OC-tober Day 19: Inspiration
I’m queueing this post because I know I’ll be away from the 17th to the 19th – and because the theme is “inspiration”, I get to talk about my boy Hideki yet again.
(…Though it’s very likely that I won’t have talked about Hideki as part of this challenge yet, but I don’t know that for a fact since I’m writing this way ahead of time. What I mean is: I love talking about this. Strap in.)
When I first created my sweet boy Hideki, his name was Daniel and he was white. Horrible history, I know. I completely revamped this character around 2018-2019 for a Danganronpa RP (horrible history, I know) which gave me the perfect opportunity to keep the same basic layout but make it better, and accentuate some aspects, such as his relationship with being a top-student, a lot more.
One thing that hadn’t changed was my warm memory of the song that inspired this character in the first place. And that song was Animal I Have Become by Three Days Grace.
I created Daniel at some point when I was in high school. By that point, I already knew that song by heart. I’d discovered it via an edgy bloody anime girls montage on YouTube when I was like 10, and after years of listening to it via the AMV, I’d bought the album it was on, One-X, when I was in middle school. And for some reason, this was my go-to CD to put on when I was home alone and washing the dishes.
So it was one random day, as I was washing the dishes and listening to this song I loved, that inspiration struck and I came up with him.
I’m not going to lie, I still love this album unironically. Three Days Grace was never the same after their lead singer left – the new singer and direction never matched the raw and sincere frustration expressed in their earlier works. This album, generally, and this song were relatable as hell. When I listened to the song for the first hundred times, without really knowing what it meant and with English as my second language, I related this song to my personal experience of living in an abusive home (a theme explored in other songs on the album) and going to a school where I didn’t belong for many reasons. The “animal I had become” was, to me, the version of me that was too mentally exhausted to interact fully with the world, to be the real me I identified with. Years later, I could even add that the “monster” was my then-undiagnosed anxiety, which scared me and made me react in ways I didn’t understand. However, this song is ultimately about addiction. This is something I think I started to understand as my grasp of the English language gradually got better, and that I wound up confirming with a Google search.
It's with that personal relationship to the song and with that knowledge in mind that I came up with a character who had become someone they hated. A character who was a horrible version of themselves, but would internally beg for help, to be freed from this horror. I came up with a character who was initially a complete softie (in my more recent writings, I would make it obvious that he was too soft for his own good) and through abuse, confusion and exhaustion exploded one day and let himself become the worst possible version of himself. This “explosion” isn’t without the intervention of addiction, he lashes out on the person he wanted to build a life with, who then leaves him, and everything is interlinked.
(Of course, because I love a little bit of drama, there’s a misunderstanding with what really caused his boyfriend to “leave”. But that’s unrelated to any song. What matters to what is at the heart of what this song means to me, is what Hideki thinks happened.)
This was the gist of Hideki’s characterisation for a long time. Now, here’s the thing about that Danganronpa RP. Although Hideki was one of my most popular characters ever, and I went through a lot of effort to explore his characterisation as fully as I could within the limitations of that story, the person organising that RP, aka the GM, abused the shit out of me. Oopsie.
This post isn’t about me so I won’t go through the details, but taking advantage of the horrible mental state that I was in back then from going through undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder following my aforementioned situation of abuse, this person, among a couple others, made me go through hell and worsened my mental state to the point that I… went in shock one day from realising I had hit rock bottom a long time ago – that I had become the monster I’d feared all my life. This was accompanied by my own break-up, which was in fact what caused me to suddenly wake up.
And here was the inspiration for the second part of Hideki’s writing.
Funnily, my ex-partner had participated in that RP alongside me and had hated Hideki’s boyfriend for having left him, even if Hideki had in fact wronged him, because they knew that character knew what he was going through, and how dangerous it was to abandon him then. I shit you not my partner wound up doing the exact same thing to me. And it’s fine! I’d always defended the nuance in what Jun – the boyfriend character – was perceived to have done.
Here’s the thing, though: there’s a good ending to that story. Having suddenly opened my eyes to what was happening to me, I first went through so much shock that my mental health reached a brand new low and my life was in direct danger. And yet, this was a period in my life that was filled with hope. I was going through something extremely difficult, and that forced me to face the me that wanted to fight to the end. I’ll skip over the details – but after surviving this, having gotten some of the help I needed, having been faced with that strong ability to survive I had, I was able to take control of myself again. And I was free to be the real me again.
And that’s when it struck me that I’d never really conceptualised a good ending for Hideki.
My writing of Hideki kinda stopped in the middle of the conflict. As far as shoving him in different RPs where he would live through specific adventures went, that was perfect. But suddenly, I had a brand new experience, and something inside of me must have known just what made sense for such a relatable character as Hideki.
I know this is already very long, but here’s another song; one day, not too long after my healing had started, I was listening to some rock classics. One of those was Highway to Hell by AC/DC.
And very fittingly for Hideki, randomly, for no particular reason, I started to think about a character who was going to heal.
I thought about a Hideki who eventually reached the right time. Who one day felt like listening to music to help vent his frustrations, and by chance discovered rock, hard rock and metal. Who listened to Highway to Hell, felt something, and suddenly had something he wanted to do. Ideas like “attending a concert”, hope like “I will enjoy it” and “I will be able to blend in”, and that was the start of a messy journey, but a journey of healing nonetheless.
This is the start of an iteration of Hideki which I often joke about, dubbing him “metal Hideki”. He dyes his overgrown bright orange hair an ashy brown, he puts on an edgy t-shirt, and there’s something so fun about how silly it is and yet how much it means to his finally putting himself out there.
This inspired me to finish writing his and Jun’s stories, and I’m very satisfied with how I was able to draw inspiration from different stages in my life to write a compelling character, and by how a song was somehow the starting point both times.
There’s a lot more I could say about Hideki; his backstory and his future, which I never used in RP, in part because I have a full story to tell now! (And also because I’m never doing that shit again. Holy shit.) I’ll leave it at this recent cutesy doodle of him, which is directly taken from a song I felt like he would relate to.
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