please give us more information about Omair, i love them so much and i want to know more about them!!!!
Fun fact, Omair is the only Muslim NPC in DT... that I can recall off the top of my head. He doesn't explicitly mention this in his dialogue, but there's a few clues, his name + his shop's rules, which are atypical for Dialtown, like not mentioning Satan's name in his shop and of course - no cursing. It's a nice little detail that separates him from the ordinarily foul-mouthed town.
His full name is Omair Al-Haddad, which is, like most DT names, a pun. Omair is frequently translated as 'problem-solver' and Haddad being 'blacksmith'. So y'know, 'Problem-solving blacksmith' pretty much sums up a talented IT guy. Fabron's surname also comes from the same place.
As for where his traits came from, I wanted another shopkeeper NPC for the game, but specifically, I liked the idea of having an honest or friendly one that was overly patient/fair with Roger/Gingi and winds up paying the price for it. I do like to imagine that after the route ends, he (eventually) gets paid back though.
Usually with a lot of my NPCs, I like to have them clearly striding for something? Like everyone in the world, Omair moves even when he's not around. He loves what he does and cares a lot for his business, but his shop is in an awful location with little foot traffic and due to his lack of revenue, he could not set up anywhere else if he wanted to. As a result, he runs TV commercials at like 3 or 4am in the morning - not once has anyone ever been swayed by them.
With Omair's design, I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted him to look like at first. I went back and forth on the head, but decided to stick with the Phone head since Fabron, the other IT guy of the route, already had a custom and swapping them wouldn't have made sense, since I was using Fabron's screen for the possession screen.
The idea of having Omair be a Muslim was pretty much the last thing I came up with for the character. It actually stemmed from me from struggling to land on a name for him. I basically looked through names that had certain meanings, y'know, relating to intelligence, problem solving, working with metal and... 'Omair' was by far the one I liked best. Then I realized that I didn't actually have any other NPCs in the game who were clearly Muslim.
Then I thought more about it and realized how relatively uncommon black Muslims are in fiction for the most part, despite being a fairly common demographic, though perhaps less so in the States. For context, my next door neighbours while working on DT were Nigerian Muslims and I always enjoyed stopping to chat to them. Probably the closest I've been to neighbours since moving out, so they left an impact on me to say the least.
African American Muslims were also hugely important in American 1960's cultural politics, with Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X's activism, and there's a few smaller references to the politics of that decade in the DLC due to Crown's influence on the story, like Benny's introduction. Benny's surname, Fusco, partly comes from the photographer who shot Robert Kennedy Sr's funeral train! I'm rambling, but yeah, I decided to go with it.
I'm glad people like Omair, he's a favourite of mine too. My favourite little detail I haven't mentioned is how his phone-cord wraps around his fingers during certain poses. Usually it's really hard to choreograph that even when you take the head AND the body shots yourself, since it's hard to visualize exactly how large the head'll be when you paste it on. But, I was lucky that it lined up well!
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