Post by Vio on Jun 22, 2015 19:51:43 GMT -5
Hey, ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to the second chapter of Vio Talks. Now, I was going to split these up over each weekend, but the personal hype for this pushed this particular article forwards by quite some margin! I've also decided to include a poll as shown above, allowing my readers to choose which character I explain in the next article! If you want to read my first article, you can find that here, where I talk about Augustus Savoie.
Also, from here on, I'll be featuring an appropriate song for the featured character!
So, who is Arelya Gaille? Well, she's one of my oldest characters here on Bon Voyage, descending from the canon Sky Island, Skypiea! This green-haired girl is an insecure individual with a passion for invention, having spent a few years hiding among the stranded ships of the White Sea after one of Enel's Judgments killed her parents. Having lived her late teens essentially in exile, she got by through wits and thievery which (along with her isolation) turned her into something of a sourpuss. Enel's defeat was a blessing to her, but life in the skies was not her thing anymore. Technology was limited, focused almost entirely upon Dials, and she wanted to venture to the Blue Sea where her hero - Monkey D. Luffy - came from.
Despite her insecurities, I made Arelya into something of an aspiring anarchist, having always hated Enel's reign and thus any sort of political agenda that involves one man (or a select few) in power. Organised chaos is her specialty, and her tinkering demonstrates that. She's now a proud member of the Hoshi Pirates, working as their shipwright, but she's also toying with advancing her technological knowledge and skills. She gets kinda hyped up when her inventions are successful, but she can also be super tsundere at times!
What inspired her creation?
Well, as one of my earliest inventions, Miss Gaille had little initial inspiration. My goal was to create an interesting pirate, a shipwright, who came from the skies. And thus Arelya was born, her design coming about quite quickly and with little known inspiration to me at the time. Or, at least, that's what I thought! Upon further reflection, I found that Arelya actually had a few hidden pieces of inspiration in her design, much of which I never realised at the time of her development.
What's in a name? Arelya Gaille is an unusual name, right? All named Sky Islanders tend to have peculiar names, so that's why I took that route, but the name is also a little reference and pun. Arelya is a corruption of the names Aries (as in her astrological sign) and Irelia which, in turn, is the name of a champion from League of Legends. Irelia was a champion I enjoyed playing, and still do, and she's one of my favourite picks for the top lane! But the champion herself has no real correlation to the character who I produced. Or so I thought. At around the same time that I had created Arelya, my mum had been watching a film about the world's most famous female pilot. Amelia Earhart, as you all should know, was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic ocean, but it was during her flight over the Pacific ocean that she tragically disappeared. Now, the famous aviator also inspired some of Arelya's design - why else would she be from the sky? Why else did she disappear from Skypiea? - and it turned out that Irelia also had a skin based on the legendary Miss Earhart as well! What a coincidence! But what about the last name, Gaille? Well, I intended to pronounce it as 'gale', as in a gale-force wind, but the spelling I decided to make more unique. Gaille? Braille?
Now, when it comes to my tempestuous tinkerer, the subtle inspirations have only increased as I've built upon her character. Appearance wise (and this will be more prevalent in the future), Arelya was inspired by Mashiro Kuna from Bleach. I quite liked Bleach, having watched the anime series, and Mashiro is one of my favourite characters from the series. Unfortunately, Kubo fell into the trap of being pressured by time constraints and ideals, and thus what was a good series fell into an irreparable power trip akin to Dragonball Z. That didn't stop it from being a good series, mind, but after the defeat of Aizen at around episode 310, I couldn't watch anymore. Bleach ended there for me, and any continuation would only feel forced.
The characters that inspired Arelya did not end there, however, for there is one more fictional individual who made himself well known to me when I started watching Let's Plays on YouTube. And that is CEC Engineer Isaac Clarke, protagonist of the Dead Space games. More recently, I've played through Dead Space, and the game itself is really immersive. I'm not normally a fan of shooter games, but this one blew that preference out of the water! The atmosphere, the sound and lighting especially, and the clever incorporation of the HUD into the game itself makes it one of the most capturing of all games I've played. But what does Isaac have to do with Arelya? Well, most of the weapons available in Dead Space are actually tools that have been reconditioned into guns! The most famous being the Plasma Cutter, but there's also a blowtorch, circular saw, etc. And that, in my opinion, suits Miss Gaille to a tee! Her most recent weapons - a pair of Axe Dial-powered pistols called Solas and Dorcha - are testament to this, functioning as tools for piercing holes in timber as well as being useful weapons. In future, I intend to expand upon this design quirk, making an arsenal of tools/weapons for the winged woman.
The future holds many things for Arelya, inspired by other things that I am a fan of. The eventual development of the vehicle I've nicknamed the WapolMetal Gear (WMG for short) is honestly inspired by the likes of Metal Gear, if that wasn't obvious enough already! Unfortunately, there's no nanomachines, son! One Piece just doesn't allow for such advancement, and an almighty defence isn't really Arelya's thing. I'm not too sure of other developments I want to make with her yet, but I do know that the Aura she will obtain in the near future will be based less around her ingenuity and more around her affinity to the wind. In her very first thread, Arelya inhaled a hallucinogenic gas produced by a pirate's Devil Fruit abilities, and one such hallucination that occurred was something I aptly named Satan's Disco Ball. This wasn't my idea, I'll have you know, but a joke made by a lesser known Let's Player named Phallll. He was the first Let's Player I ever watched, but remains one of my favourites, even though he's been out of the 'business' for some time due to real life problems and such. I do recommend giving him a watch, especially some of his bigger let's plays! Alan Wake, Dead Space 2, Silent Hill: Downpour (in which you'll witness Satan's Disco Ball) and his Fatal Frame videos are all gems! But enough advertising for him!
So, that's all I have for Arelya Gaille and what inspired her. She's one of those characters I'm really proud of and, although her progression has been slow, I can't help but hold a deep love of what this character is and what she will become! As per usual, post below if you have any questions about this character, and I look forward to writing the next article! If there's a particular character you want to learn about, vote for them in the poll above, and the winner will be featured next time in Vio Talks About...! See you guys next time, and I look forward to some good feedback from you guys!
