Anyway, not sure why I did Shad's first. I just opened his document and sort of just filled everything out.
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(I wish I had a different picture of him, but this is the ONLY one of him I've drawn. I DID fix the terrible lighting, however!)
Name: Sora’s Shadow, aka Shad (out of story, anyway)
Age: Sora’s age. So… 15
Quote: “Oh, so you want to have your ass kicked into next Thursday!”
Theme(s): Dragon Rider (Laughing Darkness) – Two Steps from Hell
Bloodlust Orchestra (alt./battle theme) – Two Steps from Hell
Personality: Cruel and always laughing. Very cocky and very, very conceited. Shad enjoys toying with his opponents, using their darkest secrets against them to either embarrass or infuriate them. He shows no restraint, not stopping at any boundary, and willing to push until someone breaks.
Despite his cruelty and nature, he does have a soft spot for Kairi. Kairi tends to see a different side of him; a calmer, kinder side. And, as time wears on, he grows to find the “softer” of him showing more often, much to his displeasure.
Pet peeves: Wolves that do not listen to him. People who can read his memories/thoughts. Light. Being in pain.
Interests/Hobbies: Dragging Sora into darkness. Stalking Kairi. Bugging people
Favorite Color: red
Random fact: Shad has only properly existed for about a month and a half (this excludes the time he spent in Sora’s heart)
Weapon: His Keyblade “Binding Chains” but he often uses just the chains alone
Abilities: Sensing/reading others’ emotions. Reading the darker thoughts of pretty much anyone’s mind. He has the ability to play with others’ emotions, forcing them to feel a certain emotion at times or even manipulating them through their emotions, much like a puppet-master pulling strings. However, the manipulation doesn’t work very well on anyone that isn’t Sora.
He can also wield various forms of magic, most of them powerful and dark. He’s been seen using Dark Thundaga and Dark Blizzaga before, and can probably use Dark Firaga too (and he might’ve already in-story, but I’m not positive).
Being a creature of Darkness, he can also manipulate the Darkness to do his will, and has at times used purely Darkness as a weapon.
Appearance: Similar to that of Sora. He and Sora share the same facial structure, body structure, etc. The main and really only difference between them (besides their personalities) is that Shad’s eyes are gold and his hair black (similar to that of Vanitas). Shad wears the form of Sora’s dark mode.
First seen in-story: ch13 of Dead Inside. Properly introduced in ch29.
Important notes: none that I can think of at the moment
Backstory/origins(in-story): Being Sora’s Shadow, Shad was created for the sole purpose of dragging Sora back into darkness. He is forged from Sora’s heart, and is basically Sora’s darkness taken physical form. However, as much as he wishes his existence was that simple, a few things when wrong when he split himself from Sora, and he ended up with more of Sora’s heart than he probably wanted.
Role in story:
TH: is not present in the Truth Hurts
FtP: He starts forming somewhere towards the end of Falling to Pieces, and is conscious within Sora’s heart for at least a few days before Ansem drags Sora to the Realm of Darkness. During this time, he plots his formation, avoids Ansem, and has a brief run-in with Ven. During the three months Sora spends in the Realm of Darkness (which to him and Sora was probably only just over a week) he’s mostly quiet, as in the Realm of Darkness he isn’t needed.
NF: Plays no role in Nothing’s Fair.
DI: Shad splits himself from Sora around ch3, and spends the next week in the Dark Margin, recovering from his rough split from Sora and gathering his strength. He doesn’t show his face until ch13, where he appears only briefly to Sora in order to taunt him. He does this periodically for the next week or so, but due to his low strength, he isn’t able to stay out of the Dark Realm for long.
It isn’t until ch29, about 3 weeks after his split from Sora, that he is able to walk the Worlds freely. He seeks Sora out in Hollow Bastion, and there they fight for the first time. After subduing Sora, he leaves, not wanting to have won the game that easily.
Shad spends the next few days wandering the Worlds, getting used to his newfound freedom. He continues to bother Sora periodically. In ch46, he visits Kairi for the first time. In ch50, only a few days later, Shad goes to Hollow Bastion again. There he battles Sora, and indirectly forces Sora to leave Hollow Bastion.
For the next week or so, Shad spends his time alternating between visiting Kairi and bothering Sora. He visits Kairi a couple of times (only one visit is written, but it is implied there are more), and visits Sora in Halloween Town (ch61), and then again in Olympus Coliseum, where he stabs Cloud in the gut (ch68-70).
Ch96 finds Shad putting together an elaborate plan to drag Sora into darkness. He realizes that Kairi is Sora’s light, and if he separates Sora from his light, dragging Sora into darkness will become easier. He starts putting the plan into action in ch97, but hits a snag, and the plan fails by ch100.
In attempts to cheer himself up, Shad spends the night and next morning using Sora to bother Aerith, Tifa, and then Leon. When Riku shows up in Hollow Bastion in ch104 (later that day) he then uses Sora to taunt Riku, in which he finds great enjoyment. His enjoyment is, however, short-lived, as he is interrupted by magik’s Namine and Riku (ch45-48 of Can’t Escape). He argues with them for a while, but they leave when a large batch of Heartless show up, and he leaves shortly after.
He returns, however, not much later, as he discovers that Sora’s control is slipping and Sora just stabbed Riku in the chest. Itching to have some more fun, Shad manipulates the darkness in Riku, and watches as Sora and Riku battle. When the battle is over, Shad goes to the weakened Riku and super-infuses him with darkness. Once finished with that, he turns his attention to Sora, only to find Sora missing. Shad then encounters a Heartless that took the form of Sora’s Nightmares, and forces it to transform into a wolf that he can use to find Sora.
After a few fruitless hours of searching multiple Worlds for Sora, Shad returns to Hollow Bastion, knowing Kairi to be there. Not willing to let his hold on Kairi go, he triggers an argument between Tifa and Kairi, and then Tifa and Leon in hopes that the argument will distract them from bringing up Kairi’s hope in Sora again. It doesn’t work as well as he hoped, however, because Joseph interferes. Shad leaves and returns to his search for Sora.
(Yes, the past three paragraphs take place in a day. It is, I think, the most crammed day of the entire fic. So far, at least.)
Currently, Shad is searching for Sora, but – minus a close shave in Agrabah – has been unable to find him.
Development of character out of story: Shad is, arguably, my most developed character and has evolved much from his original character idea. Originally, he was planned to be “always laughing, typically at all the pain he’s caused”. While, yes, that is still evident in his character, he has evolved to be much more than that. He’s no longer just a thorn in Sora’s side – he was originally planned to just be an antagonist of Sora’s side of the story, but he’s crossed over into other storylines, too. And he’s more than just a jerk who shows up, taunts Sora, battles Sora, laughs at Sora’s pain, and then leaves. He’s… He does more than that. His character’s deeper than that. He’s become whatever the crap he is now.
So, I came up with the idea for Shad during my first runthrough of BBS, while fighting the final battle of Ven's story. Of course, being my first runthrough, I was likely under-level, and so Vanitas was an absolute pain and took me probably twenty tries to beat. Sometime in my downtime, I started pondering the idea of having a character similar to Van in my fic, and Shad spawned. *shrug*
My opinion: I don’t want to say he’s my favorite – I don’t think I have a favorite character. I like each of them for certain reasons. However, he is certainly up there on my list of favorites. I am in absolute love with the relationship that has come to develop between him and Sora – not the: him needing to drag Sora into darkness, but him actually needing Sora. And what I find definitely interesting about him is that, even though there are places I could go with that relationship, he retains his Shad-attitude throughout them. He does not conform to what I would’ve wanted out of it; he remains himself. That’s something new for me, as I’ve never really written anything, so I could change characters as much as I wanted without them losing who they were.
Back to Shad, though… Idk what to say about him. I looked at his original idea, the “constantly laughing” and really only serving to a thorn in Sora’s side and nothing more, and I almost wish I had tried harder to keep him like that. It would’ve been a challenge for me to have a character like that – a character without some deep emotional conflict (all of my characters have them. Don’t argue; they do.) However, if he didn’t develop the way he did, I would be lacking Colin and Cole; possibly my two favorite characters from my not-a-fic. So… I can’t complain.
I know you all were expecting something else here, probably, like… why do I hate him? Why do I love him? Or… things like that. Well, I can’t honestly list all of the reasons I love him, as most of them are spoilers, and I don’t want to get into why I hate him, because I only hate the things he does, I don’t hate him as a character. So… meh.
Enjoy writing: 5/5
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