Seen lots of these... and though i havent read them much at all, i figured it'd entertain me a bit.

Edit: added Aurora, thanks to inx
Edit2: added Terror.
Edit3: added Rakanishu.
Edit4: added Kinetos.
Edit5: by popular request, added the Camel.
Edit6: added the Crypt Queens

Write out the names of your characters and explain:

1) how you thought of their name
2) what made you create the character in the first place
3) how the character has changed over time (if they have changed)
4) any random fun fact about that character



The Nameless One [link]
1) god... you should be asking me how I Couldn't think of his name. Naming my characters has always been my bane, and its for that sole reason that I DON'T want to have kids... because my wife will nag me and my child will curse me til my dying day if that woman doesnt give up and name it on her own.
so yeah, eventually after about 30 different attempts, I realized that He was supposed to be mysterious, and that the nature of his existence was to be unknown. The rest is history.

I don't think my future wife will accept this title for my first born.
2) every story needed a main villain (this was around 6th grade junior high time he was first conceived). After realising just how straight forward i was thinking, i overhauled my entire story idea, making him a chaotic neutral force, which would play both the good and bad side. of course, you might have an idea about which side he eventually commits to.
3) didn't change much once i finally felt satisfied. all of that mumbo jumbo happened in the initial stages of creation.
4. The Nameless One was originally a stereotypical cloaked samurai guy, and was also originally supposed to be some sort of epic killer. he still is, but now he actually has a reason for it. not to mention i totally changed his armor to be not japanese. Since the story revolved around the wide diversity of warriors on a global scale, it didnt feel right to have just japanese influences represented. the pure japanese influence design went to another character. which as of yet hasnt participated in any OCT. he has been drawn once vaguely though, though i dont think anyone will remember who, or when.



Vince [link]
1) named him after a certain someone. that was a big mistake considering he's mainly seen in the SDL scene, and thus, exists in feudal japan. but the name was decided long ago
2) i needed a main character. and Vince, being the wacky, vaguely unpredictable one, was always the perfect guy to start the story off with.
3) lots of design ideas were actually transfered from Vince to my other characters, because Vince, from the start, has always been the packrat character. He was the one that always carried the random assortment of seemingly useless items until he used them in combination. although i didnt know it at the time, he pretty much would've been the macguyver of the story. When I brought him into the SDL, I wanted to try and implement this, but his starting design stuck with him the entire time.
4) Vince was never originally going to be a practitioner of Drunken style fighting. His alcohol he currently carried was originally simply his way of earning money (and its counter productive to drink and burn your alcohol rather than sell it). However, he was originally a beginner fire manipulator, and the non-magic requirements of the SDL had me make slight changes to the details to accommodate.



Andrew [link]
1) named after one of my best friends back in junior high. i moved out of the area before going into high school so i felt it was proper to immortalize him in a way. since he was also a rough and tumble kind of guy, i reflected that in his character appearance as well. he was always proud of his norse background.
2) In the SDL, Andrew was supposed to act as Vince's makeshift guardian... given how the story and Vince's winstreak has progressed, it appears Andrew really has lost that purpose, which means some time in the near future, i should be changing his priorities a bit to make him focus his attention on someone else.
That guardianship carried over from Andrew's original purpose of creation.
3) at first, he started out as simply a strong arm. the guy who threw his weight around to get things done. it was only a year or two later that he developed into a spiked tank, when i saw the item 'Demonspike coat' in the game 'Diablo'. that item stuck in my head for a few days and i remember wracking my brain wondering how to implement this god awesome idea onto someone. (the item didnt really look all to spectacular in game, but the 'demonspike' part really invoked some impressive mental images. naturally, the spikes went overboard, and i loved it. the outfits changed alot over time, but the spikes have stayed ever since.
4) Andrew's weapon, the Sunshard claymore, was actually originally designed by the man himself. the basic idea was that it had to be big, and extra blades had to flare out of the base of the hilt. i implemented the split idea, a little over 2 years after i had last seen him. It's still going through revisions as I'm still not satisfied with its design.



Aurora [link]
1) Well i finally got the hang of names a little bit at this point. Aurora is the name of the roman goddess of the morning, and the name complimented Andrew's name and Sunshard claymore weapon. on the otherhand, it contrasts with her weapon, the Lunar crescent, and both the sun and the moon reside out of reach of man (a play on her fighting style, and her supporting role of Andrew in both love and war)
2) Based on the background story, Andrew hails from the Gemini Clan with his blood brother Kinetos. While there is a blood relation, Gemini warriors are also reassigned a brother of war, and fight as a pair. The tradition keeps the clan bonded together, and both blood and war holds all the members of the clan together. Because Andrew is, in a sense, definable as a stereotypical tank fighter, Aurora's style was crafted to attack over, around, and through the opportunities that Andrew opens when he rushes in. (you try keeping track of that bitch when Andrew's half a foot away trying to tear your face off)
3) Aurora was actually a more recent creation. Andrew was originally paired with Kinetos, but because Kinetos paired up with Rakanishu, it really made him seem like a third leg. Kinetos was already a tank, next in line to lead the clan (older and stronger than andrew already), and already in posession of demonic support, so nothing stood out about that combination. Andrew wouldnt be the kind of guy to stick around for that kind of minor role. After realising that, Aurora was created to fill that void. Back in the early high school days, i played around with a SHIT-TON of ideas.... im ashamed to say i looked way too hard at the Final Fantasy stereotype classes for inspiration... none of them worked. the only thing that didnt change was that she was to be his moral, emotional, and combat support, and somehow work well on her own.

Eventually, i threw Andrew into the SDL and i revisited her designs (thank the gods, i never would've come up with her current look a year prior). i got way more creative with playing with underlying themes and meanings, and complex weapon functions to throw in with her. her habit of keeping opponents at a distance evolved from the necessity to preserve the structural integrity of aforementioned complex weapons, and the look crafted to match Andrew's outfit.
4) Aurora's first designs were redesigns of FF's White mages. i absolutely ABHOR the fact that i even tried that for this character.



Terror [link]
1) Terror's name is pretty straight forward. I wanted to make a character that would be the absolute Worst possible matchup for them to receive. Terror was the result of that brainstorming.
2) see number 1.

seriously though, he was actually 'created' more specifically for the SDL than for my own story, but that in itself is only a partial truth. by that i mean, the concept existed long before, but the physical design was completely new. Terror was originally one of the Demons Nameless would eventually run up against. Although Nameless hunts Lucifer and blames him for the horrors of his past, Terror played a part in carrying out these crimes. Demon form wise, he was a physically untouchable spectre that preyed on the human emotions, and controlled the physical forms of his slain enemies. In the SDL, these traits were conveyed with his obscenely thick armor and his habit of mounting dead bodies on the spikes of his armor (god dammit, you'd think that i'd actually draw a walking abomination of dead bodies some day instead of his freakishly detailed armor...).
3) well... going from epic demonic spectre to giant armor clad cannibalistic human says enough.
4) In the SDL Terror hails from the same clan as Andrew and Aurora, he just went through all sorts of twisted brainfuckery somewhere early on and everyone hates him there now. originally in his demon days, The dark brethren (corrupted humans and human-like species) opened a way for him to enter earthes realm through territories controlled by the Gemini clan. Needless to say, the Gemini's and the Dark brethren have never gotten along since then.

another fun fact. terrors name was inspired by that old classic game you all know im so infatuated with. there i said it.



Rakanishu [link] (look for the one with the horns)
1) Rakanishu's name was directly lifted from a minor unique monster in (you guessed it) Diablo 2. At the time, it was a decision to pay homage to the game because i absolutely loved it.
2) Rakanishu is the key defining force that participates in the War between heaven and hell on earth. what sets him apart from the other demons is that, in addition to your usual godly demonic fire-based powers, he alone is capable of using both demonic, and angelic energy, individually, and intandem with each other. He retains his belief in the Old demon ways, which competes with the new ways that Lucifer rules by. (In a nutshell, the old way dictates ceremonial killing to maintain demon-life, whereas the new way dictates complete and total dominion over all life forms.)

Rakanishu was created to be a counter against Lucifer, who was born from heaven, and gained control over demonic energies, which in turn lead him to institute heavens practice of total and complete order, onto the demonic legion.
3) Rakanishu's look has never, and still isnt, up to par with my expectations. im still trying to figure out ways to properly define his form and function, but now im trying to break away from the mold created by the Diablo game, and trying to find new ways for him to manifest. because of how he treats his physical form anyways (and the fact that he is almost always a spiritual entity) its quite possible to say he has never actually got redesigned, just 'evolved'. i do have to say that the muscles were added only right before i introduced him to the OCT's with Nameless.
4) Theres plenty of odd stuff about rakanishu online in my previous work, but something new would be that originally, i tried to have him clad completely in demonic armor and weapons he created on his own. Long ago when i was writing up the story, he was supposed to be a hellish version of a blacksmith. Over time, i moved away from that idea, because it really didnt seem to me that the giant demons would really invest in armor when their thick skin is already so impregnable by most standards. And if you're that huge and you're up against something just as badass as you, then frankly, that armor isnt going to last anyways. The weapons crafting part of his background still stuck around though.



Kinetos (see above link for the guy with the epic arm plating)
1) i have no clue how i came up with this guys name... it was loosely based on some suggestions, web searches for names, and mixing and matching syllables. seriously, i dont think its even a legitimate name. it just sounded cool at the time D:
2) Since Nameless was originally created to be a hugely powerful villain character, i needed someone to be an equal force for the good side. Vince was already around, but from the start, he had no chance taking him on (even though i wanted him to eventually grow in strength and inteligence to reach such a point). Andrew followed shortly after, but even then, it didnt seem like a battle i could envision. while i was drawing up andrew, a few different outfits and weapon designs were pushed off into the 'save for later' pile that i really liked, but had no plans for yet. and most importantly of all, i knew from the start that Rakanishu's soul was split into two, and someone else needed to wield it (but he wasnt called Rakanishu at the time).all of those things came together to create Kinetos. His role was eventually decided to prevent nameless from wrecking too much havok on the territories he controlled as leader of the gemini's.
3) once the aforementioned story overhaul was started, and Nameless's role changed, there was no longer any need to have an overly powerful guardian figure watching over everything. he got temporarilly demoted to 'next in line' for leadership, with his and andrew's father holding the current title, and his armor reduced quite a bit (trust me... all my OP characters at the start had TONS of impractical armor). somehow during all this, i had never actually figured out how he was actually going to maintain possession of rakanishu's spirit without any magic training, and i was never satisfied with his weapons (always trying to figure out ways to make them bigger or more badass). it all got solved in one fell swoop when i drew rakanishu's head skewered by a sword for the hell of it... thats when it dawned on me. enchanted weaponry why the hell not?!

that look stuck, except now i had an overly complex design on a weapon that needed to be drawn repeatedly. by this time, i was just whipping out idea after idea for magic effects, and actually tried thinking of making the sword invisible (insert shame here). i settled for shape shifting to make my life easier without being a total lameass (as much as that decision was based on lazyness, that really opened up some creative avenues for the possibilities kinetos had for using his weapon).
4) Right before i went crazy on 10 ton armor suits, Kinetos was actually going to be the crazy ass legendary mofo that ran into battle barechested dual wielding weapons each bigger than he was.

...

the idea stuck around alot longer than i think should've been expected. thank god i didnt know how to draw a proper human body at the time.



Camel [link]
1) really, there is no epic story to this one. i called it as it was, and named the camel, well... 'Camel'
2) The reason i drew up the camel, was purely for the chance to have a random ass character to fight with in the OCT circuit. sure theres the mindblowingly epic confrontation with satan and the 4 corners of hell to win immunity from punishment for indirectly causing mass waves of cranial explosions across the internet, but that story really doesnt even need to be glossed over.
3) camel's design didnt change much, if at all, from the initial drawing i made for him. in fact, the very first drawing of Camel was included in the reference sheet. go figure.
4) i dont know if any of you know this yet or not, but camel actually has the mind blowing ability to spit camel loogies at speeds that can knock a man unconscious. badass aint it?



The Crypt Queens [link]
1) Forgive me if this seems rather idiotic of me, but because of the combined factors of: A. this being a collab piece based on a DAChat joke session. B. never actually doing anything with these characters. and C. not actually being satisfied with the design anymore... i can't for the life of me, remember either of their original names. just goes to show how they rank in my mental library. i've always called them red and blue though (for obvious reasons), but the names me and my partner *vampireking agreed on were both confusing for me to say to begin with.

regardless of all that, the title 'crypt queens' is based on their tendencies to consume the dead (in the same manner Terror does, only a bit more sexy. They were also the two first female characters for the Dark Brethren team so they got some recognition for that.
2) it all started and ended with some retarded banter between *vampireking and I... these two literally were born from the exchange of a bunch of jokes. i cant really say there was more than that.
3) This render was the first and only rendition of them that appeared before they were posted. and they haven't changed since then.
4) The original point behind them (for me atleast) was to spam a whole bunch of macabre/lesbian jokes during their fights, and have an excuse for drawing mildly erotic poses. i never did any duels with them though, so i cant say that was a success yet.

Thats all i feel like doing at the moment, any other characters of mine you wanna know about?