Which of Damien's friends is your favorite?

A Practical Discussion (PGTS)
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Who is your favorite?

  • Rhett: Suave, a brilliant fighter and strategist, secure enough to lay his head in Damien’s lap in public and ask for scritches, and loves color-coded organization. Wholesome masculinity with hidden depths.
  • Waverly: She has never met or heard of a magical creature or beast that she didn’t want immediately want to befriend. She’s willing to go against her own crown family in support of her own love of animals. A sweetheart with a sweet tooth.
  • Brinn: Quiet, but very emotionally intelligent and aware of the quirks and needs of those around him. He’s the glue that binds others’ friendships together, translating their needs to each other, taking care of all of them, and smoothing out problems. Low-key S’s favorite.
  • Ana: She seems aware of her privileged position than the others and is the only one who likes Sebastien from the moment she met him. She’s the most ambitious of the group, but also has a deep well of caring and loyalty. I feel like she’s probably the smartest of them. An elegant blend of cunning and heart.
  • Alec: …He’s… also there…
0 voters

Also feel free to use this thread to discuss the characters in general. e.g. Brinn and Waverly are adorable, but are they even officially a couple?

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Oh, Alec. I kind of like him, despite myself. Unlike Rhett, who is a character I absolutely despise. I’m looking forward to Sebastien finding an opportunity to make him cry.

(Damien is my favorite out of the whole group, though. I am unashamedly a Damien fan. He’s so cute and sweet, and maybe not the brightest beast core in the box, but you can’t help adoring him.)

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I quite like Rhett. He is charismatic and confident enough that may come across arrogant but he is capable to back it up most of the time. Which can be annoying for people around him ans he is also less likely to accept someone else’s competence. I know a guy that reminds me of Rhett a lot actually.

Alec he is the type of person that you sympathise with him when you hear what he is going through but want to punch in the face when you interact with him. He is quite classical example of good person that been traumatised by someone and you can see that in a lot of his actions. Still tough to be around.

That said my favourite out of all of them is Ana. She is the only one that is a S’s peer in terms of wit, cunning and intelligence. Ana applies those attributes more toward business, politics and people skills rather than sheer magic capability which is S’s core focus. I also liked how she gave as good as she got when S and Ana had their little spat and forced S to try harder to maintain the friendship. I also think if Ana was ever introduced to the S’s secret organisation she would see through it really quickly. Damien has too big of a blind spot when it comes to S to ever draw accurate conclusions without some massive reveal to shake him out of his usual thought processes. Ana can see true shape of the world.

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After writing the rest of them to talk up the characters as much as I could the temptation to make Alec’s a joke was too much for me. He is loyal and can be sweet, and he does seem to be growing out of the worst parts of himself, and I can empathize with being a bit of a jerk because of trauma.

If we include Damien, of course he is my favorite too, but he has unfair advantage in terms of screen time and PoV chapters that let us see his character in depth, along with interacting more with S.

Ana kinda has a similar unfair advantage by virtue of getting more screen time and interactions, but to a lesser extent than Damien, so I decided to include her. We don’t know nearly as much about what any of the others’ lives look like and Azalea has had less time to humanize them and flesh them out. For all we know Rhett got into dueling to uphold his dying grandmother’s legacy or something, but we don’t see enough of him to know.

Anyway, I expected Ana to be the main pick in this, and I do love her character and how protective she is of those around her, but also she’s probably the one I would like the least if I met equivalent personalities to all these people in real life. I get why she is the way she is, but she ends up being very fake and manipulative towards those she isn’t particularly close to.

I feel like part of the reason she likes Sebastien so much is because most of her group are oblivious to the masks she puts on a lot of the time and Sebastien seems to be, “in on the joke” as it were, which is a huge relief to her.

As for my vote, S is everyone’s favorite, while Brinn is S’s favorite (at least she said he was early on, and the stale cookie thing was pretty directly affectionate), and Waverly is Brinn’s favorite. So by the transitive property of Bestness, Waverly is best girl.

Waverly honestly doesn’t care about a lot of things outside of her niche special interest and is the most outwardly cold of the group. She definitely prefers magical beasts to people. But her passion and intensity of interest leave me liking her with every interaction.

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Ana is my favorite, but i hope we get to see more of Rhett and Brynn.

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Maybe it’s that I used to work with a bunch of people exactly like this, but I can’t stand it. Can. Not. Stand. It. The difference in how Rhett treats S as a man versus how he would probably treat her as a woman has always made me wonder how that would play out.

That said, I love reading everyone’s different opinions on the side characters, so even though I disagree, it’s great reading a completely different perspective.

Exactly. I love this, I never thought of it quite that way, but when you said this it clicked for me. She wants someone who lives with that inner darkness, too. Ana isn’t actually very nice…

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I 100% agree with Stef about Rhett.

I voted for Ana but I have mixed feelings. In real life I tend to take people at face value and someone like her would be impossible for me to trust even slightly. On the other hand it’s impossible not to root for her after the team up against her uncles and seeing how protective she is of Nat.

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I agree, I voted Ana too because I find her interesting but she is way too manipulative, which is part of her appeal as a character but really not as a friend.
She can be a great friend but you can never know when something more important to her might come up that would make her do something to you that no true friend would do.

She would still be my favourite even if Damien was included in the poll though :stuck_out_tongue:
I don’t dislike having him in the story but I really feel for Siobhan when he’s being a naive/clueless idiot trying to butt in things he really shouldn’t, or when Lacer is involved (I get why he does that but he really needs to read the room sometimes :x)

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Brinn would be the best actual friend and the easiest to spend large amounts of time with, especially for introverts like many of us probably are. He’s genuinely trustworthy, and he has a high EQ so it would be hard not to get along with him if you’re not a jerk. But he could also be one of the hardest to actually get to know, and some, who don’t find magical botany (or Waverly) interesting might find him frustrating.

I feel like Waverly would be the most fun in a mostly harmless way. She’ll pull you into her witchcraft-obsessed adventures if you’re the more passive/introverted type who actually wants to be nudged into a life of excitement.

Ana’s great if you trust her and she trusts you, but you probably can’t let down your guard completely around her unless you’re sure that you have a true and deep bond that can’t be broken (or if you happen to be her little sister.) She’s definitely always going to have some social excitement going on around her, so if you enjoy those kinds of games you could “play” with or against her in a kind of frenemy situation.

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