I would love to know more about how you came about developing Diana as an OC. Was it plot first, then character development? Or did Diana help the plot develop?
I’m just so curious!— I often have a hard time getting into OC-centric fics because I sometimes can’t connect with the OC, but I find myself very intrigued by Diana. She’s the type of character I’d obsess over making moodboards and Pinterest boards for. 😂
This is a fun question! I hope you’ll forgive the lengthy response.
What came first was the talent, actually.
Inter Vivos began life as an Aro x OC fic, and I wanted to create a character with a talent which would draw him in, in particular. The idea of a talent for influencing people sprang to mind immediately. Originally, I thought about making Diana a vampire to begin with--but the problem is that any vampire with sense who had that kind of talent would probably do their best to stay well away from the Volturi.
So, the OC had to start out human. She also had to be in a position where she would be noticed by Aro and the Volturi, without being eaten. So she had to stumble on the secret, but there had to be a compelling reason why she couldn’t just be killed or turned right away.
With these constraints, investigating a loved one’s mysterious death in Volterra came to mind immediately as the opening for the story, and it demanded a certain sort of character: someone suspicious enough to worry immediately; someone proactive and clever enough to track her loved one down; someone brave enough to walk into almost certain danger in order to save her loved one; and someone cunning enough to put together fail-safes that would, if not guarantee her safety, at least guarantee serious repercussions if anything were to happen to her.
Diana’s character unfurled from there. The story was initially going to be pretty straightforward--Diana striking the bargain for time, then doing her best to hate Aro as she slowly gets to know him, failing, and ultimately romance ensues. The hybrid pregnancy plot did not exist at all.
Diana’s character shaped the plot very significantly from there. For one thing, she’s a little too similar to Aro to make for good romance, at least in my opinion. They’re both cunning and curious and share a lot of the same values. That made it hard to come up with good conflict beyond “you ate my sister.”
(Aro, for his part, is inherently difficult to write a romance with, because when you’ve seen every thought everyone’s ever had immediately upon meeting them, it’s easy to make judgments about who you like and who you don’t like. I don’t subscribe to love at first sight, but for Aro it does seem likely that he would experience love at first touch. And while I could have written a story where Aro fell in love immediately and had to slowly woo an extremely reluctant Diana, that isn’t the sort of romance I’m interested in writing. Also, CarnivorousMuffin and Vinelle’s meta and fics have convinced me that Aro is mostly gay for Carlisle, and I’m now incapable of shipping him with anyone else.)
With the pairing that inspired the story originally in tatters, I scrambled for candidates to salvage this as a romance. Writing the Volturi is difficult because, aside from Aro, the rest of them have very, very few lines.
I narrowed down the candidates to Marcus and Demetri. Once the hybrid pregnancy plot was involved (which was a natural extension of the political situation), Demetri was out. We get very little from him in canon, but he does come across as very polite and dutiful, and thus not inclined to hit on a woman who is basically royalty and thus above his station. That left Marcus, who already had an edge because while he only says like two sentences in canon, he has a solid backstory from which his character can be extrapolated. And that extrapolated character is different enough from Diana for me to work with.
TL;DR: The kernel of a plot gave me Diana’s character, which then imploded the planned plot and forced me to rewrite the whole thing.
