Title. What prompted you to make your character? Were you inspired by a movie, a book, perhaps a show, or are they something solely from your imagination? If so, what specifically made you go "oh this thing would make a pretty cool character/plotline"? Has you character changed, or did you stay true to your inspiration?
I was inspired to make mir, because I wanted to try this whole RP thing, and I owned a copy of starbound. I looked up some starbound servers, and this one looked fun. I wasn't particularly inspired by anything, but I took the name from maplestory (but just the name though). I picked avian because I thought "oh, birds are cool". At first, Mir was an amnesiac who had found himself lost in the fringe, although I did that less for the sake of having something to work towards, and more because I was a new player who didn't want to write a backstory... But over time, Mir has grown to be a character who has goals, and motivations, and hell, actually thinks now. As I've grown as an Rper on this server, Mir has grown through his friendships, hardships, and spaceships. Some pretty big changes that have occured to mir have been, for instance, is that rather than be an amnesiac who is on a quest to discover what he's forgotten, He's embraced his new life in the fringe, with his new friends and new home. He's also changed in the sense that, Rather than being an aimless wanderer, He actually has goals now, such as helping people via his knowledge of robotics and other machinery. So I guess, to answer your question, I have not stayed true to my lack of inspiration. Mir has grown past that, and become a character in his own right.
Fenyang was more of an experiment for the Vistriean Florans that had to adapt to the gravity and environment of their planet, and was a test character to see how exactly they would look like in-game. My interest grew in actually playing a Floran for the first time, so he stuck. Lange was my entry character into GC, towards the end of horsebutt/beginning of outpost era. Lange was more inspired back in the day as more of an “Indiana Jones” inspiration. Explorer, contractor, etc. Of course, character development heavily changed that over time. Rose was inspired heavily from a couple of things. Lange was one, but Yang from RWBY was another. There’s a running joke among friends in the discord that she’s “black-haired yang”.
Anica, probably my current main is very different from how she started, at least when you dig deeper than surface level. She was actually first introduced an evening no less than 6 months ago as this cold, stonefaced engineer type who lived on a backwater world in the middle of nowhere with little motivation or backstory to speak of. I think I maybe only played her once or twice before retiring her and promptly taking a hiatus from the server. Then I brought her back for some reason. She was still the same cold, stonefaced engineer type with little motivation or backstory but oh boy am I glad I did bring her back, because she ended up meeting Digit (@ZachChase) and they ended up getting very close. From there her backstory ended up spiralling into one of the deepest and most complex backstories I've ever had the pleasure of coming up with, and it was all developed naturally from the traits she was built upon! So you could say yes, she stayed true to the original idea, but now she's become so much more than she ever was and I think that spur of the moment decision to bring her back and saving Digit was probably the best decision I could've ever made as that event singlehandedly reminded me as to why I loved this server.
Eyewing was literally just a self insert at first, and in some ways she still is. She shared a birthday, favourite colour, and set of interests with me when I first made her. Our moralities were also exactly the same. I ditched her after I realized this was boring, but long story short her inspiration was basically just me. Pitaya, my second character, gets her name and appearance from dragonfruit, one of my favourite foods. Her personality was what I thought a typical Floran would act like, though that ended up evolving over time after she was exposed to fringe culture. A lot of my characters were blatantly inspired by homestuck, honestly. Sometime after making eyewing but before making pitaya, I made a white-feathered avian that was blinded by the sun in a manner similar to Terezi. Pitaya also has a sister, Lamia, who was a catnip Floran that had the same palette and cheerful personality as the cat-themed Nepeta. Posimin’s twin theme and red/blue colours were inspired by Sollux, etc. Dave and Jane were even named after homestuck characters, though admittedly I didn’t even care about homestuck at that point and just went with the first two human names I could think of. They were meant to be throwaway characters so I didn’t think it would matter. How wrong I was. Nowadays, Dave takes inspiration from comic book supervillian tropes and what a stereotypical “cool guy” looks like. I also like to think of the name as a 2001: Space Odyssey reference more than a homestuck one. Some of his backstory stuff is inspired by the first season of Westworld and the general “broken down testing facility” aesthetic you get in Portal two. Jane isn’t seen as much but I like to dress her in 50’s fashion a lot. This isn’t for any particular reason, I just like how it looks and it helps her contrast Dave. Archie, on the other hand, either dresses like she’s from the 80’s or now, because she’s, like... younger, I guess. She tends to be my most brightly coloured character because she’s from a warm, lush, tropical climate, and when I think of the tropics, I think of vividly coloured animals and flowers. When I eventually write about the culture she came from, I plan on drawing inspiration from (or at the very least, learning about) cultures from real life tropical regions.
The original Nemo was my first character ever and a gay self insert. He's dead. Then the second, final Nemo came around. I made him a doctor because the medbay on Horsebutt was pretty much never open so I thought if I made a doctor character I could run it, but it was owned by someone and I had no clue how to sign up. Dunno if there was even a way. I like Star Trek a lot, so he was kinda based on Spock and Data. His name came from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which was my favorite book at the time. His backstory is still dumb. Amethyst (and the rest of Nemo's family) came around because Nemo died, and I wanted something to do while I waited for him to clone. I made her super bubbly and chipper to contrast with Nemo's dry, serious demeanor. Also to make Shep cry. Gene exists because I like Megaman and Persona. Robots are cool. However, the stuff that Megaman and Aigis do would need an app, so I had to find a workaround. What I came up with was that, instead of having hands, she'd have special weapons and tools designed to fit onto her wrist nubs like how Megaman has a variety of different weapons he can swap between, except manually. I got confirmation that this wouldn't need an app and went with it. Her backstory kinda goes back to a common thread among a lot of my backstories where they're almost human, and that causes them some grief. Making Gene a Glitch princess who had essentially been skinned down to her vitals and crammed in a humanoid android's body kinda just came out of the blue, and I kinda just rolled with it. I wanted to give her a brother based on Proto Man but scrapped that idea, though I kept the armor as a .json on my desktop for years, only to use it for something else. Brutal Star was never meant to be a character. I made her as a joke for the first Prix, and designed her to be essentially a Speed Racer or F-Zero OC who's waaay over the top about literally everything and has a very strict moral code. Her outfit is based on characters like that, with the black visor and gold scarf and whatnot. I wound up using the Proto Man-esque armor for her. To my surprise, people actually liked her, so I started playing her on server. However, just being loud and passionate about stuff wasn't enough to really call her a fully formed character, so I gave her a backstory and some extreme chuyuunbiu tendencies. I thought it'd be funny to have a character with no powers act like Superman. I would like to state that her whole "X of Shining Justice" bit existed BEFORE Xenoblade Chronicles 2, fuck you.
Abraxas was a character that I made under the mindset nothing would really become of him. He was gray-colored, grouchy and rude Glitch Knight that didn't like organics in the slightest, and at the time not many people were interested in knight-like stuff. I began to really grow fond of playing him when he got involved with the glitch court era and Bluechip, and eventually he became the large, horned bot you see today. There was a few arcs he got involved with, and character development turned him from an organic-hating machine to a wiser, less-inclined-to-be-enraged individual. Aries was a character I made to do off-server things with Majo, Wowgain and Nemo, and from the first day I got to play him I immediately enjoyed it. He was an asshole, a pyromaniac, and generally what his name suggests. A hothead. Whether he's mellowed out, or flipping his shit, I don't think I'll ever grow tired of playing him.
Lloyd was my first RP character, so of course he started out as more or less of a self-insert. Eventually I tuned him to be more of a tired man, from carving out multiple career paths to being sucked into politics, he just wants to have everything calm down. Since he's such an old character, I've gone through many revisions, though I think I found my niche pretty quickly. The biggest changes made are the ones having to do with Lloyd's general universal knowledge. He doesn't know what cows are because they didn't have them on his home planet, which I have also fleshed out as a smaller background setting from which Humans can draw lineage.
