Sören with the Silmarils on a Pusheen hat, because fuck you.
[art by me, with help from CogitatingKerfuffle]
This was originally written in July 2022, and updated in January 2024. Also on Dreamwidth.
Origins
Sören is more or less my self-insert [and a way to live vicariously/escape through fic], but it's complicated. There are some important/major differences between him and myself - for example, I'm 'Murrican, and Sören is Icelandic. [At some point in the future there might be an AU where he incarnates in Norway and is Søren, but I can't plan long-term.]
Sören started out as Sev, an OC that I shipped with Dooku for a Star Wars RP. Sev/Dooku was in Baby's First Fanfic in 2016, Stuck In The Middle With You [which I archive-locked and am not linking to because I don't like it now, but I don't hate it enough to delete it, plus I want it there as evidence of ownership].
In May 2018, I decided to write a self-indulgent thing to cheer myself up, called Don't Threaten Me With A Good Time, a modern AU where Dooku meets Sören in London and May/December romance ensues. At the time it was my favorite story that I'd written and still has a special place in my heart. It was important enough to me that I decided to write a sequel, though the history of In Chains is fraught enough that I'd rather not rehash it here.
From there, a multiverse was born, many different universes where across different backgrounds and circumstances, Sören finds his way to his soulmates over and over again.
In spring 2019, I first wrote that Sören is Fëanor reincarnated. The reincarnation is a major theme in some universes and barely mentioned if at all in other universes. Me writing Fëanor reborn as mortal - and my interpretation of Fëanor - may have contributed to why Spiced decided to suddenly start hating me in 2020.
Sören with the Silmarils on a Pusheen hat, because fuck you.
[art by me, with help from CogitatingKerfuffle]
Even when Sören finds out who/what he is, he's still uncomfortable with this - in my earlier universes he's Lutheran on paper but agnostic technically, so the implications of past lives and such is really problematic and upsetting for him. In later universes [2024 on] he's sometimes a Jewish convert and this bothers him less, and he grapples with the whole "Nicholas is Fingolfin, Anthony is Finarfin, and here's Maglor" business as "that was a past life and we weren't human, the first generations of Eldar were more like Adam and Eve, and this is now and we're not related here and now."
To get this out of the way in light of me formally coming out as a soulbonder in January 2024 [after having been outed in 2020 and trying to dodge the cringe bullets]: I find the theme of reincarnation intellectually interesting, as someone who was once very into studying comparative religions and mythology. My multiverse was heavily influenced by Stephen King's Dark Tower and his concept of ka-tet [and nowadays as a Jew, how it relates to gilgul]. As far as the problematic ships, I've given an explanation of why on my character sheet re: Fëanor and I will repeat I do not condone incest IRL. On a strictly personal, non-fictional level, as I mentioned in my coming-out-as-soulbonder post, I literally cannot take any hardline "this is really real and I have The Truth" positions due to the hot steaming combo of OCD + prior religious trauma; I also don't give a whole lot of thought to speculating about what once might or might not have been - I focus on the here-and-now.
To put it another way, Sören is a form of fiction-suiting.
So if you're here to make fun of me for claiming to be whatever or doing whatever, you're barking up the wrong tree because my whole attitude about whether or not I've experienced past lives personally [as in, as an actual belief rather than an intellectual exercise] is "don't really know, don't really care". At the end of the Northern Lights series I wrote Sören murdering an abusive rapist ex, that doesn't mean I murdered or want to murder someone IRL. Fiction is a form of escapism and therapy for me, it is not some sort of memoir of my day-to-day life.
Appearance
Sören's faceclaim is Kit Harington. Sören looking like Jon Snow is a running gag across the multiverse [he has a tendency of dressing up like Jon Snow for Halloween].
When Sören is cis, he stands about 6'; when he's FTM trans, he's about 5'9-5'10" barefoot. He usually has longer hair [nape to shoulder length], though he cuts his hair short in To Loose The Fateful Lightning and has a Traumatic Haircut in Rain Falls. I prefer him with facial hair.
He also has nipple piercings, two earrings in each ear, and when he's cis, he has a Prince Albert piercing. Sören almost always has ink: full-sleeve tattoos, flames on his right arm, ocean waves on his left, that lead out to a fire and water phoenix on his back.
[cis!Sören, art by SemperViridis]
[FTM!Sören, art by SemperViridis]
In universes where Sören is a Jewish convert, he gets his ink and piercings done pre-conversion. Having said that, Sören is Reform, which emphasizes the evolving nature of Jewish law, so having body mods is not as big of a deal there as it would be in other Jewish denominations.
I first wrote about Sören's ink in 2018 (Don't Threaten Me With A Good Time), and Soren first discusses his ink with Maglor [aka "Alejandro"] in chapter 3 of In Chains (March 2019):
Alejandro licked and kissed up and down from his nape to the base of his spine, and then back up. His fingers traced the phoenix tattoos on Sören's back - the sleeve of fire on one arm led to a fire phoenix, and the sleeve of ocean waves on the other arm led to a water phoenix. Alejandro had seen Sören naked enough times now to be familiar with the ink, but before he could pour more wine onto Sören's back and give another round of teasing, he lingered, and Sören could feel him looking."You designed that, didn't you?" Alejandro asked.
Sören nodded. "When I was in the hospital, during my breakdown with the internship. I had someone else do the ink, but they used my design."
Alejandro's fingers continued tracing the tattoos. "Symbolic."
"Yes."
"You have scars here that the phoenixes cover up, though they're still visible."
"I was beaten regularly growing up. My aunt and uncle were nasty."
Alejandro sighed, and Sören could feel the ache, the surge of compassion. He kissed Sören's right shoulder and for a moment just rested his head there. His hands reached to the sleeve tattoos on Sören's arms, and Sören watched him tracing the line work there.
"You have scars on your arms, too." Alejandro traced the wrists.
"That..." Sören took a deep breath. "I attempted suicide. I was in med school... I knew how to slit my wrists the right way."
His personal style is grunge-goth: jeans, band T-shirts [if I ever had a multiverse drinking game and you took a drink for every time I mentioned his Joy Division or Nine Inch Nails shirt, you would have liver failure], flannel shirts and hoodies; his idea of getting dressed up is ruffly pirate shirts and leather pants. He wears Doc Martens all the time. He dislikes wearing suits, but has worn them for occasions like a funeral... with his Doc Martens. Sören is not a formal person at all, the irony being that two of his partners [Nicholas and Anthony] are or have been suit-wearers in their careers.
Sören's speaking voice is kind of like Daði Freyr's.
Background
Sören is an Icelander; Sigurðsson is his patronymic. [In the universes where Sören is AFAB, his deadname is Sigrit, and he takes the name Sören after his great-grandfather, as well as Kierkegaard.] Sören is from Akureyri, Iceland. In some universes we meet him in Reykjavik, where he moved from Akureyri to escape his guardians [see further down], in some universes he leaves Iceland for England, Canada or the United States.
His parents, Sigurð and Brynhildur, met as teenagers and at their wedding, played "Ride of the Valkyries" on kazoo.
[art by SemperViridis]
In almost all the universes I write, Sören's parents are both dead by the time he's six and he doesn't remember his father. In some universes, his mother dies of an aneurysm and he's the one to find her body, which prompts him to go to medical school later. In other universes, his parents die in a car accident.
In some older universes, Sören has a twin brother named Dagnýr [Dag] who's an astrophysicist and moves to Toronto, and an older sister named Margrét who's a trans woman. However, in later/more recent universes, I tend to write Sören as an only child or with a trans sister only, no Dag.
Sören tends to be raised by his father's sister Katrin and her husband Einar, who are both alcoholics and abusive when they get drunk. Katrin also gets religion, and doesn't approve of Sören being gay [or trans, when Sören is FTM]. In some older universes, Katrin and Einar have a son named Ari.
Sigrit from Fire Saga is Sören's second cousin, and Björk is his third cousin.
Sören was a runty, asthmatic nerd growing up, and bullied in school because he wasn't good at sports and he was quiet and bookish. He gets Really Into Art at different stages in his life, and usually starts painting after his first major suicide attempt or major self-injury episode. He designed his ink, based on his first painting. The painting is itself based on a recurring nightmare Sören started having at the age of four, about burning to death. The water "tempers" the fire.
In many universes Sören has an ill-fated relationship with a man named Justin Roberts, who is verbally and often physically/sexually abusive. In some universes Justin incarnates AFAB, as Juniper Roberts, who is more emotionally abusive/manipulative and cheats on him. Sören's relationship with Justin/Juniper is traumatic and leaves deep psychological scars; rape recovery is a theme I've written with Sören more than once.
In my older universes Sören is born in 1984; in universes from 2022 on I began writing him as being born in 1994. The reason for this is because I myself am in my mid-forties and my brain keeps acting like I was in my twenties yesterday, so my mental age hasn't really caught up to my physical age. As a rule, I keep him younger than Nicholas and Anthony.
In the Corn of Eternity universe that I co-author with my roommate, Sören has a platonic best friend named Yeyette [my roommate's OC].
Sören has three soulmates: Anthony, Nicholas and Maglor. While Sören has had relationships with other people in other universes, these tend to be less significant and consistent than him finding his way to these three, some way somehow. He usually meets one first and nests with them for awhile, then it turns into a polymuddle, though in some universes he is taken as a third by Maglor/Nicholas, Nicholas/Anthony or Anthony/Maglor.
As I've mentioned, in my earlier universes Sören is agnostic/atheist, and in some fics written from 2024 onward, he's a Jewish convert.
"I started having recurring nightmares when I was four, about fire and burning to death. Nothing I'd seen on TV, no neighbors had a fire, just... completely random. When I got older the dreams had more detail - I was ambushed by a pack of fire demons who had flaming whips, and I was mortally wounded, fire and blood. It seems kind of obvious in hindsight, my dysphoria, the abuse at home, the bullying, but it always felt so real, like something that happened. The water was a way of tempering the fire, like a magical act."Anthony nodded. "That makes sense. And wow, those dreams sound intense."
"A few of them were even worse than that, there's a backstory - I was running away from my people because I was angry at our gods and called them useless, I led a group of followers, we ended up wrongfully killing people from another place on the way out, then we wandered through a frozen, barren landscape and just when I thought we'd come to the new land, was when I got ambushed. I started having THOSE dreams just before I ... left Iceland, and I couldn't help but think later on that it meant something, somehow, whether it was just symbolic of the anger I felt towards the religious abuse from my aunt or if it was equal parts gilgul and brain shit, or if G-d was sending me a message, or maybe all of the above... because my conversion to Judaism feels like that dream in reverse - making my peace with G-d, joining a people who've been exiles and experienced genocide and standing with them, coming home." Sören had chills speaking the words aloud, breaking out in gooseflesh under his sweater. [Healing Hands, ch4]
Career
In some universes Sören successfully graduates medical school and works as a doctor. In most other universes he doesn't make it when he loses patients in his internship [his suicide attempt happens after he loses a patient who looks like his mother, just before the holidays]. In the Under The Rose universe he manages to change course with his schooling and gets a Ph.D in art and becomes an art professor. In the Northern Lights verse he works as a bartender and barista, with occasional art sales, and for a time has his own art studio where people take classes. In other universes Sören has been a chef and a dance instructor. In my fic OnlyMags he does OnlyFans, and in Corn of Eternity he worked as an exotic dancer/occasional escort to support himself through school. In fics from 2022 on I tend to write him as a gallery curator or remote worker.
I'm more flexible about what Sören "does with his life" than I am with my other OCs, because Sören's art is more important to him and one can't necessarily make a living from that, so his job is whatever pays the bills but his art is his real passion.
Personality and Other Details
All Sören knows is McDonald's, charge phone, twerk, be bisexual, eat hot chip and make dad jokes. -MxRumpleteazer
Anthony's eyes widened and for the briefest instant Sören worried he'd caused offense, and that Anthony was going to think he was some kind of freak especially with his trauma history - but for Sören it wasn't about incest, it was about the way Anthony took care of him and made him feel safe... [Healing Hands, ch6]
Want to get to know Sören better? Here are some places to start: