@leahazel / leahazel.tumblr.com
There's wholesome ships and there's toxic ships, but I'd like to coin 'sodium chloride ships', where the individuals involved are both horrible and dangerous people, but somehow being together renders them surprisingly well-adjusted (if a little salty).
The opposite of this is a 'coke and mentos' dynamic, where the two people are generally chill and likeable but being around each other makes them both wild and chaotic.
Here's the breakdown:
The best kinds of characters are those that are conspicuous in their absence.
It's a unique type of frustration when you agree that a character is deeply flawed but other people keep missing what's actually wrong with them and assigning them new flaws that they don't even have it's like free my man he did none of that. He did a bunch of other shit tho.
characters whose philosophy is “if i cannot be wanted, i will be needed and if i cannot be needed, let me be used until there’s nothing left of me.” thank you for everyone’s attention. falls off stage and dies
craving pathetic wet old women characters. where is the feminism
give me middle aged butches w/ anxiety & cats. older femmes w/ arm flab who refuse to age "gracefully." gimme a bilingual bisexual with a trench coat & crows feet & and no retirement savings. i want them bitter & jaded & dysfunctional & menopausal! i want to watch them make poor financial dietary romantic decisions (and probably commit crimes) where are they???
What do you think of the squishy wizard trope? Shouldn’t people that travel around and go “adventuring” have some baseline of athleticism?
So, we're back to a game design discussion, again.
The short version is, if it doesn't make sense to you, don't use it.
Squishy wizards are almost more of a gameplay consideration. If you have a game, and you're balancing ranged damage against melee damage, if your ranged damage units do enough damage, you can create a situation where melee damage straight up doesn't work. It's not viable. The 40k meme about the Tau comes to mind: “Sure, they suck in melee; too bad you'll never get there.”
If you tone down ranged unit's damage, that can easily create a situation where they become the ones who are irrelevant. Such was the experience of every level 1 Wizard in AD&D. Once in awhile, you can get into the perfect situation to end an encounter, but most of the time you're just biding your time until you get to level 5 and can learn to accidentally fireball your party's front line, but that is a long time from now.
If ranged units can do a lot of damage, they need to be fragile enough that you can remove them from the board. And the Tau comparison comes back to mind once again.
All of this combines to create a board environment, where melee fighters need to be tanky enough to get into combat and stay there. Ranged units need to be fragile enough that they can remove each other, deal enough damage to harass the melee units, without doing so much damage as to render them completely irrelevant to the board.
And, while you can build a story around that structure, you don't need to.
Gandalf isn't a fragile wizard. He's not some “book nerd,” who spent high school getting shoved into lockers. When the time comes, he goes toe to toe with a Balrog (or, the Balrog, whichever), and doesn't immediately die. He clearly manages to hold his own, in melee combat, with a massive monster. (In fairness, he's also not human. I mean, none of Tolkien's, “the race of men,” are conventionally human, but Middle Earth's Wizards are an entirely different race of beings.)
In a lot of games, solution is to give the frontline fighters a ridiculous amount of health. Now, I'm going to trash on D&D for a second, but consider that a 10th level Fighter should have somewhere around 94 - 114hp. Remember that critical hits represent some kind of significant injury. These are not just blows that connect with your armor and will leave a bruise, this is someone ran you through. Someone could crit on your fighter, with a long sword, and stab them in vital places at least 4, and probably 5 times, before it actually kills them. That's a comical amount of damage someone to suffer. (Now, granted, a 10th level character in D&D is basically a superhero. If you're thinking of Boromir's death in Jackson's Fellowship of the Rings, that is what it takes to put down a relatively high level fighter in D&D. Which is to say, hilarious amounts of abuse.)
If you signed up for that, cool. I'm not going to stop you. I'm not even going to tell you it's wrong. If you want to tear down a super-humanly powerful character through prolonged combat sequences, or due to attrition of multiple fights in quick succession, that works. I mean, hell, that's how DC killed Batman in the 90s.
If your wizard power fantasy is that a wispy intellectual gains cosmic power through hard academic study, cool. Again, that's entirely valid, and as I mentioned, it even fits into a power fantasy. If you were bullied as a teenager for your atypical interests, and habit of reading, here's a character that studies strange and esoteric subjects, and has real power as a result.
At the same time, it's entirely reasonable to have an averagely healthy mage, whether they study magic academically, or have some ingrained talent that they've honed, plop them down next to a veteran swordmaster who's fought in wars on nine continents with the scars to prove it, and while they may look a bit anemic in comparison to their buddy, is still in better shape than the average villager they interact with on a daily basis.
That's where I tend to land in all of this.
When you're creating characters for your writing, it can be helpful to assign them attributes. Now, I don't mean this in the literal RPG stat blocks. (I've tried that a few times, it doesn't really work for me.) But, just a few text descriptors (which, does sound like Fudge, come to think of it.) You might describe your mage as Smart, or Intellectual, Wise (or Absent Minded), Willful. You know, “wizard stuff.” If you describe your warrior as, Strong, Tough, Tenacious, and Cunning, you're not making the wizard squishy, you're making another character less squishy. A lot of the time, we set the base line by what other people are doing. It's reasonable to say your mage is less durable than your soldier. (Unless your mage has a reason to be that tough. Maybe they're from some frozen wasteland, and are just absolutely jacked from surviving in a hostile environment.) But, that comparison doesn't mean that your mage is deficient.
Now, on the other hand, frail characters can be interesting. You're taking out their ability to fight conventionally, so when they do start decisively ending situations, whether that's through their own creativity and guile, or sheer magical power, it can be very gratifying. And, to be clear, I am very fond of flawed characters, especially when they have to work within the framework of their flaws to find solutions, rather than just overcoming them through the power of love, friendship and mescaline.
When handled well, flaws are about creating limitations for how your characters can solve problems. These can also make your story more interesting. If you say, my character can't fight, (and you don't back down from that and just let them cheat so they can fight, because they're so goddamn special), they're going to need to find other solutions. That can result in a better, more interesting, and less predictable story.
-Starke
Expanding a thought from a conversation this morning:
In general, I think "Is X out-of-character?" is not a terribly useful question for a writer. It shuts down possibility, and interesting directions you could take a character.
A better question, I believe, is "What would it take for Character to do X?" What extremity would she find herself in, where X starts to look like a good idea? What loyalties or fears leave him with X as his only option? THAT'S where a potentially interesting story lies.
In practice, I find that you can often justify much more from a character than you initially dreamed you could: some of my best stories come from "What might drive Character to do [thing he would never do]?" As long as you make it clear to the reader what the hell pushed your character to this point, you've got the seed of a compelling story on your hands.
i love unhinged women but i also love women who try so fucking hard to be hinged. clinging to those hinges by her fingernails.
Obsessed with characters who portray themselves as worse than they are. Who are lying to everyone including themselves about it. People generally assume if someone's lying about themselves they're trying to look better but sometimes they're trying to look worse. They attribute agency to where they had none, add intend to accidents, try to convince everyone that this is something they did instead of something that happened to them.
shipper anon! will catarina & co. express in-game who they ship HB MC with?
Yes, absolutely.
I have a bunch of trackers that record who if anyone Catarina and friends have seen the MC flirt with, and how many times. Catarina will have opinions about whoever is at the top of the pile and whether she thinks they're suited to the MC. And the trackers don't reset if the MC stops having a flirty or romantic relationship so you may get things like:
Catarina: you must NOT romance Raffi, why would you romance them when your Cautious stat is so high, you would be better with Savarel
MC: dude I am romancing Savarel, we've been dating for two chapters now and it's going great, not that it's your business
Catarina: but you brushed hands with Raffi when they offered you a drink of water that time!!!
MC: that... was four chapters ago, it was just us having a flirty interaction and the game has tracked that we're not a thing, me and Raffi are chill friends
Catarina: OH MY GOD WHAT
Would be hilarious if she phrased it exactly like that, too.
MC: What's a Cautious stat? Are you secretly personality profiling me? What is happening?
You know, when I see fictional characters who repress all their emotions, they're usually aloof and very blunt about keeping people at a distance, sometimes to an edgy degree—but what I don't see nearly enough are the emotionally repressed characters who are just…mellow.
Think about it. In real life, the person that's bottling up all their emotions is not the one that's brooding in the corner and snaps at you for trying to befriend them. More often than not, it's that friendly person in your circle who makes easy conversation with you, laughs with you, and listens and gives advice whenever you're upset. But you never see them upset, in fact they seem to have endless patience for you and everything around them—and so you call them their friend, you trust them. And only after months of telling them all your secrets do you realize…
…they've never actually told you anything about themselves.
Obsessed with the concept of a character who has never been treated kindly or gently in their life (or in a very long time) and suddenly being treated gently and with care and being stunned and then overwhelmed by it.
The demo is now finally ready, I just need to do a bit of housekeeping before I upload the new update. Stay tuned!
Here's a teaser while you all wait:
The character templates needed a bit of updating with Chapter 4 coming out, so... here you go!
Yup, this is how I imagine Rosie's scrapbook would look like. There's two pages, with the first page having two different versions depending on the locket shape.
Anyway, I hope you all have fun with it if you decide to use it! And please tag/share it with me if you do! 😊
Below are some tips/further details on how to fill the template:
Big third grade work sheet energy with these, the aesthetic is a good fit for the overall tone and theme of the game.
I like what they did with Holga in D&D HAT on several levels:
The end result is very satisfying, IMO.
generally not super into shapeshifter characters being revealed to have like a singular True Form. isnt it much more interesting to imagine a creature so fluid and ever-changing that even they cant identify any one body as the "true" self, or simply dont see the need to?
is this you? yes. this one too? yes. but then which one is the real you? define "real" define "you" theyre all me. even the ones that are someone else? especially those.
tip: everything you pretend to becomes a part of what you are and even the facade you wear for the sake of deception reveals a crucial truth.
also: the self is a multi-faceted, ever-shifting thing
Here's the thing I keep trying to articulate and possibly failing: I don't actually mind characters who are terrible people. I have enjoyed many. What I mind is characters who are terrible people while the narrative keeps trying to say that they are wonderful, often contradicting what the narrative shows us, with no self awareness
