Corey Darkside

NAME: Corey Darkside
AGE: 35
OCCUPATION: Barbarian Gangster
CANON: Gangs of Kingston


Do you know very many barbarians named Corey? Even female ones; be honest. Can you picture someone with that given name charging at you with a big fucking battleaxe and splitting you like a log? If this was the year 2010 and I was still writing screenplays, then I would have made this a new trend. But in order for that trend to catch on, the movie script I write has to be successful, as in it has to be made into an actual, dee-dee-dee, movie! Port Orchard isn’t exactly a cinematic town and Hollywood is God knows how many miles away, so screenplays aren’t my best option. But a regular novel with a barbaric badass named Corey Darkside? That’s a little more workable.

Today’s criminal gangs aren’t known for being liberal-minded towards women. Politicians of the middle ages were even more sexist during their time in power. Combine these two elements and you have to wonder how a woman like Corey Darkside gets involved in a gang in the first place. She’s 6’5”, muscular, carries a giant battleaxe, and has a limited sex appeal. Needless to say, Corey would never be “sexed in”, not in a million years. And yet, she somehow became the faithful girlfriend of dwarf barbarian Edge Warbringer and the co-leader of his criminal empire. I know dwarves aren’t thought of as having high standards of beauty or charisma, so this relationship might actually work.

Edge and Corey were born for battle. If you don’t believe them, take a look at the mile high pile of dead bodies they leave behind. In the screenplay Gangs of Kingston, the streets are littered with corpses of gangsters and innocent people alike to where tripping over somebody’s bloody arm isn’t unheard of. The main character, an elf warrior named Jonah Jeriqee, had to side-wind past these big ass piles just to get something to drink at the pub. Going to the pub is a bad idea in and of itself since that’s where most of the violence happens. In fact, there’s not one square inch of Kingston that doesn’t reek of death, past, present, or future. You can thank Corey Darkside for at least part of that violence.

Would you believe it if I told you that Jonah Jeriqee actually survived an encounter with Corey? In Edge’s own underground mosh pit, no less! But how is that possible? Being an elf, Jonah is a skinny twig, so watching him swing a giant barbed club like he does looks ridiculous. Corey Darkside, on the other hand, looks more than comfortable when she swings her tower-sized battleaxe. There’s only one way to survive a battle with this war-torn beast of a woman: run. After a few cheap shots here and there, Jonah got out of there with his life, despite the fact that Corey is a faster runner than he is.

Trickery and stealth will not guarantee you a convincing victory, however, which is why Corey is still a threat to anybody she crosses. When she wins a battle, she fucking wins. Everyone else either barely survives by the skin of their teeth or gets ripped up like a piece of paper. It should make perfect sense that she be a high-profile villain in any story she’s a part of. She has the last name Darkside, for Christ’s sake! There’s no way an ultra-powerful warrior like this has any room for character development like a hero would. She’s like Deus Shadowheart with tits and a vagina: every fight with her has Deus Ex Machina implications.

The only way I could picture Corey Darkside as a believable hero would be if she was a professional wrestler. There were many large women before her who became successful with their size and god-like athleticism: Chyna, Awesome Kong, Beth Phoenix, Natalya, and Charlotte just to name a few. But if Corey is going to be a believable hero in the world of wrestling, she’s going to have to have a thick skin, especially if she gets a Most Overrated Wrestler award from the Wrestling Observer Newsletter. It may seem like a chump change award, but those awards are possible because the majority of wrestling fans vote for that shit. Size isn’t everything, but character is. Therefore, Corey is more likely to be a villainous barbarian gangster than a heroic professional wrestler. Well, I gave it a shot.

　

***WRESTLING JOKE OF THE DAY***

Q: What do you call a Samoan wrestler who eats cheap noodles?
A: Ramen Reigns.

Charles Goodhorn

My older brother James has this habit of introducing me to certain media and then years later losing interest in it himself. He did it with the bands Crossfade, Nightwish, and Limp Bizkit. I still love those bands and James thinks they’re a bunch of big babies. In the late 90’s, he introduced me to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (second edition). I became addicted to it and he now thinks D&D players have no life. James changes his interests more often than he changes his underwear (not that I would know anything about his underwear habits).

But if it wasn’t for him, two things would have happened. One, I would assume RPG’s are all hack and slash and no role-playing or puzzle solving (like the Final Fantasy franchise). And two, Charles Goodhorn would be an afterthought. I originally wanted to call him Charles Goldhorn (because I had a Lego piece that was a golden trumpet), but James advised me to tweak it to Goodhorn to fit Charles’ paladin class. That ended up being good advice.

As a D&D character in the late 90’s, Charles Goodhorn, a human paladin, reached level eight before he was never used again. Throughout those eight levels of awesome adventures, I learned what it meant to be a true good guy. Paladins have a strict code of behavior they need to conform to lest they lose their magical powers and become fighters without weapon specialization. They have to have a lawful good alignment, they have to donate money to a church or to poor people, they have to help the weak whenever in danger, and they can’t have henchmen who deviate from lawful goodness. I followed this code of behavior to a tee until one day at level eight, he broke the rules by assaulting someone of good alignment (at the time, I thought the guy was evil). While Charles never actually made the transformation into a fighter, he was never used again.

In 2010 when I was still writing movie scripts, Charles was revamped into an orc paladin and became a sheriff in the D&D-style fantasy movie Gangs of Kingston. He was basically one man trying to keep order in a town highly populated with criminals and sociopaths. The streets of Kingston were piled high with dead bodies and blood pools. That’s not an exaggeration, that’s what Kingston looked like.

After a while of being overwhelmed by his duties, Charles became apathetic over time and doesn’t reconsider his disposition until the main character, an elf warrior named Jonah Jeriqee, immerses himself too deeply into the gang system of Kingston and almost gets himself killed. This would have made an awesome movie, but unfortunately, I don’t live in Hollywood, so there’s no way it would have made it onto the big screen. Plus, 2010 was a time in my life where my writing had no literary influences and therefore suffered greatly.

That’s two times in a row where Charles Goodhorn has been overlooked, both as a human D&D character and an orcish movie character. If I ever do recycle him, I’d want him to be done right this time. He’s not going to be an apathetic sheriff nor his he going to get somebody’s alignment wrong and almost kill them. He’s going to be the perfect good guy until the very end. He can have a few flaws, but not so many that it changes him into a sociopath. If ever becomes perfect, he can be a side character. Either that, or he can be the lead character who earns his way to becoming perfect. Sounds like a perfect day for a D&D story. Sounds like an even better start to the third act of Fireball Nightmare (if I have one). My spine is tingling with delight! Either that or I need to see a chiropractor.

　

***JOKE OF THE DAY***

Q: What does a futuristic police officer produce while he’s in the bathroom?

A: Robo Crap.