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stef laramée is a 25 year old man originating from nowhere right in the middle of quebec, but now lives in a village called gingham in rural central ontario. he lives on a residential road in an old biker dude's basement that he rents out.

stef is someone who can only be described as an airhead. he seems to have nothing but a few marbles rattling around in his head considering the fact that he never really says anything of much importance. people only either love him or cant stand him - he's very intense. he speaks very loudly and his energy can be overwhelming, and to say this as nicely as i possibly can, he really just is not that smart and its kind of obvious. he speaks without thinking beforehand and tends to be very critical, albeit unintentionally. he's really stubborn and forgets a lot of things, and to be entirely honest his anger really gets out of hand. but despite it all, he is incredibly outgoing and friendly and loves to talk to any and everyone - his cheerfulness is infectious and he lights up any room he's in. hes done a lot for only being 25 years old, and there are more people he considers to be a friend than he can even keep track of.
he's an incredibly passionate person. he is incapable of liking things "normally" and whenever he starts working on something, whether it be work related or music related, he wont do anything else until he's satisfied enough to let it be. he never stops talking about music (although it is very very easy to get him off track and going on about something completely different) and there isnt a single empty space on the walls of his apartment as every inch is covered in posters.

currently he works remotely for the *government* doing english/french translations and captioning. everyone who learns this information about him is surprised by the fact that he has a job like that. you'd expect someone like him to be working in a drive-thru or something of that sort. no, stef graduated from highschool a year early, received a ton of awards, moved ~700kms away to gatineau at 17 to go to university, and got himself a bachelor's degree in english.
he is incredibly intelligent in an academic sense. he rarely ever eats any processed food at all and is great at cooking. he’s very stong and never seems to get tired. he’s also a chainsmoker. the life stories he tells are so insane that they almost seem fake. everyone around knows who he is.
somehow, theres always something new and surprising to learn about him.

appearance

stef is a relatively big guy. his hair is dyed a sort of patchy artificial ginger colour, and its completely fried from many many bleachings and frequent straightenings. he basically coats it all with hairspray every day just to make it stick out more. its naturally a dark brown, but that colour hasnt been seen in almost a decade. he has a strong jaw with some stubble on the chin and an upturned nose, his eyes are pretty wide and his entire face (...and rest of his body) is completely covered in freckles. his left eyebrow and right side of his lip are pierced as well.
his skin is fairly tanned and it gets darker in the summer. his body is made up of fat and rather dense muscle as he works out most days.
he has been on hormone replacement therapy for around 3 years and has reaped all the benefits, however he doesnt bind and he never will. he is very pleased with how he is and doesnt intend on getting any surgery ever.

in terms of his fashion sense, about 90% of the shirts he owns are band tees. he likes to wear pants that are way too big and then wear like 3 belts which none of them are actually tightened enough, so then if for whatever reason his shirt gets pulled up a bit you can see his boxers, which is not exactly intentional but he also doesnt do anything to fix it and its just all kind of ridiculous. every pair of shoes he owns is dc brand. hes usually wearing some bracelets and every piece of jewelery in his piercings is black.

his voice is masculine and very raspy. he speaks really loudly with a lot of exaggerated expression, which is a pretty stark contrast compared to germ and angie. his first language is french and he spoke nothing but french until highschool, but due to having a bachelors in english and doing translation for a living you wouldnt really be able to tell on a surface level aside from the fact that he cant make a "th" sound and some rather noticeable tone differences. he swears a lot ...!

trivia

• his birthday is september 21st
• he has 11 piercings ; eyebrow, lip, tongue, twice on each lobe, nipples, navel, and the last one is a secret but you can probably figure out where it is
• he is a vegetarian, borderline vegan but he really likes eggs
• he owns 7 electric guitars, his favourite to use is his 8 stringed guitar. he still has the first one he ever owned but its more for display now as its quite beat up
• he's been smoking since he was 14. he is very aware its an issue, yet has no intentions on making an effort towards stopping anytime soon
• his favourite colour is not orange! its purple
• he is obsessed with tangerines for some odd reason
• he is terrified of driving and will only every willingly get in a car is if angie is driving it (because she drives as a job). because of this he is basically stuck in gingham 24/7 unless he is able to convince angie to take him / go with him somewhere
• i base a lot of his design off of what im attracted to #funfact

relationships

germ
germ is his beloved boyfriend. they absolutely hated each other the first time they met and the only reason why they are together now is due to the sheer absurdity of crossing paths years later in a small ass town in the middle of nowhere.
after choosing to start over with their inital relationship and become friends, they wound up falling in love. they keep their relationship pretty private which is a little surprising for stef, but germs previous partner was quite abusive and so germ is understandably pretty anxious about a lot of relationship things. theyve been together for a little over half a year now.
a lot of people dont think theyre right for each other, mainly because they argue a lot and pda makes germ very antsy, so nobody ever sees them talking sweetly or doing anything other than holding hands. maybe its true, but theyre quite deeply in love and dont hate each other, which is really all that matters

angie
stef and angie have been best friends for almost as long as angie has lived in gingham. despite knowing so many people, stef can quite confidently say that angie is his favourite friend of them all. they are a bit of an odd duo with stef being so outgoing and angie being so reclusive but their opposing personalities benefit each other well. they have much more in common than you'd expect.
it feels a little odd for stef to say that he hasn't ever had a "best" friend before now, though it sort of makes sense in hindsight considering how bitter of a person he used to be. knowing angie struggles with friendships makes the fact that she likes spending so much time with him quite special. they love spending as much time together as they can - stef likes to buy a bunch of useless crap online in the hopes that angie will be the one to deliver it to him, and then they hang out together on most of angie's days off. they are the textbook definition of best friends ♡

vern
stef is fully aware that vern thinks he is extremely annoying. he is actually quite intimidated by vern but in a very childish way - stef feels like he needs to "impress" him. i mean, its only natural to not want your partners sibling to think youre a stupid idiot. stef somehow does not really see anything "wrong" with verns behaviour at all, he doesnt think he's creepy in the slightest and has never once said anything negative about the fact that he doesnt speak. nobody can really read vern, but stef ESPECIALLY cannot. its almost comedic.

backstory (in a nutshell)

whenever stef chooses to retell his backstory it winds up going all over the place because so much has happened in his life that he forgets things and then remembers them halfway through the next story so his timeline gets all messed up. let's try to keep this as brief as possible...

stef grew up on an animal farm in quite literally the middle of nowhere as the second youngest of four and he hated everyone and everything. he was made to wake up at around 4am most days to tend to the animals as somewhat of a punishment because he acted out so frequently. being raised in strict conservatism and being given a lack of free will is precisely why he was such a furious person. his parents are terrible people and stef has actually legally changed his last name somewhat recently.
during the entire duration of his highschool years he was consistently covered in bruises and such because he would be fighting people in the yard nearly every day after school ended. he won most of them and was known among quite literally everyone in the school. he is probably still being talked about there to this day. despite being a stereotypical "difficult student" he was taking the highest level classes possible and passing with flying colours. because of this he was able to graduate a year early and he immediately fled to university. he claims to have taken out multiple loans which he is still repaying to this day to have been able to afford to do that because his parents would never support him financially like that but who knows if thats actually true. to be honest its best if you dont question anything.

he bettered himself in university, meaning he stopped fighting people because he messed up his wrist pretty badly from breaking it multiple times. in reality he was still very bitter all the time and his only friend was this girl named rue that he met at a gay club whom he wound up moving in with because his roommate in the residence of university stank really bad all the time. he and rue actually wound up dating for a little while but didnt actually really like each other romantically all that much and only started dating because they had sex a couple times and felt awkward about it. they are still friends to this day but thats really not relevant, even though thats one point he never misses when retelling the story for some reason. he had a job at a shitty cd store across the border in ottawa and one of his two coworkers there was none other than germ stonoga who stef despised stronger than he'd ever despised anyone in his life. thats a tangent that we arent going to go down right now.

yadda yadda... stef graduated ... he moved to gingham, for some reason... theres probably a long story to go along with why he chose gingham of all places, and, errmm. this is getting way too long. just ask him yourself about what came next.