(no subject)
PLAYER
NAME/NICKNAME: Riko
AGE: 25
PERSONAL LJ: riko
TIMEZONE: EST
EMAIL ADDRESS: riko.tropes [at] gmail.com
IM SCREENNAME AND SERVICE: I'm usually best reachable by private message through LJ, but I have also put a plurk together just now, so: fulgurite on plurk!
CHARACTER
NAME: Annie Edison
AGE: 20
FANDOM/MEDIUM: Community/TV show
CANON PULL-POINT: After 3x05: Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps
ABILITIES: Annie is extremely smart, ambitious and hardworking. She's very good at planning and organizing and is also a decent shot with a paintball gun. She is a master diorama craftsman.
CHARACTER BACKGROUND:
"I'm gonna tell you what my mother told me when I wanted to quit cheerleading. You're not very pretty, you have no boobs, and you can't do a basket toss to save your life, but you made a commitment. So pick up your pompoms, Pierce, stuff your bra, and get ready for the team to forget you at a Taco Bell because life is tough, but we soldier on. And that's just the way it goes." -- Annie Edison, Community 1x05: Advanced Criminal Law
Annie is currently in her third year at Greendale Community College. As a teenager, she went to high school at Riverside High where she had a near perfect academic record and was blindingly unpopular despite all her efforts. For most of high school, she had a crush on Troy Barnes, the quarterback and prom king, but he barely knew she existed.
A lot of people barely knew she existed, actually, until her desire to succeed and to get into a good college drove her to take drugs to boost her performance. She developed an addiction to Adderall and after a lot of weird behaviour, including trying to straighten the lines on the football field during a game and breaking down in a rant about how everyone is a robot, she finally gained some notoriety at Riverside High, along with the nickname "Little Annie Adderall." She dropped out shortly after.
Her parents, particularly her mother, wanted to put the whole episode behind them, forgetting it had even happened, but Annie insisted on dealing with her problems. She checked into rehab and started attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings. She eventually got her addiction under control, but her parents cut her off financially. She now lives over a sex store on the bad side of town, carries a gun in her purse to protect herself, and barely scrapes by.
After getting clean, she registered at Greendale as part of the plan to get her life back on track and make her way to the Ivy League education she always dreamed of. (It may also have had something to do with Troy registering there, but that's a different story that Annie won't be acknowledging anytime soon.) Soon after the start of her first year, she gets invited to join a study group for her Spanish 101 class. The whole idea of the study group turns out to be a plot by one member of the group, Jeff Winger, to sleep with another, Britta Perry, but the group quickly figures out that they can make some headway studying together and -- even more surprisingly -- they actually enjoy each other's company a lot of the time. They soon become close friends and embark on an almost never-ending series of wacky adventures together.
This study group includes Troy who is now more aware of Annie's existence than he ever was in high school, though not any more aware of her feelings for him. For a while, Annie continues to pine after him and tries to engineer ways to get Troy to like her. She finally decides that it's not going to happen and moves on to date Vaughan Miller, another student at Greendale though not part of the study group, until he transfer to a different school. She had originally planned to go with him, in an effort to be spontaneous and really live her life, but chooses not to in the end. In part, this is because she has developed off and on feelings for Jeff, though the relationship never really develops beyond flirting. At present, they are both at least pretending to believe that the age difference between them makes any possibility of a relationship beyond friendship too gross to contemplate, though some level of mutual attraction definitely persists.
Beyond that, Community, as an episodic half-hour comedy sitcom about hijinx at a community college, becomes hard to summarize in a way that makes chronological sense. Some final important points about Annie, then, in bullet form:
- Annie is Jewish.
- In high school, Annie was a cheerleader, partly at her mom's insistence. People still left any parties she threw early because they didn't want to miss the news, and she claims that the crossing guard used to lure her into traffic.
- Annie lost her virginity to her high school boyfriend but because the lights were off at the time, she had never seen a penis before entering community college (and she thinks they're overrated now that she has seen one).
- Annie is involved in many clubs and societies and special events on campus. She has worked for the student newspaper.
- Annie is one of the few members of the group who tolerates Pierce Hawthorne, the oldest member of the study group who is prone to racism, sexism, and basically every other -ism possible. She sticks up for him for a long time when the other member of the group try to kick him out but sometimes, he crosses the line even for her.
- Like the other students at Greendale, Annie was infected and turned into a zombie on Halloween during her second year at Greendale. Also the like the other students, since being cured, she doesn't remember anything about that Halloween.
CHARACTER PERSONALITY:
"You’re Annie. You like puzzles, and little monsters on your pencil, and some guy named Mark Ruffalo. You’re a fierce competitor and a sore loser. And you expect everybody to be better than who they are, and you expect yourself to be better than everyone. Which is cool." -- Troy Barnes, Community 2x10: Mixology Certification
At first glance, Annie is a textbook overachiever. Studious, smart, and serious about her schoolwork, Annie is probably the member of Community's study group that is most at home in a school environment. Unlike a lot of the rest of life in general, Annie knows how to excel in academics, and she throws herself into her work (and into extra-credit and extracurricular projects) with an enthusiasm that suggests that she's actually enjoying herself and may be one of the only members of the group to honestly love learning for learning's sake. Having lost her way once, due to addiction, she is especially motivated to make the most of her time at Greendale and thus is particularly protective of her school and her friends.
Annie's enthusiasm leads her to often lend a hand to anyone and everyone who might need her help. She's kind, sweet, and caring and though her desire to help might often be calculated to also help Annie get ahead (whether through a new line on her CV or a little bump in her grades or just to make the school a more respectable place), it's also clear that a good deal of her pluck, gung-ho spirit, and empathy for other people is not fake but, rather, bewilderingly, fiercely genuine.
Annie's drive to (over-)achieve has its dark side, however. She is extraordinarily ambitious and can switch from sweet, Disney Annie to competitive, destructive Annie on a dime when something steps in to either thwart her ambition or challenge her academic dominance. When in the throes of competition, Annie's moral compass can get a little wonky, and she sometimes steps over the line and does things that she would never do at any other time. It was her drive to be the best, after all, combined with her extreme fear of failure, that led to her addiction to Adderall. Annie's more aware of this side of her personality now than she was as a high school student and tries to reign herself in and take things more calmly but as she herself notes, she's never going to be a relaxed person.
(Sometimes, though, just sometimes, Annie really does enjoy the opportunity to let go.)
Most of the rest of the time, Annie is pretty straight-laced. She doesn't participate in as many of the group's less legal/moral activities (though when she does, she tends to embrace them with her usual whole-hearted enthusiasm), more often taking on the role of nagging the others into good behaviour. She also has a certain aura of innocence and naivete around her, despite her cleverness otherwise, that comes from a lack of experience. While not a prude, she approaches romantic relationships from a very stereotypical, teenage girl perspective still and is, in her own words, "perfectly comfortable being uncomfortable with my sexuality."
Occasionally, she is self-conscious -- particularly regarding her sexuality and her youth -- but for the most part, Annie is a confident, articulate, and assertive young woman. Over the course of the first two seasons, Annie has matured a lot. She's dropped some of her reliance on schoolgirl innocence to get her way and picked up some of the world weariness that Jeff and Britta display. While still mostly an optimist and inclined to expect the best of people and situations, she's developing a cynical streak that is becoming more and more pronounced as time goes on.
WORLD: Annie lives in a world that, while a little absurdist, is the real world. She lives in Greendale, Colorado and attends an affordable, slightly crappy community college there. Admittedly, a higher percentage of hijinx tend to happen at Greendale than is strictly realistic. There was an actual outbreak of zombie-ism thanks to the Dean catering the Halloween party with stuff bought at an army surplus store. The annual paintball game tends to turn the school into a barren, post-apocalyptic wasteland for a few days every year. She may have visited an actual haunted house with a real ghost at one point and been briefly institutionalized due to mercury poisoning. But otherwise, everything is exactly as it is in reality.
OCCUPATION: Teacher
SAMPLES
THIRD PERSON: The day Greendale course registration opens, Annie wakes up unusually early. She's an early riser anyway by carefully nurtured habit - because think of the hundreds of things you can do before breakfast if you just get up early enough! - but on special occasions, she gets up even earlier. Course registration qualifies as a special occasion.
It occurs to her, as she blindly reaches out to shut off the alarm and scrubs the crusty bits out of the corners of her eyes with her thumb, that the people she knew in high school would probably consider this pretty pathetic, but Annie tries not to think about that much anymore. Those people don't matter. When she’s managed a NPPF (Nobel Pulitzer Peabody Fields - not as catchy as an EGOT but whatever) then they could see who’s pretty pathetic.
Annie tiptoes her way to her tiny bathroom, taking little hops from carpet to carpet to avoid touching the cold floor with her bare toes. Another reason she likes early mornings is how quiet everything is. Dildopolis, below, is silent first thing in the day. The drug dealer a few doors down hasn't started coughing up a lung. Annie slips into the shower and shuts her eyes and enjoys the feeling of water dribbling against her neck because this is the one moment of the day when she manages to quiet her brain too.
By the time the water starts to run cold - it takes five minutes and 34 seconds; she’s timed it - the moment has passed. Annie steps out of the shower and wraps herself up in a towel, and she's ready to take on another day.
Her laptop is where she left it on her desk. She lets it boot up as she gets dressed and then sits herself down, running through her checklist to make sure she has everything she needs. Mock timetable? Check. Back-up mock timetable? Check. Back-up, back-up mock timetable? Check. Blank timetables for emergency course reorganization? Check. Pens (black, blue, red)? Check, check, check. She happily ticks off her boxes and then sets her checklist aside.
She glances at the time in the bottom right corner of her computer screen. Right. She nods to herself. Only two and a half more hours to wait. She’ll be ready.
FIRST PERSON: [ voice; ]
Do you know what's great about fall? Okay, so if I was back home, the days would be getting shorter, and the weather would be getting colder, and maybe Dildopolis would be having its annual "Fall-atio Fall Blow-out" sale which would keep you up until three in the morning until you're so exhausted you sleep in the shower with a pillow case over your head just to block out some of the noise. [ Annie pauses to take a deep breath. ] But fall? Is still great. Because fall is about new beginnings. And change. And half-price day planner refills.
You get to throw out everything you've been carrying with you over the summer and set new goals! I know people will tell you that's New Years, but no one actually keeps resolutions anyway because they’re always too big and fancy and impossible. Fall goals are just… small. Practical. Doable. And so you can do each of them and check them off on your sensibly colour-coded and cross-indexed spreadsheet and for a couple of months, you get to feel like you’re accomplishing things. You get to feel accomplished. That's what's great about fall.
NOTES: N/A
NAME/NICKNAME: Riko
AGE: 25
PERSONAL LJ: riko
TIMEZONE: EST
EMAIL ADDRESS: riko.tropes [at] gmail.com
IM SCREENNAME AND SERVICE: I'm usually best reachable by private message through LJ, but I have also put a plurk together just now, so: fulgurite on plurk!
CHARACTER
NAME: Annie Edison
AGE: 20
FANDOM/MEDIUM: Community/TV show
CANON PULL-POINT: After 3x05: Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps
ABILITIES: Annie is extremely smart, ambitious and hardworking. She's very good at planning and organizing and is also a decent shot with a paintball gun. She is a master diorama craftsman.
CHARACTER BACKGROUND:
"I'm gonna tell you what my mother told me when I wanted to quit cheerleading. You're not very pretty, you have no boobs, and you can't do a basket toss to save your life, but you made a commitment. So pick up your pompoms, Pierce, stuff your bra, and get ready for the team to forget you at a Taco Bell because life is tough, but we soldier on. And that's just the way it goes." -- Annie Edison, Community 1x05: Advanced Criminal Law
Annie is currently in her third year at Greendale Community College. As a teenager, she went to high school at Riverside High where she had a near perfect academic record and was blindingly unpopular despite all her efforts. For most of high school, she had a crush on Troy Barnes, the quarterback and prom king, but he barely knew she existed.
A lot of people barely knew she existed, actually, until her desire to succeed and to get into a good college drove her to take drugs to boost her performance. She developed an addiction to Adderall and after a lot of weird behaviour, including trying to straighten the lines on the football field during a game and breaking down in a rant about how everyone is a robot, she finally gained some notoriety at Riverside High, along with the nickname "Little Annie Adderall." She dropped out shortly after.
Her parents, particularly her mother, wanted to put the whole episode behind them, forgetting it had even happened, but Annie insisted on dealing with her problems. She checked into rehab and started attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings. She eventually got her addiction under control, but her parents cut her off financially. She now lives over a sex store on the bad side of town, carries a gun in her purse to protect herself, and barely scrapes by.
After getting clean, she registered at Greendale as part of the plan to get her life back on track and make her way to the Ivy League education she always dreamed of. (It may also have had something to do with Troy registering there, but that's a different story that Annie won't be acknowledging anytime soon.) Soon after the start of her first year, she gets invited to join a study group for her Spanish 101 class. The whole idea of the study group turns out to be a plot by one member of the group, Jeff Winger, to sleep with another, Britta Perry, but the group quickly figures out that they can make some headway studying together and -- even more surprisingly -- they actually enjoy each other's company a lot of the time. They soon become close friends and embark on an almost never-ending series of wacky adventures together.
This study group includes Troy who is now more aware of Annie's existence than he ever was in high school, though not any more aware of her feelings for him. For a while, Annie continues to pine after him and tries to engineer ways to get Troy to like her. She finally decides that it's not going to happen and moves on to date Vaughan Miller, another student at Greendale though not part of the study group, until he transfer to a different school. She had originally planned to go with him, in an effort to be spontaneous and really live her life, but chooses not to in the end. In part, this is because she has developed off and on feelings for Jeff, though the relationship never really develops beyond flirting. At present, they are both at least pretending to believe that the age difference between them makes any possibility of a relationship beyond friendship too gross to contemplate, though some level of mutual attraction definitely persists.
Beyond that, Community, as an episodic half-hour comedy sitcom about hijinx at a community college, becomes hard to summarize in a way that makes chronological sense. Some final important points about Annie, then, in bullet form:
- Annie is Jewish.
- In high school, Annie was a cheerleader, partly at her mom's insistence. People still left any parties she threw early because they didn't want to miss the news, and she claims that the crossing guard used to lure her into traffic.
- Annie lost her virginity to her high school boyfriend but because the lights were off at the time, she had never seen a penis before entering community college (and she thinks they're overrated now that she has seen one).
- Annie is involved in many clubs and societies and special events on campus. She has worked for the student newspaper.
- Annie is one of the few members of the group who tolerates Pierce Hawthorne, the oldest member of the study group who is prone to racism, sexism, and basically every other -ism possible. She sticks up for him for a long time when the other member of the group try to kick him out but sometimes, he crosses the line even for her.
- Like the other students at Greendale, Annie was infected and turned into a zombie on Halloween during her second year at Greendale. Also the like the other students, since being cured, she doesn't remember anything about that Halloween.
CHARACTER PERSONALITY:
"You’re Annie. You like puzzles, and little monsters on your pencil, and some guy named Mark Ruffalo. You’re a fierce competitor and a sore loser. And you expect everybody to be better than who they are, and you expect yourself to be better than everyone. Which is cool." -- Troy Barnes, Community 2x10: Mixology Certification
At first glance, Annie is a textbook overachiever. Studious, smart, and serious about her schoolwork, Annie is probably the member of Community's study group that is most at home in a school environment. Unlike a lot of the rest of life in general, Annie knows how to excel in academics, and she throws herself into her work (and into extra-credit and extracurricular projects) with an enthusiasm that suggests that she's actually enjoying herself and may be one of the only members of the group to honestly love learning for learning's sake. Having lost her way once, due to addiction, she is especially motivated to make the most of her time at Greendale and thus is particularly protective of her school and her friends.
Annie's enthusiasm leads her to often lend a hand to anyone and everyone who might need her help. She's kind, sweet, and caring and though her desire to help might often be calculated to also help Annie get ahead (whether through a new line on her CV or a little bump in her grades or just to make the school a more respectable place), it's also clear that a good deal of her pluck, gung-ho spirit, and empathy for other people is not fake but, rather, bewilderingly, fiercely genuine.
Annie's drive to (over-)achieve has its dark side, however. She is extraordinarily ambitious and can switch from sweet, Disney Annie to competitive, destructive Annie on a dime when something steps in to either thwart her ambition or challenge her academic dominance. When in the throes of competition, Annie's moral compass can get a little wonky, and she sometimes steps over the line and does things that she would never do at any other time. It was her drive to be the best, after all, combined with her extreme fear of failure, that led to her addiction to Adderall. Annie's more aware of this side of her personality now than she was as a high school student and tries to reign herself in and take things more calmly but as she herself notes, she's never going to be a relaxed person.
(Sometimes, though, just sometimes, Annie really does enjoy the opportunity to let go.)
Most of the rest of the time, Annie is pretty straight-laced. She doesn't participate in as many of the group's less legal/moral activities (though when she does, she tends to embrace them with her usual whole-hearted enthusiasm), more often taking on the role of nagging the others into good behaviour. She also has a certain aura of innocence and naivete around her, despite her cleverness otherwise, that comes from a lack of experience. While not a prude, she approaches romantic relationships from a very stereotypical, teenage girl perspective still and is, in her own words, "perfectly comfortable being uncomfortable with my sexuality."
Occasionally, she is self-conscious -- particularly regarding her sexuality and her youth -- but for the most part, Annie is a confident, articulate, and assertive young woman. Over the course of the first two seasons, Annie has matured a lot. She's dropped some of her reliance on schoolgirl innocence to get her way and picked up some of the world weariness that Jeff and Britta display. While still mostly an optimist and inclined to expect the best of people and situations, she's developing a cynical streak that is becoming more and more pronounced as time goes on.
WORLD: Annie lives in a world that, while a little absurdist, is the real world. She lives in Greendale, Colorado and attends an affordable, slightly crappy community college there. Admittedly, a higher percentage of hijinx tend to happen at Greendale than is strictly realistic. There was an actual outbreak of zombie-ism thanks to the Dean catering the Halloween party with stuff bought at an army surplus store. The annual paintball game tends to turn the school into a barren, post-apocalyptic wasteland for a few days every year. She may have visited an actual haunted house with a real ghost at one point and been briefly institutionalized due to mercury poisoning. But otherwise, everything is exactly as it is in reality.
OCCUPATION: Teacher
SAMPLES
THIRD PERSON: The day Greendale course registration opens, Annie wakes up unusually early. She's an early riser anyway by carefully nurtured habit - because think of the hundreds of things you can do before breakfast if you just get up early enough! - but on special occasions, she gets up even earlier. Course registration qualifies as a special occasion.
It occurs to her, as she blindly reaches out to shut off the alarm and scrubs the crusty bits out of the corners of her eyes with her thumb, that the people she knew in high school would probably consider this pretty pathetic, but Annie tries not to think about that much anymore. Those people don't matter. When she’s managed a NPPF (Nobel Pulitzer Peabody Fields - not as catchy as an EGOT but whatever) then they could see who’s pretty pathetic.
Annie tiptoes her way to her tiny bathroom, taking little hops from carpet to carpet to avoid touching the cold floor with her bare toes. Another reason she likes early mornings is how quiet everything is. Dildopolis, below, is silent first thing in the day. The drug dealer a few doors down hasn't started coughing up a lung. Annie slips into the shower and shuts her eyes and enjoys the feeling of water dribbling against her neck because this is the one moment of the day when she manages to quiet her brain too.
By the time the water starts to run cold - it takes five minutes and 34 seconds; she’s timed it - the moment has passed. Annie steps out of the shower and wraps herself up in a towel, and she's ready to take on another day.
Her laptop is where she left it on her desk. She lets it boot up as she gets dressed and then sits herself down, running through her checklist to make sure she has everything she needs. Mock timetable? Check. Back-up mock timetable? Check. Back-up, back-up mock timetable? Check. Blank timetables for emergency course reorganization? Check. Pens (black, blue, red)? Check, check, check. She happily ticks off her boxes and then sets her checklist aside.
She glances at the time in the bottom right corner of her computer screen. Right. She nods to herself. Only two and a half more hours to wait. She’ll be ready.
FIRST PERSON: [ voice; ]
Do you know what's great about fall? Okay, so if I was back home, the days would be getting shorter, and the weather would be getting colder, and maybe Dildopolis would be having its annual "Fall-atio Fall Blow-out" sale which would keep you up until three in the morning until you're so exhausted you sleep in the shower with a pillow case over your head just to block out some of the noise. [ Annie pauses to take a deep breath. ] But fall? Is still great. Because fall is about new beginnings. And change. And half-price day planner refills.
You get to throw out everything you've been carrying with you over the summer and set new goals! I know people will tell you that's New Years, but no one actually keeps resolutions anyway because they’re always too big and fancy and impossible. Fall goals are just… small. Practical. Doable. And so you can do each of them and check them off on your sensibly colour-coded and cross-indexed spreadsheet and for a couple of months, you get to feel like you’re accomplishing things. You get to feel accomplished. That's what's great about fall.
NOTES: N/A