I was resistant to doing an ‘Ask Fhaolan’ blog, as I honestly don’t think I get enough questions to justify such a thing. On the other hand, as a current staffer for MLPF there’s a chance people might be curious about the questions I *do* get. And filling up my ‘profile’ with this stuff will just get clunky and unwieldy, so here we are.

Let’s get started with a few of the questions I’ve gotten over the time I’ve been on MLPF. If you’ve got any other questions, feel free to ask. I’ve got a log of about seven right now, so that’s a week’s worth of postings. 

Q: Your OC’s name is Fhaolan? That’s not really a pony name.

Actually, the pony I use as my avatar isn’t an OC. Not really. He doesn’t really have a name, or a background, or even a cutie-mark. It’s just a headshot drawing I did when I decided I wanted an avatar for this site that was pony-related. It’s just a quirk I have of trying to have a vaguely relevant avatar.

Fhaolan is actually this fellow:

Who I created back when I joined the Furry fandom ever so long ago. I picked the name up from a story I heard once about St. Fillian, and found an obscure alternate spelling of the name, about thirty years ago.

Other avatar-type characters I’ve used in other venues are this fellow:

Wild Claw, a kind of anti-hero superhero I created back in high school when you tend to think that way. He kind of stuck around as my go-to superhero character, and eventually got fully realized in City of Heroes (which is where this picture is from). I still miss that game. It was one of the few MMOs that I could actually get into.

I have created Pony OCs before, but I don’t really think of them in the same way as most Bronies seem to. They’re just characters for stories, they don’t actually represent me. If anything the ones that stick out to me are just expy’s of other characters I’m fond of. Tweedy Plus Four from my one published MLP Fanfic ‘Doctor Whooves and the Terror of Tartaurus’, for example is an homage to Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart from the classic Doctor Who series.

However, I’ve been using this pony avatar long enough that I’ve even got holiday variants now and other people are using it as a model to represent me elsewhere. So… effectively, he’s an OC now? I dunno. I still know nothing about him as a character.