m (→Personality: *crosses fingers*) Tag: Visual edit |
m (→Personality: why won't the </div> go awaaay) Tag: Visual edit |
||
| Line 8: | Line 8: | ||
==Character== |
==Character== |
||
===Personality=== |
===Personality=== |
||
| − | {{Quote| |
+ | {{Quote|"Why, as for that," answered Oz, "I think you are wrong to want a heart. It makes most people unhappy. If you only knew it, you are in luck not to have a heart." <p>"That must be a matter of opinion," said the Tin Woodman. "For my part, I will bear all the unhappiness without a murmur, if you will give me the heart."|The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, chapter XV}}'''[''' note for further edits: tl;dr, her outspoken demeanor mask a bleeding heart ''']''' |
===Appearance=== |
===Appearance=== |
||
Although she doesn't hail from Munchkinland, Cora, like a few notable Ozians, is especially short at 4'10". She has a compact, pear shaped build, mid-length thick scarlet hair pulled away from her face, intense brown eyes, and a warm sienna brown complexion. |
Although she doesn't hail from Munchkinland, Cora, like a few notable Ozians, is especially short at 4'10". She has a compact, pear shaped build, mid-length thick scarlet hair pulled away from her face, intense brown eyes, and a warm sienna brown complexion. |
||
Revision as of 05:52, 29 September 2020
| This page is a work in progress. |
|
Maybe I don't have to feel like I need to lose my own heart just to get the respect that I deserve. And maybe, just maybe, I don't have to accept that my own subjects care more about a body I don't inhabit than the heart I still possess. |
—Cordelia Chopper's diary, Chapter Seven | |
Cordelia Chopper, better known as Cora, is the daughter of Nick Chopper. Her father is most well-known known for being the Tin Woodman in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Not all in Ever After are aware of her canonical royalty — let alone the details that caused her father to "lose" his human heart. It's a source of frustration for this Legacy Year student, but there's another metal-some point to address: the lack of autonomy over her own body, and the expectation that the Wizard's gift will magically make up for it.
For these reasons and more, Cora is a determined Rebel who wants to use her family name as a genuine source of good, rather than stand helpless while yet another Wicked Witch calls the shots in Winkie Country.
Character
Personality
|
|
"Why, as for that," answered Oz, "I think you are wrong to want a heart. It makes most people unhappy. If you only knew it, you are in luck not to have a heart." "That must be a matter of opinion," said the Tin Woodman. "For my part, I will bear all the unhappiness without a murmur, if you will give me the heart." |
—The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, chapter XV | |
[ note for further edits: tl;dr, her outspoken demeanor mask a bleeding heart ]
Appearance
Although she doesn't hail from Munchkinland, Cora, like a few notable Ozians, is especially short at 4'10". She has a compact, pear shaped build, mid-length thick scarlet hair pulled away from her face, intense brown eyes, and a warm sienna brown complexion.
Her elbows and arms have nickel-plated tin orthopedic braces, and she has two prostheses: a(n again, nickel-plated) tin left hand and lower leg. Cora has retractie forearm crutches that she’ll use when she isn’t wearing her tin leg, such getting in and out of bed and getting ready for the day/settling down for the evening.
She's almost never seen without an art nouveau/mucha-style headpiece with ear disks. Casual wear tends to be punk-ish (or any sort of alternative, really) with seldom steampunk influences on occasion; formal attire is either dandy clothes or art nouveau/art deco-inspired feminine wear, steampunk leanings optional. Her color scheme is silver and gold, usually with shades of red/orange/yellow/earth tones thrown in there.
Her tin enhancements do in fact rust, but only outside of Oz. While Nickel doesn't rust in her homeland, it rusts in other realms. Cora always has an oil can on her to help loosen her joints, but sometimes her elbow braces rust before the rest of her prostheses do when she's (inconveniently) caught in the rain.
Abilities, Hobbies, and Interests
Metalworking and 3D Sculptures
Ever since she was a child, Cora has been fascinated by the work of Nick's royal tinsmiths at the Tin Palace – not just because of the care they take to keep her father (and her own prostheses) polished, but by all the things she could potentially make. Her dad, being surprisingly, for a guy with no brains, quick to notice, eventually allowed his subjects to teach her their trade. Though her spastic cerebral palsy can sometimes make this difficult (along with flute-playing and other tendon-aching hobbies), Cora is a trooper who loves to make tin jewelry (charms/pendants, bracelets, etc) and armory, and is the top student in her Enchanted Smithing class.
Robotics
A more recent hobby that she's not quite sure about making a living from, but Cora is nonetheless curious about how technology and magic work together when it comes engineering – especially complicated machines and mechanical prostheses. Although Robotics in Ever After is quite different in Oz, the Tin Man's daughter is beginning to get the hand of it.
Music
As a nursery rhyme, Cora once found the whistle Nick used to summon the Queen of the Field Mice and her subjects. A few blows, a couple hundred mice in her wake, and a disgruntled Queen Of The Field Mice, her dad arranged for flute lessons under the guidance of members of the Tin Cornet Band to dissuade her from playing with it. Currently she plays the western concert flute and the piccolo in Muse-ic class and is in one of the school's orchestras.
Theater Techie Things
After some talk and convincing from a few of her orchestra band-mates, Cora became one of the theater department's show technicians. blahblahblah filler and other things.
Animal and Fantasy Race Rights
Cora is, frankly, someone who's easily upset by even the thought of harming animals outside of self-defense. She also once cried for twenty minutes straight after accidentally swatting a housefly and her tin hand completely rusted wiping away her tears, but that isn't her proudest moment. With the family she has and coming from a place where most (if not all) creatures are sentient, it makes sense that she's care about their rights in Ever After as well. The young Chopper is especially fond of mice and yellow butterflies, and often caters to less understood animals (rats, bats, etc) to give them the attention that others don't give them. She's frequently seen volunteering at Book End's animal shelter after school hours.
Also, being from a land where talking lions, sentient scarecrows, patchwork ladies, and living ships made out of sofa slabs and a mounted Gump's head exist in one place, Cora is absolutely mortified by the way visibly non-human people are often treated in Ever After. She'll gladly show up at scheduled protests and aims to be a good ally for othe fantasy races in general.
Fairy Tale: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (and succeeding books)
Basic Summary
We all know the tale, or at least so it seems: a little girl from Kansas gets swept away to a magical land and goes to seek the titular Wizard, meeting three quirky companions while defeating not one, but two Wicked Witches all by accident. Whether you've read the books or watched the film, there is plenty more to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz than the owner of this character needs to describe. That being said, there is notable backstory surrounding the Tin Woodman's origins:
Nick Chopper, a Munchkin man from a line of woodmen, fell in love with a lovely lass named Nimmie Amee. The maiden promised she'd marry him when he'd earned enough to provide them a house. However, she was a servant to a cruel old woman who didn't want her to marry, wanting to waited on for the rest of her life. Visiting the Wicked Witch of The East, the two struck a deal: two sheep and a cow in exchange for enchanting Nick's ax with the ability to cut off his limbs whenever he tried to swing his ax.
One by one, Nick went to a tinsmith to replace each body part with a metallic substitute: one per leg, arm, and his head. One day the ax struck his torso, and the tinsmith, Ku-Klip, just so happened to come across him. The man replaced what was left of Nick's former body. but because the tinsmith never replaced his physical heart, Nick Chopper thought that he couldn't feel love. He lost the desire he had for Nimmie, but nonetheless kept building until the house was finished. He got caught in the rain one night and rusted in place, then remained in the same position for a year until a girl and a living scarecrow met his acquaintance.
The rest is history, as he currently has a "heart" stuffed with sawdust. He ruled over Winkie Country (the west portion of Oz) as their Emperor after the Wicked Witch of the West was defeated. But despite any and all adventures thereafter, he never did remarry the love of his life, although he did try to once. Have a nifty link to Wikipedia's article on the Tin Woodman for more information.
How Cora Ties Into It
Cora dressed up for no particular line because yes.
When Cora was an infant, she was discovered abandoned and wrapped inside a blanket by Nicolás "Nico" Chopper — the current Tin Man — near a Winkie village by the border of Quadling Country. The Tin Woodman, who had intended to meet with Glinda to discuss trading routes at the time, decided to stop by the tiny town in search of the unnamed child's guardians.
The villagers stopped their leisurely activities upon the site of the peculiar Tin Emperor with the mysterious newborn. Oddly enough, none of them claimed her as their child let alone knew where she came from.When no claimed her as their own, Nico didn’t have the heart to leave the little one without a family. And so, with permission from the village elders, he decided to raise her as his own.
Later, when he unwrapped the blankets, he was surprised to see (and concerned about) the baby's condition: a missing lower leg/hand with no signs of manual amputation, and hypertonic remaining limbs. His friend Scarecrow later theorized that she may have been born premature and with a birth defect called amelia, but no one's completely sure about the circumstances surrounding her birth. Over time she was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, and Nico eventually brought her to Ku-Klip to give her tin braces and prostheses. Even now, she periodically visits his shop for fittings and to refurbish her tin parts.
Parallels
Original Books/General
- Although Cora's own pride is internally overshadowed by her own insecurities, her inferiority/superiority complex is a nod to Nick's (mostly harmless) pridefulness displayed in the sequels.
- Nick Chopper is described as a "dandy" in later books, referenced in Cora's appearance section about dandy-themed formalwear. The art deco/nouveau influences are nods to the time period that the books were written in.
- Her fondness towards mice references The Queen Of The Field Mice chapter in the first book, as well as Nick Chopper's friendship with her.
- Her yellow butterfly affinity/her butterfly peg a nod to Nick's role in The Patchwork Girl of Oz, where the Tin Woodman refuses to let Ojo the Unlucky kill a yellow butterfly for a magic spell.
- Her huge amount empathy towards animals and hypersensitivity
especially her crying over killing a flyis one big reference to Nick's sensitive nature (both towards animals and in general), especially the following quote:
|
|
Once, indeed, the Tin Woodman stepped upon a beetle that was crawling along the road, and killed the poor little thing. This made the Tin Woodman very unhappy, for he was always careful not to hurt any living creature; and as he walked along he wept several tears of sorrow and regret. These tears ran slowly down his face and over the hinges of his jaw, and there they rusted. |
—Chapter 6, The Cowardly Lion | |
- The name Cordelia is associated with the latin term cordis or cor, meaning "heart". Should be obvs.
- Metalwork + prostheses/braces = tin = tin man aka more obvs.
- One of Cora's color motifs is orange. While Winkies are associated with yellow, the color for the Quadlings is red. Cora presumably hails from the Winkie-Quadling border, and yellow mixed with red makes orange.
Other Works (mostly musicals and pop cultural stuff)
- Cora gets easily swept up when it comes to crushes on cute girls, not unlike Boq from Wicked, who later becomes the Tin Man.
- Cora is into animal rights, and is also is an activist for marginalized fantasy races such as trolls, ogres, and patchwork/scarecrow peoples. In both the musical and book version of Wicked, Elphaba (the future Wicked Witch of The West) is a staunch supporter for the rights of Animals (a race of anthropomorphic creatures).
- In the book version of Wicked, the Winkies (who are called the Vinkus in the novels) are described as having dark skin. Cora is black (would specifically be African-American in real world terms), has brown skin, and is a Winkie. The Vinkus were also discriminated against in both the book and the musical: meanwhile, there is controversy within Oz regarding Cora's Winkie origins due to the Tin Man legacy normally being an adopted Munchkin.
- In the 1902 musical for The Wizard of Oz, Nick is renamed Niccolo Chopper and is skilled at playing the piccolo. Cora is a band geek who plays the piccolo and concert flute.
- Her being a techie is a nod to Oz's background in musical theater. She also has a decent singing voice, but refuses to actually act/sing on stage
for now at least. - "Friend of Dorothy" is slang for a gay male. Although Cora is a girl, she's a lesbian whose dad was one of Dorothy's, you guessed it, friends.
Relationships
Outfits
Basic
c'mon and stay at the
Legacy Day
WHYYYY EM CEE AY
Thronecoming
c'mon and stay at the
Further Reading
Quotes
|
|
Look. If you see the haysack moping around, be gentle. Like, don’t poke him around and shit. And I swear if you ask him what’s wrong with his bird I will personally make sure you shoot for the moon before you even graduate. |
—Cora upon showing consern for the next Scarecrow of Oz while threatening a moon-prince. | |
|
|
...(un)fortunately he saved C.J.'s life. Dude was one dig away from getting his exoskeleton smashed like a pumpkin carriage when it spoils after midnight. |
—Upon being saddened that a certain Wogglebug's son wasn't taught a valuable lesson. :< | |
|
|
I know like isn't a comma now shuttup. |
—Cora being a strong, independent Ozian who don't care about your comma usage. | |
Trivia/Notes
- Cora's sister, Nikole, is owned by Theelemettes
- Does not and will never look forward to the possibility of killing a wildcat (Queen of the Field Mice chapter) let alone the possibility of killing forty wolves, whether or not this generation involves (or even would involve) animal death.
- Was one of the people who signed Rosabella's petition as described in her diary.
Gallery
