Harry Potter OC Critiques [PAUSED]

35 - Weasxley

Full Name: Bethesda Anne Demeter Pierce

[So my first thought was Bethesda Softworks, the company, but Bethesda turns out to also be a name that means 'house of mercy/house of grace'. Either way, naming your character after a gaming company is a real power move.]

Nicknames, Titles, etc.: Thes (the only name she ever goes by)

General Appearance/Link to Photo: https://goo.gl/images/XkxG27

Role in book: Character the POV is from

[So protagonist or just the narrator?]

General plot outline of book: The Weasley twins have been tormenting her since her first year because she's an easy target for pranks, but in her fifth year they set aside their differences and become friends and convert her to the ways of prankery 

Age: 15

DOB: December 31st, 1978

Height: 5'1

Weight: 105.5 lbs

Gender: Female

Sexual/Romantic Orientation: Straight

Race/Species: Human (muggle-born witch)

[Ethnicity is also appreciated.]

House: Hufflepuff (Prefect)

Family/Pets: Donovan Pierce (Father) Anneka Pierce (Mother)

Wand Makeup: Dogwood wood with a Phoenix feather core, 12 ¾ inches long, and surprisingly swishy flexibility.

Personality/How they view themselves: Shy and insecure, cripplingly awkward, cries at everything. Thes views herself as a poor excuse for a witch with no friends. She ignores the fact that she's fiercely loyal, musically talented, ambitious, and smart; and focuses more on the fact that she's shy, insecure, cripplingly awkward, anxious about everything. She also overthinks things, cries too easily, and rarely speaks unless spoken to.

[Okay, so Thes' main character flaw is that she has low self esteem, which is fine, but how it interacts with the rest of her personality is a little tricky.

Specifically, although she can subconsciously decide to be loyal or just have trouble recognizing her musical talent in relation to other peoples', her ambitiousness is a conscious thing. So is she straightforwardly ambitious and she just loops that into her self-consciousness by viewing it as having unrealistic expectations or being arrogant instead of processing it as healthy ambition? Is it healthy ambition, or is she ambitious because she feels like it'll prove she's not as much of a failure as she worries she is?

With regards to her smartness, how is she smart? If she's not particularly self-aware, is that because she's just book-smart and is otherwise kind of oblivious, or does she just tend to get sidetracked when thinking about herself and is otherwise both book and street smart? Does her self-consciousness ever get in the way of her intelligence, maybe by making her unwilling to share advice or information because she's too nervous?

Also, is her personality an unlucky trait that ended up taking over her life or does it have a more concrete cause- clinical anxiety, maybe, or some part of her childhood that discouraged her from being more confident? Her backstory doesn't have to be tragic, but if she, say, grew up in a rural area where she never had to be especially aggressive to get what she needed which backfire when she went to boarding school and was suddenly in a new environment with a lot more people with a lot more needs and suddenly needed to be able to push people to give her attention, or if she used to be openly ambitious and confident but messed up a couple times and started to associate aggressiveness with failure and embarrassment, that'd make someone who was otherwise ambitious and competent act a lot more nervous.

Obviously, sometimes people just have inconvenient traits out of sheer bad luck or unfortunate genetics, but if it's enough of her personality to be 2/3 of the description, it's a huge part of her life, so it's good to have a solid idea of how exactly her low self-esteem tends to affect her, where it comes from, how she tries to deal with it- and ideally, how she thinks it affects her, where she thinks it comes from, and how she consciously tries to deal with it, if her view on her anxiety is different than what you, as the omniscient creator who gave her these traits on purpose, know it to be.]