Character Profile -- Ophelia Piercy

Ophelia Piercy

Aliases or Nicknames:

Feels

Era:

Pre-Rift

Appears In:

Beverlee Hills Mummy

Importance:

Secondary Character

Main Goal:

text

Relationship to Other Characters:

Childhood besties with Candy and China Romney and Thai Martinez. Becomes friends with "Sunny". Has a dog named Prince Machiavelli, but Ophelia just calls him Mack.

Backstory/Infodump:

Growing up with Candy, China, and Thai, Ophelia was the natural leader. Thai wanted to be, but Ophelia was the one with the ideas. Thai and China were the closest pair of friends and Candy and China were twins, so Ophelia's role was to plan out adventures for the girls. She was the most naturally adventurous one of the group, and she used that tendency to make life as fun for the girls as possible, partly out of affection and partly to cement her place in the group.

In junior high, Ophelia was in a horrific car accident that left her paraplegic. Because she can't move her arms or legs, her superpower becomes planning. She wants to be a video game developer for people with mobility issues. 

After the accident, Thai, China, and Candy would come to visit. After a while, Ophelia realized that none of the girls told the other girls that they saw Ophelia regularly, so she realized that the girls didn't talk about Ophelia amongst themselves. In a way, she was relieved because she didn't want them bonding over their pity for her, but on the other hand, it was like she didn't exist unless she was in the same room with one of the girls. 

She started to purposely prevent the girls from planning to see her at the same time. She sensed that knowing that they all visited Ophelia, the distance that had grown between them might have closed up too tight to let her continue to fit in. One concern was that the girls are VERY wealthy and Ophelia's family is just comfortable (upper middle class). It was a distinction that was just starting to rear its head in junior high, and it's one that Ophelia is more and more aware of, even if the other girls aren't. 

The girls' families do help with Ophelia's medical bills as much as her parents will allow, though, so she feels even more at a psychological disadvantage toward the girls. She used to be the one who created a party wherever she went. What does she offer now? Survivor's guilt?

But Ophelia, like most teenage girls, undervalues herself. She is still the natural glue that holds the group together and there's a dynamic that they have together that they don't have without her. When Sunny comes around, Ophelia realizes that Sunny has a similar gluey effect on the girls, and starts to worry again that she'll be replaced and phased out. Instead, the group expands from Ophelia being a duo with her childhood friends to them being a quintet. 

By the end of the trilogy, Ophelia is full reintegrated into the group. Sunny is not just wealthy, she has ALL of the money, and can help Ophelia get her video game development financed. Sunny (aka Nakia), being someone who literally can't show her face to the world and has spent thousands of years in isolation, has a stronger empathetic grasp on the social and physical alienation that Ophelia is faced with. 

Author's Note:

In the last book of the trilogy, Nakia finds out about lush (see Worldbuilding) and is learning to manipulate her own body with it. She's also trying to figure out how to help Ophelia physically, but there's a responsibility, as writers, to not use lush as a magical solution that makes Ophelia "normal". First, because paraplegic characters are not often represented in fiction, and second, it's easy to take Ophelia's story in an ableist direction, and I'd like to avoid that.

Yes, being paraplegic sucks. I think that most people with paraplegia would agree with that. I haven't done a lot of research on it yet, but I imagine that it's physically and mentally taxing, not just dealing with a disability that severe, but also dealing with people reacting to your disability. (I have much more minor physical issues along with some mental illness and people are dicks about both.)

But people with severe disabilities AND fulfilling lives are underrepresented in fiction. Life is so hard even with control of your limbs, so when able-bodied person are confronted with the idea of losing that, it's hard to imagine any kind of life satisfaction for people with those issues. They become two-dimensional, heroic or pitiful figures, not people. And the way that people with severe disabilities are represented (WHEN they are), underlines that idea. 

I would like Ophelia, at least in this particular universe, to have an unrealistically high life satisfaction, just to balance all of that out. That said, this whole blog is about exploring all of the ways that one person can be shaped by different circumstances (hence, "a thousand" Auras), so I'm not opposed to exploring some parallel versions of Ophelia where she's still paraplegic but less privileged and seeing how she's affected by that. Or seeing what her life would be like if she had never been in the accident, stuff like that.

But another reason to avoid fully curing Ophelia through lush is that Aura has to gather up as much lush as she can in order to save the world when it's blown into four mini-planets. She has to go through as many parallel universes as possible and plunder their lush, too.

I'm still not sure how I'm going to keep The King and Nakia alive through all of that because they are characters in the Mended Era and their entire bodies are made of Lush. But, yeah, it would suck to cure Ophelia through lush and then take it all back.