#the garden in question is actually my parents but Minni lived part of her life there as well

[artharakka]

“Suru on eläin, jota ei voi koskaan kesyttää kokonaan.” ... “Ilves nostaa päätään ja tuijottaa minua. Se räpyttää silmiään kerran, toisen. Niissä hehkuu Maan auringon kadotettu valo, joka siilautuu vihreiden lehtien läpi. Sen sisuksista nousee matala, vaimea kehräys. Se näykkäisee sylissäni lepäävän käteni syrjää kevyesti, lempeästi, nuolaisee sitten peukaloani.” — Emmi Itäranta. Kuunpäivän kirjeet

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“Grief is an animal that can never be wholly tamed.” ... “The lynx raises its head and stares at me. It blinks once, twice. In its eyes glows the lost light of Earth’s sun, filtered through green foliage. From its depths rises a low, faint purr. With its teeth it nips the back of my hand resting on my lap, lightly, gently, and then licks my thumb.” — Emmi Itäranta. The Moonday Letters. Quote tranlated by me (unofficial)

[diveronarpg]

Congratulations, NAY! You’ve been accepted for the role of JULIET. Admin Minnie: My arms are wide open for you to return to us, Nay! I am so unbelievably thrilled to have your Juliana join us again. You capture her completely, without reservation and without a bit of doubt — and for good reason. You understand Juliana in a way that honestly leaves me speechless. And the fact that you wrote a whole new app that incorporated the darkness you’ve discovered in Juliana along the way? The potential, the precipice that she stands on now with so much to lose and even more to gain? Wow. Nay, I’m so glad you’re back. I can’t wait to weep reading your writing yet again. Please read over the checklist and send in your blog within 24 hours.

WELCOME TO THE MOB.

OUT OF CHARACTER

Alias | nay.

Age | twenty-one, but my birthday is next month (january 8th!) so i'm already telling people i'm twenty-two. or eighty? spiritually, i'm eighty & i'm knitting these days, so.

Preferred Pronouns | she/her.

Activity Level | my life is something of a circus, i'll be real with you. i live between two houses, i'm trying to get through my final year of undergrad while trying to earn money writing, fighting mental illness (aren't we all?) and basically having a midlife crisis every other week. but, like. an 8. i love y'all such a lot, you can't keep me away ;)

Timezone | gmt+5.

How did you find the RP? | i… don't even remember at this point. it's just home.

Current/Past RP Accounts | to quote Hamlet, act III, scene iii, line 87? no.

IN CHARACTER

Character | juliet / juliana rosa capulet.

J U L I A N A | the name is chosen before she is even born. picked out of a Bible resting askew atop rounded-belly, like a flower from a garden: Juliana. she is named in devotion to the once-suffering patron saint of sickness, Saint Juliana of Nicomedia (now, Naples). she is only a squirming bundle, already carrying a legend of martyrdom through a namesake.

R O S A | what smelt sweeter than a rose? her mother adored them – and thus, there could never be anything sweeter ever again. so sweet, many hearts yearn to pick them. enchanted by the intoxicating perfume, many lovers cut themselves on these thorns.

C A P U L E T | who truly understood the magnitude of a name? a name of Anglo-Saxon origin; coming from a wooded area beside a chapel, hailing from a family who once-lived in a village named Caplewood. a prophecy, then—taken, and bastardized: paupers evolving into the kings, a chapel beside no more than a house to their sins.

What drew you to this character? | i remember fragments of the last time i answered this question. this time, i made it a point not to read my old application, because if i was going to reapply? i wanted to do it the right way, go through the whole process, start on a fresh page. that said, i do recall my own surprise at a reincarnation of juliet capulet being my character of choice. i remember my own poetic gibberish; this romanticisation of colours & versatility, the whole universe inside juliana that causes her so much pain. somehow, after the span of only months of writing her, i can't answer it the same. somehow, a paltry chunk of time has turned an idea i was enchanted by into a person. somehow… it made the experience of reading her biography again, after all this time, a more impactful one. and perhaps that's the mark of rosey being the wretchedly talented wordsmith we must suffer angst for loving, but i found myself picking up on details i had missed, and lines i had forgotten to be arrested by – and somehow, a character i had, swathed in my own contradictory brand of hubris, thought i knew like the back of my hand? she still inspired me. i still had ideas flooding in my head, and love swelling my heart. i think that's the mark of a well-written character, every bit as much as it is an indicator that the character is one you can write with integrity.

thrive. ghost. onlooker, helplessness, obsession, lamented, saint, blood, symbol, succumbing.

isn't it absolutely prophetic?

what draws me to juliana is her complexity, at the heart of it. i love the boundless possibility of her; this dainty, precious, precocious slip of a girl—not just a girl, but not quite a woman yet—and the enormous weight of a last name, which really has nothing on the burden that is the heart she carts around in her chest. there's something peculiar about her, an eeriness about how truly, genuinely tender she is. and as easy as her tenderness is to mistake for weakness, she isn’t. she is the embodiment of love – and much as it is absolutely the greatest source of pain to her, it is her greatest strength. love is what makes her, and it is what has the power to completely undo her: to a different version of herself, harder or softer, or undone.

i’d see it as a great privilege to get to explore her story.

What is a future plot idea you have in mind for the character? |

TRIGGER WARNING: suicide mention, mental illness mention, postpartum depression mention, drowning mention

LOVER / her heart is her biggest strength, just as it is her biggest weakness. it always has been. just like it was her mother's. it's why her father worries so much about her – and how can she begrudge him for it? she worries about herself, too. jia capulet had had a bleeding heart; where had that landed her? six feet under is where. and thus, they worry, worry for the ways that she is her mother's daughter. but juliana worries about the ways in which she is her father's daughter, too. she loves him so dearly, so reverently, that she has been his dutiful puppet. she has been a figurehead, a symbol, a caricature. she has smiled… she has been smiling for an eternity, for an audience that never stops watching. she worries, still, about how much war steals: time, and lives, and this city that is their home. there is some irony to it, she thinks; the girl they say has everything, so terrified of loss.

› juliana is so thoroughly a person led by her heart. moreover, she is a compulsive overthinker. she nitpicks (internally, constantly), she analyses, she wonders and lays awake at night plagued by questions she cannot answer, and answers she knows not questions to. it isn't a surprise that her own story — i.e. the people she comes from — is something that weighs on her, heavily, and shapes her, influencing her thoughts, perceptions and choices. 

this is a self-driven plot, i know, but i want to headcanon that her mother, jia, suffered from a devastating case of postpartum depression after she prematurely conceived juliana's little sister. italy is actually a frontrunner in hands-on understanding of mental health without the questionable committing to an institution, but with that said, jia capulet wasn't italian. she was chinese, and didn't grow up in a society where she would at all be open to entertaining the idea of mental illness perpetuated by pregnancy. it is incredibly difficult to help someone who does not want to be helped – and all juliana and cosimo could do for her was pray. and when they failed her, and she and the baby girl were found floating in the lake behind capulet manor, all they could do was hide the story from the world, the first secret between father & daughter. it is a personal headcanon of mine that juliana bears an eerie resemblance to her mother, and that doesn't help the difficulty of separating her own identity from the trauma that's tainted her childhood, and the trauma currently tainting her adolescence.

i'm dying to explore how it produces an adulthood for her. as much as i love a good coming of age story, juliana's needs to be something darker. i want to see what she takes from her parents, what she tucks away, what she tosses aside – and who is left, ultimately, after it all.

ALL MY FLOWERS GREW BACK AS THORNS / two years: that's how long it's been since juliana's world was turned upside down. oh, of course she'd heard the rumours. of course she'd heard snippets of conversations, caught the caution in some eyes, malice in others, in too many others. she had never asked questions for the answers she was given, had she? but an evening in her father's study — cosimo's brows furrowed, and vivianne's arched, expectant — and reality was unveiled, all the same. beneath the cover of those luscious roses, nurtured and adored, was reality. go on, they had urged her. la principessa was to get her hands dirty, to seize the opportunity she had never been brave enough to ask for – and now, those hands bled, reality's gritty red, ruddy & relentless, oozing out of thorn-impalement, those puncture wounds. it stings. it stings, it stings, it stings, over & over. how much can she take?

› the biggest overarching plot-point for juliana's i story that i would so like to explore is the changes in her as the war progresses, and how it transforms her. i genuinely believe that she is, at heart, a good person. she is also, however, a good person who has grown up with a very basic, one-dimensional view of morality and goodness and their opposites, in the way that children are. in large part, that's attributed to the extremely sheltered way juliana has been raised, protected so suffocatingly, and that's why i understand that it hits her and begins to shape her immediately, going from the extreme of being in the dark about everything and then essentially becoming the figurehead for a war that has been going on for way, way longer than she has even known about it. there is a difference between idealism and optimism, and the lesson to understand it is a painful one. i would like to put her through that, and peel back the layers of her naiveté to unveil the woman she must grow into.

GLORY & GORE / verona is falling apart. lives are being lost – innocent, guilty… who is man to decide, what is to be done with Dio's creations? juliana was raised to believe in God. she was raised to respect the universe, to do her duty to spread kindness, to work to spread good fortune where it was lacking and to be generous with it. is a gun in her hand one day meant to change who she is at heart? who is this violence for, for whose good? what is to come of it all? is power ever enough? will it ever be? who will be left standing? will anyone? the streets run too red. this is not her verona.

› i would love to see juliana, at a point, actually take over the reins from cosimo. now, the possible events that could lead up to that as endless: a death, a coup, a voluntary succession? i'm here for any of it. but a plot i'm very interested in is seeing juliana, who has spent a majority of time being rigid, and uncomfortable, too caught up in a holier than thou take on mob reality taking on power and defining it for herself now that the war has begun to very personally take from her – first, the near-assassination of her father, then vivianne's blood on her hands, and now, her beloved rafaella. i want to see how she balances her humanity and diplomacy, if it truly isn't possible to both be in power and not be corrupted by it. i want to see who follows her, who would pledge allegiance to her, and what she would do of those who do not. spicy plot, right?

Are you comfortable with killing off your character? | so long as she dies for love.

IN DEPTH

In-Character Para Sample: 

NOTE: i cheated and stole an excerpt of my own thread for juliana. oops?

Excruciating awareness seemed to be her stock in life. One would think—as, frankly, Juliana herself often did, excruciatingly aware of her mind’s rapid, ricocheting song—that it would be she was used to it by now. But she was no such thing, and it was because of this that she found herself ultimately unable to detach herself from what a companion of hers thought of her, unable to keep from recording even the most minute of details, some of them caught out of the corner of sharp, dark eyes. Even though Juliana Capulet knew that she thought she knew better than to care what anyone thought of her, given how routinely she exploited popular perception for the benefit of her own agenda, she had only ever been able to claim the victory of divorcing what people thought of her from what she knew of herself.

Lately, that hadn’t been feeling like much. A victory, still, but only a half-baked one. One that didn’t keep her from feeling an elementary sort of embarrassed shame, like she was a child who’d got caught with her hand in the cookie-jar. Perhaps that was only because what she knew of herself was a chapter already passed by… and the person who sat in front of Katarina DuPont was not the person she knew. This person was not Juliana alone; they did not sit together to share conversation about art and religion, about culture and cuisine, about music or magic. They sat together: the future Capulet mafiosa and a soldier in the army she would inherit. It was simple and as complicated as that.

At least there will still be wine, Juliana thought, halfheartedly.

Intravenous therapy was more than what was necessary to stay the inner-workings of the heiress’ mind, unfortunately. And there wasn’t enough chilled glasses of it poured down her throat to keep Juliana from wondering what it was that Katarina DuPont knew of her. Whether there was a file out there that encompassed all the myriad reasons in which she was the awful, doubtful fit for leading the Capulet mob, and had been from the first moment that she had finally been told about it. Whether that supposed file would be a less pathetic read even with a couple of pages worth of additional material on a traumatically-revised mindset pressed between its lips in offering. Would it make a difference? After nearly three years worth of distastefully looking down upon a history begun by an ancestor called Lucius Capulet; a man who had taken power into his own hands, with a vengeful spirit burning from years worth of mistreatment setting it alight – and then eating through it, like fire through paper, until what he resented in power-wielding elite that brought as much ruination as it did opulence is what his initiative rotted down to. Three years, and all her judgement bowed its self-righteous head down to was, what? Ah, agony that altered her. A night—one night—and she was no longer the same. Did it make her enlightened, then, to be awoken by her own thirst for vengeance, now – by an insatiable urge for Rallis—and those like him—to suffer as they ought to? Or was she just another hypocrite?

Juliana had always rather liked her eyes. They were so dark, so shadowed by raven-haired lashes casting shade over enigmatic irises, it at least kept her from flustering herself over the blonde being able to read the questions she had no answers for burning darkly within them. At least there was that. It kept her from her own worries clouding the clarity with which her honeyed counterpart answered her question. And for that – oh, for that, Juliana was ever-glad. Eternally, and boundlessly. For as right as she was about their relationship being that of a leader and soldier? She was terribly wrong, as well, for the conviction with which Katarina’s words spilt felt like poetry. They touched her soul. They stirred it. Our cause, the dauntingly tall woman called it. It warmed Juliana’s gut more than even her laugh had done. Every second we live and breathe, gives us a chance to do better. “Yes.” The word was a rough whisper, sounding from the embrace of the swelled walls of her throat. “Yes,” but her own conviction cut through it, exhaled a second time.

“Better is all I want. I –” Would it be a mistake to say it out-loud? Perhaps. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. “Well, I want more than this. For this city I love, for this universe that speaks to my soul, for… these hearts that live in my heart. Better – yes, I do agree, Katarina. I believe, as well. I want more than mindless bloodshed. I want more than fear and terror, more than domination for the sake of domination. I do not know just how clearly you can see it,” wryness laced the words as fluidly as her emotions had done, “I am not my father.”

Then that, too, dissolved. It gave way to gold, still hot & bubbling: “I am another entity entirely. Not a mouth-piece, not a symbol. I am a woman, and one of my word at that. I told you I would tell you why I asked – so here is why, signora. I ask because one of those who hold room in my heart, one of the largest… was nearly lost to me. This war takes and takes. From all of us, Capulets and Montagues and those who watch, who savour, and who suffer. I got out of bed today to work towards better.” Her head canted. Lashes lifted, unveiled those same dark eyes. Juliana let them burn.

“Would you like to join me?”

Extras: 

pinterest;

playlist;

headcanons -

due to having spent a large portion of her childhood on her own, juliana very early on developed an appreciation for time to herself. many of her interests, in fact, are shaped by it: her love for learning, for one, no matter the subject matter; her attachment to art, an outlet she keeps a secret, locked away in a room no one but herself is privy access to, and; additionally, the amount she talks to and counsels herself to stay sane.

her aesthetic preferences meander on the side of classic, vintage and minimalistic. it is extremely rare for juliana to opt for overt flashiness. she's pearls over diamonds, matte lip-stain in lieu of gloss, and neutral tones apparel over pops of colour.

she is petrified of rabbits, and their evil red eyes. 

juliana enjoys music, but she prefers it not having words.

she has a codependent relationship with coffee. no one with a body this slight has any business throwing back that many shots of espresso, but here she is anyway.

she has never learnt how to swim.

her nails and lips are always red, no matter the outfit. she enjoys having a signature of her own that has nothing to do with anyone else, as if it is her own private act of rebellion.