I have a very specific vision for a character my brother and I came up with. He had the initial idea, I just ran with it and started molding it, and I have a very specific idea of his characterization. We call him the Death Rider, with the basic idea of “what if Eoghanan, but crossed with Jon Moxley, and also a Death Knight from World of Warcraft?”. He came up with it, and let me go wild with how to characterize him after, basically letting me go as Edgelord as I want to. This guy. So, the Death Rider, is a Fractures In Time variant of Eoghanan, my first FFXI character. A risen Death Knight, raised after the Broken Shores went Very, Very Wrong in that universe’s version of the events of WoW: Legion. Designate Killjoy is dead, the Warriors of Light took heavy casualties, the Army of Light Initiative barely succeeded, but its architects fell to the Burning Legion, its remnants regrouping under the Orders. Things are not good. The man formerly known as Eoghanan casts off his name and becomes a force of nature across the Isles, only answering to the Deathlord Frostbane. The combined armies of the galaxy barely beat back the Legion, opening a path for the main universe’s Army to finally defeat Sargeras, but the galaxy is heavily scarred, every planet affected in some way by the Mad Titan. In that setting, the now-Death Rider continues his rampage against the Legion across universes, on Xal’atath and the Void itself with the Fractures. For nearly ten years he carves a bloody, violent swath to ensure no one else has to go through what he did, until he reaches ours, where that insane rage is finally quelled, tempered in some form by the people he meets. People who refuse to see him as the weapon he sees himself as. People that know the still-living him, that mourn for the loss of the man he was, wondering what hell he had to go through to become…this. He is a heavily-traumatized, utterly broken shell of a man, raised into Undeath with the sole goal of avenging his wife and his friends. He is consumed by grief and rage, longing for those he lost, and can never join. He knows he could have, had he not begged to be raised, but in his shattered mind, someone had to avenge them, someone had to keep fighting, and if he damned himself to an eternity of suffering, so be it. They all have passed into the beyond, he knows there is nothing waiting for him but oblivion when the time comes for his final death. All wraps into THIS guy. When he occasionally returns to his own universe, those who remain try to reintegrate him into society, try to give him something resembling a life. But the scars of the battlefield, the scars of his rampage still remain. He hears the screams of his allies on that desolate beach, even years later, he can’t fit in with normal life, in his mind he’s beyond too far gone to exist outside of the fight. So, he rarely goes “home”, he knows that this is the work, punishing the Legion for their crimes, trying to save as many of the living he can, a part of the soldier he was still in there, even if it’s twisted by the unrelenting need to wreak vengeance. It won’t bring any of them back, it won’t even make him feel better, but it’s something. Something to help others, something to make sure no one else has to watch everyone they love die. It isn’t even a parable about revenge poisoning your mind and letting go to save yourself, this is someone who knows full well what he is doing won’t solve his problems, and no longer cares. This is all he has, and he’s going to cling to it until it kills him for good. I know, it’s edgy, and it’s not even half the story. But I’m particular about him, that he is defined by his trauma, that there is no “working through it” for him, as that would defeat the purpose. All he has is rage and vengeance and grief, his survivor’s guilt is too strong to overcome. It’s meant to be tragic, that this person who, in life, was so devoted to his wife, his friends, to the people he swore to protect, has become this perpetually grieving monster that in Undeath, carries that same devotion towards avenging them, towards giving others a future he can’t share in. Not because he doesn’t want to, but because he can’t function outside of the battlefield, can’t relearn to be human. Sure, occasionally he’ll crack a joke, ask someone about the Reds, or Ohio State, little bits of Eoghanan shining through, but that door closes as quickly as it opens. The man he was is gone, and all that’s left is this husk obsessed with vengeance. And anytime my brother tries to go away from that characterization for him, I immediately push back on it. He’s not a lighthearted, “lol we’re all just hanging out” kind of person, that isn’t my plan for him, he is incredibly serious, blunt, to the point, he does not care about stepping on toes anymore, all he wants is to crush the enemies of those he can still save. The edginess is intentional, it’s meant to be the polar opposite to his characters, meant to be a peek into a world where it all went wrong, and the galaxy hung on by the thinnest of threads. Every bit of characterization I give him intentional, I want him to be so edgy it hurts, I want him to be the try-hard counter to the light, fun characters in our settings. He’s not meant to be fun, but him interacting with people can be interesting, seeing him trying to thread the needle of acting like Eoghanan would have, instead of as a Death Knight wearing the face of the man he used to be. It’s edgy, it’s self-indulgent, and is what my 14-year-old self would have written, but that is the fun in it! That I can have this absolutely ridiculous thing coexisting with more fleshed-out, more rounded people, and it just works!