Do you take inspiration from characters from other media to create your own characters?

Lately, I’ve been naming — and sometimes modeling — some of my World of Warcraft characters after existing characters from other games. Over my many years of WoW-playing, my characters have usually had somewhat sober fantasy-sounding names, that I tried to make as original as possible. But I’ve always had a few “sillier” characters on the side — characters named after nouns like “City” or “Garlic,” as well as characters that took inspiration from existing characters from other media. For the longest time, the guild master of my alt guild was inspired by Alfred Molina’s Dr. Octopus from 2004’s Spider-Man 2, and that character exists to this day.

The Monk that you see in the header picture, Tifa — obviously modeled after the Final Fantasy 7 character, yet posing amidst two very real and official WoW NPCs in Dalaran that compliment her perfectly — is just an alt, much like the aforementioned Octopus. However, I’ve now reached a certain point in my life where I try not to take myself so seriously anymore — and I’ve learned to be okay with playing even those “sillier” characters more seriously. Thus, some of them have joined my main roster!

My Arms Warrior is a cute Pandaren named after Kawakami, the homeroom teacher from Persona 5, while my Fury Warrior is a Dracthyr called Hulkenberg, much like the exemplary knight from Metaphor: ReFantazio. Those two, however, aren’t actually modeled after their sources the way Tifa is — I’m just borrowing the names. I guess when it comes to playing “seriously,” I’m okay with taking an existing name, but I still don’t want to pretend to be playing as that actual character in a WoW dungeon. Maybe there’s a small part of me that still feels like that would be too “out of place.”

Taking inspiration from games, shows, novels, movies, or what-have-you seems to be a somewhat common thing among players, but I’m left wondering how many of us fully name and customize their appearances to also resemble those characters, perhaps even acting like those characters would — almost like they’ve been isekai’d into Azeroth, somehow. So I ask you, my fellow players: do you take inspiration from other media to create your characters? How far do you go: just borrowing a name, a theme, a faction? Fully cosplaying that character through transmog? Even pretending like you’re actually playing that character?