ESO & Skyrim Scribblings

I'd intended her to be a copy of my 19-year-old-self back before certain events in my life, so that I could imagine living through her as a version of me who never went through those things. Which is one of the reasons the Angélique in my fic has near-total amnesia of anything before waking up in Coldharbour and meeting Varen and Lyris, (other than a few scattered flashbacks of the hooded figure and of being sacrificed), the others being that narratively it's easier to use her amnesia for exposition, and I'm sticking entirely to the canon dialogue so I won't have much opportunity to share a backstory anyway, but that's beside the point here.

Then today I found an old ID card, with a picture of that 19 year old girl, and she and Angélique look almost nothing alike in facial structure or expression, other than both being redheads with blue-green eyes. At first I found it hilarious just how much I'd screwed up in character creation by trying to design her based on memory, and wondered if I should show my old pic to the person I'd been discussing Ange with, to share the joke, but... I don't share pics of myself, and it felt a bit weird to think of doing that. Then I asked a friend, with the added question of whether I should change Ange's appearance to 'correct' it, and he pointed out that if I did, would she even be Angélique anymore?

And he really got me thinking... this character has developed a personality of her own over the years (she started on PCNA as an alt long before I made her my PCEU main last year), and she deserves to be treated as herself now. She may have sharper features than the girl in the picture I found, but those suit the more sarcastic, volatile, dangerous person she has become - and she's earned that. The girl in that picture looks younger, softer, far more naïve and hopeful, (he called her a 'fairy') and she's long gone now. In Ange's case, she's who Mannimarco killed, the corpse he had his undead servants drink from and later raised - the dead girl my Vestige may have once been but no longer remembers being or has anything in common with, and changing Ange's appearance now would be like trying to turn her into someone she isn't, and shouldn't have to be.

I probably have more in common with Angélique's personality now (other than killing people, of course) than I do with that girl in the picture - I'm older, wiser, more experienced and far more cynical (maybe even a little paranoid) but I hope I've kept some of her optimism - and in a lot of ways, I should be proud of that difference. I haven't had Angélique's experiences, but living them through her both in-game and while writing has helped me process some of my own, and taught me a lot I needed to learn about myself.

I've loved this game for being my escape and a source of enjoyment through the years, but it turns out it's also provided healing and self-discovery, at a much cheaper rate than a therapist.