ValentineIrving97 BEHIND THE SCENES

I understand and respect the administrative decision to quarantine the gimmick accounts, especially after the Mansion Incident. Unfortunately, I suspect that being confined to a single area will stifle my motivation to keep going with this account eventually, 'cause I'm not somebody who has an easy time sticking with projects for long amounts of time. So, to ensure that the scope of my lore doesn't go completely unutilized, I'm gonna go ahead and completely shatter the kayfabe I've been so hell-bent on keeping pristine this whole time.

I'm Ink, and I played ValentineIrving97 on the Radio TV Solutions Unofficial Forum.

Part 1: The Initial Premise

ValentineIrving97 didn't start the way they are now. My original plan was to draw heavily from my experiences in a backwater roleplay chat room for one of those Pokemon Crater inspired games that sprouted up after its closure. The name "ValentineIrving" was specifically chosen to evoke the same energies as a friend I used to hang out with on that chat room. (He was the kind of guy who had Dante from DmC: Devil May Cry as a character ref, but I remember him being pretty nice anyway.)

As I was actually making the account though, I started to think that that idea was a bit too demeaning towards my friend. But since I already had the account, I decided to pivot and make the character a big fan of - of course - Vincent Valentine and Lloyd Irving. I also decided to draw a lot more from other experiences from my childhood; specifically, my experience with needing to go to a friend's house to play PS2 games. The idea of a person being totally obsessed with a character from a game they didn't even own was just too funny to pass up. I also canonized that they weren't allowed to get any games that involved shooting other people, which was also something else from my childhood.

In a spur-of-the-moment decision while writing the introductory post, I decided to make ValentineIrving's name even funnier with something that I think never even got to come up in explicit detail - ValentineIrving doesn't actually know anything about Tales Of Symphonia. They don't own the game. They played Super Smash Flash, saw a guy in red with twin swords, and thought that was so cool that they decided to base their entire online personality around them.
(I think it would've been fun to have them actually play Tales Of Symphonia eventually. I wonder how learning about Lloyd's Dwarven Vows would've colored their reactions with deeprockgalacticfan...)

Part 2: The Aesthetic

ValentineIrving97's very "iconic" post design was based on something from... a little bit later in my youth; that being, my time spent on fanon wikis messing around with CSS. (Valentine is probably a bit younger than I was when I started doing CSS things, but I handwaved that with the explanation that his dad is a web designer and showed him a lot of things.)

Part 3: The Extra Details

In this section, I'll just rattle off a couple extra things about ValentineIrving. These weren't part of the original premise, but I decided to add them to their "canon" as I used the character.

• ValentineIrving97 exists outside of time. They and their friend own sixth-gen game consoles, but they also own a GameClam and know about HLVRAI and Gnome. This absolutely is a contradiction, but I pretty much just decided that I don't give a damn about what year Valentine lives in. They live in every year. It doesn't matter as long as it's fun.
  
• ValentineIrving97 is way nicer than this edgy-looking profile would lead you to believe. This was kinda born out of me not wanting to be too obtrusive by getting into beefs with other users, but it eventually evolved into one of the fun little contradictions that delighted me about ValentineIrving97.
  (While I did my best to keep the subconscious Johnny Chaos influences to a minimum, a little bit of that did leak out when the baby account got blown up.)
• ValentineIrving97's dad owns a GameClam. I was pretty sure Valentine was unmistakably a gimmick account, but I wanted to include at least one detail to really cement the fact that they weren't a real kid, and owning a GameClam was the most appropriate thing I could come up with. Nothing screams "I'm a fictional character" than owning a fictional game console, right?
  
• ValentineIrving97 has two dads. The most recent introduction to their canon that I can think of. This one mostly just stemmed from me realizing I hadn't mentioned Valentine having a mom since Tuesday last week, and thinking "hey this would actually be kinda neat." One edited post later, and tada - Valentine's family is no longer nuclear.

Part 4: Pokemon Colosseum

I didn't really have any particular long-term plans for ValentineIrving97, but Pokemon Colosseum was close enough to it. I came up with the idea super early, I think because of something I posted in Shoutbox? I liked the idea of playing through a game "as" a fictional character, and Pokemon Colosseum seemed like both a game ValentineIrving would be interested in and a game their dads would actually get for them. It was also a game I was already familiar with (I have owned a legal physical copy since childhood! it was my second Pokemon game) and already had on my computer.

For the record, I really was playing through Pokemon Colosseum, exactly as described in ValentineIrving's updates... give or take some very liberal use of Dolphin's fast-forward functionality. Nicknames and all.I had their final team planned out basically from the start; Umbreon (their favorite Pokemon), Typhlosion (Fire types are cool), Hitmontop (another Pokemon they'd like), Octillery (it's red and based on a cannon, which would be more than enough to convince Valentine to go through the trouble of raising the lowest-level Shadow Pokemon in the game), Flygon (Dragon types are cool), and either Espeon or Raikou (depending on if they could be convinced that Espeon was actually cool by the time they finished the Shadow Pokemon Lab).

At one point, I very briefly considered trying to learn how to set up a 3D environment in Godot that looked like a CRT in a dark room, to post "photos" from. But I decided that was way too much work, so I just handwaved the lack of pics by saying ValentineIrving didn't have a camera they could use.

Part 5: What next?

Knowing me, I expect I'll probably drift away from this account soon. This thread probably won't help matters, in all honesty - a lot of the fun of this account was the mystery of it all, and nothing kills a joke quite like explaining it. Like I said, though, my interest in it waning is bound to happen anyway, with the way things are now.

I'll try to finish that Pokemon Colosseum file. It's a good fuckin' game, and I like the team I've got. No idea if I'll keep updating the thread though. We'll see.