Women in Fandom (or OCs Can Be Strong Too)
Okay, so there's been another fandom kerfluffle, inspired by this secret over on fandom_secrets. Miss Cam, HonorH, and my head-twin TigerKat have all made comment on this. So now it is my turn.
I'm going to go a bit differently from what they've done - I'm actually going to focus on female OCs that I have created. A lot of these come from Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Dresden Files, just to warn you.
So, without further ado, here they are.
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Yui is one of the characters I play the most, along with her twin brother Kouji and their older brother Ichiro. Unlike her brothers, however, Yui is often considered the average sibling - she has no bending ability, and doesn't have Ichiro's strength or Kouji's genius. What she does have is a penchant for lock-picking and a love for her brothers that supercedes almost everything else in her life. Yui (and by extent Kouji) is younger than many of the characters I play, being about ten years old as of the beginning of the show, but between everything going on, that generally doesn't matter. She has grown up keeping a heavy secret: that her twin brother Kouji is an earthbender. This is made all the more imperative because the three of them labour under the belief that if anyone were to find out, Kouji would be murdered.
Yui is both a fic character and a role-playing character. In the variant stories she has been in, she has: broken into an enemy stronghold and sabotaged as many war balloons as she could find; helped her twin brother break a broken little boy and a broken Prince Zuko out of a slave-barracks from the inside; captured a member of the Avatar's entourage for her adoptive lord-father; broken into an army base to free her older brother from captivity; broken her older brother out of jail (Ichiro is not well-liked by soldiers), and many other things -- all before age twelve. She is a feisty girl who will not wait around for the adults to come and rescue her.
One overarching theme with Yui as she grows older is her blatant sexuality - she loves sex, and she isn't ashamed of that fact. From the age of fourteen or fifteen (it can vary), she gives in to that sexuality, making time with soldiers, warriors, fighters, guardsmen - people that she feels deserve some measure of morale-boosting for having such dangerous jobs. She chooses her partners, refuses money, uses a weapon to say 'no' for them as can't get the hint, uses anti-fertility herbs, makes her partners wear protection, and sees a doctor on a weekly basis to make sure she hasn't caught anything. Another theme is her protectiveness - she can be very mothering, and may the gods help you if you hurt anyone she loves.
Jae is a character I haven't really done much with, but she does exist as sort of a counterpoint to my Fire trio, who often wind up siding against their homeland. Jae is an Earth Kingdom girl from a village that for several years was run by "soldiers" who, under the guise of protecting the town from the Fire Nation, terrorised and bullied the residents. However, when the Fire Nation finally arrived, those men fled, leaving nobody to defend the town. Only twelve years old, Jae found a weapon and went to meet the enemy. Rather than mocking or cutting down the little girl who could barely hold up her sword, they indulged her, giving her a lighter weapon and letting her fight for her village. When she lost, they treated her wounds and brought her home, then set about claiming the village in the name of the Firelord.
That incident showed Jae that the Fire Nation was more honourable than the Earth Kingdom, and she took to following the soldiers around. They took a shine to the child and made a mascot of her, teaching her to use a bow and arrow and telling her about the Fire Nation. By the time they moved on some years later, Jae came with them, still full of the fire that would drive her to fight for the enemies of her people.
Jīn Shí's story occurs 600 to 1000 years after the events of the TV series. It's been on hiatus for a time, but hopefully will eventually be picked up again. Shí, when we meet her, has already had a rough time of it - she lost her family when the (batshit insane) Avatar destroyed her hometown and was one of the few survivors of the incident. Rather than fall apart then, she went out and joined a militia unit to help pay off her hospital bills, and built a new family with them - a family that was destroyed by two of the Avatar's lieutenants not five years after her home town was destroyed.
Shí, however, still did not break. Within days of the attack she discovered that she was one of the five chosen (by "you're here! great, you're Chosen.") to take on and defeat the Avatar, a charge she gladly accepted so she could avenge both her lost families. She winds up taking a co-leadership position with one of the other Chosen Five and plays the position of gunman for the group, often ending in battle against her counterpart among the Avatar's men - a former general of the Earth Kingdom.
While not afraid to die in the process of taking down the Avatar, Shí strives to live so she can protect the others and help rebuild the cities the Avatar has destroyed when everything is over.
The Dresden Files: The White War
Loren DelGreco is a rather interesting persona. The alternate universe version of a White Court vampire known only as Gidget in the main Dresdenverse (Fool's Gold RPG), Loren here is a wizard, part of my Florida Crew and a much bigger character. In her backstory, she went to the same high school as a number of other dangerous people who ended up on both sides of the war, and in fact ended up on the opposite side of her high school sweetheart, Hadian Laremos. Hadian was an outspoken young wizard who disappeared his senior year of high school; Loren vanished soon after he did, having discovered that they had not been careful enough and that she was pregnant. On making it to a different city, Loren aborted the child and enlisted in the Merlin's Fire, the foot soldiers of the Magi's Alliance, where she was eventually shunted to the twenty-sixth squad, known colloquially as Themis' Dogs.
Themis' Dogs are a lawkeeping unit, where Loren's skills as a thaumaturgist (tracking by wizardry) were immensely valuable and led to many a capture. Unfortunately, the captain of her unit was a relative idiot, and eventually his carelessness led directly to the death of one of his subordinates and the ambush of his lieutenant, Lot Abdulmanji and Loren. It was here that Loren discovered that her old sweetheart had gone to the rebellion - he was liaised with this particular group of rebels and had somehow gotten his hands on a threefold spirit animal. While holding a shield against the rebels, Hadian, and the spirit animal, Loren devised a way to sever Hadian's control over the spirit and send it back; while Lot did the actual magic, Loren gave him all of her magic to accomplish it and had to be treated for severe overextension later.
This incident brought both Lot and Loren to the attention of the Merlin; while Lot was promoted to Captain of Themis' Dogs, Loren was transferred out of the Fire entirely and to the Wardens - the commandos of the Alliance - making her one of very few women to achieve this rank since the end of the second world war. Loren was set the task afterwards of using her tracking magic to find out where the rebel's secret base was hidden - and very nearly succeeded in her task. She was within a few miles of the base when she was met by a former Warden, Donald Morgan, and taken prisoner, where she still remains.
Mercy Sinclair is that lowest of lows within the world of the White War - a mortal girl born into slavery. Little is known of her childhood because she doesn't talk about it, but when she was young she was given to a man named Ricardo Sanchez as a birthday present from one of his friends. At the time she had no name, and was referred to as either chica or gatita by those around her. Despite this lack of an identity and the abuses of her master, she retained enough strength of heart to shelter and hide a mortal man from the wizards around her - a man named John Marcone, who gave her the name 'Mercy' for her kindness to him.
Nearly two years after this, Mercy was taken from her owner by the former Warden Morgan along with a baby mortal named Ashlynn, and found herself playing the role of mother to the many children Morgan rescued. She held the small family together even through a troll attack, and remains the only one who can keep the triplets - three unrelated boys, two mortal, one wizard - under control. When she was fourteen, Mercy came to the attention of the recently-promoted Warden Theo Henslow and was taken captive by him; though Lionel quickly freed her from him, Henslow developed an obsessive love for the redheaded mortal that would push him to invade her dreams and drive her from the rebel stronghold two years later in order to protect everyone there.
While in the rebel strongold, Arx Extremus, Mercy has become as known a face as any of the rebel leaders, not as a fighter, but by using her past experience as a slave to care for the dying apple trees and causing them to thrive where no one else could.
The Dresden Files (TVverse)
Monica Opkirk had kind of a shitty first six years of life before being taken from her mother and placed in foster care. Luckily for her, her foster mother was one of the good ones, and even after a move to Alaska, Monica was much happier with her than with her biological mother. Monica is a devout Christian, but a fairly liberal one - she believes that all religions are valid and that the various gods are aspects of the Judeo-Christian God. She is quiet in her beliefs, chosing to worship God in private rather than in a church and to live her life the way she thinks God and Jesus intend her to do so. When she was in her early teens, she came across the recently-orphaned Corbin Sunstealer under a bridge and took him home with her; soon after, her foster mother was granted custody of the older boy.
Monica knows and accepts that her brother is both pagan and a wizard; she loves and supports him as best she can, and helped him to escape the sorceror who originally made Corbin his apprentice. Everything took a turn for the crazy after that - the sorceror was plotting to, you guessed it, take over the world. (M Bison: "Of course!") Corbin, having allied himself with a ronin, forbade Monica from participating, and she agreed readily enough - these were powers she didn't understand and didn't want to go against. Unfortunately for her, it was quickly realised that she was Corbin's biggest weakness, and for over a year, it was only the insistence of one of the sorceror's minions that protected her.
During the battles against the sorceror, Monica would patch up Corbin and Chantelle after their fights, stand firm against Chien the weredingo, and prevent the healer Rafael Thompson from committing suicide. When at last the sorceror finally managed to get his hands on Monica, she defied him and kept her fear from him until Corbin and Chantelle - and, surprisingly enough, Rafael - came to rescue her. During that final fight, the sorceror succeeded in transforming Corbin into a raven; Monica rescued the bird and fled with him despite the death-spell the sorceror threw at her - it had rebounded off of her as if off a shield.
Monica was Favoured, under the protection of God.
With her transformed brother, she fled Alaska and made it all the way to Chicago, where she sought out Warden Morgan despite repeated warnings from Corbin, Chantelle, and Rafael that the Wardens were not to be trusted. She pleased with the Warden and convinced him to help fix her brother; when that was done, Morgan left her in the care of Harry Dresden.
Monica's story doesn't end there, but this has already gotten too long. :D
So, yeah. My characters. If you've got any comment, please feel free to leave one; I'm leaving this one unlocked. I may do a follow-up with Chantelle, Mama Abdulmanji, and OCs from other fandoms. For now, I'm done. :D
I'm going to go a bit differently from what they've done - I'm actually going to focus on female OCs that I have created. A lot of these come from Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Dresden Files, just to warn you.
So, without further ado, here they are.
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Yui is one of the characters I play the most, along with her twin brother Kouji and their older brother Ichiro. Unlike her brothers, however, Yui is often considered the average sibling - she has no bending ability, and doesn't have Ichiro's strength or Kouji's genius. What she does have is a penchant for lock-picking and a love for her brothers that supercedes almost everything else in her life. Yui (and by extent Kouji) is younger than many of the characters I play, being about ten years old as of the beginning of the show, but between everything going on, that generally doesn't matter. She has grown up keeping a heavy secret: that her twin brother Kouji is an earthbender. This is made all the more imperative because the three of them labour under the belief that if anyone were to find out, Kouji would be murdered.
Yui is both a fic character and a role-playing character. In the variant stories she has been in, she has: broken into an enemy stronghold and sabotaged as many war balloons as she could find; helped her twin brother break a broken little boy and a broken Prince Zuko out of a slave-barracks from the inside; captured a member of the Avatar's entourage for her adoptive lord-father; broken into an army base to free her older brother from captivity; broken her older brother out of jail (Ichiro is not well-liked by soldiers), and many other things -- all before age twelve. She is a feisty girl who will not wait around for the adults to come and rescue her.
One overarching theme with Yui as she grows older is her blatant sexuality - she loves sex, and she isn't ashamed of that fact. From the age of fourteen or fifteen (it can vary), she gives in to that sexuality, making time with soldiers, warriors, fighters, guardsmen - people that she feels deserve some measure of morale-boosting for having such dangerous jobs. She chooses her partners, refuses money, uses a weapon to say 'no' for them as can't get the hint, uses anti-fertility herbs, makes her partners wear protection, and sees a doctor on a weekly basis to make sure she hasn't caught anything. Another theme is her protectiveness - she can be very mothering, and may the gods help you if you hurt anyone she loves.
Jae is a character I haven't really done much with, but she does exist as sort of a counterpoint to my Fire trio, who often wind up siding against their homeland. Jae is an Earth Kingdom girl from a village that for several years was run by "soldiers" who, under the guise of protecting the town from the Fire Nation, terrorised and bullied the residents. However, when the Fire Nation finally arrived, those men fled, leaving nobody to defend the town. Only twelve years old, Jae found a weapon and went to meet the enemy. Rather than mocking or cutting down the little girl who could barely hold up her sword, they indulged her, giving her a lighter weapon and letting her fight for her village. When she lost, they treated her wounds and brought her home, then set about claiming the village in the name of the Firelord.
That incident showed Jae that the Fire Nation was more honourable than the Earth Kingdom, and she took to following the soldiers around. They took a shine to the child and made a mascot of her, teaching her to use a bow and arrow and telling her about the Fire Nation. By the time they moved on some years later, Jae came with them, still full of the fire that would drive her to fight for the enemies of her people.
Jīn Shí's story occurs 600 to 1000 years after the events of the TV series. It's been on hiatus for a time, but hopefully will eventually be picked up again. Shí, when we meet her, has already had a rough time of it - she lost her family when the (batshit insane) Avatar destroyed her hometown and was one of the few survivors of the incident. Rather than fall apart then, she went out and joined a militia unit to help pay off her hospital bills, and built a new family with them - a family that was destroyed by two of the Avatar's lieutenants not five years after her home town was destroyed.
Shí, however, still did not break. Within days of the attack she discovered that she was one of the five chosen (by "you're here! great, you're Chosen.") to take on and defeat the Avatar, a charge she gladly accepted so she could avenge both her lost families. She winds up taking a co-leadership position with one of the other Chosen Five and plays the position of gunman for the group, often ending in battle against her counterpart among the Avatar's men - a former general of the Earth Kingdom.
While not afraid to die in the process of taking down the Avatar, Shí strives to live so she can protect the others and help rebuild the cities the Avatar has destroyed when everything is over.
The Dresden Files: The White War
Loren DelGreco is a rather interesting persona. The alternate universe version of a White Court vampire known only as Gidget in the main Dresdenverse (Fool's Gold RPG), Loren here is a wizard, part of my Florida Crew and a much bigger character. In her backstory, she went to the same high school as a number of other dangerous people who ended up on both sides of the war, and in fact ended up on the opposite side of her high school sweetheart, Hadian Laremos. Hadian was an outspoken young wizard who disappeared his senior year of high school; Loren vanished soon after he did, having discovered that they had not been careful enough and that she was pregnant. On making it to a different city, Loren aborted the child and enlisted in the Merlin's Fire, the foot soldiers of the Magi's Alliance, where she was eventually shunted to the twenty-sixth squad, known colloquially as Themis' Dogs.
Themis' Dogs are a lawkeeping unit, where Loren's skills as a thaumaturgist (tracking by wizardry) were immensely valuable and led to many a capture. Unfortunately, the captain of her unit was a relative idiot, and eventually his carelessness led directly to the death of one of his subordinates and the ambush of his lieutenant, Lot Abdulmanji and Loren. It was here that Loren discovered that her old sweetheart had gone to the rebellion - he was liaised with this particular group of rebels and had somehow gotten his hands on a threefold spirit animal. While holding a shield against the rebels, Hadian, and the spirit animal, Loren devised a way to sever Hadian's control over the spirit and send it back; while Lot did the actual magic, Loren gave him all of her magic to accomplish it and had to be treated for severe overextension later.
This incident brought both Lot and Loren to the attention of the Merlin; while Lot was promoted to Captain of Themis' Dogs, Loren was transferred out of the Fire entirely and to the Wardens - the commandos of the Alliance - making her one of very few women to achieve this rank since the end of the second world war. Loren was set the task afterwards of using her tracking magic to find out where the rebel's secret base was hidden - and very nearly succeeded in her task. She was within a few miles of the base when she was met by a former Warden, Donald Morgan, and taken prisoner, where she still remains.
Mercy Sinclair is that lowest of lows within the world of the White War - a mortal girl born into slavery. Little is known of her childhood because she doesn't talk about it, but when she was young she was given to a man named Ricardo Sanchez as a birthday present from one of his friends. At the time she had no name, and was referred to as either chica or gatita by those around her. Despite this lack of an identity and the abuses of her master, she retained enough strength of heart to shelter and hide a mortal man from the wizards around her - a man named John Marcone, who gave her the name 'Mercy' for her kindness to him.
Nearly two years after this, Mercy was taken from her owner by the former Warden Morgan along with a baby mortal named Ashlynn, and found herself playing the role of mother to the many children Morgan rescued. She held the small family together even through a troll attack, and remains the only one who can keep the triplets - three unrelated boys, two mortal, one wizard - under control. When she was fourteen, Mercy came to the attention of the recently-promoted Warden Theo Henslow and was taken captive by him; though Lionel quickly freed her from him, Henslow developed an obsessive love for the redheaded mortal that would push him to invade her dreams and drive her from the rebel stronghold two years later in order to protect everyone there.
While in the rebel strongold, Arx Extremus, Mercy has become as known a face as any of the rebel leaders, not as a fighter, but by using her past experience as a slave to care for the dying apple trees and causing them to thrive where no one else could.
The Dresden Files (TVverse)
Monica Opkirk had kind of a shitty first six years of life before being taken from her mother and placed in foster care. Luckily for her, her foster mother was one of the good ones, and even after a move to Alaska, Monica was much happier with her than with her biological mother. Monica is a devout Christian, but a fairly liberal one - she believes that all religions are valid and that the various gods are aspects of the Judeo-Christian God. She is quiet in her beliefs, chosing to worship God in private rather than in a church and to live her life the way she thinks God and Jesus intend her to do so. When she was in her early teens, she came across the recently-orphaned Corbin Sunstealer under a bridge and took him home with her; soon after, her foster mother was granted custody of the older boy.
Monica knows and accepts that her brother is both pagan and a wizard; she loves and supports him as best she can, and helped him to escape the sorceror who originally made Corbin his apprentice. Everything took a turn for the crazy after that - the sorceror was plotting to, you guessed it, take over the world. (M Bison: "Of course!") Corbin, having allied himself with a ronin, forbade Monica from participating, and she agreed readily enough - these were powers she didn't understand and didn't want to go against. Unfortunately for her, it was quickly realised that she was Corbin's biggest weakness, and for over a year, it was only the insistence of one of the sorceror's minions that protected her.
During the battles against the sorceror, Monica would patch up Corbin and Chantelle after their fights, stand firm against Chien the weredingo, and prevent the healer Rafael Thompson from committing suicide. When at last the sorceror finally managed to get his hands on Monica, she defied him and kept her fear from him until Corbin and Chantelle - and, surprisingly enough, Rafael - came to rescue her. During that final fight, the sorceror succeeded in transforming Corbin into a raven; Monica rescued the bird and fled with him despite the death-spell the sorceror threw at her - it had rebounded off of her as if off a shield.
Monica was Favoured, under the protection of God.
With her transformed brother, she fled Alaska and made it all the way to Chicago, where she sought out Warden Morgan despite repeated warnings from Corbin, Chantelle, and Rafael that the Wardens were not to be trusted. She pleased with the Warden and convinced him to help fix her brother; when that was done, Morgan left her in the care of Harry Dresden.
Monica's story doesn't end there, but this has already gotten too long. :D
So, yeah. My characters. If you've got any comment, please feel free to leave one; I'm leaving this one unlocked. I may do a follow-up with Chantelle, Mama Abdulmanji, and OCs from other fandoms. For now, I'm done. :D