I like this topic, too.
Katla is my second character, after playing for a coupple of weeks with a couple of RL friends only to decide that if I was going to both stay friends with one of them and play the game in a way I found enjoyable, I would have to make a fresh start and
not play with him. I am greatly relieved at what Shin wrote above, because I picked Katla's race and background precisely in order to get a high Charisma, which I had been led to believe was essential in order to become a decent mission runner. It's great to finally know that I was not alone in making that mistake. Misery loves company.
Similarly, I made her Fed Navy, because back in 04, it let you start with racial frigate at level 4, which by itself made for a high starting SP total compared to most of the other choices.
She was a RP character from the get-go, but since I was still learning the ropes of EVE lore, she wasn't particularly well-developed. Her first missions consisted of hauling garbage (literally) from one station to another, and I ended up rationalizing this fact by deciding that she graduated near the bottom of her class and was seen as a bit of a failure by her peers and superiors. This also provided her with a good excuse for buggering off into Amarrian space rather quickly, although I've forgotten why this seemed like a good idea at the time. In any case, once there, I got involved with a small RP-lite corp started by two "veterans" (a veteran was anyone who owned and could fly a battleship, back then), and hung around with them for a few months, long enough to get a Megathron of my own, which I really had no business flying. Then RL stuff forced me off EVE for more than a year.
When I came back, the old corp was dead, my Megathron died soon after because I still didn't know how to tank, and I decided to take a trip back to Fed space, where I got acquainted with the "real" EVE RP community for the first time. In particular, Placid Reborn seemed to offer an exciting concept, but they were a bit too martial for my tastes, as I was very PVP-shy at the time. So when two of their members left PR to found the industrial corp Krysalis, I joined up almost immediately. I had a good time there, and while I didn't get rid of my PVP aversion during the time I was there, I did get more comfortable poking around in low-sec, and I got thoroughly immersed in the RP scene.
Eventually Krysalis ended as well, not long after an incredibly embarrassing war that mostly consisted of us hiding in stations and crying bitter IC and OOC tears because we were harassed by the new-on-the-scene corp INTAKI UNION, a bunch of Intaki separatist terrorists with ties to Amarr. Although we were under orders not to undock, I was very glad for those orders, and I still sometimes wish I could travel back in time and slap the past myself silly over that fact. While the war itself ended, the feeling of having a sword of Damocles hanging over our heads did not, and I believe that played a big part in the subsequent dissolution of Krysalis.
After that I put Katla on the back-burner for a while as I got my second account, where I decided to try my hand at playing an Achura, who I decided was going to be a follower of the Amarrian faith. Being more familiar with the EVE lore by then, I put considerably more initian thought into Lilya's background than Katla's. While she was born and raised on Saisio, I also decided that she had lived all her life in a remote and isolated Amarrian mission (on a tiny island, no less), and so would have had close to no contact with "regular" Achuran society before she left.
(I also decided that the mission was as remote as it was because Achuran authorities really didn't want Amarrian missionaries on the planet at all, but felt pressured into allowing it for diplomatic reasons, and decided to give the Amarrians an island instead of allowing them the opportunity to find a site on their own. The inaccessibility of the location meant the missionaries would only be able to exert their foreign influences of a very small number of people, who would in almost all cases have to seek them out on their own initiative, rather than the other way around. This potential insult was then deftly camouflaged by said authorities pointing out, very pleasantly, that the location's remoteness made it ideally suited for the Amarrians' purposes, as it was an excellent location for a monastery - which it reasonably would be, from a traditional Achuran point of view.)
I had fun playing Lilya for a while. She got swept up by Ashar, and became one of the few traditionalists in the otherwise very innovative Order of the Blessed Sisters of Amarr. Eventually, she and the other traditionalists left and formed Opus Imperium.
By that time my interest in Katla had been rekindling, however. She was over in Caldari space at that time running missions for them for who knows what reason, and I decided to take a good hard look at her seemingly wishy-washy personality and loyalties, and see if I could impose a bit of sense and structure onto it, while still allowing for her previous in-space actions to not seem completely out of character. And in a fit of inspiration, Astropolitanism, and with it, Astropolitan Front, was born. Since it was a stroke of inspiration on my own part which led me down that path, I decided to make it the case with her as well - she visited Yulai, walked around a station there for the first time, and experienced an epiphany which suddenly helped her making sense of her own identity in a way which she'd never been able to do before. Almost overnight, the alcoholic Navy washout and lackluster industrialist became a political demagogue with dreams of CONCORD's eventual supremacy and a culturally pasteurized (and politically totalitarian) society of space-dwelling people. Katla as she exists today owes a lot of her personality and quirks to this period.
AST-F was a lot of fun, despite all the setbacks and eventual dissolution of the corp. What I do regret is pulling Lilya into it once I found out that I wouldn't have time to both be a CEO and play an alt outside of the corp. While pulling her in was a sensible choice in a strictly OOC sense, it largely ruined her as a roleplay character. With the benefit of hindsight, it would have been much better to just let her fade into the background and perhaps pick her back up at a later date.
Once FW hit and AST-F got the final nail hammered into its coffin, going Sansha was a pretty easy choice. Without going into too much detail as to the philosophical whys (although I could), I had actually kept a pretty sympathetic view toward the Nation during AST-F's existence, with peace between CONCORD and the Nation being one political goal. As a result, Katla had quite a few friends among the Nation RPers at the time, and when Izzy headhunted her for Naqam, she wasn't hard to ask. This led to some awesome times.
Since the return of Sansha himself, however, and the escalation of the war between the Nation and CONCORD, Katla has felt pretty sidelined in the middle of it all. From her own personal perspective, she's caught in the middle of not one, but two civil wars (Faction Warfare and the resurgent CONCORD-Nation war). She doesn't really know what to do with herself anymore, and so often ends up doing not very much at all, besides impotently wishing that this whole bloody mess would just stop. Both IC and OOC, she remains in Naqam partly because there's not really any better available alternative, and partly because of personal loyalty to other characters and the players behind them.
Although the feeling of having painted myself into a corner while playing her is frustrating sometimes, it does still allow for good roleplay. On the plus side, she's beginning to lower her shoulders and relax for a bit for the first time in years, and although this development is in significant part rooted in resignation, it does allow for the resurgence of a more pleasant and
human side to her. She's beginning to make friends again outside of her alliance, which is a development I am enjoying greatly.
Now, to Ruby. Why do I play Ruby?
First off, I don't play her
enough, and I know it. But I absolutely, completely love her as a character. She's my own special snowflake vanity project, and I'm not the least bit ashamed to admit it. I conceived of her during the end days of AST-F, as I recall, as I became increasingly fascinated with Sansha's Nation, and the wonderful region description of Esoteria was something that really caught my interest. Adding a touch of complexity to the Nation by promoting the idea of Esoteria serving as a cultural counterpoint of sorts to Stain was something that really appealed to me. As was the idea of playing a character who, despite being essentially good-hearted, had grown up in a society which was sufficiently alien that some of the things she'd do with the best of intentions would still come off as horrendously creepy to the average outsider.
In a way it touches on Samira's reference to Vampire: the Masquerade's alternate paths of Morality, above. While the Vampire games themselves never served as inspiration for Ruby, Changeling: the Lost (by far the gem of the nWoD games) certainly did. Tomorrowland Orphanage is a strange, surreal cybernetic wonderland where lost and abandoned children, with careful coaching and cybernetic upgrades, are transformed into beautiful, talented creatures capable of realizing their true creative potential - or horrible, inhuman abominations, all in the eye of the beholder.
I chose to make her Ni-Kunni mainly for two reasons. First, and most importantly, Ni-Kunni women had access to an all-over-the-place hairstyle and a spooky veil-like tattoo that covered the entire upper half of their face, both of which I thought seemed perfect for Ruby. Second, I wanted to have a valid explanation for why she was trained as a capsuleer in Empire space, and decided that giving her the Ni-Kunni "Border Runner" background would have served as a good, hard-to-verify cover story (along with a few hefty bribes) to get her through the training without triggering the Sansha alarm. While the school representatives taking the bribes would definitely know there was something shady in her past, they'd have no reason to assume it was significantly more shady than that of your average actual Border Runner.
I definitely need to play her more. Hm.
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Topic: Why Do You Play the Character You Play? (Read 4429 times)