Your characters and their story arc's/paths/journeys.

Back in the day when I first started off, I didn't have much of an idea of where i wanted to go with this character. To be honest, I still sort of don't. Plenty of idea's, absolutely none of the motivation/patients required to see it through in any meaningful way.

But that's just me. I'm sure other people have their shit sorted out, while at the same time you yourself might just play it by post. Get a good little story arc going. Do a little character development through it. Stuff like that.

At the present, here is roughly how I'd like things to play out if I had the aforementioned things required to get it done proper.

Quote:A man who leaves nothing but broken lives and bodies in his wake. Who has betrayed, cheated and killed everyone he's ever cared about, simply because that's all he knows how to do. Because that's all he's ever known. A man who wants nothing more then to go back to a simpler time when his end didn't wait around the next corner in the barrel of Imperial guns.

And the only way it could end is with a noose of foes and former friends closing in on him, bruised and broken but too stubborn to just quit and die. A storm that he saw coming from across the horizon but didn't bother running from. A man who's shadow has finally caught up with him and has got him in a death grip, to which he snarls through clenched teeth as he attempts to claw its cold, dead eyes out. Not so that he can escape, because he knows that there is no escape, but rather out of spite.

So, I open the floor up to you guys. Sum up your character and where you want their story to go in a paragraph or two. Its not the easiest task in the world, but its a good writing exercise at least.

What a great concept to be thinking/talking about!

Play-by-post, collaboratively-written literary rpgs are not particularly conducive to the development of well-rounded, three-dimensional characters with well-developed arcs, as we've talked about in the discussion of the Mary Sue phenomenon.  The writing's just a bit too fragmented to really work up a trajectory, some of the time.  We can all agree, though, that avoiding MarySueism and unchanging, arc-less characters is still vitally important, despite the challenges of our chosen medium/genre.

So, we try.  My own efforts have not been wildly successful, I think.

For my VE character, I was interested in exploring a well-liked franchise - Star Wars - from a perspective which I hadn't seen before in the canon materials.  First and foremost, that meant Imperial, which led me to the VE.  The cookie-cutter morality of the original trilogy - wherein good guys are GOOD, and bad guys are incomparably EVIL - works really well, for a set of movies, but it's much too simplistic for a work of literary fiction.  Watching the movies, I couldn't help but wonder, "Why do the billions of Imperials fight... they can't all be 'evil,' can they?"  So, the first thing I wanted to explore in a character was a "good" Imperial.

Second only to seeing the Imperial side be given believable motives, I wanted to see some LGBTQ characters in Star Wars.  I'm an out-and-proud gay man, and I try to be good about challenging stigma and prejudice wherever I find it, so perhaps it is to be expected that I'd roll with a gay character.  But making "Trick" gay wasn't just some sort of political statement, and neither was it just wish-fulfillment for a nerdy queer from San Francisco who as a kid was more enamored of Star Destroyers than he was drawn to the noble Jedi.  No, I wanted to write a gay POV character because it is simply impossible, in a Galaxy of thousands of inhabited planets, with billions of sentient beings (most of whom are human), that there wouldn't be lesbians, gay men, bisexual and transgender folks, and a spectrum of sexuality and love at least as broad as the one we find on planet Earth.  And heterosexual authors tend to write hetero-normative fiction, so if we of the acronym (LGBTQ) want to see more gay characters, often it's quickest to write those stories ourselves.

So, this is all to say I wanted to write a good guy Imperial who happened to like guys.  But once that decision was made, I ran into a major snag: I'd designed a character I didn't want to be flawed.  Trick had to be a hero, darn it!  He was supposed to prove that there could be good people working for less-than-ideal governments, AND he was representing a whole group of maligned minorities!  That is a recipe for a Mary Sue, who doesn't grow or change over time.  Not good.

My quick-fix solution for Trick was to make him socially-awkward.  He's not super-friendly, and he doesn't really make friends very easily.  All-told, though, that's not really enough to balance him as a character, given that he's pretty darned good at his job.  In my Navy writing, I'm slowly developing his backstory in bits and pieces, but the real arc is being developed in the DJO... hopefully, by the time the next Chapter begins, Trick'll be much, much different than he was when he enlisted with the VEN.  For now, I keep thinking and writing.

To be honest, I didn't have much of an idea what I wanted to do with Corvin either. As other members have said, this is a good thread that it'd be good to see more posters in.

Corvin's definitely quite a step up from the confused, illogical mess of gratuitous references and character aspects that was Dante, but I feel there was always a bit of a gap between what I thought he was and how I wrote him as. Too introspective, too thoughtful. Too much of a bystander in his own posts, someone who things happened to rather than who did things. Too hesitant for the zealot he was supposed to be. For all that, I think I could certainly have done worse with him, and he was fun to write. I could definitely have done better with his development.

For all that, he does have character development and personality. Here's how I see Corvin:

Quote:Corvin always had a problem thinking with his blood up. It was easier to act on impulse, to charge in, to shout slogans and shoot anything that moved. Stormtroopers weren't supposed to question, anyway. Following orders, procedure, fire teams and formations....that Corvin could do. He tried not to ask why he was told to do things. Whatever it was, it was for the good of the Empire and its citizens. It was right.

The thing is, it's not possible to run away from your actions forever. Too many dubious missions, too much blood on his hands. He started to slip, started to question, but kept up the act. Played the zealot for anyone that watched. Orders and missions might be wrong or mistaken, but there would always be the squad. And above it all, the Empire was in the right. He clung to these as a lifeline, a way to push the questions away.

Until it stopped working. If he hadn't already been on the verge of breaking, he would have then. Instead, he traded one set of beliefs for another with the zeal of a convert. This code was the truth. This one was right, the way things were. The way they should be.

I like this idea, although Snipes tends change and wiggle and flit away from me, I try to nail him down and suddenly the bastard just slips away. It doesn't really matter, in a large part it's the members of The Osk Company that decide Snipes fate any more, Snipes is an important part and so trying to nail down an arc for him would nail one down for Osk, and I have no designs upon the end of Osk, if it were ever to end then Snipes would roam again, with a mixture of sadness and happiness that his burden was at an end, but that his beloved creation had ended.

Sadly I cannot speak on Bloodhound, for he is still wrapped in the ties of the DJO.

Amacuse, I can just bet Kadann, Talon, Fury, Rizzit, and Stormz are all probably going to have quite an issue with that if you try and make it VE canon. I could see it as StoryNet material, but not as anything recogized by the VE.

-Drac

It's odd how you devoted less of that to the actual character and more of it to detailing future stories and treating them as already certain to be canon...

Didn't you retire?