Ványalos the Maia (new version 4/4/05)
In writing my LotR fan fiction novel, I Entulesse (available in PDF format on my Shadowstar website), I inevitably found it necessary to introduce residents of Valinor whom we had neither met nor heard of in Tolkien's writings. He said, after all, that the Maiar were much more numerous than the Valar, but in the course of the tales, we heard of very few -- perhaps not even as many as the fifteen Valar named in The Silmarillion. Thus, once I had Gandalf (aka Olórin) return to his home in Lórien, it was ridiculous to presume that his only friends and neighbors would be Elves and Ainur with whom we were already familiar. Having written fanfic for a good twenty years, I knew well the perils of introducing new characters into an established mythos; they not only have to be brought in carefully and gradually, they have to avoid certain fan stereotypes and be given a clear function within the context of the story that could be accepted by the readers in order to work. Hence my invention and introduction of Ványalos, a Maia servant of Irmo the Master of Dreams, Lord of Lórien. Those who have read the story already know that Ványalos served as the primary comic relief in what might have otherwise been a very dark tale, and I was pleased when he met with seemingly unqualified acceptance. One or two folks mentioned that he didn't act quite in the ways they had envisioned Maia behavior, but since we see the gamut of very human-like qualities in the Valar, I figured it was even more likely that we would see them in their servants.
In terms of his personality, Ványalos is... less than perfectly dignified; one might say he's rather like a vastly overgrown and rather mischievous hobbit. When I moved him into my Valinor neighborhood, he seemed to fit right in in that role. His appearance is as close to his description in my stories: long red hair pulled back in a braid, silver eyes, clothes in dusky blues and grays. I also describe him as being unusually tall, but that remains one quality impossible to really duplicate among the Sims, who are all of virtually identical height (as adults or children) because of restrictions of the game itself (largely where it places the hands in relation to the body. Try to mess with this too much, and you wind up with some awfully weird-looking and weird-moving Sims).
My original version of Ványalos was one of the first meshes I made on my own, and I was never entirely pleased with either the meshes or the skins. For one thing, the first time the character showed up in the story, I had described him as "Elven" in appearance, which should have presumed that he had the slightly pointed ears of the Elves -- which I neglected to do in the head skin. Also, the notion of him having "sharp" features was completely lost, since I was still learning how to make the facial features more distinct even when reduced to the tiny size of the normal head skin; his face was much to muddy for my liking. I'd liked the texture I used as the fabric for his tunic, so I decided to keep that in the new design. I also added to it the emblem I'd used for Irmo in the carpet I'd made for him, both in a large clasp on the waist sash and in a smaller pin at the throat of the tunic. All in all, I'm much happier with this version of the character. I gave him a split braid down the back rather than a single tail, so that the heads would be distinctly different if some folks choose to have both versions in their game.
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