2024-05-08 19:25![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
redthedragon
redthedragonNote: this is mostly here for my own purposes - it's easier for me to find things on Dreamwdith than it is many other places, lol. But also because I like attention and I want attention. So there is that.
A handful of events have conspired to make me brush off some very old ocs:
1. I remembered Kit and Kat (first invented circa 2006 when I got two cat-shaped beanie babies) exist and that I like them in the strange incarnation I first came up with around 2013 where Kat is a stone-faced scary badass murder assassin who is Cold and Heartless because she is just not that emotive and feels awkward when showing emotion so instead she just kind of doesn't, and Kit is like pulling some manic pixie dream girl femme-fatale assassin shit but mostly because she is just a weird freak and people let her get away with licking their blood if she's being sexy about it. I think it is a fun dynamic to throw into anything, where there's a Big Scary Bruiser Girl who is just kind of a little bashful and shy but Can and Will punch you out and she is attached to the weirdest most wired little freak you've ever met with the best tits you have ever seen.
2. A friend was in my house and showed me Trigun (the original anime, from 1997) and it bit me
3. I was drawing Rex and decided that a drawing I had sketched for him to be in looked too demure and cute to be my beloved bitch asshole, so I worked it into being my like... hornyposting transitionsona "Spider" instead, and then was like hm top surgery scars are cool, and because i was a bit intoxicated while doing it I started doing some real high-fantasy top surgery scar patterning that looked like a diamond in the center of the chest where I have some scarring from unrelated issues and then like rings around it. Then I decided it didn't work for Spider, because Spider is a grimy little bug of a person the same way I am, mentally dusted off a different oc, and transplanted it onto him...
4. Elysium (nickname Eli) and Lux are two characters I made up in high school based off a book series I liked and some characters that I felt like didn't get the spotlight the way I wanted, they're a team that consists of one dirtbag 20-something year old Martian gig worker and his cat Lux who is (apparently) made of fire and who Eli found in an abandoned ruin as a preteen.
They never had a story, they only had a concept. At the time I was also really enamored with a specific character dynamic that I don't think suits either of them - the way I wrote Felyx and Rex and the way I wrote Eli and Lux was the same, even though Felyx and Rex are antagonists and not meant to be terribly lovable and Eli and Lux are supposed to be root-for-them underdog types lol.
Lux's core concept was that he was actually the physical manifestation of an accretion disk that was also alive or something, with the idea being that he was like a walking entropy-based apocalypse who had lost his memories and wasn't aware of it himself, and if he remembered tjat he could start like, eating stars and shit, but he doesn't because he is too busy being a cat.
Eli... never really had much of a concept, honestly. Just a physical design and a few vague ideas and a handful of one-off short stories I wrote that were not very good. He is a magician with an unusual set of abilities that he does not use nearly to their full extent, he has mostly a collection of distant friends doing the mid-twenties gtfo-hometown thing so they're just sort of vanishing as the days go by, and he's doing like minimum wage magical nonsense.
5. Ta'jai Elarayn is a completely unrelated guy who I just think is really fucking funny because he sucks so fucking much. He is literally the most immortal character I have - he absolutely cannot die under literally any circumstances. He's been thrown into stars and survived. He's fallen through the vacuum of space and survived. He's like a starfish and he can turn into two guys if you separate parts of him from himself, he can reproduce by budding and clone himself, he is an inside-out shambling mass of tentacles that just sort of looks like a person because the tentacles are all on the inside and he still has the skin he used to have before he was the thing he is, the closest thing he has to blood is both a sedative, aphrodisiac, painkiller and accelerant and on top of that it's bright blue and tastes like honey just because, he can talk to fish, and his greatest desire in life is to bum around going to random events and eating people. He does have some vague obligation toward eating people due to the same sequence of events that made him into the thing he is but he could always choose to just eat fish; the actual curse he's under means he has to have a conversation with his meals... and he can talk to fish. He just likes human-and-alien meat better. Because he kind of sucks.
Jai is this way because of (I was taking really heavy inspiration from Worm for this because I didn't ever need it to be relevant to the context he was ending up in) a character called The Watcher, who is also an embodiment of entropy and apocalypses in a much more straightforward way - it is the Watcher's great hobby to destroy civilizations, laying waste to everyone in them and devouring the remains. But a while ago The Watcher got into it with someone in their weight class and was put under a curse that means that they can do no harm. The spell is a weaselwords spell, like how Haven's powers work, so the exact wording (which I don't remember anyway because I'm doing some 'they're aliens and their words are different' shit here) matters and means that The Watcher can only interfere by doing what is asked of them, and giving people tools to fuck their OWN civilizations up.
On the whole folks are willing to work with that because The Watcher is like a weird fucked up space genie and they can do basically anything. Jai, fool that he was, asked for The Watcher to change his appearance and make him better at talking to people and otherwise make him charismatic and charming and also left quite a lot of awkward "or something"s in there that gave The Watcher a lot more wiggle room to be like. Lol. Lmao. Im going to ruin yr life. In exchange The Watcher sent Jai to kill his immediate family and bring The Watcher their hearts, which Jai did without a fuss and didn't think to regret until well after he received his 'reward' - most of which was some nonsense that The Watcher threw in with the vaguest hints of what Jai asked for, because they could do that and it was funny to them.
Jai subsequently did a really bad job keeping the fact that he was an immortal cannibal secret so he got launched off that planet about two years later and drifted through deep space as a miserably frozen-and-burnt piece of space debris before crashing on a (barely) habitable asteroid, defrosting a bit tardigrade-style, and then having to find a way back to a place where there were other living people so he could stop existing in miserable torment. He would like to take it easy. unfortunately there is also problems in his life such as the fact that he refuses to stop fucking killing and eating people.
6. Haven is a different oc who is like a middle-manager from hell working for the worst organization ever invented. He sucks, his coworkers suck, his boss sucks, his organization sucks, and everyone involved in the entire thing kind of just needs to die really. Their job is to make things worse for everyone and they work very hard at it. Haven and several other members of this organization, including his boss who is a much bigger fish than he is, have the ability to mind-control people into doing what they want - in much the same way that The Watcher's curse works.
I'm not convinced that Haven belongs on Elysium's Mars. I want him to exit the organization before then. But it'd certainly help keep things on the rails if Haven is managing someone who's managing someone who's managing Jai...
Anyway Trigun reminded me that MOTW stories actually fucking rule (I'm a big fan of the format!) and Elysium could absolutely just be a weird wanderer going from town to town on gig ghost work. I gave Elysium top surgery scars and realized that having one character who knows their past just fine but refuses to discuss it and having another character who absolutely doesn't is kind of a fun dynamic so Eli as a deep-stealth binary tboy who got all his surgeries done at 16 and then skipped town and is like a mysterious loner wanderer suits him better than it did before, i think. it's also more narratively interesting.
Beyond that... the big trouble I've always had with Eli and Lux is that they have nothing going on. They're not doing anything. But I forgot that sometimes a story can just be a guy going a bunch of places. Also Trigun's Meryl and Millie are the greatest characters of all time and I love them to pieces.
A handful of events have conspired to make me brush off some very old ocs:
1. I remembered Kit and Kat (first invented circa 2006 when I got two cat-shaped beanie babies) exist and that I like them in the strange incarnation I first came up with around 2013 where Kat is a stone-faced scary badass murder assassin who is Cold and Heartless because she is just not that emotive and feels awkward when showing emotion so instead she just kind of doesn't, and Kit is like pulling some manic pixie dream girl femme-fatale assassin shit but mostly because she is just a weird freak and people let her get away with licking their blood if she's being sexy about it. I think it is a fun dynamic to throw into anything, where there's a Big Scary Bruiser Girl who is just kind of a little bashful and shy but Can and Will punch you out and she is attached to the weirdest most wired little freak you've ever met with the best tits you have ever seen.
2. A friend was in my house and showed me Trigun (the original anime, from 1997) and it bit me
3. I was drawing Rex and decided that a drawing I had sketched for him to be in looked too demure and cute to be my beloved bitch asshole, so I worked it into being my like... hornyposting transitionsona "Spider" instead, and then was like hm top surgery scars are cool, and because i was a bit intoxicated while doing it I started doing some real high-fantasy top surgery scar patterning that looked like a diamond in the center of the chest where I have some scarring from unrelated issues and then like rings around it. Then I decided it didn't work for Spider, because Spider is a grimy little bug of a person the same way I am, mentally dusted off a different oc, and transplanted it onto him...
4. Elysium (nickname Eli) and Lux are two characters I made up in high school based off a book series I liked and some characters that I felt like didn't get the spotlight the way I wanted, they're a team that consists of one dirtbag 20-something year old Martian gig worker and his cat Lux who is (apparently) made of fire and who Eli found in an abandoned ruin as a preteen.
They never had a story, they only had a concept. At the time I was also really enamored with a specific character dynamic that I don't think suits either of them - the way I wrote Felyx and Rex and the way I wrote Eli and Lux was the same, even though Felyx and Rex are antagonists and not meant to be terribly lovable and Eli and Lux are supposed to be root-for-them underdog types lol.
Lux's core concept was that he was actually the physical manifestation of an accretion disk that was also alive or something, with the idea being that he was like a walking entropy-based apocalypse who had lost his memories and wasn't aware of it himself, and if he remembered tjat he could start like, eating stars and shit, but he doesn't because he is too busy being a cat.
Eli... never really had much of a concept, honestly. Just a physical design and a few vague ideas and a handful of one-off short stories I wrote that were not very good. He is a magician with an unusual set of abilities that he does not use nearly to their full extent, he has mostly a collection of distant friends doing the mid-twenties gtfo-hometown thing so they're just sort of vanishing as the days go by, and he's doing like minimum wage magical nonsense.
5. Ta'jai Elarayn is a completely unrelated guy who I just think is really fucking funny because he sucks so fucking much. He is literally the most immortal character I have - he absolutely cannot die under literally any circumstances. He's been thrown into stars and survived. He's fallen through the vacuum of space and survived. He's like a starfish and he can turn into two guys if you separate parts of him from himself, he can reproduce by budding and clone himself, he is an inside-out shambling mass of tentacles that just sort of looks like a person because the tentacles are all on the inside and he still has the skin he used to have before he was the thing he is, the closest thing he has to blood is both a sedative, aphrodisiac, painkiller and accelerant and on top of that it's bright blue and tastes like honey just because, he can talk to fish, and his greatest desire in life is to bum around going to random events and eating people. He does have some vague obligation toward eating people due to the same sequence of events that made him into the thing he is but he could always choose to just eat fish; the actual curse he's under means he has to have a conversation with his meals... and he can talk to fish. He just likes human-and-alien meat better. Because he kind of sucks.
Jai is this way because of (I was taking really heavy inspiration from Worm for this because I didn't ever need it to be relevant to the context he was ending up in) a character called The Watcher, who is also an embodiment of entropy and apocalypses in a much more straightforward way - it is the Watcher's great hobby to destroy civilizations, laying waste to everyone in them and devouring the remains. But a while ago The Watcher got into it with someone in their weight class and was put under a curse that means that they can do no harm. The spell is a weaselwords spell, like how Haven's powers work, so the exact wording (which I don't remember anyway because I'm doing some 'they're aliens and their words are different' shit here) matters and means that The Watcher can only interfere by doing what is asked of them, and giving people tools to fuck their OWN civilizations up.
On the whole folks are willing to work with that because The Watcher is like a weird fucked up space genie and they can do basically anything. Jai, fool that he was, asked for The Watcher to change his appearance and make him better at talking to people and otherwise make him charismatic and charming and also left quite a lot of awkward "or something"s in there that gave The Watcher a lot more wiggle room to be like. Lol. Lmao. Im going to ruin yr life. In exchange The Watcher sent Jai to kill his immediate family and bring The Watcher their hearts, which Jai did without a fuss and didn't think to regret until well after he received his 'reward' - most of which was some nonsense that The Watcher threw in with the vaguest hints of what Jai asked for, because they could do that and it was funny to them.
Jai subsequently did a really bad job keeping the fact that he was an immortal cannibal secret so he got launched off that planet about two years later and drifted through deep space as a miserably frozen-and-burnt piece of space debris before crashing on a (barely) habitable asteroid, defrosting a bit tardigrade-style, and then having to find a way back to a place where there were other living people so he could stop existing in miserable torment. He would like to take it easy. unfortunately there is also problems in his life such as the fact that he refuses to stop fucking killing and eating people.
6. Haven is a different oc who is like a middle-manager from hell working for the worst organization ever invented. He sucks, his coworkers suck, his boss sucks, his organization sucks, and everyone involved in the entire thing kind of just needs to die really. Their job is to make things worse for everyone and they work very hard at it. Haven and several other members of this organization, including his boss who is a much bigger fish than he is, have the ability to mind-control people into doing what they want - in much the same way that The Watcher's curse works.
I'm not convinced that Haven belongs on Elysium's Mars. I want him to exit the organization before then. But it'd certainly help keep things on the rails if Haven is managing someone who's managing someone who's managing Jai...
Anyway Trigun reminded me that MOTW stories actually fucking rule (I'm a big fan of the format!) and Elysium could absolutely just be a weird wanderer going from town to town on gig ghost work. I gave Elysium top surgery scars and realized that having one character who knows their past just fine but refuses to discuss it and having another character who absolutely doesn't is kind of a fun dynamic so Eli as a deep-stealth binary tboy who got all his surgeries done at 16 and then skipped town and is like a mysterious loner wanderer suits him better than it did before, i think. it's also more narratively interesting.
Beyond that... the big trouble I've always had with Eli and Lux is that they have nothing going on. They're not doing anything. But I forgot that sometimes a story can just be a guy going a bunch of places. Also Trigun's Meryl and Millie are the greatest characters of all time and I love them to pieces.
(no subject)
(no subject)