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Senshi: Sailor Celaeno, Senshi of Sorrow

Name: Odile Renoire

Nicknames: Ugly Duckling, Odd Odile, Oddy, Odd One Out, Cygnet (only to her brother)

Gender: Female

Age: 16

Birthday: July 1st

Sign: Cancer

Blood Type: O

Fav. Food: Citrus sorbet - sadly, she cannot eat it very often, only for special treats.

Hated Food: Duck, in any form. She will not touch fast food and cannot stand the smell of it.

School: Crystal


Hobbies:
* Ballet -- One of the few things Odile is any good at. She would live, breathe and eat ballet if only she could. On stage or off stage, when she is dancing she can lose herself in the role, becoming someone else, someone better and happier and stronger than plain old Odile. Dancing is also the only time anyone would consider Odile beautiful - she's plain and she knows it, but when she dances, she is graceful and shines from within. Too bad that disappears as soon as she stops.


* Tarot -- A hobby that developed from Odile's fascination with having her own fortune told. When she was younger, she hoped things would take a better turn for her and was naive enough to think fortune telling might be real. She racked up quite a phone bill calling psychic hotlines (usually only getting tragic or far-too-generic-to-be-useful results) before her parents caught on and banned her. Ever obedient, Odile stopped calling. In an effort to placate her, her elder brother bought her a deck of tarot cards so she could indulge the fascination herself (and for free).

Odile now performs tarot readings for others. Whether it's accurate or not is anyone's guess, but it's good entertainment for others. Sadly, any attempts to read her own fortune turn out bleak and full of despair. Maybe Odile is destined for tragedy... or maybe she's just jinxing her own readings. Who knows?


* Reading -- Tragic romances and the kind of plays where everyone dies at the end are Odile's version of Mills & Boon. She devours them in the spare time she has from ballet. What she wouldn't give for a happy ending for these stories - but you simply can't trust those other tales where they all live happily ever after. They're just lies, everyone knows real life isn't like that. So Odile will just stick with her depressing heart-wrenchers, thank you very much.


* Massage -- Having received her fair share of them to work out kinks and relax after her dancing, Odile has picked up the amateur basics of giving a good massage. She hasn't got much strength behind her, so she's better at finding pressure points, like Chinese acupressure massage. If you seem tense or worried, Odile is always ready to volunteer a free shoulder massage!


Gemstone: Pearl


Virtues:
Obedient-- Every parent and teacher's dream, Odile will follow all orders from authority figures. Her homework is done on time, she never skips her ballet practice or cuts it short, if her help is needed for school chores she's there. You can trust that Odile will do what she has been told to, that she won't act up or go off on her own. It makes her a wonderful team player. There's a good chance she'll follow other students, as well, so perhaps she'll even do the lion's share of your group project. This does work against her [see flaws].

The need to be obedient was ingrained into a young Odile in order to please her parents. Social butterflies of high society, her parents were rarely around. When they were, Odile desperately wanted their praise (and love, but she soon realised that was a lost cause) so she tried to be the perfect daughter, performing whatever was asked of her. This carried over to other authority figures in her young life, and then into school.


Dedicated-- Ballet is a hard and demanding study, so Odile knows all about dedication. She practices for hours outside classes, she studies ballet through old movie reels and videos, and keeps to the strictest of diets. Odile has great self-restraint in the face of temptation, as long as she has a prized goal in mind. She doesn't slack off, she always gives 110% to her goals.


Helpful-- Odile really, really, REALLY wants to be of some use to you. Actually, what she really wants to is to feel accepted and loved, but being helpful seems to get the best results. Or at least means that others are happy enough to have her around, which is good enough for Odile. This is one of the reasons Odile doesn't mind being a stepping stone [see flaws]. And even if you treat her so badly that you make her cry, she'll convince herself that there is some deeper reason for your bad mood that isn't your fault and you didn't really mean it and you SURELY need help fixing whatever caused that bad mood in the first place.


Organiser-- Odile is used to scheduling her days, weeks, and hours to fit in ballet classes, school, homework, ballet practice, social situations (the rare ones she's invited to)... She's a busy girl and it takes effort to fit everything in. Luckily Odile is very good at creating schedules. No PDAs or electronic methods for her, though. Paper or cardboard, colourful pens and pencils, colour-coded sticky notes, and good-old binders or diaries - these are the tools Odile works with. Having trouble finding the time for all your homework? Need to fit your study in around your busy social schedule? Odile can manage to fit it all into a schedule for you! Some senshi need a roster for nightly and weekend patrols? Odile can make that! (And if you pike out of your turn, she can also cover that shift for you so the team doesn't fail the assignment let the Negaverse win.)



Flaws:
Resigned-- To put it bluntly, Odile is a person who has become used to the life she is living and the way she is treated. Perhaps it can be blamed on being named after a tragic figure from a famous ballet, which might have doomed her since birth. But apart from the times she is transformed into someone else through dance, Odile does not feel that anything in her life is going to change or become better than this. She is plain. She is not particularly graceful when not dancing. She doesn't believe in love. She doesn't believe in happily ever after or fairy tale endings. There is no prince coming for her, no great romance that will change her life forever. She doesn't believe she deserves any better than what she currently has. There is a quiet dignity to her resignation, though, she's certainly not emo or overly dramatic about it.

This is not to say Odile is completely without hope. Of course she hopes that things will improve for her someday. She just doesn't expect it, and won't waste time waiting for it. And may not believe it at first, if the unexpected arrives/occurs.


Anxious-- Odile has been diagnosed with mild anxiety disorder. It is brought on by social situations, usually acute bullying or fear of failure/disobeying and therefore disappointing people and losing their approval. If Odile cannot get away and calm herself down, it escalates into making her physically sick and throwing up - which has started rumours that she is bulimic or anorexic, and that's how she stays so thin for ballet.

This anxiety is Odile's secondary weakness. It can be exploited in battle by enemies, if they can convince Celaeno that she's disobeyed an order, is doomed to fail, or otherwise stress her out badly enough.


Stepping Stone -- Overly obedient, Odile is the type whose 'friends' pick on her. Almost a servant of sorts, she'll carry your bags, fetch things for you, and she doesn't mind at all. It's not like she has any hope of better treatment, after all, and at least this way she is included. And if one of those so-called friends is cruel to her today, she'll still be back tomorrow as long as she isn't told to stay away (which only makes them laugh harder at her behind her back).

There are a few limits: She will not disobey a rule from an Authority Figure on a student's say-so. She will not do anything obviously stupid like follow dares to jump off cliffs, into a lake, etc. She will not do YOUR homework - but if it is a group project and therefore also HER homework, you can convince her to do most of it because SHE has that deadline and if it isn't completed on time (because you have MORE IMPORTANT things to do) it reflects badly on HER as not obeying the teacher.

Being a stepping stone is Odile's main weakness. It highly affects her civilian life, and can be used against her in battle by her fellow senshi. She'll do their patrols (what if no one patrolled and the Negaverse attacked and it could have been prevented and this is all Celaeno's fault?!?!), follow their orders in battle, let them have the limelight if they so desire...


Passive Aggressive-- Odile could never confront the people who treat her badly or make her angry. She has, however, mastered the art of guilt-tripping people. If she's in a bad mood, she can make you feel guilty over the fact you got such a good tarot reading from her ("I never get dark, handsome men showing up in my own readings... must be nice..."), tell in great detail about how she caught this cold waiting for you to show up even though you were several hours late ("don't worry... *coughcough* ... I'm not mad *coughcough* ... I'm sure you had a very important reason to leave me all alone to get sick, too bad this will ruin my chances in ballet tryouts today *siiigh*"). She can make you feel bad over the fact that you're happy and she isn't, heaving sighs and looking depressed.

Of course, this isn't something she does to everyone. Only to the people who make her mad. It's her only way of being able to retaliate.



Challenge: "Cry for me!" or "There will be no happy endings for you!"

Attack #1 (for senshi)
NAME: Tears of Frustrated Sorrow
Causes rain to fall on a single target. The person struck by the rain will find themselves physically repelled from the object of their desire at the time of the attack. This effect lasts for two minutes. The repelling is minor, much like weak magnets - it can be fought against and conquered.


* This is from Alexander Faulkner Shand's system of interconnected sentiments, where "when an impulsive tendency towards some important object is frustrated, the resultant sentiment is sorrow". (Quote from Wiki.)

** "Object of desire" would be whatever the target is most focused on the moment the attack hits. For example, it they were trying to obtain a particular object, they would now experience a magnetic repulsion from it. If they'd been focusing on attacking a particular senshi, they would now experience the repelling force from that senshi - but not from any others. But there is still the possibility for mix-ups. If the target was aiming for one thing (a senshi or an object), but at that exact moment more worried about their significant other or crush, that would take the place of "object of desire".


Attack #1b: (for Super)
Stronger version of the same attack. The repelling force is stronger, it is harder to conquer.


Attack #2: (for Eternal and beyond for senshi)
NAME: Swansong
A sorrowful ballet dance of sadness and death, casts depression over those within five metres. Lasts between one and five minutes, depending on how susceptible they are (or if they have anything to be depressed/sorrowful about), eg. people with tragic one-sided loves are going to be more susceptible than happy-go-lucky types who think the world is full of bunnies and rainbows.

Physical Description:

Hair: Pale lavender, shadows more of a cornflower blue - the rose in the middle here is a sort of example. Curly. Basically any kind of Taylor Swift hairstyle (where she has long curly hair [updo or not is fine], just not any where she's flattened it).

Eyes: A deep yet brilliant blue-green. Like this gem.

Face: Heart-shaped, round face. Sweet and innocent, if slightly tragic expression.

Body: Very slender and delicate. Long legs. Pale skin.

Fashion: When practising her ballet, Odile wears this sort of ballet uniform, with a loose cardigan over the top - possibly off the shoulders to show the straps of the leotard underneath? Pretty open to artistic flair, as long as it's a fairly casual ballet practice outfit. Can be with or without the skirt, and in any fairly standard colour (black, navy, pink, etc.)

When dancing, she has her hair fully up in a messy bun. At other times, her hair is usually half-or-nearly-fully down styles (as linked above).

The only thing I feel I can crit on right now is that there's already a Sailor Elektra, so I'm not sure if a one letter change is enough to allow you to use the name... o.o;;;


I do like her virtues and vices, it's really hard to not pity the girl and wanna snuggle her :<;;; <3

How would her weakness go along with being a senshi? You do well on explaining how it works as a civilian, I'm just curious what your ideas were for how she'd be affected by the change =o

On hot steaming pile of crit coming right up!

I'm a bit of a geek, so I really enjoy the Swan Lake references you've worked into the character. I think it would be really fun to see her in a ballerina inspired fuku, but no pressure there. I'm just going to start at the top and move down, so let's move on.

• Her list of nicknames is good - obviously these are the sort of natural derivations from her name that kids in their infinite cruelness would come up with. However, I'm confused why her brother calls her Cygnet. I know there's not room on the form for it, but I think that Odile's family and such needs to be expanded out a little bit more, even if it's just by making her history weigh a bit more heavily upon her traits and how she got to be this way. Besides her obedient trait, I don't really see anywhere her backstory emerges into her personality.
  
  
• You've got a nice set of hobbies for her, but like the note about making her history more present, I'd like to see more about how she picked these up. When and why did she start dancing? I like that her "reading" hobby is defined as being "tragic romances" - that's interesting! Thank you for being specific! But her "Tarot" hobby feels a bit out of place at present. You've created a character who otherwise feels sort of cynical, so I don't understand the fixation on trying to find out her future. If she's so hopeless and her attempts always turn out miserable, why does she keep doing it? At present, Tarot feels like something you've given her because you like the idea of it and not because of the practical implications for the character.
  
  
• Obedient and Dedicated are very similar virtues, and while they are appropriate of a trained ballet dancer, it seems like she needs a virtue or two that isn't along the same lines as these. This is your character, not mine, and I don't know what direction you plan to take her in, but it seems like there are things about her that you know but aren't communicating in the form.
  
  
• When combined with her flaws, Odile comes off as a bit of a weak character. I don't mean that she's poorly imagined, because I definitely think she has potential, but right now she doesn't make a whole lot of an impression and doesn't seem like she really has the capacity to move towards her own objectives. There are traits that work inwardly and traits that work outwardly, and so far, besides being a stepping stone, all of Odile's traits are internalized, which makes me worry that in an actual RP situation she's not going to have much to do besides nod nervously and do whatever she's asked to do.
  
  
• Try to focus on making her a more active character. Right now you seem to be playing to the archetype of the tragic ballerina, and while archetypes are a good place to start, they're not complete characters. Involving her backstory more will definitely give a better sense of motivation to her actions, and will help you get to know her better. See if by fleshing that out you come across any new flaws or virtues you can incorporate.
  
  
• Sailor concept looks fine, sphere looks fine, I like the challenge. Her first attack has me a bit confused as to how it works - maybe define "object of desire" better? I'm confused as to whether this moves people away from the person they are trying to attack or does something else entirely.

In conclusion, I think you've got a solid foundation for this character, but now you need to build the rest of the house around it. I'm going to stop speaking in cliche metaphors now, so goodbye and good luck!

Thanks for crit, Silvy, that's awesome! Will work on in a bit.

Yeah, I found that, Mouse, just haven't found something to change the name to, yet. Thanks, though n.n Will be fixing!


EDIT: Name changed to Celaeno, thanks to Marushii for suggesting! heart heart

Odile is absolutely perfect, which is why I want just one thing on her: both of her weaknesses stem from the way she lives her life -- her anxiousness is great, her resignation is understandable (it's not a flaw that shows her to be a bad person), and her stepping stone is great but, again, doesn't show her to be a bad person.

Because Odile is such a doormat, I was thinking that what rage and anger she DOES show is by being incredibly, horribly passive aggressive? Finding ways to hurt people that are very indirect -- punishing you by being late or not doing something or "I KNOW YOU'LL THINK BADLY OF ME BUT I WISH YOU WOULDN'T DO XYZ".

She's a tarot obsessive -- and her readings also are always fatalistic and despairing. What about taking this to its inevitable conclusion and making her fairly negative, again in a P.A. way? It's nice that you're happy, siiigh. Some people can't be, siiigh. It must be nice to be you. Siiiigh. She's happy for you, really, siiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

With her name, Odile... Is there some relation to Odette, ala Swan Lake here? =D INDEED I like how her name isn't an exact match to the tragic heroine in the ballet.

Tarot: How are you going to handle tarot readings IC? Do you know what the major arcana cards are? Minor? The elements behind the sword, cup, disks, and pyramids? Or, at the very least, do you have a couple sites with the card meanings bookmarked? I'm really hesitant about characters who have this hobby, as there is a ton of different aspects. I highly encourage you to have a set idea as to how you're going to handle ICly reading tarot cards, as well as becoming familiar with the cards. While you yourself may or may not use a deck, your character will be -- put yourself in her shoes, and know what she knows! It'll make writing for her a whole lot easier. :3

That's really about it. 8D If you could explain to me how you plan to work out tarot readings, then I'll stamp. heart