05-05-2025, 09:04 PM
In the far off year of 2018, I was in highschool and was the biggest fan of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, so I started making OCs based off of concepts I would have liked to see explored in the series (siblings with different godly parents, a demigod with no powers, etc.). And that basically evolved into my OCs Daryn, Evander, Casper, and Millicent!
(Left to right: Casper Song, Evander Song, Daryn Adhya, Sunday Adhya (the baby), Myra Floros, & Danielle Alston (Dani belongs to @adotcorbin!)
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I'm still very attached to these characters, but for the past few years I've been trying to think of ways to disconnect them from the PJO universe because 1. The world doesn't belong to me and will always be tied to some kinda copyright to PJO, and I might wanna change aspects of the magic or whatever and 2. Rick Riordan is a centrist Zionist so :p
So I wanna keep certain aspects of the story that I really enjoyed making while trying to think of ways to make it distinct. I would want to keep the aspect of supernatural parentage, at least as a way for the main characters to get powers. Mostly because the villain Millicent's original motivation as a powerless child of two demigods was that she felt it was unfair to be forced to live up to the expectations of her parents to do amazing things with her powers, and disappointing them when she had none. This makes her angry with other demigods, feeling that it's unfair they are able to get a leg-up on her simply from something they're born with and not something they worked for. So her goal is to take their powers and destroy them, while also training under Atlas to become physically stronger (aka why her hair is completely white now).
Main design for Millicent (July 2018)
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My favorite thing in this story to write about however is the relationship between twins Evander and Casper Song, a classic "twins separated at a young age," situation. The two of them have the same godly parent, however different aspects of him. Evander is a child of the Roman Vulcan and Casper the son of the Greek Hephaestus. But there's also a switched element to them, as Casper was mistakingly taken to be trained at the Roman camp instead of Evander, and Evander grew up with their mortal mother and eventually goes to train at the Greek Camp. So when the story begins, Evander receives a prophecy that their brother is alive and is strongly motivated to find him, while at the same time Casper believes he is an orphan with no family and desires to escape the Roman camp he was raised in order to be independent. When the two reunite, they're both happy to find each other, but begin to realize they are strangers to one another and seem to have little in common. They begin to fight as Casper wants to keep himself and Evander safe by fleeing the danger coming, while Evander believes they need to stay and try to protect the demigod camps from Millicent's plans.
Ignore that these are lyrics from a deleted Frozen song (March 2020)
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This rift between them is further imbedded when Vulcan publicly claims Evander as his child and not Casper (at this point the two don't know about the dual parentage), which culminates in Casper deciding to run away from the group. This leaves Evander to face off against Millicent alone, inevitably losing the battle to her. I don't know if I'm gonna keep this, but it's supposed to be a plot twist that Millicent doesn't have powers which Evander only discovers mid-battle, throwing them off-guard for a moment and allowing her an opening to near-fatally attack them. I feel like this dynamic is easy to separate from PJO, since it's more about the twins' personal relationship and the godly aspects of it are more an explanation for their situation.
Another dynamic I thought of a little later into making these OCs is Casper and Millicent having a sort of friendship/bond before Casper is found by Evander. In my mind, Casper is desperate for an escape from the Roman camp but is resigned to the safety it provides from monsters. That is until Millicent finds him and convinces him to sneak out and be independent with her, as she doesn't care for the camp either. He jumps at the chance to leave and the two of them live out in the wilderness camping together and protecting one another. I don't think I had much reasoning for Millicent to do this except a vague idea that Casper is involved in a prophecy he doesn't know about, saying that he's destined to stop Millicent with the help of his sibling, so Millicent is trying to either get the jump on him and take his powers before the twins can reunite or even subtly befriend Casper so he's less inclined to fight against her. She's at least successful in the latter, as Casper feels he's finally made a friend for the first time and is grateful for Millicent's protection. While Evander's group is under the assumption Millicent has kidnapped Casper, the two of them become close, almost in a co-dependant way. This all ends however when Evander's group fights her off and "rescues" Casper, who realizes that admitting to being friends with Millicent might cause a conflict of interest. He keeps his mouth shut about their bond and this affects the amount of effort he puts in to everyone else's desire to stop her, Casper basically not believing she has bad intentions and not taking her threats seriously. While Millicent on the other hand on her own again is trying to convince herself she doesn't care about Casper, and even if she did, he's better off with his real family and not with her.
IGNORE THE TANGLED LYRICS LMAO (May 2020)
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All this talk of Evander, Casper, and Millicent I haven't even gotten to Daryn! Daryn, a child of Eris, was actually intended to be the main character of this story, or at least for the first arc since they're new to all this demigod stuff as the youngest member of the group. Now with me wanting to focus on Evander and Casper, I'm at a bit of a loss on where to place Daryn. Originally they were a bit of an audience surrogate (as many first book protagonists are in a PJO series) with powers of chaos manipulation which led them to believe they themself were a bad omen, leading them to self-isolate from others. They also served as my exploration of a demigod with another demigod sibling but with a different godly parent through their baby sister Sunday, a daughter of Apollo. She would be the source of Daryn's main motivation to keep their powers in check at the cost of them expression emotion, forcing themself to be level-headed as not to cause discord. I wanted their personal arc to be something like, chaos not meaning bad things were gonna happen, just that anything could happen to them and taking life one day at a time or something. But connecting them to the main story has always been a bit difficult, as I would usually write Daryn as the one to help wring their friends in when they got into fights. This kinda left them as nothing more than a side character, along with me not really knowing what to do with Sunday. As a baby, she literally has to be carried 24/7, usually by Daryn, and doesn't provide much aside from a reason for Daryn to constantly be cautious. I've thought about her being perhaps exceptionally powerful for her age, which leads to unintentionally goofy scenes of the characters aiming a baby at enemies so she can sun-blast them or something.
Daryn walk-cycle for a college project (Feb 2020)
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The only solution I'm currently thinking of is potentially combining Daryn's character with Dani Alston, a character who is also a part of Evander's group to find Casper. I haven't talked about Dani much since she's actually my friend ADotCorbin's character who is the person I shot the shit with in creating this story back in the day, so they know more about her than I do. Dani is a daughter of the Greek god Horme, and eventually a romantic interest for Casper. So I potentially bump up Daryn's age and probably change aspects of their character to be more like Dani, who was basically the opposite personality being impulsive and energetic and also Daryn's first friend who convinces them their powers aren't a burden. Idk, it feels weird to do that, but I'm potentially changing so many things about the story that characters won't look like they used to or even have the same names since I'll always wanna keep my PJO OCs as PJO OCs and make a new story from them separately from what I have now.
Group pic! (June 2020)
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So that's kind of where I'm at at the moment. I wanna try to think of what kind of world I want the new versions of these characters to live in, I don't even think they have to even be human anymore. I'm potentially only keeping having a supernatural parent or somehow being born with supernatural powers so that Millicent has a motivation, and outside that, I think anything else regarding world-building can change. I've thought about this potentially taking place in a high fantasy world, with more celestial origins to the characters powers as a sucker for Catholicism symbolism, but I'm not married to the idea. I don't think I want the story to take place in modern times like PJO does though, I feel like there should not be a single phone present at all. But one thing I do think I wanna do is make at least the new Casper and Evander characters indigenous (or coded that way if they're not human), since you can never have too many stories about Native people, so I could perhaps do some research of a certain tribe's folklore and potentially make the story centered on that?
Lots to think about, and I super wanted to talk about my musings SOMEWHERE and maybe get feedback on my thoughts, so this felt like a great place to post :] I'll probably keep this thread going if I come up with any more ideas or if anyone else has any thoughts for me. I love love talking about my old PJO OCs, and they reflect a happy part of my highschool experience during a not-so-great year.
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