devilsbane with two [i]'s

Good god, the last time I was here was when I was still working with proto-Karin and was shipping her with Lass Isolet from Grand Chase. In 2009-2010, IIRC.

Anyway, here I was, attempting to do another "I play as Eilhart and dodge the entire romance/flirting section of the game" thing, which I did for VtM:B, (kinda, ignoring the fact that the protag is scripted to bone their sire at the start), never pulling the moves on ANYONE despite him being a Toreador, and also in BG3, despite the game having a big glaring "the gang wants to bang the protag" thing going on. 

Well, this time around, I load up PF:WOTR, choose to play as Eil for the protagonist / knight-commander, and, despite my apprehensions at the start, I caved in and let him get romanced. Got blindsided by Daeran actively attempting to court the protagonist. Not that this is unique or anything, but the way it was paced was pretty good. That, and the dynamic between the two was fun to work around with.

...This is actually my issue with a lot of other in-game romances, I have to make sure that it works with the bozo that I chose to roleplay as as or else I lose the drive to pursue it. And more often than not you'd end up running into shit like "I don't think he'd say that, but..." due to the nature of limited in-game dialogue options. 

To be absolutely fair, I actually had some apprehensions towards Daeran when I had first encountered him in-game. The archetype he fulfills can be a hit or miss at times, depending on the writing (and I definitely had a love/hate relationship with the first act of the game, lol)

Regardless, I eventually found him quite charming! Has an incredibly well-done personal questline, too, which I did become quite invested in. Made me want to continue playing the game, and I can officially say that it makes him worthy to get dropped in the blender, if you will.

Anyway, onto the ship rambling. AKA me making sense of how they end up together, plus some thoughts on Daeran's route and stuff. 

Game spoilers and disorganized thoughts ahoy!

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Surprise, surprise, I still suck butt at long-form blogging so uh, here's a convoluted post about...OCs. Again. Maybe one of these days I'll talk about something else ... (<__>)

So, Caledfwlch. Also known as Caled, Viktor, Vicky, etc. He's one of my "older" OCs, and by "older", I mean, "I made this guy before I even began worrying about college applications" old. From the current roster of active OCs, only Karin and Munn outdate him by a few years (Munn was from ~2012 and Karin was from ~2010 give or take,) but this post isn't about these two.

Caled's also a special little bastard for me -- one look at almost all my accounts would reveal this quickly -- and has been responsible for shaping a lot of my current day interests, though some of them were traceable to older interests that ultimately festered when I began locking in on him.

That being said, he hasn't been the exact same guy since his inception. Arguably the OC who's changed way too many times (vs. literally everyone else) due to changing interests and adjustments and the like, and for future Choco's posterity's sake, I wanted to kind of document major milestones that this loser has gone through over the years. Like a little time capsule if you will. That and I wanted to kind of back up his older design document(s) somewhere, lol. 

I couldn't get the mf cut to work so I had to do a workaround. sowwy.
 

click to read more

To start off, in case if you already aren't aware: Caled is an Aegislash gijinka. For those unfamiliar with the term, it means that he's essentially a humanized Aegislash / an Aegislash depicted as a human. Back then when I was a wee little lad I sucked at drawing Pokemon, and had way more fun trying to depict them as humans... Though for most part, I only focused on making one-off designs, and I didn't really turn them into proper OCs except for, like, a handful of Pokemon that I liked. However, at some point, I started making gijinka designs for my own Pokemon teams specifically, and it eventually led to me making designs for my "Kalos Trio": A Delphox, A Gardevoir, and a Doublade.

Left to right: Blaze the Delphox, Caledfwlch the Doublade, and Luna the Gardevoir (2013)

Their names were made on a whim, either from jokes (Blaze was an elaborate weed joke, which was the peak of comedy for a 13-year-old), or from pop culture references. Caled, in particular, fell into the latter.

I suppose for those familiar it's terribly easy to see that he was a Homestuck reference. Specifically a reference to Dave Strider, who, at one point, wielded a sword named Caledfwlch.

Unfortunately it wasn't really due to any existing interest in Medieval European stuff (since Caledfwlch afaik is one of the other names given to the Excalibur, but I'll be honest, I haven't actually done a proper deep dive into Arthurian literature outside of, like, a few movies and maybe skimming a few of the texts. And Wikipedia.) and was mostly due to the fact that I was really, really into Homestuck around this time. Enough to have cosplayed one of the trolls, even...

...However, I don't actually remember too much of Homestuck despite being very invested into it as a young teenager to give more insight as to why I specifically went with the Dave Strider-influenced design, but honestly I think it could be chalked up to: "character with sword" + "sword has cool name" = "cool name for sword pokemon".

Keep in mind that the Homestuck references in Caled's design will continue to persist until...late 2014, I believe. I'll get to that later, because there's a few Caled-specific tidbits that I want to ruminate about.

Just to give some background context, in Karin and Caled's current canon, Karin, at one point, gifts Caled a Dusk Stone to let him evolve into an Aegislash before she and her team tackle the Kalos League. In the actual playthrough, I held off from evolving Caled because...I didn't like how Aegislash looked at first, lol. It looks super different from the previous two evolutions! That, and I really, really liked the way Doublade looked. I recall that people were making fun of its design for essentially being Honedge x 2 but to me, it was the coolest shit ever (especially when the CoroCoro leakes dropped prior to the release.)

So, when I eventually evolved him for better stats, I got kind of disapppointed that he ended up merging into one big sword instead of, like, an amalgamation of even more swords. Just for reference, I loved designs like the Klinklang line and the Magnezone line, so evolution lines that were just "just more of this little guy" was one of my favorite archetypes of all time. Not so much now, though, but Klinklang and Doublade still hold a special place in my heart.

(Writing this down feels ironic especially if you were to consider the fact that, technically speaking, I, Choco, would consider myself an Aegislash Yume, but I suppose the fact that I had to grow to like it made him even more special to me...lol.)

I didn't like the design to the point that I reverted back to an earlier save, only to end up re-evolving him back into an Aegislash because the damage boost was too nice to ignore. Not to mention that Aegislash used to be pretty good in Gen 6 competitive if my memory serves me right. (what a fall from grace in the succeeding generations, though...) I am unfortunately not immune to metagaming. Sometimes.

So, with his newfound Aegislash form, I had to make a human design for him! This time around, I think it's even more blatantly Dave-esque, though. IIRC I did get a whole lot of comments about it too (back when I was still active on dA and on my old tumblr..)

Caledfwlch's very first Aegislash Design (2013)

With all the investment into making character designs, I naturally ended up writing more and more about the new gijinkas. Which brings us to: original Caled's personality.

If I had to sum up his original personality...he was a lot more, reserved and serious, so to speak. He was kind of the tsukkomi to a number of boke in the team, and very much specifically towards Blaze and Munn. Nicer, too, somewhat. He was way more outwardly caring and gentle, and generally had a big brother vibe towards everyone (and specifically towards Karin.) Emphasis on him being gentle. He, most notably, was quite prudish in this version of him, and I could distinctly recall poking fun at him for kind of being a "blushing virgin" type of character when it came to affection. Oh, he was also in his late 20's here.

Incredibly different from the sleazy fuck Caled of today. However, there was a unifying thread to it all, despite everything. His original background -- and the reason as to why he had a gentler persona -- was that I had planned him to have an edgier backstory, as one does as a moody teenager.

He was a fallen noble who was executed for an unspecified crime, and I put in a few implications here and there that his "softer" persona was his deliberate attempt to shed his previous troublesome tendencies, so to speak. Kind of like he's overcompensating for it, almost. That his time being cursed as a sword eventually humbled him into...this.

Scary undead knight who turns into (or at least tries to be) a huge softie after getting his ass handed over to him...

In a way, it's still the framework for current-day Caled, even if the execution is way different. 🤔

...So, the first major change from v1 Aegislash Caled, was his age. At some point I realized that late 20's seemed way too young to have that turbulent of a background, so I bumped his age to...36. To 14-year-old me, this was "old". But it served as his permanent age up until...2018 or something.

Caled's v2 design (2014)
what the hell is that breastplate, lol

In this timeframe, I ended up really getting into late medieval/early renaissance arms and armor, and began researching it earnestly just to apply it to him. I eventually settled with a mix of, like, English Greenwich armor with Gothic influences. Not that it matters much at this point, because you can't...really see it in this era design-wise, imo. He also had a closed helm at this stage, but I didn't really draw it as much until 2017-2019.

Honedge, Doublade, and Aegislash (v3) designs for Caled, (2016)
Only his Aegislash design was really inspired by IRL armor, though...

Around 2015-2017, I started workshopping his background a bit more. He would have originated from a pseudo-Germanic kingdom inspired by the 1400s, and it would have some vague custom where their kings were elected with the help of an extremely ancient Aegislash that had been around since the start of the kingdom. All these were heavily based on the dex entries for Aegislash, which provides plenty of references to the pokemon historically meddling with the nobility for its own gain.

He was then elevated from "random noble" into a king, and that he was hung to death by an angry mob, specifically after losing the "trust" of the royal Aegislash and after killing his successor in an attempt to keep his hold on the throne. He gets cursed into a sword, gets pissed about it for centuries, then runs into Karin and all that jazz.

In 2016, I eventually made the initial designs for his "alive" form, which also marked the first use of his "real" name. I chose from a myriad of names, one of which was "Caelum" and "Viktor", and, well, we all know which name won in the end. That and "Caelum" was too conveniently similar to "Caled', which kind of felt dumb to me at the time, since Karin was the one who names Caled, and would have had no prior knowledge of his background whatsoever...

Viktor's original design (2016)

 

His "alive" form was inspired heavily by Turdor-era attire, due to me mistaking the 1500s as the 15th century instead of the 16th. This is a mistake that will not get corrected until 2019.

I originally wanted him to be blonde, similar to his undead gijinka form, but eventually settled on giving him brown hair after making a hair x eye color chart, assigning numbers to each cells, then running it through a random number generator.

Design aside, I also wanted him to be very different from the "undead" Caled, which led to "Viktor" being depicted as an incredibly arrogant and hedonistic noble. A stark contrast to the gentle giant-esque persona that his undead form carries, but hints of his old self poke out whenever he's drunk... Something that he carries with a lot of shame and regret, knowing that deep down this was who he used to be.

...However, as time passed, I got very much attached to his stupid big ham persona of the past. He was fun to put into Situations! Specifically self-indulgent situations where he'd get his shit kicked in and get brought down to his knees...ehe. ^__^

Eventually, around 2019-2020, I decided that, shit, maybe he's actually just like this, dead or undead. But toned down, of course. He'd still feel shame about letting his pride go over his head, but...it would be fun if he was kind of just a huge hypocrite. That, and it kind of didn't make too much sense to me as time passed that he'd suddenly do a 180 personality-wise when he, instead of feeling bad about his misdeeds, just marinated in his bitterness after his death.

So, at some point, I merged the softer undead Caled personality and the more sleazy "Viktor" personality, and thus sleazeball Caled was born.

I also bumped his age from 36 to 44 and eventually to 53 sometime between '16-'22, I don't really remember the specifics too much.

Caled's current Aegislash design, done in the Pokemon style used for trainers. (2022)
Heavily referenced XY Wikstrom's armor, though, because I wasn't sure how to stylize the gothic plate into, well, the Pokemon style.

An illustration of Caled's "Alive" form (2023)
I got this printed as an acrylic stand! hehe.

Also, most importantly, I finally fixed the 15th century - 16th century design inspo mishap. His "alive" form now drew more inspiration from late 1400's-early 1500's art, specifically that from Italy and partially from the Burgundy regions. His armor was also adjusted to reflect this, with both his Aegislash armor and his "alive" form armor drawing (almost direct) inspiration from Gothic plate armor, with some adjustments. His "sword form" design was finalized around this point in time as well.

An illustration depicting different seasonal configuations of Caled's Aegislash-form armor (2022)



Reference sheet for Viktor, including his "normal clothing" and "armored" design (2023)

I sometimes drop the pattern on his overcoat, though

    

Design for Caled's longsword from, including the scabbard. (2022)
Fun fact: This is his "true" form when he's a gijinka; meaning his humanoid body is just a projection of sorts. He has a spare that looks exactly like this sword, which he uses for battle. The actual sword is housed somewhere in Karin's room.

Oh, I also wound up throwing the "big bro" aspect and pretty much leaned harder into him being more paternalistic (or "dad-like", so to speak. though IMO he's more of, like, a freaky uncle kind of guy...) I don't really have an excuse for this outside of the fact that I found it hot, sorry. The pervert side of him was just a side effect of merging his old personality with his current personality. (shrug)

It was also around this time where I ended up merging a lot of OC universes together, and somehow, Theo became his kid. To be fair, they did kind of share a lot of similar design aspects, and workshopping it to work wasn't too hard of a task. Piper somehow got involved too, now as his nephew. Shitty brunette family...

...So, this kind of concludes the Caled development pipeline, any further info and you'll have to dig into the website, lol. I don't think I'll alter him too much at this point, since I like the way he is right now, but I can't really guarantee that I won't get bonked over the head with the hammer of inspiration and start rewriting stuff out of the blue.

However, I do like consistency as well, and admittedly there are a lot more omissions here about minor changes to Caled's design that I don't see too important to write a paragraph about (i.e. it took me half a decade to change how his fringe looked, how long it took me to finalize the fact that "yes, he has body hair", or that his dick size is exactly the same as it was when I randomly decided it on a whim as a horny teenager, etc...)