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.
“If you follow this path, of this abyss of love, then you must do it knowing. You will be bane, outcast, criminal, rival, sinner. All the world will hate you, young one, and you will have no kingdom but that of strife.”
The young man beamed, dripping still with tyrant’s blood.
“Then I shall be the Prince of a Thousand Enemies.”
Self-made outcast. Valiant crusader. End of days. Bun goes hop.
It’s not arrogance if it’s justified.
Rin Stormenni is one of the strange footnotes in many another adventurer’s history. A short, fit blue-haired Viera boy with a seemingly out-of-location accent wherever he goes, he projects an air of being flighty, thoughtless and effortlessly airheaded. Big, heavy topics don’t tend to stick to Rin, whether they be the struggles of economies or the horrors of war. He’s also not welcome in many cities, it seems, with guards typically either knowing they want to get rid of him, or assuming they want to get rid of him.
Rin is also a terrifying force of absolutely heartless violence.
Typically, people call the kind of thing he is some kind of paladin, dark knight or other form of mage-knight. Obviously something about Rin is magical, because this is Eorzea and everyone is at least a little bit magical, but his magic is that of clouds of roses, of barbed thorns, and of trailing black shadows. There is something haunted in every wood, and that kind of darkness is the darkness that permeates Rin. Something about Rin speaks of a time when blood and claw were the greatest truths, where a bad king could just be killed, and he has not forgotten that.
In other people’s much more complicated, much more complex stories, he’s the character who sits in the background asking why don’t we just kill them?
Rin doesn’t seem to have a job, he doesn’t seem to have much in the way of money and yet despite that he’s always seemingly free to wander around and get up to things. His freeness plays out in even the things he achieves – he may slay a dreadful beast, get a huge reward, and immediately hand it on to someone who was nearby because they were nearby. What Rin values more than anything to do with power or prestige is stories, and he thinks a story about someone else doing something amazing is more interesting than a story about him getting a big pile of somethings.
Oh, and if you ask Rin, he’ll happily introduce himself as a Fae Prince, claiming to be The Prince of a Thousand Enemies. He does not explain this.
Mechanics
Mechanically, Rin is a Dark Knight. He also has levels of Dragoon. If I ever want to level him with a healer class, it’d be the Sage. The unifying trait between these three classes is that they have a leap which lets them close in on an enemy quickly, creating the phenomenon I’ve joked about of bun goes hop.
There’s nothing interesting to talk about here; any given member of one of these classes is every bit the mechanically indistinct execution puzzle that any of the others are.
Final Fantasy XIV is a lot of things but it isn’t good at being a game really. It isn’t the kind of game I like to play, with individual expression or fluid play moments. It’s largely, a game of walking between conversation nodes and occasionally there’s an unsatisfying fight between them. Then if you’re very good you get to do a dungeon or an alliance raid, and those tend to be fun when you’re not super bored with them. Because of that, it’s weird that I wind up making alts in this game, and that Rin isn’t even the last of them.
(It’s because Final Fantasy XIV is where my friends are, and they’re more important to me than mere play experience.)
Place in the World
Thing is, Rin’s right?
Like, he is a Fae prince. Through some means or another, he wound up in the domain of a Faerie Queen, and whether through violence or charm, he rules that domain. Very rarely, he just takes people in to visit it, to show them a throne of stone surrounded by vines, in a moonlit palace, but it isn’t like he’s making stuff up.
It plays into other things about him that are strange; despite the dangerous things he fights, he never seems bothered by them, nor particularly concerned about things like the fear of tempering. During the Day of Blasphemies, he was seen leaping from fight to fight, striking Blasphemies once and then refusing to kill them. Days later, several of the people that became these blasphemies were found again, unable to explain what happened to them or how.
Rin is not a character who fixes the big thing. He’s someone who stands in the face of the things we’re told we have to fear, have to care about, and laughs. Because we don’t. The world is full of dumb things that aren’t important, and they demand obeisance, and he refuses to give it to them. When presented with the demand to kneel, Rin responds as befits someone who’s overjoyed to make new, better kinds of enemies:
With violence.
Okay, but what kind of places does Rin show up in? Places with trouble.
Rin isn’t the Warrior of Light, not even in his personal canon. In the narrative of the game he runs through he keeps showing up at these events where people are all: What about the Warrior of Light!? We need the Warrior of Light here to deal with this! and he’s like: What really? Eh, lemme take a crack at it, and it turns out, no, you don’t need a warrior of light, you need an idiot with a big sword.
If you’re the Warrior of Light and you talk to him his response will probably be something in the vein of ‘cool!’ and not any interest in trying to dissuade you. After all, you’re probably right. What would he know?
Rin is a big fan of hearing people tell their stories. He is happy to listen to your problems and he wants to learn about what would make you happy, what problems would drive your story forward, what would help you overcome some barrier to your own life. And then, if he can, he’s going to try and find it for you. This is obviously, very, very silly and runs the risk of encountering some very reckless problems. Just ask his friend, the Queen of Coins, who got handed a criminal empire because he told a lie good enough.