Avenging Phoenix

Imagine if you combined Samwise and the Mandalorian into one entity and then gave that person the background of 'remorseful former horror movie slasher'. That's Pho!

Background

Pho (whose actual name is Avenging Phoenix and whose name USED to be Ravenous Vulture Strips Clean the Bones of Creation) is a character i played for a really long time in Exalted, and refuse to put down even though his game is long over. 

Vulch started out his game as an ex-minion to a very powerful and very evil ghost, who had given him demigod status and saved him from death in return for life as an undead monstrosity whose very existence was in service in bringing about the end of the world. He’d eventually had a crisis of conscience which led to the last person he still really cared about from his mortal life (his adoptive mother) being punished instead, and was kind of just desperately on the run without a real plan. When he joined the rest of the party it was as a recently-awol ghoul of a man who was pretty much completely eaten up by remorse and depression and self-hatred, and was only still anchored to wanting to life by the desire to avenge his mom’s ghost and put her fully to rest and the fact that one of the other partymembers was an old childhood friend he thought had died long ago.

Over the course of the campaign he managed to slowly and agonizingly crawl upwards out of that pit, to make a lot of really deep connections with other people despite the fact his very nature as an abyssal cursed him for it. By the end, he’d gone from a guy who sat in the corner and waited for someone to tell him what to kill to a guy who like would hurl himself headlong into trouble to hold out his hand to every person he saw who was also in a dark place. He became someone who decided he had to believe there was a chance that his old masters didn’t win, because if he didn’t he’d be letting down everyone who’d helped him get as far out of the pit as he had, so he got really intense about it.

Even then, though, he wasn’t really thinking of his own future past avenging his mother and killing the Mask of Winters- he was kind of assuming he’d just like go off into the mountains somewhere and just fade out of everyone’s lives, so when those things actually happened, he had no idea what was going to happen next, and what ESPECIALLY smacked him upside the head at 10000 miles per hour was the fact that the sun god, who had been saved from self imposed exile by the party, took a long look at him and was like ‘come here i think you’ve got a smudge of black on you let me wipe it off’, and left him standing there as a living, breathing person again, full of the essence of the sun instead of the void. It really threw him a curveball, and he probably would have wandered around aimlessly reeling from it for a long time if his travels hadn’t taken him back to check in on a group of kids he and some other renegade Abyssals had rescued from the lair of a ghost-witch they’d raided, upon which point he ended up staying there a week…and then a month…and then a year…and now he just lives there and is the official adoptive dad of at least one of them, a girl named Sachi.

Personality

Pho as a postgame character is a guy who was fully committed to seeing himself as a monster forever and who was instead given a second chance at life, and who is still really struggling with how to reconcile with that. He’s got a lot of trauma to recover from, and contrary to that the Unconquered Sun might have said, he really doesn’t think he deserves the redemption he was given . If his arc during the game was about learning how to have something to live for again, he’s currently in the stage where he’s learning how to heal and to redefine himself outside of the violence that has set the tone of the whole rest of his life. He’s a gruff, tired barbecue dad who struggles with self worth and who would rather be planting sunflowers in his garden with his kids than doing any of the things people expect or want an extremely powerful elder Solar to do, and who can’t yet admit he’s really worth of Solarhood enough to show his face when he does without hiding beneath his old deathknight armor. He's kind of awkward around new people, especially in more formal social situations, and can unintentionally come off as grim without intending to. Despite this and a history of being terrifying on the battlefield, his bark is usually worse than his bite, and his gruff shell is quick to crack in the presence of those he loves, revealing a goofy, caring man beneath. 

Trivia

• Despite his stoic facade, he's an incorrigibly broody hen of a man, and the first person to start fussing over a friend if they're hurt or upset. This trait has been at the core of his personality since childhood, and was probably one of the major undoings of his career as a villain; it just couldn't stay buried 
• The kind of guy who inner monologues Solid-Snake style while doing even mundane tasks
• Campaign-canonically as a mutated frog tongue (and a few frog mannerisms as well) because he ate obviously-cursed berries one time even though everyone told him not to. He's a hard guy to embarrass but this one does kind of get to him.
• He's a little sensitive about his height, but tries not to let on that he is, and stoically refuses to compensate for it in most situations
• Possibly the most romantically oblivious man on the face of the earth, both in regards to his own feelings and the feelings of others towards him
• Favorite color is pink, and outside of his battle armor, most clothing he owns is pink, floral-patterned, or both
• Loves gardening- after so long being a creature that channeled death to everything he tried to care for, the act of fussing over plants feels very affirming and therapeutic. He's especially proud of his sunflowers, as corny as that might be.
• His dad jokes are painfully bad.