Character Focus: Derivan!
artist is zoanluen on Twitter!
Oh man, Derivan.
I mean, his character concept was kind of what started this whole thing, right? I like monsters - if the tags on some of my other posts haven't made it obvious - and 'living armor' pushes a lot of buttons for me. There's a lot in the idea of being othered that resonates with the queer experience, and Derivan embodies a lot of that in a lot of ways by being, uh, a suit of armor that's afraid to let other people know that he's a suit of armor?
(It turns out they knew all along. Not completely, but they figured something was up, considering he never took off his helmet. 0 of his friends were surprised when it was eventually revealed.)
Derivan spent most of his formative years in a dungeon (the video game equivalent of a dungeon, as in a 'challenging location', not someone's basement), so he's very fascinated by the world at large - which explains a lot of his connection to Vex, who loves explaining just about everything in too much detail. Unlike most people who talk to Vex, Derivan sits and listens to every word attentively.
What's sort of funny is that a lot of people assume he's ace? I do have an ace character, but that's Sev. Derivan is demisexual. I leave further thoughts on this as an exercise to the reader. (Or you can respond to this post with theories.)
Derivan represents an outside-context problem for the system in the world of Edge Cases. He's essentially an embodiment of an issue I often find in video games - that video games will often designate 'monster races' that are all enemies, despite several of them being very clearly sapient. He's meant to be commentary on that aspect of the reductiveness of video game logic, so to speak.
He's very formal and thoughtful, he uses the lights in his helmet to express most of his emotions, and is otherwise protective of his friends, who were the first people to accept him. Found family vibes baybeeeeee
For those not familiar, Derivan is from my book, The Fabric of Reality.
