Moonsnail

base by Plasmawolf2016 on Deviantart, design/edit by seraphdove#5328

Moonsnail is an adult female Seawing.

## Personality

At first, although she may seem somewhat reserved and quiet, Moonsnail is genuinely a really friendly dragon and one who’s always willing to make new friends. Soft-spoken and insightful, Moonsnail seems to live up to her rather whimsical-sounding name. She often has a very dreamy look to her, often speaking in a hurried, but whispery voice, though Moonsnail is a very open-minded young dragon, one who does not believe that all understanding of the world is contained within the cold, hard facts of educational scrolls or schools, no less in the ordinary. She does not see a singular answer, but many answers, each with their own value and validity. She is someone who wants to observe the universe and stars, hold them in her hands, and ask them to share all their secrets with her. She’s always willing to try something new and see what works for herself, always hypnotized by those uncharted territories and vague answers.

Introspective and ever curious, Moonsnail is someone who wants to understand the world around her and understand her place in it as well. She is motivated to find her authentic self and to fall in love with every aspect of her life. Wanting to come across as whimsical and an old soul, but so very desperate to learn and understand. She has really strong belief and faith in things, perceiving the world and understanding it through a more spiritual lens. Moonsnail wants to understand the world, yes…but perhaps, more importantly, she wants to be seen by it as well.

Moonsnail is very emotionally honest as well. Although she does come across as quite distant and hard to read at first, and she can be, she is expressive in her strong emotions and will be very direct when she has to be, in the way she can be, even being more temperamental than she may seem at first. And perhaps it could lead her to being a bit overly honest when she gets too comfortable around people, sometimes misinterpreting when she’s ‘close enough’ to someone to speak what’s on her mind. She does have that tendency to believe she’s ‘close friends’ with someone after having a friendly conversation with them twice, or that she’s still ‘close friends’ with them when she hasn’t consistently spoken with them in months. So she sometimes says things out of nowhere that may get her a few looks. Though still, in a healthy mindset, Moonsnail is willing to share deeply personal and potentially shameful things about herself, if only just to further understand the truth of her experience and come to terms with it.

Due to her past experiences with social ostracization and bullying, much of Moonsnail’s sense of self has been built around being different from other people. Despite appearances, she is indeed very self-conscious and very aware of how she acts in a social situation. There have been many times in Moonsnail’s life where she had been rejected and cast away when she so badly wanted to be a part of something, and so she ended up comforting herself in her individuality, insisting upon it, even. Everything must be done on her own, in her own way, on her own terms, though Moonsnail does desperately wish for true and real connection with other people, wishing that she could carry herself with the easiness and confidence of other dragons.

Behind her pursuit of knowledge and understanding, Moonsnail fears for her ability to really connect with other dragons. And she loves the world and the dragons in it, she loves them deeply and believes it’s so fascinating. So full of grief and joy and rage and love, an eternal dance that she’s been so enamored with ever since she was born, but she is unsure how to join that dance herself when she feels unseen by the participants, always left wondering if they would change the dance to make room for her at all.

She’s certainly a very ‘silent sufferer’ kind of dragon. When upset, Moonsnail has the tendency to go silent and not verbalize her frustrations. She may say simple words such as ‘blue’ or ‘rain,’ but otherwise Moonsnail would not be able to verbally convey what she’s feeling when she’s upset. This also comes from her very lonely childhood, so Moonsnail is a lot more used to just carrying her burdens by herself and seeing how it goes. Although it may seem as if Moonsnail has these feelings under control from the outside, on the inside they’re very intense–she’s just not sure how to properly convey them. Unused to having the support of others, Moonsnail would retreat back into her mind where she feels more capable.

One of the things that end up hurting her most is her tendency to nurse old wounds and hold them very closely to her heart. In a way, she has become so attached to these feelings of longing and loneliness that Moonsnail has trouble seeing the better qualities in herself, or to accept peace of mind and comfort when she feels that it could invalidate her yearning. She does have her own deep-rooted anxieties, namely in that she always has this impending feeling that she’s running out of time despite her youth.

Never fully at peace with herself, always seeing something in others that Moonsnail finds lacking in herself. When she looks inward to herself, it may look more like a kaleidoscope–every changing and dynamic. Sometimes, Moonsnail will come to terms that that is the draconic experience–other times, it is overwhelming for her so she ends up keeping feelings as “her” and rejecting other feelings as “not her.”

With that in mind, Moonsnail is still an open-minded and creative dragon, one who is always willing to nurture and encourage the ‘true self’ in both herself and in others. She brings sensitivity, sensuality, and an emphasis on the importance of truly understanding yourself and coming to terms with your flaws. At her best, she is profound and expresses both the personal and the universal, inspired and self-renewing and so willing to transform her experiences into something truly valuable.

She believes that, regardless of what may happen, there is divinity in everything.

## Backstory

Ever since she was born, Moonsnail had always been fascinated with the life around her. The sea was such a vibrant, beautiful place after all, and Moonsnail often found that she would just settle herself somewhere and watch the life of the sea, of both dragons and other creatures, pass her by. Even if at times it was overwhelming for her, when the colors would be too bright and everyone always moved too fast or made noises too loud, Moonsnail had always been very enamored with the lives that would pass her by.

Even in her youth, Moonsnail had always found it difficult to connect with her family and her peers. With other SeaWing dragonets, Moonsnail would always either be too loud or too quiet, too uncomfortably perceptive or too unbelievably oblivious, too serious and straightforward or trying too hard to be funny. It was that way with her family as well, in which Moonsnail often lacked the grace or subtle charisma that her family wanted her to have. With her constant questions as well to them, Moonsnail did often feel as if she annoyed them more than anything.

She had a big family that lived in a house that often felt far too small for Moonsnail. Her parents were desperate to raise their family’s status, to leave behind a shining reputation and legacy for themselves. And if they were to make one for themselves, Moonsnail was not the daughter they wanted to inherit that. There had always been a strange kind of tension between Moonsnail and her other family members, especially with her own parents, and she often found herself envying her effortlessly graceful, smart, and beautiful cousins as well.

So Moonsnail made it a habit to leave home for as long as she could to do whatever she wanted. Although Moonsnail was not generally physically talented, certainly hardly being able to keep up with more physically active dragonets her age, Moonsnail was very intellectually and creatively active. She could read through long scrolls for hours at a time and wanted to learn and expand her mind as much as she could.

Despite that, however, Moonsnail never found great success in the classroom either. She often found the way the lessons were taught to her to be boring and not engaging enough for her, and she was often found dazing off or reading her own scrolls instead of paying attention in class. Moonsnail did often have frustrating relationships with her teachers and her peers, and often felt that she received more criticism and harshness than her peers. Even in the ‘friend groups’ that Moonsnail would drift in and out of and between, Moonsnail never felt like an essential part of the group more than she felt like a dragon the others only tolerated for a limited amount of time, which helped to build up her sensitivity to perceived rejection.

Things did not get any easier for Moonsnail when she was struck by some pretty serious illnesses when she was still really young. It had taken a while before she recovered, and although the illness left her, it took her vision with it. Now blind, Moonsnail’s relationship with her parents became even more tense as Moonsnail adjusted to her new blindness. She could no longer see other dragons, or watch them pass by her, or go up to see the stars–but Moonsnail still wanted to live her life the way she had before. Once she got used to her blindness, she no longer saw it as something that had to be ‘cured,’ but rather a part of her life–one that made her day to day life more difficult, but ultimately something that was still a part of her and shaped her experiences.