Meryem eir Halilović
| Nickname(s) | mashka, roro, |
| Gender | cis female |
| Age | twenty-six |
| Ethnicity | bozja-eschvan |
| Sexuality | gay (closeted) |
| Residence | ul’dah |
| Occupation | trade factor (& disputes) |
| Background | 'refugee' (ex-frumentarius) |
| content warning | familial suicide |
Personality & Themes
Hardworking & diligent; dutiful & reliable; collectivist (community-driven, interdependent, and family-focused); hamstrung by dignity and pride, and yet kept afloat by it; stubborn; used to love riding horses, but chocobos are okay now too; gets drunk on rakı and sings old folk songs about soldiers and countrymen, smugglers and thieves, brothers and mothers and lost lovers; ashamed of her provincial background and so tries hard to have as clean and educated an accent as possible, whether in ul'dah, nhalmasque, or other; pretty good with numbers and people, but only when it's built on false or pragmatic pretences (gets cold feet and ruins most meaningful ones).
Eschva? No, effendim. Daughters of no country with a dog-tongue, them. I speak the Imperial standard and divest myself of my wolf coat. So, now: let us dance instead and find comfort with our whole heart. It's all the same caravanserai, anyways.
Histories
From girl to cossack to spy to question mark; a thousand miles from a home that hasn't been home since before she was born; an entire new life built on a lie but when the exigence for that lie crumbles to dust, what does one do?A family chronicle built on dissatisfaction, broken dreams, and 'real redneck stuff'; has an uncle who killed another uncle by smashing a watermelon over his head; an aunt with a dozen 'strike-it-rich' schemes at any given moment; a mother with a drinking problem and enough love to crush, to suffocate, to bury you; a father who couldn't handle it all and found solace at the end of a rope; the twin sister she served alongside and still lives with - her world entire; and a whole family back home that she's not ready to return to; 'i'm sorry, annecim, we'll come home soon.'
Timelines
Meryem is available for role-play in three different segments of her life:
Current day: the assumed default for public rp and which most of this profile references; the Garlean Empire is defeated, her job in Ul'dah as a frumentarius is in a liminally defunct state and she's mostly just living day-to-day with her twin while they both figure out what to do
Under the empire: life either as a soldier or an operating frumentarius in Eorzea; could be antangonistic towards one another, a fellow operative, or the next-door neighbour who's utterly unaware of her friend's loyalties
Alternate timeline: the end times hasn't happened and the war is still ongoing and we can play with that however we want
Inspirations
Some general sources that I pull inspiration from for Meryem:
my culturally-turkish heritage
bozjan inspo: bosnia under the late ottoman empire & a smattering of other eastern european, balkan, and slavic countries
eschvan inspo: turkmens, seljuks, oğuz, cumans, and (very faintly) sephardim (i know some people play them as romani, so like with bozja this is just a personal choice)
note: eschvan are nomadic in lore and so she can easily coexist with other eschvan headcanons by assuming different subgroups migrating between different regions
Shipping
Meryem is gay and I absolutely love romance and shipping. However, she's also from a culturally collectivist background that emphasises the needs of the family and community over the individual, and this has resulted in her being fairly closeted about it.
This doesn't mean you'll have to work tirelessly to get her to open up - she lowkey wants to get caught anyways, and uses the distance she has from her country to cautiously dip her toes into this part of her, but the closeted aspect will probably be a central theme to stories like these; she's not going to be very loud and proud (I like sad stuff, I guess...).
Oh, she can also be surprisingly shallow, but mostly dealing with tidiness and presentability.
Do's
being open to headcanon and worldbuilding
family tragedy & trauma, imperialism, ten tonnes of Chekhovian heart, regret, nostalgia, and stories that hurt
being 23+ irl preferred; i don't care what your character's age is, but it might understandably limit the ways emily interacts with you depending on that age
being able to distinguish the lore made simply to facilitate gameplay mechanics vs. the 'real stuff' (i.e. i prefer not to treat tomephones and fantasias as narrative canon, and i'm even iffy on aetherytes, idc how big they are...)
Don't's
ooc capitalists/libertarians, fascists (this includes being pro-Israel or pro any current government really), misogynists
ooc/ic transphobes (there's just no ic basis for this, so one probably implies the other)
making frequent references to plot-beats in the msq; i don't dislike the msq at all, but the thing is i've already played it and prefer writers who are confident enough in themselves to come up with their own content without feeling the need to call on the same stuff we've all already seen
Miscellany
if i'm tagged up and you think our styles are a good fit, you're welcome to approach!
try to have a carrd or, bare minimum, an rphub; they help when figuring out whether we'll mesh well
tech-level: this character sits around the late 1800's or early 1900's with regards to tech, in addition to historical access to garlean magitek; there might be: candlestick telephones, bolt-action rifles... bakelite? bunch of magitek gizmos too, probably; overall, i'd just prefer to stay outside of the realm of extreme sci-fi!
be nice to me, it's the law