The Psychology of my Characters

So here's my deal with Cloud. Since I introduced him in Broken Mirror, I've though of him as a survivor. Shot in the chest, falling off the side of a mountain and surviving, then getting a taste of the seedy world that his sister has been dealing with for years... He's had years to cope with the shakeup within his family and up until Canterlot he had done a good job of rebuilding himself, but he was always a bit damaged. Canterlot was the first domino to fall and from there he's seen worse. The changeling bodies he found on the beach just before Vanhoover was attacked, coping with the changes he agreed to under rather dubious circumstances (considering he had nearly died only hours before), and realizing that the cause of his original troubles was a major player in Vanhoover's underground. The whole next chapter in The Northern Guard will show him visibly breaking under the strain before he finally meets the Griffon who's agents broke up his family.

But here's the thing; all of my characters, at least in my head, have some issues that they've developed over the years. Take Strike for example; in one of the side stories set in the same time frame as the Prologue to Broken Mirror, he learned how to fly again. His wings were never irreversibly damaged, but the psychological damage he had suffered at the hands of the Enclave pushed him away from any efforts to heal the damage, at least for some time. Comet suffered worse, as we saw in the last chapter of Broken Mirror when he started getting snippy with Steeljack. That'll be explored as well as Broken Mirror moves onwards, as not only do I think it'll be a good part of the story to tell, but I never touched on their experiences while in captivity.

While Cloud will be cut out to my satisfaction before The Northern Guard closes out, many of the issues with the characters in Broken Mirror will start to come to a head as I close all that out and Dusk finally realizes what he's missed during his absence and how bad off his friends have been. My hope is that those problems will really flesh out as I get into Broken Mirror: Reflections once both of these are done.

Oh, and before I go I've got a public service announcement; trolls. The internet is full of them. What I've noticed as I go on is that there's obviously a bit of a negative reaction to Northern Guard and Broken Mirror, which is not to say I didn't earn some of those thumbs down as I changed my style of writing. Consistency is a good thing in all respects, and I've most certainly done a rather... I guess you could say disappointing job of maintaining my consistency in my writing style. I don't usually write stories; I do research, articles and stuff like that. Eventually I plan on polishing up the early writings I did, but for now I'm using these as "design studies" as I figure out what style of storytelling I'm comfortable with. If someone see's something that I can improve on, or if I make a stupid mistake when I publish these (I am self-editing these stories at the moment), just let me know. Trust me, I don't bite. If you don't say something, I don't know where I did something wrong because I think what I wrote looks perfectly fine... But where I wrote the stories I might be a bit biased towards my own abilities.

Regards,
Striker1959