Serella has turned 18 years old. the new profile is not yet finished, and Serri will come back to civilization (and rp) when I'm good and ready gosh darnit!
I'd like to preface my eventual changes with something.
Serri's hair and eyes have changed color.
in a perfect world, I would have thought of this back when she was like, 13, and done the change then, but I didn't and now I'm stuck handwaving it as weird elven biology or something.
IF I'd decided to change her hair when she was 13, this is how I would have explained it:
a great many blonde-haired blue-eyed kids (sometimes called "towheads") actually get darker hair right before they reach puberty, fading from bright blonde to a more strawberry color, or even brown. blue eye colors often change as an individual ages (or based on the light, or a number of factors), though usually it ends up being around the light color spectrum.
biology is weird.
anyways, because I decided to do this at the transition to
18, I'm forced to explain it by a number of desperately transparent examples of Gaby reaching for straws.
first is the fact that nobody's really set down a proper age for elven maturity, but silver elven society dictates one to not be an adult until their 30th birthday. I don't know whether thats because of physical maturity, or uptight silver elves, but in any case, the 18-year-old Serri is far from being an adult in elven terms, and there are implications here and there of elven puberty being delayed in some manner.
I could explain it like that, if I hadn't already given Serri puberty hormones.
though come to think of it, they hadn't really kicked in until she was 16, so I have sooooomeeee leeway...
I can explain this weird "puberty here now, puberty there later" logic by talking about how in real life, puberty is really weird and unequal in humans, and while I might even take it one step further and say that Serri's human father is messing this whole thing up even further, that's straying dangerously close to "half-elf" territory, which is explicitly lorebanned, so forget that.
in any case, this is a huge mess of alternate interpretation lore and I'm cherry-picking evidence that works for me, and trying maximum hard to make this hair-eye change work because:
- it's starting to bother me that she inherited both recessive traits from her parents, while both parents also possessed the respective dominant traits. blonde-haired brown-eyed mother, and black-haired blue-eyed father making a blonde-haired blue-eyed daughter? Serri is some kind of miracle baby.
- it's also starting to bother me that Serri looks to silver elf society like someone with very strong commoner blood. I might be lowkey trying to rectify my boneheaded lore mistake by elaborate retcon and biology handwaving. o____o
- blatant symbolism. to those about to complain, "you're just turning her into a forest elf!" well, DUH! that's exactly what's happening IC, why do you think Serri tried to propose to a forest elf with the whole "kindred" ceremony, then runs off to Tauredal with said forest elf? she's obviously trying to join that culture and those traditions, and she's really obviously rebelling against both Lavoyard and Silver Elf customs. me changing hair and eye color is just... making that obvious. trust me, people, I've done more obvious literary devices in the past. (perfect example: Salheira. one quick glance at her profile reveals a short list of really obvious themes running throughout.)
- honestly, none of this actually matters, because while I'm writing an essay about why I'm allowed to change a character's natural hair color as according to real life examples of such occurring, there's a silver elf with pink hair and the vast majority of elves (that are still good characters with rich backstories!) blatantly disregarding lore. also, there's a character with dyed green hair, two characters that had dyed purple hair, and a bunch of other characters with yellow or red or really bright green or blue eyes, and I mean, this isn't the worst thing somebody has done regarding hair-eye color! mine's not even bad, just a wee mistake in timing!
so yeah stuff.
