March is Women’s History Month, and so for March I’m doing vignettes about or questions regarding any of my female characters, one/day from the 10th-31st.

This one comes from [Bad username: thnidu,]Addergoole, which also has a landing page here. (Stay tuned for the entirely-new rewrite of Book One of Addergoole, coming soon!)

This is a combination of nature and nurture.

To begin with, the Grigori, the bloodline of which Regine is a member, tend to be very analytic. They’re smart, some would say brilliant, and to them was given the guidance of mankind (some say) in matters of the mind.

This scientific bend tends to lead Grigori into ignoring the social and physical aspects of their development – they have the Mara for physical protection, so need no focus there, and since there is an unspoken disdain within the Grigori for the Daeva, who are those who inspire (and thus very social), social skills are seen as secondary.

Regine’s particular family line – her father, her older brother, herself – are very very science-and-math-focused, to the point where they often have difficulty understanding other people’s emotions (or, on the rare occasion that they notice their having them, their own). Regine’s father in particular discouraged all expressions of emotion as unneeded and a waste of time, so that from a very early age, Regine learned not to express feelings, and, after a time, not to acknowledge them even to herself.

In a crew with a Mara and a Daeva, Regine often feels the need to act even more Grigori-stereotypical; to be sure to show not the faintest shred of bias or emotion, to be as scientific and as analytic as possible, to balance out the often-irrational and hair-trigger-seeming emotions of her friends. This leads – along with an inability to cope with failure – to an even more repressed Regine by the time we reach the books.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/698400.html. You can comment here or there.