Character Evolution!

How did you character become what they are? As in, the history of their development on the storyboard, not their in-universe history.

• Josieph Sandlot
  • Started off as a rip-off of the Beetle Juice Sand Worm
  • I shrunk him down and gave him a companion (see below)
  • Gave him a wife who was a butterfly
  • A friend drew him smaller with disembodied hands and feet...and a Nice Hat
  • Dropped the butterfly as a wife and made Trinity his girlfriend
  • Made Trinity his wife
  • I gave him his humanoid form when too many people asked how he and a humanoid wife managed to conceive a child

• Trinity Sandlot
  • Inspired by an advertisement for a video on the history of nuclear I made Trinity in the likeness of Josieph only feminine and with radioactive blood
  • Dropped the radio active blood idea
  • Humanized
  • Married her to Josieph
  • Made her the president of a painting business
  • Gave her and Josieph a child named Kathirynn

I knew I wasn't the only one with complex and somewhat cofusing evolutionary histories for ther characters. Speaking of which, Zaran is probably the best example of mine. Her evolution is also closely related to the evolution of Forgotten Lore in it's entirity.

• Started out with an earmly version of what would become the premise of Forgotten Lore, starring three guys living as roommates and a girl living in the apartment next door (all losely based on people I know). In one story idea the characters accidentally summon a demon. The demon is male and is evil but very ineffectul.
• I decide the demon would have potential as a character and think of some other plot ideas involving him. He also got named, as Jeff the Demon. On of the stories was going to involve his girlfriend, who looked very much like what Zaran would come to look like, exept she was evil and actually competent at being evil.
• I retooled the setting for the first time, changing the place the story was set in, and dropping one of the three guys since he never really did anything.
• I retooled the setting for the second time. For some reason I decided to reduce the amount of characters further, combining the girl and the demon into a demon girl. She got named Zaran and didn't have much in common with Jeff at all, having inherited the personality of the girl character, with some traits exagerrated (and since the girl character was based on a real person, I occasionally say that Zaran is partly based on a real person).
• I think of a backstory for Zaran, which also causes her personality to develop further. At the same time the premise of the comic also changes a bit for unrelated reasons. Rather annoyingly, my most developed character now feels somewhat like [1].
• Since I don't have the skill needed to draw my vision of Forgotten Lore, and I still want to do somethign with the character, I create the Zaran il Legio comic (starring Zaran). A demon whose appearance is based on my original demon character (though with a different outfit and some changes to fit in with my more recent demons), tentatively named Legionnaire Jeff, makes and appearance there.

Oh this will be fun, dredge up old forms from how they used to be long long ago.

Mathias Watkins:

• Used to be an unashamedly similar ripoff of Heero Yuy right on down to the same hair style. This was 10 years ago when the very first flits of an idea for doing this sprang into being.
• Used to be much more stoic, almost never Hot-Blooded if even showing emotion at all.
• Basically until about 4 years ago was a So Bad Its Horrible Marty Stu of a character who had less depth than a Flat Character.
• Fun Fact: earlier iterations of Endless Conflict had Mat named as the incredibly generic name "Tom Jones". I hated it, I still hate it and I will never reference this part intentionally.

Evolutions since then:

• Gained a much more Hot-Blooded personality.
• In addition a very loving and protective relationship with his sister Samantha (who originally wasn't there).
• Gained a scar on the left cheek (incident in question is written down in early chapters)
• Gained a Red Oni and With Friends Like These... relationship with Tenchi.
• Re-named to who he is today.

Tenchi Yamanaka:

• Used to be much more background-y, almost just a filler person.
• Little more than an egregious, gratuitous "friend" for Mat.
• Had a sister that was going to be part of an esoteric tragic event. (Good thing I dumped that.)
• Very little in the way or personality in stark contrast to the With Friends Like These... and Blue Oni relationship he has presently with Mat.

Evolutions since then:

• Ditched the sister concept.
• Made him much more cool and collected and disciplined.
• Gained the Blue Oni relationship with Mat alongside With Friends Like These....
• A much more active role in the story.
• Gained the loyalty aspect. (Tenchi is a true friend despite the fights)

Colonel Barry Smith:

• Originally an Expy of Sergeant Major Avery Johnson. Long since abandoned the Expy feel into a much more original and fleshed out character.

Evolutions since then:

• Lost his left eye. (Covered with eyepatch.)
• Got a very boisterous and fun personality.
• Got much bigger in size. (Originally he was more normal, now he's a tall, well-built guy with more strength than an ox figuratively speaking.)
• Took on a much more leadership oriented role in relation to the story. (Commanding officer type)
• Basically abandoned the Sgt. Johnson Expy crap.

edited 7th Jan '11 5:01:26 PM by MajorTom

Well, this is odd. I can pretty well trace all of my characters back to a motivation or inspiration for making them in the first place...except one. I know that his name was originally Ben, and that he's a philosophically conflicted mook/dragon (in-universe promotion) and he's one of the most visually consistant characters I have (I never stopped mid-sentence and had to ask 'wait, what color is this guy's hair, anyway?') but I can't at all remember when I figured all of this out.

One of my characters, Hilda Bingham, used to be an annoying Spock clone/Mary Sue. Now, she's much more of an Absent-Minded Professor, who sometimes seems like a Cloud Cuckoolander to those who don't know her well. And, she provides Comic Relief by being the ridiculously physically weak sidekick of someone with Super-Strength, but makes up for it by being the Gadgeteer Genius.

The character of mine that has changed the most is an rp-character. She’s gone through some huge changes, but that makes sense considering I’ve used her for more than six years.

When I first created her I was a huge newbie, so of course she started out as a huge Mary Sue: Redhead, Mismatched Eyes, dead parents, abusive foster parent/uncle ect. She ran away from home at the age of ten, lived with wild foxes before becoming a thief and thirteen-year-old alcoholic. She spent most of her time hiding the horrible, horrible pain of her fate and/or sitting in a corner. Had the magical abilities to control plans and talk to animals, and her biggest weakness was being nervous around boys her age (ugh).

A lot of refining later, her hair is brown rather than red, eyes still mismatched, but in a way that can occur naturally. She still lived with her uncle, but he wasn’t abusive, and she left home at a later age. Still an alcoholic, but instead of wangsty teenage girl, she is arrogant, selfish and won’t admit how dependant she is of her best friends. She’s protective of them, but also extremely possessive. I removed the animal speaking ability, and left her with a power to control the earth/ground/dirt, but barely able to control it. She is also completely asexual.

She still needs some work, I think, but it's better than the first version.

Oh boy. One of my characters, Ace Bloodsword, was originally developed for comic books I drew when I was 10, so you can see where this is going.

Originally:

• Ace is a 12-year old warrior with a suspicious resemblance to the author who randomly finds a sword in the ocean and decides to fighthis friends who are possessed by darkness and a long-haired pretty boy with a massive sword who was originally a dragon, but it turns out everyone is being controlled by a dark god and his four elemental spirit servants.
• Ace is drawn with a sleeveless T-shirt(explicitly designed to be similar to Cloud's outfit, a cape, and long bangs covering his right eye, which holds a bizarre Millenium Eye-like object originally designed to give him the ability to see things that the plot was never fleshed out enough to include.
• Ace has some sort of Dark and Troubled Past that is alluded to, but never described in great detail.

For his second adventure, Spirits Unleashed, I was a year older, and decided to Retcon a few things about Ace:

• Ace was re-aged to 14 and randomly got a second sword, both of which were retconned into katana-style weapons.
• Ace gained the ability to summon the powers of the defeated elemental spirits in a Mons-style battles.

I later decided to reboot the whole thing when I got to high school after taking a break from the character for a while.

• Ace is 18-19 years old, and starts the story as a conscript soldier working with his best friend/future love interest Action Girl, with whom he(much later) has a baby daughter.
• The story's magic system is refined so that every single intelligent lifeform in the setting can cast magic of their innate attribute, with attributes being inspired partially by the innate system of ChronoCross. I officially designate Ace as an innate Dark-magic user, which generally grants him the ability to transform his body into shadows, attack with fire-like blasts of darkness, absorb light-energy from projectile magic, and leech vitality from the target. Summons are gone.
• He does not obtain his signature Cool Sword until partially through the series, and must first win a Battle in the Center of the Mind to obtain it, which is now a dark sword.
• Ace ditches the long bangs for an eyepatch, and instead of a sleeveless shirt, wears a T-shirt style garment. His weird eye is revealed to be a highly-refined chunk of Dark Matter which allows him to learn certain enemy skills and be able to read the pattern of enemy magics.
• Goes from being super gung-ho and unshakable in his first incarnation to more reserved and cautious, and initially far less confident in himself. He has a significant period of self-doubt particularly when his baby daughter is born and he nearly gets his entire family slaughtered by the Big Bad's assassins.

edited 8th Jan '11 4:56:42 AM by AcesoldierZero

Let me try!

Sir Raphael Moriarty:

• Evolution begins when I was fifteen.
• Started as a persona I made up while snarking at a friend and his brother playing Splinter Cell in co-op. I pretended to be their mission control, a British guy name Raphael Loki.
• After I left the friend's house, I contemplated making up a story about a team of secret agents led by this Raphael character, who was a closet supervillain manipulating his agents into helping his evil plans.
• The team switched from America to Britain. At this point, I, fresh from watching lots of Yes Minister, wanted to have the Prime Minister be a major character.
• After my first real exposure to Sherlock Holmes, I changed Raphael's last name to Moriarty and knighted him. I changed his name because I read somewhere that Moriarty was one of the first fictional examples of a supervillain, and I loved this idea. I implied that my Moriarty is a descendant of Conan Doyle's character as a one-off gag. The circumstances behind the knighthood were officially designated as a Noodle Incident, an idea that remains to this day.
• The secret agents enter the private sector, and names and roles are given to the team members. Continuing on the 'descendant' theme from Moriarty, all the team members are intended to be related to an existing public domain character. After my newfound interest in conspiracy theory, they now fight the Illuminati, aliens, and other weirdness. Moriarty is no longer a supervillain, but now an antihero. Unfortunately, Moriarty becomes a Marty Stu in this iteration, always being right about everything, getting laid quite a lot, and getting, in addition to his British heritage, French and Japanese ancestry too (as those were my favourite countries at the time). By this point, Moriarty has become everything I wanted to be.
• Reality ensues. I realize how Sue-ish Moriarty has become and decide to use his character as a form of self-parody/deconstruction/exploration. I begin playing with my own fantasy, exploring how utterly screwed up someone would be in his position.
• The French and Japanese ancestry vanishes, and is never spoken of again. Moriarty's manipulative nature is taken up to eleven, and he becomes a deceitful Machiavellian Knight Templar, playing other people as pawns in his own grand schemes. This has made him bitter and cynical, with little empathy for those around him. His sense of humour becomes much more deadpan and understated, which in my opinion makes him funnier than he used to be.
• The story itself makes the leap from 'riddled with little references and allusions' to a full-on Massive Multiplayer Crossover. This actually turns out for the better.
• He is given a sword cane. After some consideration, I decide that he needs a concealed gun, too. This soon becomes an Exaggerated Trope, and he keeps an entire arsenal of canes, each loaded with different, specialized weaponry. One of them holds a miniaturized railgun, which I still haven't found a chance to have him use yet, but the idea is so Crazy Awesome that I'm never going to let go of it.
• Moriarty becomes asexual. While he does gain a sort of romantic interest over the course of the story, sexuality now bores him.

That's where he stands now.

Asteroid Andy

• Started at about age twelve. Started as a Spaceman Spiff ripoff, with basically the only difference being that he actually did all that imaginary stuff and he had a cool helmet. Had basically no personality and was really just there to set up jokes.
• The standard yellow spiky hair got changed to brown, and jutted out a la Mike Warner. The ship was made more saucer-like, and Andy himself became a Deadpan Snarker who made himself enemies with alarming frequency. He was aged up to teenagerhood.
• Added detailing to the suit and made it more colorful, removing another element of the Spaceman Spiff vibe. I also gave him a nose like a French fry. I think it was around here when his hair-thingy began jutting out from under his helmet.
• He crystallized as a stoic snarker, and gained an actual ability to pilot, ending the frequent crashes. I also designed the interior of the ship, making it no longer just a featureless glass bubble, and added intricate controls. These two things finally separating Andy once and for all from rip-offdom.
• Began developing Secure the Area, my massive continuity-condensing project that sought to resurrect my childhood creations and place them in a common setting. I redesigned Andy's outfit, altering the helmet and goggles—the one thing that had remained unchanged in Andy's history—by decorating it with triangles around the top to keep it from being completely featureless. For plot-constraint reasons, the ship lost it's ability to go anywhere it wanted and became heavily restricted by semi-realistic science.

edited 31st May '11 2:50:50 PM by Wackd

• Tina Tulip and Dweebie Murdock
  • Started off as a geeky girl named Tina Turnip who had her eyes on the local jock and star quarterback of the school, Kevin. She was originally slated to finally end up with local nerd, Dweebie Murdock.
  • Dweebie Murdock was original a nice person who simply teased a lot by Kevin's girlfriend, Tanya Tulip who was going to be Tina Turnip in disguise.
  • Dropped the who in disguise thing and combined the personaes of Tina and Tanya and got Tina Tulip. Which interestingly left me with a dorky girl in the position of most popular girl on campus.
  • Dweebie Murdock started to become a little meaner as my dislike of the character type grew. He was still going to end up as Tina's boyfriend.
  • Tina and Kevin are now officially a couple with local nerd stalking Tina to no end. Kevin is much nicer and the only reason Dweebie is at the bottom of the popularity chain is that he's such a Jerkass.

Alex, my current Lady of War / Broken Bird / Dark Mistress. She's come a long way... (the Big Bad made me do it).

• Originally an betrothed rebel with a nasty temper and too quick to react, who is blackmailed by the Big Bad into joining him as a vampire by holding her dead fiance's soul hostage. She and Big Bad hate eachother. Her whole family is dead.
• Ditched fiance, made her too weak; blackmailed by holding her own soul hostage. Still vampire, still hate each other, still dead family.
• Twilight rears its ugly head. She is no longer a vamp; now new convoluted soul creature. Personality becomes colder, more logical and more ruthless. Have her brother survive main slaughter and then leave after bitter dispute. No longer hates Big Bad, who now appeals to her to her 'nice side'; feels begrudging respect for him.
• Make brother more a Jerkass, main reason why she is unemotional. She more serious and indifferent verging on total stoic. Open respect for Big Bad as well as antagonism. Lots of Unresolved Sexual Tension between her and Big Bad.
• Finally: brother is still a Jerkass. She feels no extreme emotions and can hide any of the emotions she feels: doesn't bother to hide haughty, sarcasm, exasperation, or glee. She becomes Big Bad's servant for a couple of centuries while being antagonistic. She and Big Bad become lovers, with an uneasy shadow to their relationship because they know it can never last.

edited 10th Jan '11 7:15:02 PM by StolenByFaeries

As a LARP/RPG in general addict, 95% of my character started from there; they are usually my own but I've used other people's as well (with permission of course). Usually the core personality stays intact (there's a reason I wanted to use them, after all) the only change is stripping out the setting-specific details/replacing them with other explanations for the character's way of thinking.

Oh yay. I did a bit of this in the character naming thread but why not

Elliott Skylar "Skye" Stryke

• Emo Kid who kept to himself.
• Bossy older brother
• older than Gem (Jewel back then) and Rusty
• Super sekrit romance with Gem (Jewel)
• major character
• The main character of my story. A quiet reserved kid with telekinetic powers who idolizes his father and is deeply affected by an abusive older half brother. He tends to hold grudges, overprotects his little brother, and has a slightly black and white view of the world. But he gets better.

Timothy Stryke

• He, his brother and his mom were characters in Lilo And Stitch T He Series fanfiction planned series that I never got around to writing. The mom was a single parent shipped with Jumba. It was called The Weevily Disaster Timmy kind of bordered on being a Purity Stu as well as eventually a love interest for Lilo.
• adapted into other stories where he was usually the innocent one and The Woobie
• The main character in an original story. At one point had a tail due to experimentation
• the secondary character in my current story. A sweet boy with self-esteem issues due to the public perception of Empaths. He has an unfortunate habit of acting on his emotions.

Katsuya

• Timmy's evil twin Gil a pint sized pyschopath and pitch dark to Timmy's light. His hobbies included watching R-Rated movies to get ideas and kicking people (mainly his twin) with a steel toed boot.
• an ambiguous gray character
• The Toyakas' Tyke Bomb who was kidnapped and raised from an early age to fight and be an assassin. He runs away when they go too far.

Dex

• The brothers' Complete Monster Older half Brother who has no heart no conscience and likes seeing others in pain.I swear he was barely human. He had evil eyes a truckload of powers and didn't sleep because it was a waste of time.
• A serious screwed up guy with a psychotic monster mommy and a burning hatred for his father and jealousy for his half brothers.

Blade

• Dex's snivelly younger brother who would do anything to get back at Dex and ruin his life
• A Smug Snake and womanizer who above all else wanted recognition from Dex.
• A Shapeshifting Pyschopath who was a toadie and best friend to Derek, another pyschopath.
• A kid who does what his aunt tells him to to protect his family members from being disowned and killed.
• The rival of the hero who unwillingly follows his relatives' orders while fighting with himself about whether what he's doing is right and wants to protect his little sister.

Gem

• An Author Avatar / Self-Insert character who loved art and cooking and making beads . Has the ability to make magical powered jewels . Kind of a Mary Sue. Best friend to Timmy and secretly in love with his older brother
• A bit less of A Sue
• an insecure girl (with no powers) who wants to be good at things so she can feel useful. She also wishes she could become better so people will like her but eventually learns to be comfortable wit herself instead of relying on other people's opinions of her.

Derek

• evil pyschopath mastermind who has the ability to control liquids and their affects on people and make 'potions'. Wanted to bring back the black death For the Evulz
• Screwed up misanthropic sadist who was driven crazy by uncontrollable telepathy, ignored by his father and locked away by his relatives. Wants to get revenge on society for what they 'did to him' and clings to his Dark and Troubled Past to justify his crimes. Well.. he has depth now.

edited 10th Jan '11 9:08:37 PM by JewelyJ

Luthor Deschain started out as a Captain Ersatz of Kankuro from Naruto. Identical appearance, wore facepaint, used a puppet to fight. The whole nine yards. Pretty much the only thing that wasn't identical was his clothes. Once I realized that I had created a Captain Ersatz, I did a bit of reworking. I dropped the puppet (which was stupid anyway), and the facepaint (also stupid). He gained and subsequently lost an eyepatch he didn't need anyway(I'm just full of original ideas ). He gained a forehead tattoo Gaara a la mode, but it's not there just because he's an emo masochist. It's a tool to help him break illusions. And it's not some sort of meaningful tatoo that plays on his name or reputation, it's just a tatoo of his family crest.

And it's over his right eye not his left.