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March MC of the Month: Evie Ayana

Please welcome March 2024's MC of the Month! Each month, we highlight one MC or OC on our Meet My MC / OC List. They are selected randomly on the Wheel of Names, and eligibility requirements can be found here. We accept MC / OC profiles on an ongoing basis. Please feel free to send yours in!

This month’s MC of the month is…

@cadybear420's Evie Ayana!

More below...

1..In your own words, tell us what you like most about Evie.

It’s hard to choose a specific thing… but most probably her drive to keep moving forward.

Before coming to Berry, Evie dealt with social anxiety a lot in her old schools. She didn’t have many close friends, she struggled to talk to people she liked, she had a little more insecurity about joining certain social/group activities, etc. And she’d lived in the same house all her life up until moving to Cedar Cove, so she wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about moving up north from the Bay Area and leaving behind what friends and memories and familiar places she did have.

She does start out as a little more impulsive and “holding herself back” when she first comes to the school– unsure how to respond to Brian at first, unthinkingly introducing herself as “Emma’s wingman” to Caleb, gives Hugh a startled look when they make eye contact at the school assembly. She didn’t have quite as much drive for change yet and wasn’t expecting much from the school, but she was definitely going to stick with the few friends she did make (such as Emma).

But one thing she did somewhat hope for was that Berry High was a new change of pace. And as Principal Hughs said on the first day assembly in canon, “That’s the great thing about a fresh start. You can be anybody you want to be”. This was perhaps the core motivator for Evie to start changing things. Soon enough, she comes to realize that Berry is sort of this “fresh start” for her, a chance to find herself in a brand new environment. She wants to be someone who is sure of herself, someone who can get shit done. And a school that strives to be welcoming to all is the perfect environment for that. That’s kind of what the OG HSS Trilogy always was to me. High school, but if it were, y’know, actually good.

So, Evie is partly motivated by the fact that the environment at Berry is much more welcoming, and partly motivated because of the opportunity of a fresh start in a new town. And so she starts to push herself out of her comfort zone a little and soon becomes a lot more outspoken, protective, proactive, and helpful towards others. Evie becomes a lot more confident through her journey at Berry High.

One major motivator for Evie is that her first friend and the one who takes her under her wing when she’s lost and nervous at the start of her first day, is Emma Hawkins, a socially awkward wallflower. So right away, she has some companionship with someone she can relate to a bit. And not only that, but seeing someone as socially awkward as Emma have no problem extending kindness to her, kind of motivates her to do the same with others.

Another major green flag for Evie is also probably in her involvement in sports. In Evie’s old high school, she had considered joining football, but was nervous about it due to the team being all guys and not co-ed. Evie is fairly secure in her enjoyment of certain sports and wanted to join the football team at her old school, but was nervous about not being allowed to join and seeming like an idiot for trying to do so. She had heard that some schools might make exceptions for girls who wanted to join, since there generally wasn’t a girls’ football team, but she was still very nervous about the possibility of “sticking out like a sore thumb”.

But since she was most familiar with Caleb of all the people she saw in the cafeteria and knew him to be a friendly guy, I had her sit with him and the other jocks at lunch that day to maybe get the chance to know more about the football team. Much to both of our surprises and delights, the sports teams at Berry are all co-ed and Caleb and Julian encouraged Evie to join football. And the best part? As she was on football, basketball, and baseball, she was treated like yet another part of the team. Rather than being pathologized, patronized, sensationalized, or tokenized for being a female football player/jock on a team of mostly guys… she was just treated as normal (Sonic Boom Knuckles would be proud, haha). As per canon, Brian did make a few comments to her during that one mini-race, but Caleb nonchalantly shot them down.

And lest we not forget her beloved Aiden Zhou. He’s passionate and dedicated to his creative craft; but also shy, reserved, socially awkward, and afraid of coming off as a screw-up or a failure in social interactions. A major reason why Evie is so drawn to him (along with her finding him incredibly attractive) is that she sees a lot of herself in him, and she can relate to him. She sees how passionate he is, and that inspires her to do better herself. It inspires her to keep doing better. And as she works to improve herself and move past her own struggles, she can sort of connect with Aiden and help him with his struggles as well, as she understands to some degree what that sort of social anxiety feels like.

2...Do you feel Evie is like you at all? How are you alike or different?

Evie is very based off of how I am, especially when it comes to the little details. She’s a cat lover, she’s a picky eater and especially hates spicy food, she’s fairly into sports and writing, she’s obsessed with scented products and cute stuff, she’s pretty horny-on-main, and a lot more. I had Evie be a jock in each of the three books because I myself was involved in sports when I was in high school (though I was more of a track-and-field/runner and I didn’t really have a lot of experience in football, basketball, or baseball; meanwhile, Evie gets experience in each of those). I can’t play an instrument to save my life, and cheerleading is absolutely not my thing, and so the same applies to Evie.

But in a more general sense… Evie is partly based off of who I am, and partly based off of the kind of person I aspire to be.

When I was in high school, I sort of dealt with social anxiety a lot, and even now I still struggle with it a fair bit. I did get along with a fair amount of people, but it was on a very superficial level with most of them and so I wouldn’t exactly have considered myself “well-known” back then. So I’ve imagined the same for Evie.

The difference, of course, is that Evie is much more outspoken, social, and heavily proactive in the school community than I was when I was in high school. I mean, I was a bit like that myself every now and then. But with Evie, she sort of gets more opportunities to be that kind of person, and she had somewhat more drive for it. And that’s what allows it to manifest. That doesn’t mean her anxieties go away by any means, she just becomes better at managing them.

Though, one thing I’ve liked about generally being more shy and reserved is that it did sometimes help me stay a little more aware of boundaries, if that makes sense. Evie is much the same, and although she becomes a more confident person throughout her story, that doesn’t mean she also can’t be aware of boundaries– and that especially shows with how I had her approach her crush on Aiden in the first book.

Evie took a slight interest in Aiden when she first met him; it started out as superficial, but it developed into an actual more deep attraction when he invited her in to listen to him play. She’d sort of push herself to talk to him and hang out with him, but for the most part, she knew not to explicitly flirt with him (not that he’d really have minded in the game but yeah). Occasionally she’d be a little bit forwards with him by accident (see: teaching him how to do “sexy moves” at Brian’s party), but wouldn’t express explicit attraction to him until when he asked her to homecoming and admitted he did like her.

And once she knew that he liked her back, she was much more comfortable with explicitly making romantic gestures/moves onto him. I’d never gotten that far with any of my high school crushes, but if I had, I certainly would have been the same. (It’s also worth noting that the more I replay the series, the more I feel like Aiden and I both share similar qualities as well, so naturally I envision Evie as someone who can relate to him).

A final MAJOR way in which Evie and I are very similar is how very GNC we are. I’d say Evie is a lot more openly masc/butch leaning than I am, especially appearance wise (as much as I wish I did, I do not have defined muscles like Evie does, lol). She prefers to keep her hair short; she loves masc clothing like pantsuits, tuxes, boxers, and swim trunks, and she takes pride in her more masc body figure. Similar to me as well, there are a few feminine-associated things (for lack of better wording), such as flowers, glittery/sparkly patterns, heart shapes, general cute stuff, etc., that you can pry from her cold, dead hands. But there are certainly a lot of feminine-associated things she has a distaste for indulging in, such as wearing short shorts or high heels or doing cheerleading– not because they’re “feminine,” but quite simply because they just aren’t her thing. We also both have major bottom dysphoria and would rather die than ever get pregnant.

3.. What is most important to Evie? What is their motivation in life?

Stability.

Not just being sure that she can end up in a good point in life and nothing changes from that, but also being sure that if things do change, she will be able to manage it. Even when things are at their worst point, she wants to do what she can to fix the problem and make the situation better.

For a lot of her life, Evie has been very unsure about what specific thing she’d want to be doing in the future, and while she agrees with the “it’s okay if it takes a little longer for you to decide” sentiment that people tell her, she does also know that she can’t spend her whole life indecisive, and the fact that she’s still figuring things out frustrates her sometimes. And as I’ve mentioned before, her and her dad’s move to Cedar Cove was initially very hard on her. Even as she gets settled in Berry and Cedar Cove, she worries about anything that could possibly disrupt it.

A big contributor to her drive for stability is her parents’ history. After her dad Scott and Emma’s mom Julia had gone their separate ways with university as per canon, he’d eventually meet a woman in his year but with a different major. Her name was Rani, and he’d fall in love with and marry her after they’d both got their graduate degrees. Rani eventually became pregnant, but it was only a few months into the pregnancy when she realized she was not interested in being a parent.

Scott, of course, had always wanted to be a dad, but he respected Rani’s decision. So, due to this contrast of life goals, the two divorced on amicable terms. Rani was okay with carrying the baby AKA Evie to term (though Scott was okay with it if she wanted to terminate the pregnancy), and after that she’d simply take on the title of being Evie’s Auntie Rani. And it was heartbreaking for both of them because they were otherwise a perfect match.

Evie knew the full story growing up, and while she did not resent Rani at all for leaving, knowing that story had amplified her own cautiousness– particularly when it came to her own romance. She’d crushed on Aiden, wanted to be official with him, and fell in love with him long before he did with her for each of those points, but she didn’t want to push anything too suddenly onto him. Often, she’d wait until moments, such as when Aiden confessed to liking her after asking her to homecoming or when he confessed he loved her at prom, before she’d start taking things further. She wouldn’t express romantic gestures and attraction to him until after he said he liked her. She wouldn’t confess her love to him until after he confessed to her.

That doesn’t mean she’d never initiate, though. She’s the one who took Aiden outside to talk about becoming official, even though he ended up being the one to ask her to be his girlfriend. After their moment on Hearst’s rooftop, she had started making plans to ask him to be her date to homecoming (but of course, Aiden beat her to it). And she was the one to (as per my headcanons) dip him in their first dance at homecoming and (as per canon) initiate their first kiss during that dance.

And make no mistake, all those moments– learning Aiden liked her, having a steady relationship with him that year, to the point of them becoming official in late February and him confessing he loved her at the end of prom, and seeing Aiden become a more confident and self-assured person throughout their relationship… she was incredibly happy about all of it. But in the back of her mind, she sometimes couldn’t help but think it to be too good to be true. Sometimes she feared that they’d end up the same way her dad and her Auntie Rani did: a seemingly perfect couple at first, all until one singular but major area of incompatibility.

Later on in their relationship, she would start to become fussy over making sure Aiden actually enjoyed what he was doing with her, telling him she didn’t want to force him to do anything he didn’t want to do. This would become a point of contention between them, as Aiden would be a little upset at Evie not being fully sure in his choices. But in the end, they’d be able to work it out together. To this day she still isn’t fully sure about what she’d do if she and Aiden ended up separating, but she would become better at being able to manage any difficulties or disagreements between them. She would do what she could to better the situation. The two would eventually get married (Evie being the one to propose), having talked about it prior and both being sure that they were happy with each other.

As for everything else in her life? She does slowly become more welcoming to change. As of now, I don’t imagine her going through a lot of sudden changes in her life, but she does become more comfortable with the idea. A year after they marry, Aiden and Evie move out of Evie’s old house and into a cozy apartment in the Bay Area, and then move back into Cedar Cove but in their own home when they decide they want to have kids. Events like these where Evie does have a bit more control over the situation, do help her get used to the idea of major change.

4.. What are Evie's biggest pet peeves/dislikes?

Evie loathes gender essentialism, gender complementarianism, TERFs, and the like (Then again, any person with common sense would loathe those things, haha). But especially as someone who is very openly and proudly GNC, she just absolutely loathes them. She hasn’t experienced a lot of direct bigotry from TERFs herself, but to put it briefly, she’s been paying attention to their behaviors, and she’s not having any of their bullshit. Especially not with their blatantly two-faced behaviors towards GNC cis people (especially cis female athletes with even the smallest bit of “masculine” features, AKA people like her3). All the more reason why she sings her praises to Berry for having co-ed sports.

For something on a lighter note… she can’t stand spicy food despite her South Asian heritage. A bit of mild spice is alright, but very spicy food is just… she doesn’t get the appeal at all. She’s generally a very picky eater, even being averse to most South Asian dishes. And overly spicy food is probably the bane of her picky eater existence.

I imagine she just also dislikes… bullies in general. In her old schools, she would get bullied quite a bit, but she never quite knew how to stand up to them. So at Berry, she does try to change that, starting with standing up for her friends (like Emma) who get bullied. She aspires to be a protective girlfriend to Aiden and an overall reliable friend. It’s not always easy– such as when Isa and the hall monitors screw over Aiden and band and cheer, when band and cheer turn on the basketball team, or when Max and Kara frame her for sabotage. But she doesn’t let it stop her. She always tries to get through it, one way or another.

5.. If Evie could change one thing - anything - what would it be?

I’m not fully sure, honestly. I imagine there are lots of things she’d want to change.

Although it’s a bit more general, Evie would change… a lot of her past. She has way too many moments of “I look back on this thing I did in the past, and I fucking cringe at it.” She knows she’s grown from all that and has become a much better person, but it’s just hard for her to not feel bad about herself over her past mistakes.

For something that’s a little more specific, her parental situation is something she’s sometimes wished she could change. To reiterate, she does not resent Rani for leaving and understands why she did. But there have been times when she’s wished that Rani and Scott never separated. From what Scott had told her, Rani sounded freaking awesome to her, and she imagined she’d have loved having her as a mom, along with Scott as her dad.

Rani would sometimes visit them, taking on more of a title of being Evie’s Auntie. But she wouldn’t visit often because it could be very awkward knowing the past, especially so when she and Scott hadn’t fully moved past their feelings for each other.

Evie and Scott have had a very healthy relationship, but the situation with Rani has created some confusion for both of them. With Scott, he’s often feeling guilt. He’d told Rani that he was okay if she didn’t want to carry the pregnancy to term– Evie knows this and understands, but he sometimes feels guilty for having felt that way about Evie, even though it was before she was born. But he also sometimes feels guilty about giving Rani a pregnancy she ended up not wanting and seeing her carry that pregnancy to term even after realizing that, even though she had agreed to it at first and agreed to carry it to term anyways.

I headcanon a big part of why he’s extra sweet to Evie, on top of her being his daughter, is the fact that he sort of considers himself lucky to have ended up with Evie. Rani chose to carry the pregnancy to term, even though both she and Scott were well aware that she was in every right not to. He’s always wanted to be a dad, and he got just that. So he tries his best to not take her decision for granted.

With Evie, she’s certainly fine with having just Scott, but she’s known the story of Scott and Rani’s separation ever since she was very young and it’s hard for her not to feel like she missed out on having Rani as a mother figure. But she also sometimes feels guilty for feeling that way, knowing Rani did not want to be a mother.

At one point or another though, she does come to terms with her parental situation. Rani would come to visit more often when she could as she and Scott were eventually able to move on from each other.

6.. What is Evie’s favorite quote or song?

I don’t think Evie can really pick just one song, haha. Though Evie can't play an instrument for shit, let alone compose a song and a lot of the musical terminology Aiden uses is mostly just pure jargon nonsense to her… she's quite the enthusiast for good songs and soundtracks.

She excitedly raves to Aiden about her favorite soundtracks from movies, video games, TV shows, etc. Often, she'll even recommend a show or movie to him partly on the basis of it having a bomb-ass soundtrack and almost 100% of the time, he will enjoy it, and they'll rave about the best parts of the soundtrack together.

So it’s a little hard for Evie to pick just one song (or one quote, for that matter). Probably something Aiden composed for her, but I’m not sure.

7.. Is there anything else you’d like to share about Evie?

I guess I’d like to ramble a bit about how fun it is to build the character of my OG HSS MC, both within the game and outside of it.

In Choices, I generally tend to prefer MCs with a more open-ended backstory and especially choices in what kind of personality they have and how they respond/behave/act. I know even the most choice-based story can’t account for every single granular detail about what we want for our MCs, but most of the time I just like being able to decide *who* my MC is whenever fitting. I like being able to make choices for the MC, and create my own backstory for them that sort of informs said choices, maybe even make two different versions of the MC that feel like completely different people from one another. (Truth be told, I’m a fan of any MC that’s allowed to have a spine and be proactive in the story, but the ones that are flexible in their character score extra major points with me).

OG HSS is definitely a series that allows for stuff like that, which is part of why both the trilogy and the MC are my favorites of all Choices. There’s a lot of variety in the kind of story experience you can have, and probably only two or three moments where default dialogue made me go “Evie would not say that”. Honestly, I don’t think the series would have had nearly as much of an impact if MC had only one activity they could do, or one singular specific backstory for Scott and their mom and their old school.

Although I haven’t really played as a MC other than “Evie Ayana” in any of my 7 playthroughs, I have tried a couple of different choices and routes for her. Once I’ve had her as a band kid instead of a jock, and I loved all the extra moments she could get with Aiden. Twice I’ve had her romance Michael, and as much as Evie would be attracted to him, they do not have all that much romantic chemistry (and so I’m making a new HSS MC for his route). One time I’ve even had Evie try and side against her own team at the basketball game in Book 2… and oh my God, it was so puke-inducingly out-of-character for Evie that I had to scrub it from my HSS screenshots history.

Once I’ve deliberately made mostly bad choices for her (outside of her activity), and it was quite interesting to see outcomes such as losing the baseball game, losing homecoming crown and guest-of-honor-– and most notably, how she can lose her tryouts spot to her respective Hearst rival if she’s been mostly awful to the Hearst kids, even if she’s otherwise good at the actual tryouts. Like hello? I can make my MC not be nice? And face consequences for it? I like. I’ve sometimes seen the HSS MC get flak for being “too perfect” or “too much of a fantasy” or “not having much personality”, and I’m just like, “Honey, with all due respect… they’re only perfect because you made them that way.”

I’ll admit, with the most recent playthrough I did to record Evie’s official storyline, I did make the choices that would lead to the “good” outcomes. But with most of it, I was just making whatever choices felt right for the kind of character I wanted for Evie and then let things take their course. I wanted her to be someone who was fairly good at her sports. I wanted her to become someone who tries to step up and be a leader, and someone who is outspoken about her opinions and stays true to them, but also knows her boundaries. But sometimes she can act without thinking and that does make her very self-conscious a lot of the time, even as she becomes more confident throughout her time at Berry. Some of it was more intentional– I did want her to be fairly competent at her activities. But other stuff like the homecoming/prom crowns felt more like bonus things for her.

Fun Fact: during my most recent playthrough, where I was recording the official choices and outcomes in the story for Evie, I kind of wanted a way to represent her lack of experience in baseball since I headcanon it’s Evie’s first time doing the sport. So what I did was I just took my glasses off and backed away from the phone screen a bit when the minigame choices were in session. And Evie did miss a few of the throws, but performed mostly successfully in the end, getting the tryouts spot and winning the baseball game.

I’ve actually gone through a couple of different “canons” for Evie, throughout each of my 7 playthroughs of the story. I’ve tried different routes and options for the sake of trying them out, but there are quite a few choices I’d imagined as “canon” for her that are now different. When I first played the trilogy, Evie was actually named “Cady Heron” after the main character of Mean Girls, my favorite HS-based movie (Scott calling her “Cady-bear” all the time is how I came up with my username). She had the blonde beachy waves hairstyle in the first book, and was a bit more openly flirtatious with the characters she liked (Aiden, Michael, and Maria), she told Koh’s secret to Isa out of panic and thinking that it would get Isa off of Koh’s back. I imagined her having figured out clear goals for herself by the end of the first day: take down Brian and Zoe, and get with Aiden+Michael+Maria.

But upon developing her character, I was sort of trying to make her a bit more like me. With that in consideration, Evie would have been someone who wouldn’t be so openly forward and would take secret-keeping pretty seriously. In my “Evie’s official choices” playthrough I did have her slip the secret to Isa, but it felt so wrong, and so I had to restart the chapter right after the choice in order to choose otherwise.

And I am planning to make a couple more OG HSS MCs too. One will be a male MC named Alan Parke, a cheerleader who is a total diva– he’ll romance either Maria or Emma, and he’ll be very flirty, preppy, and pompous. Book 3 would be a sort of a character arc for him where he may have to set his self-aggrandizing habits aside as he comes to sympathize with fellow male cheerleader Kieran, with whom he’s competing in tryouts. Another will be a female MC named Violet Jones, the one I’ll have to romance Michael. She’ll be a lot more suave and no-nonsense– she hates self-policing and is a lot more quick to call people out on their crap whenever she can, and will certainly have a lot more romantic chemistry with Michael than Evie did.

And I’m definitely gonna have one or two MCs that are utter screw-ups at everything in the game– crap at their activities, they don’t win the dance titles, they’re cold to the Hearst kids. And I also wanna do a couple of playthroughs that switch activities between books. Some that are more slow-burn in their romances. I’m even planning an “AU/alternate timeline” playthrough where Evie tries band (and is mostly crap at it). Agh, there are so many route combinations I wanna do in HSS!

Bottom line: it’s just really fun to give my MCs their personalities and make them feel like my own, and it especially applies with Evie. It brings me joy to build her character and share/discuss it with the fandom here (as well as seeing how others build their MCs too)!

#cfwc mc of the month #high school story #cadybear420 #meet my mc #choices fic writers creations #playchoices #choices stories you play #march mc of the month

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