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[mal_contented]

Warning for Spoilers for Isle Of The Lost and Descendants.

CW: for angst, food gross, some violence and horror, abuse, possible animal cruelty mentions (One of her best friends is Cruella's son....) and a lot of other things you'd probably be shocked to realize is actually fairly canon for Disney after all....

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[mal_contented]

Personality:

All Or Nothing - In canon, Mal was raised to be evil. Her world was very black and white. Good and evil were clear and obvious. Everyone knew that princes and princesses who were heroes or the kids of heroes were good guys. Villains and their kids were evil. Pink was a "good" colour. Anything dark was coded evil. Good guys ate good food, villains ate trash. The Isle was for the Evil, the rest of the world for the Good. When she went to Auradon she was evil among good working towards an evil plan. And then she flipped, she chose good. And when she did, she tried to go all in. She thought she had to be perfect good. And honestly the one thing she did knowingly that wasn't - embracing her magic - was berated by nearly everyone around her as bad. She felt stifled by good. And when she felt she couldn't handle good any ore, she decided that clearly meant she had to go back to evil.

She followed that same pattern in SMK, which was a huge part of what she and Lydia fought about at the end. (That, and a mattress...) She felt she had to show them all that she was the new big bad, that she was evil. Rotten to the core. She avoided letting anyone see any evidence that she had any good in her because she couldn't have good in her. She failed at being good... so she clearly was evil, right....? RIGHT?

Art please! Like Pi-face, Mal doesn't confine her art to polite little paintings on canvas. But where he makes his trash sculptures, she mostly paints. All over. Everything. Clothes? YEP. Lockers. For sure. The wall over her bed in the dorm? YEP. The outside of the school, every fountain she can find...? Yes and yes. She will tag everything and anything. But unlike most taggers, her paintings - even with spray paint - are pretty amazing. In SMK she spent months on a wall mural of all the apprentices, until a sort of friend, brainwashed, wrecked her work. Ace and Lydia tried to fix it but... that was kind of it for her. Plus she was getting sick of having to get to know all the new kids just to paint them properly. But when Mal gets too stressed she turns to painting to blow off steam. Paid work, tagging, decorating her own space... so long as she can be creative, it doesn't matter to her. She also canonically does some amazing sketches.


Rep is everything - Mal was the worst of the worst for her age on the Isle. She reveled in her rep and what it got her. She didn't care about respect, she had fear. Then in Auradon she tried to be good, so again she needed her rep. She needed to be seen as good, she needed them to love her. Not because she wanted to be loved, but because that was the rep she needed to be what she thought she had to be. In SMK she tried for the baddest of the bad rep again, because she was afraid that anything else would make her a victim. She doesn't know how not to try to be the best/worst. Or rather she doesn't know how not to try to seem that way. She doesn't know how to just exist as one of many. She needs people to think they know who she is, to buy into whatever persona she is selling. Because if they buy into the persona... so can she. It is easier to be evil when everyone treats her as evil. She had herself convinced it was easier to be good when people saw her as good.... but that was not the case. That she still thinks it is, is vital, however.


Four Hearts as One - Mal.... Mal refuses to admit how fiercely she can love. Her friends. Ben. Even her mother who... never loved her. Mal tries to justify the things she does for love, but the truth is... it is love that made her try to be good, love that made her stick with it as long as she could and love... that made her sure she had to leave. As shown in a scene just past her canon point, she was sure that she was all wrong for Ben, that she was ruining his goodness, that she would destroy Auradon if she stayed with him. Also after her pull point we see just how close she is with Evie, and then later with her other friends. She loves. Deeply. Strongly. Leaving them tore her apart, and she didn't leave until staying was worse. And again in a scene just after her pull, Evie offers to stay with her on the Isle, and she rips her heart apart again by not letting her. Because Evie had been happy in Auradon in a way she never had been on the Isle. Evie would be miserable, and as much as Mal didn't want to be alone, she'd rather be alone than see her best friend suffer.

Defensive obsession - I have to say I felt very vindicated in how I played Mal obsessively patrolling in SMK when canon showed her constant vigilance at the start of the third movie in hunting for Uma. Mal is a protector, no matter what she thinks she is. She wants to protect those who matter to her. Once Carlos became one of hers, she refused to let anyone else bully him. Once Evie became hers, she made sure everyone knew it, knew that crossing Evie was crossing Mal. When she came to love Ben, she kept on with the plan to protect her friends until she saw a way to protect all of them - by choosing good. By choosing love. In the battle against her mother, if you watch, she keeps herself between her mother - the threat - and her friends as much as possible.

And when she couldn't, like when her mother was between her and Ben, she did the best she could to keep her mother's attention. Even though she was scared to death. And in defense of her friends and Auradon... she was able to stare dow her mother for the first time in her life.

Again, just past her pull point we see that she puts herself on the line to save Ben, even though it puts her in horrible positions and means that she might never regain her rep. To save him, she even lets herself get dragged back to Auradon and when she realizes he's been spelled she makes herself vulnerable in front of everyone to save him.



CRAU Personality: CRAUs only:

CRAU was changing her, but hadn't finished when the came petered out. Slyvando is desperately trying to show her that middle grounds exist, and that she can find them. Sylvando, Lydia, and Ace were all working on trying to get her to love and accept herself as she is, without trying to be what she thinks she should be.

She also has learned to think on a larger scale. Not just save one kingdom, save whole worlds. Even though she was claiming she was saving it so she could take it over herself. She also had more places to paint and started seeing that painting could be a way to earn money, which she never had thought of before. Getting paid for her art. It was a path towards something more banal than being the most evil evil or being the best girlfriend of the king. It was something that was just about Mal being Mal.




Always Keep In Mind: Watching her vulnerabilities. Making sure she is very aware when someone that she doesn't trust sees something she fears could be used against her.

CRAU - the way the game tapered out, trying to remember the people she encountered but didn't have strong CR with. Trying to remember if she actually met the other Lydia, and things like that since I no longer have access to some of those players.


Green eyes: Her eyes turn green when she uses magic of any sort, and can go green during a stare down.