The Interview
1. Osprey are one of my favorite raptors. I think you have nailed the rp of one down beautifully. What drew you to the Kelvic race and to an osprey in general?
Oddly enough when I think back on it, I was originally attracted to the shape shifting of the Kelvic race, like most who first start. But the more I really read into the lore the more I realized they were very complex creatures to actually roleplay. I studied the site for over a week before I even registered and fully commited to playing a Kelvic because I so dearly wanted that kind of a challenge. Something to inspire me to continue writing. I had been dying to get into roleplaying for months before I came upon this site. I was so amazed by the depth and creativity. Kelvic would still be my first choice even if I could go back and change her into any other race. I couldn’t imagine Rinya being anything else.
Choosing an animal form was actually easier for me. I’ve always loved raptors, but choosing what kind was the harder part. I wanted to do something that wasn’t popular. When I went to research different raptors I came across the Osprey and instantly fell in love. I can’t remember how many websites I actually read through just trying to nail down their lifestyle and habits. Osprey themselves are quite different than most other raptors, and I found the perfect fit to create Rinya. Just as much as she was meant to be Kelvic, she was meant to be Osprey. I wanted different and it turns out I didn’t have to search all that hard for it.
2. You are playing a socially dysfunctional character due to her sheltered life. This comes across beautifully in your rolepaly and has allowed the reader who follows your threads to see her slowly overcoming her lack of any sort of social adjustment due to her sheltered upbringing. Why was this a theme you picked for Rinya and what have you personally gotten from it in terms of watching this PC grow?
When I first created Rinya I had no idea what I actually wanted from her. I had been out of roleplay for years, and my previous roleplaying experiences were with already created characters. I don’t know how many time I scrapped her past and her family, trying to avoid the general Mary Sue. So in the end I actually chose something I myself am familiar with. People are not my strong suite, though I am nowhere near as bad as Rinya is. And I didn’t want her mirroring who I was either—I have no intention of playing a character that was me.
Watching her grow however has been more enjoyable than I thought. She’s got a long way to go, but I honestly can’t wait to see how she mingles with others in the future. She’s spent a lot of her time the past two seasons with her bondmate, and he’s taught her a lot. But as Rinya herself learns more about who she is, she is coming to understand that interaction alone with just him will only get her so far.
3. In terms of personality, Rinya is definitely blunt and forthright, but she’s also quite a bit naïve which tends to lead her to being shocked by society or people’s actions within society. Do you see these traits as something she can overcome or are they fixed into her personality and why?
For the most part I would say her blunt personality is going to be fairly permanent. While she is growing to understand manners and social etiquette better, Rinya deep down is an honesty first kind of girl. She can’t entirely help that it comes out completely blunt and a little rude. Unless the situation calls for delicacy, she has no issue with offending people as there are very few who have opinions that are important to her in the first place. Her father raised her to question people’s intentions and that is as much a part of her as being Kelvic.
In some ways though she would rather remain naïve however, as she learns more about the kind of actions other people can play against each other. However in her case she has quite a bit coming up for her that will make it quite difficult for her to remain so. She’ll have some growing up to do, but for the most part I’d say she’s fairly locked in that stubborn personality of hers. Her core personality isn’t something she hides, or plans to any time soon. For Rinya it isn’t her problem if others cannot handle her attitude.
4. How did you find Riverfall as a city? To the outsiders, both IC and OOC, Riverfall has a bad reputation as being a scary place for women due to the fact its full of Akalak that see Kelvics as pets and nothing more. What sort of challenges did you find in using this city as your current home base?
When I went about choosing a city for Rinya, I didn’t want to start off somewhere highly populated. I understood that for Rinya a large city like Syliras wasn’t ideal for her personality, though I’m sure I could have worked it out. So instead I made her back story fit to a reasonable decision for her to leave. Granted I could have had her born in Riverfall, but it was part of her character development to have her leave everything she knew behind. I did know that Riverfall saw Kelvics as pets, it was actually something I wanted her to have difficulty with. Landing herself in a city that didn’t see her beyond a pet. Given the past I chose for her, it was going to be an interesting challenge for her to accept, which for Rinya was actually easier than I anticipated. The more I threaded with her, the more I realized as a character she had grown to realize who she was, and she was far more independent than I originally planned for. In the end their view of her didn’t actually bother her as much as it had in the beginning. She even downright refusing her Akalak friend/work partner’s offer for becoming a Nakivak—several times. Rinya knows she has to be careful, but she refuses to let the idea of how they see her actually affect how she sees herself.
5. Rinya has bonded. Knowing what the readers of this interview now know about her, was this an extremely difficult process or was it relatively easy for the girl? Please talk about it a bit and what you see as a typical bonding thread.
Way back when I chose Rinya to be Kelvic, I had taken the advice from those in chat. I learned for a lot of mods it could be a pain to watch new members bond their Kelvics on a whim without any storyline to it. Bondmates are highly important to Kelvics and it wasn’t something I wanted to do off the bat for her. I had plans to at least wait a season or two and really flesh out who Rinya was before letting her bond to someone. I was completely inspired by Khida, who was the featured character the month I joined and I read up on her upcoming bondmate. However those plans went out the window with the very first thread I ever did, and to some extent you’d think Jorin and I knew each other prior and planned the whole thing. A total of three threads and here Rinya was—bonded. So much for that idea!
In terms of Rinya bonding—it was instant. And completely unconscious on both sides. So while the process itself was very easy for her—for all her worrying about who would bond to such an awkward Kelvic—the bond itself wasn’t made over happy thoughts. Jorin and Rinya bonded over some very dark thoughts and emotions, and they didn’t even realize it. And in some ways she has a harder time handling the bond, given she is terrible with understanding people. Just because she knows how he might be feeling, doesn’t mean she understands it. Sadly Rinya tends to be more pessimistic, and she’ll take a negative feeling and make the worst out of it. As for a typical bond, that’s a little harder. The characters have to mesh—even if they have nothing in basic in common. Rinya and Jorin have nothing in common on a general level. She’s a hunter and he’s an artist. And yet they had the chemistry right of the bat from thread one. It was the only reason I actually didn’t fight off the notion of bonding her to Jorin. The characters just had that fit, and it took Rinya in a direction I never thought she would go in.
Rinya’s instant bond was completely different than Khida’s growing bond, but it worked for her. But it isn’t to be taken lightly either. For Kelvic it is a huge step in their life, and bonding to simply bond is no fun!
6. Having been somewhat or in a way ‘abandoned ‘ as a three year old by her father, does Rinya have abandonment issues or fears in her current way of thinking? Or has she moved passed this event? What made you choose this as something of a theme for your PC’s backstory?
Rinya had those fears to the extreme when I first created her. She couldn’t even take Jorin’s hand without hesitation and not be reminded of her father and his sudden absence in her life. Over the past two seasons she had grown to truly trust one person in her life at least, but even at the beginning she ran at the first sign of trouble. The simple appearance of Jorin’s ex sent Rinya off the handle. She was so afraid she might get left behind that she didn’t even bother to actually think about it. It took quite some time for her to realize she wanted to get past her fear of abandonment and she’s worked very hard towards it. For the most part she’s got a handle on it—at least better than she did at the start of summer. But with enough goading it turns up now and again.
That being said, it will always be there at the back of her mind, but she knows that she now has a choice whether or not to let it eat at her, or fight against it. Part of the reason I left it opened ended on Rinya’s end in terms of her father was I didn’t want to have both her parents dead so that I didn’t have to deal with them. Given how close she was to her father with her sheltered life, killing him off just didn’t seem—fluid for her. I also wanted to have the option of possibly bringing her father back into her life and dealing with his specific abandonment for her own personal growth. It isn’t something that just goes away with time; it takes work to even just accept what happened to her. Some of her social issues span simply from his abandonment, and it was something I was interested in expanded possibly in the future for her. She’s completely different than what he raised her to be—it’s a clash that’s bound to be incredibly interesting if it should ever occur.
7. What do you say to those masses that claim Kelvics aren’t smart nor can be taught much of anything at all? You play Rinya as highly intelligent and open to new ideas and new ways of thinking. Talk a bit about this predisposed assumption on the part of the ooc masses.
I think some confuse the fact that Kelvics can be very complex to play with the fact that they must be unintelligent due to their animal nature. Kelvic are the furthest thing from unintelligent. They aren’t animals that can simply shift into humans or the other way around. They have a beautiful blend of both that make them completely unique in the way they see the world. Sure they may not learn straight off the bat how to read or write. But that doesn’t mean they can’t. They are sentient creatures able to have desires and goals like the rest of Mizahar.
Honestly I cannot imagine Rinya being unintelligent. Even with her sheltered upbringing, and simple observing others from a distance—she has always had her own hopes and dreams. She’s got the guts to do something a lot of others wouldn’t. Leave everything she knew behind just to start a new life. If she wasn’t smart enough, then she would have never seen the age of three, much less a new home. Even animals are clever enough to adapt to survive. It comes naturally to them. Kelvics get the best of both worlds in that kind of aspect. And that makes them the furthest thing from being incapable of learning.
8. Most people who opt to be archers start out with a short bow simply because of the fact that they can use it as an heirloom (a new one being less than 50 gms) instead of paying for a longbow directly out of their starting monies. What made you opt for the harder path and to pay for a nice longbow and what does it take to build up longbow?
Another one of the things I myself am in love with—despite not knowing much about it—would be archery. So I did a little bit of research to start when trying to decide which kind of bow to choose. In terms of archery, apparently a longbow is supposedly a bit more accurate. With Rinya’s natural eyesight it seemed like a good choice for her to start with regardless of the extra work that would go into it, plus I thought it was kind of enjoyable picturing a smaller stature girl holding a weapon generally intended for the size of men. When Rinya sets her mind to doing something, then she’s going to do it. And when I pictured her learning archery, longbow was really the only way to go.
Rinya herself chose a bow for specific reasons of her own though ICly. When her father made her pick a weapon for training, the child in her wanted something similar to herself. She loved the idea arrows having their own ‘wings’, and making something like just like herself fly. It became another extension of herself, and for the longest time it made it easy for to escape the world through archery. Her love of archery is also her best stress relief. Oddly enough she’s got the patience for archery, but most other things in her life she can barely handle standing around for!
9. What was it like for Rinya’s first bonding? Was it preplanned or did it just seem to happen? Talk about Kelvic bonding and what your expectations or assumptions were contrasted with the reality of the situation.
Rinya’s first bond was a light one actually, made around her second year of life. She attached herself to the first person that was willing to see her beyond just the freakish child that grew up too fast. It didn’t last very long either, as her father got in the way, but in the very least Rinya knew she was bonded to Nickolas. He was the one that encouraged her to learn and do new things with her life—even after having left her a year before, his influence resonated with her and she left Syliras after her father’s abandonment craving change. Nickolas was entirely essential to Rinya’s growth as a character, otherwise she could have very well ended up cowering in the trees back in Syliras, too terrified to do anything but her day to day life.
In some ways I myself actually dreaded trying to find someone for Rinya to bond with. There are so many different kinds of bonds, and the things that can simply grow from being so close to one person. I honestly got lucky, and my choice was incredibly simple. But even if Jorin had chosen not to bond his character ICly to Rinya, I still would have had that possibility for her. There was no denying from the start that she was drawn to him. I would have had her deal with it ICly if it hadn’t gone through. Her reality of being bonded is nothing like she remembers, her own two bonds being completely different. And it’s enjoyable to explore the difference between them.
10. Do you have any big plans for the future for Rinya? Care to share anything or talk about what you would hope for your PC’s future?
I actually have lots planned out for Rinya’s future. Probably at least a year’s worth of stuff—maybe even longer! Everything from learning a new weapon, to becoming competent with unarmed combat, and plenty of personal drama of course. She’ll be seeing her previous bondmate in an odd twist of fate and I’ll be adding a few flashbacks for her as well. Rinya will find herself uprooted from Riverfall and the lifestyle she’s already growing accustom to. She’ll have to learn what it’s like to deal with people on a more personal basis as her family is going to be extended with leaving Riverfall and meeting Jorin’s family. And with any luck, before she leaves Riverfall she might get to meet Khida in the spring!
And interestingly enough, she may consider becoming a teacher in the future. She’s enjoyed teaching Jorin archery more than she thought she would, and it’s something she could easily see herself doing in the future. Rinya also has a lot of shock value coming her way,Her father will be turning up in the future—and he’s got a bit of a secret he’s been hiding from her. And I’m dying to see how it all turns out. Because even if I plan it out a certain way, actually roleplaying it can end up twisting my plans. It’s so easy to say she’ll react in a specific way to something, but as it happens to her I realize that’s not how she should react at all. It makes for all sorts of fun for the future!
11. I’ll turn the soapbox over to you. Anything you’d like to talk about or tell the masses while you have their attention?
I’m actually quite shocked and deeply honored that Rinya here made it to featured character. When I got up in the morning to find the PM stating Rin was chosen I was seriously on cloud nine all day. My co workers thought it was hilarious actually. Honestly I never aimed for her to be highly noticed or anything; I’ve just spent my time lovingly threading her. Thank you to whoever took the time to mention her for this honor!
I love Mizahar as a whole. The staff has been so incredibly patient with my questions—especially Magpie. She’s been so patient with some of my questions (and mistakes) and I know ALL the staff has a lot on their plates. So many of the players too! They take time out in chat to help when they can with their knowledge and I’m sure I might have actually given up if it wasn’t for all of you. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a community like this. It’s been incredible threading here, I never actually thought I would get so addicted like I am! This was supposed to just be a hobby for me to fill in my free time here and there!
Jorin gets his own special thank you of course. I would have never made my NaNo goal without his bogarting, and actually getting to sit down and plan out not only Rinya’s future but the future she has with a bondmate is an amazing thing to look forward to. And who knows, with Rinya on the move in the future—she might get to run into you! |
by Khida on December 1st, 2013, 10:11 am 
