Back in the day, I had intended Project: Spiral to branch out into different layers of consciousness. Each part of the story would be progressively more removed from my past and more concerned with my executive functioning. It was very psychological, and it got way too crazy (probably because I got most of my ideas during manic phases). The end of it was basically I'm Transgender And I'm Free To Do What I Want - which is a fantastic moral for any eggs out there, but not much of a payoff for that long of a story. So I made the titular Spiral about time instead of layers, and accordingly, the character of Dharmakaya Amber Hart no longer made sense.
The rest of her story is below the cut... and to be honest, I'm only sharing this because I'm too busy to create new art right now, and so I'm digging deep into the archive. I'm not proud of what this content says about my past.
So in the first place, the name "Dharmakaya" (pronounced DAR-muh-KIE-uh) was cribbed from Buddhism by way of Robert Pirsig's novels. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is about a very smart man going bonkerballs crazy, and Lila is about that same semi-recovered man later dealing with an opposingly-crazy woman. We're not off to a good start, is what I'm saying.
The Hell of it is, I've liked the name Deirdre since I was a kid. I also wanted to go by Deedee. I shortened it in my mind to just Dee, and then I read Neil Gaiman's Sandman series - in which it is pointed out that "D is for lots of things." That opened me up to other D names, and Pirsig kinda clinched it. Then I came out, and... well, things happened. Stuff. Life. I eventually came full-circle and settled back on Deirdre/Deedee/Dee, but not until after a couple awkward conversations about spelling and pronunciation.
Dharmakaya was going to be one of two characters who traveled between story layers, and the other one was... if you can believe it... even worse. Ladies, Gentlemen, and Nonbinaries, I am vaguely ashamed to introduce: Ishnialo Nea'shushamen. [vomit emoji]
This guy's whole character was like super-cringey from the start. I mean, just look at him. Here's a skills-better but morals-worse drawing:
The name, at least, was.... kinda-sorta plausible. You see, back in the day (no idea about now), World of Warcraft would translate free-form speech from characters of opposing allegiance into gibberish. It was marvelously creative gibberish that functioned on letter count and at least a couple other things (from what I remember of my attempts to reverse-engineer it with guild members over VoIP at the time), but it was also kinda racist gibberish. My first WoW character was a tauren shaman named "Ironhorn," and that name in Taurahe came out as "Ishnialo." The name of the guild I had founded was "Earthtreader," and it was meant to be his surname, which came out as "Nea'shushamen" (or something like that - it would've been pronounced that way, even if I'm spelling it wrong).
That last pic is from a roleplaying game called Nobilis, in which I based a game character of my book character (as I am wont to do, in both directions). After going back and forth a few times, using the games to develop the story and using the story to develop the games, I had refined Dharmakaya and Ishnialo into a dimension-hopping witch and her fox familiar:
I actually like this version of them the most, because it is the least derivative when you don't know the whole backstory (although turning a very clearly minority-coded guardian into a mere "animal familiar" is also pretty fuckin' racist, but hindsight is 20/20). Nevertheless, even after shoe-horning them back in, the story had changed so much that these characters just didn't make sense any more. So I cut them completely. And my story is better for it.
I still have lots of problems, but they're new and shiny problems, not the old and rusty problems of yesteryear. [cry-laugh emoji]
I'll leave you with this intermediary picture of Dharmakaya from her Whitewolf Mage: The Awakening adaptation, as an alcoholic EMT:
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