Joan - Fed-Up Grad Student -

Name: Joan Species: Raven Age: 25 Occupation: Graduate Student

Personality: Joan is a 2nd year grad student at Bellford University working on getting a degree in Medieval History. She is burned out and tired, most of her time has revolved around studying, and she rarely has time to go out and have fun anymore like she use to when she was in undergrad. She has grown to resent the university, and many of her classmates.

She tries to be polite when it comes to talking to her other classmates, but often times her own impatience gets the better of her. Joan is very introverted and likes to be by herself, when she is not studying she is either reading or pursuing one of her other hobbies which include: embroidery, calligraphy, painting, and pottery. She is very good at her hobbies and has one several awards in the competitions that she has entered in to. She is a very competitive person and has to be the best at everything she does, even if doing so might be detrimental to her health.

Joan loves Medieval History with a fervent passion, she talks about it with just about anyone that she possibly can. She knows just about everything there is to know about the topic, ranging from the conversion of Emperor Constantine to the fall of Constantinople. She hope that she will one day be a professor of medieval history at a prestigious institution like Oxford or Cambridge. She dislikes being at Bellford University because it is not as reputable and well known as many of the other Universities, the only reason that she is currently attending this University is because her family has their tuition waived because their father works as a janitor of the college. While she knows that she should be grateful for this opportunity that she has been given she can't help but feel that she could be doing so much more with her life as it stands right now. Joan wants nothing more than to leave the United States and travel throughout Europe.

Joan is well versed in several languages this includes: Latin, Ancient Greek, Old English, French, German, Spanish, and Dutch. She loves reading medieval literature and has many favorites including: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Le Mort D'Arthur, Beowulf, The Song of Roland, and Mabinogion. She has several copies of each of these books, several of them in their original languages. Her books are thoroughly annotated to the point that they become hard to read due to how much extra text she has written in the margins.

Joan now spends most of her time holed up in some little corner of the library reading of medieval manuscript on navel exploration and how the crusades changed how Europeans viewed navel travel. She mainly lives off of coffee and instant ramen, preferring to stay away from the cafeteria if at all possible, especially after seeing what it did to her twin brother. She is a bit agoraphobic and doesn't like to be in crowds and becomes uncomfortable when people are standing behind her.

Joan very much tries to be a realist as much as she possibly can, however her own anxiety can get the best of her at times leading to her being a bit pessimistic at times. Though she tries to remedy this by doing things that are supposed to give you a more positive outlook on life she finds that they don’t often work for her.

Background: Joan comes from a small family, just her, her parents, and her twin brother Peter. Neither one of her parents are particularly rich, in fact her father worked as a janitor and her mother was a seamstress before she was laid off in 2008. While they never had much they were able to have a mostly normal childhood. In high school Joan was often bullied for being a nerd, luckily Peter, her twin brother, often stood up for her due to his size and his popularity from being on the football team.

Joan consistently made good grades throughout high school and was even salutatorian when she graduated. However, even with her stunning grades and her determination she was not able to achieve her lofty goals of going to school at an Ivy League school, and instead had to settle for going to Bellford University. She strongly dislikes having to attend this university and would rather be anywhere else in the world.

After finishing her undergrad Joan was offered a position as a grad student and accepted it knowing that it was mostly likely her best chance at being able to get her way into academia. She works with Dr. Edward Graves, an older, ornery badger who isn't particularly know for being kind to his students. Still, the old fart is Joan's best chance at making a name for herself show she puts up with his abuse despite that it is slowly killing her from the inside out.

Joan terribly wishes that she could transfer to another university, but has been unable to get into a university that she thinks will help propel her career to the soaring heights that she envisions herself in. So, she's stuck in this metaphorical purgatory where she's afraid that she is going to stagnate and failed to get a job as a professor in the university that will fit her love of medieval culture, but unable to leave because if she does she will for sure be able to succeed in her academic career.

Appearance: Joan is a slender and small raven, she stands at around 5'2'' and weighs around 115 pounds max. She has black, almost iridescent feathers. She has black eyes and a black beak. She wears horn rimmed glasses.

Clothing: Joan prefers to wear dark colors like burgundies, indigo, and hunter green. She often models her fashion off of medieval fashion. She embroiders most of her clothing, adding elaborate designs like stars and leaves all over her clothes.

Brother: Joan’s twin brother is Peter. Like Joan he went to this school due to the fact that their father worked there and their tuition was waived. However unlike Joan, Peter doesn’t care a bit about his academic career. In high school Peter had been a star player on his football team, and while he no longer plays football any longer he still eats like he does. Peter has become incredibly obese and Joan very much dislikes this.

She fears that her brother has lost himself to his own gluttonous impulses and will eat himself into an early grave if no one stops him. However, Joan doesn’t have the confidence to say anything to her brother in fear that she may offend him. So instead she watches as Peter slowly get bigger and bigger as the years go by secretly worried that one day Peter will weigh over 500 pounds and she’ll be stuck having to take care of him.

Sexual Preference: Joan actually prefers her partners to be a bit on the hefty side, believing that a bit of excess weight leads to higher virility and libido.

She will often times hint at this by subtly pushing her partner to eat more food and to stop worrying about their weight and live a little. She also likes when her partners are just a little bit lazy, the kind of person that will sleep in, eat enough food to feed a family of five and the cuddle with her for the rest of the day while she talks about medieval history and what books she is currently reading.

Joan likes cuddling a lot, especially if the person she is cuddling with is particularly warm.