Clark, Farren Violet

[Farren Violet Clark]

This application is (complete)

farren violet clark

* - - - once upon a time

full name: Farren Violet Clark
nicknames: Ren, to her father, because she loved birds so much. This nickname is extended to her closest friends. Jokingly, he also called her “Dolly Daydream”, because of her tendency to live in her own fantasy world inside her head. However, to strangers, she introduces herself as Violet. She’s not very good at letting people in – and by giving them her middle name, she feels like she’s keeping a part of her hidden.
meaning of name: Farren – Literally meaning Iron Grey. Rather than giving her a name blatantly related to Cinderella, I got a bit creative. Cinders are synonymous with ashes – ashes are grey. That’s pretty much the whole genius =]
Violet – Cinderella is seen, in the film, to be wearing a blue dress at the ball. I couldn’t pronounce half of the blue flower names I found, and they were too utterly cruel to be used as a name, so I went with the next best thing. Violet is also the alias she hides behind with new people, and at the ball she hid behind the facade of being a princess in her fancy blue dress.
Clark – There is no genius behind this, unfortunately. Her father was British – and this was amongst the names in the list of most popular British surnames. Et voila!
age: Twenty.
birthday: Her birthday is the 9th of October, 1989
occupation: She is a professional seamstress. She designs and makes gowns for formal occasions; this includes ball gowns, wedding dresses, prom dresses etc. She finds it ironic that she makes all these glamorous gowns but never actually goes anywhere herself.
play by: Hayden Panettiere
canon: Cinderella from Cinderella

* - - - the fairest of them all

Our little Farren is your classical American beauty. She finds her appearance slightly jarring with her typical social background, in all honesty. Farren looks like the type of girl to lead up a cheer squad. Primarily, the point being she could still pass for being in high school if she tried. Her height is a petite five foot one (She doesn’t quite understand where she inherited this shortness of stature from – her father was of a perfectly normal height for a man,) and her build complies with her generally small proportions. If anyone were to describe her figure, it would be using the words slim, but shapely. She’s lucky, she believes, that she’s not inclined to carry large amounts of weight, because she fears that Oompa Loompa status would be nigh if she did. Although never stick thin, she has reached a weight of eight stone and two pounds (Roughly 113 lbs), and her figure is trim and ultimately very toned. She has realised that, her love of all things fattening and bad for her arteries will eventually have an effect on her waistline. She took up a love of exercise merely so she could get out of the house for a little while, because whilst she’s running in the neighbourhood her ‘family’ can’t ask her to run any stupid errands. But the more she’s improved her fitness over the years, the more she’s been inclined to keep at it in order to keep her legs, stomach and bottom toned. She understands that, being the height she is, if she lets herself go too much, then she’ll appear dumpy. Understandably, as a twenty year old girl, this prospect is not appealing to her. So she keeps herself trim. Her stomach is not flat, or concave, but it doesn’t wobble when she runs, and that’s all that matters to her. She wonders, sometimes, if she’s anything at all like her mother. She’s never seen a photo, and she doesn’t know her name. Her father used to refer to her mystery mother as his ‘little flower’. She imagines her mother to be relatively curvaceous, mostly for the fact all of the females available for comparison on her father’s side of the family have chests that resemble two pancakes. Her breasts seemed to take on a mind of their own when she reached around fourteen years of age. She always expected to go through life with nothing to speak of in the chest department, but low and behold, as soon as she hit fourteen, they decided that they were going to make their appearance. They don’t look uncomfortable against her frame, but she would not describe herself as an hourglass at all. She feels that they are a little too jarring, in her personal opinion, for although she does have a rather nice bottom, her hips just don’t look wide enough to balance them out.

Her colouring has prompted many Swedish and Norwegian people to attempt to strike up conversations with her in their native tongue when she’s been on holidays. Needless to say, although this makes her very uncomfortable (They always look so happy to find a ‘fellow Swede”) and rather amused, she can see where they’d get the idea. She’s been blonde, naturally, for as long as she can remember. Never white blonde. A yellow blonde. Closer to golden. Of course, as any blonde knows, as you age, the colour does begin to fade a little, so recently she’s been journeying to the hairdressers to touch up her roots with highlights. Her hair is typically left to its own devices, considering naturally, it has pretty much no fight in it, whatsoever. Her only hope is to plead with her hairdresser to throw in a few extra layers and dry her hair whilst hanging her head upside down. The sight in itself is quite comical, but the overall effect is good enough. She only ever puts her hair up if she’s going to the gym. Otherwise, she argues that her forehead looks about a mile long. If she has a fringe then her face looks about 10cm, long, however, so she just compromises by remembering not to pull her hair back (No matter how tempting on a bad hair day). A few months ago she cut her hair into a choppy bob in what she classes as a moment of madness. Afterwards, she regretted it (“I’m bald!”) so she now wears hair extensions that mean her hair falls to her chest. Underneath this ‘mile long’ forehead of hers lies her eyes. She has to admit, despite her insecurities about said forehead, she wonders if God maybe put it there as an extra long run-up to her favourite part about her. Her eyes are not striking in the sense they are flecked with different colours, but she thinks they are the largest feature on her face. Everything about her is small, so she gets excited about her eyes for the simple fact they aren’t. They possess an odd blue/grey colour that she thinks adds some aura of enigma to her face for the simple fact they aren’t that common a colour. She thinks it sets her apart from all the other classic blonde hair/blue eyes combinations out there. Her eyelashes are pale blonde, which means they provide absolutely zero emphasis. This is why you will never, ever see her leave home without her mascara and possibly a set of false eyelashes. She feels like an albino if she does.
Her nose and lips, help to distinguish, when examined closely, that she is no longer part of a student alumni. Although her eyes are wide and childlike (Without being mistaken for naive,) her nose is very...determined. It is a relatively smooth ski slope, with a slightly rounded tip. It’s not turned up, but it does get crinkled up when she finds something funny. Her lips are a little too...pouty, to be considered innocent. Her top lip is fleshier than her bottom (Though neither could be considered as plump,) but there’s something oddly sensual about them. She finds that sometimes, they can make her mouth look a little too intense. Any smile or pout gets exaggerated so the facial reflections of her moods make her look a little bipolar. When she smiles, she loses her top lip completely, and any hope at subtlety is gone when her teeth make their spectacular appearance. An obsession with dental hygiene has both helped and hindered her. From a distance, her smile appears close to perfect. Not an artificial whiteness, but certainly not yellowed, and generally evenly spaced. Her incisors look a little too sharp to be inviting, if anything. Because she doesn’t smile showing both top and bottom row of teeth, her bottom lip usually hides the flaws she’s picked up on. But occasionally, people have noted that her front teeth have chips. These chips are the bane of her life. For someone so obsessive compulsive about her dental hygiene, she feels they flaw her teeth immensely. She also has a slight overbite, despite her dentist issuing her with a retainer at age 14.

Although she has had few, many ex boyfriends have commented that although she is conventionally pretty, what has drawn them to her the most is her unusual elegance for a girl her age. She was forced to attend her step- mother’s finishing school. Even though her step-mother claims on a regular basis that she’s a social embarrassment, Farren knows it was really because she excelled far more than her own daughters ever did. The only thing she was bad at really, was the whole book balancing in heels. She was clearly at a disadvantage, having to wear heels higher than everyone else’s to at least restore her to average height. She’s glad, in a way, that she was told to go there to “straighten out her disgusting habits”. Years of being less than the social butterfly made her regress into low self-esteem, not caring for posture or polite speech. Granted, she was never a cavewoman, but the amount of tutoring she got at the finishing school eventually was the final push she needed to realise that she didn’t mind being on the outside looking in. And that she was actually too elegant to be a slut. Her dress style is relatively conserved and casual in the day time. She doesn’t wear heels unless she’s going out, because she reasons there’s little point when it only makes her ‘normal’ and not ‘dwarf’ anyway. Why bother with the pain? Plus, as above mentioned, she’s really, really bad at walking in them. She’s elegant on her own two feet, thank you very much.

* - - - look deep inside

Farren Violet Clark lives in her own little world. She knows that her current life is not the one she’s meant to lead. The most common question she gets asked by friends is why she puts up with it. When Farren’s father died, she was, essentially, an orphan. She never had contact with her grandparents in England, and her mother was an unnamed face to her. That meant no grandparents, no known aunties, or uncles. No cousins twice removed. And after all, why would the government waste time looking for them when her darling step-mother was so gracious in offering to look after her. This decision puzzles her, for the simple reason she has known from the start that her guardian has a tolerance for her, rather than a complete like. However, she thinks that upon his death bed, Farren’s father made her step-mother promise to look after his little girl. Look after is a whole lot different to care for, and sometimes she wishes that he’d chosen his words a little more clearly. Despite the fact that Farren and her step-mother do not have the healthiest relationship, she knows that she did love her father, for all her faults. There is simply a lot of confusion for the fact that the parenting style Farren has been used to all her life is the loving approach, almost soft handed. So why now, does she still continue? Why does she find it so hard to break free? Because, my friends, Farren would rather see the good in this situation (The fact she’s not completely on her own, and she does not grieve on her own,) than the bad (The small matter of her dysfunctional motherly instinct). You see, in Farren’s head, everyone’s always nice to her and the sky is always blue. When she’s still struggling to come to terms with her father’s death (It doesn’t matter how old she gets, a bond such as that cannot be displaced easily,) she has the last thing that links her to her dad.

This daydreaming has often led her into a lot of trouble. At school she was the girl who, although intelligent, often forgot about homework because she forgot to jot down due dates, the girl who got asked what had just been read out and couldn’t answer because she was too busy waltzing around in her own head and hoping that Prince Charming was waiting for her. Although she does have a vivid imagination, Farren has never let it get too out of control. There are some girls who embellish fanciful notions until they believe their versions of events as the truth. When this happens, there is a dangerous line between telling a story, and making accusations that could bring other peoples’ lives crashing down around her ears. Her father, although encouraging her creative talents, always made it perfectly clear that she was to remain in the real world as much as possible. She was often placed in front of the television, or at the table with the newspaper, to study the selection of headlines the world had to offer. She can remember asking, upon her first venture into the Anchor news, why everything was so sad. And he had had told her that “This was the real world, sweetheart, and not everything could be sprinkled with sugar and fairydust.” Obviously, as a child, she did not understand the message her father was attempting convey, but years on, he realises that he was simply trying to prepare herself for the defilement of her naivety in years to come, when the light bulb went on and she realised the world was full of horrible people who did horrible things. So, instead of portraying her thoughts (And the vacant look they accompany,) on her face, she learned to channel that big imagination into her art. Ironically, today, it is her job to ‘imagine dresses’ for clients, or at least to realise the full potential of a client’s ideas, and to envision the final project.

Her naivety regarding the world has disappeared. She arrived in school with the attitude that everyone would get along fine. Everyone would be best friends, and they would not argue over the sandpit, or the dollies. It would be a grand time. Instead, she found herself, rather awkwardly, on the cusp of almost everything she ever became involved in. She can’t lie and say that she’s confident, and she was never loud enough to force her way into situations. In class, she got on with her work, contributed when it was necessary or she had a question, but ultimately, remained silent. This was neither detrimental or beneficial to her regarding her intelligence and learning, but it did shape the way other people viewed her. Despite her classically “American” appearance, and her friendly, positive attitude, she was never quite assertive enough to get herself anywhere. She once got told she could “get noticed if she tried”, and she has to admit, sometimes when she used to see others take the credit for what she’d done, or advance before her simply because she couldn’t quite speak up, she’s thought about it. She’s thought about maybe wearing her tops a little lower, putting her make-up on a little thicker, being a little more bitchy. Something to get her to stick in peoples’ memory. Then, the voice at the back of her head, which (Despite her shyness,) has always made her relatively comfortable with herself, scolds her and informs her that she wants someone to notice her without her having to strive to capture and keep their attention. Those who do know her will of course tell you that she’s loyal and trustworthy. She has a lot of good advice for someone so young, and she thinks this has something to do with always watching from the sidelines. She’s seen thousands of scenarios play out in front of her (“Oh don’t worry, it’s only Farren, she’s dreaming again, not paying attention,”) and many more be left unresolved. She’s usually very gracious about peoples’ forgetfulness when she is concerned, but inside, she seethes. For her, them not noticing her is merely a fluorescent yellow highlighter pen over her shortcomings (No pun intended,) of her mediocrity. And it angers her, because she seems to go around seeing only the best get the happy ending. There are those who work for it, good and honestly, and then there are those who just have all the luck. When asked about her adolescence, she will proudly tell you that she was different. Her British terminology (She says pavement instead of sidewalk, and tap instead of faucet, etc) inherited from her father was simply the nail in her coffin in her alienation. She will argue until she’s blue in the face that she’s always been more mature than others her age, and she didn’t wish to go to parties, and god knows what. That she didn’t want them to ask. She will never admit to feeling as if she spent her whole teenage existence with her eye pressed to the keyhole, desperately hoping for a slice of the action.

She has the same attitude towards love. On the surface, she presents a truly brilliant facade of finding love, in itself, very tiring. She hates cheesy romances, be they in novels, or on television. Or so she says. In reality, she wonders where her knight in shining armour is. She’s not a hopeless romantic, but she does want good values. She wonders whether she’s a prude, for not sleeping with a different boy every week, because everyone these days seems to bed hop like the mattresses are actually gymnastic springboards. She wants someone who’ll take her hand and dance her along the beach. She wants someone who thinks she’s beautiful. She just wants something simple, and uncomplicated, because in her head, that’s what should happen. As afore mentioned, she hasn’t totally recovered from her naivety as a child, and this makes her prey for people willing to take advantage. Although not entirely memorable, those who do take note of her decide that ultimately, she is very kind hearted. She’s far too eager to see the good in everyone, which is why she gets used as a doormat. Even within her circle of close friends, there are some who will take advantage of her for lifts, money lending, clothes borrowing. It’s all the same. It’s not that she can’t say no, she just...doesn’t like making an issue out of things. She just wonders, sometimes, if being this nice on the surface is all worth it. On a bad day, her mental rapport will consist of many bitchy thoughts and insults. Then she feels bad, and as if she’s overreacting, but generally, upon looking back on the situation, she realises that yes, they do take advantage of her kind nature, and yes, it is wrong of them. Despite her initial social awkwardness, someone Farren also has a problem saying no to, is men. Those who do tend to take an interest in her, recognise, of course, that she is more than just a quiet girl who’s conventionally pretty. They acknowledge that she’s got a lot of layers, that she’s deeper than a lot of the girls nowadays, and she does her own thing most of the time, has her own views and opinions. They get too close to fast, and suddenly she’s freaking out and trying to ruin everything because she’s just not used to the attention.

Despite her happy-go-lucky attitude, and often introverted character, when Farren knows she is right and passionate about something, she seems to pluck courage from the air around her present herself quite admirably. Her favourite thing to do is be proved right, especially to smug, overbearing people who can’t seem to let someone else have a say. As a quiet person, she’s come up against a lot of these people in her lifetime. Farren has a point where all her positive thoughts leave her and she is left a little broken. Friends have commented that she’s ‘bipolar’, because she can fall and stumble into moods that are ultimately quite strange. There is no shade of grey for Farren Clark. She is happy and content with the hand she has been dealt, on one particular day, at ease with what has gone wrong and empowered as to how to fix them. On a bad day, she is disenchanted with the world and the way it keeps bailing out on her. How no light is ever shed on the identity of her mother, or even the strange moods of her step-mother. She feels that everyone else got a cheat sheet in life, and she must not have been the queue. Despite being reserved, she’s quite internally dramatic. She slips under the radar of ‘drama queen’, because she’s not loud enough to broadcast it, but there are some parallels in her behaviour to the classic definition. She seems to make a deal out of things that the ordinary person may not find problematic, or offensive, for that matter. Farren is an internal sufferer, but generally, if she does have an outburst about something she’s passionate about (Not frequent, but not exactly rare to the people she knows,) then it usually arrives, hot and sweaty, in the form of a rant, complete with a couple of swearwords and angry facial expressions. She likes anything theatrical, such has musicals and plays. But all her dreams usually feature hair brained schemes few people would even consider thinking about. She’s a fantasist, and she just can’t help it. Although generally, a practical person, being able to turn her hand to a variety of tasks, in her head, her mind is always wandering. Her brain presents her with too many pathways, and she’s too emotionally adventurous to not take them. Needless to say spontaneous decisions are usually a no-go area for her.

Generally, Farren is grateful, after her slightly odd life, that there are still some of life’s pleasures available to her. She enjoys treating her friends when she can, and going out. She enjoys peoples’ company, and they seem to enjoy hers, because of her gentle, mostly unassuming nature. As she’s matured, she has dropped her quiet demeanour a little. She’s somewhat more fiery, and comfortable with herself. But the memories do not go away, and sometimes, in a busy party, or a filled shop, she’s the blonde girl in the corner again, or at the dance, surveying the scene but never actively taking part. Always the wall flower, or the voyeur. Never the actress. In order to reap the maximum happiness potential from her life, she deliberately keeps her expectations of things low. If she never anticipates anything great, then she can’t be let down if it fails miserably. As she stands, today, her life is relatively content. But she can’t help dreaming. She wishes for many things; that she had more confidence, that she’d grow a few feet, that if that could happen, someone could please sweep her off her dainty size six point fives? She doesn’t talk about her trivial desires to other people, because her simplistic asks of life seem odd in comparison to her most frequent and most desired wish – that her father could please come back. Although becoming a relatively strong and independent woman, the part of her that still aches for her father’s death is a child. An abandoned, confused child. And wrapped up in this dream is another image of her perfect match. Someone to romance and dance her, until she can’t breathe with the cheesiness of it all and she might just die of happiness. So she takes them to bed as thoughts, in her head, and manufactures dreams in her sleep. In the morning, she passes them off as fanciful ideas, things that won’t happen, things that can never be, but deep inside, she knows that they mean more to her than that.

A dream is a wish your heart makes, after all.

* - - - the family honor

Farren Clark does not know who her mother is. She does not know that twenty years ago, her mother, then fifteen, sweated and pushed through hours of labour to produce a child she would never see again. She does not know that her father should not have been her father, if we review the morals of society. She does not know that her mother was her father’s favourite student.

She does not know that people would attempt to portray their relationship as seedy and immoral.
What she does know is that she has always been loved.

It sounds tacky, that this should be the overwhelming emotion of her childhood, but there is no two ways about it. Her father took her, upon orders from her mother’s parents, and fled. He left with a clipped “Good day”, in his British accent, and left the hospital without looking back at the mother of his child. Years on, when she would perch on his lap, always inquisitive and always looking for something to feed her overactive imagination, she would enquire about the whereabouts and the name of her birth mother. She would ask him why her family didn’t have a ‘mummy’. Her father would always manage to convince her that she didn’t need to know, so long as she knew that her mother would have loved her very much, that she reminded him of her. When she would shrug, satisfied and suitably distracted, Farren would leave him to nurse the hairline fractures in his heart regarding the tender issue, the angelic face with the swollen belly that he could not forget, and the worry about years to come. When the child would become naturally more curious and less easy to divert. Fortunately, he would continue to form a bond with his daughter that would give her a tremendously unfair insight into the changing of his moods, and her ability to read him. As she aged, so did her intelligence, and her perceptiveness, and when she mentioned her mother, she watched him break all over again. So she learned to avoid the issue. She knew she had not died. If her mother was dead and buried, then her father would have been able to tell her. He would not have adopted a completely torn look when she asked with plaintive tones, plying him with smiles and little cheek kisses. So she moved past it.

For the most part, Charles Clark found life very hard when he was first presented with his only daughter. He had not been against having children, but the circumstances which befell him surrounding Farren’s birth were not usually connected to the ideal circumstance he drew up in his head. He had always liked order. And maybe that was why his life went so drastically wrong when he met Lilianne Lawrence. His spontaneous mistake simply enforced to him, in his mind, that such things were bad for you. Farren always remembers him to be quite the organised man, sticking to schedules and constantly making lists. When he left the hospital holding a newborn Farren in his arms (The only name he had been given, Violet came later,) he was completely and utterly terrified. With both parents dead and no siblings, being forced to move away from a place he had called home for so long, he was ultimately alone. He could not explain himself to the poor victim in all of this, he could not reason with Lilianne’s parents. He was stuck in a rut, and it was his own fault for taking advantage. Made to feel like a predator, a pervert. If he had stayed he would have been chased out of town. If Farren had stayed, she would have been labelled for the rest of her life. He couldn’t think of what happened to Lilianne, because she did stay. During the first few days, the stress of the entirety of the situation - coupled with the new and previously unexplored territories of looking after a new baby - did prompt him into thinking of giving him. Then he realised that Farren’s mother had not given up. She had wanted to keep the baby. She had carried his child for nine months, and then her child had been wrenched from his arms. So how incredibly selfish would he be if, after all her efforts, he simply gave up. In these moments, when he knew that he owed it to her birth mother to raise the child right, he knew that he was not a predator. He was a decent human being, flawed in his design as are many based on the simple fact he made a mistake.

Farren is aware that she was very different in her childhood to what she is today. As a child, inhibitions and general consciousness of one’s appearance is lost. There is little embarrassment, unless you are caught doing something wrong. And then it’s only because you didn’t have enough stealth to cover your tracks properly. Farren was generally a very confident, boisterous young individual. Her father, worried that a lack of – for want of a better word – a classically considered “normally” family set-up (Him, and the nice old lady who lived next door and babysat when he had to work,) may inhibit her socially. She was sent to play dates and small gatherings of parents. She mixed with children well, and she was apparently gracious in sharing until it came down to her favourite cookies. There’s been no change in these character habits until today. It was only when she began to attend reception classes that Mr. Clark began to see her generally reserved nature make an appearance. There were the classic variety of children there on the first day of school. The criers, who simply became overtly miserable about almost anything concerning school, the tantrum-ers, who screamed and kicked, and the down right desperate Dans and Dianas (Doing all of the above, while clinging to their respective parents’ legs). Farren shuffled into the classroom, with her my little pony lunchbox and stared at her shoes for a very long time. She seemed fine, but when her father went to walk out the door, a little hand snapped out to tug at his coat sleeve. She turned wide blue eyes on him with a frantic urgency. When he asked her if she was feeling alright, she swallowed and nodded her head, but her eyes were screaming at him to quickly stow her away in his briefcase and take her away. She was always a silent sufferer. With a kiss to the top of his little girl’s head, Farren Violet Clark was thrust into the education system, tripping over her own shoelaces and awkward children along the way.

Reports from her teachers were much the same every year. A nice child, with plenty of personality that was just bursting out from behind her awkwardness. They encouraged him to get her to speak up more in school, to make more of a contribution to the lessons. He asked, of course, why this made a difference so long as she was actually contributing at all and her homework wasn’t suffering. They had no answer of course, but they said that they ‘just wanted her to mix’. It was around six years of age that she discovered the wonders of daydreaming. Generally, Farren was bright enough to at least pretend to be listening, but she was far too distracted to do the work properly. When her work began to suffer, Charles was called to the school, and he was informed that they ‘simply couldn’t get her to do anything to the standard they believed her capable of’. This was the start of a favourite pastime of hers, which her father instigated. Each night before she would go to bed would be time for her to be given free reign over her imagination. Charles Clark used his bond with his daughter to manipulate her young mind into learning something. He asked her that, should she have an imaginative thought, store it away in her young brain. He negotiated that, every night before they went to sleep, together they would concoct a story involving her latest imaginary adventures, the ideas tripping out of her head and into the air as words. He declared that he needed her to save every single last bit of that brilliant brain just for him, otherwise he would be terribly jealous. Surprisingly, this method worked for Charles Clark. However, there had already been problems with Farren’s ability to connect socially with the other children. Spending so much time in her own head had made her miss the integral part of bonding where children establish the hierarchy. Those who miss out on the auditions, don’t get the part, and in school, those who show no interest get left behind or trodden on.

Being a strong individual, the rest of her school life was spent largely as a solitary individual. Of course, she did make some friends, and the ones she did manage to acquire (She looks back and wonders how exactly she procured their affections,) stuck with her for a very long time. Farren was never a victim, because she made it appear that she did not consider her situation as a relative social outsider as a problem. A week before her thirteenth birthday, her official passage into adolescence and her pass to become a hormonal machine, her father sat her down in his study. He had been working less lately, but she noticed that the old woman from next year (Who never really aged at all, in Farren’s mind, even though upon initial meeting you could only have been in her late fifties,) seemed to be looking out for her a little more. She was not aware that her father had amassed a small fortune by starting his own business, and such a high profile man within the business world was required to attend many social mixers and publicity events. He was far from a celebrity, but he was definitely more important than he had been when they had first arrived together. Farren had shifted uncomfortably when he had sat her down next to him and taken her hand. He always did this when he needed to break bad news, and for a fleeting second, he thought that he was going to tell her that the old lady next door had died. But then he was pressing something into her palm, and she studied it with interest. A small, ornate hair slide, silver in colour with a delicately crafted star at the top. Farren had thought that it looked a little like a magic wand, and she had thanked her father, but asked what the occasion was. He explained to her that it had been her mothers, and he wanted her to have it because he had met someone he was very serious about. Farren did not have a problem with her father finding happiness, at all. She was never a particular selfish child, and he had seemed happier lately. Besides – what did she have to feel resentment over? Her new step-mother would not be replacing anything. He explained to her, quite simply, that he just wanted Farren to know that he was not forcing a maternal figure on her, although he thought that at this particular stage in her life, it really did help for there to be a female around the house. She was only nine years of age, at the time, but she was always forward, and her young mind was beginning to tackle issues that Charles really had no hope of combating.

Farren had been introduced to her father’s new girlfriend, and gradually, she had been induced into their house, along with her two daughters from a previous marriage. Her step-mother was not a particularly loving woman, and she could not say that she liked, her exactly, but she was bearable. Plus, it was pretty clear that her father loved her. Charles Clark made his girlfriend his wife, and they all moved to a bigger house on the outskirts of Walten City. For a while life was good. Her father seemed happy (Publicity had died down in the company as he was in talks about selling it with a foreign businessman), and there was a somewhat functional set-up within her house. The only downside for Farren was that she didn’t get to see little old Mrs. Hubermann from next door, because she no longer required a babysitter. Oh, and the obvious tension between herself and her step-family. But her father seemed so happy, and she never was one to complain, so she did as she was told and pretended to love it. He seemed so proud of himself that he had managed to secure someone who he hoped would be a good maternal influence on her. A matronly figure that she could discuss her problems with. However, things were not as rosy as they appeared to the outside world. Her father was getting to look more tired. He was older than her step-mother by a few years, not by a colossal amount, but enough to make a difference. Her father was diagnosed with prostrate cancer when she was twelve years of age. The day after her thirteenth birthday they were told that it was terminal. That they had caught it too late. Thankfully, her father was taken from her quickly at the age of forty-three, his bride now a widow. Farren was, understandably, crushed. Her father was her world, and her only relative. Her new in-laws were not family, to her. They did not know how to cheer her up, they did not know her history, and they didn’t seem like they wanted to know. In a single month, she felt as if her whole world had been tipped on it’s axis, like the titanic boat capsizing. For a lot of that time, she felt as if she were grappling furiously to hold onto the railings at the top of the boat, and she watched her memories and emotional stability slide away from her, down the ship deck towards the gaping hole left by the sinking ship. She felt as if her heart had been taken from her chest and pounded, then placed back inside, tender and hurt. Not broken, but severely bruised. Looking back, she realises that the signs of her father’s illness were there all along, they were simply too blinded by ‘normality’ to notice. Farren can’t help but think that if they were still a two-person family unit, she would have been paying enough attention for the penny to drop sooner. For both of them.

The funeral was rather unremarkable, and a surprisingly private affair for someone who had acquired a relatively high personal profile. Farren suspected that before his death, her father’s work ethic had began to suffer, and his star had began to tumble from the sky. He had not been pictured at too many parties, and his appearance with his wife was reserved to private business functions, rather than glitzy bashes. She wore her mother’s hairclip that day, and she couldn’t explain why. She thought that her father was still in love with her, despite the odd mystery that seemed to surround her conception. She thought it respectful, that she wear it, so that her mother could be there a little even if she couldn’t physically. She was disallowed to speak at the church because she was deemed too ‘unstable’ by her step-mother. Instead her step-in mother had stood before the mourners, mopping at her eyes with a handkerchief and trembling where she stood. And for some reason, Farren’s fair thinking went out of the window, and she became incensed that this woman dared to speak of her father, when she would never, ever know her father as Farren had. She had never known whether her step-mother genuinely loved her father, or whether she was just there for the money. She knew that for Charles Clark, there had never been a colossal amount of feeling, maybe a fondness, and a need for adult, female company, rather than a complete love. Maybe he just felt like he did it out of duty to his daughter, to give her some female guidance in a difficult transition period of her life. Farren had broken then, tears spilling from her eyes in hot, angry spurts, sobs wracking her slight frame. Mrs Hubermann had taken her hand and squeezed. She had not let go till Charles Clark was laid to rest in the cold, barren ground of the cemetery, in the coffin her step-mother had picked, wearing the clothes her step-mother had selected. Surrounded by her step-mothers family and friends. Farren had never felt more alone in her entire life. Her step-mother had negotiated with her, that as long as she attended counselling, that she may remain in the house. Their relationship had never been amazing, but Farren found that at this moment in time, to lose everything familiar to her would have been detrimental to her mental sanity. Her step-mother may not have shown her a tremendous amount of affection, and she seemed to rely on her step-daughter to do a lot of things around the house, but the prospect of loneliness, of solitude, frightened Farren beyond anything else. She could not bare to move out of the house that her remaining memories of her father resided in. So she stayed.

The remaining days at her high school were relatively unremarkable. When she finished there, achieving mostly the grades she wanted in all of her examinations, she was sent to her step-mother’s finishing school for the summer. She refined her manners, and her balance, and her etiquette, almost on auto pilot. Still raw and hurting. She attended college on a course that demanded a lot of her time. Upon graduating at eighteen with flying colours, she began to let a shop with the money her father had left her in her inheritance. Her dress making gives her pose to pour all of her thoughts into the detail of the fabric. She has to concentrate, or else the dress will be ruined, and she will have to start again. Everything has to be perfect. If she had known her mother, then she would have realised that there was a certain point in Lilianne’s life where she was forced to take control, also. Farren didn’t do it by attacking her body, but in her dress shop, during the design and manufacturing of a creation, she could control every single thing about the final outcome. Everything was in her hands along with her fabric scissors, and she liked that.

During her father’s life, he could not bring himself to sell their first little house, and when her step-mother suggested she move there, on her own, Farren’s initial reaction was to panic. Two had been a low number, but one was the loneliest number of all. But her step-mother’s prodding, and her psychologist’s agreement that she should attempt to gain some sort of independence in order to ‘move past’ her experience prompted her to move. She still lives there today, and her shops is managing fairly well. Unlike her adolescent years, where she spent most of her time in her room reading, she does make more of an effort to journey into the outside world. Her step-mother and her step-sisters still play a part in her life. Mostly to ask her to run errands here and there for then. Farren doesn’t know exactly why she complies to their demands, whether it’s an inability to say no, or the loyalty she imagines she owes them over her father, but she does them. It is only recently that she has began to think about her birth mother again. She finds herself more often than not wearing the slide when she is alone in her house, fingering the tiny little star, so delicate but representative of some hope. Even on his death bed, her father was unable to disclose the identity of her mother. Her eyes pleaded, as they had on her first day of school, but he shook his head softly, and simply said “my little flower”, with a glazed over look in his eyes. Of course, Farren always thought he was referring to her, but her step-mother ushered her out of the room at that point, apparently annoyed, and Farren became curious as to why her step-mother would take offense at a nickname. Despite the fact her step-mother had never tremendously liked her, she had never taken against the close bond between her husband and his only child. She hopes that someday soon, she’ll meet her Prince Charming, but most of all, she hopes that she can introduce that man to her mother. It’s a lot to ask for, she knows, but she’s a firm believer that no matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep on believing, the dream that you wish will come true.

* - - - connect the dots

“No, I mean it. Lucifer has his good points, too. For one thing, he... Well, sometimes he... Hmmm. There must be something good about him.”

Farren has had a large amount of experience, in her life, of people surprising her. Being the social anomaly, often the person watching from the sidelines, has taught her that there’s no such thing as a completely evil, or – at the opposite end of the spectrum – completely nice. People often construct a front to mask inner demons, or to highlight them, as a defence mechanism. Farren can’t blame people for not being one hundred percent of something all the time, because if she did then she’d be a hypocrite. No-one is ever one hundred percent happy, or sad, because human beings like to dwell on what has been, what could have been and what will never be. She generally likes to see the good in people, if she can. And she generally keeps an open mind regarding people. Unless they have been especially horrible towards her, she cannot judge a person. She would not say she encourages people to like others who perhaps have not been so nice to them in the past, because she knows that it’s hard to move on from things, but she doesn’t completely discourage leaving mistakes people have made in the past. She likes second chances, and despises people being needlessly horrible. In the film, although Cinderella’s step-mother is quite horrid to her most of the time, we never hear Cinderella say a bad word about her, or her step-sisters, even though she disagrees with them most of the time. She has a large amount of respect for other peoples’ feelings. Farren herself does not believe in tit for tat, which is why she encourages people to rise above the behaviour of others. Just because someone is completely horrible to you, it doesn’t mean you have to reciprocate the treatment. She believes in being the better person.

”Dreaming again. Chasing Lucifer? Catch him this time? That's bad.”

As completely dramatic as it sounds, Farren has never been particularly targeted by bullies in general. She has been bullied by society, for people not noticing her plight sometimes when she feels completely out of her league in a situation and just needs, well, rescuing if she’s quite honest. She hates a bully, though she’s often unaware that to a certain extent, her friends and the people she trusts bully her when they take advantage of her kind nature. She knows, on some level, that what they ask of her is wrong, but she doesn’t totally grasp the situation – that they are using her. She doesn’t get the obsession with revenge that some people have, because she reasons that everyone has their own motivations for being horrible, or having an attitude problem in general. She also knows that pretty much everyone puts on a facade, at some point, and she truly can’t blame them for wanting to be someone else. As Cinderella did in the film, donning her blue dress and escaping her world for one night, Farren does that when she hides behind her middle name. She pretends to be something she’s not, just as Cinderella pretends to be a well off party guest, dancing with the Prince.

“Oh, no. No, it isn't true. It's just no use. No use at all. I can't believe. Not anymore. There's nothing left to believe in. Nothing.”

Despite the generally hopeful attitude Cinderella possesses, and the way we see her portrayed as this almost indestructible young female who hardly ever lets things get to her, when she breaks down to the Fairy godmother, we see her true vulnerability. Farren has days that she loses all faith in the world around her. She dislikes people who make themselves victims, because as far as she’s concerned, there’s always someone worse off than yourself. She is an internal sufferer, but there’s only so much space she has. When she has days where everything gets too much, she usually goes to her hairdresser, or her manicurist, and she lets herself rant to them. There are moments when the unfairness of her life hits her. True, she is not the only person in the world to have grown up in a single parent family, with circumstances surrounding their childhood being unknown or inaccessible, but she is of the belief that she is one of the few who then have that single parent wrenched away from her. She always picks herself back up again, but anyone who is especially close to her witnesses her periods of disenchantment.

“Oh, well. What's a royal ball? After all, I suppose it would be frightfully dull, and-and-and boring, and-and completely... Completely wonderful.”

When Cinderella is first presented with the idea of going to the ball, she is dismissive. She knows she doesn’t belong there. She has, since her father died, been the outsider, in her family home, and in society in general. Farren herself has suffered the feeling of being on the outside, looking in. Of course, part of this is her fault, because her demeanour is not suited to attracting lots of attention. Either way, because of her social awkwardness (Unless she is hiding behind Violet), she seems to have rejected society. She has always been the type of person to dismiss typical customs. She hates liking something just because everyone else does. She can follow rules, it’s not conformity she’s afraid of, but she refuses to be a part of the clichés that often sweep the nation. She has no opinion on things that typically enrage others from her age group, or she is opposed, and this had been the case since her childhood. She has convinced herself that she didn’t want to go to all the parties she was never invited too, that she dislikes the music she never had the confidence to dance outrageously to. But in reality, she does believe in clichés, and she is a closet hopeless romantic. Despite knowing, and voicing, that society is ‘corrupt’, as are men’s morals, these days, she’s still holding out for the day where she meets her Prince Charming, and he pulls out her chair for her and takes her coat. She cannot deny that when she hears of people going out to nightclubs (A place where she doesn’t typically feel comfortable), and getting so drunk they can’t remember the night before, she scoffs at the fact they declare it a “fabulous night” when they probably can’t remember it to be sure. But she can’t deny she envies them that they are able to let themselves go so completely.

Throughout the film we do see Cinderella sticking up for herself against her cruel step-sisters. She also seems rather smug when she reads from the scroll and states that every woman in the kingdom is to attend the ball. When the Prince later visits with the glass slipper, she is determined that she will try on the glass slipper. Similarly, Farren is not afraid of standing up for herself or her rights. Being the quiet one throughout school, her views were often overlooked, which means, as an adult, she’s more aware of people attempting to sway her or bring her around to their way of thinking. If she really feels she’s being bullied into a decision, or is being treated unfairly, she will speak up and argue her point or simply make it known she’s unimpressed with the situation. Oddly, she cannot recognise when people are asking too much of her, mostly because it’s usually the people she knows the best who take advantage of her unwillingly, because they are aware of her giving nature. Cinderella works hard for her stepmother, but, again, she doesn’t complain. The only time within the film she voices complaint is when her step mother’s decision directly affects something she desperately wants – to go to the ball. Farren wants to go to the figurative ball in her head, which means to her, a peaceful existence with as little hiccups as possible (She’s already experienced enough, thank you). So she glosses over the things that other people see. Similarly, despite the fact she is aware sometimes of people taking advantage of her, she also takes advantage of her friends. In the film, Cinderella relies on the mice to make her dress, and to do small things for her. They do it without question, because they are fond of her. Farren is usually so busy running around doing things for other people, or for her business clientele, that she often forgets things like the basics. Friends are forever having to drop her off food from the shops, or basic necessities like soap, shampoo. The little things that she forgets. The saying “I get by with a little help from my friends” really does apply in Cinderella’s case.

Evidently, Farren’s ability to dream her life away if someone let her is also similar to Cinderella. Cinderella escapes her life through her dreams, as does Farren. Farren’s frequent dreams as, as far as she is concerned, and indication that she is determined to accomplish more than she already has – that she has something to gain. If she has to dream, then she wants to make things better for herself. She has yet to reach her plateaux, or her metaphorical ceiling regarding her ability, and her happiness. When she stops dreaming, she knows she will be content with her life. She also sees her dreams as a form of rebellion. Despite knowing that she can’t will everything her way, she knows that as long as she does dream, that she hasn’t been completely broken by life, she still possesses faith that things can and will get better. And that makes her happy. She doesn’t understand why people have such a problem with her imagination, because it brings her a lot more contentment to wake up with a smile on her face after a pleasant scenario she has played through, than to wake up on the wrong side of the bed with an empty mind.

And now we’ll move onto the more obvious comparisons.
I picked Hayden Panettiere as the playby, for the simple fact that she reminded me of Cinderalla’s colouring. She has the classic light eyes, blonde hair combo, without looking too blonde. There’s more of a sandy/golden blonde colour to her hair, and that’s closer to Cinderella’s colouring in the film. The differences of course, are that Hayden has green eyes. I’ve made them blue in the app, simply to suit the character more. I also made Farren a lot shorter than Cinderella (Who appears to be quite tall,) in the film. It fits her character better considering the height of her birth mother.

Also, despite her being made to work as a maid, Cinderella is elegant. She’s not out of place in a society ball, after all. Farren went to finishing school, and so embodies all of the elegant manners of a lady, despite the fact she’s usually the one making dresses for the people who go to the balls she dreams of attending.

Cinderella also has quite a way with animals. Farren also has a fondness for any house pet. When she was younger she had an interest in birds (Jokingly named the bird whisperer, by her friends,) and she can never bring herself to set inhumane mouse traps for the visitors she sometimes gets – despite the fact the humane ones mean they always find their way back. The only animal she feels she has difficult with are cats, like Cinderella experiences with Lucifer. They’re just too sly, in Farren’s opinion.

Of course, Cinderella is also similar to Farren in the most obvious way for the simple fact both of them share parents who are dead to them. They have both faced the tragedy of seeing the only parent known to them be snatched away. Even though Farren’s mother is not dead, she is too distant in Farren’s mind to be considered as alive; far too much of an enigma. Just as Cinderella keeps her mother’s dress, despite never meeting or remembering the woman, Farren also keeps Lilianne’s hair slide, for the simple fact that she feels it brings her closer to her. She has feelings for her mother, even though she has never met her, and both Cinderella and Farren honour their mothers by keeping a possession of theirs.

Also, like Cinderella, Farren also knows the pressures of the clock ticking in the background. Because of her inability to say no to people, she constantly finds herself under stress as to getting things done on time, so as not to let people down. Cinderella is set time limits by her step-mother to complete her chores, and of course, she must be gone from the ball by midnight.

For my final point. Farren often hides behind her alias of Violet, her middle name. As previously mentioned in the application, Cinderella hid behind a blue/violet dress when she went to the ball. Both Cinderella and Farren feel like they belong in certain situations, or feel more comfortable, when they are hiding behind something else.

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[Farren Violet Clark]

* - - - the stuff heroes are made of

Farren sat in her car at the traffic lights, waiting for the lights to fade from amber into green. She drummed her fingers against the sun-warmed leather encasing the car wheel, her rings clacking together to make a strange racket. She disliked silence, and her radio was currently in need of repair. She thought if she sang with the windows down to no music at all, people in the neighbouring lane to her might think she’d actually lost it this time, once and for all. So instead, she rifled through the archives in her mind. Her inner itinerary of things she had to do today. Largely, the list was comprised of favours she owed to everyone else. Her shop was essentially slap bang in the middle of town, meaning she was surrounded by various outlets people always seemed to want something from. She wasn’t complaining, but on days like today, when she had a list as long as her arm of ‘favours’, or ‘things she could do if she had five minutes to spare’, she wondered if half the people who expected her help would assist her if she needed a helping hand. The shop was in darkness, when she arrived, but the window was lit by the pale sunlight caressing the glass, highlighting the tailored contours of the wedding dress inside. It was her favourite. Her favourite that she had ever made, and she had fallen in love with many of them. It sat, surveying the world, on a faceless mannequin, that she imagined had her blue eyes and golden blonde hair whenever she looked at it. Because if she were getting married right now, it would be in that dress. She could keep it, savour every detail when she removed it from the bag and ran her finger over each painstakingly applied pearl. Hours of hard labour, sore fingers. Intricate sewing. But most of all, satisfaction. She couldn’t deny that she had considered it. Considered keeping it for the day that she could waltz down the aisle with it.

Last night, she had seen herself, the dress no longer adorning a faceless bride, but herself. Her hair piled on top of her head, make-up perfect. The curve of her neck long and elegant above bare shoulders. The church doors opening to reveal her, white, pristine and perfect and illuminated by the light pouring in through stain glass windows. For last night, she had been beautiful. She had been happy, and she had been in love. Her Prince Charming was faceless, but he radiated warmth. Her first dance had been followed by a waltz with her father, alive and well, despite the obvious difference to reality. He had told her that he was proud of her, and that she looked beautiful. Her step-family had been at the wedding, and predictably, had offered no congratulations. They had simply sat there, politely disinterested, with a nod of approval and a grunt more than a compliment. But she had known she looked beautiful. She had known that her husband was...

She snapped back to reality. Farren, darling, someone rang last night to ask you to reserve it. She slid the key she had been sub-consciously rummaging for in her purse into the lock, turning it to the right and pushing a little at the door. It gave way and she was greeted with the cold, stale air of a shop left to go retail stagnant over night. It looked like a little princess’s closet in here. There were dresses in every shade, ever length, every degree of sparkle imaginable, with shoes, bags and accessories to match. It was a tulle and satin jungle, with Swarovski monkeys in the velveteen tree branches. Sometimes, she got a little overwhelmed by the puffiness of it, the completely overstated elegance. And then she’d home in on a particularly understated dress she had made. Simple, but beautiful in its own way. These dresses always reminded her of herself, a little overshadowed and out of their depth against the huge skirts and detailed, beaded bodices. She felt cruel, sometimes, putting them out on display with the others. It always pleased and surprised her that these dresses seemed to sell the quickest. She found that the people who purchased them were often overtly beautiful. They had doubtlessly been told, at several points in their life, that they didn’t need overdone, they needed decadence in simplicity. They wanted them to give shape and life to something, not to be the picture inside an ornate frame. Either that, or the people who bought said dresses were simply incredibly comfortable in themselves. She admired their confidence, and their ability to root out the simple things that were perhaps more effective. The uncomplicated and the straightforward. The open book that could hide nothing beneath layers of fabric. She was a little like these dresses, rather open, in many ways, and seemingly overshadowed by others. Put in places where she often felt inferior. But the dress shop was her domain, and she was the creator. She was in her element, and so she was not intimidated by the huge dresses, or the people with bigger personalities who poured themselves into them.

She waded through the shop floor, casually flicking the lights on as she approached switches, and turning the tags on dresses to face outwards. She was not an extravagant boutique quite yet because she hadn’t hit the reputation that would allow her to be. She was getting there, little by little, as word spread. On her desk was the phone number of the young female who had bounded past the shop, only to reverse and do a double take to see Farren’s dream dress. She had not come inside, instead, she had gazed at the dress in awe, pressing her hand to the glass as if she could communicate with it. As if she could vow that she’d come back for it. Farren had watched, in interest, as she had yanked a man towards the window by the hand, and she had pointed at it, ecstatically. He had been checking his watch frantically, and she had seemed annoyed. But she pressed a soft pliant kiss to his lips and promised things Farren couldn’t quite understand, and then they had been off. The woman had rung later in the evening to ask her to pretty please reserve the mound of material for a day, two days at most, and in return she would give an extra hundred dollars for the dress, and also use the boutique for her bridesmaid dresses. Farren had laughed down the line at the excitement in her very breath, assuring the woman that it would still be there when she arrived to pick it up.

When she arrived to pick it up and try it on, Farren had tried not to feel envious. She had looked truly beautiful, the dress a perfect contrast to the woman’s mahogany hair and olive skin tone. As she had packed it into the specially tailored bag for Miss Walker-soon-to-be-Mrs-Smith (The girl had babbled excitedly, and Farren had made a joke where she said she hoped this Mr and Mrs Smith weren’t trying to kill one another), she had pressed her hand apologetically to the material, running her finger down the bodice one more time. She was apologising, it appeared to the dress, but mostly to herself. Because she just realised she just wasn’t the type of girl to wear a dress like this. When she had looked at it on the other woman, she had known, because she was her polar opposite, and it looked breathtaking. It was the dress. She was too plain for it, too pale for pure white. Farren told herself that it was alright, that she could move past that.

But she knew that when she slept tonight, she’d be dancing in that dress. No matter how much she tried to tell her head differently. Her heart was just too damned obstinate.

* - - - the mouse behind the ears

your name: Amy =] (Smiley face optional xP)
gender: Una chica.
rp experience: About 2 years now? Maybe longer?
age: 16
how you found us: I got recommended by a friend of mine.
(sorry, I couldn't fit the whole thing in one post! "/)

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[MARV !!]

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