When I first created her back in mid/late 2015 (the Outpost Bar era), Sydney Jones had no particular inspiration or vision beyond just being a generic, blank-slate human. Her name was randomly generated by Starbound itself and she wore only starter clothing for the most part. Her most distinctive traits, like her goggles and bastardized British/Australian accent, kind of just happened on a whim as far as I can remember. Even her backstory was (and remains) bare-bones as hell -- the child of Earthfall refugees who grew up on a backwater dustbowl planet -- and it was probably invented on the spot the moment someone asked about it. The main reason for this is that Sydney was simply intended to be an alt to an older character -- a means to sneak away and do stuff without getting badgered by my friends of the time, who were fairly tight-knit and preferred to congregate separately from the rest of the server's population. After that circle of friends collectively left Galaxy Citizen entirely to pursue other roleplaying stuff, Sydney became my main GC character. She didn't mature into her most recognizable form until the late-2016 Roji period, where she first picked up her more familiar traits of hot temper and idealism and started getting into verbal confrontations. I remember it was a very impulsive and abrupt character shift, born from my dissatisfaction with the server's grim and apathetic tone around that time. Characters like Syed al-Quresh, while they earned my respect later, ran fairly roughshod over the rest of the community and I had gotten kind of weary of the way everybody else kind of just sat around and watched whenever bullshit happened, so I threw Sydney in to make a nonviolent fuss and draw some attention to it. While it led to some great RP moments and made Sydney a Person of Interest to the server at large, it also led to a lot of stress and numerous bad decisions down the line -- I've honestly been trying to dial back that part of Sydney's character, since returning to the community. Now... how about the inspirations behind Diana Cilvay, @that_cabbage?
I had literally no inspiration for who or what Xander was when I first made him. I joined a long time after I stopped playing Frontier, which I played for a bit, but not extensively. It was suggested to me by my friend, Alxetora (Yacke), so I made a character to be almost a direct counterpart to their character, just to give me a crutch on actually getting involved in the server. As time went on, he became more independent, and I started having ideas for who he was and what I wanted him to be, although even to this day, all of my ideas get jumbled together or never see the light of day due to differing circumstances. I tried to base his personality around someone like Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad, someone who looks like they should fit into the role they've taken, but are inevitably broken by the world around them, until they become a perfect fit for their surroundings. I've always made it a point to make Xander emotionally weak and susceptible to things like stress, pressure, or manipulation. My end goal with Xander was for him to start off as some innocent rookie in the Fringe, and end up becoming someone different, corrupted and broken. Someone who can stand toe to toe with people that he was once, and should be intimidated by. Xander's death, although it was pretty upsetting at first, was probably the best thing to happen to me in terms of character writing, since now I have more time to actually think up and plan out who he will become once he returns, and actually do it right. The last thing I want is to flub something like this, especially when it's something that could make or break my character. I know this probably sounded like inane rambling, but, with the help of others, if they so desire, I want Xander to be a fun character to be around, and one I'm satisfied with playing on a regular basis again. I'm going to keep trying to improve, even with what little free time I have left given my insane work schedule nowadays. Maybe one day I can give a definitive answer to who or what inspired him, but as it stands, he's going wherever the wind takes him in terms of character development and inspiration. @SilverGallium tell me about caleb you fuck
I haven't been tagged. I'm also talking about multiple characters, because they all follow the same theme. I don't care. Most of my characters are facets or representations of me. Dox is my fear of death, and my drive for immortality. Like me, she fears eventually dying, she fears the ticking clock. Unlike me... she has the means to stop the clock, or extend it indefinitely. She's also the closest to me overall, in her overarching personality and values. Aria is my struggle with emotion and social interaction, as well as an excuse to flex my vocabulary a bit. She has emotions, sure - but she doesn't understand them, doesn't know how to cope with them. She struggles with finding friends, because of how abrasive she can be - but never means to be so abrasive. She cares, but has a hard time showing it. Ry's similar to Dox, but she more represents my obsessive nature than Dox does. When I get involved with something, it consumes my every waking moment. Either I'm doing that, or I'm bored. That's Ry. Her one interest is firearms, and firearms production. If she isn't doing that, talking about that, immersing herself in that, she's brain-dead bored. Crimson's my drive to learn. They're a representation of my curiosity about the world. They have very little knowledge, but a ton of drive and capacity to learn. Crimson's also a representation of how naive I can be, how little I truly know outside of my own bubble. I can tell you how to apply directives to an item in Starbound - I can't tell you how to do your taxes. Akra's just a fun project, an exercise in both Novakid physiology and Floran culture. That might change one day. Kianla's meaningless. She's a puppet, to fill in Dox's position on Renaize when Dox is doing something Dox-related. Shinju doesn't mean anything either, because she had no time to be fleshed out. @Ryanatorx Abdul. He's neat.
Abdul is inspired by Father Sandoz from the book The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, one of my professors, and a relatively recently grown appreciation for faith and it's utilities. His purpose is so that I can play a medical character, which is something I've wanted to do for a while with various false-starts, so that I can explore the existential crisis of having faith in the face of situations which spit on it, and so that I can explore adapting faith in a pragmatic, non-literal way. After all, he's a man from the Caliphate who fled after seeing the Caliph transform into a monster, and everything he once trusted fall apart. His faith is a small part of him that remains when everything else changed. "You will change beyond all understanding, but something of you will remain." He's high-effort but fun to play. There are other themes I'm interested in seeing out with the character, but I wouldn't want to offer any spoilers. @Alias Tell us about Kristina!
Kristina originated from an unrelated RP medium back in... oh, 2013 era? It was a forum PBP based around a space colony, and was the first character I designed for a non-D&D RP. I decided to initially play as a university student, the child of one of the offscreen research scientists in the colony, working in the town store as a sort of semi-NPC in order to make the PCs feel like they were in a world where their actions affected regular, everyday townspeople. It was a lot of fun, and got much more traction than I expected! Sadly, the site shut down not long after I began playing and the idea took a brief reprieve. Fast forward to December 2014, there's a fun game out that a friend backed on Kickstarter and they want to share it. I spotted a small German RP server and joined on a whim, reintroducing the old character with a couple added twists and a Starbound lore-faithful justification for leaving a settled life with no way of returning; Floran marauders and a stay in one of their prisons. I intentionally kept the backstory vague at first, as I wanted to be sure my half-baked ideas made sense before setting them in stone, but I had already drawn some inspiration from a couple pieces of media: Winry Rockbell from the popular manga Fullmetal Alchemist, a rugged aesthetic to mechanical prosthesis from the same series, Kaylee Frye from Firefly (a series that informed my early takes on what sci-fi should look like), and the familiar blunders made by a teenager starting out in an RP setting of making a lone survivor with a dark secret. I set out wanting to explore themes based on personal loss, rebuilding from nothing, and figured that once I had some practice in I'd scrap the character and start over with new knowledge and build someone better. Over the years she's collected much more depth, inspiration, and characterization, as well as being changed due to migrations between servers. After a couple years I ended up moving to GC and took the opportunity to do some redesigns, taking into account new lore. I was a fan of my last server's "absolutely no cloning" policy, and on seeing that five clones were allowed I decided to have this character be the last. That was the touchstone for much of the final backstory, as I couldn't think of any reason an armed, augmented young woman in her mid-twenties would have died five times without being an idiot or incredibly unlucky, and decided to make Kristina a member of a set of dynastic clones - repeatedly having the thoughts and memories of past lives imprinted in a younger version of the original. Past that point, the themes I wanted to run with clicked into place with historical events very well, as well as the lore of brain scans deteriorating over time. This led to a lot of questions I began to explore related to cloning: Is a clone responsible for the things it's predecessors did? Is it possible for a clone of an individual to be a different person? What is moral in the post-cloning world? Is there such a thing as a soul, and if so does it contribute to a person's mentality? Through the years, it's made IC sense to explore a lot of other themes that have ultimately led in intriguing directions: Transhumanism, what it means to be a conscious mind, post-traumatic stress and how it can have far-reaching effects, substance abuse and the stigma around it, and more recently the effects of prolonged isolation on depression and mental health. I've continued to draw themes from applicable sources, obscure webfiction, history repeating itself, and adding character traits as makes sense given the long and storied history of the character. Some more modern inspirations without context as to which traits they influenced: Dr. Tannis of Borderlands fame, GLaDOS from Portal, Eilonwy from The Chronicles of Prydain, Entrapta from the modern reboot of She-Ra, and Laughing Octopus from Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. It's your turn, Aella! @PadLock
Aella is actually quite old, or at least the character in concept. She originates from way back, probably a little after the time remnants were first coming out, and under a different name then. I forget it then, but that version isn't relevant to the current rendition. The second one was created after the first thaniifarri rework, gaining a much more human like appearance. The classic grey skin, yellow eyes, etc. This is when i first picked up the name Aella. Beyond a name and a design, she was a fairly flat character that i dropped about as quickly as i had made her. The modern day Aella comes post- second and mid third rework of the remnants. She served a lot of purposes this time! The initial inspiriation was Hardspace: Shipbreaker, myself for many of her personality traits, and pjrgatory for much of her backround and life. I modeled her very much to be an almost "standard" purgatorian citizen. Working class with military training, and just a little bit unhinged. Over time she has grown past her initial inspiriations, but mostly drawing upon my own life experiences with being trans to explore a few aspects of her story so far. It doesnt always translate, but it works out for the most part. You. @Teldrassil . Lorette. Now.
It's kind of hard to talk about what Caleb's "inspiration" was, or is. No real one singular thing or idea is behind why the way he is, since he's really just a huge long-running amalgamation of various ideas I've had over the years that I've used him to try out (albeit while still being a unique and noteworthy character in his own right). That wasn't all the case, but it's been since I got serious about my writing in any capacity. Honestly, I'd go as far as to say that his biggest sources of inspiration have been from other GC characters and even members, how I've shaped him and how he's changed over the years. And he's had six of those so far to his OOC lifespan, being my first character that I still play today on a regular basis. Thing about that though - and why I haven't gotten burned out on him - is that even though Caleb "himself" has been around since 2014, he's changed a ton since then, and multiple times at that. Goes through a radical shift in personality or identity almost once a year just because of how he acts and the situations he gets into. 2014 "Monstro" went through a lot of changes to end up as 2020 Caleb; just as he's been broken down and built back up time and time again in various ways, how I write and where I get my inspiration keeps shifting around. Caleb always gets a new coat of paint from time to time to keep things fresh - hence how I've been playing him for over half a decade straight without going insane - but with the ultimate core of what makes him himself intact, even if said core also changes around a little. I see something in a game or TV, mull it over in my head, thinking about if that would fit on a character, what on, if it'd be cool to portray, fun for others to interact with... and I never ever write it down, whatever or whoever it is, because I'm dumb and absent-minded like that. I should really stop relying on winging stuff so much, but anyways... Compared to now though, I'll give you that Caleb's inspirations were more pronounced back in the early days... which resulted in him being more shallow, since how said inspirations shaped him were both more blatant and more-poorly executed. Think of if you crossed the TF2 Engineer with Cayde-6, that talks like a poorly-written MCU character, with a juvenile and unintentionally-edgy sense of humor. With a (nick)name lifted from a Binding of Isaac boss just because it sounded cool. Yeah, early Caleb sucked, but it was fine that he did - everyone sucked back then. Now, Caleb sucks... less. Sources of inspiration are more subtle, and tend to be more grounded, more tastefully chosen, to say nothing of how far (I think) my writing skill has come since. Not really the case for his clones, though, or at least half of them. Cipher and Elijah lift a lot of their identity from less grounded sources. Of course, this is actually on purpose, since they're less-grounded people and characters who do more "fun" things, compared to Caleb, who just wants a quiet life. For example, Cipher maintains old Caleb's whole, typical "southern-fried genius" schtick of being a Texan- or at least cowboy-styled character whose also a brilliant machinist, with the added inspiration of Dante from Devil May Cry in terms of attitude, behavior and moral compass, but with the twist that he's introverted, antisocial and awkward due to having suffered from "cloning blues", so despite being the fun-kind-of-crazy and a showoff at heart, he never gets to show it. Elijah... is a new enough character in relation to how much I've shown him off that I don't want to say much yet. Really, most people that'll read this probably won't know who either are, which I aim to fix. ...Eventually. oh uh now I'm supposed to tag someone... I'll do lots of someones hey @Quazwerty456 2 people have asked about robin now this is 3 @zirconzz obviously I know why emiko is the way she is now but where did she come from and why'd you make her, what inspired you @Ryanatorx tell us the story of xex I always thought she was interesting to watch @Slither same thing for Naokii, I feel like not enough people talk about him
Original inspiration for Xex? That was my starbound survival character. My second one, since the OG got killed in a wipe. Early days I was just making shit up as I went. Bartender because it made interacting with people easy- I didn't need an excuse. As a result, early Xex has my personality but is more deranged, for comic effect. Her backstory was as edgy as you would expect when someone as young as I was was writing it. I remember a MGSV trailer was particularly influential on that, which isn't really a good thing. I've ret-conned a lot of that background, keeping the same concepts but making it less garbage. Still a bit edgy, but she has the realistic response to extreme trauma of 'not wanting to talk about it ever to anyone' and just trying her hardest not to think about it. Now, that same general idea of 'me but more deranged' for her personality, but she's developed a lot of the years and outside of humor, she's very different. Her political ideology and perceptions of power formed out of IC experiences, though they've doubtless been shaped by my OOC philosophy education. In particular, her experiences being the 'advisor' to the Viti and filling a similar, though less exclusive, role to the Caliph, as well as witnessing a failure of democracy via the Shifter crisis, have formed her into a uniquely warped view. I won't go into exactly what those things are, since it's much more interesting to explore them IC and they aren't things that she shares. She's still fun to play, is Fringe enough that she's batshit, and old enough that it takes zero effort. anyway uhhhhhhhh @Pinkbat5 Circle Eye @JeeJee Quuma
When I first made the Visitant, I rather reasonably decided I would have to make a few characters from my own species. It'd be weird if I didn't. CE was one of those characters, my generic 'beta' character. They showed up onserver the most and were one of the first Visitant characters to make contact with realspacers onscreen. They were kind of boring when I first made them. I didn't have a solid idea for what their personality should be, and so I took inspiration from nothing. I think their only traits were that they were deceitful and a tad argumentative. I very vividly remember a scene where they were sparring with Esas– they ended up tricking him into turning around, then attacked him. I ditched them shortly after that, then rediscovered their existence a year or so later. I didn't remember their old personality so well, so I revamped them. I took inspiration from GlaDOS and made them inhuman, sarcastic and mean-spirited, but I put my own spin on it by making them highly opinionated instead of malicious. I thought there would be nothing funnier than a character that insults people in an entirely deadpan tone instead of the red-faced "angry xbox kid" aesthetic Dave has, and I was correct. I like how they turned out. I don't think I drew on any inspiration other than GlaDOS. If I did, it wasn't conscious, or I can't remember it right now. The rest of their characterization just sort of popped into my head.
Uh hm. Honestly no idea. There's some unintentional similarities to Moira from Overwatch but that's mostly a coincidence. So I looked through old chatlogs with Pink who graded her app first and nothing clear turned up but it did spark a few memories so. Time for the grand reveal, Doctor Lorette Luo is inspired by: Herself. Literally herself. The more I thought about her the more I wanted to play her and the more I built on her. I came up with imaginary RP situations that inspired me to come up with stuff. I specifically remember that biokinetics came from one vision of healing someone in the medbay on the Iona hub. So perhaps not the most exciting of answers, but certainly a bit out there.
Siri Keeton from Blindsight definitely has a stake in Oscar's claim, in some ways that are very obvious if you know the character. A lot of meta considerations went in to making Oscar an actual character instead of just a ghoul who worked at SAS to justify a few tech apps. In fact, his original conception was significantly 'cooler' than his current one, where he was just a generic evil scientist. After discussing the particular niche of 'mid guy nerd' missing in GC and being useful for a particular plot, I re-conceptualized him as his current form. His physical design is intended to be sort of antithetical to a lot of classic GC men characters. He's short, which already makes him stand out, but he's also weak and very skinny. The end result is a little guy who is essentially harmless, then experiences what the Fringe does to people who aren't dangerous. Many of the biomods he created and installed in himself are clearly Cruelty Squad inspired, so that needs a shout-out. Personality-wise, he's generally kind, but has a temper and an ego. I don't have any particular sources to site for inspiration on this one. Some of it came organically from me feeling out the character as I played him. He's a shape-rotator in the truest sense, extrapolated by the Keeton influences and my own path being crossed with the field of topology (which I still don't understand). I've always thought there was a shortage of obscure new sci-fi scientific fields, which is where neuronetics comes from. That's obviously not something real, or even a scifi staple like cybernetics, so it raises questions about what it is he actually does. And he'll rarely answer candidly, because "you won't get it," and if he does answer candidly, he was probably right. Feeds back into the ego. Bit of a ramble, hope this was satisfactory. Uno card tell me about the origins of View.
Damn! Yeah, the mid nerd aspect really fucking shines. In CE's words, goddamn is he kidnappable. Oh god, oh fuck, didn't expect this one. Ahem. The View had quite a few inspirations. I made him back in 2020, but only got maybe a month or two of use out of him. I'll go into visual design first, and then the vibes I wanted to convey. Visuals Spoiler So, first of all, it's immediately obvious that I just ripped the Vortex helmet from terraria. I've always liked the gun set the most in it. Terraria lacks any sort of cohesive lore and narrative, yet it's implied that the Vortex set has some cool alien bug origin. So I decided when I was making him that I wanted to just rip the headpiece from Terraria, because it also served the other purposes: I like faceless characters a lot. I'm a big fan of tropes like Dark Souls armour where the character's helmet IS their face. It's their identity. It doesn't come off, and it's what they use to present themselves to the world. Risk of Rain's character design is full of this. Most of the characters have a smooth Sci-Fi headpiece. I always had the idea of having him live on Garlen. And considering the clear RoR inspirations that went into it, I figured it was the kind of thing I wanted to go for. An enigmatic Sniper, known only by a title. Like how RoR has the Mercenary, the Commando, the Huntress- and how GC has The Hermit, The Rhapsody. 'The Sniper' and 'The Watcher' was a bit too on the nose, and I settled on View in the end. The recent change to him, where he has a long Shifter name, is new, courtesy of Shifter lore. And lastly, though this one is a lot less of an inspiration, there's Furi. Furi has characters who all define themselves by 'The X'. I wanted that sort of theming, where he'd feel like a character in a video game. A much lesser-shown inspiration is the fact that his physical body is supposed to be Tardigrade-like. I liked the idea of him staying completely stationary to hibernate, like how a tardigrade transforms into a cyst, only reacting when something entered his sights. That's why I apped that one Shifter ability. The Tardigrade theme came from this little Monster-Collecting Indie game that I liked, and was interested in some time ago. It just had a cool Tardigrade monster in it, which made me want to play something related to the animal on GC. Vibes Spoiler The Sniper theme came secondary to what I wanted him to actually BE, to the people he interacts with. The main inspiration was Firewatch. In that game, you don't see any other characters. Your sole human connection is through a radio. All you hear is the voice of Delilah, serving as a lifeline that keeps you grounded to the rest of the world and prevents you from being completely subsumed in the wilderness. I wanted that sort of relationship between him and other characters. Despite never seeing him, meaningful relationships could be formed over countless conversations over the radio. Some other games where this is a theme is the Metal Gear series, where your relationship with your allies is over the radio. You never see them, but come to like them, and the bond between you all isn't any less real. That's why I limited his ability to actually interact with the world to such a degree. He doesn't put hands on his drone, he avoids using a camera on Garlen, he operates on a look-don't-touch basis for most people. If someone fucks with his radio, he's helpless to stop it, and not enough of a schizo to literally shoot someone for it in most cases. It's to minimize his physical impact on scenes, but to make him a constant, possibly overbearing presence, where he stalks people and creeps on them because he knows no other way to meet his social needs (Unless he's paid to shoot someone!). It always makes me happy when people get creeped out by the things he says, and the fact that he's literally watching most people he talks to through a scope. At the time of writing, there are 106 pages of notes and screenshots of every single person he's seen IC. It's getting hard to manage! Whenever I have free time, I go through his notes to find insanely neurotic things to comment on. Bonus points if even the player of the character he's doing it to has forgotten what it's referencing. Edit: Oh, right! I forgot the VERY FIRST inspiration for his character. The Undercrypt. In UC4, which Wowgain ran, I saw there were damage dice for Sniper Rifles. And thought: 'who the fuck would bring a sniper rifle down there?'. Then I had the idea of a hypothetical character who would follow the party from a distance and shoot from afar, and worked out how it would behave. Do actually have hopes of using him in such a way someday. Also here's his stupidly sized radio from his first iteration. Thanks for giving me the chance to write about him. I probably haven't expressed ALL my thoughts on him yet, but it's cool to write it down somewhere. @schizothotep You've told me a lot about Sun! So while I already know, I think it'd be fucking cool for you to be able to post his inspirations and design principles for all to see. If you want to keep it on the down-low, though, pick someone else.
While Pankruk gets his ducks in order: conscripting you fellas. @Endiie Tell me about Yaretzi @Roren Reggie! @ZachChase Chalk!
...FUCK literally any other character and this would've been an easy question for me, but Chalk- he's a special boy. Believe it or not Chalk is inspired by me, crazy I know, absolutely unheard of. I'm not sure how comfortably I can go into some of my inspiration for him, but I can say that his passion and struggle for art comes from my own. A primary thing with Chalk's character is him dealing with his mental battles, dealing with anxiety, depression and struggling with imposter syndrome all of which I myself have been learning to deal with over the years. In his past he was burdened with the baggage of his father and didn't have a mother who was there to care for him, how accurate this is to my own life I'm not going to go into. Despite this though, and despite what his character is currently going through now, he can't let himself give up being the positive and happy person he wants to be. He is strictly a pacifist and is overall a reject of Floran society as he feels it's wrong to kill another living thing, at least with his own hands, he'll still eat steak. His biggest flaws is that he's really spineless, not very wise, and has trouble properly getting his feelings out to people, either leading to him running from conflict or bottling things until he has an outburst. -oh also he's food motivated, if you give him food he will immediately be your friend. Chalk's design is completely original, this is all me baby. I made the sprite for his foliage in 2017 and I just adored the palette which was based on pastel colors. This makes it really hard to make clothes that go well with his multicolored foliage, but we all must suffer in the pursuit of art. If I were to choose a plant he's based on it'd be the rainbow eucalyptus, but that was not at all the plan when I was designing him it just happened to fit the best, this is why his sap is red. Chalk worries about taking care of his foliage to an excessive degree. ...I think that should suffice. Now, who do I target. Ah I know. @Mir Tell us all about Mir, right now.
This is gonna sound boring, but I uh, didn't actually have any sort of inspiration for Mir at all. I kinda just got this funny starbound game because it looked like terraria, looked for any servers to play on, and "galaxy citizen" was near the top and looked neat, so I was like "oh sure". When I realized it was a roleplay server rather than a survival server, I just took a few moments to think "Well I guess that sounds neat too, what kinda character do we wanna play. Ooh a bird, cool. Birds can fly." (I later realized birds can't fly). But anyways, I kinda just had him be a generic "Amnesiac who remembers nothing" because I had no clue what kind of character I wanted to play, and his characterization kinda formed from the first few interactions I had on server, mainly his fear of damn near everything coming from the fact that the second person he ever met tried to eat both his legs, which was fucking terrifying for him because of course it was. Anyways, for name and visual inspiration, I picked the name because I was really big into maplestory at the time, and Mir was the name of one of the pet dragon the character I liked to play had. And he was red because I liked the color red. I joined when I was like 14 or so, so I didn't really uh, think much about anything. I moreso just wanted to make friends really. In fact, his visual design kinda followed the same sort of scheme as his characterization followed, where I'd just let it be controlled by the interactions he was in because I didn't know anything. Which is how he got his hat, because he literally just found it lying on one of the tables at horsebutt and said "I'm gonna wear this now".
