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Making Characters
making characters got so much easier (and more enjoyable) when i realized my groove was explicitly making characters for plot+theme needs.
(Keeps casts trimmed down, for one.)
like - i don’t … do those eighty-thousand question lists about characters; most of those are useless for my style anyway. Don’t want to know what everyone’s favorite color is or what they feel about their grandparents > do want to know which tropes they subvert, and the why of that first crucial plot-relevant action they take. everything before and everything afterwards both leads to that.
for example - ‘i need uhhh, a random ass meatbag soldier that knew diane and her dad who’s a spineless coward under a totes smooth operator look that tries to shank them and gtfo lol’ boom, hardin. (who happens to be one of my actual favorites - and most well received - villains I’ve ever written. working backwards to find his motivation of why [why’d he betray them? what blackmail would someone need on him to switch loyalties? why’d he serve dictator dad? why does he give a shit about diane? ] has honestly been the meat of the last two chapters. )
likewise - ‘i need a villain who masterminded [redacted] and was an ambassador that mentored diane when they were younger - super charismatic, takes her in under her wing but is a corrosive piece of shit.’ even the visual designs trail that; thinking of station and what kind of institutional power they need in order to apply their will on the plot, how much of a disney villain peacock they are in order to telegraph that corrosiveness, how much they want to resemble which country to get the most sympathy from people, etc.
i - and I would wager a ton of readers - truly don’t give a shit about characters until that ‘why’ chain starts rolling out. and i honestly feel like so many more other characters would instantly be more compelling if that was applied.
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plancharacter survives first contact with theenemyplot" - van Moltke, probablyi remember in one RPG i created a character with a sort of fucked-up family backstory, one of many siblings, i had a grand time writing out some mini-shorts set in their childhood, and i'd conceived him as a sort of jovial-but-with-a-dangerous-undercurrent character—
—but then he turned into a total goofball about eight seconds into actually playing him, so uh, so much for that.
his original concept made sense and would be fun to play with in an alternative universe, but something about the mixture of characters on that game, the people he was playing off of, etc, meant the lighter approach made more sense, and wasn't incompatible with his backstory in any way. just different.
the little character questionnaire things can be fun, but i'd be surprised if there's many people who actually sketch out their characters that way—i definitely need to mess with them in a couple different settings to actually understand them.
(( this is a bit of a stretch / tangent, but i remember some parlor question i learned when i was little: "if you really wanted to know/understand someone, would you want to be a fly-on-the-wall in their life for a week, or would you want to interact with them in person for a few hours?" when i was younger i think the fly-on-the-wall thing made more sense to me—surely if you are a superspy you can figure out everything about them!—but nowadays i'd probably answer the latter, i have a lot of experience in gauging what a person's like when i'm driving the conversation, i know how different kinds of people react to my appearance, etc etc—how are they like to me is gonna tell me more than just abstractly knowing a lot of facts about their present life. ))
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Was that the RP that was based on like .... venture capitalist bros in college or something??? Because I vaguely remember you mentioning those before, and we even had a few email sessions with a character picked from that verse iirc. Was fun. :3 very you :3333
but LOL yeah, setting dictates character way more than most people think ,,, plus you kinda get to see what parts of their personality are actually true vs which parts they project given people are weirdos with elaborate social dances to ignore feelings, etc etc.
That parlor question is mighty interesting from a philosophical standpoint in all honesty ...! I mostly agree with you, but it raises the question of 'is a person's understood being more accurate with or without your (aka a figurative specific) presence, ie are you Really That Important In The Abstract' Maybe I'm saying that because Social Masks are kind of my thing and at the end of the day they're only going to react to one person like light shining off of one facet of a diamond? It's accurate for whoever's specifically seeing that reflection, sure, but like ... Schrodinger's reflection? lol
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ha! this was actually an earlier character—i don't have his files on-hand atm, but i think i was exploring some black-sheep-of-family dynamics in his backstory? the depressed STEM grad student you remember came later, though he was on the same game :P (those email sessions were great!!! ahh!!!!)
the facets-of-a-diamond metaphor seems very apt. i guess i'd argue it's something like: the observer perspective lets you get a glimpse, abstractly, at how this person behaves around a variety of other people (lots of facets)—but you won't have the full story of the histories of each of those persons, so you're going to miss a lot of subtleties of those interactions, and such.
whereas, when you're doing the actively-engaged perspective: well, i have the complete history of my own life, and the complete history of all my interactions with humans ever, so i can come to that encounter with all that knowledge ("person reacting to me in particular like X usually means Y"), and pattern-match against the bajillion other times i've met a human, and assess the person pretty quickly. it's still going to be just one facet/mask vs getting to see potentially many—but you'll probably see that one facet in much greater detail, and (with some noted exceptions!) i honestly feel like most people don't go out of their way to hide significant parts of themselves—even people i've interacted with in mostly a professional context, i can often get a whiff of what their home life is like or whatever.