counted stars } { application
Player Information:
Name or Handle: Emily
LJ: iluvroadrunner6
Email: iluvroadrunner6@gmail.com
AIM/ MSN / Plurk name: AIM & Plurk - iluvroadrunner6
Any current characters here?: Sam Winchester, (alt) Olivia Dunham, Alec McDowell
Character Information:
Character Name: Elena Gilbert
Age: 18
Canon: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Appearance: Elena is a pretty girl, about 5’9”, but slim. She has a dancer’s build and moves with that kind of grace. She has long brown hair that she normally wears straight and down, and brown eyes. She dresses casually-layered shirts in solid colors, usually with jeans, but she is known to dress up when the moment calls for it.
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 Coruscant, 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.
If you are apping a character arriving from another game: N/A
Background: Here!
Elena will be coming in post-308: Ordinary People, after she shares what she knows with Damon and falls asleep. I chose this canon point, because I really am enjoying the growth that Season 3 is giving Elena, and would like to take it further, but don’t want to deal with her having the grief of completely losing Stefan yet. This is just before Elena and Damon makes their plan to attack Klaus at homecoming, so this is when she feels like she has answers, and it hasn’t blown up in their faces yet.
Basically, I want to take her growth from a positive place, not after the plan has failed and there’s a lot more desperation.
Special Abilities or Weapons: Elena is the Petrova doppelganger which means she was the key to unlocking the curse put on Klaus to keep his hybridness contained. Also, when feeding her blood to a werewolf that’s in transition and becoming a vampire, the werewolf doesn’t go psychorabid and die, and instead becomes a hybrid.
… But no, other than that she’s the humanyist human to ever human.
Sect: Civilian
Job: Unknown
Samples:
First Person: Dear Mun post.
Third Person: Personal PSL post.
Anything Else: I am all for making Elena’s life difficult, but for right now I have no roommate preferences. Stick her wherever.