Before they were submitted

[Goldbolt]

Mostly a joke thread but I thought it might be interesting to see the thought process and inspiration behind certain characters. I'll go first as an example of what I mean.

Shannon: Semi based off Positron from the mmorpg, City of Heroes. The game was getting less fun for me and I still liked Shannon and wanted to be able to play her in more depth and not just on an rpg server. So I ventured back into the world of IRC and searched out a superheroish genre rather than fantasy. She went through a massive overhaul going from lab accident to mutant to fit her into Cobalt's theme.

Zamora: She was going to be a batty looking mutant with sonic powers, but on the day I started typing her I was beaten to the concept. Instead of scrapping Zammy I designed her with the most outrageous powers I could think of that had not been chosen.

Kenneth: Character from Shannon's background I fleshed out for fun. He deserves better :/

Edmund: Felt I needed a baddie on my repertoire, and the result was Pathogen. Loosely based on a combination of two characters from a book series I was reading at the time, though the disease affected magic users and not supers.

Shandi: She's a funny one. Shandi was originally an altered Shannon I made to play in a Harry Potter themed channel. She drifted away from her source and became her own person. I then got bit by the mutant idea bug once again and remade her into a mutant.

Ember: Created on a whim and want to play one of my oldest characters. The original Ember was a runt of a dragonette who adored shoulders.

Kevin: I was browsing around on comicvine and came across a little known Spider-Man villain named The Squid. I thought his appearance was a perfect concept of such a radical alteration that would be great for the Pathogen storyline. He was originally going to be a one-shot NPC bad guy named Dwight. I switched his name with another NPC baddie and decided to change his alignment to a good guy. I then got attached to him and voila! The squidman you all know and love <3

Julie: Still not sure what I was thinking when I made her. In some ways she has the soul of my first attempt of a bad girl character, a metamorph named Cynthia.

JJ: Not originally my idea but the very rarest of the rare. A character earned via RP. I've since grown attached to him <3

Zachary: Data about this mutant is completely confidential. So much in fact that not even Sho knows what he is.

[Utlanning]

This is kind of a neat idea, figured I might as well toss my guys in.

Loesan- This was my first character here as a total stranger, so I wanted to go with someone fairly genial and a touch comedic. It was also the first mutant character I've ever made. I've played superheroes before, but usually they were magic or tech-based. So I drew inspiration from the X-Men on him. His original inspiration was Gambit, but I wasn't going to just clone the character, so I came up with a different power set(mostly by looking through the list here and a wikipedia article on superpowers for something that didn't get used often, probability manipulation seemed like a good fit, and the other two seemed like the sort of thing a gambler would develop). When it came to his personal style... Well, that was sort of a joke nobody ever got. For the X-Team I made a half-asian american teenager who speaks in an extremely stereotypical way, wears incredibly loud clothing, and was meant to be the 'kid' on the team(not realizing that it was meant to be all students). ...Yes, I made a male version of Jubilee. Of course, he was originally written with the idea that he'd get slapped in the face a lot, who knew he'd turn out so likable?

Paxton- Okay, you can blame Paxton in equal parts on me seeing the Ancestor Channeling thing on the list of suggested powers and watching wayyy too much Deadliest Warrior over a short period of time. From there, I pretty much added some farmboy from my own personal history, and you've got Paxton.

Matthew- This is my new guy... And probably the one I've worked on the most out of the three. I've seriously been working on him since before I submitted Paxton, he started out as kind of a Daredevil tribute character mixed the desire make a character who could help people on a psychological level(since we have so many physical healers around), but kept evolving from there, incorporating inspiration from Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman, a little touch of anime, and a lot of just general ideas that kept appearing as I wrote, re-wrote, re-re-wrote, scrapped, started over, and re-wrote his backstory again. As far as his physical appearance goes, he's just a purple Oni.

[corragh]

Ahriman: Ahriman is actually the personification of my muse, who I've been playing for years. Pre-Cobalt, he was still a mute bookworm of a student with a penchant for capoeira, but he didn't have any powers - just a regular human who liked to learn and travel. He'd encountered demons and vampires and shapeshifters and all manner of freaky-deaky supernatural crazies. The only real changes made for Cobalt were adjusting his age to be more academy appropriate, giving him powers (the drawback of having not known he had powers comes from having not had powers any other place he's been played), and giving him an actual name. Miles Teg, aside from being a Dune reference, was a joke character (farmer whose farm was constantly being invaded and/or ruined by freaky supernatural characters) I'd played in other rooms, roughly equivalent to Cobalt's Blatant Boy.

Ahriman before: http://hatred-rp.webs.com/ic/misc/char/ahriman.html
Ahriman now: http://www.cobaltacademy.net/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=217

Maksim: Another character I've played in a different channel ('cause I'm lazy and apparently can't make new characters anymore). Unlike Ahriman, Maksim was completely changed to fit into Cobalt. Before, he was a traitor with a Napoleon complex, bent on overthrowing his father for leadership of their clan and destroying his youngest brother just to show off. Now he's a super-powered bartender who looks nothing like he did before and has an entirely different personality. Really, the only thing the two iterations share now are the name. My original idea for him was to make him a villain, but the power set I wanted for him was taken before I got around to submitting. So they were changed, and Maksim became a good guy with a gross power.

Maksim before: http://hatred-rp.webs.com/ic/cimmerian/char/Maksim.html
Maksim now: http://www.cobaltacademy.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=239

[Suzthulhu]

Love it! All of my characters have a little of me in them, so here goes:

Sygny: Sygny has actually been around before, in another X-men based channel from like, a year ago or so. Anyway, I have a heavy dose of German/Nordic ancestry, and I'm pretty proud of it. She is the personification of that part of my family line and carries the legendary Berserkergang gifts from the gods with her. She's also a total metalhead, a physics geek, and an all around nerd, and so am I!

Chloe: Everyone has that crazy part to their psyche, that part of them that if anyone else knew about, they'd put you away. That's Chloe. I don't really have voices in my head, other than my own, but it constantly jumps tracks, and using Chloe's narrative to type in 'stream of consciousness' is often what's really going on inside my head at any given moment. But she's also very much not me in that she carries a piece of everyone she's ever physically come in contact with in her mind, the bit of them that holds their fear. This is really what makes her crazy. She is partly based on the character of Chloe Daniels in Gothika, and truly believes that you can't trust someone who thinks you're crazy.

Gina: Gina's power set is based partly on the Lord Marshall from Chronicles of Riddick. You can see a good example around the 1:45 mark of this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I41xQCnhm7I&playnext=1&list=PLDE056231B788F770 ANYway! Gina is totally what I'd love to be. Physically perfect and fit, she's just hot. I'm working on it! She's fun to play because she's not tied down anywhere, she's not crazy, she's just normal and drinks life in because it's fun. I am pretty arrogant, so she gets that from me, and I am a flirt, so there's that, too. I made her to have fun with, and so far, so good!

[Ashe]

Ashe's inspiration

Kylie's inspiration

Glen's inspiration

Surprise factor? 0.00%.

[Blind Guardian]

Paul: By far the oldest of my characters, since his origins predate my time on IRC. He actually started out as a villain in a fantasy setting. The original version was of a race a friend of mine had invented--beings who had been born from the dreams of mortals. When I moved over to IRC, I had to find a name that fit EFnet's character limit at the time, so I chose Revenant because the original version of the character had once been thought dead, but had returned. The fantasy version of him didn't stick, but when I started playing in mutant channels, I revised the concept and eliminated the power to invade others' dreams and learn their fears, and just stuck with the shapechanging. In Paul's first iteration, he was a former villain with amnesia who was being rehabilitated by the Institute where the channel was set. The character has been a part of 4 or 5 different settings now, and has grown and evolved over the years into his present incarnation.

Eddie: Eddie originally came from a short lived setting that was a World of Darkness parody--horror with a healthy dose of comedy. Since I didn't know much about WhiteWolf's setting, I borrowed elements from D&D's werespiders and stuff from an Animal Planet special on tarantulas to make Eddie. He's also had a fantasy incarnation, as well as his stints in mutant channels.

Ray: When I made Ray, I wanted to do something different. Paul and Eddie both have melee oriented powers, and I wanted somebody with ranged abilities. I had an older character with the same name and general appearance in another channel, but with a different backstory and power set. The original version of Ray was a little darker than the type of character I wanted to play, so I started fresh with personality and powers. After deciding to go with a geokinetic, I used the Avatar: The Last Air Bender wiki to help me work out his powers.

[Remu]

Seven: My oldest character who's gone through many changes in both name and appearance across many settings. I initially came up with her first incarnation, when I was like...twelve or so, for a graphic novel that I obviously never made. Then I translated her into a kind of homonculus for a fantasy roleplay channel. Then when CA was made I sort of imported her over as a lab rat sort of character.

Octavius: My oldest MUTANT character who's survived the test of time...for now. I made him in an old channel originally as a joke character, because at the time he was only a genderbender and mostly meant for comic relief. Then when I resubbed him for here I made him a shapeshifter. His personality's basically stayed the same for the past five years, though.

Delilah: I had a summoner in this channel's previous incarnation that I never really played. I remade her in Delilah once I first came back to the room, but I stopped liking her personality. So I used some of the traumas that resulted from various plots to turn her into the crazed heathen she is today, slowly being eaten alive by her own power. Her initial appearance was that of a retired plant character (see Noa)

Eden: I wanted to make a character whose theme was 'space'. She's very vaguely inspired by Starfire from Teen Titans, but most of what I did was grabbed from my own head. I wanted her to be as close to a 'celestial' sort of character without actually being an alien as I could manage.

Noa: I had two plant characters before Noa. The first one, I loved and had some pretty deeply involved RP with, but after I left the room and came back, there were actually like... 4 other plant girls or something and I couldn't bring her back as she was. So I used her appearance (initially) to make Delilah. Then we lost almost all of those characters, but because I'd made Delilah, I couldn't really go back and make my old plantgirl. So I tried one out -- didn't like her. A long while later I came up with Noa! Whee!

[Kryll]

Mic Jeffries is based off of an mmorpg called Turfbattles. His name there was kryll and was the class of fist warrior. He wore what was called acura armor and an acura gauntlet and a small shield on his left forearm. I think the name of the left shield like armor was called a protector. out of a level of 300 cap he achieved level 235 it was a very good game and may be coming back.Anyways thats my 2 cent.
This is his conceptual image!!