#they are still fundamentally quite similar but yeah its my...character development from angsty teen to kindly mentor?¿

[kohakhearts]

hello I'm here for more ☕ can I hear about your oldest oc(s) vs the newest? I don't have anything in particular in mind just go off bro

send me a ☕️ + a topic and i'll give you my opinion on it!

ahsjdfhj sure! there is Plenty to unpack here and tbh it's more self-reflection than opinon but i guess those are?? kinda the same thing? lol. anyway! lets compare some kids. i'm putting this under a cut bc i got musing so hard it got really long jfkjgk

so my oldest ocs are the lm crew, but the osa cast isn't too far behind them. mai and nerissa are very, very similar characters, though! they both have death motifs which is a little morbid for a 13/14 year old but hey. i was edgy. i can own that. but they're also similar in that they're very magically powerful. they both become some form of "god." and they both become symbols of life and death. both of them, actually, are narratively meant to subvert the trope of dark = bad/evil, because they might feel like they're ~evil~ but they're just teenage girls. and both of them are experiencing grief and trauma. everything that happens to them happens because the world is against them, or at least feels like it is. i think...i don't need to explain why this is an obvious outlet for me at the age i made them. i was pretty fucking repressed and i don't think i even realized the extent of that until i moved away. interestingly, though, they do both have this heavy...death thing. i was really fascinated with death apparently. just call me emily dickinson lmfao (but really - probably a pretty similar situation there! the general Thought is that, you know, she experienced a close loss really young and it gave her a lifelong fixation on death. i don't think that's a bad thing? it seems normal and healthy honestly. losing people is traumatic. personally i've been a regular funeral attendee since i was, like, 5 LOL. i think that's where a lot of these themes in my writing stem from? within one year alone i knew i think 5 people close to me in the sense of like i saw them often (family, neighbours, friends, classmates). only 2 of them were "natural" deaths. but i was 16/17 then; when i was 13/14, i'd just lost my grandfather and some other grandparents, great aunts/uncles. but still been to a whole lot of funerals lmao).

the other thing that mai and nerissa have in common is that they're really...closed off. when things get hard for them, they shut people out. and they both have moments where they start believing that they can either choose to live and let the world fall to ruin, or they can choose to die and save it. in both cases, they don't die (all the way, at least). there's one striking difference here, though, and it's that mai chooses not to die and so lives, whereas nerissa chooses to die and lives against her will. however, they both face the internal conflict of thinking that maybe them dying would be for the best, and, if nothing else, it would absolve them of their guilt surrounding certain deaths (elle for mai, adrienne for nerissa). they both are yearning for someone who's passed on, and they lose touch with reality because of it.

so, with that last point in mind, let's look at eveleen, who i made when i was 18 - so solidly 5 years after mai. she starts out a first year university student who has just tragically lost her parents, whom she was really close to and loved dearly. she's extremely depressed, but she keeps having dreams about this calm, nice garden. and it tempts her. lilith is behind these dreams obviously, and essentially is trying to tempt her into eating the fruit in the garden of eden so she'll be stuck there forever. eventually, eveleen does do that, and lilith possesses her body in order to get revenge. so already there's this commonality between my three protagonists here, which is that they're out of touch with reality, right? but where mai is very cold and closed off and nerissa is very cruel and angry, eveleen is just really sad and empty. i think what all three of them go through in a sense is a desire not to die but to stop living, because life's been not so nice to them. for nerissa and mai, it's a lot about "deserving," whereas for eveleen she's just really tired and feels like she can't keep up anymore. it's kind of weird to me, actually, because as an older teen and adult i've suffered from Chronic Feelings Of Intense Guilt LMAO but i don't know if that was really present when i was younger...and yet it's a feature of characters like mai and nerissa, not eveleen or ava or nisa.

ava and nisa are, like eveleen, really quite quiet and reserved. nisa literally has no voice. she can't speak. her whole arc is learning to be bold and brave and to communicate with her hands and make people listen to her. ava suffers from amnesia, and so she goes from not even having a name to being gifted one by artemis and finding out who ava is, not who she was - and even when she finds the "was," she decides she prefers the is, and wants to stay as ava. eveleen falls into lethargy and gets possessed. first she's used by adam, and then by lilith - but her entire arc is her wanting to reach out to lilith, to save her from herself and give her kindness where adam hurt her so horribly. all three of them have in common that they're really kind, charitable people who've been through some pretty horrific things - and more than anything, they just want to save people from suffering. they can't bear to see it. contrasted to mai and nerissa, who both wind up hurting people because they can't cope with the things that have happened to them and need to learn to be better, essentially...that's actually a pretty huge difference. the greater themes of grief and death and loss and love and family and especially identity are all still there, but it's through a very different lens.

i think this is probably the biggest difference here, and i do think it's something that comes from how i've grown up and how my worldview has changed. i look back on my teenage self pretty sadly these days. i don't think i "lost" anything, per se, but i think i was in a really tough spot for a really long time and my support system was exceptionally bad. it could've been a lot worse, and i'm grateful it wasn't, but that doesn't mean it was good, either. when i was 13/14, though...i was definitely angry at the world. it felt like everyone was against me, and i had one goal that was pushing me through everything. my rage drove me. in my best moments, i thought i wanted to see the day things got better and i was successful because it would prove that i didn't need anybody, and that even if the world was out for me then it didn't work. but i did need people, and i needed them badly. which is, i think, my mai's and nerissa's interpersonal relationships are so focussed on family, and their romances are both really centred on this like...unwavering sense of loyalty to the only person (sans poseidon, in nerissa's case) they feel can possibly understand them. lance and ada both find mai and nerissa at their lowest, in a sense; lance is the one who's saying if you really have to die, then i'm dying with you because i don't want to live in a world without you, while ada sits and listens as nerissa progressively opens up more and more about all the guilt and grief that's been eating at her for so long, that drove her to do the thing she did in the first place.

then...compared to eveleen and lilith, it feels a bit like a 180 in some senses? lilith is motivated by revenge. she wants to hurt adam at least as much as he hurt her, but eveleen is telling her that it won't heal the wound. she shows her kindness instead. and for ava...she's an amnesiac who's been horribly attacked and left for dead, and artemis finds her and gives her a name and takes her in. she's vague and mysterious, and ava wants to know about her. again, it's a subversion - the love interest is the closed off one, and the protagonist is the one who's gently urging her to open up. nisa doesn't have a love interest, but she has a similar sort of dynamic with aisling.

so i think, essentially, it really comes down to the fact that i went from being angry at my circumstances and life in general to really accepting of it. i know it's a real Hot Take, but i am grateful for all the shitty stuff i went through, because now i know, right? i mean - i know, if i have ever a student who's anything like i was, then...i've done everything in my power to immortalize those feelings as i experienced them. i never want to forget what it was like to be an angsty teen, because i never want to be anything but the sort of adult i needed at that age. and especially as i continue to grow away from my childhood, i see more and more that these feelings of guilt i've struggled with so much largely stem from a life of being blamed for the fact that my parents' lives sucked and things like that, and now that i see it, even if i don't always believe it, i have the ability to say "but that wasn't my fault," and so my newer characters might still grapple with guilt, but it's not as significant as "it's my fault my sister/mother/etc. died" LOL.

but in saying all this - there's one really, really big similarity between all of them. all of these characters have things happen to them. they don't like their circumstances. they don't want to be where they are. they suffered, and they didn't ask for it, and the biggest sort of grief they're experiencing is actually a sort of grief for the self, wherein they're thinking of the things they were robbed of by the actions of other people - things that happened when they were children, or things stolen from them by others' premature deaths, or gifts of godhood when they never wanted to be anything but mortal. the only difference here is that mai and nerissa are both "born special" in some way. eveleen, ava, and nisa are, essentially, just normal people. they're not magical. nisa has a bit of a "chosen one" thing going on too, but she doesn't become a god; she just gets used by people like saoirse and aisling because she might lead them to the real god. i think i've spent most of my life feeling in some way "out of control," and that's where this comes from. again, like - i think of my younger self, and i think i really do experience a large sense of mourning for them. i see a kid who was really alone, whose family wasn't much of a family at all, and who ultimately suffered for it. now especially, i look farther back then my preteen and early teen years, and i see a lot of things that just...were far, far out of my control that i felt like i had to fix. i don't really know why my sister and brother had the good sense to keep to themselves and i didn't, but i do think that there's probably a link between me as a youngest child, left by my sole role model and protector around age 8, and suddenly feeling like it was somehow my duty to put our family back together. because, i guess, in some convoluted way, i'd been made to feel like it was my fault in the first place? hard to say. it might a real chicken-egg scenario LMAO. either way, i think that's where a lot of that comes from. it's something that sticks out in a lot of my favourite characters too, this whole "i never wanted to be THIS" or "i didn't ask to be a hero or whatever, i just wanted a family." in a lot of ways, i'd actually say characters like eveleen, ava, and nisa are a lot more hopeless than ones like mai and nerissa. where mai and nerissa start out angry about their circumstances, and have to learn to accept them in order to act now to fix things, eveleen, ava, and nisa start out already having accepted their situations - accepted them as horrific and unchangeable, but then their development winds up being a journey of accepting that, yes, the things that happened to them can't be changed, but they can live beyond those things and they aren't defined by their suffering, and it gives them this ability characters like mai and nerissa don't have, which is to see that same sort of suffering in other people. they help others through trauma more than others help them, in a sense? but it's the act of helping others that really allows them to heal. which...definitely says something about me, i'd say!

anyway! this was fun to think about idk if i really said anything interesting here kldfgjkfl but thanks for the ask owo!!! <3<3<3