oc i made up around 2004 when i was listening to green day and he was originally going to be the son of the devil !!!!!! how edgy. i listened to american idiot like it was some kind of religious experience. i wanted to make a cool dude character like the character of 'st. jimmy,' someone kind of anti-hero who had a billion million underlings. (side note, i also drew a bunch of women characters who were supposed to be his demon minions. i remember cutting them out on my bedroom floor and then 'laminating' them with packing tape and saving them in one giant folder. it would be so cool to look through those drawings again but i am pretty sure my dad threw them away after i moved.)
jeen went through a couple different iterations as i aged. he started off as a very emo-punk kind of young kid, maybe like 16, who hated his parents and self-harmed a lot. just like green day, he had messy black hair and lots of eyeliner, wore stripes and i'm pretty sure the first drawing ever he was giving the finger. after a few more years he got a revamp, i dont remember why i started drawing him again but he turned into like, a 24 year old guy (i was like 14 at the time so that was soooo old and mature) who had pure white hair and bright green eyes. i dont think i ever drew him smiling, he was very broody and depressed all the time. at this point i tried to think of a better backstory for him more rooted in reality. i came up with him being adopted into a family with an older sister and a younger sister, with parents who were attentive and loving from what i remember, but he never felt like he fit in so he acted out a lot and was a troubled kid. after high school he joined the army and once he was done with his service or whatever he came back to the states and settled in some big city.
around 2008 i met my best friend who happened to be a writer by hobby, something i also dabbled in, and we decided to put jeen and her character trigger together. trigger was just an idea at the time if i remember correctly...we fleshed him out together and because i had one green highlighter and one orange highlighter, trigger was given bright orange eyes. we decided to put them in a weird situationship where they were squatting (???????) in an abandoned house together in the middle of the city (???????) cause they didnt have any money (????? no idea what kind of media i consumed as a pre-teen to create this situation). anyway trigger was born in france in the late 1800s and found his way to america somehow and was now super gay and spent his free time trying to have sex with jeen, his non-consenting roommate. extremely edgy, extremely not ok, very much pre-teen girl fantasy dark edgy scenario. this was the story for pretty much all of high school. at one point to introduce some drama i made up a girl for jeen to have around named belle. i remember she was blonde and could whistle very well? she didn't really have a personality beyond being jeen's high school crush...and she ended up doing self-death as inspired by the end of 'mary jane's last dance' by tom petty where she jumped off of a hotel balcony (again, what????)
after high school i didn't really do much with him except the occasional vent art, i specifically remember playing with watercolors and drawing him covered in bruises and dried blood. during college i decided to have him stop 'dying his hair' white and had him shave it and grow a beard and aged him up to 34 (he was always about 10 years older than me). this is where i started wondering where the heck the name 'jeen' would come from and decided to make it something about maybe his younger sister always spelling his name with two e's instead of an 'ea' or 'gene' and he seems like a sweet older brother to her, maybe his name was eugene? i asked by bff, she liked the idea, so that was that.
lately i've been wanting a better background story for him with a more consensual relationship to his roommate...i am sort of feeling like trigger and jeen met when jeen was a closeted teenager at some bar jeen either frequented or wandered in to (being one of those stereotypical war veterans ig?) trigger was a kind of agender burlesque dancer who had a cute one night stand with jeen and blew his mind, they stayed in contact and kept hanging out, but jeen was really embarrassed about how trigger was not at all embarrassed about his sexuality and the way he flaunted himself and gave no shits cause he's like 150 years old.....jeen just ended up getting so comfortable being with trigger he never really came out as bi or gay or anything they just live together and sometimes consummate because they just fit together so well