It doesn’t happen to every author, but I have seen it happen more than once. They have that one character that they put into everything. Not just a series character, but this one character who jumps books and genres because the author just can’t leave them alone. Roleplay characters do this a lot.
Unfortunately, I have one of those characters, and his name is Jayesh Khatri.
I didn’t set out to write a character who would be in everything. No, I started out to write a fanfiction based on a game called Destiny, and I needed a character who was smart enough and dumb enough to hold an argument with a god. Destiny is basically another version of Star Wars, where humanity’s races are every color of the rainbow, even coming in shades like ‘blue’ and ‘robot’. I hadn’t spotted anybody from India yet, so I looked up the Indian equivalent of John Smith. Behold, Jayesh Khatri was born.
That first fanfic was a philosophical exercise that chewed on the finer points of the villain’s argument that he was actually the hero. Jayesh proved to be as naive and as spunky as I had wanted. But it wasn’t until the next story that he began to stick in my brain.
The second story happens months later, and Jayesh is a starving recruit on his first mission. His reputation is in shambles because of claiming that he argued with a god. It was part of his character that his faith got him canceled. This was when this character’s hooks settled in my brain and wouldn’t let go. Jayesh eventually got a whole series of fanfics where he goes out and fights aliens, dragons, and demons because his faith says it’s the right thing to do.
Well, I got tired of Destiny, as you do, but Jayesh still had a few stories left in him. So I reworked his character and imported him to my superhero fantasy books, After Atlantis. He proceeded to take over that series, too. He was more of a healer there instead of a soldier, but his faith still got him into hot water.
I was learning to draw at the time, and I needed a strong visual for this character. Final Fantasy 14 was free and has a robust character creator, so I downloaded that and made a satisfactory Jayesh. But I wanted some better clothes for him, so I started playing the game and got hooked. Your character is the main character of the game, so it’s like this odd shadow-version of him happened there.
So far we have:
Final Fantasy Jayesh
My writing group has a tradition of writing Christmas stories each year. One year, for fun, I swapped characters with my friends and we wrote each other’s characters into our different universes. So now there’s different versions of Jayesh in my friends’ universes. In particular, Shari Branning wrote a couple of stories with him, and so did Alexandra Gilchrist. Seeing Jayesh plunged into Shari’s fairytale magic world and Gilchrist’s gritty urban fantasy worlds was incredibly fun. I wrote spinoffs of both.
Jayesh is one of those characters who I didn’t mean to put into everything, but dang it, he is. And I love him in every incarnation.
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