So, saying Allanon is my OC feels incredibly… shallow for what he really is. Honestly, he feels more like a long-term internal companion, creative vessel, emotional container, identity rehearsal space, and mirror all at once.
Having a character living in your head for thirteen-plus years is a weird experience. He’s grown with me, he’s changed. We’ve both gone through phases, we’ve had negative and positive experiences. Which may make me sound a little crazy, haha, but c’est la vie.
Like, yes, technically he is just a character I made who interested me and stuck around. But he's not just a character to me. He’s a place I’ve been putting pieces of myself for years.
What I mean by that is that I’ve given him a lot of myself.
When I was around 17, I went through a sort of identity crisis. I genuinely did not like who I was at the time and was all around uncomfortable with being a woman. I had no one to really talk to about it and felt very lonely. My solution was to just become someone else. I created this sort of persona that I used online and eventually tried out in real life, too. But it always felt like I was wearing a mask. Which, I was. But I was too uncomfortable with myself to sit back and examine what that meant, so I just didn’t.
Without meaning to, I started to become more like Allanon. At the time, he was still relatively young as a character and was a mirror for myself in a lot of ways. I wanted to be him. He was confident, strong, smart, cocky, bold. Everything I wanted to be.
The years went on and I slowly started taking off the mask. Honestly, I used to feel really ashamed of that phase of my life. As I’ve gotten older, I realized it was simply me trying to figure out who I was and trying to run from my problems rather than confronting them. I’m not ashamed of it anymore, and even look back on it fondly in some ways. But I am extremely grateful that I had him to wear as a mask when I wasn’t comfortable enough with myself.
I was sitting down the other day, going through the Allanon variants, and was somewhat shocked to realize that I’ve been doing the same thing again with the newer Age of Allanon™.
Each version of Allanon carries something different for me. He isn’t exactly a self-insert, but over time I realized I’ve been using his different incarnations to hold pieces of myself. Fears, habits, wounds, contradictions, and sometimes the parts of me I actually like.
I even sat down and mapped it out and found it fascinating.
Gang carries my anxiety around mundane life. I feel… weird around normalcy sometimes. Chalk it up to derealization/depersonalization or simply anxiety, I’m not sure. It’s interesting because for him, it makes sense to be genuinely uncomfortable somewhere like a Walmart or a McDonald’s. He’s larger than life, he’s dramatic, he comes from a world that’s something like out of a movie. For me, however, it doesn’t make sense. I’m just an average, ordinary, normal person who shouldn’t feel like I’m greening out when I step foot in a Dollar Tree. But I do. So handing that to him and watching him deal with it has been a lens for me to examine that anxiety. He also carries my self-doubt and my thoughts on generational trauma. He feels perpetually unprepared for something like a Taco Bell, but can handle major events with no issue.
Vampire carries my shame. The fear that there is something inherently wrong or monstrous about me. Not simply that I can do wrong, but that I somehow am wrong. That who I am, what I am at my core, is wrong. He carries my self-punishment, my self-hatred, and my fear of being loved.
Captain carries duty: to family, to the people around me, and even to humanity as a whole. He also carries generational trauma and the process of figuring out who you are once you stop being who you were taught you had to be.
VR carries my need to be liked, my occasional bursts of ridiculous confidence, and the opposite extreme: the moments when I struggle to care about anything at all. He is confident to cover the fact that he is apathetic toward everything.
Western carries my grudges and the strange way I can minimize and magnify my own pain at the same time. “It wasn’t that bad. I’m fine. I will also remember it until I die.”
Dijiin carries self-erasure. The tendency to shrink myself, hide from myself, and occasionally realize I’ve forgotten who I am underneath everything else. Dijiin was also one of the very first variations of Allanon I came up with all those years ago, so even back then I was exploring those fears and ideas through Allanon.
Dark Lord carries performance. The need to be liked and understood, the awareness of being watched, and the resentment that comes from caring so much about what other people think in the first place. He also carries a little bit of that “who I am is wrong” mentality, as well as a healthy dose of self-doubt and self-hatred.
Cyberpunk carries my struggle with usefulness and worthiness. The idea that if I’m not useful, then I am ultimately worthless, and the loneliness that comes with such a mentality. And he has some generational trauma, poverty trauma, and self-doubt, too. Gotta have that.
Apocalypse is probably the sweetest out of all of them. He’s the most shameless self-insert. He carries my whimsy. The part of me that can look at a terrible world and still find something strange, funny, beautiful, or worth loving in it. He has my humor, my strange references, and my love for the weird reality we find ourselves in.
Maybe that’s why I keep writing him.
Every Allanon is the same man, but each one gets handed a different piece of emotional baggage and told, “Here. Hold this. My back hurts.”
And, unfortunately for him, he always does.