Post by Deleted on Apr 26, 2017 14:26:14 GMT -7
hello there, my name is aras ollivander but you can call me odd. i'm 35 so that makes me a graduate of hogwarts, where i resided in ravenclaw house. you could say i'm intelligent, knowledgeable, and witty but i personally think that i am devoted, disciplined, and melodramatic. people say i look a lot like dan stevens, but i don't really see it...
aras ilyaa ollivander
nickname:
odd (from the pronunciation of his name, odd-us), ollie ollie oxen free (because childhood is a strange time)
age:
35
date of birth:
27 august, 1988
gender:
wizard
blood status:
pureblood
sexuality:
panromantic asexual
house:
ravenclaw
occupation:
owner of ollivander’s; wandmaker
wand:
12.75 inches, beech, dragon heartstring; supple
playby:
dan stevens
appearance:
- aras is freakishly tall, standing at six feet, nine inches; he’s a fan of hunching his shoulders to hide his full height, since it tends to intimidate people
- aras always has a beard – most of the time it’s scruffy, but sometimes he trims it more neatly
- as far as style goes, aras tries to look put-together. he wears button downs underneath his robes most of the time, and always has on beat up converse sneakers.
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personality
likes:
acting, animals (especially dogs), bike riding, felix felicis, his little sister, roller skating, learning, matching people to their wands, playing guitar or piano, sharing knowledge, wands and wandmaking, when his muscles are sore after a workout
dislikes:
addiction, bright lights, charming people, cigarettes and cigarette smoke, death, gambling, guilt, loneliness, losing, professional sports (especially quidditch)
erised:
bring his mother’s killer to justice; get his father released from azkaban; continue the family business.
amortentia:
any kind of wood, copper, jack daniels
boggart:
causing the death of someone he cares about; returning to gambling.
overall personality:
aras ollivander is, first and foremost, a disciple of wandlore. he knows wands the way most people know their closest friends; intimately and easily. it’s easy to pass this talent off as just that – a talent – especially since his family is known for their unique relationship with wands, but aras didn’t get good at what he did by accident. he spent the first seventeen years of his life doing precious little other than studying wands, and his life was devoted to that cause. devotion is something that aras is no stranger to; he’ll give his entire heart to a project, and he won’t stop until he sees the end of it. trying to step between aras and the person or thing that he adores likely won’t end well. while he’s not violent by nature, aras has a temper, and even worse, the wits to make sure that no one realizes that he’s mad until it’s too late. when he’s angry, aras is cold and calculating, nothing like the charming man that many people see when they walk through the doors of his shop.
aras can indeed be charming – it’s mostly his acquaintances and customers that see his silver tongue. he’s excellent at seeing the positive side of things, especially wands, when he bothers to look for them. the thing about aras is that he doesn’t like charming, because it feels an awful lot like lying, and he doesn’t like being dishonest. aras doesn’t have many friends because his charm, which is often what attracts people in the first place, dulls after the first few meetings. if they stick around despite his lack of charm, aras’s few friends see his discipline and passion. he’s a quiet friend, but having a family of hufflepuffs has also made him value loyalty a fair bit more than your average ravenclaw, and aras is a steadfast as they come. aras doesn’t care much about what other people say about him, but as soon as people try to say something against his friends or family, he can be extremely protective, sometimes to the point of violence.
part of the reason that aras is able to devote himself to something so easily is because he’s an extremely disciplined. when he wants to do something, he gets it done by sheer force of will. trying to stop aras from getting what he wants is like trying to stop a speeding train – impossible, and likely to do you more harm than good. aras puts a lot of pressure on himself, but whether that or the disciplined attitude came first is like asking if the chicken or the egg came first. addiction was the one thing that was stronger than aras’s discipline, and he’s constantly reminded of that fact. some would argue that it was his controlling nature that caused aras to fall into addiction in the first place – the equal and opposite reaction of always having to have everything under control and his way, the sort of release valve for the constantly building pressure. if that’s the case, then aras is destined for relapse. he’s terrified of his addiction and letting it hurt the people he’s close to, especially since there are precious few of them in the first place. being an addict has only made aras more of a strict, disciplined individual, because he's afraid, never wants to lose control again.
letting him have his way is the only way to stop his stubborn streak, and because of that, aras can seem like a bit of a brat. he doesn’t particularly mind those accusations, because he knows that there are worse people, and that he’s fighting for worthy causes. if people want to disparage him for doing that because he’s willing to use any and all methods along his way, that’s their problem, not his. aras’s tendency to be overdramatic doesn’t help with some people’s perception of him as a brat, but it does make for a great hobby.
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personal history
mother:
ellie-mae ollivander née max, deceased at 60
father:
gallivan ollivander, 71, retired and currently incarcerated
siblings:
magdalena ellie-mae ollivander, 19, three broomsticks waitress
pets:
posh, a leonberger
cisco, a leonberger puppy
history:
no one ever doubted that the firstborn ollivander child would be a boy. his father was, as was his father before him, and his father before that. it was just a family thing, something undeniable. it wasn’t surprising. what was surprising, however, was his name. generations of ollivanders had named their sons names beginning with a g, stretching so far back that it seemed almost like a law. choosing the name aras for his son could have been gallivan’s way of pegging his son as a black sheep, but it wasn’t. he was wanted, and he was wanted as more than just an heir to one of the most successful businesses known to wizard kind.
aras spent most of his infancy and childhood around wands. if he wasn’t eating or sleeping (or even sometimes when he was), he was in his father’s shop. even before he left for hogwarts, aras was beginning to learn about wandlore, which was good, because there was a lot to learn. neither of aras’s parents were surprised when he was placed in ravenclaw; he was thirsty for knowledge in a way that so few were, though his thirst was greatest when it came to wands and wandlore. he examined any and every wand he could get his hands on, inspecting the work of his forefathers as well as other wandmakers. he took pages and pages of notes based just on his own observations, and sent them back to his father for his perusal and correction. it was an obsession, and everyone knew it. his school work suffered because of it; aras was obviously bright, but throughout the time at school, he barely scraped by in most of his classes, since he'd rather look at wand books than history books or charms books or whatever else he was supposed to be studying. his social life wasn't much better; he had some friends, but most of them understood that the moment the library got a new book about wandlore, they were going to be ignored for weeks as the ollivander boy pored over the new knowledge. aras couldn’t be quenched, and by the time he exited school, he was more than qualified to work as an apprentice in his father’s shop. more than one of his classmates made snide comments to him about following in his father’s footsteps like a good little boy, probably because they were upset that they had to do the same thing but weren’t half as passionate about their future work.
the one little glitch in aras’s plan to work hard and not do much else was the fact that his mother was having another baby. magdalena was the precious daughter that aras’s mother had always wanted, and he was half-tempted to let himself become jealous of the apple of his parents’ eyes. he didn’t, though, because while his parents loved magda, he loved her just as much, if not more. aras had never really let himself think about family or having one of his own, but helping raise his little sister showed aras that there was more to the world than work, and that one day, he could be a father – and a good one, at that.
those thoughts were on hold, though, because aras was working, and working hard. he knew that he was going to take over the shop one day, and he needed to know all of the ins and outs by the time his father was ready to step down – aras didn’t want to be the one keeping the man out of retirement, after all. what the ravenclaw failed to notice was that, unlike before, the obsession wasn’t a healthy one (if there is such a thing). it kept him up late at night and he constantly felt like a coiled snake, ready to strike at anyone who so much as looked at him wrong or doubted his skills with wands. the fact that magdalena, his one source of unequivocal enjoyment, had left for hogwarts around that same time, did not help the situation.
if you asked aras how he ended up at a casino, or why he had gone there in the first place, he wouldn’t know. what he did know, though, was that when he was there, he felt better. casinos are designed to make time stop, and they did their job when it came to aras. forgetting about the world when he analyzed the lay of the cards or ran the numbers of his chances to win roulette was a blessed, blessed break from the stress he was putting on himself. at first it started as just a hobby, something that he did on the weekends when he was bored, but it spiraled downwards. the spiral was slow enough that no one else really seemed to notice, especially since aras had taken over the bookkeeping as part of his slow ascension to head of the store, but quick enough that aras certainly noticed. and he ignored it, the way he ignored the rest of the world. he knew he was an addict, but for once in his life, he didn’t want to be in control of everything, and he didn’t want to be the one to have to claw his way out by his own power. his parents, bless their hearts, seemed to think that he had a girlfriend (actually, he was convinced that they were convinced he had a boyfriend, which was why they didn't confront him about it) and let him be, not pushing when aras grunted his responses to where he had been all night or all weekend. his friends were harder to fool, especially since they knew that aras wasn't into the whole dating scene, but they too couldn't figure out what was wrong until it was too late. submitting to his addiction was one of the lowest points in aras’s life, but the consequences that it would have would send him even lower.
it was just one bet. one bet in a long line of similar bets, but one bet. appleby arrows against the chudley cannons. the game that got his mother killed. aras knew that he was going to be in trouble with his bookies if he didn’t start coughing up money, but since he had no money to cough up, he had just accepted his fate. he was expecting to have a finger or two broken, but that was nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a little bit of magic. what he hadn’t expected was for them to go after his family. from what aras had gathered, it was only meant to be a warning, but a knife had slipped, and… and his mother had paid the price for aras’s lack of control with her life. even worse, aras hadn’t come forward to say anything, hadn’t admitted to his problem, and with no other suspects, his father had been arrested. aras’s life was ruined, and it had been his own doing. worse, magda’s life was ruined, and she had been blameless.
the next few months, aras was caught in a whirlwind of legal problems and self-loathing. magdalena moved away, not that he could blame her, and he was left cleaning up his own mess. and that started with getting sober. unlike many other things, aras could not just bully his addiction into submission, and that was maddening. he never went back, though, no matter how many times he wanted to. the memory of his mother’s body, and the thought of his little sister going the same way, was enough to keep aras sober. he went to gambler's anonymous meetings, but more as a way to prove to his friends (who had finally figured out that addiction was his achilles heel) that he was getting help, since his own haunting memories (and the fear that there would be another body in the graveyard if he returned) were enough to keep him on the straight and narrow. aras shoveled as much money as he could into paying back his debts, but that still wasn’t enough, and any more would cause the family business to go under, a thought that aras couldn’t stand. he laid low, and hoped that magi was doing the same. getting two dogs – a guard dog and a trainee guard dog – was an impulse by that did nothing to help aras feel more secure in his own home, but at least it curbed some of the loneliness that came with an empty house and a mountain of regret.
after finally digging himself out of the hole he had created, at least somewhat, aras finally had the time to look around and realized that the entire world was just about as screwed as he was. the killings, the kidnappings, the attack on king’s cross, the triwizard tournament – all of those had flown past him in the haze that was addiction and its aftermath. even now, aras doesn’t really know what he’s supposed to be doing to help fix the world, when he can’t even manage to fix himself.
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alias
name:
puck
age:
19
time zone:
est
reference:
top sites
other characters:
cecelia rousseau, dustin bainbridge, emilia pond, fred weasley, georgiana linley, imogen zhu, jamie greyback, lysander scamander, natalia lestrange, oscar gauthier, poet dmello, royal shacklebolt, séamus krakauer, theodosia washington, viola chase, xanthippe meagle, zytka kamuntu
