Hope Lovejoy

* Arc 1
* Arc 7

Official image of Hope, drawn by @grace.pptx on Instagram

Official image of Hope, drawn by @grace.pptx on Instagram

Hope Lovejoy is a Player Character of Arc 1 and Arc 7 and played by Jenny.

*This page contains no spoilers for Arc 7 in the Arc 1 infobox and up until the section "Between Arc 1 and Arc 7". After that, please proceed with caution.*

## Description

Hope is a tall, slender high elf with golden eyes and light bronze skin. On her forehead is an ornate golden headband with a green gem in the center, this is her arcane focus.

Her hair is brown and usually pinned in the back in a low bun, and she has a widow's peak. She wears a large yellow gown, white gloves and metal armored cuffs that cover her forearms. In addition to that, she wears a metal corset and hoop skirt under her dress for armor, as well as armored boots. At her side she has a beautiful bedazzled holster for a short sword that looks like it never came out of that holster; it is a family heirloom that has been passed down, but never really used for fighting. Her whole appearance beams with delicacy and richness.

She is very talkative, which can even annoy her deity Pelor sometimes, who tried to tell her in the past that she does not have to speak prayers that long for a simple cantrip. She also sometimes prays over the bodies of fallen enemies. When she is talking, it can be hard for another person to get a word with her, and this also shows in her letters, which can be quite long.

Despite coming from a very rich, powerful and important family, Hope never sees herself as someone important or special. At the same time, she is a bit of a perfectionist, and doesn't quite understand the concept of leaving a task with "good enough", it has to be perfect. This leads to her sometimes trying a bit too much.

Her noble background offers her a lot of money, and she doesn't really have a feeling for how much things should cost, which leads to her paying way too much for little trinkets in Thymore to gift her friends. Additionally, she offers Sir Mister Person to cover the debt he is in to pay his knight's armor.

Hope rides a horse called Sugar, who enjoys eating sugar cubes and can become a bit feisty if not fed with them for a longer time.

## Background

Hope is the 16th and youngest child of Gem and Jack Lovejoy, and thus grew up with a lot of money, but also a lot of siblings, meaning she was sometimes overlooked. One time she asked how she could help her family and after being told to go pray for the weather and then being forgotten about, Hope prayed her way into being a cleric, worshipping Pelor, who, for her, presents as a goddess.

Even though she is over 200 years old, and most of her siblings have already gone off doing great things (or simply being rich), her journey during Arc 1 is one of the first times she has left the house. She was supposed to visit a family member, and on her journey to them came through Summerview.

At the start of Arc 1, she has left her home about a day ago.

## Character Arc

### Arc 1

Hope's whole appearance is very delicate, and before Arc 1, she has little fighting experience apart from some target practice with her crossbow. Over the course of the arc, that changes, and she takes out a few enemies herself.

Her relationship with her deity evolves, too: her prayers get a bit shorter, and she gets more confident in her magic abilities. When in Episode 5 of Arc 1 her healing spells barely do any healing twice in a row, she takes some time to have a private and very sad little prayer filled with desperation, because she fears for her friends, and feels left alone by her goddess. In response to this prayer, she starts to glow for a moment, can feel a hand on her shoulder squeezing a little bit, and gets back her most recent spell slot. The invisible hand ruffles her hair a bit, and then vanishes. This event further strengthens her trust in her goddess. When she went down in Episode 6 for a bit, she again got even closer to her goddess.

Hope started the arc not only with little confidence in her magic abilities, but in her abilities in general. This confidence grows a lot over the arc. As the main healer of the party, she sometimes takes the role of the protector and caretaker.

While she did not have many friends before, with her growing up very secluded and her horse Sugar being her first real friend, she makes friends with her party members and promises to keep in touch with them, at least the ones that have an address she can write to.

### Between Arc 1 and Arc 7

After Arc 1, she continues her journey to get to the family members she wants to visit. After that, she plans on going back home, but by the time Arc 7 starts two years later, she still has not reached Glaceria again: whenever anyone asks for help, she simply has to say yes, so she keeps getting sidetracked and landing on different quests of varying difficulty instead of getting home. This is also the reason that she has to miss the Lovejoy Family Decennial Family Celebration of Love and Joy in 131 AE, even though she had planned to attend it. Because of her helpful nature, and because of the long distance between Summerview and Glaceria, she meets many new people, including Aldrum, who quickly becomes her friend. Both of them are just very helpful, and sometimes even do little jobs together.

She frequently writes everyone she has come in contact with, including her former party from Arc 1. She does so by first inquiring about their current address via the Sending spell, and then sending her letters there. These letters are notoriously long, and cost a lot of money to send, but the only thing that changes the frequency with which she writes is when she is busy on a little adventure. Especially with Thavius, she is in regular contact, but even if people do not write her back as much, or even at all, she does not let that stop her from continuing to write them. She does not revisit Summerview before Arc 7.

Two weeks before Arc 7, Arc 3 takes place, which ends with the party around Aldrum throwing Gem Lovejoy, Hope's mother, into jail for the danger she put Glaceria and the whole world in. Aldrum is the one to break the news to Hope, and since then, she has been quite distressed and has tried to reach her mother to get her side of the story. But, from what Aldrum tells her, her mother has actually done something very dangerous, and this has disrupted Hope's world view a lot.

Despite her emotional situation, Hope plans to attend the birthday celebration of Arthur Ashcreek, because she has already said she would do so before she has received news about her mother, and now she fears that it would be rude to say no. In her frazzled state, she does not remember to bring a gift, though, and even though that was never expected of her, it is unusual for her.

### Arc 7

All of the adventures Hope has gone on have brought her up to level 10. She still has the armoured hoopskirt, and her dress is also now a Dress of Holding. Additionally, she carries the Decanter of Endless Hope, and has added some extra jewellery to her look as well as little trinkets people gave her.

She has not yet told anyone about her current family situation, but some of her old adventuring party know about it from third party sources. When she arrives in Summerview, most people immediately notice that she is upset about something, but she does her best to play it down and just help out wherever she can. She is, however, easily overwhelmed, and when she does not get the stability she hoped to get from her friends from Arc 1, her facade quickly crumbles. Still, she doesn't open up about what it is that distresses her so deeply. She clings to other people talking, and when she tries to speak, rambles even more than usually. Additionally, she takes swigs from her decanter regularly, trying to ease her anxiety.

She notices that some of her party members are also unwell, and especially makes sure not to undermine Sir Mister Person's abilities, so that he doesn't feel left behind by them.

During their final fight, Hope is the one to bring Vastya down to 0 HP with her cast of Dawn.

Finally, in Episode 6, she opens up to Sir Mister Person about her issues, especially about the fact that she had always wanted to be like her mother, and now she doesn't want to be associated with her at all anymore. She sees how people flinch at her last name, and she knows that her mother has done something very dangerous. She doesn't see herself as a good person, but claims to only be nice because people have been nice to her. Sir Mister does his best to comfort her, and to tell her that she is her own person. He admits that he wanted to be like her, and tells her that the people that flinch at her last name only do so because they don't yet know her for her first name.

### Soul Coinclusion

During the soul coinclusion, Hope finds an ostentatious bejewelled necklace in the temple of Celestian. The necklace has been gifted to her by her mother when she got 100 years old, and Hope sent it off to have it cleaned a few decades ago and hasn't seen it since. She is not happy to have it back, though, as she does not really want to be connected to her family anymore. With the help of Sir Mister, she is able to reclaim it from the temple not by taking it back with the meaning it was meant to have, but by laughing about it together with her friends, her chosen family.

Later, both Thavius and she herself introduce her only by her first name, without mentioning her last name.

## Trivia

* Jenny did not originally intend for Hope to be that delicate, but in her opinion it fits her character.
* In Arc 1, Hope has a maximum of 21 hitpoints.
* The character of Hope Lovejoy was the first character of the Lovejoy Family, which became a major part of many future arcs.
* Hope's spiritual weapon manifests as Sugar with wings and she's very feisty because she hasn't had her sugar.
* The other players sometimes refer to Hope as the "Protagonist" of Arc 1.
* As of 133 AE, Hope has never organised a party.
* Hope is Aroace (confirmed by Jenny on the Discord)