Loftwings and Demons

Was reading parts of Ascent recently as I worked on fixing the formatting of the story for my website.  Reminds me how much fun I had when I was writing Ghirahim and Orynx interacting. Orynx is still one of my favorite OC's (original characters) to have written.  He might also be the one with the most characterization, though I always have fun with characterization when writing my OCs.

While I love writing canon characters and expanding their backstories, I often introduce OCs to fulfill roles that no canon character exists for, as well as to give the canon characters more relationships than they have in the canon. This was especially essential for Ghirahim, since he is the main character for my story and the only character in the canon he is positively aligned with, and who he would be expected to care much about, is Demise.

In my AU this presented a particular problem, since Hylia has already killed Demise before the events of the story take place. Additionally, I wanted Ghirahim to have more of a leadership role among the demons, since in the game he seems to be the one who presents the most obstacle to Link, and the one who has the more menacing air to him for much of the game due to the extremely poor design choice made for Demise's 'monster' forms. I felt it would be interesting to have Ghirahim running things instead since he seemed to be doing that for most of the game anyway.

The Ghirahim in my story has never even met Demise, at any rate. And I wanted him to be a more complex character than the Ghirahim in the game, while still keeping a lot of the mannerisms and personality traits of the original character.

So I made a bunch of demon OCs he could talk to and interact with. Orynx is Ghirahim's guard, but he's also something of an unofficial advisor to Ghirahim, though Ghirahim doesn't necessarily always take his advice. I gave Orynx a pretty detailed backstory, some of which I've already revealed in the story.

And though the Ghirahim of my story has no relationship to Demise at all and never even met him, I decided that there should be some character who was obsessed with Demise, so I made another character who I called Lord Terrin, who was once Demise's guard, and who's absolutely bent on getting revenge for his death.

Anyway, sometime I really want to continue this story. I always had a lot of fun with its combination of action and character interaction, as well as its extensive backstory. Skyward Sword is my favorite Legend of Zelda game, though I've been a fan of the series since Ocarina of Time (the first Zelda game I played).

There are cool unconventional design choices, and then there's...whatever I had going on here:

https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/882055

But sometimes creation is not about cool.  Sometimes creation is about taking something cool (Ghirahim's giant pointy sword form) and twisting it into something truly cursed. Sometimes creation is about anguish.

(also thank you Pillowfort for at least giving me read-only mode)