Boy, where to start?
First of all, it’s like herding stray cats with how many variations of Allanon I have now.
Anyway!
I first came up with Allanon when I was around 16. That’s 13, nearly 14 years ago (ouch, I’m old).
When I first came up with him, he didn’t have the name Allanon. I wish I could remember the name I first gave him, but that was a long time ago and now it’s impossible to separate him from the name Allanon.
I had just gotten into roleplaying on Omegle, which was a crazy time. I came upon a partner who wanted to do a rp where we didn’t have set characters, and just let them develop as the story went along. Piece by piece, Allanon (or whatever the hell his name was at the time) was born.
As the roleplay went on, I realized I… respected the character. Which was a crazy feeling to have for my own creation. I started letting him “act on his own”. In other words, I let things play out based on how he would react, not how I wanted it to go. He’s a stubborn bastard, so it made it a little difficult, but it was addicting in a weird way, as a creative.
When the roleplay ended, I realized I wanted to dive deeper into the character and brought him over into the next roleplay. That’s when he got the name Allanon. My dad was reading The Shannara Chronicles and telling me about it.
When he said the name Allanon, it’s like something inside me just clicked.
This frustrating, cocky, deeply fascinating character in my head just smirked at me and was like “that’s mine now.” And thus, he was named Allanon.
Time went on and I did two more roleplays with that specific partner using Allanon. But the thing about roleplay partners is they want variety. So when I kept saying “Uh, so I’m gonna use Allanon again…” I could tell they were getting a little tired of it. Which, fair. But I was hooked.
We fizzled out, as roleplay partners do, and I moved on to Amino. Man, I miss Amino. I was incredibly popular there and it felt nice having so many people interested in my characters and ideas.
I made a ton of different characters, but so many of them just felt like Allanon.
I remember thinking “What the hell? Why does this guy keep showing up?”
I thought I was done with him, but he had different ideas apparently. So, I made him a character profile. I was still pretty young at the time, and so he was very… edgy, for a lack of better term, haha. He actually got featured on one of the subs on Amino, which was very exciting.
The years went on and I eventually stopped roleplaying due to personal life just getting in the way.
But Allanon never went away.
Without meaning to, I would play as him in RPGs. He would show up in things I was writing, whether as the main character or side characters. I would be doing something entirely non-related to anything creative and my brain would just go “Hey, remember that dude, Allanon?” Like he was someone I met once instead of a character I created.
Time went on, and I didn’t write for a while.
About a year ago, I decided to start getting back into writing. And there wasn’t even a question of who I would write. It was always going to be him.
It started with Captain Allanon, who was sort of a blend of all the different versions of Allanon I had done in the past. Then it just… snowballed. I couldn’t get enough. I would take the core of Allanon, drop him into a new world, and see how his environment shaped him. The stories almost always have themes of identity, social standing, generational trauma, and morality.
It’s also been a way for me to explore masculinity. I’ve always been drawn to masculinity, since I was a child. The kinds of men I first had crushes on heavily influenced who he was when I created him. He was cocky, a little narcissistic, emotionally distant while being deeply traumatized, and, well… messed up.
As I got older, I started to look at masculinity through a different lens. I realized that those very things I admired about masculinity were, more often than not, a form of armor. I looked at Allanon, this hyper masculine character who brandished his armor like a piece of himself, and wondered how he would react if that armor were stripped away. Would he try to piece the armor back together? And if he did, could it ever truly be fully repaired, or were the cracks too substantial?
So, I began throwing him into different scenarios, different worlds, with different traumas and issues.
I felt like a scientist putting him into a jar, shaking it real hard, and going “And how does that feel?” Usually he’d just scowl at me and go “Pretty fuckin’ bad, actually. Thanks”, haha.
What genuinely fascinated me, though, was that he was always the same core personality. Whether he was a half-vampire in a steampunk-esque Victorian era, or a courier in a futuristic cyberpunk world, or the heir to a criminal empire, he was always Allanon. It validated me in a weird way, to realize that I knew this character well enough that I could completely change his environment, yet he was always fundamentally the same guy.
Allanon, as a character, is very morally gray. There’s a lot of nuance to him, and I’ve had moments where I don’t like who he is as a person. But I’ve always been drawn to morally gray characters. Because at the end of the day, I don’t believe in “good” or “bad” people. I think that all we are is what we do. And Allanon, despite his flaws, does try to be good. He struggles, which I feel like I can relate to. Really, I think everyone can, in a way.
The things he struggles with are almost always things that I have struggled with in the past or still struggle with. He’s given me an outlet to work through my own personal issues and trauma, to see myself break and heal and break again, and I appreciate him for that.
I don’t know how long I’ll keep writing him, or what version of him I’ll come up with next. But considering he’s followed me from being a teenager roleplaying on Omegle to being almost thirty and building an entire website about him, I have a feeling he isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.