User blog:DustpeltX/The Making of: Heart



Hey Fanon, Dust here with the second addition of the Making Of series. For those who are not familiar or have forgotten, these posts are simply one-half guide and one-half shamelessly showing off my OCs in a well contructed manner.

I stated on my first post that I would be doing this for any new charaters or character re-vamps in an effort to improve my writing, character creation and maybe gain some popularity for my characters; so here is the second one, this time diving into the mascot of my main (and only) team: Heart of team HART.

Again, I encourage anyone to do the same as I feel it forces critical thinking about your own characters as well as future approaches as well. Anyway, let's begin.

The Heart of HART
I'm going to begin by explain that I don't have a self-insert character as part of my roster. I find that when people create a character and state that it is their self-insert, it quickly devolves into a character that represents their idealized versions of themselves which makes the character itself usually flawless or have unusual unrelated quirks. They also tend to trail off into oblivion or have a very poor level of organization in its writing as the creator wrecks his/her own brain to essentially "run through an avatar creation screen".

I just think it's not a very honest thing to do and rather immature when I think about it. Therefore, instead of creating a self-insert I decided early on to make a self-insert TEAM instead.

Heart of the Matter
Heart was the first character I created, ever. Before even RWBY existed, Heart was a character that had lingered in my mined or my notes in some shape or form. She was my anger, passion, the emotion that drove me to be brash, or do something stupid and regretable. Simply put, I was, and still is to some degree, very easily swayed by my emotions. I'll be honest, I burned some bridges due to this aspect.

At the time, and also now, I was very swayed by the now infamous Monogatari Series by NisiOisiN. You may know him from his other work such as Katanagatari.

Anyway, one particular character had caught my attention during my time with the show and that was Shinobu Oshino.



Now one thing to understand about Monogatari is that absolutely EVERYTHING present is most likely deliberate. This is most present in the anime visually while in the novels it is the dialogue present, and sometimes the absent dialogue, that tells the complete story. Think about it as a detective novel starring a psychologist who LITERALLY fights other people's inner demons with the psychologist being your extremely unreliable, and sometimes outrighting lying, narrator.

Confused? Good, let's continue.

Now Shinobu was introduced very early on in the story but was immediately dismissed by the main cast. She also owned no name until we were told during own first meeting with her that she was just given one very recently. It was also hinted at that she may be the cause of the series of events happening currently due to a past event that was only nonchalantly mentioned.

Later, 2 to 3 seasons and a movie in fact, we get the whole picture. Shinobu was a former vampire, a very powerful one in fact, who was saved by the main character, Araragi, from her own death/suicide and was also reduced to her current form, a little girl, by Araragi, to keep her from killing. The reason she was forced to be insignificant (during out very first encounter with her) was to suppress her powers (as vampires, ghosts, etc. get more powerful the more people believe in theier supersitition). She appears to dislike Araragi as she would rather be euthanized than be in a state where she has no power and cannot die. However, as the series continues, she gradually warms up to Araragi due to his White Knight tendencies.



So what does this have to do with Heart? Well she, and the story she came from, was the inspiration of relationships and techniques of motif representation used in team HART. In addition, Heart's design was modeled after one of Shinobu's other forms, namely her age 17/18 form. Long story short, she changes forms which indicate her scale of power based on the amount of blood she had consumed from her master, Araragi.

In fact, Heart's EARLY design was a straight carbon copy of this design as I liked it so much it was ingrained into my mind. I even kept her gold eyes and purple hoodie and just changed her hair from gold/blonde to silver.

Not my proudest moment I admit, but people grow and learn by imitation and this was my phase of doing just that. As time went one, I tweaked her enough to be a character who was capable of standing apart from this aspect of Shinobu but also call back to her as an obvious inspiration. I didn't feel bad about liking and wanting to create something close to Shinobu because I knew it was something more than liking the design but more about liking what she represented as a character, someone trapped by her own despair who found solace in others. Having Heart physically be similar to her reinforces that my anger was part of me that needed comfort from another part of me to keep it happy and under control.

Heart of the Design (Initial and Revamp)


Shinobu in her prime was a powerful vampire named Kiss-shot Acerola-Orion Heart-Under-Blade (I typed that from memory, obsessed is an understatement) who wielded as katana called  Kokorowatari (心渡, lit., Heart Span) alternatively called Kai'i-goroshi (怪異殺し, lit., Oddity Killer), a demon sword that harms and effectively kills oddities. So, I gave Heart a katana.

Not very original, I know, but it was something I recognized and knew I had to fix. I was no good at making RWBY styled weapons when I started porting her as a RWBY OC so I decided to stick with the plain blade instead. She also couldn't be an actual vampire for obvious reasons so her backstory had to change too.

This is where we get into the second set of inspirations, this time from a manga: History's Strongest Disciple: Kenichi and a character by the name of Shigure Kōsaka. Long story short, she inspirational backstory gave me the idea to give Heart a similar one as well. Being the daughter of a bladesmith gave her a reason to know how to fight, especially at an early age, and both Shinobu and Shigure were denied names for similar thematic reasons.



Thus, I ended up with a backstory where Heart was the daughter of a mountain blacksmith who taught her how to fight and had "mysteriously" died leaving her all alone in the world to wander off and search for her own reason to live. It also gave me an excuse to not give her a complicated RWBY-style weapon on the reasons that she did not know how to craft such a weapon and prefered the way her father taught her to fight with just her sword.

Yeah, not very proud of her first design (left), carbon copy with slight tracing from the source material. At the time I didn't know how to draw at all, didn't even own a tablet so I self taught myself to a reasonable degree.

Then this happened (right) after after a good 3 months or 4. I was inspired by a Megurine Luka design and rekindled my desire to do something proper for once in my life. This designed stayed for a long time, about 2-3 years. I was happy with it. It was simple and original enough and it wasn't dumb to move around in.

Then Fall of Beacon happened!

This was a great opportunity for character growth aligned with my own personal growth as well so I went with an actual artist instead.

HELL YEAH


This new design was a mix of old and new. The lace and hair is a call back to Shinobu and Shigure while the outfit comes straight from one of my most favourite and underappreciated games, Vindictus. It just suited her way better than it should have so I plopped it in.

The weapon concept took the longest however, as I was not sure how to approach it. At the time, I have finished fleshing out her father as a standalone character but having Heart inheret her father's weapon was simply too boring and not much development on both sides.

Again, I took inspiration of other sources, namely Japanese artist by the name of yuccas-612. One of his pieces had a girl with the same exact set-up which looked like an awesome direction to go in for Heart so I rolled with it.

But comeing back to reality. I needed to justify this all growth wise. A change in design was a physical one only, if the character itself does not grow, it's meaningless.

And so the story moves on.

Cross my Heart (and Hope to Die)
I won't describe what I did with the character growth as that would just be me typing out Heart's entire profile page out in a blog post. I hope you're curious enough to read through her page as I am really proud of her as a character and as a part of myself as a person. I hope you enjoy her as much as I do! Sincerely,Dust