Maven Sartorial - D8

Anybody parading the name Maven Sartorial would be met with the assumption that one is posh, delectable, or gruelling particular about their mealtime tendencies. While Maven is expected to be all of those things, she’s the rebel in the rich family that she has. Their designs have made it to the Capitol countless times, and as such they are sought after for their minds. It matters not what they look like, as long as what is produced is of supreme quality. Thus, the family Sartorial is known as a competitive arena of stitch, sew, and seam. To dye for the family, so to speak.

Maven is the willing outcast. While she is expected to be brutalist and competitive, she is free-spirited and aloof. She’d happier runaway for the day with a ragtag group of street sketchers than sit in the family classroom and learn the intricate yet monotonous designs of lesser beings. Provided with the perfect education, perfect home, perfect upbringing, Maven is definitely ungrateful and unrepentant about it all.

Maven is known as wasted beauty. Offensive, of course, as while yes she is beautiful. She’s immaculate. She’s technically stunning for her age. There is no reason why she is a waste. To her, the cutting jaw and bright light eyes are a gift she didn’t need. It’s her personality people love, surely. It’s not true though. If anything, her unruly nature is what puts a lot of people off. She’d have people believe that those aren’t the people to have around her anyway. Deeper, she cares violently about what people think. She just can’t bring herself to conform. The dichotomy of the Sartorial way.

Mother and Father Sartorial are renowned in the District for their affluence, and the hoarding of their secrets in fashion and refinement. Textiles and fabrics bend to their will in a high quality factory that Maven knows all too well. She could tour the place with her eyes closed, and that was taught by way of cane – should she get a room wrong. Growing up in such a household, and company, was unthinkable to others, and still envied by most.

Being raised in such a household of constant vying for attention, Maven was happy to sit back and allow her older sister and younger brother take all of the limelight. Where the middle child may cry at the news of a baby brother, Maven was overjoyed. She cried in relief, for the spotlight was so ever brightly lit upon her at every family or personal milestone. She resented her sister for it, who revelled in the advantage of having a lesser-than sister, unwilling to step up to the plate. But in the Sartorial family, there was no declining the call to fashion design. It was all that they would ever do and have ever done.

Now eighteen, Maven has the ability to think and speak for herself on a grand stage. That stage being The Hunger Games. She hadn’t considered it for the greatest part of her childhood. Now that the final year of potential entry has come, she sees it as a last resort. It’s a last-ditch effort to repay her family for all of the humiliation over the years, most of all her sister, who she resents more than most. She wants her sister to watch her rise to that stage and weep, to finally realise that her darling sibling has ascended to death because of her actions. Then, in sweet Sartorial fashion of course, she would return only to be the prize child of the family for generations to come.

Her younger brother followed in the suit of her sister. The know-it-all, never-goes-wrong star-child that serves only to make Maven look terrible. It works, too. Her parents have essentially begun despising her for what she has become. Labelled ungrateful and unwanted, the poor young woman knows little else now than the disregard she has felt since she can remember. She strives day in day out for a better life. Even if it means something drastic.

To this effect, she trains. She doesn’t train the body – everybody knows that in the Games you’re flailing around helplessly without a brain, unless you train that portion first. She joins the locals in their poor-folk games. She makes friends with the riff-raff in hopes to learn the hidden, most treasured, means of survival. Making clothes is a side project, for now she is fixated on the eradication of her sister’s precious reputation, untouchable by other means.