Decided to get Elijah Lancaster in on the "swap the head on a pre-existing pose" action too, so I'd have some full-body (well, technically 3/4) art of him and a place to dump a little bit of lore.

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Elijah always has been something of an old, cranky loner. The life of a long-haul trucker definitely suits him.

I never really did give him a great deal of backstory, owing to the fact that he's always been a bit of an outlier in terms of design and I wasn't even sure if I intended for moosefolk to be canon for the majority of the time he's existed, but he's always just been a grumpy loner that seems unapproachable. I'm sure he has his reasons, and there's probably stuff going on behind that tough facade that's worth exploring (much of which I've probably thought of and then forgotten over the years), but I do honestly think it's fine for some characters to be rather one-dimensional, as it's always possible for them to develop further as time goes on.

What little I do remember about his characterization beyond "angry old loner" is that before his career as a trucker he was a truck driver for the paramilitary organization ShadowHyena Tactical, and he might still do some transportation jobs for them on the side. He did a bit of boxing (another recurring trait of military bovid characters of mine, it seems) and may have even had a bit of success with that on some amateur or regional circuit and/or as a prizefighter.
His skills at hand-to-hand combat, along with his innate size and strength, do come in handy whenever some punks want to hijack his truck, mug him at a fuel station, or drag him into a barfight, and it's possible that he does still do a bit of prizefighting or even bounty hunting when he's not on the road for his trucker job.

In the past, like a surprising number of my characters, I had considered that he was gay and maybe part of his anger was some sort of guilt that, with his species seeming to be in very limited numbers, he wasn't exactly contributing to remedying that problem, but changes to the worldbuilding and lore over the years make that concern less relevant--perhaps now it's something a bit less lower stakes, like having grown up in a conservative area or with a conservative family, that keeps him somewhat closeted even as he now lives and works hundreds of miles away from where he grew up.

Very early possible lore connections also had him possibly related to Buck Donner somehow, but I don't quite remember. The idea of Buck being a young nephew whose adventurous and rebellious spirit yet easygoing and casual and, at times, downright "slacker" way of carrying himself annoys Elijah seems familiar to me. I imagine that the very young Elijah behaved very similarly to Buck, though, and maybe Elijah's annoyance was less out of, well, annoyance, but more out of concern that Buck might make the same mistakes he did, or find even worse mistakes to make. They're both drifters and adventure-seekers, but whereas Elijah has always been a loner, Buck is sociable, however both Elijah and Buck are fiercely loyal to the very few friends they truly feel close to.
Perhaps one or both of their story arcs could feature the two reconnecting, and if I decide to scrap any potential familial connection whatsoever in favor of them just encountering each other from time to time at truck stops and roadside diners and gas stations (and perhaps in a moment of somewhat uncharacteristic kindness, Elijah helping Buck out by giving him a ride to the next stop when his bike breaks down on a lonely country highway), perhaps the two could actually bond over their respective drifter lifestyles and share tales of their adventures.

All of this military experience and fighting experience has, at many points in the past, considered that he'd be a surprisingly good (and surprisingly willing) but tough mentor for another character that needs to learn to handle themselves in a fight for whatever reason. The idea of the gruff and normally very solitary Elijah taking someone under his wing and showing them some small corner of his basement where he's still got a punching bag and maybe some weights and perhaps even a couple old pics of him in his glory days or newspaper clippings and whatnot from matches of his seems like an interesting concept.

A lot of the redundancy in characters as time goes on seems to come from me having certain traits and archetypes that I liked, applying them to characters earlier on, and then applying them in different ways and different combinations later on as time goes on and I figure out how to create better characters, and then this leaves me to go back to those older characters and try to update and revise and improve upon them with what I've learned. This leads to me having a lot of characters with glaring similarities, like the Geoterran Ram Morris also being a retired bovid soldier that was also a boxer and now sometimes trains others in the art of boxing.
Outside of those similarities, however, I'd say Elijah and Morris would have little in common if they met, with Morris being a warm and friendly cook and baker who is happy having settled down and starting a little bakery, and Elijah being a cold and distant trucker who seems to long for the road and the solitude of his truck's cab every moment he's not behind the wheel of his rig.

When I posted the portrait of him, I was in the sort of bitter and depressed mood that leads me to type very short descriptions (as opposed to the sort of melancholic and depressed mood that leads me to vomit textwalls of lore about nothing characters to an audience of no one but myself), and mentioned the whole "why does a moose man have such small antlers that he seems to never shed" thing, and the answer to that is quite simple and probably very unsatisfying--hybridization is something that is commonplace in my worldbuilding, at least for Demeter. While the demihumans like Nick Domnall are the most striking example of hybridization at work, it's extremely common for a character to not be 100% pure blooded whatever species they are. In the case of the various deerfolk, the permanence of their antlers is simply a consequence of having other bovid ancestors who had horns that were not shed. If these antlers are somehow knocked off or damaged, they will slowly grow back, but I imagine that a broken antler is often reattached somehow (albeit more as a cosmetic concern than a medical one).

As for the decline in size over the years from the glorious racks sported by moose and elk to the fairly simple and borderline vestigial antlers carried by the likes of Buck Donner and Elijah Lancaster, simply put, selection pressures no longer favor those large sets of antlers. In fact, the selection pressures that come with the shift to anthropomorphism likely favored the reduction of antler size out of pure practicality, as the larger antlers take more time and resources to grow and carry, and fortunately, by the time doorframes were invented this process had been underway for many, many generations, meaning the deer could live in the same houses as everyone else, even if doorframes often sport scratches and chips and divots from where a careless cervine forgot to duck a bit while entering the room!

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