What My Favorite YA Characters Would Be Like in Quarantine

In the U.S., some states are starting to ease quarantine restrictions, but many of us—either legally or by choice—remain locked down. So, I think it’s been long enough that we ask ourselves a very important question: what would some of our favorite fictional characters be like in lockdown?

Let’s discuss.

Pepper from Tweet Cute

I just read this one recently, so Pepper and Jack were some of the first characters who popped into my head, and I feel like I can pinpoint exactly what they’d be like in quarantine, and to be honest—probably like a lot of us.

I imagine they’d each be quarantined with their individual families, so these two lovebirds would spend hella time on FaceTime with each other, just constantly FaceTiming as they go about their day and even just do their day to day tasks. They’d FaceTime so much that their families would get annoyed and beg them to put down the phones for a little while.

I also feel like their families would tease them relentlessly about them being overly cutesy and lovey-dovey. And trust and believe, they would be overly cutesy and lovey-dovey. No matter how long it’s been since they’ve seen each other, they’d definitely be openly declaring how much they miss each other and how they can’t wait to be together in person again.

For…hugs. Totally innocent hugs.

On top of that, Pepper would be baking. Like. Crazy.

We’re talking tear up her mom’s entire kitchen, make a huge mess daily, all kinds of different baking experiments, throwing together anything they’ve got. There’d be Monster Cake coming out their ears and she and her mom and her sister would all three probably put on a couple of pandemic pounds from all the delicious treats she’s constantly rolling out. The baking blog would have new posts left and right…but there would also probably be some major fails, because let’s be real, quarantine makes us all a little crazy.

Cath from Fangirl

Let’s be real. Cath is already prone to anxiety (like yours truly), so the pandemic is not going to help with that one bit. If this girl ate hidden granola bars and peanut butter just to avoid going to the cafeteria, quarantine just might send her into a bit of a tailspin. But on the bright side, if she ate granola bars and peanut butter just to avoid going to the cafeteria, she has experience with living on only what she’s got—and that’s going to really help her out.

Cath would probably be reading anything and everything she could on the virus and the whole situation, constantly driving herself crazy learning anything she could and obsessing over statistics and numbers and news and trying to come up with new ways to keep her family safe. She would be calling and checking in on her dad constantly, grilling him on what he was doing, asking him if he is staying in, where he has gone, how he protected himself when he went out, and is he washing his hands enough??? She’d also be making sure he has food in the house, and reminding him that quarantine is not an excuse to stop eating healthy and live off of junk. She’d push him to pick up produce and other decent options when he did venture to the store, but even if he said he was eating the healthiest diet he could, she would still worry about him all the time.

Wren, though she would take it seriously, would probably be a lot more casual about it than Cath, and probably take advantage of the quarantine as a time to spend time having fun with whatever friends or roommates she was locked down with, while calling the other people in her wide social circle to chat and make sure everyone was okay. Cath of course, would try to impress the importance upon Wren and remind her that it’s not just an excuse to socialize, but a very serious situation. Conversely, Wren would remind her that they were safe and healthy and to be grateful for that and try to get out of her own head.

Luckily, Cath would have two other important things that would help her get out of her own head—Levi and writing. Levi would definitely be able to help Cath stay calm, and I could see him making her coffee or other treats, listening to her rant about whatever she saw on the news that day, and then redirecting her to something else that might make her feel better, like reading a book together (Cath reading to him, of course) or watching a funny movie—maybe one of the Simon Snow film adaptations.

And since there isn’t much to do in quarantine, Cath would turn to her favorite activity—writing. Whether it’s more fanfic or her own stories, I could see her staying up until all hours of the night, completely wrecking her sleep schedule, just working on writing non-stop, fueled by nothing but Levi’s homemade coffee drinks, granola bars, and the pure energy of channeling anxiety into a real activity.

Ellis from Let’s Call It a Doomsday

First things first, let’s just get it out of the way upfront: Ellis would feel completely justified. Whether or not she said it much, she would feel it. She would feel totally justified in worrying about the so-called end of the world, she would feel completely right for being concerned about things that her family thought were ridiculous, and she would even be justified in being worried specifically about “superviruses that can’t be cured.”

Now, would she actually say that to people? Probably not….Okay, maybe like once. I don’t know if she could resist at least pointing it out, especially if her family was grating on her nerves at some point after being locked down together for quite some time. It might slip out.

But at the end of the day, no matter how justified her worries might have ended up being, Ellis loves her family and just wants the best for them, so she would more time and effort into taking care of them than she would lording it over them.

She would finally get to put her stockpile to use. It’s likely they’d get to delve into some of the non-perishable food she has been stocking up on, and if she was lucky, she might have even stockpiled some toilet paper in her supply stash. And knowing Ellis, and the fact that superviruses were one of the things she was concerned about, she would might even already have some face masks or protective face coverings, gloves, and if they lucked out—the coveted hand sanitizer.

Now that she has a new group of friends, she would use FaceTime to keep in touch with Hannah and the boys, and they could all play Five Word Books while Sam stuffs a towel under the door and hotboxes himself in his bedroom.

Speaking of technology and FaceTiming, I think Ellis would transition well to virtual appointments for her therapy, too. I think she’d want to keep going at a time like this, because even if she was reluctant to admit it at times, she knows that her therapist did help her out in some ways, and she would be able to continue on with the modern miracle that is online therapy in order to help quell some of her more extreme fears and learn some healthy coping mechanisms she can start using during a really scary time, and in order to pull herself out of getting lost the black hole of research and prepper forums.

I also think Ellis’s family would actually be really wholesome to quarantine with, and even though she would want some time away from them and they might get on each other’s nerves now and then, they would probably spend a lot of time together, cooking together, playing board games in the evenings, watching movies together, or maybe even trying to learn new things or make things together. I imagine their church would also roll out some kind of option for online church, so they could all watch the livestreams together so that they can still participate. They seem like they’d be a wholesome AF family to lock down with.

Fred & George Weasley from Harry Potter

Okay, be serious, did you think we were going to get through an entire quarantine post without me mentioning being locked down with the twins? Come on.

We all know what the twins would be like in lockdown—raucous, mischievous, a little dangerous, and somewhat out of control. But also secretly really loving. Hear me out.

The Weasley twins would see lockdown as an opportunity to perfect their talents. They would spend all their time working on new concoctions for Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes, pranking their friends and family members/fellow lockdownees, and testing out potions, spells, and clever sweets and treats to whoever was lucky or unlucky enough to be isolated with them.

It would be a little bit of a shitshow—but while it would seem like they had just set out to drive everyone insane, there’s more to it than that. At heart, the twins are loving and sweet, and really, they’d be pranking and messing with everyone out of love. They would want to keep things lighthearted and help distract people from the mess that was going on around them (that is, if the virus even reached as far as the Wizarding World—but this is my blog post, so we are going to suspend disbelief and proceed accordingly). Think about it—when you’re busy worrying about where the next joke or surprise is going to come from, it help keeps your mind off the darker things you could be worried about.

Just as long as they stay away from any WWW treats that make people cough or lose their sense of taste. Read the room, guys.

Marceline the Vampire Queen from Adventure Time

 I realize it’s marginally debatable whether Adventure Time is either YA or a book, but consider three things: one, in addition to being a show, it’s also a series of graphic novels. Two, those graphic novels are shelved in the YA area, and, perhaps most importantly, three—once again, it’s my blog post so I’m going to roll with it.

Plus, I love Marcy and I think she fits into this post perfectly.

Going to be frank with y’all: this would be small. Potatoes. For our girl the Vampire Queen. Marceline has already lived through so much. I mean, first of all, she’s immortal. She has already survived the Mushroom War, which was the biggest apocalyptic event in the Adventure Time universe/history. And she survived having Ash as a boyfriend, and that guy was a real dick. HE SOLD HAMBO.

So compared to everything she has already done and the apocalypse she already survived, Marceline would probably see this is as no big deal and have no issue being calm about it all with her trademark vampire coolness….pun intended. (I’m so sorry.)

But I feel like this would be a good thing, because she’d be able to keep her friends and companions calm. But she would go about it in her own way, by making smartass comments and questioning them sardonically when they make questionable decisions.

Marceline is another one, though, that is a softie at heart (shh, don’t tell anyone). So even though she’d be a smartass about it and probably raise her eyebrow at Finn and Jake more than once, she’d be doing it out of love because she actually does care about LSP and PB and the whole crew.

What do you all think? What do you think your favorite YA characters would be like in quarantine? Any characters you’d like to be locked down with? Let me know in the comments. You know I’d love to talk. <3

In the meantime…stay safe and stay sane!