That Girl

No, not That Girl.

I’m talking about my first major OC. It should be noted I’ve mentioned her elsewhere, her history, and general evolution. To reiterate, this OC started out as a mildly angsty character with a sad backstory that I was writing to deal with Various Personal Issues. I was also at the time doing some extensive worldbuilding with this character’s setting.

(At some point, I am going to have to discuss the frustrations inherent in tending toward worldbuilding over storytelling and then getting flat out told you’re wasting your time doing the worldbuilding. There is nothing more frustrating or aggravating than having to deal with someone who tells you “worldbuilding” is stupid and you should just “make things up,” because that’s all fiction is. The result is not so silent screaming my friends, and imposter syndrome because it’s literally easier to create a setting than tell a story sometimes.)

Now, I do not technically have a name for this character. She has had several. Mara, Marrha, Nara, Narani for a while except Narani is the name of an atevi from C.J. Cherry’s Foreigner series. I might go back to Nara. Our girl is very tall and very gangly-thin. She started out standard pretty, but I eventually gave her features with a little more character–high cheekbones, pointed chin, arched nose, green eyes, and red hair. Ears are pointed with lynx-like hair tufts. Hair is usually worn short and spiky in the front and sides, long and braided in the back.

I like to play with character archetypes/tropes. Sometimes I want to use them playing straight, and sometimes I want to give them a little twist because I don’t like how they’re presented. These are some of the concepts I was playing with. In the first run, Nara was something of a Drizzt clone in that her society was very dysfunctional and her family was abusive. Nara was a loner type and an outcast due to not having magic powers, but instead was a magic nullifier. This is an ability that occasionally shows up in some fantasy series, and I wanted to play with it. She was also a shape-changer and an empath.

Now, there is a fantasy series I started liking but gradually came to completely dislike. This would be Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar Saga. (The next generation books are kind of upsetting because it doesn’t seem like any problems were solved from what I remember. Also, I kind of dislike the latent misogyny in the way female characters are treated.) The one cool thing about the series was a species called (IIRC) the valheru. The valheru were humanoid but decidedly inhuman in that they were essentially super powerful psychic/magical brood parasites who were usually abandoned at birth. The baby valheru would then latch onto the nearest vaguely parentally minded creature as a source of food and shelter, when they weren’t just hunting like the monster babies from It’s Alive. Their tendency in the past to create/kidnap new species and have them fight each other motivates a great deal of the background plot! The valheru make for some interesting villains but I could have done without the color coded good and evil elves.

Anyway, the idea of a super powerful, intelligent but solitary species is pretty cool, so I eventually incorporated some of these traits into Nara’s species. (And therefore, into Nara) But before I did that, I had created them as a species/society with a caste system. (Nara’s first iteration was in fact otherwise high caste but essentially hiding from her relatives because her magic nullification abilities were dangerous and they didn’t like her.) This eventually evolved into Nara’s species being more of a genus, with five subspecies that are able to intermarry/have kids with each other. I don’t have a clear idea of a species name, but I’ve gone with “hiri” the longest. Nara’s particular polity refers to these as “branches.”

One branch is completely solitary. In the “wild” they will pairbond/mindlink with exactly one other member of their subspecies but it will be a mostly long-distance relationship. Very occasionally, they will pairbond with a hiri from another subspecies. They are shapeshifters, powerful magic users, and they can reshape/heal others. Other subspecies tend to view this branch as near-gods or spirits. If socialized from an early age, this species will be capable of pairbonding with multiple people.

In Nara’s polity, the ruling class was descended from this subspecies.

One branch was extremely social and tended to be a mix of agrarian or seasonally nomadic. They were strongly telepathic over short distances, and formed mindlinks/pairbonds with multiple people. They had magic but no shape shifting abilities. In Nara’s polity the artisans/crafters/middle management class comes from this subspecies

One branch “in the wild” is generally full-time nomadic. They are strongly telepathic over very long distances and could also form mind links with multiple people. They have mass-limited shape-changing abilities they mostly use to create armor/weapons. In Nara’s polity, this branch makes up the military/warrior/hunter/spy cast.

One branch is fully agrarian! In the wild, they are powerful empaths. The entire community shares a mindlink, and it is physically unpleasant for any one individual to be separate from the community. This branch has some magic, but it takes the form of protection/warding spells. In Nara’s polity, the laborers/servants, town guard comes from this subspecies. (A certain person who shall remain nameless accused me of recreating the hertasi from Mercedes Lackey’s books and um. No. Nameless was very hypercritical of my writing and I don’t know why I ever showed him anything I wrote.)

Now! In Nara’s society, which is mixed between four branches of hiri, what you have is pairbonding/mindlinks forming around five or six years of age as kids start getting introduced to each other/are allowed to run around. These bonds break or reform until what you end up with is little groups of mindlinked kids who will eventually form spousal groups. (And those spousal groups are connected to other spousal groups and so on up the chain of social rankings.) The “ideal” spousal group has hiri from different branches.(The links and groups of linkages is pretty much incorporated into the society on all levels, to the point where most of the buildings in the city are interconnected.

So, here we have Nara. Nara is an empath, and she’s a shapechanger. She cannot use magic, instead, she’s kind of a magic sink. (She has non-mass-restricted shape changing because she absorbs all the magic in a Very Wide Area.) At some point, her character started…shifting. I started as I said with a more or less dramatic Drizzt attitude, but that started changing for a very dry sense of humor and general frustration when people said one thing and did another. Nara turned out to hate change and prefer a routine. It was difficult for her to understand people. Despite being a projective empath, she wasn’t able to form pairbonds, or at least the kind that involves mindlinks.

I uh. Okay. So you know how Mary Sues are writer inserts or sometimes when a writer is writing, they’re writing about themselves? And how I was essentially writing Nara to work my way through some pretty dysfunctional baloney in my life?

Yeah. I gave Nara magic-neurodivergent/magic-autism. (I would later get assessed for autism, and I was told “yes, you are.”) Nara’s neurodivergence is only slightly autistic: in addition to having trouble “reading” people and needing to avoid things that might overwhelm her like sudden changes, and bad sensory stimuli, she’s extremely territorial and almost fully solitary. She cannot form mindlinks. This is a neurodivergence that shows up in a very, very small percentage of hiri, with or without a mixed background.

I also ended up giving her a family that cares about her but doesn’t actually understand her. (This was part of my effort to make Nara’s backstory less about me, while actually still making it about me because of the imaginary happy family I created for her!)

I do not have any stories for her! I had at one point some scenes, but they never went anywhere.

1. There’s the one where Narani first contacts with human mage-colonists who gated from another world featuring my occasional authoritarian society bad/nonauthoritarian society good Thing.
2. There’s the one where Narani is the supporter/protector of a little  (human) community in the mountains

But other ideas have yet to come.

_{This was previously posted on my Patreon, 08/03/2022}