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.
At the end of 6th grade, my dad got a job in a small town 2 hours away from kansas city, and we moved again. This is where I lean over to the psychoanalyst from my place on the chaise longue and explain that I think my restlessness, and need for change/reinvention, and struggles to commit, and adhd, and depression, and suicidality and whatever else all stem from the cycle of moving and settling that defined my youth.
Small town life in Emporia, Kansas suited me better than Johnson County though. I found manga and my anime tastes sharpened up a bit. I got really into things like DNAngel, Vampire Hunter D - Moonlight Shadow AMV, D. Gray Man - just pictures of the main guy the rest of was boring, and all the other Adult Swim type stuff (Cowboy Bebop, S-Cry-Ed, Trigun, FMA, Gungrave, Gun x Sword, etc. etc.) etc. etc. etc. There was a lot. There's still a lot. Special shoutout to Psychic Academy tho.
As 7th grade was starting, girls were starting to discover me in the ways that I had already discovered them, and the girls were getting me into the prettyboy music of the time: MCR, P!atD were huge, that one FOB video where Pete Wentz was a broody vampire-cum-vampire hunter. I was very swallowed up in the magic of the prettyboy archetype. I wanted that, and I wanted to reconcile it with my angry goth feelings, into one superb, angry prettyboy essence. I felt at one with the universe.
Out of that sprouted Jean Paul de Sant Exupery, le Beau Monstre (I don't know french, I have never known any french or much about France. It just happened and nobody stopped me).
Le Beau Monstre was my gothic fantasy OC, originally written for a cheesy little horror story I wrote where he got cursed and then had some sinister monolog. He was later adapted to a Teen Titans RP forum, where he had a very healthy series of adventures as a recurring villain I could throw at heroes to give them something to fight.
He was defined by fitted suits with cravats and overcoats, tophats and canes, and a huge, stone arm with claws two feet long ending in needle-sharp points. The arm was unnaturally fast and could extend up to fifty feet, and usually was described as "snakelike". He liked intimate crimes, but was known to rob a bank or bomb a military convoy here or there.
His story, edited for brevity, was that: "He was a French businessman. He got cursed because he was a bad person, with the intent to ruin all his business dealings by showing clearly that he was a bad person. But the curse came with upsides. He learned that he liked being a bad person and started killing and robbing under the cover of night, getting stronger with each additional sin."
There was a load of offensive stereotyping in there.
He had a lithe frame that was out of balance with the demonic appendage attached to his shoulder. He had wavy black hair, a smile like a cut in need of stitches, and clever eyes.