago she was in a car that had just plunged into a river off a bridge. It’s not the best way to spend a day.]

I—

[she blinks for a moment trying to refocus. She’s had a lot of info poured on her in the last five minutes, and that’s all fine, really. She just needs to find someone first.]

I’m looking for someone. His name is Matt—Matt Donavan? He was with me, in the car when we crashed, and I just … I need to make sure he’s okay.

[she pauses for a moment, running a hand through her hair and then blinking again.]

If you see him, please tell him I’m looking for him? My name’s Elena Gilbert. Thank you.

[and she’s going to wander Thurisaz for a bit. Someone please come find her and get her back to the candidate house.]

Third-Person: Bete Noire: Elena has a run in with Draco and a confrontation with Damon.
Third Sample From the Test Drive Meme.