This is Xenallure's current cast of 'gettable' characters, which we would love to hear some feedback about. :) Skewbald - Skew is a magical who is dissatisfied with being a magical and outcast from that culture. Bullied as a child, now that he has come into power he is torn between seeking the acceptance of those who rejected him as a child, and seeking revenge against them for that rejection and mistreatment. His story is about passion and the ethicality of using force to achieve one's desires. The opposite of Skew is our seduceable spiritual characeter. (Name?) Both of these characters have stories rooted in their childhoods, but while Skew was disaproved of and bullied, his resentment stoked to flames of hatred, our spiritual was a child that was very mature for its age - logical, calm, always obeying the rules. It never did anything wild or naughty, but instead studied and transcended into being a full-fledged spiritual... and now finds itself thinking that maybe it never really lived, wanting to know what makes these mortals desire things so passionately, fight so hard for their dreams, and take such joy in their loves. Then we have Lion and the athletic techno, a pair of characters who are all about competition and conflict. Lion's struggle is take his identity, which is based on the black-and-white values of the magical culture, and decide how to react to the greys of the technos and magicals who don't quite match the stereotype of the ideal magical as well as Lion does. The athletic techno's struggle is confront the fact that no matter how extremely techno sie makes hirself look and how hard sie fights against the magicals, sie is more like the magicals sie hates than the technos sie grew up among - the very acts of hating the magicals and fighting against them are a testosterony magical way of doing things. Now we have another pair, Kitten and FollowTheLeader. These two are submissives, which means that their issues are about loyalty, how their identities are dependant on others, and whether their leaders treat them well or abusively. Follow gets a crush on Lion and attempts the dangerous gambit of crossdressing to try to win his love. Kitten's issue is more one of morality - she has to learn to trust her own evaluation of what's right, and not blindly go along with a leader whose decisions are immoral. Now we have one more pair, Desiderada (Bunny) and Leslie. These two are visionaries strongly persuing a goal, and their issues are about whether their goals are really what they want/need, whether the ends justify the means, and whether they are damaging themselves or their followers in persuing the goal. Desiderada's goal is knowledge and magical power, while Leslie's goal is racial unity and social power. So there's our starting point. What do you guys think of this cast of characters? Do any of these characters seem redundant so that we shold eliminate one? How do you feel about each of these characters- do you like them/not like them? Why? Does it seem like we're missing any important or attractive types of character? We could have two more, another magical female and another human, if we had something useful to do with them. [Edited by - sunandshadow on February 24, 2005 6:17:01 PM]

In your post you described eight characters:
Skewbald, CS01
Lion, CS02
Kitten, Follow
Desiderada, Leslie

Subjective, short answers:
This is the order of interest from the most interesting to the least:
CS01 > Skewbald > Desiderada >>> CS02, Lion, Leslie, Kitten, Follow

This is the redundancy grouping. Characters that are in the same bracket share traits that can combined to form a single stronger character:
{Skewbald, Follow, CS02, Leslie}
{CS01, Kitten}
{Desiderada, Lion}

Complaints on the overall design:
C1: Lack of coherence among the characters (You don't get a sense of unity among the characters as you read their descriptions one by one, the sense that the cast together belong to the same story to convey some messages) When you read strong character designs, you can see the 'geometry' of the cast (usually triangles), your current cast is very loose and is lacking this. At the current state, your cast is like a few sticks of spaghetti floating in a pot of water. There are lines, but no shapes.


[Edited by - Estok on February 24, 2005 8:10:13 PM]

Estok - Well, I think the geometry among the characters would have been more obvious had I taken a different strategy for describing them; it's still not that strong, but then again is a strong geometry among characters necessarily a good thing or even possible with a large cast of characters?

Anyway I would be very interested to hear more about which elements of the characters you would suggest combining to make sronger ones. For instance I'm baffled how Desiderada and Lion could possibly be combined since I see them as fundamentally different types of people.

Lion:
- Competition,
- Conflict,
- strong conviction

Desiderada:
- Desire for power (a competition, dominance over the others),
- ends over means (strong conviction in the result, conflicts allowed as well as any other means.)




The way you presented the characters was unexpectedly dull. It seemed that you were trying to present them in a way that was not your natural style. Although I hold the meanings of the character paramount, not even I would present them in this fashion.

Geometry is a trait of strong characterization. It is the foundation of the feeling: 'I don't think that the story would have worked without any of the main characters.' In other words, the characters together partitioned the meaning of the story. For your story, the primary plane of partitioning is the plane of romance. Your description should have focused primarily on that domain. For any addition planes you need to partition you would define their dimensions in your mind and present the characters with the partitions.

The cast you presented seemed incomplete, redundant, and fragile because the planes were not well-defined and not shared among the characters. It was as if the characters exist on separate planes, that the story can very well do with any of the characters removed.

Partitioning is the first level. The next level is to make the characters interlock like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

[Edited by - Estok on February 25, 2005 1:52:47 AM]

Skewbald – bullied as a child. He has come into power in a society that does not agree with him and he does not agree with it. He has a choice whether to take revenge or to seek acceptance by the culture that nurtured him as a boy. Skewbald has little internal restraint against his anger.

He does not agree with how? What about the magical culture does he not like? What is it that makes him different? What stigma does Skew have that would make him be the object of bulling?

‘The spiritual’ – as a child grew up focused on the study of transcendence and devoted its life to such studies.

How does the child become a transcended Spiritual? What is a transcended spiritual? Are they immortal and if so do they still have feelings? Is being a spiritual like being a ghost almost and only letting yourself be seen by whomever you wish to be seen by? Does a spiritual mean peace without love?

Lion – enjoys competition and conflicts. He does not hesitate to confront people. He struggles to take his cultural roots and define how to react to people who don’t conform to the magical or techno cultures.

So does Lion abhor cultural deviance? What is the ‘stereotype’ for a magical or a techno?

Athletic Techno – struggles to become part of the techno ideals but soon discovers through interaction with his/her peers that he/she is becoming more like the magicals that he/she has hated.

Why does he/she hate the magicals?

Kitten – submissive
Why has Kitten chosen to define her own set of morals and become more independent? Is she discovering that she has been submissive only because of a person insecurity with herself? Is she running away from situation because she fears that if she takes control she’ll make a mistake and cause harm to herself?

Follow - submissive
Why would this character who is submissive be attempting to seduce another character for that characters love? Does seduction breed love that satisfies the heart?

5MG - Your questions about Skew, the nature of sprituals, Lion, and the stereotypes of magicals and technos are all answered in the Design Doc.

That leaves the athletic techno, kitten, and follow.

Athletic techno - we're still developing this character, but the current idea is that sie is a halfbreed who had a magical father, but was raised as a techno. All hir life sie has been criticized as being too barbaric, aggressive, angry... in other wods, like a magical. In order to protest that sie is a techno, sie has gotten a lot of bod mods to make hirself look extremely techno, and competes against Lion in the techno/magical sport to prove that technos are better than magicals. So the athletic techno will have to confront the fact that despite hir best efforts sie is just like the magicals sie is fighting against, and there's nothing wrong with being that way.

Kitten - she would be more afraid of causing harm to others than to herself. Mostly she has never been given responsibility for anything, and so is hesitant to take it for the first time. One question I wanted to address with Kitten's story is when is a leader worthy or not worthy of loyalty. But the final decision for all things Kitten is Avatar God's, so questions/suggestions about her should be directed to him.

Follow - there's no reason a submissive character can't be seductive, they just have to do it in a submissive way. Follow's submssive way of seducing is to try to become whatever hir beloved wants and needs - in this case, a female magical. Follow does this because sie feels it is the only way Lion will give hir a chance. Obviously this is a problematic strategy since Follow's stll a hermphrodite underneath hir clothes, and Lion would naturally discover this if he did decide he liked 'her' and wanted to consummate the relationship... As for seduction as the foundation of a relationship, I blieve this questionis looking at thngs from the wrong perspective. Seduction is just trying to get someone to love you, and all relationships have some sort of seduction involved. The issue instead is Follow's deceit, and whether Lion will react to discovering it and suddenly being confronted with his prejudices with extreme violence, or perhaps by continuing his relationship with Follow but in a more secretive and abusive way.

Quote:

Original post by Estok Lion: - Competition, - Conflict, - strong conviction Desiderada: - Desire for power (a competition, dominance over the others), - ends over means (strong conviction in the result, conflicts allowed as well as any other means.)

Hmm. Well, Desiderada wants power, but not for the purpose of dominance over others. Desiderada's goal is manipulating the world to hir satisfaction, and to hir power is a tool to use in sculpting the perfect world. Thus manipulation, seduction, and science are hir chosen tools rather than direct conflict which has less predictable and pleasng results. Lion OTOH doesn't care anything about that - the only power that matters to him is physical and social power, and he needs them to support his identity of being a superior, approved-of person. He lives to be admired, while Desiderada really doesn't care what others think of hir.

{Leslie, Lion}

Yeah, Leslie and Lion are quite similar personality-wise. But just combining them would be a problem, because it's necessary to have a leader with racial loyalty for both the human and magical races. Hmm, perhaps if Leslie was female, their personalities might be very similar but different player would be inteested in pursuing them.

nice to see u guys are working hard on this :) I wish I had some spare time to help, but I'm just too bloody overworked those days :( Barely have time for myself...

anyway, I know I am repeating myself, but I cant help compare Kitten to the character Nathaniel from the Anita Blake series. Rather than describe him, you can look him up there
I dunno if it's any use to you guys, but since this character has been quite studied throughout the novels, some of the material might be of use.
Particularly the whole "why on Earth would someone be like that?"
Nathaniel is particularly interesting in that he just won't say no. He doesn't know when to shout Alabama, if you will. This might be useful for understanding the problem with Kitten
"she has to learn to trust her own evaluation of what's right, and not blindly go along with a leader whose decisions are immoral"
See, Nathaniel _doesnt_ wonder about these issues, because IMO, it's in the very nature of the submissive not to question...
anyway, it's time to leave the office for me, now :P

Hope this helps?