#//In those two's case; it just feels WEIRD being cared for so kindly. Esp with what secret he's holding

[dutybcrne]

For Kaeya, people who are exceedingly sweet, even naturally so like Barbara, absolutely make him severely uncomfortable. He can deal with people who possess sharper attitudes like Rosaria and Diluc just fine, and is alright with those Jean and Lisa who know to scold and rein him back when needed, but someone he percieves to be too kind always set him on edge.

[bouwrites]

OC Spotlight: The Cardinal Virtues

This isn’t so much a spotlight on each of these four individual characters so much as an elaboration on how they came about and why they’re so closely related in my mind despite no more than two of them appearing in a single universe at at time thus far. Honestly, I felt this elaboration is necessary just to save space for if/when I do individual spotlights for them.

The Cardinal Virtues are some of my very favorite OCs that I have, and I’ve been calling them that because each one roughly corresponds to one of the four cardinal virtues. In truth, all four are very similar in a lot of ways, for reasons I’ll explain soon, but to prevent this from getting too long...

Hunter Stone - Justice Valerian Isolde - Strength Arno Buenaventura - Temperance Carter Wroden - Prudence

The first thing to know about them, is that Hunter and Valerian (Vale) were originally meant to be the same character. Likewise, Arno, though not created with Vale in mind, was put into my personal cast of OCs with the intention of him “replacing” Vale for stories where Vale isn’t really appropriate. Likewise, Carter was created as a “replacement” of sorts for Arno.

All of them grew in their own ways and developed into distinct characters, but it’s important to note that the framework of their characters, esp. Hunter/Vale and Arno/Carter are essentially the same, and based around my original concept for Hunter, who is actually my very first OC.

Now, I didn’t design them to fit so nicely into the four cardinal virtues. In fact, the reference to the virtues is something that only arose very recently, as I was looking into adding Carter and Arno into my Persona daydream story and stumbled across references to the virtues by chance as I was trying to assign arcana to them.

But this isn’t a spotlight of the characters themselves, but rather how they’re related, and for that we’ll have to go all the way back to my very first OC ever, Hunter Stone.

Hunter is, for all intents and purposes, retired as a character. I haven’t seriously worked with him in many, many years, yet he’s almost constantly on my mind because Arno and Carter, both characters I work extensively with today, are so closely connected with him.

He was my favorite OC for a long time, and my primary best friend and sometimes love interest character in my daydream stories at the time (yes, I romance my OCs in those daydream stories and yes, I’m only admitting to that because that is one of the threads tying these characters together.) until the time I decided to make an original story.

That story was a fantasy novel, and ultimately a tragedy. It’s pretty much abandoned now, though I’d like to use that world for a story at some point, but the creation of that fantasy world is where things got... slightly out of hand.

Now, I should note that a large portion of the magic system used in that fantasy world actually comes directly from my development of how psychic powers work in the Pokemon world (where Hunter is from - kindly don’t remind me that middle-school me thought making an OC child of Steven Stone and Wallace for my cringy grimdark Pokemon story was a good idea. He’s keeping the name, though.) and thus a lot of the framework for how certain things work came from that world as well. Including some characters.

That said, there’s a bit more background we need before getting into that original story. And that, my friends, is Wizard101. I promise you I am completely honest when I say this, and you can trust me because if it wasn’t true there is no way in hell I’d ever admit to this, but “Valerian” is actually the name of my Wizard101 main. I once made a half-baked attempt at a Wizard101 fanfic, and my love for Hunter meant I wanted him in the story, but I decided to use “Valerian” as his name instead to nod to my actual in-game character. For both our sakes, I won’t elaborate any more than that and continue into the original story.

The original story started, at first, in media res with Hunter and some other OCs and their problem, and helping them out is this team of adventurers who were, in hindsight, basically there to babysit the main cast. I actually wrote a lot for that story - most of it, in fact - but eventually decided to change it entirely and set the story two years prior, focusing on that previously mentioned band of babysitters and how they came to be.

But I love Hunter, and couldn’t stand to let him go, so Valerian Isolde comes in to take his place. Vale is probably the single character of mine that has changed the most throughout his development - he actually was in the original script of the story as one of the babysitters, not to mention the other changes from when he was a copy of Hunter as a Wizard101 OC - and that would be much more appropriate for a spotlight of his own, but suffice it to say I ended up with a story with Vale and Hunter both, and them different enough that it honestly doesn’t feel weird even today.

(Needless to say, with my mind so much in that original universe, Vale occupied a lot of my daydreams. He was my primary companion character, often bringing him into fandom universes, though it always felt off to try to romance him, and to an extent even have him around, because of his canon romance and other ties in his native story.)

Enter Arno. Arno Malik Buenaventura is a character I created in tandem with one of my friends as we were traveling to and from university. Long car-rides and shared fandoms, two writers stuck in the car together, there’s only one logical conclusion.

He and his twin sister, Elizabeth, were created for a shared story we worked on. It never developed into anything, really, and to be honest I never really felt right for a while after that using either of them, as they aren’t technically “mine” so I used Arno as a background character for a while. If I needed a name in a fic, just some random schoolgoer who’s mentioned, that kind of thing, I’d use Arno.

I ended up getting more comfortable with him and using him more freely - he’s one of the featured OCs in my ML Twin AU, actually - though I still don’t use Elizabeth much if at all. That’s the reason she doesn’t appear in that story despite being mentioned several times, and being his literal twin - I just kind of feel like she’s more my friend’s OC than my own.

Anyway, I fell in love with Arno, and since, for a while, I was nervous to use him as a character proper due to his origin, he ended up becoming a character that appeared often in my daydream stories - the ones I don’t write, which are usually self-insert just for my own entertainment.

But I ran into another snag like with Vale. Arno didn’t have a love interest at the time, but I was getting older and it started to feel weird to me to play out imaginary romances with imaginary boyfriends in my daydream stories only to turn around and have him as a perfectly ordinary character in my actual written ones.

The solution was simple: make an OC cast reserved for self-insert daydream stories. “Their” stories, their native stories, would include me, or rather my self-insert character based on me. So, I did. Thus, Carter was born. To this day, Carter is my “imaginary boyfriend” and because of that is probably one of the most heavily featured OCs I have in terms of number of universes they appear in - he’s just in my daydream versions of those universes rather than the ones I use for actual stories.

The rest of his crew, some of which are mentioned in the one fic I’ve written that includes him, including his “love interest” Avery Graham who is, in truth, my self-insert character (though not, technically, meant to be me), are also part of my “Daydream Cast” which follow me around and appear as-needed in my daydream stories so I can avoid awkward situations with characters who are supposed to have very clearly defined stories not ruined by me running around in their backyards, so to speak. I don’t always care about that, but sometimes it doesn’t feel right.

Anyway, that’s  the summary of the four who were supposed to be one but somehow separated into four completely distinct characters. I know I didn’t really describe what makes them similar and different in this spotlight, but their character analyses are much more appropriate for individual spotlights and this one has already gone on long enough, I think.

Interestingly, though, despite the fact that you can roughly categorize them as old (Hunter/Valerian) and modern (Arno/Carter) they actually match up in personality more closely in the pairs of Hunter/Carter and Vale/Arno, though in the first case that’s somewhat by design and in the latter is because that’s one of my favorite archetypes of characters. Hunter/Carter are also the most similar in design of them all with Vale being a huge outlier design-wise.

That’s enough for now, though. I’ve leave this here before I add on another whole essay about these four.