Character Inspiration Thread

hmm... i got inspiration for my character yz2000 from the hit show "Fat Clout Eat Out"

 

Elijah Drachen Ulmer -> Inspiration came from viewing different images of Wehrmacht, Volksgrenadiers. Then I started sifting around for images of sheriff/detective like kind of art, then found what could be best described as Eli

 

you make me want to commit national crisis

 

Imma do two because one isn’t legal yet but I love them anyway. Will tag two people to make up for it.

Hornet girl (el psion in the process if being passed) took some big inspiration from Jane Prentiss, a character from The Magnus Archived - a horror podcast, it’s spooky. I do not recommend you look her up to avoid spoilers but in GC terms I’d put her as a psion with some form of animal control that means she has a parasitic worm army that also uses her body as a hive.

Okay nvm I can only think of inspiration for one character. Either I’m super original (eh) or subconsciously getting inspiration and not realising it (probably this one).

@Kodakazi One of your chars that isn’t Xander @TurnWall Oenui

 

Ok ok ok ok

So- I'm torn between explaining Masina and Leon, so I'll just do one and hope I get tagged because I LOVE talking about stuff like this and I could go on and on about it. Usually I only rant at WowGain about it because I feel like he's the only one who wants to hear me rant about stuff like this like the autismo I am.

Masina has a ton of inspirations and a lot of it is really personal to me. So forgive me if this gets really sappy or weird.

So- first off, media, Riko from Made in Abyss, Madoka Kaname, Sayaka Miki, and Kyoko Sakura from Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and a teeny bit of Psycho Pass, CSI, and Law and Order. From Riko I took Masina's background as an explorer and spelunker. From Madoka I took her pigtails, general outlook of idealism and altruism, and also the bubbly ditzyness. However that inspiration has been shifted more onto Masina's sister Aluna now that Masina has grown out of some of that. From Sayaka I took her brashness and how deluded her idealism became, how she channels her feelings into self destructive tendencies. From Kyoko I took her anger, her conviction, and Masina's eventual guardedness. Psycho Pass, CSI, and Law and Order are all like- kind of obvious given that she's a cop, lol.

More personal stuff now. Masina means a lot to me on a personal level. I've put a lot of my own story onto her. So when she started out, she had cancer and came from a religious background that stifled and abused her. A lot of the time I will take what happened to myself and exaggerate it greatly to help convey a narrative more clearly. Since this is particularly recent- I took my own battles with illness and exaggerated them. For a large portion of my life I've felt at odds with my own body because of some undiagnosed issues I had... probably for longer than I even realize. So once that was fixed, her psionics turned against her. Something truly out of her and anybody else's power, something she can't fix, and only something she can try to maintain and attempt to stop hurting herself, and now others. It's also a bit of a double metaphor to me, because having been through a large amount of trauma myself, I find myself realizing that I've developed toxic behaviors that I have to manage in order to not continue the cycle, so to speak. I feel like Masina's psionics reflect that, or at least I try to convey that the best I can, especially since Masina more or less developed her powers as a result. Trauma doesn't start or stop with the person inflicting it, it always spreads to the victim, and tries to twist them into an abuser themselves. The way that she tries to stop it, struggles to do so, and ends up hurting the people she cares about, lashing out at them with anger and fear, just makes me think of someone struggling with those toxic behaviors and trying to keep them at bay.

Whoa! That was really revealing and I've typed up way too much but I'm gunna post it anyway. @Khaos Tell me about Tanze!

 

Telroth was made out of necessity as Trireef wanted something GMed that I was doing, The Sanctuary District, where Remnants from The Void Swimmer were taken to after their ship was destroyed and their populations captured. The Sanctuary District was a very poor ghetto neighborhood made quickly and cheaply to host the sudden influx of life. The government was in shambles and didnt care about its people, and thus the people began running the joint. The Sanctuary District became host to gang wars, druglords, and slave trafficking. I wanted this to be made quite blatant, so one of the first characters Trireef's B-19 met was one of these traffickers and druglords.

Unlike most of my characters, very little thought went into Telroth initially, as he was designed to be an NPC to be forgotten in a days time. his name I pulled out of thin air after watching some Dunmer lore, and his original description was something along the lines "a well fed pink remnant wearing tattered clothes but enough fine linens and jewelry to tell apart from the others"

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As the plot stuff with B-19 continued in the sanctuary district, I began growing Telroth's character as needed. He took up biker gang aesthetics in his outfit and role. He was outwardly extremely harsh and almost merciless because he thought they were needed in order to survive and thrive in this urban hell. He however had a softer docile side as he took good care of his family and the florans he had captured for his 'club' as to show some redeeming quality to this otherwise distastefully pink asshole.
By the time Telroth made his way to Haven he was already fairly developed, but he never had a defined backstory, and I liked it that way. Like his origins, the backstory would come as needed, and as I saw dramatically fit. Even to this day, large chunks of his backstory are up in the air, ready to be filled as the narrative needed.

In short, he wasn't so much inspired as he was a conglomeration of "Well shit, I need to make a product of this situation" and it blossomed from there. Despite this, Telroth did play a pivotal role in me realizing where I really needed to take remnants in the future, culturally especially.


@Caucasian Asian Where'd Frosthand come from?

 

Hey! Thanks Skid.

Leon's a really big mix of inspirations similar to Masina.

When I made Leon, I didn't have a lot of specific inspirations from media and other outside sources, but rather ones I've realized retroactively? I think the first and most obvious is Kite from HxH with his Crazy Slots and gambling. Sons of Anarchy is a show I haven't watched in a long time, but still is pretty pervasive in the gang related narratives I write. Another big inspiration is just music in general and the personalities behind it. Orville Peck specifically with his masked gothic-punk cowboy aesthetic is really something I've enjoyed and funneled into his design, though for Leon it tends to lean more punk. Metallica, Post Malone, even Motley Crue and Harry Styles. I look for distinct styles, people who capture the persona of a musician not just in skill but in look and persona. An inspiration I'm keeping in my back pocket is the movie Perfect Blue. I'm waiting to pull it out at just the right time.

As for personal inspiration, there's a lot here similarly to Masina, just in different ways.

For a long time I struggled to play male characters. I was always worried they wouldn't feel "masculine" enough because I tend to base a lot of my characters around myself and my experiences, and a lot of the time those experiences felt directly molded by being a woman in a lot of ways. Mixed with an admittedly bad history with men, it was always a struggle for me to feel comfortable putting on a man's shoes for roleplay.

Then it crossed my mind to make a male character specifically designed for a me to connect with. So I took my worry of being able to play a man, and put it into Leon's own worry of not being "man" enough because of some of his demons. He exemplifies my worry of developing a addictive personality, with his heavy drinking and gambling. He is neurotic like me, though exaggeratedly so, prone to mood swings and mania, even delusions if he gets worked up enough. I think potentially out of any of my characters, his struggle with mental health is most like my own in that way. Similar to Masina- I like to think of Leon's use of his psionics as part of his struggle to shake off his past and become a better person out of it. He has more control over is powers than Masina does, which always makes his lapse into using them underhandedly feel a bit more like a struggle within himself instead of a struggle against an outside force.

Though, despite those flaws, in a lot of ways Leon is a love letter to the good men in my life. I've taken traits from my significant other (love you <3 @WowGain ), my family, and my friends that I think are really positive that directly contradict the bad history I've had. Leon's a good person, or at least he tries to be, and thats part of why I love him and playing him so much.

Again I feel like maybe I wrote waaaaay too much, but oh well. It feels like cheating but I really want to know @PrivateNomad Do Sinji or Aurelie and @WowGain Do Creva or Caesar

 

Alright! Blair then

The concept from where Blair started was, honestly, the shade of a character's hair that an artist I followed drew, a fantastic wine red. And it spun off from there. I wanted to make an out-going, flirty character that hand their hands dipped into the less than morally good side of things, from drugs, to weird stuff, to extortion. Sadly a lot of those things fell through because... Blair doesn't ever have a reason to really do that kind of thing- but continuing.

I pondered which species to make her for a good long while. Going from Synthetic, to Anoloa, to Hylotl and Remnant, until I finally decided to settle on Vampyr for a number of reasons.

The biggest one being that they were cool as hell and I wanted to finally make one. Other than that though, they fit what I was searching for. A fun aesthetic, interesting mutations I could play around with, a possible gateway into La'Megoth things. All things I wanted to do.

From that point onwards though, I wondered about how to make her unique from other Vampyr characters so far, so I started digging through mutations. Minor regeneration, extendable claws, paralyzing venom- that last one was actually what began the spiral into making Blair's strain, the Caligo. How, you may ask. It's simple. I wondered for a good long time of how to make a venom that was useful, but would actually see use in RP. The first idea was to paralyze the person she bit and injected, boring and mainly something for CRP along with the fact that no matter how much I looked there wasn't exactly a way to make it non-lethal and that's no fun if it isn't. And from there, I got a suggestion from a friend. Drug venom. It took a bit of thinking from there, planning, figuring things out with other people helping me. But eventually, Blair's new strain was born. A more serpentine Vampyric bloodline with a venom that they needed to inject into people, a venom that was a highly addictive drug. And from that point onwards, Blair the character was brought on server, and things spiraled off from there. Her starting to own a number of different businesses across the Fringe, from an apothecary on Haven that sold odd things she had collected, to a strip club on Baldr's, to several other locations, all bringing in funds for her newly founded Vampyric house.

@9K Belle inspiration, go.