Rune, Aryze's Viking mascot
How I turned the Viking on Aryze's X account into Rune, with a reference image and prompts written to keep his face the same.
- 12prompts written to keep one face
- 4looks in 7 weeks, 8 October to 26 November 2025
- 24posts on Aryze's X that name Rune, November 2025 to May 2026
- My role
- Wrote the prompts and made Rune's images in ChatGPT and Nano Banana
- When
- September 2025 to May 2026
- Made with
- Result
- One recurring character on Aryze's X from November 2025 to May 2026. In spring 2026 he explained Pay by Bank.
At Aryze I gave our online community its own brand, the Vikings. In spring 2025 a Viking was the hero of the Stablecoin Saga, a comic I made, and he stayed on as the mascot on Aryze's X account. On 1 September 2025 he was still a cartoon, waving good morning at the start of the week.
A Monday good-morning clip with a waving cartoon Viking, one of the account's regular morning posts.
Through October and November I worked on his face in ChatGPT, from a bearded man in a dark suit to a charcoal portrait with a horned helmet. By November he was called Rune. On 26 November I made the image every later picture started from: a full-body, photoreal Viking with a red beard, a horned helmet and a dark T-shirt with the Aryze mark.
Rune's looks from October to 26 November 2025, and a December series where he holds up a crashing temple and builds new rails. Made in ChatGPT and Nano Banana.
To keep him the same in every picture, on 4 December I wrote 12 prompts for the AI image tool Nano Banana, all starting from that image. Each keeps his face, beard, helmet, T-shirt and build, and puts him somewhere new, from a neon ATM to a harbour at dawn.
Rune kept turning up on Aryze's X. On Saturday 10 January 2026 the morning post was a 5-second clip of him at sunrise with a mug of coffee. On 6 March he rode a T-rex in a post saying Rune would have survived the dinosaur era.
Rune with a morning coffee, posted on a Saturday as the account's good-morning post.
Meme clip of Rune, the Aryze Viking, riding a dinosaur.
In spring 2026, when Aryze put its focus on Pay by Bank, Rune began to explain it. On 16 April he told followers that a payment straight from one bank account to another does not have to wait one to three days. From 27 November 2025 to 16 May 2026, at least 24 posts on Aryze's X named him.