chaos_thon post: Make Your Own TV Show
Synopsis: In a nutshell, Vermillion is Degrassi with magic. Set in modern-day, albeit a slightly different modern-day where witches and other creatures of magic are now out-and-proud minority groups with basic rights and freedoms, Vermillion focuses on the small town of Costa Sonrisa in Orange County, CA. Aside from all of the beauties of a seaside town and the perpetually successful sports teams at Costa Sonrisa High School, Costa Sonrisa also happens to be home to a sizeable population of witches, all of whom attend either Vermillion Girls' School or the Wilson-Krauss Academy.
Main Characters
Owen Young :: Hunter Parrish
Amoret Moore :: Alexa Nikolas
Cy Garcia :: Michael Trevino
Guster Wallace :: Chanel Iman
Supporting Cast
Nelson Ortega :: Avan Jogia
Bluebell Mary Garcia :: Ariana Grande
Reoccuring Characters
Desdemona Papas :: Ashley Newbrough
Bram O’Brien :: Aaron Johnson
Sarita Goycolea :: Alia Shawkat
Ricardo Fernanez :: Benjamin Bratt
Asuncion Ortega :: Kristina Lilley
Judith Ortega :: Génesis Rodríguez
Nina Nass :: Constance Victoria
Veronica Gold :: Beatrice Martin
Grayson Wallace :: Dennis Haysbert
Costa Sonrisa Red Devils
Costa Sonrisa High School is the local public school in town. But of course, everyone knows that “Costa Risa” puts a bigger emphasis on athletics than academics. In this school, first-string football, basketball, swimming, tennis and soccer are the social elite.
Owen Young - played by Hunter Parrish
Star linebacker on the football team at Costa Sonrisa High School, as well as a center on the basketball team, Owen is considered one of the rising athletic stars of Costa Sonrisa High. Formerly a womanizer, he’s tamed down significantly in the three months since he’s started dating Amoret Moore. He considers himself well-outside of the society of witches, although as the series progresses he gets more and more entangled into their lives. Owen is more often than not the subject of Amoret’s rage, and as a by-product of her rage, finds himself in odd magical situations such as being turned into a frog. Personality-wise, he retains a few of his womanizer qualities without realizing it - including some leftover sexist feelings towards women in positions of power. He was baptized and raised Catholic, making him more conservative than most of the other characters - the only exception to his conservative values being his feelings towards sex (the more the merrier) and witches (whom he equates socially with Baptists).
Cyan Nine “Cy” Garcia - played by Michael Trevino
Cy is Owen’s best friend. He is a junior at Costa Sonrisa High School with Owen and plays a runningback on the football team. His parents are second-generation hippies, forced by the failing economy to finally settle down and get jobs, but still cling to their old lifestyle adamantly. They forbade Cy from using such modern necessities as mainstream deodorant and eating meat for much of his life, which left Cy bitter and rebellious in his childhood. At the beginning of the story, he has voluntarily moved out of his parents house and is couch-surfing on friends sofas all over town. Despite the fact that he hates his parents’ hippie lifestyle, he himself is outspoken against many of the same issues they hate. Cy is considered the neighborhood “Suicide Boy,” as he has more piercings than most of the girls in town and often sports dyed hair. Cy and Amoret don’t like each other; Cy hates Amoret for taking all of his best friend’s time and, in his thoughts, emasculating him into an unrecognizable person, and Amoret hates Cy because of his playboy tendencies and the fact that he consistently tries to pull Owen back into his old, girl-manipulating ways. Cy is friends with Desdemona Papas and has been since childhood. Through her he knows a lot about witch society, and in particular which factors of it he dislikes the most.
Nelson Ortega - played by Avan Jogia
Nelson is Guster’s boyfriend, and a star tennis player at Costa Sonrisa High School. He is the lead singer for his garage band The Jump-Offs, and a good friend of Cy’s since elementary school and a friend of Owen’s since high school. Nelson met Guster when they were both thirteen, when she had started helping out in his uncle’s junkyard lifting cars and metal heaps after his uncle’s magnet broke. Nelson finds witch society too bureaucratic for his taste, which is why he’s been hiding the fact that he can see “ghosts” from Guster for the past three years.
Vermillion Girls’ School
The prestigious Vermillion Girls’ School is where every little witch in the country dreams of going when they grow up. Just like in many other magic schools around the country, witches are recruited on an invite-only basis to attend. Once admitted, they are given standardized magic aptitude tests to decide what category of witchcraft they fall into (molecular manipulation, molecular modification, aerometry, cognitive interrogation, or elemental manipulation) and are shuffled into different departments to practice their specialization. Five “class heads” act as student liaisons to the administration, each voted into their position by teachers from their department. Committees run amok in this school in a small-scale version of what’s to come after graduation.
Amoret Moore - played by Alexa Nikolas
Amoret is a junior witch at Vermillion Girls' School and the on-again-off-again girlfriend of Owen Young. She comes from a long line of powerful, noteworthy witches stemming from a powerful clan in Cuba. She is the class head of the molecular modifiers (“Mollies”), giving her power over decisions in her particular department, as well as a member of several different committees. As such, she doesn't have too much free time and when she isn't at school, she is often at home doing homework or some other school-related activity, which puts something of a strain on her and Owen's relationship. At Vermillion, she specializes in molecular modification, which is one of the hardest powers for witches to master and allows her to shape-shift anything, living or non-living, into whatever she wants. She aspires to work for the government once she gets out of school.
Amoret has intense trust issues, having been screwed over multiple times by past boyfriends, and has a hard time trusting Owen at first. She is good friends with Desdemona Papas at the beginning of the story. She is a very traditional-minded witch and has a very black-and-white understanding of right-and-wrong. She is known for always following the rules, with Owen noticing more than once that although she has the ability to supply herself with anything she wants and as much money as she could ever need, Amoret prefers to play by the rules just to see if she can win the game. This mindset begins to wear off as the story progresses, with Amoret becoming more and more motivated to use magic for her own agenda.
Teresinha “Guster” Wallace - played by Chanel Iman
Guster is a junior witch at Vermillion Girls’ School with Amoret, with whom she has something of a political rivalry with. Guster is originally from Brazil, where she lived for her first thirteen years in poverty before her mother died and her father, a millionaire, finally claimed her as his daughter. Having never before learned English, her father arranged for an expensive translation spell to be put on her, which allowed her to speak and understand English fluently but also took away her Portuguese entirely. She specializes in aerometry, the ability to control the density and movement of air, which is often simplified to non-magic humans as “telekinesis” because she usually uses it to move objects or deflect other witches' magic. Guster is the class head for aerometry at Vermillion, as well as on many of the same committees as Amoret. She, like Amoret, is considered one of the (if not the) most powerful witches in her particular specialization, although she rarely ever exhibits her full powers. At the beginning of the series she is dating Nelson Ortega, who gave her the nickname “Guster” when they first met as the translation spell she had was making it hard for her to remember her old Portuguese name. Although she is in a relationship with Nelson, this doesn’t stop her from flirting when he isn’t around. Guster is exactly opposite of Amoret in most ways: she's considered a slacker and is usually forced by teachers and school administration into most of her committee positions.
Bluebell Mary Garcia - played by Ariana Grande
Cy’s thirteen-year-old sister who still lives at home. Bluebell Mary is a stereotypical club kid: although she plays by her parents rules more than Cy did and therefore earns their favor, she still sneaks out to go to raves and clubs at night. She, like Cy, developed a more mature body at an early age and knows how to use it to her advantage. Bluebell Mary inexplicably develops magic in the “pilot” in a big way, forcing Amoret and Cy to butt heads yet again. Before Bluebell Mary discovers she is a witch, she does not fit in very well at the local middle school. Cy’s reputation as an ambitionless rebel displeases a lot of parents in the neighborhood and they warn their children not to hang out with her, as a result she is friendless until she attends Vermillion.
Desdemona Papas - played by Ashley Newbrough
A friend of Amoret’s with a really big house and perpetually absent parents. As such, her house is a popular spot for parties. She specializes in molecular manipulation - the ability to speed molecules (make things combust) or slow molecules (make things freeze). Her potentially violent power is in contrast to her personality: Desdemona is a vegetarian and holds every living thing in high priority. Despite her personality, Desdemona, like all molecular manipulators (called “Maps”), is has been drafted into the military under the “Halloween Draft,” (called so by humans and witches alike) which forcefully enrolls witches with certain powers into the military. Desdemona and Cy dated for about a month during Cy’s freshman year (Desdemona’s junior year). Although they’ve since broken up, they’re still friends. Cy’s parents love Desdemona because she shares many of their same beliefs about animal consumption. Desdemona’s mother is a non-magic human and her father is an elemental manipulator who lives nine out of twelve months of the year in Moscow.
Other schools
The Wilson-Krauss Academy is the budget-friendly version of Vermillion, and for a reason. Just in the past few months, ever since vampires alerted the media to their existence, Wilson-Krauss has been admitting students with alternative dietary habits - with night classes to suit their peculiar sleeping schedules of course.
DeMarco Valley High School, meanwhile, is Costa Sonrisa’s cross-county rival. Nothing to special for a school of its’ size, with an absolutely average student population and a good marching band.
Abraham “Bram” O’Brien - played by Aaron Johnson
An Irish vampire that Amoret begins to date during one of her break-ups with Owen. Bram is 182-years-old who, after vampires reveal their existence to the public, is forced to attend an ‘endangerment seminar’ at the Wilson-Krauss Academy. Physically and mentally, he is frozen at twenty-years-old. In life, he was the son of a farmer who was bitten while traveling to America to look for more work.
Sarita Goycolea - played by Alia Shawkat
A witch specializing in elemental manipulation (control over the elements) that Nelson meets and befriends at the grocery store. She’s funny, pretty, intelligent, shares common interests with Nelson and knows how to play video games - all things that provoke Guster’s jealousy. Sarita attends Wilson-Krauss, although she doesn’t socialize too much with the night-creatures that attend the school.
Veronica Gold - played by Beatrice Martin
A quirky student from Demarco Valley High School that catches Owen’s eye while he’s on a break with Amoret. Veronica is in the marching band and, according to Cy, is the very definition of every Taylor Swift song ever invented - the perfect girl next door who probably commonly gets overlooked by the football players she falls in love with. Guster notes that she is also somewhat dumb, as she doesn’t realize that taking Amoret Moore’s ex-boyfriend is like signing a death warrant against yourself.
Parents and Others
Gelsomnina “Nina” Nass - played by Constance Victoria
A mysterious ghost that appears frequently to Nelson. She is unique because she is able to see him back, when most of the time the ghosts he sees can’t see him.
Ricardo Fernandez - played by Benjamin Bratt
Mr. Fernandez is Amoret’s dad. A former cognitive interrogator, he gave up his power after Amoret’s older brother was born so that he could be a stay-at-home (or at least a stay-in-the-country) father. The removal of his magic left him extremely depressed for several years and although he has learned to live without magic for the time being, he still feels the loss. He sympathizes with Owen, also being in the position of being the powerless human in a relationship with a powerful witch (Amoret’s mother, a skilled molecular modifier as well who is often abroad), and offers advice even when Amoret and Owen aren’t together. Mr. Fernandez comes from a very powerful magical bloodline, stretching back across centuries.
Asuncion Ortega - played by Kristina Lilley
Nelson’s mother, a high-powered attorney. Mrs. Ortega finds the society of witches an all-around bloodthirsty place and advises Nelson and his sister not to get involved in it. Despite this, she dotes on Guster like she were her own daughter. Mrs. Ortega works in the legal department of NewFound Dynamic Industries and is privy to some of the companies’ most well-guarded secrets.
Judith Ortega - played by Génesis Rodríguez
Nelson’s meddling older sister who loves nothing more than to interfere with his life. She has known for a while that Nelson can see things that aren’t there, and she was the one who told him to keep his power a secret from his mother first and later Guster as well. Judith is a senior at USC, but frequently visits to make sure that no one fills her place as the bane of Nelson’s existence.
Grayson Wallace - played by Dennis Haysbert
Guster’s father. Grayson carried on an affair with Guster’s mother Luz while he was on a two-week-long business trip in Brazil. To his credit, he didn’t realize that she was with child when he left. Upon hearing that she had given birth to his daughter, he adamantly refused that Guster was his child until six months after her mother died when the “Hounds” sent him a report on an extreme demonstration of raw power in Sao Paolo. Grayson finally took responsibility for Guster, enrolling her into Vermillion Girls’ School and moving her into a house he bought close to the school (although he himself resides in a condo in Venice Beach). Grayson is the CEO of NewFound Dynamic Industries, a corporation that has ties with the witch society and provides numerous services for both magicals and humans alike. Grayson is a witch, trained in aerometry like his daughter, but unlike her his skills are far below par for aeromets. Grayson made up for this weakness by establishing himself as a juggernaut in the genetics game.
Common themes/plotlines are probably going to be along the lines of Owen and Amoret's on-and-off relationship (which, during the course of the first season, will probably be "off" most of the time), Bluebell Mary suddenly demonstrating powers and how it affects Amoret and Cy, the ghosts that follow Nelson around (and why they do). The format will probably something like character-centric episodes and a shorter season than usual. :P