#also he has such low self esteem cause of his grandmother and father and its so fucking sad

[echo16reads]

He mentions the fact that he's lactose intolerant so often lol

[despressolattes]

AFTERMATH | CHARACTER FILES

book masterlist » book one masterlist

< previous chapter

I wanted to take a quick break just to reevaluate the character files, from Lilah's point of view. ——————

LILAH RAE MIKAELSON

I. BACKGROUND & BEHAVIOR OBSERVATIONS

Lilah is an ancient vampire who never got the chance to be a kid, and may be the most messed up of all of the troubled kids at the Salvatore School. From the start, she was living a life someone else chose for her: living with Dahlia because of a choice her grandmother Esther made, living the life of a vampire because of a choice Dahlia made for her.

The only choice she made for herself was to keep her family just beyond reach once she got free, and she grew into the habit of being a side character in her own life. With the aftermath of her father, her uncle, and her cousin's mom's deaths, she has started lashing out in anger, slacking on her studies. She has a history of being a ripper, but has been under control for over 500 years. Unfortunately, from the world she was thrown into, Lilah believes it is her job to make everyone else happy before herself.

II. CLINICAL DIAGNOSES

CHILD OF A MIKAELSON — Lilah learned that certain personality traits and behaviors came directly from her bloodline, ill-tempered, stubborn, and unconditionally loyal.

SAVIOR COMPLEX — She believes it is up to her to protect everyone else, even at the expense of her own happiness.

ABANDONMENT ISSUES — With the life she lived, she is scared every new person she meets will leave her one way or another: physically or by death.

DADDY ISSUES — While she refuses to acknowledge it, her everlasting love for her father has caused her to push away a lot of her relationships, including at one point, Hope, and currently, Roman Sienna.

III. LONG TERM RECOMMENDATIONS

Lilah needs to realize that her savior complex needs to be directed inward, and understand that she can't save everyone, but she can save herself.

HOPE ANDREA MIKAELSON

I. BACKGROUND & BEHAVIOR OBSERVATIONS

Hope Mikaelson may be the most unique of them all. She has grown up knowing she is the mythical tri-brid: part witch, part werewolf, and part vampire - a melage of supernatural lineasges once thought impossible.

Hope used to be unable to forge meaningful connections with the other students besides her cousin, Lilah, but has since formed close friendships with Rafael Waithe, Josie Saltzman, Milton Greasley, and Kaleb Hawkins; she has formed a frenemy relationship with Lizzie Saltzman; and she has found herself a boyfriend in Landon Kirby.

Due to her often disastrous past, she resigned herself to isolation for so long, and has slowly came out of that cave she concealed herself into. She considered it a path would would provide the least heartbreak, but has since decided she was wrong.

II. CLINICAL DIAGNOSES

PTSD — Hope suffers from bouts of what she describes as an "inner darkness." She believes this to be a side effect of her childhood possession by the villainous Hollow, but these episodes are just as likely to have been caused by the severe and repeated psychological traumas she has experienced.

DADDY ISSUES — As the child of Klaus Mikaelson, a man who many call 'evil', Hope will have to battle her fear of becoming her father, while holding fast to her love for him and the values he instilled in her: bravery, conviction, perseverance, and loyalty.

III. LONG TERM RECOMMENDATIONS

While she is getting better on the isolation side and the anger issues, Hope has a long way to go. She thinks she knows what is best for people because of her own hurt, and makes decisions that can often hurt people more than help. She has to learn to let people make their own decisions for themselves. Her fear of getting hurt is projected onto them, and she wants to protect them from the pain she feels herself.

Despite her past, she is a powerful young student with great potential. She also expressed the belief that her existence is some sort of "cosmic mistake." Surrendering to this mindset would mean buckling under the burner of her family legacy, and could lead Hope down a dark and uncharted path. As the tri-brid, Hope has the power to change the world, but she must first accept that she has not only the potential, but the willingness to become the hero she was born to be.

ROMAN SIENNA

I. BACKGROUND & BEHAVIOR OBSERVATIONS

Roman's past dates back decades. His story with the Mikaelsons started when Klaus Mikaelson pities his adopted mother, adopted sister, and himself after killing his adopted father. He lives in consent regret for his help in the death of Hayley Marshall, and loves Lilah Mikaelson fiercely. He tended to sit around quietly during Lilah's fits of isolation, believing that her distance may be a result of a mistrust he put into their relationship when he helped his mother, unknowingly, hurt her family. He is a listening ear for both Lilah and at times Hope, and wants to give back to Alaric, who took him in even after his wrongdoings.

II. CLINICAL DIAGNOSES

PTSD — After his father's death and being saved by his adopted mother, he felt indebted to her. He listened to anything she wanted, believing everything she did was good. This lead him down his path of mistakes.

CLASSIC CODEPENDENT — He relied on his adopted mother for acceptance, blindly trusting in her. He also relied on Lilah afterwards, seeking her love as a way to cope with how bad he felt with his mistakes.

III. LONG TERM RECOMMENDATIONS

He has left the Salvatore School to do independent recruiting, which may do him some good. Without being dependent on Lilah to feel less guilty, he may be able to forgive him for the mistakes he made, and also forgive the deceased Klaus Mikaelson for the harm he caused him as a young vampire.

LANDON KIRBY

I. BACKGROUND & BEHAVIOR OBSERVATIONS

He bounced between foster home to foster home. He has intelligence, loyalty, resilience, thoughtfulness, and charm. He has learned to subsist, on his own, by any means. With the best of intentions, he relies on deception as a defense mechanism to protect himself and those he cares about the most. He seems always on guard, especially since he never felt like he fit in at any of the schools he was at.

II. CLINICAL DIAGNOSES

RESILIENT RESPONSE TO TRAUMA — self explanatory

FEAR OF BEING ORDINARY — self explanatory

III. LONG TERM RECOMMENDATIONS

Landon's problems with honesty may continue to affect future relationships and connections with people. With a consistent home and counseling, he may be able to make a huge emotional recovery.

RAFAEL WAITHE

I. BACKGROUND & BEHAVIOR OBSERVATIONS

Rafael is a charminy, charismatic boy, who is extremely loyal to Landon for sticking around during the hardest moments of his life. While driving, he took a turn too fast, causing the death of his girlfriend at that time, and unlocking his werewolf gene. Rafael's time in foster care resulted in a traumatic childhood and anger issues that he is trying to keep under control. He seems to not be able to talk about his own feelings, and acts rationally.

II. CLINICAL DIAGNOSES

SAVIOR COMPLEX — Rafael thinks its his job to stick by Landon at all costs, making sure his foster brother is happy and safe, often times putting himself in danger or hindering his chances at being happy (like the time he left the Salvatore School because they wouldn't keep Landon).

III. LONG TERM RECOMMENDATIONS

His determination to live by the truth causes him to risk heartbreak when he realizes that the standards he has in people in his life cannot be lived up to in a world of supernatural. His feelings can become dangerous as he lacks the ability to act upon them, and can leave him reckless. If he doesn't work on conquering his inner demons and continues to conceal them under the mindset that he has to protect those around him, it'll end him hurting himself with the risk of him losing control of his violent tendencies.

ELIZABETH "LIZZIE" SALTZMAN

I. BACKGROUND & BEHAVIOR OBSERVATIONS

She has some psychology issues that she is aware of, and is attempting to fix. She doesn't want to hurt anyone, but has trouble controlling her inner voice from becoming her outer voice. She has a sinister lineage and a questionable biology, and posses the power to cause great harm. She has mood swings, can be self-absorbed, and over-possessive, even over things that are not in her possession. She is attached to the superficial and has trouble controlling her breakdowns.

II. CLINICAL DIAGNOSES

CHRONIC LOW SELF ESTEEM

SUPERIORITY COMPLEX — she masks her insecurity by pretending to be better than everyone else around her

BIPOLAR DISORDER — her highs are portrayed in ruthless narcissism, but her lows are violent outbursts that can hurt someone, herself or anyone else, if not contained properly

CONTROL ISSUES — she turns it into her job to create something picture perfect out of herself and those around her, always trying to manipulate the situation in her own way.

III. LONG TERM RECOMMENDATIONS

She has to address her image-control issues and accept help for her mental disorder. Otherwise, she will continue down the path she is on, pushing those that she wants to hold onto away.

JOSETTE "JOSIE" SALTZMAN

I. BACKGROUND & BEHAVIOR OBSERVATIONS

She is supposed to be the level headed of the twins, always taking care of Lizzie. She takes after her biological mother and her father more than her birth-mother, Caroline. She lives in the shadows of her sister in attempt to try to protect her sister from herself. She is quick to protect Lizzie, and always puts herself first.

II. CLINICAL DIAGNOSES

CLASSIC CODEPENDENT — She puts everyone else's needs before her own, sublimating her own problems to always be ready to help her sister's inner conflicts.

ABANDONMENT ISSUES — Loss of her biological mom, absentee birth mom, and a father who has divided attention.

FAMILY HISTORY OF PSYCHOSIS

III. LONG TERM RECOMMENDATIONS

She needs to learn to stand on her own, without internalizing her own needs and ignoring them. To live a life that doesn't drain her, she needs to step out of the shadows and not be dependent on being her sister's source of calm.

MILTON GREASLEY

I. BACKGROUND & BEHAVIOR OBSERVATIONS

Lilah doesn't know him well enough to know

II. CLINICAL DIAGNOSES

Lilah doesn't know him well enough to know

III. LONG TERM RECOMMENDATIONS

Lilah doesn't know him well enough to know

ALARIC SALTZMAN

I. BACKGROUND & BEHAVIOR OBSERVATIONS

The man who loves the kids he works to protect. He is a father figure to many, providing a safe haven for kids who aren't always safe. His divided attention causes rifts between the two girls he fathered, and the other two who look to him as a father.

II. CLINICAL DIAGNOSES

PROJECTION — the trauma of his past with the supernatural causes him to want to protect the students from it, not allowing them to learn certain things about the world.

GUILT — he is haunted by the legacy of the people he couldn't save, and the sacrifices he had to make along the way to safeguard his school and his children, fearing that the choices will either get the school exposed, or make him lose his children's trust.

III. LONG TERM RECOMMENDATIONS

If he continued to maintain the school alone, he will quickly be in over his head. In the face of increasingly dangerous situations, he must be careful not to keep the secrets from his daughters, and has to be better at dividing his attention from his daughters.

ARIANELLE VICTORIA "N/A"

I. BACKGROUND & BEHAVIOR OBSERVATIONS

she's a mystery

II. CLINICAL DIAGNOSES

still a mystery

III. LONG TERM RECOMMENDATIONS

to be updated as Lilah learns about her

——

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

[awkwardanime]

Awkward Anime Episode 14.1: When Marnie was There - Anna’s Step Forward

In 2014, Studio Ghibli released another visual adaptation of a classic novel after the well received Secret World of Arrietty in 2010, this time with Joan G. Robinson’s When Marnie Was There, originally published in 1967. Anna Sasaki, a 12 year old orphan who lives with her foster mother (and father, who’s never around), is socially alienated and resentful after the death of her mother and grandmother. Always on the outside looking in, she’s sent to the seaside to live with a kind couple (relatives of the foster Mother), in hope of not only helping her asthma with the fresh sea air, but to have the quiet breeze and the coastal lifestyle bring Anna’s spirits up.

After the success of his directorial debut with The Secret World of Arrietty in 2010, Hiromasa Yonebayashi decided to take up the chance to bring Marnie to the big screen, this time without having to be conscious of the thoughts of Hayao Miyazaki, who co-wrote the screenplay for Arrietty. With full creative control promised this time around, the Director’s main intention was to create a visualisation of Joan G. Robinson’s detailed descriptive words that expressed the familiar feeling of anxiety for young people, hoping it would help those in a similar situation to take that step forward.

“I thought many people who live in this constricted present-day society could also share this empathy”

Hiromasa Yonebayashi knew in what way to visualise and tell this story, doing so in a similar way to that of Arrietty, with focus solely towards character development. By surrounding the protagonist with emphasis on atmosphere,the audience is able to connect with Anna from the very start. The opening scene epitomises what the long term Ghibli employee’s principles comprises of, along with the knowledge he has gained from working under the famous Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata.

“I think the environments and relationships that surround people who are afflicted have a great impact on their psychological healing”

The Studio always sets its tone for the film from the word go, telling us who is the main piece to the puzzle and what the feature length picture will be about. When Marnie is There’s opening 2 minutes is no different, as we see toddlers playing in a small playground as a young student sits in a somewhat reclusive way. Knees touching, arms close together as she continues sketching the scenery around her. As her classmates sit in their own groups chatting away, the thoughts of this girl are told to the viewers, setting the tone:

“In this world, there’s an invisible magic circle…the circle has an inside and outside… these people are on the inside… and I’m on the outside…but I don’t really care.”

Hesitant to hand over her sketch book to the teacher, she is saved by the fall of a child. Mere seconds later, clutching the book close to her chest as beads of sweat appear, we are told as to what the main theme will be. I love this scene. Perfectly visualising what an anxiety attack can feel like, just the small task of having to show her art to a teacher leaves her worrying. It is important to point out that the attack she had is described as an asthma attack, but it is clear to see that Yonebayashi focused on the mind of this character to be seen as the cause of her attacks, and not a symptom. What I found to be interesting is that with all the people around her enjoying themselves on this sunny day, her pencil sketch was only that of the playground, showing the view in its simplest form. I loved that Yonebayashi added this touch to enhance the insecurities of Anna. No people to burden herself with, alone… that’s what she’s comfortable with. We get the descriptive definition of who Anna is at the start, both through her thoughts and the wonderfully drawn facial expressions on a simple school day. The last line we hear as the scene ends sums up who Anna is at this moment, giving the audience that compassion and hope for a pleasant ending:

“I hate myself”

Yonebayashi's idea with Anna was to portray a 12 year old girl. The pre-teen is filled with much negativity within herself that leads her to become this silent, angry girl. Arriving at the seaside, I as a viewer immediately was shown the setting that would be the focal point to lifting Anna’s spirits. Her relatives are a laid back and down to earth couple, the Oiwas, completely the opposite of Anna thus we see her fake smiles quite a lot here. As much as I love the Oiwas in this story, I would have liked to see some type of confrontation between them and Anna as they are a little too relaxed about Anna disappearing at night and insulting one of the local daughters - to bring a little more depth to both characters I feel an argument or talk would have really brought even more insight into Anna’s thoughts and feelings. That being said, I understand the roles Yonebayashi chose for the couple here, as it could be said this is just what Anna wanted and needed at this time in her life. Letting her enjoy the time however she wants, to not be overbearing which definitely is something we all craved as an adolescent.

“Anna builds a wall around her, she refuses help from the outside, but at the same time she’s screaming out for it as well, and eventually she realises she’s loved by the people around her and she’s gradually adapting to the realities of life”

Anna’s uneasiness emanates from her belief that she belongs nowhere and that she has no true family. What becomes apparent quickly is that this is a film about belonging and family. Those are the two main themes I feel are present throughout, all for the end goal to be Anna being able to actively explore her surroundings, chasing for answers about her family herself - which leads her to Marnie. Connecting with Marnie, Anna suddenly feels part of something, part of a friendship. Instantly connecting with this secret girl who lives in the distant Marsh House, the two’s relationship is definitely an almost interdependent type of friendship, however different they may be. As important as Marnie is in this narrative, the main point of this animated feature was to express the feelings of adolescence and anxieties within young people.

Anna Sasaki’s journey from a lonely depressed girl, to someone who’s full of life and happy is a very honest representation of what losing connection to those around you can lead to. There is an emotional complexity in this film that I have never seen in the very best Disney films. Forget mature children, adults need to  sit down and battle with these themes.  A film about a young girl standing on the outside looking in, battling her insecurities day by day, to later become someone who is so in touch with everyone and everything around her. Visually presenting the importance of how to overcome low self esteem and depression; treating the audience with respect and maturity, When Marnie Was There is a must see.

“There are so many children who feel lonely and separate from others, cut off from others, even though they’re always connected by SMS. They still feel left out, or feel lonely. But when they see Marnie, maybe they could take a little step forward. If they could do that, then maybe it’ll have been a worthwhile work to do”

Please share if you enjoyed this analysis and remember to eat those tiny trees!

Check out previous Eps:

Ep 13 - Hotarubi no Mori E

Ep 12 - The Wind Rises

Ep 11 - The Secret World of Arrietty

Ep 10 - Tokyo Godfathers

Ep 9 - Garden of Words

Ep 8 - Kimi No Na Wa

Ep 7 - The Boy and the Beast

Ep 6.2 - Fading innocence of Ame

Ep 6.1 - Wolf Children Poster

Ep 5 - My Neighbor Totoro

Ep 4 - Summer Wars

Ep 3 - Spirited Away

Ep 2 - Koe no Katachi

[impressivepress]

The Matisse we never knew

Henri Matisse, unlike the other greatest modern painter, Pablo Picasso, with whom he sits on a seesaw of esteem, hardly exists as a person in most people’s minds. 

One pictures a wary, bearded gent, owlish in glasses—perhaps with a touch of the pasha about him, from images of his last years in Vence, near Nice, in a house full of sumptuous fabrics, plants, freely flying birds, and comely young models. Many know that Matisse had something to do with the invention of Fauvism, and that he once declared, weirdly, that art should be like a good armchair. A few recall that, in 1908, he inspired the coinage of the term “cubism,” in disparagement of a movement that would eclipse his leading influence on the Parisian avant-garde, and that he relaxed by playing the violin. Beyond such bits and pieces, there is the art, whose glory was maintained and renewed in many phases until the artist’s death, in 1954: preternatural color, yielding line, boldness and subtlety, incessant surprise. Anyone who doesn’t love it must have a low opinion of joy. The short answer to the question of Matisse’s stubborn obscurity as a man is that he put everything interesting about himself into his work. The long answer, which is richly instructive, while ending in the same place, is given in Hilary Spurling’s zestful two-volume biography, “A Life of Henri Matisse.” The first volume, “The Unknown Matisse: The Early Years 1869-1908,” was published in 1998. The second, “Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954” (Knopf; $40), completes the job of giving us a living individual, as familiar as someone we have long known, who regularly touched the spiritual core of Western modernity with a paintbrush.

Spurling is a veteran English theatre and literary critic and a biographer of Ivy Compton-Burnett. The fact that she is an amateur in art matters proves to be an advantage, given that she is also unfailingly sensitive and thoroughly informed. Matisse’s greatness resides in capacities of the eye and the mind that almost anyone, with willingness, can discern, and no one, with whatever training, can really comprehend. I don’t think it is possible to be more intelligent in any pursuit, or more serious and original, and with such suddenness, than Matisse was when he represented a reaching arm in “Dance I” (1909), or the goldfish that he painted as slivers of redness in a series of still-lifes in 1912. How can intellectual potency be claimed for an artist whose specialty, by his own declared ambition, was easeful visual bliss? It’s a cinch, now that Spurling has cleared away a century’s worth of misapprehensions and canards. Take, for example, the popular notion that Matisse was hedonistic. Hedonists seek pleasure. Matisse served it, as a monk serves God. He was a self-abnegating Northerner who lived only to work, and did so in chronic anguish, recurrent panic, and amid periodic breakdowns. Picasso recompensed himself, as he went along, with gratifications of intellectual and erotic play. Matisse did not. His art reserved nothing for himself. In an age of ideologies, Matisse dodged all ideas except perhaps one: that art is life by other means.

“The Unknown Matisse” told of an awkward youth from a dismal region of northern France—he was born in the cottage of his maternal grandmother, in 1869, and was raised in Bohain, an industrial textile center. He was an unhappy law clerk when, in 1889, he began to study drawing and, while laid up with appendicitis, was given a set of paints by his mother. The effect was seismic. He said later, “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.” How much did he mean that? He meant it to the extent of warning his fiancée, Amélie Parayre, whom he married in 1898, when he was twenty-eight, “I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more.” Amélie assented. She “had spent much of her life searching for a cause in which she could put her faith,” Spurling writes. Her parents were ruined in a spectacular scandal, as the unsuspecting employees of a woman whose financial empire was based on fraud. Spurling attributes to Amélie’s memories of that public disgrace a cocooning “suspicion of the outside world” that would always mark the Matisse family. (If there is any reason to doubt aspects of this book, it’s the unprecedented coöperation that the author coaxed from the congenitally overprotective heirs.) Amélie and, later, Marguerite—a daughter Matisse had fathered with a shopgirl in 1894 and raised with Amélie—were strong-willed confederates of Matisse in his work, and severe critics when his concentration flagged, managing a virtual family firm of which the artist was both the fragile chairman and the slave-driven labor force. According to Spurling, “The family fitted their activities round his breaks and work sessions. Silence was essential.” Even during the years when Matisse lived mostly alone in Nice, an “annual ritual of unpacking, stretching, framing and hanging ended with the whole family settling down to respond to the paintings.” The conference might last several days. Then the dealers were admitted.

Matisse was not taught to paint; he just started doing it. His first two canvases, from 1890, are essentially consummate Old Master-ish still-lifes, the first one pretty good and the second, featuring opulent reds, a knockout. (Of the second painting, Spurling writes, “Digging this picture out of his father’s attic ten years later, Matisse said it came so close to containing everything he had done since then that it hardly seemed worth having gone on painting.” Twenty years later he had the same reaction to it, only stronger.) He had style before he had craft, which he picked up along the way by copying paintings in the Louvre and taking classes with, among others, the arch-academician Adolphe-William Bouguereau and the Symbolist Gustave Moreau. (His one art-schooled technical standby, almost a fetish, was the plumb line. No matter how odd the angles in any Matisse, the verticals are usually dead true.) Most of his early works employ a dark palette and tend to be gloomy, but each strives for an integral vision. Matisse was thirty-one years old when he began showing in Paris—in 1901, a year after Picasso, eleven years younger, arrived in town from Barcelona. (They met in April of 1906, at the salon of Gertrude and Leo Stein.) It was in 1905, in the Mediterranean town of Collioure, that Matisse, in close collaboration with André Derain, combined pointillist color and Cézanne’s way of structuring pictorial space stroke by stroke to develop Fauvism—a way less of seeing the world than of feeling it with one’s eyes.

“Matisse the Master” opens in 1909, with the Matisse family—which now included, in addition to Marguerite, two sons, Jean and Pierre—living in a former convent on the Boulevard des Invalides, in Paris, where the artist conducted a painting school. His immense notoriety, which had been confirmed in 1905-06 by “Le Bonheur de Vivre,” a fractured fantasia that seemed to trash every possible norm of pictorial order and painterly finesse, was regularly exciting near-riots of derision in the public. (“My Arcadia,” Matisse called the picture, which established his career’s dizzying keynote: calm intensity or, perhaps, intense calm.) His huge-hipped, sinuous “Blue Nude,” of 1907, discomfited even Picasso, who complained, “If he wants to make a woman, let him make a woman. If he wants to make a design, let him make a design. This is between the two.” As usual, Picasso (then creating “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” his own monumental riposte to “Le Bonheur de Vivre”) was onto something: pattern was a decisive element in Matisse’s kind of picture, which applied a passion for decorated fabrics that began in his childhood. But Picasso was loath to admit that the combined effects of ornamental rhythm and blooming flesh constituted a revolutionary correlative, and not a contradiction.

Picasso and Matisse are poles apart aesthetically. Matisse told his students, “One must always search for the desire of the line, where it wishes to enter, where to die away.” Picasso’s line has no desire; it is sheer will. Form builds in Picasso, flows in Matisse. Picasso uses color. Colors enter the world through Matisse like harmonies through Mozart. Young artists and intellectuals in Paris at that time overwhelmingly favored Picasso’s analytical rigor, to the extent of attacking Matisse in print and snubbing him in public. Gertrude Stein (unlike her sister-in-law Sarah Stein, Matisse’s first major collector) enjoyed ridiculing him, “reporting with satisfaction,” Spurling says, “that her French cook served M. Matisse fried eggs for dinner instead of an omelette because, as a Frenchman, he would understand that it showed less respect.” Matisse’s intimate friends among artists were mostly easygoing minor painters, such as Albert Marquet. His temperamental aloneness made him prey to vertiginous depressions. He later recalled a breakdown that he underwent in Spain, in 1910: “My bed shook, and from my throat came a little high-pitched cry that I could not stop.”

Matisse himself precipitated the most significant and indelible controversy of his career. In 1908, in a famous text, “Notes of a Painter,” he stated as his ideal an art “for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” At the end of “The Unknown Matisse,” Spurling writes that the metaphor “has done him more harm ever since than any other image he might have chosen.” Straining to defend it, she hazards that “this passage reflects its obverse—Matisse’s intimate acquaintance with violence and destruction, a sense of human misery sharpened by years of humiliation, rejection and exposure—which could be neutralised only by the serene power and stable weight of art.” This tack strikes me as unnecessary, on two counts. First, in general, the principle of Matisse’s armchair seems ever sounder in comparison to more stirring but ultimately vain programs of modern art. If “modernism” had any effective purpose beyond acclimating cultivated people to rapid worldly change, it was a bust. Second, in particular, the tired businessman whom Matisse most likely had in mind was no Babbitt but almost a co-producer of some of the artist’s greatest works, the Russian textile magnate and visionary collector Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin, who wrote to him in 1910, “The public is against you, but the future is yours.” “Dance II” (1910) and “Music” (1910), heraldic mural-size slabs of resonating minor-key red, green, and blue, fulfilled commissions for Shchukin’s house in Moscow, which by 1914 contained thirty-seven Matisses—“He always picked the best,” the artist said—in history’s first dedicated museum of modern art. (Lenin expropriated the collection in person but allowed Shchukin to remain, in servants’ quarters, as caretaker and guide. He died in Paris, in 1936. The collection is now in the Hermitage and Pushkin Museums.)

Among Matisse’s students was Olga Meerson, a Russian Jew who had studied with Wassily Kandinsky in Munich and, already possessed of an elegant style, sought to remake herself under Matisse’s tutelage. Her talent is as apparent as her emulation of him, in a charming 1911 portrait, that shows him reclining on a checkered bedspread, reading a book with amused eyes. Spurling writes, “She personified the pride, courage and resilience that he responded to all his life at the deepest instinctual level in his female models.” She also epitomized a period type of “self-reliant single girl,” an obsessive subject for Matisse in those years, which Spurling locates between the earlier heroines of Henry James and the later solitaries of Jean Rhys. Matisse’s 1911 portrait of Meerson shows a primly dressed and posed, tremblingly sensitive woman slashed with “two fierce black arcs—plunging from neck to thigh, and from armpit to buttock,” which resist any explanation aside from their sheerly formal éclat. Spurling loses me when she hesitates to concede a sexual relationship. The body language in two group photographs from 1911 testifies that Amélie scented the worst. (In one, nearly everyone faces the camera except Meerson, who stares at Amélie, and Amélie, who carefully gazes at nothing.) A combination of Amélie’s jealousy and Meerson’s peremptory neediness caused a severely rattled Matisse to end the connection, with a maximum of bad feeling all around. Meerson moved to Munich, where she married the musician Heinz Pringsheim, a brother-in-law of Thomas Mann. Never having fulfilled her promise as a painter, she committed suicide in Berlin, in 1929.

But the Matisses’ marriage ran afoul not of any romantic rival but of the artist’s growing will to stand, however precariously, on his own. A climax came in 1913, when Amélie sat more than a hundred times for the “Portrait of Madame Matisse,” a thunderous painting, in drenching blues and greens, of a chic and stony woman leaning forward in a chair, with a black-featured gray mask of a face. (“Saturday with Matisse,” a friend’s diary reported at the time. “Crazy! weeping! By night he recites the Lord’s Prayer! By day he quarrels with his wife!”) Spurling says that the portrait, which was the last work to enter Shchukin’s collection, caused Matisse “palpitations, high blood pressure and a constant drumming in his ears.” Such frenzy was not rare when Matisse had difficulty with a painting, but in this case it was compounded by something like exorcism. The portrait expresses no specific feeling but, rather, registers innumerable emotions, not excluding tenderness. The game tilt of Amélie’s small head, sporting a dainty ostrich-feather toque, could break your heart. He referred to the painting years later in a letter to her as “the one that made you cry, but in which you look so pretty.”

One well believes Spurling that life with Matisse could be “close to unendurable,” but enduring it had been Amélie’s vocation, through years of impoverished existence in studio-centered homes. What eroded her role was security, which Shchukin’s patronage provided, along with a big suburban house in Issy-les-Moulineaux, where the family moved in 1909, and from which Matisse was increasingly absent. (In 1930, his travels took him to the United States, where he was thrilled by New York, and to Tahiti, where his melancholic character drew comment from a new friend, the German filmmaker F. W. Murnau: “Shadows are rare here. There’s sunshine everywhere except on you.”) Matisse continued to depend on Amélie, just not enough. Sulkily, she ceded routine leadership of the family to Marguerite. The 1913 portrait was his last painting of her. The couple finally split in 1939, when Amélie tried to dismiss the coolly efficient young Lydia Delectorskaya, an orphan refugee from Siberia who, having been hired as Amélie’s companion, increasingly served the ailing master as model, assistant, and nurse. Delectorskaya reacted to being banished (among other sorrows, which included a thwarted ambition to study medicine) by shooting herself in the chest with a pistol, to remarkably slight effect. Soon the artist and his wife were legally separated and Delectorskaya was back. Phlegmatic in the face of the family’s icy resentment, the Russian said of Matisse, “He knew how to take possession of people and make them feel they were indispensable. That was how it was for me, and that was how it had been for Mme. Matisse.”

Spurling, in her preface to “Matisse the Master,” announces an intention to demolish “two standard assumptions, both false.” The first, which is, indeed, common, concerns “the supposedly exploitative relationship” that Matisse had with the women he painted. The second, which was bruited in 1992 by an American art historian, Michèle C. Cone, in a book on artists in Vichy France, is less often heard, and involves, according to Spurling, “baseless but damaging allegations about Matisse’s behavior in World War II.” In answer to the first charge, Spurling—backed by access to Matisse’s immense correspondence, among other previously withheld archives—contends that the artist, after his marriage, rarely, if ever, had sex with models, despite his keen feelings for many. In this, Spurling is up against a climate of cynical received opinion. I’m one of numerous critics on record as being certain, based on no evidence, that Matisse womanized during his decades in Nice, which started with seasonal sojourns in 1917, when he lived in hotel rooms painting naked or harem-garbed models who, Spurling writes, “were drawn from the tide of human flotsam washed up in Nice between the wars.” Matisse never disavowed, in principle, the libertarian anarchism of most of his avant-garde generation. Nor did he seem to share the wintry belief of Piet Mondrian, quoted by Spurling, that “a drop of sperm spilt is a masterpiece lost.” He would visit brothels, though apparently without enthusiasm. (“Not much fun,” he said.) But I discover ready support for Spurling’s arguments in my own experience of the Nice odalisques, who loll on chairs or chaises amid flowers, fruits, and sumptuous fabrics. Indubitably erotic, the pictures diffuse arousal. Their sensuality never fixates on a breast or a thigh but dilates to every square inch of canvas. Such is the character of Matisse’s formal radicalism, early and late: distributed energy, suspended gesture, deferred climax. Might the tension have been so precious to him, as the engine of what gave his life meaning, that its only end could be exhaustion? It may count that, according to Matisse, he never ate even the fresh food that he used for still-lifes—including oysters, from a restaurant in Nice, that were returned in time for the lunch crowd.

Spurling associates the Vichy charge with a “popular image of the painter indulging himself among the fleshpots of Nice in wartime,” which is absurd on its face. During the war, Matisse was isolated in Nice and Vence. He was old and ill with cardiovascular, renal, and abdominal disorders; he underwent a colostomy in 1941 and, a year later, almost died. Cone bases a speculation that Matisse “sided with the nationalism of the current Vichy regime” on a mild complaint by the artist, back in 1924, that people were mistaking, as French, the cosmopolitan art scene in Paris. (“French painters are not cosmopolites,” he told a Danish interviewer—an observation, largely accurate, about the Parisian avant-garde of the twenties.) Beyond that, Cone primarily cites wartime interviews, in which Matisse chatted amiably about his work, as evidence of irresponsible disengagement. It’s true that he shielded his art from politics under all circumstances—he created the reverberant domestic idyll “The Piano Lesson” (my favorite twentieth-century painting) in the summer of 1916, while death swaggered at Verdun. But there seems to be no gainsaying his at least passive solidarity with the Resistance, which swept up the two most important women in his life—Amélie, who was a typist for the Communist underground, and Marguerite, who served as a courier—as well as his son Jean, who was involved in sabotage operations. (Pierre had by that time become an art dealer in New York.) Amélie was jailed for six months; Marguerite was tortured by the Gestapo but escaped from a cattle car that was stalled on its way to a prison camp in Germany during the war’s chaotic waning months. The artist’s loyalty to the poet and leading Communist Louis Aragon, who, while on the run, spent time with Matisse and wrote passionately about him, also weighs in his favor.

Matisse was so consumed by aesthetic sensibility that his responses to life, when not baffled and distraught, were like unwitting prose poems. Asked to recommend a possible mate for Jean, he sized up one young woman as “tall, well made, limbs a bit long—sprawling movements like a young dog—intelligent, very gifted and very reserved.” His habits were incredibly regular. On a typical day in Nice, in 1917, Spurling tells us, he “rose early and worked all morning with a second work session after lunch, followed by violin practice, a simple supper (vegetable soup, two hard-boiled eggs, salad and a glass of wine) and an early bedtime.” Spurling knows her man so well that you readily tolerate her occasional reading of his mind: “By the seventeenth it was so hot he stayed indoors all day, drawing fruit, reading or dozing on the studio couch, feeling his feet swell and thinking about his ‘Still Life with Green Sideboard.’ ” (As anyone might: that quiet painting, from 1928, is one of the most uncannily ambiguous ever made; you cannot decide if you are looking at or into the surface of a cabinet door.) He had warm but awkward dealings with his sons, realizing late in life that he had burdened them with the sort of hectoring pressures to meet his standards that he had suffered from his own father. Pierre said of the boy in “The Piano Lesson,” “Yes, it was me, and you have no idea how much I detested those piano lessons.” The one person who could command Matisse’s attention was Marguerite. She had married a brilliant man of letters, Georges Duthuit, who was Matisse’s best critic in his lifetime; when Duthuit proved unfaithful to her, the artist forbade him to write about his work. Matisse is never so affecting as in his account of the two weeks that Marguerite spent with him after her escape in 1945: “I saw in reality, materially, the atrocious scenes she described and acted out for me. I couldn’t have said if I still belonged to myself.”

Matisse spoke with self-knowledge both sad and ruthless—on behalf of driven artists in general—when, in a 1941 letter to Pierre, he referred to a harrowing recent painting by his friend Georges Rouault: “A man who makes pictures like the one we were looking at is an unhappy creature, tormented day and night. He relieves himself of his passion in his pictures, but also in spite of himself on the people round him. That is what normal people never understand. They want to enjoy the artists’ products—as one might enjoy cows’ milk—but they can’t put up with the inconvenience, the mud and the flies.”

The last decade and a half of Matisse’s life, spent mostly as an invalid, was a bonus gift of time—“a second life,” he called it—in which, deciding that he had gone as far as he could with oil painting, he invented and developed a new kind of art. His compositions of paper cutouts included the 1947 book “Jazz,” and designs for Catholic vestments to go with his total design of a convent chapel in Vence—an improbable, gruelling commission, including seventeen stained-glass windows and several nearly abstract murals, that was arranged with help from a favorite former model, who had become a nun, and an idealistic young monk who came to remark, “I feel less and less Gothic, and more and more Matisse.” The project horrified not only much of the Catholic hierarchy but also a contemporary art world then largely in thrall to Communism. (Picasso is often said to have recommended that Matisse decorate a brothel instead. Actually, he proposed a fruit-and-vegetable market, to which Matisse “was proud of snapping back that his greens were greener and his oranges more orange than any actual fruit.”) But such was Matisse’s prestige, with the added advantage that the artist largely financed the project himself, that the chapel opened in 1951 in a ceremony led by the Archbishop of Nice. At first bewildered by the chapel, the sisters of the convent came to love its chaste serenity and effulgent color. “From now on,” Spurling writes, “indignant or derisive sightseers demanding to know the meaning of the stations of the cross received a firm response from the nun in charge: ‘It means modern.’ ”

Matisse’s cutouts realized a brilliant conjunction of drawing and color which had always been implicit in his art—often, as if his lines were not the container of his color but the edge produced by its expansion, like the contour of wetness left by a wave on a beach. Formed with scissors, color and shape become effectively one. In his house, luxuriant with simple amenities and living things, he “exercised dominion . . . from his bed,” Spurling writes. “Models and assistants were jealously guarded, cut off from outside contact and more or less confined to the premises.” Picasso, accompanied by his lover, Françoise Gilot, was a frequent and welcome visitor. While still fencing with each other like old duellists, they talked art. (Gilot remembered one occasion when Matisse, producing American catalogues of the work of Pollock and Robert Motherwell, asked Picasso, “What do you think they have incorporated from us? And in a generation or two, who among the painters will still carry a part of us in his heart, as we do Manet and Cézanne?”) Matisse died at the age of eighty-four, on November 3, 1954, with Marguerite and Delectorskaya at his side. Spurling reports that Delectorskaya “left immediately with the suitcase she had kept packed for fifteen years.”

If Spurling fails to make one important element sufficiently clear, it’s the connection between the peculiarities of Matisse’s life and his singularity, which is also his absolute modernity, as an artist. The key fact is his self-invention as a painter, entering art history from essentially nowhere, as if by parachute. Never having had traditional lessons to unlearn (unlike Picasso, with his incessant industry of demolishing and reconstructing the inherited language of painting), Matisse innovated on something like whim—a privilege, without guidelines or guarantees, for which he paid a steep toll in anxiety. There is even a touch of the naïf or the primitive about him, though it is hard to grasp, because his works quickly assumed the status of classics, models of the modern. You can track his inspirations, seeing, for example, that his discovery of Russian icons, during a visit to Shchukin in Moscow in 1911, informed a large confrontational painting of him and Amélie, “The Conversation” (1911). But how does this marital anecdote (the great man in pajamas!) manage to impress as an all-time symbol of creativity? Matisse couldn’t say, and no one else can, either. The circumstances of his life and time, as detailed in this appropriately capacious biography, continually distill into drops of wonder.

~ Peter Schjeldahl · August 22, 2005. Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic. His latest book is “Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings, 1988-2018.”

[epivskey]

Just wondering about your next gen headcanons. Do you favor any characters (including OCs and ships)? Also, who plays what on the Quidditch team?

oh my dear this will be long. most of my headcanons can be found on /tagged/hp-next-gen-headcanons on my tumblr.  

I’m just going to do my faves because there are too many kids.

Teddy Lupin - I subscribe to the canon that he is the Head Boy Hufflepuff. I like thinking that while his teachers expected and received grades worthy of his father, that he would also have his mother’s energy and clumsiness. His hair reflects what he feels, and since blue is the colour of calm and happy, its the colour you would most likely see him in. He’s close with the Potters and the Shell Cottage Weasleys. He plays the resident big brother role pretty well, so well that even the adults don’t notice the hurt he feels. He’s jealous that these are full families, that his family ended before it could properly begin. He relates to Professor Longbottom in that way, since they both were raised by their grandmothers. He didn’t have the paparazzi as bad, since his parents were dead war heroes not alive ones. He never let on to the younger ‘uns that he was too busy with exams to help with their problems.

Victoire Weasley - I like to pin her as the perfect cousin, the one on such a high pedestal in terms of looks, grades, her Gryffindor status and general care toward paparazzi and followers. She’s kind to the paparazzi, never breaking their things or swearing or making rude gestures; her head is always kept low and often holds a soft smile. Because for all the attention she got from them as a child, and from being told that all the others should act and be like her, Victoire enjoys the attention. She enjoys the flashing lights, although she didn’t always. When she was young she despised the camera, knowing that it awaited her outside her home, but as she got older and accepted it as part of her life, she found that she actually enjoyed it. It helped her greatly when Dominique broke a camera from sheer rage, because she got to fake niceness to get on their good side; her sister’s anger and rage was her saving grace. She enjoys it when her face is plastered onto a magazine, looking as pretty in her flawless nature. Fights break out with Dominique over how paparazzi should be handled, but she ultimately doesn’t give a shit.

Molly Weasley - Ever since a young age her father pressured her to do her best in school. Percy was a prefect and got high grades, and he expected no less from his daughters. Molly did as she was told and studied hard, studying even before her enrollment in Hogwarts. It didn’t help that her mother was Korean, so the stigma of her being smart was only due to “natural” instances of her being Asian, not her hard work. Half the time she questioned why she hadn’t been sorted into Hufflepuff, but the answer was always the same: expectations. Of course she would do well at school, of course she strove to be number 1, of course she was a Gryffindor. She was called a “Mini Victoire” or a “Victorie 2.0” by tabloids. The weight of expectations and the constant exposure to paparazzi outside of school did not do good things to her mental state. At thirteen she fell into a pit of depression. Her sister Lucy and cousins, James and Fred, were the only ones that really knew. For once she was glad she was in Gryffindor, because she had James and Fred to keep her from falling- both figuratively and literally. She made a suicide attempt at age fifteen. Her self-esteem was hurt and self-confidence plummeted; an incident concerning her friends, Daniel Wood and one Rita Skeeter during a Hogsmeade day caused her to lose them all because of an article written. That was the pushing point that led her to try and jump off the Gryffindor tower. Luckily James caught her and brought her back to his and Fred’s dorm. She’s being using them as a crutch ever since.

Fred Weasley - Having your dead uncle who is also your dad’s twin brother as your namesake could not be easy, and for Fred it was hell. His entire family had a legacy from their involvement in the Second Wizarding War, and while only one Weasley died for the cause, he was named after said Weasley. From when he was about ten years old Fred realised that everything he did and said would be compared to his namesake. Every bad joke he tried to tell that received pitied laughs, all the times he did something naughty with James and got scolded by Grandmum Molly, when he got sorted into Gryffindor. It was like he lived in a shadow he could never escape, the sun never shone where he stood and it would never shine for as long as he would live. He once spoke his fears aloud with James and Molly and was surprised when they resonated with him. At twelve he made himself a promise for the future: he would never ever name his kids after anyone he knew. The responsibility of knowing a namesake was heavy enough when it was just his family, but the tabloids took it to new heights, blowing his position as a Keeper in Quidditch way out of proportion, “Fred Jr walking away from everything his family taught him! Read more about how this junior is diverting from his predestined path.” He’s the most vocal of all the cousins about how fucked up their lives are.

James Potter - James has five things he considered to be the worst in life, but their order always got shuffled around: being named after your grandfather and great godfather; being Harry Potter’s son; being Harry Potter’s first born; being Ginny Weasley’s son; and being sorted into Gryffindor. Sometimes being named after your grandfather and great godfather sucked ass because of their reputation as tricksters, and replicating that kind of expectation was hard- or at least harder than anyone would know. The two categories of being Harry Potter’s son and being Harry Potter’s first born were split, because the former added pressure onto James to do something equally as selfless and amazing. How do you trump the fact that your father basically saved the whole world? The latter because, according to all the movies James had watched, the first born was always “destined for greatness” and was always the mold from which the other siblings would follow from. But James considered himself to be a mess and got into trouble- but not the good kind. He caused scandal after scandal leaving behind strings of “broken hearts.”  He loved his mum dearly, but hated that she pursued professional Quidditch (and that his father was the youngest Quidditch player in a century) because that meant James had to pursue Quidditch. He loved watching the sport and the thrill of the games, but hated actually being on the pitch. But duty calls, and so he joined Quidditch and became Captain. This tied with him being a Gryffindor. He didn’t want his future to have been planned out for him already, often waking at night from nightmares.

Relationships I do ship are: Teddy & Victoire, Scorpius & Albus. Ships with the canon and my ocs: my oc Imogen Wong & James, my oc Dinah Wood & Teddy, my oc Frank II & Louis, and my oc Bella Hart (Pansy’s daughter) & Lucy.

As for OC’s I favour:Amelia Finnigan-Thomas - Adopted child of Dean and Seamus from Myanmar, Amelia was a darling to the public eye. It was a fairy tale, the tale of a poor unknown witch from a poor country being adopted by gay, loving war-hero parents. She had an older brother who was adopted from kenya with a similar story. She hated the paparazzi and still does, but she loves to make fun of them with her brother and friends. At fourteen she became the Quidditch Captain for Hufflepuff, managing to bring Hufflepuff to victory and get the House Cup! She spawned quite the attention when she did, doing everything she could to emphasize the fact that she did it, she brought her house victory. She’s at times cocky and unchecked, but if you ever say shit about her fathers or her brother, she would not hesitate to hex you.

Dinah Wood - First born child of Oliver Wood and Quidditch mastermind in her own right. She was captain of Gryffindor’s Quidditch team when James first entered Hogwarts, drawing knowledge from her father on tactics to use on the field. Many players from within her own house, and plenty from the others, complained that she had an unfair advantage. McGonogall brushed it all away, and Dinah felt connected to her head of house, grateful that her faith was placed in her. Her hype about Quidditch is considerably less crazed than her father. But her legacy as a Captain garnered her a position as a “popular” girl, alongside the fact that she was best friends with Teddy Lupin and Victoire Weasley. She’s very competitive, fighting for the title of prefect in Fifth Year, and Head Girl, but the title instead went to a Slytherin prefect.

The kids that played Quidditch in Hogwarts:James II - ChaserFred II- Beater, KeeperDominique - Chaser, BeaterLucy - ChaserScorpius - KeeperAlbus - SeekerDinah Wood- ChaserAmelia Finnigan-Thomas - Seeker, Chaser Louis - ChaserFrank Longbottom II - Beater

[worlduniversityrp-blog]

Accepted Romania App

Accepted! Please have a blog up within the next week, and send the URL to this blog so we can add you to the members page. @ask-wph-alfred

OOC

Name: Nami Pronouns: doesnt really matter to me Contact URL: @ask-wph-alfred {| or @ask-antihero-al }

Character Wanted: romania Activity Level: 5 or more? {| depends on how active this au is|} Timezone: Est {| viriginia beach|} Password: accepted

Extra: I have multiple blogs and work so i may be busy, but i love a good rp and will still try to be as active as i can

IC

Full Name: Vladimir Popescu

Age / Year: 21 and 3rd(1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.) Gender / Pronouns: Male, he/him

Appearance: Vlad is considered to be the average height in Romania which is 5'8. His appearance leans on the feminine side, and he looks a bit too skinny for how tall he is. All though not toned he is stronger then he looks. He has characteristics of a vampire; his skin is naturally pale, his eyes are red, and he has fangs. His hair is straight, light brown, shoulder length, and his bangs are side swepted to the right. While his facial structure is more rounded and soft, and upturned eyes.

Personality: Vlad was never good at interacting with people. Especially of his age. He is very shy and when he gets nervous or feels uncomfortable he starts to stutter. It seems as tho he is nervous and awkward all the time giving little smiles here and there, and tripping all over the place. Which causes him to get embarrass and flee the place as fast as he can. Despite this he is a hard worker and would try even hard next time. Which means sometimes he would forget that he is human. He is also a kind hearted person always forgiving and trying to do the right thing which makes him the number one candidate for being walked all over especially seeing how he can be rather gulliable or naive. He is weird though, telling stories mostly scary ones and cant really tell if he made someone feel creeped out because of it. He does have a jokester side and sometimes like to scare people on purpose, he would do a little pranking but nothing over the top. He would also make it known if he didnt like a person and it would be obvious. He would tell the person and treat them kind of rudely, but once someone become his friend it would be hard to make him not trust you.

Skills: Strengths or talents. At least 3. Describe them a little. -Sketch He carries a little book around in which he likes to sketch things through out his day, he its like his diary. He isnt a pro but its something he enjoys doing -Cooking He learned how to cook at a fairly young age, and thinks he makes atleast decent meals. He had to cook for his family which he found out was pretty fun. It gave him something to do and he loves the ending results. - Magic He picked up magic from an older friend. Its his favorite thing to do! Messing with peoples minds and being faster and slicker then the eye can see. He can do from just a simple card trick to making good luck charms to fortune telling! Its so much possibilities you can do and thats why he loves it.

Flaws: Weaknesses or flaws. At least 3. Describe them a little. - Desperate for friends He loves having people around him although he isnt good with socializing. He would do just about anything to get them and keep them around. It just feels great to have someone to talk to or hang out with sometimes. - Low self esteem He knows he looks creepy, and can hnever do anything right. No matter how hard he tries there’s always something that he would do wrong. He hates it, all he wants is to be normal and not have that much problems. Getting told he can’t do something right and people pointing out his flaws suck, but not as much as proving them right and failing at the simplest task. - Lonely From his mom barely being there and being neglectful, or caring about his day. He feels as if all the time he has no one hand has to go thru everything by his self. He hates the feeling, having no one who cares or even recognize that hes gone. Even with the “friends” he has now he still feels lonely. He doesn’t know why but sometimes he forgets until hes alonr, which is all he wants is..to forget that hes lonely - Drinking problem He is a bit of an alcoholic. He goes to the bar daily, but he doesnt get to drunk unless something is really bothering him. He was a teen when he found out that alcohol was a distraction and became dependant on it. 

Backstory: School life: He enjoyed going to school. Learning new things or meeting new people. He was always friendly to them and did everything he can to make friends, he was desperate. Seeing how happy everyone is and how he would just be alone during recess or study hall. He would try different methods to approach someone or copy a conversation he heard. It never went well. He would get strange looks, wondering what he wants and when he would leave. So after a while, he gave up just being alone. Until he met a group of children that would stick with him almost towards the end of elementary through some where around beginning of high school. They would call him their friend. He loved it. It was all he wanted. He didnt care that the taunted him for how he looks, and use him to scare people. He didnt even care if they told him to steal something or give something for someone. He did his best to please them, because when he doesn’t they leave. He hated when they did that. So he would go to them begging for forgiveness and what he could do for them to forgive him. Before he knew it his circle of friends expanded he meet on of his friends sister. It seemed as though she really liked him. Her brother came to him telling him to date his sister. When he refused it ended with him getting beat up and ignored for a week. He ended up changing his mind and told him he’ll date her. His friend threatened him to not do anything that would make his sister sad. To prevent that he did whatever his new girlfriend wanted, and got her everything. It was hard tho and tricky cause sometimes he couldnt afford many things which made him have to do things he really didnt want to do. Around college she seemed to get bored of him, cheating on him and then dumping him. He asked her if they can still be friends he didnt want to lose someone. She said no and told him how creepy he was, but always came back when she needed emotional support or anything.

Home life: Vlad lived majority of the time with his grandparents which means he took care of them when they started to get sick. His mom was barely ever home and his father left once he was born. By the time his grandfather died, his grandmother decided to go into a nursing home. So his mom decided to bring work to home. She also got him to play some part of it. He didnt fully understand what his mom did at work or why she wanted him to take wallets from strange males and females. Although he did find out what his mom does and why their was strangers in the house almost every day. He was in his preteens when that night came, when he walked in to that room and it turned his life upside down. He couldn’t do it, take that guys money. He didnt want to do anything really. The guy left and his mom stepped out after, when she heard the door shut she asked him for it. Instead of answering he asked why told to go into the punishmemt room. The room was dark it had no windows and a cold floor. It was small he had to sit down in an awkward position and his back touched the ceiling with his back. From the crack of the crack of the door a little light can in and all he can see is a slight reflection from the mirror. He hates it. Looking at him self for hours or days or how every long she kept him in there. First few days or hours she would stand by the door telling him the truth about his dad and what she really thinks of him. He would try his best to please his mom but she would always find something wrong. He felt kind of useless not being able to do even the smallest of tasks like give her food, which he would usually trip on himself and break the plate. He would have to pick it up with his bare hands and his mom would step on his hand causing the glass to dig in. She would tell him to be more careful that the cant afford for him to be breaking everything because hes a clutz.whenever he did something wrong she had a new punishment just for that thing. Though her favorite is the room. When he finally turned 18 his mom kicked him out not ever wanting to see him ever again. Although 2 yrs after that his mom was in a horrible accident and she couldnt take care of her self. She became bed ridden and could barely walk. Vlad felt bad for his mom and decided to make things right and got 2 jobs to get an apartment for his mom and him. He does his best even after all she done that was his mom and he loved. He never wants to abandon her, no matter how mean she may get he knew she needed him and felt bad. He feels as if his mom hated him ever since he was born but never showed it til he screwed up. He learned to just be quiet and do as told it would just cause him to not get in trouble as much. 

Headcanons: List min 2, max 5. -owns a motorcycle -hates mirrors -scared of the dark -is a polyglot -demisexual

Major(s): -psychology -sociology Minors: -Romance languages and literature Courses: - abnormal psychology -developmental psychology -social problems -statistics -Spanish Ships:

OTP(s): All

NOTP(s): dont have any

Writing sample: It was a normal day, hot and a little breeze every few seconds. The romanian smiled as he walked down the street. After a few minutes of walking he reached his destination, a bar. He opens the door and walks in to the old fashioned, wood floor bar. It was filled with people, some sitting down and having a drink with their friends, or attempting to play pool or beer pong which was always funny. He walked over to the counter, the floor creeks with every step he took. When he reached the counter he sat down on the stool next to other poor lonely saps. He got a look at the bartender, “ oh your back” the bartender said with a smirk as he continued his sentence"the usual?“ Vlad nods his head along with a "da.” The bartender grabbed a cup and dried the inside of it, he then turned around and grabbed a bottle of wine from one of the lower shelves. He poured half way, put the bottle back and handed the drink to vladimir. “Mersi” vlad thanked him as he grabbed the drink and drank it all in one gulp. A tiny bit of wine rolled down from his bottom lip and fell from his chin. The bartender gave a laugh as he made a joke “ you know kid, you look like one of ‘em vampires. If i didnt know any better i would think you were one of them!” He wiped his chin and looked away, he blushed with embarrassment. “ you know i’m only messin’ how about i give ya another one?” He offered the younger man with a gentle smile. “D-da, mulțimesc”