about.

[swimfan]

about

amanda. seventeen. horse girl. born rich, born bored, born weird. depending on how thick-skinned you are, she's either one of the meanest people you've ever met, or just refreshingly blunt. the vibes are off.

First it was borderline personality, then severe depression, now she thinks I’m antisocial with schizoid tendencies. She’s basically just flipping to random pages of the DSM and throwing medications at me. But at the end of the day, I have a perfectly healthy brain. It just doesn’t contain feelings. And that doesn’t necessarily make me a bad person. It just means I have to work a little harder than everyone else to be good.

content warning: animal death by euthanasia; death and violence; drugs.

background

amanda is a rich girl, raised in a leafy and undisturbed suburb of connecticut. she was raised with a wealth of privilege, allowed to pursue her passion of riding horses: her room is covered in pictures of horses and rosettes and trophies from riding them in competition. when her horse, honeymooner, was injured and her bleeding-heart mother refused to accept that the horse needed to be put down, amanda took it upon herself to euthanize him. the drugs she acquired didn't work, so she was forced to do it violently, and has since been charged with animal cruelty.

to try to push her daughter back into socializing in the midst of therapy appointments and court dates, amanda's mother rekindles a friendship between her and lily, another rich girl she went to school with. they were close as children, but drifted apart after lily's father passed away. they first hang out under the pretence that lily is helping her study for her SATs, but the girls drift back together and start hanging out without her mother's prompting. amanda tells lily about a realization she's made about herself: she is incapable of feeling emotions. it's always been the case, but it's only now that she's come to understand and accept it.

on the surface, lily is bubbly and shallow, but encouraged by amanda's frankness, they find a common ground, bouncing off each other in a way which reveals they're closer in temperament and personality than they may have first appeared. amanda senses immediately that lily hates her stepfather, mark, who is something of an authoritarian. she suggests that they kill him. lily is reluctant at first, but eventually comes around to the idea. when their first attempt – to blackmail a local drug dealer and force him to break into the house and kill mark as part of a 'robbery gone wrong' – doesn't work, lily puts her own plan in motion.

one night, lily roofies amanda's drink as the first step in her plan, but changes her mind at the last second and tries to get her to stop drinking it. she explains that her intention had been to get amanda to fall asleep, then go upstairs and kill mark herself, and frame amanda, who is already facing charges of animal cruelty and would be the prime suspect. she suggests that amanda's emotional disorder means that she somehow lives a less meaningful life, because while she can't feel sad, neither can she feel happy. against lily's protests, amanda chugs the rest of the drink and falls quickly into a drugged sleep. lily frets for a while, but eventually she leaves amanda sleeping, and heads upstairs to kill mark.

basics

name amanda

age 17

born 31st january 2000

from connecticut

sexuality bisexual

height 5′ 5″

hair brown

eyes brown

canon thoroughbreds

pb olivia cooke

first impressions

visual short, lithe, with shoulder-length brown hair that she usually leaves to dry curly. she tends to wear simple, relatively plain clothes; it's easy to spot when something was picked out by amanda (plaid shirts, shorts, t-shirts, simple dresses) versus picked out by her mother (blouses, simple dresses), but she wears it all without much fretting.

aural neutral american accent. her voice is even and mostly flat, rarely raising beyond a steady drawl. she speaks as if completely unconcerned, delivering everything with a sense of steady calmness. (ex.)

demeanor best described as unbothered. nothing fazes her: she never seems to be caught off-guard. she often holds onto the upper hand in a conversation purely because she's impossible to offend (even with personal jibes or criticism) but she can equally and easily offend someone else just by being abrupt.

personality

emotionless quite literally. by her own admission, amanda doesn't feel any emotions. no guilt, no love, no anger, no jealousy, there's a big blank spot in her brain for all of those things. she's recently sort of come to terms with it. in the past, she used to try hard to blend in, but after honeymooner and a lot of therapy, she's decided to just accept it. as a result, she's eternally unfazed and impossible to offend.

blunt never the type to worry about what other people think of her, amanda is blunt to the point of brutality. she says what she's thinking, with little regard of how it might affect the person hearing it. at least you can be confident of the truth with amanda, but it can be hard to put up with.

practical amanda tends to make her decisions based on practicality, eschewing sentimentality or closeness. her choices are formed around following the path of least resistance, or at least what that path appears to be in her own mind.

mimic while she doesn't feel emotions herself, she's very good at mimicing them: for years she was able to ignore the truth of her own mind by pretending, even to herself, that she was feeling the requisite emotions. but she has a tight grasp of what she should be feeling, and if she needs to mask, she can do a pretty good simulacrum of what those feelings should look like. she can also cry on command.

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