Man, I love stuff like this. 
I always like to see how other people go through the process of creating something, be it a character or a story or anything really. Personally, most of the time my characters (and any writing I do, really) come from lots of different origins at once, bits and pieces here and there that converge to create a cohesive whole. While I do base some aspects of the characters on my own personality (Mali's loyalty to friends and unpredictable behavior, Tiv's politeness in mixed company and stoic attitude) I like to make them different enough from myself that I am challenged to think in new ways, and/or distanced enough from the characters that I can let things happen to them (such as battle damage, or even death) without feeling like it's personal. Anyway, for the details:
For Tiv, the name came waaaaay before the character in FFXIV, and Tiv actually started out very different from what he is now. The original "Tiv" was a fairy in a dark fairy tale I was writing (that I would still like to return to in some fashion), and was originally named Tiv Pifilloffolus. He was a very sarcastic, cowardly character to be the foil for the serious and unafraid protagonist. Much like the current Tiv he was both very magical, and (out of all things) had purple hair, but other than that they are entirely different characters.
After the initial "Tiv" character I never really used it as a name for a fleshed out, playable character, and used it mostly for gags because the entire name was very sing-song-y and goofy. Eventually, "Tiv" became my go-to name for male characters in MMOs simply because it was short and simple and never, ever used. Sometimes it would be extended to "Tivrin," usually because the game had a minimum character limit for names. I never used it for RP, but the fact that I used it a lot was a deciding factor in naming the current Tiv.
Flash forward to FFXIV 1.0, I start RPing with my character Mali (we'll get to her soon). While Mali is a fine character and all, I suddenly get the urge to try playing a male character. In my writing the main characters are equally distributed between female and male, in RP I'd rarely play male characters at all. So I go through the races and try to think up a character concept, when I hear that some people in the RP community play male Miqo'te using female avatars, which sounds like a really good middle ground for someone who isn't used to playing a character that is visibly male outside of the imagination. So, the character concept starts easily: The character is a male Miqo'te crossdressing as a female. Because I'm lazy, I use my generic male MMO name (Tiv!), but I wanted to be at least a little serious, so I didn't give him the goofy surname of the original. Instead I tacked on Grimmgeist because a) I am a fairy tale nerd, and since the original character was a fairy I wanted to give a nod to the Brothers Grimm, and b) I like spooky things, and ghosts are spooky, and since Grimm is German the ghost part may as well be too. Thus, the name "Tiv Grimmgeist" was born. I would later lengthen his full name to Tivault because it sounded cool, and somewhat olde-English.
After I made up the silly name and the basic character concept I started fleshing it out, and the more I thought about it the more complex it got. I decided that he should have a foppish personality, and because I was still new to the lore I made him a foreigner so I wouldn't have to worry about lore as much. Then, it became a series of questions that kept coming up in my head.
Where did he come from? I made up a country.
Why is he so foppish? I made him a noble.
Why is he crossdressing? I made him a fugitive.
Why is he a fugitive? Why is he so focused on magic? Why why why why? The questions kept coming, and I was getting more into studying the lore at the same time, and now I have an entire novella to write out for Tiv's backstory on his wiki page. =_= Most of my ideas for Tiv all settled for the most part in 1.0, and have really only been tweaked a little to fit new information.
When I became more comfortable with male characters I briefly played Tiv as a RP character in TSW, where he had a much darker personality to fit with the darker tone of the game. I added a little bit of that to 2.0 Tiv, but except for tweaking his first name to sound more "Miqo'te" his story and personality has hardly changed, aside from tacking on another 5 years.
Personality-wise, I purposefully made FFXIV!Tiv my complete opposite; he's sociable, exuberant, flirtatious, and easily opens up to new people and new experiences, partly because it's a good exercise for me, and partly because I just wanted a character like that.
===
Mali's story is shorter. The name started as a joke between an old MMO friend of mine. I was tired of using the same name for all of my female characters (Saeris, which originally came from an old comic idea of mine), so when I rerolled on FFXI with him I made a character whose name was "what might happen if someone translated my name into Japanese and then translated it back wrong." The fact that it wasn't already taken was pretty amazing, and I didn't remember until after I had gotten attached to the name that it's also the name of a country, but whatever. It stuck, and I liked it.
The original Mali's personality came from a lot of IM role play I had done with the aforementioned friend, albeit nerfed quite a lot. In our IMs we made up some ridiculous stuff for both teh lulz and because we ran on "rule of cool" more than anything. I think at the height of our IM shenanigans I was an Eldritch Horror in human form who wielded a guitar-scythe and used equal parts music magic and good ol' hack n' slash to get shit done, and he was a half-vampire with a demonic entity stuck in his head and was essentially a Dragoon with super strength, and somehow there was a giant mech shaped like a mushroom and what is this I don't even. But anyway, the point is that FFXI Mali inherited a lot of things from IM Mali; scythes and black magic as her primary weapons (yay Dark Knight), insanity and unpredictability (originally from being mini-Cthulhu, now just from being "touched" by some eldritch abomination), a fierce loyalty to her friends, and a sadistic love for killing things.
When I started playing FFXIV, Mali was my go-to character name for sentimental reasons. She was my main in FFXI, after all. By that time I had gotten pretty tired of playing a "boring human-analogous race" and rolled 1.0 Mali as a Miqo'te. Originally I was planning to play her with the same insanity and sadistic glee as FFXI Mali, but the more I RPed with her and watched the RP community the more I realized that crazy cat girls came in large quantities, and because I wanted to be a little more unique I played her as a radically different character (ironically, much more like my own personality than anything else), who grew to be a very interesting character, but not one that really fit the "Mali" motif from FFXI.
Once I saw the designs for female Roegadyn, I knew that I could "revive" FFXI Mali come 2.0 without reverting to the human-analogous race. Granted, FFXI Mali was made god-knows-how-many years ago so the character has undergone some changes, mostly nerfing her "RP powers" further (no cthulhu relations, less chaotic evil) and being fleshed out as an actual person rather than a teenager's power fantasy.
===
Jesus Christ I am so sorry for the text wall. I'll stop now.
I always like to see how other people go through the process of creating something, be it a character or a story or anything really. Personally, most of the time my characters (and any writing I do, really) come from lots of different origins at once, bits and pieces here and there that converge to create a cohesive whole. While I do base some aspects of the characters on my own personality (Mali's loyalty to friends and unpredictable behavior, Tiv's politeness in mixed company and stoic attitude) I like to make them different enough from myself that I am challenged to think in new ways, and/or distanced enough from the characters that I can let things happen to them (such as battle damage, or even death) without feeling like it's personal. Anyway, for the details:For Tiv, the name came waaaaay before the character in FFXIV, and Tiv actually started out very different from what he is now. The original "Tiv" was a fairy in a dark fairy tale I was writing (that I would still like to return to in some fashion), and was originally named Tiv Pifilloffolus. He was a very sarcastic, cowardly character to be the foil for the serious and unafraid protagonist. Much like the current Tiv he was both very magical, and (out of all things) had purple hair, but other than that they are entirely different characters.
After the initial "Tiv" character I never really used it as a name for a fleshed out, playable character, and used it mostly for gags because the entire name was very sing-song-y and goofy. Eventually, "Tiv" became my go-to name for male characters in MMOs simply because it was short and simple and never, ever used. Sometimes it would be extended to "Tivrin," usually because the game had a minimum character limit for names. I never used it for RP, but the fact that I used it a lot was a deciding factor in naming the current Tiv.
Flash forward to FFXIV 1.0, I start RPing with my character Mali (we'll get to her soon). While Mali is a fine character and all, I suddenly get the urge to try playing a male character. In my writing the main characters are equally distributed between female and male, in RP I'd rarely play male characters at all. So I go through the races and try to think up a character concept, when I hear that some people in the RP community play male Miqo'te using female avatars, which sounds like a really good middle ground for someone who isn't used to playing a character that is visibly male outside of the imagination. So, the character concept starts easily: The character is a male Miqo'te crossdressing as a female. Because I'm lazy, I use my generic male MMO name (Tiv!), but I wanted to be at least a little serious, so I didn't give him the goofy surname of the original. Instead I tacked on Grimmgeist because a) I am a fairy tale nerd, and since the original character was a fairy I wanted to give a nod to the Brothers Grimm, and b) I like spooky things, and ghosts are spooky, and since Grimm is German the ghost part may as well be too. Thus, the name "Tiv Grimmgeist" was born. I would later lengthen his full name to Tivault because it sounded cool, and somewhat olde-English.
After I made up the silly name and the basic character concept I started fleshing it out, and the more I thought about it the more complex it got. I decided that he should have a foppish personality, and because I was still new to the lore I made him a foreigner so I wouldn't have to worry about lore as much. Then, it became a series of questions that kept coming up in my head.
Where did he come from? I made up a country.
Why is he so foppish? I made him a noble.
Why is he crossdressing? I made him a fugitive.
Why is he a fugitive? Why is he so focused on magic? Why why why why? The questions kept coming, and I was getting more into studying the lore at the same time, and now I have an entire novella to write out for Tiv's backstory on his wiki page. =_= Most of my ideas for Tiv all settled for the most part in 1.0, and have really only been tweaked a little to fit new information.
When I became more comfortable with male characters I briefly played Tiv as a RP character in TSW, where he had a much darker personality to fit with the darker tone of the game. I added a little bit of that to 2.0 Tiv, but except for tweaking his first name to sound more "Miqo'te" his story and personality has hardly changed, aside from tacking on another 5 years.
Personality-wise, I purposefully made FFXIV!Tiv my complete opposite; he's sociable, exuberant, flirtatious, and easily opens up to new people and new experiences, partly because it's a good exercise for me, and partly because I just wanted a character like that.
===
Mali's story is shorter. The name started as a joke between an old MMO friend of mine. I was tired of using the same name for all of my female characters (Saeris, which originally came from an old comic idea of mine), so when I rerolled on FFXI with him I made a character whose name was "what might happen if someone translated my name into Japanese and then translated it back wrong." The fact that it wasn't already taken was pretty amazing, and I didn't remember until after I had gotten attached to the name that it's also the name of a country, but whatever. It stuck, and I liked it.
The original Mali's personality came from a lot of IM role play I had done with the aforementioned friend, albeit nerfed quite a lot. In our IMs we made up some ridiculous stuff for both teh lulz and because we ran on "rule of cool" more than anything. I think at the height of our IM shenanigans I was an Eldritch Horror in human form who wielded a guitar-scythe and used equal parts music magic and good ol' hack n' slash to get shit done, and he was a half-vampire with a demonic entity stuck in his head and was essentially a Dragoon with super strength, and somehow there was a giant mech shaped like a mushroom and what is this I don't even. But anyway, the point is that FFXI Mali inherited a lot of things from IM Mali; scythes and black magic as her primary weapons (yay Dark Knight), insanity and unpredictability (originally from being mini-Cthulhu, now just from being "touched" by some eldritch abomination), a fierce loyalty to her friends, and a sadistic love for killing things.
When I started playing FFXIV, Mali was my go-to character name for sentimental reasons. She was my main in FFXI, after all. By that time I had gotten pretty tired of playing a "boring human-analogous race" and rolled 1.0 Mali as a Miqo'te. Originally I was planning to play her with the same insanity and sadistic glee as FFXI Mali, but the more I RPed with her and watched the RP community the more I realized that crazy cat girls came in large quantities, and because I wanted to be a little more unique I played her as a radically different character (ironically, much more like my own personality than anything else), who grew to be a very interesting character, but not one that really fit the "Mali" motif from FFXI.
Once I saw the designs for female Roegadyn, I knew that I could "revive" FFXI Mali come 2.0 without reverting to the human-analogous race. Granted, FFXI Mali was made god-knows-how-many years ago so the character has undergone some changes, mostly nerfing her "RP powers" further (no cthulhu relations, less chaotic evil) and being fleshed out as an actual person rather than a teenager's power fantasy.
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Jesus Christ I am so sorry for the text wall. I'll stop now.
