Thursday, June 30, 2011

Getting to Know Your Vamp: Alice Style

Fellow readers,

I apologize now for not updating as regularly as I should have within the Twilight realm. I was having trouble figuring out who to introduce first, but I've finally decided. For this introduction, I will be introducing Mary Alice Brandon, the girl we all know and love as Alice Cullen (or my personal favorite, Pixie).

Enjoy!

Not much is mentioned in the Twilight Saga regarding Alice other than what we learn from James (the baddie in the first novel) that he once persued her, and that she was in a mental hospital at one point in her life, which is why Alice's memory of her past is so foggy. The only thing Alice remembers is waking up after she had been changed (her sire is unknown) and she automatically started having visions about her future. It is only later on towards the end of the series that we, along with Alice, discover that she had a sister in her human life, and that she currently has a niece living in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Like I said before, Alice has the gift of being able to see into the future, but it is limited; she can only see the outcome of the decision made, nothing is ever set in stone. Her visions are also only limited to humans and vampires, the reasoning? According to Stephenie Meyer, it is because Alice was a human and is a vampire; therefore, she cannot see into the future of shapeshifters or any other supernatural beings who are not like her.

Just recently, more of Alice's past has been revealed (thanks in part to SM's Twilight Guide, which has finally been published). In the guide, her sister is given a name: Cynthia, and we learn that her father was a jeweler and trader specializing in the pearl trade. Back when she was human, Alice received visions at an earlier age, but they only dealt with the changes in the weather. Her true visions of the future wouldn't come into fruition until later on when she was much older.

Up until that point, her parents accepted her visions, laughing them off while also following her guidance; if she mentioned that her grandmother would be arriving shortly an extra plate would be set at the dinner table, for example. Once Alice got older though, her visions became more vast, and unpredictable. She didn't understand back then that her gift had limitations and would change with every decision. She started to hesitate revealing her visions in case she was proven wrong. By the time she was eighteen, she ignored her gift unless the vision/feeling was so intense that she felt compelled to speak.

People started calling her a "witch" or a "changeling" whenever things would turn out badly. When Alice had a vision of her mother being murdered in the woods, she tried to warn her. At first her mother listened...but as the months passed and nothing happened, her mother eventually gave up and went back to her usual duties.

Then one night, Alice had a vision as clear as day of a man in a Model T running her mother's automobile off the road. She tried to stop her, but it was too late. Mrs. Brandon was dead; they declared it an accident

Merely six months later,  Mr. Brandon remarried a women only ten years older than Alice in Illinois (jumping the gun, much?). Alice quickly became suspicious of her new stepmother once she discovered that the preparations for the wedding had been going on much longer than six months. When Alice confronted her father on the matter, he was furious and denied everything. After the confrontation, Alice had a vision that proved her suspicions were accurate: her father had exchanged money with the man that killed his wife. Her own father had killed her mother, and was planning on killing her too.

So Alice fled.

She escaped to her Aunt's house, but she refused to listen to her as well (nice relatives, eh?). As a result, her own Uncle chased her off of their property, and Alice was forced to go to the town marshal. By the time she got there, her father and stepmother were already waiting for her. They insisted that Alice had gone mad and sent her to an asylum two counties away.

Once she was there, she was proclaimed dead by her family and the town itself.
While in the mental institution, Alice's head was shaved due to a threat of typhoid fever and she suffered through massive amounts of electroshock therapy, which caused Alice's loss of memory. Her luck was about to change for the better though, for a vampire happened to work at the institution as groundskeeper and he quickly took a liking to the tiny girl with visions. He became her friend and tried his best to keep her away from the electroshock therapy.

Then, one day, Alice saw James was coming for her, and her fate was sealed. She confided in her vampire friend, and together they tried to escape the institution, but it was futile. There was only one thing left to do to protect her. Turn her. The vampire immediately bit her, releasing the venom into her system. The vampire hid her body away while he tried to slow James down, but he was distracted and interrogated by Victoria. By the time James found Alice's body, she was already transitioning. Enraged, James went back and killed the vampire, Alice's only friend in the institution.

As Twilight fans will know, Alice eventually received a vision of Jasper and the Cullen family. She changed her way of living to the vegetarian style of the Cullens as she waited for Jasper to appear. She already knew what Jasper would mean to her.

Finally in 1948, the fateful day arrived. Alice met Jasper in a small diner in Philadelphia where they began their life together before joining the Cullens in 1950. Since becoming a vampire and joining the Cullen family, Alice has attended high school many times and has earned several college degrees in fashion design and international business. She enjoys spending time playing the stock market (which is helped by her visions) and loves designing and shopping for clothes.

Alice can be a little-in your face (though maybe not as much as Rosalie), but I adore her as a character. She had a miserable life as a human, one in which I'm sure we all hope will never happen to us, but she was able to overcome that. Alice could've easily taken her vampirism as a curse (like a certain bronze-haired person we all know), but she didn't. Instead she accepted what she was given and in return, found her soulmate and a family.

-I do not own any of this information, this belongs solely to SM. ScarC

ScarC occasionally writes random oneshots such as "Emmett and the Radar Gun" and "Football Game." She can be found on fanfiction.net under her penname pyroprincess89

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