CIVILIAN. MOON, EUN-YUL

Female

Bisexual

Seventeen

October 10, 1994

Korean

Korean (Fluent)
Chinese (Academic)
English (Getting better)


Her English name is Mabel, but she prefers not to use it.

0.5

N/A

N/A

NONE.

11/25/13 BY SENRI.

Jellyfish

Donovan Shepherd

High

Suzume Yosano from Hirunaka no Ryuusei

Eun-Yul's father is a Samsung executive who regularly travels internationally on business and her mother takes care of the matters at home to oversee her children's education.  In a show of their growing financial status after her father's promotion, they moved to Gangnam four years ago into a too-expensive but roomy apartment.  She lived there with her parents, her older brother Eun-Seob, and her grandfather.

She's recently moved to LA to live with her aunt and uncle in LA to finish her final year of high school in the US.  She shares a room with her cousin Mi-Ho in their place above the instrument repair shop.  In preparation for the start of the next school year, she's taking the summer to adjust to American life and receive English tutoring.  Eun-Yul receives an allowance from her parents each month, most meant to cover the expenses of her living there and a bit extra for fun.

Taking after her mother's side of the family, Eun-Yul is petite in stature with narrow hips and a flat chest, and her height just shy of 5'1" with little hope left for any extra inches. She often supplements her lack of height with heels, which she's learned to run, hike, and slip across icy sidewalks in without complaint. Of course they hurt, but she comforts herself with soaking her feet and slippers in the privacy of her own home. She doesn't have much in the way of muscle mass, flimsy arms and stickish legs. While she isn't particularly strong, Eun-Yul is remarkably flexible and can out-hula-hoop anyone around.

Her hair is thick, mid-back length, and black, and she's never bothered to lighten nor perm it as many of her peers have done. She keeps it out of the way with quick ponytails or braids when painting or doing any task, but otherwise wears it down without any special style. Her skin is pale, and her eyes as dark as her hair.

She typically dresses in well-fitted basics purchased by her mother that are almost impossible to pair badly, and follows rather modest dressing standards. She looks nice in a clean, understated way, although by the end of the day she manages to look a bit worn out and ruffled because she neglects to fix herself up every time she passes a mirror.  Her mother's concern is what kept Eun-Yul looking up to standard most of the time, often pressuring her daughter into not leaving the house without at least some makeup.  And it was under her mother's insistence last year that she received double-eyelid surgery, which Eun-Yul thinks is ridiculous because now her eyes are far too wide.

She has decent posture, but not stiffly so. Her shoulders are prone to slouching when she's not engaged and she rocks on the heels of her feet when bored, impatient, or wanting to leave. There's a lot of unnecessary movement to her presence, unable to keep too still for too long.

Overall Eun-Yul's movements are carelessly unhurried, slightly disjointed, and she has the tendency to cut responsive motions short (nodding, waving). She's light on her feet and has a slight bounce to her step, although her slower pace keeps her from looking too energetic. The most graceful and expressive part of Eun-Yul is her hands, which she works with a lot with painting, and it's where most of her stress shows. Clenching her fingers betrays her stress, clasping her hands when suppressing emotions, and digging her fingernails into her palms when deeply bothered. She has a very delicate but precise touch, and excellent hand-eye coordination when actually focused.

Eun-Yul's voice is tad lower than average but not deep or husky, and soft in a way that doesn't project well. She doesn't have a lot of range, but enough not to be considered monotone. Her voice usually is devoid of any strong emotion, quiet and slow, until she gets excited about something and starts talking too quickly for anyone to follow. She tends to trail off mid-sentence or start a thought halfway through.

Extremely imaginative, Eun-Yul happily defies all rules of logic at her own whim, and has problems thinking inside the box or seeing obvious (and often the correct) answers. She doesn't care if things don't actually make sense to anyone else, and following her train of thought from A to Z can be a headache to anyone who is too heavily attached to concrete and literal thinking. This has been the source of a lot of conflict in her life, her inability to just follow the standard way, seeking to explore possibilities that clearly lead to dead ends. She'll link completely unrelated information in ways they probably shouldn't go together, and follows conversations in the wrong direction.  Even her morals aren't quite bound to reason, and she's able to roundabout justify much of anything. 

Eun-Yul is definitely not an idealist- she's somebody who enjoys a certain amount of drama and suffering in her own life as well as in others'. She has an interest in the morbid, enjoys horror movies and horribly gory monsters, and reading accounts of serial killers, and has even tried writing letters to various inmates convicted of murder with no success in getting responses.  One of her longest ongoing hobbies is collecting insects- trapping them in jars, identifying them, and pinning them into boxes which she kept secretly stored under her bed until her mother discovered while cleaning and threw them out.

Eun-Yul also has a rather vast knowledge of natural poisons, and enjoys any sort of plant or critter that can kill you, the more painfully the better. In recent years, she's taken to collecting dead or dying animals to dissect, often with her mother's kitchen tools, and her findings carefully sketched out in various notebooks. Eun-Yul has a fascination with injuries, and the one way to enact her sympathies is to present her with something that needs patching up.  She'll be more than glad to clean your gashes or stitch something up.  She'd like to be a surgeon or pathologist if it didn't require so many years of education. Instead of hours of grueling over her studies, Eun-Yul prefers to paint, and art is one of the few classes she's ever excelled in. A lot of her work is dark and surreal, with very naturalistic themes of decay, anatomy, and vegetation inspired by her interest in the balance of death and nature.  She's technically quite skilled, and has copied many famous works to precise details as practice.

Since a young age, Eun-Yul has been labelled as selfish and defiant by her teachers, weird and an outcast by her peers, and an exhausting disappointment to her family. She never really intended to be any of those things, but has since accepted them as part of her image. Anyone else might have felt much shame to have fallen into such a low position, would have scrambled to fix themselves to meet expectations, but Eun-Yul sees herself as freed her from much of the pressures and obligations that traps the rest of society. She's faced the consequences of her choices, and has accepted the challenge of being uncompromisingly herself. Individualism isn't well accepted in Korean culture, the ever-present demands to conform and compete to survive, but Eun-Yul has pushed herself beyond any social recovery that she has no more face to save. She pities her peers that think going to school 16 hours a day is the only way to achieve some form of success, that getting married and having a baby is the only way to validate their lives. Eun-Yul wants more. She's not sure what more there is, but she's determined to find it and do things because she wants to and not because she's expected to.

The victim of near constant bullying and an inescapably wrecked social life through most of her school years, Eun-Yul has a strong dislike for social games and status. She doesn't want to be part of your clique, she doesn't want to be your pet project like some bad teen 90s movie, and she certainly isn't going to tolerate somebody acting nice toward her without calling them out on their motives. She has a fondness for people that are brutally honest and willing to make themselves disliked, finding that far more admirable than anyone too passive. The girls that quietly watched from the sides as she was tormented, claimed to see nothing when asked by the faculty, Eun-Yul hates them the most. She sees nothing worse than going along with somebody else's plans, being a voiceless follower. Yet Eun-Yul has no desire to be a leader either, would resent anybody would did what she said too easily. She's never quite certain if being a loner is what caused her to be an outcast, or if she adapted that tendency as a way to survive. Either way, Eun-Yul is not used to anyone being interested in pursuing even a friendly acquaintance with her, that she's never really had to push anyone away.

Eun-Yul has a sharp memory, but tends to overlook subjects she doesn't find interesting (which is most) and blocks out information she doesn't find personally relevant. There's a lot of things in the world that she'll never know, more than anybody could possibly know, so she doesn't see the point in memorizing facts she doesn't care about. Since most of her education has been focused on memorization to produce one specific answer and not asking questions, she's never been too successful in a classroom environment. Instead, she learns a lot from personal experimentation and observation. Eun-Yul doesn't like to read, often having to read the same sentence many times to actually register it, too distracted by her thoughts.  When she gets excited about sharing an idea, things can get a bit jumbled up into her wanting to express far too many tangents at once, making it difficult for Eun-Yul to narrow things into one concise train of thought.

Eun-Yul prefers to improvise her way through most situations without much of a plan, although she's learned to adapt to strict schedules that she manages to be somewhat on time if she values being so. Otherwise it's too easy for her to lose track of what she's doing, and at some point not showing up at all is better than being late. She hates repetition and anything too predictable, will lose interest quickly in anything that seems too monotonous. Eun-Yul often finds her inner world far more interesting than what's going on around her, her make-believe conversations with people more entertaining than any actual outcome. She's found some fondness for people that can catch her off guard, can provide a steady flow of new input and expand upon her ideas. Eun-Yul likes ideas that contradict her own, information that she's never heard nor considered before. Once engaged, she's actually quite cheerful and playful, and she's more than willing to pull somebody else along into her private thoughts.

Eun-Yul was a rather cheerful and curious child, although a bit more interested in playing her own games than interacting with any of her peers.  Like most Korean children, she began her education at four years old through private preschool programs and additional after school math lessons and art classes.  She wasn't particularly good in school, too distracted by daydreaming or doodling in her workbooks, but that wasn't too much of a concern to her parents who were more invested in her older brother's education.  As a preschooler, her oddities were easily dismissed as something she'd eventually grow out of, and her teachers were usually endeared to her quiet smiles and lack of complaints or fighting with other students. 

However, once she entered elementary school and the amount of work and expectations increased, her teachers became steadily more frustrated with Eun-Yul's lack of progress and perceived her inability to produce the answers they wanted as disobedience.  Often criticized in front of the other students for mistakes or missing homework by teachers, it allowed a chance for other students to chime in too, students happily willing to report any of Eun-Yul's missteps to the teacher.  Corporal punishment wasn't an uncommon method of correcting students' behaviour, and Eun-Yul was on the receiving end of being hit far too often for her lack of attention, incomplete homework, and inability to follow directions.

Her increasingly withdrawn personality and lack of interest in building friendships made her an easy target for other girls to assert themselves socially.  They'd pull her in under false pretenses of fun, only to make Eun-Yul the target of merciless teasing.  On one occasion in elementary school, another girl used scissors to cut off all of Eun-Yul's hair in the bathroom, while the other witnesses insisted she did it to herself.  Becoming the wangdda of the class was a reputation that carried over from year to year, the outcast that nobody dared to defend or even talk to out of fear of becoming the next target.  Eun-Yul hadn't been fully aware of how different she was until she was being punished for it, and that only solidified her unwillingness to conform even at the expense of her suffering.  Stolen lunch money, flushed toothbrushes, vandalized school shoes, having her textbooks thrown out the window... it was a common occurrence that went ignored by the faculty.  Anyone would say she brought it upon herself. Eun-Yul refused to be hurt by it, refusing to contribute to the growing number of suicides of students in her same situation.

By the time she was in high school, Eun-Yul was going to school from 7am until 11pm, and was stressed and miserable from not being able to find time for the only things that made her happy anymore.  Depression was viewed as a largely personal failing, and the lack of school counselors or friends to confide in made it all the more difficult.  She was skipping a lot of her classes by then, and after many calls from her teachers after she stopped showing up completely, did her mother finally realize that there was something wrong. Eun-Yul had hidden a lot of her problems to protect her mother from shame, knew that her mother cared a lot about her social standing.  Getting Eun-Yul double-eyelid surgery in an attempt to make her prettier and more acceptable to her peers, and moving her to a different school didn't actually help. 

It was her grandmother in Itaewon that finally suggested that Eun-Yul be sent to the US for her final year of high school, that she'd be far better suited for a more liberal environment where she could freely express her creativity.  They had relatives in LA, that Eun-Yul had only met briefly when they visited when she was twelve, and it seemed to be the perfect arrangement.  Her parents reluctantly agreed, knowing there was little else they could do for Eun-Yul.

Eun-Yul isn't particularly optimistic about studying in a US high school, not sure if being a foreigner will make her any less of an outcast than she already was, but the promise of a lessened work load was enough to make her agree.  Also, she really wants to try tacos.