"You're not me!" · 1:34am Dec 18th, 2013
As you may have noticed, quite a few people like my writing. Not surprisingly, I occasionally get PMs asking me for writing advice. I generally try to respond as best I can, hopefully with something a bit more substantial than the standard Writing Tip cliches (get a prereader/editor, read, make sure you have an ending before you begin, etc.), and if they have some work posted on FIMFiction already, I'll take a look and try to give helpful feedback, but I've never really had a fresh idea to present before... until now, that is.
You see, I recently started playing Persona 4 again. This was the game I was playing when I wrote Petriculture, so I thought it might put me in a good frame of mind to write the finale. Two things became apparent rather quickly: first, I'd forgotten to list the game as an influence on my user page (this has since been rectified), and second, this game inspired one of the best writing exercises I've ever come up with.
A bit of background, first. For those of you who are allergic to anime hair, Persona 4 is essentially a mix between an old-school, menu-based JRPG and a visual novel/dating simulation game. The hero is a teenager (because this is a JRPG) who must enter a parallel universe inside of a television with his friends in order to do battle with physical manifestations of humanity's collective neuroses called "Shadows" (again, this is a JRPG). Blah blah, Jungian psychology, tarot motifs, murder, etc.
For our purposes, though, the most important part is how new party members are gained. Basically, at several points throughout the game, characters are confronted with a Shadow who looks just like them, exhibiting some aspect of their personality that they would very much like to keep secret, to the point where they will flatly deny anything the Shadow says is true, usually because the current party is present to witness the exchange.* Once the character says the magic Arc Words "You're not me!" (exclamation point included), a boss fight commences, and the player crosses his or her fingers and hopes the party has leveled up to the point where they won't be completely slaughtered.
The "writing exercise" I came up with is a result of an abandoned attempt to write a crossover between Persona and MLP. (It was abandoned because rather than a straightforward "Human In Equestria" style crossover, I wanted to write a completely original story that used the conventions and plot elements found in the Persona series that was set in Equestria, and it soon became apparent that the story I wanted to write was just too damn complicated and I'd almost certainly burn out before I finished.) In the prewriting stages, though, I often found myself writing "You're not me!" scenes for various characters, and I often found that imagining the aspects of different characters' personalities that they'd hide from themselves was very stimulating (except for Luna, because it was already obvious to me that Nightmare Moon filled that role perfectly). Even though the story itself was abandoned, the "You're not me!" scenes still gave me lots of ideas for potential internal conflicts, not to mention some interesting lines of dialogue that could be adapted to other situations. For example, this had a big influence on the story I actually did end up writing, Inscape, because I came up with the notion that deep down, Twilight Sparkle knows that she's smarter than Celestia, and that opened up the possibility that she might do a better job of ruling Equestria, which is what gave the Nightmare a foothold in her consciousness and basically started the plot.
So, basically, if you want to get inside a character's head, try writing a "You're not me!" scene. The results will probably be very interesting, and besides that, it's fun.
* If you've never played P4, this description probably isn't enough to give you a good idea of what I mean. Fortunately, there are plenty of LPs on YouTube, so I can just show you an example:
This sounds like a really fun exercise I'll definitely include in my character creation process for tabletop RPGs.
Huh. I'll have to remember that exercise. I
Thanks!
do you still have those "your not me!" scenes? I would love to read them..
1619261 - I never actually wrote them down. They were just scenes that I worked out in my head while I was doing some particularly boring and repetitive jobs at my workplace.
1619273
darn, well then..
On the topic of 'anime'...
How come I still remember this song? Why, really?
Hummm... that does sound like an interesting new tool for developing characters. I will have to try it.
Literally just finished watching a Persona 4 video, then I come here and see a blog about it. Weird.
Well, didn't expect that one
I need to get my hands on a copy of this game
That is actually pretty good tip for any kind of character creation, thanks.
I've been playing Persona 3 myself; it doesn't have the Shadow Conflicts, but it has a damn good theme: Mortality.
1619410
I'm currently watching a Persona 4 LP video as I type.
Great game.
Just to stir the pot a little: I'm not sure that Nightmare Moon fills the role all that well.I mean, it seems sort of like the whole point of the "Shadow-Self" is that its an aspect of the individual about which he or she is in denial, or at the very least would like to hide. It's their deep, dark secret, to the point where they may not even consciously acknowledge that they have the secret.Princess Luna's relationship to Nightmare Moon...isn't exactly a secret.As I was writing this, it occurred to me that you probably meant that Nightmare Moon actually was Princess Luna's shadow self, rather than her shadow self presenting itself as Nightmare Moon and taunting her that she was Nightmare Moon.
1619458 - That shouldn't be too hard. It was recently remade for the PS Vita as Persona 4: Golden, which means that copies of the original PS2 game shouldn't be that expensive, since some fans of the original game no doubt upgraded to the PS Vita version, which includes a lot of new content. Also, the PS2 version is available digitally on the Playstation Network.