Age: 26
Place of birth: Swansea, Wales, UK
Residence: Swansea, Wales, UK
Education: Comprehensive school, sixth form college
Relationship: Single (but looking)
Personality: Obsessive, passionate, paranoid, pushy
- Stacey was born in Swansea to two loving parents. However, the demands of a newborn child proved too much for her father and he left, leaving her mother to raise her.
- As a young child, Stacey's mother raised her with Disney movies and the idealistic portrayals of princesses and beautiful women. Stacey often had fantasies of becoming a princess herself and finding her handsome prince whom she would marry and live happily ever after with.
- Stacey attended nursery school and eventually fell into a friendship group with the same interests as her (romance, boys and princesses) and made firm, friendly relationships.
- Stacey would spend her nights as a girl in her room, listening to the latest chart music, reading magazines and playing with her vast collection of dolls.
- As she got older and progressed into primary school, Stacey eventually developed an interest in romantic comedy films. She developed this after attending a screening of the film Clueless at the local cinema with friends. Fascinated by the romantic storylines punctuated with humour and light-hearted characters, Stacey felt that she could live her own romantic comedy and thus developed a life-long fascination for the tropes and plot lines that accompany rom-coms.
- During her teenage years, Stacey collected rom-coms on video tape and DVD when they came into fashion. Her personal favourites are Never Been Kissed, Love Actually, Pretty Woman, Sleepless in Seattle and My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Her favourite actors are Colin Firth, Keira Knightley, Julia Roberts and Drew Barrymore.
- With the emergence of Internet dating, Stacey created an account on Facebook shortly after graduating from comprehensive school. She also signed up to dating networks such as eHarmony.
- After several years of casual dating whilst attending sixth form college, Stacey met a man on Facebook shortly after receiving her A Levels. They began a steady stream of conversation using the site's messaging system.
- Due to her fascination with rom-coms, Stacey was adamant that the events of a rom-com took place in real life, having had no real life experience of relationships. Stacey became increasingly dependent on talking to this man, and would spend any spare minute messaging him, probing for personal information and his whereabouts. If he fails to reply within a few minutes, she becomes increasingly anxious and paranoid, thinking that he has grown tired of her and wants her to go away.
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Research:
The Rom-Com
As a part of my research into this character, I felt it important to analyse the standard formula of a romantic comedy film, as the character lives her life as if she were in one of them. This included the types of characters seen, music and plot points.
(Wysaski, 2013)
15 Best Romantic Comedies of All Time
1. Annie Hall (1977)
2. When Harry Met Sally (1989)
3. Sabrina (1954)
4. It Could Happen to You (1994)
5. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
6. Bridget Jones's Diary (2000)
7. Sleepless in Seattle (1993)
8. Kissing Jessica Stein (2001)
9. Clueless (1995)
10. Pretty Woman (1990)
11. My Best Friend's Wedding (1992)
12. Love Actually (2003)
13. Father of the Bride (1991)
14. Coming to America (1988)
15. The Wedding Singer (1998)
(Heyman, 2015)
"Romantic comedy is an attractive genre for Hollywood: often big bucks at the box office, for lower-than-average production budget (less need for digitally enhanced aliens - plastic surgeries provided by actors themselves). In short, something to get the producers squealing with delight. Traditional Hollywood thinking suggests that marrying romance and comedy creates a match made in date movie heaven, if the romance ropes in the females, and comedy the males. Whether this ploy works in reality or not, the genre's escapist aspect of light-hearted plots and practically guaranteed happy endings appeals to a large chunk of people." (TV Tropes, 2017)
Online Relationships
The character's life at the point I am presenting revolves around a relationship she is having with a man on the internet. I found it crucial to conduct research to determine the difference between engaging in a relationship face-to-face compared to through a computer screen.
"For the past decade, Paul J. Zak, a professor of neuro-economics at the Claremont Graduate University who sometimes goes by “Dr. Love,” has been conducting studies on how relationships maintained over social media differ from relationships in real life. What he has found is that there’s hardly any difference at all.
“It’s as if the brain doesn’t really differentiate between you posting on social media and you being there in person,” he told me. “We’re such hyper-social creatures that we have a large release of dopamine when we’re with other people. But we can also get that release through Twitter or any social media, really.”" (Delistrady, 2014)
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References:
Delistrady, C. (2014) Online Relationships Are Real. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/online-relationships-are-real/380304/ (Accessed: 29 April, 2017)
Heyman, J. (2015) The 15 Best Romantic Comedies of All Time: From Annie Hall to The Wedding Singer. Available at: http://www.vogue.com/article/15-best-romantic-comedies. (Accessed: 29 April, 2017)
TV Tropes (2017) Romantic Comedy. Available at: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RomanticComedy. (Accessed: 29 April, 2017)
Wysaski, J. (2013) Every Romantic Comedy Ever. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYMmlZb3FNM. (Accessed: 29 April, 2017)
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