Rejected Characters Depot VIII

My god, has it seriously been five years since I've done one of these? Well, at least I have excuses! The shift toward massive collaborative plots like The Curse, Dark Matter, Salvagers, and Cardholders was pretty good at clearing the decks and even rescuing some of the rejects (former Depot member Lord Dominator found a sizable role in 2019 as an elite Curse member, and around the same time Byakuren rose up as a full-fledged protagonist as well!) and I've also used small cameos, minor roles, and Secret Fiter slots to give characters enough to keep them from being considered truly "rejected". However, five years is still a long time, and enough debris has built up - and enough time has passed for some of these guys that I'm pretty sure they won't make it to the forum - that I can finally cobble together a fresh look at rejected characters. So without further ado, here are some folks who've been on the backburner for so long I'm ready to scrape them off the pan and into the Depot.

Amshel

Origin: Ever Oasis
Considered For: Kuwahawi, Agama
Ever Oasis was a great action RPG that hit the 3DS late in its' lifespan and kind of got overlooked as a result. I played the demo shortly before going on a shopping trip and really liked what I played, purchasing it alongside Metroid: Samus Returns to make my 2017 birthday heavily 3DS-centric. Naturally, with so many cute characters in it, the temptation to use one in RP was strong. I settled on Amshel for having a good mix of a cute design, fun personality, and a couple of different images online. The lack of penetration Ever Oasis made in the community ended up weakening my excitement, however, and I had also played Ever Oasis in October and November - meaning by the time the next season rolled around, too many other fresher ideas had interfered. Amshel was put on the shelf for Olympia, but Agama seemed like a reasonable fit and I briefly considered her once more before ultimately putting her aside for good.

Huntress Wizard
Origin: Adventure Time
Considered For: Agama
For quite some time now, I've been considering putting an archer in RP. I've run through several ideas, including the Heart Star version of Rinoa Virran and simply bringing back Ariel. Huntress Wizard got the closest - I found the design appealing and she was one of my very first ideas for Agama. Like Amshel, though, ideas kept piling up while I waited for the new setting to arrive, and by the time it finally did I had so many ideas that Huntress Wizard got pushed out. I'm actually STILL trying to get an archer into RP again, and my latest pick for the role is slated to appear in Whalestrand. Will she actually get in where Huntress Wizard and others failed?!

Ebirah
Origin: Godzilla
Considered For: Kuwahawi
An early concept I had for a Season 7 plot was a war with an adaptation of the villain group from Godzilla vs The Sea Monster. Named "The Red Bamboo", they were a group of terrorists manufacturing nuclear weapons, and they had multiple monsters under their control to keep their base defended. Ebirah would have been their greatest weapon, a monstrous shrimp that was being forcibly controlled to serve them. We'd break the mind control, revealing that Ebirah was no villain - just a big animal who'd been taken advantage of.

Ebirah was put aside when I saw Draco begin making gags in Chatzy about potentially using him. Since Draco's character jokes very often lead to the character actually showing up, I decided to wait and see if Draco would use Ebirah. My plot ideas for Season 7 eventually mutated into what we got with Hedorah and Angelica Von Buxton as the big bads, and while Ebirah skipped Kuwahawi, Draco did finally get him into RP as Gamera's partner in the tenth Big Bar Brawl.

I also considered the Gamera monster Legion around this time, but proactively decided to leave her alone since I thought Draco might have wanted her for a Gamera thing. There are far fewer Gamera monsters than Godzilla monsters and Legion is one of the coolest. Legion did eventually make a brief cameo - I believe she appeared as one of the nightmare monsters during an event featuring many imaginary opponents appearing around Kuwahawi, or something like that - and then her name was taken by a Falinks.

Gokicha
Origin: Cockroach Girls
Considered For: Olympia
An early Olympia concept, this tiny bug-sized cockroach girl would have shown up to do goofy interactions with Widow Maker and The Swarm. By the time I came up with The Curse, though, she was already on her way out as I was simply not able to sustain interest in her idea with so many other ideas for Olympia filling my head. Sometimes things just don't pan out!

The Lord of Lightning
Origin: Super Mario Odyssey
Considered For: Kuwahawi, Olympia, Agama
Hey, remember one of the older Rejected Characters Depot posts where I talked about a possible Mario Plot? That Mario Plot remained on the table for years, with Gloria's return in Agama potentially sparking it. This new Mario Plot would have been about Gloria's rowdy Bowser summon breaking free of her command completely and striking out on his own, looking for princesses to kidnap. The exact foes faced along the way were always in flux, but The Lord Of Lightning was pretty much set in stone as Bowser's trump card from the moment I first faced him in Super Mario Odyssey. In the end, Mario Plot was a victim of my interest in cutting down on how many events I was doing, as I wanted to scale back after the event-heavy madness of the Olympia years. Probably the final nail in the coffin, though, was when Harpy brought in Nia, Sonia's Bowsette alter ego, and basically ran her own Mario Plot inside Brine's House Kal-Vec plot.

...Plus, I did eventually do a Mario plot in the form of the Legion of Stationery, so there's that!

Spades Slick
Origin: MS Paint Adventures
Considered For: Agama
An early concept for my 2021 plot featured Spades Slick working alongside Orville Elephant and Gust, acting as a behind-the-scenes mastermind who was rounding up people who'd have long-time grudges against the Kobbers. After Chao told me about Cardholders, though, I realized Spades' card theme made him impossibly perfect for Chao to use, especially since Chao had already used Hearts Boxcars. To hopefully ensure Chao used him, I not-so-subtly hinted that Spades would be great for Cardholders. As Chao revealed in his Cardholders blog, he actually wasn't sold on Spades until I vouched for him, and so we got the extremely excellent second arc of Cardholders and its' climactic finale for the Midnight Crew. I've never been more pleased with rejecting a character!

 

Death Adder
Origin: Golden Axe
Considered For: Agama
Death Adder was going to be an antagonist of some sort, but with a twist. Exactly what that twist was varied as time went on, but there were two concepts in particular that I spent some decent time ruminating on.

The first concept was for Death Adder to be the main villain of a silly single-day plot that presented itself as an epic plot finale... but it was the ONLY event we ever saw onscreen, with our characters having done all the other events during the offseason when no one was looking. The joke was that our characters would know exactly what was going on, but we the users would not, and we'd just kind of make up the entire plot's past events via ad-libbing as we went along, having our characters gasp at "shocking plot twists" we pulled out of our butts mid-post. I thought it seemed like a fun, silly idea, and maybe someday someone will give this joke a try, but it didn't pan out for me.

The second idea was for Death Adder to show up as an obvious villain and seemingly get set up as a major bad guy, only for him to either get offed by one of his underlings or to see the Kobbers were in town, abandon his plans, and run away to hide (he would potentially show up at the very end of our time in Agama to pay off the gag.) Either way, I was never going to play this guy straight - I've done "big mean guy in armor" too often to play it without a wink and a nod.

CJ
Origin: Jenny LeClue
Considered For: Agama
Possibly appearing alongside Jenny LeClue would be one of her friends! CJ is a conspiracy theorist at least a couple decades older than Jenny, and his theories and discoveries about ancient aliens would have tied into an early version of Regiplot/Qerh Plot. As you may recall, I had been considering an alien invasion plot for a long time, and it eventually got merged into Regiplot in 2021 and then attached itself to Businessplot in 2022. While Alienplot did finally happen in some form, CJ didn't get a place in it, and so like fellow conspiracy nut Russi Clover he was put aside.

Paddy-Tan
Origin: Paddy The Pelican Wiki
Considered For: Kuwahawi
This one's pretty much just a shitpost. I came across Paddy The Pelican when looking up awful media on TV Tropes - it's a zero-budget cartoon that essentially submitted pencil tests as complete, ready-to-air episodes, with the voice acting all being done by a single guy reading from a script and making himself sound like a lunatic in the process. Paddy The Pelican, along with other ludicrously cheap fare like Clutch Cargo, symbolizes the bottom of the barrel for cartoons in the mid-20th century, when the notoriously cheap and simple Hannah-Barbara was actually the top of the heap.

Anyway Paddy The Pelican has a fan wiki, and of course the fan wiki was a joke, and of course they gave themselves a wiki-tan mascot, again as a joke. I considered Paddy-Tan for a surprisingly long time, but I don't think I had any actual ideas for things for her to do - probably just make fun of cheap old cartoons by having her act like one. She could be immune to things she didn't have animation frames to react to, and would move in repetitive ways while spouting incomprehensible kid-appeal dialogue. Pretty much a female Hella Jeff, actually.

Ena
Origin: ENA
Considered For: Agama
You may remember the story here. During the 2020-2021 offseason, I discovered ENA. These surreal, dreamlike videos about the bizarre girl Ena and her various friends and acquaintances are difficult to parse, but while they deal in absurdist humor, one thing anyone can see about them is that they're love letters to the 90s PC aesthetic, with crude polygons sharing space with scaling sprites and the general colors, tone, and aesthetic all matching the early days of widespread computer adoption. I wasn't sure if I wanted to commit to Ena as a character, but I did have an idea to have her test the waters - she would be my BBB11 Secret Fiter!

And if you DO remember this story, then you know how that turned out. On Season 11's opening night, new user Roserade busted out his very first RP character... Ena. And just like that, any plans I had for her were done for! I'm glad it happened, though - Roserade did some nice stuff with Ena, and my replacement pick, Vondu, actually won the Secret Fiter roll and ended up playing one of the biggest and most major roles of any Secret Fiter in Brawl history when he not only survived half the Brawl, but brought in a small army of bonus characters for everyone else to fight! He went on to make further appearances on-forum and became a fairly notable secondary character throughout the two Agama seasons. I even brought The Shepherd into RP in Season 12 so that I ended up getting to use someone from the ENA series after all. I do miss Roserade, his RP had a lot of potential. Wherever Ena is now, though, I'm sure she finally found Moony and is off having a great time.

Leaf
Origin: Pokemon
Considered For: Agama
Born from a gag during a Harpy stream of FRLG, the concept here was Leaf running her own BBQ where her Charizard provided the fire to cook her food. She was going to appear in the Agama Grand Market as a stall owner, similar to Adeleine, but I don't believe she ever actually made it to the forum. She might have gotten a mention somewhere, or a vague reference, but she was meant to be a full and proper character with a Pokemon team. I like Leaf's design a lot, but there's just so much competition for Pokemon characters and I already had Gardenia (and Gardenia already had a friend in the form of Lucina) so Leaf didn't find a niche to squeeze into.

Piranhadon
Origin: King Kong (2005)
Considered For: Agama
I had a few ideas for one-day plots in Agama that were all scrapped for time except the Lucina/Peppa rematch and the battle with the horde of Warbats. They were all simple boss battles meant to flesh out the setting some. One was an "alchemist battle" intended as a way to give Annie the spotlight, but I never settled on a good way of doing it or a solid opponent. Another was a fight where we'd help Melody Farklight defeat a vicious plant monster lifted from Melody's home game, Nostalgia. The event to get the furthest along in concept and development starred Piranhadon here, a monster that appears in a deleted scene of the 2005 King Kong film. We'd go on a river tour of Agama, following the rivers from the city into the jungle to see where they led. There'd be some posting about local wildlife and a chance for some worldbuilding, but then we'd run into some hostile fauna. The Piranhadon would be the biggest threat of the evening, but still nothing too special. It was a neat little event, but very disposable, and in the end it was indeed disposed of.

The Maverick
Origin: Nostalgia
Considered For: Agama
Nostalgia again! This isn't really a character - The Maverick wasn't alive - but it's a scrapped concept instead. Melody was supposed to have the airship from Nostalgia as a secret weapon she'd whip out at a climactic moment (it was even hinted at in her character profile). This never happened for two reasons. First, Melody was one of the least important Coven members and didn't get enough opportunities to use any big weapons. And second, by the time there was a chance for her to bust it out, there were too many other more-established airships in RP already, like the Atragon, the Flutter, and the Grand Charion's ship form. I may have come close a few times to putting the Maverick onscreen, but it just never felt quite right.

General Diabol
Origin: Final Faction
Considered For: Agama
Before he was moved forward a year to be faced as Regiplot's final boss, Qerh AKA The Creator was going to be a looming background threat in Season 11 before coming into focus in Season 12 with a group of powerful alien generals to serve as his underlings. Metron, Fine, and Commander Genesis were all part of this group, alongside a stereotypical green alien (who would have been very Totally Radical and served as even more of a joke character than Metron) and Diabol here. General Diabol is the second-in-command villain of the Kharn, the alien antagonists of the Final Faction toyline, and as I'd already been lifting from Final Faction for RP I was planning to keep doing it. My secondary character Synthoid would have been one of many Synthoids, the others all working under Diabol alongside other Kharn baddies like the Drone, Brute, and Crawler. Crawlers made it to RP alongside Huntras and Decimators, but Diabol himself was left out when I trimmed down the revamped Alien Plot after shifting it to focus on Commander Genesis as the big bad instead. The rush of inspiration that gave us the Legion of Stationery necessitated cutting out some events to keep my plot from getting too long (I was very conscious of not taking up too much space so that Chao's Cardholders plot had room to shine). Diabol almost still made it in as extra muscle for Commander Genesis - the initial idea for my finale featured an attack on two fronts for the first day, with an alien army led by Diabol attacking Agama under orders from Genesis while the Spamton rescue squad went into The Backrooms and faced Spamton in his Elohim body, as we saw in the final product. I removed the alien invasion when I saw how large-scale other finales of the last week of Season 12 were shaping up to be, deciding I didn't need to go so hard with so many other finales also going hard. If Genesis seemed a little easily dealt with, that was why.

Normally I would hang on to a useful evergreen-type villain like this just in case, but I've done three seasons in a row of alien conquerors and I need to give that dead horse a rest and make my next plot about something else.

Calamity
Origin: Fortnite
Considered For: Olympia, Kuwahawi, Whalestrand
This Fortnite character almost got into RP because of my Jurassic toy collecting habit. I was browsing the DinoToys subreddit (which used to be a good source for news and discussion on new and upcoming JW toys, but years ago devolved into nothing but a handful of people posting photographs of their figures) when I saw someone post a photo of a Calamity figure riding a raptor. I liked her design immediately and asked the OP who she was. Shortly afterward, Amazon had the Calamity figure on sale and I bought one for myself. It's a nice little figure.

Calamity was considered as a literal Cowboy Cop. Various drafts had her appearing either as a new ZFPD recruit or as a resident officer who didn't approve of Kobber methods and would rub against us as a mild antagonist a few times before we'd eventually do something to win her over on the Kobbers. She also had a scorpion partner planned, and that character - Sting Westclaw - actually DID make it to RP briefly when Jenny LeClue transformed into him during one of Harpy's Radical Dreamers events.

A major factor in keeping Calamity out of RP was Joy. I felt weird introducing another cowgirl who hit some of the same notes, and Frost also did a good job of siphoning off Calamity's potential niche on my roster since Calamity was shaping up to pretty much be a Joy/Frost fusion. By the time Joy stopped being particularly prominent, I'd come up with Burnin Justice as my new cop characters, and that was what finally binned poor Calamity for good after years of being on the backburner.

The Aranea Totem
Origin: Original
Considered For: Agama
Again, not a character, but a concept. The Aranea Totem technically isn't unused - it was the focus of the Warbat dayplot, after all - but it never actually made it to Kumonga like it was built up to do! The purpose of the Aranea Totem was to give Kumonga the power to speak English, so that he could more easily communicate with other characters. It wasn't an ability I wanted to hand him out of the gate, because I was easing into the idea of a talkative kaiju - Biollante lost her voice when she un-merged with Nostronomitron, and Battra never spoke at all. However, I eventually opted to take Kumonga's language barrier in a different direction. He gained Cordie as a translator, and Regigigas could understand him as well. I preferred playing around with this limited communication where Kumonga could converse freely with bugs and ancients but no one else, even if it did get in the way sometimes. After he merged with Elohim in my 2022 finale, Kumonga finally gained the ability to fully communicate with all other Kobbers and associates in English, though since he was retiring he didn't get to do much with this new power.

Bob
Origin: Animal Crossing
Considered For: Agama
Ah, Bob. My favorite Animal Crossing villager! 2020 was a lot of things, but one of the more fun things about it was that it was the year Animal Crossing finally exploded into mainstream, widespread popularity. Everyone and their mother was playing New Horizons for a while there, and it also marked my own return to the franchise for the first time since I played the heck out of the original on Gamecube way back in early 2006. And as big new video games tend to do, I started getting RP ideas from New Horizons. Before I settled on Ena, my first idea for a BBB11 Secret Fiter a year in advance was Bob! And his weapon would be the animate skeleton of a Brachiosaurus. Which sounds completely nonsensical until you remember that Animal Crossing actually does have a Brachiosaurus skeleton in it, albeit a non-animate one. It was of course meant to be intentionally ridiculous, and a lot about Bob in general would have been ridiculous, with him having a similar personality to the laid-back Jinako except he would also be a low-level reality warper who could whip out all manner of Animal Crossing-related objects from nowhere for use with everyday tasks or battles. Easy to get along with and a lover of the easy life, Bob would have been fun but like a lot of the other characters on this page I just didn't have the room. My character rosters have been enormous as of late, and even after efforts to massively pare it down for the transition to Whalestrand, I've still got a couple dozen characters on deck with more to be revealed as the offseason rolls on. Good thing I show up for so many events so I can actually use a good portion of my ideas instead of having to scrap even more.

There are some other characters and ideas I could lob into this post, but they're mostly either insubstantial "I thought of RPing this character for a couple minutes one time and wrote down their name" or else they might still make it into RP someday, so I'm going to call it a day on this long-awaited delivery to the Rejected Characters Depot.