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Welcome to Charming, the year is now 1895. It’s time to join us and immerse yourself in scandal and drama interlaced with magic both light and dark.

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Did you know? Jewelry of jet was the haute jewelry of the Victorian era. — Fallin
What she got was the opposite of what she wanted, also known as the subtitle to her marriage.
all dolled up with you

Don Juan Dempsey
Threadlog
624 Posts
139 Likes
Played by Lynn
Mr. Dempsey sat down and spoke with the swagger of a man who didn't need to be liked, but very much wanted to be perceived. — Samuel Griffith
Disaster; Ghost Writer
31 year old Halfblood
Disaster; Ghost Writer
5 ft. 11 in.
❤   Unattached
Profile
Full Name: Don Juan Byron Dempsey

Nickname(s): He'll answer to just about anything.

Birthdate: 24 September 1863

Age: 31

Gender: Male

Occupation: Ghost Writer

Blood Status: Halfblood

Residence: Galway, sometimes.

Hogwarts House: Gryffindor

Wand: 13" wisteria and unicorn hair, pliant

Family: The Dempseys. You know the ones.
Appearance
On seeing Don Juan's face, he thought that the man had not liked his dismissal, even though he took great care not to show it. He had quite expressive eyes; they were not as carefree as his demeanor seemed intent to suggest. — Samuel Griffith

General ♦ Tall and lean, Don Juan has close-cut dark curls and hazel eyes.

Expressions ♦ Dramatic, hard to miss and hard to misinterpret. Don Juan is very expressive and rather careless with his feelings.

Fashion ♦ Given how often he is in a various state of undress you would think he didn't have proper clothing, or didn't care about it; this actually isn't true at all. He likes fashion, likes dressing up, likes looking good — when he's at an event or out of doors. He treats clothing like a costume for a fancy dress ball; something to be put on and played at and then discarded swiftly. Essentially the moment he is inside (his home, yours, a mutual friend's, an opium den, occasionally a shop) he is loosening ties, unbuttoning vests, discarding jackets, et cetera. Sometimes he manages to bring all of the clothing he started the day with back home with him, but not often.

Scent ♦ His usual cologne is made with lavender and citrus. He often also smells of some variety of alcohol, popular party potions or scented tobacco.

Distinguishing Characteristics ♦ A tattoo with a brief script phrase in Italian on the outside of his right forearm, too high up to be visible unless he's shirtless. Acquired in 1893.

Face Claim ♦ Luke Brandon Field
History
I want a hero: an uncommon want
When every year and month sends forth a new one
Don Juan is the fourth child to poets Eamon and Lowri Dempsey. The household is busy one; plenty of siblings, and by the time he is old enough to form lasting memories the oldest is already away to Hogwarts. He wants very badly to distinguish himself amongst first his siblings and later, when he goes to Hogwarts, his friends and peers — but has a buried suspicion that deep down he is fairly ordinary. To cover this grave but hidden sin he is ostentatious from an early age, attaching himself to whatever scheme seems most likely to provoke reactions from his friends. He is also (obviously, probably, given his parents) deeply obsessed with poetic ideals and gothic romance. After a middling Hogwarts career (schoolwork never interested him so much as his various hobbies) he graduates and is dispatched to a tour by parents who probably ought to have known better.
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant
The age discovers he is not the true one
Newly unsupervised, Don Juan proceeds to do the following over the course of his first six months:
  1. meet a woman he describes as "a veritable goddess"
  2. drunkenly propose marriage to her
  3. elope
  4. get her pregnant
... at which point he decides perhaps he ought to loop his family in on this whole thing. He returns to England in high spirits with his new wife in tow (lagging behind while he paves the way and makes introductions, since she speaks very little English and his family can be A Bit Much). He encounters Oz first and declares he has fallen in love, to which his oldest brother responds, in essence: that's cute; have fun but don't do anything stupid, like promise to marry her. Sensing that the introductions will probably Not Go Well, Don Juan changes course and instead runs off with his wife back to the continent to play house while he puzzles out how to tell his family about her in a way which won't lead them to freak out.

His pondering ends up lasting longer than the relationship does; she may not speak much English but she isn't stupid and is also unamused by his hesitancy to admit he married her — and some of the things that seemed cute at first seem much less so over time, for both of them. They start arguing about things here and there and then one day she kicks him out. Don Juan shrugs, dusts himself off, and goes back to touring and debauching, with his family none the wiser. He is not entirely unaffected by the ordeal, though; it hurts his confidence to have been so certain about something and then to have been so swiftly proven wrong. Unfortunately the ultimate effect was not a productive one: in order to avoid future embarrassment, he simply determines never to take anything seriously — or at least not to let on that he does.
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan—
On returning to England Don Juan has a series of short-lived occupations, becomes wildly obsessed with a series of ill-conceived hobbies and antics, and sleeps with anyone who will have him. Most of these are short-lived flings, but notably he does get progressively more involved with Dean Hudson from summer 1885 to spring 1889. This continues on, his reputation slowly declining until a culminating event in which he and a married woman are caught in the act by a member of her family. Her husband challenges him to a duel. Don Juan goes through the business of finding himself a second and scheduling things but decides on the morning of that he has lost interest in this entire interlude and instead tips off law enforcement, who descends on the scene and arrests his opponent and Don Juan's second (whoops) while the rest flee. They are each released after paying a fine and Don Juan "finds employment abroad" while things cool off.

During his "exile" (as he describes it to friends in letters), Don Juan is melancholic and lonely; he feels the absence of familiar faces quite keenly and fills the gaps with — the things you would expect. Around eight months after leaving England he finds himself at the altar again — the details on how this occurred are a little hazy. The pair of them move into a little bungalow together for a few months and Don Juan is beginning to wonder if he ought to tell his family about this one... but apparently one "member of the family" has already heard about it, somehow, because his legal wife shows up out of nowhere and causes a terrible scene. Don Juan is, as one might image, thrown out of the bungalow. This seems like as good a time as any to return to England.
We all have seen him, in the pantomime,
Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time
At this point Don Juan decides to write his autobiography, a project which he will seize upon for a series of frantic days before lapsing into a bouts of melancholic naval-gazing where he declares to anyone within earshot that nothing interesting has ever happened to him in his life and that his youth is all but spent and entirely wasted. What he lacks in consistent inspiration he does make up for in writing skill — he was, after all, raised a Dempsey — so he does find some work in various writing jobs; editing, sometimes, but more often ghost writing for other people with ideas and the ambition to realize them. He builds up a relationship with a publisher who values his work and will tolerate his haphazard approach to deadlines.

In December 1892, he receives a letter that his first (and only legal) wife has passed away, and that her relatives are now raising her daughter (surprise! did you forget Don Juan knocked her up? So did he). He sends the epistolary equivalent of the thumbs up emoji. He certainly has no inclination to intervene on behalf of a child he's never met, who was raised by a woman he hasn't had a meaningful conversation with in a decade. He does have a lot of feelings about Adriana's death, though, and funnels those feelings (probably unhealthily and unproductively?) into a rekindled relationship with former lover Dean Hudson. This lasts about a year, but eventually the relationship buckles once again under the weight of Don Juan's substance addictions and general unreliability.

His brother's election to Minister of Magic in late 1883 sees Don Juan restored to society's good graces — not actually, but he does start fielding more invitations. This comes with some good but also some bad... notably he manages to connect with Samuel Griffith, younger brother of the man who volunteered as his second in his duel with Yaxley and whom he accidentally got arrested, who has some... shared hobbies, to both of their detriment. In December 1884 he overdoses and Griffith barely claws him back to the land of the living; this affects him enough that when given the opportunity to change something about his life on New Year's Day, he requests sobriety.

His past also comes back to haunt him in other ways in December 1884: his daughter, Kaatjie, tries to reconnect with him, and when he seems disinterested she goes over his head and tells his mother everything, which means Don Juan has to come clean about... quite a bit of previously unknown details. While he is still generally uninterested in raising the girl and believes himself an unfit parent, his parents feel unfairly deprived of a grandchild and encourage him to pursue custody.
Personality
♦ CAN AND WILL DO JUST ABOUT ANYTHING FOR ATTENTION ♦ (PROBABLY HAS DONE, TOO) ♦
♦ "ADORABLE BUT UNSERIOUS" (SELF-DESCRIPTION) ♦
♦ EASILY DISTRACTED ♦ LIKE, VERY EASILY ♦
♦ OBSESSIVE ♦ COMPULSIVE ♦ (BUT NOT LIKE THE DISORDER) ♦ (PROBABLY) ♦


"Dean had fallen in love with the impulsive, impractical, passionate idiot Don Juan had always been."
Other
THE REVIEWS
Dempsey never apparently set out to do anything. No forward thinking, no rhyme or reason, no apparent understanding of consequences, no concept of repeating the same mistakes.
— Dean Hudson —

Scandal rode the name Don Juan Dempsey across the flighty tongue of every debutante attending. Mother nearly turned purple when she learned of his presence. A man like that could only have ill intentions.
— Titania Applegate —

Dempsey was not just being sweet; he was also leading the way, and squeezing her hand. Sera knew enough to know that she was being seduced, but that was charming enough in and of itself — Dempsey was distinct enough from her husband that he bothered with seducing her.
— Seraphina Bythesea —


And she couldn’t recall how many Dempsey brothers there were, but the only other she had heard of in the pages of Witch Weekly was in conjunction with a hundred lurid stories of illegal duels and affairs and other wildly scandalous things.
— Matilda Farris —

The cigarette smoke smelled like cherries? He wasn't surprised to find that so much of Don Juan Dempsey felt like an affectation, but the fruit-scented smoke was a bit much for Kieran.
— Kieran Abernathy —

... but if they gave money to everyone who had been in a scandal with Don Juan, then they would live in Pennyworth.
— Thomasina Dempsey —
[Image: 0hYxCaj.png]
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