Character Fun Facts

[||ADMIN NESSIE||]

The other day I was browsing the RC archives and reading over old threads - nostalgia is a great hobby of mine - and subsequently came up with this list of facts, reflecting on previous versions/ideas for my characters. I thought it might be interesting for everyone to share facts like this, to show a glimpse of the method behind the madness!

. When I first came to Rewritten City back in 2010 I was involved in my school's production of the musical 'Oliver!', playing Fagin. Hence, my first character at RC was Fagin - I reinvented him as Ira Fagin, whose parents had emigrated from Poland to New York and who ran a pawnshop.

. Not long after this my obsession with Shakespeare's 'Richard III' really took off - you may be surprised to hear I did not originally think of applying for the man himself but instead his right hand man, the Duke of Buckingham. I planned to reinvent him as Henry/Harry Stafford, Richard's campaign manager and PR officer. I also had the idea of gender-bending him to become Harriet Stafford. Get some women involved in NYC politics!

. Speaking of RC politics and the Rickyboy we all love to hate (-hugs Ricky-) originally his last name was not Plantagenet (the name of the royal dynasty of which Richard III was the last ruler) - his last name was originally going to be King! I changed it because not only did it sound a bit silly but it bugged me how his name would be Richard King and not King Richard. XD

. I loved the character of Lady C for years, and have played her at RC for quite awhile now, but did you know I also portrayed Her Ladyship onstage? This was in March 2012. Good times. <3

. When I originally recreated him, Claudius could hold his liquor! This version of Claudius did not last long. XD

. I had a difficult time choosing a playby for my latest character, Lady Macbeth. Kay made some brilliant suggestions and I was going to use one of them (Lily Cole, I think). Then, listening to random songs on my iPod, I came across 'The World is Not Enough' by Garbage. The lyrics made me think of the Macbeths and so for awhile the singer from the band, Shirley Manson - a Scottish singer, funnily enough - was the face of Lady Macbeth. However, I eventually settled on Kate Walsh, another of Kay's suggestions, simply due to the photographs of her I found that I use for Morag's avatar and signature - they just screamed 'Lady M' for me! ^^

Share your random facts/stories guys! ;D What were your original ideas for your characters - name wise, appearance wise, personality wise, occupation wise...?

[DETECTIVE PETER ARAMIS]

Ooo, I like the idea of this thread, Ness! Though my stories are much less connected to theatre and acting than yours, haha

Here are some fun facts from my end:

• Originally when I found RC, it was 2010 and the canons were more limited. So I wrote up an entire app for Apollo, finding a connection with him. I’m a fraternal twin, my father was absent during a lot of my upbringing, and the bright personality Apollo was known for was something I could connect with at the time. However, due to my increasingly depressing personal outlook at the time, the app became a darker version of him and I gave it up before it got too twisted, haha. Apollo eventually ended up as a parole violator and was a great little character, but as circumstances again changed, I lost touch with him, and lost my ambition to join the site until 2012. I know, so much wasted time, Tens! But eventually the next thing happened and I did join:
  
  
• In university we looked at the movie Sleepers which was a film revolving around the idea of child abuse in a reformatory for boys in the 60’s and how years later four of these abused boys took their revenge and got justice for what was done to them. It’s a powerful film and was great for our theme of professional ethics. The narrator was always bringing up The Count of Monte Cristo, so I went to read it, found it to be tedious, and picked up another Dumas title – The Three Musketeers – instead. This would inspire me to come back here and see if the canon had opened up. Low and behold it had – kismet anyone?
  
  My Aramis was born from seeing this film and reading the novel again afterwards. His character took on traits from the movie’s narrator – the peace maker who was along for the ride, willing to do anything for his friends, but inherently screwed up in ways he knew wouldn’t change because he’d lost his faith and his innocence far too young – and the priest from the film, Father Frank, who preached from the basketball court and managed to do whatever he could for the boys in his congregation. Combined with amorous Aramis from the original novel, and my own western upbringing....well, you can see how this all went down, haha.
  
  
• Peter Aramis. Where to start? Peter was a name I picked because I honestly love it. The original Aramis from the story was Rene Aramis, but Rene is a bit passé for 2012, so he became Peter Rene. His original play by was Joshua Jackson, who ironically played Peter Bishop on TV’s Fringe, but I dunno, I wanted someone who looked a bit more classic, so after some extensive shopping, Brant became his PB. I adore his eyebrows, haha, especially the scar through the right one. It gives him some character.
  
  
• Baze – Peter’s dog – is a replacement for the character Bazin, Aramis’ servant in the novels. The dog I use for a PB was one I lived with named Tundra – a Husky/Sheppard cross.
  
  
• Zander, my blond spoilt brat, was actually born from a funny story. I was asked to take him on by Kay, as she and Trae had him as a character in their planning and I was looking to expand my participation here. I was a bit reluctant, unsure how I would reinvent Zeus, especially when I was brought up to speed on his role and informed that ‘he’s kind of a bitch’, haha. I had no idea how to swing that, so I did what I do best – let him write himself. Low and behold, despite my best intentions, he did turn out to be kind of a bitch, but loveable in only ways I could make him.
  
  
• Zander’s original name was Shane Corbin King and he was going to be an LA transplant. However, when it was decided that Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon would be brothers on the site, I went with the naming trend they had going – Hector/Hades, Perry/Poseidon. So it had to be a Z/Zeus name. Zack, Zeke, Zim... Z is the worst letter out there to name a male with, I swear to Christ. I finally invented a name which sounded amazing in a southern accent, so I tweaked it and BOOM. Zander was born. Devereux was the last name I chose in honor of Bruce Greenwood’s character Jonathon Devereux in the movie Double Jeopardy
  
  
  
• My next character was Siobhan. By now you’ve probably caught onto the fact that I love irony. Ironic characters are epic! So, Nyx, Goddess of the Night and all things dark, became an outgoing blonde in my reinvention, haha. Fun facts on her include that her play by, Elisha Cuthbert, is a Canadian, like Siobhan. Elisha was born in the same hospital I was, though she has some years on me, so I thought that was kind of cool!
  
  
• Speaking of Calgarians, Victor Webster – the play by for Peter’s handsome college roommate, Damon Reese – is also from my home city. Ironic, huh?
  
  
• This brings us to Sunny. As you all know, I didn’t settle on a PB for a while. First, he was Ben Browder – a throw back to my love of Farscape. Next he was the charming Michael Weatherly – another kudos to my favorite TV character, Tony DiNozzo of NCIS fame. However, they were older than I had wanted for the character and that made it hard to see them in the character role I had picked out for Sunny. After asking for help in Kay’s Play By Shop, I was given a lot of other ideas. For about ten minutes he was even Robert Downey Jr., seeing as how his Iron Man attitude was close to what I wanted for Sunny, if more narcissistic. Then I randomly ran across Casper and got a laugh.
  
  My first RP character, Danny Blake, was my baby for three years. He had an intricate plot line full of cousins, step siblings, a wife, a kid...Anyways, long story short, the actor I used for his PB was Garret Hedlund, and the actor I chose for his grown son was none other than Casper Van Dien – a bit backwards, I know, but it is what it is. It was only after months of play by considerations, shopping around, and getting ideas that it hit me to use Casper. Life is definitely funny sometimes.
  
  
• Something I didn't consider until it was too late was that we have a company up here in Canada called Shaw - a TV/Phone/Internet provider. It was only after Siobhan was created that it hit me I'd not only named her after my phone company, but I'd created a life around it, haha. Welcome to how my brain works...
  
  

Well, in the words of Porky Pig, that’s all for now, Folks! I’ll add to this if I come up with more fun facts!

[OSRIC YOUNG]

What a cute idea Ness - I loved reading you and Tens' little tidbits so much! As for my own…

• I found RC through Leff's mention of it in her A/N in her fanfic. I was intrigued; the only RP I'd done was wolf, cbox RP (you can take a moment to judge me) and I loved the idea of modernized legends. It was 2011 and Al, Ness and Yols were the staff. Thought Kay was too but… nope.

• Gregory was English until Kay and Al told me they had too many English people in NYC already, so I changed it to Irish because it was the first other European country I could think of. And my family is an army of Irish Catholics so I had inspiration.

• Initially I did NOT understand the concept of playbys, RC being my first human RP. I thought Rupert Graves was my only choice. That being said, I'd never seen Graves in anything but Sherlock - and had only seen, not read Sherlock - and wanted to play Watson, but Leff had him at the time. I then wanted to use Colin Firth, but Kay had him as James at the time and now Graves is just too much of Greg to change it. Still, the way I used to play Greg was heavily influenced by Firth's performance in A Single Man.

• The names of Greg's many relatives have changed several times. Mostly because I'm indecisive, but also? I just chose really horrible names for people in his app. I'm still regretting Dolores.

• Aric (Mormon spelling of Erik), Aaron, Aaric and Rick were all thoughts for Osric's name, but I ended up going with the original because... It's a cool name I guess. I also considered making him a Christian alter boy / priest-in-training. At any rate, religion has always been a big part of his character.

• Osric's PB was always supposed to be Adam T. Siska, but there weren't enough good pictures of him, especially with short hair. So I used his TAI… bandmate Bill Beckett. Brendon Urie and Ryan Ross were also considered; a lot of Osric's personality was inspired by Urie. If anyone's ever read THROAM I'm sure you get a lot more references to Sisky & Ryan than anyone else.

• Osric's always been heterosexual. By now his character would try dating a man if he was asked even though it's not his thing because of curiosity, but originally Osric was meant to be a lot less tolerant and a lot less metro. He was sensitive, but he would quietly consider homosexual tendencies wrong.

• I saw Jonny Lee Miller as the creature and Cumberbatch as Frankenstein in their NT incarnations last year at the movies, and read the book this year. Both have seriously stuck with me.

• I had a lot of trouble thinking of a way to recreate Frankenstein's animations. I had ideas like science experiments on animals but it was too like Doolittle. I thought of singular human resurrection. Eventually I stuck to almost-canon; if Shelly could be ahead of her time and get away with extreme but cool sounding vagueness, then so could Victor.

• Victor's insanity wasn't meant to be so… strong, but as I keep playing him and realizing how damn fun it is to play neurotic, he just gets madder and madder. Sorry, Victor.

• I think I just suck at playing woman. My second and third attempts at characters, before Osric, were LingLing Dongfeng (a depressing Chinese woman with a too-dramatic past) and Cosette Valjean, who was just...boring and never even made her first post. Still trying to make a female who works. Sigh. Meant to have a female before Victor but… meh. I've toyed with an OC Meryl Streep character (a divorced and devout Jewish grandmother figure) or a Melanie Laurent character (as some goddess) a lot so… maybe someday.

• I play eight characters in all on different sites: Osric, Victor and Greg, scatterbrained ghost king William on Leff's site (using Hugh Grant), Mycroft on a site with Sammeh (Mark Gatiss), a chronically ill high schooler named Albert (Darren Criss), a wandering soul of a thespian named Morgan (Jonathan Groff), and a lonely jerk of a social worker named Sean (Zachary Quinto). I've also tried my hand at a not-crazy kid at a mental hospital, an autistic Alaskan, a widowed English teacher, a hyper wacko, a nervous civil servant, Seb's husband Andrew, a teenage BSI, and Andrew's wandering drug addict brother Lucas. Rewritten City is the only site where I'm currently official staff and have multiple characters.

[ERIK DANIEL LENOIR]

So where do I start?

I used to write a lot of fan fiction stories. Going back to high school, before i even knew there was such a thing as fan fiction, I was writing stories about my favourite television shows. Time passed and I discovered fan fiction. I have a fascination with comedy and I love the silent comics and the early talkie comics. I wrote some fics on old tv shows and some of the silent movie comics. I did crossovers. Then I decided to write a story about Phantom of the Opera, the silent version with Lon Chaney, Sr. I loved that story and I loved Lon in it (and all the other odd stories he had been in too.)

So I wrote a fic based on the 1925 silent movie which starts with the premise that the crowd did not kill Erik, that he instead escaped. The story dealt with his adventures after escaping. I named him Erik Lenoir, thinking the last name appropriate for a Phantom who wore black and had more than a modicum of darkness in his heart.

One of the people who read the story and had her own version of the POTO story she liked best from the 2004 movie, invited me to an RP site connected with the fic site I was on. At first I wasn't sure, but eventually I decided to try it. The premise was a modern Phantom story, with a ghostly Phantom. I played a descendant of the original Persian from the Leroux book. Somehow even though it was a great story with great players, the format was difficult to work with and I left after having some of the people tell me how to create characters on Facebook.

I then created a whole slew of characters, some successfull, most of them not. I created an OC Phantom, using Michael Crawford's phantom as playby and kept the Lenoir name. I had a Raoul, a Christine, an Erika, another Phantom based on the 1990 TV version, (Carrière), another Phantom based on Lon Chaney, his father Gerard, two relatives for Lenoir, a cousin and a daughter and a character based on Edward Scissorhands which absolutely went nowhere. Actually most of my characters went nowhere. Lenoir was rather successful, but no one respected my characters on Facebook, and I became very tired of that.

When Leffie opened up Phantom Manor, I jumped at the chance to play Erik Lenoir as a canon character from the 1986 ALW musical. I have a Raoul ... canon LND...an OC Christine who is a girl from the American west... and another Phantom, the Lon Chaney version.

Earlier this year Lady B opened up another rp site concerning POTO and I joined again playing the canon Erik Lenoir, an OC Christine and she (talked me into?) playing a very fictionalized version of singer/actor Crawford. She allows real people in this rp.

Then I discovered Rewritten City. Of course I thought immediately of playing a Phantom, but I had to think about it for a while. But then in talking about it with a friend, she mentioned he could be into computers and maybe a hacker...then I realized i had it! And of course who else could be the playby but the original musical phantom Crawford.

I wanted to use the name Erik Lenoir because I liked it and then decided to give him a middle name for no other reason except I like the name and it seems to fit the character. I have too many Eriks and this makes him different. He is probably the most complex character I have created. The canon Lenoir is complicated, but more logical. Danny is just all over the place, but I am getting very attached to him and hope he will be a successful character.

Thank you all for accepting his application here and for threading with him...all the characters I have met are quite awesome!