My Japanese is very limited. What are you asking what of? XD

It's just what is. Da is desu in plain form. Literally it would be what is it.

Aha, what is what, then?

Uuh, I'm just saying, because I don't know what's going on.

Ohh. Moi's just talking about weird things again.

The baby's sleeping so I'm taking the opportunity to clip his nails. Makes me wonder if Faris ever used things like baby finger nails in his potions. XD;

Is that character of the month thing new?

Hmm, inspiration is the new topic. It's different for each OC for me. Some arise as direct mimics of characters I loved in other things and some arise out of ideals and personal experiences, people I know. Some I don't know exactly, but I could ponder it.

I know where Nuke and Mikko originated, though after 6ish years they'd completely different from how they were originally. I mostly know because of old pictures though, I don't remember exactly what I was thinking when I made them. Mikko seemed to be based off the Laughing Man from Ghost in the Shell. I changed his appearance for some reason (an RP I think or just because I wanted to), I don't know why though. I drew pictures of Mikkousha before I ever named him or made him a character. I just liked the combination of black and blue. In on of his first pictures he's a merman (05), which I think was for an RP now that I think of it (I think I was calling him Aoi at the time.) By 06 I had clearly established his basics as far as being an elf and everything and I know I played him constantly in walk-in RPs on the Commerce forums of early Gaia. From there on he deteriorated into an abandoning, lazy pervert, a reflection of how I've RPed him over the years.

Nuke went through at least three different names and his appearance has change a great deal with time. He was originally a shapeshifter who's usual form looked a lot like me and his name was just Shifter at the time. There were problems with that name and I got teased about it a few times. He went through 3-4 names before settled on Nukelius. For a while when I was fleshing him out he was modeled after Krad from DNAngel. His current appearance came as kind of an in-between for Mikko and Morris, who were all kind of color coordinated when I working them out. Their theme colors were blue, green and red. I didn't exactly stick to it that way with Morris, but the Mikko and Nuke are still like that.

Morris' original character design was a child, which would turn out completely different from how he'd end up. I'm not sure what he was inspired by. I know originally he was a little blonde kid, but I didn't like the design and kind of tossed it. What Morris looks like now He's pretty much looked like that since 07, I've just fleshed out his features more to figure out how I want him to look. I'm still kind of debating it I suppose.

Idelle and her parallel characters could be said to have been inspired by Near from Death Note. I was really into that series, but the picture I posted of Idelle a while ago obviously isn't Near. I think I was working on a character for something, either a story or an RP. The pic that kind of lead to the character was a doodle I was doing on the edge of a math notebook (I still have it somewhere). My first draft design looked a great deal like Near, color wise and everything. The one from this notebook I cleaned up and colored randomly though. I love reds, so that's how I colored the pic ver with horns. I don't remember why, but I had a version with horns and without horns. I don't think I have the horn version outside of photobucket now. I think one of the first names I gave to the character was Terrence and even when I was drawing the character more as a copy of Near I knew the character was a hermaphrodite. I think that whole obsession had something to do with Jung and alchemy. Someone else named Idelle. I knew her (she appears female most frequently I suppose, like Nuke appears male most frequently) last name would be Wings, but I didn't have a clue for a first name that would be ironic, but someone suggested that and I went with it.

Some characters I'm less sure about, especially recent ones which I figure I've probably cobbled together from a bunch of random stuff, mostly because they're secondary characters and I don't care as much. Shin is a naga because I like Nagas and didn't really officially have one and his personality is pretty typical in my opinion.

Well I can pretty much see where every character comes from, but one of my most recent. Of NoCon <-that's his name- He's a kind of distracted guy with four arms and a tail that was made from clay and now "runs an inn."

Anime/manga influences me a lot. Books and video games do as well. Sometimes I just make characters, because there are certain things I like and want to make. Sometimes they end up a combination of things or more inspired from something I randomly doodle.

I hope that covers the topic. I know in the past it seems like I've struggled to provide the desired answers about stuff.

It's been there for a while but I haven't done anything with it yet. I'll probably figure out something for it when school's out, yes? :3

Aha, it's interesting how characters evolve like that --you write about someone and ten years later, they can become completely different. XD I had a character like that as well --Seth, but he never changed his name or appearance (much). He did age over the years though, and evolved from a hummingbird theme to a dragon one. Most of his past has been adjusted to better suit my new stories, but he's still himself under all those changes. X3

Aha, desired answers = ones that directly answer the questions/topic. Sometimes I get confused when I ask one thing and people answer another.

Well, I guess if I didn't get it that's alright. I can't seem to figure it out.

Ten years seems like a long time to have a character. Sometimes I feel weird about having characters for 5 or 6 -_-;

Most of the characters I write about in stories are for those stories though. I don't tend to count them among my OCs, at least not directly. That would be... so many characters.

Wow, now that I count back...the core 10 or so main characters I play around with are a decade old now. 0___0

A lot of my inspirations aren't very serious at all. Like for a character named Panik, the sole inspiration was to create a character who was "the unluckiest son of a b**** to ever walk the Earth" without making him some lame-o whiner. Another, Daniel, was to create the most un-vampire vampire I could think of (his main hobbies are weight-lifting and watching daytime TV whilst drunk). My ideas usually start out with a gimmick, but as I write the character through more and more little prompt-ideas, they start to flesh themselves out nicely.

Another thing I'm fond of doing is thinking up an odd occupation that you don't hear written about often and making up a character who does it. Like a female taxi driver, a tailor, an agronomist. I'm tired of reading about characters whose occupation is simply "total awesomeness". It's just not so interesting anymore. Also, you can come up with interesting subschools of magic this way...

@Nuke: But you did? I added your member point after you posted. XD

I don't write with characters I've created ten years ago, but they still exist. Their concept (in terms of appearance) are a bit plain, but I might make them over sometime. >>b

I count all my OCs all at once. I've lost count when it hit over 20, I think. XD;


@Meme: Wow that's pretty cool --sticking with a character for so long. I think my time of interest with a character is about five years at most; after that I have other new characters I'd like to play with. Occasionally, I'll bring back some of my oldbies, but I find creating characters very enjoyable, so I tend to just go with that.

Aha, your vampire sounds pretty interesting and not so suave. XD That is very unvampire-like. I think I understand the sentiment with those characters --I've stated before that I've created characters with the mentality of breaking stereotypes. Now, I guess I just do whatever I think is enjoyable at the moment.

Ah, I had tailor --now he was an old one; wouldn't be surprised if it really has been almost ten years. He was pretty unlucky too, but unlike your character, Allen (or was it Allan with an "a"?) grumbled often about his bad luck. I don't remember much about him now, except he didn't get along with people so much, he liked animals, had freckles, and kept a journal, which was most of the story I had written for him. I really enjoyed it too, I remember, it was just slap-stick humor about how things didn't work for him and how his sister left him to run their little traveling business alone. I probably still have scribbled notes about him somewhere, and I drew some art of him way back when, but I lost his journal when my brother reformatted the computer. Ouch.

Thinking about it now, I can't really say if it's better off gone or not. I know some memories are sweeter as memories.

What did you mean by subschools of magic?