this page is for my OCs! i was hesitating about making this, because i already have toyhouse, but i decided to write about them here! i need to put worldbuilding and OC pride flags/pronouns somewhere, right?
this OC universe is called ethereal refuge, because that's what it is to celeste (and they're kinda the main character of this whole thing). the plot is still very hazy, even though i've had these OCs since around 2021.
celeste's backstory is the closest thing i have to an overarching plot, so i'm going to put it on the home section while pasting it onto celeste's section as well. click to view!
—a child lives in a facility, blocked off from the outside world. the kids around them don't talk much, sometimes the older ones disappear, but the adults don't seem to care. every day, their lunch is nutritious, but bland. the walls are white, the floor is white. cold and unfeeling.with nothing else to do, they throw themselves into training.
they're basically trained from birth to fight- they don't know why yet. a normal child would be playing with a fake sword, not a real one. a normal child wouldn't cry all the time for no reason, wouldn't wander off when the adults are trying to talk to them, wouldn't be punished so often, banished to the room with the barred skylight and the dusty mattress.
before, when they had nothing else to do, they would fight. but in this tiny room? they could only go up. they dared to gaze at the stars and dream and hope-
they learn that they're training to fight something insurmounable. impossible. they were born to die.
death has a funny way of sneaking up on people. what if the reverse happens?
only two other characters listed here directly affect the main plot. the rest are just in the main world chilling. they may be avatars of the main three, actually. i thought about that once and it was cool. if you're wondering, claudia is definitely related to despoina, which leaves carson and wren on the human side and celeste/vox to the immortal side. i would say that wren is more likely to be related to vox and carson to celeste.
oh wait, who's despoina and vox? the answer is: they're cherine and athene. they get more than one name because of their funky lore. despoina and vox are more like epithets than names, though. i'll call them cherine and athene because those are the names their friends call them.
cherine and athene are like gods, in a way. they represent about half of the world each. cherine gets things like art, fluidity, emotion, chaos. athene gets logic, law, order, peace. you can infer their personalities from that. if you're a nerd, think of them as the dionysian and the apollonian. if you think about this for more than a few seconds, this breaks down, because they must share custody on a lot of things.
if they're gods, someone has to worship them, right? i sure hope people don't apply patriarchal gender roles to them, transforming cherine and athene's images against their wills- oh, i haven't thought about this enough to talk about it yet. maybe i'll start doing social commentary about butch/femme dynamics, trans people , personhood, the construction of the self, and more, once i actually read theory. they're a bit parental to celeste, which makes sense, celeste is literally 14 or something. let's talk about other OCs because i'm not ready for this yet.
aura and soki are there because they're the OCs from my beloathed gacha life/club days that i've decided to keep, along with carson. aura's an elf and soki's a cat thing. for brevity i should make soki a sort of cat mimic that's technically an elf, but i honestly don't think soki is the type of person to care about that, so i won't either.
carson may be one of the best OCs i've ever made. i've been thinking about him for over the span of about 4 years at time of writing. the only reason that aura migrated from wherever my gacha OCs live (i had, like, 40 of them and maybe 8 personalities between them all) to ethereal refuge is because she was friends with carson in there and i didn't want to bring him alone to etheral refuge along with soki. he was a gacha OC that didn't know soki at the time because carson was gacha life and soki was gacha club. it would've been awkward! so aura and carson, already besties, will go along with soki. carson was in a batch of OCs who i wanted to make a horror gacha series about called Broken Ties (that fell through after one episode because i didn't create a plot before i started recording). soki was in a different batch of OCs which i forgot the name of...
*checks google docs*
huh. i never named the batch of OCs that soki was in. apparently i renamed soki to SACHI at some point? i guess it makes sense, but she's soki to me forever now. i made the name by smashing syllables together, so she probably did that in-universe, that's my justification for keeping their name as soki. this document is extremely insightful to my mind in 2021. it's a bit scary how revealing it is. i'll call them the sapphic searchers because they're mostly queer girls lol. it's hilarous how i made the characters i cared about queer, but didn't know i was queer myself.
but i digress...
apparently i had two OCs called aura in my gacha days, but i think the older version was just a draft, so it doesn't matter. when i transferred carson to gacha club when that game came out is when aura was created. she didn't have any lore at the time other than being an elf. her first version had purple skin like celeste, fun!
i made celeste, cherine, and athene in late 2021, basically 2022. i stopped playing gacha life/club and left that community in the early months of the year, where i got new friends and was eager to drop any of the old hobbies that i thought were 'cringe'. at that point in time, i didn't really care about my ocs anymore anyway, except for soki, carson, and aura, which i revived in 2023. wren and claudia are unique, in that they're completely human ocs that i made when my gacha phase was long gone. all the characters i created after my gacha phase were divine in some way. well, wren and claudia are both trans feminine, which makes them divine in their own right!!!
wren and claudia may actually be younger than soki, carson, and aura. i think of wren and claudia as being in high school or recently graduates, while soki, carson, and aura are all older than that. they're also the only OCs i have that are dating. carson and aura may be in a QPR, i haven't decided yet, while cherine and athene probably are in a QPR if you wanted to assign that to them, which defeats the whole purpose of a QPR.
if you've actually gotten to the end of these paragraphs, i am mildly concerned. how are you here? how did you get here? what are you doing? wait, don't click the links, they're broken- NOOOOOO!!!
