basically what the post says, what inspiration did you take when you were creating your characters? what did inspire you? ideals, behaviours, designs? and from what sources, are they books, movies, funny capibara videos? i found mild inspiration from three movie characters, that happen to be (coincidentally) from the same director: pete hogwallop from brother, where art thou. i admire john turturro's acting in this one, it gave me a overall inspiration of the design and behaviour wells from no country of old men, played by woody harrelson gives of a strong vibe of a man tired by his job, yet still pursuing it as the burden became a part of his soul and le lebowski, great showdown of how a carefree lifestyle reacts when met with consequences of choices sry i'm bored at work and can't run discord on office computer
A lot of my characters are inspired by art I have saved on my phone, as well as the vibes they give off. Past that, I try to root them in something I find interesting and want to personally learn/teach others about. For Meryl, it's Polish food and culture as well as artillery concepts and where both subjects would fit in a space opera. Originally, Meryl was based off of art by @jeremyxc123 on twitter. I wanted a character with an unseen weight on them, but is still at the start of a long road ahead of them. When it comes to real-world concepts, I took designs from Polish GROM and the American field artillery. For character traits and quirks, I used Major McOnie from AC7.
All of my characters are a mixture of different sources with my own taste sprinkled in but Gossa is probably my most overtly bizarre and unique character so I'll be going over her now. I might edit in more characters here later. It probably doesn't surprise anyone here that my slice of life role-play is greatly inspired by a little game called Night In The Woods, which s provides relatively tame but informative look at the emotional impacts of mental illness. That's right. Goose's bipolarity and chaotic nature is a direct pull from Gregg Lee. It's no secret that Gossa is a character with rampant mental illness, and I think that may be a recognizable theme throughout the majority of my characters. Gossa has frequent "up and down" days where her mood is simply dictated by how she woke up that morning, and her actions are extremely rebellious due to her past of persecution due to her lack of inhibitions. The Oppositional Defiance Disorder is strong with this one. As for her physical design, Gossa is based off of the verdant Sylvari from the Guild Wars series, but only from appearance. Not only are the Sylvari folk who resemble plants-- they are plants through and through. Gossa's flower bursting through the side of the head was inspired from a face-style in the game in which, behind the eye, the skin of the face opens up to reveal a bioluminescent mass of flora. Additionally there are hairstyles which show the head opening up. There is no brain. Just flower. An aspect I love from playing Gossa is her dangerous mix of open-mindedness, incredible intelligence, and overall being a polymath tipped with extreme megalomania that causes her practicality to be completely trounced. While in the moment I don't think I had a direct inspiration I believe now that this was influenced by Tony Stark, from the MCU. Gossa can do just about anything she wants when she has the resources-- she knows this and flaunts it. And then there's Gossa's inherent butchiness. That might just be me.
My characters tend to be very on the fly. Like - I don't generally go in with an inspiration. But... I can name one. Sometimes I'll go in with something to work off of and then lose that as I play the character (Ry, for example, had a lot of inspiration going in which she shed almost immediately), or sometimes I'll gain an inspiration for characterization as I play. The only current active inspiration for one of my characters that I have is... Seven of Nine. Anyone who's been around my characters for more than a few minutes will know exactly which character of mine draws from Seven's conflicted, overly rational, sometimes-volatile nature - one Aria Durasteel. She's quite a similar character overall, and... honestly? I've had fun putting my own spin on the archetype Seven represents. It's neat.
I've only really played one character on GC consistently, that being Lithui. If I remember correctly I originally wanted to create a psion, but that didn't really work out. I had already imagined a certain look for them, which was a combination of inspiration through a YouTube series (Astartes) and just the idea of having a sort of half animal half human character that was created in a laboratory, deemed a mistake an left to die on some remote planet. I wanted the character to be on the simpler sides of things, giftet with psionic powers they weren't really sure how to use, only really working with them through instinct. The original draft didn't work out though, as I said, and I kept the idea of the human animal hybrid and the left to die part but dropped the psion part. I still wanted them to be unique though, so I gave them a unique ability they were given when experimented on, that being the ability to generate a sort of electromagnetic impulse that would ionize dust and push it around. I got that inspiration from the YouTube series too. Thinking that there should be a downside to this ability I made the character have this insatiable hunger, caused by the need of energy for their ability, which would really be the actual defining trade of them later on. I then pretty much just shipped the character, giving it a sprite I made myself, also somewhat inspired by the YouTube series and me thinking "Wouldn't it be cool if they had a large backsail and antlers". Where did I get that idea from? No clue, I just thought it would be cool. I played that character for a few months, but soon got bored, so I decided to go the simple way and evolve them into adulthood, since the original character was sort of child-minded and not very smart. At that point I also wanted to give their ability a little more spice, so I decided to improve that aswell, making it not just a dust-pushing emp, but a real, weak regional emp. That would also increase their desire for food in them. Some time after that I dropped rpng for a bit and when I returned a few days ago I felt that the original idea, that being that the characters ability was a sort of natural, instinctual ability, so I decided to turn the emp ability into a electroreception one, only keeping the weak emp for some very little spice. I think I pretty much missed the entire goal of the thread, but I hope that my textwall still somewhat explains where I got my inspiration for Lithui from.
