Matt Vartoogian

Name: Matthew “Matt” Vartoogian Gender: Male Age: 18 Grade: 12 School: Aurora High School Hobbies and Interests: Video Games, Physics, LGBT Activism, Cooking

Appearance: Matt stands at 5’8” and weighs 148 pounds. He is a moderately slim guy, with relatively little fat and a bit of lean muscle from running. From his Armenian heritage, Matt inherited bronze skin and a moderate amount of black hair that covers his head, face, arms, legs, and chest. He wears his straight hair at a short length, a quarter inch on top and an eighth of an inch on the sides, and he maintains a short beard and mustache that covers the lower part of his face and his steep jaw line. He has dark-brown eyes, thick eyebrows, and an average-sized nose. He tends to hold himself with a stern, neutral expression, but his facial expressions are very animated when he is excited or happy.

Matt has nothing in the way of tattoos, piercings, or scars. He tends not to be bruised or battered in any way, except for the occasional cut or burn from cooking. His typical outfit consists of blue jeans, sneakers, and some sort of plain monochromatic t-shirt, usually from The Gap or Banana Republic. On the day of the abduction, Matt was wearing a black hoodie, a dark-green t-shirt, a pair of slightly faded blue jeans, and a pair of black sneakers.

Biography: Matt was born as the second child to Stephen and Julia Vartoogian in San Francisco, California on February 28, 1994. Stephen worked as a municipal bond lawyer, and Julia as a secretary for an investment management firm. However, upon the birth of their second child, Julia decided that she should retire to take care of Matt and his brother George, who was born about two years prior.

Most of Matt’s early years were relatively unmemorable. His father worked somewhat inconsistent hours, and was otherwise home as much as he could be. His mother had transitioned well into a homemaker and was focused on bringing up her children to be thoughtful, courteous, and hardworking people. However, her efforts for the latter attribute were unintentionally subverted by her younger brother Albert, who gave Matt a Super Nintendo and some games for his third birthday. Matt very quickly fell in love with video games, enjoying them much more than kicking around a soccer ball or throwing a baseball, and so Matt was quick to entrench himself in the worlds of Mario and Kirby. While his parents didn’t fully approve of these games, they saw he enjoyed playing them, so they allowed him to play for two or three hours each day.

Throughout pre-school, Matt didn’t really have any friends. His parents had sent him and his brother to an Armenian parochial pre-school. Matt had a hard time relating to the other kids because they had parents who were mostly immigrants from Soviet Armenia, and thus had had a very different upbringing than Matt had in his assimilated household. Instead, Matt would keep to himself more at school, focusing on completing the various projects that his teachers gave him.

Matt’s parents had, on a whim, decided to apply for George to go to a private elementary and middle school, and had been stunned when he had gotten in. Since the school had a policy where siblings were guaranteed admissions, Matt also then went to the same school. Upon entering kindergarten, Matt found it easier to relate to his non-Armenian classmates. However, both as a result of his limited social interactions up to this point and an innate level of awkwardness, Matt had a hard time making a lot of friends. He made a few good friends, but otherwise his social interactions tended to be awkward.

His awkwardness problem wasn’t helped by the fact that, by second grade, it had become apparent that Matt was innately more academically inclined than most of his classmates. Whenever learning something in class, Matt would be the first to understand it, and his lack of social skills caused him to seem incredibly arrogant to his other classmates, although none of them had yet learned the word to describe it. Matt didn’t have the social awareness at the time to realize what he was doing, so he alienated a lot of his classmates, although he was upset that he had managed to do so.

As he progressed through elementary school, Matt split his time between studying, gaming, hanging out with his few friends, and cooking. As soon as Julia had deemed it appropriate, she began letting Matt help her cook. It was an activity over which they were able to bond greatly, and Matt loved eating delicious food that he helped prepare. When he was younger, he was only permitted to do things that weren’t particularly dangerous. However, as he got older and cooked more, Julia decided that it would be okay to teach him how do more dangerous things like chop vegetables and butcher meat.

During this time, Matt wasn’t particularly close to his brother. Unlike him, George never had much of an interest in video games or cooking, instead opting to spend time playing music and sports with his friends. They would sometimes get into fights over little things, things like use of the television or drinking the last of the chocolate milk, and these fights would usually end with their mother yelling at both of them.

Upon reaching middle school, sleepovers at his friends’ houses became a common occurrence; Matt would spend many Friday or Saturday nights away from his parents and with his friends. Matt greatly enjoyed the freedom from his parents that this enabled, and he also enjoyed spending more time with his friends. However, the close proximity with his male friends caused Matt to realize something about himself; he was sexually attracted to other men. He didn’t have any problems with coming to terms with his sexuality, since both of his parents had said positive things about gay people that they knew, Matt was quick to come out to his family. Everyone in his family was supportive, although they were a little surprised by the announcement. His being gay did nothing to change the relationships with anyone in his family; his parents still loved him and he and his brother were still not particularly close.

Towards the end of his eighth grade year, Stephen’s law firm disbanded, leaving his father without a job. However, he was given an offer by a firm in Seattle conditional on passing the Washington State Bar Exam. His father passed, and so the Vartoogians moved to Seattle, thus enrolling Matt and his brother in Aurora High School.

During his freshman year of high school, Matt grew aware of his physical appearance because of snide remarks that he received from some of his new classmates. Matt had grown a bit overweight from the limited amount of physical activity that he engaged in. Matt, at the advice of his father and brother, both runners, began to start running himself. Over time, he worked off the excess weight and became fairly well conditioned, but he didn’t enjoy the activity enough to ever consider competing.

Matt also decided that there was no real point of being in the closet in high school. Just before leaving for Seattle, he had told his friends back home that he was gay, and they had taken it fairly well. Matt joined the Aurora High GSA his freshman year, and from that point forth remained an active member. Some of the bullies would harass him for his orientation, as well as his avid gaming, but Matt had a high enough opinion of himself not to care what they thought of him.

Matt also joined the gaming and cooking clubs at Aurora High, although he was not as interested in those clubs as he was with GSA. Nevertheless, he found people that he could bond with in these groups, and it made transitioning to his new life in Seattle a bit easier. He had a difficult time making friends outside of these groups, because most of his interactions with his peers were during class, where he had never outgrown his tendency to sound arrogant. This made people apprehensive about approaching Matt, and Matt’s limited amount of social interactions growing up made him nervous about initiating conversations with people he didn’t know. By this time, Matt had learned to make a concerted effort to tone down his arrogance in interpersonal interactions, but he would slip from time to time. While his friends learned to accept these bouts of arrogance as a personality quirk, people who don’t know Matt particularly well often take offence to them.

Starting his sophomore year, Matt decided to take more of his time outside of class studying chemistry and physics. Of what he had studied in class, these two subjects were really the ones that engaged him the most, and Matt reveled in taking breaks from his gaming to read a physics article or do some practice chemistry problems. Matt had always been strong in math, and he felt that his strength in math was a tool supplied to him to support his desire to study sciences.

Early in his sophomore year of high school, Matt began to play League of Legends, abandoning playing most other games. He improved rapidly, his experience from having gamed his entire life providing him with an edge for improvement. Matt was drawn to the game because of the game’s strategy depth, mechanical ease compared to games like Starcraft, and necessity of teamwork and cooperation. It wasn’t long until Matt had reached an elo rating of 1850, which was really high given his involvement in school and other activities. Halfway through junior year, Matt decided that he should become a professional gamer after graduating high school, and he told his parents shortly thereafter. While his rating was just outside the top 1% of players, not exactly pro material, Matt was confident that, given the chance to play fulltime, he would be able to gain the couple hundred elo that would let him find a team. His parents were a bit disappointed in their son’s decision, but felt it better not to argue with him if it was what he wanted to do with his life. They gave him permission to play more, trusting their son to manage his school work with his gaming. George, on the other hand, felt that his younger brother was going to throw his life away on a worthless endeavor when he had so much potential to become a great engineer or physicist. This opinion of his brother only further hurt their relationship.

Since then, Matt has spent most of his free time practicing League of Legends in preparation of going pro. He still participated in his other activities, although over time he had eased off of them a little as he needed to open more of his free time to playing League of Legends. Nevertheless, Matt still enjoyed the time spent with people in GSA and the cooking club. Matt’s academics remain strong, although less so. He pulls relatively easy As in his Math and Science classes, but his grades in other subjects have largely dropped down into the B range.

Advantages: Matt is very intelligent, and he knows a lot of physics and chemistry, knowledge that may be very useful on the island. He is also able to run fairly fast for long distances, so he will be pretty good at fleeing from conflict. Disadvantages: Matt can come off as arrogant very easily, which may dissuade potential allies. Also, there may be some of his classmates who do not like that he is gay. Because Matt’s only physical activity has been running, Matt is severely lacking in upper body strength, which would make him easy to physically overpower.

Designated Number: Male student No. 003

Designated Weapon: Diving Knife Conclusion: V3's B051 is the only contestant in SOTF history to score a pentakill, B003. Do you think you can be the second? You want to make that practice pay off, after all. - Dennis Lourvey

'The above biography is as written by BROtoro. No edits or alterations to the author's original work have been made.'

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