#Obi-Wan only ever goes to said bar to talk to Quin

[gaily-daily-musings]

If this isn't obikin at its core

[kyberled]

As an OC blog, did you have any characters in mind while creating your character you took inspiration from? (from the burntout meme)

Easy Meme for a Burnt Out Mun

Yes and no. See, I originally didn’t intend to create Braig as a character at all. In fact, he was Rodi’s idea. Way back in the day, my main blog was over at @asiifisms​. Rodi, at the time, had a bunch of muse for her Obi-Wan, @highgrcund​. We had our boys chatting in a thread, and they got on well enough, and we got to talking. Rodi suggested an AU where K/H Braig was Obi-Wan’s padawan, and, well. 

At first, he started as just an AU. But then we decided to make him younger to fit the AU, and that changed him a bit; then we got to talking about upbringing, and that changed him a bit. Then we talked about his education, and that changed him a bit. And then he started interacting with more people, and I got more into the SW lore and universe, understood more about the Order, and more and more people ended up falling in love with him and he just– Basically, a lot of things happened to change him from that AU. So I made him his own side-blog, and then his own full blog, and now, the only things that are the same are his name and I guess his scarf? And the scar he gets across his face. 

I originally considered changing his name, once I finally realised that he was nothing like my King/do/m H/eart/s boy. His new name was going to be Bréan (Pronounced BREY-on), but I never went through with it. So many people already had custom tags with his name in it, and we had so many nicknames made (Braigimus, Braiggo, Braigos, Braiglet, etc), and shipnames (Braigsoka, mainly; We could’ve made Bréba, probably, but I’m not sure it looks quite as nice as Braiba) that wouldn’t have worked, and so many reasons I never went through with it. (Sidenote: I recently started listening to the broadway OST of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Claude Frollo has a brother named Jéan, pronounced almost the exact same as Bréan, and let me tell you, that threw me for a loop.) After I decided I didn’t want to change his name, I thought to myself that I still really liked how ‘Bréan’ sounded, especially if you paired it with Braig - Braig andBréan. For a time, I debated giving Braig a Force-Sensitive identical twin brother, with whom he got up to shenanigans with, before Bré left the Order, fell to the dark, became a Sith, and one inevitably had to kill the other, because I’m awful. After that, I decided that Bré would be a non-Force-Sensitive twin of Braig who still lived with either their father or their mother. Then I made him older, since I thought that would be a fun dynamic, then I made him look less like Braig, I kept him as Braig’s moral opposite but in different ways, threw him in the exact opposite living conditions (a slum in the Outer Rim vs. the Jedi Temple on Coruscant), renamed him to Karvan, and made him Braig’s half-brother by a different father. They don’t know each other exists, and don’t have any reason to think they’re related, when/if they ever meet. 

So his name stayed the same. He loses his scarf when he’s about 16, but has it before that. His scar’s… Mostly the same, except he only has the one visible one, and his goes down past his jaw onto his neck, while KH Braig’s doesn’t, and the origins are from two very different events. But, I feel like I can’t possibly discredit the influence my trash son had on this sweet boy, and how - I’m not sure this counts - he was the inspiration for Braig in the early stages of his development. Sort of. 

A lot of Braig’s ‘mannerisms’ have been inspired by Obi-Wan: His love of tea, his penchant for proper etiquette and manners, the way he tries to straighten his appearance out and avoid looking too scruffy, and the way he strokes his chin (an invisible beard) when he’s very deep in thought. A lot of this comes from how Rodi and I wrote him as being raised largely by Obi-Dad since day one; Papa had a lot of influence on his boy, in-canon and out, so it makes sense to me that he’d pick up on things dad did. Honestly, a lot of this wasn’t intentional, but rather something that happened over the course of our writing together, so I suppose that counts. 

Braig’s hairstyle, as he gets older, was inspired by Qui-Gon, but you already know that. Rodi honest to god messaged me in the middle of a skype chat saying she’d been thinking about how Braig would look with a Qui-Bun and attached this sketch:

And I was SOLD. Absolutely, 100% sold. 

(If you can’t tell by now, whenever I say Rodi has 50% custody over Braig, it’s not as much of a joke as you’d think. He wouldn’t be who he is without her. [Neither would I, but that’s beside the point.] Hell, he wouldn’t even exist. She’s the one who even got me watching TCW in the first place.)

(Rodi probably has just as much if not more influence on this boy’s appearance than the original K/H character did.)

I don’t remember if it was my or Rodi’s idea to make him a Force-Healer; I just know it came up in a chat we were having. And I know making him a doctor changed how I envisioned him, but making him a Force-Doctor even more so. Because he had to be someone who the Force would… Choose, for lack of a better word, to be a healer. Especially once I did more reading into healing - he had to be someone who could and would focus enough, who had the patience to do the necessary meditation, and so on and so forth. So I think that had something to do with it all, too. 

He’s indigenous because some nice anon suggested it ages back, after asking me about his real-life race and me answering I hadn’t decided. (My K/H boy is latinx.) Heidi, wherever she ran off to, suggested Booboo Stewart as a faceclaim, and we all know how perfect he turned out to be. So that wasn’t really inspiration, either. It just happened.

He’s as cuddly as he is because adults showered him in affection when he was a baby and I guess nobody ever stopped. It started out just with Obi-Dad, of course, but has since spread to Shaak, Eeth, Yaddle, Mace, Depa, Quin, A’sh, and so many more. So nobody ever weaned him off the cuddle bug, so now he snuggles everyone he’s comfortable with. 

I don’t know where his love of flowers came from; I guess that just happened. I do know that he got his journal, which is now his most precious belonging, from Obidad, in another skype chat with Rodi. I know he can heal without the Force, using either ‘standard’ or herbal/natural medicines, because Cad and Hora taught him. I know he can play holochess because of Obi-Dad and Mama Ti, and cards because of Xann and the folks at Aruk’s bar, and he’s learning how to cheat at cards from Quin, because of course he is. I don’t know why he likes stars so much, but I know Obi-Wan takes him stargazing, sometimes. He likes getting his hair brushed out because Obi-Dad and Boba and Cody do it for him and it’s relaxing. He knows Vapaad because Mace decided to teach him, Tusken from A’sharad, Chaulis because of Nihrik and Reyvahl, and Mando’a from Bes’laar and Wolffe and Cody and Boba and Satine. I don’t know why he likes reading so much or why he so desperately wants to be published in the Archives, but I know Jocasta has encouraged that greatly. He likes lullabies because of Shaak and Obi, hot chocolate especially because of Shaak and also Hora, and operates under the assumption that he can get away with murder because apparently it’s true. 

To make one (1) soft boy, it takes a village, not a Batman. 

Honestly, a lot of his growth and development has come from interacting with all my partners on this blog, and I couldn’t be more thankful. You’ve all helped bring him to life and develop this intricate canon and flesh him out and just, wow.

But enough of that.

The biggest inspiration for Braig? My dojo. I’ve been training in various martial arts for fifteen-plus years now, and we’ve always been harsh on our traditionalism. We actually had the oldest living student of Yagi Meitoku visit us not so very long ago who’d been training for sixty years (Not sixty years old, he has been training for sixty years), and he said, of all the schools he’s been to, ours had the most similar energy to Meitoku Daisensei’s, so that was really cool for us; Our grandmaster of kung fu (who’s also grandmaster of the Shaolin Fist in Asia) has said that our school has kept our forms closest to the patterns/ways he first taught it decades ago, which is also really cool for a few reasons. We’re HUGE on maintaining tradition, right down to the way we take our jackets off (that’s right, you can take your jacket off wrong). It’s pretty obvious that the Jedi are heavily, HEAVILY influenced by East-Asian ideals. So I thought it only make sense that I put dojo culture into this kid. The self-imposed perfectionism over his forms and kata, the dedication he has to his tasks, the way he tries to present himself to the general public, how he handles and treats weapons, how he rarely if EVER crosses his arms, how he fixes his posture, the playfighting he does with his close friends, hell, even how he stands when idle (a loose approximation of ‘parade rest’) all comes directly from my dojo. His philosophies are MASSIVELY dojo oriented. Even the fact that he just wants to keep people safe comes from something my Hanshi told us years and years ago at a Ni Nen Keiko that really stuck with me for some reason: “The strong must serve the weak, not the other way around.” That is a MAJOR influence for how Braig views the world and his role in it. So if you talk to him about philosophies, or ask him for an Aesop’s-Fables-esque story, he’s probably gonna say something I picked up over at the dojo. 

I teach there, too, I teach tiny children and pre-teens. So a lot of baby Braig’s ways of expressing himself comes from them, they’re how I understand tiny children operate and thus are my references for writing a tiny child. That, and my brothers (also dojo rats like me). 

Honestly, I think that’s why I never lose muse for Braig. I go to the dojo at least three times a week, every week (perhaps two on weeks when we’re closed for long weekends), and every time I’m there, if he’s been fading, this boy comes right back, because that’s him. This is going to sound majorly cliche, and it’s not really a character, but he’s been inspired by the dojo spirit, and it’s constantly being renewed, so, so is he. 

So, tl;dr, he’s not really inspired by any specific characters, as far as his OOC creation goes. Or maybe he’s been inspired by a bunch of them. Depends on how you read it. But I’d say he was inspired more by lessons, and philosophies, and interactions with the many people who have come together to shape him and his life into what it is, now. 

Oh, and, of course, the light of my life and my best friend, @ectochoir / Rodi.

Blame her, not me.