...sigh
you know there was this entire... chapter... that just sorta flew by. i don't write about this here when i'm feeling good about a concept i suppose, and the last one was three at once. not even in the usual "string of adjectives" way.
i essentially folded. after so much begging from my friends to keep old concepts around instead of changing them, to just run multiple characters if trying to fit all these concepts in is bugging you, for these cool old designs they got to know me through to at least remain as side characters, i folded. it happened when i was considering rebranding from the Dragon (middle) to the Robot (left) but then in a moment of horrific brainrot created the Vampire (right, she's also a Harpy) because suddenly biting people's necks and drINKING THEM sounds very much like a great time. so, i gave up on deciding. that was it. i'll just have three forever now, and we'll all unlive contentedly ever after.
Each represents a different range of my hyperfixations. The Vampire, Q.C., you've seen her name here before (sometimes in different contexts), would deal with mythical and magical topics. Thia, a Dragon, would deal with creatures and nature, you know, fucking dinosaurs. 499, robot, obviously, technology. They'd essentially act as authors/presenters for certain topics I'm writing on and hopefully eventually making videos of- and this is likely to remain the case, honestly. What might not, in my ever-uncertain proclamations, stay in the plan, is how I was planning to use them for streams and even in the short-term just referring to one as "me." Each would have four months (Q.C. would start October 1 because spooky, then 499, then Thia), plus they'd "take over" any games that naturally fit their genres.
Simply put, I'm not sure I view these characters as sonas anymore.
In getting this off my chest it is making some thoughts clearer. From the beginning I've been in a vicious ebb and flow of trying to make my character stand on her own, then realizing I don't like what they became- not only do I not want to stream in a degree of kayfabe past "lol look I'm a mythical creature that's cool," but these characterizations inevitably grew jarringly fucked up and trying to write that character just for lore became extremely tiring, even sickening. I don't like having that degree of fuckedupedness in a character I'm building as a skinsuit, even if I admit that they're not straight-edge Lawful Good (NG/CG/LN seems to be the range I'd put them in). And, in splitting the character into three, I've inevitably ran into similar issues with the bunch. Q.C. is nice, but doesn't feel like me, being far more sociable and noble- 499, perhaps fittingly, kind of just a tired delivery driver and otherwise a blank slate, and the only way to advance past that for her would probably be to lean into her tired snarkiness mixed with technical knowledge in a way that doesn't suit me. Thia has slipped hard into being fucked up to a degree that I really gotta fix, this bitch had a six-figure bodycount and not even in a cool way. The idea was to lampshade that they were all "me" by having them all in conflict with each other, only begrudgingly cohabitating, but, frankly, I did too well- none of me is left in them.
So fuck it, balls to the walls, we're going full cringe, any character that represents me is basically just gonna do as I would in that situation, and to offset that last nagging fragment of the cop in my head telling me that's bad writing my actual sona is only going to be canon-lite.
As for these three, I suppose that if you love something, and if I can't figure out how to fix them (indeed, maybe I shouldn't- maybe they should stay how they are) then, well, set it free. Kinda. I mean keeping them as side characters. It's really, just, ironic. Through tweaking their designs and personalities and making them shed my "main" name, I've done entirely on accident what I struggled with every other time I arrived at these crossroads-
I've created three characters who I'm proud of, and who don't run the risk of being easily confused with a character I design purely to represent me, and who stand on their own and don't really lead to me filling the setting wall-to-wall with self-inserts like a substantially less terrible version of Zeus across ancient Greece, all while trying to make nominally similar characters out of the three.
When I rolled Q.C. out, I said that my sona, at this point, isn't a character, it's the setting. That's what I have fun with, and it's why I'm so focused on what my character is instead of who, or where they came from. Even if you don't engage with the insane amount of lore I'm gonna pump out- and fair enough- it's the framework for a means of character design that I am extremely proud of. That one-liner meant on that day that I'd be doomed to constant rebrands unless I just settled for covering my bases with several characters. But, as it turns out, splitting all those weird characteristics of your initial abomination of a sona into three different sonas actually makes things MORE difficult to explain to people, not less. "Marketability" aside, I just wanna say "I'm Northy and I'm a Weird Bird" again.
I could talk more about how some of the ways I've displayed gender through them that are putting me in uncomfortable spots (notably Thia's current design pushing the boundaries of my dysphoria in some aspects while 499 and Q.C. are so femme they're alien to me) or what exactly that next character concept is gonna be (Techno-Slime? Revamped Doll? Jabberwock?), but it's late, and I have work tomorrow, so I'll leave it with the obvious:
I still. Have not. Fucking decided if I'm actually gonna go through with my rebrand's rebrand's rebrand's rebranded rebranding of a rebrand.
Anticipate more writing from me in the very near future, and I'll still use the character names like I did for Q.C. in the last one, because one way or another, they're here to stay- and also the previous service I used to do lore rambles in private has started feeding its stuff to generative AI haha wow cool so I'm gonna just send it all straight the fuck here now.
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