bete noire } { application

[braveandstupid]

1. Player Information
Name (or internet handle): Emily
Current characters in Bete Noire: Dean Winchester (hasperkynipples), Buffy Summers (isaywe_party)
Past characters in Bete Noire: Dr. Remy “Thirteen” Hadley (god_ihopeso)

2. Character Information
Name: Elena Gilbert
Livejournal Username: brave_andstupid
Fandom: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Image: Here, have a icon.
Reserve: Here, have a reserve.

3. Character Information II
Age/Appearance: 18 (born June 22, 1992) // Elena is about 5’6”, 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, have a wiki page.

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. From what I can gather from canon, she was pretty sure of who she was as a person and where her life was going until her parents’ death 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. Essentially, if those two plus the founders’ council represent the conservative “KILL ALL THE VAMPIRES” camp, Elena and her brother would be the hippie, vampire-loving liberals 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 she 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.

Stefan, however, is the one to make her realize that regardless of how she feels about being left behind, her life is still worth fighting for. 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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

At the time that she’s arriving in Bete Noire, he’s 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.

Sexual Preferences/Orientation: Canonly speaking, Elena is heterosexual. She has had two long term relationships over the course of her life and both of them have been with men--one was with Matt Donovan, her best friend since childhood, and it was mostly treated as an inevitable progression of their relationship--this is what they’re supposed to do, they were made for each other since they were kids; that kind of thing. The other was Stefan Salvatore, who was also her most recent relationship, and she is currently in love with him. This relationship is much more passionate in nature, compared to her relationship with Matt, and indicates that she does enjoy being with Stefan that way.

However, as I stated earlier, Elena is only eighteen and hasn’t really been given the opportunity to find herself. She’s a polite girl from a small Virginia town who always does what’s “expected” of her, not necessarily what she wants to do. Since she hasn’t really been given the room to grow, I also think that there’s potentially a lot of her sexuality that she hasn’t explored, and there is room for her to expand beyond the parameters that she’s given in canon, which would be an interesting element for her to explore in Bete Noire as well.

Powers: Elena is the Petrova doppelganger, meaning one of her ancestors who looked just like her was used to seal a curse placed on the first werewolf-vampire hybrid named Klaus in order to repress his werewolf side. Elena doesn’t really have any natural power that offers her any kind of advantage but her blood has power in it. Klaus needed to drink her blood in order to break the curse, and any werewolf in transition to becoming a vampire needs to drink her blood in order to become a full hybrid--if they drink any other human blood, they go rabid and eventually die.

However, given that the game does not have a Klaus at the moment, this isn’t really relevant as the werewolf in question also needs to drink Klaus’ blood before they die to even be in transition in the first place. So, in the end, Elena is just the humaniest human to ever human. She doesn’t even really have any physical prowess.

Reason for playing: To be honest, when I first started watching The Vampire Diaries, I was expecting to spend most of my time ignoring Elena. I was pleasantly surprised when she drew me in as a character, and allowed me to get invested in her story. She’s more than just vampire bait--she’s a warm caring character who gets sucked into everything, even if she doesn’t want to be, which gives her a lot of room for growth as a character, as well as room to discover things about herself.

That, in part, leads into the reason why I want to bring her to Bete Noire. While there is a book cast for The Vampire Diaries, for the most part, Elena would be on her own. The Damon present isn’t her Damon, which means she would have some distance from the brothers and need to take care of herself, as Damon and Stefan never really gave her a chance to be able to do that. If there is no one to protect her, she will have to protect herself, and therefore be able to find herself in a way she couldn’t in Mystic Falls.

That, and all the confusion regarding the differences between TV and book Elena is bound to be entertaining.

5. Samples
First-Person: Here, have a Dear Mun entry.

Third-Person: Stefan was gone.

It’s a phrase that echoes in her head as she walks home through the streets of Mystic Falls. She should have stayed at the boarding house tonight. It was her safe house, and given the events of the evening, she probably should still be there, but she couldn’t be there with Damon there. She could feel the anger building under his skin, threatening to take on a life of it’s own, and when it got to be that way, it was contagious. It took up every space in the house until he found a way to dissipate it, and she couldn’t be there until he did. It made her feel as though she couldn’t breathe and while she felt terrible for abandoning him like this, she needed some air. She needed a lot of air, to try and get her head to clear and figure out what they were going to do next. She didn’t know if they had another move to make.

All she knew was that Klaus was alive, Mikael was dead, and Stefan was gone.

He said he was going to leave, and he was actually gone. She had hoped that once Stefan could be Stefan again, that he would be strong enough to fight past the need for blood. He had done it before. She had seen him do it before. Granted, he wasn’t this far gone the last time, but she couldn’t give up on him. She had to hold on to some kind of hope, because if all that was left of him was a monster, then there was the small chance that John was right about vampires—all they breed is death.

She was so wrapped in her own thoughts that she didn’t even notice when the scenery changed. In fact, it was the temperature that she noticed more than anything else. It suddenly got quite a bit colder, and she wrapped her coat around herself, looking up to see where the wind was coming from. That was when she found she didn’t recognize anything at all.

Elena had been kidnapped before. She knew what it was like to be shoved into the trunk of a car, and carried away from everything she knew. She had never been transported so completely before, and that struck her to her core more than the cold ever did. Her hands fumbled softly, reaching into her pockets and trying to find her phone, so that she could call for help. She could call Damon. She could call Damon and he would come get her. He had to.

If he didn’t, she had no idea what she was going to do.

It didn’t even occur to her that her phone was different. She just scrolled through her phone book until she found Damon’s name and pressed send. Then she pressed the phone to her ear, and waited for the phone to connect.

She had a really bad feeling about this.

Third-Person #2: Stefan wasn’t her first.

Her first was Matt, in his room at his house, not long before her parents died. Kelly was gone, as usual, Vicki was out, and it was just the two of them, hanging out like they always did. No one ever seemed to bat an eye when they were alone together. It might have taken some of the thrill out of it, but it didn’t necessarily stop them, either. Elena was comfortable. She felt safe with Matt, like she could trust him, which wasn’t something a lot of high school girls could say about their boyfriends. She trusted him. She loved him, and she knew he loved her. At that moment, to her sixteen year-old mind, that was all that mattered.

Matt wasn’t a guy that was big with words, but he and Elena had known each other long enough that she could practically read his mind at this point. Whatever he couldn’t say, she could always see it on his face, and when the clothes started coming off, and his hands brushed against skin for the first time, and she saw the look of hesitation on his face, the wanting to be sure that she was sure. She didn’t say anything, simply nodded and pulled him in for a kiss. She kept it soft and slow, letting him set the pace and soon the nerves started to fade away, and all that was left was heat and Matt.

Soon all of the clothes were gone, and Elena was naked in front of him. He’s the first person to see her like this, to really see her. She’s changed in front of friends before, but this was different. There was an intensity to this that she hadn’t anticipated, and while she wanted more than anything to share this with him, the strength of the moment caught her off guard and for that moment, she hesitated. Matt caught it, and the uncertainty returned to his face, but she shook her head, reaching for him and pulling him in again.

“I’m okay,” she whispered softly. “I’m okay. It’s just … this is new.” He nodded as he started to shift above her, and she could still feel the tension in his shoulders, the awkwardness in his stance. Neither of them knew what they were doing, it was all new, and things were just getting out of hand. Someone needed to say something, and one hand moved to his face, brushing against his cheek gently. “I love you, Matt.”

Almost like waving a magic wand, the tension melted from his frame. He leaned in to kiss her again, before murmuring a soft “I love you too” against her lips. She sunk into the kiss, leaning back against his bed and just letting the safety of Matt surround her, and keep her close.

After that, they only paused long enough to fumble for the protection that Matt had swiped from his mother’s dresser, and it wasn’t exactly the stuff of romance novels. It was uncomfortable, awkward, and over to fast, but in the end it was still Matt. There was still no other person that she could imagine sharing this with, and she felt like she could keep sharing this forever, and be perfectly happy.

Six months later, it all will fall apart, but for now, for this one moment, it was perfect.