COBRA

PERSONALITY

At her core, Cobra is an intelligent, good-natured person who has been dealt a strangely bad hand in life. She's been through many phases in her life, but chief among them is her keen back in school, she was more of a bookworm than anything else, often finding herself lost in various fictional worlds - in fact, she had a tendency to live with her head up in the clouds, so much so that she often neglected her actual social life in favour of the one she'd created in her head. All that reading was good for something, though, as she found a particular interest in learning about survival skills despite her family never being one for that sort of thing, and, crafty as she is, used her observational skills and ability to learn quickly to survive out in the wilderness long enough to hitchhike her way to the city and start to make a name for herself - this time, on her own terms.

Cobra tries her best to be a sociable person, and to tell the truth she wants nothing more than to be close to other people, to make lasting connections and be appreciated and wanted for who she is. Her band has let her be truer to herself in that regard, but she also fears that maybe "herself" isn't quite good enough. She can masquerade as a social butterfly when the situation calls for it, and she's not shy, as she knows that would be unbecoming of someone of her stature, but she's just not particularly good at making friends or holding down friendships. Most of the time she barely knows where she stands with other people, and neglects her relationships for fear that people don't want to put up with her as much as she wants to put up with them. As a result, she'll often let relationships fall by the wayside, never making first contact and simply hoping that people will keep coming back - a one-sided deal that almost never works out in her favour, but she doesn't mind; her relation to the physical realm is tenuous at best, with all the alcohol. And the drugs.

All that is notwithstanding some of her more negative tendencies, which have an awful habit of sabotaging even the best of her relationships. While she tries to keep the more volatile aspects of her personality down, despite her best efforts, she's pretty hotheaded, and can easily fly from zero to one hundred in seconds flat if she doesn't keep a tight leash on her emotions - becoming belligerent, snappy, and rude. Cobra often assumes the worst of people; she sees the world in black and white, and very few people ever reach the "good" side of that dichotomy. She can get along with people fine and in fact loves to do so - mingling is fun, after all, but she often feels as if she'll never fully trust them or their intentions - a lesson her father loved to drive home, that one should trust only themself and no one else, and that other people are fundamentally untrustworthy. Hilariously, though, she still wants the best for people, and is altruistic and a pessimistic optimist at heart, holding onto the hope for radical change (in Earth terms, "maybe a bit of a communist"). Cobra thinks of herself as a hateful person but despite her warring inner feelings she's not a terrible one, just incredibly flawed and hurt. On a lighter note she's quite snarky and sarcastic, trying to drum up witty retorts and at times incorporate reference humour that may or may not fall flat depending on the patience and knowledge of her audience.

As a much younger child, Joan was a lot more open, but that openness quickly gave way to an intense fear of the world and the people in it, with her being subject to the stringent religious beliefs of her parents that kept her under their watchful eye and strict regimen - a terrible twist of fate, given how uncommon religion is on Lynxon in general. The cruel irony of this was, despite their strictness, Joan's parents often weren't paying much attention to her anyway, with much of their focus being placed on her apparently more troubled younger sibling, leaving Joan and her budding mental illnesses (of which she has quite a few, mind you) to fester without proper tending. She was also frequently the subject of bullying for her strange ways, which only compounded her feelings. Under this period of her life she found in herself a nascent desire to prove herself, or at the very least garner the attention she was often denied and often found herself - sometimes even subconsciously - trying to one-up others all for the hope of some sort of notice, among other things. People were fundamentally terrible, frightening, and out to hurt others, and at least if you were the best, you could be better than them, and maybe even prove to them your strength in some way. She became abrasive, competitive and aloof, in her own words no longer believing in the sanity of the world.

Life continued like that for her for a long time; it was only after meeting Jennifer and being adopted into the fold of her roving band of misfits in high school that she began to entertain the thought of a better life, one ruled by love of other people rather than the fear of them and the need to drive them off before they chose to hurt you first.

...The intensity of that spot of hope has long since vanished, however, following her experiences being sent away, though she still clings onto what remains of it and tries her best despite it all. After all she's been through, her two sides - fear and love - find themselves at war constantly. It's a strange duality for sure, and not one she particularly enjoys trying to manage.