Gunter Hesse's profile is basically complete. There may be future changes as plot updates or new details occur, but this is it for now. It hasn't been checked for typos.

This is a rather heavy bulletin, so proceed with caution. No spoiler tags as I'm coding by hand.

Please note if you give Hesse a look, WARNING that he is an antagonist--a literal Nazi--who is treated rather sympathetically at points. He's a complicated character in that I'm attempting to show an especially nasty bad guy who nonetheless truly believes he's doing good, and actually does do some good acts. IMO too many bad guys are presented as two-dimensional "monsters" which makes it all too easy for a reader to think of them as an inhuman "other" and believe there's no way they would ever act the same...a mindset which bad guys like Hesse themselves promulgated. Most bad guys started out as regular people, not monsters. They were not some inhuman "other."

I DO NOT condone/excuse Hesse's choices or actions...I'm merely trying to illustrate that once, he was a regular person who never believed he could become a monster. I. e., I wanted to understand how a once decent person could become radicalized toward hatred and violence.

Regarding the "In Heaven" section of the profile: I realize this could be particularly controversial, though that wasn't the intent. The Trench Rats is not a religious story, though religion and spirituality of different types do play a part. Without going into too much detail about my own beliefs (which are rather hazy anyway), I find it difficult to believe that a loving God would condemn any of His children to eternal damnation, so long as they sincerely seek forgiveness for their wrongs--even if only after death. Therefore, the Christian concept of Hell makes little sense. This was combined with a coping mechanism I've utilized to deal with characters whose deaths bothered me greatly, especially given the recent painful loss of my own father. Some of these deaths I had not planned, and I felt rather cheated by them, by things left unfinished. The "In Heaven" scenarios presented a means of dealing with this sense of loss and grief by imagining a sort of "alternate reality" of what could have been, the main difference between this and an AU being that "In Heaven" is canon. It simply occurs outside the bounds of the storyline itself, since, as I said, this is not a religious story.

Given that only certain character deaths bothered me inordinately, only a handful of "In Heaven" scenarios have been thought out. As a result, most profiles will not have this section filled in for a long while, if ever. They'll still be considered as essentially "complete," however.

Most profiles should be nowhere near as long as Hesse's, though Otto Himmel's may come close. If you made it through all this without concluding I'm a horrible person, thanks!--and feel free to subscribe, favorite, ask for an invite code, follow my art Tumblr, whatever! I'm painfully shy and may not always respond (sorry ;_; ) but I always appreciate knowing that someone has enjoyed something I created, even if what they enjoyed was a particularly icky character. (Don't get me started on Ernst Dannecker...ugh.)

The first version of Gunter Hesse's profile has gone live. Hesse's plot follows a weird trajectory, so his history--and his "In Heaven" section--will be divided in two. These later parts aren't written yet, but Hesse's main history has been, and is available to read. It HAS NOT been checked for typos, AND there are likely to be future additions/plot changes, though this is a good example of how future profiles will look, albeit likely shorter (Hesse and Otto Himmel are two of my most developed characters, so their pages will of course be quite long).

"Hesse In Heaven (Part One)" should be along soon, to illustrate what this part of the profiles entails. The second part of the history will likely be much abbreviated as the final story, Ultima Thule, is still highly under development. "Hesse In Heaven (Part Two)" should be more developed.

A disclaimer to state I DO NOT condone the horrific actions of many of my characters, Hesse included. Though he does go through a redemption arc, he is a bad guy. "In Heaven" is explained somewhat HERE (spoiler warning); I hope the eventual writeup will speak for itself.

I'll update when Hesse's profile is "finished."

Basic profiles and art are all caught up! These are all my guys who have been drawn so far. What remains now is typing up of extended profiles, which will be a long ongoing process, but it's nice to have placeholders.

I'm toying with a modified new style...

...but wish to finish my profiles in the current one. Le sigh. So concept art may appear here and there.

And GOD do I wish the image and link insert functions would work on mobile, I hate toggling between code and WYSIWYG.

Time to get writing! Himmel or Hesse will probably be first.

Introducing a new character profile format to do away with the cumbersome fields (my browser of choice loves to crash while I'm adding them, and there's no draft feature, so...buh-bye, fields); again, Otto Himmel is my test subject. (Writing my own code and using the "Disable WYSIWYG" feature is pretty unforgiving with this code, it kept freezing on me and not saving edits. Wondering if I'm doing something wrong. And ugh, had to disable it again just to link here, the link feature keeps disappearing on mobile, why??) This was very loosely based on profile HTML I found here yet I changed it drastically as I don't want to rely on others' image links (well, text images...like Webdings, I can't remember what they're called but I don't have them and don't understand how they work) and I want it to display correctly across devices and files since I write and save these locally. I won't even bother with CSS, it never works for me. The simpler, the better; most codes here are just hopelessly complex or needlessly cluttered. Ill suited for my longwinded, non-RPG profile style.

Himmel's extended history (and finished profile tag) has been removed for now; it'll be rewritten as some details have changed or been added. I plan to redo all existing profiles in this manner then add all those I haven't had the time to add yet while catching up on my art blog (writing long character entries is ironically what took up my time)...all in the Trench Rats storyline...as I really want to make my way through everyone. Upcoming redos may lack the personality characteristics part for now, I found it took a while longer to write than I'd intended. I want to infodump all over these, just that it's not yet the time.

Here's hoping I get some work done now.

EDIT: God do I hope it's easier to edit these profiles on laptop than on tablet, something about switching between rich text and WYSIWYG just really borks everything up here and I can't understand why. I have this problem nowhere else.

I finally finished the novel that is the profile of Otto Himmel.

If I could find the motivation and dedication to do this to each of the new profiles spewing out of my head lately, it'd be nice. But wow that was draining.

I've considered starting a forum thread about the phenomenon I'm experiencing regarding a storyline that's been dead and defunct for decades suddenly bubbling to the surface and spitting out new characters and plot left and right, but I'm not sure anyone would read or respond...similar to my novel-length profiles.

Anyway, I hope someday somebody actually reads it and enjoys it.

I've...been absent a very long time. Got an e-mail, panicked, and avoided. 😳 I didn't mean to. I'll try to get back into this soon... (And I'm especially sorry to the person who messaged me. And anyone who may have interacted with me/my page since I've been gone.) (Fortunately it looks like very few, if any.)

I can't guarantee I won't do the same thing again, though. ;_;