#which is why i cant bring myself to abandon that concept altogether but it's hard to make it work ._. i can't just mesh the two concepts

[mercuryislove]

Which of your characters did you create first? Is that character significantly different now compared to when you first created them?

okay i wrote this at like 3am last night when i couldn't sleep and it makes absolutely no sense but i figured if there was anyone on this earth that would appreciate it, it might be you lol

It's kind of funny you should ask this because the last few days I've been reading the stuff I was writing when I first picked it back up this time last year and like. shit's changed a lot lol

Of like. the stuff I'm writing now uh TECHNICALLY Yixing came first because when I was first toying with the idea of running a dnd campaign of my own, I started coming up with some npcs just to like. get some inspiration I guess? (I'm pretty sure I've talked about this before...) So I didn't really have any ideas about a setting or a plot or anything but I had two very specific characters, and one of them was like. a classic drifter/outlaw type character. And his two defining features were that he had really long black hair and was covered head to toe in tattoos. And uh. Only one of those stuck lol (though in my dnd campaign he still does have the tats! And they are plot relevant lol) OH also it stands to say that in my campaign Yixing is a MONK WITH A GUN because he was originally a gunslinger but I didn't really like any of the way the gunslinger homebrew options worked, and a lot of them were basically monk adjacent so I turned him into a monk and made his fucking monastic weapon a GUN.

Also the other npc I made was a really bonkers woman that lives in the woods and thinks the world is about to end at any moment and is extremely magically adept and eats a whole lot of shrooms lmao. idk if she'll actually show up in the campaign but she has a character sheet ready just in case

anyway. Yes Yixing is WAY different. He still has the yeehaw flair but he was originally intended to be shady and self-serving and standoffish and the kind of person who will play all sides but still find a way to come out on top. (he is still like that in my campaign..... he's like a quadruple agent lmao SPOILER for my dnd campaign that nobody cares about: he CLAIMS to be working for Anwei but he's actually working for Ciaran who knows he's also working for Anwei but he's actually double-crossing them both AND someone else that he's working for because he has his own side hustle and honestly he may or may not end up being the actual Big Bad of the campaign. I don't know yet. I hope my sister isn't reading this lol) anyway again, in the context of my novel he's now only a little bit self-serving and he will probably complain if he's super inconvenienced by helping out other people but he's still going to do it. He's a GOOD PERSON and even though I still have an extremely detailed outline of the idea I had where the plot is basically the same but he's a real shithead instead, I can't bring myself to really entertain the idea because I like him being nice. :( the whole point is that he's been through hell and back and has had a really shitty life but still finds a way to be kind and to see the good in people in spite of it all!!!! I get like. really passionate about this. Like truly agonizing about it to no one but myself. I'm the one writing the damn thing I can do whatever I want so why do I care so much about an alternate reality where Yixing is a real bastard??? I do not know.

ANYWAY AGAIN. (now here is where we really lose the thread of the original question lol) This all goes back to dnd lol because as someone that is a hard atheist, it's like. tough for me to get into the whole uhhh god thing in fantasy settings (but in this case I'm talking dnd). Like they EXIST FOR REAL in the context of the game so when your cleric or paladin prays, someone is really listening. And I was like... hm. What if I want to write a campaign where they just aren't there? (and some of my friends said I couldn't because that's breaking the rules which is stupid.. I do what I want!!!) Or that they had otherwise abandoned humanity? So then because I played final fantasy x too much in my formative years, I had the idea of “what if the gods got really fucking mad about people forsaking religion and punished them?” which turned into “what if the gods just DIED suddenly and the world fell apart in the wake?” which turned into “what if the gods realized they sucked at their jobs and that humanity was unintentionally destroying itself so they made a pact to start over but when they tried to do just that, they accidentally killed themselves?” and that is........... mostly the so-called lore now (but there is definitely more but I can't say at this time because spoilers lol) uh. I forgot where I was going with this. OH. How the characters changed. WELL. Anwei has probably changed the least lol. She is still kind of mean and weird and thinks of herself and the others like her as Far Superior to everyone else, but she's no longer downright evil. At one point she was intended to be the villain!!! but I changed my mind because I love fellow mean lesbians so much. Also it was kind of uhh. low stakes with her as a villain/antagonist. She's a little shady and definitely still very manipulative and she gets mean when jealous but not like in her first iterations.... she does still sort of try to get yixing killed though lmao

Oh also Ciaran was the last of the three that I came up with lol which is funny considering he's like. such a big deal. The only reason he exists at all is because I wanted to come up with a real Corruption Arc kind of Guy because I am a big fan of those. Also I wanted the Big Bad in my campaign to be related somehow to the Big Good. And like. what better way to do that than siblings! And then I needed a way to make my Very Cool New npc connected to both of them somehow to make the whole uhhh revolver ocelot style mind games work so I sat down and was like. well. time to tell a tragic love story lol. soooooooooo uh Thank you dnd for inspiring me to write a trilogy of novels because I wanted to do a SINGLE basic worldbuilding exercise for my dnd campaign (that even now has only had uh. four sessions ever) while I was sad and lonely last summer.

I totally went off the rails with this question and I am sorry for that :( also I could write a thousand essays about how much I love Yixing and also how many versions of him there are in my mind lol he's like that one oc that everyone has that they find a way to put in everything always. he is my alternate universe oc. very versatile