Birthday Bios: Jasmine Flower · 3:09pm Jul 23rd, 2016
I’m happy that my most recent chapter of Brotherly Bonding Time was written before this particular bio, because this one contains a major spoiler. I managed to avoid it with Crème Brulee’s, but I can’t really avoid it here.
Aw, geez, makes me wonder what I’m going to do to avoid spoiling things involving Bell Pepper and Honeydew. I guess I could go the vagueness route with Bell and avoid talking about Honeydew past a certain point (though there’s the possibility of future bios mentioning them).
But anyway, BBT spoiler and Birthday Bio after the break.
Jasmine Flower is the second daughter born to Blue Raspberry and Flower Power on the outskirts of Salt Lick City. She was a tiny, dainty baby that had to be handled delicately. Despite this, big sister Sego Lily enjoyed watching over her.
She soon enough got her turn being a big sister at age two when her younger sister, Honeysuckle arrived. Over the years, Honey was followed by other sisters Violet Song, Daffidazey, and May Alyssum. Despite being the second oldest, Jasmine was not very good at controlling the younger three, and usually Sego Lily’s second-in-command was Honeysuckle.
She was not one to wander into trouble often, as she preferred to stay inside and do quiet activities like puzzles and sewing. Sometimes she’d read with Honeysuckle, and they often did chores together because they both liked having a clean house (though Honey would get annoyed over Jazz being overly fussy and nitpicky).
Jazz was always interested in fashion and beauty. She was especially interested in perfumes, which she always wanted to wear because they smelled so nice. Of course, some of the best kind, the ever present Fruitgrance brand, was expensive, and the cheap ones she found suffocating. So, she took to making some of her own when she was in her early teens. This eventually led to her earning her cutie mark.
She was at first an apprentice to a local perfumer, who then decided that Jazz was good enough to attend a newly-opened fragrance academy in Manehattan. It took quite a bit of begging to get her parents to agree to send her, with the perfumer promising to take care of the cost.
It took a while for her to get used to the city’s hectic lifestyle, but she did enjoy some of the things that the city had to offer. Even after her training was over, she stayed because she was offered a comfortable job as a perfumer, though she wrote her family often.
When she was taken to a party by her employer, she happened to meet the heir of the Delightful Creams industry, Mr. Rich Custard. He was instantly smitten, while she was coy. It took a couple years of him dropping by and getting her to open up until they married, which was the only time that Jazz’s parents and sisters (as well as Sego Lily’s husband and baby) got to go to Manehattan.
While Custard at first lived in a luxurious penthouse, he discovered that Jasmine didn’t really like living in apartments, so he went and bought a nice mansion for them to live in instead. They usually went about their businesses, had weekly one-on-one dates, and every once in awhile, the couple would travel to the Salt Lick Valley to visit Jasmine’s family (for her sisters’ weddings, Flower Power’s birthday, Hearth’s Warming, or the Salt Lick Frontier Festival).
It was a couple of years before Jazz was pregnant, and the rest of the family found it hilarious that she and Honeysuckle were at the same time. They often joked about it being a race to see which foal was born first. In the end, Honey won with her daughter, Flora Peace, being born one day before Jazz’s daughter, Crème Brulee.
While everything went well with the pregnancy and birth, Jazz was not willing to do it again. It was too uncomfortable for her delicate sensibilities, and seeing as she couldn’t even control her sisters when she was younger, she didn’t think she’d be able to handle more than one foal. Custard was okay with this decision, and as an only foal himself, he didn’t see any problem with it.
Crème was an easy filly at first, being one of the most delightful babies that had ever graced Equestria. Jasmine was thankful that her daughter was relatively easy, especially in comparison to Honeysuckle’s, who she heard was a very temperamental baby. With Crème’s current personality and the wealth at her disposal to provide for her, Jasmine thought that motherhood would be a cinch (though she still didn’t want another—they might come out like Flora!).
Of course, Crème started having tantrums as a toddler, and because Jasmine had a job to do, she often left it to the maid or gave her whatever she wanted in order to calm her down. She thought that if she just gave the kid whatever she wanted, she’ll remain as sweet as she was when she was a baby.
It went on for years, with Crème pretending to be a perfect, sweet daughter to her parents. Often, Jasmine and Custard would have to get on some foal’s parents’ case, often scolding them for not teaching their kid to be nice. They did not know why the foals bullied their daughter, though Crème often said that the other foals were jealous of her being rich.
Though, she did find it adorable that one of Crème’s classmates, Tomato Sandwich, had a crush on her, and that he was genuinely a sweet and friendly colt. As far as she knew, his only flaw was that he annoyed Crème (and that he was getting kind of grumpy as a teenager). She and her husband even agreed to hire him as Crème’s math tutor. They changed their mind when Tommy suddenly went berserk at a party and frightened the family and a bunch of the city’s business leaders.
She wished she could support Crème’s budding modeling career, but Jazz was too busy with her own job. has tried to bond with Crème over perfume and fashion, though she was sad that her own daughter was disinterested in her as a pony. On trips to visit family, she tried to get Crème to appreciate her heritage by looking through archives at the Salt Lick Genealogical Library, which Crème was not interested in either. In fact, Jasmine was hurt when Crème said the Salt Lick Valley was boring, and wasn’t all that interested in bonding with her cousins—more like trying to make them her servants (they never listened, since they had no respect for her).
It all came to a head when Jazz and Custard discovered what Crème had been doing behind their backs for years—framing servants who crossed her, threatening her peers into compliance, sneaking out for some fun times without permission, and generally just being an egotistical snob with no concern for others.
Jazz was in denial at first, even with all the interviews with former employees and Crème’s former friends and classmates. Her husband was furious, and he put his hoof down. Their daughter’s career was ended, and Jazz decided that maybe her sisters (especially Sego Lily and Honeysuckle) could teach her something. So, they sent her off to live with them.
When her niece Flora Peace (who had grown out of her brattiness and was now a sweet mare) was coming to town to attend college, Jazz was a little excited to have her around. While Flora wanted to try living independently in a dorm, they still support her by paying her whenever she comes over to give them a spa day. There, she tells them all about her adventures at school, though when she mentioned her new friend Tomato Sandwich, they were up in arms, telling her to stay away from him as he was a ticking time bomb (however, Flora didn’t listen, knowing Crème must have done something).
Still, Jazz still regrets letting Crème grow up the way she did and wonders what could have happened if she had actually done her job as a parent. She hopes that her sisters could undo her mistake.
This bio is an excellent example of how and why you are skilled at multi-generational character development.
Most writers, having created a deeply unlikable character such as Creme Brule, and one whose monstrousness specifically stems from her belief that she is such a special superior filly that she is above all normal rules of morality, honesty or even fundamental politeness (seriously, if Creme tended toward violence, I could see her killing other Ponies) would have given her a similarly nasty mother and father. Because the easiest explanation for a character being bad is that her parents were also bad people.
EVIL JASMINE: EVIL, Creme, evil! Drink in our vileness!
BABY CREME: Goo goo gaa gaa (*slurp slurp slurp*) Burp. Evah!
EVIL JASMINE: Look, Rich, she said her first word! Evil!
EVIL RICH: That's my baby girl!
EVIL JASMINE: Should we start buying her daggers yet?
EVIL RICH: Well, maybe rubber ones?
You may remember that G1 MLP actually went that sort of route with the Three Witches, who were their only returning villains.
badmovies.org/movies/mylittlepony/mylittlepony2.jpg
(yes, they're Humanoids. In SWSV terms they are descended from some branch of the Eldren).
They explicitly have a philosophy of what could only be termed AD&D chaotic evil. They despise Draggle for merely being what in game terms could be described as neutral with chaotic evil tedencies.
You could have gone that route.
But you've, instead, created a pair of nice, loving, decent parents whose problem was that, basically, they both had important and meaningful careers which they couldn't work raising a child into. So they left too much of her raising up to servants, who didn't really love her but knew their jobs depended on pleasing her. So little Creme learned that she could get away with being bad, and as time passed she grew worse and worse.
It's significant here that Rich and Jasmine aren't bad to each other. They're both adults, they don't need to always be around each other. From your account they have a happy and loving marriage, and treat each other very well indeed. It's just that one can't be a parent by only giving one's child time eery now and then during the week, the way that one can be married but still go on dates every week or so to avoid letting the marriage die. Because children simply need more attention than do mates.
I also rather like that she's the cousin of one of your flat-out most-uncompromisingly good characters, Flora Peace. It's much easier to do the Family Of Evil cliche than the Bad Seed trope, and make it convincing.
You've made it convincing.
Also, I have no idea at this point if Creme will ever reform. She's done some bad things, but nothing really unforgivably evil, though she was obviously on a path toward really serious evil before her parents noticed what was happening. Maybe she'll be inspired to goodness; maybe she'll descend into true evil. I don't know, and that creates dramatic tension regarding her in story, because she's real and complex enough that readers can care what happens to her.
I'm facing a similar situation with my Sunney Towne Wraiths. They're all one Big Screwed-Up Family (kinship ties) and their leader Grey Hoof is definitely evil now, though as his daughter Ruby reveals in the chapter I'm writing now and posting soon, more of a Fallen Hero than somepony who started out bad. His son Gladstone is more evil than is Grey Hoof himself (he abuses members of his own Skeletal Guard); his daughter Starlet and his cousin Roneo are more thoughtlessly evil, corrupted by following Grey Hoof, than inherently bad Ponies themselves; his mistress Three Leaf has done evil but wants to be good (she tries to avoid killing mortals); his ex-wife Mitta Gift is good but sometimes has problems controlling her hunger for Life Force; and his daughter Ruby (whom he killed, precipitating the series of bad events that led to their being Cursed) is unequivocally good.
So I have to keep in mind writing these Ponies that they really are a family, and mostly all love one another, but have been warped by a thousand and more years of undeath. And Grey Hoof has to be both the sort of Pony who, before his fall into evil, could plausibly have inspired somepony like Ruby to become good and heroic herself; but could fall into such evil and madness that he could kill Ruby in the first place.
And that's true of any multi-generational story, unless we take the simple route and have, say, the Abel family who are all just wonderful nice lovable people, and the Cain family who are evil vile treacherous bastards, one and all. And of course in the story I took that example from, Abel and Cain were brothers, so it's all still the same family anyway.
Poor Jasmine, How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child! I hope we get to see Creme Brulee develop in some way, either she's gong to reform or run off and become a supervillain.
If it gives you Peas of mind, I think pretty much all of your readers have guessed at this point.