Basics
Name: Dulce Aguado
Nickname(s): None
Ultimate Talent: Ultimate Matchmaker
Country of Origin: Philippines
Age: 25
Height: 4’5” / 135 cm
Gender: Cis Woman
Pronouns: she/her
Likes: Baked desserts, pop music, cute people
Dislikes: Dark colors, alternative aesthetics, sour candies
Personlity
Dulce comes off as a lively, eccentric, and outgoing woman with a knack for matchmaking people in any kind of relationship. While the prodigy level talent of her analyzing dynamics between others is true to life, the aspects of her bubbly personality were debatable in authenticity prior to her enrollment at Hope’s Peak. They were real to some extent, but she had learned to play them up and use them to mask her true nature. Underneath the exaggerated facade was a lot of anger, resentment, and insecurity, all stemming from a troubling and turbulent upbringing. Dulce learned to become a master manipulator to get by, often lying, threatening, and scheming. The cause of this behavior was purely out of a means of survival, rather than any kind of malicious intent. From the nature of her childhood bullying, Dulce picked up the habit of expressing her anger with violence or threats of violence, perpetuating the same behaviors she faced. Before attending Hope’s Peak, she was known for having a nasty temper. Despite her masking her inner feelings and trauma, she is very social and craves attention from her peers.
As she gained real friends and people who actually enjoy her for her at Hope’s Peak, she regained a fair amount of the truth behind her energetic and animated self. Dulce also regained the ability to have a genuine sense of humor with others, which could be described as very playful and teasing most of the time. Overall, Dulce began her true healing process while attending the ultimate academy, and gained a new understanding of herself. Dulce does still hold consequences of her past in her personality, which can be seen with her habit of manipulating others and tendency to anger quickly. Despite her healing, these lingering traits did cause her to continue to repeat the cycle of bullying in just one particular case at Hope’s Peak
Background
Dulce was born the third and final child into a wealthy family with a lot of social influence. Her family from the outside looking in, appeared to be picture perfect - money, power, talent. From the inside, however, her parents held her and her siblings to very high standards, and her siblings competed for their approval. Dulce was keeping up with her siblings in terms of developmental milestones which pleased her parents, though they could live without the energetic and goofy nature she seemed to have. However, as she grew and enrolled in school, it was quickly noticed that she was much smaller than her peers, not reaching growth milestones. After some testing and trips to doctors, it was found that she had short stature due to Growth Hormone Deficiency. As soon as she had this diagnosis, she became the official outcast of the family. She no longer had the same high expectations as her siblings, but gained the sting of permanent disappointment and dehumanization. Not only was she the black sheep at home, her classmates at school took notice of her physical difference. This was the start of brutal bullying, ranging from verbal berating to humiliation, and it eventually escalated to becoming physical on a regular basis. Because of all of this turmoil, she became withdrawn and passive, and fell way behind academically.
At home, her parents' relationship began to crack, and turned into frequent shouting matches, but they refused to get a divorce for the sake of their image. With no positive social outlets at home or school, Dulce began to observe people and their interactions as a coping mechanism. It started out as her trying to handle not having any sort of social life, and watching people and their actions while daydreaming about having positive and meaningful interactions with others. However, she soon found she had a knack for analyzing people, particularly interpersonal relations. She realized that she could predict things such as her parents bickering erupting into a large fight, and would hide in her room to avoid being in the crossfire. The coping mechanism turned from maladaptive daydreaming about others, to being utilized as a way to avoid being harmed. For example, she could determine when kids were setting up a scenario to humiliate her, and she would avoid the situation accordingly. In spite of her skill and due to all of the trouble and abuse in her life, she harbored a lot of anger and resentment, but kept it buried deep down so she didn’t draw any more negative attention to herself than she already did.
All of this deeply harbored rage did wind up blowing up in her face, though. During a physical assault from a larger male classmate, she snapped. Dulce attacked the classmate back, and it ended in her biting a large chunk out of his arm and breaking his wrist. This wound up getting her expelled. Her parents were horrified, and paid a large sum of money to the kid’s family and Dulce’s old school to get them all to stay quiet. Dulce was sent to another school, which actually delighted her, as she saw it as a chance to start over. She redid her whole wardrobe with trendy and colorful clothes, bought countless accessories and trinkets, and put some color in her hair. When she started, however, she was unpleasantly surprised to learn that the other kids avoided her out of fear from the rumors of her snapping. But Dulce wasn’t going to have any of that, so she tapped back into her dormant outgoing and social nature from early childhood. That paired with her extremely skilled ability to read others and their relations/interactions, she took advantage of their fear of her, and manipulated others into being her “friends” (in name only). However, she did build a genuine reputation for predicting things such as other breakups and getting together, platonic fallouts and makeups, etc. Eventually, this led to her setting up multiple people in successful relationships (romantic and platonic).
People trusted her seemingly supernatural ability to do all of this, which led to one of the most popular girls in school, asking Dulce to help her set up a blind date for the girl’s cousin. Dulce only asked that she get credit for the matchmaking part of it, which she played into the fearful rumors about her and threw in a few subtle threats to ensure that this side of the deal would be held up. It turned out that the girl’s cousin was an up and coming teen popstar, and the relationship Dulce set up became a celebrity power couple. Dulce reminded the girl of her “end of the bargain” and it resulted in the popstar cousin crediting Dulce publicly. Rumors of Dulce’s matchmaking work spread far and wide as she got more business (and began taking fees at this point). This caught the attention of Hope’s Peak Academy, where she would then be enrolled as the Ultimate Matchmaker.
After graduating, Dulce created a business for her matchmaking services, as well as hired people with professions like relationship counselors to work with her to expand her company’s services. She tried her best to keep up her connections with most of her classmates and checked in on them via online messages once and a while, but spent the most time with the close ones such as Alina. She would keep in touch almost daily with her close companions online, and arrange meet ups in person semi-regularly as well. In the aftermath of the Tragedy, Dulce used her social influence both online and offline to help in whatever ways she could.