Yesterday I went down a bit of a rabbit hole. It started simple enough with a post from Ricki Tarr who posed a question like they often do, this time about your preference for video game characters. This led to me sifting through directory after directory of screenshots compiling “evidence” and eventually making a post in the thread. The question posed is not quite as simple of an answer as you might think. Truth be told I am not exactly sure how I ended up in this situation because it wasn’t always like this. I guess I should stop stalling and just get into the meat of the discussion.
When confronted with the character creation screen of a new video game… I create the same character over and over and that character is named “Belghast”. Yesterday I assembled this collage of 28 characters that I have played in various games and how they all mostly align to the same features. Given the choice my character will be light-skinned, have jet black or at least dark hair… occasionally gray if the black shader looks goofy, either a full beard of a goatee, and some sort of facial scarring preferably over one of the eyes if that is an option. Creating this character comes as naturally as anything else at this point, and I can pretty much chip away at the system and reveal the inner “Belghast” quickly.
When a game has a fixed character but allows for customization options… I will generally speaking lean towards bringing out the inner Belghast in that character as soon as possible. For example here are two screenshots from two different games, and in both, I have adapted the character that I am forced to play into as close of a reasonable facsimile of “Belghast” as I can. The piece that I have not really understood and continue to not… is how I landed on this particular vissage. On some level it is the idealized version of what I actually look like. I have brown hair instead of black, but I’ve always fancied black hair. There was a period in the past where I was super into The Punisher and one year for Halloween I dyed my hair black with that awful spray paint style temporary color and I think maybe I liked it enough for it to have embedded itself into my psyche.
I’ve often assumed that deep in my subconscious there is an action hero from my childhood that looked like this, and I just keep adapting my characters to that model that I imprinted upon. Thing is “bearded” punisher is a thing that did not exist during the time when I was actively reading that comic. He was a clean-shaven man of many guns… and of note, I was into Punisher in the 90s, before the facists decided to co-opt his branding. I was also really into Nick Fury, Wolverine, and Cable… so maybe this character that I landed on is a bit of an amalgam of all of those. There is also Chuck Norris but weirdly I was never into his martial arts movies in a big way. I saw more than my fair share of them as would any pre-teen/teen growing up in the 80s/90s but it wasn’t a big deal for me so I doubt it came from there.
Generally speaking my success at adapting to a video game is directly related to how good of a “Belghast” I can create in it. Sometimes I can’t and in those scenarios, I often create a female character. The thing there is that I want to be able to create something “beefy” and heavily armored. This is something I struggle with endlessly with games adapted from the Chinese or South Korean markets because they tend to feature hairless pretty boys and dainty waifs. Sometimes I just play female characters for a break and I am going to use an example from Diablo IV as the sort of character that I tend to create when given access to a character generator. I’m also highly partial to the female orc models from World of Warcraft because they are “Stronk” and battle-ready.
When none of these options really feel right… I sometimes play something inhuman. For example, when Destiny launched there was nothing available but clean-shaven characters, so instead I went for the robotic Exo. In ArcheAge I could not create a character with a decent beard, so I wound up rolling a cat person. I think more than anything that beard is probably the most important element. I get grumpy when a game has a weak beard game or the only beard options are “peach fuzz” stubble. I don’t mind a trim beard and I can get by well enough with something like that. Lately, I have created characters with pretty bushy beards in part because I kind of miss my own full beard. At some point, I switched back to a trimmed goatee/mustache combo and I keep contemplating growing back the full treatment.
This is a post that zero people asked for, but sometimes that is what happens. For those who are curious… here is a quick rundown of the games all of the collage shots came from. In a top left row by row to bottom right order:
- Dragon Age Inquisition
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Outriders
- Phantasy Star Online 2
- Guild Wars 2 my Necromancer
- Red Dead Redemption 2
- Wildstar
- Guild Wars 2 my Warrior
- Elder Scrolls Online
- Starfield
- Final Fantasy XIV aka Lala Bel
- New World
- Baldur’s Gate 3
- World of Warcraft
- City of Heroes
- Enshrouded
- Diablo IV
- Dark Age of Camelot – The First Belghast
- DC Universe Online
- Fallout 76
- Landmark
- Monster Hunter World
- Neverwinter
- Skyforge
- Star Wars the Old Republic
- Secret World
- Hellgate London
- Fallout 4
I hope yall have a wonderful week and tomorrow I will probably post something a bit more meaningful.
I mean…. you know I have some artwork you did in highschool that is basically this exact character.
“This is something I struggle with endlessly with games adapted from the Chinese or South Korean markets because they tend to feature hairless pretty boys and dainty waifs.”
Yeah, tell me about it. It’s kinda ridiculous but one of my primary criteria for choosing who to play in Genshin Impact is “does this person look like an actual adult who might be useful in a fight?” The pickings are slim.