#oc: theodonalus

[ruthlesslistener]

4, 9, and 14 for Theodonalus

And 6, 22, and 24 for Takhanobou!

And not from the Ask Game but how did you come up with their names? I think they’re really cool and unique!

Theodonalus:

4. What is something that they’re secretly good at? Do they have a hidden talent, such as being a brilliant kazoo player or a master chess wizard?

-Theo is an amazing singer! The Queynï are one of the few dragons who are capable of true song, and are famous for immortalizing history, folklore, and tales they pick up on their migration paths into long ballads. Theo pretty much never sings, since he's a self-selected outcast from his tribe, but his voice is exceptionally compelling and his storytelling immaculate. His relationship with his voice is somewhat conflicted, as it was his only feature that made the rest of his tribe pay a lick of attention to him other than considering him a pitiful dead-spirited dragon, but that particular gripe faded with time, and later legends came to claim that his voice had an ethereal, spellbinding quality to it.

9. Tell me your favorite moment with your OC. (Either that you wrote or drew.)

-Haven't written it yet, but it has to be when Theo goes claw-to-fang with Verada, Takhanobou's adoptive mother. To lure her into a blind rage, he mutilated the corpse of one of her new hatchlings (that died from neglect, but she was unaware of this fact), then spat the body out at her and mocked her, which enraged her so much that she locked her focus onto him, allowing Takhanobou the opening to leap onto her back and snap her neck

wait fuck, i forgot i doodled it

14. Does your OC have any superstitions? Good luck rituals? Do they believe in and/or practice the arcane arts?

-Dragons aren't really religious; they believe themselves to be the most powerful form of life at their apex, which means no gods for them. They do, however, have a very keen sense of the cycle between life and death, and believe that when they die, the creatures that feed on their corpse will take their life essence, and who they were will become one with the land, a belief that's pretty much exactly in line with how magic works in their world. Theo is more connected to this natural pulseline than most, but he never consciously tapped into it, nor was as reverent about it as the rest of his kin (when you grow up with everyone expecting you to die, and then viewing you as spiritually dead because you are incapable of flight, the first most important thing to your tribe, then you tend to not care as much about death as the rest of them, apart from being very determined not to meet it).

Takhanobou:

16. How organized is your OC? Do they like to have a place for everything and everything in its place, or do they live inside a tornado of chaos and mayhem?

-Taki is actually pretty damn neat, to the point where it would be considered obsessive-compulsive in our world. Part of this is because Verada wanted him to remain as scentless and pristine as possible (the better for him to look like an idealistic killing machine for her cause), but it's also just because he's naturally an orderly dragon who likes his living space to be clean. He is far more diligent about dragging old bones and meat out of the den than Theodonalus, and when they finally settle in a place that allows for a courtship-hoard to be accumulated, he makes sure that its always neatly arranged and carefully placed in an area that makes it easy to defend- anything less will make him anxious. The sole exception to this rule is during or after battles, where he will stalk around with blood crusted all over him and his wounds still seeping blood, a display done with the sole purpose of scaring the everloving shit out of any other dragons in the nearby vicinity.

22. If your OC were a real person, would you be friends with them? Why or why not?

-Lmao hell to the fuck no. All my ocs are my property to arrange and mutilate as I wish. All my enjoyment of characters in general comes entirely from the fact that they are fictional narrative tools. I do not want my life to intersect with my own.

that being said i do have a self insert in my own universe (two actually, bc i am god) who is khazari, and i am half the size of taki at his adult age. if i got into a fight with him- and i would- he would fucking kill me. no thank you.

24. What is your OC’s favorite food? Can they cook it? Where do they get their food? (And most importantly, do you feed your OCs enough? Don’t forget to throw them a meal once in a while.)

-Taki's favorite food is gazelle, as I said! And no, he cannot cook it, though this is not his fault in the slightest. He either eats it raw, or he devours it in the manner that all fire dragons, which is burned to cinders on the outside and raw as fuck on the inside. Sometimes half raw half charred, depending on if he chose to kill it with fangs and talons or with flame. He hunts all of his own food, though Theo does half of the hunting after they become mates, and pretty much only starts eating enough/healthily after he's exiled from the Isles. Part of this is because there was a famine going on in that part of the world, and part of it was that Verada was forcing him to hunt on his own instead of collaboratively with her and the rest of his nestlings, which sharpened his wits and killing skill at the expense of gurenteed meals. I mean, he probably got more nutrition in him than his 'siblings'- eating a variety of small prey compared to the macrofauna that his tribe normally eats means he got more of a range of food in him during harsh times- but it still wasn't enough. The Shurya-Khazhar also don't know how to fish, as they are an inland locale of fire dragons whose large, bulky frames are more suited for taking down large prey, so Theo teaching him how to fish also helped quite a bit.

(Interestingly, spineback boar is his least favorite type of meat, despite it being favored prey of the Khazari. This becomes less surprising when one realizes that Verada only fed him spineback when he failed his hunts, which means that he associated its taste heavily with failure and her cold disapproval.)

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As for how I named them- I honestly cannot remember in the slightest, because I made them waaaay back in 2013. I just remember that 'Theodonalus' was meant to dance on the tongue while 'Takhanobou' was meant to be pronounced with a harsh growl. I can say, however, that Theo's name roughly translates to 'ghost wind rising' (aka 'soon to be dead'), while Takhanobou was named after the massive volcano that the Khazari believe the first of their kin to have risen from, and very roughly means 'cleansing destruction, fire of creation', though linguistic drift and fracture of the tribe into different subregions has caused some issues with translation

[ruthlesslistener]

Motion, Canvas, and Bling for Theodonalus!

motion: How does your OC move? How does their clothing help or hinder their range of motion? Are they flexible, coordinated, clumsy?

-Theo moves like if you crossed a greyhound with a ferret, and is extremely flexible and agile to boot! The Queynï are built like a blend of storks, sighthounds, and cheetahs, but since Theo has underdeveloped wings, he doesn't have the same muscle distribution that the rest of his very flight-based tribe tends to obtain, so he's far more agile on land than the rest of them. That sense of coordination is important, too- nests are built high on mountainsides, often in small nooks on sheer cliffs, where its assumed that even newly-hatched drachlings would be able to glide to safety if they fell. Theo didn't have that (part of the reason why he was treated as basically already being dead from hatching), so if he was any less coordinated, then he'd be long gone. Luckily for him, Queynï claws are sharply hooked and built for being able to cling to pretty much any surface, but he's also just a pretty nimble fellow to begin with

canvas: Does your OC have any scars, piercings, tattoos, or other markings? Do they display or cover them up at all?

-Theo has a lot of scars, and he pays little to no attention to them, as most were obtained from either stealing prey from other carnivores or from defending his meals from scavengers. The only ones he's bitter about are the ones on his throat, where some of his own clanmates attempted to tear it out 'for his own good', but he isn't ashamed of them at all. They just inspire him to live out of spite even more than he already was doing

bling: What jewelry does your OC wear? Does it have any meaning?

-Alas, Theo is nakey. Dragons both queensborn and not always collected precious stones as a means of impressing their mates- pretty rocks or objects are hard to spot on the wing, and even harder to defend, so the dragon with the most shinies is the one who's got the keenest eye and is the best at hiding/protecting their nest- but it's not until bonds between the human refugees crossing from the Sea of Storms and willing members of the Queynï were fully established that draconic jewelry began to become a thing, as a means for rider, craftsman, and dragon to show off their status and skill. Theodonalus was the dragon who extended the olive branch to humankind (as he is a curious fellow and was fascinated by these complex, clever-pawed monkeys), but he never took a human rider, and the full establishment of the dragonriders and their culture happened centuries after his death

Oc ask game

[ruthlesslistener]

11. Tell me a random useless fact about your OC. (the dragon on your profile pic)

That's my boy Takhanobou! Oldest oc I have, and also my specialist little boy even though I'm sure he still counts as an edgy motherfucker. I keep getting told that he's basically dragon Zuko despite me never watching ATLA

There's probably many useless facts I can say about him, but the first that popped into my head is that gazelle is his favorite food. It's a prey item that's far too small for him and generally unsatisfying, but the reason why its so special is because a gazelle was the first prey item he ate that was gifted to him by another dragon. Sharing or gifting prey is always a very special ritual among any of the Queensborne dragons, but it is an extremely intimate one for the clan he is from, the Shurya-Khazhar (the tribe that lives the closest to the active volcanoes upon which the fire dragons make their home). Prey tends to vary from small animals that make very poor meals to macrofauna that requires a family group to take down, and he was hatched during a global cooling event that lead to mass starvation among his clan, under the wing of a dragoness who forced him to hunt by himself as soon as he was old enough to manage it to 'toughen him up'. Additionally, after a drastic misinterpretation of social cues lead to him killing a hatchmate in a duel that was forbidden by tribal rules, his attempt at offering an apology by way of food to the dragoness who reared him ended with a violent rejection (specifically her nearly tearing his throat out in fury).

So Theodonalus (a disabled member of the Queyni, a tribe half the size of the Khazari) killing a gazelle buck and dragging it all the way back to him in order to establish peace wasn't just a big show of goodwill, it was also the first time that he was ever invited to share a meal side-by-side with another dragon. And since the Khazari are at once an extremely social and extremely resource-defensive, territorial tribe, being treated to kindness and respect for the first time in his life pretty much knocked him directly from his 'I will kill you the second your back is turned because nobody can be trusted and I was born to kill' to

OC ask game

[ruthlesslistener]

Quick doodle of my boy Theo that I never posted

[ruthlesslistener]

For the emoji OC meme: 🥞🍩👑 for Taki, 🖍️🚆🌩️ for Theo, 💥🎂☀️ for Leysha

Personal OCs:

🥞 PANCAKE - what is their comfort breakfast?

-Takhanobou never really had a comfort breakfast until Theo came along! Verada forced him to hunt for himself as soon as he was old enough to learn how to pounce, as a way of honing his killing skills asap. In a way, this saved him a lot of awkward blunders when learning to hunt, as the firetouched are not very good at working with other dragons (firetouched dragons are a Whole Deal but tdlr theyd be marked as autistic if they were human), but it ended up with him considering the first hunting-meal of the day to be the most tedious. This changed when Theodonalus started to bring him gazelle, fish, gerabali, and any other things that he managed to catch if he woke up before Takhanobou did, so now his favorite breakfast is whatever Theo brings to him, even though the dragons of Shuya-Khazhar are not typically fisheaters

🍩 DONUT - favourite sweet treat?

-Spineback boar bone marrow for sure, though really bone marrow from any hefty herbivorous animal will also work. Spineback boar is just special because its one of the hardest prey items for the Khazari to kill. The boars were favored because they are considerably larger than the sows (which are elephant sized to begin with), and thus would feed a full queen's harem with little effort, but they require a harem full of experienced hunters to kill, as the technique to split a boar from his sows and reach his throat or underbelly without being gored by his tusks or the porcupine-like spines on his back. Verada had no harem by the time her last clutch hatched, so getting a hold of a spineback boar carcass was usually a great stroke of luck when scavenging around for food. To his exile, Takhanobou never tasted the flesh when fresh, or dined on spilt organs, but the bones he managed to fly away with when young would take many long joyeous hours to break open and feed on away from Verada's nest.

👑 CROWN - what does your oc want to be remembered as? why?

-Oooh, that's a tough one. When he was young, Taki wanted nothing more than to become the terrifying warrior-killer that his mother wanted him to be, but after his exile and meeting Theo, those priorities shifted. Part of this is because he was no longer chasing desperately after Verada's pride, but its also because Theo was able to show him that being a ruthless killing machine was not any way for him to live, and that he was instead fulfilled by caring for a mate and controlling a plot of land that he saw as his- living like a dragon, not the hyperdangerous, all-devouring beast of flame that Verada believed him to be. If he was to be remembered as anything other than the Rogue Fire Dragon, then I'd say he'd still want to be remembered as a warrior who was never felled in battle- but a warrior that bowed not to a Queen of Queens, rather than the shadowclaw killer his mother tried to shape him into.

🖍️ CRAYON - what advice would you give to them?

-Me? Give Theodonalus advice? I would have an easier time speaking to a brick wall, because the brick wall at least wouldn't snap back. Theo got his life where he wanted it by putting his claws down and going 'no, fuck you, I will not listen to what you have to say to me- I shall find my own path, or die trying', he would take any offer of advice with suspicion, if not outright contempt. And that's an entirely valid concern- he spent his entire life being told that he was barely a dragon for being born without usable wings, and that it would be better for him to die than to live on as a ghost. You either internalize that and waste away, or you spit in the face of others and forge your own path, which was the choice that Theo decided to make. He wouldn't listen to me.

If there was a way, though, then I'd tell him that he needs to work on letting things go. He left his homeland as soon as he was strong enough to do so, and claimed that he did not need the rest of his tribe, but the Queyní are the most social of the queensborne dragons, and he secretly suffers from a lot of bitterness at being forsaken. Sometimes, proving oneself does not need to be a battle to the very end, it just needs you to let go.

🚆 TRAIN - what is their answer to the trolley problem?

-Destroy the trolley. Honestly, he wouldn't see the point of answering such a stupid question when that seems like the most logical answer to him. Then again, he's a dragon, so even if he's a runt of the smallest queensborne species, pushing a trolley car off the tracks would not be implausible for him. He's roughly the same size, and it wouldn't take too much force for it to tip.

🌩️ LIGHTNING - are they scared of lightning?

-Lol, nope! Wind Territory is primarily composed of high mountains, great valleys, sweeping plains on plateus, and sheer cliffs dropping down to the ocean on the southern side. He was a southern baby, born at the foothills of one of the roosting-mountains near the start of the plains, so thunderstorms and other violent weather was pretty common. If he didn't curl his tail over his head to sleep through it, he would be using the dark skies and thunder as a means of sneaking up on prey that would normally spot his bright white hide from a mile away. Dragons usually don't hunt during thunderstorms, and the Queyní never hunt from the ground, so all the prey on the plateau would be more occupied with looking out for other predators, making for some easy catches

Fandom OCs (Elden Ring):

💥 COLLISON - what emotions do they have trouble dealing with?

-Grief, and that particular brand of helpless anger that comes when you watch someone be harmed or killed for no reason whatsoever. Leysha was young when her country was invaded by a neighboring warlord, so she went from being a farmer's '''son''' to a teenager conscripted into the army right quick. She saw the horrors that the warlord imposed to break her people's spirits firsthand, and then experienced them herself when the Grace presented itself right when she was about to be discharged on the account of forming a marriage bond with one of her squadmates. In her homeland, to be Tarnished is to be seen as at once blessed and cursed, and those unlucky ones chosen by Queen Marika have their foreheads branded with the sigil of the Erdtree before being sent off to the Lands Between, never to be allowed passage back unless they become Elden Lord. She's had quite enough of grief and helplessness, which is the very reason why she set off on the momentous task to shatter the Golden Order and remake it anew, with like, 100% less atrocities and crusader bullshit involved

🎂 BIRTHDAY CAKE - when is their birthday? do they like celebrating it?

-Oh man I never even considered birthday dates. Well, I don't know if the Lands Between follows our calender, but Leysha's birthday would fall somewhere around March 16-17 if so. And yes, she very much enjoys celebrating it- when you've been at war all your life, every year that comes is a blessing. She's very happy that she's managed to make it to her 40's, thank you very much, and while being Tarnished/consort to a demigod + in possession of shards of the Elden Ring often remove some effects of age/slows the progression of time to a near crawl, she still intends to continue celebrating her birthdays in the future

☀️ SUN - are they a morning person? what is the first thing they do in the morning?

-She's a morning person by habit, but enjoys the opportunity to stay in bed if it presents itself (and outright rejects the concept of being productive if Morgott is in rut). Once she wakes up, her first instinct is always to check on Aeluk, before going on to ensure that the rest of the household is secure, and that the guards are at their posts before heading down to breakfast. She was in the army for 20 years, and while she despises the military lifestyle and wants nothing more than to have a family of her own in peace, old habits die hard. Plus, she spent the first 15 years of her life waking up at the crack of dawn with her parents to check on the livestock, so its practically scarred into her mind anyways.

(Oh yeah, Aeluk is an omen baby that she found in the Shunning-Grounds when she and Morgott were still in an extremely shaky stalemate. She found him as a newborn, took him in as her own, and slaughtered every watcher and Omenkiller that she found on the way out. He's a pretty hardy kid, but he's got a cleft lip, and her needing to get him his milk by blindfolding a wet nurse and standing in the room with her greatswords drawn sparked a bit of paranoia about his health and safety. That she eventually ended up marrying Morgott and working hard on stamping out the stigma of the Omen 'curse' doesn't mean that she's any less worried about her little one getting killed.)

[ruthlesslistener]

'how tall is Takhanobou in comparison to Theodonalus'

yes.

[ruthlesslistener]

why are the only good pictures i've ever drawn of theodonalus that actually look like how i imagine him in the notes of all my most boring classes

[ruthlesslistener]

what’s up everyone it’s angry gay weasel time

[ruthlesslistener]

hey tumblr vibecheck my original writing

[ruthlesslistener]

Why not TWO dragons in sweaters? 

14. Doing something they don’t normally do- Theodonalus, relaxing/being vulnerable

19. Wearing a funny hat- Takhanobou, being shamed for his crimes (attempted murder again, probably)

(click for high res)