A quick question for any writers out there who are willing to answer · 1:37pm Mar 13th, 2013
Hey guys and girls. A little deviation from my usual posts, I'm in need of a little assistance with a project I'm working on in college, which aims to explore the relationships between an artist/writer/animator/other, and the characters they create.
So in short, what sort of emotional connection do you have with your characters (If any)? How do you as a creator of these characters, percieve your characters? Extensions of yourself? Role-models to aspire towards? Props to be exploited and used? Some sort of family member, perhaps even offspring of some sort? It is a bit of an odd question, yes, but hey, it's an odd project I'm working on. I'm an art student, what are ya gonna do?
Naturally, this question only really applies to those of you out there who have either written fairly extensively with an OC character (Human, pony or otherwise) or have also written original stories outside of fanfiction. So if you have an interesting answer, either reply here or even drop me a PM. Any information would be useful, not to mention it may help get my project a bit more credit for including primary-research.
Hope to hear from some of you soon!
Hmm, this sounds kinda interesting actually. I'll give it a go.
How do I perceive my character? My character (Jazz, cat, Dreaming of Paws, Chessgame of the gods, nuff said) is a relaxed sort of person. I created him with myself as the very base of his character. He's relaxed, uses comedy for just about everything and he's a lover of music. I have a feeling that you can look at all OCs out there and you'll find just a shimmer of his/hers creator in him/her.
Jazz is me, but not. He's what I want to be, yet not what I aspire to become. He's being himself, which is not me. I'm him, but me. If you're still following me, then I applaud you. I created him with relaxation and comedy in mind. I wanted to have a story that would break the action-packed chessverse-cliche, and focus almost entirely on comedy. For this I needed a funny character that would still be able to be classified as an actual person. Not just a clown, but a human being with emotions and preferences.
He's a brother and a friend, with myself as a template for his character.
Hope this helps you, even though it was little more than incoherent ramblings of a madman.
-Glassed
A little late to the party but I'll give it a shot.
Me=God
Characters=Chess pieces, but with personal freedom.
Everything from their destiny, personality, and appearance is determined by me, but how they achieve that destiny is up to them. I'm serious, I don't do much planning when going into a story, and many times I find myself thinking about the solution to this problem with the characters and their skills I have at my disposal.
All of my characters are born out of aspects of my personality that most people have never seen. They've only seen the "Fluttershy" part. The others that never surfaced are pretty much copied into characters.
If I had to describe the two characters that I feel closest towards, original fiction characters Michael and Felix (who can also be seen as OCs in a-currently-under-rewrite fanfic as Virtuous Fury and, um, Felix) I would describe them both, rather glibly, as myself without the flaws or the virtues.
To be less glib: Michael is brave and resolute, always ready to take a stand upon his moral integrity, which are things I'd like to say about myself but can't. He also has a ferocious, violent temperament and a notable lack of empathy, which I flatter myself that I control rather better than he does. Similarly, Felix is an indecisive doormat but also childishly cruel, which are qualities I am aware of but try to overcome.
I don't identify so strongly with any of my other characters, but I do like all of them: even the villain who wants to destroy the whole world so he can remake it as he recalls from his youth or the genocidal elf have something about them that commands my sympathy and respect, if not that of the readership. Turns out I have a very hard time writing people I don't like, so that even the antagonists tend to become more and more symapthetic over time.
I won't say that they are my friends, but I will say that I'd hope they could be if they were real.
Except for the genocidal elf, she'd just kill me.
Oh, goddess above, this is not an easy question to answer for my. My relationship with my characters is... complex.
One, in particular, is sort of a projection of me - a partly idealized me that gets to go on adventures... but also suffer all the tortures. (I'm... not very nice to my characters - this one in particular. Serifina has been through a lot.) She's also the character I tend to use for just little stories in my head, the kind I never write down because they're just silly and ridiculous. I have a lot of these, too, since it's my primary entertainment while driving around (aside from listening to music).
My other characters, however, run the gamut. Some are reflections of parts of me, bits of my personality I captured and stretched for various effects and reasons. Most often these tend to be protagonist type characters, but it's uncommon for them to be antagonists, either. Others are simply concepts, things I thought of and wanted to put into use. Sometimes I'm attached to these, sometimes I'm not.
Then there are a few characters that have come out of literally nowhere, popped up in my head fully formed, and said "HI MAKE USE OF ME SOMEWHERE" and I generally go "wtf
" until I do something with them. These have come from dreams or random musings or just completely I have no clue. I've used these in many different ways.
It's worth noting that I do a lot of RPing (primarily RL, tabletop gaming) so some of these characters get used there, but most of them are for writing.
916471>>914585>>915594>>915193 Thanks very much for your answers. They've been compiled in my workbook, and have proven to be very useful little bits of contextual research. Just one more bit of credit towards my final grade. So thanks again
