Post by nanuk on Feb 16, 2010 1:16:56 GMT -5
Name: Nanuk
Age: 15, almost 16
Gender: Female; however, she presents herself as a male
Group: Northern Water Tribe Citizen
Nation: Northern Water Tribe
Bender?: No
Physical Appearance: Being a bit on the homely side, the only person who has ever considered Nanuk good-looking is her mother. Nanuk has a large frame for a girl her age, with her broad shoulders, wide hips, and thick waist. She stands at 5'7" and weighs in at about 150lb. Luckily for her, her physical development has been slow - what little curves she has are barely noticeable, and her breasts are small and easily bound. While she has some muscle definition, it's not pronounced, and is limited mostly to her arms and legs. Her russet skin contrasts nicely with her black hair, which she wears in the wolf-tail style. Her wide, ice blue eyes and full lips are the only feminine facial features she has, contrasting with a large nose, a long, thin face, and a square jaw. There is some light acne scarring on her cheeks.
Clothing/Armor: Nanuk favors loose clothing, covering herself up in an indigo wraparound wool tunic with white trim and sleeves that end just below her elbows. Beneath that her chest is wrapped in cloth bandages, from her armpits to the bottom of her ribcage. This is done to bind her breasts, though it does have the added benefit of keeping her chest a little bit warmer. She also wraps her arms from wrist to elbow, again for the added warmth. Over all this she wears a midnight blue anorak made of sealskin, which is lined and trimmed with polar bear fur. In colder weather, she wears leggings that are of the same color and material as her anorak, while in warm weather (or at least, what counts for warm weather up at the North Pole) she wears Prussian blue wool leggings. She also wears sealskin boots and a leather belt that holds her dagger and water skin.
Weapons: Nanuk carries a dagger on her at all times. It has a 4-inch steel blade set into a polished bone handle, and used to belong to her father. She also uses a bone spear for hunting.
Personality: Nanuk is easygoing and quiet, preferring to let others do the talking if she can get away with it. That's not to say she's shy or antisocial, just that she prefers not to be the center of attention. She'll happily listen to people natter on about girls or grandchildren or cabbages or what have you, as long as she's not being put on the spot - she's loathe to reveal personal information to anyone she doesn't trust closely. Her habitual silence also helps to hide her annoyance when people make less-than-complimentary comments about women, though she’s often grumpy for hours afterward. Thanks to her laid-back nature, Nanuk tends to be rather introspective. When faced with an important decision, she often considers her options several times before finally deciding what she wants to do. She possesses a deep respect for authority and the elderly, but she's adamant in her belief that respect does not mean blind obedience. Of course, that doesn't stop her from having trouble saying "no" to Mom.
Her relationship with her mother is a bit rocky. Kaya spent years watching her daughter’s every move in an attempt to protect her, and her reluctance to allow Nanuk a bit more freedom as she grows older is often a source of aggravation for the both of them. Normally Nanuk goes along with her mother’s wishes in order to keep the peace, though she won’t hesitate to complain if she thinks her mother’s decisions are unfair. Lately her stepfather, Siku, has taken to acting as intermediary between the two. As for Siku, Nanuk gets along with him most of the time, seeing him as a role model. She prefers to come to him with problems rather than her mother, since he’s much more patient and willing to listen to her input. She also confides in her grandmother sometimes, but she’d rather just relax and have tea with Granny than bother her with “boy stuff”.
While Nanuk is slow to anger, usually letting annoyances roll off her back like water off an oiled sealskin, when something does bother her it simmers nice and slow, building in pressure until she finally explodes. These outbursts are not often violent, usually resulting in a lot of shouting and possibly slamming things around, but they do tend to surprise even people who have known her for years. She rarely cries, and if she feels herself tearing up she will squeeze her eyes shut and pinch the bridge of her nose tightly in an effort to force the tears back.
Nanuk is definitely not the most masculine-looking guy at the North Pole. She doesn’t normally try to change how her voice sounds, either – she speaks in a low pitch, so she figures she doesn’t need to disguise how she sounds. While most people don’t seem to have trouble recognizing her as a boy, every so often someone will mistake her for a girl. She tries not to let it bother her too much, but every time someone has trouble placing her gender, she can’t help but be nervous.
Ever since the Avatar and his friends came to Shai City, Nanuk has pretty much idolized Katara for being able to do what Nanuk herself has only dreamed of doing - showing the world that women can fight and waterbend just as well as men can. Her friends think it's a silly crush on a weird girl, and her mother assumes that she looks up to Katara as a role model, but Nanuk just wants to be able to meet Katara and thank her for the impact she's had on Water Tribe society. Even if it hasn't necessarily caused a huge change, Nanuk views it as a step toward women one day being considered equal to men.
Background: Ever since she was born, Nanuk has been posing as a boy. Her mother, Kaya, was a headstrong woman, but try as she might she couldn't avoid the inevitable, and at sixteen she married a man she barely knew and liked even less. She performed her "wifely duties" willingly enough, but she didn't exactly shed any tears when her husband was killed in a hunting accident, leaving her to give birth to their only child under the care of her aging mother. In the two months preceding the birth, Kaya made the decision that, in the event she gave birth to a girl, she would give her daughter all the opportunities she'd never been allowed. With only her mother, a practiced midwife, in the room when she gave birth, it wasn't too much effort to swear her to secrecy and announce to the rest of the family that she'd born a son.
Nanuk grew up in her grandmother’s home under the ever-watchful eye of her mother. Teaching Nanuk to act like a boy was slow going; she couldn’t understand why, if she was the same as Mama and Granny at home, she had to be different out in public. Her confusion, added to the fact that she had no significant male figure in her life to base her behavior on, led her to withdraw, only spending time with other children at school. Kaya would sometimes force her to go out and play, but Nanuk would usually sit on the sidelines and watch.
When Nanuk was six years old, her mother remarried, this time to a man named Siku with whom she had grown up. Nanuk adored her stepfather, and often took to following him around like a baby turtleduck. Siku gladly accepted Nanuk as his stepson, teaching the girl things like how to gut and clean fish, and stepping in between Nanuk and her mother whenever Kaya started to fuss over her "son". With Siku's influence, Nanuk began to come out of her shell, making friends at school and spending more and more time out of the house. Even so, she was still a quiet child.
When she was ten, Nanuk accompanied Siku on a hunt for the first time. Normally they would have gone with a group, but Siku thought it would be a good opportunity for some father/son bonding, so it was just the two of them. They were hunting seals, and four days into the trip Nanuk stepped on a weak patch of ice and fell through. Siku managed to pull her out quickly, but the shock from the intense cold left her too weak to do more than shiver uncontrollably. Desperate to keep her from going into hypothermia, Siku carried her back to their campsite, stripped her of her wet clothes, and wrapped her in several bear skins to warm her up. It wasn't until the color had returned to Nanuk's face, and she had drunk several cups of tea, that Siku quietly asked her how long she had been dressing as a boy. When Nanuk went silent, Siku laid a hand on her shoulder, kissed her forehead, and told her that he wasn't angry, just upset that she hadn't trusted him enough to tell him the truth. With a promise that he would never reveal her secret, Siku put Nanuk to bed, and the next day they went home empty-handed but closer than ever.
They didn’t immediately tell Kaya about what had happened, fearing her reaction. Instead Nanuk went to her grandmother, who told Kaya of the incident at her granddaughter’s request. Kaya was relieved that Siku had taken the news so well, but the fact that her daughter’s secret had been revealed in an accident that could well have happened with other people around frightened her badly enough for her to forbid Nanuk from doing anything she considered dangerous – which included pretty much every activity she did with her friends. This sparked the beginning of Nanuk’s contentious relationship with her mother; she rarely disobeyed, but she would often argue with Kaya until either Siku or her grandmother stepped in.
Although Nanuk wasn’t the most popular kid her age, she managed to get along well enough with her classmates. She got teased from time to time for looking “girly” and being a “mama’s boy”, but she did her best to ignore the taunts. It helped that she had a good group of friends, mostly boys, to rely on, and that she didn’t go running to an adult every time she had a problem.
At fourteen, after returning home from the ice dodging rite, Nanuk told her that she wanted to enlist as a warrior, claiming that she wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps. Kaya immediately forbid her from joining, and Siku, who rarely agreed with most of Kaya's methods of raising her child, backed her up completely. They both thought that there would be too many opportunities for Nanuk's secret to be exposed, and that the consequences would be much more severe than if she had been found out as a child. Unable to convince her parents otherwise, Nanuk has given up for the moment, determined to join up as soon as she comes of age. In the meantime, she's been accompanying Siku on as many hunts as possible, curing and selling the pelts from the kills she makes to help support her family. Since the arrival of the Avatar, Nanuk’s become even more determined to become a warrior and help defend her homeland.
As her sixteenth birthday approaches, tension has been growing in the household. Nanuk never gave relationships much thought before, let alone marriage, and whenever her mother brings the subject up she refuses to talk about it. Kaya, worried about both this and Nanuk’s insistence on joining the military, has been urging her daughter to leave the North Pole and find some place where she could safely live as a woman. Nanuk is reluctant to even consider this idea, but if she had to leave she would prefer to head to the South Pole, where she would probably feel more at home than in the Earth Kingdom.
Sample RP: Nanuk hummed to herself as she scraped a sharp, flat rock over the polar bear pelt in front of her, removing the last bits of blubber and flesh she'd missed when she skinned the bear. With this one, that would make five pelts total from this hunt, and they would fetch a good price at market. Maybe she would even have enough to get a new knife from the Earth Kingdom traders that came by once a month. Last month they'd had a really nice one with an ornately carved jade handle - it probably wouldn't be too good for hunting, but it sure did look cool.
"Hey, Nanuk." Her stepfather stopped just behind her, clapping her on the shoulder. "Good work on the pelts. They should sell pretty well tomorrow." Siku winked at her. "What are you going to do with all that money, huh?"
She shrugged. "I'll probably see what the traders have for sale, then pick up some more lamp oil on the way home. Mom said we're almost out."
"Good idea," Siku said. "But for now, how about we go see what your mom's made for dinner? I'm starving."
Nodding, Nanuk wiped the rock off on her leggings, then put the pelt she'd been working on on top of the stack of finished pelts and carried them inside, where the smell of frying squid carried out the door and made her mouth water. She could decide what she wanted to do with tomorrow's profits after dinner.
Age: 15, almost 16
Gender: Female; however, she presents herself as a male
Group: Northern Water Tribe Citizen
Nation: Northern Water Tribe
Bender?: No
Physical Appearance: Being a bit on the homely side, the only person who has ever considered Nanuk good-looking is her mother. Nanuk has a large frame for a girl her age, with her broad shoulders, wide hips, and thick waist. She stands at 5'7" and weighs in at about 150lb. Luckily for her, her physical development has been slow - what little curves she has are barely noticeable, and her breasts are small and easily bound. While she has some muscle definition, it's not pronounced, and is limited mostly to her arms and legs. Her russet skin contrasts nicely with her black hair, which she wears in the wolf-tail style. Her wide, ice blue eyes and full lips are the only feminine facial features she has, contrasting with a large nose, a long, thin face, and a square jaw. There is some light acne scarring on her cheeks.
Clothing/Armor: Nanuk favors loose clothing, covering herself up in an indigo wraparound wool tunic with white trim and sleeves that end just below her elbows. Beneath that her chest is wrapped in cloth bandages, from her armpits to the bottom of her ribcage. This is done to bind her breasts, though it does have the added benefit of keeping her chest a little bit warmer. She also wraps her arms from wrist to elbow, again for the added warmth. Over all this she wears a midnight blue anorak made of sealskin, which is lined and trimmed with polar bear fur. In colder weather, she wears leggings that are of the same color and material as her anorak, while in warm weather (or at least, what counts for warm weather up at the North Pole) she wears Prussian blue wool leggings. She also wears sealskin boots and a leather belt that holds her dagger and water skin.
Weapons: Nanuk carries a dagger on her at all times. It has a 4-inch steel blade set into a polished bone handle, and used to belong to her father. She also uses a bone spear for hunting.
Personality: Nanuk is easygoing and quiet, preferring to let others do the talking if she can get away with it. That's not to say she's shy or antisocial, just that she prefers not to be the center of attention. She'll happily listen to people natter on about girls or grandchildren or cabbages or what have you, as long as she's not being put on the spot - she's loathe to reveal personal information to anyone she doesn't trust closely. Her habitual silence also helps to hide her annoyance when people make less-than-complimentary comments about women, though she’s often grumpy for hours afterward. Thanks to her laid-back nature, Nanuk tends to be rather introspective. When faced with an important decision, she often considers her options several times before finally deciding what she wants to do. She possesses a deep respect for authority and the elderly, but she's adamant in her belief that respect does not mean blind obedience. Of course, that doesn't stop her from having trouble saying "no" to Mom.
Her relationship with her mother is a bit rocky. Kaya spent years watching her daughter’s every move in an attempt to protect her, and her reluctance to allow Nanuk a bit more freedom as she grows older is often a source of aggravation for the both of them. Normally Nanuk goes along with her mother’s wishes in order to keep the peace, though she won’t hesitate to complain if she thinks her mother’s decisions are unfair. Lately her stepfather, Siku, has taken to acting as intermediary between the two. As for Siku, Nanuk gets along with him most of the time, seeing him as a role model. She prefers to come to him with problems rather than her mother, since he’s much more patient and willing to listen to her input. She also confides in her grandmother sometimes, but she’d rather just relax and have tea with Granny than bother her with “boy stuff”.
While Nanuk is slow to anger, usually letting annoyances roll off her back like water off an oiled sealskin, when something does bother her it simmers nice and slow, building in pressure until she finally explodes. These outbursts are not often violent, usually resulting in a lot of shouting and possibly slamming things around, but they do tend to surprise even people who have known her for years. She rarely cries, and if she feels herself tearing up she will squeeze her eyes shut and pinch the bridge of her nose tightly in an effort to force the tears back.
Nanuk is definitely not the most masculine-looking guy at the North Pole. She doesn’t normally try to change how her voice sounds, either – she speaks in a low pitch, so she figures she doesn’t need to disguise how she sounds. While most people don’t seem to have trouble recognizing her as a boy, every so often someone will mistake her for a girl. She tries not to let it bother her too much, but every time someone has trouble placing her gender, she can’t help but be nervous.
Ever since the Avatar and his friends came to Shai City, Nanuk has pretty much idolized Katara for being able to do what Nanuk herself has only dreamed of doing - showing the world that women can fight and waterbend just as well as men can. Her friends think it's a silly crush on a weird girl, and her mother assumes that she looks up to Katara as a role model, but Nanuk just wants to be able to meet Katara and thank her for the impact she's had on Water Tribe society. Even if it hasn't necessarily caused a huge change, Nanuk views it as a step toward women one day being considered equal to men.
Background: Ever since she was born, Nanuk has been posing as a boy. Her mother, Kaya, was a headstrong woman, but try as she might she couldn't avoid the inevitable, and at sixteen she married a man she barely knew and liked even less. She performed her "wifely duties" willingly enough, but she didn't exactly shed any tears when her husband was killed in a hunting accident, leaving her to give birth to their only child under the care of her aging mother. In the two months preceding the birth, Kaya made the decision that, in the event she gave birth to a girl, she would give her daughter all the opportunities she'd never been allowed. With only her mother, a practiced midwife, in the room when she gave birth, it wasn't too much effort to swear her to secrecy and announce to the rest of the family that she'd born a son.
Nanuk grew up in her grandmother’s home under the ever-watchful eye of her mother. Teaching Nanuk to act like a boy was slow going; she couldn’t understand why, if she was the same as Mama and Granny at home, she had to be different out in public. Her confusion, added to the fact that she had no significant male figure in her life to base her behavior on, led her to withdraw, only spending time with other children at school. Kaya would sometimes force her to go out and play, but Nanuk would usually sit on the sidelines and watch.
When Nanuk was six years old, her mother remarried, this time to a man named Siku with whom she had grown up. Nanuk adored her stepfather, and often took to following him around like a baby turtleduck. Siku gladly accepted Nanuk as his stepson, teaching the girl things like how to gut and clean fish, and stepping in between Nanuk and her mother whenever Kaya started to fuss over her "son". With Siku's influence, Nanuk began to come out of her shell, making friends at school and spending more and more time out of the house. Even so, she was still a quiet child.
When she was ten, Nanuk accompanied Siku on a hunt for the first time. Normally they would have gone with a group, but Siku thought it would be a good opportunity for some father/son bonding, so it was just the two of them. They were hunting seals, and four days into the trip Nanuk stepped on a weak patch of ice and fell through. Siku managed to pull her out quickly, but the shock from the intense cold left her too weak to do more than shiver uncontrollably. Desperate to keep her from going into hypothermia, Siku carried her back to their campsite, stripped her of her wet clothes, and wrapped her in several bear skins to warm her up. It wasn't until the color had returned to Nanuk's face, and she had drunk several cups of tea, that Siku quietly asked her how long she had been dressing as a boy. When Nanuk went silent, Siku laid a hand on her shoulder, kissed her forehead, and told her that he wasn't angry, just upset that she hadn't trusted him enough to tell him the truth. With a promise that he would never reveal her secret, Siku put Nanuk to bed, and the next day they went home empty-handed but closer than ever.
They didn’t immediately tell Kaya about what had happened, fearing her reaction. Instead Nanuk went to her grandmother, who told Kaya of the incident at her granddaughter’s request. Kaya was relieved that Siku had taken the news so well, but the fact that her daughter’s secret had been revealed in an accident that could well have happened with other people around frightened her badly enough for her to forbid Nanuk from doing anything she considered dangerous – which included pretty much every activity she did with her friends. This sparked the beginning of Nanuk’s contentious relationship with her mother; she rarely disobeyed, but she would often argue with Kaya until either Siku or her grandmother stepped in.
Although Nanuk wasn’t the most popular kid her age, she managed to get along well enough with her classmates. She got teased from time to time for looking “girly” and being a “mama’s boy”, but she did her best to ignore the taunts. It helped that she had a good group of friends, mostly boys, to rely on, and that she didn’t go running to an adult every time she had a problem.
At fourteen, after returning home from the ice dodging rite, Nanuk told her that she wanted to enlist as a warrior, claiming that she wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps. Kaya immediately forbid her from joining, and Siku, who rarely agreed with most of Kaya's methods of raising her child, backed her up completely. They both thought that there would be too many opportunities for Nanuk's secret to be exposed, and that the consequences would be much more severe than if she had been found out as a child. Unable to convince her parents otherwise, Nanuk has given up for the moment, determined to join up as soon as she comes of age. In the meantime, she's been accompanying Siku on as many hunts as possible, curing and selling the pelts from the kills she makes to help support her family. Since the arrival of the Avatar, Nanuk’s become even more determined to become a warrior and help defend her homeland.
As her sixteenth birthday approaches, tension has been growing in the household. Nanuk never gave relationships much thought before, let alone marriage, and whenever her mother brings the subject up she refuses to talk about it. Kaya, worried about both this and Nanuk’s insistence on joining the military, has been urging her daughter to leave the North Pole and find some place where she could safely live as a woman. Nanuk is reluctant to even consider this idea, but if she had to leave she would prefer to head to the South Pole, where she would probably feel more at home than in the Earth Kingdom.
Sample RP: Nanuk hummed to herself as she scraped a sharp, flat rock over the polar bear pelt in front of her, removing the last bits of blubber and flesh she'd missed when she skinned the bear. With this one, that would make five pelts total from this hunt, and they would fetch a good price at market. Maybe she would even have enough to get a new knife from the Earth Kingdom traders that came by once a month. Last month they'd had a really nice one with an ornately carved jade handle - it probably wouldn't be too good for hunting, but it sure did look cool.
"Hey, Nanuk." Her stepfather stopped just behind her, clapping her on the shoulder. "Good work on the pelts. They should sell pretty well tomorrow." Siku winked at her. "What are you going to do with all that money, huh?"
She shrugged. "I'll probably see what the traders have for sale, then pick up some more lamp oil on the way home. Mom said we're almost out."
"Good idea," Siku said. "But for now, how about we go see what your mom's made for dinner? I'm starving."
Nodding, Nanuk wiped the rock off on her leggings, then put the pelt she'd been working on on top of the stack of finished pelts and carried them inside, where the smell of frying squid carried out the door and made her mouth water. She could decide what she wanted to do with tomorrow's profits after dinner.