Dreamless Artist

Feeling alien as she fails to see the humanity that lies in the people around her, only focused on the hate, greed and violence that disproves all of it, she fills the emptiness of the city with paintings and murals of fantasies of 'real' humanity, fueled by love and wit.

Personal History

Being brought up by her two loving fathers, she has had a bright childhood, spending her days drawing and listening to her father's stories about her grandmother. They teach her why this city was founded and the core values the community cherishes: love, peace, freedom. No violence, hate or greed. They said it was unethical, something inhuman. Even though they didn't intend the word like that, she took it very literally and let this shape the way she views the entire world.

When tensions rise between the Curious and the Conservatives, she sees the stress in her conservative father. It puts her on edge, too, sensing that something is about to go wrong. When the city erupts into violence and the Curious start rioting, the family is caught in the middle of it, being the face of conservatism and keeping the underground city underground. This forces her father to use violence in order to protect is family.

She witnesses the relentless violence of her father as his anger combines his familial instincts. This clashes with everything he's ever taught her, and this betrayal, as she sees it, causes her complete view of every person she's ever met and she will ever meet be tainted by it. Her whole trust in the the average human has collapsed. She can now only see the hate they carry, the greed they surpress, the selfishness inherent to every human being.

Tough she is right about the fact that we all carry these feelings and characteristics, she is wrong about the fact that it makes us less human. In reality, these traits, as ugly as they are, can exist alongside the pretty traits. That specific combination of the good and bad is exactly the most human thing ever.

She leaves her family, letting them think she died during the riot, and moves into an abandoned place just outside the city, where she spends her days with her new family she has created, painted out of loneliness and a desire for love. She cannot trust her heart with anybody anymore, so she reserves it only for the shards of herself and her past which are her paintings in her home. To further fill the emptiness, wanting more and more 'friends', she starts filling the city with what she deems real humans, making funny, loving faces to 'repopulate the city'.

As a person, she is someone who takes things literally and who thinks in black an white. Her high level of wisdom results in observations that are correct, with false or twisted conclusions. Amplified by her betrayal trauma, she loses touch with reality, thinking she is completely alone and alien in this confined space that is this city. She feels the need to repopulate it with real humans, resulting in her obsession with painting faces on walls.

Themes

Blindness

• She is blind to the fact that humanity is not only the good, but also the bad and that they can coexist.
• She is blind to her father's love.
• She is blind to the humanity (love, compassion, etc) that lies within all the people she deems as inhuman.
• She is blind to the way she changes over the course of the story, where she will ultimately be the one who actually loses their humanity (alongside other characters, like the crying man) by using violence in order to safeguard her freedom and humanity.

Dreaming

• She doesn't dream due to trouble sleeping, as a result of her mind being full all the time, with things such as her conflicting feelings about her family, her loneliness and obsession over her paintings.
• She also doesn't dream due to the fact that, more so symbolically, she is already dreaming when she's awake. She has lost touch with reality, so her brain also cannot tell apart dreams from reality anymore, so when she does get some sleep, her brain is finally able to just shut off instead. Her mind is spending so much energy during the day (and night).
• Another reason for why she has trouble sleeping and dreaming is that with her sensitive nature, she is experiencing more severe effects than others due to the fact that she's only always been underground. There is no distinction between night and day and without being bound by social limitations, she only sleeps when she's really exhausted. This messes up her sleep, too.
• Her big dream is that one day, the city will be full of humans again, just like childhood. She doesn't yet understand that her childhood was a dream, too. She idolized everything back then, only saw the love, the freedom, the peace. She hopes that once she has repopulated the city, she won't be lonely anymore and will be able to feel the love around and live peacefully.

Intellectual Characteristics

• She's very artistic, knows how to express herself beautifully and translate it into art.
• Very observant of other people, even though it is twisted by her beliefs and trauma. Quite blind for herself.
• Thinks in black and white, and takes things others tell her very literally.
• Has lost the ability to trust to anything or anyone but herself.

Morality & Philosophy

• What is human? Love, empathy, peace, unity, freedom, tolerance, no violence.
• What is not human? Hate, greed, violence, anger, selfishness.

She idolizes humanity and has (quite literally) painted a version of it which portrays it as something solely positive, cooperative, beautiful. She immediately sees all the negative, ugly parts of it as inhuman. In this sense, she thinks very black-and-white, especially when it comes to other people. When she gets to a point in which she starts using violence (when she realizes she's doing it), she justifies it by claiming it's a means of protecting her own freedom, peace and humanity.

Objective Taboos

• Uses violence to protect her own humanity, which is very hypocritical, even though she doesn't notice it herself until much later on.
• Isolated from society.
• Left her family alone, letting them think she's dead.
• Sees her father and all other people as non-human, eventually even as monsters, all caused by her black-and-white thinking.

Motivation

Main goal: put an end to her loneliness, while maintaining her humanity and being in a human, loving environment (again).
Subgoal: fill the gap that the people around her have left with her idea of real humans, in the form of paintings and street art. Or, repopulate the city.
Translation into behavior: avoidance of humans, only entering the city when she wants to repopulate it with murals. Gets very defensive when people get in her way, eventually turning to violence herself, as she is so focused on her subgoal that she forgets all about her main goal.

Representation & Legacy

• The murals on the walls.
• The girl that came back from the dead.
• The girl who learned how to dream.

Gender & Sexuality

Presents herself as feminine and is considered more female, but doesn't really think about gender, as she is more concerned about how human she sees herself. The distinction human/non-human is more important to her than male/female/non-binary/etc.

Demisexual, lesbian (though these terms do not exist in the city) It takes time to really build a connection for her, partially due to her mental state and trust issues, but once the bridge is crossed she feels a very strong attraction to women and non-binary people.

Physical Description

• Silver mullet with long, layered backside. The ends of her hair are purple, the hair color she used to have during childhood. This symbolically represents her disconnect with the rest of the world. The death of her experience of love and trust.
• The patterns on her body she draws on herself. Drawing these is her way to calm down. It's a practice of self-love.
• She speaks very little (at the beginning of her arc). She doesn't have anybody to talk to, but she also chooses to speak. There is no reason to risk communicating with non-humans only out for violence, greed and hate.
• She always has paint or dirt on her body.
• Always carries a heavy bucket of paint when she's out painting (will also serve as her primary weapon further on).
• Wears comfortable and airy clothes, often stained with paint and dirt and sometimes ripped.
• Carries a thin paintbrush filled with ink to paint on her body at any time, she has a conflicting relationship with it, as it is a gift from her father, who later betrayed her. She sees it as a symbol of the past, that her father is no longer human and that this is an artifact/remnant of something that was and never will be. She paints herself with it to feel human and go back to the time when there were more humans around.