How'd you find your muse?

[Alfred F. Jones]

So I'm gonna shamelessly copy TND's thread since I'm actually curious as to how everyone found/developed their muse(s). Including those that we don't play on IoF if you'd like to share those too.

[Lovino Vargas]

Lovino - I found him 4 years ago when a friend I introduced Hetalia to said she was roleplaying England on a site. She urged me to join, and though my favorite character at that time was China, I decided I wanted to try and roleplay something different. Since I liked Spamano decently at the time I decided to try to RP Romano. This was hard for me because I was used to roleplaying little 5 year old girls, so it took a long time to adjust, and probably annoyed many people along the way XD maybeevennow... >>;

Emil - When a different friend, Eli, told me she wanted to make a Nordic group, I was assigned Iceland. It was a much easier transfer from Lovino to him, and I enjoyed playing him on FoF. I might even bring him here at one point, maybe. ^^

Ren - I used to roleplay Akito Sohma from Fruits Basket, for a short time. That's where I got that little bit of, and probably have him act like that character from time to time too. This was before we all knew that character was a girl XD

[Mihai C. Eliade]

I already wrote a really long thing over in TND so I'll give a shorter explanation here and more centering on IoF pfft

Romania has kind of become my default muse, so naturally I took him here as well when Mona persuaded me to join. My condition for joining was basically that I would get to make him suffer (OTL) so his powers were designed with that in mind. I also wanted a set of powers that were super useful to everyone else but completely useless, maybe even harmful, for the person who possessed them; it was an exercise in designing, and it was fun to brainstorm up ideas for abilities that pretty much no one would want to use for their own benefit. (Along the way I've been researching mental disorders typical to torture victims as well, and trying to incorporate them into the narrative since it seems like a pretty natural side effect of his powers.)

IoF's setting also gave me a lot to explore in terms of muse. People who are familiar with my Ro-muse in other forums probably know him as cheery, much more self-confident (to the point of arrogance), manipulative, etc. etc. Most of the time he's someone who's used to pulling the strings rather than having the strings pulled on him, so one of the most interesting parts here, I think, is definitely that he lacks agency. At this point, he's mostly letting things happen to him rather than being an instigator of events—not that he's given up altogether and there are moments when he does take his own initiative—but it's interesting to write Mi in a vulnerable position and to explore how that affects his actions and his psyche. He's being forced to navigate a world where he isn't free to do and say whatever he wants, but is still trying to find ways to bend the rules from time to time and still has traits from that "default" persona. Another thing I'm working on is not to make him out to completely be a victim. He has his own faults and is ruthless in his own ways, so it follows that he'll go along with being a victimizer if it suits his needs, despite what his own moral leanings tell him. I'll be happy to know if he isn't exactly sympathetic in other people's eyes haha.

Also, as a sidenote: even though this isn't mentioned in his app I've recently come to read Mi to be at least part Roma in heritage. It's quite fitting as a juxtaposition to canonverse/historical elements, since the Roma in Romania were kept in slavery until the mid-1800s.

[Deleted]

I've rambled a lot on TND thread too so I'll just sum it up pretty quick here and add a bit about IoF!Nesia.

Making an OC based on your own country sounds easy at first - at least, when you just joined a roleplay forum and don't know how things work. But after going to other places, making new app to fit the various AUs and researching the cultural stuff, Nesia's character expands and grows before me. Yet sometimes I doubt myself, critical on my own work, afraid to make her too Sue/wish fulfillment self insert. I've seen some OCs like that in the local fandom (there are great OCs too though) so I try my best to avoid it.

My take on Nesia is making her shell (appearance and personality at a glance) as "how foreigners see us Indonesians"; building it basing on stereotypes and all that. But the deeper layers are "how Indonesians see ourselves". Because I've played in various AUs, I have a chance to use different angles to shape Nesia. For IoF universe, I choose the middle-upper class angle, hence she comes from a rich family and a bit sheltered/naive about the world around her. I had in mind of making her a mutant too on IoF, but mutant!Nesia is too intense - the government will kill her immediately |D besides, the upper class angle is rarely used (as far as I've seen) in any fanworks.

As with the IoF's theme, historically the people in Indonesian islands were used to enslave and be enslaved. We are a bunch of kingdoms/states/sultanates under one identity; hence long ago we're used to wage war against each other. Slavery wasn't a rare thing until around 20th century.

[Hamish A. Stuart]

Okay since my crazy self wants to go through all those I can remember I will put how lovely process.

Prussia: Before Scotland came around I played Prussia because I used to adore the piece of shit. Honestly it came from watching the anime and reading the manga that I decided he is the biggest dork ever. That muse was killed by Scotland though.

Scotland: So we all know the fan design and it's one of my favorite accents so I saw the design and thought what a piece of utter shit. So I decided I wanted to play as this total dick of a man that literally was a trash talking stick. From there I looked up history and developed a lot of things with him. From the beginning he's never liked girls, always had an accent, and been pretty much a dick. The first person to ever make him nice was a Bavaria rper. Honestly the Bavaria is the only reason it was ever discovered that Hamish isn't always a dick for no reason. They helped shape Hamish's need to have his family close as he planned to always have their families together for holidays. (But honestly ask Reed Hamish is probably a little less cruel now than he was. Poor Feli those wounds will never heal.) I've played Hamish since 2010 or 2011 so of course over time he changed but still he's very similar to his original muse form. Everyone always asks about what caused me to add his fear but in reality it's just what I felt when writing so I just went with the feeling.

England: Back toward when I started Scotland I also loved England and used to love USUK, it creeps me out now. An America was aiming for that ship so I decided to develop England to go for the ship. In the end it never happen but he was one of my mains for some time.

New Zealand: My love for characters who lack a known gender abd then taunt the reader with the lack of knowledge brought me to this baby. I started rping him before he appeared much so no one knew his hair color even. This childish demonic baby formed. He's changed but he is still terrible at not realizing he's flirting.

Egypt/Greece: My/Silv has always been my Turkey so she led to this. I was looking at fanart and suddenly just they began to form together as a set which was rather confusing because I had one just neutral in all fights and the other starting fights with a Turkey. I did research with both but Egypt is the one I'm more comfortable playing.

Iceland: Always has been my favorite Nordic and I just related to him a lot so he began to form due to similarities I feel with the character.

I have more characters but I don't remember all 12 stories

[Feliciano Vargas]

Oh jeez I have a whole /novel/ to give Feli jfc And probably another novel for Lovi ahahahahaaa orz

Well then, let's start with Feli. This might be a surprise to people, but Feli was not my very first muse. He was my second, after Alfred. Like some people I know, I started RPing on FF.Net - those old letter systems that were so popular back in late 2010-early 2011. I met Amy--the resident Ireland/Belgium RPer--and several other people I don't see much in the fandom anymore: Issy, Char (Chandinee), and Suboi, there, answering to two of them as Feli while managing my own Alfred letters. Feli was pretty much canon-Feli to start with, to be honest. I was interested in the idea of letter-systems, and I had been slowly getting into Hetalia, but it wasn't much of an obsession so I didn't put too much thought into the characters at first. Not to mention the fact that I was so focused on Al that I kinda...neglected Feli ahahahaha (then it became the complete opposite when the Italians took over my life and basically smothered all my other muses for a really long time--in true Italian fashion *shot*) However, I had fun creating wacky situations for Feli to get into to kinda...relieve the stress of wacky situations people were trapping /Al/ into. Let it be said that my intrigue took over my common sense because before Issy and her Lovi-muse, I hadn't even known that Feli HAD a brother--and that's why I started actually watching the series, and started getting really invested besides such a time-waster.

Only a couple months after I started this silliness, people were going around and taking down the letters from FF.Net; they were technically against the rules, after all. Amy messaged me saying that a friend of hers (or was it a friend of a friend?) named Cori--she played N. Ireland on MoF pretty recently--had started up a site where we could rp this stuff in peace. Al was already taken, but Amy told me that Feli was free if I wanted to join the site. That's...honestly the only reason that Feli became my main character, I bet. To think that such a small thing could shape my entire RPing experience, ahahahaha! Anyway, I wanted to keep rping with Amy, Issy, and Char, so I decided to put as much research into Feli as I possibly could. Because of that, I changed Feli's character pretty radically--he became, like I think most starter-roleplayers who aim for historical accuracy, become almost a direct representation of his nation's history more than his canon personality. It certainly made him darker, but I still wasn't super-versed in the show's canon anyway, so I didn't realize that darker isn't necessarily better. I didn't have to write an app for this site, so once I finally had to I was super-confused by the set-up lol n00b. Letters is where I met Dee and Jen, and I actually introduced it to my friend, Silv (we were looking for a Germany and I advertised the site on FF.net and she responded--just in time for one of the other awesome rpers on the site to take him. But, being the great person Silv is, she decided to research and take Turkey, instead). We were complete dorks on this RP, too--we had serious plots the longer we were on the site, but at first we were pretty wacky. Like. Seriously wacky. Hell, our Truth and Dare thread had like 800 pages (and Feli was part of /most/ of that jfc). But because of that, I slowly grew into Feli as a character without feeling rushed to do so. Like, at first, Feli was part of the Mafia, which is now something I will never condone for my nation!Feli or any nations in general never, ever again. However, I can't regret that decision 100% because it also helped me flesh out how Feliciano acts when he loses his temper, and other, darker things without any serious consequences. (as much as truly plot-oriented sites are good, it's also good to have silly rps that let you branch out and explore a character, I believe)

Interacting with Dee's Hamish in particular helped me figure Feli's mind out, at least in a way that made sense to me. Hamish wasn't the nicest person to Feli--nicer than he is to some others, but still. (It was actually nice, somehow, because a lot of the time people are ridiculously nice to Feli for no reason so to have a character /not/ be nice to Feli in the beginning was refreshing) For a lot of these rps and stuff, Feli was incredibly happy and nice and sickeningly sweet, but could lose his temper at any moment and that wasn't how he was meant to be, y'know? Sometimes he was just angry for no reason--like I didn't try to force that portrayal, but it felt wrong. But when I played with Hamish... Feli started becoming more like he is today. To have him interact with someone who wasn't nice to him on a default, where Feli-muse is like "I WANT TO BE FRIENDS WITH HIM" and just...smothered how upset that stuff was making him in order to try understanding Hamish, helped me realize that that's probably how Feliciano is. I think that's the biggest change I added to Feli, because it reconciled my need for him to have an actual character without giving up Feli's general happy personality. Interacting with a Germany on Letters was crucial for me, as well (I don't seem to have the best luck with getting Feli's other canon-friends/family to rp with, but I'm always happy when they appear!) because it helped me to not only explore a close platonic friendship but a romantic one as well (and the situation also helped me cement my headcanon that Feli's related to the Germanics, as a cousin). It just helps me to explore all these aspects of the character, because I can guess and guess and guess how I think he'll react based on my knowledge of him, but he has a bad habit of surprising me and I prefer to know instead of just guess.

After a while, though, Letters died and I moved on to other sites. The next place I took Feli on (I took Lovi on a site called Supertalia, who actually shares the same power that Feli has on IoF) was MoF, which was my first attempt at an app with Feli as the focus. MoF has probably been the most influential site I've taken Feli on, because human!Feli is a slightly different personality. He's more forgiving, almost happier (which I guess would make sense? Less years to be bitter over and all that). Plus it's the only canon-site I'm on with Feli, anymore ahahahaha orz It's truly cemented in me the idea that Feli is a little ball of super-repressed emotion--like a boiler that's slowly becoming too pressurized. And when he became a ghost (because SOMEONE @rarirurero had to break his neck and KILL HIM) he just became this angry little man. Like seriously angry. Feli represses a lot of his anger because he knows the kind of pain that violence and anger can lead to. Sometimes he's irritated, agitated, annoyed, but he doesn't really let the full extent of his anger out. He was a pretty angry kid (honestly my headcanon on Feli's childhood is slowly warping, as I'm growing more and more enamored with the idea of Feli having northern-Italian siblings that he kills) and as much as he was about trade and greed, I mean; he literally hijacked the 4th Crusade to ransack and destroy Constantinople, which weakened and eventually led to Byzantine Empire's death at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. He can't be happy-go-lucky while attacking someone like that, y'know? that'd be even more disturbing


When I rp with Feli nowadays, after these discoveries I've made with him... one of the biggest thoughts on my mind is "How can I make him suffer?" I don't know if it's because he's so happy that I just want to see him suffer, but he's...really the one muse I love to torture. It's what made me decide on Feli's specific power--it's useful, very useful, but it puts him at odds with the world around him. Without perfect settings, there's a strong likelihood of something setting him off. It's why I assume it was easier for me to write the mutant-app than the human one. However, as much as he can suffer as a mutant, I think I've done worse to him on the final site I currently have Feli on--Ever After, a fantasy-setting roleplay. That one's interesting because Feli is a human currently possessed by an incubus--an incubus that does very, very bad things for fun. It gives me a chance to explore Feli's darker side while still tormenting the hell out of his muse. <3

I think I've rambled on long enough, though, and I don't know what else to say. xD; I'll write another post for my other muses later.

[Alfred F. Jones]

This is long so I'm putting it under spoilers.

Alfred

SPOILER: Click to show

Alfred was...basically a stroke of luck? Just a coincidence really and a matter of timing. I saw he was available and thought why not? I didn't think I'd get the chance again so I went for it. And I'm really glad I did.

I had a sense of where I wanted to take Alfred as a character, but to be honest, I sometimes cringe a little when I think back to my original characterization of him. While it wasn't necessarily bad, he's certainly different from the Alfred that I write from today. I edited the hell out of my app during the first couple months I was here. I had in my mind the idea to make him a little more broken, a little darker than how I would imagine Alfred typically being portrayed. Gradually through writing him though, I've gotten the sense that I really can't force Alfred to angst all the time. At the very least, not on the outside. So I guess in some ways I still hold to how I originally imagined Alfred, but more subtle. He's much more lighthearted than before and I leave his angsting to the smaller moments in between.

I really wanted to play with the idea of courage vs. cowardice and Alfred's hero complex. I liked the idea of Alfred's bravery (or recklessness) stemming from a fear of not acting or running away. Again, with the hero complex, that typically originates from failing to save someone. That's where Matthew (or as I've rewritten Alfred's bio, his friend) comes in. I really wanted reasoning behind most of Alfred's actions, which is why Alfred's fear of ghosts is rooted in his fear that he may have killed a mutant when he was younger as opposed to just something that just randomly arose.

Alfred's sexual and romantic orientation has baffled me, particularly in the last few months. I originally scripted him as a bisexual character as that offered a lot of wiggle room. Then somehow (and I really don't remember how), Alfred became a virgin. I think it was a joke at first but then I just kinda accepted it and made it real. It was reasonable, considering that he would've been in his mid teens or so when he ran away from home and probably right before the age where he was likely to lose his virginity. This, I believe, was also when I had a Matthew for Alfred, and it would make sense that Alfred would take a step back from any romantic relationships after finding out about his brother.

As I rped Alfred more though, I got the feeling that he really would not be open to romance. I originally imagined him using it for cons, but I see Alfred shying away from intimacy in general while simultaneously craving affection. So I scrapped the idea of playing with people's affections to get his way. Mostly. He's not below flirting on short cons, but a long term romantic relationship for a long term con would never be used unless absolutely crucial. Alfred doesn't want to grow close to anyone, but his nature presses him to seek affection. He's against romance for himself, anything that distracts him from what he's set out to do, anyone that could be used against him. In my mind, Alfred would get attached fairly quickly to people if he let himself. So I have difficulty imagining him, at least in this au, being able to just have casual sexual relationships. If I had to label Alfred, he'd probably be somewhere along the lines of demiromantic and bisexual/demisexual. He has an infatuation with Steve Rogers (of course) but doesn't think of himself as anything but straight. In a way I guess this kind of reflects how I see a lot of the U.S. now—although views on LGBTQA+ are improving, a lot of people still take the stance that "that's okay as long as it's not me/my child/my friend/my family."

Really in the end, all IoF Alfred wants out of a relationship (romantic or not) are kisses, cuddles, and someone to talk to and cling to. Whether or not he allows himself to enjoy that is a different matter.

I really loved Saph's idea of making Alfred a con artist. It gave me the opportunity to explore him in different scenarios, playing different people. He can be cool and confident, or cheery and flirtatious. Whatever gets the job done. Alfred is, ironically, most confident when he's pretending to be someone else. The idea of being behind a mask and being shielded by whoever he's playing allows Alfred to loosen his reservations. He feels comfortable that way, being someone else, and it's one of the reasons he likes pulling cons so much.

Alfred's history is a lot about discovering what he's done wrong and trying to correct that, which I think does reflect American history to some extent. But most importantly, he's young. He's basically a kid, who, similar to a lot of characters here, has been forced to grow up due to his circumstances. Alfred hopes more than he lets on. He's very much goal oriented, wanting something new to do and growing bored of the same thing over and over. Alfred concentrates a lot on the short term as opposed to the long term and doesn't see much out there for him in the future other than the FF. No matter how the entire situation falls out, Alfred can't see himself doing anything other than the FF and really, he doesn't bother planning to do anything past that. Alfred is someone who tries to learn and to understand and sometimes fails. He's willing to bend and break the rules if necessary to get what he wants. Sometimes he wants to back out but his fear of cowardice keeps him in place. He has an unusual amount of responsibility put on his shoulders as one of the more active members of the FF, which I think corresponds somewhat to America as a nation, which despite its youth was formed in the right place at the right time and holds a great deal of responsibility in the world because of it.

Alfred is a flawed character and I like it that way. He pretends to be invincible and he is reckless. At heart he's a dork, even if he pretends not to be. He gets excited over food and Steve Rogers, he can be serious when the situation calls for it. He's not stupid, but he can be oblivious. He's not perfect or selfless or superbly intelligent by any means. But he tries. I don't think of Alfred as 'hardworking' necessarily, but he's pretty damn determined.

BUT YEAH, long story short I picked up Alfred as a character just for fun and to try him out and didn't expect it to go anywhere and then just the more I wrote him the more I fell in love so there.

Elizaveta

SPOILER: Click to show

Elizaveta...

I definitely don't know Elizaveta as well as I know Alfred as a character. She's a more delicate character to write. I originally started her on TND with the intention of making her an example of 'normal is fine.' So many characters have tragic backstories, which are really fun to work with, but...it's also unrealistic to an extent. However this also limited me in how much I could do with Elizaveta if she was just an ordinary civilian.

So when I took her on IoF, I wanted to change that. Really it was through a lot of discussion with Jem and Saph in the cbox. I wanted Elizaveta to challenge the stereotypes surrounding women. Jem suggested the idea of making Elizaveta a guard and I decided to kick it up a notch and make her the Head Guard. A bit of a stretch considering her age, but we all take liberties.

Making Liz the Head Guard gave me the opportunity to explore a lot of her masculine side, but I wanted to include the more feminine side as well. Elizaveta seems like a girl who would use all of her skills to her advantage and that came out when I thought of her being the Governor's daughter. With a political position, this opened another set of doors to Elizaveta, allowing me to explore her intelligence in manipulating people and contrasting these two different sides of her. Thanks to this, another side of Elizaveta appeared: her warmer, more nurturing and kinder side...but that is mostly obscured in my rps outside of the one with Antonio since Liz has to keep up a front both with her mother and with the guards.

I like how I've developed Liz to generally be a girl who doesn't take any bullshit, but I do neglect her somewhat on this forum. I'd like to explore her more in 'proper society'/politics and with friends. Sadly, with the limited number of human characters right now, that's fairly difficult.

[Antonio F. Carriedo]

I don't know, maybe it will come as a surprise, maybe it won't, but the character I got into Hetalia for and did a lot with at the beginning and still do... is Germany aha xD I've taken 7 years of German and absolutely adore German history. It certainly helped that he's blond too jnfd.

Anyway, Toni. The thing is with Jem - I'm sure most of y'all still remember her pf - I did a lot of ficwriting. One was a Germancest shipping fic that had some Spamano on the side, and one way or another I offered to take Spain. I think at the time I just thought that he was funny and that he wouldn't be too hard because I'm not... very quick on the draw either fff. We ended up doing a sort of off-shoot fic with Spamano as the main couple, which made me look more into Toni. I think what REALLY got me to adore him and connect so well was when we did a super long historical chapter for that fic. Being me, I did weeks of research into Spanish history to make that chapter the best I could in the historical sense. When applying some of it to a character experiencing it... some things ended up being rather dark. It shaped Antonio more and more for me, made me FEEL for him so much. I don't know just - as someone who's gone through some troubles in my childhood, family and friends treating me the way they did until I was extremely depressed and had very low self-worth... the idea of a character going through the sort of things we wrote into the fic for Antonio, and still smiling and being happy at the silliest of things... really inspired me? Still does??? Honestly because I respect that quality as much as I do sometimes I'm fearful that I play him without showing any flaws to his character jfdsdf

As for Ky, well... between our personal silly RPs and fics over the years, Jem and I have probably split up nearly the ENTIRE cast of Hetalia between us. Me usually taking the blonds (>A>) meant that I ended up with Norway. I'll be honest in saying that I haven't done near as much with him as I have many other characters, and will readily admit to still working my through how to write him, much less him in this universe. I do quite like him though - I can relate to being an annoyingly loving older sibling pf.

[Gilbert Beilschmidt]

Eheh... the short answer for all of my muses is "Eh, why not?" I first got into rping in 2008 on FF. Net though it was with a different fandom. Once that board died I pretty much just stuck to private rps with a few friends from there. But then my obsession with Hetalia started aND I couldn't find anyone who shared my interest, so one Google search later, I ended up on Monday.

Kiku: I usually played more subdued characters in my other Rps so Japan seemed like the natural choice. Those who met me on MoF probably remember me as the incompetent one who couldn't even set her own picture ((I have never felt do old in my life)) I liked playing Kiku but I don't think I ever really got comfortable with his voice.... maybe I'll try again in the future.

Feli: The next board I found was TND and when I saw that Feli was free I couldn't help but give him a try. I always loved Feli but he was just so different from my normal type I wasn't sure I could pull it off. I honestly was about to pick another character when I came across a picture of Feli holding a bouquet of flowers and a handgun and everything just fell into place. I was really surprised by how easy I was able to flesh him out as a character and I was equally surprised by the positive reception he got. Talking to several other members I learned that a lot of people get a bit leery of new Feli players because they can be extremely overbearing ((and obnoxious)) it was a relief to know that my Feli-muse made the cut.

Gil: last but not least IoF! Again, Gil was more of a test of my flexibility than anything. I adore playing a brother and I alays felt like being a big brother was an essential part of Gilbert. His back story was probably one of the easiest I've done, and his voice was pretty loud from the beginning ((no surprise there right? )). My main concern was how to play him in a real and meaningful way. Like Feli, Gil often seems to be reduced to one or two obnoxious characteristics. But from the get go, I saw him as someone who legitimately cares for those who are marginalized or forgotten. He comes off as conceited or arrogant because he's learned that at least it gets him attention. In his mind, bad press is better than none at all. My first instinct was to make him a mutant due to his coloration. But I really loved the idea of him sort of caught between both worlds. With his looks and being constantly under suspicion as a kid, I felt like he'd be far more sympathetic to other mutants. For some reason I really loved the idea of Gil having a fairly boring job and using that as a platform to do wonderful things. I think people often focus on his arrogance and sometimes dopey behavior and forget that he was a hell of a strong fighter--and that requires a strong mind. I really wanted Gil's lesser emphasized qualities to shine, while still keeping the aspects of him that makes him so unique. I hope I managed that.

Mattie: I'll be frank. Up until about 3 weeks ago, playing Canada never crossed my mind. But I was looking at something for Al and Gil and suddenly I had an idea. Both boys share similar stories in that they had both lost their little brothers and that event drastically changed their lives. I though it would be interesting to have a parallel between the two pairs. And then I thought "what if Al doesn't get the same happy reunion that Gil does? How would Al react to discover his brother warped almost beyond recognition?" The idea of Mattie being something of a chaotic force fascinated me and I really wanted to explore a character who had clearly been a tragic figure, but is now something to be feared. In Matt I really wanted to ask the question "is there a point in which a person can no longer be saved?" And for Al I think the question is "Can I accept that reality? "

[Vash Zwingli]

Okay so...I'm procrastinating assignments and I'm on reading week right now and realized I never actually wrote on this thing. SO I figured I would. I actually have three muses for Hetalia (Vash, Natalia and Lukas (Norway)) but I'm only going to write about Vash for now anyway since he's the one I play on here and sort of my baby out of the lot...I've also had him the longest and having developed his relationships with the other two characters is sort of how I developed those muses in general to begin with. 

So my Vash muse actually didn't really start in rp form at all, it started back in 2009 when my friends wanted me to go to a convention with them (my first Anime Convention as a matter of fact) and had my join in with the anime group at my school. I knew little to nothing about anime since it wasn't really something that my family promoted watching and my dad and I were suckered into watching the Space channel for TV (ie Canada's sci-fi and fantasy channel), and I'll admit I'm still much more into sci-fi and fantasy than I am Anime. But anyway, all of my high school friends started really getting into Hetalia and then one of my friends who was to cosplay as Austria approached me and told me that she had a character for me to cosplay which I could do last minute as I looked like them (yes I did have the bob and bangs and angry eyebrows don't judge me.) She also told me the character would be easy to get into because I too used to be an angry porcupine of a person and I'm still short SO. 

I ended up cosplaying Switzerland (mainly agreeing to it because my Dad had some amazing pictures from skiing there and I love skiing and sdomsooosd I've always wanted to move there and thus doing research for the country on history and everything wasn't hard. I've also loved the medieval period of history which is when a lot of the really interesting swiss history comes into play.) 

To say the least this is also how I got into Hetalia and so...well a Vash muse to some extent has been with me since the beginning of my Anime and convention going things...so well I'm really attached to him. 

In any case, a few months later that same friend (along with another) asked me to join an rp forum with them as Vash and so I said why not, I'd never really done a serious rp before and I found the character easy and fun to work with....I also felt the need to actually come up with a large amount of backstory to explain why he was the way he was as it didn't seem realistic enough to just leave him with his over-protectiveness of his sister, emotional immaturity, weapon love and money obsession without having a proper reason. And so this is where I really started looking on the actual history of the country. 

While I was reading through the nation's history I realised that well, there would be reason enough for anyone who experienced hardship from day one and had to really depend on himself would react in a similar manner—but exactly how that was executed was when I really developed my muse. I don't necessarily have a solid history for Vash (of course each forum is different) but I know the patterns in which his history has to be to make up his character, otherwise it simply wouldn't make sense and so that sort of historical template was sort of based off of the historical occurrences of the actual history of the country itself. Here is a bit of an exception however I still twisted it in such a way that it keeps with the layout that I need to make him realistic. So, to say the least he does also vary from forum to forum, which at first was hard to work with...but after having rped him for years (and those of you that I talk to on skype know how often I do actually rp him) it became painfully easy to predict how he would react. Then again, I suppose really I can relate to how he does act and react due to the fact that I've focussed so much on his history (and potential plots) since it really makes the character. Because of this he's sort of stuck with me and as long as I don't have noisy music to bother my muse while I'm writing, I feel I can get pretty on the mark replies usually for how I feel he'd be. (Yes my muse doesn't like the noise and so he can't focus and then I can't focus on writing his thoughts and since he's a man of few words, the internal tangents he has and observations he makes make up most of my posts.) 

Fun fact: in my first forum I actually had him lose his mind because he thought he got his sister killed when they were little, since I didn't have a Lili and frequently don't, I have to come up with some sort of explanation as to why she's not around and usually he worries himself sick about her because he's a worry wart (she's very often his only family) no matter how safe she is because of that first rp. 

I also frequently like to have history with a Francis or Roderich as historically speaking those are the two most influential countries during the middle period of swiss history and well, really carves out his personality I find. So even if it is in an AU I like to have something there since I know how the exchanges would be and it works well into future plotting.