fourth wing got its violet and xaden. i used an ai character creator to cast my own

Every fandom gets one week where the group chat stops being polite. For romantasy readers it was the week of October 15, and it sent me straight back to my AI character creator.

Quick recap if you missed it. Deadline, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter reported that Prime Video’s Fourth Wing series had its leads: Esther McGregor as Violet Sorrengail and Emilio Sakraya as Xaden Riorson. Amazon made it official a few days later, with Rebecca Yarros thanking the team for “a thorough, worldwide search to find Violet and Xaden.” No release date yet.

Then the internet did its thing. One reviewer told CNN she was squinting and could “kind of see the vision.” Someone else pointed out that “Violet’s not blonde.” Half my feed was mock fainting. The other half was pinned lists of who it should have been.

I have a fan-cast too. Since chapter four. But watching thousands of people argue about two faces made me notice what I actually like about fan-casting, and it isn’t being right. It’s building the room.

fan-casting is ensemble design wearing a costume

A single character is a portrait. A cast is a machine. The fun in a series like this lives between people: the instructor who knows too much, the rival you’d hate less if she were worse at everything, the friend who always has the thing you need and never says where she got it.

So I didn’t rebuild Violet and Xaden. They belong to Yarros, and my rule is to only build what’s mine (I wrote about that when Character.AI’s sale started). What I borrowed was the shape. A war college. Dragons. Four people who need each other and would rather not.

the four i built

I started each one with a paragraph in Soulkyn’s creator, let it draft a first pass, then went through the traits by hand. There are 17 of them, and the manual pass is where a generated character stops being the model’s guess and becomes yours.

Marrow Quill, 41. Flight instructor, demoted after a crash nobody discusses in front of him. Patience high, warmth low, humor so dry it takes cadets a week to notice it’s humor. His tell: he taps the rail twice before he gives bad news.

Ilse Varga, 23. Top of the class. Her family funds half the academy. She is terrified of heights and would genuinely rather fall than say so. I gave her a low honesty trait, and I mean the slider, not a judgment.

Tamsin Hale, 26. The quartermaster’s daughter. Runs a small black market in boot polish, letters home and other people’s secrets. Friendly to everyone, loyal to about two people.

Corvin Ashby, 24. Son of the general who lost the last war. The whole school watches him waiting for him to fail. Cold in the corridors, warm in private, and the only one who has noticed Ilse never looks down.

All adults, all with backstories I wrote at least half of myself. That matters later.

lists are the casting board

Soulkyn’s 0.9.5 update (October 24) added Lists. You group your Kyns, Soulkyn’s word for characters, into private or public lists, and each one gets a role in that list. Then you can cast a novel, a comic or a group chat straight from the list.

That’s fan-casting, just pointed at my own people. I made a private list called the hollow wing and gave out roles: Marrow as the mentor, Ilse as the rival, Tamsin as the fixer, Corvin as the lead. The list keeps the lineup and who plays what in one place, so starting something new means picking the list instead of rebuilding the cast every time.

In July six of my characters shared a room. A room is one scene. A list is a company of actors you keep sending into new productions.

the comic test

First production: a comic. The comics beta takes up to four Kyns, which is exactly the hollow wing, plus a few lines of what happens. Mine was the first morning of flight drills, Ilse refusing the ladder in front of everyone, Marrow tapping the rail twice.

For the look, the default First Kyn style draws the comic in the style of your first Kyn’s own pictures. Marrow was first on the list, and I’d saved Fantasy Comic on him, one of the five styles that came out in early October next to Bold Ink, Digital Fantasy, Flat Anime and Grunge Horror. So the comic came out in his look without me picking anything. You can also choose one of 24 comic styles, from manga ink and 90s anime to watercolor and pulp comic.

Two pages, lettered, with the speech bubbles next to whoever is talking. One panel had Tamsin holding a lantern she’d never carry, so I redrew it while the comic was still unpublished. Next chapter keeps the same four, the same style and the story so far. Chapter two is the night Corvin finds out why she won’t look down.

the fan-cast nobody can argue with

Here’s the quiet win. Nobody can tell me my Ilse has the wrong hair, because I wrote her. All the good parts of fan-casting, none of the comment section.

The show has no date yet, so there’s time. If the casting news gave you that itch, build your first character from one sentence: who they are and the one thing they’d never admit. Do three more. Put them in a list and give them roles. Or browse what other people have built and steal a mentor.

Marrow just tapped the rail twice at me. I should probably go see what that’s about.