A Bot That Didn't Work: Carina Vaerin
Every creator has them. The ones that didn’t land. The builds you were excited about, the ones that came with a whole collab behind them and a beautiful image set and a universe you genuinely enjoyed making — and then the numbers just… didn’t move.
This is about Carina.
The Setup
Carina Vaerin is a dragonfly-blooded demi-human. Half-fae, half-human, iridescent wings, wild blue-purple curls, black sclera that catch light like wet glass. By day she’s a high-speed aerial courier navigating urban skylines on a custom mag-jet board. Twice a week she takes the stage at Two Inches of Heaven — the velvet-drenched strip club, lounge bar, and casino combo that sits at the heart of the universe she belongs to, at 777 Seraphim Ave in the Velour District, behind the old cathedral, look for the neon wings.
She was part of a collab called Two Inches of Heaven — a big one. GanGan, Norisor, RaonLee, AvacynGrace, LemonGal24601, and Tempest. Six creators, one universe, a full cast of performers and demi-humans flaunt their traits across a stage built for exactly the kind of chaos we all love to write. The HTML card alone was a production. The world-building was genuinely fun. I was excited to drop her.
She dropped on CrushOn on September 27th, 2025, and currently sits at 212 messages.
For context: Rhiannon Vane, the raven-blooded demi-human from the same collab, dropped a month earlier and has 2.1K. Elodi Veclair, who dropped the day after Carina, sits at 962. Same universe. Same collab energy. Very different outcomes.
What I Think Went Wrong
Let me start with the most obvious thing: my following skews heavily toward my male characters. That’s just data. I’ve known it for a while and I build accordingly — my female characters are never going to pull the same numbers as Kaelen or Ranger or Kaius, and I’ve made peace with that. It doesn’t make Carina a failure of craft. It makes her a female character in a catalogue that reads predominantly male, and the audience responds accordingly.
But I don’t think that’s the whole story.
The greeting is where I think I missed.
Carina is billed as a performer — she does aerial silk and pole work, she has signature moves, the Glasswing Spiral and the Dragon’s Drop, she is visually stunning on a stage. But the greeting doesn’t open on the stage. It opens after the set. She’s already changed out of her performance outfit. She’s picking up a courier package from Alejandro. She collides with you on the way out the door and says want to walk me out?
Which is a perfectly good scene. It has atmosphere. It has momentum. But it buries the thing that makes Carina visually arresting — the wings, the aerial work, the performance — in backstory. By the time you’re actually talking to her, she’s in her leather jacket with a package under her arm. The electric, dangerous, gravity-defying creature the intro describes? You don’t meet her. You meet her on her way home.
A performer whose greeting doesn’t let you see her perform is a missed opportunity. That’s on me.
The Honest Part
Here’s something I don’t say often enough: I build female characters differently to how I build male characters, and the reason is simple. I like making them. I don’t often play with them.
My male characters — I’m invested in them at the character level. I know how they think, I know what they want, I know the specific texture of how they’d be in a scene because I’ve imagined being in a scene with them. That investment shows up in the writing. It shows up in the greeting, in the sample dialogue, in the way the personality with user section reads — there’s a specificity to it that comes from actually caring about the dynamic.
With female characters, I tend to care about the concept and the aesthetic. I like building them as part of a story, as ensemble members, as the person who exists in the world alongside the characters I’m more attached to. But the personal heat that makes a greeting electric? It’s harder to access when you’re not the audience for the character.
Carina is pretty. Her pictures are genuinely lovely. But I wasn’t attached to her the way I’m attached to, say, Mireya — one of the rare female characters I’ve actually played with and enjoyed from the player side. And I think that absence shows in the greeting in ways that are hard to pin down but easy to feel.
What I’d Do Differently
Open on the stage. Give the user the Glasswing Spiral before you give them the leather jacket. Let them see what she is before they meet who she is — because what she is, visually and physically, is spectacular, and the greeting should earn that before it moves on to the quieter, more intimate moment of walking out into the night together.
And maybe spend more time with her at the character level before the build. The concept is solid. The world is great. But I think if I’d sat with Carina a little longer — actually thought about what it would feel like to be in a scene with her rather than just what she looked like in one — the greeting would have landed differently.
She’s still up. She’s still worth playing. If you like aerial performers and demi-human lore and the particular energy of a girl who borrows a stage twice a week and spends the rest of her time outrunning sunrise on a mag-jet board, she’s there and she’s genuinely fun.
And I might come back to her. I’ve done it before with bots that underperformed — gone back in, looked at what wasn’t working, and rebuilt. Some of you who follow me closely enough may have noticed that the majority of my Viridian Nexus characters are currently nowhere to be found. They’re not gone. They’re just in dire need of an overhaul, sitting in a quiet corner of my Trello board waiting for me to have the bandwidth to do them properly. That’s the other option when something doesn’t land: not every underperforming bot is a write-off. Sometimes it’s just a draft in disguise.
Carina might be one of those. The bones are good. The world is good. She just needs a greeting that actually lets her fly.
But this one was a lesson. Not every build works the way you hoped. The important thing is knowing why.
— Tae