Character Musings: Dangerously Genre Savvy

The Sarahkin weren't always my "signature" characters. In the first two seasons of RP, they shared this distinction with another character - the one responsible for this blog's name and logo, Widow Maker the giant praying mantis.

Wids was born in 2010. Major Failure was taking time off from the final battles of Zoofights in order to get married and go on a honeymoon. To help fill the gap, people began holding mini-Zoofights with underpowered Zoofights rejects. I recall "Vuvuzebra" in particular, a zebra with a vuvuzela for a mouth. Just beautiful. Anyway, I wanted to join in, so I submitted some crude sketches and character profiles for two quasi-Zoofighters that would go at it while the Major was away.

When trying to think of monsters, I considered animals Major Failure had never used. The first one to come to mind was a marlin. From this, Marlin the Magnificent was created. Marlin had drills in place of his front fins, a jetpack on his back, and a reinforced snout to make for a devastating battering ram.

For Marlin's opponent, I went with one of my favorite animals, which had never been used in Zoofights - a praying mantis. I made the mantis female, as female mantids are known for being bigger and stronger than males. She received nails on her claws, an invisibility cloak, and a rear-mounted gun that shot black widow spiders. The resulting creature was named Widow Maker and given high intelligence but low defense.

Voting was a landslide in favor of Widow Maker, but Marlin kept it reasonably close when someone drew fanart of him. I ran the tractor upon voting's end and Widow Maker was the winner. The resulting fight was crudely illustrated but pretty good in terms of action, I felt, and ended with Widow Maker decapitating Marlin and piloting his corpse into Ourobouros, the tournament's villain, in order to make her escape.

The following April, Widow Maker resurfaced for the final Zoofights tournament. Initially wearing a cloak to hide her identity for a big reveal right before the tournament began, Widow Maker was a rare sight in the bar early on. I wasn't too comfortable with roleplaying yet, so she spent her time on the sidelines and was very heavily focused on discussing the tournament and the fighters, hanging around The Betting Corner and lamenting her luck as one monster after another lost after she bet on them.

Then ONE VOTE happened (see Sarah's Character Musings for details), and Widow Maker began making more frequent appearances after her release from the hospital. After the Big Bar Brawl, when roleplaying began to truly take off on the forum, Widow Maker became a fixture of the place and one of the most common sights. She was also a baby.

You see, for the first Big Bar Brawl, Widow Maker entered with a weapon given to her by Sine, who felt that Widow Maker could channel her frustration over never winning a bet into an arena win for herself. The weapon, a swordlike thing from the Devil May Cry series, seemed "off", and I decided this meant it contained dark energies. Jumpropeman, in the BBB1 preshow, expanded even further on this and made the weapon outright hostile. After Widow Maker began attacking with it during the Brawl, it began possessing her, and halfway through the fight Widow Maker went on a killing spree and allowed the darkness to consume her completely, becoming a towering nightmare I named "Widow Colossus". Widow Colossus became the first ever Big Bar Brawl godbeast, adapting a long-standing tradition from Zoofights. Fortunately for the Brawl, Alex was able to put Widow Colossus down.

Now for the weirdest part. When Widow Colossus was destroyed, emerging from the remains was a little baby Widow Maker. I adapted this into Widow Maker's abilities - when she is killed, she respawns, but she doesn't come back as her usual self - she comes back as a baby. To return to normal, she had to "gain experience" - either through winning Zoofights bets or winning RP fights. After enough victories, she was restored to an adult body, this time without any nails in her claws or guns stuck to her butt, leaving her a mostly-natural giant mantis.

Baby Widow Maker has all of Widow Maker's intelligence but very little combat ability, and she also cannot fly. In later seasons Babby Wids was something of an inconvenience, but in the very dialogue-heavy Season 1 she had lots to do no matter her current size, and she wound up returning to baby form a second time later in the season.

Wids' most famous trait is her genre-savviness. She seems to be aware she is in a roleplaying forum, or at least is really good at recognizing cliches, tropes, and stereotypes. Any antagonist that acts too stereotypical around Widow Maker is sure to get interrupted and shut down. Wids sometimes seems utterly fearless, and very little fazes her. But that wouldn't be true all of the time...

Widow Maker, despite being a very important character in the first season, never had a proper plot of her own. She almost got one when Marlin the Magnificent returned, given a new head and new weapons by World Creature Wars, but that plotline was scuttled when Cornwind started a new, significantly bigger-in-scope plot on the same night. Widow Maker managed to get "New Marlinnium", as he was now called, on her side to help fight the greater menace, who wound up permakilling New Marlinnium by disintegrating him. Marlinnium later made a handful of cameos in the underworld.

So anyway, since Wids never got a plot, my plan for Season 2 was to craft a large one for her. I decided I wanted the normally stoic Wids to feel fear, and the best way to get her to fear an enemy was by making it personal. I introduced Dr. Bulgrave, a mad scientist who was one of the people responsible for creating Widow Maker in the first place and subjecting her to the horrors of a Zoofights tournament. I'll go into detail on Bulgrave more another time, hopefully, but suffice it to say that merely seeing him triggered traumatic flashbacks in Widow Maker, forcing her to lean on others for help.

After Season 2, Widow Maker mostly vanished from view, but she made returns in seasons 3 and 4. In Season 3, she reappeared for one more crack at the Big Bar Brawl, and in Season 4, she returned as Gloria's "secret weapon" after an overwhelming influx of plots forced Gloria to take a break and return to Manhattan for a week or two.

Widow Maker began life as one of the Zoofights "talking head"-type characters, used pretty much as an avatar to let me discuss Zoofights in-universe. But with the help of the RP Explosion, she became her own character, making friends, going on adventures, and developing a following - and becoming quite fun to RP, especially when there's a logical misstep or cocksure villain for her to tear into. Her returns are always met with positivity, and as Harpy once said, "Nobody keeps it real like Widow Maker". I'm always very happy when a character is a success!

Widow Maker is set to return in a limited role once again in Season 5, this time because of one of the Neo Kobbers - Spitfire, another giant mantis. Widow Maker and Spitfire have been planned to meet since 2013, and at long last the two of them will go head to head in Las Vegas.