{application | last voyages 2.1}

[forgetyourusedtobe]

User Name/Nick: Crystal
User DW: nerdangel
AIM/IM: kyotoshowgirl
E-mail: octoberrain08 [at] gmail [dot] com
Other Characters: Philip Blake (broughtwhiskey)


Character Name: Elena Gilbert
Series: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Age: 18
From When?: 4x19 - Pictures of You

Inmate/Warden:

Elena graduated while she was on the Barge and would have become a warden had she not left. That means she has turned her humanity back on. Her emotions are still something she has to put a little effort into controlling sometimes, but she embraces them. She's come around from being self-serving to finding a healthier balance between selfishness and selflessness. Elena also has a much more realistic view of people at this point. In the past where she might have tried so desperately to see only the good in others, she would blind herself to the wrongdoings they commit. Now she understands that everyone has good and bad in them, it's just a matter of the choices they make that will ultimately make them good or bad. She now has a firmer belief in others' ability to choose wiser and better and will try to appeal to that in any inmate she takes on.

With her emotions back in check, Elena is back to being someone who always tries to empathize with someone as much as possible and the same will be true of an inmate under her charge. She will be their biggest supporter and their loudest cheerleader. But Elena will hold them accountable when they make mistakes. She won't be one to punish immediately, but there will be conversations and she will see to it that they try to make amends towards people they hurt in the process. Elena is definitely going to have an easier time with inmates who have problems with understanding themselves/their identities since that's the path she had to walk once before. She may have a tendency to over-apply her own experiences from time to time in that regard, but she'll be more apt to listen to what her inmate has to say and what their experience is since the only person who can really speak for them is themselves.

Abilities/Powers:

This stuff here.

Personality:

Before the death of her parents, Elena was your garden variety girl next door type. She was fairly popular at school, but preferred the company of a very close circle of friends that she had grown up with since Mystic Falls is that kind of ass-end of nowhere small town. She also did well at just about anything and everything she attempted or put her mind to. Elena has always been reliable as a friend and was always the person that could be turned to during a crisis. There really wasn't a whole lot missing from Elena's life that would be the picture of happiness. But Elena is still a teenager and that means trying to figure out who you are and what you want. Even before her parents' deaths, Elena struggled to find herself. For example, she started to date her best friend Matt but wasn't entirely happy with that. Their relationship was solid and comfortable and in a sense, Elena felt obligated to want it - or at least something similar to it. But on the other side of the coin, it felt too spelled out and finalized for her. Even back then when things were easier and simpler for her, Elena has been the sort of small town girl who didn't want to miss out on the world and has never been all that comfortable with settling with good enough.

The death of Elena's parents amplified these feelings tenfold, but also was a shock to her system. Elena, quite understandably, was depressed for a long time afterward. She broke up with Matt and stopped spending as much time with her friends. She seemed to spend more time writing in her diary than actually leaving the house. On top of grieving for her parents, Elena also had to deal with survivor's guilt because not only was she the only one to survive the accident, she was the reason why they were out driving in the first place. Elena began struggling with not just the typical teenage worries of figuring out her place in life, but also now trying to justify even wanting anything for herself in the first place. By the end of the summer though, she makes a conscious effort to move on from the death of her parents though in many ways, this is Elena putting on a brave face for the sake of everyone else.

Then there were vampires and that screwed everything up so much more. Though, to be fair, they didn't screw everything up right away over night.

At first, it was actually relatively nice all things considered. Elena managed to fall head over heels in love with Stefan Salvatore and it was epic. Their relationship had its dramatic ups and downs, but the important part was that being with Stefan always made Elena feel safe without the feeling of being stifled like she felt in her relationship with Matt. With - not to be confused with "because of" - Stefan, Elena was able to experience new things and evaluate them for herself. She gained more confidence to say yes or no for herself in terms of what she wanted for her life though it came at some pretty steep prices and with some bad mistakes.

Elena has lost a lot of family in the process and her friends have lost a lot in the crossfire as well. (Matt lost his sister, Bonnie lost her grandmother, Caroline became a vampire, Jeremy and her both lost their aunt, she lost her biological parents, etc.) The loss is, however, a part of growing up and to a certain extent, it becomes almost normal and expected for Elena that she's going to lose something along the way. As long she doesn't lose everything, Elena manages to weather most of the losses she faces fairly well. And even when she feels like she's falling apart at the seams, she manages to keep it together to be there for her friends. Because at the end of the day, it's what she has left that matters most of all to her. Best example of this, of course, is Elena's willingness to offer herself up to Klaus for sacrifice in order to keep everyone else safe even though she can't even begin to realistically convince herself that somehow she's going to survive because nobody else is convinced. In fact, most people try to talk Elena out of going through with everything, but she has a enough resolve to make the choice for herself because at the end of the day, Elena is both stubborn and independent.

Lastly, there is also the important relationship Elena has with Damon which in a lot of ways is the polar opposite of her relationship to Stefan. Where Stefan offers a lot more safety and stability, Damon is generally unpredictable and volatile. At first, Elena outright hates and distrusts Damon. (And not a soul blamed her.) But as time goes on, Elena's views of things being black and white start to change and as a result, so does her opinion of Damon. While she is certainly able to sympathize with him on some level and she's able to offer him forgiveness in a lot of situations most wouldn't, she still holds him accountable for the bad things he says and does. It's a complicated relationship that Elena is generally unsure of how to approach or even how to define it because on the one hand, she is attracted by him and on the other, she knows better.

In some ways, Elena still is that girl next door even if her life is not so cookie cutter. She's been there to help and support the people she cares about through the various losses they've experienced. Her compassion for others has only intensified since the loss of her parents; before she was just a shoulder to cry and now she's willing to lay down her life to protect what she holds dear. At the same time though, Elena has become aware of how tricky the world/life can be to navigate and absolutes just don't work so much anymore. She doesn't have all of life's questions answered (and more importantly, she's come to realize she probably never will because things are way too complicated for that), she knows far more of what she wants than ever before. And the more she knows of what she wants, the firmer Elena is willing to stand and fight for that very thing regardless of whether or not the path ahead is straightforward.

Then she gets turned into a vampire.

Deciding to become a vampire wasn't an easy decision for Elena. She never wanted to become one in the first place, but she definitely didn't want to die either. Most of this conflict about being a vampire arises when she kills one of the Five and is cursed to hallucinate various people that are basically trying to convince her to off herself. Ultimately she survives it and comes to find that just because she's a vampire now doesn't mean she's any less Elena Gilbert than she was before. While all of this is going on, Elena is moving from Stefan to Damon, but her feelings for Damon are heavily called into question because she was under the influence of a sire bond. For her, this meant that whatever Damon said, she immediately agreed to and wanted to please him. Although this has yet to be resolved in canon, Elena is convinced that her feelings for Damon are real and not due to the sire bond. She believes that at this point she's tired of safety and stability. Basically dangerous is sexy now.

So that just leaves the question of Elena turning her emotions off and what the hell that's done to her. For starters, Elena was pretty close to the edge to begin with even without Damon invoking the sire bond and telling her to turn it all off. As a vampire, her emotions and personality are heightened which meant the loss of her brother was even worse than what it would have been if she was still human. She was ready to burn down her family home and throw away everything of her old life in an attempt to escape and did after her emotions were turned off because ooh symbolism ooh. With her emotions off, Elena's thought process has changed from being considerate and mindful of others to seeing others more as liabilities and obstacles from what she wants. She's indifferent to how her actions are going to impact others and she very adamantly does not want to go back to feeling. In fact, the Elena who would have sacrificed her life for the sake of her friends is nowhere to be seen and she's made several attempts on the life of those very same friends for her own purposes. And most importantly, Elena's stubborn independence is now a big problem because she has zero intention of ever going back and turning her emotions back on.

UPDATE FROM THE BARGE

Turning her humanity back on didn't come immediately for Elena nor did it revert her back to exactly who she was before she became a vampire. It was a very slow-going for her. Elena didn't make friends very easily and was manipulative towards her first warden (Racetrack). Much of the time she was under Racetrack's guidance, she behaved and was exactly as above and it wasn't really until she was assigned to her second warden (Arkin) that Elena began to finally make some progress.

Elena made an arrangement with Abigail Hobbs. She offered her protection to the other girl and her help in getting her revenge on Hannibal and anyone else in exchange for blood. More or less, Elena wasn't that emotionally invested and was simply bored while she was concocting her own revenge plans. Friends with benefits was definitely a thing she could live with since otherwise she was stuck on the ship. Arkin demanded honesty from her, but she simply manipulated him the same way she did Racetrack and moved kept her eye on the prize. Without Damon (or Katherine) to exact that revenge upon, she set her sights on Cassel. She spent months taunting and tormenting him before she finally compelled Cassel to go after Bond. She was, naturally, punished, but not any more inspired to turn her humanity on. However, she wasn't any more inspired to keep it off either.

Elena's arrangement with Abigail began to develop more beyond a simple business arrangement. Try as she might, Elena couldn't help the concern and care she was beginning to experience for Abigail. She was frustrated in seeing Abigail engage in what Elena had to admit to be self-destructive behavior. It was upon that admission that she realized she couldn't deny that her attack on Cassel had come from a place of anger and hurt (and most importantly, that it did nothing to alleviate any of what she was feeling) or that Dean's tenacity was beginning to wear her down. Elena eventually came to understand and realize that she was afraid and that was the final hurdle from turning her humanity back on. She took the plunge and from there began trying to cope with the emotions she felt, the knowledge/guilt of the things she had done, and the girl she used to be.

And that's something Elena is still working on in her day-to-day. Although she managed enough progress to graduate and she's managed to put a lot of the bad things she did behind her to make amends and reach out to people like Mal, Bond, and Dean (as well as figure out where the hell she stands with Abigail), she still is trying to figure herself out to a certain extent. Elena knows now that she has the choice, but it's a matter of figuring out what that choice is. She's spent a lot of her time being concerned about other people and how best to accommodate them that she's somewhat forgotten what is she wants which explains the hedonistic behavior when her humanity was off. But now that she's turned her emotions back on, she needs to learn how to strike the right balance. Elena still has the potential to dip too far in both directions, but she's still more likely to head in the direction of too selfless than selfish after all the harm she caused by being too selfish.

Push comes to shove, Elena is still, in a lot of ways, that same girl she was before becoming a vampire and before losing Jeremy. She's someone who's brave and willing to sacrifice herself to protect the ones she loves without a second thought. Elena is also someone who carries her share of survivor's guilt that will never fully go away. But she's gained more self-awareness from her time on the Barge. She's learned that sometimes the best way to help others is to help herself and she knows that she deserves the life that she's been allowed to have through the sacrifices of others. It's a lesson that she needs reminding of every once in a while, but she learned that if nothing else during her time as an inmate.

Elena will not remember her brief stay on the Barge after her return. As far as she's concerned, this is her first return.

Barge Reactions:

Elena isn't really going to have much of a reaction to the Barge given that she's been on board before, but there are a few differences from before.

For starters, Elena's interest in other people will be fair more genuine. She's going reconnect quickly with her previous relationships, be unafraid of the nastier types about the Barge, and be willing to offer a helping hand to those less familiar and more lost. Elena will still have her curiosity about ports and be more apt to leave the Barge to explore. She'll also likely want to do so in the company of others. Moreover, if there's danger, she's going to want to look out for those who are less capable as well as the people she cares about. As far as floods and breaches are concerned, she'll endure them as she always has and try to make the best of every situation.

History: Wiki

Sample Journal Entry:

That time she graduated.

Sample RP:

That time she shared memories.

Special Notes: None.