INFO (etraya)

[filloryfanboy]

⏵ character information
name: Quentin Coldwater
canon: The Magicians (tv series)
age: 23-ish
canon point: episode 6, after finding out Fillory is real
history: https://themagicians.fandom.com/wiki/Quentin_Coldwater.

abilities:
MAGIC: Quentin can channel ambient magic into spells using the techniques he’s been learning at Brakebills. His specialty is physical magic (though he’s not currently aware of this), specifically Repair of Small Objects (though he’s really not currently aware of this), but as with most Magicians in his universe, he’s capable of a wide variety of magic. Also like most Magicians, he’s capable of bursts of magic that aren’t mediated by the usual spellwork, typically in times of crisis.

Because magic in his canon is very fiddly and dependent on what’s referred to as Circumstances (which can include anything from the current location of the moon to the direction the spellcaster is facing), he’s going to be particularly limited in the beginning until he gets a handle on the general Circumstances of Etraya and how to account for them properly.

ABOVE-AVERAGE INTELLIGENCE: As with pretty much everybody at Brakebills, Quentin typically excels at academic pursuits. He was on gifted tracks throughout his schooling career and had a good shot at attending Yale for a postgrad philosophy degree when Brakebills interfered.

POLYGLOT: Because spells in his canon verse are from all over the world, he has a decent handle on a large number of Earth languages for at least the purposes of spellwork.

personality:
Quentin is that kid who’d been waiting most of his life for a magical adventure to find him because he could never find a way to make the non-magical world work for him. Depression hit him hard sometime around pubescence, and he’s been struggling with it since to the point of multiple hospitalizations starting from age sixteen. One of his main coping strategies is throwing himself into fantasy; his best friend Julia got him into the children’s series Fillory and Further (effectively The Chronicles of Narnia without the Christian overtones). It turned out to be the perfect balance of escapism and real-world conspiracy theories to convince his brain to let him have some serotonin again.

As an adult, Quentin is realizing that the problem with entering a world where everything you wanted is real is that you’re still yourself, and if you couldn’t find a way to like yourself in the world of philosophy degrees and Ivy League then you’re still not going to like yourself in a world where you can conjure a glass of water from nothing. Still, he’s not all depression and self-hatred. It’s noted by a classmate that in an environment where magic is taken for granted, he believes in magic. He’s still capable of feeling awe and excitement at the possibilities of magic that others have already registered as mundane reality.

But he doesn’t quite fit the mold of the perfect fantasy hero he wants to be. He’s seduced by the power that magic offers and the opportunity to finally be better than he was. A part of him enjoys the reversal of fortune between him and his best friend Julia, likes being the stable one for once, who got inducted into the world of magic while she tries to claw her way in. He lets himself fall in with the Bitchy, Hedonistic Crowd™ at Brakebills because he likes being liked by Margo and Eliot, even if they’re kind of assholes. (Not that they aren’t also more than assholes; his taste in friends isn’t fully horrible.) He can be selfish and so caught up in his own problems that he ignores other people’s pain.

Still, he’s a better person than even he thinks he is because the standard he’s holding himself to is much higher than anyone could reasonably achieve. He might do heroic things partly because he wants to fit into the narrative of a hero, but he still does heroic things. He’ll go to extremes to help and protect the people he loves. He has a tendency towards self-sacrifice that’s partially fueled by self-destruction, but it’s also fueled by a desire to save others from harm. He tries, and he keeps trying, and that’s worth more than he realizes.