History

Child of Divorce

Emma was born on March 23, 1999, to Maggie and Kevin Duval, in Lakewood. She grow up in a picturesque suburban home in the upwardly mobile district of “west Lakewood”.

Emma’s home life was marred by the deteriorating relationship between her parents, leaving Emma a firsthand witness to scenes of domestic violence as her father’s rage grew more and more incontrollable. This culminated in an incident where Kevin physically attacked Maggie. This was the last straw and Kevin, shaken by his own violence, left his family and Lakewood behind. Emma was 8.

She found solace in her friendship with Audrey Jensen. Audrey’s parents were friendly with Maggie, and the girls became close, spending time together into their adolescence.

Audrey would recall more than one incident in their childhood when she discovered Emma had taken scissors to her picture books to make origami from the cuttings. When confronted, Emma would assume a hangdog expression and claim she could explain.¹

The In-Crowd

Emma and Audrey’s friendship began to fray when the girls started high school and Emma began spending more time with the “in-crowd”, thanks in part to her first romantic relationship, with Will Belmont. The nonconformist Audrey, bristled, especially since Emma’s new friend group was spearheaded by GW High’s Queen Bee, Nina Patterson who, in earlier years, been a frequent tormentor of Audrey’s.

From Emma’s perspective, the dissolution of this friendship was gradual and barely noticeable, seeming like a natural consequence of growing up, meeting new people, and developing new interests. She was in love with Will, a handsome jock and rising star on the basketball team. The arrogance that may have attended his popularity was tempered somewhat by his farmboy upbringing, which made him seam “realer” than his counterparts. Their relationship, solidified when Will took her to homecoming, became more serious as the months passed. Will planned an extravagant Valentine’s Day date, after which Emma lost her virginity to him.

The Video

Emma’s loyalty to her new friends would be tested in earnest on the afternoon of October 17, 2015, about a year into her relationship with Will and the beginning of her association with Nina and the others. Emma was hanging out with Nina, Tyler O’Neil, Brooke Maddox, Jake Fitzgerald, Riley Marra, Zach Henderson, and Will at the Wren Lake Overlook when she recognized Audrey’s car pull up at the other side of the summit.² Emma watched with shock as Audrey, in the driver’s seat, began making out with another girl. Her reaction drew the notice of the others, who largely responded with scandalized glee.

Nina, in particular, took a venomous pleasure in this bit of gossip, whipping out her phone and recording the girls’ intimate moment. Emma, offended on her old friend’s behalf, told Nina to delete the video. Nina promised to “take it off her phone”, and honored this exact words defense by deleting it from her phone, after uploading it to YouTube the next day, where it rapidly went locally viral.^{3 4}

Emma was with Riley at the time the video was uploaded, attending a lavish house party at Brooke’s.⁵ No sooner had Emma seen the video on her YouTube feed did Audrey crash the party, beelining for Emma, having already decided the in-crowd was responsible. Emma didn’t deny knowing about the video, but insisted she didn’t film it. Before long, their respective friends intervened: Brooke for Emma, and Amanda Steele and Noah Foster for Audrey.⁶ Emma and Audrey were separated, Brooke removing her to the relative safety of the house, where Emma brought her up to speed on what Nina had done. Brooke was sympathetic but unsurprised, and pointed out that Emma should’ve known Nina would do whatever she wanted. Confronted with this, Emma marinated in guilt for not stopping Nina when she had the chance.⁷

Their conversation was interrupted by commotion from outside. Tyler and Jake had come to blows, splashing down into Brooke’s pull. Brooke called a stop the proceedings, startling would-be Good Samaritan Zach into falling into the water himself and needing Emma to fish him out. Brooke’s temper wasn’t improved by learning of the fight’s origins: Amanda’s insinuation that Nina was cheating on Tyler with Jake. Disgusted, Brooke called an end to the festivities, and ordered everyone to leave.⁸

Emma was one of a handful of guests, along with Zach and Riley, who stuck around to help clear up the wreckage. She admitted she was annoyed with Nina for ditching before she could be confronted about the video, but the others maintained that the best thing to do would be to let Nina’s temper run its course: plainly, she wasn’t in any mood to argue after the drama with Tyler and Jake.

Before Emma could leave Brooke’s for home, Zach got word from his mother of a new emergency: the Hendersons’ neighbor, Stacy Winters, had been murdered, along with her boyfriend, Brock Carmichael. Zach’s Mom had found the bodies.⁹

Playing the Game

The next morning, Maggie broke the news to Emma over breakfast. Emma tried to placate her mother’s worries by telling her she hadn’t known Stacy and Brock very well, sad as the situation was. Maggie could tell Emma was preoccupied and offered to give her a lift, but Emma declined, going to school on her own.¹⁰

The murders were a naturally inescapable subject at school, with Emma being peppered with questions given her mother’s role as medical examiner. English class with Mr. Branson was derailed thanks to a paper Noah had written which, by macabre coincidence, attempted to compare The Great Gatsby to the 1994 Brandon James murders, a local tragedy that felt particularly close to home after Stacy and Brock.

For Emma, 1994 was an especially sore subject. Her father, Kevin, was the sole survivor of the attacks: the victims were his friends, and Kevin had been forever changed by the ordeal, the psychological effects becoming a haunting shadow all through Emma’s childhood experiences of him. Noah’s insinuation that Brandon’s victims were “careless people” who had in some way invited their own destruction, provoked an uncharacteristic outburst that momentarily chastened Noah.¹¹

At lunch, Emma ran into Kieran Wilcox, a new student who’d been present in English class. Kieran was searching for his half sister, Deanna. Emma, not particularly keen on returning to her friends given the continued fallout from the video, offered to help him search and the two got to talking. Kieran told Emma how he and his sister had come to Lakewood to live with his biological father, after their mother and Deanna’s father had died in a car crash. Conversation turned to Emma’s sharp remarks in English class and Emma admitted her own estrangement from her father, sympathizing with Kieran over his complicated relationship with his Dad.

Before they could get better acquainted, Emma spotted Deanna sitting on the school roof, prompting Kieran to run off to retrieve his sister.¹²

After school, Emma worked her shift at the Grindhouse, where she was visited by Nina, who ostensibly wanted a favor from her. Emma didn’t give Nina a chance to explain what it was, shocked at her audacity for showing up and not even addressing the video which, Em reminded her, she’d expressly told her to get rid of. Nina was unsympathetic, reminding her that she and Audrey fell out long before this and, if Audrey wanted to act like Emma had committed some great betrayal, that was her prerogative. Anyway, if Emma objected so much, she could’ve snatched the phone from Nina’s hands when she had the chance. Could it be that Emma felt some lingering resentment for how Audrey dropped her as a friend?

Emma protested but couldn’t get much of a word in before Audrey entered the coffeehouse and, seeing Emma and Nina in conference, as quickly stormed off.¹³

Appearance

Emma is a fairly-complected young woman with hazel eyes and long dirty blonde hair, down to her mid-back.¹⁴

Wardrobe

Emma wore a blue sundress with white dots to Brooke’s Big Beautiful Bash.¹⁵

Emma wore a pair of beige suede boots and a caramel-tone leather jacket to school the day she received her first call from Ghostface.¹⁶

Emma’s Grindhouse uniform included a teal teeshirt and navy apron.¹⁷

Personality

Emma’s personality has evolved considerably over the course of her compound ordeals. Initially, Emma was very much a follower, easily cowed by large personalities like Nina and even Brooke, who she was on better terms with. Emma’s passivity proved consequential when, though she told Nina not to film Audrey and Rachel making out, she wasn’t proactive about stopping her.¹⁸

Equipment

Car: Emma drives her own car.¹⁹

Development

Emma was the protagonist of Scream the TV Series and consequently has been part of the Scream Roleplay Universe since its inception. Since 2015, she’s been portrayed by four people. This technically ties her with her arguable deuteragonist Audrey, but ThePlotMurderer only ever wrote Emma for The Story so Far, not for an active game.

She was portrayed in the 2015 Season 1 AU by forum co-moderator Fate, who would’ve had an almost unbroken streak as the character if she hadn’t joined the May 2016 Season 2 AU late, leaving Emma to be portrayed by Celebrity01 for that game. Fate reprised the role for the October 2016 Season 3 AU, and returned to it when The Final Retreat launched in April 2019. She remained with the character through that summer before surrendering her to Snafu Guru, who has since portrayed the character in The Final Retreat and Lakewood: Year One.

When the original, now defunct, Scream Appendix was compiled in 2020 – 2021, Emma’s birthday was reckoned as February 21, 1999. This has since been retconned in favor of March 23, 1999, the date chosen by Snafu Guru for Emma’s Year One yearbook page in 2023.

Other Interpretations

Season 1 AU

From the beginning, Emma’s characterization has been, at least nominally, an attempt to improve upon her canon counterpart. The moderators of the Season 1 AU, including Emma’s portrayer Fate, consciously attempted to make Emma a less passive protagonist, though the extent to which this effort succeeded within the forum’s three month run is debatable.

For instance, Emma is introduced seeming to disapprove of Tyler mocking Amanda Steele’s disability, but she doesn’t do anything about it, instead merely attempting to quietly leave the party.²⁰ When Tyler and Jake get into a fight, Brooke is the one who breaks things up, leaving Emma to reprimand them after the fact.²¹

In an unfortunate usage of dramatic irony, after Audrey notes Brandon James’s “Daisy” is rumored to still live in Lakewood, Emma loudly insists those are, after all, just rumors, in a blatant set up for her to be proven wrong later on. In this same outburst, Emma vehemently denies there’s a serial killer loose in the town, despite nobody claiming there was one. In any event, she would shortly be proved wrong in this as well.²²

Cut Developments

Prior to the forum launching, Fate collaborated with TellatrixForever to outline storylines for their characters. One of these included Emma being taught practical self defense by Clark and Kieran, both portrayed by Tellatrix. Emma was to receive a taser from Clark following this training. Presumably, this would have occurred following Emma being attacked by the killer in the game’s first “episode”. Ultimately, Emma spends the rest of the forum confined to a hospital room and it’s Deanna that receives a taser from Clark.

Trivia

Emma has been portrayed by four different writers since 2015, three in active games.

Emma’s faceclaim, Willa Fitzgerald, is shared by the shoeless and inexplicably strong Irish maiden Caoimhe O’Halloran in Big Trouble in Little Lakewood: 1846.

Quotes

I just have a really fast panic response.

Emma rationalizes her “good reflexes” to Kieran.

Yes, I’m having a big sad!

Emma snaps at Nina’s flippancy

Gallery

1. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 1 ↩︎
2. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 5 ↩︎
3. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 2 ↩︎
4. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 29 ↩︎
5. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 5 ↩︎
6. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 1 ↩︎
7. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 2 ↩︎
8. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 5 ↩︎
9. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 7 ↩︎
10. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 12 ↩︎
11. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 17 ↩︎
12. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 20 ↩︎
13. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 29 ↩︎
14. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 12 ↩︎
15. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 1 ↩︎
16. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 12 ↩︎
17. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 29 ↩︎
18. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 29 ↩︎
19. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 12 ↩︎
20. Season 1 AU: Pilot, Post 15 ↩︎
21. Season 1 AU: Pilot, Post 59 ↩︎
22. Season 1 AU: Pilot, Post 213 ↩︎