poppy seacrest

overview

What if reality is just a mirror of our collective perceptions? When someone believes something is good, they treat it as so. Something seen as bad is despised. Then what it 'actually' is... doesn't matter! Who cares about 'truth'? We make it all up from what we see! Poppy Seacrest would've loved to embrace such a philosophy, but a problem with it always pricked her: she hated how easily people agreed with it, while reality itself never did.

So how is it that Poppy Seacrest ran so afoul of reality that she destroyed a whole country the second she got in its governing seat? It's not hypocrisy, loves. The problem is people. If people could simply recognize the truth of what's good and what's bad, collectively, instead of everyone having all their own little ideas, people could do good things and be good~! And if they did bad, they'd be punished~! Everyone gets what they deserve. It's the definition of social justice!

How to arbitrate the standard for what's good and bad?

Darling, everyone knows who good and evil are. It's the people who win in the cartoons, and who make you feel special! That's a good person! Simple as pumpernickel cheesecake!

...

Okay, maybe she messed up a little. But so did everyone else! Her criteria for minimum wages were so easy they were almost unreasonable, and still nobody could manage it. If the people are just assholes, don't they deserve to starve to death? Darling, of course she doesn't mean that. She truly did try to salvage things. Sincerely. But sheesh! Don't put all the blame on Poppy when all you had to do was be kinder, to people who weren't even her!

God agrees with her! That's why she got raised as an Archon! So darlings, so sorry, but you're gonna be putting up with that nasty murderbitch Poppy and her LOVE LOVE REVOLUTION for a billion more years in your nightmares! ...Or maybe, your dreams.

You are a treasure, darling, a star radiating its own brilliant light. Please, never forget how precious you really are.

spend too long around me, and I might compliment you to death!! XD

story

Placeholder.

- Born from a one-night-stand between her father, head of billion-dollar Ordish corporate conglomerate Seacrest Enterprises, and her mother, who sabotaged the condom. Mom made the pregnancy a media scandal and secured a healthy income of child support money from Seacrest. Poppy lives alone with her mom, while her dad, stepmom, and two stepsisters stay largely uninvolved with her life.

- Mom is nuts. Former C-list singer who never broke into serious fame, has remained bitter since. Smothers, shelters, and spoils Poppy, but becomes cruel and punishing when her house rules are broken, or whenever she's in a bad mood, really. Homeschools her too. Poppy, friendless and unallowed to leave the house much, retreats to internet fandoms for socialization.

- Relationship breaks down more as Poppy becomes a teenager and starts rebelling against Mom's authority. Cold war of constant passive-aggression and gotchas and threats to make Poppy live with her (allegedly evil) stepmother instead. Failing again and again to fix Mom's mood, and with encouragement from internet friends, Poppy reenacts some scene from her favourite cartoon to try confronting her Mom. Fails. Mom calls her ungrateful and sends her to boarding school, then she'll see how good she's had it, and maybe she'll learn to stop being such a brat there, because apparently her mother loves her too much to punish her properly when she misbehaves. Poppy is devastated.

- Struggles to fit in or make friends at school, falls in with the rejects. Dissatisfied, tries to outspokenly prove she and her fellows are just as good as the popular kids. Auditions for main roles in everything, tries to ace the science fair, tries to hold a cartoon expo, tries to represent her class in an art show, tries to sell the most products during fundraisers, tries to direct the school play, so on and so on. Everything fails. Gains a reputation for being intrusive and bossy. Friendgroup tells her to chill out. Poppy is self-loathing.

- When she goes to a secluded section of campus to cry, comes upon a girl being bullied by upperclassmen. Despite her trepidation, decides screw it and unloads all her bitterness on the bullies. They back off. The girl is grateful and impressed, and invites Poppy to hang out. Only later hits her that she finally succeeded at something and made a friend. Poppy happily cries herself to sleep that night.

- Friendship goes downhill, explodes into big drama. Poppy barely manages to not get punished for her role in the whole thing, though much of the student body shuns her. Cuts off even more people and withdraws even more into fandom, pleased with her overall victory but exasperated that everything went wrong in the first place.

- Around a year later, a transfer student arrives. He's from a lower social class than most students and, though not frightfully poor, does live in a nearby vault, which is irregular. Poppy pounces on him, monopolizes him, and soon hooks up with him. Common pasttime soon becomes complaining about other students and enacting justice on whoever annoyed them this week, alongside vidya, fandom, cartoons etc.

- Boyfriend one day invites her to his neighbourhood. As part of the visit, invites her to ogle and batter some slaves. Poppy is shocked and disgusted at their conditions and doubly shocked to learn they’re chattels of Seacrest. Paranoid epiphany that this is how people perceive her.

- Desperate to prove she isn't a slaver, does a 180 into advocating kindness and human rights and so on that catches on among the school, mostly among teachers, mostly because she's a Seacrest. The media get involved for the novelty of a 17-year-old having such a worldview and pushing it effectively.

- Catches the attention of a cult who sees value in promoting the rhetoric. They keep the hype alive way longer than it should and secure her more interviews, more appearances, and use her as a mouthpiece for some of their philosophies. Poppy turns out to be a naturally good media darling, reports of her start spreading internationally, and she becomes drunk on the attention.

- Becoming a minor celebrity, Poppy feels invincible. She comes under the impression everyone is personally cheering for her success. At the next major conference, to an audience of hundreds or thousands, takes the stage... and without prompting or instruction, starts singing.

- Singing is one of her few talents she's genuinely confident in, which conversely makes her more fearful of it being denigrated. Further, her talent for it consistently annoys her mother. While half-certain that this will kick off a career for her as a starlet, it's assuredly an intentional stab at/appeal to her mom. Mom failed; she succeeded, so time to swallow her pride and support her.

- It is a success. Poppy cries in delight at the applause. Her mom pulls her out of school and congratulates her.

- That very same night, her mom gasses her with carbon monoxide.

- The dose is more than intended; Poppy is left near completely paralyzed. Her mom nonetheless gets her to a hospital and tries to ride the injury for media fame, but the circumstances are plainly suspicious and she is quickly implicated. Poppy's dad, ashamed that this happened, decides to involve himself in Poppy's political cause and actively liberate the underclass.

- His activities clash with the aims of the cult and quickly destabilize the country's social structure and economy. QoL in the vaults isn't getting better so much as QoL in the middle/upper crust is getting worse. He banishes the cult, seeing them as esoterically-minded opportunists with no real investment in social reform, while the aristocrats flee either overseas or into seclusion. Base of enemies growing while allies fracture into subcliques of who needs priority more.

- NOW BEHOLD

- THE STUPIDEST FINANCO/SOCIO/POLITICAL SYSTEM I COULD CONCEIVE

- INTRODUCING: THE CENTRAL COLLECTIVE BANK OF ORDANZ

- it’s poppy’s idea. Thanks poppy.

- EVERYTHING goes to hell. many vaults become either completely anarchic or self-governing, usually under opportunistic raiders. Widespread cliques, gangs, instability even aboveground. Blackouts and pipe failures. Several vaults freeze, lose water, or lose ventilation. Chaos pushing more people to the surface. Deaths in the billions. This period comes to be known as the Hunger Years.

- Poppy’s condition slowly recovering over this time, but the constant failures her regime’s causing are overwhelming her. Her brain kinda snaps as she tries to rationalise how this all happened until her usual plan of ‘idk throw money at it’ stops working because uuuuh pop there isn’t any money.

- writing smutfic while rome burns. Psychotic breakdown public address

- gets eaten alive. Cam swoops in all like bruh, and archons her

- ordanz is still dead 100 yrs later with the vaults sealed off/shut down/teeming with monsters. whole country’s infrastructure got shot back to like, bronze ages, with almost no working factories/farms left and no money to trade. Poppy still wants to prove her stupid hell-bank will work as long as the society is full of good people and all that; she still annexes people and convinces them to live on her cult reservation in the freezing-cold snow in a region full of hungry angry locals who may or may not also be cannibals

- her cultists prolly died/got killed a lot so she’s probably decentralising the whole operation now

- pantheon thing is a thing too

- ren is probably doing a reconquista of the vaults

- poppy pls calm down

- highest killcount in goh behind camellia and barely (BARELY) vertel

personality

appearance

A beautiful young woman in an ornate ball gown, gazing from the other side of a mirror. Her porcelain skin, saffron hair, and turquoise eyes are feylike in their perfection. Though she holds herself with poise, her troubled smile betrays some trepidation — and is perhaps, a plea for help.

In life, she was a tall mousey girl with an unremarkable fashion sense, noticeable acne scars, glasses, and light brown hair. Her dream appearance is copied from the design of an in-universe cartoon character she liked.

personality

The first impression of Poppy: how cheerful and sweet, how fun and giving, how outgoing and kind, what an absolute darling! The second: how strong and courageous, how mature and responsible, how forgiving and loyal, selflessly shouldering others’ pain. And the third: ah, what a cruel, petty tyrant.

How can it be? Was it all a trick? Well, yes, in a sense — but one that Poppy has played on herself, more than anyone else.

Poppy thinks she’s the centre of the universe: a cosmic protagonist who moves the world by virtue of being on-screen, inherently deserving of victory, love, and success. Nothing truly exists or matters outside its implications for, and interactions with Poppy. If an enemy appears, the camera focuses on Poppy defeating them. If a friend succeeds, the camera focuses on how Poppy supported them. She views the world and the people in it principally as vehicles to make her look good, feel good, and prove herself good, panicking and feeling viciously betrayed whenever something forces her to feel bad about herself or her public associations.

What makes her feel bad? Basically everything. Poppy has zero self-esteem. She’s persistently unconfident about her choices, embarrassed about her interests, conscious of things people could mock her for, sensitive to outside judgements, and threatened to the point of psychotic breakdown when faced with the thought of being a bad, uninteresting, undesirable, or unreasonable person. Rather than acknowledge and expose herself to that underlying shame, she survives by hermetically sealing herself in an environment where nobody questions her, by dismissing her critics as worse than her, by punishing those who insult her, and by constantly maintaining a respectable public image.

That image is a 24/7 commitment. Every action she takes, she thinks: does this reflect on me positively? Am I doing this for a respectable reason? If someone challenged me about this, could I justify myself? Do I look like the better party? Can I win this? And indeed she must win. Hatred and panic shred at her brain until those who annoy or oppose her are either charmed or humiliated into complete submission, while those she loves or who gratify her, she rewards ostentatiously. If her enemies win, she can’t stay. If those she loves refuse her, she explodes. She bends the truth like a cat’s cradle to avoid acknowledging herself, her failings, or her feelings as ever unjustified. Often, without realising she’s even doing it.

Her emotions drive her. Massive repositories of envy, resentment, depression, loneliness, and fear simmer under her skin, which she struggles to vent without behaving in rash ways she later struggles to justify. It paralyses and terrifies her that anyone could have valid, provable examples of her bad behaviour, that anyone might see her as childish, irrational, weak, or inferior, or that anyone may feel entitled to power over her. Though her understanding of love is warped, she truly does love certain ‘interesting’ people and feels obligated to shower them with favours, gifts, and validation, expecting them to respond with ‘love’ in turn. Inevitably, Poppy’s love fades, as she finds it insufficiently requited and its recipients undeserving.

Everything said, though, Poppy is genuine about wanting to be a good person who her friends and community love and value. Her heart’s… not quite in the right place, but close enough to motivate her to campaign for changes that are usually beneficial in theory. She’s highly transactional in a way that makes her predictable: you’re good to her, she’ll be good to you, and she reins herself in pretty easily as long as her underlying emotions are validated.

Despite everything, she’s just a sheltered quirky fun-loving nerd, socially dumb and a little perverted, who really really really wants friends but shouldn’t be left near the controls of any kind of authority system ever.

powers

Archon Immortality: Dreamwalker

Poppy’s consciousness inhabits her personal dream realm. Though her body in the waking world is dead, her consciousness indefinitely inhabits the realm of collective dreams. Anything that would destabilise her form or realm fails to stick. She will only die if/when she wakes up.

Archon Power: Dream Realms

Poppy is always asleep, and always exists in a dream. She is omnipotent inside her dream. She is also a dreamwalker, able to freely enter and observe the dreams of others. She can transport dreamers into and out of others' dreams, but can only alter the dreams themselves while conforming to their logic. Dream Realms Poppy’s presence stabilises dreams into ‘realms’ with internal rules and logic, dictated by the dreamer’s subconscious. The more Poppy visits, the more stable the realm, and the more stable the realm, the more it behaves like a consistent, continuity-abiding, self-contained world with more developed and intelligent native inhabitants. If aware they’re dreaming, dreamers can consciously alter the rules to shape their realm however they want, becoming omnipotent inside it.

Poppy can annex dream realms into hers with the conscious consent of the dreamer. This transforms both the dreamer and their realm into objects Poppy can completely control, even when they’re awake. When an annexed dreamer dies in reality, their psyche continues to inhabit her dream, until Poppy eventually dies. Mirror Link Poppy's dream is connected to the real world through reflective surfaces, such as mirrors and water. Poppy observes the real world through these reflections, and will appear in a given reflection when focusing her attention there.

The link only allows observation, not passage. The connection is stronger and image is clearer on both ends when the reflection in the real world is of high fidelity. Dream Rules Death and physical pain do not exist in dreams. Events in dreams don’t affect the dreamer in real life, except psychologically. Objects from dreams cannot be carried into real life. They are just dreams.

Archon Power: Insidious Idolatry

Poppy is always mind controlling anyone she encounters. Everyone who consciously feels her presence is compelled to think positively of her, listen to her, believe her, and generally hold her in high esteem. These feelings of admiration return whenever the subject thinks about Poppy, even after she has left, and strengthen with repeated exposure.

The effect can always be resisted, though doing so feels unnatural, immoral, and frightening. Guilt, shame, and self-loathing torment those who continually refuse to submit — in the worst case, to the point of depression or suicide.

People who have never met Poppy are unaffected, and those who have rarely realise these feelings were imposed upon them, and not simply their natural thoughts, until deeply entrenched in them. The initial mind control effect most reliably triggers in dreams, where Poppy is actually present, but can trigger in the real world if the observer is particularly sensitive, empathic, or psychically predisposed, and/or if Poppy contacts them through a high-fidelity surface.

Archon Power: Hallucinatory Illusions

Poppy is an illusionist, able to incur vivid hallucinations through any sense of anyone she is observing, even those in the real world. These hallucinations cannot be resisted, even if the subject knows they are fake.

relations

camille

friend!

Oop! At top of the list, where he belongs, it’s Camille! Surprised? Is your papal jaw dropping, seeing an atheist and God being besties? Just goes to show, you don’t need some stuffy old books to be someone in the eyes of the universe! Mleh!

Camille has done so much for Poppy. He reached out when she was scared and confused and thought the entire world was against her, when it felt the sun had been snuffed of its healing light and the hatred of millions cast her into the umbral ink of eternal darkness, when she had nowhere left but her one final fortress, her sanctuary, her dream… and thought herself banished forever to loneliness and solitude, it was he who eased her back into life. …Maybe she’s being sentimental, but it’s true that Camille saved her. Hallelujah!

It was a super rough time. He’s kind as a dove and sweeter than honey, the exact kind of person who deserves a religion. His presence is the harbour for Poppy’s truest heart, the weakest and most fragile part of her, which he’s gently supported with love and direction. He’s helped her a lot… not just as an Archon, but as a person, and it feels she’s on the right track now.

She has nothing but good things to say about him. Really.

Mephi

jerk

……….siiiiigh…..

Ok, honestly? Honestly-honestly? She doesn’t like this guy much. And no she’s not going to apologise for it. People are allowed to not like each other, and not everyone in the world is going to get along. That’s fine. But what’s not fine is when disliking someone turns into this… weird, obsessive vendetta like what the mean old goat has going against her. She’s nothing but polite and friendly to him, but every time, it’s always death threats, yelling, trying to make people hate her… when she’s already dealing with the world hating her. It’s traumatic, but he doesn’t care.

She’s not going to let it get under her skin. But, if she knew why he was behaving like this, maybe they could sort things out and come to an understanding. After all, they’re both Archons, so they’re going to talk in the future — or maybe even work together. Simmering in this bad blood is just a pointless hassle for everyone. It’s shockingly selfish and irresponsible of him, too, as a national leader, to stay on such bad terms with her.

But if he wants to reconcile, it’s on him to apologise. She has no obligation to carry the emotional turmoil, or danger, of teaching someone who wants her dead how to be less of a psychopath. Really, she’s being amazingly tolerant by not just writing him off… since he’s 600 years old and still hasn’t grown out of his nappies.

It’s never too late to change, though. She’s confident it can still happen, with effort.

trivia

public perception

The face and driver of the social revolution that unwittingly destroyed Ordanz. Extremely unpopular, especially in Ordanz, if not outright feared with her followers shunned and rejected. Poppy enjoys tormenting people who vocally dislike her by annexing their children or exposing them to her mind control, which has only worsened her reputation.

Was a BNF in multiple in-universe fandoms under the screenname oxitokin. Still participates in fandom through her annexees, but uses various different screennames. Remains generally popular in several big fandoms.

in fights

N A S T Y. Quick to take offence to things, quick to punish people for it, loves making people regret wronging her and has little to fill her time with except writing fanfiction and bullying people she hates. Limits herself to what feels an ‘appropriate’ level of punishment to any particular slight, but, like, schizophrenia isn’t fun even if it’s temporary, the nightmares she flings people into are nasty, and any mind control effects she lands last permanently.

Can also use her annexees to bother people irl while she hangs out safe in her dream.

Will deny to the end of the earth that she was responsible or meant anything maliciously.

romance

Believes herself destined for and deserving of true love, but feels creepy and gross about letting her mind control influence people for romantic purposes. Only interested in people who of their own accord want to date her, without ever meeting her. It’s a hard sell, Pop. Otherwise, pines after tortured but sensitive hotties.

Had a loyal irl boyfriend she annexed but his role nowadays is basically ‘comfort animal,’ ‘venting receptacle,’ and ‘sex toy’. Mentions him so little that people generally don’t realise she has a boyfriend. She was an awful communicator but he was psychic, so it kinda worked despite everything.

hobbies

Cartoons, video games, cosplay, fandom. Loves smutfic and yaoi, writes a ton of it, poorly. Extremely talented singer but hesitant to put herself out there.

ADORES gossip and friend/fandom drama. Actively participates in, exacerbates, and encourages drama.

misc. trivia

Full name is Poppy Cordelia Seacrest.
Her dreamworld has an Alice in Wonderland type aesthetic, with lots of talking fantasy creatures and palaces and the like. Poppy is bored to tears with her dreamworld, and usually only interacts with it to refresh after being overwhelmed by irl happenings.
Compulsive liar. Forgets half of everything she says once she no longer needs it, contradicts herself often because of it.
Self-inserts hard on her favourite characters, media, and people, becoming ferociously protective of them.
Her boyfriend’s a cross-dressing furry who wore collars to school. Their customary greeting was “Nya~!” “Rawr~!”.
Frequently hums music to herself when people are around, hoping for them to comment on her voice. Claims it's just a habit or a nervous tic. It's not.
Was a lucid dreamer all her life. Loved it.
Her favourite colours change often, but she consistently likes black and pink.
Terrible diet. Reluctant to eat anything unfried or unsweetened. Favourite drink is cola.