Every character I made lived in five different places
By Ola Oriola on , 4 min read
Before this site existed, here is where one of my characters lived.
The artwork was in a Drive folder, inside a subfolder named after the month I drew it. The backstory was in a document with eleven other characters in it, each one separated by a row of equals signs. The abilities were in my notes app, half of them in shorthand only I could read. The only version anyone had actually seen was an Instagram post with a caption I wrote in about thirty seconds and could never edit again. And when someone asked where they could see my work, I sent them a links page with four buttons on it, none of which went to the character they had just asked about.
That is five places for one character, and not one of them knew the other four existed.
The moment it actually breaks
You can live like that for a long time. It only becomes a problem at the exact moment it matters most: when somebody is interested.
Someone sees one drawing and asks who that is. You have about a minute of their attention. What you want to hand them is everything: the face, the name, where they came from, what they can do, what it costs them, the world they belong to. What you actually hand them is three links and an apology, or you start typing the backstory into a reply box from memory.
Most of the time you just say "thanks" and let it go. I have no idea how many people would have cared about my work if I had been able to show it to them properly. Neither do you.
Nothing was built to hold a character
This is not for lack of tools. There are good tools everywhere. They are just all built for something else.
A links page answers "where are your accounts". A portfolio site answers "show me your art". A document holds your lore but nobody is opening a document you sent them. A social post reaches people and then disappears under the next one.
A character is none of those things. A character is a name, a face, an origin, a set of abilities, a weakness, and a world it belongs to, and those six things only mean anything when they are in the same place. Split them across five apps and you do not have a character any more. You have five files.
Every creator I know has built the same workaround out of four different products, and every one of them thinks they are the only one doing it.
So I built the thing I kept trying to fake
VantaOrigin is one address for the characters you make.
Each character gets a card: artwork, name, the universe they belong to, their origin, their abilities and stats, and whatever else matters about them. You can group them by project, so the cast of one comic stays together instead of mixing with everything else you have ever drawn. All of it lives on one page with your name on it, and that page is the link you give people.
One link. Not four. When someone asks who that is, you send it, and they see the character the way you see them.
It takes a name and a picture
I want to be honest about the thing that nearly killed this.
The first version asked for five things before you could make a single character: a picture, a name, an origin, a universe and a tagline. It was well meant. A filled in card looks better than an empty one. But asking someone for five things before they have seen anything is how you lose them halfway, and I watched that happen.
It asks for two things now. A name and a picture. That is a character, and you get your link straight away. The origin, the abilities, the universe, the stats, all of that is there whenever you feel like writing it, and plenty of characters sit half finished for weeks. Mine do.
Where this actually is right now
Early. I would rather say that than pretend otherwise.
It works, it is free, and people are using it. It is also still being built, mostly by me, mostly at night, and you will find rough edges. If you hit one, tell me. I would rather hear it from you than find it in six months.
It stays free to use, because the point was never to charge people for having characters.
If you make characters
Comic artists, VTubers, illustrators, writers, people who have run the same tabletop campaign for four years: you have characters scattered across five apps right now. You know exactly which five.
Bring one over. Give it a name and a picture and see what the page looks like with something of yours on it. That takes about two minutes, and at the end of it you have a link you can actually send someone.
That is the whole idea. Everything else here is in service of it.