Family trees!
I just finished casting the Kinleys and the Grahams entirely... all the boys got cast back in 2006, but the parents and sisters weren't very important back in the RP days. But now that I'm writing about them again and their families are making a lot more appearances, I figured it was time to put faces to all the names. So.... let's meet them all!
The Kinley family
(PB: Annette Bening)
Donna Kinley is a home visitation nurse and single mother of six. She used to be a waitress in a restaurant attached to a hotel next to the airport... and nobody ever learned her a thing about birth control, so she ended up with a whole litter of mismatched children with foreign fathers. She really does her best to be a good mom... but she's very, very glad that her kids are almost all grown up because she's kind of forgotten what it feels like to only be responsible for herself.
(PB: a lady from Ontario, I couldn't find her name)
Alisha is her firstborn. Donna was doing kind of a lot of drugs right after she got out of high school, and she was not ready to take care of a special needs child at all. Her mother basically took Alisha away from her and told her to clean up her act. Donna... tried, anyways. She stopped doing so much coke, at least. Alisha was much better off being raised by her grandmother, at any rate. She still had a lot of contact with her siblings, as Donna's mother offered to babysit while Donna worked to support herself... and her increasing brood.
(PB: Justin Long)
Rishi was the unanticipated result of a one night stand with an Indian businessman. Pretty much the only thing he left behind was his name, so she gave it to the baby boy. Rishi is the most mellow of the Kinleys, possibly because he smokes a lot of weed, but also because he's just inclined to be chill. He's the night manager of a hotel in one of the nicer parts of Detroit. He was married for about a year and a half, but she was really high strung and they just couldn't make it work.
(PB: Chloe Bennett)
Sakura was born ten months after Rishi. Her father was Japanese... and also married, not that Donna really cared that much. Sakura is a multimedia artist who primarily works in sculpture. She's not really very grounded in reality, but she deliberately sought out a very sensible man to marry so she wouldn't have to worry about practical details. She moved to New York City and now lives in Greenwich Village with her husband Jacob and two very overweight corgis.
(PB: Zach Braff)
Orly is the middle-younger of the siblings, born a year and a half after his sister. His dad was Israeli, and he thinks it's really amusing that he's genetically Jewish because he is both the biggest worrier and the most practical with money of the bunch. He decided that the best way to afford college was to join the military, so when the country went to war with Afghanistan the year after he graduated high school, that was a very unwelcome complication in his plans. He worked as a translator while he was overseas, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. He speaks Arabic and Farsi fluently, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese conversationally, and he's in the process of learning Japanese now. He was really badly injured when his convoy hit an IED on the way to Al Hadr from Baghdad, and it was touch-and-go for a while whether he'd even be able to keep his legs, let alone use them again. But he's also the most determined of his siblings, so when he was told he might be able to walk again after extensive physical therapy, he shocked everyone by being back on his feet (albeit with crutches) in half the time the doctors predicted. He gets around with a cane now. He's still working as a translator, but he translates mostly news and books now.
(PB: Jason Schwartzman)
Quentin is the youngest brother, four years younger than Orly, and easily the most disagreeable of the six. His father was Italian and he's got all the swagger with not much to back it up with. He's not particularly smart and he's not at all nice, but he can be very convincing when he wants to be, which serves him pretty well as a call center employee trying to upsell people on things they don't really need (when he's not temporarily fired for one reason or another, but they always re-hire him). He's sarcastic, cynical, impulsive, he has a mean streak and he enjoys screwing with people to make them as angry as he always seems to be, with one notable exception. Once when he was incredibly drunk he tried to sail across Lake St. Clair into Canada with Tyler Jordan Graham. It did not work, but it did change both their lives. Whether it was for the better or not is still a matter of debate, according to his sister. (While that is still in question, the fact that they met resulted in them introducing their war vet brothers, which has undeniably worked out for the best for both of them.)
(PB: Ellen Page)
Janet didn't come around until eight years after Quentin. She's the only one of Donna's kids whose father is aware that she exists, not that it did her much good. Her dad was American-- in fact, he was Donna's boss at the time, long after she'd stopped working at the hotel but long before she made the decision to get into nursing. Donna and all her kids came down with chicken pox while she was pregnant with Janet, which resulted in Janet being born prematurely via c-section, and a full hysterectomy for Donna, or there would probably be more Kinley kids. Janet is blind in her left eye and she's always been... kind of weird. In a sociopathic sort of way. She is a senior in high school, although she considers blogging about social justice on Tumblr to be her occupation. (She's the kind of Tumblrina that makes people give up on Tumblr.)
---
The Graham family
(PB: Michael Emerson)
Harold Graham is twice-divorced, probably because he's so far in the closet he can see Narnia, but he really wanted to be a family man, so he tried very hard to be straight and it only worked for so long before his wives were done with him. It didn't help that he had a tendency to go for very fiery women with latent substance abuse issues, either. But as terrible as he is as a husband, he's actually a really great father, and he absolutely adores all his kids. He has a high-ranking IT position with Ford, so he was financially able to support six kids, and the custody battle with his second wife wasn't a protracted one after the court actually compared their fitness as parents. He was very concerned with making sure his kids were healthy both physically and emotionally, and even though he never phrased it to himself like this, he wanted his children to live more authentically to themselves than he felt he'd been able to himself.
(PB: Pete Wentz)
Paul is the eldest child. He was always a daredevil, the kind of kid who climbed every tree and fence just to see if he could do it, but he was also the kind of kid who brought home every stray kitten and fallen baby bird because he cared about every creature he came into contact with. He also ended up with a strong sense of duty after his mother took off and left him and his little brother and his dad to fend for themselves; a sense of duty that was reinforced after his sisters' mother left in much the same way and he ended up with more responsibility than a 13 year old should have had to deal with. Two of those traits conspired against the third after the country went to war; Paul enlisted in the army out of a sense of duty, but one tour in Iraq left him mentally traumatized and emotionally wounded. It took meeting someone who'd been as badly broken in a similar way before he made much headway in putting himself back together.
(PB: Brendon Urie)
Tyler Jordan is five years younger than his brother. Their mother left when Tyler Jordan was still in diapers. While Paul was prone to caring too much about everything, Tyler Jordan had the problem of caring too much about specific things. The first thing he fell in love with was music; he took up the flute and piano in grade school, the violin and the tuba in middle school, before deciding in high school that his true passion was in playing guitar. The second thing he fell in love with was Maria, his first girlfriend in middle school that he vowed to stay with forever. They were together for eleven years, until Tyler Jordan turned 23 and everything fell apart all at once: "creative differences" with his band (which involved a fistfight on stage), the culmination of a decade's worth of annoyances making him absolutely lose it with Maria, and then he ended up drunk on a raft with Quentin Kinley trying to sail to Canada and somewhere between the shoreline and moving all his fishtanks into Quentin's apartment he realized that he'd fallen in love with Quentin too. They argue a lot and Tyler Jordan has gotten a little meaner in self-defense, but he's the first person to demonstrate to Quentin that love doesn't have to go hand in hand with abuse, and Quentin does seem to be learning the lesson, albeit slowly. Tyler Jordan works construction by day and is the bassist and founding member of the band With Intent To Sell by night.
(PB: Aubrey Plaza)
Kendall is the older twin sister by eleven minutes. Getting out of the womb first was just her first move in wanting to be where she isn't; she took all the study abroad options she was offered in high school (and went to Italy and France) and in college (she's currently in Germany). She plays field hockey and the saxophone. She is really, really into experiencing new things.
(PB: still Aubrey Plaza)
Theresa is a homebody where her twin has the urge to travel. She opted for a college in Detroit so she could stay home and cultivate her artistic talents in fiber crafts without having to worry about paying rent. She's less open about her feelings than Kendall is, but she writes a lot of poetry that she's never shown anyone. She also goes to all of Tyler Jordan's band's shows in a two hour radius.
(PB: Lea Michele)
Wendy writes an advice column for her high school newspaper. She's a total hippie who believes in past lives and meditation and herbal remedies. She's really nosy, but well-intentioned. She also wants to be Tumblr famous like Janet does, but instead of being a social justice warrior, she's really into dispensing advice and reblogging inspirational things. She has a lot more followers than Janet does. When she gets to college she plans on majoring in the fine arts with a focus on photography and digital production.
(PB: Bailee Madison)
Olivia doesn't really know what she's all about yet. She's at that awkward stage of puberty where everything is confusing and people are starting to expect things from you that you're not ready for yet. She knows she likes animals and baking. She knows she doesn't like sports and she isn't big into music. Theresa keeps trying to get her to knit but she hasn't gotten the hang of it yet. She thinks Miley Cyrus is pretty cool and her father keeps trying to convince her that she really isn't.
The Kinley family
(PB: Annette Bening)
Donna Kinley is a home visitation nurse and single mother of six. She used to be a waitress in a restaurant attached to a hotel next to the airport... and nobody ever learned her a thing about birth control, so she ended up with a whole litter of mismatched children with foreign fathers. She really does her best to be a good mom... but she's very, very glad that her kids are almost all grown up because she's kind of forgotten what it feels like to only be responsible for herself.
(PB: a lady from Ontario, I couldn't find her name)
Alisha is her firstborn. Donna was doing kind of a lot of drugs right after she got out of high school, and she was not ready to take care of a special needs child at all. Her mother basically took Alisha away from her and told her to clean up her act. Donna... tried, anyways. She stopped doing so much coke, at least. Alisha was much better off being raised by her grandmother, at any rate. She still had a lot of contact with her siblings, as Donna's mother offered to babysit while Donna worked to support herself... and her increasing brood.
(PB: Justin Long)
Rishi was the unanticipated result of a one night stand with an Indian businessman. Pretty much the only thing he left behind was his name, so she gave it to the baby boy. Rishi is the most mellow of the Kinleys, possibly because he smokes a lot of weed, but also because he's just inclined to be chill. He's the night manager of a hotel in one of the nicer parts of Detroit. He was married for about a year and a half, but she was really high strung and they just couldn't make it work.
(PB: Chloe Bennett)
Sakura was born ten months after Rishi. Her father was Japanese... and also married, not that Donna really cared that much. Sakura is a multimedia artist who primarily works in sculpture. She's not really very grounded in reality, but she deliberately sought out a very sensible man to marry so she wouldn't have to worry about practical details. She moved to New York City and now lives in Greenwich Village with her husband Jacob and two very overweight corgis.
(PB: Zach Braff)
Orly is the middle-younger of the siblings, born a year and a half after his sister. His dad was Israeli, and he thinks it's really amusing that he's genetically Jewish because he is both the biggest worrier and the most practical with money of the bunch. He decided that the best way to afford college was to join the military, so when the country went to war with Afghanistan the year after he graduated high school, that was a very unwelcome complication in his plans. He worked as a translator while he was overseas, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. He speaks Arabic and Farsi fluently, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese conversationally, and he's in the process of learning Japanese now. He was really badly injured when his convoy hit an IED on the way to Al Hadr from Baghdad, and it was touch-and-go for a while whether he'd even be able to keep his legs, let alone use them again. But he's also the most determined of his siblings, so when he was told he might be able to walk again after extensive physical therapy, he shocked everyone by being back on his feet (albeit with crutches) in half the time the doctors predicted. He gets around with a cane now. He's still working as a translator, but he translates mostly news and books now.
(PB: Jason Schwartzman)
Quentin is the youngest brother, four years younger than Orly, and easily the most disagreeable of the six. His father was Italian and he's got all the swagger with not much to back it up with. He's not particularly smart and he's not at all nice, but he can be very convincing when he wants to be, which serves him pretty well as a call center employee trying to upsell people on things they don't really need (when he's not temporarily fired for one reason or another, but they always re-hire him). He's sarcastic, cynical, impulsive, he has a mean streak and he enjoys screwing with people to make them as angry as he always seems to be, with one notable exception. Once when he was incredibly drunk he tried to sail across Lake St. Clair into Canada with Tyler Jordan Graham. It did not work, but it did change both their lives. Whether it was for the better or not is still a matter of debate, according to his sister. (While that is still in question, the fact that they met resulted in them introducing their war vet brothers, which has undeniably worked out for the best for both of them.)
(PB: Ellen Page)
Janet didn't come around until eight years after Quentin. She's the only one of Donna's kids whose father is aware that she exists, not that it did her much good. Her dad was American-- in fact, he was Donna's boss at the time, long after she'd stopped working at the hotel but long before she made the decision to get into nursing. Donna and all her kids came down with chicken pox while she was pregnant with Janet, which resulted in Janet being born prematurely via c-section, and a full hysterectomy for Donna, or there would probably be more Kinley kids. Janet is blind in her left eye and she's always been... kind of weird. In a sociopathic sort of way. She is a senior in high school, although she considers blogging about social justice on Tumblr to be her occupation. (She's the kind of Tumblrina that makes people give up on Tumblr.)
---
The Graham family
(PB: Michael Emerson)
Harold Graham is twice-divorced, probably because he's so far in the closet he can see Narnia, but he really wanted to be a family man, so he tried very hard to be straight and it only worked for so long before his wives were done with him. It didn't help that he had a tendency to go for very fiery women with latent substance abuse issues, either. But as terrible as he is as a husband, he's actually a really great father, and he absolutely adores all his kids. He has a high-ranking IT position with Ford, so he was financially able to support six kids, and the custody battle with his second wife wasn't a protracted one after the court actually compared their fitness as parents. He was very concerned with making sure his kids were healthy both physically and emotionally, and even though he never phrased it to himself like this, he wanted his children to live more authentically to themselves than he felt he'd been able to himself.
(PB: Pete Wentz)
Paul is the eldest child. He was always a daredevil, the kind of kid who climbed every tree and fence just to see if he could do it, but he was also the kind of kid who brought home every stray kitten and fallen baby bird because he cared about every creature he came into contact with. He also ended up with a strong sense of duty after his mother took off and left him and his little brother and his dad to fend for themselves; a sense of duty that was reinforced after his sisters' mother left in much the same way and he ended up with more responsibility than a 13 year old should have had to deal with. Two of those traits conspired against the third after the country went to war; Paul enlisted in the army out of a sense of duty, but one tour in Iraq left him mentally traumatized and emotionally wounded. It took meeting someone who'd been as badly broken in a similar way before he made much headway in putting himself back together.
(PB: Brendon Urie)
Tyler Jordan is five years younger than his brother. Their mother left when Tyler Jordan was still in diapers. While Paul was prone to caring too much about everything, Tyler Jordan had the problem of caring too much about specific things. The first thing he fell in love with was music; he took up the flute and piano in grade school, the violin and the tuba in middle school, before deciding in high school that his true passion was in playing guitar. The second thing he fell in love with was Maria, his first girlfriend in middle school that he vowed to stay with forever. They were together for eleven years, until Tyler Jordan turned 23 and everything fell apart all at once: "creative differences" with his band (which involved a fistfight on stage), the culmination of a decade's worth of annoyances making him absolutely lose it with Maria, and then he ended up drunk on a raft with Quentin Kinley trying to sail to Canada and somewhere between the shoreline and moving all his fishtanks into Quentin's apartment he realized that he'd fallen in love with Quentin too. They argue a lot and Tyler Jordan has gotten a little meaner in self-defense, but he's the first person to demonstrate to Quentin that love doesn't have to go hand in hand with abuse, and Quentin does seem to be learning the lesson, albeit slowly. Tyler Jordan works construction by day and is the bassist and founding member of the band With Intent To Sell by night.
(PB: Aubrey Plaza)
Kendall is the older twin sister by eleven minutes. Getting out of the womb first was just her first move in wanting to be where she isn't; she took all the study abroad options she was offered in high school (and went to Italy and France) and in college (she's currently in Germany). She plays field hockey and the saxophone. She is really, really into experiencing new things.
(PB: still Aubrey Plaza)
Theresa is a homebody where her twin has the urge to travel. She opted for a college in Detroit so she could stay home and cultivate her artistic talents in fiber crafts without having to worry about paying rent. She's less open about her feelings than Kendall is, but she writes a lot of poetry that she's never shown anyone. She also goes to all of Tyler Jordan's band's shows in a two hour radius.
(PB: Lea Michele)
Wendy writes an advice column for her high school newspaper. She's a total hippie who believes in past lives and meditation and herbal remedies. She's really nosy, but well-intentioned. She also wants to be Tumblr famous like Janet does, but instead of being a social justice warrior, she's really into dispensing advice and reblogging inspirational things. She has a lot more followers than Janet does. When she gets to college she plans on majoring in the fine arts with a focus on photography and digital production.
(PB: Bailee Madison)
Olivia doesn't really know what she's all about yet. She's at that awkward stage of puberty where everything is confusing and people are starting to expect things from you that you're not ready for yet. She knows she likes animals and baking. She knows she doesn't like sports and she isn't big into music. Theresa keeps trying to get her to knit but she hasn't gotten the hang of it yet. She thinks Miley Cyrus is pretty cool and her father keeps trying to convince her that she really isn't.