#gtkmo: fwc: original

[bardic-tales]

7.3.24: GTKMO: Issue # 2: Seraphine

Welcome to the second issue of Get to Know My OC, focusing on the original content part of Fantasy Worlds Collide. I decided to focus his issue on Seraphine, the biological mother to Bianca Moore.

As I explained in the last issue of GTKMO, I wanted to give Bianca to resemble the ‘blood of the ancients’ line that Sephiroth said in Final Fantasy 7. For Bianca, Blood of the Ancients meant celestial parenting. Both of her parents were archangels before her father’s own fall from Grace. Her mother, a watcher, is an archangel who was sent to the mortal realms to watch over mortals and keep the balance of all realms.

Seraphine’s name is not really that complicated. When I rewrote Bianca Moore’s biography, I named her Seraphine because of her being a seraphim race. I had a much harder time of deciding a name for her that called out to me and said ‘hold up, NL. That’s her name’.

For my angels, I try to keep them sounding like biblical counterparts, but this didn’t exactly work for Seraphine. At least, for me, it didn’t. One name that she went by was Uriel before I changed that angel’s role in my AU. I still had the problem where no biblical name sounded right when I was naming this character.

It wasn’t until I added different combinations of letters to seraphim until I came across the combination of Seraphine. I don’t know exactly what jumped out about it, but I thought it was perfect and a wonderful fit for the self-sacrificing angel who has guided Bianca through all of her life as a living conscious, as some sort of angelic Jimmy Cricket.

For more Get to Know My OC answers centered on Fantasy Worlds Collide, please see the tag gtkmo: fwc.

[bardic-tales]

6.29.24: GTTKMO: Issue #1: Azrakiel.

I figured I would bring this back to this blog. I really found this exercise to be really helpful to get into the heads of my characters. For the first issue of this, I will explore the fallen angel Azrakiel.

Introduce your OC. What is their name? Do they have a full name?

When I first developed Bianca over twenty-seven years ago, I never considered her a fallen angel (or Nephilim, since the primordial demons are angels who sided with Lucifer in the Heavenly war.) Last year, I developed her more and since she was originally Final Fantasy 7 OC, Sephiroth’s words about the blood of ancients kept rolling through my mind, forcing me to have to redesign some basic information in her backstory completely, as I wanted to connect her history to have some type of ‘blood of ancients’. Thus, I developed her father to become a commander of the original Heavenly War.

As such, I needed to come up with a name for this mystery man who was the antagonist of every piece I wrote for the Fantasy Worlds Collide Multiverse. I looked at some names associated with angels: Adriel, Azrael, Gabriel, Michael, and Uriel. I knew I wanted something that would flow and have the name end in -iel.

I brainstormed a few names. Each one had that same ending: -iel. Only one of them really stood out to me and leapt off the page at me. Azrakiel. Azrakiel has no meaning outside of Fantasy Worlds Collide, as it was only a made-up name. In the Multiverse, Azrakiel is commonly known as the ‘angel of balance’, as he belongs to the group of Watcher Archangels, just like Arakiel. He and his comrade, Seraphine, would often receive assignments to monitor different areas of the Multiverse and intervene only when the delicate balance of Creation was at risk.

Once I was writing the timeline for the second age of Fantasy Worlds Collide, I knew I wanted Azrakiel to become one demon that I knew actually knew about. And while Bianca was originally a Final Fantasy 7 OC, I wanted to make expand on her. Around 2016-17, I gave her her own original story and make it exist in something that I called the Lydia verse: a loose collection of novellas and novels that were to loosely connect together. The genres that I planned to feature spanned everything from Romantic Suspense to Gothic Horror. I have since scrapped that idea, but not the work I put into creating my angelic and demonic realms. I still have notebooks filled with crude drawings and lore written in the margins.

Inside of the world of Fantasy Worlds Collide, Azrakiel’s motivation is to surpass Lucifer and the Creator Deity. I have come up with a prophecy that foretold a being that has a duality. This person will be the one who will bring the entire Multiverse to heel. Azrakiel saw this as his opportunity to be all knowing, all seeing, and all powerful. Since the prophecy I created centered on the birth of an individual, I narrowed down the demon who he would eventually embody: Asmodeus. This has now become his demonic name.

For more Get to Know My OC answers centered on Fantasy Worlds Collide, please see the tag gtkmo: fwc.