[break]Quick facts: Muggleborn, 36, originally sorted into Unda.
[break]Started Hollow Creek in Fall 1992, graduated Summer 1999.
[break]Became a healer at the Potion and Plant Poisoning floor at Alora Jane shortly thereafter.
[break]Started working at Hollow Creek in the capacity of Potions Professor in Fall 2013, taking over the former professor.
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Extra Lou information (Google Docs) [break]
Impressions other people have of Louis [break][break]Alright kiddos I’ll try and keep this as succinct as possible. Lou here is Hollow Creeks’ jackass professor – what would a Harry Potter roleplay be without a jerk for a Potions’ professor? He thrives on shredding arguments, whether he believes the premise or not, repeatedly invalidates other people’s opinions when they are based on emotion instead of reason. He’s insensitive, intolerant, argumentative, needlessly pedantic, cold, and impatient. People that prefer comfort and white lies over rationality will be uncomfortable around Lou. There are reasons for his personality that you can read about in his application located
here if you want.
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Platonic[break][break]Friendship is obviously hard to come by for Lou, and if he’s being quite honest, it’s because he feels he has nothing in common with his coworkers. He believes they are far less intelligent than himself as well as the healers he used to work with at Alora Jane. The people he is most likely to be non-contentious with are those that are a little thicker-skinned and able to recognize his sarcastic, dead-pan sense of darker humour. They are also capable of expressing their thoughts on recent political changes without needing to resort to emotional pleas, and won’t pry into his personal life. He has found himself drawn to people who are deeply passionate about the advancement of knowledge, whatever their field of passion may be.
[break][break]Louis can be a decent friend, provided they can speak at length about one of his passions. What he is not good at is being an emotional support for his friends. He has a tendency to offer solutions whether they are wanted or not and quickly points out the flaws in logic behind fights between his friends and their spouses. This can cause friction when the advice is unsolicited when they wanted him to simply be there to listen. Lou is also uncomfortable with overt expression of feelings and tries to change the topic when conversation veers that direction.
[break][break]You’ll notice in those friendships they are all superficial friendships where they never discuss their own lives at length. And those are the friendships that Louis does best with – the less his friends demand he come out for a Butterbeer with him or ask why he leaves social events early, the better.
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Romantic [break][break]Ha.
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Louis describes himself as a cismale heterosexual but truthfully he very rarely experiences sexual attraction and would be better described as gray asexual. The sad truth of the matter is that a lifetime of chronic Anorexia Nervosa has plummeted his testosterone levels and effectively robbed him of having a fulfilling, healthy sex life. He has only ever been in a single relationship, his short marriage, and it was a disaster from start to finish.
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I don’t anticipate any romantic relationships for Lou for a plethora of reasons including the repulsion he has towards his body, because of all of the normal avenues for finding a partner involve food, his need for absolute control over a situation, and really his personality in general. He simply has no interest in finding another partner, and Lou will never take the initiative to pursue a woman, even if the chemistry is right.
[break][break]Of course, you’re free to have one-sided crushes where your character flirts with Lou. I cannot fathom why that'd be the case, but you do you. He won’t take it well and think you’re insulting him. I’m also open to playing bad relationships as long as your character initially pursues him. Hit me up in PM or DM; I’m sure we can come up with something.
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Antagonistic [break][break]
Lou is a… special person who tends to have far more enemies than he does friends. And for the most part the reason is him. He does not follow the archetypal healer and is not warm and understanding. Instead he is sarcastic, pedantic, judgmental, and impatient, and tends to rub people the wrong way straight from the get-go. If he meets you and recognizes that you are a ‘live off the fat of the land’ sort of person who prefers nature to technology, you instantly become a nuisance and he tries to shut-down conversation. The way he does that is blunt and somewhat insulting, and by itself wouldn’t be an issue if it weren’t for the expression he gives. It is the disparaging look of mocking distaste alongside his words that send people over the edge. He rushes you through conversation, and rolls his eyes profusely when he gets annoyed – which is frequent.
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Rivals, his ex-wife, friends, enemies, authority figures, co-workers, his ex-wife, cashiers, lawn care workers, his ex-wife, and children will have felt this to some degree. To Lou being antagonistic is his shield and keeps people at arm’s length and away from the things about himself that he hates. It also prevents him from excessively long interactions with people who bore him – a lengthy list of people he is contentious with include: conservatives, anti-science, anti-progression, emotionally-driven people, people who would pry into his life, other members of staff, most of his students, most of the patients he healed while working at Hollow Creek, Libertarians, people loudly professing their political stances without having thought them through, optimists, Quidditch fanatics, and lazy people.
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What his students think of him[break][break]
I think most important to Lou’s plotter is what his students and fellow staff members think of him. Louis has woefully steep expectations of his students and is seldom impressed by his students’ accomplishments. Many of his students likely feel he is unfair when it comes to his grading schemes, and needlessly pedantic regarding grammatical correctness. Louis’ intention when he teaches is that his students do not just have the ability to spit out potion ingredients and recall instructions on the fly, he wants them to truly understand the principles behind the selection of components and steps of potion-making. Louis is yet to find a textbook that relays what he wants taught, and so students who depend on memorization and lack critical thinking skills will do poorly in his class. He uses a great deal of muggle science and chemistry to explain potion-making, along with plenty of self-exploration and discovery. The only students whom he is impressed by have been those who have the innate curiosity to determine properties of potion ingredients by exploring a variety of texts, or ask him questions related to potions he does not know the answer to himself.
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The average grade by a student in his class is Poor to Average. I ask if your student supposedly does well in his class and earns higher than this, that they do not simply follow instructions as is the case in the books, but have a deeper understanding of why potions work. Like Snape, Louis would only accepts students who have earned an 'O' in their OWL into his NEWT lessons, and begrudgingly takes less talented students with an E as per law. His favourite students are those he feels have a voracious desire to learn, whether they’re his top students or not
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Relationships[break](Will be listed when we’ve talked!)
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