OOC; Character Profile
Series: Howl’s Moving Castle
Series' Medium: Specifically drawing from the Novel canon
Character: Sophie Hatter
Age: 19
Sex/Gender: Female
Canon Role: Protagonist
"Real" Name: Evelyn Jones
Where have you roleplayed in general and/or with this specific character?:
In general, I’ve played in LJ games: Discedo, DramaDramaDuck, Microcosm_RP, Route_29, Siren’s Pull, Somarium, and Squarewarts. I’ve also been over on IJ with Marina. Sophie specifically was played over at Squarewarts for about a year and a half.
Please give us a personal history of your character's life and explain to us in detail how they grow and develop over the course of their canon:
Sophie’s story really starts with events one would think don’t relate to her at all. Important events are unfolding in Ingary, and they all come to be a part of this tale in time. The Witch of the Waste has come to threaten the King’s daughter and it seems she might have even killed the Royal Magician, Wizard Suliman. There’s also the matter of a flying castle settling on the hills just outside of Market Chipping just months before we truly enter into the novel. This is quite the problem, considering the castle is the property of one Wizard Howl, a wizard said to be so wicked that he would eat the hearts of the beautiful young girls he would manage to lure to him.
It’s revealed that just before the tale starts Sophie’s father has passed away and that her step-mother was forced to pull Sophie and her two sisters out of school (though it is inferred that Sophie was in her last year anyway). In Ingary, there is a belief that the eldest of three daughters is cursed to have no fortune, or no luck with pursuing one. So, while her younger sisters are sent off to be apprentices (Martha to Mrs. Fairfax to learn magic, and Lettie to the Cesari’s bakery where she might have the luck of finding a boy to marry) Sophie is left stuck in her her father’s shop to be kept busy with sewing and fixing up hats under her step-mother Fanny.
With all of that backstory, we are finally brought into the tale on May Day, where Sophie decides to go out and visit Lettie at Cesari’s after months of being cooped up in the hat ship. She feels out of place amongst the crowd, having been up in the shop day in and day out leaving her out of place and feeling like an invalid in some ways. She is more thoroughly throw when she has a run in with an intimidating and refined man (who we later learn was Howl), who offers to buy her a drink or at the very least accompany her to Cesari’s. She turns down the offer and rushes off, feeling quite a bit silly afterward.
Once Sophie does make her way to Cesari's she is surprised with the news that her sisters switched places. Her sisters had be discontent with the lots Fanny gave to them and instead each wanted what the other had. Martha stayed at Mrs.Fairfax’s long enough to learn a spell that allowed them to take on each other’s appearances so they could switch without causes suspicion. Martha went on to ecplain that both her and Lettie felt bad for her, because they felt Fanny was exploiting Sophie’s talent and lack of drive to change her own situation. As Sophie leaves the bakery she finds herself rethinking about what she was doing with her life.
While Sophie does come to realize that she is discontent, she believes she has no way of helping herself. She is convinced that she will fail simply because she is the eldest, and the thought of that failure keeps her firmly planted in the shop as opposed to leaving to seek her own fortune. This discontent slowly fuels a foul mood, one she happens to be caught up in when she meets with just the wrong person to show an attitude to. It’s a weeks after her talk with Martha when a beautiful woman comes into the shop. Sophie, subject to her temper, tells the woman off only for the woman to reveal herself to be the Witch of the Waste.
The Witch, not one to be mouthed off to, goes on to cast a spell on Sophie (“I’ve heard of you, Miss Hatter, and I don’t care for your competition or your attitude. I came to put a stop to you.”) and leaves. It’s not long until Sophie realizes that the spell has turned her into an old woman. She is very surprisingly calm about such a thing, and rather than panic she sets her mind on leaving without telling anyone what had happened-not that she would be able to say anything anyway.
As Sophie sets off into the world, she makes several side stops. The first of these is to find herself a walking stick, something she has come to need now that she is feeling the aches of an old woman. She stumbles upon a stick in the brush, but is instead a scarecrow stuck upside down. She frees it, talks to it telling it that it if it weren’t for her lot as the eldest, it could come to life and help her seek her fortune-which, little does she know quite yet, it will-and then sets off on her way again. Her second encounter is a far deal more successful, as she finds a stick bound to a dog tied up in another hedge. Despite her fear of dogs, she takes the time to free the animal at takes the iron tipped stick as her reward. She makes a habit of talking to the stick as she walks, a fact that will become important later as these talks actually have some affect on the stick.
It is some time after this that Sophie comes across another problem that would require a stop-it was getting dark soon, and that would mean having to find a place to stay. Unfortunately, nothing seems to be around. She continues on, only to run into the castle that belonged to Wizard Howl. She finds herself to tired to care and, convinced that Howl is no longer of any threat to her now that she is old, she decides to simple settle there for the night.
After basically breaking and entering, Sophie goes on to impose on Michael, Howl’s young apprentice, and manages to doze off in front of the warm fire. She doesn’t come to until it’s the middle of the night and finds herself greeted by the fire demon Calcifer, who is bound to Howl’s fireplace due to a contract. Being a demon, Calcifer almost immediately notices that Sophie is under a spell and offers to remove it from her if she can puzzle out and the break the details and conditions of his contract to Howl. After some resistance and reluctance, Sophie agrees and sets her mind to figure out how she could stay in the castle.
The matter of staying becomes rather null and void when Howl finally waltzes in and proceeds to only take notice of her when she starts to pester him continuously for information. He lets her stay, though that is done in a rather indirect manner. Comfortable with the fact that she is now safe from being tossed out, she comes to the realization that the castle is rather filthy and needs quite the scrub down. She receives several pleading attempts from Calcifer and Michael trying to keep her from doing anything, but she goes on to practically attack the dirt-though some of her gusto could likely be blamed on the fact that cleaning gave her an excuse to dig for clues. Despite the castle’s excentricities (like a door that opens to four different locations: Kingsbury, Porthaven, Howl’s home town in Wales, and the actual location of the moving castle) she can find no clues, and absolutely no evidence of any of the supposed hearts Howl was said to have “eaten”. Howl seems to have little opinion of this until her cleaning spree starts to threaten his more personal things. And thus begins a pattern of arguments that with accent and define their odd relationship for what may well be the rest of their lives.
It would seem her cleaning, while efficient, would come to cause quite the problem. While tidying up the bathroom, Sophie managed to mix up Howl’s dyes-and while this shouldn’t be a problem Howl is a very vain man and goes on to throw a tantrum over his discolored hair. This also wouldn’t seem to be a problem, if it weren’t for the fact that Howl’s tantrums seem to have the odd effect of having him produce quite a bit of green slime from his body. He does settle down eventually, and She is left to clean up the mess left behind.
The slime isn’t the only unusual situation that Sophie comes to encounter while staying in the castle. She comes to deal with the trouble of having Howl chasing after Lettie (the real Lettie and not Michael’s “Lettie” who is indeed Martha at Cesari’s) with his over-the-top ways-not that it was necessary since both were actually just using each other for information about Sophie’s own circumstances. She also comes to cross paths with that same scarecrow she saved-a great source of anxiety once she finds it has somehow indeed come to life.
It is sometime within all of these adventures that Sophie comes to find about the curse that the Witch of the Waste cast on Howl. Michael was having some trouble with a spell (which turns out not to be the spell he was meant to work on at all) and in their attempt to puzzle it out they go off to try an catch a falling star. Failing, they go to ask Howl just what the spell is meant to do and he ends up whisking them off to Wales. The paper was instead an assignment for his nephew from his school teacher Ms. Angorian-who they go off to visit. Ms. Angorian is quiet the beauty, and Sophie comes to resent her as it seems Howl is taken with her (though really it was a matter of the curse since Angorian later turns out to be the Witch’s fire demon). They stay in her place for several moments, at least until Ms.Angorian begins to read more of the poem that the assignment was based on (Song, by John Donne for reference). Howl sudden appears ill and he forces them all to take their leave. When they arrive back at the castle, he tells Calcifer that the Witch has caught up, to which the demon says that he felt “it” take in reference to the curse.
With the Witch of the Waste hot on his heels Howl makes the decision to send Sophie off after the other “threat”, that threat being the King. He nearly forces her to go meet with the King under the guise of being his mother, all so she could potentially effectively blacken his name before the King is set in appointing him as the next Royal Wizard to be set with the task of finding the missing Prince Justin-a task that would put him right in the Witch’s path. However, Sophie doesn’t meet with the King right away. Instead, Howl has her meet with his teacher, Mrs. Pentstemmon, to help her prepare. Mrs. Pentstemmon easily identifies Sophie’s own magical abilities (to talk life into things), if not the fact that she has come to be important to How. Unknown to Sophie (and to us for some time) the meeting was in fact orchestrated by Howl to see if his teacher could remove the curse on Sophie, which she could not and thus her and Howl assume that Sophie is metely keeping herself disguised. From this meeting, Sophie goes on to meet with the King, and utterly fails in blackening Howl’s name and instead endears him further to the King. As she wanders from the castle, Sophie comes to run into the Witch of the Waste who reveals that she had just killed Mrs. Pentstemmon.
It is around this time that Sophie finds herself inexplicably falling for Howl even as she finds herself annoyed at him for a sudden lack of interest in Lettie and an apparent interest in Ms. Angorian instead (even if that interest was all an act on Howl’s part as an attempt to find the Witch’s weakness). Amongst all this trouble, a dog-man comes to the moving castle, apparently sent by Lettie (whom the dog-man loves and who loves him back) to keep a closer eye on Howl and to guard Sophie’s heart from his clutches. To make matters even more frustrating, Howl decides to go off to Mrs. Pentstemmon’s funeral in Porthaven even though it may expose him to an attack from the Witch.
Of course, this does come true, and Howl is found and attacked by the Witch of the Waste. Back in the castle, Sophie and Michael hear a commotion from the Porthaven entrance and naturally rush out in disguise and go to find Howl. When they come back to the castle, Howl sets about preparing things to move the castle’s entrances since the Porthaven entrance was now compromised. I’m taking Sophie from around this time.
What point in time are you taking your character from when he/she appears at Landel's and why?:
I am taking her from right after Howl has the fight with the witch in the harbor in chapter 16. This is due to the fact that it’s a clean break for her (in the sense that they are preparing to move the castle’s location).At this point in time she’s also slowly becoming aware of her own feelings for Howl, but she’s not yet at the point where she should be willing to admit to such a thing. Over all, I find it to one of the more interesting novel points to pull her from.
Please give us a detailed description of your character's personality:
Sophie is, whether she realizes it or not, a girl that has the potential for many things. She’s capable and talented; she just hasn’t had much encouragement to pursue anything that would use these traits. She longs for something more than her normal life but she was rather fatalistic when it came to the lot life gave her because of a belief is some ridiculous superstition about being the eldest of three. With this fatalistic attitude, Sophie makes an excuse of it and constantly tells herself that she can’t do any better than what she had, and that trying would only end in failure. If anything this shows a reluctance to take a chance, either from her own fears or from the fact that she had never been encouraged to do so and thus had little faith that everything would turn out all right. This attitude not only affects her in her decisions, but in her day to day life as well. She comes to think of herself as an invalid or old woman, so stuck in her ways that there is little point to changing them. This thought manifests itself physically early on in that she has aches and pains and she feels much older than her years should make her feel. It’s possible that she even talked the Witch’s curse into staying put by saying it suited her, as Howl mentions that he tried (more than once) to remove the curse it seemed there was another power keeping it in tact, almost as if Sophie herself preferred being that way.
As we move forward in the story however, Sophie slowly begins to challenge these previous stereotypes that have been laid on her and that she has laid on herself. Once leaving home, Sophie finds herself unburdened by her usual responsibilities and she comes to feel at home in Howl’s castle, growing comfortable in her assumed identity and life. She uses her appearance as an excuse to be a nosy old biddy, though it’s likely she was always a busybody that made a habit of getting down to things. She is naturally intelligent, and this makes her a curious sort of person even when she is rather obtuse about matters that pertain to her personal matters and well being. She’s relentless about anything she gets in her mind to do and she can be strong minded about her own thoughts to a fault. These traits, when present, served her well against her sisters when they were in her care, though it seems Howl has a talent for getting past her no-nonsense attitude.
Sophie has quite the temper as well, though this likely attests more to a latent trait of being frank and outspoken as opposed to actually being of a poor attitude in general. She can see situations with a hint of objectivity and, combined with her education and being an avid reader, this lends itself to her love for the occasional puzzle. While she is frank to a point, Sophie is also sympathetic to most people. There are some people and situations that can still work past her objectivity and cause her temper to flare up and a bullying nature to come forward (usually the victims are Howl and Calcifer, though Michael has been a witness to it once or twice). That being said, she never truly abuses her talent for bullying. While she will scold and admonish people, she is just as quick to come to their defense as well.
Sophie, as an eldest child, has been subject to learning several valuable life lessons early. She was often set to look after her younger sisters which led her to be able to deal with other’s tempers as well as learning some confidence in tackling certain situations she may come to encounter. This also is likely what leant itself to helping her develop that nosy side, seeing as it was pretty much her duty to know just what her sisters were up to at all times when they were younger.
While she does have a temper and at times has a difficult controlling it, Sophie comes to be defined by her kindness as events progress. She shows a great amount of sympathy and kindness to people, even those that she is not particularly fond of at the time. A good example of this is Ms. Angorian, who she is extremely jealous of, as Sophie still found it in herself to go to her rescue when she thought she had been captured by the Witch of the Waste. She is very empathetic, sympathetic, and well-meaning-even if these traits sometimes leads to trouble, they are very positive traits at the root of it all.
Please give us a physical description of your character:
Despite believing that she is quite plain, Sophie is in fact rather lovely as several have noted (including the base narration of the novel). She has fair skin and long hair that she herself says is more of a “red-gold” than pure ginger. While under the curse she may have appeared as an old woman, Sophie will be reverting back to her original and natural state in Landel’s.
What kinds of otherworldly abilities does your character have, if any?:
Sophie’s abilities lay within her words, that ability being the power to talk life into things. She can bring life to anything she talks to, be it by doing so consciously or subconsciously-meaning, yes sometimes she does do this without meaning to. This ability is inherent rather than learned, as Sophie didn’t even know she possessed the skill until it was pointed out to her and from the point she is coming from it lacks any refinement of training and learning control. While at the start she talks to things out of loneliness and thus her spells lacked a focus to be particularly potent, she is a very powerful witch capable of many things including giving life to an already powerful magical creature (i.e. Calcifer).
There are no specifics laid out for just what is all within Sophie’s range of abilities, but it can likely be inferred that if she talks to it she will at least have some effect on it. Giving life isn’t the only way her words work either, her words can also instill traits into things (such as her hats that have been known to make someone appear as “young as a spring leaf” and so on) as well as creating something new entirely simply by focusing her emotions on it (As she did by turning a bucket of what should have been fertilizer into a very potent weed killer simply by focusing an ill timed bout of anger at it).
If present, how do you plan to tweak these powers to make your character appropriately?:
While Sophie can try to influence things, the effort of the magic will drain her and make her more tired with every attempt. These types of spells can be naturally draining as well, especially the more the go against any standard law of physics-so it’s likely that the more complicated the spell, the more strain it will present on her. While Sophie can influence things subconsciously without thinking about it, in Landel’s any spell work would have to have all of Sophie’s attention and focus with an intentional effort to work magic. When it comes to the strain on her body, she will at first get tired, and if she continues with the effort she will begin to suffer aches and heart palpitations similar to those she suffered as an old woman.
I’ll be using a magic count similar to the one implemented by Howl with some minor changes. Since Sophie has far less training on control with her magic, she will be limited to four counts of magic per night-this is just to limit her realistically in accordance with the control she has on her own abilities. The first will be simply tiring with slight aches in her joints, the second count would cause the aches in her joints to intensify and her heart rate to speed up, the third count of magic would have her feeling ill and her heart rate would be up to the point of being painful, and the fourth would bring on actual heart palpitations that would cause her to feel sufficiently more ill and faint. Anything past these three counts would cause her to fall unconscious and have lingering pains for several hours into the next day
Since Sophie’s abilities can affect many things on varying skills, I’ll give a few examples on what she would be able to do in Landel’s:
- She would be able to perform minor healing should it be necessary. The most she would be able to manage considering she has little to no knowledge of the medicinal arts, the most she will be able to do here would be patch up superficial skin deep wounds and perhaps stem blood flow. She may also potentially talk the pain out of a wounded victim, but that would take severe concentration and at least two counts of magic.
- Should Sophie come across a bladed weapon or implement, she could cause it to sharpen or dull itself but she can only do this once per night per weapon. So she could command a knife to dull itself and a pair of scissors to sharpen itself, but she cannot command the knife to dull and then sharpen in the same night. Any changes would only last until morning at which point all items would return to their original state.
- Should Sophie need to hole up somewhere, she could talk the door into being a veritable defense. For example, she could talk it into opening to no one at all and standing up to an attack-however this would only last for a period of about ten minutes and the door would only be minutely stronger than it would be normally, meaning that it could shatter once a little more force is supplied.
- She could also command an object to attack on her behalf, but the attack would only work if the command is to attack a specific target. For example, in canon she commands her walking stick to attack the Witch’s fire demon but to not harm anyone else. If damage came to the item, the attack would immediately cease, otherwise it is only useful for two turns.
Any spells that would involve going against the law of physics (floating items, expanding items, creating something from nothing, etc.) would take at least two counts of magic as that is a very complicated effort on Sophie’s part. All healing will demand severe focus on Sophie’s part. If she should try to heal while not focused or emotionally distraught, that count of magic will be gone but without any result.
Does your character have any non-otherworldly abilities/training that surpass the norm?:
Sophie has lived in a hat shop all of her life, and she has quite a talent for creating amazingly and astonishingly beautiful hats. That said, sewing is definitely a talent of hers. Hats aside, she has been known to create beautiful dresses and can even darn your socks if it suits her too. Her ability to talk to these objects is only something that adds to a beauty that she already created on her own.
What do you see your character doing in the scope of the game and how do you plan to use the setting of Landel's Institute to develop them and affect their psychology in a unique, interesting way?:
Intially Sophie will be frankly horrified at the idea of suddenly being in a place that she doesn’t recognize, and considering her canon point will likely think that she was left somewhere when Howl and Michael moved the castle. The idea of that will likely have her upset, and should she find the nurse’s referring to her but her “real” name she will certainly think something has gone terribly wrong.
The real trouble she will have will come with fighting monsters. She’ll doubt that she will be able to do anything to help herself in that situation and will likely try to work into a group if only for safety in numbers. She isn’t the most social, but she is a kind soul that doesn’t mind having friends and making general conversation, so the social side with for once be her stronger suit.
The matter of Landel’s and just what the place is will take on the brunt of her curiosity. She’s a nosy thing, and will likely get up to all sorts of trouble with initially trying to find clues as to how to get out and get home-not that she’ll find anything to that effect, even if the answers are out there she is quite hopeless when it comes to noticing clues.
Given that this RP takes place in an unsettling and outright horrific environment, how do you justify your character as being appropriate in both body and mind for this kind of setting?:
First off Ingary is a land that is parallel to the real world. It is subject to wars, political turmoil, and crime. While Sophie hasn’t seen the battle front, she is likely not blind to the fact that it does in fact happen. She’s been subject to the ill effects of magic as well-from curses to slime. She’s just barely an adult, but she is mature enough to handle situations that may or may not be out of her control. After all this is a woman that was cursed and handled it with unusual calmness.