This is an explanatory writeup of one of my Original Characters (OCs). Nothing here is necessarily related to a meaningful fiction you should recognise and is shared because I think my OCs are cool and it’s cool to talk about OCs you make.
There were two people he used to be. Once, he used to be a quiet, insular kid who wore hoodies all the time and grumped about being short and feminine but never dared to say anything. The other was a raging, loud, abusive asshole on the internet, winning the game and making everyone involved feel bad. Even himself.
He did lose once though. That loss came with it a dare and a bet and a crossplay and then that got him attention from another cosplayer, and that became a friendship. A friendship that wasn’t based on bullying and winning or on shame and shortness. Took some time, but he learned through it to bring who he was together; he could be a cute, short, prettyboi AND an apex gaming predator AND he could be a friend, all at once.
Then six months later, his friend came back to him and asked him to join her, to pilot a big, stomping, videogame-powered mecha, the realest cosplay possible.
Most of the people who work with GG don’t know who he is. They may know they’ve worked with a heavily mechanised tank called the EZ. It’s quite large, about three meters tall, and defended at all surface levels with an electrical shield that serves pretty well at defending people who are standing around or behind it. Sometimes through brute magnetism, where a lot of metal equipment gets stuck to the outside of the EZ, sometimes it’s through super-science chicanery where the field distorts the path of lasers and pulse rifles.
The EZ is a big, brawling tank equipped with stun pulses. It is very hard to destroy, though it can be temporarily immobilised, and it reboots itself with enough time to run maintenance. Even tearing bits off it is challenging, with the device’s impressive engine letting it use mediport networks to re-teleport components back in place, and re-fuse them, with a glittering hex effect when it does it. It has ranged attacks like charges of lightning and thrown electrical bolts, and it can even speed up for advanced terrain exploration.
The EZ, in its basic form, is a real physical walking tank that can treat the world like a videogame character.
That’s the EZ, though, which often fights entirely without any communication from its pilot. The actual pilot of the EZ, callsign GG, name Gigi, is a short young adult male who fits the mecha mostly due to his being so small, and for whom the mech was custom fitted. He took an unlikely path towards being perfectly suited for piloting this kind of mecha, but he’d never have found it through normal means. Seems that he had a real problem building and maintaining social connections – something that other people notice when they’re talking about the EZ, which normally fights in silence. It’s not because the pilot is being cautious and keeping from talking to teammates, it’s because the pilot is a dick and doesn’t think it’s interesting to talk to other people when he could be sassing friends on personal comms.
In some visions of his personality, this is GG being an asshole, and in others, it’s GG trying to avoid making sure anyone has to deal with him when he’s being in his own mind, pretty toxic.
Mechanics
GG-EZ is a electric armour/radiation melee tanker. Tankers are, if you’re not familiar with the results of the changes, really, really strong on Homecoming, because some people looked at one of the best archetypes and said ‘uh but sometimes a brute makes me feel bad in 1% content’ and for some reason as a result I got buffed in all the ways I like to play. Weird.
Particularly, Gigi’s build is what I consider very, very cheap. It hasn’t got purples. It hasn’t got PVP sets. It doesn’t have ATOs or Winter-Os (which sounds like a cereal. It’s just stuff you can buy off the market, most of which he did at retail and didn’t spend more than a hundred million doing. There’s a lot of room to push the build, and yet this cheap build has:
- 37% Smashing/Lethal defense
- 47% melee defense
- Capped resistance to Smashing, Lethal and Energy damage
- 100% global recharge, without Hasten or its attached crash
- AoE coverage in the form of Ball Lightning and Electric Fences
- Two damage auras, which I love
- Room for taunt and stealth infiltration powers
It’s great! It’s a really good, very cheap build that hits a lot of goal numbers. It’ll wear buffs really well, so any large group environment it works great, and the only time it’s a real problem is when someone is asking him to hold down large groups of challenging enemies without any fire support.
If you want to look at the build, you can click this link to do it.
Backstory
Remember that character, Trancer?
She got her start as an idea of using the City of Heroes engine to replicate the Overwatch characters. Not quite replication, but certainly ‘inspired by’ with the idea of cosplay and identity play being a part of how these characters all held together as a circle of friends. GG started out as part of that group, and got refined a little through some roleplays, where he wound up as a hyper-competitive gamer geek who got a little too competitive when he knew the stakes didn’t matter.
The funny thing is I’ve been told is he definitely ‘feels like a male D.va’ but I don’t know anything about the kind of personality D.va has. She’s just a pretty advertising banner for a game I could never get into. Any resemblence is therefore a coincidence.
But I do like a lot the idea that what got him out of his shell and into a friend group was a mix of defiance and play, where someone challenged him and he lost, and he refused to give up on what he was doing just because of that loss. That meant he could run away from or run to the embarrassing task, and rather than give up on it, he pushed himself to do it. Defiance, see.
Basically, it is entirely a story that some guys fear comes about from hanging around trans folk, where what if they trick you into emotionally maturing and having fun with things you find you enjoy doing? Jesus christ, wouldn’t that be fucked up or something.