Application for Hogwarts School
→ CHARACTER INFORMATION.Name: Tallulah Belle Sloe
Birthday: 02 September 1934
Hometown: San Francisco, California, United States of America
Bloodline: Halfblood
Magical Strength (pick one): Charms
Magical Weakness (pick one): Transfiguration
Year: Fifth (held back a year*); Sixth
Biography:On the corner of the bed of one Tallulah Belle Sloe is a self portrait--clearly ripped out of some bound journal of Muggle make, almost as clearly forgotten where it was discarded. While I am not an expert in Art or in human psychology (or even, as it were, in Tallulah Belle Sloe), I will do my best to interpret it for you.
The first element of note is a change in medium. Where before the girl in question favored crayon to the exclusion of all else, she seems now to have switched to oil pastels. Present on this particular piece are also a few mixed medium items as well--rippings from what looks like newsprint (both magical and muggle), a few bird feathers, something that looks dangerously like it might have originated in a library book--affixed with what is either simple muggle glue or some sort of poorly executed sticking charm (I say this not to be rude but because it doesn’t seem to have worked quite as intended; corners of most of the items so affixed are peeling up or elsewise hanging on by a bare thread, though perhaps this is an artistic choice). While it could simply represent a natural evolution in Tallulah’s artistic process, from what I know of the girl, I am almost certain it’s something else, something more. What, exactly, I am not quite sure.
Next, I suppose, we should discuss the general style, as there has been quite a bit of development in this area as well. Gone are the ball-headed, unevenly-limbed, garish sort of caricatures from her younger youth. In their place, she seems to have adopted a more...see, here is where my lack of art knowledge betrays me. Her style is decidedly more life-like than before, but more--perhaps the word is
stylized. What was once round and squat has now elongated, gone waif-like and exaggeratedly thin. It appears almost as if the subject of her work is pulled between two fixed points, stretching out the length of her neck, the lines of her arms and legs, giving the impression that the subject is merely ghosting across the page, a sort of smoke-like hint at the person herself. The overall impression, while not unpleasant per se, is still somewhat unsettling, though it is undeniably much more aesthetically pleasing than some of her earlier work (again, I say this not to be rude but from a place of honesty).
Where the meat of the discussion lies, however, is in the subject herself. As mentioned above, there’s that sort of feeling of being an apparition, of being not-quite-physical, but it lacks any sort of connotation of the ephemeral. What is smacks most of to me is a sort of down-trodden medieval art. You know the ones of which I speak, I am sure; the strange saints, all forehead and gilded halo, with fingers as long as death and politely distant glances. The portrait of the artist in question has that sort of feeling, but with the (already limited) life of it turned down. Against a nondescript and lazily swirling dark background (featuring bloodied, deep maroons and soiled goldenrod, and including the mixed media items previously discussed), the subject is stark. Pale. Eyes sunken, angry black circles beneath. She stares just off the page but in no particular direction. The line of her lips is neither soft nor hard, but seems an indifferent sort of slack. The tip of the nose is rounded and stands out as much redder than the rest of her. The whole of the head is tilted sideways slightly, like the subject couldn’t quite muster up the will to hold her head straight. Behind a mess of brown, tangled hair, there is what could only be described as a sort of halo--or at least a roundish sort of lightening of the dark shades of the background, a corona in pastel shades of icor and bile. Limbs ghost out where sleeves would be but are not, out of the background itself as there is no body for them to grow from, and are as pale as the rest. I feel like it speaks for itself, though should you need a prod in the correct direction, I venture to say it’s not a terribly hopeful one.
Art is, naturally, subjective, but I feel the portrait provides an accurate reflection of Tallulah Sloe not only as a growing artist, but also as a girl in crisis. It is perhaps inappropriate to go into biographical details, but the general malaise seeps off the very page like thick waves of some gloomy incense; again, I feel that it speaks for itself, and voluminously so, of the sort of tribulation she has faced since last we took a moment to observe her artwork.
→ ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.House Request: Gryffindor
Personality:In a word: different.
In another: colorless, perhaps.
Look, here’s the thing: she’s in there somewhere, I swear she is--that frenetic beam of too-hot sunshine and never-staying-still. Somewhere, deep perhaps in the parts of herself she can’t see right now, she’s there, talking as if in all capital letters through still-grinning lips, asking for more than too much, only to run off, laughing wild and free, a half second later. She’s there. I promise. Somewhere.
But the thing is, she’s had a rough go of it. Some of it is self-inflicted, some situational, some wholly out of her control but not out of her capacity to feel guilty for it anyway, and it’s gone on mostly in her head. It started off little and light, a subtle sort of retreat inward, bore out of nothing more than needing a quiet breath (for once) alone. Somewhere along the last few years, it became more permanent, her isolation. Before, it could have been said that she lived in a world of her own creation. The same could still be said of her, I suppose, but to a completely, much less enjoyable extreme.
Appearance:Puberty did very little to Tallulah Sloe outside of soften her slightly at the edges. She’s still fairly short and wears her hair with bangs. What is more notably about her appearance nowadays is that she seems to care less about it than even before. Her uniform skirts are usually rumpled, her stockings typically sporting at least one noticeable run, and it’s a small victory when she remembers to brush her hair.
→ SAMPLE ROLEPLAY.When she couldn’t go high, she went low.
Here, that meant that instead of going to the South Tower (it was her usual haunt, certain tucked-away rooms she had claimed for herself or for Euphemia Vane), which had experienced a recent and unfortunate rash of excited young couple seeking out a tucked-away place to, as they said,
snog, she went to the dungeons to get away this particular night.
Tallulah Sloe had once liked the dungeons, though she couldn’t quite remember why anymore. Presently, she disliked them, for this evening they stank with a sort of salty cabbage smell, but even that was much preferable to Gryffindor Tower. She loved her housemates, truly, but they were terribly loud and talkative, and tonight, the Sloe girl simply wasn’t in the mood to be pestered. The new batch of first year students were particularly boisterous. Why, even
she had never been so loud.
(She had, of course; she had been so many more times worse, but it felt like a distant memory then.)
In a word, Tallulah was skulking, moving about the labyrinthine dungeon corridors in no particular way but stealthily, peeking into rooms here or there when the mood or curiosity struck her. Again, she much preferred the altitude of the South Tower; there she was usually much more likely to find something of interest--a family of rats, an old piano, strange mirrors hidden beneath sheets (though she shuddered to think what she might find lurking there now). So far, she hadn’t found anything terribly exciting in the forgotten rooms of the dungeon outside of a collection of once-dried, now-mildewed toadstools. She was just about to push open the door of a room from which the promising sound of ghostly chains rattling issued when--
"H-h-hello?"--a whisper reached her ear and--
”Hello! Is Emma Birch here?"--Tallulah Sloe was hit with the strangest sensation of deja vu. One eyebrow arching dangerously high towards her hairline, the girl rounded the nearest corner.
“.....Evangeline?”
Was that her name? Yes, she thought it must be. And she was a first year student, if Tallulah recalled correctly--one of the very same over-loud Gryffindors she had sent herself to the dungeon to avoid. A strange feeling tugged at her stomach, though; it felt like she had been here before, with this very girl in this very dungeon.
So it went, she supposed, with school legends like the ghost of Emma Birch.
“Did the older girls trick you into coming down here?” Taking a few steps closer, Tallulah’s muted sing-song voice echoed through the hall. When she had been a first year, even she had almost fallen for the same story she had overheard some seventh year girls telling loudly in the Common Room earlier. As the head of the small blonde girl loomed closer in the darkness, she reached out was she hoped was a reassuring (if a little clammy) hand.
“They’re a bunch of loons, you know.”
→ ABOUT YOU.Please list any characters you have on the site (current and previous): Over 9000.
How did you find us?: What matters, I think, is that I always find my way back.
*I would like for Tallulah to have been held back last year, her fifth, and to repeat the same. In-Character reasons for this include a steady decrease in school participation that corresponded to the steady increase in her care-taking for her mother each summer, a general isolation from the student population, and dropping her extracurriculars to replace them with frequent detentions. I imagine, too, that she missed her O.W.L.s at the end of last year due to a family emergency, though this, perhaps, was merciful; she likely hadn’t studied a wink.
Out of character and certainly selfishly, I just really want to play her fifth year. It’s when all the good things start, the angst and the woe and so on, and I want to do Edgelulah justice.
