Hobbies:
Let me see you one-two step / Oh, I wanna dance with somebody (Dance): Once upon a time, Sable’s parents mostly put their little Melissa in ballet classes to give her an activity that got her out of their hair for a while. Dance was supposed to keep her distracted while giving her a physical activity to do that she actually enjoyed. Instead, Sable wound up not just moving up the ranks in ballet, but progressing on to jazz, tap, modern/contemporary, hip-hop, and ballroom dance classes, plus eventually: more adult-oriented dance classes (e.g., belly-dancing and pole-dancing); studying dance at DCU; and looking for extracurricular dance opportunities (e.g., sneaking around queer bars and queer hangout spots in town to find someone who could teach her how to vogue properly, or sneaking into ladies’ nights with a fake ID so she could hit the floor). Girlfriend knows how to move her body, and her number one judgment metric for whether or not she likes a song is “Can you dance to it?” Doesn’t need to be the same kind of dance—doing an Argentine tango to “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” is just as valid as a foxtrot to Scissor Sisters’ “I Can’t Decide,” a salsa or cha-cha-chá to “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” or sexy club dancing to Nicki Minaj or a gay cover of “Hot In Herre”—but one needs must be able to dance to a song or she probably doesn’t like it.
Also, if you disagree with Sable’s opinions about
Dancing With The Stars,
So You Think You Can Dance, and more recently HBO’s
Legendary, then you are wrong and she will fight you. Or at least she will pout like a kitten who has been subjected to unwanted bath-time. Anybody can always learn to dance, no matter what’s holding them back, but you cannot expect her to tolerate you thinking anyone else deserved to beat JoJo Siwa and Jenna Chermovsky.
All the world’s a stage / This magnificent ACTING TALENT!!! (Thespianism): A lot of the other Theater Kids who Sable’s met in her time came to dance because they were already actors or singers, and in order to be in the vast majority of musical theater, one must also know how to dance. For Sable, it was the other way around: dancing was her first love, which then led to singing because singing was a good way to learn the music anyway, which then led to acting because she had to learn how to put more feeling, character, and life into her performances. Ever since starting down this path, she’s never looked back and doesn’t want to. In the theater, on the stage, you can be anyone you want to be—depending on the roles you get—and even offstage, there’s so much magic to be found in everything from choreographing a group musical number and watching it come together, to improvising when things go wrong during a performance.
You’re such a work of art, they oughta put you in the Louvre / I looked at the Reubens and Rembrandts (Art): Not making it, mind you. Sable may have a good eye for art and style, but she’s not actually very good at making it. Which is just as well for her because she prefers looking at art anyway. Going to museums and galleries, studying the history of this piece or that piece, eyeing the prices that different pieces sell for at auction then crying and resigning herself to only ever having postcard-sized prints because she doesn’t have $22 million to drop on an original Van Gogh. Enjoying the new exhibition at the art museum until she gets distracted by a cute girl. Just let her luxuriate in ART, okay. It’s her happy place.
I could be a better boyfriend than him / Long legs and burgundy lips (Girls): Girls, girls, girls. Ladies. Chicks. Babes. Maidens. Real classy dames with sob-stories and legs that don’t quit. Women. Whatever you want to call them, Sable can’t get enough of them. Her list of ex-girlfriends is about a mile long (though she would argue that some of them shouldn’t count due to miscommunications re: her wanting to hook up a few times vs. some other sapphic getting a U-Haul and paperwork for a joint checking account ready because Sable took her out to dinner once). If presented with a cute girl and an opportunity to flirt, she will almost always take it, even when she has previously been laser focused on something else.
What type of girl does she find cute? Yes.…… The answer is “yes.” All of the girls ever in the entire world are cute. All of them deserve to be flirted with and told that they are cute. Now get out of her way so she can steal your girl.
Virtues:
Would you use your water bill to dry the stain like me? / I fought the law and I won (Creative): Not that it always comes out in ways that other people appreciate—it regularly does quite the opposite, given her habit of tailoring for her audience how she tells any particular story—but Sable has a talent for coming up with
something to help herself. The thing is, she doesn’t like being caught with her pants down, so to speak, but she also isn’t the best at planning ahead. She
can plan ahead, sure, and she does try. But she isn’t reliably any good at it—not least because she often has some incredibly dubious hot takes on her opponents, and thus makes assumptions about their potential behavior and responses to things that aren’t as accurate as she thinks they are. So, instead, she’s learned to think on her feet, improvise, and jimmy-rig
something together out of whatever’s available, whether that means a story that sounds just plausible enough to cover her a** or a way out of whatever questionable situation she got herself in, this time.
Catch you throwin’ smiles in my face / Can’t move as you consume me whole (Charming): One thing nobody can deny about Sable: she certainly knows how to make a first impression. She knows how to smile in just the right way, tailor her self-presentation to match what any given audience might want to see from her, and tell people what they want to hear in order for her to ultimately get what she wants. As far as she’s concerned, none of this is
lying so much as the social/interpersonal equivalent of choosing her battles. True, carrying on for too long inevitably increases the risk of her accidentally doing or saying something that contradicts any given impression she’s created for someone, which could be A Whole
Thing under the wrong circumstances. But really, if she charms somebody and they stick around long enough to not like what they see, then isn’t it
a little bit on them for not expecting her to be a human person in her own right, with needs and feelings that might not be exactly what they want to see from her?
Champagne for my real friends / When you’re good to mama (Fair-Minded): ……by
someone’s definition of the term, anyway. Although Sable acknowledges that life’s not fair and that the concept of “justice” is regularly kind of a joke, she doesn’t think that the universe
should be that way. She may not like someone, but if they’re nice to her, she tries to be nice to her in return. When someone puts in a lot of effort on something, she tries to tell them they did a good job, even if the end result was, uh, questionable. Believing in fairness might be a “cognitive distortion,” or whatever her therapist said before she stopped going to therapy, but fine, if you don’t like that, then call it enlightened self-interest or whatever makes you happy—because Sable will also admit that the “enlightened self-interest” tack isn’t wrong. Something something, honey vs. vinegar. People are more likely to give you what you want or help you with things if you haven’t been a heinous b***h to them, after all.
It’s just that, on some level, she
does wish that life were fair and that justice wasn’t a ******** punchline, so regardless of her also wanting to get things from people down the line, she
does also try to pay people back in kind. This is especially true in work environments, whether that means the Negaverse or the theater company she works with. Keeping things pleasant among colleagues is ultimately better for everyone involved and means more things can get done more efficiently, and while Sable accepts that disagreements between people do happen, she at least tries to do her part to keep them from being
too horrible.
Buy the world today and pay it off tomorrow / Get that ice or else no dice (Resourceful): Going hand-in-hand with Sable’s particular brand of creativity, she tries not to limit her perspective on what she has available to use for any given project, task, etc. Anything can be a resource if you try hard enough—just look at how many problems MacGyver ever solved with paperclips and duct tape. Maybe that pile of garbage looks like trash to someone else, but if you look closer, you’ll see a glass bottle that you can throw at the annoying senshi of the day. You just can’t really guess how things might play out, so you can never rule out anything (or anyone) as potentially helpful under the right circumstances. Since anything can make itself useful to her, she tries to stay aware of her surroundings as much as she can, and doesn’t like ruling out ideas until she’s guaranteed that they won’t work.
Flaws:
Diamonds are my new boyfriend / Tell ‘em: that s**t’s expensive (Materialistic): One of the biggest things about herself that Sable has trouble concealing, no matter how good of a first impression she creates, is the extent to which she enjoys and appreciates
things. Stuff. Finer things, especially. Material possessions. She enjoys living her best life, thank you—or at the very least, crafting the impression that she is doing so—and her concept of what constitutes her “best life” is inextricably linked to how much it costs to obtain and maintain that best life. See, if her best life costs a lot of money, then being able to secure and maintain it is surely a sign of her success, right? The more people perceive you as expensive and successful, the more willing they are to agree with you about what you’re worth—and Sable
wants for people to agree with her: she’s worth quite a lot.
It’s a b***h convincing people to like you / You overthink, always speak cryptically (Two-Faced): Well, Sable doesn’t tend to see herself this way and wouldn’t use “two-faced” to describe herself……but the fact of the matter remains: she prefers telling people what they want to hear (or at least what she thinks will most benefit her for them to hear), rather than the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. On a deep level that she prefers not to acknowledge, there are some vestiges of the wide-eyed sweetheart she was as a child, who started exaggerating different aspects of how she performed her personality or creatively tailoring how she presented herself because she wanted to have friends, she wanted for people to like her, and she didn’t want to be one of the weird kids who had to eat lunch alone. Somewhat closer to the surface, though, is her impulse toward self-preservation and self-advancement. You can’t rely on anybody else to fight for you, but rather you need to fight for yourself—and sometimes, the fight doesn’t look like a fight from the outside.
Sometimes, the “fight” is simply biting your tongue and holding back everything you want to say to that stupid b***h coworker you hate with the fire of ten-thousand suns, then only talking s**t about them when they’re not around to hear you do it and subsequently get upset about how you really feel.
Real pain for my sham friends / Revenge is a dish best served cold (Vindictive): One of the downsides of Sable’s particular breed of “fair-mindedness” is that, once someone wrongs her, spits on her, pisses her off, or otherwise gets on her bad side, she can and will justify
a lot of wrongs that she could do unto them in return—because, you see, that’s just what’s
fair. Sable is the sort of person who thinks Harvey Dent’s Two-Face meltdown in
The Dark Knight was more in the right than not because honestly, Batman and Jim Gordon should’ve been more careful about the collateral damage and not letting someone who was integral to their “stop the Joker” plan get so caught in the crossfire that he lost literally everything. Batman and Gordon ******** up; their ******** are directly responsible for Harvey Dent losing his fiancée and everything he’d worked for. Therefore, he would’ve been totally in his rights to kill Gordon’s son (who ends up being a serial killer in the comics anyway, so Dent would’ve done a good job in preventing that from happening, if not for stupid-a** Batman ruining everything by insisting on being Batman in this, a literal Batman movie).
Sable applies the same sort of logic to people in her life who cross her. She tries to make sure the punishment fits the crime—e.g., being a jerk to her in line at Starbucks (or a jerk to the barista she was flirting with) will not summon her to kill your entire family while you watch or anything—but her sense of scale about these things is regularly……kinda not great, and she gives herself a lot of mental wiggle room for justifying and rationalizing her choices. Suffering and violence for you, senshi who interrupted her while she was energy-draining. Suffering and violence for ONE THOUSAND YEARS!!
Now, there’s never gonna be an intermission / You can’t wake up, this is not a dream (Cynical): Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you ask Sable, the world is largely comprised of b*****d-coated bastards with b*****d filling, some bad bitches who are on the same level as said bastards but usually sexier about it, and a handful of precious innocents who don’t know any better and will get devoured by this wretched, sinful universe if they aren’t either careful or smart enough to wise up quick. None of this should be confused with
nihilism—which she finds tedious, dull, and terribly exhausting; ugh,
bored now—but she operates from a base assumption that nothing means anything outside of the value that humans assign to it themselves, and that everyone is ultimately out for themselves (maybe a precious handful of people they care about personally). Since everyone is equally selfish, she’s not doing anything wrong by looking out for herself first and foremost; she’s just being honest about the fact that the world in general sucks and so do most people, and that her idea of happiness means getting to the top of whatever heap most holds her interest.
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