Envie De Voyager

Rediscovering My Characters

I generally pride myself with my extreme memory of seemingly pointless things. I remember details of fermions and leptons, but completely forget that the next day has about four major homeworks.

But it seems that I've been filling holes in my memory with recent thoughts and speculations! After opening the basement cabinet (That I hadn't opened in a very, very long time because of my compulsion to leave the basement workshop the exact same way it has been for years), I found incredibly old notes. They were the first drafts of most of the characters that I know by second nature. They seemed quite different from the way I knew them, and I quickly went on to compare them with later notes.

I found the gradient of information between my first OCs, made at the ripe age of six, and their later versions. I then remembered why some of them were like that, answering questions about my own characters that I had forgotten the answers to.

For example:

1. I remembered that the reason I have someone named Shirou Fubuki is because it started out as a joke. The name Shirou was the name of a friend and was his original name for a long time, but Fubuki was added when I found out that there was a character with the name. It was a joke that eventually just stuck. Furthermore, his tiger features were a reference not only to my first toy as a child, but also Taiga Fujimaru from the Fate Stay/Night visual novel, who is the guardian of Shirou Emiya.

2. I found out that my powerful angel OC, Veritas, was named so because of a religious radio station in my country. But the polarity was swapped—instead of a religious Veritas going against a dictatorship, Veritas is 'heathen-like' with his views against Heaven, which is authoritarian in his story. His sword, The Baptist was apparently my way of referencing an official, who was part of this revolution, named Juan. His lances, Kardia and Evangelium, were references to the two leaders who were struggling for power at that time—the two so happen to be spears of Light and Darkness.

3. I rediscovered the reason behind Shawn Sombre's surname. He's a Percy Jackson OC, a son of Nemesis. His surname was apparently a reference to Grimm's Fairy Tales, as 'grim' and 'somber' are close in meaning. This connection was further established with some of the (Some vague, some not) references to fairy tales, like fighting off seven lycanthropes (The Wolf And The Seven Young Kids), finding a pair of knives where one is pure silver and the other is completely red (Snow-white and Rose-red), and an encounter with a nymph by a windmill (The Nixie of the Mill-Pond).

It was refreshing indeed, and it gave me a breath of life. After a not-so decent session of writing for Evanescence, it was something good to see.