My first OCs that i remember making: I was little, probably between 6 and 10, and i drew two monsters - one was a guy made of pumpkins stacked on top of each other, in away that was reminiscent of Power Ranger Monster of the Week vibes. The other was a gargoyle made with gravestones. I drew them with crayola markers and showed my mom, and thats all I remember. I was very into power rangers and nightmare before christmas; I had done jack skellington and white ranger costumes on various halloweens. Point made.
In 5th or 6th grade, I made my first OC with any sort of story, personality, etc. I was finally starting to enculturate to suburban Kansas City, in the historically redlined Johnson County. On top of starting to grasp American culture enough to like actually figure out what was going on around me, the differences between me and my peers were stacking up.
I had different morals and different beliefs: I had anger problems, I had attention problems, I was cruel, I was a class clown, I was discovering internet porn and that exacerbated a lot of things. Around that time, I hurt a class friend fairly badly and was charged with juvenile assault and that sent me along some paths.
Somewhere in the midst of all that, my mom got me a PS2, and I picked out Arc the Lad: Twilight of Spirits from a gamestop, and i played the first, idk, 20 or 30 hours of it. From my degraded 20-year-old memories of the game, Twilight of Spirits is about cultures clashing, and about heroes of mixed heritage who have been raised to hate each other, only to find that they have more in common than they first thought - more explicitly: Kharg the Human (white guy, heroic, courageous) and Darc the Demon (brown guy, ferocious, violent) both finding out that theyre actually Half-Demon, and how each of them responds to that (and how their friends and cultures respond to that).
I can't speak to the racialized tones of the game; I hope they were good, I imagine they were pretty hackneyed, but that game found me randomly at a time when I really needed to be seen for my own struggles with being caught between worlds. I was obsessed with Darc, and to this day, I think that game has pretty much defined a lot of what I like to do in fictional spaces. As with mosy games, I got bored and stalled out. Unlike any other games before, the story had hooked me so deeply that I was sure I was going to write a fantasy epic with my own take on demons and humans and magic, that would blow everything wide open.
So I made Karn (no relation), a half-demon swordsman who, from what I remember:
- had hair like coal, eyes like fire, and skin like ash
- fought a Bone Golem and killed it, but got punched in the process
- had a catgirl friend that fussed over him
I drew a bunch of pictures of him, but the story didn't really go anywhere.