InsaneJournal

Name: Bryce Alexandra Dunstan
Birthday: May 24, 1982 - 21
Blood: Halfblood (very mixed)
Former house: Ravenclaw (1994-2000)

Sexual orientation: Bisexual (with a leaning toward men)
Marital Status: Steadily shagging and loving on Laura Madley, but is always open for more love.

Nationality: British
Hometown: Oxford, England
Residence: Euphoria Lane 234, Flat 1B, with Simon Capper and looking for a third roommate.

Occupation: Freelance Musician/Tailor & Clothier *notes*
Financial Status: Low/Mid - Middle class
Political Affiliation: The good guys

Social stereotype: The Free-Spirited/The Hippie/The Pacifist

Personality:
Bryce Dunstan strives to be above else a righteously moral and natural individual, or, if you use the common term: a hippie. It comes naturally to her, many say she was just born in the wrong decade, though much of it is by choice as well. She's not the type to go about with a picket sign, shouting about the injustices of the government, however. She's extremely laid back and her intelligence and ability to asses situations in a logical manner put her in Ravenclaw, so she prefers to express her views in calm, if passionate, debate and conversation, or through her music. She's got idealist goals and hopes, holds to the thought of free love and world peace, but she keeps realistic boundaries as well. She believes it's all possible but knows that not everyone feels the same, and sometimes for good reason. She also doesn't press her views on others, but is an advocate of leading by example and therefore takes pride in her own mannerisms and ways of going about life.

She has quite a bit of optimism that comes through with these ideals, but her logical side refuses to let her be a completely dreamy flower child. She knows she's decently smart, and when in a debate with someone, she has no problems being a bit cutting if her opponent's getting slightly on her nerves, and she'll do this most often when the other person isn't arguing well. She respects someone with differing beliefs if they can steadily support themselves but she'll raise a brow and look at you as if you're slightly moronic if she doesn't see that. She doesn't have much of a problem snickering at what she feels is the wrong view with her friends, even though she's usually very sure to not be openly or directly insulting of them. She also doesn't hide her own very often at all. Because she thinks that it's rude to pressure others into one way of thinking or drilling them without provocation, many times she'll instead choose to just be completely open with her own habits, rarely hiding anything except for perhaps from the more conservative relatives of her closest friends. She thinks she shouldn't have to and also gets a bit of a kick out of opening someone's eyes or forcing them to acknowledge that people like her exist.

She holds some of the very basic views of the hippie culture:

Bryce is an advocate of free love, gender not really being an issue though she tends to prefer men as the more superficial women out there grind her nerves a bit and she likes to be laid back and comfortable with someone and isn't a fan of drama. There was no real 'realisation' for her when it came to being labeled bisexual, she just never had much of a problem admitting the beauty she found in both men and women. People are people to her, and people fall in love and make love with each other and who they are, rather than their bodies. She also thinks that physical expressions of affection should be more fun than anything and shouldn't be made awkward or taken too seriously. She's rarely opposed to the random snog or fooling around as long as both parties are having a good time and things are relaxed. She's been known to catch the occasional person off guard by beginning to kiss them, and if they object, she just shrugs, lights her cigarette and goes back to the conversation or whatever they were doing. She's more picky about who she has sex with just because of the trust issues needed to go along with it, but if they're her friends she doesn't mind no strings being attached. If it makes them both happy, why not?

As far as acting as a bit of an environmentalist, Bryce wears clothes made of a lot of natural fabrics and is big on hemp and other natural fibers. She likes to cut them in the style she likes if it's not so she has a lot of clothes that look like one fiber but are actually made of another, styled and dyed how she likes. She doesn't eat red meat, but doesn't really have a problem for other people who do. She's all for animal rights, but also thinks that if human beings reverted to their natural state they'd still be eating meat in nature's food chain, so really, what's the harm? Red meat just doesn't appeal to her, and she orders the vegetarian option often enough mostly for health reasons.

As far as drugs go, Bryce will try most anything once, and has. She stays away from real hard stuff, but has been known to dabble in hallucinogens every so often, but that was mostly when she felt the need to get away from the real world back during the war, and it's very rare for her nowadays. She isn't a real fan of alcohol, but will drink socially, and is a fairly regular smoker, but is hardly a pack a day person. The smoking is more to cover up her favourite habit of the bunch, marijuana, and she has a tendency to just let an unlit cigarette dangle from her lips to satisfy her cravings of oral activity. She's rarely seen not holding sewing pins and needles, a cigarette, a joint, or a long piece of grass between her teeth and lips or chewing gum. She's not sure why she has the oral fixation, but she's never really found the need to correct it and it keeps her from biting her nails, which she likes to keep trimmed at the right length for guitar playing purposes.

Bryce is a very laid back person, possibly more so than she should be about some subjects, but one thing she's very passionate about is her music. She dreams of being a great folk-rock singer and musician at some point, not to celebrity level fame, but known enough to travel and have regular gigs. As of now, she plays mostly at small venues, most commonly at local cafes, coffeehouses, and the occasional club, as well as for background music for parties, special events, etc, sometimes with fellow musician, but so far mostly on her own. She writes a lot of her own things, and she's a fairly strong alto, voice a little raspy from time to time, but nothing that usually takes away from her performance. She loves the music from the sixties and seventies mostly, and can enjoy a wide range of different things except for music which she considers overproduced and mechanical. She's not a fan of rap, pop-country, or electronic tunes, and gets fairly irritated with overly simplified or repetitive music, her Ravenclaw nerd tendencies finally displaying in her analysis of music in terms of chords and intervals, as well as getting emotionally involved.

Childhood:
Douglas Dunstan is a Humanities Professor at Oxford University, a muggle, but one with a wizarding mother and muggle father. His older brother, David, went to Hogwarts as a Gryffindor, inheriting their mother's magical blood. It never bothered him much that he hadn't been magical, their father got along just fine being a muggle in a wizarding world, and the household combined the styles of life enough to make both boys feel at home. He met a young Ministry-affiliated business woman Marie Richardson when he was a few years out of school and they got along famously, she also being from a similarly mixed family and a Hufflepuff Alumnis. The two were a happy couple, despite the occasional disagreement of politics, and married at 25 and 26. They gave birth to their first little girl in 1976, Bryce's older sister, Jane Dunstan. The couple then waited out the first war before deciding to have their second child and finally in May 1982, Bryce was born.

She had a fairly normal childhood, beside the fact that her house was a mix of magic and muggle. It was clear early on, however, that Bryce took after their more relaxed and open-minded father, and Jane, their more traditional and strict mother. Bryce began to get fed up with her mother and sister's attitudes at a young age and began going out of her way not to be like them, taking opposing views on most subjects and learning the art of playing devil's advocate, and not following their leads into the world of the upstanding financially aware and professional-at-all-times ladies. When Jane went off to Hogwarts and was sorted into Hufflepuff because of her staunch work ethic, Mrs. Dunstan focused her energy on correcting what she found as lazy behaviour on Bryce's part - spending hours just listening to her father's records or hanging out on the couch with her friends, reading but never anything she didn't find fun to do so, etc. Her father gave her a guitar for her birthday the summer before her first year, just in case she didn't receive a Hogwarts letter, and the young girl was ecstatic. Mrs. Dunstan again disapproved as it just encouraged Bryce to get wrapped up in music and not much else, practicing for hours on end on the balcony of their Oxford flat. But lo and behold she did get accepted into Hogwarts, and upon arriving she was sorted into Ravenclaw.

During her time at school, Bryce was fairly easy-going and made many friends as it was in her nature to get along with a wide variety of people and could be seen spending time with older students as well as those younger. She felt fairly neutral with all the rumours flying around about Harry Potter and his friends, and mostly chose to just stick to her own devices and concern herself with her friends. Her sister had no problem pestering her just as her mother had all the year before at home, and it made Bryce itch to continue defying them - they called her lazy and she'd be sure to get by in classes by doing the littlest about of work possible, they called her too sympathetic, and she'd make sure she listened to anyone who spoke to her, they called her a dreamer, and she learned how to play all the most idealistic music she could on guitar. As she got older, all she knew is that she didn't want to be like they were. Her mother and sister were far too selfish, far too concerned with money, far too closed off to the world around them. They spoke of proper jobs and local governmental issues, when Bryce saw a life stuck behind a desk and eyes closed to the suffering in the world. She went through a phase of political action in her third year, giving her allowance to charities, becoming a vegetarian, and beginning to dress in her vintage style. She researched the civil rights and anti-war movements from the sixties and seventies and realised that she felt most comfortable being considered one of those people. When her mother shouted at her that she'd become nothing but a bleeding-heart hippie summer before fourth year, Bryce grinned, thanked her mother, then padded outside barefoot to practice some Simon & Garfunkel on her guitar.

It was in her fourth year that she began to receive the reprimanding letters from her mother, the apologies from her father, and the warnings from her sister. Jane was working for the Ministry now, a starting position in Muggle Relations, but she still lived at home for her first couple years out of Hogwarts and she told Bryce how their parents fought. They disagreed more and more often, and according to Jane, much of it had to do with the way they were raising their children. Mr. Dunstan wanted to let them be individuals, make their own mistakes, but had severe issues with any sort of discipline, while Mrs. Dunstan wanted a strict and upstanding household, infuriated by his unwillingness to reign Bryce's behaviour in. Bryce now knows that her mother had good intentions, wanting her to be able to support herself and be a respectable member of society after Hogwarts, but at the time Bryce was extremely hurt and angry about the prospect of causing her parents so much grief. She started experimenting with drugs then as a bit of an escape summer before fifth year, both as an escape from her home life and the constant bad news of Voldemort's return in the wizarding world. Fourth year she began to get interested in romantic relationships and fifth year she began to 'date' as much as Bryce ever did, which usually consisted of very open agreements or more often than not boys to snog regularly than actually be the girlfriend of. Bryce's attitude about it kept her from being taken advantage of, and the fact that she didn't snog people she didn't like and never let it go too far kept her from getting any sort of reputation of being easy or things similar. She was known to be relaxed about that type of thing, but because she was open about it, few were able to get a kick out of gossiping about it.

Dumbledore was killed then. Her mother immediately took up arms with the concerned parents who demanded Hogwarts be closed or they were pulling their children from school, it being too dangerous, but Bryce was adamant about returning. Her friends were there, and there was no way she was leaving all the work she'd done in that castle, not to mention change was not something Bryce was ready for anymore than she had to be then. Mr. Dunstan supported her decision to go back, and from then on the family became divided down the middle. In the end of her fifth year, it finally came to divorce with her parents - the arguing just becoming too much. Their mother moved out of their Oxford home and near her sister's place in London, and that summer was the first of Bryce and Douglas's summers alone. Bryce felt incredibly guilty, though she never let her mother know that, and now she was out to prove that her father's view of the world was a good one and decided then she'd be a musician. If she could make it and live a happy life in her own way, and change the world with her passion, her mother couldn't accuse her of being anything but a credible citizen. Her ideals felt a bit strained for awhile, becoming more realistic and a bit cynical at moments, also dropping a few of her proactive habits like starting to eat meat again and focusing more on her own personal growth rather than giving up everything for causes. She wanted to believe in the human race, but they kept proving her wrong and the full-on war that had broken out did not help these feelings. She supported the cause of the good guys, of Harry and his friends and what they fought for, but Bryce would never be able to get herself completely behind any such mass violence.

War involvements:
The war was at it's peak during Bryce's last couple years at Hogwarts and then for a bit over a year afterward and it in frank terms: broke her heart. She wouldn't have fought, not with violence. She would have even had trouble getting involved with healing or strategy for as much as she likes to try and right injustice, violence and war are concepts that are very hard for her to comprehend the reason of. It hurt her horribly to see what people were capable of, and it hurt her even more to know what Voldemort's followers were forcing her friends and fellow previous students to do. She used her skills with needle and thread to get a job at as a tailor and seamstress for the Ministry's uniform department, and the work flooded in along with the charity stitching she did of anyone's garments ruined in the chaos. She supported them as much as she could, but the most she found herself truly able to do was help counsel and shelter her friends when they needed it. She tried to use her power of debate and conversation to convince those on the fence to at least not offer support to the wrong side, but there wasn't much to do sometimes but hunker down with her father and hope everything would be all right. Eventually she found a way to help by volunteering for any clean up and restoration groups, and she became known amongst her friends as the one to owl or call for a report on who had made it and who hadn't, because she developed the habit very quickly into the war of owling, apparating, and calling everyone she had contact information for (and that was quite a few) to see if they were alive after an attack or battle and would then let their friends and family know. She tried her hardest to be optimistic throughout it for those who were actively fighting and aiding, and sometimes it became too much for her and she would break down, hit up, or just stay in her room with her guitar. When news of Voldemort's fall reached her, she was stunned into silence and then erupted with joy and her optimism and ideals came back into her heart with a rush. She was immediately on the scene, volunteering for everything she could in the restoration and began to once again work on her musical career.

Now Bryce has fairly regular local gigs, known for her folk-rocky style or playing piano for background music to fancy parties all around London, both Muggle and Wizarding. She still works as a part-time tailor and clothier at Twillfit and Tattings, does the occasional odd vintage job for Madame Malkin, and takes personal commissions to work on in her home studio. She has skills for most types of professional sewing, and her main task consists of bespoke tailoring and patching things up, but she loves getting a request to make something new from scratch. The thing one needs to know about her is that if you get a Dunstan original, it probably won't be any sort of formal wear. She enjoys her work, but it's mainly what she does in the daytime to keep a steady amount of money coming in whenever gigs dry up or she needs time off from performing to get some serious songwriting done. She worked out of her home in Oxford during the war and after for a couple years, but securing the job at Twillfit encouraged her to move closer to Diagon Alley and when she found many of her old classmates at Euphoria Lane, she had no hesitation in moving right in.

Height: 5'7 1/2"
Distinguishing marks/features? Bryce is a bit tall, but other that most things about her are fairly average. She's got short cropped dark brown hair, with pale skin that tans slightly if she's spent hours lounging outside on a sunny day. Her eyes are a dark hazel, and her fingers are noticeably callused from all her guitar playing and sewing. Her body's not very curvy and she has a rather large mouth but she does have a nicely oval-shaped face with a bit of an indented chin and what most would consider a nicely rounded backside. What most notice about her, however, is her style of clothing - if it isn't authentic vintage outfits from the sixties and seventies, it's similar or has been personally adjusted to look like it. She's almost always either wearing bell bottoms or a long peasant skirt, she loves denim anything - jackets, overalls, jeans, hats, patches, and her shirts range from more boyish concert and rock band t-shirts to much more feminine peasant blouses with soft floral patterns and belled sleeves. All of her clothing has a personal touch to it and her hair's too short to do much of anything with, but she loves to wear the occasional cap or bandanna. Her make-up is extremely natural, if she wears any at all, and when she does she tends to overdue it a bit on the eyes so as to draw attention away from her lips and her slightly oral habits. The jewelry she wears is usually fairly stylized and almost always hand-made, not by herself, but by other artists she likes to support. She can usually be seen with a long doubled-up beaded necklace that she rarely takes off, a strappy bracelet or two, small earrings and rings that are either of the mood variety, or eastern in style, along with ying-yangs and peace signs, and then her favourite scarf on colder days. Overall, even being an excellent seamstress, she's never been much into fashion, but she does work to keep a very individual style.

PB choice: Missy Higgins
Preferred character journal: bryceoftours