Here is the actual first page of the Valfrey Guide I am working on, the intro that goes over their basic identity.
I may have mentioned before that Valfrey was initially meant to be a more Japanese take on a butterfly orb since my Morpho Knight (Muthsera) used to not be Japanese at all, despite canon Morpho Knight leaning into Japanese themes. That originally led to me using the name Valfrey for her since it is a possible transliteration of Morpho Knight's Japanese name, Barufurei Naito. There was meant to be a lore explanation that explained that Valfrey ended up calling themselves that due to them mispronouncing the word butterfly. This was later changed.
Today the primary inspiration behind me keeping Valfrey as their name is that I used “Freya” as a nickname to Valfrey vaguely remembering that there was a norse deity of that name, then eventually got around to doing some research into the deity and finding out that she is sometimes known as “Valfreyja” and her brother being named Freyr. This led to me thinking “Valfrey” would be a sweet gender neutral alternative, though upon closer inspection Freyr is apparently sometimes known as Frey so that is a bit of a bust. (On a side note I do not believe that canon Morpho was named after Freya, the Valfreyja name is rather obscure.)
The current lore is that Valfrey was originally named Freya by her adoptive parents, then the name updated into Valfreyja upon a certain milestone of their life, then this got changed into Valfrey as they assumed a non-binary identity.
What inspired me to make them non-binary was the song “Terra Incognita” by Project Pitchfork, which mentions three entities imagining a planet taking turns He says, She says, It says, followed up by a They which is supposed to be those three as a group, yet I liked it more as a fourth entity for OC creation purposes. These four would be the four original matterborn who created my Kirbyverse, each being assigned one of these pronouns, Valfrey obtaining They/Them, which quickly turned into They/She as I developed her character more.
The earliest depiction of Valfrey labels them as “Valfrey Knight”, yet I quickly switched to calling them just Valfrey figuring they would not want to be called a knight when they are clearly a samurai. There were a few times where I noted down that Barufurei Samurai is their warrior title, but this idea was never really used in practice and eventually dropped.
I don't quite recall what inspired the soul sickness if anything. Perhaps it was just that I wanted them to represent duality and this turned out to be one of the ways in which the idea manifested. Due to their age they do not know this as a mental illness and will not refer to it as such.
