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Name: Arden
Personal Journal: <user name="dancinpenguins"> 
Contact Info: AIM: thegreatmuldini; Plurk: <div class="ljuser" site="plurk.com"><img alt="[plurk.com profile] " style="vertical-align: bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;" width="16" height="16" src="http://plurk.com/favicon.ico" /><a href="http://plurk.com/ardendactyl">ardendactyl</a></div>
Other Characters Played: N/A, also apping Dean Winchester
Preferred Housing: N/A, though I have a strong preference towards giving her housemates who are also newbies? To maximize the initial WTFery.

Character Name: Isabelle "Izzy/Iz" Lightwood
Character Series: The Mortal Instruments
Character Age: 16

Background: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mortal_Instruments_(series)">Link</a>!

Stuff that's left out of the above: Basically, Isabelle is the second child of a family of Shadowhunters (aka the secret police of the "Hidden" supernatural world that most people don't know exists), that was exiled for the complicity of her parents in a secret organization called the Circle who tried to spark an Uprising against allying on any level with sub-humans. Until recently, Izzy was unaware of what exactly her parents' crimes entailed: all she's known is that unlike most Shadowhunters, she didn't grow up in their home land, but rather in New York City, where her family owns and operates a Shadowhunter Institute. She was privately trained and taught by both her parents and the Lightwood's tutor, Hodge Starkweather, and had little contact with other children. Her entire life revolves around demon hunting, and while she's very social, it's always with those who are already "in the know" of the Hidden World: mostly Downworlders (vampire, werewolves, faeries, warlocks, etc.)

Personality:

The family sigil of the Lightwood family is the letter "L" surrounded by flames - and more than anyone else in her family, Isabelle seems to personify that element of fire, both inside and out.  Beautiful, impossible to look away from, but dangerous, unpredictable, and impossible to contain or restrain.

Izzy's surface personality is so strong that to most people, it doesn't seem to leave room for much hidden beneath the surface, and they often don't bother to look.  Her physical appearance is striking enough to turn heads everywhere she goes: dark, mysterious, tall, and confident, and she's very aware of the fact.  Isabelle doesn't shy away from using her looks to her advantage, and therefore comes across as exceedingly vain, spending a great deal of time on her personal appearance, and fashion sense.  Just like any young woman, however, she finds room for insecurity, and tends to feel as if her height intimidates men, openly wishing that she could look smaller and more delicate and expressing jealousy over those who are.

In fact, for someone who professes not to invest too much emotionally in other people, she's incredibly quick to anger and jealousy, and the depth of her passionate outbursts betrays her otherwise detached demeanor. The reasons for her facade run deep. When she was only thirteen, Izzy's father had an extramarital affair, and her mother, a harsh, humorless woman, entrusted her teenage daughter with the knowledge and expected her to keep it a secret from her siblings. She also informed Isabelle that men were not to be trusted, and by extension, Izzy grasped onto the notion that it was safest to just not trust anyone, in order to protect your own heart. She specifically distances herself from people with her superficial behavior, and even though she's had many, many flings with various Downworlders, she specifically latches onto boys that she knows won't expect a commitment out of her (or, in Simon's case, ones she thinks have already given their heart to someone else, and therefore aren't at risk of falling in love with her). She rejects the ideals of romance, and spent her teenage years feeling as if those who bought into that kind of fairy tale were either a) weak or b) fooling themselves and dooming their hearts to being broken. She doesn't see what her mother did as burdening her - rather, in her eyes, she was being given a great deal of responsibility, which she was only too proud to shoulder.

This fact is probably what lies at the very core of Isabelle's real character. Loyalty comes to her as naturally as breathing does, which seems completely at odds with the image she presents, of someone fickle, self-centered, and uninterested in the lives or feelings of anyone else. While her attitude might seem haughty or bitchy most of the time, she is also fiercely protective of those that she loves, and would do absolutely anything for them. Despite the serious nature of her older brother Alec, Isabelle is actually the most responsible member of her family, and the one who acts as caretaker to them all in her own ways. She even admits that a large reason for her flings with Downworlders (flings her parents greatly disapproved of) was to keep them focused on her romantic escapades, so that they would never focus on Alec and realize that he was hiding his homosexuality from them. Izzy considers her greatest personal failure to be not being able to protect her younger brother Max, but instead of wallowing in guilt like her brothers might, she turns her grief into determination, which is certainly the more mature choice.

Izzy finds an escape from the pressures of responsibility in the release of sex and violence. She professes to hate the moments right before a battle, the uncertainty of anticipation, the necessity of concentration when you aren't certain what you're focusing on. But when embroiled in an actual fight, she doesn't have to think about anything else but fighting. It's speculated that other than her adopted brother Jace (who has special powers from experiments done on him as a baby anyways), she is potentially the best Shadowhunter her age living, and Simon remarks that it's only when she's hunting or thinking about hunting that her eyes truly come alive. She comes from an excessively proud family, and that pride is wound into her core inextricably, so that she sees what she does as not only the highest calling, but a part of her identity.

There is, of course, a negative side to her intensely emotional nature, and it manifests largely in her terrible temper.  She throws fits, lashes out, gets violent, and otherwise scares the pants out of anyone who manages to piss her off or get in her way.  All of her maturity can go out the window if it means that she gets to throw out a particularly scathing remark, and she doesn't know how to control her tongue, or really see a reason why she should.  Much of that sense of entitlement comes from being raised by her snobbish family, isolated away from any other humbling influences.  She's used to looking at "mundanes", or regular humans, as victims or weaklings, and even though she cavorts with Downworlders, her family still looks down their noses at them, and it's taken a lot of the events revolving around the mortal instruments to get her to re-examine her preconceived ideas.
  
For all of Isabelle's superficiality, she's anything but stupid, and her vocabulary, knowledge of demons, and wit can attest to the fact.   She's also excessively good at improvising, which manifests most plainly in the way that she fights, but also contributes to her general spontaneity.

Abilities:

Canonically, as a Shadowhunter, Izzy has access to runic magic that enhances speed, strength, dexterity, and more, accessible by drawing appropriate runes on her skin with a magical artifact called a 'stele'.  These can also be used to heal injuries, improve eyesight, open doors, etc. etc.  Trained since she was young to use a variety of weapons, Izzy is completely at home in battle, though her preference is to use a special golden electrum whip.  She's also skilled with daggers and the Shadowhunter weapon known as a seraph blade, and she tends to rely on using her charms and feminine wiles to gain an edge when she can.  She's also been tutored privately her entire life on a number of topics.

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