Maggie Beth was born to Thomas and Ava Arett, a fairly ordinary middle-class couple in Winchester who died in a house fire when Maggie was seven. This foundational trauma gave her a fascination with fires and was the beginning of her investigative abilities, as she - always a very curious child - learned everything she could about how the fire started, how different fires spread, etc..

Following her parents' death she grew up in an overworked but largely benign orphanage in the city, where she befriended an older girl named Cordelia. When Maggie Beth was sixteen, after Cordelia had already moved out of the orphanage, Cordelia took up with an older, wealthier married man. She tried to blackmail him and he murdered her, setting a fire to erase the evidence. The local police claimed it was an electrical fire, the sort that had killed Maggie's parents, and in her own snooping Maggie quickly discovered that this wasn't the case. She brought her evidence to the police but was laughed out of the station.

This injustice ignited Maggie Beth's determination to become an investigative crime journalist, an aim she would dedicate the next several years of her life to despite numerous frustrations. While she did eventually get a job working for a newspaper in Hampshire, she was kept away from the more "masculine" pursuit of crime reporting and was stuck on the society pages instead. This is how she was assigned to cover Isabelle's debutante ball, when she was twenty-four and Isabelle was twenty.

Feel free to make a guest OC! I always love to see those.

I'm assuming we're talking about romantic/sexual relationships here, but honestly, Isabelle tends not to miss those when they're gone. In her twenties she dates people, mostly men, who are in some way bad for her, and she keeps the relationships short on purpose because she fears commitment. (Looking at how possessive of her Alec was, I'm sure you can see why.) She doesn't date the kind of people she would want to be friends with, in short.

Her friendships are much more healthy and much more long-term - Isabelle remains friends with Saifi and Star for years, and I plan on building more healthy friendships for her too! So no, she's not lonely. Her romantic/sexual partners serve a purpose for a short time, and that's by design.

Depends on what you mean by sexual intercourse! Alec and Bertrand mutually consider their first time, despite some prior experimenting, to be the blowjob Alec gave Bertrand and the handjob Bertrand gave Alec when they were twelve. It's the first time either of them made the other come, and it took place in what was nominally Bertrand's bedroom but usually shared by him. Bertrand saw the encounter as coercive on his part, thinking he was taking advantage of Alec, but Alec had wanted it for months and had been practicing. Both of them left the encounter elated.

As for their first anal sex, if that's what you consider intercourse, it's a matter of debate between them whether they were fourteen or fifteen. It happened in their dorm room at Eton, and Bertrand topped using Vaseline for lube. Again, elation. While their sex life was damaging to both of them in deeper ways, neither of them really detected it, too busy focused on the feelings of euphoria they could chase together.

That's a reasonable question! I haven't really had the chance to get into Starlet as a character as much as I'd like, but we'll get there, and in the meantime I never mind answering honest questions.

Alec does a lot of horrific things. Ultimately the stories I'm writing could be summed up as being about a horrible family and the people they hurt, and Alec is probably the biggest contributor to the latter. I can see how after a while it might seem like I'm just adding atrocities for the sake of adding them, but I feel like Star is key to the themes I include for a number of reasons: she illustrates the class components of Alec's misdeeds; her family situation and upbringing contrast strongly with Isabelle's, deepening the exploration of childhood vulnerability; and in the end she, like Isabelle, finds happiness and healing far away from those who hurt her.

In a lot of ways, Starlet is kind of an exercise in comparing and contrasting with Isabelle. They're both genderfucked, highly dissociative people left disabled by childhood abuse, robbed of normal development by adults who should have done better. However, Star primarily faced neglect and uncaring, casually exploitative caretakers, whereas Isabelle suffered from her father's obsession and desire to possess her. Star's greatest childhood trauma, being raped by Alec, was done once and with brutal disregard for her, whereas Isabelle was carefully groomed into a decade of abuse over a long time. Both of them were rendered vulnerable simply by the fact that they were children of evil, heartless individuals, but in the end they're able to decide who they are as their own people beyond what happened to them.

I think that's the crux of it. If you think of Starlet as nothing more than what Alec did to her, of course it's going to seem gratuitous, because all it really does is serve to illustrate something that we already know: that Alec is a sick motherfucker who should be hanged in the streets. We're already very aware of that! It's Starlet's life after that encounter, especially as an adult forging her own way, that makes her interesting and meaningful as a character.

Thank you very much for the question! If you want more details on Starlet's life I recommend you ask my friend Voros, who created her. Here's the link to his askbox: https://revospring.net/@veresvoros

It was actually her cousin! Edith (Alec's mother, for those of you who haven't heard the name) was sexually abused about three or four times by her cousin Leopold when she was 9/10 and he was 14/15. Leopold would corner her at family gatherings and kept her quiet by heavily putting the blame on her and telling her she'd face dire consequences if anyone found out.

This is the same Leopold who went on to father Bertrand and Alec years later, during Edith's marriage to his brother Richard. This time the sex was...dubiously consensual? Edith, having strictly denied herself any form of sexual pleasure or freedom during her teenage years as a result of the abuse and the religion she used to cope with it, was very repressed by the time she got married. Leopold had forced pleasure on her before, and so she associated it with him, and when that dam eventually broke he was the one she went to. The affair stopped after she got pregnant, and Edith transferred all the guilt of the childhood abuse and the adultery onto her resulting offspring. This created the upbringing that fucked them over so badly.

Really, it's like a flowchart.

I wouldn't characterize it as fear, per se? Viola's not scared of Alec, she's just realistic. And thorough. By the time Isabelle left, she was aware that to lose Isabelle would make Alec very unstable, and she planned and prepared for that. One such way she did was killing Maggie Beth, to help make sure that instability wouldn't be headed straight for her like an oncoming train.

If Alec did find out, I would say Viola would probably have about six months of hell on earth before death by vivisection. As always, I gesture to @underground_ira and their wonderful fic A Family Portrait, which depicts their very accurate take on what Alec would do if Viola tried to separate him from Isabelle in a much less drastic fashion. Take that and multiply it, leave it in a bucket of gore to putrefy for a while, and you'd get his reaction to learning what Viola did in canon. (Fic linked in replies)

You're the first to ask and he's not part of Underwood canon, so this answer is gonna be all the publicly available information about him so far!

Lars, who later chooses the name Anthony when he realizes he's trans, is the youngest of the three Strathmore children - younger than Ridley by ten years. Sexually abused by his father Wendell from an early age, most of Anthony's childhood is a blur to him. He remembers very little about Ridley, especially since Ridley left home when Anthony was only five. He idealizes Ridley not only as a concept of masculinity who isn't his dad, but as the one who managed to escape the incredibly bleak environment that is life with Wendell.

By the time he's old enough to understand what's happening to him, Anthony has already resigned himself to essentially filling the role of Wendell's wife - keeping him happy, sexually satisfied, emotionally regulated, and generally looking after all the man's needs. He loves his big sister Abigail, who works very hard to get an education so she can provide for herself and Anthony without needing Wendell, but he doesn't really believe in that future. He can't imagine a life outside of his father's abuse, and loves Wendell too much to want to abandon him.

However, one day when Anthony is fifteen he wakes up and finds that Wendell died next to him in the middle of the night. Suddenly Abigail inherits everything, including the status of being Anthony's legal guardian, and she reaches out to Ridley to invite him to Wendell's wake so the siblings can reunite. Anthony, while still deeply grief-stricken, is thrilled to see Ridley, and they quickly bond.

Unfortunately Ridley's been deeply scarred during his time away. You already know about that, I think - the grooming and abuse from Alec, the incident with Isabelle, everything that Grayson did to him during Ridley's time as his slave. He doesn't really know how to express love and be close to someone without an element of sex. Anthony, too, has already been groomed by Wendell into thinking that part of love and looking after a man that you look up to is sex. You see where this is going.

Ridley eventually realizes that what's going on between them is wrong to say the least, and has a crisis of conscience over it. He sort of "breaks up" with Anthony, apologizing to him and putting some distance between them for a while. Anthony is deeply hurt at first, but over years and with some pretty intensive therapy he comes to understand that Ridley made the right decision and that they never should have had a sexual relationship in the first place. At the same time, he can't bring himself to resent Ridley, and they eventually grow close again when they're both adults and try their best to have a normal brotherly relationship.