August 2010
July 2010
I'll start by telling you about the original Miel from FFXI.
This character was something I'd created over a period of...well, most of my life, honestly. When I was little, I used to latch onto all blue-eyed blonde females I saw in movies, declaring that they were "me" because that's what I looked like at the time. As a result, most of the characters I created for stories and games were blue-eyed blondes up until pretty recently. I was still a teenager when I started with FFXI so I followed the same pattern, my character creation skills being still pretty unrefined.
So Miel, just like all the others, was to be a blue-eyed blonde. She was also, just like the others, supposed to be small and fragile with pale skin and wavy hair. Her personality was to fit my then-ideal: shy, sweet, artistic, fashionable, all that girly, princessy stuff.
I also knew I was going to have to play a catgirl because they were available (I would have played an elf in any other game). Why a catgirl? Well this might be horrible of me, but I kind of view my characters as pets. Or, more accurately, as a combination of myself and a pet. Cats are amusing pets (their tails and ears are so hilariously expressive!), and I'm a human girl. Catgirl. It just makes sense.
So as most of you know, FFXI's character creation system was pretty basic. There were only three options for blonde Mithra, and none of them had curly hair or pale skin or looked fragile in any way. So I picked the cutest option and the shortest height and decided it would have to do.
This was the result:
She was nowhere near my ideal character at the time, but I became attached to her pretty quickly. Soon she started developing her own personality, based on how I saw her. She had a fat, round, babyish face, so she became comically immature and quick-tempered. She was short and her emotes were wild, so she became excitable and obnoxious. She was a Corsair (originally just because they had the prettiest AF, but eventually because I loved the job so much), so she became ineffectually violent and obsessed with treasure, food, and attractive people.
Overall she was a very silly character, and completely different from how she was originally envisioned. I even pictured how her voice would sound--high-pitched, nasal, whining, and with a mewing quality, and always very emphatic about what she says. I still do the voice from time to time, and yes, it is as annoying as it sounds.
After playing her for a year, her personality solidified. After three and a half years (which is when I quit), I knew exactly what she would say and do in any given situation. (Usually: shout "Screw yew gaiz!") Despite the fact that she's probably one of the most annoying things on the planet, pretty much everyone who has "met" her loves her. When she's in my mind, suddenly everything I say becomes hilarious. Because of the ridiculous amount of time I spent in FFXI, "Miel" has basically become a new facet of my personality that I bring out from time to time.
Eventually she even became a representation of my Id: animalistic, immature, selfish, and concerned with pretty much nothing but sex, violence, and survival. Giving a cute name and goofy face to my Id actually helped me lose my fear of it, which is something I had had problems with before. So FFXI had a hand in my personal growth, strangely enough.
After FFXI, I could never play my standard delicate, willowy elf archetype again. It just felt so...sickly sweet and childish. Of course calling anything "childish" in comparison to Miel is pretty funny, but I hope you can see what I mean.
When I heard the news of FFXIV, mostly the fact that the races would be similar to FFXI's races, I knew I would have to create Miel again. Nothing else would do. But I also knew that she would have to be a much more serious character this time around. FFXI has a sort of cartoon feel looking back at it, which lends itself well to such an extreme and animated character, but FFXIV is more realistic and subdued.
Over time I came up with my new character, who ended up being similar to Miel pretty much in appearance only. And there are even some differences there: she is taller than Miel, around average height, and is thin and fairly muscular rather than plump. Her face, instead of being cute and kittenish, is serious and somewhat unremarkable, as is her backstory. She is pretty much right at the place where the old Miel and the real me meet.
As for what the old Miel has been up to: well, she's now a character in a comic book that new Miel writes sometimes to entertain herself, basically a chibi version of herself. The comic book takes place in a strange world called Vana'diel, where the pirates are good guys and the Roegadyn have tails. She will never die.
This story is relevant to all of you who want to create a fleshed-out character, whether for roleplaying purposes or not, because none of us will know exactly what our characters will be like until we get in game. Either they won't have the customization options we were hoping for, or their animations won't match how we envisioned their personalities, or after playing for a while we end up deciding we'd rather go a different direction than we'd originally planned.
How we deal with this, though, is going to be different from person to person. I know a few people who would just stick with their original ideas, ignoring their character's in-game behavior. Which is fine. Me, I'm too much of a perfectionist for that. I may have the basics figured out, but the rest is up to her. And I'm looking forward to meeting her.
