What inspired your Steampunk Persona?

[Lady Rayna Keller]

My daughter asked me this a few months ago while I was trying on a new belt I made and I thought I would pass it along.

 

What inspired your Steampunk Persona?

 

My persona was inspired by my interested in myths and legends...especially the ones about Morgan Le Fay.  So I took that interest and spun it into a character I could be....incorporating most of interests and my Irish Heritage.

 

So now it's your turn........answers don't have to be long.  Just a simple sentence or two.....easy things for a six year old to read as her interest grows.

[Wilhelm A. Heizeltroff]

Mostly it was my interest in history and fantasy and how I could combine them. I don't think I ever really thought about why it was that I wanted to do what I wanted to do

[Captain Lachlan Bellraven]

I suppose my inspiration was well several things, I love history and especially changing it, I wanted something different from the majority of Steampunkers so a Voo Doo charm carrying Air pirate seemed kinda fun.

[Marshal Sir Jon Marshall]

It was my interest in history, sci-fi, and myth. My persona is inspired by such historical characters as Lord Kitchener, Heinrich Schliemann the archaeologist, and a nod to the occultists of the day.

[Oswin Bernerd McGuinness]

Mine was my interests in sci-fi and science. My style is just a little tweaked from my every day clothing to give it more of a period look. There is a whole lot of me in my persona, just a bit more adventure than there is in real life.  Mostly because I don't have Archy or my weapons set actually functional.......yet.....

[Arabella Porter]

 Let me break this down…..

 ARABELLA:    Well, my sister, Josie, had introduced me to steampunk and I was getting really into it so she explained to me about how people create these characters that they become when they step in the steampunk world. I thought that was just damn cool. Around the time (I was thirteen) we had been studying gothic literature and Edgar Allan Poe and I would stay after school with my english teacher and we would talk about all kinds of things. Somehow, a conversation came up about murder stories and she told me about Jack the Ripper and with that, was an introduction into a part of London called White Chapel where the ripper killed his/her/variation thereof's victims.

      I got interested and decided that I wanted my character to be somebody from that side of town but since I didn't know enough about english culture, I decided that, "ok, she'll be from Boston but maybe move there." And then that's how I came up with Ara's story. Originally, she was just a bartender and and entertainer. Her mother was a school teacher, best friends were homeless orphans. My sister said that she'd make a great airship pirate but when I went onto steampunk forums, most of the people I befriended were airship pirates, not only that but there were enough captains to congest the sky. so I wanted to do something a bit different. Then I introduced my best friend to the genre and she came up to me one day and said, "I want an airship." I was just like, "Well good for you." But she explained that she wanted US to be an airship. I thought about it and didn't like it and she said she wanted me to captain it but I didn't like that either and I felt like I'd have to change my whole story. But we made it work. She captained, I became first mate. I even came up with the ship and crew because I got this huge sort of vision.

    THOMAS DUNNING:   My friend Liam then got into steampunk despite how he made fun of it to his friends on the lacrosse team at school. He created Thomas Dunning, wanted to work for the Queen and be an officer of the law. But he also wanted to make this guy sort of comical so he made Thomas out to be some rich kid with this obsession in aroma therapy. naturally, we had to be enemies. we fought all the time, anyways so it actually kind of worked out. We even dated for like…. three days in freshman year before I ended up getting a detention for slugging him in the stomach. So we incorporated it into the story and every time we had a fight at school, we'd make up by going home, going to our lap tops, and writing it all down via steampunk. So Ara and Thomas became this… thing…a story while my captain (my best friend) didn't have time to write with all of her AP classes. We even thought it'd be fun to screw with people in the Steampunk Empire chat by making up stories about Liam (thomas) walking through a blizzard to reach my house or me climbing into his window to take over his laptop. but that was just for lolz. After awhile, Liam began writing less and less and when I brought the idea for a story up at school, he would laugh it off and pretend I was kidding. He switched over to the alternative school because he was doing poorly at my high school and then stopped talking to me for awhile only to call up and ask if I wanted to hang but we always had fights over a past relationship we had and he never wanted to write anymore. He was growing up. So eventually he moved to New York state without telling me and then gave me permission to do whatever I wanted with his character in fiction. Thomas Dunning became my character. 

   DOMINIQUE: My friend Shannon and I work really well together. and we geek out over most of the same things so she came over my house one day and while we're watching t.v after romping in the woods, she asked what I was typing up, and I explained steampunk to her. So then she got interested and wanted to be on our airship. I asked my friend who was the captain and because Shannon was in my french class, Dominique L'overture became the sassy feminist gunner of the group. Shannon and I hung out ALOT and decided our characters would be almost inseparable and due to her casual nature towards men, she thought it would be funny to make Dominique almost despise them for at least a good two years. 

    RODERICK: My friend Kevin, felt left out. He made a character. He has a horrible sense of directions so we put him as navigator. ….. We don't know. He's always nice to me and I'm always a jerk to him so we decided that he would be well raised and educated. The kid who, on a pirate ship, would always be picked on. 

   MERCURIAN: our ship needed a quarter master and I already had this idea brewing that I always told myself, if I weren't Ara, I would be this guy. My favorite word in the dictionary is "mercurial" it means fickle or ever changing. So I once dreamed up this character (at the time, I thought I'd never use him) a young kid who changed his mind about everything. One day he'd like someone, the next day he'd hate them without anything changing but his attitude via nothing. He was also going to be comical. The nerd who, being educated and creative, was set with the job of creating new weaponry but never got anything done because he would keep changing his mind about every detail, every day. But then, when I wrote for him, he started to sound old. Not only that, but I wrote him out of character a lot. Things started to get done in his lab and finally, I scrapped him and brought him back as a grandpa like character. 

    LEANDER and AURELIAN: Leander was the name of a friend from primary school whose name I always called out on the playground because it was fun to say (I ended up stopping because we were ten and he made fun of me for "liking" him because his mother told him I "liked" him if I was always calling him.) anyways, later on, I was looking at class pictures and I noticed he wasn't in them. In fact, most of my friends said they didn't even remember him from primary school. I decided I would add him in as someone Ara DID like this time because his name. I made him a homeless orphan because the kid I remembered didn't seem to have a place in anyone's memory when I recalled stories about him at a party. "remember that boy Leander?"  "no. Who was that?" So naturally, he was someone only I would hang with because in My memory, he did have a place. the name is naturally sort of romantic and feeling bad that no one remembered the real Leander from school, I ended up forming him to be a kid Ara liked romantically to make up for all the times I said I didn't like him when he made fun of me. His brother Aurelian, no inspiration, I pulled that one out of my ass. I don't even know where I got the idea for a burn mark on his cheek. 

   THE REST OF THE CREW: This lively bunch was a compilation of actually, the different moods I used to be in and the different moods my friends used to be in. the dialogue and undeveloped emotions and actions were a mix of miscellaneous crap that happened to my friends and I on a regular basis. Until my year in Israel when I realized that the group, made up of mostly english kids my age, one german, and two spanish, (with the australians coming in later in the program) actually added up to the amount of crew members and I ended up developing the crew based on corresponding emotions and events that took place with the group in Israel. Even the countries corresponded, one german and a hell ton of brits So after adding the two spanish, I was going to let Alex (the german) be voice for Roderick until I got to know Alex a bit more and realize that actually, he was more, in personality, like Ezra. I switched a few names around, ones I had never spoke  for in the rejected Gear but realizing that my friend Fran was like Marcus and Zachary was like Katie, it all added up. The mutiny that's happened in my blog is simple. At one point of my year in Israel, the group split up two be on two different programs and with the additions of the australians, new voices were there to be written for but many voices were leaving. So therefore, I was going to make it that there would be mutiny and a loyalty switch from some crew members, over to another ship. The crew that I write for is still the same group from Israel but now that they're gone, I'm either taking conversations and stories from Skype sessions and turning them into something, or I'm finally looking into the deep imaginative side of my brain for anything interesting. 

….. yeah

[C. H. Brown]

Don't really have a "personna" at this point, but my idea is that I serve as member of the Tinker Corps. The ones that serve everywhere as the "make it work" / Victorian era CSI types. Broad based knowledge with little patience for stuffy, self-important types or impractical dandies. "If you're not part of the solution, you're in the way" would be their motto. But catch up with us off duty and we're happy to hoist a pint with you. (Edited.)

[CPT Edward Leviticus H.]

I was inspired by watching the old 1960's Wild Wild West as a kid (Re-runs, I'm not that old) and loving science fiction. I have incorporated my own history with hypothetical science fiction history of steam powered technology and 1800's story lines.  

[Lady Rayna Keller]

Interesting Ideas....thanks for sharing!

[Basil Weeks and Cyril Tewksbury]

Our steamsonas are inspired by our love of writing and England.