What's in a Name?

Marcy Mendes

Marcella "Marcy" Mendes- Brazilian ancestry;  Marcy Mendes is an honors student at Hannah Quigley's school who has high-functioning autism and is a member of the art club. She is highly observant and tends to be vocal about her opinions, but is also heavily introverted and has a hard time expressing herself around others. She devotes much of her free time to advocating human causes, namely women's rights, as well as watching certain cartoon shows such South Park and making commentary on them. She is a confident and intelligent overachieving type, with nerdy tendencies, and idolizes Kyle Broflovski and anything related to him, considering him to be her "comfort character". Marcy tends to be good-natured and well-meaning, although she is not always great at reassuring others and tends to lack empathy at times. She feigned insecurity over her looks when she asked some of her more popular classmates for a makeover, but ultimately decided to keep her new appearance. Before her autism diagnosis, she was prone to outbursts at home and felt isolated, wishing to be more outgoing and included by the "girly girls" of her school. She began drawing as an escape and quickly realized she had a talent for art when a number of her fan works received positive feedback on the Internet. Marcy is shown to be kind, quirky, thoughtful, understanding and, according to her family members, very loyal to her friends. She is also very idealistic and expects everyone around her to live up to her own expectations, lofty as they may seem at times. Her diagnosis caused her significant difficulties in social interaction and gave her repetitive behaviors and interests, yet it did not affect her language skills or intelligence. It can make her seem emotionless and uncaring on a surface level, although on the inside, she simply wants to understand the world around her, giving her a slight interest in human behavior. 

Marcy's family is extremely wealthy, being descendants of a line of upper-class aristocrats who were well-off in their native Brazil. She keeps her family's wealth as a secret however, only revealing it to her certain people whom she trusts as a means of not drawing too much unwanted attention to herself. She can come across as rational, snarky, forceful, bossy, passionate, and strong-willed, but is also good-hearted and caring. She isn't spoiled and would much rather earn real friends instead of dealing with the popularity and fake friendships that come with wealth. At first, Marcy appeared to be an average teenage girl attending the middle school, with an awkward and nervous, but friendly demeanor. Like most teenagers, she had crushes on boys, a desire to find her niche, and a strong dislike of bullies and embarrassment from her parents. Although she isn't the most sociable person around, she is clever at devising plans, having good ideas and using resources, like her computer skills, to communicate effectively. She is not particularly good at sports, but was encouraged by her mother to participate on the school's soccer team to give her better eye-hand coordination and make more friends. Marcy almost rarely gets extremely mad or emotional, but has shown distress when it comes to failure in herself to protect others. She can be very naive and sometimes had difficulty reading others or understanding their ulterior motives, which could cause her to be taken advantage of. Her geeky and eccentric nature were not always embraced by the other students at her school, which caused her to have a bad reputation amongst some of them. Her first loves however were her IPad Pro, which she cannot live without, to the point that her greatest fear is life without it and her trusty headphones, which always manage to calm her down. 

While she may not consciously know it, Marcy tends to think that her intelligence makes her superior to others and can go overboard if she is shown to be wrong. She tries to use her knowledge and her understanding of psychology to point her classmates in a more "normal" direction, even if it sometimes is quite annoying to others. She proved to be increasingly antagonistic towards Hannah Quigley and joined in with a few negative influences, such as Kirsten Lundgren in taunting her due to her feelings of jealousy. She constantly tried to one-up her skills in art and tried different means to impress their teacher, seeming reluctant to have her sit at her table while working on a project in the art room. Marcy made frequent efforts to mask her traits around the other girls in order to be socially accepted, which made her rather unhappy deep down. She openly confronts Hannah one day, after which she admits to feeling insecure and not wanting to admit that someone was better than her at an ability she naturally excelled at. She admits to not having a lot of close friends and resorting to different means, such as her escaping into fantasy and using cartoons to fill a void. She is later befriended by Hannah, who invites her to eat lunch at her table with Mia Vasquez-Rivera, leading the two to become co-councilor's of the sixth grade. Marcy also has a romantic side and enjoys watching Brazilian soap operas from her country, particularly ones that are oriented towards children and teenagers. She has a special fondness for a famous one from her country called "Complices Al Rescate", appreciating the concept of polar opposite twins who are separated at birth. One of her greatest passions is creating original characters of her own that reflect her unique ideas and perspective on the shows she loves. She is also quite active on social media and resorts to various platforms such as Twitter to express her views and connect with fellow fans from different walks of life.