Template:Ava Willis - Personality
Much of the humor of the show results from the collision of Ava's deeply conservative manner, nature, and philosophy with the world and people around her.[1] She is uncomfortable with intimacy and with expressions of affection or sexuality (as demonstrated by the running joke throughout the series, in which Ava is extremely averse and overreacts to physical contact or anything sexual concerning Baxter/Bianca, but she has a healthy relationship with her wife Angie (later Kellie), as well as the rest of her family. She believes passionately in hard work, honesty, tradition, and convention (she refuses to leave work early, even so much as 10 minutes early on a Friday); and is a proud Hoosier and American, to the point of occasionally struggling to suppress mild xenophobia, though always trying her best to see others, regardless of culture, for their personal character. She is, however, a highly respected authority among her friends and family, who often seek her help and advice, knowing that she will always advocate doing the right thing in the right way.
One of Ava's most treasured hobbies is the care she takes over her lawn and carpet. She's unofficially nominated the best home in the neighborhood. She uses a fictional "Kankanee" 2500 series carpet shampooer, a carpet cleaner she also covets to the point when the Kankakee Corporation undertook the focus group discontinuing her model in favor of a new one, she managed to point out all the flaws in the engineering and convince the group the shampooer was inferior. In the episode "Queen of the Mouse Hill" with March Madness approaching, Ava purchases an exorbitant new carpeting for $2.25 per square foot, which Melissa destroys as an act of revenge to Heather having sex with Melissa's mother in retaliation ("The Story of Melissa's Mother"). When she converted her den into a basketball court, she installed hardwood (much to Angie's chagrin). In only one episode did Ava purposely allow her carpet to die; when the great recession forced Ava to run for public office on a platform opposing the city policy which wasted more funds than it saved. She later discovered Lando was bribing the health department employee to keep his lawn green and carpet shampooed and Deanna blackmailed him to keep Ava's house from deterioration. Refusing to be corrupt, she ceased shampooing. Ava has also states that she has held back "tender feelings" towards her family in order to focus on the lawn and carpet.
Ava resided in a single-story Rancher (later renovated to a two-story home that began in season 7 and completed in season 9), that she claims has historic value until moving to a similar Rancher in Quillsville Cold Case. She is a noted do it yourself (DIY) enthusiast and prides herself on homeownership. She is skilled in home repair, lawn and garden and automotive repair. She meticulously obeys virtually every building code in the city ordinance. She gets a great deal of joy engaging in home repair and her level of skill (and attention to detail) was repeatedly shown to exceed that of workmen/workwomen she employed.
Ava is also a follower of sports. She is a huge fan of basketball and football, being a former player of both sports herself. She is a long-time fan of the Indiana Colts, and before the Colts arrived from Baltimore in 1984, is also said to have previously been a fan of the Chicago Bears because they play in a different conference and wouldn't play the Colts unless it was in an all Indiana Super Bowl (in a coincidence, the all-Indiana Super Bowl Ava mentioend did in fact happen on February 4, 2007 when the Colts defeated the Bears in Super Bowl XLI and in the same football season Queen of the Willis premiered). She is also a long-time fan of and a supporter of the Ball State Cardinals.
She also follows basketball as a fan of the Pacers and Fever. However her idyllic passion is golf and bowling which coincides with her love of lawns and floors. She once converted her back yard into a putting green and her den into a bowling alley and a basketball court. She is however critical of some sports. She was critical of baseball/softball, claiming to Tom "I didn't think I ever needed to tell you this, but I would be a bad parent if I didn't; Softball was invented by women to keep them busy while their husbands did the cooking"; this changed after marrying Kellie in "Into That Final Good Night in Quillsville" which Kellie reveals to be a fan of both the Los Angles Dodger and Anaheim Angels. She is however, still critical of soccer and hockey.
While more of a stereotypical transgendered geek and redneck in earlier episodes, for example, idolizing singers John Mellencamp and Crystal Gayle, Ava becomes more of a small town, middle class conservative who is extremely law-abiding. Everybody looks to Ava when they have any seemingly useless or dull work that needs to be done. Her gruff, temperamental, and impartial tendencies have been challenged a few times throughout the series, during which Ava always proves herself to be on top of her game. When Rags and Shushu attacked a black repairwoman named Millie (voiced by Kim Fields) working on their heating system, she was accused of being racist/sexist and portraying those feelings onto her dog and cat, though it was later proven that she is not racist nor sexist but that in fact she hates repairmen, as she prides herself on proper home maintenance. Before Rags and Shushu had attacked Millie, Ava had told her that "A woman should not be judged by the color of her skin but by the actions of her heart". She prides herself on having taken auto-shop and shop class in junior high, high school, and college and refuses to let mechanics touch her truck, feeling that she can accomplish anything without help. Ava has briefly worked at AldiMart as a saleswoman trainee after AldiMart drove Craven Gifts out of business. Ava's reserved nature probably resulted from years of verbal abuse from her war-veteran educator mother Peggy Willis. However, if sufficiently provoked, Ava has proven not to be a pushover, often ending disputes with her self-popularized quote "I'm gonna kick your ass!" (though she rarely follows through on this threat). She is also staunchly pro-Indiana. In the episode "Indiana Blizzard," in which a blizzard has torn off all her clothes, she is given the choice of covering herself with the Indiana flag or tarp. With barely a thought, she chooses the tarp, thereby sparing the flag.
She is for the most part an outspoken conservative (she once said dreamily that she missed voting for George W. Bush). She was initially a huge fan of former Vice President Mike Pence, but had second thoughts about voting for him because of his weak handshake, and when asked if she would vote for "the other guy," presumably John Gregg, she responded "I don't know." Ava is a registered Republican, but has respect for some old-school Democrats. However, Ava also shows deference to Richard Lugar when they meet and greatly respects former Democratic Indiana Governor Joe Kernan (although she displays great respect for, and deference to, all authority figures, but the respect was most likely the result of Ava's great liking of Indiana culture and history as mentioned throughout the show). She has also expressed support for labor unions and equal rights.
In nearly every episode, Ava and her friends Melissa, Tiffani (later Kendra) and Pamhouser will stand about in the alley behind Ava's house, drinking Mississinewa Cola and discussing the events of the day. When consensus is reached and at breaks in the conversation, they will give short words of agreement, such as "yup" or "mm-hmm." She considers her wife her best friend and feels that physically punishing children is wrong; she is verbally strict, but not directly abusive. In the "Revenge of the Male Anchors" trilogy, it was revealed that Ava does not mind two women co-anchor a newscast, yet has a huge dislike for two men anchoring a newscast when the male fills in for the female anchor after seeing Clyde Lee and Howard Caldwell in 1984 (that eventually eventually leading to her gender transition).
Political parties aside, Ava is very conservative and old-fashioned, being largely ignorant (and disdainful) of new trends; several episodes involve her reluctantly dealing with subjects outside of her comfort zone. Despite her discomfort with change and unfamiliar or awkward social situations and milieus, when her involvement is unavoidable, Ava repeatedly shows the ability to adapt to[2] (and even learn from[3]) them, even to immerse herself and become intellectually or emotionally invested in them[4] — Ava's surprising ability to adapt to the awkward and uncomfortable is also evident from her good relations with all three members of the Stephanie Rose love triangle. Ava is portrayed as having traditional family values and she is shown to be uncomfortable with hiring a man to work at Craven because she was believed to be too handsome, even though he was overqualified; instead, she hired a woman for shallowly expressing a fondness for the Indiana Colts and a blatantly fraudulent adoration for retail. The woman was later revealed to be a completely unreliable alcoholic. Her old-fashioned ways extend to a suspicion of new technology. She does however, eventually get a cellphone and briefly becomes addicted to a computer game whose main character is modeled on her. In the episode Scrappin' Meth Scrap, Ava made the mistake of purchasing meth she assumed was scrapbook materials; when her liberal lawyer explained that virtually everyone has consumed drugs she comments, "Not my Governor! I voted for (David) McIntosh!", referencing the 2000 re-election of Frank O'Bannon.
Ava is not entirely unbending in her habits. One of them is her discovery and embrace of vegetarianism. She even goes as far as to defend hippies, something she seemed somewhat ashamed to do; nevertheless, she agreed with them on the superior flavor of some natural and organic food. She has also been shown to have fairly tolerant views on other religions. Ava has some environmentalist leanings (though she distances herself from the movement at large), once lamenting about air pollution in Bloomington, opposing the building of McMansions, and running for city council on a platform of removing low-value items, in part, because they wasted more food than they saved. Similarly, she seems to believe in nuclear winter, as when Melissa commented on how colder temperatures could lead to a potato industry in Florida, Ava responded "We live in Indiana. It's already 20 in the winter, and if it gets one degree colder I'm gonna kick your ass!" Despite her un-worldy outlook and occasional naiveté, she has been shown to be very clever in various scenarios. These include outsmarting an incompetent District Attorney who was attempting to not proceed with Heather's rape, outwitting a rapacious lawyer who was attempting to sue Craven Gifts for an injury suffered on its premises by making it appear as though the injury occurred in his own law office, and forcing a veterinarian who was requiring costly and unnecessary tests for a soldier's cat to desist (in poetic irony, Ava began informing the vet's demanding clientele of an unneeded, but slightly superior, imaging machine the vet was unwilling to invest in). Ava also got the see-no-evil parents of a youngster who was bullying her to exert discipline by having Deanna behave exactly like their daughter toward them.
Ava can be gullible, as for 35 years she bought vehicles at sticker price from Denins Duke's dealership, thinking they were a great deal. She has also been tricked because of her relative ignorance concerning drugs or subcultures. Hence she once mistakenly bought vials of meth believing they were scrapbook materials and in a time of stress took a hit of cocaine because she thought it was a cigarette. She once introduced a woman named Rochelle King, who later turned out to be a prostitute, to several business associates, she gifted Ava with a feather tipped hat while driving her mother's vintage Mercedes leading to the community to thinking that she was a pimp. This led her former pimp, Gavin Duvall (voiced by Ice Cube), to believe she was her new pimp, a role she was forced to act out to rid of him. In one episode ("The Rape of Heather Willis"), her predecessor Adrienne Fansler hired a man named Bobby Joe Bones, who later turned out to be a sex offender and rapist.
In one episode, a flashback reveals that shortly after Ava graduated from high school with her three best friends, Braden Rose (now Melissa), Ken Kendall (now Kendra), and Anna Pamhouser, Kendra's then-wife Tiffani Donovan enlisted in the United States Marines—a night of celebratory drinking led them to a punk bar, where the then-formidable Tiffani saved a drunken Ava from a beating. In gratitude, Ava (then Frank) stumbled off to a tattoo parlor and paid to have Kendra's name inked onto her lower back before passing out. Only Pamhouser was with Ava, and, unable to persuade the proprietor to ignore Ava's purchase, convinced him to put the tattoo in a less conspicuous place, Ava's pubic area and her head; Ava had completely forgotten that night, but was reminded of it while undergoing treatment for cysts on her enlarged clitoris in the present (an affliction caused by Melissa trying to gain a veterinarian contract). She had the name removed out of disgust, but eventually had a jailhouse tattoo of it put on to show Melissa that the two were still friends.
Ava thinks very highly of Indiana. She thinks that Indiana is superior to all other states in the U.S or at least Hollywood or New York. (This is a play on the stereotype of exaggerated Hoosier pride.) In the episode "To Russia: With an F2M Brother Part 1", Ava says "Angie, I've already chosen the country for our summer vacation, America. And the state, Indiana. And the town, Avon. I don't care what their police did to that cyclist. It's still a great town." That was her response to Angie's ideas for their summer vacation. Later in the episode, she also says to her mother Peggy, "Mom, there is no other place I'd rather be," after Peggy said, "Ava, you work at a convenience store; fuel this thing up and fly me back to Indiana!". A recurring gag throughout the series is Ava's contempt for big cities and urban areas, once comparing a youth oriented shopping center to "Hell, or Bloomington", regarding Lafayette, asking "Why would anyone want to live there?" as she and Deanna watched a weather girl screw up on camera, and regarding Fort Wayne as "neither good nor bad".
Ava's personality has evolved throughout the episodes. She is commonly the voice of reason to Angie's shenanigans, but in some episodes she can act darker than normal and sometimes shows a taste for sadomasochism. In the episode "Believe it or Not, Ava is a Supermodel", Ava becomes an anorexic model. However, in "The Former Life of Ava", just the opposite happens where Ava gains a ton of weight after Angie loses her sex drive. As a result, Angie makes fun of her causing her to get even fatter out of spite. She doesn't stop until she discovers just how amazing "fat lesbian sex" is and force feeds her to make her even fatter which in turn will please Angie. By the end of the episode she is returned to her normal weight by the family doctor after having a heart attack. Two episodes ("Where There's Pressure, There's Affairs" and "Therapist Hopping 2") shows Ava and Angie splitting up because of Angie's jealousy, only to discover that Ava has the same character flaw of jealousy and the two decide to live with their mutually jealous nature. After the first six seasons, Ava is shown to have more of an egotistical, neglectful, and cold-hearted personality, usually towards Heather or Tom (before his death) most of the time (and later Tabby and Shushu).
Though she still truly loves her wife, Ava is somewhat promiscuous and during her 38 year marriage to Angie, has cheated on her on occasion at times, with older and younger men and women, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Ava has had eight extramarital affairs: Lando ("Where Ther's Pressure, There's Affairs"), marriage counselor Lynsay Gerardo ("Therapist Hopping 2"), Anna Pamhouser (Meet the Pamhousers), ex-girlfriends Brittani Hicks ("The Former Life of Ava") and Christiana Sellars (mentioned in "Ten Years To Life"), Alisan Porter ("Tina's With Stupid"), and Avril Lavinge ("The Perils of Quillsville Idol"). In "Ten Years To Life", it was revealed that aside from Tom, Deanna, Ron, Brian, Stuart, Emilie, Hillary, Luanne, and to some extent Brynn with Angie, Ava has a total of four more children after Lynsay Gerardo revealed she had given birth to a daughter Brynn Addison Hannah (Ava got Lynsay pregnant in "Therapist Hopping 2" and Angie decided to adopt the then-unborn baby in Quillsville Cold Case: Albert Willis) as well as another child with Christiana named Breeanna Lucille (in a flashback), as well as one child with Alisan Porter named Dylan Porter and in "The Former Life of Ava" it was revealed that Ava has two children with ex-girlfriend Brittani Hicks (Ava got Brittani pregnant on two occasions while a student at Port Melissa University) named Stan and Dominique. In "The Rape of Heather Willis" and "A Quillsville Under Suspicion", it was revealed that Glenn Turner was the only boyfriend Ava had (predating Ava's gender transition by 11 years).
As previously mentioned, Ava has been shown to have numerous ex-girlfriends, including Alisan Porter and a friend of Angie's named Christiana — both of whom have given Ava the nickname "Loose Frankie" (before becoming "Loose Ava"). In the episode "Hey, Hey, Hayes, Quillsville, it was revealed that Ava (before her transition) had participated in a porn film with Brittani and Christiana in high school, as well as a second with ex-boyfriend Glenn Turner and Christiana, which further cemented her promiscuity. This episode has also reveals Ava's dark side in high school as a bullying athlete who bullied and at one time humiliated Jessica Hayes, Cynthia Wilson, Josh Kaufman, Bart the Bully to name a few. Ava's interests are usually pursued in an attempt to separate from Angie or to a lesser extent Kellie, and her antics, or when she feels she's being controlling.
