#just me gushing about a fictional man nothin to see here move along

[hotmess-exe]

I'm asking you about your favourite OC😌 anything you wanna say!

thank you 😔 my tummy has healed

his name is Eric and he's like genuinely, actually my oldest original character. i luv him very much

he was originally the older brother of my very first OC but that girl was scrapped for being boring af many years ago. i never let go of Eric, though, and he quickly became my absolute favorite

he is very kind, very compassionate, and among the sweetest characters i'll ever make. he's stupid pretty and wicked smart. he's the sort to make friends out of enemies without even trying.

he struggles with depression and will do so, so much for others in his quest to not let people down, to the point of self-neglect. ...i think i've always known that this is a manifestation of my own personal baggage 😂😂

i plan to make him a love interest in my second interactive fiction project! very excited to finally write him in full again. and like, properly fleshed out for the first time. so much nuance and depth to him 😭 i can't wait

i share a stupid number of coincidental, retrospective parallels with him. i realized this during the pandemic lol. i foisted a lot of concepts and things teen!me did not understand onto this character when i first wrote him... just to eventually look back at my own life and be like, 'holy shit, that's me' or 'holy shit, wait. i've done that.' i was 13 when i created him, so this still trips me out:

he is and has always been gay, even though i didn't have any grasp of what being LGBTQ+ is like outside of the facts that gay men and lesbians exist and people hate them for no good reason. that 'them' now very much includes me 😂 and all my friends lol

he is and has always been a sex worker, even though i did not have a proper understanding of sex work and how/when it differs from trafficking at ALL at that age. i wish i could say i barely understood sex either, but i'm p sure i had a porn addiction in hs, so no Fast forward to me at Eric's original age (19/early 20s) and I was, you guessed it, doing sex work.

i had a deeply problematic and frankly embarrassing portrayal of an abusive relationship with his older boyfriend/pimp as an integral part of his story. and... it turns out the ""friendship"" i had with the old guy who was finding me clients at one point was a lot less of a "friendship" and way more of an exploitative, possessive pimping situ sold to me as a partnership. like, honestly--i can't even begin to compare these dudes, the fictional bf and this real-life mf i knew, because the parallels between them, and even me and Eric during that time, are so many. you'd think i could have taken a step back and been like, 'oh shit. this is actually really similar to some of the more toxic elements of the abusive relationship i've been writing for literal years now' but. y'know what they about hindsight

i play every single interactive fiction game i touch as Eric, first and foremost. every. one.

consequently, i (and everyone else once that second project starts) have the choice of games title Drag Star to thank for the epiphany that Eric obviously had to be a drag queen. it just fit. I could picture him in every scene with such vividness that i just knew it was right. like a missing puzzle piece. ..........and hilariously enough, this was about 2 years after i got really, REALLY into make-up and drag. so that was like... the opposite of what usually happens with those parallels lol

i've been playing dress-up games since there was only ONE website for it 😂 so now i'm very, very happy that i get to rediscover my love for those silly things with the perfect excuse: drag looks for my favorite precious baby OC, Eric 🥰

i think that's prob more than enough, thank you so much for indulging me, anons!