FILE #003: Nathan ''Nate'' Cooper

Name: Nathan Peregrine Cooper ''Nate'' (based on an old character with the same name)
Date of birth: 26 April 1998
Age: 21
Height: 175cm
Nationality: English
Hometown: Painswick, Gloucestershire, England, United Kingdom
Languages: English
Eye colour: Greenish blue
Hair colour: Blond
Skin colour: Fairly light
Distinctive features: One piercing in right ear, a visible scar on left cheek
Personality in a few words: An anxious but friendly intellect who might hold a grudge.
Family: David Cooper (father), John Black (stepfather), Danielle Cooper (younger sister); Lisa Cooper (mother; deceased)
Issues: Anxiety disorder, victim of homophobic bullying, acid reflux

Detailed information

Favourite music: Blur, Oasis, The Verve
Favourite movies: GoodFellas, The Matrix, Star Wars: Episode IV - The Empire Strikes Back
Favourite TV series: The Twilight Zone, Saturday Night Live, All in the Family
Favourite foods: Yorkshire pudding, steak, crispy fried chicken
Hobby: Stamp collecting, bird watching

Character history

COMING SOON

The creative process

Out of the first three characters I ever created, Nathan was the last one. He's also probably the one who has changed the most, comparing to the first version of him. The reason for that is probably the fact that as time went on, I became more and more unsatisfied with the way he was shaping up to be. I felt like he was kind of boring and that he really had no interesting issues to deal with. Initially, in their original universe, he was an English boy who moved to Finland at the age of 7, because of his father's boyfriend. He became friends with the others belonging to the same universe and eventually learned to speak Finnish fluently. His initial character was someone who was more often than not seen as a lot more stupid than he actually was. I actually got the idea to make him very intelligent much later on, because I got annoyed at the fact that he was constantly treated like an idiot by the other characters (and me, his creator). I wanted better for him, as a proper mother should for her son.
   Most of his issues and stuff I came up with only after I remade him. I mean, in the earliest stages of Sunset Bay (right after I decided to get rid of the superpowers I had so generously granted my children with; Nathan's power was teleportation if I'm not entirely mistaken), Nathan was basically just Jake's best friend and his conscience, for the lack of a better word. It wasn't until Dani came along as his love interest that he really started developing as his own person. His family situation stayed pretty much the same, with his two fathers, younger sister and a mother who died when he was very young.
 The first thing I came up with was his anxiety. I've always imagined him as the ''voice of sanity'', which probably contributed a lot to the fact that he's always been very secretive about this particular issue of his. He feels like he has to be the one who has his shit together, when the people closes to him (Jake and Dani, mostly) really don't. So he tries to hide it, but obviously at some point it comes out. Also, he's had two dads since he was created, but when I remade him, I added the whole bullying-storyline. It was mostly because he didn't really have anything concrete to deal with, other than Jake's shit, and even though it was a very different kind of bullying, it's something I've been through and it's always important to talk about. His issues with acid reflux were definitely a self-insert, I'm not going to lie about that.
   Along with Jake, Nathan's appearance hasn't changed much. The biggest things that did change were probably his height (he used to be the shortest of the three, but the more Jake became a self-insert, the shorter I wanted him to be) and his hair, which used to be a lot longer. I mean like down to his back long. That idea was short-lived, though, because I couldn't imagine him wearing it down or in a ponytail either. So I scrapped it. Actually, to be entirely honest, I still don't know how he wears his hair exactly. All I know is that it's blonde and that's about it. The scar on his cheek is also something he's always had; the story for that is that he ran into a glass door as a kid.
   In their original universe, Nathan's initial love interest was Niko (my friend's character), who ended up cheating on him with Jake (this is definitely nothing spectacularly scandalous in this universe, because at some point everyone was cheating on everyone and the relationships between the characters were a hot mess). After that, Nathan stayed single. For one of the most recent versions, a possible love interest (Pyry, my friend's character) was created, but seeing as that version didn't live for long, they never actually got together. In the most recent version, though, he was together with Antti, who had a crush on him when they were younger (another running gag in the original one was that everyone knew Antti liked him except for Nathan). His present, remade self, has a love interest in Dani, which... was the most logical thing to do. They were best friends initially anyway and I kind of always imagined that maybe there'd been something more. I also liked the kind of contrast between their characters and the fact that Jake doesn't approve of Dani at all, which kind of creates a conflicting situation for Nathan, who's put in between his lover and his best friend.