(no subject)

[unpranyaunceable]

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Lisa
AGE: 22
JOURNAL: uwaaaah
IM / EMAIL: CommunistCod on AIM, lyingpieceofcheese at gmail
PLURK: captainplanette
RETURNING: Y!

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Anya Borzakovskaya
CHARACTER AGE: 16
SERIES: Anya's Ghost
CHRONOLOGY: post-book
CLASS: H...ero??? she's just a well-meaning teenage girl, I don't know what class that is.
HOUSING: hit me with roommates! no preference on location.

BACKGROUND: Born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1992, Anya was moved to America at the age of 5. Her parents saw the Russian economy declining and feared the worst, so they took Anya to America, where they settled down in Canton, MA. (Six years after coming to the US, though, her parents split up and her father disappeared from her life.)

Shortly after the move, Anya began her first year of schooling. She was chubby and new and foreign. She knew no English, which made her a social pariah. And when she learned enough to communicate, she had a thick accent. For years, she was bullied and made fun of by the other children for the funny way she talked, for her chubbiness, and for her unpronounceable name. All she wanted was to be American. For a while, she strongly resented her little brother Sasha--he was born five years after her family came to America, so he never had to struggle with trying to look American, because he always was. He had no accent to get rid of, nothing to constantly prove.

So she became American. She lost her accent, lost weight, and distanced herself from the fat, foreign girl she used to be. She put on an air of not caring. She did anything that the other kids did, as long as it helped her fit in. At first, she joined softball with the other girls. Then, she started wearing bras and makeup (far too early, if you asked her mom). Then, she stopped going to church.

Anya would have been content to go to the regular public high school in town with the rest of her peers. But no, her mother heard from one of her friends back in Russia that they were moving to America soon and that their son Dima had gotten a scholarship to the private Hamilton School in town. Immediately, Anya's mom used what few funds they had and enrolled her there as well. Anya was plucked from the few friends she had and made to attend a new school. She was unhappy about it, but stuck with it. Soon, she picked up smoking like many of the kids in her school--especially Siobhan, a tall, sarcastic girl in her grade. Together they would skip school and share cigarettes. Siobhan was her only friend in school, especially because she pushed Dima away so aggressively. Dima was unabashedly Russian, and Anya could not afford to associate with him lest all her hard work to appear American be ruined.

(From here I'm mostly quoting the Wikipedia summary of her book, because they explain it a lot better than I did when I tried writing it myself.)

It is at this point, in her sophomore year of high school, that she one day falls into a deep hole on her way to school. The body’s ghost, a shy, homely girl, soon appears and explains that she had fallen down the hole and died of thirst after breaking her neck ninety years ago, but is unable to move very far from her bones.

Anya is rescued by a passerby, but the skeleton is not discovered. At school several days later, the ghost appears to her, as Anya had apparently put a small finger bone in her bag by accident while leaving the hole. Anya initially wants to put the bone back in the hole, but relaxes after the ghost helps Anya cheat on a biology test and spy on Sean, a popular basketball player at school that she has a crush on. Later, the ghost reveals herself to be Emily Reilly, whose fiancée had died during World War I. Shortly thereafter, Emily’s parents were murdered, and Emily fell down an old well while escaping the killer. Anya promises to find Emily’s killer, while Emily agrees to help Anya fit in at school and win over Sean. However, Anya’s attempts to become popular ostracizes her from Siobhan, and Emily becomes disinterested in discovering the murderer’s identity.

Later, Anya goes to a party and discovers Sean habitually cheats on his girlfriend Elizabeth, who is only with him for the boost in social status. Anya leaves, leaving Emily, who believed the two were destined for each other, angry and confused. Afterwards, Anya notices Emily is becoming more obsessive and meddling than before, even changing her appearance and smoking cigarettes (ghost cigarettes?) like Anya had. Anya decides to finally search for the killer, going alone without Emily, and finds a newspaper article about Emily’s disappearance with Dima’s help. It is revealed that Emily had no fiancée, and had in fact murdered a young couple in their home after the man rejected her, and then died running from the authorities.

When Anya returns home, she discovers the finger bone to be missing, and that Emily is not only capable of moving solid objects, but put her own finger bone into Anya's bag to escape the well. Emily begins threatening Anya’s family in order to make Anya stop resisting her manipulations, even causing Anya’s mother to fall down a flight of stairs. After Emily appears before Sasha, he reveals to Anya he had found the bone earlier and put it with his “dinosaur bone” collection. Anya retrieves the bone and runs to the pit, pursued by Emily. After Anya drops the bone into the hole, Emily manages to possess her skeleton and climbs out of the pit. Anya convinces Emily of the futility of her situation, causing the tearful ghost to dissipate into the air and the skeleton falls into the pit again.

A little while later, Anya convinces her school to fill up the hole and rekindles her friendship with Siobhan. She kicks her smoking habit upon realizing she only did it to fit in.

PERSONALITY: For her entire life, Anya has always deeply feared coming off as being "fresh off the boat." She is so concerned with keeping up appearances that she sacrifices her family, her friends, and even herself to look like an average American. She looks beleaguered when people try to pronounce her name and sometimes even tells them she's "Anya Brown" instead. She picks up smoking simply because her classmates do it. She refuses to go to the orthodox church, the only real gathering of other Russians in the area.

It's not that simple, though. Sacrificing so much to be American comes with consequences. She is so focused on her own appearances that she often comes across as selfish. She throws away the lunches her mom makes for her, she refuses to associate with the only other Russian kid at school, she constantly skips school and church to be with Siobhan, she doesn't share her cigarettes with friends. It's this obsession with her own appearance that also leads her to have insecurities about her own body. Like many teenage girls, she fears gaining weight and worries that she is turning into her fat mother and the many other Russian women she knows. To maintain her appearance, she diets--eating only low-fat foods and produce. And even though she's largely assimilated and is considered American by all her peers, it's an image she feels she constantly has to maintain and any slip-ups (eating her mom's fatty cooking, Dima talking to her) are like a backslide.

Being so inwardly focused on making sure she's perceived the right way means there isn't much room to pay as much attention to others and how they might feel. She ends up coming across as callous and as if she doesn't care for others. It doesn't help matters that she's also quite sarcastic to most of her peers (except for when she's trying to impress, like when she speaks to her crush Sean).

Of course, she is still a teenage girl, though, which means that as selfish and callous as she might seem, she still blushes nervously around cute boys, wants to perform well in school and make her family proud, and will still throw down for those she loves, if needed.

After the events of the book with Emily, she's begun to realize that everyone struggles with how they're perceived and that her perfect fantasy of being an all-American girl is both impossible and a lie. She begins to not only re-embrace her culture, but also let go of her insecurities (if only a little bit), and looks beyond herself to be more open and generous with others.

...Of course, all of this could easily be reversed by suddenly being dropped into a place where her culture is not only strange, but actively reviled.

POWER: She has none in canon, so I'm giving her:

Object Switching -- she has the power to switch the physical locations of two items, regardless of what they are. I'm going to put a size limit on this of like...something the size of a smartcar? You know, the tiny ones? That's as big an item as she can possibly switch. She can also use it to effectively teleport by switching herself with an item elsewhere (although she'll have a much harder time of this one). Oh, and both items have to be visible for her to do this.

Intangibility -- good ol' standard going through things. She remains visible when using this power, although she is transparent and looks washed out in white. The power only works for her, she can't spread it and make other people or items intangible with her.

And this isn't a power but it is worth noting that she can read, write, and speak Russian too. Not at the same level of a native-born-and-raised speaker, but definitely well enough to comfortably hold a conversation.