What was your inspiration?

[Maggewetok]

All of my characters are products of tabletop roleplaying campaigns that I've run over the past few years and become quite familiar. Maggewetok was one of the first and has a long history. When choosing a background and place of birth, I had been reading a book on the Eskimo and how they live, which sparked the search for an arctic-like world. Belsavis was the world that I settled on and then later found the novel placed there, detailing the native locals that had been treated by offworlders like slaves which fit perfectly.

Shyahwyn was taken from a character of a short story that I started some years ago about a girl who was Force sensitive and was discovered by a reclusive witch living on Yelsain. The coven that she was a part of - the Pachmari - was also sparked from that story and has since taken on a life of it's own.

Torgeir DeHaan became a desire to write after seeing Captain America: Winter Soldier and I turned him into a Corellian who had been through a terrible accident at work. Losing everything, he walked away from family and friends to discover this thing called the Force which he never knew he had.


What inspired your characters?

[Rigel Bismarck]

My characters all stemmed from different places. The first of the characters I eventually wrote on SWFans wasn't made here. Rigel Bismarck was a character I created for a different Star Wars RP fansite, which was run by a friend I used to know. My inspiration was simple - I wanted a character who could serve as an antagonist to the Light Side character I created for that board and (thanks to Tim Zahn) I wanted to do my own take on a Thrawn-like character. I first brought him back when everyone was creating alternate SWFans characters and my interest in writing Pierce Tondry was starting to wane.

Although the core parts to his background have remained the same, Rigel's character expression has changed somewhat radically as I've shifted parts of his personality to give different features emphasis. For example, in his original incarnation, Bismarck loved games, but they were a diversion from the war against the Alliance and a way of showing off his superior intellect. In his current incarnation, games are much more important - the war against the Alliance IS a game, and one which he is prepared to sacrifice much to win. This Bismarck, however, has certain distractions that may prove to be his undoing. Time will tell, I think.

Admittedly, one of the reasons I love writing him is his dialogue. He's very much a talker and not one to hold back his opinions where he has free reign to do so. That gives me a lot of liberty when it comes to saying things I want to say.

[Matatek Sel Vissica]

I have a thing for dour-faced and morally-upright paladins. Maybe that started by watching Lucius Vorenus in Rome, but I've also written one in a previous RP universe here, as well as a pen and paper campaign we've been carrying on among friends since 2011. My best Skyrim playthrough was also more or less this sort of character.

Vissica springs from that general tendency. I try and keep her dialogue spartan and trimmed to evoke Vader's cadence. That said, she's a fanatic, so she's more prone to lash out like Kylo if things don't go her way. It's a short fuse temper that doesn't hold grudges so she'll flare up and then go back to cool again in a beat.

As far as her fighting, I took cues from Siegfried/Nightmare in Soul Calibur to illustrate a tall fighter swinging an equally tall blade. She has to move her body into her weapon's momentum. It's not good for minor and deft corrections in swordplay but she's trying to clear the field or get somebody to stand their ground and defend, which she is likely to break. Of course, I also have had fun writing her as a fighter who is clearly not humanoid, so she can do things like run on all fours, bend and flex in ways people can't, etc. That's a bit of open ground, but I've taken a few cues from General Grievous (not the four armed twirly stuff) but just in general how acrobatic he can be.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

I'm gonna divide s'Il up into pre- and post- reset inspirations


To start, s'Il was actually ported over from stories that I'd been writing about her and the galaxy she lived in since I was thirteen, so having her at Fans has been a wonderful exploratory journey into her different mindsets over time.



Pre-Reset:

Pre-reset, s'Il was a blow-hard big-talkiing asshole, pretty much. She had a soft core, but was mostly a braggart. I tapped into my younger self's love for picking fights and she sort of went from there. A lot of Ghost in the Shell went into her backstory in terms of her love for cybernetics and augmentations, and a touch of Battle Angel to round things out. Later on, after she got turned into a Lupine by Diego Van-Derveld, I dove into uncharted waters and explored the avenues of a mind not really prepared for such a transformation, so s'Il turned into a bit of an unstable cannibal. She had lucid times, but she also began to develop a mindset of 'this is where I've been put, and so now I'm surviving the best I can'. I pulled A LOT from Stranger in Paradise, modelling s'Il off of Katchoo in her descent into madness and then eventual partial redemption.


Post-Reset:

Post-reset s'Il is a little bit more close to how I had originally written her in my own stories; as a quiet, internally angry woman resentful of her past and how it treated her. There's still a bit of Katchoo in her, but there's also a lot of little bits thrown in from inspirations like Altair, Corvo Attano, and my own self. Like me, she tries to see the best in people, and is more prone to try and find quiet ground rather than being ready to come to blows. However, she's very much a woman and is prone to - again like myself - being prickly. There are small elements of an aging Kirk, Kahn, and strangely enough Rock-Em-Sock-Em Robots in her, as is evidenced by her tenacity and unwillingness to give up even if her bell is about to be rung. The space sickness came about from one of my sisters, who used to get carsick no matter the car she was in.

[Alexander Bane]

Post-Reset Alexander was a combination of Carcer, the Always One More Knife Psychopath from the Discworld Series (Nightwatch), and Deadpool of Marvel Comics fame. A sort of stabbedy stab character with no moral compass who doesn't stop talking. Just pure gibberish falling out his mouth at all times, even while he's cleaving people up. More recently I've added a twist of the Joker (DC Comics) into his mix, creating a more stable and organized, but still incredible unhinged and terrifying psychopath. This last development formed as a result of me already using Jared Leto for his playby and then Suicide Squad rolling around. Seemed a good transition for the character, especially as he's currently embroiled in the crazy murderbowl that is Corellia.