Toko wanted me to talk a bit about characters, so here goes, I guess. I've written pages on pages about characters, but I'll try and be concise here. If what I say seems plausible enough, I'd really enjoy talking about this more in depth with people individually; there's always more I can learn about it. Anyway, here goes: Most characters are boring, not necessarily to read, but to roleplay. Why does it feel like such a chore to post in your thread half the time? We have a pattern, and it usually looks like this 1. Get an idea that sounds like it would be awesome to roleplay. It could be a character or a general theme. 2. Find a site, get excited, and make a character. 3. Start roleplaying and get knee-deep into it. 4. The person you’re roleplaying with has finals or goes on vacation for a week and takes a while to respond to your posts. 5. When they come back, that fiery, hot love between you two seems awfully cool. 6. Maybe finish the thread or get so sluggish with your response that it starts collecting dust 7. Stop posting for 2 months. 8. Get bothered back into posting until you can gain momentum and repeat the cycle OR come up with another sweet character or general roleplay idea. 9. Pursue the new interest until you lose steam and stop again. 10. Repeat. If you don't think this has happened to you, I bet you've seen it in other people. So... why? Well ultimately, we have to come back to the question, "Why is it so hard to post half the time?" I think the answer is that what we're writing is... not interesting enough to us. I've had a lot of characters from here and there. Kings that ruled the world, children who would save all mortality, men who could stop time, and women who could command the elements. Right now I'm only roleplaying one character who happens to be a bumbling, half-hearted, old, overweight Alchemist, and I'm waiting on a post so I can keep RPing him. Especially compared to the other characters I've had, I can summarize how I feel in one word about the RP I'm having: PUMPED. WHY? I mean, he's just a normal guy with nothing go for him. You probably wouldn't want to know him in real life, and that's not a complement. My quality of roleplay isn't it, because that's definitely lacking, and I don't think it's because he's just the new thing I'm working on right now. I think it's because I'm trying to roleplay something that I find interesting to write about, not necessarily read about. I think all those kings and sorcerers I roleplayed before were cool concepts, but when it came down to it, they weren't fun to RP (save for those momentary, fleeting times in RP when I got to feel like a little god in my own universe). I've found, personally, that the interesting part of writing and roleplaying isn't all the action or the feats of strength you can accomplish, it's about creating something complicated, vivid, and nearly alive. Alright so you might not agree, or say that it wouldn't be interesting for you, and that's fine, but bear with me here. We would all agree Mary Sues are bad. It's not cool to have a perfect character; it's not interesting. It's not real. You can have Mary Sue elements in a character without them being perfect, though, and it deflates it in the exact same way. People do this in lots of ways, most noticeably though, it's through something like this, "My character has a poor sense of humor, except when it really matters." Or "My character is really stubborn" with an implied "Because he's right" at the end. People go on and on about how their characters are flirty, stoic, stubborn, passionate, filled with vengeance, sword-masters, prodigies, and so on. Okay. These are not faults. Most of the time, any real fault people put in also has a disclaimer "but not all the time" at the end. What's more, people even put "faults" down like being vicious, obsessed, cold-hearted, a killer, too-smart-for-his-own-good, and whatever else. I don't get the feeling that it makes the character seem like a faulted person, it makes it sound like you're trying to write a badass. And the unfortunate reality of it is that badasses are boring. They're fun to watch in movies, and sometimes they're fun to play in games, but from what I've found... they're not that fun to roleplay. People end up just creating lots of them and roleplaying each one very little. You might not think they're boring, but look at your track-record for posting. If not yourself, look at the people around you. It's kind of bleak. I could talk for hours about this, and it's still definitely open to discussion, but I'll try and wrap it up. Challenge yourself. Take a look at what you write critically and ask, "What fundamentally makes my character interesting? Or am I just writing characters that I think would be cool." Because it's hard. It's really difficult to roleplay a truly faulted character, but it's also the most rewarding and interesting thing I've found. So yeah, enjoy :V
