#boy I hope this is readable considering it was written in various chunks and never edited as a whole thing

[outeremissary]

2, 8, 10 and 11 for Balthazar?

sorry this took so long I accidentally deleted half of it while writing it yesterday. pain. Anyway thank you for the ask, I have put my Enormous Essay under the cut. And I am so sorry if on some platforms the formatting of the images loads fucked up I've given up on that. Tumblr hates me and wants my post to take up the entire dash and then some

[prompt list]

2) Who's your OCs best friend? How did they become best friends?

I feel like I don't do enough with this in a lot of my doodle posting just because I actively dislike using the black pencil because it smudges like a bitch, but that would be Jaethal! They have similar outlooks on life in many ways- the cold pragmatism, self serving hedonism, and general disdain with the place they find themselves in makes them get along fairly well. Balthazar has a lot of respect for her and values her counsel; she sees him as a reasonably sensible person in most matters who is, at the very least, very much on her wavelength.

I guess the becoming is the more interesting question considering the fact that neither is a person who's particularly eager to invite others in. Part of it is just long exposure. Spending a lot of time wandering around and becoming familiar with other people builds a sense of rapport and gives a lot of time to get a sense of who's agreeable to you and who isn't. But that's accelerated in my eyes by Jaethal being able to pretty effectively see through Balthazar's facades. His benevolence and his gradiosity are convincing performances, but only performances- and under that the ambition and the calculation are clear. He's something interesting to watch and feel out. And he's responsive to attempts to tease out the motive, and quick to try to build a bridge when discovered by someone who so proudly displays the spirit he hides. He shows her the respect she believes she is due and shows it genuinely; she recognizes his real character without exposing it in return. I think they build trust in one another fairly early as kindred spirits and allies in pursuing their separate goals.

8) What hobbies does your OC have? What do they do to unwind?

He enjoys learning new things relevant to his interests, games of strategy and social maneuvering, and keeping up with fashion trends and collecting bits and pieces of his wardrobe. On the social side he often enjoys engaging in a bit of frivolous debate and while he wouldn't consider it a hobby per se does enjoy going out dancing.

When it comes to completely relaxing, he prefers to be alone. Taking a long, hot bath is a favorite activity, and the privacy his noble status can afford him is a welcome novelty compared to the public bathhouses of his youth. He likes to take time to read, and just generally to be away from others and not in a state of managing his performance. And of course there are the often less solitary time honored traditions of drinking or sex.

While he wouldn't see it as worth mentioning, he's someone who also engages in people watching when able to be inconspicuous- there's an idle entertainment to seeing others go about their little lives. And in Absalom he enjoyed watching kites.

10) How does your OC handle their mental health? Do they take care of themselves?

Balthazar handles mental health by simply never having issues ever! *checks notes* Wait, it looks like that's wrong. By repressing fucking everything except a sense of smoldering retributive anger and never showing vulnerability to anyone. He's a very "catharsis in vengeance" kind of person; while he's not exactly devout, the self-centered justice has contributed to him being an irregular of Calistria's faith. He's good at sorting his problems into "things I can get even with" and "things I can't do anything about" and pouring a lot of energy into plotting against the first while burying the second. He's good at multi year campaigns to ruin someone who made him feel humiliated, but he refuses to acknowledge his mother even exists. There's nothing to be done about that abandonment or what it did to his father. So it doesn't exist! It's easier to pretend that's just a blank space in his life.

When confronted with something that's impossible to avoid and impossible to affect he tends to break down. Despair seeps in. He's not someone who's able to be vulnerable in front of others, so he tries to act as if nothing is wrong before retreating as far from public life as possible. And he's prone to lashing out at people who try to help him, as well as just fruitlessly lashing at the problem in general. Deceit and avoidance being first lines of defense often make problems worse, but he's not eager to change for that.

As for taking care of himself... he feels that he does. He indulges in what feels good whenever he can, he props himself up to feel powerful, he takes petty vengeance on others and pays forward the ill done to him. It feels good. Like being a problem solver, like not being denied. And what he does to soothe himself makes him feel like he's in control of his life.

Anyway I'm not sure I've ever created a character with Good Well Adjusted coping mechanisms

11) What was your inspiration for your OC?

Uhhhhhhhhh. So like, flashback to 2016 where for Reasons I was creating an evil god demon-y fallen angel-y kind of character who was the proto-Balthazar. My original thesis with this Funny Joke Character was a character made of stereotypical fandom bait traits for the kinds of fandoms I'd been in (mostly anime), which meant a mysterious, androgynous, ambiguously queer pretty boy who behaved like he knew more than anyone else in the room and was a master manipulator. I've never actually been able to pin down a specific point of inspiration for Balthazar, but he's very much based on an archetype that you get a feel for watching a bunch of anime (or did in the mid 2010s watching a bunch of anime). I think if you wanted examples that were probably especially influential, a sampling of that list would look something like what's below, the true TLDR section.

Breaking with the archetype a little immediately with a lady inspiration just because I absolutely know she was in my mind- Takano Miyo from Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. And when I say "she was in my mind" I mean "originally Balthazar looked like a flat chested Takano when first conceived." Little of that remains, but Higurashi was like. A primordial weeb influence for me. I was first exposed to the series at age 13 and Takano was one of the first examples I saw of a character who seemed very kind and ordinary but was actually quite callous and even cruel. She had this sleepy, nonthreatening softness to her that stuck in my mind. Imagine that, the visual language of a character being used to deceive. That's crazy <- 13 year old Emi

The second, which I never ever thought about consciously but feels in retrospect like he had to have been lurking somewhere at the back of my brain as one of the examples of the archetype I was most familiar with: Vincent Nightray from the manga Pandora Hearts. I was obsessed with Pandora Hearts in my early teens and I fucking hated this dude, which is a surefire way to solidify "will be into this type later" in your developing personality. Playfully malicious, totally nonthreatening compared to all the magical warriors around him, always a step ahead of the other clever planners, and someone who's constantly pushing boundaries of comfort around physical contact to the point of making your skin crawl.

Annnnnd Joshua from the DS game The World Ends With You. I don't remember if he was a conscious inspiration but I feel like at some point he must have been. Joshua is a fucking cunt. He's a condescending, teasing know it all who refuses to make genuine connections with other people and serves as a marker for the main character's growth as a person by showing all his shittiest early game traits taken further. He's also, spoilers for a nearly twenty year old game, an angel. Angel-like being. In the small scope of things, God. He treats everything around him like a game because that's what it is from his perspective. I was very fond of this treacherous God-being who stood in the middle of his own machinations for a better view. You can also see he has light white-ish hair- I feel like this prettyboy manipulator type is pretty strongly associated with blonde or white hair lmao.

I feel like Joshua's physical mannerisms were also Influential here