Have you ever gotten to think about an original character that you created in the past, and felt that it had been around for way longer than it seems? Like, you can pinpoint the exact moment where you first conceived it, or the first drawing ever of it, but you somehow feel like that idea had been around in your mind waay before.

Kriyu has a long and curious story that I never shared with anyone, because it mostly goes all the way back when I was a small kid with a big imagination, and obviously waay before I got actually involved in posting art online, or even before I started interacting with anyone online to be honest. I felt an urge to share her story, no matter how cringey the details, of how she came to be as an original character. And maybe to encourage everyone else to talk about their own OC’s that have a special place in their hearts.

So buckle up cuz I’m terrible at writing but I wanna share it to whoever could find it interesting.

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When I was a small kid, probably around 8 years old, I dreamed once of a light blue-ish sprite (fairy) with alien like eyes and long hair, and I instantly had a crush on her. She looked like, what you’d get if you mix Lilymon from Digimon, with Dreamsprite from Yu-gi-oh, and Navi from Zelda (Although I never played Zelda as a kid, but it works as a reference). She was fully nude and had insect-like fairy wings. Of course no naughty bits whatsoever because I was small and innocent and I hadn’t even hit puberty.

I wasn’t a skilled artist when I was 8 obviously, but having watched Art Attack and having played Microsoft Kids Fine Artist a lot, I was a really creative kid that always loved to make things. My first OC was a small green/red guy named “Super 3D” which happened after I screwed up trying to draw explosion and just decided to add eyes and suddenly he was a character. I used to draw comics with him and shit and it was pretty cute, and he even had friends and crap. And the only people who ever knew about him and his friends were my sister, my mom, and my cousins.

But of course my artistic skills weren’t enough to be able to draw the blue fairy girl, so she mostly remained in my head, while I tried to focus on more doable stuff like giving eyes to an onion and calling her a character. Here’s a modern day accurate recreation of what these guys looked like.

Fast forward a few years, to the mid 2000’s, and I’m now a teenager that lurks the interwebs and has discovered furry art through a “Pokémon Hentai” gallery website which obviously had just reposts and ads all over the place. I didn’t even know it was called furry, hell, I didn’t even know how to use Google properly, so my only clue to get to the Furries was that one Pokémon Hentai gallery site that I somehow managed to get to by following a chain of links from a known beforehand porn gallery site. So my only keyword to find that stuff was “Pokémon Hentai”, and it was really disappointing every time I found a new gallery site but all I saw was drawings of Misty and Jessie, yet no Eeveelutions, or Pokémon whatsoever (And Pikachu girls were a hit or miss).

Anyway, I somehow ran into fchan, and in that moment I learned that Furry was an actual thing, with a name. Then I found agnph. And, logically, it all went downhill from there.

Simultaneously with all this, I started to semi-seriously get into drawing, privately obviously, since I was a teenager who wasn’t sure what was going on with me, but saw Pokémon animals and thought “hey this feels very nice”. But I was an absolute ignorant to sexuality because I was a teenager, and while I did like porn a lot, I was just an introvert weird kid who didn’t even fap. So there I am, being in my room by myself, drawing anthro Pokémon to the best of my abilities, and boy to this date I’m not sure I’m ready to look at them again. I still have those drawings stashed in a box (securely taped), and I made sure to write the date and time for each drawing, so that at some point, in the future, I would be able to tell which drawing came after which.

I was purely a pencil “artist” and sometimes I’d use color markers to color using crosshatch patterns. A few years later I discovered I could use Microsoft PowerPoint to color using vectors, and I stuck with that for quite a while because I, as a game developer firstly/artist secondly, was VERY used to PowerPoint; so much so that It was the thing I used to make proto-videogames when I was an even younger kid (Very elaborate, using animation triggers and on-mouse-over slide changes, and that stuff).

Kriyu was originally conceived as an anthro Glaceon, and when I first decided that, I originally also designed a group of friends for her, all of them also pokégirls because I was adolescent, and furry. And technically speaking, a closeted closeted furry, because I didn’t even interact with anyone online, I just lurked websites like agnph and fchan and grabbed and saved pictures that I found sexy; but also I was slowly but surely trying to become a furry artist myself, behind the curtains and, obviously never showing it to anyone. But yeah, anyway, inspired by a lot of furry artists of the time (some of them still going about, and some of them now actual friends of mine!) 15 year old me drew a jolly Glaceon girl on an A4 paper and named her Kriyu.

Around that point in time Pokémon Diamond and Pearl where the fresh new thing; and I had a fascination with Glaceon because I always found the eevelutions cute, and I thought “hey... Glaceon looks a lot like that fairy girl from when I was a kid”. And so I decided I would repurpose that concept into her. I was fully aware I was designing her to be my “waifu”, even though I didn’t even know of such concept back then, and completely aware that it was just fantasy.

Also because of that, at some point I decided that she would have a fixed birth date. Because back then, I only made OC’s purely for my own enjoyment. Not for a story, a comic, a video game, or anything. It was just me and my characters, like any introverted artsy teenager would have. And so I decided that her birthday would be May 28th 1993, which was a date with no significance to me. So at the time of this writing she’s 26 years old; and at any point in time she would be just slightly younger than the real me.

So yeah lmao, I was lonely and very imaginative and I was yet to become an adult. But I was always smart yet comparatively innocent and sometimes immature even, so this mentality, even though covered up to act like a normal kid throughout high school, followed me all the way till I was about to enter college.

At that point my mother and my sister surprised me by gifting me a Pen Tablet! Which is, in retrospect, one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received because it kick started me becoming an actual artist, and is the same tablet I use today. I made myself a deviant art art account and started slowly posting my drawings there, and slowly trying to join groups where to post my art and even joined the dA muro forums to doodle some stuff. When I had figured out digital art a bit more, I decided I would color some of my pencil drawings and post them on deviantart. One of those drawings was a gang of four friends who were like an RPG party. And Kriyu was part of it, except she wasn’t a Glaceon anymore. Instead she had become her own thing, which was now a rabbit looking thing, with a long fox-like tail, and ears shaped sort of like Eevee. She now had earrings and two long ponytails, to symbolically represent her Glaceon past.

Then... I’m not sure how it started exactly but it was around, or right before, the time X and Y got announced, that I suddenly decided I wanted to draw Pokémon girls, and inspired by Gb-of-bs, I decided I would try to draw them all, one by one, in no specific order. And so at that moment, I became a full time poképorn artist.

Nobody ever saw Glaceon Kriyu. In fact the only time I “soft-referenced” that, was when I drew a random anthro Glaceon and gave her Kriyu’s earrings, as a way of saying “Hey! It’s not by chance that she looks similar! ;)”.

At some point I drew an anthro Zubat who was deliberately meant to look as generic as possible, and who became so popular with everyone that I decided to adopt her and give her a name, “Bangs”. Suddenly not much longer I decided that Bangs and Kriyu would be friends. I made a special comic when I reached 1000 watchers on deviantart and it was cute and kinda lewd, but it really helped define their personalities and I even made a cameo of myself as “the artist” himself.

Kriyu was already kind of separated from the rest of her gang of friends by then. And she finally moved away from them when I designed “Caterpija”, the Shiny Caterpie, and decided that him, Bangs, and Kriyu, would live together in an apartment. I made an ask-blog on tumblr and Kriyu became the responsible mom of the bunch, even though she was only a few years older than them.

By that point, Bangs was the center of attention, and I deliberately put Kriyu in absolute second place. To the point where she went from being “my favorite character”, to “my favorite character to neglect”. I still always thought about her, but Bangs was popular, easily recognizable, and she was cute and slightly easier to draw. Hell, the ask blog was literally called “Ask-Bangs” and Bangs being the center of attention was a running joke of it, even though Kriyu was technically the one who was actually running the blog behind the scenes.

Kriyu’s personality at this point was a lot different from the one I had originally envisioned for her when I first created her. She was no longer the star of her own pokégirl gang. Instead of being cheerful, jolly, innocent, happy-go-lucky, and kinda lewd, she was now instead prudish, down-to-earth, sensible, and the responsible adult. And the jolly careless one was now Bangs, the new star of the show. Heck, they even have similar looking hairstyles. Bangs had pretty much taken Kriyu’s place as my go-to mascot.

After the ask blog went on indefinite hiatus, Bangs was still showing up every now and then in doodles and whatnot, but Kriyu was far less frequent. She still got her dose of fully shaded drawings and stuff. I’m still super proud of the “Rise and shine” drawing. And even the “retro game” series of drawings, where I would draw fan art of old obscure games from my computer childhood, and insert my OC’s in them.

I kind of stopped drawing Kriyu’s original gang of friends, save for a few doodles every now and then. Thus, even though in my mind they’re still a team, I never drew them all together again. Holly the plant girl suddenly became the protector of the ghastgirl. Herman the (boring) human became the trainer/owner of Glauki, the sea slug girl (who was the first tablet drawing I ever posted to deviant art). And Bolk, the black lizard guy... is still kind of in the shadows. I like to think that Kriyu is still friends with her old pals. Just, she doesn’t get to see or talk to them almost ever.

What happened later is that I dropped out of college, and suddenly art block got tougher ‘cause I moved back to my hometown with mom, getting way less privacy than I was initially comfortable with, and also I started becoming more and more social with people online and made a lot of new friends. So, drawing my own characters went into the backburner, in favor of just doodling what I wanted in the spur of the moment, and struggling to do full renders because a doodle gets the point across anyways, and drawing quickly was always an obsession of mine. I even made a stopwatch app myself to be able to optimize drawing speed. So much so that, to this day, I always finish drawings in one shot... except for, well, the Team Fortress 2 OC redraw.

I never truly forgot about my Original OCs. I drew, in my early days of deviant art, a picture of “all my 5 ocs” dressed as Team Fortress characters (Kriyu, Holly, Herman, Bolk, and Glauki), but many MANY years later, they all made a big comeback (or had a last-hurrah, so far, I suppose) when I drew them once again, in what I still consider my most detailed drawing ever: another Team Fortress 2 drawing with all my characters, but this time it was 12 of them and not just 5, and it included many new faces that had been also relevant. This 12-character drawing took me an entire week of work, and is to this day, the biggest exception to the whole draw thins in one-shot habit of mine. I keep thinking I drew this thing fairly recently but in fact, I did it more than a couple years ago already.

So where are we right now?

I’m playing Pokémon GO and I have a Glaceon buddy. But it’s not Kriyu. His name is Cher. He’s a male Glaceon boy, who I created randomly after I realized that snow in Russian is spelled Снег (Snieg), and thought it was funny that people would just call him Cher (like the singer). He was born out of a randomized run of Pokémon Alpha Sapphire, but later down the road I found myself doodling him again a couple more times, so he stuck, and now he’s a thing too.

I wondered if Cher had taken the spot that Kriyu was occupying when I was a teenager, except that now I’m a full grown adult who sees things in a very different way. Cher may not be particularly jolly, innocent, happy-go-lucky, or as “kinda lewd” as Kriyu was when I was in college, but looking at him made me think... damn I wonder what Kriyu is up to right now.

And then I realized she’s not up to much right now, because I’m neglecting her. And she’s my favorite character.

I need to draw my characters more.