Before I write anything - credit to @funnyaltname. Without them, this wouldn't have been possible. Give them as much praise as you can. They deserve it.


Maude was not my first OC. My first was a self-insert on a private chat server (Transformation Games Site, though I'm not sure if anyone is still there in 2023), and their name was Francine Novikov. She was a gender-bended mad scientist archetype with a vaguely defined powerset. You've seen it before. Hell, I'm sure many of you have fully fleshed out scientists - or scientits, I won't judge. She was a thinly-veiled substitution of desires. Now at the time, I didn't realize Francine was me cracking the egg, and when I made Maude as her assistant years later, partially then fully with the intention of hanging up the labcoat, she was almost something of an accident. Alliterative name, downright normal framing, femme presentation without the transitive property of being me. In that sense, she represented the next step, from 'me but horny' to 'me filtered through the lens of femininity.'

Then Francine retired.

Or rather, I got too old to be her.

Maude, on the other hand, is someone who connects with me. Abigail is what I aspire to be, the cool and confident soft dominatrix who knows exactly what to say in any situation. Compare to this character - a cautiously optimistic, awkward, old-fashioned intensely committed magician just learning the ropes of real magic - that's exactly how I feel right now. I wanted a character who could fully embody both my anxieties and my optimism, in a way that is and isn't a power fantasy. Maude is my love for urban fantasy. She's my joy for mid-2000s one season anime and grungy sci-fi. She's my angst about femininity and gender and being femme in public.

In short, this is the year of Maude, and here is her redesign to celebrate.

For those of you interested in lore - Maude Moss used to be an occult agent for the corporation OCCINTEL, a nominally good organization that helped defuse and resolve Transformation events before they reached apocalyptic levels. She's had plenty of adventures before. Her time there taught her 'computational demonology' (thank you Charles Stover for the Laundry Files, I will shamelessly rip you off), as well as basic fire magic, protection spells and CQC. Francine was the head of the company, and some undefined incident betrayed Maude's trust and pushed her to quit. Incidentally, this happened the same time as I finally became full anarchomarxist. As she exists now, Maude is a wandering ronin archetype. A witch-magician with skills and baggage, processing her borderline sexual feelings for a complicated woman twice her age and learning magic by communing with the different layers of spiritualism and knowledge that exist out there at ground level, away from a stuffy desk in Atlanta. If there ever was an anime for her, it'd be 13 episodes (with a movie) with vibes taken from the original Fullmetal Alchemist, the original Hellsing, Mushishi, Kino's Journey, Witch Hunter Robin, and the Blade anime, and soundtrack by In This Moment and David Sylvian (the opening would've been You Always Believed with cuts and flashfowards to the climactic resolution with her boss in the finale and the ED would either be Darkest Dreaming or I Surrender off the album Dead Bees on a Cake, i've thought about this a lot).

Yes, it's eclectic. And indulgent, I guess.

Fuck it. Maude deserves this. She deserves all the love.

If you like, there is a design document you can read for more details about her influences. I'm still new to the idea of OCs and investing my energy into them, so take this nervousness and lack of specificity with a note of earnestness. This is me being raw, and I hope that she's just as interesting a character to you as she is to me.

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