OC stories/themes important to you personally

Hong Yi: Hong Yi is pretty much my personal interests kitchen sink. He's actually personal to a painful degree, to the point I get nervous talking about him sometimes. Like me, he loves marine biology, oceanography and bizarre deep sea creatures. He's also a Chinese international student surrounded by American influences and has grown detached from his home culture. We both have a foot in two different cultures and are ever so slightly being pulled apart by them. This detail clarified itself to me later, but we are both trans (in my case nb but more masc identifying) with families we're not out to. But he's so much more gregarious than I am; he isn't inhibited by anxiety. We have similar senses of humour...except I tend to repress it.

The eleventh world (i.e. Havaiki) is extremely grounded in my own nostalgia for my own life growing up on a tropical island, trying to find and grasp and hold onto all the things I found beautiful about it, since at times I thought it was so immeasurably ugly and this exercise of seeking beauty was the only thing keeping me going. I often felt trapped and stifled in Singapore; at some point I started to feel like I'd seen every corner of the island a thousand times. And I thrived on feeling like I was in a place I didn't recognise, thrived on the feeling of being lost and realising there were places I still didn't know, imagining life in a radically different form from what it is now. All that gets reflected in this world and its characters...

Pala and Fen: These two Havaiki residents get projected on a lot in ways very few of my other characters are. Pala especially: I'm suspected but undiagnosed as autistic; the notion that I could be neuroatypical upset my parents a lot and they always refused to listen to my experiences. As it has been for me, home is entrapment and she tries to as much time away from it as she can. In some sense, writing her as an autistic person who shares a lot of my habits and interests--maps, being alone in unfamiliar places, being lost, recording places in photographs, noticing unusual patterns others don't--felt like a chance to delve as deep into those subjects and experiences as I wanted to, while also getting to reexamine that omnipresent feeling of alienation, of being weird and different, that characterised my entire life. Fen is inspired by two people: my brother and my best friend, both of whom were some of the only people in my life who liked and weren't afraid of me, in circles where everyone felt distinctly the opposite (my siblings, my classmates). the thing I share with both these people was that we have all felt different, misunderstood and isolated, for different reasons.

Vesper, Ruthenia, Liss, Curia, Artur, Adamanta: "will stop at nothing to attain their goals"/"will work past the point where it becomes unhealthy"/"would give up all personal indulgences in the name of their cause" is an extremely common theme with my characters because...surprise surprise, that's the sort of person I am. So... 90% of my commissioners have remarked on how quickly I complete their commissions (in a day or less). That's really one symptom of my problem: I tend to feel as if something's wrong if I'm not working myself to death at any given point in time, which, combined with my unbreakable hyperfocus, can get very unhealthy very fast. The ability to put oneself aside in favour of an ideal is a trait that I have long had a deep relationship with, admiring it on one hand, and being terrified of its potential effects on the other, and on some level I definitely romanticize workaholism like it's the thing I want others to admire me for. I struggle with just...being, and not serving a purpose, so it's something I write a lot about.

Ruthenia: Ruthenia and her entire story are...of extreme personal importance. E&S was my therapy novel from when I was 16-18; you know how I mentioned in the World 11 bit that focusing on the things I liked about my home helped me feel less stifled by it? I have a bit of a history of writing about fictitious places similar to my homeland of Singapore (usually along the lines of being small island nations in the subtropics or tropics) and Astra was yet another. everything I liked about the world that I saw from day to day went into this story. Ruthenia as a person gave me hope; she's suffered but it has only made her more determined. (she was also inspired by my crush at the time, that's how it is sometimes)

Liss: She's referred to as having "the blood of the volcano" by her friends and the elders. fun fact: "the volcano" was one of the nicknames that my childhood bullies used on me because of the way I blew up and got violent when they harassed me. I guess this is me taking it and turning it on its head, weaponising it. Honestly a lot of my characters are power fantasies about overcoming my bullies and tormentors, and Liss is a definite example. I have a very similar mindset to her in some regards: I feel like I could do anything if I only decided to.

A lot of my characters are trying to figure out where they fit in the world. Many of them are either driven personalities or they go along with others who are driven and hope it works out for the best-- both types are often people who are ignoring personal problems in order to keep fording on, and well, that might catch up to them someday. These are people who need to learn to accept help and love, and themselves. It's a lesson I could learn from them, but if not, then I'll just tell their stories.

Jill is a character I actually aspired to be like when I was younger, or used as a sort of alter-ego. We're extremely different and she certainly has her flaws, but I really admire her inner strength and her conviction to do everything the right way, with kindness and justice-- and it's important to me that one of the strongest personalities in my story is this tiny, disabled minority woman who wields compassion and sheer force of will like a machete to cut her way through the bullshit of life and chase her goals. (and why is she so determined to chase them? hmmmmm)

In contrast, Amber is the character I'm most similar to, and not because she likes the Islanders and owns a Walkman. Her TH bio is a little vague because she's difficult to talk about without spoiling something important, but she's like me, this person who appears friendly and fun-loving but is dealing with some things that she'd rather not burden anybody with, and she'll isolate herself from her friends when things are bad. She's the character I still debate the most about how I want to handle her, but it's very important to me to tell her story. In the most basic of plot terms, both she and Haggis are characters who don't really want fame or fortune or attention at all; they don't really want to be in this contest, but they'll throw themselves into helping their friends, and make that sacrifice for their sakes. How far can you push yourself; how much of yourself can you put into other people before you start to lose yourself?

Haggis is a character I never intended to relate to at all, but here we are and along with Amber he's absolutely the character I identify most with. He's a mess, and he tries to push people away, but it's a defense mechanism even if he doesn't understand it: he cares so much what others think of him, he cares so much if they're happy. He won't let himself be happy, won't do things for himself, won't be selfish about pursuing his talent, but he has to learn that he has a life, too.

I could keep going, but you get the idea. They're all people trying to make their way through the world. I usually call it a story about young people who make bad decisions, and I don't mean it patronizingly. They're all figuring things out, and they'll definitely screw things up in their pursuit to get there, but that's like everyone in life. Sometimes they might screw things up spectacularly, but they're not bad people; they're just people making the decisions they thought were best, and I think that's important You can't pin all the blame for bad events on "bad guys": everyone's just people, with their own viewpoints and goals. I wouldn't say Catband is a happy story or a sad story, but at its core it's an optimistic one, because I think that's what life is.

Beyond that, there are tons of themes of sexuality and relationships (friends, family, otherwise) that are mired in my own experiences, and most of my characters have complicated home lives or have chosen their families, because that's what I know. The characters are diverse not because I'm trying to fill out a Burger King Kid's Club but because that's how life is. I want to tell a story about how beautiful life is, with all the amazing unique people in it, and how we're all in it together.

I think that a lot of my RECENT characters have been made, in some regards, for  me to discover and deal with my sexuality. I'm an introverted 25-year  old with self-esteem issues who's afraid of physical intimacy and who,  although not asexual, outright forgets that sex is a thing that  most people crave.  And thus a lot of my recent roleplay characters  are...deliberately flirty/sexual/confident people (Xiaofan, Henry/Julia, Parable),  as I feel it's important for me to broaden my comfort zone and explore the matter. However since they're also MY characters they end up  developing some sort of self-esteem or intimacy issues over the course  of their respective roleplays. And that's fine too, helps me seek out patterns and get to  know myself better through them. So rather than creating really "prudish" or  borderline-asexual characters I deliberately try to make them dissonant from me in that regard and seeing how well it turns out.