#lisenne was herself a reaction to a certain archetype of characters

[starcunning]

2, for a warcraft character of your choice?

Did you design them with any other characters/OCs from their universe in mind?

The most interesting character, probably, will be Joceline. Joceline was designed and developed as a reaction to Lisenne, who had been my paladin (blood knight) up to that point. After the storyline where Arienne Dawnforge died and was rerisen as Lisenne, I wanted to make a character who was very different. Dawnforge was a pretty reprehensible person--the accident of her death was perhaps not that, which sums things up nicely--but people let a lot of it go (or didn’t notice!) because she wore the gilded armor and the white tabard of the Argent Dawn. She was a person who had faced terrible injustice in her life, and became terrible to meet it.

Joceline was (and is) not that kind of person. I gave her a similar background to Lisenne’s (both had extensive religious education; both left their homeland to pursue service; both were members of the Argent Dawn). I even had Joceline investigating the circumstances of Lisenne’s death so that she had a reason to talk to and integrate with my friends’ characters, so that event also tied them together. It was later in Joceline’s roleplay where she went through perhaps her worst trauma, one that actually robbed her of her connection to the Light for several real-life years. It’s fair to say that she, like Lisenne, lost her faith and her way for a while, but they reacted to it differently.

Lisenne became terrible in the face of terrible things so that they would never happen to her again. Joceline became resolute in the face of terrible things so that they would never happen to others again. I didn’t set out to make their paths similar, but I did make them foils. It just played out better than I’d expected.