Fun Thread: Origins

[Nox]

As someone who aspires to write later in his life, I find it interesting to hear other people's train of thought in relation to characters. With that in mind, I came up with this thread. I figured it might be interesting to hear from other people on the board about how they came up with their character(s), as it might aid in our growth as rpers to hear about another thought process. 

 

I'll start us off. W'Dekan started under my default character name "Nox" in the last phase of the beta. I attached "Ascalon"(The name of St. George's spear) as his surname because I figured it was fitting for a lancer. At that time, I didn't really have rp in mind because I figured "Hey, this is beta, I shouldn't become attached to him." Well, safe to say that thought didn't last long. I started to subconsciously develop this character in my head, adding personality and soul to the creation as I was playing. Slowly but surely, his personality developed. I find that my character's personalities always develop as a facet of who I am. W'Dekan came to embody the "new" me. I've had characters develop into embodiments of my anger issues and (to keep the list short) a few other parts of my psychological make-up. I designed W'Dekan's physical appearance the way I did because of, mainly, personal taste so there's not much to go on there.

[Savarah]

I'll try my best!

 

I actually found the name Savarah a few years ago on Kongregate of all places, and instantly fell in love with it. My mains in every game are always some variations of Savarah or Serafyna. I came up with Ardyn all on my own as a surname, simply because I like the sound of it and it's rather simple.

 

I RP my characters as an extreme extension of myself. I'm actually a rather assertive, bitchy female with intense emotions. I find it easier to project a character as myself (more or less), simply because my reactions to certain situations are genuine and realistic. For example, if you threaten or attempt to injure my sister, you're damn right I'm gonna come after you and do everything in my power to protect her including sacrificing myself. As for physical appearance, I like to play around with whatever character creators but I tend to gravitate towards fiery looking humanoids or lunar looking individuals (think red haired humans and traditional Keeper Miqo'te).

[Grott]

I like this! My turn!

 

I originally had some basic ideas for a male Miqo'te because I wanted to play a male Mithra in FFXI and I figured this could be fun. I started modeling him after Captain Nemo from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but decided I didn't enjoy being a Miqo'te and Captain Nemo was extremely anti-social so that wouldn't work well for RP. Next I tried my hand at lalafell in an attempt to make them more serious and break some stereotypes. I found that I can't do magic and canned that character too. While I was sitting around waiting for beta, I picked up the book The Once and Future King. I've always been a fan of the King Arthur legend and I've used Arthurian names for a lot of past games. I decided to take a knightly character approach. After doing some lore research I found the knightliest place in the game was Ishgard, so I went Dragoon. With Dragoon in mind, I chose the last name Skystrider as it sounded cool and was the name of a lance in FFXI. The name Uther came later. I then created Uther's entire family tree out of a mix of Midlanders with Arthurian names and Highlanders with Nordic names. It fit in my head because knights and vikings are the most commonly pit against dragons in Western fiction. I needed a reason for Uther to be in Gridania instead of Ishgard, so I went scrounging for inspiration in books again. That's when I remembered the story of Ivanhoe, the disinherited knight. I threw that in and added in some details about rejecting the zealous nature of Ishgard's devotion to Halone and a dislike for the city's isolationist policy and voila! Uther Skystrider!

 

After mastering that character, I didn't want to ruin him by over-thinking him. So I moved on to my alt, Wart Totonji, who started off as just the name Wart, also from The Once and Future King. With Wart I wanted to go back to the idea I had earlier for breaking lalafell stereotypes. I wanted him to be strong and noble while keeping the lalafell intelligence. That's when I got the idea for making a dirtied up, sideburns-wearing engineer/paladin. Wart was born Wowonji Totonji and joined the Brass Blades at a young age, where he got the nickname Wart. I figured since he's smaller than most fighters, he probably took a lot of beatings early on. So how would he solve this problem? I decided to add in an engineering edge, bringing in the use of chemicals and simple machines to help him fight foes bigger than he is. Almost like a medieval lalafell Batman. With that idea in mind, I started building his back story around it. 

 

How would he fund these inventions? Maybe he comes from a Dunesfolk family from Ul'dah that has some money.

 

Where did he learn to fight? Maybe he was a member of the Brass Blades before he took to adventuring.

 

Why did he start adventuring? He probably had a patriotic flare in his youth but decided it wasn't worth the bloodshed as he got wiser and left the Blades.

 

Why wasn't he at the battle of Carteneu? He's a rough-and-tumble sort of guy, maybe he broke his leg and was in the infirmary at the time.

 

How old is he? I imagine he joined the Brass Blades when he was in his late teens, but what inspired him? Maybe the invasion of Ala Mhigo. Lalafell age slower anyway. We'll make him about 36.

 

I find that once you have a central idea, everything else kind of falls into place.

 

EDIT: I, too, project myself onto my characters. Uther, like myself is the youngest sibling, and since he left home (I moved halfway across the country IRL) he's been kind of looking for an older-brother-figure, despite being perfectly capable of taking on problems by himself. Wart is obviously very short (I'm a 5'3 male IRL) and because of that, he feels he needs to prove himself. Deep down he's a kind-hearted man, but he often lets bravado get in the way of showing it.

[ArmachiA]

I'll give it a go.

 

Armi came from a shortening of Armachia, which is now generally my internet handle but WAS a character I made in Vampire: The Masquerade about 13 or so years ago. V:TM was the very first thing I ever RPed, I had never even heard of doing such a thing before it, but it was really fun (And through it I found out my dad was a big D&D nerd and he had been keeping that little fact from his kids!). When FFXI was announced, I was hella mad it was an MMO, but decided to give it a shot because I really love the Final Fantasy series. I was quite confused about MMO's at the time, having never played one, and thought they were places you paid to play to Roleplay in (I didn't even realize most people wouldn't be RPing ), so I made a whole character.

She was going to be a Summoner, kind of sweet and quiet, but the daughter of a Pirate. BUT her dad is dead and she was actually raised in Bastok, then moved to San Doria. I needed a name, I couldn't think of any so my ex-husband (Husband at the time) told me to just use Armachia. I thought Armachia sounded to harsh for the character, so I shortened it to Armi. I came up with Alliando as her last name because it just sounded good with Armi.

 

Armi has pretty much been my main from game to game (In some games I'll use Loki, who I'll explain below ) and has evolved as I learned how to Roleplay better in the medium. Armi v.1.0 was kind of a Mary Sue who was kind of pathetic and far too quiet so I've been working on making her better from game to game. I always keep two things in mind for her though: She is very, very likable and she has a Martyr complex. Other than that I change her up. She's less quiet, more jovial, and really weird in the FFXIV version - due to her not really knowing how to deal with people. I've never played her as weird, socially awkward yes, but never flat out strange so this will be a real treat!

 

Loki is a character I made about 11 years ago for a Homebrew game called Unizen. Unizen was (and is, as I took over the project about 6 years ago from the original author) a Science Fiction Table Top game about the human race having evolved into 10 different races in another galaxy. Loki was a space pirate (I had a thing about pirates back then) and part of a race of scavengers who don't live on planets and sail the outer reaches.

I used the name because, in Unizen lore, Loki's race do not use their real names in front of other races, at all. They have nicknames and these nicknames can be anything, from History to just a color. Loki got her nickname from her fathers friend who was big on Earth's old gods. In Unizen, the name is rare, as not many people know of God's from an Earth they've never seen.

 

However, I know the name is generally popular, especially now after The Avengers

 

STILL, I like Loki's personality - sarcastic, logical, and quite open with her sexuality. So when I make a character like her in other media, I generally use the name Loki because, why not? I haven't used her often in other MMO's, and once she wasn't even named Loki (Didn't work in SWTOR, so I changed it to Mahla). I tend to shy away from using her tooooo much because of the "Open with her sexuality" thing. In some cases, this meant people thought I ERPed all the time. So I generally use her when I think the RP community can be mature enough to handle her flirting .

 

In both cases, I've had people tell me my character names are not RP correct (Armi = "Army", Loki = "A god from mythology lol you are uncreative") but ah well, I'm attached.

[Tivahlt]

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.

[Nako-Chan]

So many amazing stories!

 

Like many here my characters tend to have some aspect of myself in them. And lots of different characters over the years of role-playing. My signature character, Mist, had radically changed since her first conception. Originally she had a generic name like Anna Windtail. She was a character in a novel I was writing in my teen years and actually not the lead protagonist of the story despite envisioning her as myself. The lead protagonist was a character based off my ex-boyfriend and the time. I knew I wanted the story to be about redemption through the eyes of his character and a tale of rebirth, but I kept losing the pages I wrote and couldn't find them... so I had to keep rewriting sections over and over as I kept losing papers until I gave up. I am horribly disorganized. Anna started out simplistically, mainly just having the attributes of my loyalty and passionate disposition. Admittedly my character at this stage was more or less your average boring female protagonist who's role was to support the lead protagonist.

 

As I moved on I enjoyed role playing in other mediums like IMVU and Second Life for good while, altering Anna into Sophitia Conway, a cyborg for a sci-fi roleplay. These special government weapons, these cyborgs, were once people who died and were resurrected through technological marvels. Machine halves were also installed into their consciousness to exert some control over the organic half of the mind while the organic half of the mind offered a realistic personality and logical that a machine could not replicate alone. The Government Project and it's creations became known as Deus Ex Machinas (God from the Machine), a poetic name for the government's intent and hubris of attempting to achieve god like powers and immortality through technology. Some DEMs overcame the machine half of their minds and briefly reprogrammed the others to follow them instead of the others, the now rogue unit of DEMs free from the government's control roaming the solar system according to their own agenda. Again my character played a secondary role, my NEWEST ex-boyfriend at the time was the leader of the DEMs in this role-play. I don't know, I guess I'm just good at playing a supportive lead. Sophitia took on even more of my personality traits; love of the classics, appreciation of fine culture, perhaps a little snobby at times.

 

Then... later when I finally got around to using her again, Sophita became Victoria Palmacosta, a main character in a friend's upcoming novel series and pen-and-paper system; both called Imagino. Victoria in this incarnation remained mostly the same as as before, like me. But the idea of good was twisted into a near zealot idea of "Justice". On a DnD alignment box, she'd be annoyingly deep in the "True Good" box. Clarification: She was True Good before, now it was just obsessive and her vision became borderline black and white.

 

Recently I revisited the idea of my own novel, expanding on it again as I intend to pick it back up. I fleshed out the world some more this time, expanded a lot more of the world's culture and religion. The world held 9 elements. The Lower Elements were made of Fire, Water, Earth, and Air. The Higher Elements were made from fusions of the Lower Elements; Steam came from fire and water, Dust came from earth and air, Mist came from air and water, and Ash came from fire and earth. The Heavens or the Divine made the ninth element. More characters were added to the Novel: a hero for each of the more common eight elements with the male lead based on my ex re-envisioned as the Hero of Ash. Also, every Hero, chosen by destiny to represent their element took their element as their name. Thus Victoria became Mist.

 

In the world's lore... Steam came first, purging the void of darkness and it's daemons. Second came Dust, giving form and shaping the land. Mist came third, granting life and beauty upon the world. Lastly came Ash, marking death but also rebirth, a renewing cycle.

 

The novel is still in progress. Though now I am very interested in FF14. Admittedly I don't know much about Final Fantasy as a whole still, I only played the spin-offs in the past like Crystal Chronicles. As I import Mist's personality into FF14, I'm likely to play her as an amnesic miqo'te, as much as a cop-out as it is. It'll give me a chance to both enjoy role-play while learning about the world in the process. It also makes it easy to take the character name "Mist" without breaking lore; Mist as a nickname. Her 'real' name could be X'sumbla Tahz or whatever a random name generator throws at me. Mist remains mistrusting of strangers but a loyal friend once its earned; a staple of people with blue colored auras. She still has enjoyment of culture, poetry, music, and likely will have a soft spot and weakness for Bard players... And she possess a dualistic personality; inspired by my birth sign, The Gemini.

 

I have ideas for her back story but I don't want to commit to anything yet until I learn more about Final Fantasy in general. I'm looking forward to mingling with other RPers and learning the lore. :]

[Eva]

I've been meaning to input my own thoughts here.  It's been interesting reading about some others' creative processes and how certain things elements sort of materialized.

 

Like a few others did in the time leading up to the release of 1.0, I decided to create my new character as the adult child of my character from FF11.  A lot of the lore needed to be transitioned in such a way as to make sense.  Details about many things were limited and we were left to our own devices for much of it.  Much has since been illuminated for us and minor alterations here and there have been made to keep things plausible.

 

Dyterium was an extremely skilled San d'Orian dragoon whose wife left him for another man after they had a baby girl together.  I felt San d'Orian lore transitioned most smoothly to Ishgard - though we still know precious little about Ishgardian culture.  I've taken a few (and only a few) liberties with regard to this, keeping most of the details veiled.  Both moved out to Coerthas and lived a pastoral lifestyle shortly after Eva's mother left the scene.  Eva has no memory of her mother nor Ishgard - which makes things simpler regarding the fog that is Ishgard lore.

 

I should also point out that I take a very psychological and sociological approach to the structure and creation of this character and had input from a number of sources (including my own RL father - a licensed counselor) about what her development would have been like, how she would have grown up, etc.  It's also hard to talk about what went into Eva's character without delving a bit into the events of her past and looking at the various chains of cause and effect.

 

Eva's name also isn't actually Eva.  It's Kes.  For those familiar with the Star Trek franchise, this is derived directly from the Voyager series.  The character's personality in many ways is also similar, though this worked out to be more of a happy coincidence than being rooted in her namesake.  While we're on the subject, 'Ianeira' derives from greek mythology - a water nymph.  Water in all forms has been an important element throughout Eva's story - swimming, rain, etc.

 

We were left figuring out what it would be like to grow up, the child of a single father who was a fallen knight and a broken man.  His story from the point was about his inability to cope with his loss - his wife, his status, and eventually even his sanity.  Her story bears tragic elements as well, though arguably nowhere near as severe.  Her story also deals a lot with learning to let go, and living after loss.

 

I deleted a few paragraphs that were basically just talking about character history.  Suffice it to say, there was an accident that happened at the age of  7 that caused a lot of stress and prompted a move to Gridania, she gained a significant amount of weight, which led to her having issues with her self-image even to present day.  She also met a boy, fell in love, had 7 wonderful years with him before he died tragically, and it can be said that in some ways she is still grieving that loss, even having sort of moved on from it.  There is also the element of her duskwight culture, which has been handed down.  Again, without a lot of detail from lore we're left to draw our own conclusions here.

 

She was also never really intended to look exactly as busty as she does, either.  At the start of 1.0 she was still working through her weight loss and was supposed to be regarded as much better, but still rather 'fluffy'.  After running through the original character creator it seemed that certain face types were tied to certain bust sizes and another member of this community remarked about Eva's from our initial "show your character" screenshots, so that wound up getting factored in which sort of worked out nicely for her as a matronly or motherly character, though has made for some awkward moments in RP - which in and of itself is kind of awesome too.  Throughout the course of the 2+ years of her story, she has become much more disciplined and trained hard and much more of the weight has been shed, but we have left her on the chesty side and RP this from a more realistic angle rather than sexualizing her the way I imagine most would.  She experiences back pain, and has problems fitting into certain clothing and armor, for instance.

 

Most of what has happened from the game's launch has been less a factor of what we inject into the character and more a factor of how she reacts to those around her.  From early on we sort of figured if she was somewhat susceptible to peer pressure, in part as a result of her self-image and wanting to be accepted.  We decided if she was befriended by bandits or mercenaries, she would go that way, and such.  There was no "alignment" metric figured out at the onset, or an argument can be made that she was initially True Neutral.

 

But she's not a natural leader (which will make for some awkwardness in ARR when she eventually gets prodded into the role), but she does well as an advisor and counselor.  She's also very motherly and nurturing.  There was an accident some years back that left her [supposedly] barren, and being a mother was always something that was important to her since she never had a proper mother of her own.  More recently the 'barren' diagnosis turned out to be false, and this wound up being the result of a really fluky dice roll, but we went with it, and this will be a critical and unexpected turning point in her story as well as her pregnancy (with twins, another fluke, praise Nophica!) progresses into ARR.

 

So this got rather longwinded (though the ones above all are as well so I don't feel so bad), however I think there might be room for a...

 

...TL;DR:  Inspirations came from FFXI character as a parent, lore transitioned from XI to XIV stuff, names came from Star Trek, Greek Mythology, character personality evolved as would be expected from the daughter of a fallen knight in a broken family, and cause and effect surrounding two or three major life events dictated pretty much everything else.  Almost everything else from 1.0 release and on has been governed by her interactions with other RPers.  And her ginormous boobs were unintentional and kind of a fluke, but a happy one.

 

...TL;DR for the TL;DR:  FFXI>FFXIV transitions + RP happenings = Eva

[Valan]

The story of my character isn't so amazing as the other, I'm afraid.

 

I copied Sarah from a old roleplay forum (FF based) where i play yet.

the old Sarah is my first male character turned female ( Y Chromosome inactivation, no surgery involved) after he raped a colleague. luckily she completed the transformation just before the director came to arrest him, so she can pacefully live in disguise. IC speaking the name "Sarah Dòxa" was the first the first name that came to her mind in a panic. OOC  Sarah is a random name. Dòxa in philosophy is the false opinion, the error, the opposite of episteme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxa because she isn't a real woman but pretends to be it.

 

Obviusly I change something in the FFXIV Sarah in order to fit better in the game enviroment. First of all she born female. In order to justify the lore breacking name her parents came from a far province of the garlean empire, exiled in eorzea. Behavior and appareance are similar to her first incarnation, (flat chest included).

[Ellie]

I think I've posted this somewhere before, but I won't mind posting again.

 

Originally Keisuna was one of my characters in FFXI. I got the name by combining "Kate" (my online pseudonym at the time) with "Esuna" because I wanted to make a white mage. Unfortunately one of the people in my little group was already covering the white mage bit, so I made her a red mage instead.

 

It wasn't until I saw how mischievous she looked in a doublet that I realized what I wanted to do with her character. She was a young cat-burglar (I thought I was so clever, too), and a cocky one at that. She insisted on wearing bright orange even when committing her crimes, thinking herself too skilled to be caught. She was a bit of a narcissist in that sense. I didn't get to roleplay much with her, though, because we were on Hades and I was too busy trying to catch up with my friends who were max level.

 

Once I got to FFXIV I decided I wanted to do something different with Keisuna. I loved her overall attitude but I wanted to develop it more into a richer character. I then got to thinking about what would happen if FFXI Keisuna was finally caught and sent to the dungeons to pay for her crimes, and FFXIV Keisuna was based on that idea. I loved the idea of playing an older woman, and I thought the fact that she was inexperienced despite her age would make for great roleplay (turns out it didn't much).

 

There was the problem of her backstory as a nigh uncatchable cat-burglar being a little too close to being mary-sue for my tastes, so she was instead I made it so that she came from a family of vagrants and nobodies, a concept that would eventually evolve into the Adarest.

 

And that's how she came to be.

[CallmeYahweh]

This is my new favorite thread. I love reading about the process behind people's characters.

 

 

While I was sitting around waiting for beta, I picked up the book The Once and Future King. I've always been a fan of the King Arthur legend and I've used Arthurian names for a lot of past games. I decided to take a knightly character approach.

 

Hear, hear! I am a junky when it comes to mythology and Arthurian legend is right up there as one of my favorites. I caught you at the Blue Skies event last weekend, playing Wart and was curious if that's where the name came from. Tre cool.

 

For Rendal, the name was just a temporary one while I partook in beta festivities. It comes from, laughably, Dark Souls. One of the minor background characters, Knight King Rendal. When I found out that there was, indeed, a roleplaying community to this game, I knew Rendal wouldn't stick so I had to scramble to come up with a reason why he had a very unMiqo'te sort of name. That became a huge part of his backstory though, and a major defining trait of his character; V'ahal Tia ran away from home, got wrapped up in some bad dealings in Ul'dah, enlisted to help out in the battle of Carteneu, but because ultimately, he is a coward, he ran from it before the fighting started proper. To help erase that part of his life, he adapted a new name, and Rendal was born.

[Ryanti]

I have to say, I've really warmed up to this thread, and I appreciate that there are people out there that enjoy reading about how characters came to be, and the story of the process.

 

 

M character, Ryanti Veanysus, was born around the year of 2010. The first name, Ryanti, was actually the middle name of a character I created for Star Wars: The Old Republic. The name of that character was Bain Ryanti Noronel and the name Ryanti itself was his real name, Bain being the name he would go by, because his presence around others normally spelled doom for their fates considering that he was a Sith.

 

When it came time for Final Fantasy XIV to come around, I was already an individual who had my neck deep into JRPG's. Ever since Tales of Symphonia in 2004, I had been immersing myself in more of the JRPG philosophies of world building, and spent many late nights studying what makes a JRPG wonderful. I became inspired by the natural idealistic beauty of the words, and also with sophisticated names.

 

The word Veanysus came from a combination of things. There was a character at the time whom I had a thing for, particularly in the new Star Ocean game that had released in 2009. This game was called Star Ocean: The Last Hope. In that game, there is a character by the name of Myuria Tionysus. Myuria Tionysus was a very capable woman who walked with a charismatic stride, and seemed to be perfect on the outside, but in truth had many faults and challenges battling her on the inside.

 

I realized that I wanted to make Ryanti's surname as a tribute to that wonderful game, but at the same time, I wanted to change that last name into a more romantic sounding tone. I took inspiration from the Italian Renaissance as well as romantic space fantasy. Quite odd inspirations for a pseudo-medieval world, but, the result, Veanysus, I believed was a unique one.

 

I made him a Hyur Midlander, with white hair, and cyan eyes. I went for the bishounen look, because I had come to admire the idealistic, ethereal storytelling atmospheric practices of the games and anime I had watched. I decided that he needed to look angelic above all else.

 

The first ideas I had for him were quite primitive and impromptu at first. I never really got that deep into roleplay in FFXIV 1.0. The game turned out to be very disappointing, so I decided to take the Ryanti concept elsewhere.

 

Enter TERA. Upon garnering interest in that game, I completely redesigned Ryanti's story to fit the universe of TERA. In TERA, Ryanti was a high elf male, who's father was lost in the great war that came before the present time of that game, and was forced to grow up before most boys did in order to succeed where his father had failed. I won't speak much of it, as I wish to erase that recorded story I did in TERA. Although I did write a few short stories about it.

 

However, TERA's community made me leave only after a few months. It was then that I realized that my internet pseudonym, which had previously been something else, was now becoming Ryanti, because of old friends leaving, and new friends being made. Ryanti Veanysus were two names I had came up with by the concurrences of my own mind, unlike other names I had came up with. Therefore, it began to become my own internet pseudonym. For a while, that was its purpose.

 

When Final Fantasy 2.0 was relieved, I waited a few months before coming back here. When I did, I sat down, and figured out how to redesign Ryanti completely again.

 

I realized I wanted to keep that aura of capableness that Myuria Tionysus from Star Ocean had. However, I wanted him to be defined by his weaknesses, not his strengths. I wanted him to radiate a feeling of vulnerability and struggle, but keep the sensations of beauty and gracefulness.

 

I felt like I needed a tough young man, but I couldn't make him gritty. I felt like I needed a strong soul, but I couldn't make him cold. I felt like I needed him to be heroic, but I couldn't make him sure of himself.

 

I thought back to the stories and trials and tribulations that I valued immensely in the past. Stories that stayed with me in my heart for many years. For Ryanti's personality, I ended up using the bishounen prince archetype. I combined the personality of Prince Arslan from the Heroic Legend of Arslan, Ciel Phantomhive from Black Butler, and inspirations from the original characters I am working on in my own original world.

 

I ended up adding some aspects of myself in there as well, in order for me to relate to him to a certain degree, so that I would find it easier to suspend disbelief, and of course, to empathize with him.

 

I wanted him to have a beautifully flawed inside, and define his strengths through his perceived weaknesses, in order to place emphasis on the wonder of being 'human'. Though of course, as you can see, Ryanti isn't human.

 

 

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For his backstory, I wanted to be a male Miqo'te for the sole sake of OOC preference. As I have waited, and waited, and waited, in MMO's for years, in order to be able to play a race similar to the Miqo'te. With a few animistic features, but mostly humanoid. FFXI didn't allow it, so eleven years later, I couldn't resist.

 

However, I did not desire to RP him from the culture of Miqo'te. I wanted him to possess the affinity and the aura of man. (AKA Hyur). So I decided to make him a Miqo'te halfbreed, with his father being a Hyur. I wanted to RP a perspective from the haves, and I wanted most of Ryanti's suffering to have to deal with social life and self-actualization, so I made his family wealthy in a capitalistic sense. I wanted to put pressure on him to live up to his family name, so I made his father a War Hero, and an extremely successful man in life, that refused to show weakness in front of his son, and that who's 'perfect father' aura during the rare times he was home that he showcased to his son backfired into his son believing him to be perfect. That living up to him would be a nightmare.

 

I wanted him to despise the side of himself that made him feel like an animal. I wanted him to feel terrible about his mixed blood. I wanted him to frown upon the Miqo'te's tribal culture, as well as him being half-blooded with them. I gave him a ton of depth by diving deep into his personal life through his childhood, and involved nearly most of his backstory to be very close to psychologically ripping him apart. To define who he is in on the inside without being so blunt about it.

 

I made him a complicated, conflicted person by having multiple opinions about single situations. I made him so that his opinions are not iron clad, and that his values and views would forever be moldable by the world around him, which he looks at in a very rose-tinted perspective because he has had such a sheltered life.

 

I wanted him to have a sheltered life because I wanted a character who had his own perception of the world that would make sense to others if they had an open mind. I wanted a kid who spent his hours looking up in the stars, or balancing himself on a fence post while the rest of the world stared at him with a weird look. I wanted somebody who would walk their own path in perspective and by doing so, I would be able to create something interesting out of the way he behaves. I didn't want him to be grounded.

 

So fast forward to how, and you have Ryanti Veanysus. :thumbsup: Another product of my passion for writing.

[Grott]

I caught you at the Blue Skies event last weekend, playing Wart and was curious if that's where the name came from. 

 

Glad you caught on. I was wondering if anyone would notice. I saw you there, too. If there's one this weekend (nothing has been announced to my knowledge but there's still time) I'll be there as Uther. :thumbsup: